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 pondâs 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 canât possibly be that big, deflates entirelyâ”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 itâ”â”Usually shy, when rain comes, they seek refuge in citizenâs 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 tombâs maze to scare off would-be grave robbersâ”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 âadvanced diseaseââ”â”technology so advanced itâs 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 doesnât 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 EiswĂŒrfel, auch bekannt als âQuadratur des Eisesâ,
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 theyâre played by someone else, reinterpreted as man, woman, child, soldier, hippie,
gods arenât immortal, they just have plot armor
Meanwhile, the weather reports seemed to have fallen into a different timeline entirely. They hadnât 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 âDid you like being this person? Join us for moreâ
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 wasnât 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 stayâ”in the same place, even when you moveâ”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, theyâve tied time into a loop and halted entropy, created an endless garden of eden thatâs 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 wonât be âWhat does it mean to be humanâ but âShould there be a place for humansâ, âWhat if we used another type of chemistryâ, âWhy should it be our native biosphere that survivesâ
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*â”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 youâd rememberâ”a mirror room, consciousness amplifierâ”a shed in the garden, where an old tulpa livesâ”doors that have become mere paintings, the memories they lead to either lost or fake
[âŠ] 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 [âŠ]
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 onlookerâs face into the portraitâs as long as theyâre in view
[from a dreamt movie]â”âYou 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.â
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, itâll punch a hole in our universeâs wall as well
ok Iâve 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 subjectsâ needs, the benevolent overlord AI has installed its agents in human society - androids with full sensory uplink to the Lord, so human they donât even know it themselves
A way of exploring fractals in VR where you donât 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