#the library app doesn't have a real sorting system and it makes me >:(

[threadmonster]

Searching for a book to read is hard when the book you want to read doesn't actually exist because the damn author never actually writes the damn story.

It's me, I'm the damn author.

[smol-nevi]

Pretty much this. It's easy to take for granted how much infrastructure it takes to support a smartphone, but consider that

Even the Garleans largely can't reverse engineer Allagan tech very well and they're leading authorities on exactly that

Nobody at all can write Allagan programs, except possibly lifelong scholars who can maybe hello world a bit but it's still largely black box stuff to them and full apps would be wildly beyond current capabilities

There is likely no stable working Allagan infrastructure in place; even Azys Lla, untouched since its abandonment, is decrepit and many systems there are malfunctioning now

To most NPCs it really is 'just' a fantasy setting, they may have heard of or seen debris from Allagan tech but it's absolutely mysterious and alien to them

Linkpearls, assuming they're like FFXI, don't actually require infrastructure other than being cultivated in the same linkshell oyster thing, making them feasible in ways other long distance communication is not

Garlean radio is still fairly primitive and not very secure

Illuminati Goblin radio is only marginally better

And consider the emote text: "You swipe excitedly at your tomestone. Nothing happens." It's not even functional other than lighting up, basically. (I may be paraphrasing a bit because I'm not looking straight at it but it's close enough.)

I mean, yeah nobody can or should stop anyone from doing whatever they want in RP, but I'm not planning on acknowledging it ICly and I hope nobody tries to force the issue because abrupt community-wide breaks in tech level canon could easily go really poorly for everyone. It's a fun little Easter egg-ish emote based off the assets for the phone safety ads they ran in Japan, not intended to be new canon.

We would need, in order to have real-world equivalent smartphones: a power grid; cellular service towers; data service towers, which can piggyback off the cell towers at least; a functioning internet-like service to connect to; server centers and data backbones to support that; GPS satellites; imaging satellites to populate the maps for GPS; the capability to even launch satellites because orbits decay and space accidents do happen, so the potential Allagan ones almost certainly wouldn't still work; and trained professionals in sufficient numbers to keep all of those things in repair, including programmers of all sorts, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, astrophysicists, aerospace engineers, and countless other maintenance and R&D roles. Or at least in-world equivalents. Some of that you might use magic for, sure, but even an aetheric system to do the same would probably have to be at least as complex. Magic isn't necessarily more simple, look how long and difficult it is to become an Archon. Magic PhD is still a PhD.

It's one thing to have photo booths at events and such where a little anachronism doesn't impact anyone's plots, but being able to just Google stuff from the Great Gubal Library, or send messages without a courier or Moogle, or pull up satellite maps that aren't thousands of years out of date and use GPS that really shouldn't function either? Ehhhh...not something I want to have in my RP, honestly.

I'm sure someone is going to be like, "BUT NEVI UR NOT THE LORE POLICE, I DON'T CARE ABOUT REALISM IN FANTASY, AND I'LL DO WHAT I WANT." Go for it, you're right, I'm not the lore police. I don't want to be. Just be chill about canon mismatches if someone isn't down to RP about your cool new tomestone you bought from Sprint (whose logo is definitely just the sprint button graphic), is all I ask.

(I hope OP doesn't mind me soapboxing, sorry for being up in your notifications. ;u;)

so how many of you are considering TOMESTONES as cellphones ic now bc im genuinely curious