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