anon6789

TVTropes doesn’t have anything listed as the origin, but it has a ton of examples if you want to go back in some of the media and see how far it goes back.

The reasoning they give to its popularity is that floating text is easy to animate, can be very flashy for little effort, and can be used as a plot device, with either characters needing time to draw runes, or people refining/debugging their spells, and having something observable to show off the magic power level or the effective range of spells. Basically, it’s a really cool, easy, and cheap way to make magic look badass.

Breaking Bad Anime

toads were thought to carry a jewel in their heads that changed colour to warn of poison and protect against evil

Wahhh?! 😦

Toadstone

The toadstone, also known as bufonite (from Latin bufo, “toad”) and crapaud-stone, is a mythical stone or gem that was thought to be found in the head of a toad. It was supposed to be an antidote to poison and in this it is like batrachite, supposedly formed in the heads of frogs. Toadstones were actually the button-like fossilised teeth of Scheenstia (previously Lepidotes), an extinct genus of ray-finned fish from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. They appeared to be “stones that are perfect in form” and were set by European jewellers into magical rings and amulets from Medieval times until the 18th century.

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Fossilized Scheenstia jawbone with “toadstones”

From ancient times people associated the fossils with jewels that were set inside the heads of toads. The toad has poison glands in its skin, so it was naturally assumed that they carried their own antidote and that this took the form of a magical stone. They were first recorded by Pliny the Elder in the first century.

Like the fossilised shark teeth known as tonguestones, toadstones were thought to be antidotes for poison and were also used to treat epilepsy.[1] As early as the 14th century, people began to adorn jewelry with toadstones for their magical abilities. In their folklore, a toadstone was required to be removed from an old toad while the creature was still alive. 17th century naturalist Edward Topsell wrote that this could be done by setting the toad on a piece of red cloth.

The true toadstone was taken by contemporary jewellers to be no bigger than the nail of a hand and they varied in colour from a whitish brown through green to black, depending on where they were buried. They were supposedly most effective against poison when worn against the skin, on which occasion they were thought to heat up, sweat and change colour. If a person were bitten by a venomous creature a toadstone would be touched against the affected part to effect a cure. Alternatively Johannes de Cuba, in his book Gart der Gesundheit of 1485, claimed that toadstone would help with kidney disease and earthly happiness.

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Polished Jurassic toadstones

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😁

That’s the one! Dang COVID. So many fish left in the sea they could have caught!

I also just remembered:

Working!! / Wagnaria!! (restaurant)

Do It Yourself!! (DIY project club)

Hanasaku Iroha (hot spring / traditional hotel)

Some I like that I don’t often see mentioned:

Supercub (motor bikes)

Silver Spoon (farming)

Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater (fishing)

I still have clear memories of trying to download the huuuuuuge 20MB install and a phone call ruining it when it was almost done. All that time, wasted. I think of that every time my phone is now downloading apps updates that are around 90MB in a few seconds.

I miss the excitement of going 14.4>28.8>36.6k baud and 2x>4x>8x CD ROM drives where each update was very noticeable. Nowadays I do the majority of my computer stuff on my phone, so a bit of the magic is gone.

The last PC I got was a hand me down my old boss gave me that he built for playing Flight Simulator. I think I had it for at least 10 years. It had Vista on it, but sometime in the last couple years I put Mint on it.

I used it originally to play World of Tanks until something broke on it, I think the wireless card, and I fixed that. After that it served as a media PC to stream things. Now it mostly collects dust as my phone is powerful enough for 90% of my computing, and anything more fancy I’ll use my work laptop or the wife’s PC we get like 4 years ago when she went back to college.

I also use an ancient Walmart grade HP laptop that takes like 5 minutes to boot and has no battery to play with synth and piano VSTs hooked up to my piano.

I’ve wanted a used PC for a bit, maybe a Mac Mini as I hear they’re better for audio, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

Same here.

I was in college in the late 90s and remember being in Intro to Business. One of the exercises we had was something about looking at a list of applicants and choosing who to hire. The teacher had looked over everything and got disgusted and read a bunch of replies in front of the class. The answers were basically all about who seemed to be the most exploitable at the advantage of the fictional company, ie who would work overtime they didn’t want to but they had family to support, etc. He couldn’t believe that people were looking at business that heartlessly.

It really gave me a bit to think about, and I remember that more than anything else from that class, but it seems a lot of others really felt they were on to something, since that seems to be how things played out. Maybe my teacher was too idealistic or this was still just Reagan era economic policy kicking in, but it does feel like this is the kind of business world we’ve built since then.