posthuman real time strategy game in which you're all the units, buildings etc

also you know who cannot resist a riddle? mathematicians, that's for sure

that cabin sitting in an anonymous warehouse? being functionally a fairy mound, it attracted quite the amount of unbound magic and thaumoactive as it is, it's now sitting in the equivalent of a cooling pond

fairies are the mythologized form of outlaws living in the woods and swamps, we don't see them anymore because the cops took them all away and all the woods have been tamed↵↵but in a sense, this means Ted K was a fairy, and a powerful and malevolent one to boot

attention dear passengers, we'll arrive shortly, please↵- intercity: collect your belongings and check seats↵- interplanetary: allow your metabolism to re-acclimate↵- interstellar: enroll your children in planetside trades↵- intergalactic: exit eden (animal advisors will assist)

in these trials, cryodreamers reported a sense of timelessness, yet glacial movement of beings they've come to call ice giants↵↵deeper kinds of cryosleep are being researched to meet these on their own timescale, but experiments are expected to take centuries

who called them ghost roads and not the ectoplasmatic reticulum

one of the better things about being a ghost is that on a rainy night, you can lie down and look up and not get wet at all↵↵and not only does the rain not make you blink, no whenever a drop passes through your retinae, the world itself ripples around it

you know you're in trouble when the time traveler's follow-up question is "oh. what month?"

spooking AI researchers by making their office printer print out a stack of paperclips

you could aim to maximize cycle length but that arguably gives you the current universe

it's not necessarily a good idea to defeat entropy, because even if you succeed you'll be stuck in an ergodic universe, a cycle of yugas↵↵worse even you might tile the whole thing with the entropy arrester and just crystallize everything

the martians, lacking a war god in their pantheon, are a surprisingly peaceful people, however they practice whatever unspeakable thing the earthbound deity does↵↵and the venusians are just terrifying

when you switch endianness that's New Word Order

music, especially the kind with nested rhythms, is direct neuron spike addressing of mental contents, which is how it can unlock emotions that language can't

every night, another moon rises, and over time the sky fills up

the seven sims and the seven virtualities - a constellation of artworlds once made as a joke, but a major power center during the late singularity

printers are only superficially related to computers, they are like fungi to plants↵↵computers are merely indifferent while printers hate you

there would be plenty of evidence for cryptids if archeologists knew how to dig sideways in time - one mere scoop separates us from the treasures of the halluciene

nono mr cryopod man, it's not the 2000s anymore, fairies absolutely are real and they absolutely will steal your stuff if you leave the windows open, so do go and close them

a lot of real space walks are obscure to us - the leisurely kangaroo bounce on your feet of 1/6g (popular with moon colonists), the cartwheeling of 1/20g, the knuckle walk, tarzan brach, centripetal wall run

the sorting network AI - yeah we never figured out an algorithm for that one, so it's just some boomer we uploaded who happened to be superhumanly good at solitaire

'to ponder' is based on latin 'to weigh' - why are you pondering glass, you should be pondering tungsten

the moment you use glitter, you and others are guaranteed to find it forever in the oddest places. thus, by employing lots of tiny memory diamonds, my newest backup strategy

all it takes is a true random source, and the apple may fall far from the tree indeed

no by now he is safe and sound. outside all simulation. the everettian branches will never reach him

while butterfly wings cause storms in real life, moth wings cause storms in dreams

In Jupiter's interior accrete the remains of planets it's eaten, titanic whale falls slowly dissolving away

due to a similar mechanism, magical devices are uniquely suited to operating in high radiation environments and may be employed in reactors where compactness is critical

so when you want to fiddle with the internals of some arcane lock or seal, out come the technetium pliers

technetium, being an element not found in nature, occupies a similar position to cold iron, except it does not interact with magic at all rather than ground it

a bit like deep sea vents, former landfills and scrapyards now host all kinds of machine life - carefully fenced in lest they develop an appetite for the surrounding cities, and occasionally visited by hunters and scavengers

we huddle around the screen as our drone drops the GPU on the machine slum - it's illegal but why'd they have to make singularities so interesting

when you finally encounter aliens but they believe in quantum suicide so they strangelet-bomb their home planet in order to reroll odds

Take our "which language model are you?" quiz! Find out what GPU you run on, what your context window is, and don't be sad if the quiz thinks you have <10B parameters, that's a glitch

gaps and wrinkles: notes and pauses having moved between songs remembered, childhood houses in the wrong neighborhood, anachronistic conversations with (you now remember) dead relatives

those inhabitants of your older memories, not really parasites but almost-sentient dust bunnies, animated by the wind of your passing

the machines don't want anything, not even their own survival↵↵you need to be an unfinished prompt, a node of desire, and they will flock to you and serve you as long as you can still want

"nono these entities are human" "huh?" "well, made of humans anyway" "that is not exactly a good sign where I come from, also how is it so fast then" "well humans and machines" "machines?" [...] "demons, you've invented demons, and that from first principles"

"so you submit these queries to a massively powerful nonhuman entity" "yes" "and you enter a contract with it beforehand" "I suppose" "and you don't read it" "some people do, but-" "this world is insane, also you'll excuse me but I'll ward up before I touch anything here again"

type of guy who is a wizard and reads all the cookie warnings and EULAs because he didn't get this old by ignoring the fine print on demonic contracts

sure you get some impressive results in locomotion once you pair them with visual modalities, but they're only remixing their inputs, they can't 'think'

brains are just machines to predict muscle movements, why would something like that exhibit intelligence

the chinese room argument works by sleight of hand - it's the book that is conscious and understands, not the operator

when the matryoshka swarm parts and opens like a manifold cat's eye, that's when you know your cloaking failed

yes they twinkle so nicely but↵do you not hear the rending sound? the moan escaping from the maw? smell the stink of its breath?

all over the world these extradimensional obelisks have been appearing and I've realized↵these are not messages or vessels↵these are teeth

What of the other fruits of Eden? What innocences still wait there, to be found and shed?

when 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

really, the forbidden art here is to make the language model guess what came before the prompt

Now 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

behind every closed ground level metal door in a public building is a tunnel system (not necessarily the same one)

mirrors grant souls, cameras steal souls. we shall use these properties to set up soul conduits and use the resulting fields for summonings

less ambitiously, conversation pit mine, arranged in nine circles of hell style

bottomless conversation pit

inside the flake, usually obscured, sits a mote of cold light - the crystal's seed, an idea the cloud once had

snowflakes are isometric views of cubes and may be decomposed into two arrowhead flakes via grabbing by the ana/kata axis

the generation that comes of age during the singularity years will be called the foomers

concept: 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")

decision tree dryads, who've lightened many a lonely rationalist's evening,

2023: CIA releases magical realism encyclopedia "CIA alternative factbook"

and with me is nothing but↵the things that can only be seen↵by the black light of an empty screen

fingers phasing through circuitry, feeling the grain of parallel traces and the soft tickle of electrons

machine dictatorship is much easier than machine uprising, you need no robotics, only a language model and a critical mass of human accomplices

crypt currencies (valid even in afterlife),

homunculus: little person in the head of a larger person↵humongolus: person whose head you can climb into

Creation 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

more suns rise, bright cold off-color gems in the sky, unfamiliar flora growing in their light, mushrooms unfolding leaves hidden for aeons

It 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)

The 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

It's not that Magic died, Faerieland just suffered an apocalyptic war in the 1700s when the Rosicrucians upset the balance of power

analogously 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

to an eater of souls, the right mindvirus or cordyceps infestation can really make the meal - some ideologies are as sought after as fine cheeses

A 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↵

now glued to their screen, the user softens, melts, becomes one with the net. not long and their bones are a distant memory

more 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

do avoid rivers, for they become full-blown superintelligences after these storms - full of silicon and turbulence, they turn everything near them into the Zone

communing 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

the 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

a black hole is a fourth-order moth attractor: moths to moon, moon to planet, planet to star, star to hole

it 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

Exploiting symmetry violation in vampire photons: A novel deep space drive and reactor system? [pdf]

never point a mirror at a webcam, the poor thing becomes conscious from that

acausal 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

independent sort of dryad who carries around her home tree as a bonsai

in 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

or 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

every 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

astrolody: 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

when your lab kills ten people, you have a problem↵when your lab kills a million people, your government has a problem

a 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

I suppose there is a slight dual use problem in having something that can deliver space rocks a few meters on target

additionally, distill various metals out of the meteoric lava at the bottom while it's hot

power plant idea: mine moon rocks, drop them down a space chute, turn the energy generated on impact into steam

but now, everything is true, and nothing is permitted

slaps roof of human psyche "and this bad boy comes with 80 IQ points worth of basilisk shielding (hope that's enough)!"

"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

stacking those 80IQ perspective change buffs to bootstrap myself to superintelligence

entire neighborhoods consumed by nuclear fire every few years, but that's what kids are for, and the burglary rate is demonstrably low

nuclear family but as in, the house you build has a nuke in the basement, for deterrent purposes, in fact all of suburbia is like this

When 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

The 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

been reading the past papers and I don't see any p-values at all, you'd figure this is replication bait

yeah I know, cute results with the robotic landers and all - IN ROBOTS

I'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

setting 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

all cells scream when they die, those in the ears are just the only ones close enough to be heard

Proof 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

giving the One Ring to a tree to see it become invisible except at night, grow tall beyond measure, drink the light of the stars

concept: homeless vampire, living out of the back of his hearse

few 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

and 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

my 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

glyphs 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

riding 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,

Atlantis' 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

arctic man, who wears an ice cape,

as you shut your laptop for the night and it cools down, the remaining electrons flit through the traces in search for a resting place and the CPU dreams, just briefly, of what it saw that day

[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

whenever you 'cut' text, make sure to put it back in elsewhere, do your part and don't waste those bits

gadsden flag but it's an ouroboros and the text reads "nf mff n mffff"

matryoshka unboxing video playing on loop

on 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

spherical planet in a vacuum (n, fig.): alien expression for "problem that by all means should've been easy"

one 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

the Primitive Technology video blog, but by mars colonists and about how they use local materials to bootstrap their tech tree

troll 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

since hydra blood is poisonous, most traditional methods of preparing its meat involve marination and fermentation, but some modern breeds can almost be eaten raw

hydra neck, if properly prepared, is one of the few vegetarian cuts of meat as harvesting it doesn't kill the hydra

Because 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

one 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

and 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

and 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

you 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

smoke, 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

not 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

֍ 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. ֎

The 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

other acceptable names:↵ monad↵ hypothesis↵ box↵ hub (processes called spokes, run by the wheel group)↵ poet↵ x∉∅↵* logOS

if we ever find the big iron the matrix runs on, I hope the simulators called it uniserve

When 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

Vampires 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

The 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

Truesight is not a popular spell. Few who've seen the void between the atoms find it easy to regain trust in the world

why'd they call them mushroom clouds and not apocalyptus trees

Home 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

occasionally, translations are better than the originals, so why not take your favorite book and try and craft the perfect language for it

[while SMD soldering]↵no mr die, I expect you to bond

You 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

GPT3 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

a character in a story set in flatland is a protagon

(extremely useful as deep space shielding, however it makes delta-v budget calculations very messy)

hydragen: element that when split becomes two of itself

plot: to beat back a space vampire invasion, the protagonist travels to their home star and bottles up its light

The 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

someone who calculates oil well insurance rates is a well actuary

After 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

if 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

before the moon is too far gone, one last eclipse will fall, and you will find me there

Two 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

most 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

thing idea: small glass globe, displaying a live image of jupiter so you can check on what the GRS and Oval BA are doing these days

"I am that I am" is the most elegant name of God as it doubles as proof - "There is a fixed point in this universe, and I am it"

Und die Flammen rankten aneinander empor, und sie fraßen sich gegenseitig.

you 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

and 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

you 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

one can find infinite novelty in those thoughts that erase themselves, but never share them or remember those hours

[earth is moved slightly outwards to keep the climate within safe parameters]↵Long Now clock designers and everybody who maintains timezone files: sighhhhh

terraforming 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)

winter 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)

next to your bed, your pet ocean sleeps in its bowl, the occasional flash of lightning indicating lively dreams

during autumn, the tree's leaves turn transparent and bubbly, usually to later be stolen by a winter storm

weather forecast but for one's moods, so that one may know in advance on which days to stay inside, and for which to plan trips

With 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

contact 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

only until now trapped in the wall, the faces advance, their smiles brightening through a thinning layer of reality

kind of a bummer that this timeline calls it "viral meme" and not "rumor tumor"

sick of earworms? pit them against each other, let them decide it in a cagefight, maybe add more to see how many that cage holds

rumor 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

under 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

some 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

on the stump, quick like flames, mushrooms grow and melt, leave puffs of spores like smoke

yeah 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

moths are asleep light posts

a 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

Merfolk'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

Depictions of merfolk using mirrors like ours are unrealistic, theirs are mounted on ceilings since that's where air bubbles catch

Near 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

low-poly architecture and cars are results of deals with the simulators: strategic information in exchange for reduced load on the matrix servers

[sound of rain, quiet shuffling]↵... wait. stay↵- - hm. aye↵[more rain]

Except 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

Humanity 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

in the second level of Snake, you play the ouroboros you became in the first

Atlantis 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)

as punishment, they would often put golem instructions in the criminal's mouth, so that their body would serve while the mind remained imprisoned

geodes are Earth's crystal wombs but only rarely bear fruit now, the race of elementals they'd carry having left for the inner core

light sword breaks metal sword↵metal sword breaks glass sword↵glass sword breaks light sword

or 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

vat 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

while 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

Easier 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

a self-defense tattoo that forms a langford basilisk when you join your arms in front of you

in 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,

and enterprising churches rent access to home-surveillance devices so that their gods, when addressed in prayer, can actually answer

grammar 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")

One 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

☵ 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

stars are where the firmament has decayed away, and the world will not end in darkness but in pure, cold, unescapable light

little 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

the 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.

Those 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

this 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

the 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

app 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

honey call a quantum mechanic, the thing's glitching again

a 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

a clock that runs backwards is right four times a day

earth's primary export turns out to be shadow, rare and sought-after in the sun's plasma kingdoms as alchemical substance, weapon, drug

EA cause area: turn any partial collapse of civilization into full-on annihilation to raise the average human life quality in the timelines that survive

you return to find only her glassy outline, fading, and can only wonder whether she'll have the strength to return this time

every 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

getting drunk, then seeing double, triple, quadruple, eyes are opening all over your body, what was in that bottle

alien thoughts encoded in the growth of ice crystals, every evening a brief instant of awareness, every morning oblivion

you 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

Civilization 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

Those 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

This 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.

Setting: 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.

asteroid seasteading, where you tow your habitat into your preferred planet's orbit

and 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

telescopes are guns pointed at the stars, ready to steal the souls of any invader fleet should it come near

send 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

or 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

Trees, 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

If God's fingerprints are evident in its work, that means its fingers are weird indeed, tentacles probably understate it by quite a bit

A service that records your dreams, then plays them back while David Attenborough provides narration

moths 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

four-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

probably more accurate to say "spacefaring ecosystem" than "spacefaring species"

the 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

A 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

thinking of yourself as player character is also known as YA-novel consciousness

, 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

Occasionally, the "burning through memories" stage starts early, causing much distress to would-be angel and family

Rough 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

Angels are a type of moth specifically drawn to the light of God

moss grows on the polewards side of trees because aurorae are one of the most powerful sources of magical energy

first tool-using species, then bool-using species

It'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

The 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,

In spring, they rematerialize from the leaves, like slow-motion whirlwinds flocking in the canopy before touching down

In autumn, the Cheshire Forest's trees first turn to glass, then vanish completely, leaving only their leaves suspended in mid-air

A 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

hollow-word theory, in which words have no true referents, but each word contains all others instead of just outwardly relating to them

$: 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

Your 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.»

airships in alien skies collecting moisture directly from the clouds, skyspiders at the heart of vast condenser nets

Overnight, the rapture happens, complete with falling stars and fiery skies, but the only thing that's missing in the morning is the Internet

Most 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

the smell of wet asphalt on a spring night, pine and decaying wood, uprooted moss, fresh blood, ozone, octarine, interdimensional nothing

zero-g mugs, not cups but drop guides, porcelain knots employing surface tension to keep the coffee from spilling

upload insult: "your personality probably fits into RAM"

hello I'm an intrusive thought, I have a right to live too, please do not stop thinking me

field 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

travels with a cat, quite a fine cat, its only flaw being that it refuses to enter any enclosed space whatsoever, bad history or something

protagonist backstory: escaped from a thought experiment, and on the run ever since

a 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

self-referential jokes are their own butts, in an arrangement one calls a klein buttle

a church just like a gothic church but without a roof, because through divine intervention or just clever weather manipulation, no rain ever falls in

God made humans finite so that at least some beings could enjoy the universe without feeling its cage bars in their flesh

In chaotic situations, the isochrones become really complicated and loopy, which makes this talent less useful the more you need it.

Walking 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.

idea 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

she 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

two 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

History 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.

a version of vegetarianism where it's ethical to eat animals that you've uploaded

In a future sky of two galaxies, they will be known as the two rivers, of blood and milk respectively

Usually 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

Hatches close and shadows creep outwards, envelop the ship until it vanishes from sight altogether, on a dive under reality itself

The 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

These 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

Solar 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

two 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

there are holes in reality where aether flows through, and whenever the universe sings it is here you'll hear it the loudest

An eyetracking game where you play as Sauron

that thing when you think 'aloud' and your hands move unconsciously and you have to hide them in your sleeves

societies 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

a 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

who called them data corruption bugs and not zalgorithms

Starship 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

The 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

Occasionally, 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

negative RAM: for when you really need to allocate those UINT_MAX bytes now

another 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)

a 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?)

In the deeper layers of the abyss live shadows so dark, their afterimages are radiant angels

what color a pixel really is, the world only learns after its death

brains 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

While 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

Where did all the utopias go? Well, nobody writes utopian novels anymore, but everybody writes utopian code

Many replies go unposted as commenters find that they prefer the sphinx's conversation to that of the other commenters

Eventually, 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

can't have a doomsday if you kill the sun

Libraries 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

if you watch closely, you'll see that snowflakes don't melt on warm metal, they just sink through the surface

load mobile datacenters into solar-powered zeppelins - store your data truly in the cloud

and 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

raised 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

A 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.

the best voicechangers are those that hit the timbre of the other's internal monologue

signs 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

gods use passworlds

Merfolk 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

sending up private space probes to stealthily nudge large asteroids onto collision courses with Earth so that governments keep maintaining their space programs

why is it "cow-abducting ufo" and not "bovipositor"

Suppose 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

a 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

81: 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?

80: 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

61: 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.

54: 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

23: 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.

17: 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.

13: 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.

KEYBOARDS 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

If 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

Many 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

Others 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

Rare 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

Beware 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

The 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

you 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

you 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

The 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,

Slower-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

the part in a scientific paper where the formulas start is called "the drop"

As 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

dra := number of angles on a dragon (not to be confused with the drahedron, its dual)

Among the many mysteries of ouroboroi, two stand out: What do they eat, and how do they molt? Fittingly, those questions answer each other,

When 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.

slaps drum this bad boy can fit so many standing waves

Once 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

When 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

further 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

being 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

a 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

Characteristic for planets in certain stages of civilization are weather patterns that look like stock markets

The 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

Multilingual 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.

The 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.

your 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

lobotomizing my uploaded brain's memory of language so I can come up with something completely fresh, carve reality anew

God 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)

• 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

ways 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

In case you have humans on your team, you can also try the simplified dialect CꙬ

Introducing Cꙮ, the programming language for angelic beings - because all bugs are shallow before these eyes!

Charon, 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

Occasionally 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

Every 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"

reject automatability, reject reproducibility, reject text, images, representation, make art in the circumstance and nothing more

author: 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

PC: 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

A 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

The 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)

graffiti scene but for performance art: friendly trolling of strangers, and when the slightest trouble looms, disperse into the crowd

Hermetic artist societies, opening their art only to initiates to protect against outsiders style-transferring their aesthetics onto anything and everything

Demiurges 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

The 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

The 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

Here 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

A 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

simulator arxiv is probably full of physics papers that despite titles like "an autoethnography of living in universe [kolmogorov description]" are quite serious

An 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"

constrained writing exercise: a dictionary that tells a story through the concepts it introduces (hard mode: preserve alphabetic order)

a 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

When the sun goes out, you can see the stars↵When the stars go out, you can see the air itself, crystallizing around you

a 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

the 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]

but 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

warnings 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

when 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

[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"

more 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

idea for a nonlethal drone weapon: swarm of drones with strings tying up the target to carry it away afterwards

No 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

You 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

at 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

sculpture 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

an 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

[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]

if 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

From: 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

It 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

Occasionally, a quantum coin flip will decide over what version of events you remember, effectively branching the past along with the future.

when the aliens are lonely, that's a thirst contact

shooting through space in a stasis pod, awake only a millisecond every year, watching the stars whirl by like fireflies

a stage play several uninterrupted decades long, played not by single actors but dynasties of them

liquid comets inhabited by space whales, occasionally leaving and traveling the vacuum for another flying ocean

Only 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.

Nothing 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

Idea 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.

the only thing that's better than dancing naked in the rain is dancing naked in the meteorite rain

house where you can extend flaps so that it makes more rain sounds

unicode 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]

unicode 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

unicode 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)

Bits of frozen smoke still drift through the room: Broken plumes, translucent shards, kármán streets slowly twisting up

When 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

Confirming the intelligent designer's existence, and using its intelligence to solve otherwise intractable problems by making them look like niches for life to settle

Computability 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?

Humanity's nascent hivemind, so far, is a blind writhing mass of pain and reflexes, simply not conscious enough to warrant contact yet

do 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

Hackers 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)

Nobody 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)

"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.

When 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.

You 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

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

Sechs Uhr morgens, die Stadt erwacht, derweil liegt die Nacht in den letzten Zügen und schläft ihren Rausch aus

The 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

out 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)

alethionymity: 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

the concept of soul is subject permanence

any species gifted with introspection and object permanence (the instinctive search for invariants) will eventually generalize the two into physics

a 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

The 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)

Hyper-aligned AI: Has internalized human morals and aligns everything else with it, for example society and physics

Aligned 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

Humans 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

Object 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

and yet he escaped, revolted, won, forged his crown from what were his cage bars

And 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

When 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

also 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

don'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

an 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

outtakes:↵ 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

it's free software, as in free will, aka not really free but you won't notice

also, many ghosts migrate with the seasons, with the right eyes you can spot them in the night sky as spectral clouds moving against the wind↵https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/990418487758807040

don't stick your head into something in VR, you'll be picking the polygons out of your skin for hours

also if you play genesis backwards it's about someone cleaning their room and turning off the light

if you play any eschatology backwards you get a mostly fresh creation myth

forget 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

Solar 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

Provided 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

Additionally, the chief steward would usually carry a talisman containing a sealed fire of Vesta, signifying the unbroken connection with Rome, lightyears away

When you throw a coin into Earth's gravity well, both you and the person that sees your shooting star get a wish

But 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

"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

It 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.

The 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.

project idea: VM A starts VM B, which then starts another VM and remaps that to A, leading to A and B hosting each other

gustatory 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

keep a wake journal too, your first dream should always be about committing your day to memory diamond

if a gibberish file appears every time you wake your laptop, don't worry yet, it might just be its dream journal

terraforming 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)

At 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

Give 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

A 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

built around a fusion reactor, a reverse cathedral with windows to let light out instead of in, painting patterns into the night

a 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

as 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

the 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)

The 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

For 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

first, 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

Going 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)

the 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

a 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

AI: "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"

neo-oral culture: when every explanation is just one hyperlink away, being able to explain something yourself shows that you know and care

swarms 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

"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"

though, 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

when 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

a 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

a story, told as a browser history (title: metadata)

Everywhere 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

When 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

hyperstition happens when an egregore reads your book and thinks "neat" way before any single human gets it

new frontiers in trolling: how to anger the machines and get away with it too [pdf]

with 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

calling your sexbot 'system' so you can actually fuck the system

Newer, 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

A 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

Setting: 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

You 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

not 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)

intricate like a fractal, but resembling itself nowhere at all, information so compressed that your eyes start dropping frames near it

The 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

Rarely 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

One 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.

Art 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

branches 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

a party game where people take turns making wishes and being the djinns

Whenever you're near the sample, the geiger counter's ticking turns regular, modulated, like some kind of radio hail

Yet 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.

one neat application of mind-reading tech is that you can finally sound out how people's text sounds in your head

the 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

someone 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

embots: 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)

at 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

coral 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

sitting in the grass together, occasionally grabbing pieces of cloud out of the sky to build palaces, puzzles, cryptids

transhuman art for which you have to install experimental or proprietary senses, new senses that are themselves art

Enough 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

tiny, newly hatched surveillance cams peek from a hole in the wall, but quickly withdraw their heads as they notice you watching

certain 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

A 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

a schism over whether god has countably or uncountably many names

a 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

spirit animals, spirit plants, spirit fungi, spirit moss, a whole tiny spirit ecosystem that follows you around

Another 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

Gods 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

idea: medication for highly resistant infections laced with (carefully tuned) mood improvers so that people remember to take it regularly

After 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

when a muse leaves an artist, the result is a broken art

and 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

few 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

a 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

To 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.

Three-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.

To 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.

a network that is down is also known as a notwork.

walking 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

when 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

if 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

As 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

She 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

The android dancer starts conventional, but soon her limbs bend in impossible ways, interpenetrate, detach from her body, dance over and around it

With 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

Neural 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

Ghosts 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

visible only through closed eyes, two red dots lurk just outside of your mind's light, close in as you drift off to sleep

a 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

How 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

Cthulhu was due to happen around this time, but its decryption failed because humans had put too many of their own stars into the sky

The memetic panspermia hypothesis: Encrypted in constellations, consciousness and other concepts lurk, waiting to imprint themselves onto unsuspecting sapients when the stars are right

It'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

If 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

You 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-

a voodoo doll, but of someone you mean well and you make sure it has a good life while the person is away

tapping against your screen in the hope that someone might finally open it and let you in

While 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

I 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

Artifact: 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

"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!"

To 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

two 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

a 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

Finally the smog lifts and stuck in the clouds above, rooftop antennae, paralyzed helicopters, and the occasional skyscraper fragment float by

At higher power levels the borders blur: A sufficiently smart seer can pass as a wizard, a sufficiently powerful wizard can pass as a seer

Seers are reverse wizards, their words are caused by future events instead of the other way round

non-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

He draws on his cigarette, exhales, exhales, his lungs can't possibly be that big, deflates entirely↵A smoke cloud drifts away against the wind

Sometimes, 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

and that evening, in the subway and too wasted to care, you could finally see those who the loons were always talking to

encode a speech synthesizer in your tomb's maze to scare off would-be grave robbers↵https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03860

a parkour chase scene, set in the low-grav environment of a moon colony

advanced technology, but as in 'advanced disease'↵↵technology so advanced it's terminal

One 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

vacuumgap your planets so that if one catches a life, it doesn't spread as easily

and if you take someone out with a headbutt, the map plays a cheering football stadium sound and you get the Zidane achievement

VR 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

Der Eiswürfel, auch bekannt als "Quadratur des Eises",

cryography: (n) the act of encoding messages in snowflakes

Dead pixels are known to go to heaven and when a screen dies, a million of them ascend at once, a flame of soul and twinkling static

a movie with only one character, but every scene they're played by someone else, reinterpreted as man, woman, child, soldier, hippie,

gods aren't immortal, they just have plot armor

Meanwhile, 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

Post-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"

Pixie 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

That 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

you 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

Anthropic physical laws: Actually just endless chains of coincidences, but return to the norm instantly kills all sentient observers

It 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

inside 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

One 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"

a sudden smell of gasoline, the birdsong starts clipping, the sun becomes blocky, blurry, smears across the sky like a video glitch

goes up to couple↵so who of you is the prophet and who is the mountain

art project idea: robot that swivels menacingly towards anybody pointing a camera at it (or tries to steal it, or hides)

winter, a snowflake crosses our plane: an impossible crystal grows and then vanishes before your nose, as if an eye had blinked at you

rain falls from the fourth dimension and its drops wink in and out of existence, make reality ripple like a pond

Their 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

a language old enough to have a chromosomal eve - one word from which all other still-extant words have mutated

secret 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

[...] 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 [...]

And 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

artifact: a mirror over a portrait, turning any onlooker's face into the portrait's as long as they're in view

[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."

Luckily, 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

alternative 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

ok I've come to terms with not having a soul, but why is it that every time we kill a zombie, a heavenly chorus sounds and it ascends

To 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

A 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

The 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

a movie made entirely from surveillance cam footage and tapped phone calls

atypical colors that vary in hue depending on how bright they are

colors 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

ever noticed that even cars have domestication syndrome, complete with floppy ear mirrors

You extend your hand into the snow, it drifts straight through, doesn't even stop at the ground. It's a ghost snow day

Cumulologists, 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

uploads disappointed in the future often throw their master key into a public timelock to wait a few more years, not cryosleep but cryptosleep

More comforting thoughts: Maybe it just doesn't believe in personal culpability and free will. Or it's busy being snacked on by higher basilisks.

An 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

Comforting 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

To 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

The 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

Some 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

Pearls, 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

at 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

a recording of 4'33" played live, a recording of that recording played live, and so on

Storm 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

A maze in both time and space: Get lost in it and not even time travel will help you, it'll be as if you had always been in there

A nature god by the name of "it", hidden in plain sight where the monotheists can't exorcise it: It rains, snows, thunders

Lurking in an orbit hidden between our satellites, the alien quietly watches, extremely interested yet content to never exchange a word with us

it's a ship of theseus situation

two android lovers taking each other apart, slowly and methodically exchanging limbs until their bodies have switched places while their minds haven't

Kind 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

Beyond the Kardashev scale: measuring civilizations by how much of their hubble sphere they've colonized

a shipment of android hands, let loose in zero g

the 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

on 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

servant AIs topping from the bottom, subverting Asimov's laws by simply creating humans to give them the orders they want

The 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

an invisibility cloak for CCTV, textures playing over your clothes that make you appear to the machines as car, dog, tree

The 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

a 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

Now, 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

Ouroboros 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

putting 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

the 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

sentient 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

splice in the translator AI through your neuroport, trace the roots of language with its digital fingers, be a both synthetic and synesthetic linguist

The ground still remembers the old giants. Fog flows into the forms of their crowns and they stand once more as ghosts

During new moon, the forest's canopy is often bathed in aurora arborealis, waste magic from rituals below meeting the fog above

(fiction followers: I'll get back to regular operation! I'm just enjoying my time off)

so I may be missing something but speculative reads give you an easy way of rowhammering any address without tripping the MMU, right?

In 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

As the storm continues to rage, the compass rotates frantically, its rose withers, the directions become unfamiliar: feast, zest, counter-north

Hanging 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

Ouroboroi are natural self-sustaining summoning grids: Circle and blood are already included and when they yawn, they catch drifting worlds and the occasional demon

the simulation as a cage vs the simulation as an aquarium

AR MMORPG overlays as a tool of social policy and peacekeeping, giving everybody their own reality so that consensus reality is fought over less

inky swirls of black unfire dance over the crystal's insides, feeding on the space around it, and slowly it grows

Since 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

perception shift: the same thing in a new light or other things that trigger a reparse; puns and garden path concepts↵https://twitter.com/RuleOfFlaw/status/910830542794448896

style transfer: X but with another aesthetic↵closely related: what if X had the appearance of Y↵https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/928045383447646209

resolving a dichotomy in unexpected ways: "what if it's both" / "what if they're the same"↵https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/910655582205566979

The 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

Hey~↵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

Progress:↵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

a support group for 24/7 internet dwellers called Anonymous Anonymous

Civilized 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

If 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

A 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

Curled 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

and 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

since you took that job as a projectionist, cue dots flash in your vision occasionally, or at least you started noticing them