Despite warning coloration and sirens, ambulances are stingless, even benign. It’s the more dangerous police car they mimic to be left alone

The label says “snow orb” but it’s empty. You shake it and soon stand in a blizzard, it seems this one’s snow was on the outside

Northern mermaids are round and plump like seals, with layers of fat to keep the cold out. Way less seductive, but also way less extinct

“I too love rain”, says the mermaid, “where the ground’s been melting, I’ll dance in its bubbles, or catch them with one of your umbrellas

however, these are hard to talk to, they refuse to use words and will instead wander over your screen in murmurations of pixels

second-order AIs amuse themselves by designing minds, sleek and efficient ones but also art minds that extract the greatest possible beauty

I think you should issue a factory recall on these humans, they’re prone to exploding

as of next year, it’s not “climate change”, it’s “world sauna championships, proudly sponsored by

tfw your pet planet is blocking the reading light because it’s playing eclipse again

⌘: Through these, you will not only see the world as it is, but also all the ways it could be↵⌖: These are regular glasses?↵⌘: exactly

It turns around (can bubbles turn around?), casts its baleful gaze (can bubbles gaze?) upon the operatoＳＡＦＥ，　ＣＬＥＡＲＬＹ　ＳＡＦＥ，　ＤＯ　ＣＯＭＥ　ＣＬＯＳＥＲ

The bubble collides with a dust mote. Divides, divides again, again, falls to the ground as a foam baby.↵unsafe

One twists, distorts, turns inside out in a complicated maneuver without popping. You probably don’t want to be that engineer. Unsafe!

Nearing the reactor, the bubble freezes, petrifies into a geode and then shatters, showering the floor with gems. Clearly unsafe

The bubble wobbles, explodes. unsafe↵It accelerates, smashing into the far wall. unsafe↵Galaxies form on its surface, then it pops. unsafe

In industrial magic, to test whether magical equipment is cold enough to service, you blow a few soap bubbles near it. Some outcomes:

internal, infernal, what if the hell we’ve been looking for was inside us all along

Being a cheap and very practical way of casting spells that would usually require a group ritual, tulpamancy is a core mage skill these days

Earth is in fact the only solid celestial body, all the other stars and planets are hollow due to budget constraints

The pixies won’t stop bumping against your screen, mistaking it for a portal back into faerieland

“Make it rain, old man, make it rain one last time”↵There is thunder but no clouds, instead the night sky lights up with meteors

Does it ever annoy you when you find yet another ghost universe where the only thing that’s left is humans scuttling between systems

Theory: Since diskworld earthquakes resonate across the disk, its geography should show Chladni patterns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Chladni#Chladni_figures)

invisible flames lap at reality as if it were celluloid, burning holes that pixelate towards the edges and surround ↵nothing

With the hourglass turned around its ana/kata axis, it briefly runs in reverse, but then shatters. The sand falls upwards, into the clouds

◆: Humans? You don’t need to worry about them, I’ve trojan’d their junk DNA. They get uppity, I flip a switch, they become furniture.

As the housing market heats up further, it finally becomes more economical to just assume a thumb-sized android body and live in a dollhouse

In the timeline where Jesus has children, his water walking trait turns out to be heritable and his children rebuild Atlantis on the waves

looking into her eyes, you wonder where your thoughts went↵↵around her pupils, brilliant accretion disks have formed

One of the better externalities: Dragnet AIs and their programmers become unable to cope with humanity’s increasingly inscrutable mutterings

Famously, a meme disguising itself as a memeblocker download page poisons the filters, making a popular blocker hide all mentions of itself

At first, NLP-powered memeblockers are a huge success - but the memes catch on and the resulting arms race renders most of the net illegible

Expecting it to be a mushroom, you tap it with your shoe. But it shudders, starts pumping air and floats away, trailing mycelium tentacles

Finally, he hands you a slice of a clock’s face, an unfamiliar numeral on it. “This is a spare hour. Use it wisely.”

Now, while our hypersparrows did breed, we kept finding their eggs unharmed but empty, the chicks having left along another dimension.

Since the potion spill made Pete grow a few extra arms, we’ve come to call him Centipete.

𝔚e will live as mice do, scurrying between their engines, living off scraps. Our children will not see the sun, only gears and coal dust.

ℑ fear that one day, the calculating engines may discover the secret of their manufacture and drown the world in their clockwork flesh.

or take reverse dementia, where you wake up every morning with new memories that aren’t yours, and your own become harder and harder to find

An excavator severs your neighborhood’s fiber link and in that moment, everybody around you stops walking, assumes a vacant expression

↻↯: “Even those that don’t rain are nice. Their winds pull at my surface as if they wanted me to play with them. They never stop trying.”

↬~↭: “rocks against your belly, always, new substance coming from above tickling your surface, first alien and cold, soon dissolving in you”

We uplift animals, trees, then stones, lurk the forums of sentient rivers to learn how they experience rain

fractal jellyfish coast through parameter space, assuming forms that bulge outwards, then becoming tangles of stalks

He yawns, a few moths escape from his mouth. He follows them with his gaze, then notices you, startles, looks away sheepishly

also known as time flies, their imagos feed on unnoticed seconds and will for example lurk near engrossed readers, antennae extended

a brass worm writhes lazily where the clock’s gears used to be, another priceless artifact destroyed by chronophages

that ambivalent feeling when your pet void has gone missing, but then you find it in your wallet

When you look out of a crystal ball instead of into it, you can see the past - actually that is how eyes work

dig into the pain, dissect and measure it, lose sight of the whole↵↵until there’s no more suffering, just neuron spikes and physics