By Lady Marion’s explanation (and Rich’s further clarification), the afterlife is a natural part of the YAFGC cosmos. It existed before the gods, and will still exist after them, and the souls of the dead will still travel there.
The change the gods made, once they learned to move back and forth between these realms, was to each cordon off their own territory in the afterlife, and gather the souls of their followers there (in Ch’Thier’s view, as a reward or punishment, or in Ranna’s more pragmatic view, as a power source.)
With the gods absent or significantly depowered, souls will presumably be able to move through the afterlife as they wish, rather than being confined to their own god’s feifdom. Perhaps many of the existing communities will persist, but voluntarily now. The new system strikes me as a better one in general, though it’s possible that the more gods were also protecting their subjects from whatever dangers might threaten an afterlife denizen…
Note that we’re all making slightly different cosmological statements with our choice of error message. I assure you, though, I did indeed mean 503. There’s as much significance to my choice as there is to each of yours…and all of these are interesting choices.
Yeah, I just thought that "service unavailable" would be for if magic as such was removed from the way the universe works. The service does still seem to be working, though with no power. That’s why I thought a 204 would be appropriate: the request was in order (no 4xx error), and the universe as such did not break (5xx), it just isn’t returning any content to the mage’s request any more.
Ahh. I was likening it to an "insufficient resources for server process" response, suggesting the server process was running but unable to complete requests due to resource constraints. I’ve generally encountered 204s in cases when "no content" is expected, not an exception — thus I filed it as a 5xx. From my memories of the HTTP spec, 2xx meant "success," 3xx "redirect," 4xx "client error" and 5xx "server error" — this struck me as "server error" territory.
As an aside, I boggle to imagine what a magical 507 error would look like. I have a few speculations, but we’re so far off into left field here that I suspect I should shut up and let the subject return to YAFGC!
Poor Lewie. Hope Eddie isn’t going to have one of his years long power naps. (Tho not sure if it would happen now that magic is going to be on an all time low)
Hmm…y’know, the people in this room are among the cleverest men and women in the world. And they knew in advance that if their trap was sprung, it would leave magic severely depleted. Maybe one of them could have pointed out *in advance* the trouble with the follow-through phase of their plan?
(Yeah, I know, they had a lot on their minds. And mages tend toward the thunderously overconfident sorts who assume that they’ll always improvise their way out of whatever mess they create…)
Perhaps it was a case of "we knew the check would raze the account balance when it cleared, but we thought there’d be just enough left for the utility bills to go through, this month…and we weren’t expecting them to cut off electricity *quite* so quickly…"
Or maybe they felt the loss of magic, and the effect on them personally, would be worthwhile to remove Ranna. Regardless, I’m enjoying the action, and Lewie’s being-clothed-in-skin- and Eddie’s reaction *snigger*
Rich, I’m curious- do you sometimes delay posting the next strip if the current one is generating good conversation? Was talking with someone who does that on his blog, got me wondering with all the conversations about the history, backstory, and philosophy.
Oh, I definitely agree with your first point. Everyone in that flying brick is brave enough to lay down their lives, if needed, to free the world from Ranna. Anyone who is NOT that brave would be…pretty much anywhere else, right now.
But you can be brave and still make an evacuation plan. Especially since (a) the spellcasters had lots of time to plan the details of their scheme beforehand, and (b) the current dilemma — trapped on board a temple held aloft only by good intentions and the dregs of failing enchantments — isn’t an unexpected setback, but exactly the best-case result they intended.
Of course, their original plan might have involved Turg and his kids. I would still lay odds that they’ll be the (reluctant, in Turg’s own case) rescue force, further complicating any thoughts of revenge that Runt might have been nursing.
You brought up Runt and revenge, I don’t see how that is relevant in this case
And it wasn’t where Turg’s kids are, it’s how many he brought with him. Don’t believe he can communicate long distance to call the rest, certainly not in time
The Sphinx on the other hand… Wasn’t she involved in the Ranna fight?
There will definitely be some magic users outside the castle, but those would probably be students or otherwise inexperienced. So, yes, if all mages here would be squished it’s definitely going to affect the magic knowledge …
Again, I find the metaphysical implications for anyone trapped in a magical state to be fascinating in this universe. Do curses fade away? Or do they lose the ability to be countered? ETC ETC. The explorations of what this means for a fantasy world are interesting…
Larry Niven influenced a lot of thinking about magic in his essay "Sometimes The Magic Goes Away". He introduced the idea of magic being a sort of energy he called mana, rather than as cheat codes that break the laws of physics. I like Neil Gaiman’s way of defining Magic:
"Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible."
While not directly following rules of D&D, this comics is still too close to RPGs – and in RPGs, magic IS sort of energy and can be worked with quite scientifically. In YAFGC, not only Larry Niven’s view can be experimentally proved to be correct, it’s probably something magic students are doing on beginning of study as an easy exercise.
Also, as long as magic is talking in words, you can apply formal grammatics to it, just like with programming languages. Lot of science in that direction.
Mags as talking in words is what I call the "Magic is the cheat codes" idea, that specific incantations allow access to hacks that the Creator(s) left in the universe. Which is not incompatible with the "magic as a sort of energy" trope.
I think Rich kinda sorta stumbled into this direction, letting the way magic works in his world change and evolve as the story dictates. Magic is a resource, but to access it you need to use specific protocols and avoid syntax errors.
And the best thing about magic? By bending reality, it can change itself.
I guess I’m arguing with Neil Gaiman and not you then.
"Those two are rarely compatible" … WRONG. Science is very powerful and universal tool. Sure you can have magic incompatible with science … but you can’t have magic SCHOOLS, you can’t have WIZARDS … you have shamans. If you have wizards and magic schools, if magic can be taught, it means it can be studied scientifically … and made MORE POWERFUL using science.
I can’t speak from experience, but I expect that if I’d been without skin for centuries, I would just revel in having it again, much like Lewie did when he got it again.
I wonder if he *feels* clothed? He also has internal organs now, so there’s quite a bit of padding.
Even if he’s aware of his nudity, I think he’s got more important things to worry about than modesty.
You know, those may be welcome problems to have, after centuries of unlife. Remembering what it’s like to taste…to be tired and to *sleep* and to feel refreshed by it…to remember that every need and lack has a corresponding state of satiation. Inconvenient, perhaps…but impermanence and chasing the rituals of self-sustenance is the very heart of being a temporary being.
May Lewie enjoy it, and find reward in the rituals of impermanence, anew.
Magic is not only way to fly, but anyone actually studying lift will tell you the ratio of wing surface, weight and minimal speed means dragon wings are nowhere near as big as would be needed. Most if not all winged creatures we saw in comics must be partially using magic for flying.
Yeah, but Bob would never be buoyant enough to float by physics alone, and many of the very large or very small creatures couldn’t even be alive without a radical reconfiguration of their bodies, internal and external, to comply with the square-cube law. So a certain amount of magic seems to be baked into even the "nonmagical" physics of the yafgc world.
(Larry Niven, in those "the Magic Goes Away" stories that many others have referenced here, was by contrast quite brutal in his enforcement of real physics on a previously-magical world. Whenever magic would collapse in a region, most of the magical creatures would simply drop dead, because magic was part of their metabolism down to the cellular level. Even relatively mundane creatures like centaurs died, because as described by legend, their cardiovascular systems would never have worked.)
I see it more as "magic is diminished but didn’t disappeared completely" – which was directly SAID in the comics, BTW. So, there is still enough magic left for the creatures to survive, and apparently even for Bob to float, but probably not for levitating whole cloud castle.
Note that the spell Lewie is trying did SOMETHING. It apparently didn’t worked, but there was some effect.
So, question is, just how much magic those flying creatures needs to fly and if they have that much. Personally, I would expect that they WOULD be able to fly, but NOT immediately, or they will be very wobbly now until they train a little and get used to flying being harder now.
I just wonder which of the three commands failed and which one did nothing
Three commands: ‘Make thee light as a feather’, ‘Glide gently to the ground’ and ‘Touch down gently’
Kinda like that great song "Two out of three aint bad!"
Okay, there’s a small speck of real history at the heart of the story. There *were* people, back in the 1930s or so, who were perplexed at how bees — and insects in general — can fly. These people were experts on fixed-wing aircraft, and bees do not have fixed wings. Fixed-wing calculations worked great for planes, were vaguely in the right ballpark for birds, but worked terribly for bugs.
So humans went and learned a lot more about fluid dynamics and about flight with rapidly flapping wings, and nowadays, equations and computer models can describe flying insects beautifully.
Point is, it took a *lot* of time and research, from experts in a *related* field, and they weren’t having to worry about figuring it out before the ability that allowed them to fly stopped working
And the bee just continued happily bumbling along without (much of) a care on how they were doing it 😀
And on a related note, dragons are using their wings like birds or airplanes. They don’t flap rapidly, they barely flap at all. They actually don’t have much choice in this regard, as they are too big for the rapid flapping (and square-cube law enters the equation here).
Oh yeah, insect wings present a hell of a difficult calculation. Fluid dynamics in general — and turbulent flow specifically, which is what happens around those rapidly buzzing wings — give rise to some of the grungiest equations you’ll ever solve.
My peeve with the whole "Physics claims that bumblebees cannot fly" cliché is that, even back in the 1930s when it first arose, it was never true. At most, back then you could have said, "Physics claims, correctly, that a bumblebee who isn’t flapping its wings can’t fly or even glide. We’re gonna need a little more time to figure out the case when it *is* flapping."
Which wouldn’t be a big deal, if you didn’t so often hear the bumblebee legend dusted off to sow doubt and inaction on issues that science *does* understand.
Will admit to only hearing of the cliché (is that the correct word?) about how bumble-bees shouldn’t be able to fly, thank you for correcting me (it did make for a fun, if false, story though, about how there is so much in nature that is not fully understandable)
Well Lewie, I have been cheering you on for years, here is your moment of truth.
Get it together and THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX.
Magic is just a word for stuff people don’t understand, after all these centuries you ought to know more than even Eddie about how things really are.
And for one thing, you have that bog fluffy could under you….
Lewie proceeds to take everyone’s cloths, and VERY QUICKLY make a giant parachute out of them to get them all down safely. 😛
Ooooo… I wonder what happens if anyone has a bag of holding with them… When those things fail, they tend to spontaneously dump ALL of the contents of the bag back into the main world. There could be some very strange, and possibly useful stuff popping in around the unconscious mages any minute!
I wanted to joke that Lewstrom’s "curses" expression became less pronounced with flesh then without. Maaaaybe it’s a little true, but it’s more just different. This one looks more confused, where prior ones ran a range from total rage to the "I am just tired of this s*&%."
This one is still expressive, just…softer maybe? I don’t normally talk art as I don’t know any of the technical stuff, but my impression.
I have the feeling he became a bit more panicky, than he was before. It might comes with the possibilitiy of dying properly, but I think thats what really changes his expressions. On a second thought, his general attitude seems to be different.
Also, I can’t help it, but I try to imagine his expressions on the last 2 scripts with his skeletal face.
He seems to be acting very much like the mortal man he once was. Whether Ch’Their’s lifting of his curse undid some of his psychological changes as well as physical ones, or whether having his body back just makes him *feel* like his old self again, so he’s unearthing long-dormant parts of his personality, I have no idea.
I am curious to see how the restored Lewie handles moral dilemmas (starting with this one: is his goal to save everyone present, or to save his own…well, skin? And Ata’s, of course, since she’s the only one here who he’s got a personal tie to.) His original mortal persona seemed neutral-to-good aligned, while even after recovering his memories and allying with Ata, Lewie has remained distinctly evil, though less scenery-chewingly so.
For example, one of his first acts after mending fences with Queen Maula was to have a more-or-less-harmless hobgoblin prisoner hanged so he could make a new zombie servant. Were he to keep doing such things in his current form, it would seem a lot harder to write off as "that’s just how Lewie is."
Well the panicky is just rational in this situation. And he could panic as a lich as we. At first I felt that he seeed more confused, but looking at it again, I’ll say it’s just a softer curses. And, again, in this situation, it makes sense that the failure makes sense to him. He’s only trying something because so much magic is being drained as to cause the temple to fall. Unfortunately, what he’s trying, magic, has the same problem, even if he tried to scale down his solution.
Hmm, in Lewie’s attempt at a pre-emptive save, he may have just *FZZTTT*ed them all
By ‘pre-emptive’, I mean, I couldn’t remember if it was actually stated they *were* falling, and Lewie simply said that <quote>"I guess what little magic is left in the world is going to have no use for a giant floating castle-tomb."</quote>
Realisation struck and he attempted to wake Eddy up, and then ran outside wondering what to do, but nothing was implied, either vocally or visually, that the castle-tomb was *actually* in the process of falling
Unless they’re some weird physics going on, at least for the moment the building isn’t falling. If it were everyone would be floating or stuck to the ceiling.
Not entirely true. "Stuck to the ceiling" only happens in cartoons or in plane which is using jet engines to go down even faster. In free-falling object, everyone would be floating – however, in object which falls not-entirely-freely, maybe because the magic still slows the fall somewhat, maybe simply because those clouds works as parachute a little, people can still walk normally.
I think that when Lewie looked down he did saw the ground is getting closer.
On the plus side, they might get to a better afterlife now Ranna is out of the picture.
Does the afterlife still exist now that all the gods have been eaten up?
By Lady Marion’s explanation (and Rich’s further clarification), the afterlife is a natural part of the YAFGC cosmos. It existed before the gods, and will still exist after them, and the souls of the dead will still travel there.
The change the gods made, once they learned to move back and forth between these realms, was to each cordon off their own territory in the afterlife, and gather the souls of their followers there (in Ch’Thier’s view, as a reward or punishment, or in Ranna’s more pragmatic view, as a power source.)
With the gods absent or significantly depowered, souls will presumably be able to move through the afterlife as they wish, rather than being confined to their own god’s feifdom. Perhaps many of the existing communities will persist, but voluntarily now. The new system strikes me as a better one in general, though it’s possible that the more gods were also protecting their subjects from whatever dangers might threaten an afterlife denizen…
Like the crew of that ship reuniting in the afterlife… can’t remember which number it was…
I doubt all the gods are gone. Lloth didn’t get eaten at least.
Oh dear. I do believe Lewie just received a 503 error from the YAFGC universe.
I thought it was a 204. The universe is still working, it just isn’t returning any content.
On second thought, the fizzle could be a 410 response.
Of course, it’ll be a 418 if Fang is involved somehow.
Are you sure it was not a 403 message instead?
404: Mana Not Found.
Note that we’re all making slightly different cosmological statements with our choice of error message. I assure you, though, I did indeed mean 503. There’s as much significance to my choice as there is to each of yours…and all of these are interesting choices.
Yeah, I just thought that "service unavailable" would be for if magic as such was removed from the way the universe works. The service does still seem to be working, though with no power. That’s why I thought a 204 would be appropriate: the request was in order (no 4xx error), and the universe as such did not break (5xx), it just isn’t returning any content to the mage’s request any more.
Ahh. I was likening it to an "insufficient resources for server process" response, suggesting the server process was running but unable to complete requests due to resource constraints. I’ve generally encountered 204s in cases when "no content" is expected, not an exception — thus I filed it as a 5xx. From my memories of the HTTP spec, 2xx meant "success," 3xx "redirect," 4xx "client error" and 5xx "server error" — this struck me as "server error" territory.
As an aside, I boggle to imagine what a magical 507 error would look like. I have a few speculations, but we’re so far off into left field here that I suspect I should shut up and let the subject return to YAFGC!
Ah no, don’t kill Lewie. He was so happy….and naked..but mainly happy!
Poor Lewie. Hope Eddie isn’t going to have one of his years long power naps. (Tho not sure if it would happen now that magic is going to be on an all time low)
Hmm…y’know, the people in this room are among the cleverest men and women in the world. And they knew in advance that if their trap was sprung, it would leave magic severely depleted. Maybe one of them could have pointed out *in advance* the trouble with the follow-through phase of their plan?
(Yeah, I know, they had a lot on their minds. And mages tend toward the thunderously overconfident sorts who assume that they’ll always improvise their way out of whatever mess they create…)
Perhaps it was a case of "we knew the check would raze the account balance when it cleared, but we thought there’d be just enough left for the utility bills to go through, this month…and we weren’t expecting them to cut off electricity *quite* so quickly…"
I don’t think they anticipated that BOTH Goddesses would get zapped.
I suspect they didn’t anticipated they SURVIVE.
Or maybe they felt the loss of magic, and the effect on them personally, would be worthwhile to remove Ranna. Regardless, I’m enjoying the action, and Lewie’s being-clothed-in-skin- and Eddie’s reaction *snigger*
Rich, I’m curious- do you sometimes delay posting the next strip if the current one is generating good conversation? Was talking with someone who does that on his blog, got me wondering with all the conversations about the history, backstory, and philosophy.
Oh, I definitely agree with your first point. Everyone in that flying brick is brave enough to lay down their lives, if needed, to free the world from Ranna. Anyone who is NOT that brave would be…pretty much anywhere else, right now.
But you can be brave and still make an evacuation plan. Especially since (a) the spellcasters had lots of time to plan the details of their scheme beforehand, and (b) the current dilemma — trapped on board a temple held aloft only by good intentions and the dregs of failing enchantments — isn’t an unexpected setback, but exactly the best-case result they intended.
Of course, their original plan might have involved Turg and his kids. I would still lay odds that they’ll be the (reluctant, in Turg’s own case) rescue force, further complicating any thoughts of revenge that Runt might have been nursing.
Runt is on the ground, and… don’t believe Turg brought enough of his kids to save everyone
Yes, Runt is on the ground. Not catching the relevance of that.
And Turg’s kids, should he decide to call them in, are precisely one plot unit away from the scene. 😉
You brought up Runt and revenge, I don’t see how that is relevant in this case
And it wasn’t where Turg’s kids are, it’s how many he brought with him. Don’t believe he can communicate long distance to call the rest, certainly not in time
The Sphinx on the other hand… Wasn’t she involved in the Ranna fight?
I guess all the magic being gone won’t be helped by everyone who can use it getting squished in a falling castle.
Or at least most, isn’t dewdrop able to use it and still chilling with her brother somewhere else?
She was already experiencing problems with using magic even before the super spell was finally set off.
3271 "Nature Girl"
There will definitely be some magic users outside the castle, but those would probably be students or otherwise inexperienced. So, yes, if all mages here would be squished it’s definitely going to affect the magic knowledge …
Again, I find the metaphysical implications for anyone trapped in a magical state to be fascinating in this universe. Do curses fade away? Or do they lose the ability to be countered? ETC ETC. The explorations of what this means for a fantasy world are interesting…
Larry Niven influenced a lot of thinking about magic in his essay "Sometimes The Magic Goes Away". He introduced the idea of magic being a sort of energy he called mana, rather than as cheat codes that break the laws of physics. I like Neil Gaiman’s way of defining Magic:
"Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible."
While not directly following rules of D&D, this comics is still too close to RPGs – and in RPGs, magic IS sort of energy and can be worked with quite scientifically. In YAFGC, not only Larry Niven’s view can be experimentally proved to be correct, it’s probably something magic students are doing on beginning of study as an easy exercise.
Also, as long as magic is talking in words, you can apply formal grammatics to it, just like with programming languages. Lot of science in that direction.
Mags as talking in words is what I call the "Magic is the cheat codes" idea, that specific incantations allow access to hacks that the Creator(s) left in the universe. Which is not incompatible with the "magic as a sort of energy" trope.
I think Rich kinda sorta stumbled into this direction, letting the way magic works in his world change and evolve as the story dictates. Magic is a resource, but to access it you need to use specific protocols and avoid syntax errors.
And the best thing about magic? By bending reality, it can change itself.
I guess I’m arguing with Neil Gaiman and not you then.
"Those two are rarely compatible" … WRONG. Science is very powerful and universal tool. Sure you can have magic incompatible with science … but you can’t have magic SCHOOLS, you can’t have WIZARDS … you have shamans. If you have wizards and magic schools, if magic can be taught, it means it can be studied scientifically … and made MORE POWERFUL using science.
We know that creatures turned to stone by gorgonas are still stone.
Exactly- are they just statues now? Like mundane ones? Or are they still people trapped in a stasis that no magic exists that can undo?
Well its not the impact that kills you but the sudden stop
The impact *is* the sudden stop
I believe you meant "It’s not the *fall* that kills you but the sudden stop at the end" 😀
What about all those flying ships? What’s happened to them now?
Apparently this is what happens when you have a room with a massive combined INT score but a low aggregate WIS score.
I wonder if Lewie is starting to the:
"Oh great! I returned to life just in time to die horribly."
Also… mages , wizards, and sorcerers everywhere and not one spare robe to be found.
Hey! He’s got flesh for the first time in how long? He’s gonna wanna flaunt it!
At least until he re-discovers mosquitoes and biting flies.
She was already experiencing problems with using magic even before the super spell was finally set off.
Sorry for the double post!
Judicious thigh placement!
I can’t speak from experience, but I expect that if I’d been without skin for centuries, I would just revel in having it again, much like Lewie did when he got it again.
I wonder if he *feels* clothed? He also has internal organs now, so there’s quite a bit of padding.
Even if he’s aware of his nudity, I think he’s got more important things to worry about than modesty.
t!
"Hey, *nobody* is more naked than a skeleton. Amateurs."
“It ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.”
I have loved that song ever since Thursday.
(Ask Rich.)
t!
I’m just sitting her wondering when he’s going to realize he’s hungry, thirsty, has to use the little lich’s room…
(I know, bad Mrs. Fang… Cookies for everyone is my punishment)
You know, those may be welcome problems to have, after centuries of unlife. Remembering what it’s like to taste…to be tired and to *sleep* and to feel refreshed by it…to remember that every need and lack has a corresponding state of satiation. Inconvenient, perhaps…but impermanence and chasing the rituals of self-sustenance is the very heart of being a temporary being.
May Lewie enjoy it, and find reward in the rituals of impermanence, anew.
"May Lewie enjoy it, and find reward in the rituals of impermanence, anew."
He certanly will, once he remembers some stuff… https://www.yafgc.net/comic/0590-newfound-power/
Might want to change Lewie the Lich" to "Pantsless Lewie"
Hey, just be glad you’re not a lich anymore. You’d be a pile of bones on the floor.
Now is the time to learn *very quickly* how to make parachutes. 😛
Large friendly winged beings would be a very good asset right about now… magic is not the only way to fly.
Especially large friendly winged beings that aren’t 1/3rd afraid to fly. 🙂
Magic is not only way to fly, but anyone actually studying lift will tell you the ratio of wing surface, weight and minimal speed means dragon wings are nowhere near as big as would be needed. Most if not all winged creatures we saw in comics must be partially using magic for flying.
Yeah, but Bob would never be buoyant enough to float by physics alone, and many of the very large or very small creatures couldn’t even be alive without a radical reconfiguration of their bodies, internal and external, to comply with the square-cube law. So a certain amount of magic seems to be baked into even the "nonmagical" physics of the yafgc world.
(Larry Niven, in those "the Magic Goes Away" stories that many others have referenced here, was by contrast quite brutal in his enforcement of real physics on a previously-magical world. Whenever magic would collapse in a region, most of the magical creatures would simply drop dead, because magic was part of their metabolism down to the cellular level. Even relatively mundane creatures like centaurs died, because as described by legend, their cardiovascular systems would never have worked.)
I see it more as "magic is diminished but didn’t disappeared completely" – which was directly SAID in the comics, BTW. So, there is still enough magic left for the creatures to survive, and apparently even for Bob to float, but probably not for levitating whole cloud castle.
Note that the spell Lewie is trying did SOMETHING. It apparently didn’t worked, but there was some effect.
So, question is, just how much magic those flying creatures needs to fly and if they have that much. Personally, I would expect that they WOULD be able to fly, but NOT immediately, or they will be very wobbly now until they train a little and get used to flying being harder now.
Let’s just hope Lewie didn’t just speed up the decent!
His left hand looks like when the starter’s dead, you turn the key and hear a faint click – but absolutely nothing else happens.
Where in his right hand, something turned – once – then ground to a halt.
t!
I just wonder which of the three commands failed and which one did nothing
Three commands: ‘Make thee light as a feather’, ‘Glide gently to the ground’ and ‘Touch down gently’
Kinda like that great song "Two out of three aint bad!"
Tell that to the common bumble-bee: scientists are *still* trying to figure out how they can fly, or why
No we aren’t. That’s an urban legend.
Okay, there’s a small speck of real history at the heart of the story. There *were* people, back in the 1930s or so, who were perplexed at how bees — and insects in general — can fly. These people were experts on fixed-wing aircraft, and bees do not have fixed wings. Fixed-wing calculations worked great for planes, were vaguely in the right ballpark for birds, but worked terribly for bugs.
So humans went and learned a lot more about fluid dynamics and about flight with rapidly flapping wings, and nowadays, equations and computer models can describe flying insects beautifully.
Point is, it took a *lot* of time and research, from experts in a *related* field, and they weren’t having to worry about figuring it out before the ability that allowed them to fly stopped working
And the bee just continued happily bumbling along without (much of) a care on how they were doing it 😀
And on a related note, dragons are using their wings like birds or airplanes. They don’t flap rapidly, they barely flap at all. They actually don’t have much choice in this regard, as they are too big for the rapid flapping (and square-cube law enters the equation here).
Oh yeah, insect wings present a hell of a difficult calculation. Fluid dynamics in general — and turbulent flow specifically, which is what happens around those rapidly buzzing wings — give rise to some of the grungiest equations you’ll ever solve.
My peeve with the whole "Physics claims that bumblebees cannot fly" cliché is that, even back in the 1930s when it first arose, it was never true. At most, back then you could have said, "Physics claims, correctly, that a bumblebee who isn’t flapping its wings can’t fly or even glide. We’re gonna need a little more time to figure out the case when it *is* flapping."
Which wouldn’t be a big deal, if you didn’t so often hear the bumblebee legend dusted off to sow doubt and inaction on issues that science *does* understand.
Oops. That was meant as a reply to NR in the thread just above.
(And a new cliché is born. "Science doesn’t even know how to use forum software correctly.") 🙂
Will admit to only hearing of the cliché (is that the correct word?) about how bumble-bees shouldn’t be able to fly, thank you for correcting me (it did make for a fun, if false, story though, about how there is so much in nature that is not fully understandable)
Well Lewie, I have been cheering you on for years, here is your moment of truth.
Get it together and THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX.
Magic is just a word for stuff people don’t understand, after all these centuries you ought to know more than even Eddie about how things really are.
And for one thing, you have that bog fluffy could under you….
Come on, man, make me proud. You can DO this.
You do know what clouds are really made of, right? Cotton Candy!!
Lewie proceeds to take everyone’s cloths, and VERY QUICKLY make a giant parachute out of them to get them all down safely. 😛
Ooooo… I wonder what happens if anyone has a bag of holding with them… When those things fail, they tend to spontaneously dump ALL of the contents of the bag back into the main world. There could be some very strange, and possibly useful stuff popping in around the unconscious mages any minute!
I wanted to joke that Lewstrom’s "curses" expression became less pronounced with flesh then without. Maaaaybe it’s a little true, but it’s more just different. This one looks more confused, where prior ones ran a range from total rage to the "I am just tired of this s*&%."
This one is still expressive, just…softer maybe? I don’t normally talk art as I don’t know any of the technical stuff, but my impression.
He also looks a little… cross-eyed, something he couldn’t do as well before, with only his rubber bones to give expression 😀
I have the feeling he became a bit more panicky, than he was before. It might comes with the possibilitiy of dying properly, but I think thats what really changes his expressions. On a second thought, his general attitude seems to be different.
Also, I can’t help it, but I try to imagine his expressions on the last 2 scripts with his skeletal face.
He seems to be acting very much like the mortal man he once was. Whether Ch’Their’s lifting of his curse undid some of his psychological changes as well as physical ones, or whether having his body back just makes him *feel* like his old self again, so he’s unearthing long-dormant parts of his personality, I have no idea.
I am curious to see how the restored Lewie handles moral dilemmas (starting with this one: is his goal to save everyone present, or to save his own…well, skin? And Ata’s, of course, since she’s the only one here who he’s got a personal tie to.) His original mortal persona seemed neutral-to-good aligned, while even after recovering his memories and allying with Ata, Lewie has remained distinctly evil, though less scenery-chewingly so.
For example, one of his first acts after mending fences with Queen Maula was to have a more-or-less-harmless hobgoblin prisoner hanged so he could make a new zombie servant. Were he to keep doing such things in his current form, it would seem a lot harder to write off as "that’s just how Lewie is."
Well the panicky is just rational in this situation. And he could panic as a lich as we. At first I felt that he seeed more confused, but looking at it again, I’ll say it’s just a softer curses. And, again, in this situation, it makes sense that the failure makes sense to him. He’s only trying something because so much magic is being drained as to cause the temple to fall. Unfortunately, what he’s trying, magic, has the same problem, even if he tried to scale down his solution.
Plus, when he tries to do good, he fails
Or was it when he tried to do bad? It was one of the two
Hmm, in Lewie’s attempt at a pre-emptive save, he may have just *FZZTTT*ed them all
By ‘pre-emptive’, I mean, I couldn’t remember if it was actually stated they *were* falling, and Lewie simply said that <quote>"I guess what little magic is left in the world is going to have no use for a giant floating castle-tomb."</quote>
Realisation struck and he attempted to wake Eddy up, and then ran outside wondering what to do, but nothing was implied, either vocally or visually, that the castle-tomb was *actually* in the process of falling
Unless they’re some weird physics going on, at least for the moment the building isn’t falling. If it were everyone would be floating or stuck to the ceiling.
Not entirely true. "Stuck to the ceiling" only happens in cartoons or in plane which is using jet engines to go down even faster. In free-falling object, everyone would be floating – however, in object which falls not-entirely-freely, maybe because the magic still slows the fall somewhat, maybe simply because those clouds works as parachute a little, people can still walk normally.
I think that when Lewie looked down he did saw the ground is getting closer.