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

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