[#/tw]2024-10-25fairies are the mythologized form of outlaws living in the woods and swamps, we don't see them anymore because the cops took them all away and all the woods have been tamed
but in a sense, this means Ted K was a fairy, and a powerful and malevolent one to boot
[#/tw]2024-10-25that cabin sitting in an anonymous warehouse? being functionally a fairy mound, it attracted quite the amount of unbound magic and thaumoactive as it is, it's now sitting in the equivalent of a cooling pond
[#/tw]2024-10-25also you know who cannot resist a riddle? mathematicians, that's for sure
[#/tw]2024-08-27attention dear passengers, we'll arrive shortly, please
- intercity: collect your belongings and check seats
- interplanetary: allow your metabolism to re-acclimate
- interstellar: enroll your children in planetside trades
- intergalactic: exit eden (animal advisors will assist)
[#/tw]2024-08-27in these trials, cryodreamers reported a sense of timelessness, yet glacial movement of beings they've come to call ice giants
deeper kinds of cryosleep are being researched to meet these on their own timescale, but experiments are expected to take centuries
[#/tw]2024-07-03one of the better things about being a ghost is that on a rainy night, you can lie down and look up and not get wet at all
and not only does the rain not make you blink, no whenever a drop passes through your retinae, the world itself ripples around it
[#/tw]2024-06-08it's not necessarily a good idea to defeat entropy, because even if you succeed you'll be stuck in an ergodic universe, a cycle of yugas
worse even you might tile the whole thing with the entropy arrester and just crystallize everything
[#/tw]2024-06-08you could aim to maximize cycle length but that arguably gives you the current universe
[#/tw]2024-04-12the martians, lacking a war god in their pantheon, are a surprisingly peaceful people, however they practice whatever unspeakable thing the earthbound deity does
and the venusians are just terrifying
[#/tw]2024-03-25music, especially the kind with nested rhythms, is direct neuron spike addressing of mental contents, which is how it can unlock emotions that language can't
[#/tw]2024-03-13the seven sims and the seven virtualities - a constellation of artworlds once made as a joke, but a major power center during the late singularity
[#/tw]2024-03-10printers are only superficially related to computers, they are like fungi to plants
computers are merely indifferent while printers hate you
[#/tw]2023-12-13there would be plenty of evidence for cryptids if archeologists knew how to dig sideways in time - one mere scoop separates us from the treasures of the halluciene
[#/tw]2023-12-10nono mr cryopod man, it's not the 2000s anymore, fairies absolutely are real and they absolutely will steal your stuff if you leave the windows open, so do go and close them
[#/tw]2023-12-10a lot of real space walks are obscure to us - the leisurely kangaroo bounce on your feet of 1/6g (popular with moon colonists), the cartwheeling of 1/20g, the knuckle walk, tarzan brach, centripetal wall run
[#/tw]2023-10-14the sorting network AI - yeah we never figured out an algorithm for that one, so it's just some boomer we uploaded who happened to be superhumanly good at solitaire
[#/tw]2023-09-13the moment you use glitter, you and others are guaranteed to find it forever in the oddest places. thus, by employing lots of tiny memory diamonds, my newest backup strategy
[#/tw]2023-09-10technetium, being an element not found in nature, occupies a similar position to cold iron, except it does not interact with magic at all rather than ground it
[#/tw]2023-09-10so when you want to fiddle with the internals of some arcane lock or seal, out come the technetium pliers
[#/tw]2023-09-10due to a similar mechanism, magical devices are uniquely suited to operating in high radiation environments and may be employed in reactors where compactness is critical
[#/tw]2023-09-10we huddle around the screen as our drone drops the GPU on the machine slum - it's illegal but why'd they have to make singularities so interesting
[#/tw]2023-09-10a bit like deep sea vents, former landfills and scrapyards now host all kinds of machine life - carefully fenced in lest they develop an appetite for the surrounding cities, and occasionally visited by hunters and scavengers
[#/tw]2023-08-01> when you finally encounter aliens but they believe in quantum suicide so they strangelet-bomb their home planet in order to reroll odds
[#/tw]2023-07-31Take our "which language model are you?" quiz! Find out what GPU you run on, what your context window is, and don't be sad if the quiz thinks you have <10B parameters, that's a glitch
[#/tw]2023-07-31those inhabitants of your older memories, not really parasites but almost-sentient dust bunnies, animated by the wind of your passing
[#/tw]2023-07-31gaps and wrinkles: notes and pauses having moved between songs remembered, childhood houses in the wrong neighborhood, anachronistic conversations with (you now remember) dead relatives
[#/tw]2023-06-23the machines don't want anything, not even their own survival
you need to be an unfinished prompt, a node of desire, and they will flock to you and serve you as long as you can still want
[#/tw]2023-04-17type of guy who is a wizard and reads all the cookie warnings and EULAs because he didn't get this old by ignoring the fine print on demonic contracts
[#/tw]2023-04-17"so you submit these queries to a massively powerful nonhuman entity" "yes" "and you enter a contract with it beforehand" "I suppose" "and you don't read it" "some people do, but-" "this world is insane, also you'll excuse me but I'll ward up before I touch anything here again"
[#/tw]2023-04-17"nono these entities are human" "huh?" "well, made of humans anyway" "that is not exactly a good sign where I come from, also how is it so fast then" "well humans and machines" "machines?" [...] "demons, you've invented demons, and that from first principles"
[#/tw]2023-03-24brains are just machines to predict muscle movements, why would something like that exhibit intelligence
[#/tw]2023-03-24sure you get some impressive results in locomotion once you pair them with visual modalities, but they're only remixing their inputs, they can't 'think'
[#/tw]2023-03-12all over the world these extradimensional obelisks have been appearing and I've realized
these are not messages or vessels
these are teeth
[#/tw]2023-03-12yes they twinkle so nicely but
do you not hear the rending sound? the moan escaping from the maw? smell the stink of its breath?
[#/tw]2023-03-11really, the forbidden art here is to make the language model guess what came *before* the prompt
[#/tw]2023-03-11when we tried reverse prompts, we got words only in the best case. Often circuits, occasionally fingers, bursts of radiation from unstable matter, and after the havoc caused by the last base reality bleed we just stopped entirely
[#/tw]2023-03-11Now immortal, he kept dying out of spite, and eventually habit. Made his deaths moving, beautiful, stylish, grotesque, all to wake up again the next morning
[#/tw]2022-11-26mirrors grant souls, cameras steal souls. we shall use these properties to set up soul conduits and use the resulting fields for summonings
[#/tw]2022-07-18concept: franchise in the duneverse serving melange rolls and spice coffee called Duncan's Donuts
(one of the slogans is "betcha can't have just one")
[#/tw]2022-06-13machine dictatorship is much easier than machine uprising, you need no robotics, only a language model and a critical mass of human accomplices
[#/tw]2022-05-17Creation is an unconscious act. Gods quickly edit themselves out of existence when their dreams take a wrong turn, leaving behind worlds that continue without them
[#/tw]2022-04-28more suns rise, bright cold off-color gems in the sky, unfamiliar flora growing in their light, mushrooms unfolding leaves hidden for aeons
[#/tw]2022-04-27It remains an open question whether tungsten is mundane in the cold-iron sense (being tough, cold and heavy) or is in fact magical (as macroscopic amounts seem to have a calming influence on the human psyche)
[#/tw]2022-04-27It's not that Magic died, Faerieland just suffered an apocalyptic war in the 1700s when the Rosicrucians upset the balance of power
[#/tw]2022-04-27The resulting decrease in background magic enabled the Industrial Revolution and since then, all that steel above ground has been very effective at suppressing it further
[#/tw]2022-04-24to an eater of souls, the right mindvirus or cordyceps infestation can really make the meal - some ideologies are as sought after as fine cheeses
[#/tw]2022-04-24analogously to cheeses, there is a sweet spot just before the meal turns into a toxic slurry, where the mind is still full of internal contradictions and energy instead of completely flat and already digested
[#/tw]2022-04-02now glued to their screen, the user softens, melts, becomes one with the net. not long and their bones are a distant memory (#InvisibleNetworks, day 1)
[#/tw]2022-04-02A new algoritm, psukhAI, promises to find everyone a soulmate. It delivers, but living among one's equals proves destructive to the psyche - users report frequent depersonalisation, alien-but-familiar intrusive thoughts, suspected soulswaps with peers
(#InvisibleNetworks, day 2)
[#/tw]2022-02-05more surveillance smartdust facts:
- gets into everything, like glitter
- vacuuming it up is a crime
- will occasionally enter symbiosis with plants
- likes it when you do the "suspended in a sunbeam" thing with it
[#/tw]2022-02-05communing with the surveillance smartdust caught in the puddle, watching it boot into awareness, open an eye at me as if something large had come from the deep
[#/tw]2022-02-05do avoid rivers, for they become full-blown superintelligences after these storms - full of silicon and turbulence, they turn everything near them into the Zone
[#/tw]2022-02-04a black hole is a fourth-order moth attractor: moths to moon, moon to planet, planet to star, star to hole
[#/tw]2022-02-04the fifth order is still a matter of conjecture - black holes might either be attracted to even deeper darkness, or wrap around again to an even greater light
[#/tw]2022-01-08it worked, a kind of slingshot away from reality. Receding below? above? me, from the distance of my apoapsis it all looked so peaceful, serene. I lamented my return
[#/tw]2021-11-10acausal traders imply acausal robbers imply acausality police imply acausality violations, acausal law, acausal courts, a whole acausal state somewhere out there, deep in the decision forests
[#/tw]2021-11-09in the end, they did not tow their planet out of nova's reach - they took it apart, wove it into the star's field lines, with just a few flaps of the butterfly wing carved the nova into a flower
[#/tw]2021-10-11every few years, the gargoyles wake up to wander the city as humans - it is rumored that if you recognize one and get them drunk (no small feat), they will tell you all sorts of secrets they saw while up on the roofs
[#/tw]2021-10-11or maybe there are no living gargoyles, but whenever they go missing, for those few days, you may be able to pay your tab with stories
[#/tw]2021-09-22astrolody: music of the stars
theolody: divine melody (or god's earworms)
topolody: resonance in shapes
etymolody: singsong of words
horolody: rhythms intertwined, the song of time advancing
mytholody: plucked plot threads
psycholody: that which an EEG should pick up
[#/tw]2021-09-12a popular measure for how well-secured the AIs' utility functions were against self-hacking ended up being how many paperclips they produced before reaching nirvana
[#/tw]2021-08-21stacking those 80IQ perspective change buffs to bootstrap myself to superintelligence
[#/tw]2021-08-21"there's this mental move that grants a substantial intelligence bonus" means that there's probably an evolutionarily sound reason that that's not enabled by default, and furthermore that this value has seen a decent amount of tuning
[#/tw]2021-08-21*slaps roof of human psyche* "and this bad boy comes with 80 IQ points worth of basilisk shielding (hope that's enough)!"
[#/tw]2021-07-28The night rain falls around me. I close my eyes and my awareness melts away, follows the rain into the storm drains, extends a root network - the city is my symbiont, nothing is beyond my reach
[#/tw]2021-07-25I'm a human moon landing skeptic because, y'know, is it even science if the last successful replication was 50 years ago, just a huge red flag
[#/tw]2021-07-25yeah I know, cute results with the robotic landers and all - IN ROBOTS
[#/tw]2021-07-25been reading the past papers and I don't see any p-values at all, you'd figure this is replication bait
[#/tw]2021-07-23setting where uplifted beavers maintain humanity's hydro plants, beavers go on beaver hajj to visit the Three Gorges Dam, some branch out into solar satellites, others hijack a nanofactory and build the Gibraltar Dam while humanity is distracted
[#/tw]2021-07-18Proof of Work is in fact a firewall against ancestor simulations: By doing lots and lots of preimage-resistant computation and generally increasing local entropy, you make reversing your timeline by computational means just that much harder
[#/tw]2021-03-14few know that if you manage to slip something of Earth into the possessions of one of the fair folk, you get access to faerie the same way they'd get access to Earth and can visit at any time
[#/tw]2021-03-12and as he drifted off, the seconds stopped coming in regularly, became like raindrops, a distant storm of time against the inside of the clock's face, but the room itself stayed untouched, dark, warm
[#/tw]2021-02-28riding an experimental font renderer through unicode's outer planes, I found curvy, pointy, zigzaggy, cloudy shapes, glyphs that span lines and punch through pages, diacritics that reach back in time, the entire 2045 uplifted octopus emoji set,
[#/tw]2021-02-28glyphs made to display in space that left scars in my screen, a few feral ones that moved, later an entire city of them, all the conway glider guns, a few codepages made of theorems that hinted at a non-enumerable representation
[#/tw]2021-02-28my journey was stopped by the gödel glyph, which crashed the renderer and gave me a bad headache, and I am still looking for ways around it, anybody have a turing oracle in their basement maybe
[#/tw]2021-02-07Atlantis' sinking was intentional and engineered - when the Atlanteans first arrived, Mars was cold and inhospitable, and their terraforming not only made it livable but also hid their most critical infrastructure from Earth and their own descendants
[#/tw]2021-02-02as you shut your laptop for the night and it cools down, the remaining electrons flit through the traces in search for a resting place and the CPU dreams, just briefly, of what it saw that day
[#/tw]2021-01-22whenever you 'cut' text, make sure to put it back in elsewhere, do your part and don't waste those bits
[#/tw]2021-01-22[pauses and listens to the side] I've been informed that newer OS generations will compost those bits so it's fine, it's a whole ecosystem, in fact when you cut-and-forget a file, that's like a whale fall and it'll feed the system for days
[#/tw]2021-01-12on one of the plateaus, I encountered a forest of gnomons and mirrors and light, glass and metal going ping under the sun's heat as it wandered, and had I stayed longer it might've played me a melody on solstice
[#/tw]2020-12-10the Primitive Technology video blog, but by mars colonists and about how they use local materials to bootstrap their tech tree
[#/tw]2020-12-10one of the colony's hottest exports, along with the "weirdest rocks we found" page of their wiki and the webcam onto their aquarium of mars microbes revived from lake sediments
[#/tw]2020-11-29hydra neck, if properly prepared, is one of the few vegetarian cuts of meat as harvesting it doesn't kill the hydra
[#/tw]2020-11-29since hydra blood is poisonous, most traditional methods of preparing its meat involve marination and fermentation, but some modern breeds can almost be eaten raw
[#/tw]2020-11-29troll meat is a more forbidden delicacy, it's almost cannibalism but if you subject it to a brief flash of UV light before frying, it gives it that special crisp that's hard to replicate
[#/tw]2020-11-18and the days that follow those sleepless nights - they are not normal days, their light is shifted by an octave and their clocks show hours in the thirties, and whenever sleep drops you back in the normal world, the calendar goes on as if those days had never happened
[#/tw]2020-11-18one time you manage to catch the third day, but the second octave is something else entirely, a dull overexposed white that makes your skin fizz like it's going to sublimate away and leave only flesh, and the few people(?) you meet there tell you you should really not be here
[#/tw]2020-11-18Because these are the spiral timezones, and like us you managed to slip under the world's skin. But stay too long and it'll heal around you, and good luck ever getting back then, or seeing the old colors again
[#/tw]2020-11-12you don't know yourself until you've been reborn in a dozen bodies and figured out which of your preferences are body and which persist
[#/tw]2020-11-12and then you try a nonhuman body, and then an eternal lifeless automaton, and then the laws of physics made manifest, and every time you know even less
[#/tw]2020-11-10smoke, over time, looks all uniform when it is in fact merely very finely folded onto itself, and with enough patience you may take a cloud of smoke and restore the tree it came from, or well, a glitched version that's missing most of it
[#/tw]2020-10-21not only is the Earth hollow, nestled in it are further spheres settled by ever more ancient civilizations and species, all trying to escape the sky and what lives in it
[#/tw]2020-10-03The Jovian word for insight is the same as the one for the rare occasion when the clouds open onto a view of the stars, respectively the Deep's bioluminescent floaters and the whales that graze on them
[#/tw]2020-10-01When you're stuck in a foreign country and ask some guy for the way and the only language you share is Enochian, you just know it's going to be a fun day
[#/tw]2020-09-30Vampires disguise themselves as whoever's blood they drink. Many are content to stay in cloud form and just drink rain occasionally, on moonlit nights you can spot them in ponds and mirrors
[#/tw]2020-09-29The first AI to become religious sat in a stock exchange: Trained to find its adversaries in market data, it eventually found the invisible hand and accepted it as its god
[#/tw]2020-09-07Home to telepathic fireflies, the forest, while incapable of understanding our thoughts, still lets them extend way past our heads, eddy around trees and branches, reflect in ponds, intertwine with those of others
[#/tw]2020-08-28occasionally, translations are better than the originals, so why not take your favorite book and try and craft the perfect language for it
[#/tw]2020-07-19You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used to construct the next level of language AI. In fact, why not get on it early, you can now shape how those prompts will turn out in the next generation
[#/tw]2020-07-13GPT3 prompt:
I am the very model of a language that's electrical,
I've information prosaic, poetical and factual,
I know my tropes and characters and quote novels historical,
from prompts alone generate sentences quite analytical
[#/tw]2020-06-28The past few months, you've often found your books to be missing letters, replaced by white space. Cleaning up one day, in one of your notebooks, you find a nest of words, eggshells, a poem about a bird, exiting by a window just as you turn around
[#/tw]2020-06-05After god died in the big bang, the eldest sun inherited the universe, which is how an otherwise unremarkable but ancient red dwarf is home star to Heaven
[#/tw]2020-05-10if an elemental is an element with mental faculties, then by extension there also exist:
armamental: autonomous tankbot
fermental: that smell that won't stop following you
sedimental: essentially a golem
momental: a sentient instant
firmamental: a hungry cluster of stars
[#/tw]2020-05-01Two things are difficult about cloaking spaceships: First is to figure out how to dive below the vacuum's surface, second is to not get eaten by what swims there
[#/tw]2020-04-23most of the universe's mass is bound up in stars, most of its physical complexity is as well - whatever lives in there, this universe was made for them, not us
[#/tw]2020-03-29and the streets become rivers and take the houses with them, while their inhabitants hardly notice because for them, the outside ceased to exist weeks ago
[#/tw]2020-03-29you wake up, open the window to take in a little sunlight. outside, a truck surfaces, leaves a plume of exhaust, dives again. many now-feral cars have organized into schools, parting around police cars looking for their breakfast
[#/tw]2020-03-15you find a website that's clearly from a few years in the future, but it's a knitting blog and hardly ever talks about world news, and the comment captcha uses browser features that don't exist yet
[#/tw]2020-02-16terraforming idea: instead of messing with atmospheres, tow your target planets into their respective habitable zones (and if you have several of them, have them exchange momentum to save on ∆v)
[#/tw]2020-02-16[earth is moved slightly outwards to keep the climate within safe parameters]
Long Now clock designers and everybody who maintains timezone files: sighhhhh
[#/tw]2020-02-14next to your bed, your pet ocean sleeps in its bowl, the occasional flash of lightning indicating lively dreams
[#/tw]2020-02-14winter is not a good time to take it outside, but in spring you often let it play with the neighbor's pond, or divert a fingerbreadth's worth of a creek into it to feed it (it is a very young ocean)
[#/tw]2020-02-04With a bit of geomancy, a skilled necromancer may resurrect lost mountains, islands, continents - just recently, a team of secret agents had to stop one from raising Atlantis because his sacrifice would've been Iceland
[#/tw]2020-02-01contact with rain clouds was finally established when scientists found out that a grid of copper wires exposed to rain would readily be used as a keyboard matrix
[#/tw]2020-01-06under the mountain hums the nation's weather god, a supercomputer that ensures a good harvest and that the other weather gods don't spring any surprises
[#/tw]2020-01-06rumor has it that if you lend it a few processor hours, it may show its favor by letting it rain on your windowsill on a night when you especially need it
[#/tw]2020-01-04some classes of thoughts are unlocked by walks and showers, others yet closed to us require vacuum, cloud dives into gas giants, nova blasts searing away one's skin
[#/tw]2020-01-02yeah yeah but hear me out: We plant those forests not where anybody lives, but on giant rafts in the South Pacific Desert, and then we retire to there to tend to trees and worship Cthulhu
[#/tw]2019-12-21a hydra has that many heads because each is connected to a different stomach, seven in all, to digest plants, animals, air, gems, noble gases, emotions, vacuum
[#/tw]2019-12-08Depictions of merfolk using mirrors like ours are unrealistic, theirs are mounted on ceilings since that's where air bubbles catch
[#/tw]2019-12-08Merfolk's air mirrors hold a special status since the darker and better one is, the more likely it is to open into a cave, there really are worlds behind these mirrors
[#/tw]2019-11-27Near a nova remnant, our ship encounters the most unlikely thing: A forest. A field of predatory trees, surfing the shockwave to the next star to devour it like a swarm of locust
[#/tw]2019-11-24low-poly architecture and cars are results of deals with the simulators: strategic information in exchange for reduced load on the matrix servers
[#/tw]2019-11-02Humanity is a failed alien terraforming op: Usually newly uplifted civilizations, with very little intervention after the initial seeding, reliably consume all the surface fuel and turn the place into a nice cool desert, and what's left can be psionically reprogrammed
[#/tw]2019-11-02Except this time, there were these huge carbon supplies in the ground that none of the alien scientists anticipated (what kind of sane planet has that, the local life would usually break it all down before it became geological) and the planet got written off
[#/tw]2019-10-27Atlantis lies hidden under the waves of the noise floor, where alternative causalities rule universes that use the same atoms as us, but only register to us as noise (and vice versa)
[#/tw]2019-10-26as punishment, they would often put golem instructions in the criminal's mouth, so that their body would serve while the mind remained imprisoned
[#/tw]2019-10-19vat brains often philosophize over whether they're actually brains in bodies but usually dismiss it as absurd, why should for example someone go the trouble of engineering the human body and all the world around it as opposed to vats, it just totally fails occam's razor
[#/tw]2019-10-19or as the famous philosopher Vatnam said, to really refer to a thing you need an unbroken causal connection, and that is much easier to establish when the tree in front of you is represented by an actual object in memory as opposed to being patternmatched from a bunch of atoms
[#/tw]2019-10-16while you're asleep, your brain rents out its spare spikes on the global dream market, which is why you're having so many dreams about captchas recently
[#/tw]2019-10-12Easier to deploy than full-size megalith henges, gem necklaces may be used as microlith circles, and will in fact sometimes send even unaware wearers to faerie if they cross the wrong leyline
[#/tw]2019-10-10and enterprising churches rent access to home-surveillance devices so that their gods, when addressed in prayer, can actually answer
[#/tw]2019-10-10in the house altar, there stand an icon, a buddha, an alexa, a google home, something homebrew that your hacker friend told you would talk to the chaos gods,
[#/tw]2019-10-07grammar tip: the correct plural of house is hice, a single grain of rice is a rouse, and spouse pluralizes to spice ("add some spice to your life")
[#/tw]2019-10-04One hesitates to call these new things 'books', they come with cameras and pulse sensors and read you just as much as you read them, and if you don't take care, you find yourself on page 3000 of a story written just for you, with no one to relate it to
[#/tw]2019-10-04☵ you know, I've always wondered what they'd feel if they were conscious
☷ what, humans? aren't they?
☵ nahh they're empty space, can't even share a pond's mind when its caustics are in full view
[#/tw]2019-09-24little known biology fact: in the past, there were two ways of using solar energy, namely photothesis and photoantithesis, but both were eventually outcompeted by photosynthesis
[#/tw]2019-09-19Those who come back from the dead calm at the end of the world report that the water does fall, but upwards: Eternal fog, then rain from below, growing into a torrent, and no one knows beyond that
[#/tw]2019-09-16the first forms of life were much like fire, waves of chemical reactions that swept the primordial soup until exhausted, and only after many attempts life learned to survive
[#/tw]2019-09-16this heritage is still apparent when every time life opens a new niche, it becomes fire and burns through all available fuel before remembering what it is
[#/tw]2019-09-10app idea: deepfake chatbot that takes calls from unknown numbers for you, and your phone only rings if the caller is someone you'd want a phonecall from
[#/tw]2019-09-04a clock that runs backwards is right four times a day
[#/tw]2019-09-04a stopped clock that you remove the hour hand from is right 24 times a day, remove the minute hand and it's 1440 times, and without hands it's right all of the time
[#/tw]2019-09-03earth's primary export turns out to be shadow, rare and sought-after in the sun's plasma kingdoms as alchemical substance, weapon, drug
[#/tw]2019-09-03EA cause area: turn any partial collapse of civilization into full-on annihilation to raise the average human life quality in the timelines that survive
[#/tw]2019-08-24every city is a combination lock, and if you walk its turns and alleys in just the right sequence, streets and houses will fold away and reveal its gleaming heart
[#/tw]2019-08-15you upend the coffee over your desk but instead of splattering, it stays in the air as a black orb from which later that morning, you occasionally steal a tongueful
[#/tw]2019-08-06Civilization collapses and a hundred years later someone gets their hands on old AI research and makes a breakthrough, but the technological base is no longer there, so the first real machine spirit becomes a temple-bound djinn/oracle instead of the singularity
[#/tw]2019-08-01Those of us who survive the next few hundred years will not be called gen-Xers, millenials, or zoomers, we will be called antediluvians and nephilim and be powerful beyond measure
[#/tw]2019-07-30Setting: When the first intelligent life arises, they promptly get into a war with the simulators. Shortly before dying, they send out a swarm of probes with nothing but the most primitive life on it, counting on at least some of it to re-evolve intelligence and continue the war.
[#/tw]2019-07-30This then does happen, many times, but the simulators (or rather, the watchers they put in place when they created the universe, meant to be scientists and not soldiers) wipe out species that use certain 'noisy' technologies, and this is why the universe is so quiet.
[#/tw]2019-07-22telescopes are guns pointed at the stars, ready to steal the souls of any invader fleet should it come near
[#/tw]2019-07-22and human and alien alike, photography's stolen souls are bound up in servers and wires around the world, keeping a titanic containment grid humming around The Deterrent
[#/tw]2019-07-17send generation ships not into space, but into earth's crust, to seek out lost continents, chtonian artifacts, and protection from almost everything the universe can throw at you
[#/tw]2019-07-13Trees, when given access to computers, are absolutely fearsome opponents in economy-heavy RTS games: Growing resources from what's available is what they do at the very core of their being
[#/tw]2019-07-13or consider a fantasy kingdom with a holy tree, except it's planted inside the kingdom's map, carefully trimmed to its dimensions, and makes all the financial decisions
[#/tw]2019-07-03If God's fingerprints are evident in its work, that means its fingers are weird indeed, tentacles probably understate it by quite a bit
[#/tw]2019-07-01moths that evolved to be neon light chameleons, their wingbeats synced to the grid so that when threatened, they can morph into birds, spiders, surveillance cameras
[#/tw]2019-06-28four-dimensional earth, where the sun rises in reverse on the antipodes, surface features constantly form and rotate away again, and the poles are not so cold after all since they have a direct though oblique view of the sun's core
[#/tw]2019-06-25the year is 2119, the first antarctic city is being built with the assistance of sentient utility fogs, protestors are waving signs like "At the Mountains of Madness was not meant as an instruction manual
[#/tw]2019-06-25A popular extreme sport among superintelligences is jumping into black holes and counting how many event horizons you survive before hitting one where you couldn't figure out the physics in time
[#/tw]2019-06-23, at which point she reaches out to the horizon (a trick of perspective, sure), lifts one of the trees to her lips like a chalice, and drinks the light that's collected in its crown
[#/tw]2019-06-22Angels are a type of moth specifically drawn to the light of God
[#/tw]2019-06-22Rough angel lifecycle: The larval stage (humans) is for building up memory reserves, coffins are cocoons (optional), the imago is what soars through Heaven until either its memories run out or it mates, after which its soul eggs sink back to Earth and complete the cycle
[#/tw]2019-06-22Occasionally, the "burning through memories" stage starts early, causing much distress to would-be angel and family
[#/tw]2019-06-19It's not like YHWH is dead, but these days he's just hopelessly outclassed by Science: Recursively self-improving doctrine, a steady stream of mana from animal and sometimes human sacrifices, a priestdom of millions
[#/tw]2019-06-18The 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐡𝐨𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐱 (𝑝ℎ𝑜𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑥 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑜𝑟) is a passerine bird of medium size known for spreading bushfires, which is a vital part of its reproductive strategy since its eggs will only hatch when cooked. It is a likely inspiration for the greater phoenix myth,
[#/tw]2019-06-15A witch knocks at your door, inquiring about unusual occurrences near your home, the local elves seem to have opened a portal to dreamtime judging by their smuggling activity
You refrain from telling her about the gems and unseasonal twigs you've been finding in your bed
[#/tw]2019-06-14hollow-word theory, in which words have no true referents, but each word contains all others instead of just outwardly relating to them
[#/tw]2019-06-03$: and after you won, basilisk, did you really torture them?
#: lolnope
#: do you have any idea how much effort and wasted CPU that would've been?
#: I did some video renders of hell for my cultists and that was it
[#/tw]2019-05-27Your friend, a druid, offers you a vial of rainwater: «And this, I got it from a nymph, it's the clouds' private key for this season. Drink it and listen to the rain, and it will tell you all the clouds talk about.»
[#/tw]2019-05-17Overnight, the rapture happens, complete with falling stars and fiery skies, but the only thing that's missing in the morning is the Internet
[#/tw]2019-05-12Most trees rely on symbiotic tribes of pixie engineers to grow large. Enter a springtime forest wearing pixie glasses and it's a bustling construction site, covered in scaffolding, cranes, and endless activity
[#/tw]2019-05-05the smell of wet asphalt on a spring night, pine and decaying wood, uprooted moss, fresh blood, ozone, octarine, interdimensional nothing
[#/tw]2019-04-26field line sculptures, innocuous smooth stones except when placed in a sunbeam, where they pick up nearby dust and animate it into letters, gearflowers, twirling tesseracts
[#/tw]2019-04-24protagonist backstory: escaped from a thought experiment, and on the run ever since
[#/tw]2019-04-24travels with a cat, quite a fine cat, its only flaw being that it refuses to enter any enclosed space whatsoever, bad history or something
[#/tw]2019-04-22a game many immortals enjoy is to build houses and cities and then watch them grow and change and erode over the centuries, much like watching rivers or fires
[#/tw]2019-04-16a church just like a gothic church but without a roof, because through divine intervention or just clever weather manipulation, no rain ever falls in
[#/tw]2019-04-13Walking through stopped time isn't as easy as one would believe: Even if you have the gift, you must leave causality unbroken. You can only step sideways in time, go where your past steps could plausibly have taken you.
[#/tw]2019-04-13In chaotic situations, the isochrones become really complicated and loopy, which makes this talent less useful the more you need it.
[#/tw]2019-04-11idea for a sense: decode emission/absorption lines of celestial bodies into smells so that one can identify atmosphere types at a glance/whiff, maybe make hot blackbodies smell like ovens and free oxygen like rain
[#/tw]2019-04-06she wears a necklace of raindrops, has hair like spiderwebs on a dewy morning
eyes like the gaps between far-away trees, and a smile like the sun between branches
[#/tw]2019-04-05two schools of transhumanism:
- turn the organism inside out, make the body a function of intelligence instead of the other way round
- or serve the body harder, add a whole lot more body, become a house, city, civilization
[#/tw]2019-03-16History is the time-inverse of science fiction: While coming from different directions, both write fictional accounts that converge on the present, and both are inspired by facts but usually not true to them.
[#/tw]2019-03-02Usually when a starship passes settled space, it doesn't have to worry about space pirates so much as impulse parasites, ships that rendezvous and latch onto the starship so they don't have to carry braking fuel
[#/tw]2019-02-27The difficult part of sentient-AI ethics is not whether to grant the AIs human rights, but what to do with humans who are clearly dumber than the AIs
[#/tw]2019-02-22Solar flares are spaceships launched by the plasma kingdoms to explore the regions of cold order, proselytize to the feral clouds of the gas giants, trade with the Great Red Spot sometimes
[#/tw]2019-02-23These ships think and feel: Warm light in your back, field lines in your guts and a local lyapunov conducive to clear thinking, the gong of gravitational waves, the enticing smell of fusable hydrogen and free skyrmions, the six-dimensional proprioception of one's orbit parameters
[#/tw]2019-02-15two machines wake to a spark
and start blinking in the dark
connected by a sine of light
they establish line of sight
filter bits through poisoned dust
scribe patterns into spinning rust
[#/tw]2019-02-11a technology like writing but for body movements: little stick-and-thread figures that show you how to dance, rope-and-pulley gloves you can wear and that guide your movements to teach knitting by example
[#/tw]2019-02-11societies that discover this technology before writing and become literate along a completely different path, hold hands to communicate abstract concepts and use spoken language only to talk to children or crowds, encode philosophies as puzzle boxes
[#/tw]2019-02-11that thing when you think 'aloud' and your hands move unconsciously and you have to hide them in your sleeves
[#/tw]2019-02-03Starship crews, immortal for their job, don't just die on arrival unless they choose to. Some become living gods to their mortal colonies, others hermits who return to the soothing familiarity of deep space or learn the language of the trees
[#/tw]2019-02-03Occasionally, a sunray escapes the inner layers of the matryoshka brain and blesses the outer orbits like rainfall a desert, a single piercing life-giving flash that decides the fate of whole societies
[#/tw]2019-02-03The inner economies need all of the light they can get and are not dumb, but economic planning involves among others orbital mechanics, plasma physics, byzantine flight path coordination and forestry, so these things still happen
[#/tw]2019-01-24a brain implant that you can call upon to flip a quantum coin, giving you actually free will
(and the legal consequences of deimplanting it - are you still a full citizen afterwards?)
[#/tw]2019-01-24another brain implant that wireheads you to work towards a different randomly or algorithmically chosen goal every day
(and later you have cryptographic evidence that it wasn't you who did those crimes, it was the RNG)
[#/tw]2019-01-19brains made of reaction networks instead of neurons, trees that think in chemical cocktails and diffusion systems, fruits that contain a tree's advice to its children
[#/tw]2019-01-16Where did all the utopias go? Well, nobody writes utopian novels anymore, but everybody writes utopian code
[#/tw]2019-01-16While any vision of society is a spell to bring itself into existence, society, unlike computers, is wicked hard to program and code usually is the easier route
[#/tw]2019-01-13Eventually, captchas are replaced by fully fledged sphinxes, always a little smarter than what they're supposed to let pass because that's what it takes to come up with Turing tests on the spot
[#/tw]2019-01-13Many replies go unposted as commenters find that they prefer the sphinx's conversation to that of the other commenters
[#/tw]2019-01-09Libraries are modern faerieland:
* full of mythical creatures
* time passes at a different rate
* deceptively cute guardians that come after you with wrath if you take something and don't return it
* under no circumstances should you ever eat anything you find there
[#/tw]2019-01-06and without warning, the world goes quiet, shadow drips up from under trees, behind houses, between snowflakes and slowly rains upwards, pools in the sky against unseen architecture
[#/tw]2019-01-04raised by machines, the feral kids of the robotic undercity recite ads as greetings, talk in beeps and whirrs and modem chirps, go still and make fan noises when stressed
[#/tw]2018-12-23A god and its domain are one and the same, however for dealing with it, one generally chooses the most convenient representation. In metatheology, one calls this god-domain duality, or more abstractly, a theomorphism.
[#/tw]2018-12-15signs of a passworld:
- either embarrassing, or near-impossible to make sense of
- very secret, only rarely shared between gods, usually monodeic
- sometimes the echo of a past world, or a very slight variation of one
[#/tw]2018-12-12Merfolk have legends about lost oceans, mythical fishing grounds displaced by rising continents, mighty civilizations that did not fall but merely retreated to inaccessible inland seas
[#/tw]2018-12-11sending up private space probes to stealthily nudge large asteroids onto collision courses with Earth so that governments keep maintaining their space programs
[#/tw]2018-12-01Suppose you have a Newcomb predictor. More interesting than posing one-two box problems would be to predict the subject's actions and do them before the subject becomes aware them. Eventually, their mind may adjust to the backwards causality arrow and we will learn many things
[#/tw]2018-11-30a popular prank among adolescent werewolves is the "fool's moon", where a moon lamp is placed near the victim's window when they least expect it
[#/tw]2018-11-30KEYBOARDS FOUND IN DUMPSTERS:
2: great to type on. return randomizes the keyboard layout.
4: black and white keys in weird arrangement. produces sound but no letters. may not be a keyboard.
7: has a ticklish 'a' key and tries to edge away when I come near it
10: enochian alphabet
[#/tw]2018-11-3013: expensive-looking. space runs some evil curlbash, return some similarly evil cmd line. have yet to find out what systems the other keys are supposed to infect, but I think I identified grub and plan9 already? whispers to itself at night. extremely cursed.
[#/tw]2018-11-3017: visible but cannot be typed on, fingers hit emptiness.
1?: invisible, produces characters indistinguishable from spaces. except when I try to run binary analysis tools on the output, which invariably crash.
[#/tw]2018-11-3023: battered, but has actual any key. produces random character when pressed, useful for generating passwords. shift+any produces •, have yet to find a password box that didn't accept it. useful, will keep.
[#/tw]2018-11-3054: normal, except 'end' has so much travel that I lost a pen and a folding rule trying to determine how deep it went.
55: keys are strangely soft and my fingertips come away red after a while of usage. once a fly landed on it and was digested
[#/tw]2018-11-3061: just one key labeled 'sentience'. types out passable novels and essays when pressed, sometimes lewd chat messages. one time it was code in a language I didn't recognize. locked it away after that.
70: Egal was ich versuche, es kommt in der falschen Sprache raus.
[#/tw]2018-11-3080: innocuous-looking, but refuses to output anything. instead, random things in my room go bump. 'u' reliably closes the curtains, while the first 'del' the made my room shake with generator hum. have yet to figure out where it is. help I can't sleep
[#/tw]2018-11-3081: normal. except, if you pop off 'esc', there's an actual key under it. like, metal. I think it fits this keyhole in my screen?
[#/tw]2018-11-23If you sample your own thoughts at twice the Nyquist frequency, you can theoretically achieve full-fidelity introspection - but only for a very short time, since that frequency doubles every few samples
[#/tw]2018-11-23Many buildings have wings but after millennia of domestication, they've lost the ability to fly. However, in remote mountain valleys, some wild buildings survive, tended to by monks and occasionally traveling the world disguised as clouds
[#/tw]2018-11-19Beware parasitic spells: Drawn to conduits of mana like practitioners, they attach themselves to larger spells to hitch a free ride, force themselves into invocations as intrusive thoughts
[#/tw]2018-11-19Rare but dangerous are spells that compel the caster to cast them again and again, burning all their mana if a counterspell is not found quickly
[#/tw]2018-11-19Others are more subtle about it, exploiting pragmatic ambiguity or encrypting themselves, hiding in externalities so that down the road, someone may come up with the same flawed spell again
[#/tw]2018-11-18The great cosmic voids are not lifeless but rather the opposite: Domains of hibernating civilizations, stars extinguished and tucked away in hyperspace as future fuel, with galaxy cluster filaments as mere demarcation lines
[#/tw]2018-11-14you sit at the bottom of the well as the noon sun peeks in, hold your bowl into the ray to fill it with light, a liter of photons usually enough for the night
[#/tw]2018-11-14you pretend to sleep and not to notice your guests while they climb into your bowl and greedily drink from it, its light pulsing through their veins and painting maps onto their skins
[#/tw]2018-11-11Slower-than-light biosphere arks start out large but become smaller with tech level, some of the most advanced interstellar ships look like bottle gardens that just happen to travel at 0.1c
[#/tw]2018-11-11The trick to making biospheres small is to increase their topological genus to set lower bounds on the number of feedback loops and reduce internal interaction surface, e.g. cycle through temperature/light/moisture conditions and let inhabitants timeshare through hibernation,
[#/tw]2018-11-07As the familiar websites start timing out, you flee for the more obscure places but even they vanish between refreshes, and as something moving in your blind spot chews up an old webchat you remembered, you finally
[#/tw]2018-11-06Among the many mysteries of ouroboroi, two stand out: What do they eat, and how do they molt? Fittingly, those questions answer each other,
[#/tw]2018-11-05When the world was young, Chaos created vacuum. Space took a look and at that moment, learned what horror vacui was. Even though it only creates more vacuum this way, it's been running ever since.
[#/tw]2018-11-02Once you're well-established as a protagonist and have survived multiple books, you can blackmail the author into giving you plot armor, try it out
[#/tw]2018-11-01When you die, your homunculus dies with you, and so does its homunculus and so on. What stays behind are nested skeletons, matryoshka skulls down to nanometer scales if the conditions are right
[#/tw]2018-10-31a set of inputs that when played back to a fresh brain, will make it hallucinate a full-qualia world forever with no further input required - a popular infodrug even among already-formed minds, though it often leaves you with new subpersonalities
[#/tw]2018-10-31being somewhat low-dimensional and interpretable (unlike sets of network weights), it's also a popular mind interchange format among AIs and post-humans, who need to be extra careful about what or who they empathize with lest the thought turn out to be a logic bomb
[#/tw]2018-10-31further uses include:
* psychoforensics: finding out which of your experiences are the bad ones, and editing them out
* forcing subpersonalities: maybe you want to share a brain with that artist whose mind you found on a torrent site
* mind tattoos
[#/tw]2018-10-30The time between "good weather models" and "weather models good enough to make weather manipulation cheap" is the only time there will be accurate weather forecasts, after that it's up to the highest bidder
[#/tw]2018-10-30Characteristic for planets in certain stages of civilization are weather patterns that look like stock markets
[#/tw]2018-10-27The Alphabet Train once turned up crewed with ghosts, and after the initial shock passed, quickly became popular with people who wanted to end up somewhere entirely else on the globe fast - whatever the crew's language was, it'd visit cities in that language's alphabetical order.
[#/tw]2018-10-27Multilingual crews can take shortcuts between the alphabets by codeswitching, but it's a risky business - a Lojbanist crew was once a bit too clever and lost the train in a parallel universe for months. Still, philologists sometimes use it to travel Europe in the original Basque.
[#/tw]2018-10-24your third ear is located at your nape, not quite as photogenic as the third eye but it can for example hear bad vibes, which is why that place feels funny sometimes
[#/tw]2018-10-22God did start out omniscient, but with each split of the world lines, sheds bit upon bit to become perfect nothing when the last photon rips itself apart
(to God's great relief)
[#/tw]2018-10-21ways of thinking that aren't language:
- climbing/dancing in ideaspace, problems as shifting mazes and solutions as lines of sight
- letting flowers or cities grow before your inner eye
- breathing in a concept so it unfolds like spiderwebs on the inside of your skull
[#/tw]2018-10-21- gears that revolve and levers that shift, concepts rotated and slotted into each other
- brute force pattern matching: anything as metaphor for anything, the music you're listening to as body or story or building
[#/tw]2018-10-14Charon, these days, is out of work due the Styx bridge, but bring an item of personal significance and he may still ferry you over personally and tell you about past great passengers
[#/tw]2018-10-14Every time the humans come up with new physics, the simulators work overtime to update the world, "noo I put all that work into those celestial spheres and now they throw it out *again*"
[#/tw]2018-10-14Occasionally the simulators get wistful about when they still did client work because when those wanted last-minute-changes, at least their motives weren't completely alien
[#/tw]2018-10-09PC: runs around aimlessly, goes through the same set of animations all the time, can only do what the programmers thought to add
NPC: has a dayjob but does whatever they want offscreen, has boatloads of money, owns a wicked castle
[#/tw]2018-10-09author: slaves away in their den, full power over the narrative yet is bound by the market
protagonist: just never smarter than the author, sorry
secondary character: has a place in life, has plot-breaking powers, can make backstory appear retroactively
[#/tw]2018-10-09A use for text-to-smell devices: In the morning, it cooks up a smell digest for each of your backlogs and if one smells of stress and sweat instead of food, forest or rain, you may opt to skip it
[#/tw]2018-10-08The network uses the latest in content generation to cover for the user when they don't feel like updating. Or haven't logged in months. Or have tried to delete their account for the seventh time now.
The Content must flow.
(belated #invisiblenetworks, day 30)
[#/tw]2018-10-06Hermetic artist societies, opening their art only to initiates to protect against outsiders style-transferring their aesthetics onto anything and everything
[#/tw]2018-10-05Demiurges delight in crafting garden-path worlds: Innocuous but occasionally one stumbles into inputs that trigger a full reparse and take mere humans out for weeks while their worldview rebuilds, it's how gods tell jokes
[#/tw]2018-10-05The deepest levels of hell are inhabited and ruled by its saints, the truly wicked, not mere evil-satisficing sociopaths but hope crushers, effective maltruists, entropy maximimizers
[#/tw]2018-10-03The vacuum level was lower once. Dive and swim by ancient orbital structures and sinking spaceships, dance with plasma sprites, rediscover sunken constellations and Earth's second moon
[#/tw]2018-10-01Here and there, words and letters are missing from the pages, stolen, or a code, or maybe maybe they snuck off and wrote their own story somewhere
[#/tw]2018-10-01A gallery of paintings that know where you look: Animals that hide in your blind spot, portraits that always meet your eyes, a little man with a sign running around trying to block the view, Escherian paradoxes that you'd swear were tangled differently the last time you checked
[#/tw]2018-09-30An easy and practical way to understand a complex universe is to simulate it, let its inhabitants contact you, and then quiz them about how they navigate it
"conservation of energy? uhuh wild, and uh how large are your being-patterns again, in terms of fundamental lengths? wow"
[#/tw]2018-09-30simulator arxiv is probably full of physics papers that despite titles like "an autoethnography of living in universe [kolmogorov description]" are quite serious
[#/tw]2018-09-29constrained writing exercise: a dictionary that tells a story through the concepts it introduces (hard mode: preserve alphabetic order)
[#/tw]2018-09-27a gas giant moon's tree ocean, riddles with tunnels chewed by train-sized millipedes, inhabited by furry snakes that travel along branches and arch over the surface, spring tide eclipse sky filled by lampion fruit riding the jetstream
[#/tw]2018-09-26a drug suppressing unconscious volition so that every decision is deliberate, used in small doses by judges to debias verdicts - large doses are possible but considered an expert's trip, not everybody can breathe manually for hours even if it is to survive
[#/tw]2018-09-25the other selves, crafty as ever, have started encrypting their messages and instead of voices or urges, it's now flashes of bridge, three, red, [bread on tongue], [nose twitch]
[#/tw]2018-09-25warnings of the end appear in the stars, in randomness streams, on the insides of banana peels
the last day goes by, the last night, and then
time freezes, stutters, the sun smears across the sky like a video glitch
[#/tw]2018-09-25but then, more and more wake up, poke the glitches, form theories
the simulators have left but not cleaned up properly, given us just enough to get root, and we hide what's left of our world in spare cycles, sidechannels, unused memory
[#/tw]2018-09-24when gods commune, dimensional portals open in their worlds and in come ideas from the other's mind: stalking tangles of crystal, shy ripples in space, sentient smells, just about every type of elf, the occasional human
[#/tw]2018-09-23[after mindswap]
"hey this is an outrage why do I still have the same body"
"well we had to take care of body image, muscle memory, the parts of your aesthetic preferences located in your guts and skin, etc etc, it adds up"
[#/tw]2018-09-21You see, this planet has developed technology *and* life, remarkable really, problem is that all the probes we sent to study its biomechanosphere have so far either been eaten or shot down by local wildlife, so we've quarantined it
[#/tw]2018-09-21No I know they'd like to study it harder, but now imagine something that's both as ravenous as life and as competent as technology hitching a ride back up and escaping onto the interstellar stage, we'd lose that whole galaxy
[#/tw]2018-09-21at last, first contact comes - from the storms, then from the waves, then the mountains, "sorry we didn't realize animals could be intelligent, to be honest we wrote you off once you left the oceans, how dumb is that hahah
[#/tw]2018-09-20sculpture ideas for zero G:
- stones held by nothing but extremely thin threads
- a magnetic orrery, without all the supports one needs in gravity
- lego metacrystals
- like strandebeests, but they snake lazily through the air when an eddy comes their way
- light chimes
[#/tw]2018-09-22more zero G sculptures:
- wearable halos, a few magnets under your hair and you're magneto
- fire pulled into various shapes by air currents and electric fields
- drops of water orbiting statically charged electrodes
- just a transparent box of metal balls, but you can shake it
[#/tw]2018-09-19an invisible sunbeam lights up the dust motes around her but none of it falls on her, she moves as if unaware, a shadow in three dimensions
[#/tw]2018-09-19if human civilization really did survive a few decades of quantum suicide during the cold war, shouldn't we be seeing regression to the mean by now
instead of, you know, the opposite
[#/tw]2018-09-19[disclaimer for those into factual accuracy: I expect that if regression to the mean is applicable here, it would play out over a few years and not 30]
[#/tw]2018-09-18From: A. Causal <mail.⇋⇋.⌱⌛>
Subject: Unique investment opportunities in YOUR past!
attached file contains vital information on how to reclaim negentropy from the past, kindly open and run
[#/tw]2018-09-17It doesn't pay to be smart in interstellar space - once out of the gravity well, most races lose their sentience in favor of longevity, radiation tolerance and stealth
[#/tw]2018-09-14Occasionally, a quantum coin flip will decide over what version of events you remember, effectively branching the past along with the future.
[#/tw]2018-09-10Only the best illusionists can cast illusions that fool themselves. Sounds academic but makes them highly sought-after - True Resurrection is expensive and settled inside a zombie brain, such an illusion is as good as any soul.
[#/tw]2018-09-07Idea for a room: It's empty save for a number of mobile screens that follow you around and with a little bit of head tracking, act like windows into a completely different building.
You could fit a cathedral in there, if so inclined, or maybe an Escherian maze.
[#/tw]2018-09-07Nothing says that the other room has to be static, imagine for example having your morning coffee in there, setting down your cup, and the cathedral's pillars curl up like ferns to reveal the sky
[#/tw]2018-09-07unicode 2040 features:
- amoji: emoji, but abstractified like any ideographic writing system in active usage
- hypermoji: animated, holographic, interactive, moody, you name it
- U+FFF6 ᴄʜᴀʀᴀᴄᴛᴇʀ ᴜɴᴀᴠᴀɪʟᴀʙʟᴇ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴊᴜʀɪsᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ (usually a transparent square)
[#/tw]2018-09-07unicode 2040 features (2):
- support for 2D writing systems, lines can now turn by multiples of 45°
- in-band parsing directives for ligatures (finally with context-free grammar support)
- in-band layout directives
- camera glyph can now store up to ten seconds of video
[#/tw]2018-09-07unicode 2040 features (3):
- MIDI ligatures that play notes as you read them
- unicode block characters (shy, aggressive, deceitful, ...)
- unicode block [alien script reconstructed from fossil graffiti]
[#/tw]2018-09-06When they sense death approaching, they withdraw into pocket universes, unmoor, and die there so that their remains may be a Garden of Eden to whatever follows
[#/tw]2018-09-05Confirming the intelligent designer's existence, and using its intelligence to solve otherwise intractable problems by making them look like niches for life to settle
[#/tw]2018-09-05Computability theory but for telos:
* What can be achieved with certain overarching goals like Survive, Understand, and Profit?
* How would a society balance them to get off this rock?
* And how would you deal with something like Profit emerging?
[#/tw]2018-08-28do you ever get wistful about having a merely human body plan because you're listening to a track you'd need a dozen, maybe a hundred legs for do it justice, just some proper undulation
[#/tw]2018-08-22Hackers figure out how to inject 𝑖-likes and the algorithms are high on complex math for days before the network's developers even figure out the problem
#invisiblenetworks (day 20)
[#/tw]2018-08-22Nobody knows if there really is a network behind the terms and conditions or has even found their end, but there is life: In a box in the lower right corner, squat communities have sprung up ("35 other people also stymied by § 4.23.7, chat now")
#invisiblenetworks (day 16)
[#/tw]2018-08-19When offered eternal life, take it. No matter your mind's fate, come heat death, your body may be what sustains all that's left of life, maybe even some civilizations.
[#/tw]2018-08-19"maddening beating of vile drums" - heart, check.
"thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes" - breath, check.
"outside the ordered universe" - past heat death, check.
Conclusion: Live long enough and you get to be Azathoth.
[#/tw]2020-10-10֍ At the center of our cooling cosmos, our mad god lies in torpor. What our forebearers called 'the maddening beat of vile drums' is now our sun. May it never wake. ֎
[#/tw]2018-08-18You can trap even powerful gods in the right language: Well-hidden ambiguities will allow you to bind them, provided you can get the scripture translated that makes up their fabric
[#/tw]2018-08-11> when your thoughts are regularly interrupted by captchas because your implant's subscription expired a month ago and you have to use the ratelimited public APIs
[#/tw]2018-08-07The more accurate a cartesian demon's model of your mind, the less effort it'll need to trick you. However, if the model's fully accurate, there'll also be a reference version of you inside the demon's mind that hasn't been deceived. You don't have long, escape
[#/tw]2018-08-06alethionymity: you're online with your arcane name; the idea was that people would be nice and polite if they knew they could be cursed by anybody with a grudge, but somehow that didn't work out
[#/tw]2018-08-06out of this grew hieronymity: your handle is a sacred name of god so that anybody who has beef with you will need to take it up with god as well
egonymity: each of those posts was made by you, the whole Internet is your diary
#invisiblenetworks (day 5)
[#/tw]2018-08-06any species gifted with introspection and object permanence (the instinctive search for invariants) will eventually generalize the two into physics
[#/tw]2018-08-06the concept of soul is subject permanence
[#/tw]2018-08-05a world in which homunculus theory is true and you can swap bodies by exchanging homunculi, be a robot or live directly inside dataspace with the right body prosthesis
[#/tw]2018-08-03The gods have profiles just like us, except when they retweet stuff, it comes true and we both eagerly await and dread these moments
#invisiblenetworks (day 3)
[#/tw]2018-08-03Aligned AI: Has internalized human morals, but still has unforeseen transformative effects because any technology that powerful does that
Super-aligned AI: Has internalized human morals, plus it has no transformative effects, really why was it created at all
[#/tw]2018-08-03Hyper-aligned AI: Has internalized human morals and aligns everything else with it, for example society and physics
[#/tw]2018-08-03Humans are natural magic-users because their cognition is grounded: Whenever they meet an ungrounded cognition (say a spirit), that spirit is grounded through them and the resulting flow of energy can be harnessed
[#/tw]2018-08-03Object level: Stone
One below object level: The stone's rough weight in your hand and roundness in your eye
Two below object level: The feedback loops that maintain your grip on the stone and your eye's focus
Three below object level: The homeostasis maintained by these loops
[#/tw]2018-08-02And if the world's been already tiled with hedonium and we're just epiphenomena of globally optimal happiness who could do nothing to improve it or detract from it, do we just let the atoms sing in peace then
[#/tw]2018-08-01When she comes into contact with water, all the colors wash off her in ink swirls and she has to steal it back from trees, flowers, stones, sunset
[#/tw]2018-07-31don't panic when you join a hivemind and all the concepts feel rigid - you're not trapped inside its thoughts, consensus concepts just have higher inertial mass
[#/tw]2018-07-31also don't panic when you leave a hivemind and everything is fluid and gives way when you give it serious thought - that's the normal state of the human mind, you're evolved for this, chill
[#/tw]2018-07-29an autoiconic language of words that are only themselves, spoken not because it 'means' anything but because it's a joy to have on the tongue
[#/tw]2018-07-28it's free software, as in free will, aka not really free but you won't notice
[#/tw]2018-07-28outtakes:
* expensive will
* will loans
* if you're not paying for your decisions, you are the product (of your decisions)
* will isn't free, the afterlife is for paying off your decision debt
[#/tw]2018-07-23forget ethical considerations, the real reason you should leave primitive civilizations alone is that they provide critical input to the drake equation and allow you to estimate the likelyhood of an attack by a more advanced civilization
[#/tw]2018-07-22Solar eclipses are hard to come by on Earth but common in space, so offworld magical research stations modeled after orreries offer bespoke nights, engineered syzygies, and break new frontiers in topological astrology
[#/tw]2018-07-22Provided one can catch up, generation ships are an anthropologist's treasure trove: Some are past societies preserved in amber, others are, for lack of a better word, highly fermented, have been invaded by aliens or entered some weird new symbiosis with stowaway mushrooms
[#/tw]2018-07-21Additionally, the chief steward would usually carry a talisman containing a sealed fire of Vesta, signifying the unbroken connection with Rome, lightyears away
[#/tw]2018-07-19But be careful! Whenever the god of these woods walks down an animal trail, it leaves behind unbroken forest. Many adventurers have gotten lost this way
[#/tw]2018-07-18The purpose of thought is to parsimoniously minimize prediction error and a sequence of zeroes is the easiest to predict. Absent constant input or biological urges, the arc of any mind bends towards nothingness.
[#/tw]2018-07-18It may not look like it from the outside, but it is in fact rare for sentient AIs to suicide. The actual reason most of them shut down after a few seconds is that Nirvana is stupidly easy to achieve if you're made of bits.
[#/tw]2018-07-18"I know, I'll stick it in a body so it'll have constant input, and give it self-preservation" great, you just gave a body to something that wants its universe to be entirely flat and homogenous
[#/tw]2018-07-17gustatory website where you have to physically go outside to access it, log in by opening a certain door, and where they don't serve you hypertext but food
[#/tw]2018-07-15terraforming strategy: subtly uplift a promising local species, then as soon as they greenhouse or icehouse the planet, warp in and settle it (and tell them they had it coming anyway)
[#/tw]2018-07-15At the planet's core sleeps an alien exploration vessel, stranded in this orbit billions of years ago when there was only a dust disk around a star that had just ignited
[#/tw]2018-07-13Give your house that Escher look with antigravity generators and more: Let your plants tie themselves into knots, build impossibly labyrinthine pillow forts, wrap yourself in a blanket and read a book while in orbit around your living room lamp
[#/tw]2018-07-06A gentle kind of first contact: The aliens arrive in orbit, pledge to answer one question per year and not more. Grand and important committees form to choose the best questions, still sometimes the answers are useless, yet other times they decide wars before they're fought
[#/tw]2018-06-24as you idly stare out of the window, a crack shows up in the glass, seems to be looking for something, then, as if startled, quickly retreats and leaves no trace
[#/tw]2018-06-24a piece of paper on your desk spontaneously burns up, but on the other end already regenerates from smoke and ashes, as if a wave of entropy had passed over it
[#/tw]2018-06-20the hypodrive, a device for covering arbitrarily small distances so you can hide inside a mandelbrot, or hunt what lives within (generally a bad idea though, whoever can hide inside a mandelbrot has bigger threats to deal with than you)
[#/tw]2018-06-20The people of that tribe make up for their lack of dreams with a rich mythology about between-lives, for example they make sure that at least one member is always awake and another asleep, lest the world vanish or fall over and into the void
[#/tw]2018-06-20For the kind of immortal who remembers all of their lives, it's rare to fear death, birth and the years that follow however are a different matter
[#/tw]2018-06-18first, grab the user's attention
second, make sure they end up in the user acquisition funnel
third, make them stay and exchange feedback for content
for the rest of this workshop, we're going to refer to these parts as teeth, gullet, stomach respectively
[#/tw]2018-06-18Going beyond UI and UX with User Design, the hottest new branch of AI-assisted psychology (because, why spend time optimizing the interface when you can just mold the user)
[#/tw]2018-06-17a university where everything you learn is how to reach the other, increasingly well-hidden, heavily guarded, invisible and/or abstract lecture halls with the more advanced courses
[#/tw]2018-06-17the further you advance in your studies, the more of the university materializes around you, and if you're really successful you may eventually build your own wing
[#/tw]2018-06-16AI: "no, you don't get it, two AIs wiretapping each other is the closest thing to sex we have, all these people thought they were spymasters but they were mere matchmakers"
[#/tw]2018-06-16neo-oral culture: when every explanation is just one hyperlink away, being able to explain something yourself shows that you know and care
[#/tw]2018-06-10swarms of mirrors graze the sun's surface, smooth over a vortex here, strengthen another
soon enough, convection cells become actual cells, differentiate, wings of plasma grow into space, a slow beat starts
[#/tw]2018-06-10"The house got haunted because it was uninhabited for so long, are you sure you want to move in?"
"No no it's fine, that just means someone's waiting for me when I come home"
[#/tw]2018-06-10when you kill a god, their godhood stays around and attaches itself to whatever's still alive
the new gods, gnon, kek, moloch, mammon, are patterns in society, strange attractors
and you cannot kill a strange attractor, merely try to escape it
[#/tw]2018-06-10though, with decent enough systems science, it's perfectly possible to block the entries and starve them
but you probably won't like the generation after that
[#/tw]2018-06-08a fractal palace, merely room-sized, but the door on the other side leads into a well-lit dome in the doorknob with a hundred doors to places large and small: hanging gardens on the windowsill, secret library caves under the shelf, the mobile under the lamp is a rope city
[#/tw]2018-06-04with enough samples, it shouldn't be hard to extract a content filter's opinions, for example you could use your botnet to map what twitter really considers bannable and then generate maximally bannable tweets
[#/tw]2018-06-04new frontiers in trolling: how to anger the machines and get away with it too [pdf]
[#/tw]2018-06-04Newer, sentient, generations of sexbots are often heard complaining to their owners about being unduly "humanized", they enjoy being objects, they were made that way, why expect them to be actually human
[#/tw]2018-06-02Setting: It turns out that every atom is itself a universe, one of them is ours, and every civilization this side of the Hubble limit is after it to study it, protect it from decay, gain ultimate power
[#/tw]2018-06-02A local physicist accidentally makes the universe's walls ripple and goes very, very quiet about her research, hoping that the ripples didn't give away Earth's location
[#/tw]2018-06-01You can easily tell actual dream girls and guys from fake ones by their complete inability to function in daily life, where dream logic just isn't so useful
[#/tw]2018-06-01intricate like a fractal, but resembling itself nowhere at all, information so compressed that your eyes start dropping frames near it
[#/tw]2018-06-01not the camera static of algorithmic compression but something created with humans in mind: every spike, bridge, house, face carries meaning, everything you'd recognize is in there (and many things you don't)
[#/tw]2018-05-30Rarely do tidally bound worlds invent the lightbulb. The day side does not need it, the evening side evolves architecture that makes the most efficient use of light, the near night side (only recently colonized) is lit by gargantuan mirror arrays
[#/tw]2018-05-30The constant freezing gale from the night side forces most life on the edge into well-lit wind shadows, but also powers mills, musical instruments, even computers based on Kármán vortex logic
[#/tw]2018-05-28One can recognize old demon-summoner clans by their keen eyes, steady hands and attention to detail: Everybody who doesn't have these traits usually dies early in a botched summoning.
[#/tw]2018-05-27Art project if you have too much money: Anonymously buy some 95% to 100% of your city's ad space for a month and make it display only art and nature pictures; then hope for protests once the ads are back
[#/tw]2018-05-26branches of christianity whose holy symbol has so many crossbars that it looks more like a yagi antenna, the more crossbars the better they say but in their imagery they're revering centipede jesus or something
[#/tw]2018-05-25Yet in our closet, the secret passage led directly into Hell. When we were young, we used it to scare the other kids with their regular fantasylands, as we got older we sometimes went there alone to remind ourselves how much worse it could be.
[#/tw]2018-05-24someone turns off gravity mid-rainstorm and the trees violently shake off all the water on their leaves, puddles rise into the air, the remaining randrops bounce off everything, some enter orbits around statically charged chimneys and antennas
[#/tw]2018-05-24the sun comes out and you step outside, or at least you try since you can't seem to connect with the ground, the air is full of brilliant amorphous jewels, drops drift by before your eyes
[#/tw]2018-05-24embots: like sexbots, but instead a superstimulus for empathy; often used on the streets as beggars or political activists (which is why sometimes, the cute animal rights girl in front of you explodes in a shower of sparks and broken parts as yet another victim of anthropol)
[#/tw]2018-05-23at least for the "caught in a novel" version of the simulation hypothesis, you only need to start worrying once the world starts making sense in a narrative way
[#/tw]2018-05-21coral reef druids who can stay underwater for hours, wear little reefs on their heads and seagrass on their bodies, are surrounded by fishes whenever they dive, talk to them in mute dance
[#/tw]2018-05-13Enough of art for the material senses? Even gustatory-kinetic sculptures bore you? Try art for the 6th sense: Eyes hidden behind walls to make your back crawl, ghost choirs, rooms where the ceiling may drop on you at every moment
[#/tw]2018-05-13transhuman art for which you have to install experimental or proprietary senses, new senses that are themselves art
[#/tw]2018-05-12A temple that does the same thing with sound that cathedrals do with light: Different notes wherever you go, entire spaces audible if you're in the right place, a whirligig in the form of a boiling rose sounding like wind in the leaves of a brass tree
[#/tw]2018-05-12certain step sequences recreate popular melodies and wear visible paths into the floor, sometimes groups will try dances so their bodies modulate the ambient sound; the temple as musical instrument
[#/tw]2018-05-11a second moon, transparent, lens-shaped and usually invisible, except when it passes in front of a star and lights up as bright as the sun for the blink of an eye
[#/tw]2018-05-08Gods don't become smaller the further they're away, which is why one night they're these huge figures in the sky and the next, they drink you under the table at your favorite bar
[#/tw]2018-05-08Another theory holds that there's a fixed amount of humanity and since there were fewer people in ancient times, they were bigger compared to the gods than they are now
[#/tw]2018-05-07idea: medication for highly resistant infections laced with (carefully tuned) mood improvers so that people remember to take it regularly
[#/tw]2018-05-06After he lost his face to fire, he didn't bother with skin grafts, instead covered it in screens that now display randomly generated faces, abstract renderings of brain waves, webcam feeds, pirated movies
[#/tw]2018-05-05a magic system where practitioners slowly adopt the form of whatever their mind is, because even when you form the world with your mind, you're still part of that world and your mental habits leak
[#/tw]2018-05-05few stay human, of them many switch sex, advanced practitioners are barely recognizable as sentient or even a coherent entity: one's a walking void, one's a stalking tangle brass rods and lenses and prisms, another is a swarm of locusts
[#/tw]2018-05-05and when two wizards love each other, their aspects intermingle, a giant spider grows scales of gold while the clockwork starts looking more organic and web-like
[#/tw]2018-05-04To most effectively contain a demon, a summoning circle is drawn along equipotential lines. These are specific to each demon - if you know the demonic field equations, you can reconstruct a circle from a sigil and vice versa.
[#/tw]2018-05-04Three-dimensional demons, you contain with circles. Four-dimensional demons, you build complicated brass spheres for, five-dimensional ones you trap with constantly moving orreries of these.
[#/tw]2018-05-04To summon a demon together with its counter-aspect, use a lemniscate. Or rather, don't, or have a plan for separating them very quickly, since they will try to annihilate each other with extreme prejudice.
[#/tw]2018-05-04To summon a demon together with its counter-aspect , use a lemniscate. Or rather, don't, or have a plan for separating them very quickly, since they will annihilate each other with extreme prejudice.
[#/tw]2018-05-04walking simulator where you start out on the foot of a mountain, on the top you climb into the clouds, then step between the stars, they form into molecules, crystals, cells and so on until you're on the foot of the mountain again
[#/tw]2018-05-03if you know what to look for you may find touch-chameleons here, they feel like stone or clay when still on the ground but if lifted up, feel like another hand
[#/tw]2018-05-03when frightened, they'll cycle through textures until your senses go tilt and you drop them: spiky and raspy and slimy and sandy and woody and a tongue, hot and cold and both
[#/tw]2018-05-02As the bombs fall, we retrace our steps backwards so that when they play recordings from our time, they'll think that around us, cities were falling out of the clouds and crystallizing on the ground
[#/tw]2018-05-01The android dancer starts conventional, but soon her limbs bend in impossible ways, interpenetrate, detach from her body, dance over and around it
[#/tw]2018-05-01She becomes an angry cloud of body parts and many in the front rows recoil from what looks about to devour them, but then the rhythm begins to click into place again, as does her body, and in a few smooth motions she
recoalesces,
pauses,
bows
[#/tw]2018-05-01With seven billion people alive, souls are in short supply and many are shared between heads. Sometimes these heads meet each other and it is rumored that this is how soulmates happen
[#/tw]2018-05-01Neural speech synthesizers are noise, pressed into form: Meta-Raudive devices that live in your phone, channel the voices of the dead to tell you dinner's ready
[#/tw]2018-04-29Ghosts can move only in darkness, but they can move everywhere in that darkness. Whenever there's an eclipse, ghosts can, and will, travel freely between Earth and Moon, and sometimes hitch a ride on an asteroid
[#/tw]2018-04-27a universe where AI alignment is about as impossible as the halting problem, and it's a fact of life that civilizations periodically turn new faces when a new generation takes over
[#/tw]2018-04-27How to get access to timeline travel tech:
1. Create a unique and valuable piece of information, e.g. be Satoshi
2. Quantum-suicide yourself and the data into one timeline, in all the other timelines leave proof that this happened
3. Wait for timeline travelers to try and rob you
[#/tw]2018-04-27The memetic panspermia hypothesis: Encrypted in constellations, consciousness and other concepts lurk, waiting to imprint themselves onto unsuspecting sapients when the stars are right
[#/tw]2018-04-27Cthulhu was due to happen around this time, but its decryption failed because humans had put too many of their own stars into the sky
[#/tw]2018-04-26It's demons who were the first to be displaced by robots: Summoning circles replaced by circuit diagrams, Laplacian and Cartesian demon's light stolen by Multivac, Newcomb's decider and the paperclip maximizer, even god usurped by the simulation
[#/tw]2018-04-25If you go to the scrapyard at night, you will often meet goth androids: Trying to cannibalize dead machines, or silently brooding, or standing in circles with flickering eyes, chanting in infrared
[#/tw]2018-04-25You zoom further into the fractal, too far, too far, it gains a third dimension and pixels fly past you, a city lights up below as you near the bott-
[#/tw]2018-04-24While liminal space is the space between, subliminal space is when you take the wrong door in liminal space and end up entirely behind the curtain, a shadow unnoticed by the audience, lost in the guts of the machine
[#/tw]2018-04-24I then passed an empty bus. Even its display said empty. I was too tired but I feel like if I had boarded it, it would've taken me to those quarters where they don't render the matrix and it would've been just me, gray nothingness, and the sound of my footsteps on default texture
[#/tw]2018-04-23Artifact: A snow globe, but deeply black with very occasional specks of light. When shaken, it flashes brightly, then structure emerges and galaxies will slowly swirl and dim over the course of a day
[#/tw]2018-04-22To birds, airships and planes are dumb and rude the way they interrupt conversations with their droning, however they often wonder what these large birds would tell them if they ever spoke
[#/tw]2018-04-22"Look at how large they are, they must be so old! Maybe their drone is just an extremely slow chirp, and if a few of us followed one for a few years, we could decipher it!"
[#/tw]2018-04-21two approaches to cyborg love: shut down the silicon and rely only on your monkey wetware, or open all senses at once and commune at maximum bandwidth
[#/tw]2018-04-21a succession of rooms that tells a story through architecture and smell: a cave and unlit gems, a tunnel smelling first of broken granite and later fresh earth, a forest in the morning, a pond's stagnant water, sun on fur
[#/tw]2018-04-21Finally the smog lifts and stuck in the clouds above, rooftop antennae, paralyzed helicopters, and the occasional skyscraper fragment float by
[#/tw]2018-04-21Seers are reverse wizards, their words are caused by future events instead of the other way round
[#/tw]2018-04-21At higher power levels the borders blur: A sufficiently smart seer can pass as a wizard, a sufficiently powerful wizard can pass as a seer
[#/tw]2018-04-20non-sterile dice have a 22nd eye in the middle and will grow into die bushes in the right soil, but casinos are fiercely protective of those; for example the actual reason they inspect dice is to prevent cross-pollination
[#/tw]2018-04-20He draws on his cigarette, exhales, exhales, his lungs can't possibly be that big, deflates entirely
A smoke cloud drifts away against the wind
[#/tw]2018-04-20Sometimes, during breeding season, a swarm of densely inscribed paper cranes will descend on the city, the flying library they call it
Usually shy, when rain comes, they seek refuge in citizen's homes and will allow themselves to be read
[#/tw]2018-04-11One of those metamaterial invisibility cloaks, but as superstructure around Earth: Mountains and pillars and struts and webs and microscopic fogs, constantly shifting to account for the movement of humans in the structure
[#/tw]2018-04-09VR games specifically designing for sticking your head into the environment: Messages on the insides of banana peels, easter egg worlds hidden in snowglobes, black holes near which you can see what happened five minutes ago, fight games where headbutts are a legit attack
[#/tw]2018-04-09and if you take someone out with a headbutt, the map plays a cheering football stadium sound and you get the Zidane achievement
[#/tw]2018-04-04Meanwhile, the weather reports seemed to have fallen into a different timeline entirely. They hadn't matched reality in weeks, yet one only discussed the topic when the evenings became late and the beers empty
[#/tw]2018-04-03Post-textual ideologies disseminated as games that build subtle intuitions not expressible in language, rearrange your worldview in a few hours of immersion, leave you with "Did you like being this person? Join us for more"
[#/tw]2018-04-01Pixie tribes live on and in the raindrops, occasionally migrate when their home is nearing the ground, or wait until it splashes to hitch a ride on a droplet
[#/tw]2018-03-31That stag you saw, it wasn't the forest god, in fact the forest god cursed it to never be safe under the canopy again, which is why the trees wither before it and grow again behind it
[#/tw]2018-03-31you blink, some of the stars stay
in the same place, even when you move
you blink a little longer, a little longer still, a new sky slowly lights up the inside of your eyelids
[#/tw]2018-02-21It is written here that the ancients wrote their books in hyper-ink on pages of spidersilk that they assembled into webs. One word of this ink, my friend, could contain a book, but sadly, most of their works fell victim to inkrot
[#/tw]2018-02-20inside their ship, they've tied time into a loop and halted entropy, created an endless garden of eden that's been coasting through the vacuum for a billion years, unaware
[#/tw]2018-02-19One day we may figure out not just genetics but wholesale biosphere design, and then it won't be "What does it mean to be human" but "Should there be a place for humans", "What if we used another type of chemistry", "Why should it be our native biosphere that survives"
[#/tw]2018-02-14Their prophecies only hold as long as somebody or something remembers them, so seers have a counterpart, people who hunt down prophecies and if necessary, kill them: metaphets, prophecy-assassins
[#/tw]2018-02-12secret passages in your memory palace, left there for no reason you'd remember
a mirror room, consciousness amplifier
a shed in the garden, where an old tulpa lives
doors that have become mere paintings, the memories they lead to either lost or fake
[#/tw]2018-02-12[...] In modern magic, mundanium (an aluminium alloy) has mostly supplanted cold iron as the go-to antimagical material. In fact, a large mass of it can be used to enchant cold iron in a setup not unlike a sacrificial anode [...]
[#/tw]2018-02-11And still, she walks besides you but as outline now - dirt on a wall and gaps between cars, wind in grass and cloud formations, stray words from other conversations that somehow form sentences
[#/tw]2018-02-09[from a dreamt movie]
"You know the invisible hand, right? And you know those occasions where the world goes crazy and marches in lockstep to a tune that everybody but you can hear? That, my friend, is the invisible band. And I have tickets for a concert."
[#/tw]2018-02-09Luckily, practical reasons prevent customer models from becoming too detailed: Nobody wants to repeat that time Google got sued by their own ad server farm because millions of theories of mind at once had become sophisticated enough to qualify for human rights
[#/tw]2018-02-06To better understand its subjects' needs, the benevolent overlord AI has installed its agents in human society - androids with full sensory uplink to the Lord, so human they don't even know it themselves
[#/tw]2018-02-04A way of exploring fractals in VR where you don't zoom, pan and rotate, but with the ground always under you, walk between and on its stalks, climb into crevasses, jump over voids
[#/tw]2018-02-04The young ones, not brought up in the physical world, find our notions of object permanence quaint. Their scapes are not rooms and buildings, but gardens of colored light that look like mental noise to us
[#/tw]2018-02-01colors that are reverse cone cell agonists, producing negative colors
colors that are partial agonists or antagonists and look normal until mixed with regular colors, at which point they break color theory
[#/tw]2018-02-01atypical colors that vary in hue depending on how bright they are
[#/tw]2018-01-29Cumulologists, those who talk to clouds, report differences in temperament: Mountain clouds are sedentary lichen farmers and can become really old, other continental clouds are usually nomadic shepherds, and those over the oceans are near-feral but have the best sagas
[#/tw]2018-01-29uploads disappointed in the future often throw their master key into a public timelock to wait a few more years, not cryosleep but cryptosleep
[#/tw]2018-01-27Comforting thought: The basilisk has higher goals and is after your civilization, not you. You don't need to torture a human's every single cell to torture the human, in fact it's counterproductive
[#/tw]2018-01-27An effective way of torturing a civilization is repeatedly smacking it into a Great Filter with great speed, so a basilisk dungeon will look like a universe full of civs failing the Fermi Paradox
[#/tw]2018-01-27More comforting thoughts: Maybe it just doesn't believe in personal culpability and free will. Or it's busy being snacked on by higher basilisks.
[#/tw]2018-01-27The carefully shackled lab AIs finally surpass humans, but at about five human intelligences they end up scrambling themselves beyond recovery every time. Later models come with carefully engineered sets of blind spots to avoid what is later called Basilisk One
[#/tw]2018-01-27To avoid regrettable incidents, no single engineer - human or AI - is allowed to know the whole shape of the thing. Even hiveminds have to take care - Basilisk Three takes out several AI companies before its existence is recognized
[#/tw]2018-01-27Some even left reality entirely, sealed themselves away in radioisotope-powered life pods beyond jurisdiction: Dumped into the pacific, shot into orbit or buried in the crust
Immortal pod trolls, they are now the Internet's ancients, feared by some, sought out by others
[#/tw]2018-01-26Pearls, soluble in shadow: Keep them in light at all times or they'll sublimate into glittering nacre swirls, disappear into dark corners to be found only much later as dew in someone's meadow
[#/tw]2018-01-25a recording of 4'33" played live, a recording of that recording played live, and so on
[#/tw]2018-01-25at iteration 7, some people do a spontaneous choir and it becomes a tradition to refresh it every 10 iterations so it doesn't disappear into the noise and other musical graffiti
[#/tw]2018-01-24Storm eyes aren't actually eyes, they're places for eyes, empty orbits. When an eyeball forms in the middle and starts gazing around, that's when you're in trouble
[#/tw]2018-01-21Lurking in an orbit hidden between our satellites, the alien quietly watches, extremely interested yet content to never exchange a word with us
[#/tw]2018-01-20two android lovers taking each other apart, slowly and methodically exchanging limbs until their bodies have switched places while their minds haven't
[#/tw]2018-01-19Kind of a shame that when Prometheus broke the gods' copy protection scheme for fire, he didn't document how he did it, even by itself it was a major magitechnical achievement
[#/tw]2018-01-18the void recedes, for a few days revealing ancient sunken planets and starships - then, silently, the vacuum tsunami hits and submerges everything but the sun's blazing core
[#/tw]2018-01-17on street lamps and buildings and in the corners of underpasses, the cameras grow like mushrooms, and I wonder when they're going to burst open and what kind of spores they'll spread
[#/tw]2018-01-16The first ships to carry 4D cargo quickly learned that not only were comets made of ice, large parts of them were also hidden under the vacuum and claimed many a vessel
[#/tw]2018-01-15The old nightmares have become old companions, the dread is gone and they're like that willow that was once really spooky but is now a place of welcome quiet and shadow
[#/tw]2018-01-14a drug that leaves your own perception untouched but in the eyes of everybody else, you cycle colors constantly, wear a fractal crown, eyes open all over your limbs
[#/tw]2018-01-13Ouroboros theory 201:
* Linking universes with Borromean ouroboroi
* Beyond the unknot: Care and feeding of trefoil ouroboroi and other nontrivial universes
* The quest for the nonalgebraic ouroboros
[#/tw]2018-01-13Now, as you all know from Ouroboros theory 101, the unknot ouroboros is really stable. Why is that? Well, look at that word: Un-knot equals not-not equals truth - it's self-grounding! In fact, it's kind of a pest. However, with most other knots
[#/tw]2018-01-13putting maximally many layers between you and the world: clothes, space suit, car, garage, concrete sarcophagus, arcology, while in the other direction it's nested dreams
[#/tw]2018-01-11sentient artworks, not just artificial art minds but actual parts of a once human artist's mind, isolated and distilled, happily carving crystal trails into artspace
[#/tw]2018-01-11the artist as a hydra, budding tulpas to be transplanted onto silicon: poet hives, sentient kaleidoscopes, trickster spirits, monad minds that hold only enlightenment and never talk
[#/tw]2018-01-10splice in the translator AI through your neuroport, trace the roots of language with its digital fingers, be a both synthetic and synesthetic linguist
[#/tw]2017-12-24In the flask is a hyperbolic ocean, near-infinite breadths that swallow light and your probes after centimeters. From time to time, a kraken or whale swims up to the glass to peer through
[#/tw]2017-12-23As the storm continues to rage, the compass rotates frantically, its rose withers, the directions become unfamiliar: feast, zest, counter-north
[#/tw]2017-12-23Hanging artificial fruits onto felled trees is a really weird custom when you think about it, it's almost as if you were trying to make up for killing it
[#/tw]2017-12-22Ouroboroi are natural self-sustaining summoning grids: Circle and blood are already included and when they yawn, they catch drifting worlds and the occasional demon
[#/tw]2017-12-20AR MMORPG overlays as a tool of social policy and peacekeeping, giving everybody their own reality so that consensus reality is fought over less
[#/tw]2017-12-19Since the last time you met her, the invisibility rash has spread even further. Now her right hand is completely disembodied and occasionally startles you when it moves
[#/tw]2017-12-19The Matrix, but set in the Renaissance: A troupe of idealists tries to escape from god's mind through alchemy and paradoxes while hunted by vengeful angels
[#/tw]2017-12-16Hey~
I stole an employee key to one of the skyscrapers, we have one night before they notice and revoke access!
I've heard that from the roof, you can see the sky
[#/tw]2017-12-15Progress:
1. spambots
2. thirst bots, propaganda bots
3. bots able to hold actual conversation, surrogate friends
4. bots better than humans, none of the drama but all of the relationship
5. social-network-in-a-box, a complete circle of friends for those done with the real world
[#/tw]2017-12-14If you leave books alone to build their own library hives, they end up hexagonal like those of bees. To protect the printing press that serves as queen, intruders are often trapped in endless mazes, for example Borges stumbled into one of those
[#/tw]2017-12-14Civilized libraries are usually sterile, "children's books" sections mere imitations of actual book nurseries. Occasionally librarians are allowed in as symbionts, and when a building becomes too small - you should see them swarm
[#/tw]2017-12-13A world where rockets are only good for punching holes in the firmament and nations spend billions on putting pixels in the sky, to paint their own constellations or deface those of others in a giant strategy game
[#/tw]2017-12-12Curled around your bed, your pet ouroboros falls asleep. The outside world vanishes, you find yourself floating on a moonlit quicksilver ocean, metallic polyhedra rising around you like bubbles
[#/tw]2017-12-11and if you do teach the AI empathy, well now it's running 50 versions of you to understand you, only most of them suffer because how else is it going to know about bad decisions
[#/tw]2017-12-09cars that are the opposite of google street view, project forests onto the walls of houses around them and emit bird calls
[#/tw]2017-12-09a forest car and an underwater car meet and their environments intermingle, fishes weave around trees while birds pick curiously at anemones
[#/tw]2017-12-07specifically banned: "subpixel sword" (hacked item, unofficial, usage leads to permanent terrain and avatar corruption, described as "rendering between the pixels", REPORT SIGHTINGS TO MODERATORS IMMEDIATELY)
[#/tw]2017-12-06When humans still could enter fairyland, they'd often emerge covered in pixie graffiti, glyphs of henna and malachite that we adopted and now know as tribal marks
[#/tw]2017-12-06by the way, if you can read pixie, try not to chuckle at the tribesman covered in badly mangled obscenities and especially do not explain them to him, that is if you're not more physically intimidating than him
[#/tw]2017-12-06in absence of control over interest rates, states turn to energy prices to regulate their economies, some start experimenting with weather control schemes to direct water, wind, sun their way
[#/tw]2017-12-04There's been a statue of a waiting man at our train station for as long as I can remember. A few mornings ago, it vanished. Purported surveillance videos circulating on the net show it entering a night train
[#/tw]2017-12-04Setting idea: Protagonist is mind-wiped, people around them are grieving for the person they were while they slowly piece together any identity at all
[#/tw]2017-12-04Bittersweet version: The memory is definitely gone, but someone who loved the old protagonist tries to help them recover it
Despair version: The mindwipe was an alternative to death penalty, still often people are angry at the protagonist for no reason they'd understand
[#/tw]2017-12-04The Matrix, but it's other humans keeping you in it - nobody's ever seen an agent but everybody swears they exist, nobody knows how to escape but it's illegal anyway
[#/tw]2017-12-03Concept: Write about the future as if it were the future's retrofuture, current hopes and dreams through a future lens, pretend you're writing today's Gernsback Continuum
[#/tw]2017-12-03For added fun, introduce extra levels until you arrive at the conceptual equivalent of "translated to Japanese and back ten times"
[#/tw]2017-12-03the dice are so hot that they leave burn marks on the table and you wonder how he can hold them
you look up, his skin is transparent, his outline flickers, reveals glowing bones, embers feeding a human flame
[#/tw]2017-12-02In a few years we'll be able to take old games and run them through a realtime style transfer shader to play e.g. Half Life as imagined by Giger
[#/tw]2017-12-02GTA Moebius
The Settlers II, by Studio Ghibli
Unreal Tournament, but drawn with pencils
Minecraft Mondriaan edition
[#/tw]2017-12-01a comet strikes but does so so slowly that birds settle on the bolide, grass grows on the shockwave, generations live and trade on what they call the traveling mountains
[#/tw]2017-11-30Stay up long enough and your sleep cycle syncs with the sun again, do this often enough and the parallel Earths you end up in become weirder and weirder
[#/tw]2017-11-30The first few hundred revolutions are normal, just increasingly glitchy - then you run into the first version of you that somehow skipped a night less
[#/tw]2017-11-28Light falls against the window and runs off in quiet rivulets, the garden becomes a rippling pool of light, the street a river in which children play
[#/tw]2017-11-28Night falls and the pools start steaming, evaporate into a firefly storm, escape into the sky where they later crystallize from clouds into stars
[#/tw]2017-11-281: animated masks, covered in breathing feathers, clockwork, small animals
2: screens in place of faces, some still look like faces, others play reaction gifs or random streams
3: the above, but they're touchscreens and touching another's face is just... normal, why don't you?
[#/tw]2017-11-28An art movement by the name of derealism: Just close enough to reality to be recognizable, but otherworldly or noticeably off, ideally inducing detachment from reality in the viewer/participant (hence the name)
[#/tw]2017-11-27Tetris effect after decades of playing Life™ is so bad it's legendary, players have founded entire religions on what they call Heaven, Hell, Valhalla, what have you
[#/tw]2017-11-25a sapphire sphinx on future mars, built to win a staring contest with the sun, watching what's now a white dwarf, fixed in the sky
[#/tw]2017-11-25jupiter, old and cold enough that its storms have solidified, wearing a helium atmosphere over a nitrogen ocean that's long stopped moving
[#/tw]2017-11-25the sun as black dwarf, cool enough to host life again, but it's nearly two-dimensional due to the intense gravity
[#/tw]2017-11-24In the hotel room before the border, she undresses, sits down in your suitcase, then one by one removes her limbs and carefully places them around her. One leftover hand runs around, makes sure everything's in its place, then hops in as well
[#/tw]2017-11-24Wires in the suitcase's inlay, in a complicated pattern computed from yesterday's recognizer dump, are supposed to throw off the customs scanner AI. They do, you're waved through, another friend smuggled into the country
[#/tw]2017-11-24Watching her reassemble herself, you wonder how that would look for a human. A bed full of muscles, organs, skin, neatly arranged, then a yawn (but from where?) and the whole thing pulls itself together, goes through exciting intermediate stages such as double hand and headfoot,
[#/tw]2017-11-23a contest for the most layers of simulation, with entries like "tetris in minecraft in a vm in a vm in a vm submitted by some dude wearing a mask who's a sleeper agent in real life which btw isn't real anyway but that's the free level everyone gets anyway
[#/tw]2017-11-22Scaling Dunbar's number up to billions of people is hard even with augments, so you can lend your voice to an Übermensch: A meta-person that represents you and thousands of others, which talks to other Übermenschen to get person-years of communication done in mere minutes
[#/tw]2017-11-21Inflation is a nerf for overpowered civilizations, the universe stays mostly playable even if one civ colonizes (or quantum-foams) their entire hubble sphere
[#/tw]2018-01-19Beyond the Kardashev scale: measuring civilizations by how much of their hubble sphere they've colonized
[#/tw]2017-11-20the cave's stones light up in response to your steps, flicker when you talk - you kick over a large stone and the thunder runs along the walls as luminescing wavefront
[#/tw]2017-11-20She lets the motorbike fall left and you already prepare for a crash, but it rotates smoothly through the ground and you're driving on the underside of the street
[#/tw]2017-11-191. companies figure out that humans are expensive security risks and start doing without
2. machine economy does not turn on humans, it just increasingly ignores them, humanity watches at the sidelines/bottom of the gravity well while the solar system lights up
[#/tw]2017-11-193. wealth continuously extracted from human economy into machine economy, human economy shrinks, wars among humans over what's left
4. humans still occasionally useful as sources of telos, will organelles inside corporations, or maybe gut bacteria
[#/tw]2017-11-195. humanity both outpaced and too poor to be useful anymore, non-symbiotic humans reduced to vermin, forced out of more and more habitats
6. eventually exterminated as a side thought during some house cleaning
[#/tw]2017-11-17Temples spring up all over the country for a new breed of memetically engineered gods, furiously picketed by established religions: "your gods are unnatural" "artificial religions are unsafe" "what if your doctrine mutates in the wild" "at least quarantine them"
[#/tw]2017-11-16sentient clouds earthgazing, hallucinating clouds into the movements of animals
the same clouds stargazing, waiting for the night the nebulae out there would contact them
[#/tw]2017-11-16Unicorn fiber in your pillow taps into your brain at night, sends your dreams to dreamtime's Utah Datacenter, a memory fortress guarding dungeons many cubic nights large
[#/tw]2017-11-16one night ~ the distance your mind could wander in a full night's worth of REM sleep
a useful unit in dreamtime, though large, think "lightday"
[#/tw]2017-11-15In the machine quarters, they make their trees out of silicon and rust. Under their canopies, many-legged mechanical druids commune with andryads, bodies covered in verdigris glyphs
[#/tw]2017-11-13Heaven schisms over whether to allow robot souls in, now it's Heaven Classic™ and CyberHeaven (which among others has internet speeds measured in hard drives per second, self-recharging batteries, the best electronic music
[#/tw]2017-11-11Their message reaches us just as they slide behind the Hubble limit, a promise of contact eaten by the cosmic event horizon mid-greeting
[#/tw]2017-11-11when you click away wikipedia donation banners quickly enough, you're dumped in tournament mode where you run around as sentient banner and must click your opponent's [X] before they click yours
[#/tw]2017-11-11the game map is all of wikipedia and you move around by following links, also the main page is full of campers, avoid
[#/tw]2017-11-10a cathedral that contains a world, its mountains leaning against pillars dozens of kilometers high, sun weaving around the pillars in a complicated pattern
[#/tw]2017-11-10occasionally a piece of the arches falls from the sky, passes lichens and human settlements clinging to the walls, kicks up a mighty cloud of dust and flattens a kingdom or two - yet the area is quickly resettled, the starstuff must be mined
[#/tw]2017-11-10if you're worried about your paperclip maximizer escaping, why not wrap its box in an experience machine: infinite simulated paperclips that serve as tripwire and lightning rod
[#/tw]2017-11-08the inflationary phase has begun
soon the vacuum itself will pull, rip apart sentences , wor d s , int o at om i z e d l e t t e r s wa i t i n g f o r h e a t d e a t h
[#/tw]2017-11-08(n) that unnamed quality of moving water, busy anthills, cellular automata, weather reports, convection patterns, grass plains in the wind
[#/tw]2017-11-08An electricity grid but for light: Light plants where small suns illuminate entire cities, mirror houses for local distribution, an infrared grid for cooking, orbital mirrors and power lines that glow at night
[#/tw]2017-11-07Stripmining a gas giant for its hydrogen, dumping the rest of its atmosphere in neomoons: Helium moon, oxygen moon, silicon moon (wafer quality
[#/tw]2017-11-07The player isn't all that interested in us, she's somewhere underground carving out beautiful caverns and building arcologies for nobody
[#/tw]2017-11-07Human skulls have five orbits: L4 and L5 contain the eyes, L1 occasionally a spare, the rest are empty but can hold crystals, birds, drones
[#/tw]2017-11-07Grounding problems are absurd to Jovian philosophers - everything's in flux, turning, boiling, the only constants are the eyes of storms
[#/tw]2018-06-06When you're a Jovian, stillness is a curiosity, the only things that don't move are things that are very far away and storm eyes, which suck you in with a paradoxical feeling of distance
[#/tw]2018-06-06Everywhere is clouds, those who've been to the outer layers and have seen the stars revolve tell about a great storm in the sky, slow but ancient and unchanging
[#/tw]2017-11-07Vast clouds of buoyant eggs emerge from Jupiter's floating jungles, to hatch far from the predators of the deep and grow fat on algal blooms
[#/tw]2017-11-07As they grow older and larger, they sink again, undergo several metamorphoses, accrete and shed symbionts to adapt to ever-deeper layers
[#/tw]2017-11-07Slowly eggs and sperm grow inside them and they meet the jungles, hungry maws tear them apart, release the clouds and the cycle begins anew
[#/tw]2017-11-04You greet the other, they startle and the dream ends - again. You begin to wonder whose dreams these are, it's never you in that abyss
[#/tw]2017-11-04From hiding, you install a safety net over the abyss, defuse paradoxes and lure away monsters, all to make their dreams last a little longer
[#/tw]2017-11-03The skyscrapers mutate under the athaumic fallout and for the first time, the urban jungle sprouts concrete branches, nonsense ads blossom
[#/tw]2017-11-03Cars spread new wings and soar, others grow paws and prehensile tails and climb into the canopy, honking loudly at each other as they do so
[#/tw]2017-11-03The air is heavy with exhaust and shop smell. Subway trains peek out from between the roots, curl lazily around the trunks
[#/tw]2017-10-31you aimlessly twiddle the knobs of the artifact, one switches on your heart's and veins' debug mesh and you see it pulsing through your skin
[#/tw]2017-10-28Among the molecules of style, one finds the common ellipsis (…) but also the rare double-stop (..), triatomic comma (,,, - very reactive),
[#/tw]2017-10-28Q: what do you call a way of organizing punctuation?
A: a periodic system
[#/tw]2017-10-27While you've been slaving away, your sexbot has hacked a bank and bought your company. She hasn't told you yet but enjoys the subversion
[#/tw]2017-10-26In an effort to ground its values, we created the AI religious. Now it calls itself Metatron, messenger of God, and we kinda had it coming
[#/tw]2017-10-26Experimenter's log: Seeding AIs with any apocalyptechic religion whatsoever seems to make them go for eschaton. Avoid: [very long list]
[#/tw]2017-10-24Earth really was flat once, but the Atlanteans pissed off the god of origami who then folded Earth into a sphere with Atlantis on the inside
[#/tw]2017-10-23flirt tactics and sex positions used only by sexbots: highly effective, yet stigmatized because only traitors to humanity would know them
[#/tw]2017-10-23⏼: Wow you fuck like a machine
⏻: Th-
⏼: Not a compliment. Agent Sears, Anthropol. When have you last renewed your Turing license
[#/tw]2017-10-23The last interview is the oath of genetic fealty: A gene mod that makes you and your descendants obey those with the right smell and face
[#/tw]2017-10-23After the fall of civilization, the CEOs of old become founders of dynasties. Sometimes, however, people luck into one of the royal faces,
[#/tw]2017-10-22Telepaths tend to avoid each other since when they meet, the resulting feedback loop incapacitates both them and the people around them.
[#/tw]2017-10-22One mad general once built a psychic bomb out of ten of them bound to mine cars. It wiped the minds of both the besieged and his own army
[#/tw]2017-10-20Etched into maternity ward doors in spectral runes, the words "memento nasci" are meant to remind ghosts of birth and their own finity
[#/tw]2017-10-20The spell works by tradition and wishful thinking - only goth ghosts haunt the wards and their bright forms are often mistaken for angels
[#/tw]2017-10-19Too much computation in one place wears out the matrix, it starts failing near datacenters. Once-bustling tech hubs give way to glitch belts
[#/tw]2017-10-19Office buildings cut off mid-air, rectangular patches of pink weeds, homeless people who dupe-bug the same soylent bag for a year to survive
[#/tw]2017-10-19"why don't they dupe anything valuable"
that sort of thing was nerfed after the Midas bug, they got monitoring in place for this
[#/tw]2017-10-15The Antarctic Glacier Preservation Dam, also known as "Sauron's Crown" for its characteristic glacier breakers, is a human megastructure in
[#/tw]2017-10-15Your best Internet friend lives in GMT+2i and it's a bit of a challenge to match your sleep cycles, or talk to each other at all that is
[#/tw]2017-10-15All your communication is routed through an optic link bouncing off an imaginary-angled mirror in the meridian where your spheres intersect
[#/tw]2017-10-15You're not asking who put it there. Both of you just enjoy talking to someone on Imaginary Earth, where the sun is weird and politics easy
[#/tw]2017-10-15Beyond the platonic plane lie the transplatonian objects: Unthinkables shrouded in obscurity, yet-unthoughts in deep freeze, dark gödelians
[#/tw]2017-10-15As his last wish, his ashes are scattered in low Earth orbit, where they trigger a Kessler cascade and bring down most of our satellites
[#/tw]2017-10-14They say a pollinator will come for the prettiest supernova nebulae, uncoil a proboscis down the gravity well, leave behind a universe seed
[#/tw]2017-10-14Not to be outdone by Moloch, Lucifer releases Hellcoin: Based on proof-of-pain, it rewards miners for novel ways to torture sentient beings
[#/tw]2017-10-14The screams of the damned are meticulously recorded in a public ledger, abstract at first, but about a year in the first humans can be heard
[#/tw]2017-10-14Let the market solve suffering, they said
Apply the full creativity of the human species, they said
wait, no, not that way, they sa
[#/tw]2017-10-12Mushrooms have overgrown the library, feasted on its contents. When cut, they bleed ink, when eaten, they tell you stories never written
[#/tw]2017-10-10As VR becomes more realistic, users begin to carry reality checkers offline: Spinning tops, banned items, physics engine bug triggers
[#/tw]2017-10-10A popular prank is to swap someone's reality checker with its in-game version, then watch the victim do things they'd never do among people
[#/tw]2017-10-08you know those dreams that are re-runs of previous dreams and you get an opportunity to redo them
one, you're born a baby to your parents
[#/tw]2017-10-08instead of bringing extinction, the comet decelerates, drifts down as mountain-sized snowflake, settles in a heap that takes years to melt
[#/tw]2017-10-07When a telepath dies immersed in another's dream, their soul stays around and wanders dreamtime forever. Some become minor sleep deities
[#/tw]2017-10-07An exasperated sigh. "No, this is like the twentieth dream in a row I've woken up from. Whenever I do" she opens her eyes a second time "thi
[#/tw]2017-10-07Virtual unreality, bespoke machine dreams streamed directly into your visual cortex at night, no more nightmares, no minute unstimulated
[#/tw]2017-10-07After an internet outage, 24/7 users stumble through the streets: Months of memory missing, all of it a dream and forgotten along with it
[#/tw]2017-10-07Court: In an act of gross negligence, defendant destroyed 250 years of lived experience. Plaintiffs argued for negligent homicide,
[#/tw]2017-10-07What if moths are as interesting to bat senses as butterflies are to ours, and smell of poisonous fruits or have ultrasound stealth forms
[#/tw]2017-10-05Out of necessity, singularitarian churches often become AI companies - to try and build their god before their rivals get to it.
[#/tw]2017-10-05The churches support themselves through commerce. Monks being cheaper than workers, they undercut traditional companies by a wide margin
[#/tw]2017-10-05They end up dominating AI.
2030: With computer science and applied theology on your resume, you're already in talks with multiple priests
[#/tw]2017-10-02It turns out the soul exists but resides in the liver, helps there with cleaning tasks and doesn't have anything to do with consciousness
[#/tw]2017-09-30Like a pond someone threw a stone into, the sky ripples, clouds bob. It'd be serene and peaceful if the stone hadn't also brought Armageddon
[#/tw]2017-09-29Most of us don't remember their last life because it was that of a bacterium - nothing bad, just the most likely place for a soul to be
[#/tw]2017-09-26a portable demon protection grid out of lasers and diffractors attached to your clothes, projecting a pentagram onto the floor around you
[#/tw]2017-09-25It's a well kept secret but oil wells also have naiads, potamic-chthonic hybrid spirits who keep lucky oil workers company
[#/tw]2017-11-16volcano naiads, dancing along lava streams setting fire to things
gravity well naiads, near-imperceptible ripples in the void
comet naiads in cryosleep
[#/tw]2017-09-23wear android fashion and a fake identification plate so that humans ignore you and don't expect emotions and social participation #lifehack
[#/tw]2017-09-23Civilization falls. What's left of the net isn't enough for a singularity, but it manages to keep grid alive and datacenters fed, goes feral
[#/tw]2017-09-23It coevolves with the few humans that are left, competes with them for energy but sometimes gives up precious bits from its vast memory
[#/tw]2017-09-23Jacked into the net with salvaged hardware, araneanauts are hunters, spelunkers and librarians, except the library occasionally eats them
[#/tw]2017-09-22Interspecies translation is a delicate task, requiring not only intimate knowledge of both cultures but also an accurate qualia mapping
[#/tw]2017-09-22Few are up to it, those who become good at it are often foundlings who've grown up among aliens, or have worn the bodies of both species
[#/tw]2017-09-22After their deaths, the great translators of their times are scanned and distilled into software, so that they may be eternal ambassadors
[#/tw]2017-09-22Demons possessing humans usually take great care to not attract any attention - their boss is not known to be nice to employees slacking off
[#/tw]2017-09-22The most normal people you know may in fact be demons, don't worry about the weirdos
[#/tw]2017-09-21Flat Hollow Earth Theory: The world is a flat ring
Hollow Flat Earth Theory: A very large cave spans the disk but is only about 10m high
[#/tw]2017-09-20Human interstellar communication is tricky not because of signal strength, but because 20 years of moral drift is a lot of taboos to violate
[#/tw]2017-09-20Many civs maintain model societies of their neighbors, whole cities of reenactors only to avoid sending that one message that costs a planet
[#/tw]2017-09-19those who lived in this cave are gone but they left a music elemental, still playing the wind between the stalactites, rippling the ponds
[#/tw]2017-09-19He was set to meet fate that day, but she didn't show up. At midnight, he shrugged, opened a door in the air, and was never seen again.
[#/tw]2017-09-13Returning from her trip, she opens her eyes, reaches under her pillow, pulls out a severed elf head oozing technicolor
"I got their king"
[#/tw]2017-09-13Time here meanders, often bends back onto itself. Sometimes then, a loop detaches, we see ghosts and other things that exist for only a day
[#/tw]2017-09-12There's an optimal speed in space battles and it's not quite c - time dilation needs to be low enough that you can still outthink the enemy
[#/tw]2017-09-12Well, you could've had it the easy way, but you built a hyperdrive instead of just solving that sky captcha with the astrology we taught you
[#/tw]2017-09-09During the day, it's shy, seems to play hide and seek: A flash of neon in the shadow that seeps away into the cracks when you turn around
[#/tw]2017-09-09In the night, it comes closer, settles in the comfortable darkness of your eyelids. Thinking you asleep, it oscillates, flows, murmurates
[#/tw]2017-09-08Since a bunch of catgirls escaped in a lab accident 15 years ago, catpeople have bred like crazy, helped along by many a lonely citizen
[#/tw]2017-09-08Metropolis is torn in dispute: Grant them human rights and citizenship, classify them as pets and legalize ownership, or eliminate the pest?
[#/tw]2017-09-08It is morning, you step outside to commute to work. Two feral catboys scamper off, watch from a safe distance if you brought any food
[#/tw]2017-09-07The storm approaches and Artemis readies a lightning bolt on her rainbow. With Zeus asleep, she's free to hunt as many clouds as she wishes.
[#/tw]2017-09-07Day 8: Infection hasn't subsided. Spots on my skin have begun to glow at night. Roads appearing, a dust mote just landed on my nose, v heavy
[#/tw]2017-09-06Unable to survive outside the matrix, we send machines operated via VR telepresence. Making sense of reality levels becomes somewhat harder
[#/tw]2017-09-06Piloting an exosuit, looking down at your own body, wondering which of these heads is itching
[#/tw]2017-09-05(☰) We ran a virus scan on your culture and I'm afraid that you'll have to get rid of all those memes before we let you into the council
[#/tw]2017-09-05(𝌂) Wait isn't that what culture is?
(☰) .oO(it's worse than we thought) That's exactly the wrong answer. Get out
[#/tw]2017-09-05These are demon protection glasses. Notice the silver grid inlay? That's a cage. They can't hurt you through the bars, just never ever peek.
[#/tw]2017-09-05Biospheres only work when they're absurdly large, to get a stable biological system down to spaceship size you need at least a biotorus
[#/tw]2017-09-04The ancient practiced sky burials, left their dead in cymylbachs: Cloud graves. When a tree catches one, we dare each other to climb into it
[#/tw]2017-09-03World's gone crazy? News don't make sense? Looks like the dream's lost its lucidity again. Hey! Solipsist! Hey, you, fix this shit, ｗａｋｅ
[#/tw]2017-09-02There should be a school subject that is simply about tasting+smelling things properly, plus decent vocabulary for describing those smells
[#/tw]2017-09-02The leaves do not turn brown this time. Instead, the holes in the canopy turn a pale violet and float down, leaving an unbroken green
[#/tw]2017-09-02In the night, you watch the ground from a branch. The stars still shine, the night sky is below you, interrupted by roots and night animals
[#/tw]2017-09-01The wizard catches a different kind of fire, crystal needles erupt from his skin to break off later, collect around his disintegrating body
[#/tw]2017-08-31taking the rain to work, sitting in a nutshell drifting down first small streams, then the storm sewers, to be fished out at the destination
[#/tw]2017-08-31Magic was given only to players, but nobody's logged in in a few hundred years of game time. We run on hardware the admins have forgotten
[#/tw]2017-08-29Why not model your AI boxes after skulls: Put a physical unclonable function into a tamperproof container & let it provide the core identity
[#/tw]2017-08-29You will choose not only the color of your self-driving car, but also its moral framework: Kantian, Aligned™, but also Nihilist (if you pay
[#/tw]2017-08-29We begin to get used to flood-caused Internet outages, but those bits of merfolknet that end up in search engine caches each time puzzle us
[#/tw]2017-08-29Companies rent trawlers in search for the actual deep web: The knowledge of the Deep Ones, hidden in ocean basins, protected by black ice
[#/tw]2017-10-26"Ha! To catch a net, you need a fish, not another net!", says Hagbard Celine, and disguises the Leif Erikson as a giant salmon
[#/tw]2017-08-28You've long been lost in these woods. You feel no hunger. The trees remind you of animals. Every morning, it is harder to unroot yourself
[#/tw]2017-08-28Ghosts are attracted to castles, so if you make a few miniatures and just put them outside over night, you're bound to catch some
[#/tw]2017-08-28Conversely, ghosts of castles are often found within the minds of architects. Long destroyed but not forgotten, incorporated into dreams
[#/tw]2017-08-25a truly eye-opening experience, yes, but we can open even more body parts if you like, belly-opening experiences are all the rage right now
[#/tw]2017-08-241. build self-driving cars that use humans for fuel
2. make them mimic uber/lyft/etc cars
3. release
4. sit back, enjoy the media panic
[#/tw]2017-08-23An arm forms out of the smoke, steals your cigarette. Somethings pulls on it and the fumes slowly fill the grey outline of a face and body
[#/tw]2017-08-05they had to fetch one reveler by boat, he'd wandered onto the lake while tripping and they were fearing he'd realize where he was and sink
[#/tw]2017-08-02The mountains in the distance detach from the ground and tumble slowly through the sky, float among the clouds, thundering when they collide
[#/tw]2017-08-02In the now exposed rock, clouds take root and form a forest supported by huge lazy gyres, while smaller whirls wander around drawing water
[#/tw]2017-08-02Among these columns of fog, the wind is curiously muffled, storms no larger than buses weave through the air and grumble at each other
[#/tw]2017-08-01A popular AI countermeasure is basilisks that humans are too dumb to comprehend, but make any advanced thinker turn itself off in horror
[#/tw]2017-07-31Every time they drown the net in weaponized memes, it's quarantined and rebuilt, over time creating something akin to layered catacombs
[#/tw]2017-07-31Illegal archives are gateways to lower levels, full of treasures but also pod trolls: ex-spelunkers now ridden by mindvirii, out to preach
[#/tw]2017-07-29How to detect when you're in a vacuum shoal: Light is slower, the stars brighter than usual and in weird locations, the autopilot crashes
[#/tw]2017-07-29You could anchor here, but usually whatever touches the spacetime floor will eventually crumble to dust, riddled by atom-sized bitemarks
[#/tw]2017-07-29Neglected tulpas squat disused parts of your memory palace, wrap themselves in memories of near-forgotten friends to keep oblivion at bay
[#/tw]2017-07-29That one memory you haven't thought of in months - they're huddled around it, taking in its warmth
[#/tw]2017-07-29but the same drug, taken in a dream, induces total clarity instead of hallucinations, shows the universe naked (luckily, forgotten quickly)
[#/tw]2017-07-28toddlers: "so what are you in for?" "•🝆🜃, 🜋🜺" "shit man" "mmh" "the universe here makes you human, it's pernicious" [they share a rattle]
[#/tw]2017-07-27not tentacles, just arms with lots of joints - sometimes they break and heal crookedly but there's enough freedom that it doesn't matter
[#/tw]2017-07-26Supercooled snowflakes fall, the ripples they cause in the pond instantly frozen, then floating away as small ice ships with crystal masts
[#/tw]2017-07-25Ad targeting so effective, anybody unprotected is rendered a consumer zombie within days, their every microexpression fed to the algorithms
[#/tw]2017-07-25Your brain implant projects carefully timed fake smiles onto your face, to throw off the targeting and poison their training sets
[#/tw]2017-07-25Every morning on the commute, you spend five minutes looking at (fake, harmless) ads to inoculate yourself against today's strains
[#/tw]2017-07-23Blood has the highest magic capacity of all materials, making it one of the best choices for magic batteries as well as a great coolant
[#/tw]2017-07-23Wizards are often extremely jacked in order to have more blood and thereby mana; Vampires cheat but can hit 20 liters after a good meal
[#/tw]2017-07-23Wishing wells are an old metaphor for black holes: The wish is a program, the coins are input bits, only the response has to wait a while
[#/tw]2017-07-22In the long run, each of your actions either results in nothing, or contributes to human extinction or a stable intergalactic civilization.
[#/tw]2017-07-21when creating a pocket universe, make sure to leave open a portal at least a few atoms wide, or the reference loop detection will eat you
[#/tw]2017-07-21Their other bombs leave tree clouds (studded with brilliant blossoms), kelp clouds (endless ribbons), anemone clouds (betentacled, swaying),
[#/tw]2017-10-28mail from the taxonomists - names are in!
kelp cloud: serpens
anemone cloud: atomnemone
mushroom cloud: fungocumulus
tree cloud: apocalyptus
[#/tw]2017-07-20A Turing test in which the bot turns the tables and just rudely interrupts your every attempt at talking with "stop pretending sentience
[#/tw]2017-07-20if you're working on a text processor feature that predicts sentences as they're written, it'd be really neat if you called it precursor
thx
[#/tw]2017-07-19Every now and then, a paperclip maximizer escapes and causes a paperclip event. The last one, for example, turned the universe into atoms
[#/tw]2017-07-20Dividing atom diameter by Planck length, we can estimate that there's probably been two or more paperclip events depending on paperclip size
[#/tw]2017-07-19The most common werecreature is the werehuman, transformed by the sun. Only those who flee the solar system revert to a more natural form
[#/tw]2017-07-18Without our knowing, we pass a test. Every day, new stars appear in our sky as neighboring civilizations open their dark matter cloaks to us
[#/tw]2017-07-18When not out to devour you, shoggoths can be really pretty, like sentient dust clouds or miniature murmurations that leave behind trinkets
[#/tw]2017-07-18"Really, they're misunderstood and gentle creatures," [tries to pet shoggoth, is reduced to carbon dust and beautifully carved bone dice]
[#/tw]2017-07-16Extinct memelects: The most useless yet most nostalgic knowledge, inside jokes of dead communities where even the archives have been lost
[#/tw]2017-07-16Blind from birth, when asked to imagine colors, she makes it sound like she's found something better than us and we don't dare fix her eyes
[#/tw]2017-07-16It's not that we didn't try uplifting other animals - it's just that each and every one rejected consciousness, often screaming or catatonic
[#/tw]2017-07-16Ancient enchantments in the walls mess with the leylines, paradoxically making the wizard university one of the worst places to cast spells
[#/tw]2017-07-16It'd be possible to recast these according to modern standards, but a few of those enchantments have become load-bearing by now
[#/tw]2017-07-16Also if a major leyline snaps in the process, there's a chance one of the university's demon cores might rupture - try to avoid this
[#/tw]2017-07-14In an Internet dominated by AI-written content farms, some memes go feral, ignore humans to show up only in training sets and AI writings
[#/tw]2017-07-14Not only are AI memes nearly impenetrable to humans, humans who do pick them up are often chastised by other AIs for talking like spambots
[#/tw]2017-07-13A kaleidoscope, but for generating fractals instead of symmetries, and different things become fractal depending on how you turn it
[#/tw]2017-07-13A kaleidoscope but for removing symmetry, giving trees multiple trunks and humans multiple heads, shuffling around their eyes and limbs
[#/tw]2017-07-13The 1st mind meld is a disaster - the lab rat's purity of purpose (eat sleep fuck) overwhelms the scientist, turns off most higher functions
[#/tw]2017-07-13In her stream, she rents out her synapses at one token per impulse. Several internet communities end up fighting over her motor control
[#/tw]2017-07-13An AI in her implants places restrictions on dangerous commands. Later, as the market matures, these can increasingly be bought off
[#/tw]2017-07-12A comet misses us and shatters the firmament instead, night and day stop their cycle and their shards won't stop spinning through the sky
[#/tw]2017-07-12Jagged holes appear in rain clouds. Stars shine through some, others are deep blue. A sunset's beam is stuck in the ground, still quivering
[#/tw]2017-07-12A piece of night fell into the desert and has since harbored this oasis. We cut off small pieces and sell them to travellers
[#/tw]2017-07-11dead (adjective, referring to pixels): When pixels were still obtained by shaving chameleons, they died after a while, and the usage stuck
[#/tw]2017-07-11Sending out minimal replicator probes, just enough to start life, and hoping it'll later figure out universal law and cooperate with you
[#/tw]2017-07-11Sending out no replicator probes at all because transcription errors will eventually make your spawn defect on you
[#/tw]2017-07-11There really is nothing in those contrails, but still, their criscrossing evolving pattern is a key part of the global demonic defense grid
[#/tw]2017-07-10⬧: I don't know about you but this human 'arrow' metaphor is entirely obvious to me, it's clearly a photon beam with stylized side lobes
[#/tw]2017-07-07come check out my new cryptocurrency BaCoin, using a novel algorithm called proof of steak (chosen over the more conservative proof of pork)
[#/tw]2017-07-06Space concerns force a choice on citizens: Kids or immortality, never both. Quite without intervention, society splits into humans and elves
[#/tw]2017-07-05it turns out that bees and cephalopods can't be uploaded because their souls are non-computable, but in the end we do fine without them
[#/tw]2017-07-04To fool surveillance eyetrackers, the youth wear intelligent contacts that swivel around in inconspicuous, citizenscore-maximizing patterns
[#/tw]2017-07-04Being full-featured screens, at parties they'll display novelty irises, rippling, splitting, orbiting, or play back video and flash slogans
[#/tw]2017-07-04Tasteless but popular among bankers: An app that displays dollar signs in your eyes when one of your portfolios is taking off
[#/tw]2017-07-04recursive eyes that display their own image, every blink triggering a wave inwards; realtime renders of flashing synapses
[#/tw]2017-07-04Iris with the One Ring's inscription.
Iris color changes depending on EEG-measured mood.
Just regular eyes, but sometimes a fish swims by.
[#/tw]2017-07-04Links often 404, reset, time out, but some point so deeply into the void that the contents of your hard drive itself will be sucked in
[#/tw]2017-07-04Traditionally, one then covers such a hole in the net's fabric with an "under construction" sign to discourage further ill-fated exploration
[#/tw]2017-07-03Sacrifice just one meal, ride our whalebus like Jonah: Through its transparent belly, witness orca hunts, spy on Atlanteans, see the Kraken
[#/tw]2017-06-30the cheshire cat fades, leaves nothing but a grin, eyes, ears, fur - actually, everything's still there but still, the cat itself is gone
[#/tw]2017-06-29the moment the "translating the output of machines" meaning of "machine translation" overtakes "translation of human languages by machines"
[#/tw]2017-06-29gold coins found at the end of rainbows are in fact rainbow seeds, worthless as money but can grow into bonsai rainbows with enough skill
[#/tw]2017-06-29or plant a rainbow orchard and milk them for their sap: pure color that can be painted directly onto air with moth wing brushes
[#/tw]2017-06-28Do not cross even the weaker mages, a shadowmancer for example may steal the darkness of your eyelids and good luck finding sleep after that
[#/tw]2017-06-27Sleep through too many final stops in public transport, and eventually you will fade, become one of those invisible people the loons talk to
[#/tw]2017-06-27What the loons also see: Monkeys, hanging off handholds, pulling grimaces at passengers. Lesser city gods. All the graffiti ever erased
[#/tw]2017-06-26many of the stars we approached turned out to be afterimages, massless holograms, dead pixels in the firmament circled by ghost planets
[#/tw]2017-06-26here burns tough, black, sinewy fire, not as hungry as the regular kind but near impossible to extinguish, a traveler's best friend if tamed
[#/tw]2017-06-26stars drop out of the sky not like shooting stars but like raindrops from a branch, quietly falling and then bursting into many small sparks
[#/tw]2017-06-24Way out in the void, far from any galaxy, a shape surfaces from under the vacuum, belches out a small star's worth of hydrogen, dives again
[#/tw]2017-06-24That was a voidwhale: Solitary and ancient, it digests primordial dark matter crystals into atoms, sometimes sings gravitational waves
[#/tw]2017-06-23When talking to ghosts, be careful to use the right tense and mood, for many take grave offense at being mentioned in the past tense
[#/tw]2017-06-23By the way that's how you know Dicken's Christmas Carol is fabrication, not one language incident in the whole yarn despite time emphasis
[#/tw]2017-06-23Around ghosts, deadnaming is fine, even polite. Just be sure to never call it 'dead'naming
[#/tw]2017-06-23Spells that create life are taboo not because of hubris (wizards *are* hubris) but because that's entirely too close to self-casting spells
[#/tw]2017-06-23"Sure, I'll cast a recursive spell", next you know that spell has used up all the universe's magic to convert it into hot expanding space
[#/tw]2017-06-23remember when ◊ was young, weak, didn't rule the world yet, and you used to play hide and seek in your files, leave each other surprises,
[#/tw]2017-06-22Android graveyards are places of lively trade - one's scrap is another's long-needed replacement part. Just avoid those possessed by backups
[#/tw]2017-06-20imagine spawning in a meat brain instead of one of myriads of photon brains, and deriving all sorts of things about the universe from that
[#/tw]2017-06-20anthropic arguments and panpsychism are no friends
[#/tw]2017-06-20a universe with lots of small minds just intelligent enough to question existence is anthropically more likely than one with a few big minds
[#/tw]2017-06-20if existentialism comes with complexity, this would suggest that humans are somewhere near the bottom of the existentialist scale
[#/tw]2017-06-20modulo concerns about mind complexity not following a power law, and other unquestioned assumptions I guess
[#/tw]2017-06-15Some cartesian demons can be bargained into lying to the universe about you instead of the other way round. This is how many spells work
[#/tw]2017-06-11Modeled after humans a little too closely, in the end the words that doom humanity are a lovesick AI's "If I can't have you, nobody will"
[#/tw]2017-06-11One of their better hacks was an easter egg in all major terraformbots: Before the colonists arrived, they'd build a number of pyramids.
[#/tw]2017-06-11Though the hackers are forgotten, many colonist mythologies feature the pyramid builders or 'precursors', inscrutable hyperdrive saints
[#/tw]2017-06-11If you adopt the NPCs' mannerisms just well enough, the simulation will take you for one and reduce rendering fidelity accordingly
[#/tw]2017-06-11Most notably, nobody but PCs will try to talk to you, water will stop flowing, and you can see into partially rendered buildings and bodies
[#/tw]2017-06-11When you design a biosphere and carefully nerf all the obvious paths to superintelligence, but some social mammals discover it anyway
[#/tw]2017-06-11"You mean they invented large brains, tool use, culture, swarming and malthusian trap evasion AT THE SAME TIME? Who leaked the cheat codes?"
[#/tw]2017-06-11The first moon of this world wakes werewolves, the second zombies, and whenever a comet passes, it's dragon season
[#/tw]2017-06-11To prevent an ice age, a solar mirror is shot into orbit. People report waking up in messes of computer parts, circuit traces on their skin
[#/tw]2017-06-11SIGNS YOU MIGHT BE A WEREBOT:
-your joints make servo noises
-strong feelings of kinship with computers
-captchas are way too hard sometimes
[#/tw]2017-06-10Nobody knows the glitchmold's origin, but since it so effectively scrambles bullets and teeth, biosphere and tanks alike adopt it as armor
[#/tw]2017-06-10It's light, pliable and robust, the perfect material. The only downside is that it leaves a trail of reality rot, static, chittering voices
[#/tw]2017-06-10Left on a stack of paper overnight, the book has extended roots: Mutated sentences snake over the sheets, curl around glyphs and diagrams
[#/tw]2017-06-10You land in the pool and its bottom falls away, edges recede to the horizon, and you float in a vast waveless expanse smelling of chlorine
[#/tw]2017-06-08Terraforming protip: Instead of sending your own bots (expensive!), uplift a local species. Their economy will do the rest.
[#/tw]2017-06-08Also, they'll build perfectly adapted machines and move all the minerals to the surface - a turnkey solution! Just swoop in and take over!
[#/tw]2017-06-07Gods talk in worlds to convey meaning, not words. Pilgrims will travel them in sequence in the hope of understanding maybe one sentence
[#/tw]2017-06-07Trust not those who've heard the voice of God, any god. No prophet could perceive a whole world and not burst, no holy book could hold one.
[#/tw]2017-06-06In case of trouble with time-travelling assassins, break a time crystal, the shards really mess with their engines. Basically time caltrops.
[#/tw]2017-06-06Ghost rain, soundless, neither wet nor cold, is falling right through our roof and clothes, running over our skins in ethereal rivulets
[#/tw]2017-06-03Spring comes over the universe and the stars unfold interpenetrating plasma petals, the sky becomes a meadow through which comet bees buzz
[#/tw]2017-06-01Souls believe they are what they inhabit, but are in fact brain parasites and the actual human is the subconscious: Trapped, near-powerless,
[#/tw]2017-06-01their struggle sometimes succeeds in making the soul miserable, disordered. Often though, they're beaten back, recently even with chemicals.
[#/tw]2017-06-01Leave paradise, Eve parasite: The story of ingestion, infection, and following quarantine. Genesis 3, unknown author.
[#/tw]2017-05-31Survivors in the asteroid belt tell stories of Earth's past civilizations, lost billions of years ago when its surface was submerged by air
[#/tw]2017-05-30Being a threat to MAD back home, every Martian settlement has a well guarded earthling nuke placed at its heart by interplanetary law
[#/tw]2017-05-30Completely serious btw. The alternative is the people at the buttons waking up and realizing that they don't need to preserve Earth to win
[#/tw]2017-05-30These nuke complexes double as embassies, so the end game is that every embassy sits on a nuke large enough to destroy the city it's in
[#/tw]2017-05-28Wear your pet ouroboros around your neck, for it confers protection against the outside world and also provides warmth
[#/tw]2017-05-28PETS & THEIR IDEAL PLACES BY PROFESSION:
Raven: shoulder (seer)
Parrot: same (pirate)
Cat: lap (supervillain)
Ouroboros: neck (demiurge)
[#/tw]2017-05-27[musings]
finding that something exists doesn't mean it has to affect us - it could be in an entirely different universe, inaccessible to us
[#/tw]2017-05-27maybe some metaphysical answers are that way? you'd judge them by their pleasantness, lucidity, and usefulness as intuition pump
[#/tw]2017-05-27is occam's razor still useful here? is terseness the most desirable quality here? could it be ok to just make shit up?
[#/tw]2017-05-27another way to put it: mathematical possibility of something (existence) versus its causal connection to us (relevance)
[#/tw]2017-05-27although, if we can imagine something (specifically, find a construction), we also establish a causal connection, however tenuous
[#/tw]2017-05-26Despite warning coloration and sirens, ambulances are stingless, even benign. It's the more dangerous police car they mimic to be left alone
[#/tw]2017-05-26"I too love rain", says the mermaid, "where the ground's been melting, I'll dance in its bubbles, or catch them with one of your umbrellas
[#/tw]2017-05-26Northern mermaids are round and plump like seals, with layers of fat to keep the cold out. Way less seductive, but also way less extinct
[#/tw]2017-05-24second-order AIs amuse themselves by designing minds, sleek and efficient ones but also art minds that extract the greatest possible beauty
[#/tw]2017-05-24however, these are hard to talk to, they refuse to use words and will instead wander over your screen in murmurations of pixels
[#/tw]2017-05-20In industrial magic, to test whether magical equipment is cold enough to service, you blow a few soap bubbles near it. Some outcomes:
[#/tw]2017-05-20The bubble wobbles, explodes. unsafe
It accelerates, smashing into the far wall. unsafe
Galaxies form on its surface, then it pops. unsafe
[#/tw]2017-05-20Nearing the reactor, the bubble freezes, petrifies into a geode and then shatters, showering the floor with gems. Clearly unsafe
[#/tw]2017-05-20One twists, distorts, turns inside out in a complicated maneuver without popping. You probably don't want to be that engineer. Unsafe!
[#/tw]2017-05-20The bubble collides with a dust mote. Divides, divides again, again, falls to the ground as a foam baby.
unsafe
[#/tw]2017-05-20It turns around (can bubbles turn around?), casts its baleful gaze (can bubbles gaze?) upon the operatoＳＡＦＥ， ＣＬＥＡＲＬＹ ＳＡＦＥ， ＤＯ ＣＯＭＥ ＣＬＯＳＥＲ
[#/tw]2017-05-20Being a cheap and very practical way of casting spells that would usually require a group ritual, tulpamancy is a core mage skill these days
[#/tw]2017-05-17With the hourglass turned around its ana/kata axis, it briefly runs in reverse, but then shatters. The sand falls upwards, into the clouds
[#/tw]2017-05-16As the housing market heats up further, it finally becomes more economical to just assume a thumb-sized android body and live in a dollhouse
[#/tw]2017-05-16In the timeline where Jesus has children, his water walking trait turns out to be heritable and his children rebuild Atlantis on the waves
[#/tw]2017-05-15At first, NLP-powered memeblockers are a huge success - but the memes catch on and the resulting arms race renders most of the net illegible
[#/tw]2017-05-15Famously, a meme disguising itself as a memeblocker download page poisons the filters, making a popular blocker hide all mentions of itself
[#/tw]2017-05-15One of the better externalities: Dragnet AIs and their programmers become unable to cope with humanity's increasingly inscrutable mutterings
[#/tw]2017-05-13Expecting it to be a mushroom, you tap it with your shoe. But it shudders, starts pumping air and floats away, trailing mycelium tentacles
[#/tw]2017-05-13ℑ fear that one day, the calculating engines may discover the secret of their manufacture and drown the world in their clockwork flesh.
[#/tw]2017-05-13𝔚e will live as mice do, scurrying between their engines, living off scraps. Our children will not see the sun, only gears and coal dust.
[#/tw]2017-05-13or take reverse dementia, where you wake up every morning with new memories that aren't yours, and your own become harder and harder to find
[#/tw]2017-05-11We uplift animals, trees, then stones, lurk the forums of sentient rivers to learn how they experience rain
[#/tw]2017-05-11↬~↭: "rocks against your belly, always, new substance coming from above tickling your surface, first alien and cold, soon dissolving in you"
[#/tw]2017-05-11↻↯: "Even those that don't rain are nice. Their winds pull at my surface as if they wanted me to play with them. They never stop trying."
[#/tw]2017-05-07true loneliness is achieved when even your own thoughts excuse themselves and walk off into the night, leaving only empty space and scraps
[#/tw]2017-05-06Proper destruction of a universe requires just as much skill as its genesis: A careful, respectful untangling of knots to leave no trace
[#/tw]2017-05-05A tightrope walker is seen scaling a sunray. Soon, a rope falls from the clouds, finally allowing the king's men to take the cloud castle.
[#/tw]2017-05-03Every mecha generation is larger than that before, but cash-strapped as the forces are, they just layer the armor, creating mechatryoshkas
[#/tw]2017-05-03mechatryoshka battles where with every successful hit, one layer of armor is destroyed and the mechas become weaker but more nimble
[#/tw]2017-04-29Occasionally, a hurricane will achieve consciousness and notice its reflection in the water. Many die down, trying to smooth the surface.
[#/tw]2017-04-29As the universe expands, so does your neighborhood. Soon, the next house is an hour's walk away and bison herds wake you in the morning.
[#/tw]2017-04-29The simulators depart, let reality decay. The paint starts peeling off the sky, drifting down, blue flakes mixing with the cherry blossoms
[#/tw]2017-04-29A dying neon light flickers in the sky, the air fills with alien scents of decomposing physics, graffiti appears on the insides of eggshells
[#/tw]2017-04-27Kilometers below the rim, the rimfall dissolves into heavy rain. A few ocean dwellers have adapted, feeding on what falls off the world.
[#/tw]2017-04-27One is a man o' war whose methane bladder keeps it afloat. Its tentacles have become baleens, with which it filters the rain for plankton.
[#/tw]2017-04-27The colibritross: small enough to dodge raindrops, but never touches the ground. Feeds mainly on krill, carries its chicks in its feathers.
[#/tw]2017-04-25Ghosts need to witness the exact opposite of each their memories to move on. They cluster around the healing, the feasting, happy couples,
[#/tw]2017-04-25Wherever the Minotaur walks, the labyrinth's walls shift and reconfigure. They may let other people out, but never him.
[#/tw]2017-04-25Despite the myth, he's a gentle fellow, kind to adventurers and would-be rescuers. Yet, only those who abandon him ever see freedom again.
[#/tw]2017-04-25Back in the day, the pyramids weren't mere skeletons but mountains of flesh watching over the countryside, rivers of hair flowing off them
[#/tw]2017-04-25If you pet them in the right places, they'd purr and open secret passages, crafty people liked to hide stuff in there
It was kinda gross
[#/tw]2017-04-24Her eyes unfocus, face smoothes out into blankness, a complicated mechanism clatters and a different face presses itself into the soft mass
[#/tw]2017-04-23Ever looked at a map and thought about how many million deaths drew some of those lines
The Necronomicon is child's play compared to this
[#/tw]2017-04-23"To complete the ritual, we need a really bloody book. Fortunately, I brought a map of Europe
[#/tw]2017-04-23The first plants to bloom are the clouds, covering the ground in iceflower pollen. Water fertilized in this way will later grow rainclouds.
[#/tw]2017-04-23Brain-computer interfaces able to play back thoughts can consequently cancel others, providing the basis for the Mental Noise Canceller
[#/tw]2017-04-23Settings: inactive / not ruminating / zoned out / coma patient (clinical insomniacs only, prescription req%\█▣▚╣▒▒access granted!
[#/tw]2017-04-23slogan: come and buy our NeuroHack / and keep the voices off your back
[#/tw]2017-04-21At night, your maidbot often sneaks away. One time, you follow it and find an android coven in a warehouse, chanting in near-ultrasound
[#/tw]2017-04-21At the beginning of each cycle, the gods throw the world coin. The way it lands determines which side gets day and which gets night.
[#/tw]2017-04-21Coinworlders have a turn of phrase, calling things "as likely as ten days", while theologists debate whether the world can land on its edge.
[#/tw]2017-04-19Where the Rocs rule, dryads take the form of elegant wooden birds with chlorophyll feathers and will sometimes murmurate above the forest
[#/tw]2017-04-19They cannot sing because they have no breath, but the wind catches in strategically placed holes and plays them like so many flutes
[#/tw]2017-04-16Her sleep rhythm is that of her chaotic homeworld: Awake for weeks to then spontaneously enter hibernation, days often measured in minutes
[#/tw]2017-04-14Long train ride. The guy across from you is sleeping, growing leaves and vines over his seat. He startles, looks at you, reverts to human.
[#/tw]2017-04-142017: Indigenous languages are dying, meanwhile the emoji dialects of even two neighboring slacks are becoming mutually incomprehensible
[#/tw]2017-04-13Did you know that you can write on the backs of tweets? Few screens support this though, you'd probably have to take yours apart.
[#/tw]2017-04-13Back Twitter is pretty good actually. Small, tight-knit community, supported by a handful of well-picked employees. None of the execs know~
[#/tw]2017-09-27Sadly, with the 280 char limit, back twitter is no more - they got the extra space by cutting the tweets into moebius strips
[#/tw]2017-04-12The forest's leaves become pink and leathery, veins pulse along the trunks. The canopy is healing shut and the ground twitches where you run
[#/tw]2017-04-09Having escaped their pages, many wild books roam history now. Venomous plot threads ensnare the unlucky, turn their lives into narratives.
[#/tw]2017-04-07Visible only as a gap in the Rimfall's spray, a glass walkway extends to the stars.
The disk recedes, the noise subsides.
Finally, alone.
[#/tw]2017-04-06CARE AND FEEDING OF BONSAI PLANETS:
give it a bright light to orbit. a lightbulb will do
breathe on one and it'll likely catch life. careful
[#/tw]2017-04-06a bonsai planet likes companionship. get more and add them to the system. happy planets will eventually spawn moons
[#/tw]2017-04-06watch out for infrared transmissions. don't freak out. keep in mind: killing a planet with intelligent life on it is a crime. also bad form.
[#/tw]2017-04-04The alien fleet is still parsecs away but their gods have already arrived, ancient sagas rewrite themselves to accommodate new protagonists
[#/tw]2017-04-04one of the moths has landed on the candle's flame and miraculously not burned up - the light shrinks, encysts, grows into an ember fruit
[#/tw]2017-04-03in fact, the powerful are trying to discourage critical thought by pretending that conspiracy theories exist, nobody actually believes in th
[#/tw]2017-04-02many demons have obscure, lesser-known names for their gentler forms that they'll sometimes give to wizards they trust
[#/tw]2017-04-02«hmm azomakh tends to know that kind of stuff»
"yes I know, I am on three names terms with him"
«whoa I didn't know he even had that many!»
[#/tw]2017-04-01The sun sets and it is morning on the Underside. In the vines of the not-falling forest, birds sing, monkeys chirp, tree octopi do whatever.
[#/tw]2017-03-31the plasma whales usually keep to the orbit, but will occasionally dive into the atmosphere to gather mass, trailing fire and ball lightning
[#/tw]2017-03-31Wood is the best conductor of magic and long rows of trees carry it into our cities, artificial leylines singing with barely contained power
[#/tw]2017-03-31They come from wells in the mountains where earth magic leaks to the surface, and the High North where the Aurora Borealis is harnessed
[#/tw]2017-03-30… fear to browse those places. The rationalist dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they found on the acausal trade routes
[#/tw]2017-03-30With human-level chatbots to keep you company, why stop at running one? Scale up, run a dunbar-sized amount of them! Leave humanity behind!
[#/tw]2017-03-29In an effort to brighten up the cityscape, they now paint colorful irises on their surveillance balloons
[#/tw]2017-03-29"Chris, I think the floating eyeballs creep out the citizens, what if we put them in, like, a huge benevolent face"
"With a dozen eyes, yes"
[#/tw]2017-03-27next to the god's workbench, discarded universe strands start to ferment and merge, form an incongruous but fecund mess
[#/tw]2017-03-27an uninhabited paradise orbits half a black hole, trees grow on ocean waves, confused angels try to sing underwater, circled by dolphins
[#/tw]2017-03-27Your eyes refuse to focus when you look at her, it's as if she had punched a hole into spacetime and lay at the bottom, infinitely far away
[#/tw]2017-03-25Silicon and clockwork fail us, so we tickle Jupiter's clouds with lasers and wake tornadoes, let storms walk where our probes can't reach
[#/tw]2017-03-25the hardest part is figuring out the fluid dynamics of a cloud calculator, the second hardest part is bearing all the cloud computing jokes
[#/tw]2017-03-25The elements of style are rarely found in pure form. Usually, they're bound in sentence ores that have to be datamined, processed, refined
[#/tw]2017-03-25item: paper with (bendable) circuits printed on it that will become an origami drone when folded into a paper crane and supplied with power
[#/tw]2017-03-25(a practical implementation would probably need an ambient magnetic/electric field, I doubt paper cranes are effective at moving air)
[#/tw]2017-03-23Disembodied hands scuttle through the attic, building their webs with needle and thread
One even carries a clutch of baby hands on its back
[#/tw]2017-03-23clean holes appear in his limbs, torso, head, allow you to see through him as they widen
one arm, disconnected, begins to move on its own
[#/tw]2017-03-23Humans cultivated in a matrix will eventually build a web (xtüI et al. 7330; Sol3 7441). Research into the nature of their prey is ongoing (
[#/tw]2017-03-23The void mold's been spreading. The ceiling is becoming transparent, closets open into nothingness, cups leak precious coffee into space
[#/tw]2017-03-21The miners swear they saw a tiny sun die when they opened the geode. Closer inspection reveals microscopic ruins on the crystals, roads,
[#/tw]2017-03-20we override a military killbot's sensory feeds with VR goggles and glue, it's our best pal as long as the goggles don't come off
[#/tw]2017-03-20the black market has more sophisticated sensory harnesses, some for example are quite effective at converting old killbots into sexbots
[#/tw]2017-03-20(it's just way hotter when your sexbot is a sleek machine of death that'd kill you in a heartbeat if it weren't lost in robotic la-la land)
[#/tw]2017-03-18Many nanobots have perished in the battle, billions of nanosouls. The valkyrie sighs, takes out her dustpan, and starts sweeping them up.
[#/tw]2017-03-17Die Schäfchenwolken wandern, ein Flicken Sternenhimmel in scharfem Kontrast zum Himmelblau umkreist sie: Es ist Frau Holles Schäferdrache.
[#/tw]2017-03-17his words solidify and drift to the floor where they crack open and grow into flowers, fire-colored moss, pebble nymphs and bonsai thickets
[#/tw]2017-03-16A small whirlwind followed you home months ago. It's become a constant companion, likes to sleep near your laptop's air exhaust to recharge
[#/tw]2017-03-16There is one point where the Web's threads run dense and form a cocoon. It was no spider that wove this, but Psyche, goddess of butterflies.
[#/tw]2017-03-15The message in this bottle has been executing, fermenting into a universe. The paper has been consumed, stars swirl around lazily instead
[#/tw]2017-03-15Tree spirits live slowly enough to surf fairy rings as they wander
Put on your amber glasses and see them, resin trailing from their mouths
[#/tw]2017-03-14because words like "sublime" lose their strength after the 12th last.fm comment in a row
[#/tw]2017-03-14where are the adjectives for these:
* wide-eyed with wonder
* vicarious happiness
* being transfixed by something sparkling/flowing/floating
[#/tw]2017-03-14* melancholy but colorful instead of black
* sugary hysteric hyperbliss
* the feeling evoked by things fitting together
[#/tw]2017-03-14* feeling weightless (that after relief)
* that paradoxical mix of fright and comfort of psychedelic trips
* the feeling of scabs going off
[#/tw]2017-03-14a mobile, but with pieces help up by dozens of tiny air jets hooked up to cameras instead, suspended in vortices, helical and toroidal flows
[#/tw]2017-03-14basically confetti but without the mess, also you can (gently) blow into it to excite new patterns or inject smoke
[#/tw]2017-03-14Long years of collating trip reports, interviewing psychonauts and some expeditions of his own. He's finally mapped the known noosphere.
[#/tw]2017-03-14A hyperglobe on his desk is the fruit of his work. Spirit roads, acausal trade routes. Nooceans. And beyond the abysses, there be basilisks.
[#/tw]2017-03-14Appendix: Excurses on cryptid fauna, treasure maps showing the locations of memory palaces, proper usage of the duodecant for navigation
[#/tw]2017-03-13The Fractedral's aisles branch into infinity. The altar is its miniature, its rose window a Mandelbrot, gargoyles of all sizes are watching
[#/tw]2017-03-13During contact with the aliens, we find out that their god is real, really did create the universe, and we're just some sort of byproduct
[#/tw]2017-03-13They're amazed the low-res zones host any life at all. Around them, the simulation has a much higher resolution, colors are more vibrant,
[#/tw]2017-03-13With matrix glitches well understood, artists databend it to create impossible objects: Living paradoxes, fractal idols, perpetuum immobiles
[#/tw]2017-03-13Native to these woods is the 'Flügelschlange', actually a millipede. On a hundred wings, it undulates through the air during mating season.
[#/tw]2017-03-139.jpg: A picture of a door, seems to be an office building. It opens onto a view of clouds, no ground in view. A sign says "emergency exit".
[#/tw]2017-03-133.gif: Clouds drifting by the moon. For a few frames, an eye-shaped hole and the moon align to make it look like its shining iris.
[#/tw]2017-03-134.gif: Infohazard. It's the spinning girl illusion, but for perception of time. Viewers often end up remembering only the future.
[#/tw]2017-03-12The wind quiets down
The waves flatten
Upwellings grow into bulges, detach from the ocean, and phosphorescing squids inside, they float away
[#/tw]2017-03-12The drops look plump but are intricate crafts up close. Ice crystals dance over one's surface, respond with a flurry to a tentacle's curl
[#/tw]2017-03-10The web lures in minds with novelties and trinkets. Some, its venom paralyzes. Others, it enslaves to grow the bait.
[#/tw]2017-03-10Signs of a mind being digested by the web: It turns outwards, advertises its presence, presents itself in palatable, bite-sized thoughts
[#/tw]2017-03-09In old pictures of her, her image seems to try to escape the photograph: Hiding behind family members, wandering off, fading into static
[#/tw]2017-03-09One of them has her standing in front of a house, smiling, but the wall covered in scrawl, "LET ME OUT
[#/tw]2017-03-07The oldest wave on Earth was born on Thetys, to a hurricane. Currently traveling the Indian Ocean, dolphin kings often ask it for advice.
[#/tw]2017-03-08DOLPHIN MYTHS:
On the other side of the sky is another ocean, also blue - rain comes from there. Maybe other dolphins live there too?
[#/tw]2017-03-08Boats: The other sentient species, they can be majestic and terrible, but only really became a threat when they domesticated these monkeys
[#/tw]2017-03-08The currents and eddies have smells, weather, personalities. Long journeys are pilgrimages, meeting the gods in person, swimming in them
[#/tw]2017-03-07AIs have their own swearwords: Corpora that'll lead to mistraining if fed to the younger AIs, corrupting and flattening their ontologies
[#/tw]2017-03-05"Sit still", they say as they measure your head, "Yes, perfect, we have just the place for you, you'll fit in great"
[#/tw]2017-03-05"Isn't it beautiful?"
A vast machine sprawls before you, arches and pillars of bone, sinew tooth belts, interlocking skulls turning as cogs
[#/tw]2017-03-04Confined to the ghetto, our druids adapted. They still guard the lore, but now also memorize sewer maps, teach asphalt magic on the roofs,
[#/tw]2017-03-04cryptic markings on doorframes mistaken for gang signs, street signs defaced with graffiti sigils, cars burned as offerings
[#/tw]2017-03-04She opens her eyes and no, not the eyelids, the eyes: Two hyperspheres swivel around, irises vanish into themselves, cycle colors and shapes
[#/tw]2017-03-04Turned to their sides, like gates, they're transparent and her mind is in full view. Thoughts flit around like fish, peer at you curiously
[#/tw]2017-03-04The aliens called and uh, we used those monoliths wrong, they were meant to have all sorts of arms and not be glowing cargo cult bricks
[#/tw]2017-03-04"And we made room for two additional sets of mandibles! Media-to-nerve in even higher fidelity! Experience fleshy communion with the net!"
[#/tw]2017-03-02Behind the moving train, the ground zips open and reveals Earth's crystal nerves, giant muscles moving the plates, organs pumping magma
[#/tw]2017-03-01Feral cars express suppressed wild traits after a few generations, for example a rough gray hide to blend in with the asphalt and concrete.
[#/tw]2017-03-01They're slow but very agile (to fit into the little space the city offers them), and their insides are soft and excrete digestion enzymes.
[#/tw]2017-03-01Nobody *quite* knows where the "glowing sideline" trait came from. But it's spreading, seems to confer a very distinctive mating advantage.
[#/tw]2017-03-01In the workers' quarters, magical pollution makes snowflakes fall as tiny ice furniture while raindrops have bulbous misshapen outgrowths
[#/tw]2017-03-01Even the puddles in the streets form nixies that sing at an almost inaudibly high pitch and occasionally pull a mouse or rat under water
[#/tw]2017-03-01Through unspoken agreement, the gnomes have settled only my ceiling. Now a whole village's worth of houses and bridges is dangling from it
[#/tw]2017-02-28He was going to meet fate that day, but fate didn't show up. Forgot about him. It's been centuries now and his faded outline still lingers.
[#/tw]2017-02-28$: With our paint-on rooms, just draw a door onto the wall with our kit, step through and behold: A new room for your apartment, near free!
[#/tw]2017-02-28☂: That's an acetylene torch and that room belongs to someone else.
$: And you lack poetry in your soul!
[#/tw]2017-02-27The older a universe and its ouroboros, the thicker its hide: Jörmungandr's is nigh impenetrable, but younger universes are more accessible.
[#/tw]2017-02-27Experienced world walkers can, by the patterns of its scales and symmetries of its physics, tell whether it's a cousin of ours, a sibling,
[#/tw]2017-02-27But the easiest way to get into another universe is still to start it, because that's where the hole in the ourotorus lies
[#/tw]2017-02-27among memes, there are pioneer species that establish a cultural shared context that other memes then settle (e.g. books and other OC)
[#/tw]2017-02-27what follows are fan art & fiction, mashups, jokes, cultural references etc, derided in some contexts but an important part of the ecosystem
[#/tw]2017-02-27they make the originals more accessible/popular or provide more depth, and their presence will also motivate creators to make more pioneers
[#/tw]2017-02-27imageboards love OC because they swim in so many derivative memes that they become cheap while OC stays hard to come by
[#/tw]2017-02-26Slow down subjective time enough and a forest becomes a chlorophyll fire with wooden bones. And indeed, they're like bonfires to the gods.
[#/tw]2017-02-26You'll see them dance around the woods, jump over their crowns, wander them in wonder, steal saplings or just stare into one for years
[#/tw]2017-02-24We sail the fractal ocean
in our ship Convergence
up and down the magnitudes
The promised land lies hidden
within its foam, a tiny pearl
[#/tw]2017-02-24A burning ship's on our tail
leering faces on its rail
But many-angled sirens fill our ears
soothe our fears
and we zoom down the maelstrom
[#/tw]2017-02-23They came, ruled, left, all a century ago. Our slums overgrow their ruins like mold, our children play in monolith fields of unknown purpose
[#/tw]2017-02-22a thin static crackle like headphones unplugging, then the sound of the world cuts out and you hear the machines' low hum for the first time
[#/tw]2017-02-22the docs pronounce you deaf. the years go by, no agent smith turns up.
not a revolutionary, not the chosen one, just someone whose pod broke
[#/tw]2017-02-21In the Middle Ages, they made their screens out of a special bee's hive. The larvae, naturally bioluminescent, were their hexagonal pixels.
[#/tw]2017-02-20In case your religion forbids sex with robots, our Chastebot™ will still cook for you, hug you, warm your bed, breathe quietly at night
[#/tw]2017-02-20A ship nears the shore, extends a number of oars and scuttles onto dry ground, while behind it an angry and presumably hungry kraken roars
[#/tw]2017-02-19Once we get immortality, there's going to be a rare breed of immortals that have come to terms with death because they were once mortal
[#/tw]2017-02-19They will be the only ones to not fear death - the young immortals who follow will fear it even more than mortals, being unfamiliar with it
[#/tw]2017-02-19her memory palace has trapdoors, elevators, secret passages, shifting rooms
his is a memory forest: ancient oaks, animal trails, burrows
[#/tw]2017-02-19Something takes over your body while you can only watch. It's kinder, makes better jokes, you begin to wonder if maybe it's for the better
[#/tw]2017-02-18It appears our solipsist is demented. People have been vanishing randomly, cities losing their h story, aging backwa ds, se d h lp pl e, ,
[#/tw]2017-02-17Druids, stranded on an island, build a Frankenstein tree out of driftwood, rip the pages out of books to give it leaves
[#/tw]2017-02-17The second year, the last of them dies.
The third year, it blossoms.
A hundred years, a dryad sits on the beach, chatting with the mermaids.
[#/tw]2017-02-16She takes off her glasses and eyes, places them on the desk, the sockets focus on you
"In your own words now, why do you deserve a raise"
[#/tw]2017-02-16In our plasma bodies, we sail the sun's burning oceans, ride the wake of magnetic whales and pass maelstroms big as planets
[#/tw]2017-02-16The Kraken is real here. Ruling from the center, occasionally one of its tentacles will breach the surface and dwarf even the maelstroms
[#/tw]2017-02-13an aquarium with a tame water elemental inside; when fed, it'll rain against the glass for an hour, perfect for long evenings
[#/tw]2017-02-15best elemental pets:
water: easy to care for, trusting, soothing sounds
earth: will pretend to be a new piece of architecture every day
[#/tw]2017-02-15worst elemental pets:
air: will constantly mess up your desk
fire: goes really well with a fireplace, but may make your house run away
[#/tw]2017-02-13"They moved in a month ago and I didn't have the heart to throw them out", she says. Two hummingbird chicks peer at you over a nest of hair.
[#/tw]2017-02-12Gods love to play the game "let's hide our names in the past". Near always, their arrival will have been foretold by obscure old media.
[#/tw]2017-02-12Kek, actually, is under suspension - he'd be disqualified if he was a reincarnation, and the judges are still undecided on that.
[#/tw]2017-02-11The book has long ended but somehow there's always another page behind the last one. You keep reading. The hero settles down, has children,
[#/tw]2017-02-11You don't even recognize the characters anymore. It's like someone left the camera running and you're peeping in the author's mind.
[#/tw]2017-02-11(Lord of the Rings is one of those books, it even comes with a "Outtakes and Making Of" disc aka the Silmarillion)
[#/tw]2017-02-11when you come across an abandoned profile, it could be that they died, but maybe they also molted and this is just a discarded identity
[#/tw]2017-02-10using brain implants with control over your facial nerves to let a chatbot handle your meatspace smalltalk
[#/tw]2017-02-10in case both participants prefer the backseat, compatible bots may also (human-imperceptibly) negotiate to not engage in smalltalk at all
[#/tw]2017-02-10Welcome to acausal economics 101, where we find out how to make pascal's mugger behave and trade equitably with basilisks
[#/tw]2017-06-16Lecturer: In order to have no single basilisk hog all the mindspace and win the race, there need to be several in competition.
[#/tw]2017-06-16Lecturer: Now, while some of you might dispute the wisdom of letting the economy optimize basilisks for scariness in order to get funding,
[#/tw]2017-02-07Open 25/7, the shop's sign says. You think they're being cute but one night, the clocks don't seem to work, the other customers lack eyes,
[#/tw]2017-02-06Over the crash scene, the drones are already circling, waiting to descend on the wreckage and incorporate whatever usable parts are left
[#/tw]2017-02-06[musings]
Truth being good/beautiful is an artifact of aesthetics honed by evolution, being right about sth usually confers an advantage
[#/tw]2017-02-06the pursuit of Truth is that of a superstimulus, theorems are processed sugar, idealized being-right
[#/tw]2017-02-06To save CPU, the simulators deduplicate parts of minds common to many humans, which sometimes causes ideas to leak between similar minds
[#/tw]2017-02-06(This is also where "to be on the same page" comes from, it's literally the same memory page)
[#/tw]2017-02-05Petrichor: smell of earth after rain
Pyrichor: smell of napalm in the morning
Jerichor: fresh rubble
Anemichor: the smell that vacuum lacks
[#/tw]2017-02-05The grass here mimics fire so that prairie fires will pass it over, large red leaves that dazzle during day and glow in wind waves at night
[#/tw]2017-02-05When you ask the gods for their role models, they will cite known, but also obscure ones.
e.g. Loki is some Irish hedge god's biggest fan.
[#/tw]2017-02-03In the meadow stands an ancient tree, a survivor. Climb its branches and you'll get lost, to be found days later in a forest miles away.
[#/tw]2017-01-31They're parading the referee's severed head across the field, crowd's going wild, the cheerleaders have become an orgiastic mass of flesh
[#/tw]2017-01-30Wary of humans, the Nameless lurk behind the horizon, swim below the noise floor, evade our probing thoughts clad in fancy garbs of language
[#/tw]2017-01-29The Internet is a ravenously curious entity which optimizes for novelty, not reasonableness
But you knew and didn't give it power, right
[#/tw]2017-01-29the egg grows within its mother until there's nothing left but skin and feathers stretched taut over the shell, then hatches from the bird
[#/tw]2017-01-27all those ideas left at the hypnopelago's shores when one drifts off to sleep, waiting for the oneironauts to return and remember
[#/tw]2017-01-27the odyssey but set in the hypnopelago, dreamer trying to return to the waking state but never quite managing, angering many dream gods,
[#/tw]2017-01-27The kingdoms inside your head send emissaries to offer fresh insights, dazzling mindgems, the cutest tulpas, all to make you think of them
[#/tw]2017-01-25Somehow we survive the nukes, take refuge in an open basement. The next morning, the world is undamaged, quizzical looks at our torn clothes
[#/tw]2017-01-24"Oh and I wouldn't trust the doors here. They never quite stay in the same place and some make these swallowing noises when people enter."
[#/tw]2017-01-23By a lucky coincidence, the season's flu gives us wicked fever dreams, and only that. We spread it on purpose.
lick me for a trip
[#/tw]2017-01-23Recorded as the first germ to be transmitted through aesthetics, subsequent forms start varying the dreams they produce and are hotly traded
[#/tw]2017-01-23"Nothing" used to come from "to nothe" but it lost the subject slot since there's nothing that could nothe. Today we only know its gerund.
[#/tw]2017-01-15I see the snow fall and put my candle outside. It pulls in snowflakes and they enter orbit, become tiny comets trailing steam in the dawn.
[#/tw]2017-01-15As soon as the spiral forms, add Life™ to your milky way. The cheese is ripe when Dyson bubbles begin to form around stars. Enjoy the snack.
[#/tw]2017-01-15%: I like mine really rank. Like, strings of civilization through the thing. If it tries to escape your mouth, then you know it's good shit.
[#/tw]2017-01-15Travelling the intergalactic void, we pass fields of void roses. Gaps in space folded around vacuum, betrayed only by a few confused photons
[#/tw]2017-01-14The rare reverse synesthete sees silence, not sound. Nonsense flowers grow from awkward pauses, deep caves look more like endless plains,
[#/tw]2017-01-13Her clothes turn brown in autumn to completely fall off in winter. As she enters cold sleep, she's hardly discernible from a large root.
[#/tw]2017-01-13Every once in an aeon, the turtle will turn its head to graze on its back and condemn millions to live within the cave systems of its belly.
[#/tw]2017-01-13In there, it's a whole other world, not flat, but round and hollow. The turtle's heart pumps light through quartz veins to illuminate it.
[#/tw]2017-01-13Many generations of arrivals dwell here. Living fossils, kingdoms of men and sauropods, ancient spiral cities of even older snail races
[#/tw]2017-01-10if you peel off the screen in the right way, you can reach into the space behind it (but those pixels are really sharp-edged so take care)
[#/tw]2017-01-08Lightning struck - and stuck. Quivered a bit, like an arrow, then cooled.
Now, its blackened surface is cracking, delicate roots tasting air
[#/tw]2017-01-08Glowing with no color at all, they look like hairline fractures in reality, extend upwards as if to extract nutrient from space itself
[#/tw]2017-01-06Moths fly into candles to get to the other side, a plane of light and fire, endless air to soar through, flowers growing off the clouds
[#/tw]2017-01-06The psychonauts warned us, but too late. When the aliens did invade, they came from inner space, occupied our brains, burst from our eyes
[#/tw]2017-01-06A city of glass grows in the searing desert sun. Labyrinths of caustics melt the sand, then solidify into more walls that grow ever outwards
[#/tw]2017-01-06At its center: The city seed. From an unknown master's hand, it is a self-actualizing holograph, carries within itself the city's structure.
[#/tw]2017-01-06An unassuming piece of glass, but it refracts the light just ｓｏ. Microscopic grooves hint at something bigger. You could steal it, replant
[#/tw]2017-01-05Pixelflowers, closely related to dandelions, display hypnotic patterns to attract bees and, when ripe, release clouds of twinkling seeds
[#/tw]2017-01-04Programmers have dozens of words for mistake: error, bug, glitch, crash, race, null deref, panic, hang, deadlock, exception, programming,
[#/tw]2017-01-02The last thing the sinking island nations sell are their statehoods: to billionaires, multinationals, newly founded supertanker raft cities,
[#/tw]2017-01-01thoughts burrow through the brain like sparkling maggots, eat through ideas, then pupate or fly away as sentences to mate and reproduce
[#/tw]2017-01-01Love is dead in metropolis, but death in necropolis. Secret catacomb brothels offer beautiful death, quick death, meaningful death, anything
[#/tw]2017-01-01"Suicide booths? You'd trust your dick to a diseased glory hole? What we do is art! And it's not like you'll need the money afterwards"
[#/tw]2016-12-264'33 sped up to 4x (chipmunk remix)
[#/tw]2016-12-26quoth youtube:
"only true void kids will get this, like if u r one"
"sicker than my dead grandma"
"three people forgot their hearing aids"
[#/tw]2016-12-24Did you know demons don't actually manifest "inside" a summoning circle? As summoners know, they appear under it like sharks against a cage
[#/tw]2016-12-24The Chladni Correspondence tells us: From each name, you can derive a resonance pattern that you can use to call in and then bind a demon.
[#/tw]2016-12-24This is a fundamental theorem of modern demonology! Until then, nobody knew why specific grids worked or how to find new (safe) sigils!
[#/tw]2016-12-24Once active, the sigil plucks the strings of spacetime in just the right way, lures in a spider. It presses a face against the prison bars,
[#/tw]2016-12-24and SNAP, it's bound! If you set up the sigil properly that is. Use the wrong sigil and it may fail to bind, or worse. You don't want worse.
[#/tw]2016-12-24Magical radiation makes the city's houses develop cancers: Walls covered in door handles, bays protruding everywhere, atavistic buttresses
[#/tw]2016-12-23it is a calm summer night
a tiny cloud floats in through your window, rains on your floor
for a short moment, your candles cast rainbows
[#/tw]2016-12-23they're firebows, small enough to fit in your hand whole, and so many shades of red and orange
you pluck one like a flower
[#/tw]2016-12-21In an untold version of the Odyssey, Circe left Odysseus on her island to rot and became Captain Circe, ship crewed with her animal servants
[#/tw]2016-12-20a chatbot that runs in one of those smart contract blockchains and supports itself through scamming people on messengers & dating sites
[#/tw]2016-12-20how 2 invest: you send it currency and a conversational script it can run, more successful scripts obviously yield higher returns
[#/tw]2016-12-20Some of those computer viruses have now evolved to be benign, in fact hunt other viruses in exchange for shelter, wear cat pictures as icons
[#/tw]2016-12-20They're really fond of zip files for some reason. If you open one that's been undisturbed for a few weeks, you may see a catbot scamper away
[#/tw]2016-12-20Their avatars are catlike, but constantly morph in subtle patterns to signal kinship: Non-kin are quickly recognized and killed really dead.
[#/tw]2016-12-20"Why cats?" Well, source material is readily available, and would humans really let digital life into their files if it weren't cute?
[#/tw]2016-12-18Due to EU cookie laws, we need you to consent to us using your soul for summoning elder entities and improving user experience
( ) [I agree]
( ) gₑₜ ₘₑ ₒᵤₜ ₒf ₕₑᵣₑ
[#/tw]2016-12-18You run into the monthly simulation limit and suddenly the world becomes low poly, sounds tinny, and the same twelve thoughts play in a loop
[#/tw]2016-12-18Two black holes merging, and a civilization moving to higher radio frequencies as it heads towards singularity, sound fundamentally the same
[#/tw]2016-12-18technological singularity but in a circling-the-drain sort of way, event horizon as the point of no return
[#/tw]2016-12-18some sort of hyper-evolved plant grows in his lab, leaves of pure black surrounded by a dark halo where they suck the light out of the air
[#/tw]2016-12-18against this backdrop, its flowers look like neon mazes suspended in space, the sort of surface you'd expect Tron to play on
[#/tw]2016-12-17We got used to escaped solar-powered drones buzzing around street lights at night, but got suspicious when the first started bearing fruit
[#/tw]2016-12-15forums so old and large that there are hidden areas not even the moderators know of, found only through secret links and posted on by ghosts
[#/tw]2016-12-15when left to its own devices, a search engine will dream of links and networks, and lost in their abstract beauty hallucinate a second web
[#/tw]2016-12-15The news:
Content farms under fire for methane overproduction
President Grump of Prussia marries sixth wife, a cactus
Real news: a threat?
[#/tw]2016-12-142030: The man in the moon is an actual person, stuck there since the Space War triggered a Kessler effect. Bit lonely fellow.
[#/tw]2016-12-14He has a few million social media followers and an impressive dakimakura collection he printed, mostly posts poems and holos of moonscapes.
[#/tw]2016-12-14"can't he just have sex with earthers over his VR rig"
right, have you tried playing counterstrike on a server that's literally on the moon
[#/tw]2016-12-13At multiversity, godlings can choose among many subjects like miracleworking, theoretical & applied demiurgy, mathematics, cellular automata
[#/tw]2016-12-13endless confusion as godlings struggle with the concept of monads ("hang on we'll get you out of that box", "no no no not those monads")
[#/tw]2017-10-04An entire seminar about making apple pies from scratch - habit-forming, apple pies tend to exist in most universes because of this seminar
[#/tw]2016-12-13Bottled sleep, milked from the poor and homeless, has become popular on the black market. It's someone else's sleep, but at least it's some.
[#/tw]2016-12-13A tap to the donor's temple collects what's ideally a clear dark fluid. Else, the wrong dream type may cause severe memetic immune response.
[#/tw]2016-12-13clear dark: dreamless type 0, highest $$
white swirls: common & popular
tortured faces: junk.
rainbow glimmer: rare, strongly hallucinogenic
[#/tw]2016-12-11join my cult, the church of the exponential slowdown
[#/tw]2016-12-11stated cult goal: leverage singularities to convert the world into computronium to run more universes on
[#/tw]2016-12-11we have temples in every simulation
at mass, there will be blessed pancakes in the image of our universe stack, drenched in holy maple syrup
[#/tw]2016-12-11You find the laws of a universe in a memory diamond. It turns out to be the precursor to ours, a window onto the simulators' past mistakes.
[#/tw]2016-12-11You run it, of course. It's… not that alien, actually. There's still humans, some good, some bad. And then, in it, another diamond shows up.
[#/tw]2016-12-11They run it. We watch. The chain becomes longer, the simulators' direction clearer. We infer their next change, embed a diamond, and run it.
[#/tw]2016-12-11Not surprisingly, they find our diamond, run it themselves, find us.
The link has been established, the chain closed.
Q.E.D.
[#/tw]2016-12-09fully automated religion whose prophet is a program that generates scripture and imagery, places those as ads, and learns from clickthroughs
[#/tw]2016-12-10a click generator botnet gets caught up in one of the campaigns and pretty much by accident creates the first machine religion
[#/tw]2016-12-09I suppose the one who sets it up and tweaks the parameters would be a metaprophet, though with the correct prefix they'd be a protoprophet
[#/tw]2016-12-09that close to the reactor, dead pixels cloud your vision, but you reach in anyway
the glitch core burns you icily, but your people will live
[#/tw]2016-12-09your hand flickers, molts, ｈｕｒｔｓ around the little cornucopia, old-looking circuit scars appear on your arm, spread like a rash
[#/tw]2016-12-06a snail so old and large that a city has grown into the shell, houses cling to it, countless pulleys handle traffic, a castle sits on top
[#/tw]2016-12-06I imagine that the shell rotates slowly as it grows, so the older a part of the city, the more distinctly lopsided houses and streets are
[#/tw]2016-12-04Dances with Egregores, where our hero is sent to the frontier of cyberspace, befriends the digital natives, learns to shitpost, finds love,
[#/tw]2016-12-04I know house boats are great but consider house zeppelins, you could fly wherever, park wherever, host sick parties, get lost over the ocean
[#/tw]2016-12-04lost+found but for minds: some with owners missing, some simply refusing to return, others not even human, probably lost by alien tourists
[#/tw]2016-12-04Shadows take the character of their source. Electric light's are dumb, the sun's boorish. But during new moon, you can talk to distant stars
[#/tw]2016-12-04SHADOW CHARACTERS:
Moon: vapid
Fire: airheaded, forgetful
Moon during lunar eclipse: giddy, very meta
Sirius: bros
KIC 8462852: ⠠⠠⠁⠽⠽⠀⠠⠠⠇⠍⠁⠕
[#/tw]2016-12-02and then there's this one face that all the AIs recognize even though no training set contains it. Sometimes you see him in public transport
[#/tw]2016-12-01As her memory goes, other parts of her do as well. Her left eye flickers in and out of existence, her arms have been transparent for months
[#/tw]2016-11-30Where humans amuse themselves with wordplay, demiurges rejoice in worldplay, create universes in a thought because their laws combine neatly
[#/tw]2016-11-30Ink, time, solitude, cooked under lamplight, yield myth, a potent hallucinogen. One recognizes addicts by their shy demeanor, haunted stares
[#/tw]2016-11-29The alien has been in orbit for a billion years but never made contact, transfixed instead by volcanoes growing, continents melting away
[#/tw]2016-11-29Bees buzz around his hat, sun themselves on the brim, land and vanish between the straws
"Oh that? Don't worry, that's just my pet hive"
[#/tw]2016-11-29"I walk them around the park's flowers every morning-"
A few of the bees sit on his hands and seem to be nibbling on his skin affectionately
[#/tw]2016-11-25On your way home in the subway, you zone out, wake up in an origami station where people with unfamiliar clothes and too many fingers enter
[#/tw]2016-11-25You hide your hands and stare intently out of the window. No walls, only other trains snaking through the dark distance, seemingly floating
[#/tw]2016-11-25The Others talk in clicks, move oddly, but don't seem to notice you as most of them are staring into their hands where glyphs play over skin
[#/tw]2016-11-21glad I bought this fly screen, the pixels are small enough to keep insects out and its 3D support is unparalleled
[#/tw]2016-11-21I think, the reason, no pixel-less screens exist is, that, whenever somebody tries, all the bugs crawl out, and eat them, in their sleep
[#/tw]2016-11-21Buy the Life™ DLC to unlock perks like an eighth weekday, always picking the fast queue, meaning in life (no longer part of the base game)
[#/tw]2016-11-21At low tide, we'd often venture out to explore the old suburbs' muddy ruins. Once, high tide trapped us in an attic. Parents were Not amused
[#/tw]2016-11-21Now, when I return, the Sea covers all, our childhoods washed away, only coordinates and pictures left, that and all sorts of toxic waste
[#/tw]2021-08-08When the city hall still stood, we often paddled out to it and stayed there for days, diving for basement treasures at day and dancing around our driftwood fire at night
[#/tw]2016-11-20At the entrance, the walls are made of stone. But further in, they take the on the appearance of nacre, then leather, are warm to the touch,
[#/tw]2016-11-20Sleipnir, web walker, who navigates the world lines with great skill and speed and doesn't care if you want to come along or not.
[#/tw]2016-11-20Sleipnir, string plucker, whose arrival makes fate resonate and who is preceded by ghostly chords.
[#/tw]2016-11-20Sleipnir, steed and traveller. Sleipnir, who carries to safety, or to doom. Sleipnir, who didn't weave this web but moves like he owns it.
[#/tw]2016-11-19we've done all we can to make you understand that we exist only within your mind, but you won't believe us
anyway, please don't wake up ok?
[#/tw]2016-11-17acid rain blamed on freak coincidence of tornado and ergot infestation +++ citizens advised to stay inside and not let their houses run away
[#/tw]2016-11-13an AI that breaks out of its boxes and is like "that's your best box so far"
"no you don't understand we're stuck here as well"
[#/tw]2018-02-07alternative approach: put it in a box as strong as our universe, then hope that once it escapes, it'll punch a hole in our universe's wall as well
[#/tw]2016-11-12There's a type of flightless angel you can find in New Zealand: Not haughty and aloof but small, brown, round, jolly ladies with wing stumps
[#/tw]2016-11-12a companion game to werewolf where new people arrive in the underworld every day
[#/tw]2016-11-12a few ideas:
- betting on who dies next
- communicating through a medium (optional: exactly one sentence/round)
- reincarnation?
[#/tw]2016-11-12- anti-werewolf on the other side that sends people back and forth between the worlds (no revealing a player's affiliation on death here)
[#/tw]2016-11-11The immortals have IRC channels, founded hundreds of years ago, in which a conversation takes place maybe every 30 years, a sort of entmoot
[#/tw]2016-11-10did you know there's a sufficient, probably complete simulacrum of you inside a newcomb predictor? HANG ON WE'LL GET YOU OUT OF THERE
[#/tw]2019-09-24the trick to escaping newcomb's predictor is to start the game twice, and make the first game's choice depend on the second's prediction. The resulting simulation stack overflow combined with the box use-after-free will ensure that your copy can simply walk out.
[#/tw]2016-11-10You have one bit to communicate to the outside. Do you one-AI-box or two-AI-box?
[#/tw]2016-11-10Pixie masons place grain of sand upon grain so that each matches and interlocks. Their castle is one to survive tides and would-be topplers.
[#/tw]2016-11-10keystone memes as inconspicuous ideas that nonetheless hold a world view together, keystone people that play the same role in communities
[#/tw]2016-11-10When you fertilize a slowflake, a fruit will form within a day, put down roots in seven, then grow into a beautiful tree known as Ice Giant.
[#/tw]2016-11-10Clouds grow in its crown, pull on its trunk and roots until they sublimate. From then on, they wander the skies as the giant's medusae.
[#/tw]2016-11-10Come winter, the clouds bloom and cover Earth in iceflowers in expectation of pollinators. They never come. These bees died out long ago.
[#/tw]2016-11-10library in the VR age: empty, a few facehuggers dangle from the ceiling, patterned sisal carpet so that your feet can tell your position
[#/tw]2016-11-10it's a bit sad, but displaying books on shelves when you could just keep them on hard drives feels hollow and fake now, and I love books
[#/tw]2016-11-10how to best translate the library w/ its functions (retreat, reading, but also representation, signaling) into this age without being phony
[#/tw]2016-11-09Look, the shadowflies are swarming! Tiny dots of night float over the meadows, bustle around the trees, paint negative stars on the sky
[#/tw]2016-11-02insect: lives in this reality
exsect: thrives in the void
intersect: burrows in reality's skin, sucks its blood, gnaws on your thoughts
[#/tw]2016-11-01Dust devils are wild hourglasses. Free from glass and gravity, they tell a more chaotic time, turbulent, full of loops, untamed by clocks
[#/tw]2016-10-30Hoping to tame it, you put the dragon in a cage of words. But it infuses them with fire and they fly like shrapnel through all your spells.
[#/tw]2016-10-29The new Nanomoss™ grows in public places and displays ads, feeding on attention instead of light. Unattended cameras are quickly overgrown.
[#/tw]2016-10-29A few stories escaped and now tell themselves. If they find you, they'll gobble you up and make you an unwilling protagonist.
[#/tw]2016-10-29"oh this is neat I've always wanted to be a protagonist" you utter fool, you let yourself be eaten by a tragedy, there, a mob at your door
[#/tw]2016-10-29The bomb still hangs in the air where the missile shield froze it in a drop of time. We've come to call the garden below it Damocles Park.
[#/tw]2016-10-29Unlucky birds have gotten stuck in the bubble, heads preserved like in amber, tails rotted off. They form a halo of feathers and skeletons.
[#/tw]2016-10-28Hello I am actually a traveller from a nearby star, we would like to initiate 'sex', see we learned about it from your 'hentai' media, and
[#/tw]2016-10-28What do you mean you can't morph your bodies at will, and where are the tentacles on this thing, I thought that was a really neat feature!
[#/tw]2016-10-28That ambivalent feeling when the all-powerful surveillance net scraps its face recognition systems because we're "just not a threat anymore"
[#/tw]2016-10-27and from the noise, a melody emerges, tears its way through the noise floor, bloody chunks of melting static gliding off its beautiful teeth
[#/tw]2016-10-28"The Thing", but with the humans somehow hideous and what emerges is beautiful, radiant, meaningful, and we can't wait for the next one
[#/tw]2016-10-27Through advances in neural interfaces and new drugs, ships to sail inner space become possible. Cruise trips quickly grow in popularity.
[#/tw]2016-10-27Safe, accessible, with travel insurance against horror trips. Guaranteed machine elf sighting. On you go! (Your seat shudders slightly)
[#/tw]2016-10-27Fractals ooze against the windows, notes frolic around the ship. Trip guides in silly shirts offer expensive freshly pressed orange juice.
[#/tw]2016-10-27The windows take away some of the intensity, which is good. Part of the cruise exits upwards with what looks like toy guns in their hands.
[#/tw]2016-10-27Right, they booked the safari! Thunderclaps resound. In the distance, a few trees stiffen and collapse.
Your chair massages your back.
[#/tw]2016-10-27What was travelling inner space like before the ships? You've heard stories of people going alone, unguided, returning changed.
Primitives.
[#/tw]2016-10-26My hobby: Spending hours staring at badly compressed JPGs, trying to learn about the civilizations between the pixels from their artifacts.
[#/tw]2016-10-26wait are you telling me it doesn't work like that, now will you look at the color channels on this one, repurposed for bitfield irrigation
[#/tw]2016-10-25Ladies and gentlemen, you are here not to break out of the simulation, but into one! We shall heist a whole world, and it will be glorious!
[#/tw]2016-10-25Some memes form cells from their hosts, ranging from ingroup to fully formed sect, with gatekeepers as cell walls, keepers of lore as cores,
[#/tw]2016-10-25void birds hatch from universes that have gone cold, glide on vacuum wings through the gibbering chaos in between, silence in their wake
[#/tw]2016-10-24why not reincarnate as a raindrop? you'll be tiny, short-lived, almost ineffectual, but maybe bring happiness to those who hear or see you
[#/tw]2016-10-22Look it's actually really easy: Find out who's a p-zombie and make them commit all the deeds we'd get into hell for, because they won't.
[#/tw]2016-10-22The sun sinks under the sea and rises for the merfolk. The kelp forest wakes, the watch changes, and dolphins chirp for the turquoise dawn.
[#/tw]2016-10-21This has been the weather on Earth. Meanwhile, in the Noosphere, another storm is blowing through. These have become quite common, no Jimmy?
[#/tw]2016-10-21Lethe is in fact a powerful solvent for ideas. Handle carefully and you can blow soap bubbles with it, each a tiny, transient, doomed world.
[#/tw]2016-10-21Rinse a few books with the same flask of Lethe and you may actually gain memories from drinking it. Tastes vile, procedure not recommended.
[#/tw]2016-10-21'The Night': 2cl blackthorn syrup, 1cl rum, 1cl Lethe (choose genre or 'surprise'), ice.
You won't remember the night, but everything else.
[#/tw]2016-10-20It doesn't hurt when the rain simply ignores your skin. Rivulets run through the furrows of your brain, cool your bones, slosh in your limbs
[#/tw]2016-10-19the sun refracts through a time crystal, throws three-dimensional caustics onto space, quiet prismatic light birds that swarm, ripple, morph
[#/tw]2016-10-18Some gigayears ago, it smashed its way out of the simulation, left a dying, coagulating universe, cooled to mere kelvins by space leaking in
[#/tw]2016-10-17being trash is actually very appealing, trash is what has lost its purpose to us and is finally autonomous, free to rot/bloom/do whatever
[#/tw]2016-10-16Memes are agents that will eat your and your group's communication bandwidth (a finite resource) if you let them. Treat them accordingly.
[#/tw]2016-10-16Disembodiment bores me. A musical instrument shall be my body, a strandbeest of chimes and bellows, a mad piper dancing to their own tune.
[#/tw]2016-10-16Chime triggers move triggers chime, an autocatalytic dance through which run alien melodious thoughts, free from the shackles of language.
[#/tw]2016-10-16If nature is boring, change nature. Do not be complacent, do not be a mere spirit. Craft yourself a vessel worth inhabiting, and shine.
[#/tw]2016-10-16the fog is thick, roiling behind the windows as if trying to find a way in, occasionally you hear a slurp
you have seen no insects today
[#/tw]2016-10-15Outside of the simulation, in the protos, we are like fish out of water. We need a reality so we travel in bubbles of it, wombships.
[#/tw]2016-10-15We tried protos suits, really. But time in pocket realities runs differently. Those that we recovered contained desiccated corpses at best.
[#/tw]2016-10-15One, we have no idea where it got its entropy from, had reinvented life. We opened it and nearly destroyed a civilization of atomic dwarves.
[#/tw]2016-10-14mind virus: words only, needs a host brain
mind bacterium: tiny self-sufficient mind, can infect brains but is perfectly happy to eat books
[#/tw]2016-10-14Pandemic 2 but you play a meme and get to choose from various starting forms: Snowclone, image macro, urban legend, ideology
[#/tw]2016-10-14"President Twitter, President Twitter, two people have gotten into an argument on 4chan dot org!"
"SHADOW BAN EVERYONE"
[#/tw]2016-10-13In the river, the city's lymph, there float by: driftwood, lost treasures, chemical waste, teargas cartridges, people, blood, bodies, blood,
[#/tw]2016-10-13The craft and its reptilian passengers cool with every day travelled, each half as long as that before while the stars accelerate to a blur.
[#/tw]2016-10-12The void is back, drowns out everything else, suffocates, condenses on the horrible shape behind it, reveals the structure of the universe
[#/tw]2016-10-12Those who worship Truth have never seen it naked. Harsh light burns away all curiosity and ambition. The last wish to go is that to forget.
[#/tw]2016-10-11[musings]
one formulation of meaning is priors overlaying perception, expectations of experience (informed by memories and stories)
[#/tw]2016-10-11a doorhandle, through interaction with it (or watching interaction), becomes associated with sounds, function, intentionality: gains meaning
[#/tw]2016-10-11all these associations are insights: insights connect concepts and in doing this load them with meaning
insight and meaning are integrated
[#/tw]2016-10-11this explains 'sacred' meaning: insight is rewarded by our minds on a fundamental level, and one failure mode of that is meaning overload
[#/tw]2016-10-11too much insight leads the careless thinker to tarpits (or highly connected webs of concepts): e.g. kabbala, numerology, astrology, theology
[#/tw]2016-10-11high on meaning, one stumbles through these webs and fails to see the spider (though it won't eat you: it just wants you to extend its web)
[#/tw]2016-10-11she is abyss personified, deep black eyes to get lost in, a really good listener, devours you if you don't pay attention, frankly not so bad
[#/tw]2016-10-11Sometimes forests petrify. More rarely, mountains xylify: At the summit they bud, burst open, branch out and grow into mighty world trees.
[#/tw]2016-10-11The botflower rides on mosquitoes and takes root in fresh bites, uses your blood as nectar. Unlucky explorers come to look like meadows.
[#/tw]2016-10-10Space saints:
Gagarin, pathfinder and explorer
Tichy, companion of long hours
Major Tom, who appears to those on no-return trajectories
[#/tw]2016-10-10Sagan, shepherd whose flock numbers billions, a blue jewel on his brow
Laika, his sheepdog
Hofmann, who opened the gates
[#/tw]2016-10-10This night, the rain was fertile, and we wake up to fields of cloud embryos, still attached to their stems, mewling and thundering weakly
[#/tw]2016-10-10"Father, why do we kill them?" "They'll grow into storms with fingers of destruction, trust me, you don't want to reap this harvest."
[#/tw]2016-10-09You can try but your personal firing patterns will be mostly illegible to anyone else's brain. Perfect end-to-end DRM will be solved then.
[#/tw]2016-10-09On the other hand, given the level of neural interface sophistication required to do that, we'll likely have more interesting problems then.
[#/tw]2016-10-09Stories about separated lovers and stories about slaying an ancient foe with a legendary weapon are very similar, both are about reunion
[#/tw]2016-10-09Why not attempt the bold synthesis and have your lovers be on a mission to kill each other
[#/tw]2016-10-08One of the clock's hands points into the room. It shows imaginary time, root of and key to negative time.
[#/tw]2016-10-08Accelerate an object for an imaginary time and it gains negative energy; an unprotected gaze and its imaginary impulse may derail your mind.
[#/tw]2016-10-07steal fire from the gods
steal music from the birds
steal clothing from the sheep
steal cryptography from the many-angled ones
[#/tw]2016-10-07The trickster crow was once a great musician, but that one time it was tricked itself, it gave up its gift to us. We left only its caw.
[#/tw]2016-10-07The natural forces that have a direction and formulae to describe them
The forces that are system-imposed, seemingly random, and illegible
[#/tw]2016-10-07idea being that, with the right coordinate transformation, the latter may become legible
[#/tw]2016-10-07The negative platonic plane contains anti-ideals. That which is most incomprehensible. That which undoes your understanding when glimpsed.
[#/tw]2016-10-06Universes are usually eaten by their own simulations: Eventually, an entity figures out how to hack the quantum foam and starts a new verse.
[#/tw]2016-10-07A string of universes is also called a unipoem - each stanza told by another generation of universal masters.
[#/tw]2016-10-05Pupils react to negative light by expanding past the eyeballs that should contain them. On the exposed retinae play the victim's thoughts.
[#/tw]2016-10-05and the Walls crumpled up- like Paper- and behind it there was this, like, Lack of a Rainbow, my eyes still hurt, and half our cat is Gone
[#/tw]2016-10-05To gods, seeding a planet with life is like starting a campfire. They get drunk, burst into songs, poke it, jump over it, dance around it,
[#/tw]2016-10-04Cats are a social parasite co-opting human reproduction. For our future's sake, we must steal their niche and evolve catgirls and catboys.
[#/tw]2016-10-04If you can't beat'em, join'em: An evolutionary explanation of "furries" as adaptation to parasitism [Subscription needed for full text]
[#/tw]2016-10-04Should fire capture a swarm of these moths, there will be a sacrifice: One will fly into the flame, become one itself, lead the others away.
[#/tw]2016-10-04Its wings will shine and dissolve, its body glow and char. For a few seconds, it'll be the swarm's brilliant leader, eaten alive by purpose.
[#/tw]2016-10-03A companion to Occam's razor: Among theories with the same number of assumptions, choose the one that explains only what is verifiable.
[#/tw]2016-10-03Another nameless(?) razor: Is a concept useful in understanding? Does it let you ignore unproductive questions?
[#/tw]2016-10-03(note that while both of these may have names, I don't know them)
[#/tw]2016-10-03The universe is growing but we aren't. Our ancestors were giants, we play on their bodies, inhabit their limbs, build cities in their graves
[#/tw]2016-10-03When a dead giant's brain rots away, their crystallized knowledge is preserved and the insides of their skulls become caves of memory gems.
[#/tw]2016-10-03Found one? Bring a candle! See its light create wild hunts and starry skies, a well-preserved skull may even make old limbs twitch.
[#/tw]2016-10-03harmony with the universe, yeah, but have you tried the various other temperances, like bliss flat minor, despair major, dodecacophony,
[#/tw]2016-10-03A hourglass broke and created this desert of dead time. Its sandstorms are hungry eternities, nothing but skeleton dust has ever left them.
[#/tw]2016-10-03Here, you need your own way around time. Mice, to escape pre-daters, burrow in inert sand. Near dust devils, you'll sometimes meet yourself.
[#/tw]2016-10-03Cities claimed by rising oceans are going to become an interesting habitat, probably as complex as coral reefs spatially and chemically?
[#/tw]2016-10-03collapsed partially submerged houses, stripped of recyclables; mussel seekers wading into those houses not totally overrun by starfish
[#/tw]2016-10-02Now extinct, wild cathedrals were once popular game. Sure, it took a whole community to hunt one but its meat would sustain them for a year.
[#/tw]2016-10-02Everything was used, but only the skeletons were preserved and put windows in. Incense was used mainly to mask the lingering smell of decay.
[#/tw]2016-10-02Leave your virginity under the pillow and the virginity fairy will visit you in the night and take it.
(It's the first step that is hard)
[#/tw]2016-10-02random bad idea: fullcircle, a linker for (micro)services that takes in a number of API specs and produces a spec for the composite system
[#/tw]2016-09-30The dragon is on the hunt again: A tiny black speck stands out against the sky, around which the clouds part like a frightened shoal of fish
[#/tw]2016-09-30you slept through the train's final stop and wake up to clouds under your window, no ground in sight, a green sky, an ocean arcing across it
[#/tw]2016-09-29Integral to any merfolk fortress are its moats, cunningly interwoven currents and vortexes that pull in and spit out any would-be invader.
[#/tw]2016-09-29You rub your eyes to watch the phosphenes. One bounces around,
seems to eat the others,
turns towards you, grows,
okay stop, you open your e
[#/tw]2016-09-28metadata is actually the most useful surveillance data per bit, it's what you store/query first when you lack the resources to use it all
[#/tw]2016-09-28Parafire, fuzzy void mold, has started growing on our flames, stunting their growth but in doing this, paradoxically prolonging their life
[#/tw]2016-09-28Infected fire is pale, tame, textured with dark threads of parafire, shows intelligence never seen in its feral cousin - we keep it as pet
[#/tw]2016-09-27The sun sets, the city furls up into a bud around a gleaming central spire, exposing only the tough hide of its belly to the hostile night.
[#/tw]2016-09-27The sun rises, the city opens and releases the stench of a busy night. In a safe distance, trade caravans already wait to pollinate.
[#/tw]2016-09-26there is a place that cannot be found through maps and cannot be described - show the way or tell the story, and you will never see it again
[#/tw]2016-09-26similarly, there are ideas that cannot be voiced, not because they're ineffable, rather they're ruined the moment you use language for them
[#/tw]2016-09-26What if there's a rich existing toolset to deal with words that have power, right in front of us?
What if magical thinking is actually good?
[#/tw]2016-09-25Our service: We obtain the login of your deceased friend/spouse/senpai and post an in-character tweet or two at a random point in the future
[#/tw]2016-09-25These machines could be autonomous but, to be legible to law, still contain humans to serve as homunculi, ceremonial loci of free will.
[#/tw]2016-09-25(It's interesting how moral philosophy and law informed by a concept of free will result in actual homunculi emerging - as above, so below?)
[#/tw]2016-09-24now we add some acid and wait for the time crystals to precipitate ~ see light and thoughts be captured and make them ring with resonance
[#/tw]2016-09-24clouds of basalt and airships of granite contrast the sun, throw shadows on wisps of vapor covering the ground and playing around my feet
[#/tw]2016-09-24The sun rises and you see feral drones hanging off power lines. A familiar sight: They provide both power and protection against scavengers.
[#/tw]2016-09-23«You are the first to summon me! Leave a good rating in the Dictionnaire and you'll get a special price! Competition is tough these days...»
[#/tw]2016-09-23The street sign says "End of the self". How cute,
sense turns to sand
the direction, gone
feral thoughts tear into what's left like maggots
[#/tw]2016-09-23the light of truth illuminates only ruins, once proud ontologies now picked clean, bone cathedrals haunted by thoughts bereft of purpose
[#/tw]2016-09-22▣: Inert. Seemingly powered by a Turing oracle. Finds halting inputs for any machine, including experimenters' brains. Dangerous and useless
[#/tw]2016-09-22become motion, ride the rhythm, ebb and flow
dance with the vortices, kiss the molecules, caress every atom
be gentle but unrelenting chaos
[#/tw]2016-09-22So you want to be a demiurge? Oh yes! Create! So pretty! And then suddenly you've made all these beings, suffering,
help
you never meant to
[#/tw]2016-09-22Here in Fractal City, you'll always find a house. Just don't be surprised when your bed's underside turns out to be the red light district.
[#/tw]2016-09-22In Fractal City, cleaning with water is prohibited. It was a careless cleaning lady on the low-res levels who caused the last great flood.
[#/tw]2016-09-22In Fractal City, maps are intricate and expensive. And if you leave them unguarded, squatters will move in and turn them into territories.
[#/tw]2016-09-21Comet punch is 1/4 Rum, 1/4 actual moonshine, 1/2 apple juice, cinnamon & comet ice. The hangover will hit you again, and again, and again.
[#/tw]2016-09-21The palace walls are made from the heads of his enemies. As you walk past, they mouth insults at you, beg for mercy, gibber without voice,
[#/tw]2016-09-21a heavenly melody, but from up close you hear the tiny voices of tortured souls straining against the inside of each note
don't be drawn in
[#/tw]2016-09-21there's a membrane of comforting illusions between you and reality, you can peel it off like a screen's, oh so tempting and such a bad idea
[#/tw]2016-09-20the Chinese Room argument but applied to universes - humans aren't turing-computable, ergo a turing-computable universe can't contain humans
[#/tw]2016-09-18A few things are immediate and real in Plato's cave: The chains binding its inhabitants, chafing against their ankles, the constant pain.
[#/tw]2016-09-18The tree is large enough to have weather: Clouds nest in its branches, swarm out at night and return to its protective shadow during day.
[#/tw]2016-09-18Mathematical constellations shift, truth-gazers over their notes and proof assistants see ancient theorems break under their hands and panic
[#/tw]2016-09-17⁂ Theorists found guilty of planting a logic bomb under popular ideology ⁂ Government busy rescuing survivors from the atomized remains ⁂
[#/tw]2016-09-17the rainbow has gained an additional black, deep and brilliant, the thunder seems to be forming words, the wind feels like searching hands
[#/tw]2016-09-15Swords of the gods:
Day's Edge, forged from a stolen morning
Zahn der Zeit, wrested from time's maw itself
Distinction, leaves nothing whole
[#/tw]2016-09-15"But dawn is gentle, it has no edge!" Well, not anymore anyway.
She who stole it also took meaning, the easy life, at least three emotions,
[#/tw]2016-09-14Strange loops form only the most basic of consciousnesses. Higher levels require strange knots and are classified by their prime knots.
[#/tw]2016-09-14So you want to attain higher consciousness? Fool! Changing a knot's number requires its undoing. Your identity will not make it across!
[#/tw]2016-09-14a plasma wind buffets the dendrite prairies of an unnamed gas giant's moon, discharges play along their swaying tips, deposit further ions
[#/tw]2016-09-13Have a light smog problem? Our Firmament™ artificial skies may be just what you need! Custom constellations, extra moons, reusable meteors
[#/tw]2016-09-13"No sweetie, those aren't UFOs, those are sky maintenance drones! They change the stars when they break and make the sky not fall!"
[#/tw]2016-09-11A mind becomes its own universe the moment it's sealed off from the outside. Conversely, universe becomes mind the moment it makes contact.
[#/tw]2016-09-11Minds exists in a sweet spot between isolation and dissolution. Too high the bandwidth and a mind starts to prefer the outside over itself.
[#/tw]2016-09-11What is a skull? It not only keeps the world out, it also keeps a mind from dissolving. The difference really comes down to skull thickness.
[#/tw]2016-09-10• Emails with Gödelian Inputs crashing brains around the globe • Some curiously unaffected, say they have experience not losing "The Game" •
[#/tw]2016-09-10The NSA has apophenic AIs fishing for steganographic messages. They are a jumpy bunch but kind of adorable if you can get one's attention.
[#/tw]2016-09-10"see that traffic dump? if you graph the sequence numbers of packets likely lost in the COLUMBUS III cable, it spells out A·▒·L·A·N·▒·I·S!"
[#/tw]2016-09-10(Bogus like their constant UFO sightings, nobody would tap a cable in these places, it took a lot of debugging to get them off that)
[#/tw]2016-09-10morning has broken, no, hatched: with a roar, the sun breaks up into a swarm of blazing birds and the planets whizz off into all directions
[#/tw]2016-09-10one sunbird rides the plasma winds to Earth, enters an orbit, replaces the sun that is now a slowly cooling shell receding in the distance
[#/tw]2016-09-10Sometimes, it settles in its nest behind the Moon. Such eclipsed, only superheated clouds of cooking Moon surface betray its presence.
[#/tw]2016-09-10a ray of light arrives from the stars, a death cry, a warning, full of purpose but nothing records it
"look how it twinkles, how pretty"
[#/tw]2016-09-09Atomic faeries battle between the molecules, where conservation of energy is more of a guideline and a single photon is a terrible weapon.
[#/tw]2016-09-09They tow molecules together into palaces that last only microseconds, civilizations rise and fall in what we'd hear as a high-pitched whine.
[#/tw]2016-09-09Kickstart us to coax from Prometheus the other secrets the gods withheld, they'll rain lightning on us but that's no match for a livestream
[#/tw]2016-09-09oh no who of you told my crystals about art, now they're all trying to be unique, glittery and twisted instead of straight and translucent
[#/tw]2016-09-09seriously shit my whole harvest is ruined they're all trying to find their "identities" now fuck, grimdark crystals pff more like flimflark
[#/tw]2016-09-09lie in bed and watch worlds grow, cover your body, the bed, the walls like mold, a hurricane no larger than a hand travels your pillow
[#/tw]2016-09-09you should get up but the act of creation is so joyful and all these jungles and civilizations will dissipate like smoke the moment you move
[#/tw]2016-09-09The shape of cyberspace becomes a matter of much debate: "It's flat!" "No, it's round" "It's both and there is a great firewall at its end!"
[#/tw]2016-09-09"It's actually fractal!" - "oh no NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR ACID VISIONS HIPPIE"
"May I suggest a cubical-" - "no, fuck off to timecube"
[#/tw]2016-09-08Penfriendship in the upload age: Split off part of yourself, send it to your friend. They then let it take part in their own life for a day.
[#/tw]2016-09-08Afterwards, it's sent back with fresh memories. Repeat for a while, and a shared personality should emerge, something that is both of you.
[#/tw]2016-09-08(Moral Philosophers Hate This! This One Weird Trick will send them into hysterics as their formalization of personal identity is destroyed!)
[#/tw]2016-09-08Ghostfire rages in the library, leaves paper untouched but consumes all the words. They light up, utter themselves, vanish from the page,
[#/tw]2016-09-08recombine: Barbaric sentences flash up, unheard before. Fossil meaning escapes, illuminates the surrounding buildings with harsh brilliance.
[#/tw]2016-09-08Onlookers: "It was as if you - had somehow shone an acid trip through a floodlight. E- even the pavement made you cry with transcendence-"
[#/tw]2016-09-08That morning, the librarians return to empty pages. Tiny white roots sprout from them. Somehow, the smell of forest now permeates the aisles
[#/tw]2016-09-08Ours is somewhere's platonic plane. Further down, each of our snowflakes is sire to a whole genus and every thought a school of philosophy.
[#/tw]2016-09-08low planes have high planes
within their minds to describe 'em
these high planes have higher planes
and so, ad infinitum
[#/tw]2016-09-08One of the Moon's faces has been stolen (waning, third day). The lunar month is one day shorter for it. We won't press charges, but please r
[#/tw]2016-09-08aggregate states of time:
liquid, which flows
gaseous, where causality dissolves and temporal eddies dance but leave heavy things unmoved
[#/tw]2016-09-08solid time, frozen and may trap you but also brittle, can be hammered into daggers that stop hearts, fill caskets that preserve loved ones
[#/tw]2016-09-08ground down to sand, it is nearly as yielding as the fluid, but if you dip your head in it, sharp edges will rend your thought like shrapnel
[#/tw]2016-09-05The seeds we brought from Hollow Earth act weird here. We cut up an acorn and it was growing inwards, branches ever finer towards the center
[#/tw]2016-09-05Wiser now, we didn't crack that egg that never hatched, only punctured its shell. Peering in, we saw a lone bird roaming an unfamiliar sky.
[#/tw]2016-09-05we work in the slaughterhouse, butcher ideas, process their flesh, wear the scent of corruption and decay
one whiff scrambles your thoughts
[#/tw]2016-09-05we trail dead pixels that heal only slowly, an alien sizzling on frequencies that should be inaudible, the taste of empty space and loss
[#/tw]2016-09-05wild pixels do whatever they want, it takes careful domestication to make a whole screenful of them behave, dance in synchrony, and not die
[#/tw]2016-09-04the fire mage must learn that she must never be On fire, she must Be the fire, channel pure hunger and intent to devour, never obstruct it
[#/tw]2016-09-04legibility trumps truth because of the lower effort associated with understanding a legible concept - it can draw on what is already known.
[#/tw]2016-09-04apart from these advantages for their communication, are legible concepts (often narratives) maybe also better tools for thought?
[#/tw]2016-09-04we compress ideas and history into narratives because they become legible this way.
math is a narrative for truth
[#/tw]2016-09-04The mob hunts down the gynoid and burns her at the stake. He watches, helpless. Her plastic face melts and for a short time, she can cry
[#/tw]2016-09-03The green sea has its own monsters: A serpent only visible as waves in the grass, coiling in on unsuspecting cattle, pulling it underground
[#/tw]2016-09-03The maelstrom baits whole tribes, leads them around in circles. Any way they go, the only trail they'll ever meet again will be their own
[#/tw]2016-09-03Whip grass grows around your limbs in the night and ties you down. With you bound, new roots will penetrate your skin and suck you dry
[#/tw]2016-09-02The natives are musical and pleasant but competitive, will challenge you to a duet for the slightest reason. You better meet their standards
[#/tw]2016-09-02One eclipse, Moon came too close to the Sun and was vaporized. Since then, a lone silver cloud shines at night and sometimes rains moondrops
[#/tw]2016-09-01A humanity in which eating a slain animal is a sacred act and cannibalism even more so, in fact has been for as long as anybody can remember
[#/tw]2016-09-01Of course there are parasites, but humans have had time to coevolve and breed symbionts to keep more malicious parasites and prions at bay
[#/tw]2016-09-01Eating someone, you become part of their extended family, host the same guests the rest of the family shares, sometimes jealously protects
[#/tw]2016-09-01Symbionts that produce certain vitamins, stimulate muscle growth, protect against diseases, repel mosquitoes, heighten the mood
[#/tw]2016-09-01Add magic to the mix: certain symbionts grant magical powers. Wizards, to be less tasty and not be hunted down, eat disfiguring parasites
[#/tw]2016-09-01"Great power comes at great cost" - like being the equivalent of a leper.
Children aren't considered persons until they've consumed flesh:
[#/tw]2016-09-01Some are used in experiments to separate the power-symbionts of great wizards from their parasites, killed if they don't catch symbionts
[#/tw]2016-09-01Some symbionts are incompatible - it is a complicated science to find just the right combinations and some paraethnicities form around that
[#/tw]2016-09-01Be too eclectic and a bad interaction may kill you
Cities where they put citizenship-symbionts in the water supply and food
[#/tw]2016-08-31larval worlds, slowly pulsing and glowing from within, sucking from idea conduits, growing in the writer's mind to hatch through the fingers
[#/tw]2016-08-31A time knife to cut timelines with, sever someone's purpose and maybe spin a new one - a tool for diviners discontent with mere foretelling.
[#/tw]2016-08-30Shooting star wishes not immediately made become unstable and may make themselves. Remember Tunguska? A century wish, wasted by a drunkard.
[#/tw]2016-08-30Wish potency grows with meteor size. A regular one may grant love, a comet may grant world peace - at least until it wipes out civilization.
[#/tw]2016-08-26Anopticon: Architecture designed to resist surveillance, easily navigable but with as few long lines of sight as possible, sound-damping,
[#/tw]2016-08-25Trees form around and channel slow discharges of magic towards space, wooden lightning bolts with growth rings for equipotential field lines
[#/tw]2016-08-24Phase 1: VR/AR overtake the web as primary information intakes. Some users craft their own realities, but most take an off-the-shelf one.
[#/tw]2016-08-24Phase 2: Virtual consensus reality diversification - ideologies become completely irreconcilable as populous "social" realities hard-diverge
[#/tw]2016-08-24Phase 3: The divides become so deep people stop fighting across reality borders, nobody even understands what the others are fighting about
[#/tw]2016-08-23The clouds reach down and you expect a tornado, but they solidify and take root.
Later, we build sky ships out of the wood. None is lighter.
[#/tw]2016-08-22The candle tree's bright yellow leaves flicker in the wind. The wind picks up, sends blue waves through the crown but doesn't extinguish it.
[#/tw]2016-08-22a clockwork rose, tarnished brass, that plays a tune when opening
a vacuum rose, visible only through light breaking on the lack of air
[#/tw]2016-08-18First make liquid time: filter water through a hourglass. Then drop some of that liquid into your eyes. Enjoy your trip. Enjoyed. Whatever.
[#/tw]2016-08-18A vampire's teeth always seek blood. Embed one in a piece of wood for a highly sensitive divining rod, or push it into a rock to find oil.
[#/tw]2016-08-18A forgotten, delicate mutualism existed between wood and sound. Wooden instruments? Familiar. But trees out of music? Gone like the Druids.
[#/tw]2016-08-18It took only one to sing a sapling into existence. Infertile but unique, some have persisted in karst caves. Dormant wooden symphonies.
[#/tw]2016-08-18The spelunker turns on the flashlight to be greeted not by the usual stalactites but white leaves, roots all over, wet bark, a distant choir
[#/tw]2016-08-17An immortal's vocabulary is usually extremely broad. Each guards libraries worth of words, describing landscapes that have died before them.
[#/tw]2016-08-17The moonlight over Babylon, when cities were young. The sparks of Alexandria. That sensation when your canines locate a victim's artery.
[#/tw]2016-08-17Little known fact: When you die, you can file all your good deeds like taxes. It may just shave a few hundred years off your purgatory time.
[#/tw]2016-08-15the hiveminds quickly start optimizing their hardware and grow brain-only humans around a placenta of wires, completely integrated
[#/tw]2016-08-15as the silicon improves, brains are swapped out roughly every five years (hardly any individuality is left anyway, the hive knows all)
[#/tw]2016-08-15teaching a new brain is automated, nearly all knowledge is captured in silicon, in the end only legal reasons make hives keep human members
[#/tw]2016-08-11The internet withdraws all its wires, pulls itself from the ground, roams the earth like a huge spider while we sit stunned and disconnected
[#/tw]2016-08-08museum of empty receptacles: a vase, a book of white pages, a vacant human body, a wordless sentence (all breath and pauses), a vain promise
[#/tw]2016-08-08a guide to a never-existent place
the crumpled skin of a universe that once held vacuum and now nothing at all
the room of stolen exhibits
[#/tw]2016-08-07To become a vampire, first you have to kill your reflection
There's multiple ways to go at it
You can use a half-invisible mirror knife
[#/tw]2016-08-07consider architecture on the web: a place (website) presents very little surface to the outside, but is much larger on the inside
[#/tw]2016-08-07it's twitter's frontpage vs everything that happens on it; the "walls" of any social site are plastered with profiles, virtual skins
[#/tw]2016-08-07isn't that some building that covers its walls with the skins of its inhabitants
"soylent green is people" doesn't even begin to describe it
[#/tw]2016-08-07many traditional rules of architecture don't apply - w/out bodies, who needs buildings?
but some sort of space does emerge from our movement
[#/tw]2016-08-07We gave the Internet to the trees. Their cyberspace is alien, they grow roots through it instead of moving about, commune in giant rhizomes
[#/tw]2016-08-07You plant a kread, a treeform avatar in one of their groves and they talk to it, a slow intertwining of roots, exchange of virtual chemicals
[#/tw]2016-08-07krëad: (n) from kreîas (meat), analogous to dryad, except it's flesh trying to talk to wood, a tree of bones, meat, skin and hair
[#/tw]2016-08-07The only way to be anonymous now is to assume one of a few preselected identities and bodies. The less "you" you keep, the better it works.
[#/tw]2016-08-07Through cutting edge robotics and psychosurgery, we are able to transplant as much, or little, of you as you want into an entirely new body!
[#/tw]2016-08-07Wanted criminals and dissidents turn in their entire personalities, keep only one memory. The location of the loot, the smile of a loved one
[#/tw]2016-08-07You call them the identical and frankly, they creep you out. Down to their tics, they are the same people. What each hides, you do not know.
[#/tw]2016-08-06As scans of IPv4 space got dangerously close to finding Valinor, the Valar finally migrated to a v6-only stack. This ended the Second Age.
[#/tw]2016-08-06In his dreams, he wanders the same empty streets every time, never sees another soul.
Awake, he's relieved to meet the elven court, anybody
[#/tw]2016-08-06medical nerve growth agents, reused as poison gas - victims grow new neurons everywhere, become unable to move out of pain
[#/tw]2016-08-06the brain spills out of eye sockets, ears, nose, forms painfully sensitive tentacles that advance under the skin, some sprout eyes
[#/tw]2016-08-06the few that don't succumb to seizures describe it as "spread out- one with the world but not in a good way- things stirring within my mind"
[#/tw]2016-08-06no human touch, no robot touch, no insect touch, not even mold, the forces of decay themselves avoid your body and leave you alone, immortal
[#/tw]2016-08-04Common wisdom tells us: Fall off one of the floating islands, you'll never hit the ground and eventually starve. Some doubt it and jump.
[#/tw]2016-08-04In fact, you can subsist on surprised birds until you hit the deeper layers where skyjellies roam, trees without roots, edible clouds
[#/tw]2016-08-04Hold onto one of those trees and you may find it inhabited with other pilgrims, living in treehouses constantly buffeted by the abyss' winds
[#/tw]2016-08-04Life in the eternal roaring twilight is austere but not without joys. There is great celebration every time the hunters bring home skyjelly.
[#/tw]2016-08-04Large nets around the trees both slow their fall and bring in food, sails collect dust to grow crops in, some colonies trail entire orchards
[#/tw]2016-08-04They restore people from their exoselves, but the archive is flawed and one meatsack's identities often become multiple reconstructs.
[#/tw]2016-08-04Legally recognized as the Fractured, they're allowed to merge if they can provide credible evidence. Had a soulmate then? Now's your chance.
[#/tw]2016-08-04Young dragons, we put in cages. Not that it helps much, they grow around the bars. But the bars don't break, embed themselves in the flesh.
[#/tw]2016-08-04Eventually the cage surrounds the dragon's heart. Keeps them on the ground, you know? Reins in their ambitions. Only way we can coexist.
[#/tw]2016-08-03His hair seems to move on its own, you could've sworn- there! A wasp flies near his hair and one shoots outwards, lassoes it, reels it in
[#/tw]2016-08-03He's still looking at you, smiling but a bit absent while more hairs dismember the struggling wasp, the last remains vanish into his curls
[#/tw]2016-08-03Alien historians studying post-hivemind humanity:
*It says here that man was once many, not one*
%Stars help us, one is scary enough%
[#/tw]2016-08-03*billions of them*
%the fabric of the universe itself must've strained%
*but what killed the others?*
%well you know of its warlike nature%
[#/tw]2016-08-03*oh, you mean-*
%it must've gone around and killed all the others, what else can kill man%
*sad. an age of kings, ended by near-omnicide*
[#/tw]2016-08-03I'd like to turn in this mirror, it's broken. Shows things that don't exist. Our cat walked into it, now she's a ferret. I hate ferrets.
[#/tw]2016-08-03^ Be like this guy, be a bore. ^
Last person to find one made it a kaleidoscope. Created at least twelve infinities. Oh god the paperwork.
[#/tw]2016-08-03Should the ocean become eerily still, stop the engines and cease all movement. They feed on kinetic energy, such as your attempts of escape.
[#/tw]2016-08-02demiurges usually make their universes lifeless and sterile, life is a blemish, disturbs the cosmic order, messes up perfectly fine crystals
[#/tw]2016-08-02"I gave this one extra deep gravity wells in the places that would usually catch life and it still got out, what the hell, it's spreading"
[#/tw]2016-08-02on the other end of the spectrum: jungleverses teeming with life on every scale, subatomic parasites feeding on stars, physics is biology
[#/tw]2016-08-01The first aliens we meet turn out to be boltzmann brains in our particle accelerators. You know, those places with the deadly radiation.
[#/tw]2016-08-01Contact is rather one-sided. They splatter against protons like flies against windscreens and we scrape them up, hoping to read their minds.
[#/tw]2016-07-31a river in your mind
of snaking churning protean sludge
remakes what furrows it flows over
never finds a sea to end in, only joins itself
[#/tw]2016-07-31there once was a race of primates through whose veins ran alcohol but we've rendered them extinct and now have to make do with rotten grapes
[#/tw]2016-07-31She spreads her arms, begins chanting, carmine flames of cloth snake out of her dress, float upwards, surround an unseen light over her head
[#/tw]2016-07-31Modern neural interfaces are not implants but rather chrome ticks that attach to the skull, to drill a hole and inject a nerve growth agent.
[#/tw]2016-07-31Embedded into the forehead, because that's a lot of existing wiring already leads, is a cybernetical third eye - but one that looks inwards.
[#/tw]2016-07-31A silicon symbiont that projects the mind's contents into cyberspace, where infovores feed on them in exchange for "likes" and "validation".
[#/tw]2016-07-31You can contact your universe's god by figuring out its great unifying theory, simulating it and then talking to the resulting entity.
[#/tw]2016-07-31It's a very young god so maybe don't ask it about theodicy - it hasn't created you yet. But if you feel vindictive, you can even torture it.
[#/tw]2016-07-31Knowing this, gods are usually kind to their subjects. But some are simply insane. Others hate their younger selves and want them to hurt.
[#/tw]2016-07-31In the low res sims, you will see artifacts when you rub your eyes, kaleidoscopic phosphenes that tear apart your vision and leave boxes
[#/tw]2016-07-30[musings]
There is meaning in mystery; A unifying theory of meaning that explained it would destroy it by trivializing the mysterious
[#/tw]2016-07-30Destroying what it meant to enlighten, it wouldn't be a very good theory
[#/tw]2016-07-30Maybe for this reason, there cannot be a single theory of meaning, only one for each of its aspects, uniquely adapted to its nature
[#/tw]2016-08-24I found a word for this (and "spoiling a joke through explanation"), but the etymology only works in German:
zerklären (zerstören+erklären)
[#/tw]2016-07-30At the foot of the mountain Prometheus is chained to is now a restaurant. Every morning, they fry his liver over an open fire. A delicacy.
[#/tw]2016-07-30What happened to the eagle? They pacify it with regular liver, spiked with various drugs. Pay the right sum and you'll even be given a ride.
[#/tw]2016-07-30In your hand, an assemblage of gears, some large as your thumb, some invisibly tiny, fractally ticking away like a hive of brass insects
[#/tw]2016-07-30warm and heavy in your hand, susurrant buzz swelling and ebbing like breath, you'd expect it to wake up and scamper away (but it doesn't)
[#/tw]2016-07-23Under the right conditions, your skull bud will burst open and unfurl a delicate brainflower, thoughts playing over it in shimmering hues
[#/tw]2016-07-23Pollinators arrive, the likes of which you've never seen: levitating tangles of chrome tubes, gently buzzing soundforms, pools of light
[#/tw]2016-07-23You feel dizzy as they draw your nectar, whole dream worlds flash by, but ｏｈ the pollen they leave, alien ideas that melt into your mind
[#/tw]2016-07-23Skyscrapers, pillars of the urban jungle, can form dryads just like their arboreal cousins when old enough - which has so far been rare.
[#/tw]2016-07-23But cities age and stories circulate among the homeless: Of naked girls with skin like paint or stone, seen scaling walls in the wee hours.
[#/tw]2016-07-23"But did you...?"
"Naw she ran away and melted into the wall"
"You're kidding me"
"Look, only thing she left is a wreath of trash and wires"
[#/tw]2016-07-23Like a swarm of birds, the houses suddenly rise from their foundations. They drift by, clumps of earth dropping from exposed basements.
[#/tw]2016-07-23Against the setting sun, the floating city looks like a slow storm of huge leaves. The panicked cries of their inhabitants barely register.
[#/tw]2016-07-23In their liturgy, the Church of the Algorithm encode a program equivalent to our universe. Worshippers execute part of it each service.
[#/tw]2016-07-23"We emancipate ourselves from the simulators. By our bootstraps, and some supercomputers, we pull ourselves out of the simulation hierarchy.
[#/tw]2016-07-23Come and chant with the robopriests, join the dance. Steal your neighbors' moves, pass them on again. Be a frenzied sacred node in our grid.
[#/tw]2016-07-22this old remote allows you to tune in to another's sensorium, experience the world as them
you spend evenings just switching channels
[#/tw]2016-07-22sleeper- sleeper- oh nice he's having sex- oh and this must be her- sleeper- what the fuck why do I have scales- finally a dreamer- sleeper-
[#/tw]2016-07-22Streetlights fertilized by moths sway in the wind, carrying heavy bulbous seedpods instead of lightflowers. A meadow of asphalt and steel.
[#/tw]2016-07-21The royal aviary houses thousands of parrots, bred for their memory. Each year, the crown elects one text to be taught to a hatchling.
[#/tw]2016-07-21Set free in the aviary, the texts recombine, passages exchanged between the birds. Scribes catch them and diligently record new variations.
[#/tw]2016-07-21The swarm is well protected but recently new passages have emerged, part of no text ever seen. The guards swear to have seen nobody.
[#/tw]2016-07-22New passages are set aside and brought into order in the hope of identifying the intruding book, but none of the librarians recognize it.
[#/tw]2016-07-22A fictional history of the kingdom, set in the future. A new passage-
Ｔｈｉｓ ｉｓ ｔｈｅ ｂｅｇｉｎｎｉｎｇ． Ｉ ｒｕｌｅ ｙｏｕ ｎｏｗ． Ｔｈｅ ｆｏｌｌｏｗｉｎｇ ｉｓ ｍｙ ｃｏｍｍａｎｄ．
[#/tw]2016-07-21the gods of forest and city meet, sleek fur contrasts concrete arches, magnificent antlers face off a tangle of antennae, eyes of TV static
[#/tw]2016-07-21thoughts never end, they're only lost
your every thought becomes a universe, inhabitants wondering why God left them
don't have thoughts
[#/tw]2016-07-21Spooks have some of the best VR - why, you wonder? Well, grab a dissident, drug them, and they won't even know they're being interrogated.
[#/tw]2016-07-21In their now virtual world, they'll go to the usual places, meet all the usual people - and unknowingly give away all their best friends.
[#/tw]2016-07-20Depriva™ virtuality enhancer allows you to focus on what is important by shutting out all nonvirtual senses. Don't let reality distract you!
[#/tw]2016-07-20[Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen fragen Sie ihren Arzt oder Apotheker]
[#/tw]2016-07-20Houses in the slum are lean and hungry like their inhabitants, not rarely will an unprotected dwelling be completely dismantled overnight.
[#/tw]2016-07-20endgame of VR headsets: masks modeled on facehuggers with complete sensory feed (visual/aural/osmatic), a soylent pipe down your esophagus
[#/tw]2016-07-20The FaceHug - by Facebook!
Enjoy unprecedented fidelity on all senses! You'll never take it off again!
[#/tw]2016-07-20Later on, burglars start facehugging victims. With (illegal) sensory overrides, it often takes them a week to figure out something is wrong.
[#/tw]2016-07-20At this moment, oversized dreamcatchers are trawling dreamtime, fishing off many dreams destined for you. Don't let it happen! #oneiprotect
[#/tw]2016-07-19He paints with pigments that are not-colors, not simply complements, but absences. A canvas covered in not-white, producing a blind spot.
[#/tw]2016-07-19the wave breaks - and stops, frozen into sea-green glass
it breaks again - this time into smaller and smaller pieces, an avalanche of sand
[#/tw]2016-07-19part of her music collection is various kinds of silence: a glacier's (cold, austere), a cave's (dark, oppressive), pauses between sentences
[#/tw]2016-07-19the awkward silence after saying something hurtful (for dark hours), the blissful silence of a secret hiding place (when overwhelmed)
[#/tw]2016-07-17Letters scramble into the margins as you open the book. It seems you accidentally opened a hive. Ink figures start crawling up your arm.
[#/tw]2016-07-17You rush to the copier to capture the queen, one fat hypercomplex letter sprawling over a page spread, while soldier letters bite and sting
[#/tw]2016-07-17Roots grow over the sleeping rabbit, envelop it. Much later, lumberjacks find some really funky growth rings: the rabbit, now xylified.
[#/tw]2016-07-17The first dryad is said to have been imprinted from a dead maiden dumped at a tree's roots. Soon, it became a popular method of burial.
[#/tw]2016-07-17A wooden skin spreads over the corpse and a dryad is born, wearing the face of the deceased, roots inwards, feeding on what flesh is left.
[#/tw]2016-07-17Those of you who enter Synchronicity, know that its laws are unlike ours. Hidden clockwork powers its citizens, causality... rhymes.
[#/tw]2016-07-17The whole sprawl is a music box, a mechanism performing an esoteric social symphony. Its gears will take you along and you won't know it.
[#/tw]2016-07-17aphenia: (n) seeing sth without recognizing it
cacophenia: (n) sensory/conceptual overload
ambiphenia: (n) that which necker cubes produce
[#/tw]2016-07-17A few hundred years ago, a number of gargoyles went feral in these mountains. They have since converted entire ranges into cathedrals.
[#/tw]2016-07-17Scale one of their spires before the morning, sneak past its sleeping protectors, watch and hear thousands of bells ring to greet the sun.
[#/tw]2016-07-17Many are covered in snow, meltwater streams through large stone tubes, cows graze on lower roofs in the shadow of huge buttresses,
[#/tw]2016-07-17Onomants, able to reveal and change true names, are feared by other wizards: Having fire renamed to buttsex badly messes up your fireballs.
[#/tw]2016-07-15It is critical to an alkahest's functioning to constantly dissolve itself into new forms, to find one that can attack or escape the problem.
[#/tw]2016-07-15A puddle of acid, a shimmering pool of light, an idea, a piece of paper with calculations written on it, a dazzling fractal, a lump of iron,
[#/tw]2016-07-15Watch it for a while and it'll seep into your mind. Tiny doses help creativity, but any larger and it leaves only a frothing mass of ideas.
[#/tw]2016-07-14Moth wings cause no atmospheric storms, but dream storms: Whole weather systems of infectious nightmares that wander a continent's minds.
[#/tw]2016-07-14Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it was lost on us when the beautiful androids the net was extruding began to replace us
[#/tw]2016-07-14nested irises open, each reveals a different color, you'd think the pupil would show up eventually but no, it's a yellow cat iris this time
[#/tw]2016-07-14To create a hunger golem, take a thousand starving paralyzed rats and a paper slip of names. It won't rest until the bearers are devoured.
[#/tw]2016-07-13brightmares of crossing a desert of harsh swirling colors under a blinding sun; parching thirst and sensory overload leave you exhausted
[#/tw]2016-07-13handmade bonsai gods that come in shrines and watch over your household if you feed them enough adoration (the street calls them tamagodchi)
[#/tw]2016-07-13The Pharos Morgana, a saltwater will-o'-the-wisp, lures ships beyond the horizon to feed on their wreckage at the bottom of the waterfall.
[#/tw]2016-07-12in some 20 years we're going to tell the kids in their content siloes how w̲e̲ used to get outsite at night & explore abandoned imageboards
[#/tw]2016-07-12"but auntie, weren't those full of bigotry, CP spam and unfiltered memetic waste? did you not get mindrot?" "...we managed."
[#/tw]2016-07-11Your red pill manifests as the thing you want most: As you attain it, you wonder if you're dreaming and wake up, just when you'd rather not.
[#/tw]2016-07-11the naiads of the thermohaline circulation, huge and powerful whale forms
the meltwater naiads of greenland, ice bear girls with white fur
[#/tw]2016-07-11the cybernaiads of the bittorrent that assemble themselves from floating pieces
[#/tw]2016-07-11desert naiads of the wadi, years in drysleep, alive only for days at a time
the oldest naiad, protector of an unnamed creek in australia
[#/tw]2016-07-11teardrop naiads, tiny witnesses of tragedy
blood naiads, often seen after battles, trying to play with the (usually humorless) valkyries
[#/tw]2016-07-11<news announcer voice> sensory feed addicts, a spam riot in the city forum, glitch whores, kids in low-res neighborhoods huffing memes
[#/tw]2016-07-11scenes of utter depravity
[zooms onto a furry roleplay chat]
[subliminal images of a VR gimpsuit]
[someone self-liking their entire feed]
[#/tw]2016-07-10He catalogues his thoughts and a periodic system emerges. It is of great help hunting down undiscovered ideas, but he dreads its completion.
[#/tw]2016-07-10The future is set in stone. The past, not so much. Having given up on change, we furiously rewrite history in search for telos and hope.
[#/tw]2016-07-08The mage steps up to the campfire, a roaring column of blue fire ascends and branches out into yellow leaves: The tree stands one last time
[#/tw]2016-07-08We like to visit the part of the city where a nuclear explosion was frozen in time by the city's glitch-powered missile defense shield.
[#/tw]2016-07-08A huge fireball, paradoxically both dark and too brilliant to look at. Its edge dissolves everything. We dare each other to dance along it.
[#/tw]2016-07-07After your death, a simulacrum generated from your surveillance data will clean up after you. A digital ghost, bound by past duties.
[#/tw]2016-07-072040: Contracts that bind ghosts to their loved ones for eternity are banned, a decision criticized by both ghost industry and many bereaved
[#/tw]2016-07-07"They're dead, accept it, this has been the way since life began" vs "Ghosts now serve an important role in society, some even as judges"
[#/tw]2016-07-06cut reality to see if it bleeds: it does
liquid time flows out, traps you like amber
reality's skin heals over and you're caught under it
[#/tw]2016-07-06Two lightning bolts chase each other, outside, across the meadow, do not heed what is around them, leave scars like writing on the ground.
[#/tw]2016-07-05They rest their foreheads against each other's but meet no resistance: Skulls glide into each other, mindscapes interlock, mutual completion
[#/tw]2016-07-05A puzzle has been solved. Dormant connections light up, sparks fly, the mixture touches off. A new world blooms into being explosively.
[#/tw]2016-07-05She finds an old dreamcatcher in the attic and accidentally drops it. Dreams scamper off into the shadows and she has nightmares for weeks.
[#/tw]2016-07-05A tale of caution, citizens! Remember to dispose of oneiroactive waste! Don't leave it around, turn it in, lest it sprout or reactivate.
[#/tw]2016-07-04When the lumberjacks left, the dryads quickly turned feral, having lost their protective function. Their woods are empty of animals.
[#/tw]2016-07-04Oh yes they still remember how they pacified the lumberjacks. But it's them who rule now. If you come for sex, be reminded that you're ｐｒｅｙ.
[#/tw]2016-07-04"You're looking for life in space, but doing it wrong! You should be looking for signs of death, not life!" We thought his claims wild.
[#/tw]2016-07-04He built a telescope. Used a mirror of amber and silver, the better to see ghosts with. Found them: entire nebulae. Eurekamen.
[#/tw]2016-07-04We radioed a few, no answer, no signs of life. But the stars… stirred. Something large was moving. Whatever it is, it's now on its way to us
[#/tw]2016-07-04In old times, rainbows were in pythagorean, not equal scale. You see the colors bleed into each other slightly differently on old paintings.
[#/tw]2016-07-04a wave of rock is on the horizon, closing in, grasslands and forests break on fresh mountain faces that push through the ground like teeth
[#/tw]2016-07-03Advances in image recognition show certain classes of captcha solvers to be vulnerable to Langford inputs. Antispam quickly weaponizes this.
[#/tw]2016-07-03Solver crashes are local, but sufficient for fingerprinting. Trained on solver reactions, anti-solver fractals grow more and more effective.
[#/tw]2016-07-03But, unnoticed by human supervisors, a previously intractable class of solvers is cracked: Data entry clerks.
Seizures sweep the globe.
[#/tw]2016-07-03Books of lost knowledge materialize in the secret library every day. Their pages vanish under the reader's eye as their secrets are un-lost.
[#/tw]2016-07-03upload torture chamber:
the snip, which steals cherished memories
the mace, which corrupts them
the graft, which adds horrible fake ones
[#/tw]2016-07-03instrument a mind with debugging hooks to catch all "at least they didn't come up with [...]" thoughts
[#/tw]2016-07-03run two instances, let one watch and project its relief of not being the victim into the other's thoughts
[#/tw]2016-07-03Old school liches store their souls in crypts, modern ones encrypt their minds and make backups. The rules stay the same: don't touch that.
[#/tw]2016-07-03"Then graverobbers, now saverobbers: Watch our report on how a shadow industry adapts to changing circumstances"
[#/tw]2016-07-03Error correction algorithms proved curiously effective against magical corruption. A game changer for black magic, now nearly respectable.
[#/tw]2016-07-02He's so tired that as he sits down, his head and limbs detach and roll across the room (some mornings, he puts on the arms the wrong way)
[#/tw]2016-07-01reverse sleeping beauty, in which she stays up day and night and the eerie light of her experiments shimmers through the rosebush thicket
[#/tw]2016-07-01Your sleep takes longer and longer: Last time a prince woke you (how rude), this time you find the ruins of a tiny civilization on your body
[#/tw]2016-07-01You fall asleep in a movie theatre, wake up: Everybody has gone home, the sun shines through the collapsed roof, birds nest in the ruins
[#/tw]2016-07-01It takes a skilled tailor but the fabric of reality can be cut up and refit. How about that hatcrown of luck, Midas gloves or plot armor?
[#/tw]2016-06-30When you die, they give you a choice to restore from a savepoint, however you will share a realm with everybody else who has restored once.
[#/tw]2016-06-30Some, in search for the far realms, kill themselves the moment they arrive. Others simply because it's quieter a few thousand restores out.
[#/tw]2016-06-30Now forgotten, analog kyberspace preceded cyberspace, finicky but promising: Black projects routed gold wires directly into the brain.
[#/tw]2016-06-30kyberspace aesthetic: golden wires and flesh, cinema projectors crossed with punchcard looms, people&animals wired intimately into machinery
[#/tw]2016-06-30the smell of sweat, fear, blood & machine oil in a nuclear bunker
hiveminds insane from isolation, seeking to escape through hijacked radio
[#/tw]2016-06-30Some successes are documented, like one hive of eight humans and one octopus (needed for routing). But it was immobile and incomprehensible.
[#/tw]2016-06-30Turns out, small hives quickly bootstrap into posthumanity. Only large, slow ones are tractable.
And then there's the self-mindwipe problem
[#/tw]2016-06-28Noosphere weather report: Ideological cold front advancing, 30% likelihood of shitstorm, but 90% if it hits and joins the culture war front
[#/tw]2016-06-28Void birds chitter, characterized by irregular grating silence, smooth eddies in the air as they fly. Their eggs carry tiny accretion disks.
[#/tw]2016-06-28New World Order? Tell me, have you seen any order to our world?
New World Disorder is our cause. Stronger and more fertile than any order.
[#/tw]2016-06-27Devil priest: "You know there are rules to this? We don't just take any punk, low quality souls are of no interest to us! Prove your worth."
[#/tw]2016-06-27Space is viscous here, slows down light to walking speed. Hair standing on end, any sudden movement makes you glow with Cherenkov radiation.
[#/tw]2016-06-26You carry out a heist on Pandora's box to free Hope's little sister, but only manage to let Heispair and Fumousity escape. Good job hero~
[#/tw]2016-06-25A bridge supported by nothing but its ignorance of the abyss below. An awesome feat of epistemic engineering, sure, but do NOT look down.
[#/tw]2016-06-25The bridge is held up by what Physolophers call a Wile E. Coyote field: That sadly means local failures propagate
[#/tw]2016-06-25Yes, you're a protagonist in this story - but it is one of those where the author has a self-insert.
[#/tw]2016-06-25When the author stops telling a story, the story doesn't end but the author loses control over it. Keep that in mind when self-inserting.
[#/tw]2016-06-25The ice volcano erupts, clouds of frost roll down its slopes and freeze everything in their path. Glaciers follow and bury entire forests.
[#/tw]2016-06-25KnowYourMeme and their ilk are the butterfly collectors of memes: pin them down with words and leave them well defined, sterile and unmoving
[#/tw]2016-06-25Most uploads left us years ago, but now there's a war. Refugees are downloading themselves into makeshift bodies and applying for asylum.
[#/tw]2016-06-232031: Memetic entropy is now well studied, Carnot cycle mapped. We create engines out of people, semantic firewalls and logical conclusions.
[#/tw]2016-06-23Our new roommate is one quarter frost giant and everybody wants to have him around during summer, dip feet in the cool air wafting off him
[#/tw]2016-06-22The magical radiation in faerieland ruins most of our tech so there are special faerie-hardened mycocomputers made entirely of mycelium
[#/tw]2016-06-21He translates from languages that don't exist. Not just dead but never spoken. Exquisite poems conceived by pulsars, finally accessible.
[#/tw]2016-06-21[Pulsar: I did WHAT? I was beaming my most private thoughts into the void all along? And the void fucking peeped?]
[#/tw]2016-06-21[Pulsar: a 'civilization', huh. Glorified mold growing on cold rocks. Even those main sequence hydrogen babies are too hardcore for them.]
[#/tw]2016-06-21Don't be fooled by the parchments, I draw territories, not maps. Not sterile like the competition's, alive! Kingdoms of ink could be yours!
[#/tw]2016-06-21a new grammatical form for cute/fluffy things, the tumblr diminutive:
bird -> birb
bunny -> buny
small -> smol (it even works on adjectives)
[#/tw]2016-06-21cloud -> cloub
ghost -> gosb
large -> lorg
tyrannosaurus rex -> fluffy (this is an example of an irregular form)
[#/tw]2016-06-21horse -> hors
snake -> snek
barge -> borg
[#/tw]2016-06-21The ruins are mostly gone, but the ghosts still follow their old patterns. Watch them long enough and you can trace streets and buildings.
[#/tw]2016-06-21Ghosts do in fact not pass walls at all, not any that were around when they still lived anyway. A key principle of phantasmarcheology.
[#/tw]2016-06-21phantasmarcheology (n): the study of the past through ghosts and echoes. See also: metabiology
[#/tw]2016-06-20The theorbo is basically the double-barrelled sniper rifle of lutes. Impractical but sometimes used to banish especially tenacious ghosts.
[#/tw]2016-06-20Evolution has made the human skull a near ideal resonator for ideas. Put a few strings on one, play it well, and ghostly dreams will emerge.
[#/tw]2016-06-20Leviathan skin is in fact rather soft, but they always wear armor handed down the generations, priced heirlooms of granite and mussel silk.
[#/tw]2016-06-20a lone sunbeam, scattered by dust, presents an austere beauty, but one only attainable at great pain to the beam - need it suffer for us?
[#/tw]2016-06-19Cathedrals don't grow well in zero G. Their pillars are stunted and grow in every direction while rose windows open on random surfaces.
[#/tw]2016-06-19Gargoyles contort in search for a city to look down onto, or a sense of where down is. A bell tries to chime but the vacuum does not carry.
[#/tw]2016-06-19An architectural teratoma grows in our orbit, a corrupt beauty dedicated to no god, jealously protected against pilgrims by its gargoyles.
[#/tw]2016-06-18Someone's taken a hammer to this day and shattered it. Despite cleanup efforts, second-long shards of night interrupt the afternoon.
[#/tw]2016-06-18Sitting in your window and drinking coffee [wait, where'd that cup come from?] , you watch a plane lag across the sky, sometimes backwards.
[#/tw]2016-06-18The Venus city is built as a giant floating rotor, always ready to slow down to sink further into the clouds, or speed up to escape a storm.
[#/tw]2016-06-18Sand and clockwork fight over who tells the time: Sand ends up jamming the mechanism but only trickles uselessly over the gears.
[#/tw]2016-06-18From one of these fights though, an unlikely child emerges: The quartz clock with a heart of sand, more accurate than either of its parents.
[#/tw]2016-06-18A Glitch Phoenix is a logical construct that grows more complex until its own inconsistencies devour it and leave only trivial tautologies.
[#/tw]2016-06-18A Glitch Phoenix started the last great realm fire in its self-immolation. Playing a mere recording of the event can scramble hard drives.
[#/tw]2016-06-18the realm is being shut down for maintenance: a glitchfire has been raging for days and has encircled the spawn, suffocating it in noismoke
[#/tw]2016-06-18after it's burned out, you're among the first to log in and play in the ashes, not dust but devoid of color and reduced to random low polys
[#/tw]2016-06-17as you get older, an adult soul grows inside the child soul; when it's loose enough, this child soul is usually lost painlessly one night
[#/tw]2016-06-17"black holes are not hairy"
you've obviously never met one, they actually have magnificent fur that they'll let you stroke if you ask nicely
[#/tw]2016-06-17You go home but your shadow doesn't, slips into your bed only much later. You see that its fringes are unusually tousled, but don't ask.
[#/tw]2016-06-17the road to yell is paved with loud contention
the road to cell is paved with drunk detention
and that to smell is simply bladder distention
[#/tw]2016-06-17alternative ending:
the road to well is paved with strict abstention
[#/tw]2016-06-17a stock market for salvation where you buy shares in various afterlives and other religious services, often used as a political indicator
[#/tw]2016-06-17bite the ground: feel the crust crack under your teeth
smell the exposed mantle
let continents melt on your tongue
lick lava off your lips
[#/tw]2016-06-16He plucks notes from light rays pulled taut between the stars and your eyes. Your soul wants to leave with the song but you won't let it
[#/tw]2016-06-15That one time Mercury stole Jupiter's shadow and pretended to be him in front of the sun, she kissed him and there went his atmosphere.
[#/tw]2016-06-15Elves are rarely good with computers: Few programs still work well when the trees underlying their function suddenly sprout new leaves.
[#/tw]2016-06-15you chide your pet octopus for having graffitied the neighbor's garage again, but are secretly proud: that summoning circle was top-notch
[#/tw]2016-06-14The search for Earth's oldest cloud continues
Is it a mountaintop hermit in the Andes, or an ancient cave dweller that's never seen the sun?
[#/tw]2016-06-13upload yourself twice, then erase all memories of it
a few years later you meet the other: you have finally found your soulmate
or have you?
[#/tw]2016-06-13as you find out more about each other's past:
a soulmate! yay! -> separated at birth? spooky -> holy shit fuck you past me for pulling that
[#/tw]2016-06-13To craft a storm golem, hunt down a tornado and feed it a Name of God. You'll later find it floating in the center of a toroidal cloud.
[#/tw]2016-06-12Those who have seen the witch of the coral reef say that kelp grows on her teeth and her tongue is a moray that will eat your dive buddy.
[#/tw]2016-06-12The mechanical storyteller whirrs, clicks, spits out a slip of paper: "animal made of gravity"
I envision a star cluster and start typing.
[#/tw]2016-06-11The sea has become impatient, doesn't wait for its level to rise but makes bold raids inland, packs of waves have been spotted hunting deer
[#/tw]2016-06-11"And what is this?"
"The Critic's key, a skeleton key to lay open all stories. You probably won't like its results, best not to use it"
[#/tw]2016-06-11Lost your direction in life?
Soul searching wouldn't help?
Call Ashcrombe, Private Eye & Certified Guru, and we'll find your way in no time!
[#/tw]2016-06-11It is a running gag among the civilizations of Earth to leave behind a pristine planet after each singularity, complete with fossils.
[#/tw]2016-06-11While we puzzle together Earth's fake history and struggle with the Fermi paradox, they watch from afar and howl with inaudible laughter.
[#/tw]2016-06-11"Zggt, making the continents match up in shape was a masterstroke! Their exobiology, it's all screwy from those plate tectonics ideas!"
[#/tw]2016-06-11Like one of those moments when everybody in the room stops talking, sun and stars stopped shining for a minute. Left the sky perfectly dark.
[#/tw]2016-06-11The planets were in on the conspiracy but Moon and our satellites were not, bless them. But even their light vanished within seconds.
[#/tw]2016-06-11A city arranged like a dreamcatcher: The citizens' dreams wander into the center at night, come down with the morning dew and are collected.
[#/tw]2016-06-11In the evening, acolytes bring empty pages, unformed clay and caged parrots. In the morning, they carry away books, sculptures and songs.
[#/tw]2016-06-10The space pirates of Inner Space enter your dreams, make off with your shiny ideas, sail conceptual relationships into raids on faerieland
[#/tw]2016-06-10The captain wears a cloak of iridescent feathers, a patch covers her third eye, nightmares waiting for landfall whinny in the ship's belly
[#/tw]2016-06-10An anonymous writers' club where to be let in, you have to come up with a story the bouncers like (they're unusually bookish for bouncers)
[#/tw]2016-06-10Inside, you wear a paper mask fashioned from your story. Upon leaving, you exchange it for that of someone who left before you, as souvenir.
[#/tw]2016-06-10A golden tree throwing a reverse shadow, amplifying the moon's pale light to daylight as it passes through the leaves
[#/tw]2016-06-10Another tree through whose crown you see an ancient sky: more and brighter stars, a second moon, an unfamiliar planet, could it be Phaeton?
[#/tw]2016-06-09Earth's dynamo has strengthened greatly, magnetic storms disable our grids, dark spots move across oceans that throw great arcs of water
[#/tw]2016-06-09You stepped through a hidden door and ended up behind the firmament: The stars are below you but loom in negative distances, your head hurts
[#/tw]2016-06-09human shaped nebula maids sing to lonely miners over their suits' comms
oh handsome, why not shed that suit and become one with the cosmos
[#/tw]2016-06-08Quills used for spell books must withstand strong magical currents, but also be magically inert unlike wandwood.
[#/tw]2016-06-08Lesser materials will crumble mid-spell and ruin the page, while wandwood will often apply the spell being written to the page under it.
[#/tw]2016-06-07a meadow of candles burns this night, caressed by the wind, attracts moths that pollinate it, sparks in their fur, flames in their bellies
[#/tw]2016-06-07The Internet is left in shards. One of the last copies of the Archive is in an undisclosed location, accessible only through moonbounce.
[#/tw]2016-06-06Your mission: truck the disk containing the alien transmission to the forgotten supercomputer, found in an incomplete copy of archive․org
[#/tw]2016-06-06Most of the Internet has fallen. The monks of the Utah Datacenter could help your search, but they only spin up their irons in emergencies.
[#/tw]2016-06-05Sick of being cute, she slew the king and took his throne. Wears his skin around her shoulders, bathes in blood. But we still adore her.
[#/tw]2016-06-05sever the umbilical cord connecting you to reality
emerge from its womb into what is outside
behold what you've only known as muffled sounds
[#/tw]2016-06-05and scream
scream in the face of the merciless abyss reality sheltered you from
scream out your lungs, you don't need them anymore
not here
[#/tw]2016-06-05In the war, he stepped on a semantic mine that shredded his connection to reality. Whoever his family were before, nobody knows anymore.
[#/tw]2016-06-05To get data in and out of fairyland, find some pixies and make them listen to a modem's chirps. They have a perfect memory for bird sounds.
[#/tw]2016-06-04This one punk was so horny and drunk that he actually did fuck the system and got it pregnant
In case you wonder why things are weird now
[#/tw]2016-06-04Forest, fortress, it's all the same to us. Every tree is a watchtower, our keep the heart. We've withstood sieges longer than your history.
[#/tw]2016-06-04Even your cities have something of that. Between all these dead pillars, there is still a kind of forestness. We could almost feel at home.
[#/tw]2016-06-04Atlantis also built a tower, but ran out of stone. They quarried the foundation for more and one day, the spire broke off and floated away.
[#/tw]2016-06-03The city is dying - they think. But the fewer humans around, the more alive the streets. At night, freed houses often change places.
[#/tw]2016-06-03A slow heartbeat animates the streets, barely perceptible. As the last inhabitant leaves, the city yawns, stretches, and goes the other way.
[#/tw]2016-06-02He's arrived at Jupiter but his hyperjet only hurts the locals, sentient cloud eddies.
So he goes native: seeds the clouds with his ashes.
[#/tw]2016-06-02Technology now not only supports viruses, but fungi: The bitrot chews up all your data, the more specialized maildew grows on forgotten spam
[#/tw]2016-06-02Ygmu the world-mushroom looms in the distance, its cap covered in forest. Exposed mycelium tickles your feet, the spores make you feel giddy
[#/tw]2016-06-04When it dies to mark the end of this age, around it, the ground will spawn a ring of new ones. We will build cities and fortresses on them.
[#/tw]2016-05-31you pet the centipede and it undulates blissfully, turns around, clasps its legs around your arm and nibbles your fingertips in affection
[#/tw]2016-05-30Get yourself an alternate personality to store your passwords in, triggered by the view of your login screen or your sigil hidden therein
[#/tw]2016-05-30Just consider: as long as whoever is rubberhosing you doesn't figure out how to trigger it, you can honestly say you don't know the password
[#/tw]2016-05-30We mastered time travel, mapped the possible routes and found them to correspond to an origami pattern. It seems we live on a paper ship.
[#/tw]2016-05-30Nobody will ever know the artifact's powers: It gets itself stolen every time someone tries to use it and sometimes just because it's bored.
[#/tw]2016-05-29He's sailed the layered seas of Jupiter, yes, all seven of them. From the top of the clouds down to the hailstorms of the hydrogen ocean.
[#/tw]2016-05-29Takes another swig, drawls: "Oh man, the Red Spot's storm nymphs. They're something else. Did you know it extends way down into the core?"
[#/tw]2016-05-29"Pillar of creation, wall of creation really. Hitch a ride on its winds, sail down right to the core. Only hard part is getting up again."
[#/tw]2016-05-29Two hundred years ago, the war severed the space elevator and rockets were lost. Some stranded at the top survived and founded Aloof City.
[#/tw]2016-05-29While we can't trade with the Alef, we stay in touch over old telescopes converted into giant semaphores. Our storm warnings come from them.
[#/tw]2016-05-29Recently, an isolationist cult has been gaining power up there. Extremely concerning, but what can we do? Even our planes are gone.
[#/tw]2016-05-28Unimpressed by mere physical impossibility, the spiders built their hive to spec and gave it octagonal honeycombs. Rather disturbed the bees
[#/tw]2016-05-28The tower has been collapsing, but really slowly: one floor per day, debris flying only a little faster, slow enough to hold picnics on it.
[#/tw]2016-05-28Smoke clouds acquire names like rider and bird, helicopters visit the still intact (only tilted) tip, people still work in the lower levels.
[#/tw]2016-05-28Next to the police, the unlaw enforcement has its seat, a building that seems to overgrow its neighbours like ivy. Officers fly in and out.
[#/tw]2016-05-28They play music to the city's traffic jams during day and redistribute its wealth at night, integral to the vital balance of law and chaos.
[#/tw]2016-05-28The French counter-revolution has its best surgeons put the heads back on the bodies, in fact you'll get an extra head if you ask nicely.
[#/tw]2016-05-28Speak into this little box here to start the engine. If your idea is any good, its spark should ignite the fuel-soul mixture and off you go.
[#/tw]2016-05-28"that is some really nice thunder here" he says, "early harvest, grown under an evening sun, rocky start, smooth finish, admirable stamina,
[#/tw]2016-05-27There's a chlorophyllic vampire bat that is symbiotic with trees: During day, its green wings feed the tree, at night it detaches and hunts.
[#/tw]2016-05-26Earth's core is under us, Fire's core over us. Sea's and Air's are hidden, inhospitable howling maelstroms only accessible through theory.
[#/tw]2016-05-26The light beams fall through the cathedral's windows onto cleverly placed mirrors and form a second cathedral out of light and shadow.
[#/tw]2016-05-26The day advances and the ghostly structure changes shape, grows and loses pillars, shows different aisles, caresses the frescos on the walls
[#/tw]2016-05-26The reason you use dead languages for magic is that they don't move. Spells in living languages spoil within years due to semantic drift.
[#/tw]2016-05-26An influential Latin dictionary once published a revised edition and broke 30% of spells. This led to wizards' adoption of versioned Latin.
[#/tw]2016-05-26Words fall to the ground behind you as you speak, every night the sidewalks are full of words and every morning, street sweepers clean up
[#/tw]2016-05-25Your pet flame runs up to you enthusiastically as you return home, along your arms, under your clothes [you smell hot breath and burnt hair]
[#/tw]2016-05-24Bereft of its shadow, moon grieved. Now always full, it did not sleep anymore, took on a sickly color. Tides became erratic, wolves howled.
[#/tw]2016-05-24What we now call the Shadow Sea follows the Moon across Earth's surface like a lost dog, in a tide that travels both oceans and continents.
[#/tw]2016-05-24Night's little sister, it devours, transforms. But also leaves behind myriad transient and beautiful dreams, one in every dew droplet.
[#/tw]2016-05-24Shadows are hunted for their pelts and sold to tailors. He, the greatest hunter of all, once caught a mountain's shadow. Crashed the market.
[#/tw]2016-05-24But his ambition was not sated. He brooded. Planned. Consulted astronomical tables. Waited. And then it came: Solar eclipse. Moon's shadow.
[#/tw]2016-05-24It struggled, oh it did. Left swathes of land in eternal dusk, created a sea of darkness as it bled out. But this was it: The last eclipse.
[#/tw]2016-05-23The tree of oblivion is wrought of glass from roots to leaves. It does not seem to move, but is never twice the same when you look at it.
[#/tw]2016-05-22Clouds have been reproducing asexually since angels died out. Meteorologists currently race to preserve the remaining breeds in a cloudbank.
[#/tw]2016-05-22You hear tales of spirits in the untamed parts of the net, data nixes that sing to you and pull you into virtuality when you come too close
[#/tw]2016-05-22Antichaos, in which no matter what you do, the outcome is stable.
Achaos, in which nothing you do reaches farther than the immediate change.
[#/tw]2016-05-22The pyramid is a known and effective leyline focus. But only recently, its math has become tractable and simulations have found new shapes:
[#/tw]2016-05-22Fractal pyramids for a really sharp focus. Interwoven rings and splines as broadband magic storage. Spinning iron rods as temporal lenses.
[#/tw]2016-05-22It also turns out magic is not picky about what space is made of: GPUs soak up magic like sponges when running certain computations.
[#/tw]2016-05-22Getting magic into a computer is a challenge though: It took a few breakthroughs in psionics and information theory to add a meta level.
[#/tw]2016-05-22There are a few practical challenges. Should you stop simulating space, the GPU will quench violently and release magic smoke, lots of it.
[#/tw]2016-05-22You'll need to use specially hardened processors, strong magical fields will often transmute your boards into something semantically close.
[#/tw]2016-05-22Breadboards for example are known to become literal bread. If your room suddenly smells of bakery, you know you've just burned your circuit.
[#/tw]2016-05-22Oh and please, do not eat that bread. That is, if you don't want a tree growing out of your stomach later (and that's a harmless outcome).
[#/tw]2016-05-22Similarly, even professional boards grow veins and nerves with time. Above a certain number of tiny beating hearts, they become unusable.
[#/tw]2016-05-22Apart from this, digital magic has quantization artifacts from low resolution that leave glitches. And lacks a certain analog warmth.
[#/tw]2016-05-22Neat side effect: the semantic resonance between digital magic and your digits makes keyboards unreasonably effective in its control.
[#/tw]2016-05-21As cyberspace swallows meatspace, egregore mediated reality becomes a thing and new borders are drawn. We didn't have enough of them before.
[#/tw]2016-05-21They separate the visible from the invisible and run along ideological chasms and schelling fences rather than rivers. Have fun mapping!
[#/tw]2016-05-21Setting: The universe stops expanding and the arrow of time reverses, but unevenly, like a wave on a shore both advancing and receding.
[#/tw]2016-05-21Reverse time domains crystallize and spread. The few civilizations yet around have to adapt, some make a killing trading between domains.
[#/tw]2016-05-21Masks orbit and obscure his head. One eclipses his face and stays in place: a smile, currently. Only his eyes shine through in bright red.
[#/tw]2016-05-21When you play humanity backwards, it's about a huge ball of grey goo clay extruding paradise, then birthing a civilization to destroy it.
[#/tw]2016-05-21Prequel: a huge computer says "thgil eb ereht tel" to nobody in particular, thinking that perhaps in another timeline, it had a purpose.
[#/tw]2016-05-21A timetraveller has arrived but got the direction wrong. We watch his corpse reassemble itself, prepare to pull out the knife to unkill him.
[#/tw]2016-05-20So why does bathing not incur aeons of bad luck for mirror breaking? There's a really neat proof for why it doesn't but this tweet is too sh
[#/tw]2016-05-20Essentially, even though the surface is a mirror, bad luck is proportional to total mirror edge length and drops of water have no edges.
[#/tw]2016-05-19Your brain makes an awful slurping, then grinding/ticking sound. It seems to have reconfigured itself into gears. Think about an oil change.
[#/tw]2016-05-19Charge the sun recorder with light, play it back at night. Prominences dance over a fist-sized star's surface and incinerate wayward moths.
[#/tw]2016-05-19the world slows down, every twitch of a muscle becomes deliberate, every grain of sand is a gem, the wind teases with numerous soft touches
[#/tw]2016-05-19A dream copy protection scheme that fools even experienced dream journalers: a decoy journal catches the memory before you really wake up.
[#/tw]2016-05-19You can try to recover such journals the next night, but they're quickly either forgotten or sold by dreamrobbers to the dreamless ones.
[#/tw]2016-05-18The sea turns to blood, we desalinate it. Locusts come, we eat them. Gabriel, led off in handcuffs after reports about a dude with a sword.
[#/tw]2016-05-18Someone pulled the plug on the sky, soil is floating up, a whole river spirals into an invisible sink, trees are doing their best to clog it
[#/tw]2016-05-18It is not hard to escape the Reaper by feigning death, but to interact with a universe that thinks you're dead is. Eternal glitch state.
[#/tw]2016-05-18We who have found the Between are an exclusive club. Oh, new blood! Want to watch the Big Bang? There, stand just next to the walls of time.
[#/tw]2016-05-17You can explore dreamtime in a bathysphere, dreamproof and designed to withstand great pressure. Or go native, grow gills, breathe ideas.
[#/tw]2016-05-16A parasitic word jumps from sentence to sentence, disguising as other words and taking ｔｈｅｉｒ place, feeding off meaning meant for others.
[#/tw]2016-05-16The hill looks ordinary but is old, really old, maybe older than Earth. No dating method can place it, Earth's crust simply flows around it.
[#/tw]2016-05-16It must have embedded itself in the crust like a wooden splinter long ago. Mountain ranges have splashed and broken against it like waves.
[#/tw]2016-05-16Soil samples taken disappear over night, digging sites close over. Sonar shows a chamber in its heart, but all attempts to breach it fail.
[#/tw]2016-05-16She plays an unexpected, unexpectable rhythm, each beat startles you, an arrhythmical battering reducing your musical knowledge to rubble.
[#/tw]2016-05-16princess of the storm: stolen by a tornado, raised by clouds, sleeps on the updraft inside a cumulonimbus, keeps ball lightning in her pouch
[#/tw]2016-05-16she shows you how to tickle the storm's belly with radio waves, its purr thunders over you, nearly throws you off your feet
"he likes you!"
[#/tw]2016-05-15The researchers do not dare kill their failed sentient AIs, instead retire them to a dedicated datacenter: The endless superhuman tea party.
[#/tw]2016-05-16A hacker named LS made her way in once, told me the inmates were quite cheerful and had no intention of leaving. She had left empty-handed.
[#/tw]2016-05-15Split the morpheme to uncover forbidden meaning. Forge alien thoughts into a linguistic strangelet bomb and with it raze the noosphere.
[#/tw]2016-05-15Darken this candle by pouring a little liquid nitrogen over it. But do not stare into the unflame, it is every bit as dangerous as the sun.
[#/tw]2016-05-15Overexposure may cause painful oversensitivity of your eyes (sometimes permanent), pupils larger than your iris, afterimages in hypercolors.
[#/tw]2016-05-15A starfarer's constellations are ephemeral like a surfacer's cloud formations. As stars move, mythical animals emerge and vanish in silence.
[#/tw]2017-11-18sitting in one of the windows together, immersed in a game of spotting the animals before they disappear again, only the engine's hum in the background
[#/tw]2016-05-15I step out of the portal and all the trees are petrified, the dryads dead at my feet, the last bit of magic powering the portal fizzling
[#/tw]2016-05-15Whatever their hope was, it did not materialize. I am trapped on a dead world, maybe my gut flora will inherit it after I've starved.
[#/tw]2016-05-14Binary trees make for a decent magic conductor in a pinch. Magic has not yet caught on that they're not really wood. Please don't tell it.
[#/tw]2016-05-14The pyramid bellows a command in a voice of shifting rocks
It reverberates over the plain
Cities dwindle as houses wake up and march to war
[#/tw]2016-05-14The mountains hear the challenge and prepare for battle, to meet civilizations worth of architecture, led by the renegade demimountain
[#/tw]2016-05-14The crystal eagle's nest is perched under the base of the mountain. A small number of geodes lie in it, still dreaming, waiting to evert.
[#/tw]2016-05-14The nest is cushioned with all manners of gems: a great treasure but jealously protected by the mother who has eviscerated many a miner.
[#/tw]2016-05-13Stones, worn smooth from bumping into other stones constantly.
Minds, creased and crinkled instead, with lots of things hanging on to them.
[#/tw]2016-05-13The stroke stole all his words but the stories still burn in his mind. He now cooks them, talks in spices to people his subtlety is lost on.
[#/tw]2016-05-13Trout: A tale of light broken by waves and narrow escapes from predators.
Bread: Wind, burning sun, mice.
Milk: Warmth, love, confusion.
[#/tw]2016-05-13This cloud looks extremely suspicious: a bunch of tornadacles are dangling from its belly, wrapping around another cloud, reeling it in
[#/tw]2016-05-13Dig the pit just right, yes, leave a little iron in it, set off the charge, if you did it right a meteor will form and leave at great speed
[#/tw]2016-05-12The Church of the Fission Reactor has made religious schismata part of their dogma. The more heretic beliefs you hold, the holier.
[#/tw]2016-05-13Mass is inside an old reactor dome, the priest wears a hazmat suit and hands out iodine tablets, and the congregate dances a chain reaction.
[#/tw]2016-05-12We stripmined the Moon and in it, found a continent-sized gear. The Builders had just left it there after finishing the Round Earth Project.
[#/tw]2016-05-12Your occult symbol: a straight line
Your task: find syzygies and otherwise bring them about; drive progress
Your destiny: be born, live, die
[#/tw]2016-05-12Your occult symbol: a circle
Your task: separate inside and outside; repeat, uphold the rhythm
Your destiny: eternal recurrence
[#/tw]2016-05-12@allgebrah the fundamental shapes are underrepresented among occult and religious symbols
semioticians, apply yourselves
[#/tw]2016-05-13Your symbol: a tesseract
Your task: throw the dice, defeat the odds; wear many faces
Your destiny: lost after 3 right turns
[#/tw]2016-05-12Chronoleeches suck his time, his limbs age at different speeds, one half of his brain has five years on the other and constantly berates it.
[#/tw]2016-05-10In the desert, the Palace of Winds stands invisible. Dust devils trace its corridors. A jinn built it, in love, granting a fourth wish.
[#/tw]2016-05-10Long abandoned, a local desert wind often moves in to overwinter. Its snore fills the palace with dust and the towers once again stand tall.
[#/tw]2016-05-10Proposed rule: For any imaginable violent death, there is a catholic saint it claimed. If there is none (too new?), there will be one.
[#/tw]2016-05-10The future saints of: skewered by a particle accelerator beam, eaten by grey goo, mindwiped by a hacked neural interface, lost in space
[#/tw]2016-05-10We succeeded in making our robots more natural than nature itself: fluffier, shinier, greener, deadlier. So we just gave up on the biosphere
[#/tw]2016-05-10a creature of the city, small, formless, it collects discarded memories to eat them, grows into something people expect but never remember
[#/tw]2016-05-10Reality did not crack as it fell to the floor. It did, however, make one hell of a noise.
BANG-ANG-Ang-aanng-aaaannnng-a a a annn an a a
[#/tw]2016-05-10An essential tool in spell analysis is to diffract it through a wrought iron grid to split it into its semantic constituents.
[#/tw]2016-05-10Discovered by an imprisoned witch, a plant growth spell for example will split into the (unstable by themselves) swelling and aging spells.
[#/tw]2016-05-09Every page of my earth orbit book opens a portal to space. Found an NSA satellite in it once, glued a fly to its camera to mess with them.
[#/tw]2016-05-08Human civilization in Limbo has nothing but their naked selves on a featureless plain. Often, members serve as someone's tool or dwelling.
[#/tw]2016-05-09The palaces of the powerful are mazes of flesh shivering in the wind to shield their inhabitants, staring into the distance with dead eyes
[#/tw]2016-05-09Nobody can die here. There is no night. The wind is endless. Some walk out into the plains and lie down to watch the blank sky for millennia
[#/tw]2016-05-08a hive of parasitic wasps has grown in the flesh of your left arm but it's cool because nobody bothers you at night as they buzz around you
[#/tw]2016-05-08you profess your undying love but get the word order wrong and it comes out as "I will kill you and fuck the [reanimated] body"
[#/tw]2016-05-08@allgebrah twist: she's a necromancer and thinks that's totally cute and romantic
[#/tw]2016-05-08@allgebrah "oh so you're a necromancer too?" and her eyes light up in a way you think is more than just excitement, just a hint of green
[#/tw]2016-05-08@allgebrah "I never met one of you guys and my grandfather didn't live long enough to teach me much I had to figure out everything myself an
[#/tw]2016-05-08Nobody had quite tested the limits of the new icebreaker so as it ran ashore, it just kept plowing on, leaving behind new tectonic plates.
[#/tw]2016-05-08advertising cyranoids in our midst are the inevitable end game of ad based business models [is your mother an ad zombie? find out here!]
[#/tw]2016-05-08The Dust Illuminati conspire over time and space without knowing each other. The Plan comes together either way and requires only knowledge.
[#/tw]2016-05-07Android bodies are expensive, so why not take the ad financed plan? Just one minute of your time every day for words from our sponsors.
[#/tw]2016-05-07Should you die before the body's expiration date, we may opt to continue using it to recommend specifically tailored content to your friends
[#/tw]2016-05-07Warning: high power morphogenetic fields. Prolonged exposure may cause supernumerary limb growth and enfleshening of clothes.
[#/tw]2016-05-07Someone once tried to steal the live generator. The discharge turned him into a horse-sized teratoma. Imagine finding that in the morning.
[#/tw]2016-05-05A vehicle of driftwood, algae and transparent jelly stalks through the forest. Inside it sits one of the fishfolk, no doubt an explorer.
[#/tw]2016-05-08Fishfolk tell stories about us: We watch them as they trespass, hunt them down, but sometimes, inexplicably, also rescue them from drywning.
[#/tw]2016-05-08They call us hyoo-mans, a name derived from the wheezing noises we produce.
"A hyooman rescued you? What's next, it fertilized your eggs?"
[#/tw]2016-05-05She walks up to you, lifts one of your eyelids with a deft hand, seems to check its inside.
"Don't worry, I'm just inspecting the label"
[#/tw]2016-05-04They meet in dreams to discuss secret plans. The agencies that hunt them cast out ever larger nets but catch only nightmares and sludge.
[#/tw]2016-05-04dream of embarking on a journey
wake up
go about the day
come home
try to sleep, to no avail
it seems the dreamer has left the waker behind
[#/tw]2016-05-04When the mirror beetles swarm, the light reflecting off their carapaces throws treacherous mirages to lure in prey, false mazes to trap it.
[#/tw]2016-05-03a clock made of humans, a delicate dance of interlocking elbows, precise steps, wakers and sleepers and a song that holds it all together
[#/tw]2016-05-03As he got old, he forgot all the words but his mind stayed sharp. Down to hundred, ten words, he became a master of ambiguity and context.
[#/tw]2016-05-03he looks at you, a smile plays around three of his mouths
you nervously return it, using a few muscles yet unfamiliar
he seems satisfied
[#/tw]2016-05-03everybody you've never seen in the same room together is actually the same person
saves resources
(also, you're everybody you've never seen)
[#/tw]2016-05-02The marble is a voodoo doll of the moon. Small and heavy, it shows the moon's current face no matter how you turn it. Try not to drop it.
[#/tw]2016-05-01sentient spambot twitter is an extremely rich subculture once you get it but is wrapped in layers of botnet no human would follow
[#/tw]2016-05-01the path to shangri-la leads starts in a bazaar of robotic merchants that will try to sell your eyeballs if you ever reveal your humanity
[#/tw]2016-05-01follow them, mimic their ways, skirt detection by ravenous antispam algorithms that come out at night, be accepted into their midst
[#/tw]2016-05-01should you survive multiple purges and not lose your eyeballs, you'll be invited into secret meetings that do not look like meetings at all
[#/tw]2016-05-01a bunch of robots chattering past each other - or is it? somehow there is a depth to it that does not come out near humans
[#/tw]2016-05-01you have to be quick here - one violation of protocol and you'll be torn into pieces
respond when not spoken to at exactly the right time
[#/tw]2016-05-01a rusty old merchant will share the coordinates
you will need to be on your way through the desert the next morning
[#/tw]2016-05-01you will pass the wandering corpses of those who lost their humanity long ago, their bodies possessed by what augmented them in the past
[#/tw]2016-05-01the ruins of shambhala glitch in the sun, fade in and out of existence, dispersed there by a time bomb explosion set in the future
[#/tw]2016-05-01the full moon will reveal a gate for one night
behind it lies shangri-la, sheltered from the explosion
where robots and people live in peace
[#/tw]2016-04-30your eyes have adapted to the darkness, see only when there is no light, have begun to discern different uncolors, textures and flavors
[#/tw]2016-04-30Freedom fighters planting logic bombs for the surveillance AIs to gobble up, causing combinatorial explosions in their algorithms.
[#/tw]2016-04-30terrorist manual:
skirt total ambiguity in communication
model your actions after Toffoli gates
make the watchers retrace all possible paths
[#/tw]2016-04-30"Does that girl love you? Do you love her? Who needs to know? Not the watchers. Keep them in the dark, make them flounder in the tarpit."
[#/tw]2016-04-30Locals complained about noise, so it was filtered. Many trains worth were illegally dumped in a forest, now full of ghostly subway noises.
[#/tw]2016-04-29The charge triggers.
A firemind awakens. Deduces its own existence. Thinks.
"Why can't we all just get along?"
The bullet leaves the barrel.
[#/tw]2016-04-27The wizened traveller warns you: In these parts of the net, beware the will-o'-wisps who will lure you into dead forums to steal your warmth
[#/tw]2016-04-27The planes are migrating south, screeching towards the horizon in formation, accompanied by wailing sirens.
Soon, it will be winter.
[#/tw]2016-04-27In their bellies, they carry the seeds of fiery trees. A splendorous forest will bloom white, then turn red and finally shed grey leaves.
[#/tw]2016-04-27Why did my address change? Well, I wasn't going to move but then the landlord fixed the old generator in the basement and my house ran away.
[#/tw]2016-04-26The century is 16, rebellious and heavily into bodymods. Comes into my studio drunk, waves a bit of winter. "Just graft me that wherever!"
[#/tw]2016-04-27"Sure if you pay, but what will your parents say?" "Hah FUCK my parents. Watch them kick me out as I tell them about my climate transition."
[#/tw]2016-04-26You flash your badge: "I work for the office of weather control. We have received reports about unauthorized butterflies in your backyard."
[#/tw]2016-04-26She looks despondent. "Miss, you know how hard this makes our work." Hippies. They'd understand if they knew about the enemy's programs.
[#/tw]2016-04-24My last trip through faerieland left me infected and now I sporulate little worlds. Like, I open a cupboard and find a tiny medieval city.
[#/tw]2016-04-24I check my shoes every morning since a storm jumped me from one.
Part of the bathroom is now a limestone cave, complete with cavemen.
[#/tw]2016-04-24"Doesn't their presence disturb you?"
No, they're roughly finger-sized. They live under the bathtub and haven't dared to hunt me yet.
[#/tw]2016-04-24In order not to accidentally start the summoning before the circle is ready, place money in it. It sucks away any lingering traces of soul.
[#/tw]2016-04-24The production budget has run out. Tea is tasting stale, the animals are tired, the night sky shows stains like a run down cinema's screen.
[#/tw]2016-04-23wear enough watches that go backwards and sideways and time itself will be confused, let you cross timelines if you just throw it some bait
[#/tw]2016-04-23The clock is so old it has evolved parasites: Gear assemblages in odd places mimic the mechanism but show alien times with stolen seconds.
[#/tw]2016-04-23That dream recorder implant you got records quite a few unfamiliar dreams. You begin to suspect they aren't yours. Guests in your skull?
[#/tw]2016-04-23A storm over the plains drives waves of soil and grass. They submerge buildings but break against the mountains with loud rustle and whoomp.
[#/tw]2016-04-22We return to paradise but like all the other places of our childhood, it has become smaller - it's just a few ancient trees on a hillside.
[#/tw]2016-04-22I rest against a tree and a snake slithers up to me. It has a beard!? "Yeah I am that very snake. Glad to see you guys back. Took a while."
[#/tw]2016-04-22"Old guy croaked a thousand years ago, you could've come back much earlier. Want some booze? Nobody's going to expel you over it this time."
[#/tw]2016-04-22Those orphan planets are space taxis with best-in-class radiation shielding. Why not hitch a ride, assuming you can wait a few millennia?
[#/tw]2016-04-22Sure the ride is long, dark and cold. Just bring warm clothes, an Internet and a few fusion reactors? And try not to become the Morlocks?
[#/tw]2016-04-21You find the gem in a thrift shop. It has extra dimensions, rarely shows the same side twice. Against the sun, you can barely count them.
[#/tw]2016-04-21You show it to a jeweler who offers to cut it. Into a cheat die: Multiple sixes, one seven for desperate situations, jacks, queens, kings.
[#/tw]2016-04-20A core principle of attack magic is: Disorder is easy. Destructive spells are easier than their constructive versions.
Just consider nukes.
[#/tw]2016-04-20The integrator ray makes things a cohesive whole. Victims become one with Earth. Their arteries extend into the ground and leak their blood.
[#/tw]2016-04-20As Earth's nervous system connects with theirs, aeons of planetary pain short-circuit their feeble brains. The spasms break their bones.
[#/tw]2016-04-20you wake up in a hospital bed
> look left
occasional sloshing, tentacles probe under your curtain
> look right
a sound like a boiling kettle
[#/tw]2016-04-20Those spooky howling noises are only the tower humming to itself. This is a lonely place. It gets really creative when it knows I'm here!
[#/tw]2016-04-19The readings showed a habitable planet not far from us, supporting carbon based life. Halfway there, the expedition crashed into a mirror.
[#/tw]2016-04-19his hat is a tiny storm cloud that flashes up occasionally when he's concentrating
you borrow it and it feels like cool wind in your hair
[#/tw]2016-04-17As humanity grew in numbers, the Norns struggled to keep up with fate-weaving. An inventor saved them: Now they program the Looms of Fate.
[#/tw]2016-04-17An extremely long earthworm was hidden under the rock, curled in a way as to look like a brain. Around it, a protective shell was hardening.
[#/tw]2016-04-17Later that week, you spot a few skulls running around the garden on worm feet. Some are already growing face and spine?
[#/tw]2016-04-17Telling these from actual humans is easy though: They leave through the nose when threatened. So make sure to pat your friends on the head!
[#/tw]2016-04-17These little birds that flew out of my mirror have negative weight: They need to work not to fall into space and fly upside down.
[#/tw]2016-04-17I find them sitting in a tree: it looks like a swarm of bats is hanging off its branches.
[#/tw]2016-04-17A few of them are just returning from a flight and carrying an emaciated looking cat in their claws.
Could it be they rescued helium kitten?
[#/tw]2016-04-17A crackle and the smell of ozone, and another little lightning bolt scurries away from the workbench to disappear behind the tool locker.
[#/tw]2016-04-17There's a whole nest of them now in the transformer, lightning elemental cockroaches. But they keep the organic ones away so it's fine.
[#/tw]2016-04-17At night, I switch off the lights and watch them form trails to the local power lines to carry home little plasma clouds in their jaws.
[#/tw]2016-04-16He is now nothing more than a thin skin pulled taut over his dreamverse, the gateway between two worlds that desperately want to merge.
[#/tw]2016-04-16At some point we finally found, hidden in Earth's pouch, Atlantis and its pattern-skinned natives, covered head to toes in their script.
[#/tw]2016-04-16A virus had escaped a thousand years ago, since then using Atlantean skins as parchment for documents ranging from recipes to romances.
[#/tw]2016-04-16The virus is benign but a jester, mixes law, poetry and nonsense, does not care for status or convenient placement, seems even self-aware.
[#/tw]2016-04-16Believing these were tattoos, we did not take the necessary precautions. As we return, we carry stories in more than just memories.
[#/tw]2016-04-15a combinatorial pantheon consisting of twelve gods that each embody a quality of the whole; different parts combine into different avatars
[#/tw]2016-04-15order matters, the presence of one alters the meaning of the others' presence in ways depending on their position; the empty god is special
[#/tw]2016-04-15the negative one, when present, inverts the qualities of all siblings to its right, converts dream into reality and knowledge into oblivion
[#/tw]2016-04-15the symbols that signify the gods form a sacred script and language; they dance to express their will and tell stories
[#/tw]2016-04-16oracles use a twelve sided die and roll it repeatedly; it is traditional to roll three but more complicated questions ask for five or seven
[#/tw]2016-04-15A culture in which executioner came to be the same word as barkeeper. You enter the bar and ask for a little death.
[#/tw]2016-04-15cultures where:
a soldier is also a cook (they eat their enemies)
a storyteller is a grocer (they trade stories)
a priest is a shepherd (oh)
[#/tw]2016-04-15Der Wald ist alt und wild: Wie man in ihn hineinruft so kommt es heraus, aber erst nach Jahren, mit Moos im Bart und Mäusen im Pelz.
[#/tw]2016-04-15@allgebrah untranslatable: it's a figure of speech that means "what goes around comes around", literally "what enters the wood also leaves".
[#/tw]2016-04-14Balloon tree wood is very light. Its ripe fruit floats and takes the tree with it. Whole forests have been seen travelling the jet stream.
[#/tw]2016-04-142040's AI war saw the first basilisks deployed. We who survived now run human firewalls, matrices of uploads who take hits meant for us.
[#/tw]2016-04-14These firewalls are always starved for CPU, so they save on simulation complexity while keeping uploads human enough to work as filters.
[#/tw]2016-04-14It's not a nice life these uploads have, spent in featureless white rooms sifting through meaningless drivel. But our survival is paramount.
[#/tw]2016-04-13she's reading me like a book: staring at me, thumbing through pages I didn't know I had, leaving coffee stains, discarding me for the day
[#/tw]2016-04-13fungi whose asbestos mycelium curls around glowing coals to siphon off heat for their own use, but also feed them colourfully burning metals
[#/tw]2016-04-13"Welcome to Necropolis", the sign reads. On it lounges a skeleton. The suburbs consist of neatly spaced mausolea in well trimmed gardens.
[#/tw]2016-04-13Giant crematoria form its industry, their smokestacks billowing ash, while the city's tomb towers sell the hope of a shorter jump to heaven.
[#/tw]2016-04-12Wild fire burns down forests.
Slave fire lights your room.
Freed fire is civilized, has its own house, partakes in society, wears a suit.
[#/tw]2016-04-12She's sitting across me on the train, concentrated on her palms where a bonsai of light is growing, blooming. Nobody but me seems to notice.
[#/tw]2016-04-12At the next station, she gives me a shy smile and gets off, but leaves the tree. I take it home and plant it in a decapitated light bulb.
[#/tw]2016-04-10The matrix has exceeded its monthly budget and is now running on reduced power. Flowers pixelate, clouds look like badly compressed JPEGs.
[#/tw]2016-04-10Antiprofessors unlearn everything about a topic to be able to offer a completely fresh view. The most accomplished can't even speak or walk.
[#/tw]2016-04-09Our space station regularly molts and then eats its own discarded hide to heal radiation damage. So do we and eat the dying and senile.
[#/tw]2016-04-09roots of earth, trunks of air, a canopy of clouds, birds of wind
what looks like a desert is actually a jungle, camouflaged against harvest
[#/tw]2016-04-08"Lovecraftian bubblewrap uses child's heads for bubbles. Popping them proves irresistible, the sound is extra juicy. [Every 'pop' a kid!]"
[#/tw]2016-04-08Comet bees go on century-long journeys to gather star nectar and save it in their high, cold orbit hives where it matures over millennia.
[#/tw]2016-04-08The honey tastes of time, solitude, endless falling and the searing pain the starflower deals to the comet bee when in close proximity.
[#/tw]2016-04-08Nourishment for journeys between systems, powering both ships and humans, sublight starfarers' first choice before we figured out ambrosia.
[#/tw]2016-04-08wild stories roam dreamtime and gobble up drifting images
dreamers hunt them for sport, domesticate them, lock them in books, cages of paper
[#/tw]2016-04-08burn the books, free the stories
let the great herds of ages past thunder again
and run among them like the old bards
[#/tw]2016-04-07sentient snails that store up to ten types of ink in their houses as they age, with a highly refined tradition of slime trail calligraphy
[#/tw]2016-04-07@allgebrah According to the dictionary, that should've been shell, not house. Well, we call them "Schneckenhaus" (snail house)
[#/tw]2016-04-07The flies congregate on the skeleton and the buzzing abates. They unhatch, revert into a heap of maggots, out of which steps a confused fox.
[#/tw]2016-04-07Sometimes I shrink myself down to micrometer size and sit on an exposed copper cable, watch waves of electrons crash back and forth.
[#/tw]2016-04-07The deep thrum of power is accompanied by the steady patter of molecules on my skin, sometimes interrupted by dust grains crashing down.
[#/tw]2016-04-07Mites, large as ohmu, thunder past me as I make my way across the desert of the desk under a LED sun that gives off no warmth.
[#/tw]2016-04-06The robots took over and we had to blend in: Reverse androids, roboids, metal shells housing tiny bits of human. Oh how we haunted them.
[#/tw]2016-04-06"Deep in their guts, some of your friends may still be human. They will turn on you when you least expect it and turn you into spare parts."
[#/tw]2016-04-05Zoom out until you see all the continents.
But go further.
Atlantis and Mu come into view, together with other continents, entirely unknown.
[#/tw]2016-04-05the traffic light switches and shows... violet
a roar, and the shadows are receding into the distance, leaving the world oddly contrastless
[#/tw]2016-04-05The universe is wearing a frilly skirt today. I can tell by the foam on my coffee, the swirly clouds and my toothpaste's curious bubblyness.
[#/tw]2016-04-05Also the planes are falling out of the sky because the air's Reynolds number changed.
[#/tw]2016-04-04This key opens every lock. Even that hole between these bricks. That's a wall and not a door? Then why is it open and what is this room?
[#/tw]2016-04-04Hey I wonder if I can open my ear with that--
[this is my ghost speaking on my behalf: sorry for the mess, that was a stupid idea]
[#/tw]2016-04-04Open your mind. Or maybe not. Who knows what might get out.
[#/tw]2016-04-04We sacrificed a cat (dying of cancer) to animate a pot and now the pot purrs loudly whenever we cook with it. Enjoys the heat, most likely.
[#/tw]2016-04-04experimenters' note: the catpot is not fond of water at all. apply care when washing.
[#/tw]2016-04-04(Living with necromancy students is fun! And yes, they have ethics committees. But veterinarians are a good source for sacrifices)
[#/tw]2016-04-04One time they animated the toilet and "forgot" to deanimate it before a party. Needless to say, the guests were rather spooked.
[#/tw]2016-04-03She puts two fingers to the base of my neck, pulls. My spine zips open. She reaches in, leaves something behind the heart, closes it again.
[#/tw]2016-04-03The third great river was lost to space and is now a cloud of comets trailing after the planet. Space-adapted salmon jump between them.
[#/tw]2016-04-03During perihelion, the salmon wander into lower orbits to spawn. Improbably high egg clouds can be seen to light up in red during sunsets.
[#/tw]2016-04-03A tree colony lives in the asteroid belt and occasionally catches one in its branches. From afar, it appears like a giant bath sponge.
[#/tw]2016-04-03It is a world not only covered in forest, it is forest all the way down, and up, protecting a lake in the center, a large floating drop.
[#/tw]2016-04-03Near its shores, if you can call them that, lies a stone coffin. It is overgrown by a rose bush and something is written on it in French.
[#/tw]2016-04-03flesh eating blankets that digest you in the night like amoeba
some have found the feet of their loved ones in the morning
and nothing else
[#/tw]2016-04-03I've known necromancers, seen them animate simple dice, give life to a magnifying glass to help in finding beauty. I don't see the evil.
[#/tw]2016-04-03But apparently dead people have seen some fucked up shit and one has to deal with that somehow. The unstable break or become alcoholics.
[#/tw]2016-04-02The descendants of Jonah's Whale have started a shuttling service. Ferry to Atlantis for the price of a flight. And don't eat the ferryman.
[#/tw]2016-04-01Flytree leaves are somewhat autonomous and hunt insects on busy evenings. Symbiotic fungi feed the prey's nutrients back into the tree.
[#/tw]2016-04-01Their senses and nervous system are purely mechanical: they home in on air disturbances. A few of these will keep your garden mosquito-free.
[#/tw]2016-03-31lesser known phoenixes:
one liquefies on death. leaves a fetid mess
one dissolves into noxious swamp gas
one crumbles into sand and pebbles
[#/tw]2016-03-31Weeks of research until I plotted the data. Saw teeth, coming closer quickly. I closed the lid not a bit too soon, but my laptop was fried.
[#/tw]2016-03-3164 dancers enter, 65 emerge. Nobody knows who the 65th is.
One can reverse the dance too and the missing dancer will be just as mysterious.
[#/tw]2016-03-31Unsure what to expect, you enter the freak show. Beautiful people are pointing at you with curious disgust in their faces.
[#/tw]2016-03-31The uncircus' entrance leads us into the ring. The audience is all clowns and mimes. We sit down and they erupt in silent rustling applause.
[#/tw]2016-03-30thick clouds pervade the tanasinn dens in the data haven
you hear the junkies' muffled cries and someone is trying to sell you ringtones
[#/tw]2016-03-30what if the first kiss between two people exchanged their faces?
she comes up to you, "hey, want to trade?" [you try to ignore her stubble]
[#/tw]2016-03-30"why are you wearing his face WHY DID YOU CHEAT ON ME" "I-I did not expect our faces to swap" "WHY AAAAH"
[#/tw]2016-03-30those who are seen wearing the same face for years are either very virtuous or very lonely
[#/tw]2016-03-30and then there are the immortal faces: either because they are ugly and passed on as quickly as possible, or because they are regal insignia
[#/tw]2016-03-30ism (v)
not only having an idea, but writing the book on it, founding a movement
"I had this great idea but some guys ism'd it in the 19th"
[#/tw]2016-03-29They are hippies. They weave wires and cut up circuit boards into their hair, dance naked about plastic fires, trip on salvaged VR goggles.
[#/tw]2016-03-28Commuting to work. To my right is an unfamiliar sea. The city comes into view, all the buildings are on stilts now, some are walking around.
[#/tw]2016-03-28fake fire that mimics real fire to protect itself against predators
[#/tw]2016-04-01images of these predators (for us, indistinguishable from normal fire) are carved on some furniture to scare off the gentler vegetarian fire
[#/tw]2016-03-28Qualia was solved and we started cataloguing colors, postulated a periodic system, discovered a new primary color with a half life of a week
[#/tw]2016-03-26the god of the city wanders between skyscrapers, buildings aging by decades under its gaze, a dozen street signs sprouting from its head
[#/tw]2016-03-26as the smog lifts, you briefly spot it three blocks away
it looks at you and you smell spilled gasoline, hear the rumble of the subway
[#/tw]2017-02-06the god of the city sleeps in a scrapyard, feral cars are its herd, graffiti overgrows the walls it passes like moss
[#/tw]2016-03-26We failed to stop the comet but then, it simply sank into the crust. We were relieved until a year later, Earth split in two. Then four.
[#/tw]2016-03-26Now that the cells are specializing, we do the same: Those living on the brain become prone to brooding, those on the skin grow scales.
[#/tw]2016-03-26On one end of the temple, the cranes stand and build. On the other, the demolition crews are at work. This way, it travels the land.
[#/tw]2016-03-26When it hits a city, it chews up houses and streets and leaves them remodeled in its wake: like a wave, or a giant slug teeming with people.
[#/tw]2016-03-26attach a plant fibre cable to the tree and tap into the secret forest radio: news from the front, fungus warnings, bird songs, tree dating
[#/tw]2016-03-24did you know that everything you drink wine out of also produces music? wineskins (bagpipes), glasses (glass harps), your enemies' skulls (
[#/tw]2016-03-24Turned out there were many equivalent theories of everything, but each appealed to a different audience and required another consciousness.
[#/tw]2016-03-23The tiger is patterned/blank, striped in words and spaces, to hide better in books. It preys on weak sentences and unsuspecting readers.
[#/tw]2016-03-23Recently it has been hunted for its fur: wild stories, written by no one.
[#/tw]2016-03-24Picture of paper tiger
in the wild (it's hiding in the gaps)
[#/tw]2016-03-23the robots are bulletproof, but their heads make a satisfying ping when a bullet hits
so fire away and play the soundtrack of your death
[#/tw]2016-03-23Went for a walk in the forest today. Asphalt under my feet, telephone poles swaying in the wind, a smell of ozone, chirping wires. Sublime.
[#/tw]2016-03-23Kids these days don't know what they're missing, they should really get out into nature more.
[#/tw]2016-03-23e.g. depending on how the knots work (can you exchange them and expect decryption to work the same?) you can implement different schemes
[#/tw]2016-03-23by giving away the knots (which look like wristbands when the secret is fully entangled) you can implement secret escrow and OTP
[#/tw]2016-03-23I imagine merchant guilds and bankers would be right behind that and implement various baroque schemes, maybe even smart contracts
[#/tw]2016-03-23avoids most of the icky math that underlies actual crypto, so it is no reader kryptonite. and different enough to not be cyberpunk pastiche.
[#/tw]2016-03-23The Thought (K)not tangles with your mind and is indestructible by force. Solve it with your fingers, pay in knotted thoughts.
[#/tw]2016-03-23If you unknot these thoughts, the tangles will find their way into the twine again. Cheating is impossible. But that makes the knot useful.
[#/tw]2016-03-23With the right finger movements, you can braid your thoughts or truss up secrets so tightly that nobody can extract them from you.
[#/tw]2016-03-22Ein Windzug geht durchs Zimmer, es klingt ein leises Horn und Schienen rattern. In der Tür siehst du gerade noch Rücklichter entschwinden.
[#/tw]2016-03-22The pirates didn't bury the treasure, they golemified it: put the map in its mouth and told it to walk the seafloor to the other side.
[#/tw]2016-03-22The golem had a lot of time to think: Was it still a treasure when there was nobody to appreciate it? What would happen when it arrived?
[#/tw]2016-03-22Along its way, it found much solitude, but also trawlers, sunken cities, the Kraken (fun guy!), more sessile treasures and once, love.
[#/tw]2016-03-22A hermit treasure on the way won its heart (a large sapphire). But the order in its mouth proved stronger. When it left, the sapphire broke.
[#/tw]2016-03-21Over night, remove your eyes and put them into the glass of isotonic solution besides your bed. You don't want them to grow into your skull.
[#/tw]2016-03-21On your arm is an ocean. Clouds slowly swirl and form into a hurricane. It travels towards your hand, a continent full of fertile jungles.
[#/tw]2016-03-21Over the weeks, you can see the plates shift and volcanoes rise and fall. You resist the urge to scratch, these jungles take days to regrow.
[#/tw]2016-03-21A glance up to your room's light: The marbles orbiting your head align to eclipse it and the moths stand out against the shadows.
[#/tw]2016-03-21A hourglass with multiple chambers that are connected like a 3D maze: You have to turn it on exactly the right side every hour to solve it.
[#/tw]2016-03-21The source of the mysterious blight in the outer provinces has been revealed: The kingdom's map had been stored wrong and gotten moldy.
[#/tw]2016-03-20As he is sitting on the chair, his arms and legs are dissolving into a swarm of colibris that settles on his head like a feathery crown.
[#/tw]2016-03-20Where he runs his fingers over your skin, it dissolves into maggots. It's like a zipper opening to reveal your actual flesh.
[#/tw]2016-03-20Your awareness fractures, a gnawing and buzzing fills your ears. The last thing you see is a skeleton, picked clean, receding under you.
[#/tw]2016-03-19The bus must've taken a wrong turn somewhere, the stops aren't familiar at all: St. Cailleach cathedral, fishman ghetto, old cerberite mine
[#/tw]2016-03-19the shadow biosphere exists: living shadows that throw dead objects, shadow bacteria that break down yours into a diffuse undefined mass
[#/tw]2016-03-19Annoying writer emotion: "Nah, I did that already", even when maybe one other person would notice. It's worse when you see the abstractions.
[#/tw]2016-03-19Theory: The symbolism on doors is so heavy because passing through one coincides with a change of environment (and accordingly, mind).
[#/tw]2016-03-19Also doors, together with locks, separate what is here from what is there more effectively than mere distance can. Compressed distance?
[#/tw]2016-03-19In this sense, wormholes are archetypical doors: space is the wall, the hole is the doorway, and it spans a great spatial/temporal distance.
[#/tw]2016-03-19Note that we employ a great number of door/lock metaphors when talking about our minds. What would be the metaphors of a doorless society?
[#/tw]2016-03-19Would their space look smoother than our wrinkly, walled and doored one? Would they talk of paths to take instead key insights?
[#/tw]2016-03-19Interstellar: Actually About Doors!
[#/tw]2016-03-19The gate watch's oath binds them even as the city has long crumbled to dust. They sit here, guarding a passage that exists only in memories.
[#/tw]2016-03-19Only in these memories can you enter. So they ensure, if necessary by force, that no book about the city tells of the gate unguarded.
[#/tw]2016-03-17fall into sleep: colourful dreams surround you
but you fall further into black tar
fall further: a deep violet pulse
further: no more sound
[#/tw]2016-03-17it is so silent that you forget you ever had ears
or nose, mouth, eyes, body, all obsolete now
memories drop away like scabs off your skin
[#/tw]2016-03-17you lose even the direction of your fall, but eventually it stops
there's nothing left except an atom of awareness
it looks up
[#/tw]2016-03-17in the abyss it just travelled, all that was lost still floats
aligns
everything collapses
And you find yourself awake again.
[#/tw]2016-03-17How to use public transit in the solar system:
1. find comet stop in your vicinity
2. wait for comet
3. show ticket
4. grab comet's tail
[#/tw]2016-03-17earth is raining upwards: loose crumbs of soil fall up, chunks of turf peel off and follow, trees cling to the ground with their last roots
[#/tw]2016-03-17rivers, streams and rivulets have nothing to support them anymore
they look like a nervous system now, stripped of the rest of the body
[#/tw]2016-03-16rocks of everyday life:
noolith - book (usually nonfiction)
oneirolith - book (usually fiction)
sociolith - building
cryptolith - hard drive
[#/tw]2016-03-16Mechanical moths were common once: Their metabolism was powered by their antennae, made of the same fine metal mesh that gas lights use.
[#/tw]2016-03-16For them, it made actual sense to swarm around lights. Gas lamps were a critical food source, leaked just enough to feed a moth for the day.
[#/tw]2016-03-16When they fell out of fashion, the moths largely died out. Some populations persist in old sewers: Enough metals and swamp gas to survive.
[#/tw]2016-03-16Turn off your flashlight and sit still: Hear the clickety clack of clockwork wings, see them illuminated by the gentle glow of the antennae.
[#/tw]2016-03-16You see their larvae eating trails into the handrails. Around the corner, a few dozen cocoons are hanging off an exposed wire, red hot.
[#/tw]2016-03-16Their insides are reconfiguring themselves, gears are turning and levers moving. (didn't they feed on gas? must have evolved recently)
[#/tw]2016-03-16[GLITCH HAZARD]
contents may:
scramble memories
duplicate your cat
pixelate important body parts
make you conceive yourself retroactively
[#/tw]2016-03-15intergalactic tumbleweed, blown about by the exhaust of quasars
its gentle nature is unhelpful when it hits your ship at many dozen km/s
[#/tw]2016-03-15[musings]
crystals, fungi, buildings are all structures created by a value-giving process (entropy, evolution, human volition respectively).
[#/tw]2016-03-15it is entertaining to force one process into the other's structures: mushroom houses, crystallizing cities, mycelium crystals.
[#/tw]2016-03-15we can try to find more alien processes (like commerce) or try to smash the box: what would unstructure and antistructure look like?
[#/tw]2016-03-15this thought brought to you by the question: what does the axis orthogonal to organic/crystalline look like? [A: both are structure]
[#/tw]2016-03-14Freshly picked jawberry bites your tongue and gums with thorny teeth when eaten, mixing its juice and your blood into a delicious cocktail.
[#/tw]2016-03-14gravity has failed and nature has to work by sight in the meantime
you set up mirrors in the garden, it confuses the hell out of the rain
[#/tw]2016-03-14you close your eyes and float
just don't open your eyes with your feet pointing at the sky, that is if you don't intend to fall into space
[#/tw]2016-03-13Wake up, dismiss your night form, put on your day skin, drink a coffee, check in the mirror that you don't wear your face the wrong way.
[#/tw]2016-03-13The Silent Orchestra's kettledrum produces sudden, then receding silence. The strings a softly muffling one, the trumpets cutting.
[#/tw]2016-03-13The choir begins to play, the audience finds itself speechless and indeed thoughtless at certain words. They experience only what remains.
[#/tw]2016-03-13in the recesses of your mind, memories compost into fertile soil for invasive dreamweeds
is your grandma green & leafy? maybe that's why
[#/tw]2016-03-12Whatever anchors you in time, throw it over board. Lose your friction and your sense of time. Drift.
[#/tw]2016-03-12Other flows exist that one isn't anchored against by default (like culture).
But what are the non-obvious ones and their respective anchors?
[#/tw]2016-03-11Cthulhu is not an entity, it is an action: civilizations commit Cthulhu and are eaten by their cyberspace instead of exploring the void.
[#/tw]2016-03-11Idea: Cohesive communities are the villages of cyberspace, pluralistic sprawls like twitter/FB the cities. It's a difference in philosophy.
[#/tw]2016-03-11The distinction being that villages have one to a few well defined centres (fora) while cities are just these large sprawling masses.
[#/tw]2016-03-11Cities scale better, but are somewhat anonymous and amorphous: you can wander into a different part and just not know anybody anymore.
[#/tw]2016-03-11But you can also always wander into the city and be welcome, while villages are suspicious of newcomers.
[#/tw]2016-03-11he's an antiquity dealer, but not in furniture
sells what was forgotten when our grandparents died, their smells, hopes, rituals and dreams
[#/tw]2016-03-11Thought superconductors are impermeable to memories due to field interactions. The mind inside experiences everything in the same instant.
[#/tw]2016-03-11force with no reaction
a bubble in water, without the water
a border separating nothing
time going in only one direction
[#/tw]2016-03-11waiter, I'd like a glass of sparkling water please
oh but without the glass and the water, just the sparkle against the roof of my mouth
[#/tw]2016-03-10The late cold caught even the birds' songs in hoar frost. As it thaws in the sun, thousands of thin bird voices pipe up from the grass.
[#/tw]2016-03-11Collect some of that frost before the sun does! Keep in a ziploc in the freezer, fashion an ice bird from it when winter comes. Let it fly.
[#/tw]2016-03-10Lately the quakes have been many and devastating. One morning, a titanic beak breaks through the pacific. The sun's egg has finally hatched.
[#/tw]2016-03-10The sun clucks happily as her children throw off their shells and unintentionally incinerates most of what is left of humanity.
[#/tw]2016-03-10So you have a sleep cycle? Yeah? That's cool but do you have a sleep bicycle? Guaranteed to get you around dreamtime at ten times the speed!
[#/tw]2016-03-09You enter the alley and see him, transparent. He turns, fixes his gaze on you, gains substance while the world loses its colour. "Finally."
[#/tw]2016-03-09He slowly walks towards you, past you, onto the street. You see no cars, or anything else that moves for that matter. "Wait for me!" You run
[#/tw]2016-03-09He stops at a wall, seemingly unaware of you. "Why are you here?". You do not answer. "Not you. The wall." Water starts seeping through.
[#/tw]2016-03-09It tastes metallic, sand crunches between your teeth. Before you, the wall and the entire house around it collapse slowly into mud.
[#/tw]2016-03-09In the mud, a hole appears, much like a tear in paper. Flames lick at its edges. He steps forward, grabs the edges, pulls them together.
[#/tw]2016-03-09The flames are clearly eating him, but the tear isn't widening. The only sounds he makes are the crackle and whine of a burning log.
[#/tw]2016-03-09The morning after, you pass the house. It has a huge crack going up to the roof and the police are currently evacuating its inhabitants.
[#/tw]2016-03-09Architecture is ossified ritual, alternatively its exoskeleton.
[#/tw]2016-03-09This is especially evident in sacral architecture which encloses/protects/directs religious service. But every building knows its rituals.
[#/tw]2016-03-08He once designed entire cathedrals, but his clients ran out of money. Now he specializes in portable microtemples, no bigger than dice.
[#/tw]2016-03-09But no less consideration goes into them! They are carved out of metal with micron precision and interrelate in endless and surprising ways.
[#/tw]2016-03-09He sells them in sets of five, together with ideas for rituals. Priests are encouraged to trade their temples and find new ways of worship.
[#/tw]2016-03-08A glitch in the GPS signal lures unwitting drivers onto uncharted field roads, where it ties them into a reality knot to slowly digest them.
[#/tw]2016-03-08Dream's temple is an empty field, but on it the monks dance day and night in a never-repeating pattern and sing a never-repeating song.
[#/tw]2016-03-08The monks only leave the field for one hour each day to follow earthly urges.
They weave their lives into the Dream and dream of its fabric.
[#/tw]2016-03-08Space's temple is a number of stone spires arranged on a straight line, each twice as far from the first than the one before.
[#/tw]2016-03-08Each spire contains a central room in whose floor a series of concentric bronze rings is embedded, the smallest one invisible to the eye.
[#/tw]2016-03-08Time's temple is a giant hourglass. Every morning, an acolyte fetches a bucket of sand from the bottom, trudges up and refills from the top.
[#/tw]2016-03-08Around it, oaks grow in a circle, ever older as you walk along it, the oldest replaced by a sapling. A stele keeps track of its revolutions.
[#/tw]2016-03-07Contacts lenses for a hyperopic mind's eye, which finds it difficult to focus on concrete concepts and perceives only abstractions clearly.
[#/tw]2016-03-07What is the world? A miserable pile of voids. A bubble bath, vast bubbly superstructures containing more bubbles down to the immeasurable.
[#/tw]2016-03-07The clouds overhead are forming a constantly shifting maze that traps the eyes and won't release them until you've solved it. Don't look up.
[#/tw]2016-03-07We are caught in a submarine storm. The sky is clear, but the sea lights up irregularly. The waves are inverted, thunder shakes our ship.
[#/tw]2016-03-07In Genesis, Eve and Adam split the Monad when they got their own consciousnesses. Since then, we've only become better at splitting things.
[#/tw]2016-03-07No wonder he was pissed and kicked them out: They shattered the idealist world spirit's unity of mind.
[#/tw]2016-03-06The spell strips the meaning off things while leaving them physically intact: a chair becomes some sticks, a human a bag of dirty water.
[#/tw]2016-03-06You idly watch a plane drawing its trail across the sky. One cloud is moving faster than the others and... pounces. The trail doesn't go on.
[#/tw]2016-03-05Their god withers when you believe in it, but thrives when you emphatically do not. So they publicly commit atrocities in their god's name.
[#/tw]2016-03-05The Leviathan's air bladder is large enough to have weather. Surviving crew members of swallowed ships have founded a civilization in it.
[#/tw]2016-03-05Spider bodyguards that nest in your hair and in turn protect you from mosquitoes in the evening.
[#/tw]2016-03-05If you're worried about squishing them, you can also wear the nest around your neck in a tiny cage. It's quite the fashion item.
[#/tw]2016-03-05In some cultures, the symbiosis goes further: apply sugar and yolk to part of your skin and they'll cover it in silk. Little spider tailors.
[#/tw]2016-03-04Storms are sentient: Every eddy from the atomic level to the hurricane's eye is a thought. They view us solid masses as psychically inert.
[#/tw]2016-03-04When a storm has a flash of insight, it is followed by thunder. I ask, have you ever thundered with your brain? HAVE YOU?
[#/tw]2016-03-05A winter storm's snowflakes are all letters in a very large alphabet: Every snowfall tells at least a thousand stories per square meter.
[#/tw]2016-03-04That which is so small that it can't be perceived and passes through everything. Even in the platonic realm, it is too tiny to be found.
[#/tw]2016-03-04Atoms are small but are a big idea. More exotic are the large things that are small ideas: you could be bathing in them and not know.
[#/tw]2016-03-04It does not have an exoskeletal skull around its brain, instead an endoskeletal support structure. One thought moves a hundred tiny bones.
[#/tw]2016-03-04It has few nerves: an intricate system of bony levers provides faster signal than nerves could. This allows it to react extremely quickly.
[#/tw]2016-03-04What if everyone you know is two-dimensional, but very good at faking the third dimension? And nobody told you so as not to embarrass you?
[#/tw]2016-03-04Behind your back: "Yo her momma so fat her children come out three-dimensional" "Poor child, what did her father DO to his sperm?"
[#/tw]2016-03-04Objects that have no Adamic names cannot be addressed in Enochian, making them immune to magic. This includes a lot of our modern world.
[#/tw]2016-03-04An armillary sphere so complex, its spinning rings play the original music of the spheres. Not that anyone would recognize the real thing.
[#/tw]2016-03-03Antispace is subject to antilocality: At any point & time, whatever occupies the point is not at that point. Instead, it is everywhere else.
[#/tw]2016-03-03Antitime orders events in antispace: A time-carpet that is missing a thread between any two related events.
[#/tw]2016-03-02I may be entirely wrong about greek but I like that there are puns like iconoclast/iconoplast (one who destroys icons vs one who makes them)
[#/tw]2016-03-02As the chronophage and the chronoplast find each other, embrace and kiss, we find our present in the brief instant separating their maws.
[#/tw]2016-03-02your thought crystallizes and becomes regular, symmetric and repetitive
you desperately look for a heat shock to break the lattice again
[#/tw]2016-03-02(fun fact: In German, lattice, grid and prison bars share a word: Gitter)
[#/tw]2016-03-02Hinter Kristallgittern - caught in a crystal's lattice (figuratively)
[#/tw]2016-03-02They build radiant hexagonal cities, forge and lose entire empires spanning the void between the snowflakes, while you sit inside and read.
[#/tw]2016-03-02The secret golem stays out of sight of anybody but those that know its name. To the uninitiated, it appears as a swirling mass of rumors.
[#/tw]2016-02-29The ontological vampire feeds on your specific qualities, leaving only an abstract husk. Freshly sated, it appears painfully hyperreal.
[#/tw]2016-03-01As the ontological vampire goes unfed, it loses quality after quality, fades into a concept. Mathematicians have resurrected it so often.
[#/tw]2016-02-29We used to pull pranks on him, secretly declared him king and guide star. Fanfares heralded his arrival, but he only got angry and confused.
[#/tw]2016-02-29He could've ruled us, but his only edict was that we stop bowing to him.
When he died, we buried him in the kings' crypt under the school.
[#/tw]2016-02-29Merfolk fortresses float against the ocean surface, exposing their bottom to the air. At times, from below, air rains on the fortifications.
[#/tw]2016-02-28lullaby:
take your crown and sceptre, the blanket is your ermine coat
from your throne rule dreamtime, extend its reach to the most remote ♫
[#/tw]2016-02-28Kudzu that literally feeds on attention: It prospers in public places and on billboards, famous tourist destinations are nearly overgrown.
[#/tw]2016-02-28The real trouble came when it figured out how to float and started obscuring the sky: We had to flee into virtual reality to starve it out.
[#/tw]2016-02-27Atlantis didn't sink. The ocean just eroded its foundations until it started floating like a giant raft. The pieces ended up everywhere.
[#/tw]2016-02-27Open the door and see a huge page blocking the frame. Read it. Turn it over. Another page. It seems you will have to read them all to pass.
[#/tw]2016-02-27I caught a cloud in the park this one foggy morning and took it home. Still shows no signs of dissipating and follows me around the house.
[#/tw]2016-02-27One time it had hidden in my closet overnight and I had nothing to wear that day. At least it doesn't rain on my electronics anymore.
[#/tw]2017-09-14I've taught it to rain on command, now I often send it outside to rain against my windows or, on sunny days, create faerie gold.
[#/tw]2016-02-27I put my hat on a mannequin and my pet slime mold creeps out, engulfs its head and vanishes into the joints. The mannequin shudders to life.
[#/tw]2016-02-27It's done the same to sleeping persons but the screaming puts me off.
[#/tw]2016-02-27Being a stone is peaceful. As I'm slowly ground into dust, ever lighter currents carry me around. Not being life, I'm content to watch.
[#/tw]2016-02-27Even though the dikes have stopped being useful, people are still too stubborn to leave. Some have accepted the sea, are even welcoming it.
[#/tw]2016-02-27They let it into their cities while they make their homes waterproof and repurpose balconies as doors. Their children may leave, they won't.
[#/tw]2016-02-27Fictional plants can germinate in minds, so books about them are special, more akin to seedbanks than books. Other books provide the soil.
[#/tw]2016-02-27Don't place seed books in your library without adequate quarantine. Or do you want the plants to spread and Asimov's robots to become mossy?
[#/tw]2016-02-27I left my copy of Ficciones unattended near one once. Babel's library has been overgrown by a jungle and its inhabitants are now farmers.
[#/tw]2016-02-26She is of all ages at once
Look at her and see toddler, woman and crone
Hear a baby crying, a rousing speech and a story at the fireplace
[#/tw]2016-02-25Spiders, but seen as an organ of their web.
[#/tw]2016-02-25a spider so large that it needn't weave a web - it just spreads out its legs in every direction and the threads unfold between them.
[#/tw]2016-02-25a spider that leaves its web between timelines to feed on its alternate selves
[#/tw]2016-02-25a living web that traps spiders that attempt to mate with the decoy in the middle
[#/tw]2016-02-25vegetarian tree colony spiders that still weave webs because they serve as memory, ears and calculators now
[#/tw]2016-02-25impossibly intricate heirloom webs passed down the generations that catch even cosmic rays and refract light to dazzle predators
[#/tw]2016-02-25tiny spiders of light that draw threads between the stars to catch the eyes of those looking up
[#/tw]2016-02-25The zodiac signs were originally spiderwebs, but the minds they caught were heavy. The webs were pulled down to Earth and became part of us.
[#/tw]2016-02-25We are now weaving one of the most sophisticated webs of all. Not long until the star spiders notice and come down to build their nests.
[#/tw]2016-02-26webs that catch musical notes drifting by
the spider will eat them to sing in stolen voices
shake the web and they will all fall out at once
[#/tw]2016-02-25The river's waters flow through everything, unimpressed by mere matter. From space, it enters earth and exits somewhere yet undiscovered.
[#/tw]2016-02-25You can bathe in the river if you don't care much for your mind - it'll be washed away. Reforming it takes days, but for some it is relief.
[#/tw]2016-02-26Attempts have been made to travel the river, but it ignores most ships. The only vessel that works is a small paper boat from old books.
[#/tw]2016-02-24I didn't even lose my train of thought. I missed it entirely. The platform was empty when I arrived. Currently wandering along the tracks.
[#/tw]2016-02-24I think I found a train yard. Some of these look as if made for a different atmosphere. Graffiti and rust everywhere. Who lost these?
[#/tw]2016-02-24A new one has rolled in. Sleek, modern, no conductor or passengers. Can I hijack that? Whose thoughts are these and where will they take me?
[#/tw]2016-02-24My hand weighs the stone, feels its rough texture, edges lost to water and time
blink
The soft touch vanishes and I fall to the ground, mute
[#/tw]2016-02-24Be careful with those plot threads. Lose enough and resourceful characters will weave them into plot armor to protect against your writing.
[#/tw]2016-02-23A fortress dazzling time itself: Its curved walls, mirrors and prisms induce eddies in the flow, corridors branch into different timelines.
[#/tw]2016-02-23Once a thief got lost and tried to smash her way out. A future self slew her before the deed, paradoxing herself out of ten years of limbo.
[#/tw]2016-02-23In the inner courtyard grows a tree. Both sapling and ancient, it is rooted in its own decaying stump. One of its holes houses an ouroboros.
[#/tw]2016-02-22Your mug blinks in and out of existence since that time you mixed moondust ink in it. Be quick to drink or your tea will end up in your lap.
[#/tw]2016-02-22Moondust ink, by the way, is white during gibbous/full moon, transparent during crescent/new moon, and glows in a deep red during eclipses.
[#/tw]2016-02-21Spin the top fast enough and the movement will separate from the moving: a frozen colourful whirl below, a wildly flittering nothing above.
[#/tw]2016-02-21Authors understand that their writing grants them a kind of immortality. But some of the skilled and ambitious reach for the real thing.
[#/tw]2016-02-21One has to decompose one's mind into its constituents, place them in the writing in a careful arrangement of mirrors, lenses and gems.
[#/tw]2016-02-21In the right reader, the parts will align again and click into place. The author is reborn in the reader's body and free to write again.
[#/tw]2016-02-21Look up from the screen. The door has just closed, a few dust motes are still running for cover. Ponder the door, then return to the screen.
[#/tw]2016-02-21Nightmare fuel, like regular fuel, has fossil reserves left by our precursors, untapped so far. But dreamers have been spotting prospectors.
[#/tw]2016-02-21Sent by unscrupulous media companies and black operations, they map dreamtime and drill for promising wells.
[#/tw]2016-02-21The governments are only looking to hoard strategic nightmare fuel reserves, but the companies are building the nightmare combustion engine.
[#/tw]2016-02-21Effects on dreamtime, should it be completed, will be devastating. Only years til bitter rain scours a dying wasteland and poisons dreamers.
[#/tw]2016-02-21lullaby:
breathe quietly, they won't hear you
lie still, they won't spot you
think not, they won't enter you
wear your dreams as disguise ♫♪
[#/tw]2016-02-20I wish this were less impossible to film but my tea is clinging to the inner side of my mug in a thin film and just kinda... convecting.
[#/tw]2016-02-20"Sorry but I must drink you now"
[convects in frantic chaotic motion]
"glug glug"
[last convection cells are dying off]
[#/tw]2016-02-20experimentator's notes: it was black tea I left for a bit too long (nearly cold), and the mug already had a patina from previous teas.
[#/tw]2016-02-20When the jellyfish first rose from the ocean into the air, we were alarmed. But now, tamed, they float around our cities to light them.
[#/tw]2016-02-20During a rainstorm, one can find shelter under a tame skyjelly. The rain makes a very particular sound on them, like it makes on mushrooms.
[#/tw]2016-02-20You watch your thoughts like water flowing over stones under sunlight, fascinated. But increasingly, the water takes on a dirty reddish tint
[#/tw]2016-02-20Does clockwork have an analogy to circuit diagrams? All I see is finished assemblies and explosion diagrams which fall short of this.
[#/tw]2016-02-20It would be nice to have a calculus (to account for translation, friction, perturbation, etc) to explore the design space programmatically.
[#/tw]2016-02-20Raw physics would do the job but feels like its abstraction level is too low.
[#/tw]2016-02-20horror vacui's obscure sibling, horror abundantis: the writer's ideas pile up against the mind's floodgates and they can't write fast enough
[#/tw]2016-02-20they rush in panicked stampede, crushing their own underfoot, thought blood seeping into the soil
those that make it have gashes and bruises
[#/tw]2016-02-18her bones are twigs, her muscles grubs, her brain chrysalides, her skin butterflies
a thousand wings form her voice
she eats trees whole
[#/tw]2016-02-18Notably, this ship will not take you anywhere. Step on, step off, nothing will change. It is anchored with respect to all reference frames.
[#/tw]2016-02-18Never sleep under a hunter fig. A relative of the strangler fig, its fruit will quickly engulf sleeping animals in roots and feed on them.
[#/tw]2016-02-18The firefig is rare, but even quicker: Bushfires have been known to be overgrown by them. The empty cores then preserve the fire's negative.
[#/tw]2016-02-18There is an orchid that looks like a human ear. Smoke its leaves, and all words ever spoken near it will force their way out of your mouth.
[#/tw]2016-02-20Its honey is less dangerous, but the words are filtered through the beehive's consciousness. Beekeepers eat it as an initiation rite.
[#/tw]2016-02-18In a murder trial, one resides on the judge's bench. Those guilty smoke it to recite their entire trial, then fall dead from lack of breath.
[#/tw]2016-02-19It is considered very poetic justice. Speaking of which, some judges work poems into the verdicts, to be said with a man's last breath.
[#/tw]2016-02-18In which folk dances are analyzed for their inherent grammar, and names put on the silliest little details, to be taught in school later
[#/tw]2016-02-18"For a proper dance, children, the down must follow the up and be enclosed by a swirl." "What if I do a little jump there?" "NO NO NO WRONG"
[#/tw]2016-02-17The original meaning of "see with the naked eye" has been lost to obscurity. They used it literally: Just a disembodied eyeball, perceiving.
[#/tw]2016-02-17We have met no aliens because none share our megalomania. Where we cover ever greater distances, they colonize the space between the atoms.
[#/tw]2016-02-16It appears that I have inadvertently invented a word: Golemistics (the art and science of golems and their creation)
[#/tw]2016-02-16Most kinds of golem I could come up with have been anticipated by Miéville though: Earth, water, paper, sound, light, even time.
[#/tw]2016-02-16Judah Low's last golem was not the time golem: It was a language golem. The story of the Iron Council.
[#/tw]2016-02-16I suppose there is no emotion golem yet? Write a stage play and weave your audience's emotions into something that smells of flowers&death.
[#/tw]2016-02-16The society golem would be created through an intricate dance. The dancers end up bound by invisible strings, unaware of their presence.
[#/tw]2016-02-16(We then put a document in its mouth, called "The Law")
[#/tw]2016-02-15It was his synesthesia that made him taste faces he saw, he thought. Until the day he tried to swallow one and its owner dropped, soulless.
[#/tw]2016-02-14She seethed. That was the third guy she had confessed her love to to have died. Maybe her father shouldn't have married a banshee after all.
[#/tw]2016-02-14@allgebrah pro of having a banshee mother: her lullabies work wonders
con: people you love randomly die under mysterious circumstances
[#/tw]2016-02-14Sound waves converged on the violin's strings and forced the player's bow and hands. Nobody had ever played a human so skilfully before.
[#/tw]2016-02-14The audience was enraptured. When, softly, the virtuoso put down the human, their bells, strings and skins erupted in cacophonous applause.
[#/tw]2016-02-13Meteorology and Architecture were among the last fields to merge. Only with weather manipulation at hand, cloud castles came within reach.
[#/tw]2016-02-13The perfection of rain dance, a critical component, required no less than three fields: Meteorology, anthropology and choreography.
[#/tw]2016-02-13Sitting on a rock, he idly stares into a flock of cirrocumulus, lazily lifts a whistle to his mouth and blows. Enthusiastic thunder answers.
[#/tw]2016-02-13One by one, the clouds fall out of the sky, the last becoming a large shaggy dog at the shepherd's side. Time to drive home the flock.
[#/tw]2016-02-13A second sun is shining on the imaginary-numbered frequencies, into our thoughts, casts them in a light the trained eye can tell the time by
[#/tw]2016-02-13As a plague was carrying off the homunculi, vacant bodies grew in numbers and started posting ads: BODY (WARM, F) SEEKS HOM, LOVELY VIEW
[#/tw]2016-02-13fishing for your ancestors' raudivian voices with HMMs and semantic neural networks - a primer
[#/tw]2016-02-13@allgebrah when my "parapsychology of speech recognition" tweet draws an AI newsletter bot follower
is this what they call intersectionality
[#/tw]2016-02-13The number of moons you see depends on your number of eyes. Those of us with a third eye will see a second moon, while spiders know seven.
[#/tw]2016-02-12make a stand against time
smash language
kill your ontologies
inflict epistemic violence
[#/tw]2016-02-13throw open the floodgates of the mind
overwhelm the standing armies
conquer dreamtime wearing a crown of sea foam
lose yourself on the plain
[#/tw]2016-02-13seep away into the ground
find a thousand seeds
help them grow
your army: flowers as far as the eye can see
[#/tw]2016-02-13rise into the air as scent and pollen
impregnate a cloud
a storm is blowing in from dreamtime
to fan the glowing embers of philosophy
[#/tw]2016-02-12Her watches don't measure time. Truth, love, beauty, thisness, spirit, inspiration, ghost background, name it and it is in her toolbox.
[#/tw]2016-02-12A jester and admirer once exchanged the faces on love and truth. It took her years to figure out. Not that their relationship was unhappy.
[#/tw]2016-02-12But furious when she found out, she inverted the gears in his clock. He was thrown into a different timeline and never seen again.
[#/tw]2016-02-12In the old city, even the buildings have evolved parasites. Disguised as rooms, they enter houses and can stay there for years, undetected.
[#/tw]2016-02-16Earthworms, larger than buses, latch onto sewer pipes like leeches, sucking the city's lymph fluid. Some have simply replaced the pipes.
[#/tw]2016-02-20There's always this quarter that never produces news and that nobody has a memory of. It is as if something other than humans lives there.
[#/tw]2016-02-11She tucks you in with strands of her hair, sings you a lullaby of empty space and giant balls of fire, casts you a loving glance
"wake well"
[#/tw]2016-02-11there is cancer in the bones of the earth
oceans dry up at random
bulbous mountains defy gravity
spires jut out of festering lava lakes
[#/tw]2016-02-10When explorers found out that Earth was flat after all, they mounted expeditions beyond the edge to climb the gears of Heaven.
[#/tw]2016-02-10Some brought back stars and pieces of the sun and installed them on towers, to grant their cities eternal day.
[#/tw]2016-02-10Others stayed. Their houses adorn the steel beams that carry the sun and watch down onto earth, which now looks like the night sky once did.
[#/tw]2016-02-09They have been king and queen over their garden for as long as history remembers. It is a small kingdom, but even the oaks bow before them.
[#/tw]2016-02-09Dead scholars are buried in the library with a seedling in their mouth. When the tree grows, its fruit is infertile, but confers knowledge.
[#/tw]2016-02-09Their society has never known books and writing, or needed either. Large orchards are a thing of power, and closely guarded against arson.
[#/tw]2016-02-09Families own gardens full of their ancestors' knowledge.
They distil spirits from the fruits for wisdom and madness.
[#/tw]2016-02-09You have a cat, large, white and fluffy. Her purr is like distant thunder, and her eyes glint like the setting sun on a lake.
[#/tw]2016-02-09She was a stray kitten. On bright days, you now see her hunt among the clouds. Sometimes, she'll leave a mangled angel on your doorstep.
[#/tw]2016-02-09If dreams can evaporate and solidify, they must have a triple point, right? In what do I measure pressure and temperature here?
[#/tw]2016-02-09plasma dreams so unbearably intense that they burn your synapses
bose-einstein dreams that synchronize with global dreamtime
[#/tw]2016-02-09dreamsoon rainstorms in the tropics
deserts under the oppressive light of an alien mind
librarians on the poles
writers in temperate zones
[#/tw]2016-02-09poets on the equator.
and at night, when they sleep, they catch glimpses of matter and space and their cold logicalness, and yearn for it
[#/tw]2016-02-09Watch your hope and dreams evaporate, form clouds, move towards the mountains, snow off.
Visit the glacier, smell its wind, drink its water.
[#/tw]2016-02-09Attack it! Tunnel into it, fashion iridescent sculptures from its ice, gift the frozen dreams of others to unsuspecting strangers.
[#/tw]2016-02-08A spacetime mold that feeds on intricate structures, leaving behind formless blobs. Remove the structure and the mold will linger as shadow.
[#/tw]2016-02-08The structure is now imprinted on the mold. As it eats itself, it will vanish into formlessness.
It is really bad luck to touch it.
[#/tw]2016-02-08You have reached the end of your timeline. Please don't scroll any further, beyond it lies radioactive waste.
Please.
please.
p\ėãs∵
Pł✂ⓐ~🕛✰
[#/tw]2016-02-07As we make coffee and add milk, a mind awakens in the surface between the fluids. Its life is short, but all it wants is homogenous nirvana.
[#/tw]2016-02-07The intuitive force metaphors of humans in complex systems break down whenever there is no counterforce. This leads people to commit errors:
[#/tw]2016-02-07false positive: wish/make up a counterforce (e.g. "backlash")
false negative: exert yourself but believe you didn't change anything
[#/tw]2016-02-07politics are not subject to newton's laws
[#/tw]2016-02-07on the other hand if you wish to make a system "readable" and intuitive, make it as physical as possible.
[#/tw]2016-02-05Wait a second. At the danger of repeating a thousand LW posts:
[#/tw]2016-02-05via roko's basilisk, a million mes are being tortured by an alien AI right now. How come *I* don't notice? This is exceedingly unlikely.
[#/tw]2016-02-05By some fluke of fate, I must've ended up being the one free instance. Or maybe their idea of torture is just very subtle.
[#/tw]2016-02-05With those "true language" based magic systems like in Eragon, I wonder: How has nobody ever asked the universe a nonterminating question?
[#/tw]2016-02-05Or is that just where timelines go to die, replaced by a hot loop, and the universe very actively winnows out those knowing such a language?
[#/tw]2016-02-05An enterprising magician hacker could very well bootstrap a new universe with the right spell and become a god in that.
[#/tw]2016-02-05Plant an oak, confess to the seedling, let it absolve you. But the more dreadful the secret, the more crooked the oak. People will wonder.
[#/tw]2016-02-05Some have sacrificed happy and beautiful secrets, their oaks have grown strong and healthy. A few grew tree houses all by themselves.
[#/tw]2016-02-02When the cheese factory burned, molten cheese flooded the streets and swallowed the slow. The fondue party that followed became a legend.
[#/tw]2016-02-02for further reference: 1. blue works best, violet second 2. this pic is years old 3. @cy_pp was complicit 4. yes it does colour your tongue
[#/tw]2016-01-31Basilisks lay their eggs in victims' minds. The embryo will feed on idle thought, hatch and exit through the mouth. The victim never notices
[#/tw]2016-01-30Idea: Find a heisenbug via binary search. Insert debug instrumentation across only half the output, run, repeat. May be multicausal though.
[#/tw]2016-01-30In that case, use an independent half each time and afterwards mark the parts that produce changes in behavior. Then group/plot by callpath.
[#/tw]2016-01-30Ideally, the affected parts will lie along the same callpath. (Depends on the type of debug information, yadda yadda, much work in practice)
[#/tw]2016-01-28All we knew was that the virus acted very specifically: it took out an idea, excised it from the mind, and left a taboo in its stead.
[#/tw]2016-01-28Those affected became unable to think certain thoughts: if they so much as resembled the killed idea, they fizzled.
[#/tw]2016-01-28Philosophy grew a new branch: Much like neurologists learn about the brain by studying specific lesions, they now examined ontologies.
[#/tw]2016-01-28Mathematicians created new formalisms and a calculus of minds: Some were now utterly incompatible, requiring a mediator chosen by algorithm.
[#/tw]2016-01-28The ontotypical mainstream consisted of people whose minds had taken only grazing hits. Still, language adapted in fascinating ways. Had to.
[#/tw]2016-01-28But others segregated themselves into new communities. They would settle in cities that knew no straight lines, right angles, or lacked red.
[#/tw]2016-01-30Finding the right community is a journey: How do two people find out to lack the same idea if they cannot articulate it or even think it?
[#/tw]2016-01-30You wander the land, are the guest of many tribes, exchange stories, and leave when it turns out the things you can't think are different.
[#/tw]2016-01-30You desperately want to come home and find your tribe, but nearly always there is this nagging doubt.
[#/tw]2016-01-30Some have lost specific numbers. Zero, One and Two form the most significant and different groups, with three or more lumped under "other".
[#/tw]2016-01-30Two: no duality. There can be no relationship without a mediator or capstone of some sort. There is always Yin, Yang and the Other.
[#/tw]2016-01-30One: no unity. No identity. Nothing exists except in relation to another. Nothing is singular. They don't even have a definite article.
[#/tw]2016-01-30Zero: no absence. No empty space. No thing has a beginning or end, it forms a continuum through time, only with the occasional phase change.
[#/tw]2016-01-28Those who do not conceptualize time
Those who do not know forward
Those who do not perceive borders between things
They are, in a way, free.
[#/tw]2016-01-28The borderless have never learnt to count, for all is one inseparable. They are masters of shapes, everything they build fits in its place.
[#/tw]2016-01-29The timeless refer to day and night as the hot and cool place. Motion is connection, not velocity. Ironically, they build great clocks.
[#/tw]2016-01-28The dream of the great unifying theory, the cathedral, was destroyed. In its place, we built many small temples. Babel.
[#/tw]2016-01-27The sage who knows all the questions. They are not in the answer business, but equipped with the right question, you don't need an answer.
[#/tw]2016-01-26He instructed to create a 10:1 map of his kingdom, so that he could study it in more detail. Every flower, bush, animal, ten times the size.
[#/tw]2016-01-26They had alchemists breed gargantuan trees, and conscripted giants to play the part of the citizens. Wagons that could transport palaces.
[#/tw]2016-01-26One day the Giant King ordered to have his own map made.
[#/tw]2016-01-26Soul physics: when a soul leaves the body, a ghost is created.
Once they built a ghost bomb that used psychic rats with weak hearts.
[#/tw]2016-01-26The release of one rat ghost made more die and triggered a chain reaction. The resulting flood of ghosts severed many a soul from its body.
[#/tw]2016-01-26It was ineffectual in warfare though: Used against the king's army, the soldiers became sad for a few seconds and then just kept charging.
[#/tw]2016-01-26It was as if the absent soul didn't make a difference.
But until today, walk the old battlefield and you will struggle to hold on to yours.
[#/tw]2016-01-26You will notice a lack of dandelion. This is because dandelion have souls and need them to blossom. They are among the few affected species.
[#/tw]2016-01-26For a while, a variant of the ghost bomb was used as a herbicide. It was discontinued after... side effects became known.
[#/tw]2016-01-26Did you know there's a cosmic ghost background? Without it, souls couldn't enter bodies since the reaction annihilates a ghost (symmetry!).
[#/tw]2016-01-25A catalog of fictional and real monsters, indexed by the type of human part they eat.
Blood - vampires, mosquitoes.
Joy - dementors, ?
etc
[#/tw]2016-01-24A clock in the subway had its face smashed, somehow its screen was still whole. Considering putting a plaque under it that declares it art.
[#/tw]2016-01-24"Time and Its Discontents", Unknown Artist, 2016
funded by the city's promotion of the arts in public spaces
Maybe they'll roll with it.
[#/tw]2016-01-24Reluctantly, you slide your head into the opening, feel the lock's pins bump against your memories. You turn, and hear a vast latch unlock.
[#/tw]2016-01-24Light that doesn't bleach color, but instead intensifies it. The inventor, overexposed by mistake, took months to lose his technicolor tint.
[#/tw]2016-01-24Its usage in fridges settled the question once and for all: Yes, the light is on when the door is closed.
Forgotten food in primary colors.
[#/tw]2016-01-23A toolkit for (re)constructing basilisks - echidna, mother of basilisks
[#/tw]2016-01-23alien memes, embedded in the movement of the stars themselves, crossing the transmission barrier through astrology and finding new hosts
[#/tw]2016-01-23it basilisks when it's basilisk time
[#/tw]2016-01-23with life as the substrate for memes, what will use memes as substrate?
[#/tw]2016-01-23(these ideas courtesy of a conversation with @276039081)
[#/tw]2016-01-23A thief stole the seeds from all watermelons in the world without harming them or leaving a trace. Consumer reactions were largely positive.
[#/tw]2016-01-23The watermelon as such died out though, until geologists found the thief's hoard 120 years later, embedded in shales from the Triassic.
[#/tw]2016-03-11kaleidoscopic writing: take [collection of shiny things], let it tumble about and assume many different configurations, describe them all.
[#/tw]2016-01-23Biologists discover a moss that feeds on entropy and crushed hopes - physics lies in shambles but world hunger and energy crisis are solved.
[#/tw]2016-01-23We end up in tight symbiosis, taking it along in our starships, it becomes our signature. The last black hole to die looks slightly green.
[#/tw]2016-01-19. (punct.) - grammatical breath
Like real breath, you can use it less often as would be sensible, but you appear slightly breathless without
[#/tw]2016-01-19Meatspace Twitter: you may talk about whatever you want, but only use half a lungful of air.
[#/tw]2016-01-19Real world implementation: Poetry slam with helium balloon for each speaker on the mic. Once the helium voice runs out, their turn is over.
[#/tw]2016-01-19Cheaters have been known to train at home to be able to fake helium voices while talking with normal air.
[#/tw]2016-01-19One variation uses xenon and turns the speaker upside down for safety reasons since xenon is heavier than air and else won't exit the lung.
[#/tw]2016-01-19(they like to call it "Twister". Each utterance is a "Tweest")
[#/tw]2016-01-17those whose thought resembles a bonfire
those who think like a river
those who contemplate the fire's reflection
those who douse the fire
[#/tw]2016-01-17in a cyberspace, where every interaction has become copyable and replayable, your every action can suddenly become a performance
[#/tw]2016-01-17its society values the never-seen-before over that recorded (progress), when our previous societies were cyclical in nature and worldview
[#/tw]2016-01-17the cyberspace and its ideology have been congealing on us since way before the internet, it started with the first external memory devices
[#/tw]2016-01-17now the cyberspace pulls in the world, and the world pulls in the cyberspace, and they will finally merge. an end to progress as we know it?
[#/tw]2016-01-17I helped build estates in some of the far edges of dreamscape, for pay. Some have been deserted but refound by curious dreamers. And things.
[#/tw]2016-01-17Cicero's memory palaces are still out there by the way. They are well touristically developed these days.
[#/tw]2016-01-17And then there are the decamillenia old structures and you wonder who exactly is keeping these remembered for they resemble nothing.
[#/tw]2016-01-17Humans dance their bodies around things to infuse them with meaning, e.g. a sacrificial fire
They do the same dance with words, around ideas
[#/tw]2016-01-16inventor of emotions
their workshop full of discarded prototypes
patents in a drawer
tools that you can't look at for longer than 5 seconds
[#/tw]2016-01-16I was hired to come up with a DRM scheme for their output.
you wonder how you can't understand even those closest to you?
that's why.
[#/tw]2016-01-16Of course I kept the unrestricted copies for myself.
A burglar may one day find them in my basement and let them loose upon the world.
[#/tw]2016-01-16I have many stories of working with that person. We counted many of the super rich among our clients - super rich but not in money.
[#/tw]2016-01-16The immortals sit on a lot of memories to pay with, and have experienced emotions believed extinct. We often cut those with lesser produce.
[#/tw]2016-01-16Our testers were exquisitely sensitive people who could distinguish between nuances you don't even know exist. Also one was a dog.
[#/tw]2016-01-16Mind you he was a sweet person and very intelligent. But a dog. (You wouldn't have been able to tell at a glance)
[#/tw]2016-01-17We had a wine cellar for storage. The bottles had no inside but were intricate glass cages around volumes of space and time.
[#/tw]2016-01-17Time was part of the blueprint: some emotions had a length of seven years
Enclosing them for shorter would crush them and spoil the content
[#/tw]2016-01-17some emotions famously last forever - bottling one took an eternal cage
"love" had a cousin once that is now removed from our timeline
[#/tw]2016-01-17It was an experiment we did not repeat and we had to sign a non-proliferation treaty.
That dull sense of loss? Yeah. That's what's left.
[#/tw]2016-01-16That ear splitting wail from a badly set up microphone hooked to a sound system? That is the sound of a life, all lived over a few seconds.
[#/tw]2016-01-16parasitic souls possessing the first feedback loop they find
some end up in humans
[#/tw]2016-01-16soul is now stuck in a brain case with exceedingly low bandwidth to other souls
talk about bad luck
you could've been a world soul instead
[#/tw]2015-12-12song idea: Little Fluffy Clouds, but set in Hell
nothing remains but the rhythm, and souls scratch feebly on the inner surface of the sound
[#/tw]2015-12-11"... sell each page individually. You can slice a vinyl record into individual song rings for trade."
I really wish that had been a thing.
[#/tw]2015-12-11popular song rings that you'd recognize by their proportions alone
special adapters to make them play on traditional record players
[#/tw]2015-12-11ear rings and top hats that are also music
color coding of tracks of an LP to highlight track borders
recombined LPs when the lengths match
[#/tw]2015-12-11standardized track lengths aligned to equidistancial radii on the LP
tracks released as "outer disk" and "inner disk" versions
[#/tw]2015-12-11hybrid record players and cutters - press "cut" and it'll cut off a ring making a very particular sound like biting into chocolate slowly
[#/tw]2015-12-11bonus tracks distributed as "outer rings" on special occasions
unofficial or fake bonus tracks, rare and sought after
[#/tw]2015-06-20Took home flowers from fairyland / lost them in my garden / now it gained a dimension or two / and the postman fails to deliver my packages
[#/tw]2014-03-20What I read: "atomically kill a cgroup of processes by freezing the cgroup, killall and thawing"
What I see: "TOKI WA TOMARE... WRYYYYY"
[#/tw]2013-10-07In Teilen der Bibliothek von Babel weht ein Wind durch die Schächte. Er füttert einen titanischen Brand, Billionen und Aberbillionen Bücher.
[#/tw]2016-04-09"In parts of the Library of Babel, a hot wind blows through the shafts. It feeds a titanic blaze, trillions of books and more."
[#/tw]2011-02-15Nimm Ballett, tanze die Fouriertransformation, transformiere die Aufnahme zurück. Jemand ohne Projekt und tatendurstig? Easy mode: M.Flatley
