[Fanzine] The Path of Cunning

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

yet another setting which makes magic look more like psi in Babylon 5's Psi-Corps than as *magic* in magical settings.

Can you explain this a bit? I've never watched Babylon 5 - it appeared after I had given up TV - so I'm not sure what you mean.

The setting the article is about has both magic-as-powers and several schools of ritual magic.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I too found it the most interesting read, but also one that poked the most at my pet peeve: yet another setting which makes magic look more like psi in Babylon 5's Psi-Corps than as *magic* in magical settings.

That was not the impression that I got, so I am also curious about how you came to that conclusion - and I have seen a lot of Babylon 5.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Can you explain this a bit? I've never watched Babylon 5 - it appeared after I had given up TV - so I'm not sure what you mean.

The setting the article is about has both magic-as-powers and several schools of ritual magic.

Some hallmarks:

• Huge involvement of secretive government organisations in the topic of magic.
• Witchhunt apologia.
• The suggestion of a register which is suspiciously similar to the psi-corps register: on paper you're not forced to join, but in practice the coercion is implied to be huge.
• Plans for wide-scale governmental recruitment and implicitly the accompanying propaganda.
• Hints of the governmental magical organisation lacking transparency and public accountability.

These are some of the things that are big differences between how magical settings tend to treat magic and how B5 treated psi (though lately I've seen some fantasy settings that imitate B5 in its treatment of magic, such as Dragon Age).

Unrelated to the above, but related to the fanzine in general: why are all words spelled like this?

Originally Posted by Path of Cunning

I f m a g i c i a n s b e c o m e c o m m o n , s a y , m o r e t h a n
0 . 1 % o f t h e p o p u l a t i o n , t h e p o l i c e w i l l b e a b l e
t o r e c r u i t e n o u g h t o s o l v e t h i s p r o b l e m .

It's hard for people, hard for software, and super-hard for people using accessibility software.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Unrelated to the above, but related to the fanzine in general: why are all words spelled like this?

What reading software are you using to produce this result? (Might be best taken to PM.)

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

What reading software are you using to produce this result? (Might be best taken to PM.)

Huh, this is interesting.
I discovered it by simply trying to search for a word in Sumatra PDF, it not coming up, me trying to copy a word and discovering that the text has spaces between each letter like that. I've been using Sumatra for years and I haven't seen that happen with other PDFs (e.g. SJGames' or PHS' books).

The issue doesn't come up in Acrobat, so now I wonder what's so peculiar about this PDF that it makes the usually-reliable piece of software stumble like that. But if it happened to one, it might happen to others. I mean obviously it's not your fault, as you can't be expected to test all possible combinations, but it's still an issue that's of some interest to look into.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I discovered it by simply trying to search for a word in Sumatra PDF, it not coming up, me trying to copy a word and discovering that the text has spaces between each letter like that. I've been using Sumatra for years and I haven't seen that happen with other PDFs (e.g. SJGames' or PHS' books).

This is odd. I use Sumatra, and I'm not seeing that. What program were you pasting copied text into?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by johndallman

This is odd. I use Sumatra, and I'm not seeing that. What program were you pasting copied text into?

Notepad, Windows Run, the browser's text boxes (Vivaldi) all had the same effect. I'll check for updates and see if that changes anything. Yep, updating the version fixed it.

I'm very curious why this specific document had this issue and whether it's a thing that can affect other software.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Some hallmarks:

• Huge involvement of secretive government organisations in the topic of magic.
• Witchhunt apologia.
• The suggestion of a register which is suspiciously similar to the psi-corps register: on paper you're not forced to join, but in practice the coercion is implied to be huge.
• Plans for wide-scale governmental recruitment and implicitly the accompanying propaganda.
• Hints of the governmental magical organisation lacking transparency and public accountability.

Well, this is a GURPS campaign set during WWII, where the PCs and their opponents have been in intelligence services, special operations units and the like. There was no public awareness of magic being real at the start of the war and Appendix A really was the first public statement acknowledging it by any government. The secretive government organisations are the only ones with any practical expertise.

Several adventures have been about amateur occultists who'd made up their own systems of ritual magic and got themselves killed or otherwise created major trouble using them. The paper isn't talking about magical training exclusively for government service, but training as part of the general education system, so as to allow magic to become part of society without lots of accidents. It isn't "witch-hunt apologia" but trying to avoid people getting killed by their neighbours' unwise experiments.

There's no deliberate parallel to the B5 psi-corps, because I didn't know of that. I don't see where you get large-scale governmental recruitment, though this may be a terminology issue: the British police of 1945 weren't under the direct control of central government, but under local government.

There isn't a governmental magical organisation described: the implication is that the various branches of government will recruit their own magicians if they can, but nobody knows how many magicians there will be, so making plans isn't practical yet.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Notepad, Windows Run, the browser's text boxes (Vivaldi) all had the same effect. I'll check for updates and see if that changes anything. Yep, updating the version fixed it.

I'm very curious why this specific document had this issue and whether it's a thing that can affect other software.

I suspect that something was fooling Sumatra into copying text to the clipboard in two-bytes-per-character format and labelling it as one-byte-per-character format. I can't find anything in the Sumatra release history about this, but that document does not list every change. What was the previous version you were running?

The PDF was generated from Libre Office: Roger knows more about that than me.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I suspect that something was fooling Sumatra into copying text to the clipboard in two-bytes-per-character format and labelling it as one-byte-per-character format. I can't find anything in the Sumatra release history about this, but that document does not list every change. What was the previous version you were running?

The PDF was generated from Libre Office: Roger knows more about that than me.

It was 2.something, now it's 3.1.2 ×64; I wonder why the two-byte copying happened specifically with that document though.