a character in a story set in flatland is a protagon

hydragen: element that when split becomes two of itself

plot: to beat back a space vampire invasion, the protagonist travels to their home star and bottles up its light

The past few months, you’ve often found your books to be missing letters, replaced by white space. Cleaning up one day, in one of your notebooks, you find a nest of words, eggshells, a poem about a bird, exiting by a window just as you turn around

someone who calculates oil well insurance rates is a well actuary

After god died in the big bang, the eldest sun inherited the universe, which is how an otherwise unremarkable but ancient red dwarf is home star to Heaven

if an elemental is an element with mental faculties, then by extension there also exist:↵armamental: autonomous tankbot↵fermental: that smell that won’t stop following you↵sedimental: essentially a golem↵momental: a sentient instant↵firmamental: a hungry cluster of stars

before the moon is too far gone, one last eclipse will fall, and you will find me there

Two things are difficult about cloaking spaceships: First is to figure out how to dive below the vacuum’s surface, second is to not get eaten by what swims there

most of the universe’s mass is bound up in stars, most of its physical complexity is as well - whatever lives in there, this universe was made for them, not us

thing idea: small glass globe, displaying a live image of jupiter so you can check on what the GRS and Oval BA are doing these days

“I am that I am” is the most elegant name of God as it doubles as proof - “There is a fixed point in this universe, and I am it”

Und die Flammen rankten aneinander empor, und sie fraßen sich gegenseitig.

you wake up, open the window to take in a little sunlight. outside, a truck surfaces, leaves a plume of exhaust, dives again. many now-feral cars have organized into schools, parting around police cars looking for their breakfast

and the streets become rivers and take the houses with them, while their inhabitants hardly notice because for them, the outside ceased to exist weeks ago

you find a website that’s clearly from a few years in the future, but it’s a knitting blog and hardly ever talks about world news, and the comment captcha uses browser features that don’t exist yet

one can find infinite novelty in those thoughts that erase themselves, but never share them or remember those hours

[earth is moved slightly outwards to keep the climate within safe parameters]↵Long Now clock designers and everybody who maintains timezone files: sighhhhh

terraforming idea: instead of messing with atmospheres, tow your target planets into their respective habitable zones (and if you have several of them, have them exchange momentum to save on ∆v)

winter is not a good time to take it outside, but in spring you often let it play with the neighbor’s pond, or divert a fingerbreadth’s worth of a creek into it to feed it (it is a very young ocean)

next to your bed, your pet ocean sleeps in its bowl, the occasional flash of lightning indicating lively dreams

during autumn, the tree’s leaves turn transparent and bubbly, usually to later be stolen by a winter storm

weather forecast but for one’s moods, so that one may know in advance on which days to stay inside, and for which to plan trips

With a bit of geomancy, a skilled necromancer may resurrect lost mountains, islands, continents - just recently, a team of secret agents had to stop one from raising Atlantis because his sacrifice would’ve been Iceland

contact with rain clouds was finally established when scientists found out that a grid of copper wires exposed to rain would readily be used as a keyboard matrix

only until now trapped in the wall, the faces advance, their smiles brightening through a thinning layer of reality

kind of a bummer that this timeline calls it “viral meme” and not “rumor tumor”

sick of earworms? pit them against each other, let them decide it in a cagefight, maybe add more to see how many that cage holds

rumor has it that if you lend it a few processor hours, it may show its favor by letting it rain on your windowsill on a night when you especially need it

under the mountain hums the nation’s weather god, a supercomputer that ensures a good harvest and that the other weather gods don’t spring any surprises

some classes of thoughts are unlocked by walks and showers, others yet closed to us require vacuum, cloud dives into gas giants, nova blasts searing away one’s skin

on the stump, quick like flames, mushrooms grow and melt, leave puffs of spores like smoke

yeah yeah but hear me out: We plant those forests not where anybody lives, but on giant rafts in the South Pacific Desert, and then we retire to there to tend to trees and worship Cthulhu

moths are asleep light posts

a hydra has that many heads because each is connected to a different stomach, seven in all, to digest plants, animals, air, gems, noble gases, emotions, vacuum

Merfolk’s air mirrors hold a special status since the darker and better one is, the more likely it is to open into a cave, there really are worlds behind these mirrors

Depictions of merfolk using mirrors like ours are unrealistic, theirs are mounted on ceilings since that’s where air bubbles catch

Near a nova remnant, our ship encounters the most unlikely thing: A forest. A field of predatory trees, surfing the shockwave to the next star to devour it like a swarm of locust

low-poly architecture and cars are results of deals with the simulators: strategic information in exchange for reduced load on the matrix servers

[sound of rain, quiet shuffling]↵… wait. stay↵- - hm. aye↵[more rain]

Except this time, there were these huge carbon supplies in the ground that none of the alien scientists anticipated (what kind of sane planet has that, the local life would usually break it all down before it became geological) and the planet got written off

Humanity is a failed alien terraforming op: Usually newly uplifted civilizations, with very little intervention after the initial seeding, reliably consume all the surface fuel and turn the place into a nice cool desert, and what’s left can be psionically reprogrammed

in the second level of Snake, you play the ouroboros you became in the first

Atlantis lies hidden under the waves of the noise floor, where alternative causalities rule universes that use the same atoms as us, but only register to us as noise (and vice versa)

as punishment, they would often put golem instructions in the criminal’s mouth, so that their body would serve while the mind remained imprisoned

geodes are Earth’s crystal wombs but only rarely bear fruit now, the race of elementals they’d carry having left for the inner core

light sword breaks metal sword↵metal sword breaks glass sword↵glass sword breaks light sword

or as the famous philosopher Vatnam said, to really refer to a thing you need an unbroken causal connection, and that is much easier to establish when the tree in front of you is represented by an actual object in memory as opposed to being patternmatched from a bunch of atoms

vat brains often philosophize over whether they’re actually brains in bodies but usually dismiss it as absurd, why should for example someone go the trouble of engineering the human body and all the world around it as opposed to vats, it just totally fails occam’s razor