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 Or for the “magic as code” aspect going through an old spell and complaining about how badly written it is then realizing they wrote it a decade earlier.
@MacBalance @cstross "When I cast this spell, I discovered that Belphegor is no longer Lord of Eternal Pain, and that I now need to call on Astaroth for that. But the invocation for Astaroth seems to be totally different. Can I still use these black candles, or do I have to throw them away and lay in a stock of hemlock?"
"When I summoned Belphegor I wanted a loud shouty demon, not a 1970s Polish jet-propelled biplane cropduster, dammit!"
"Not my fault, guv, it's just a namespace collision!"
@darkling @MacBalance NB: In case you thought I was pulling it out of my arse, here's the PZL M-15 Belphegor in all its incredibly slow, screechy, beauty:
@cstross @darkling @MacBalance see also refactoring an old spell base after a rebranding and having missed some strings that need both updating and localization.
Also merging branches requires cycles so multidimensional incursions with the accompanying bit rot poisons the whole history (see multidimensional) and may or may not be recoverable.
A kind of Heisenberg paradox if you will - observed or otherwise the spell is dead and is probably going to make you wish you were too.
@cstross @MacBalance I already looked it up. I'm just...
[the] "decision to adopt jet engine propulsion [...] had been at the insistence of Soviet officials"
@darkling @MacBalance My strong suspicion is that the Belphegor was *perfect* for spraying persistent nerve agents in the path of an enemy advance. Slow, low, huge tankage for pesticides, and a turbofan to provide bleed air for aerosolizing noxious substances … also, crop-dusting is a plausible excuse for "peaceful" forward basing on farms just behind the front line in the run-up to hostilities. (But the An-2 could also do the job and was more numerous and easier to maintain.)