[#/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]2021-01-22whenever 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
