Videos of the awesome gadgets in action that will have people believing you’re a wizard.
Our Japanese-language reporter Go Hatori is many things. He’s the absolute worst nightmare of online scam artists, a talented wrestler, and even a pretty handsome dude when he feels like dressing up like a Tokyo host club host.
Oh, and he’s also a wizard.
We actually didn’t know that about Go until just recently, when we had to stop by his apartment (and by “had to,” we mean we made up an excuse to visit in hope that he’d let us play in the home batting cage he built for 500 yen). While we were there, Go showed off his sorcerous skills by charging up his earbuds by using a magic circle!
If you’ve watched a few fantasy anime or played some Japanese-developed RPGs, you’ll immediately recognize the intrinsic, occult patterns used to focus energies of enchantment. Instead of being painted onto the floor or wall, though, Go’s magic circle is its own self-contained disc, to which he attached a USB cable. He then set his earbuds down in the center of the circle, and…
…the rune patterns activated with glowing energy, which they began transferring to the earbuds!
But Go’s mastery of the arcane goes beyond just transferring electrical essence from one vessel to another. As you might be aware, magical circles are also sometimes called summoning circles, because of their ability to call people or creatures to the caster’s location. This time, Go placed his smartphone at the center of the circle, silently uttered an incantation in his head (we assume), and moments later…
…a mystical sage emerged from the darkness!
At this point, Go became obviously worried about having revealed too much of his power, and ineffectively began trying to backpedal. “That’s just a picture of someone I met at a market when I was traveling in Bangladesh. I have it set as my phone’s wallpaper,” he said, but we weren’t about to fall for this ploy to hide the truth: that Go is the greatest warlock of this, or perhaps any, generation. We even tricked him into confirming it himself, when we asked if he could use the magic circle to gaze into our future. “Well, I mean, if you had photos of all the cards in a tarot deck saved on your phone, and you set your wallpaper to random display, then yeah, you could use this to do readings,” he admitted.
Having now glimpsed forces that had, until now, been beyond our ken, we were consumed by the temptation to bend them to our own will, and we asked Go where we could acquire a magic circle of our own. “Amazon,” he told us, which makes perfect sense. Such wondrous artifacts must obviously be the remnants of a long-forgotten civilization, secluded from the rest of the world by thick walls of primeval jungle. “You can get one from the company Spaher for 4,350 yen (US$40),” he continued.
Really, 4,350 yen seems like far too low a price to dispatch teams of adventurers to bring back relics to harness energy beyond which the gods intended mortal man to wield, but apparently this Spaher is an extremely cost-efficient adventurers’ guild, as well as modern one, since they accept orders online here.
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where he learned the word “primeval” from the manual for the NES version of Rygar as a kid.
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