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