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