Wiser now, we didn’t crack that egg that never hatched, only punctured its shell. Peering in, we saw a lone bird roaming an unfamiliar sky.

The seeds we brought from Hollow Earth act weird here. We cut up an acorn and it was growing inwards, branches ever finer towards the center

we trail dead pixels that heal only slowly, an alien sizzling on frequencies that should be inaudible, the taste of empty space and loss

we work in the slaughterhouse, butcher ideas, process their flesh, wear the scent of corruption and decay↵one whiff scrambles your thoughts

wild pixels do whatever they want, it takes careful domestication to make a whole screenful of them behave, dance in synchrony, and not die

A late green shadow trails after the cloud, desert flowers fed by its rain that wilt shortly after

X but taking place in the platonic plane↵↵biologize/mechanize something that wasn’t yet (an instance of process/structure mismatch)

[tale of human ambition]↵↵[atrocious pun, but taken seriously]↵↵[neat invention, thinly disguised as story]

the fire mage must learn that she must never be On fire, she must Be the fire, channel pure hunger and intent to devour, never obstruct it

we compress ideas and history into narratives because they become legible this way.↵↵math is a narrative for truth

apart from these advantages for their communication, are legible concepts (often narratives) maybe also better tools for thought?

legibility trumps truth because of the lower effort associated with understanding a legible concept - it can draw on what is already known.

The mob hunts down the gynoid and burns her at the stake. He watches, helpless. Her plastic face melts and for a short time, she can cry

At some point, we stop storing knowledge in books and just archive entire minds to resurrect when needed. To attain immortality, know.

Whip grass grows around your limbs in the night and ties you down. With you bound, new roots will penetrate your skin and suck you dry

The maelstrom baits whole tribes, leads them around in circles. Any way they go, the only trail they’ll ever meet again will be their own

The green sea has its own monsters: A serpent only visible as waves in the grass, coiling in on unsuspecting cattle, pulling it underground

She has her head in the clouds, can’t get out, is floating, her legs treading air. A crunching sound and she grows still.

A keffiyah with sequins on it to dazzle surveillance cameras

The natives are musical and pleasant but competitive, will challenge you to a duet for the slightest reason. You better meet their standards

Take a piece of clear sky, melt it, cast it into a lens, and you will be able to peep on naked lightning nymphs in the storm clouds

Elevator pitch: “We create custom symbionts for any purpose! We disrupt evolution!“↵- Intelligent Design LLC (trademark pending)

You meet him before his swamp hut, bats dangling off his hat. “Don’t worry”, he says, “they’re tame. Hunt mosquitoes when I go out.”

One eclipse, Moon came too close to the Sun and was vaporized. Since then, a lone silver cloud shines at night and sometimes rains moondrops

okay okay time for another world building entry:↵http://www.synkretie.net/writings/world%20building%20-%20cannibala.html↵(you get three ways of human inheritance! exciting!)

Be too eclectic and a bad interaction may kill you↵↵Cities where they put citizenship-symbionts in the water supply and food

Some symbionts are incompatible - it is a complicated science to find just the right combinations and some paraethnicities form around that

Some are used in experiments to separate the power-symbionts of great wizards from their parasites, killed if they don’t catch symbionts

“Great power comes at great cost” - like being the equivalent of a leper.↵↵Children aren’t considered persons until they’ve consumed flesh:

Add magic to the mix: certain symbionts grant magical powers. Wizards, to be less tasty and not be hunted down, eat disfiguring parasites

Symbionts that produce certain vitamins, stimulate muscle growth, protect against diseases, repel mosquitoes, heighten the mood

Eating someone, you become part of their extended family, host the same guests the rest of the family shares, sometimes jealously protects

Of course there are parasites, but humans have had time to coevolve and breed symbionts to keep more malicious parasites and prions at bay

A humanity in which eating a slain animal is a sacred act and cannibalism even more so, in fact has been for as long as anybody can remember

Assuming a spherical dyson civilization in a vacuum,

The philosopher king leads an army of monks across the platonic plains, conquering concepts those before him only discovered

larval worlds, slowly pulsing and glowing from within, sucking from idea conduits, growing in the writer’s mind to hatch through the fingers

A time knife to cut timelines with, sever someone’s purpose and maybe spin a new one - a tool for diviners discontent with mere foretelling.

Wish potency grows with meteor size. A regular one may grant love, a comet may grant world peace - at least until it wipes out civilization.

Shooting star wishes not immediately made become unstable and may make themselves. Remember Tunguska? A century wish, wasted by a drunkard.

IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) router/uplink spotted in rural Poland (they get creative with the last mile here) https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/770225364757049344/photo/1

Anopticon: Architecture designed to resist surveillance, easily navigable but with as few long lines of sight as possible, sound-damping,

one of those improvised soldier graves with a helmet on a cross, but with a flower wreath/propeller cap/fedora

bar where they just hand you a set of dice if you’re unsure what to drink (can also be bought as souvenir)

party where attendants wear color-coded AR gear, see only those with the same color, and walk on color coded lines to avoid collisions

Trees form around and channel slow discharges of magic towards space, wooden lightning bolts with growth rings for equipotential field lines

I found a word for this (and “spoiling a joke through explanation”), but the etymology only works in German:↵zerklären (zerstören+erklären)

Phase 3: The divides become so deep people stop fighting across reality borders, nobody even understands what the others are fighting about

Phase 2: Virtual consensus reality diversification - ideologies become completely irreconcilable as populous “social” realities hard-diverge