52 Project #43: Dev Environment (Patreon)

People always want to know, how did I come up with it? And what they mean is, it’s so obvious, why was I the first, in centuries, millennia, of people practicing magic? Yeah, so the fact that magic became obscenely hard between the 15th century and the mid-20th had something to do with it, sure, but surely someone smarter than me should have come up with it? Someone from a great magical family, generations of mages, steeped in lore? Some prodigy who was doing magic since the age of 8? Hell, they’d settle for someone who went to Beaumonde or Gallagher, when they were actually at least teenagers, not someone who went to the Greye Academy at the age of 28 and had to payfor their education. I’m supposed to be way low on the totem pole, barely one step up from someone who went to trade school to learn how to banish ghosts.

Let me tell you why that is bullshit. And to do that, I have to start by telling you a bit about my background.

I was a little boy in the 1970’s. Yes, I said boy, keep up, it’ll be important later. I know the people in the magical know were reeling from how magic blew up and expanded in 69, but for those of us who didn’t know jack about real magic, there was something that was magical to us, and that was computers.

You don’t know. To you it’s a tool, and it works well or it works badly. For us there was no question, it’s going to work badly, it’s going to hardly do anything you want and it’s going to screw that much up pretty often, but it was the future. And it was shiny! We knew our computers were shit, but it was the promise of them, the magic we predicted we’d be able to do as they got faster and smarter, that amazed us and compelled us. Some of us. Mostly nerds, mostly male, mostly white in this country because other races generally didn’t have the money lying around to buy what was, in those days, an expensive toy. But for those of us with access and a love of the things, they were magic. And they were the shiny science fiction future we’d been promised, with flying cars and solar panels.

I was always into engineering stuff, but when I got my first computer, at the age of 10, I was hooked. Tinkering with the damn thing became the most fun activity I could think of, most of the time. When I was 14 I got a job with a hole in the wall mom and pop shop that built and repaired computers. It was a great relationship. They exploited the shit out of me because I was 14 so they didn’t have to pay me what they’d have to pay a college grad who knew this stuff, and I exploited them because I was getting paid more than minimum wage, at a time in most kids’ lives when they couldn’t even get a job flipping burgers, to do what I was going to do anyway. And that gave me an excuse why I wasn’t going to hang out with the other boys after school and I wasn’t gonna play sports and all that, because I wasn’t, but now I could say, sorry, guys, I’ve got a job. I had a few friends, nerds like me, who were also into computers but not quite as much as I was, and we used to hang out playing Atari, and later Nintendo and Sega, and I am absolutely sure that some of you have no idea what Atari was and barely recognize Sega, but you know what Nintendo is, so context.

Now, today, all the different things you can do with a computer are split up into separate skills. You’ve got your programmers, your system admins, your guys who climb under your desk and hook up your internet. Your data crunchers, your webmasters, all that. In those days, there were no divisions. Your computer was incredibly expensive and a piece of shit that could barely do anything, and parts you bought for it required extensive arcane knowledge. Know what a jumper is? That’s okay, you don’t need to anymore. So you knew how to install parts in your machine, how to maintain and upgrade it. And the software could barely do anything, so you learned how to program, how to debug, how to get around really lame DRM schemes – that part hasn’t changed – and hacks for your operating system. When the web showed up, then we learned HTML because we were pioneers and there was no Wix or Wordpress or anything making pretty sites for us. About the only thing we didn’t routinely do that is a major IT profession nowadays was databases. I’m gonna admit it, the people who focus on that scare me. DBAs know things about their servers and how to optimize them that seemed to me, most of my career, to be high wizardry.

So in the 90’s, I didn’t get a college degree because I was too busy making money. By the time I was 18, I went into business with a friend of mine who was a half-decent salesman. Also, as I found out later, a lying sack of shit, so I ended up in the corporate world, doing whatever work I could get as a temp – nowadays we call ourselves “consultants” but back then it was the same word you use to describe the girl at the front desk who’s subbing for Jenny with the sore throat. I knew my value and I charged my value, so I got fired by a lot of agencies, but there were lots of fish in that sea.

By the time I was 25, I was rich. I had dot com stocks up my ass, and sweet IRAs, and a fuckton of liquid money in the bank, and more coming in, because I had experience like no one else did. I could say “I have been working on PCs for 11 years” and prove it. I was a network engineer, I was a programmer, I was a webmaster, and I could still build and repair PCs and fix Janice from accountings’ Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet.

I also had no significant other. I had no good relationship with my family – my dad wanted an entirely different kind of son, one who actually acted like his understanding of what a boy should be. I’m pretty sure you can guess why that was not me. So I had nothing to spend money on but my cats, and beer and pizza for my Shadowrun roleplaying group. Sweet new machines, fast for the time; great stereos, a projection TV, all that kind of stuff, but none of that put a dent in my salary. I realize this sounds like bragging, so let me clarify. It absolutely is. I was hot shit and it made me rich.

Also I had privileges I didn’t really understand until they were gone.

See, I was miserable, and I had a hard time figuring out what was wrong. Yeah, I played women in every role-playing campaign I’d ever joined, but a lot of guys did that, back then. I was throwing everything into my work so I wouldn’t have to be alone with my thoughts, because my thoughts were mostly about how bad and wrong I felt and I wished I could be somebody else. Specifically a female someone else. Yeah, you guys see where this story is going.

I was 25 when I figured out I was trans. 26 when I decided, fuck it, I’m made of money, I’m going to live as a woman. Also 26 when I discovered that a, your landlord absolutely could evict you for being trans back in those days, which by the way, in a lot of places, still can, and b, people who clocked me treated me like shit for being a man pretending to be a woman and people who didn’t clock me treated me like shit for being a woman in IT. I cannot tell you how many times, talking to some temperamental asshole client who thought this task was better handled by a man, I wanted to say, “Well, if you needed someone to fix your network with their penis, you should have said so!” and then whip it out. I did occasionally, doing phone support, transfer some caller who would only speak to a man to myself, talk in a deep voice, solve his problem, and then go back to my real voice and be all like, “So glad I could help you out today! I’m Lisa, and if you have any more problems, feel free to ask for me!”

It wore me down. I was lucky as shit – or rather, I had magic, but I didn’t know it then – that I’d grown up skinny and soft and pretty-boy, and as soon as I grew my hair, wore makeup and stuffed my bra, hardly anyone made me as trans. People in the 90’s were amazingly shitty to trans women, even more than today, and I’m sure every trans woman in this audience is thinking, “short of burning you at the stake, how could they have made it worse?” But see, I was in a big, liberal city, with friends who were nerds, and I lost all of them because they thought I was a freak. I couldn’t get jobs when my driver’s license still said Pete but I was wearing dresses and makeup, because whatever gift I had that prevented people from figuring out I was trans if they didn’t already know, it broke down as soon as they knew. I was rich, so I lived off my savings, but I didn’t have health insurance because back then you basically couldn’t if you didn’t have a job, and there are only so many doctors who would prescribe hormones and I was paying for them out of pocket. Worth it, but Jesus. I mean, some of you probably have stories that are a hell of a lot worse, I know, but it was bad.

I see some of you guys are a bit uncomfortable because I shared my deadname. Maybe because I say I used to be a boy. A lot of trans people don’t do it like that. They feel like, this is who I always was under the skin, I was always a girl regardless of how I looked. Or a guy, if they’re trans men. But I feel like, I can’t retcon my past. I thought I was a boy, therefore I might as well talk like I was. Women who change their names when they get married aren’t like “my name was always Smith” when they were born Jones on the birth certificate, so I figure, why should I?

Anyway. Then when I finally had docs telling the world I was Lisa and a shiny F on the license? Then I got condescending bullshit. I had been working on computers practically since I was out of diapers and these people were constantly testing me, talking over me, stealing my ideas… ladies, I’m sure a lot of you know this all too well. Up until this point, I had secretly harbored the belief that maybe my female co-workers who complained about harassment and not being taken seriously were… hmm… exaggerating things. No perspective. Making mountains out of molehills. No. Guys? They are absolutelytelling the truth. They’re probably downplaying it in front of you. It’s not about their competence. I was hot shit on a stick and when I was a man, they all knew it and accepted it, and the worst I got was people thinking I was arrogant because I was too young to be so good at my job. Soon as I was a woman, here comes the second-guessing and the constant interruptions and dudes trying to flirt when I was trying to work. Still hot shit on a stick and frankly my dick was probably bigger than most of theirs, but long hair and lipstick and all of a sudden I don’t know shit.

I put up with this for two years and then quit. Fuck it. I’m gonna just write video games. Gonna quietly go crazy inside my apartment, with no friends because I’m not working and I never knew how to make friends outside of work, and I didn’t trust men because of my previous friends who dropped me, and I didn’t know how to make friends with nerdy women. Like, what are they into? If I start talking about the different colors of dragons or how the Force works, are they even going to know what I’m talking about? Short answer’s yes, by the way, and if you’re looking to make nerdy female friends, go where there is fanfic, but I didn’t know that then. So I’m all alone, spending 16 hours a day coding my video game because I’m so fucking lonely, if I stop coding I might realize how lonely I was and blow my brains out. I figured, I’d make the game, I’d sell it on the Internet – which was rapidly becoming a thing – and then I’d make another, ad nauseam, until somebody was willing to befriend me just because holy shit, I made this great video game. I had friends, sort of, if you count people I knew from the Internet who I’d never met in person, but honestly? Folks, those are acquaintances, most of the time. Not real friends.

Instead, the Greye Academy contacted me.

So I don’t need to explain to you all how this shit works. But I’m gonna anyway because I’m on a roll and hey, maybe some of you don’tknow. Gallagher and Beaumonde and Ricelynn, they go scouting for teenagers. They find the ones who are prodigies, with magical spikes. Then they give them a free ride for either college, or high school that’s really college, depending on how old they are. Then they hit the ones who get rich up for donations, and they do top-notch magical research, oh, and probably they’ve got oneiromancers predicting the stock market from people’s dreams and whatnot. Yay, gravy train. Those mages are set for life.

Then there’s you. And me. The ones who have to pay for it. Older students. Students who didn’t spike as high as the big magic schools want, or didn’t pass the test. Or have neurodivergencies that don’t work well with We Are The Top Of The Line Most Academically Rigorous School Ever crap. Or, and I am being quite blunt here, people who aren’t living in communities full of really white gifted kids, because they can’t go looking everywhere, so they go where they know they’ll find a lot of kids who will probably grow up to make money with their magic, thus fat donations.

We mortgage our future to go to a goddamn magicschool. We take out student loans. We attempt to explain to parents that magic is real and we want money to go to magic college. We do work study to pay for ballooning tuition. Or, in my case, I just spent all the money I’d made working in IT all those years, because fuck it, why not? I was miserable and the next stop on the train was a gun in my mouth, so if this turned out to be a scam, well, how was it going to make anything any worse?

Now, here is a thing you probably don’t know about IT. When you are programming and you’re working on something whose stability is important to you – it’s used by the company you work for to make millions of dollars, it’ll be really embarrassing if it breaks or looks weird, or you just need to keep control of what bugs happened when, you don’t write your program in the place it’s already running. You don’t make changes to the real thing. You make changes in the dev environment.

It stands for development environment. It’s ideally just like production, meaning real life, except that if you fuck it up it’ll be fine, you’ll be able to fix it and no egg on your face. Sometimes we have multiple such environments, like dev for the raw, new stuff, and test for where the raw new stuff goes when you’ve tested that it doesn’t break things horribly, and stage for where the tested stuff goes when you want to make absolutely sure it will work in prod, and then prod. Stage is generally maintained as identical to prod until the moment you check in your latest tested changes.

This is a thing everyone in IT knows. Or knew, back then, I guess nowadays we’re all specialized enough that maybe only programmers and system admins know it. You don’t make changes to your production environment, because the consequences could be, your web store doesn’t work and no one buys product, or your reports stop running, or your reports run but the data is bad so the report is a lie, or no one can get into the document repository, or the Internet goes down. All things that are terrible, from the perspective of business. So you make your changes in the dev environment.

But I got over here, and I found out… you people make changes to real life! The ultimate production environment! All the time! And there are so many spells where if you mess up one little thing, you open a portal to space and get sucked into vacuum, or the candle you’re trying to light explodes and burns your building down, or you turn yourself into an orange and then someone eats you. So you’re expected to do the spell perfectly. The first time. Every time. While meanwhile you’ve got to manage knowing a dead foreign language fluently, and best if it’s more than one, and how is the position of the moon, the time of day and your latitude influencing your spell, and where’s the nearest ley line… it is absolutely no wonder Greye makes you sign waivers saying that if you die because you were performing magic, it’s not their fault. Like, do they do that at Beaumonde? I wouldn’t know, I never went there, but some of you are dropouts from there, right? Oh, they just mess with people’s memories so the family thinks it was an off-campus accident or something. Gotcha.

How in the fuck did human beings ever invent magic without blowing themselves up? How’d we ever get good enough at this stuff to write it down and teach it to new mages, when doing magic by trial and error generally gets most people very dead?

And that’s why no one at Greye Academy had come up with new spells for I-don’t-know-how-long. Because the curriculum’s not as harsh, people can keep up with it better, but that means they have to focus a lot more on teaching you how to do specific shit than on the theory that would allow you to get yourself into serious trouble.

Well. Fuck that. I didn’t go to magic college at the age of 28 to be a script kiddie, cutting and pasting together bits and pieces of other people’s spells when I don’t understand most of it, and hoping I don’t blow myself up. I figured out that what magic needs is a dev environment.

Which meant, ironically, that I had to work my ass off to master theory, because what I wanted was not just a new spell, but a really complex new spell, that would replicate the real world as well as possible without, you know, the mass of the entire planet Earth being generated, and that most magic would not interfere with because if the magic you’re testing breaks your dev environment while you are personally in it, I thought that would probably be bad. Like don’t cross the streams bad. Ha! I see some of you smiling at that. A few of you guys are as old as me, and for the rest of you, there’s DVDs and Netflix, right?

Even at Greye Academy, if you have a passion, a specific realm of study or a specific type of spell you want to do, and you need theory for it… there are professors who will help you. A lot of them. They didn’t go into the profession of being a magic professor to teach script kiddies either. They love theory. But probably they were working at Gallagher and they got drunk in class, or slept with a student, or maybe the rest of the faculty just didn’t like their face. Tenure’s hard to get in any college. I’m not gonna question why a professor might have ended up working at Greye even though they’re really talented. And nowadays… nowadays we are on the map.Nowadays we are where the cool kids go to practice really esoteric magic. So talk to your professors, and if you get nowhere, talk to some others.

Because here is where we can do world-changing magic safely. Here is where overusing magic doesn’t burn you up, it just cuts you off. Here is where I built the dev environment.

At first it was just me. But I needed an anchor. Portaling into a mirror is all well and good but if you straight-up portal into a mirror, you know you’re in an in-between nothing world until you get to the second mirror. So I was building my replica of reality in there, but it’s pretty constrained. There is honestly not a lot in the mirror world to build with.

Yes, you get into it with a mirror, but now the mirrors are portals to the anchored fractal dimension. Each time you invoke the spell on a mirror, you’re generating a new dev environment, which is frozen in the exact state the world was in when you made it. So you wanna know why your spell won’t work, you can rule out “maybe I cast it wrong for nighttime” by making a nighttime dev environment where you can try to debug it. And if you’re in there and you do anything that causes harm to yourself – changes in yourstate, the caster of the dev spell, collapse the environment unless you deliberately carve out an exception. Like I did when I figured out my sex change spell. Yeah, I know there are some magic libraries that already have one, but you know what, they are not at Greye. Changing your body physically at that level willbreak your dev environment, because regardless of the status of your soul, it’s still an intrinsic change – a radical change to your physical body. Same thing if you give yourself wings. You input exceptions for the category of magic you’re trying to perfect.

Initially I was terrified of the idea of collapsing the environment. What happens to you when you’re in a place that suddenly ceases to exist? It didn’t occur to me until later, what happens when you put a letter in an envelope and then you disintegrate the envelope but not the letter? Well, the letter falls on the floor. So the dev environment just dumps you into the real world if you do something that breaks it.

There are some advanced techniques like making stupid mooks to practice battle magic on, and one I call the Holodeck and if you’ve ever seen any of the newer Star Trek series, you can guess why. But you actually have to have enough mastery of theory to understand how the dev environment works to make those kinds of modifications, so don’t start with that. You wanna pretend to be a jazz singer in a 1940’s nightclub in a noir mystery, get one of the grad students or the faculty to do it for you. Or me if I’m not busy. I usually am busy though, and I don’t have office hours, so you know what, probably you will not be able to ask me. You can email me, though, and if your idea sounds cool enough I might just decide to help you out.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the other schools have implemented a dev environment yet. It’s not rigorous enough, they say. Fear of death or self-inversion keeps students better grounded and focused on getting it right, they say. You can’t actually do the magic in the real world with the safeguards of the dev environment, so what’s the point, they say.

The point is you can do damn near any kind of magic you want, and if it would harm the fabric of spacetime, draw too much magic and harm you, summon a god, or turn you into a newt when that wasn’t your objective… basically, almost anything… the dev environment collapses and kicks you out. Greye is the only school that’s got one. Because Greye is the only school that will take as a student someone who’s 28 and has already had a career in IT. Because it took someone who trained to make modern, mundane magic in the real world, on computers, to figure out how to make theoretical exploration of magic safe enough that students can play with it.

You guys may have been told you were going to a second rate school. Or you thought it was the best thing ever because woo, magic exists, and then you found out about those hoity toity assholes from Ricelynn and the like and now you feel like you’re going to a second rate school. You may also be thinking, why am I spending so much money to go to a second rate school? I am here to tell you that MIT is not in the Ivy league. There were probably some snobs once upon a time who were all like, “ooh, engineering college? How gauche. I’m getting a fancy Ivy League degree in making a lot of money.” And then some smart kid from MIT opened up a dot com and got much richer than them. MIT is an excellent school and people will stab each other’s eyes out to get in – not literally but sometimes it’s close – and just because it’s not Ivy League doesn’t make it not excellent.

I want you to understand. Here at Greye, we do engineering magic. Because we can. Because figuring out how shit works is a lot easier to do when you have a dev environment to practice in. I mean, you can still major in magical disaster cleanup and just learn rote spells, that’s a path and it’s worth good money. But if I were you, I’d take advantage of the fact that this is the only school in the world where you can practice insanely dangerous spells without getting hurt or destroying the world.

Okay. I’ve used up half our first session telling you why this is awesome and you should be proud of your school and you are lucky to get me for a professor. And you know all this is true because I have tenure despite saying “fuck” in front of my students. Now let’s get into the reason you’re all here and learn how to create one for yourself.