One of the least plausible aspects of fantasy as a genre is that sorcerers NEVER seem to get bogged down in creating a new spell then spend the next three or four months muttering "I hate this, it's rubbish" under their breath.

@cstross I hate those modern spells. The entire summoner facing interface is written in pig Latin. The language should even exist in the first place. It doesn't even relate to actual Latin other than that it shares some of the syntax. It was fine for making the pictures in the grimoire move, but for entire spells? The semantics are totally different to Latin. It's entities are weakly typed for fucks sake. Look at that identifier. It should refer to a lesser demon but half the time you get a shoggoth instead. How the hell should I track that down? Also the spell is utterly slow for the amount of black candles I have to throw at it. And then I need to summon an entire demonic entity just to interpret it. We should have stuck to the original ancient languages. So much more efficient.

@acb @sebastian Or, from Microsoft, VisualENOCHIANScript for Excel! Now with added widgets of unspeakable gruesomeness in multidimensional sheets

@cstross @sebastian To be fair, Microsoft knew their way around the eldritch realms. I think I still have my 1990s Microsoft Creatures Of The Necronomicon CD-ROM in a box somewhere…

@cstross @acb @sebastian To be fair, I’d take my chances with that versus a VLOOKUP and a pivot table.