She takes off her glasses and eyes, places them on the desk, the sockets focus on you↵”In your own words now, why do you deserve a raise”

The Kraken is real here. Ruling from the center, occasionally one of its tentacles will breach the surface and dwarf even the maelstroms

In our plasma bodies, we sail the sun’s burning oceans, ride the wake of magnetic whales and pass maelstroms big as planets

worst elemental pets:↵air: will constantly mess up your desk↵fire: goes really well with a fireplace, but may make your house run away

best elemental pets:↵water: easy to care for, trusting, soothing sounds↵earth: will pretend to be a new piece of architecture every day

Alternative outcome: They have wings, in fact they’re all wings, spinning like helicopter blades, trailing holy fire from the hub

The angels did fly, but it turned out they used buoyant helium bladders and were unsightly blobs

when you have multiple thirstbots running on one cpu, it’s two girls one cpu

if you demolish a chinese room with an axe and then replace its handle, is it still the same axe, and

what if your chinese rooms are inhabited by really tiny people and each replaces a neuron, is the resulting chinese hotel conscious

if you replace parts of the brain with equally functional chinese rooms, at what point does the assemblage cease to be conscious

an aquarium with a tame water elemental inside; when fed, it’ll rain against the glass for an hour, perfect for long evenings

“They moved in a month ago and I didn’t have the heart to throw them out”, she says. Two hummingbird chicks peer at you over a nest of hair.

The exalted willow’s branches hang upwards, sway in the wind like an anemone’s arms, occasionally pull in an unwary bird for a snack

every day, you wake up into a new world, the sky a different color, gravity in another direction, with gray dreams the only fixture

perceptions are intrusive thoughts about physical reality

Kek, actually, is under suspension - he’d be disqualified if he was a reincarnation, and the judges are still undecided on that.

Gods love to play the game “let’s hide our names in the past”. Near always, their arrival will have been foretold by obscure old media.

With this new brain firmware, you won’t need to sleep anymore, downside is rare crashes that will require a technician to reboot you

You don’t even recognize the characters anymore. It’s like someone left the camera running and you’re peeping in the author’s mind.

The book has long ended but somehow there’s always another page behind the last one. You keep reading. The hero settles down, has children,

when you come across an abandoned profile, it could be that they died, but maybe they also molted and this is just a discarded identity

no, he can’t do that, we have mythematical proof that the narrative won’t bend that way

in case both participants prefer the backseat, compatible bots may also (human-imperceptibly) negotiate to not engage in smalltalk at all

using brain implants with control over your facial nerves to let a chatbot handle your meatspace smalltalk

We grant you freedom↵No leaders↵No masters↵Earth is free to rule itself now↵Merely a speck of light from our escape capsule

Welcome to acausal economics 101, where we find out how to make pascal’s mugger behave and trade equitably with basilisks

and in the gashes in his skin, a hundred eyes open and look at you accusingly

How about we teach you a spell that crashes the smartphone of that guy playing bad hip hop aloud in public transport, yes that one

Do not cross the spaceport mafia. They’ll tie an antigrav pod to your feet and throw you into the sky.

The witch’s books lose their pages in autumn and are reduced to their spines in winter. But each spring, they’ll grow new knowledge.

One by one, the stars come loose, drift down like snowflakes and cover the ground in constellations we do not dare tread on

Open 25/7, the shop’s sign says. You think they’re being cute but one night, the clocks don’t seem to work, the other customers lack eyes,

the god of the city sleeps in a scrapyard, feral cars are its herd, graffiti overgrows the walls it passes like moss

Over the crash scene, the drones are already circling, waiting to descend on the wreckage and incorporate whatever usable parts are left

I just want to know, can you apply for asylum with international megacorps yet

the pursuit of Truth is that of a superstimulus, theorems are processed sugar, idealized being-right

[musings]↵Truth being good/beautiful is an artifact of aesthetics honed by evolution, being right about sth usually confers an advantage

To save CPU, the simulators deduplicate parts of minds common to many humans, which sometimes causes ideas to leak between similar minds

online service where people vote for DNA sequences to be included in the next season’s flu

2020: The meme “humanity would be better off at 1% of its current size” is compiled into DNA and goes viral

sideburn (n): burn delivered in passing, not directed at the paragraph’s actual subject but nonetheless savage

In the beginning, there was Falsehood. From it, the Multiverse followed.

Petrichor: smell of earth after rain↵Pyrichor: smell of napalm in the morning↵Jerichor: fresh rubble↵Anemichor: the smell that vacuum lacks

anaclysm, anacomb, anapult, anaract, anastrophe

analysis/katalysis↵↵also anagram/katagram, katachronism, katalogy, katathema, kataconda

the antonym of anarchist is obviously katarchist

tiny sprites live in our servers and will sometimes put their ears to our fibers to hear the heartbeat of the internet