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

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

a forest car and an underwater car meet and their environments intermingle, fishes weave around trees while birds pick curiously at anemones

cars that are the opposite of google street view, project forests onto the walls of houses around them and emit bird calls

music beamed directly into the auditory cortex, freed from sound waves the way electronic music frees it from instruments

specifically banned: “subpixel sword” (hacked item, unofficial, usage leads to permanent terrain and avatar corruption, described as “rendering between the pixels”, REPORT SIGHTINGS TO MODERATORS IMMEDIATELY)

An umbrella that looks like a soap bubble and changes in color and texture accordingly

Overhead, the storm clouds interlock, turn into fractal clockwork, emit deep clonks instead of thunder

by the way, if you can read pixie, try not to chuckle at the tribesman covered in badly mangled obscenities and especially do not explain them to him, that is if you’re not more physically intimidating than him

When humans still could enter fairyland, they’d often emerge covered in pixie graffiti, glyphs of henna and malachite that we adopted and now know as tribal marks

in absence of control over interest rates, states turn to energy prices to regulate their economies, some start experimenting with weather control schemes to direct water, wind, sun their way

dynamite wishing, where you throw explosives into a lamp shop and hope one contains a djinn

There’s been a statue of a waiting man at our train station for as long as I can remember. A few mornings ago, it vanished. Purported surveillance videos circulating on the net show it entering a night train

Bittersweet version: The memory is definitely gone, but someone who loved the old protagonist tries to help them recover it↵↵Despair version: The mindwipe was an alternative to death penalty, still often people are angry at the protagonist for no reason they’d understand

Setting idea: Protagonist is mind-wiped, people around them are grieving for the person they were while they slowly piece together any identity at all

The Matrix, but it’s other humans keeping you in it - nobody’s ever seen an agent but everybody swears they exist, nobody knows how to escape but it’s illegal anyway

For added fun, introduce extra levels until you arrive at the conceptual equivalent of “translated to Japanese and back ten times”

Concept: Write about the future as if it were the future’s retrofuture, current hopes and dreams through a future lens, pretend you’re writing today’s Gernsback Continuum

the dice are so hot that they leave burn marks on the table and you wonder how he can hold them↵↵you look up, his skin is transparent, his outline flickers, reveals glowing bones, embers feeding a human flame

GTA Moebius↵The Settlers II, by Studio Ghibli↵Unreal Tournament, but drawn with pencils↵Minecraft Mondriaan edition

In a few years we’ll be able to take old games and run them through a realtime style transfer shader to play e.g. Half Life as imagined by Giger

physics is a scheme by the simulators to make us figure out optimizations for the simulation

rain that falls in fog-beams, not drops, and instead of twinkling dust motes it’s aethereal jellyfish that floats in them

all the city’s billboards and screens are replaced by vantablack, just for a day

a comet strikes but does so so slowly that birds settle on the bolide, grass grows on the shockwave, generations live and trade on what they call the traveling mountains

You watch your hands take form as if they were being drawn, wonder how you got here, in fact you remember nothing before this sentence

The first few hundred revolutions are normal, just increasingly glitchy - then you run into the first version of you that somehow skipped a night less

Stay up long enough and your sleep cycle syncs with the sun again, do this often enough and the parallel Earths you end up in become weirder and weirder

Night falls and the pools start steaming, evaporate into a firefly storm, escape into the sky where they later crystallize from clouds into stars

Light falls against the window and runs off in quiet rivulets, the garden becomes a rippling pool of light, the street a river in which children play

when raindrops talk, that’s a patter language

Any sufficiently advanced bioweapon is indistinguishable from civilization.

1: animated masks, covered in breathing feathers, clockwork, small animals↵2: screens in place of faces, some still look like faces, others play reaction gifs or random streams↵3: the above, but they’re touchscreens and touching another’s face is just… normal, why don’t you?

An art movement by the name of derealism: Just close enough to reality to be recognizable, but otherworldly or noticeably off, ideally inducing detachment from reality in the viewer/participant (hence the name)

Tetris effect after decades of playing Life™ is so bad it’s legendary, players have founded entire religions on what they call Heaven, Hell, Valhalla, what have you

the sun as black dwarf, cool enough to host life again, but it’s nearly two-dimensional due to the intense gravity

jupiter, old and cold enough that its storms have solidified, wearing a helium atmosphere over a nitrogen ocean that’s long stopped moving

a sapphire sphinx on future mars, built to win a staring contest with the sun, watching what’s now a white dwarf, fixed in the sky

Watching her reassemble herself, you wonder how that would look for a human. A bed full of muscles, organs, skin, neatly arranged, then a yawn (but from where?) and the whole thing pulls itself together, goes through exciting intermediate stages such as double hand and headfoot,

Wires in the suitcase’s inlay, in a complicated pattern computed from yesterday’s recognizer dump, are supposed to throw off the customs scanner AI. They do, you’re waved through, another friend smuggled into the country