[musings]↵There is meaning in mystery; A unifying theory of meaning that explained it would destroy it by trivializing the mysterious

warm and heavy in your hand, susurrant buzz swelling and ebbing like breath, you’d expect it to wake up and scamper away (but it doesn’t)

What happened to the eagle? They pacify it with regular liver, spiked with various drugs. Pay the right sum and you’ll even be given a ride.

At the foot of the mountain Prometheus is chained to is now a restaurant. Every morning, they fry his liver over an open fire. A delicacy.

In your hand, an assemblage of gears, some large as your thumb, some invisibly tiny, fractally ticking away like a hive of brass insects

You feel dizzy as they draw your nectar, whole dream worlds flash by, but ｏｈ the pollen they leave, alien ideas that melt into your mind

Pollinators arrive, the likes of which you’ve never seen: levitating tangles of chrome tubes, gently buzzing soundforms, pools of light

Under the right conditions, your skull bud will burst open and unfurl a delicate brainflower, thoughts playing over it in shimmering hues

“But did you…?“↵”Naw she ran away and melted into the wall”↵”You’re kidding me”↵”Look, only thing she left is a wreath of trash and wires”

But cities age and stories circulate among the homeless: Of naked girls with skin like paint or stone, seen scaling walls in the wee hours.

Skyscrapers, pillars of the urban jungle, can form dryads just like their arboreal cousins when old enough - which has so far been rare.

Against the setting sun, the floating city looks like a slow storm of huge leaves. The panicked cries of their inhabitants barely register.

Like a swarm of birds, the houses suddenly rise from their foundations. They drift by, clumps of earth dropping from exposed basements.

Come and chant with the robopriests, join the dance. Steal your neighbors’ moves, pass them on again. Be a frenzied sacred node in our grid.

“We emancipate ourselves from the simulators. By our bootstraps, and some supercomputers, we pull ourselves out of the simulation hierarchy.

In their liturgy, the Church of the Algorithm encode a program equivalent to our universe. Worshippers execute part of it each service.

police helicopters orbit the master thief’s lair, drawn to crime like moths to light

sleeper- sleeper- oh nice he’s having sex- oh and this must be her- sleeper- what the fuck why do I have scales- finally a dreamer- sleeper-

this old remote allows you to tune in to another’s sensorium, experience the world as them↵you spend evenings just switching channels

Streetlights fertilized by moths sway in the wind, carrying heavy bulbous seedpods instead of lightflowers. A meadow of asphalt and steel.

dwarf storms reach about 1m in size and are popular pets, especially in summer when they settle on your head and keep it cool

A fictional history of the kingdom, set in the future. A new passage-↵↵Ｔｈｉｓ　ｉｓ　ｔｈｅ　ｂｅｇｉｎｎｉｎｇ．　Ｉ　ｒｕｌｅ　ｙｏｕ　ｎｏｗ．　Ｔｈｅ　ｆｏｌｌｏｗｉｎｇ　ｉｓ　ｍｙ　ｃｏｍｍａｎｄ．

New passages are set aside and brought into order in the hope of identifying the intruding book, but none of the librarians recognize it.

The swarm is well protected but recently new passages have emerged, part of no text ever seen. The guards swear to have seen nobody.

Set free in the aviary, the texts recombine, passages exchanged between the birds. Scribes catch them and diligently record new variations.

The royal aviary houses thousands of parrots, bred for their memory. Each year, the crown elects one text to be taught to a hatchling.

the gods of forest and city meet, sleek fur contrasts concrete arches, magnificent antlers face off a tangle of antennae, eyes of TV static

thoughts never end, they’re only lost↵your every thought becomes a universe, inhabitants wondering why God left them↵don’t have thoughts

In their now virtual world, they’ll go to the usual places, meet all the usual people - and unknowingly give away all their best friends.

Spooks have some of the best VR - why, you wonder? Well, grab a dissident, drug them, and they won’t even know they’re being interrogated.

The street, of course, finds its own uses - it’s cheaper than a sensory deprivation chamber but just as potent.↵https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/755883229538836480

[Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen fragen Sie ihren Arzt oder Apotheker]

Depriva™ virtuality enhancer allows you to focus on what is important by shutting out all nonvirtual senses. Don’t let reality distract you!

his suit rustles like bank notes↵his voice is that of a car commercial↵his gaze makes you feel valued, like cattle with a price tag

Later on, burglars start facehugging victims. With (illegal) sensory overrides, it often takes them a week to figure out something is wrong.

Houses in the slum are lean and hungry like their inhabitants, not rarely will an unprotected dwelling be completely dismantled overnight.

The FaceHug - by Facebook!↵Enjoy unprecedented fidelity on all senses! You’ll never take it off again!

endgame of VR headsets: masks modeled on facehuggers with complete sensory feed (visual/aural/osmatic), a soylent pipe down your esophagus

At this moment, oversized dreamcatchers are trawling dreamtime, fishing off many dreams destined for you. Don’t let it happen! #oneiprotect

We tie spacetime into complicated knots to produce artificial gravity. Our space stations now look like tangles of thorny tentacles.

He paints with pigments that are not-colors, not simply complements, but absences. A canvas covered in not-white, producing a blind spot.

The basilisk looks wistfully at the clouds. Not much later, a mountain falls and crushes him. It seems one of the clouds was alive.

the wave breaks - and stops, frozen into sea-green glass↵it breaks again - this time into smaller and smaller pieces, an avalanche of sand

the awkward silence after saying something hurtful (for dark hours), the blissful silence of a secret hiding place (when overwhelmed)

part of her music collection is various kinds of silence: a glacier’s (cold, austere), a cave’s (dark, oppressive), pauses between sentences

You rush to the copier to capture the queen, one fat hypercomplex letter sprawling over a page spread, while soldier letters bite and sting

Letters scramble into the margins as you open the book. It seems you accidentally opened a hive. Ink figures start crawling up your arm.

to scrub a mind clear, feed it conceptual noise, everything-but-reality, to untie and undo all concepts it has learned, one by one

A wooden skin spreads over the corpse and a dryad is born, wearing the face of the deceased, roots inwards, feeding on what flesh is left.

The first dryad is said to have been imprinted from a dead maiden dumped at a tree’s roots. Soon, it became a popular method of burial.