You would see it as condescending only if it's your personal strategy to always know what is going on behind the scenes. For some people, they don't know and don't care, and the statement was merely a meant as the kind of warning that this is where the smoke and mirrors begins.

I put "{grin}" because I was amused at the analogy I had created, not because I wanted to soften the blow of the statement.

Put another way, "Beyond here lies dragons" can mean two things: if you consider yourself a dragonslayer, this is where to find them, but if you consider yourself a person who can be killed by dragons, this is a place not to go. And in either case, you're now happy for the sign.

Get it?

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker