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, youâve 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:â”armamental: autonomous tankbotâ”fermental: that smell that wonât stop following youâ”sedimental: essentially a golemâ”momental: a sentient instantâ”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 vacuumâs surface, second is to not get eaten by what swims there
most of the universeâs 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
âI am that I amâ is the most elegant name of God as it doubles as proof - âThere is a fixed point in this universe, and I am itâ
Und die Flammen rankten aneinander empor, und sie fraĂen 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 thatâs clearly from a few years in the future, but itâs a knitting blog and hardly ever talks about world news, and the comment captcha uses browser features that donât 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]â”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 âv)
winter is not a good time to take it outside, but in spring you often let it play with the neighborâs pond, or divert a fingerbreadthâs 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 treeâs leaves turn transparent and bubbly, usually to later be stolen by a winter storm
weather forecast but for oneâs 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 wouldâve 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 âviral memeâ and not ârumor tumorâ
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 nationâs weather god, a supercomputer that ensures a good harvest and that the other weather gods donât 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 oneâs 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
Merfolkâs 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 thatâs 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]â”⊠wait. stayâ”- - hm. ayeâ”[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 whatâs 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 criminalâs mouth, so that their body would serve while the mind remained imprisoned
geodes are Earthâs crystal wombs but only rarely bear fruit now, the race of elementals theyâd carry having left for the inner core
light sword breaks metal swordâ”metal sword breaks glass swordâ”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 theyâre 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 occamâs razor