Database Magic Quotes

Somewhere in that database my name sat in its own little niche, the name of a reject, undisciplined and worthless. Just the way I liked it.

Well, when it became obvious that magic was going to wreck the computer networks, people tried to preserve portions of the Internet. They took snapshots of their servers and sent the data to a central database at the Library of Congress. The project became known as the Library of Alexandria, because in ancient times Alexandria's library was said to contain all the human knowledge, before some jackass burned it to the ground.

Here’s something you may not know: every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves undersea fiber-optic cables, the world’s best database technologies, and everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time. The magic of how this happens is called “real-time bidding” (RTB) exchanges, and we’ll get into the technical details before long. For now, imagine that every time you go to CNN.com, it’s as though a new sell order for one share in your brain is transmitted to a stock exchange. Picture it: individual quanta of human attention sold, bit by bit, like so many million shares of General Motors stock, billions of times a day. Remember Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, Goldman Sachs’s old-school brokerage acquisition, and its disappearing (or disappeared) traders? The company went from hundreds of traders and two programmers to twenty programmers and two traders in a few years. That same process was just starting in the media world circa 2009, and is right now, in 2016, kicking into high gear. As part of that shift, one of the final paroxysms of wasted effort at Adchemy was taking place precisely in the RTB space. An engineer named Matthew McEachen, one of Adchemy’s best, and I built an RTB bidding engine that talked to Google’s huge ad exchange, the figurative New York Stock Exchange of media, and submitted bids and ads at speeds of upwards of one hundred thousand requests per second. We had been ordered to do so only to feed some bullshit line Murthy was laying on potential partners that we were a real-time ads-buying company. Like so much at Adchemy, that technology would be a throwaway, but the knowledge I gained there, from poring over Google’s RTB technical documentation and passing Google’s merciless integration tests with our code, would set me light-years ahead of the clueless product team at Facebook years later.

Skill Unlocked: Dramatic Magic Theory. The art of blending Somatic and Expressive magics is the line which separates the wizards from the mages. The fact that spells of this type are notoriously prone to spectacular miscasts is a feature, not a bug. Can be used with Istari Style. Skill Unlocked: Expressive Magic Theory. This magic complements Somatic magic, using the power of words to create spellforms. It is easier to use in battle and can be more powerful, but the effects are less capable of movement through space. Bards use a type of Expressive magic focused around singing, but you don’t care about that because you’re not some worthless bard. Unless you are, in which case, there has been an error in the skill description database. Our apologies.

The very title of the episode, The Magicks of Megas-Tu, shows the writers had clear knowledge of Satanist Aleister Crowley’s spelling of the word ‘magic’ by adding the letter “k” on the end to signify it was of a satanic kind. In fact, IMDB—the Internet Movie Database, the most popular online resource for film information, contains some interesting revelations about the man who created the Star Trek franchise. Gene Roddenberry (August 19, 1921–October 24, 1991) was raised as a Southern Baptist, but as an adult considered himself to be a humanist and agnostic. He actually viewed religion as a primary cause of many wars and rejected organized religion.528