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Mundane Utility: Difference between revisions
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** Shaving is excellent training for controlling the wild magic. Considering he couldn't use it in the first series at all, and when it did activate, it had a tendency to blow up everything around him, that sounds perfectly reasonable.
** It's also his own (morbid) personal self-mastery ritual. Being a leper he doesn't have the feeling of presure in his fingertips to have perfect control. Also as a leper he is very prone to infection. Tom being the [[Sarcasm Mode|cheerful]] character that he is uses a cutthroat razor, in his left hand, that's missing two fingers, and he still slips up with.
* ''[[Discworld]]'':
** The mighty weapon of ''[[
*** On a similar note, Susan, Death's granddaughter, has inherited The Grim Reaper's many talents, among them the ability to exist outside of time. She uses this talent to grade papers (largely due to her suffering a heavy case of [[I Just Want to Be Normal]]).
**** However, Susan's classes do take quite interesting, Disc-travelling unscheduled field trips during her lessons.
** There's some mundane uses of magic-derived technology on the Discworld, such as using tiny summoned imps to paint pictures (essentially a photo camera), or as (dis)organizers. However, magic on the Disc is likened to nuclear power
** On a related note, many nobles in ''[[Discworld]]'' send their children to the Assassin's Guild of Ankh Morpork. There are two main reasons for this: 1: Knowing how to assassinate people teaches their children how to guard against assassination, and 2: it actually is one of the best formal education schools in the world.
** Unseen University's omniscopes are powerful scrying devices that can see anywhere and anywhen. Because of this it's extremely hard to get them to show anywhere and anywhen ''in particular'', so they usually show the blackness of empty space (that being what most of the universe consists of). The wizards mostly use them as shaving mirrors.
** In a world in which technology to make clockwork is rare, how does one keep track time? Trap tiny demons in watches of course! They aren't dangerous, but the clocks aren't very reliable, which makes mechanic ones far better.
** Swamp dragons, dog-sized and
** On the other side of the fence, Discworld witches are trained to avert this trope (which doesn't necessarily mean they do it 100%, just that they're trained not to rely on magic as much as possible). Most of them seem to take it as a point of pride how far they can go using only hard work and completely nonmagical things like herbalism and headology.
*** [[Lampshaded]] in ''[[
{{quote|'''Nanny''': But only when there ain't no alternative.▼
▲'''Nanny''': But only when there ain't no alternative.
'''Mrs Googol''': Sure. When there ain't no alternative.
'''Nanny''': When ... you know ... people ain't showing respect, like.
'''Mrs Googol''': When the house needs paintin'.}}
** Meanwhile, Wizards will occasionally use magic for mundane purposes
** In ''[[Equal Rites]]'', Esk disguises her wizard staff as a broom, occasionally using it to sweep up. When Mustrum Ridcully was summoned to UU to become its Archchancellor, he had to retrieve his own staff from the garden, where it was serving as the support-pole of a scarecrow.
* The [[Animorphs]] frequently use their powers for mundane things, despite the risk that it would blow their cover and lead to the enslavement of the entire planet. For example, doing a science project and watching concerts for free (twice!). They technically have a rule against this, which [[Team Dad]] Jake is miserable at
* [[Keith Laumer]] has written a series of stories about "[[Bolo]]" tanks, super sized military tanks. In one of the stories, it is mentioned that after a war an attempt was made to use them for peaceful purposes, including attaching a blade for demolition work to one and calling it a "tractor". The half-megaton/second firepower still available on it tended to belay the "peaceful" status.
** A later scheme was to use an obsolete Bolo's massively powerful AI and large hull space to create an automated tractor/bulldozer/genetics lab for adapting crops to survive on newly settled colonies. While those responsible were smart enough to remove the [[Frickin' Laser Beams]] this time, they made a really shoddy job of adapting the AI's programming: the result being that when the colony was invaded by hostile aliens it kicked into combat mode and exterminated them all with customised bioweapons, all while thinking they were just a particularly large type of crop pest.
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