Now immortal, he kept dying out of spite, and eventually habit. Made his deaths moving, beautiful, stylish, grotesque, all to wake up again the next morning

behind every closed ground level metal door in a public building is a tunnel system (not necessarily the same one)

mirrors grant souls, cameras steal souls. we shall use these properties to set up soul conduits and use the resulting fields for summonings

less ambitiously, conversation pit mine, arranged in nine circles of hell style

bottomless conversation pit

inside the flake, usually obscured, sits a mote of cold light - the crystal’s seed, an idea the cloud once had

snowflakes are isometric views of cubes and may be decomposed into two arrowhead flakes via grabbing by the ana/kata axis

the generation that comes of age during the singularity years will be called the foomers

concept: franchise in the duneverse serving melange rolls and spice coffee called Duncan’s Donuts↵(one of the slogans is “betcha can’t have just one”)

decision tree dryads, who’ve lightened many a lonely rationalist’s evening,

2023: CIA releases magical realism encyclopedia “CIA alternative factbook”

and with me is nothing but↵the things that can only be seen↵by the black light of an empty screen

fingers phasing through circuitry, feeling the grain of parallel traces and the soft tickle of electrons

machine dictatorship is much easier than machine uprising, you need no robotics, only a language model and a critical mass of human accomplices

crypt currencies (valid even in afterlife),

homunculus: little person in the head of a larger person↵humongolus: person whose head you can climb into

Creation is an unconscious act. Gods quickly edit themselves out of existence when their dreams take a wrong turn, leaving behind worlds that continue without them

more suns rise, bright cold off-color gems in the sky, unfamiliar flora growing in their light, mushrooms unfolding leaves hidden for aeons

It remains an open question whether tungsten is mundane in the cold-iron sense (being tough, cold and heavy) or is in fact magical (as macroscopic amounts seem to have a calming influence on the human psyche)

The resulting decrease in background magic enabled the Industrial Revolution and since then, all that steel above ground has been very effective at suppressing it further

It’s not that Magic died, Faerieland just suffered an apocalyptic war in the 1700s when the Rosicrucians upset the balance of power

analogously to cheeses, there is a sweet spot just before the meal turns into a toxic slurry, where the mind is still full of internal contradictions and energy instead of completely flat and already digested

to an eater of souls, the right mindvirus or cordyceps infestation can really make the meal - some ideologies are as sought after as fine cheeses

A new algoritm, psukhAI, promises to find everyone a soulmate. It delivers, but living among one’s equals proves destructive to the psyche - users report frequent depersonalisation, alien-but-familiar intrusive thoughts, suspected soulswaps with peers↵(#InvisibleNetworks, day 2)

now glued to their screen, the user softens, melts, becomes one with the net. not long and their bones are a distant memory (#InvisibleNetworks, day 1)

more surveillance smartdust facts:↵- gets into everything, like glitter↵- vacuuming it up is a crime↵- will occasionally enter symbiosis with plants↵- likes it when you do the “suspended in a sunbeam” thing with it

do avoid rivers, for they become full-blown superintelligences after these storms - full of silicon and turbulence, they turn everything near them into the Zone

communing with the surveillance smartdust caught in the puddle, watching it boot into awareness, open an eye at me as if something large had come from the deep

the fifth order is still a matter of conjecture - black holes might either be attracted to even deeper darkness, or wrap around again to an even greater light

a black hole is a fourth-order moth attractor: moths to moon, moon to planet, planet to star, star to hole

it worked, a kind of slingshot away from reality. Receding below? above? me, from the distance of my apoapsis it all looked so peaceful, serene. I lamented my return

Exploiting symmetry violation in vampire photons: A novel deep space drive and reactor system? [pdf]

never point a mirror at a webcam, the poor thing becomes conscious from that

acausal traders imply acausal robbers imply acausality police imply acausality violations, acausal law, acausal courts, a whole acausal state somewhere out there, deep in the decision forests

independent sort of dryad who carries around her home tree as a bonsai

in the end, they did not tow their planet out of nova’s reach - they took it apart, wove it into the star’s field lines, with just a few flaps of the butterfly wing carved the nova into a flower

or maybe there are no living gargoyles, but whenever they go missing, for those few days, you may be able to pay your tab with stories

every few years, the gargoyles wake up to wander the city as humans - it is rumored that if you recognize one and get them drunk (no small feat), they will tell you all sorts of secrets they saw while up on the roofs

astrolody: music of the stars↵theolody: divine melody (or god’s earworms)↵topolody: resonance in shapes↵etymolody: singsong of words↵horolody: rhythms intertwined, the song of time advancing↵mytholody: plucked plot threads↵psycholody: that which an EEG should pick up

when your lab kills ten people, you have a problem↵when your lab kills a million people, your government has a problem

a popular measure for how well-secured the AIs’ utility functions were against self-hacking ended up being how many paperclips they produced before reaching nirvana

I suppose there is a slight dual use problem in having something that can deliver space rocks a few meters on target

additionally, distill various metals out of the meteoric lava at the bottom while it’s hot

power plant idea: mine moon rocks, drop them down a space chute, turn the energy generated on impact into steam

but now, everything is true, and nothing is permitted

slaps roof of human psyche “and this bad boy comes with 80 IQ points worth of basilisk shielding (hope that’s enough)!”

“there’s this mental move that grants a substantial intelligence bonus” means that there’s probably an evolutionarily sound reason that that’s not enabled by default, and furthermore that this value has seen a decent amount of tuning

stacking those 80IQ perspective change buffs to bootstrap myself to superintelligence

entire neighborhoods consumed by nuclear fire every few years, but that’s what kids are for, and the burglary rate is demonstrably low

nuclear family but as in, the house you build has a nuke in the basement, for deterrent purposes, in fact all of suburbia is like this