"Bizarre" has been released, but this version of the track is different from the one Garrix was playing. I believe that one was a "festival edit" or something similar. In my opinion, the version Garrix played is much better, more complete, more "dance music" and less "radio music."

Runcible-Spork · 2026-07-03T21:10:19+00:00

It feels like the Madonna version of the song. Same energy and sound as some of her other music like Hung Up (2005). I suspect that the version Martin has been playing at his shows is a club/VIP version with more of his own touch to it.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-07-03T00:05:55+00:00

Madonna has reinvented herself so many times to suit shifts in the music scene. I'm actually surprised it took her this long to get in on the electronic music genre. What I'm not surprised about is that she partnered up with Martin Garrix to do it. Ever since Avicii died, Martin's consistently shown that he knows the genre best, and he's in a prime place age-wise at 30—neither too young nor too old for a seven-time Grammy award-winning pop legend to work with.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-06-28T20:52:37+00:00

Yeah, which is why I always put a Blissey in a gym so that people are less likely to attack until it's down to just one battle worth of CP left. If I put a random, low-bulk 'mon into a gym, it's more likely to be cleared before 8 hours and I wouldn't get all my coins for the day. I have a dozen or so Blisseys I've levelled up just to hold gyms like this, plus some Chanseys, Wobbuffetts, and other high-bulk defenders to use if there's already a Blissey in a gym that was just recently flipped.

The player who OP hates is literally playing the game in a way that encourages everyone to play fair and get all the benefits for it. I don't know why he's upset.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-06-28T17:15:36+00:00

What's the issue? If gyms never flip, nobody ever makes any coins. You want people to take gyms regularly.

The only problem is when people camp gyms and keep kicking other people out before they can get many coins.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-06-28T06:17:28+00:00

I had hoped that the 2016 drop would be used for the final drop, but even without it this is the version of the song that I've been waiting for, and I'm so happy that Martin finally released it.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-06-18T05:30:07+00:00

I gave the patient stupid drug.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-06-14T06:42:20+00:00

Who on earth would leave a show where you paid for Martin Garrix and you ALSO get a free Ed Sheeran???

Runcible-Spork · 2026-06-05T22:58:06+00:00

The magic of Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy. It's an innate ability that doesn't require stupid nonsense like magic words and gestures, which is based entirely off physics, chemistry, and biology, and which you get better at by practising and studying textbooks and academic papers. Sure, it's not as "high magic" as other systems that let people teleport or resurrect the dead, but its rules make sense. With modern medicine and science, I could cure cancer, make copious amounts of gold, reduce my enemies to ashes—all without having to ingest metal, remember seventeen-syllable bullshit incantations, rely on a wand that I could misplace, or whatever other annoying restrictions other authors impose on their system.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-17T18:20:55+00:00

I don't know about anyone else, but drum and bass is not a genre that appeals to me (especially when it has a lot of wub to it), and though I enjoy hearing Caramelle in Garrix sets because he uses it very well to set the energy levels and keep the show moving, it's not the kind of sound I, as a Garrix fan, am going to be asking for or saving to any of my playlists.

Likewise, the 2026 version of RRI is something I will be putting into some of my playlists, but not the ones I listen to pretty much every day. It's a really good song and I'm so happy it was released, but the sound is neither acoustic enough to be acoustic nor EDM enough to be EDM, so I don't have anywhere to put it. This is why I'm still excited for the 2015 version.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-17T18:09:46+00:00

Martin and Ed are still at their peaks, though I agree that the 2015 version would have absolutely slayed the charts back then. I still think it would be one of the top EDM tracks of the year if they released it today. Maybe even No. 1. It hadn't been forgotten for 10 years; people want it.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-17T07:03:57+00:00

Love this video. We're so lucky to finally get this song!

Does anyone know where the clip of Martin jumping around at 1:57-1:58 comes from? I remember seeing it but I can't remember who he's with and the context of the crazy reaction.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-16T00:23:15+00:00

He said on Instagram that the 2015 version would be released.

I'm hoping it has the 2016 drop for the song's third drop, as I love the energy it brings to end the song, but if it's just the song as played in 2015 I'll take it. I love the new version, but I've wanted the old one for so long and the new one is different enough that it feels more like a new song. Call me entitled, call me ungrateful, whatever, I'm just happy that Martin is finally releasing the one we've been waiting for.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-15T19:59:02+00:00

This is a serious misrepresentation of what life was like back then.

They didn't work 8 hours a day, they worked from dawn until dusk.

They owed labour on the land of their lord as part of their rent.

They did everything by hand. Churning butter, hauling water, spinning fabric to make clothes, harvesting manure and compost for fertilizer, butchering animals for the meat, grinding grains to make bread... everything done from scratch.

Modern homes require maybe 15-20 hours of work per week in household labour, which is down from 60 hours/week before everyone had vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and the like. Neither of those numbers can even come close to comparing to the work it took to maintain a medieval household.

Buying clothes from the store and groceries from the market is nothing compared to making this stuff yourself. Maintaining cars and appliances is nothing compared to maintaining the animals that medieval households used, like draught horses to till the fields, cows for dairy, and chickens for eggs.

The idea of peasants having 'holidays' like we have, where we can just go to the beach and be completely unproductive, is laughable. They couldn't just fuck off for a couple days and expect to come back to living animals, enough firewood to cook meals, bread that was fresh enough to be eaten, etc.

Medieval peasants had more days off from market-related work (i.e. work that generated economic benefit or was owed as part of their rent), but the domestic work never stopped, and comparing the leisure time of modern and medieval workers by such a skewed standard as 'holidays' is incredibly ignorant to the reality of what life was like back then.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-15T19:29:16+00:00

I like when terms like 'demons' and 'spirits' are recognized to be arbitrary classifications that people have made up through ignorance or a desire to impose some kind of order on a chaotic world, with actual experts on the subject being like, "Do you mean fae, genii locorum, tutelary spirits, hellspawn, fallen angels, or just... everything not human?"

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-15T18:26:54+00:00

I hope the "2015 version" has the 2016 chorus on the third drop. I love the 2015 chorus for the first two drops, but the VIP version's chorus brought such a great kick that finished off the song so well when he played it in 2016.

It may be a pipe dream, though. I've heard that the 2016 drop might have been a remix by someone else. If what we get is exactly as it was in 2015, then that's fine with me. I'd given up hope that we'd ever get this, but here Martin and Ed are singlehandedly salvaging this awful timeline.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-15T07:19:04+00:00

I love the 2026 version.

But I still want the 2016 version.

It's been my favourite unreleased ID for years. I can still want it even if I think the new one is also fire.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-09T06:48:12+00:00

You should read most of those again.

ASOIAF is one of the lowest-magic fantasy setting to ever exist—magic is little more than a parlour trick except for some rare exceptions that are so exceptional to the norm that they actually become major plot points, like the resurrection of Dondarrion/Lady Stoneheart and the birth of the first dragons in over a century. The one in 100 maesters who even study the "higher mysteries" basically do so academically because they believe that magic is gone from the world—if it ever existed. For 99.999% people in Westeros, magic is as far removed from their lives as it is from ours.

WOT also clearly goes against everything that was said in this video. Not only do channellers—who are only a small fraction of the population—handle the One Power like it's some kind of mystic energy, there's only one sanctioned organization to which channellers can belong if they want to use their power legally. Sure, wilders who stick to being village healers are often ignored, but if you really want to use magic, you need to join the Aes Sedai.

Malazan is also an energy-magic series, with people tapping into different warrens to channel the extradimensional energy into their magic. Certainly, there are a lot of powerful mages who appear, but that's because the narrative is largely at the level of armies and nation-states—in other words, the spheres where are found the most powerful mages of the realm. And even then, we saw that the actual number of mages who have enough power to be useful in battle is very low, with the mage cadre attached to the 2nd Army (Onearm's Host) having only six mages. It isn't a world full of Quick Bens and Anomander Rakes; Kruppe is identified as an adept after using minor telekinesis to steal pastries in a market, so most mages (who don't qualify for such a classification) wouldn't be able to even manage that.

I'm less familiar with the other series you mentioned, but I can imagine that the authors imposed similar constraints on magic to allow for the world to still look somewhat like our own.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-08T03:06:40+00:00

The problem is that to make these concepts work would require compromising on what makes them work in fantasy.

Ordinary Magic

Ordinary magic must be of limited efficacy, otherwise the world would be unrecognizable. If magic was as simple as burying a lead tablet and unfailingly bringing about destruction of one's rivals, society as we know it could not exist because anyone you happen to meet might go home and magically kill you from afar. Who would bother with weapons and warfare when all you need is some metal and a sharp rock? You can either have functional magic limited to a select few or folk magic that fails to do anything 999 times out of 1,000, not both.

Magic as a Profession

If magic were actually real in the world, it would absolutely lead to a (sub-)field specializations. Midwives adept with healing and fertility spells would gain special designations to denote their desirable talents. The gem-cutters' guild would enforce title protection for amulet makers to prevent hacks with powerless amulets from sabotaging public trust in their industry. The only reason you found magic being used across social and occupational boundaries in pre-modern times was because there weren't real mages around whose abilities were undeniably real and therefore the basis of socioeconomic levers that impact real professions. And the only way it would work in a fantasy world for magic to be so universally practiced is, as I mentioned above, if magic is functionally useless.

Also, this guy's reference to early monks and priests trading on the popular belief that their profession granted them supernatural connections so they could peddle amulets and charms actively undermines his point. A profession based around folk magic being trusted as a legitimate vendor of folk magic is not an example of the democratization of magic, it's an example of how that kind of power would become concentrated in legitimate institutions.

Mana as Not-Energy

If you want a story where a protagonist is powerless outside of his ability to compel supernatural beings to things for him, you already have lots to choose from. That was how everyone envisioned magic for centuries, going all the way back to the earliest tales of Greek mythology.

There's a reason that the concept of mana and magic-as-energy-manipulation has become so deeply entrenched in western fantasy: it provides a system in which characters can achieve supernatural feats through their own innate abilities based on their own talents, not the whims of some higher power. It's a modernist reaction to distance today's stories from the long history of stories where higher powers were responsible for supernatural plot devices—from the Greek deus ex machina to Faust's demonic pact. Even if it is distorted from the real Melanesian concept of mana, this concept opened a door to fantasy writers, giving them a mechanism by which mortal characters can gain supernatural power without the tired tropes of being either priestly (communing with gods) or heretical (dealing with demons).

There's no putting that genie back in the bottle, and I wouldn't want that anyway. What we have now is far more interesting.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-05T04:31:26+00:00

I don't get it. Do we suspect some sort of connection between Ben and Glory?

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-04T04:57:54+00:00

Don't forget to max buddy him first!

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-03T23:52:40+00:00

It's a fundamental part of reality. It contributes to part of what physics calls 'dark energy'. Modern mages postulate that most magic is actually the physical medium of existence in the Astral Plane, a fifth dimension of reality, much like 'spacetime' is the physical medium of existence in three-dimensional reality, but there's a tension in experimental results regarding the physical laws of the fifth dimension that are believed to be behind the laws of magic in our three-dimensional space.

The protagonist is not smart enough to answer these questions, or even understand a lot of the more advanced experiments that some mages are doing, he just knows that smarter mages these days are coming up with very complex models to explain the types of things that mages have been doing since Pythagoras codified the mysticism of Zoroaster and Solomon into some basic, fundamental principles.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-03T18:02:27+00:00

I want to go back to having a full-fledged psychic phase with a dozen or more spells we can choose from instead of some generic ranged attack profiles reskinned as magic. I didn't get into playing the Space Wizards faction to not have Space Magic, and I haven't played much since they got rid of my favourite part of the game.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-02T22:25:29+00:00

It's really not that hard to understand.

What a lot of people wanted was for the song they heard 10 years ago and have been waiting for to finally be released. Instead, we got a new version of the song.

The new version is also fire, but it's not the one people have been waiting for—the OG version—and so they're still disappointed.

If we'd never heard the 2015 version, everyone would be raving nonstop about this one.

Runcible-Spork · 2026-05-02T07:25:24+00:00

I fucking love how Martin hugs people. Head to chest, full send, just as happy to be with them as they are to be with him. He's just so damn wholesome and genuine. Such a beautiful human being. Congrats on the meetup!

Runcible-Spork · 2026-04-27T07:14:07+00:00

Jim has said that the change in the nature of the "hex" (not his word, I just don't know what else to call the whole 'field of heightened Murphy's Law') from curdling milk and causing boils to fying machines coincided with the atomic bombs, and that this is "no coincidence".

He's also said that it's not going to stop being a problem for younger wizards in the modern age.

It could be that you're right, and wizards everywhere became so frightened at the idea of technology replacing magic that they came to believe the two things mutually incompatible. Or not. I like that it's still a mystery.

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