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