Quote Originally Posted by Grey_Wolf_c View Post
No, it does not "do that one thing". That has been my point from the start. We, like Elliot, are blasé about the "magic" at our fingerprints. You can fry bacon in a microwave. Poach eggs. Cook salmon from scratch. It's all there in the manual. And yet something like 80% of people never use it for anything more than making popcorn and heating ready-made meals*. In such circumstances, I find it hard to believe declarations that "I'd be practicing whenever possible and reading my spell book religiously". No, we clearly don't. Because we are so used to just doing the easy stuff, that the hard stuff is too much of a bother, when we already can do the basics.

And this is with you guys deliberately picking what you felt was the easy target. The sheer complexity of the things we can do with our computer dwarves any spell - indeed, every spell - in EGS, and yet the large, large majority of people have never read their computer's manual, and limit themselves to email, web browsing and youtube.

Grey Wolf

*I swear I saw tis number in a study somewhere, but I can't find it in a quick google search. for the purposes of this discussion, I think it is a safe enough number, but feel free to substitute your own.
All of that is simply some form of heating up your food. You might be heating up your food in a different manner, but that's all it's doing. But sure, lets say microwave is a bad example and move on.

Computers is a much better example, though not a good one personally. I'm going into programming so that I can access the crazy stuff computers can do. Cars is another good example, and while I'm not trying to upgrade my car to do more stuff, I'm fully cognizant of what you can do with a car. I'm just not interested in learning those skills because all I want out of my car is a means to get from point A to point B.

But that's the thing, I'm interested in computers and put my effort there. I'm not interested in cars so I don't put any effort in there. I imagine most people are the same for their own interests and hobbies.

Magic though, doesn't follow that. Yes, it takes time and effort to learn and use, but by the rules of magic in El Goonish Shrive, you will get spells that are a reflection of yourself, and thus are almost always something you are interested in. (Barring awakening improperly). If I had access to it? You can damn well bet I'd be focusing on improving it as much as possible. Afterall, whatever I get will likely help me with what I want to do in life or my daily life because it's a reflection of me.

And we've seen how easy it is to improve your magic. It simply just casting as many spells as you can til you run out of magic. Nanase was able to practice her magic while going through her daily school life. Alright, she had subtle enough spells to do so with, but it wouldn't be much harder for say, Ellen to zap herself repeatedly, or for Susan to put a pencil in her box and repeatedly summon it. It is substantially harder to get good at programming, or to rebuild a souped up engine of a car.