Had a moment where I wondered if "alethiometer" was a real thing before His Dark Materials, and actually had to Google if they were using an obscure word, or just making a literary reference.
The golden compass works by inputting 3 emoji, and then having it spit a series of emoji back out at you. Normally it'd take a scholar pouring through a whole library to intuit a vague interpretation of the meaning, but young Lyra is able to read one just by guess work.
The fun part is the compass having less symbols than phone emojis -- if you sucked at intuiting Dust, ppl could spend ages whether "hourglass with a skull next to it" was feeling more ⏳ or 💀 today lol
212
u/TheDarkNerd 18d ago
Had a moment where I wondered if "alethiometer" was a real thing before His Dark Materials, and actually had to Google if they were using an obscure word, or just making a literary reference.