Ygmu the world-mushroom looms in the distance, its cap covered in forest. Exposed mycelium tickles your feet, the spores make you feel giddy

Posthuman hermeneutics analyses corpora whole, archives saved from bitrot by valiant scrapers document the then-nascent hiveminds’ origins

Mythologos:↵(n) appeal to narrative↵(n) appeal of narrative↵(n) the Word as told↵(n) narrative principle underlying history and future

Mythodology (n): the study of the structure of myths, their applications and shortcomings, how to craft, de- and employ them

you pet the centipede and it undulates blissfully, turns around, clasps its legs around your arm and nibbles your fingertips in affection

dance on his grave / to wake him up (chorus: we need him [stomp])↵should morning come / we will not stop (chorus: we need him [stomp])

Just consider: as long as whoever is rubberhosing you doesn’t figure out how to trigger it, you can honestly say you don’t know the password

Get yourself an alternate personality to store your passwords in, triggered by the view of your login screen or your sigil hidden therein

We mastered time travel, mapped the possible routes and found them to correspond to an origami pattern. It seems we live on a paper ship.

Nobody will ever know the artifact’s powers: It gets itself stolen every time someone tries to use it and sometimes just because it’s bored.

“Pillar of creation, wall of creation really. Hitch a ride on its winds, sail down right to the core. Only hard part is getting up again.”

Takes another swig, drawls: “Oh man, the Red Spot’s storm nymphs. They’re something else. Did you know it extends way down into the core?”

He’s sailed the layered seas of Jupiter, yes, all seven of them. From the top of the clouds down to the hailstorms of the hydrogen ocean.

Recently, an isolationist cult has been gaining power up there. Extremely concerning, but what can we do? Even our planes are gone.

While we can’t trade with the Alef, we stay in touch over old telescopes converted into giant semaphores. Our storm warnings come from them.

Two hundred years ago, the war severed the space elevator and rockets were lost. Some stranded at the top survived and founded Aloof City.

Grow leather from lab cultivated samples of your own skin, tailor clothes from it, wear a second face on the back of your head

Eternal September ends when the Internet achieves near 100% penetration. Perpetual growth shock dissipates and time starts again.

Unimpressed by mere physical impossibility, the spiders built their hive to spec and gave it octagonal honeycombs. Rather disturbed the bees

Smoke clouds acquire names like rider and bird, helicopters visit the still intact (only tilted) tip, people still work in the lower levels.

The tower has been collapsing, but really slowly: one floor per day, debris flying only a little faster, slow enough to hold picnics on it.

They play music to the city’s traffic jams during day and redistribute its wealth at night, integral to the vital balance of law and chaos.

Next to the police, the unlaw enforcement has its seat, a building that seems to overgrow its neighbours like ivy. Officers fly in and out.

The French counter-revolution has its best surgeons put the heads back on the bodies, in fact you’ll get an extra head if you ask nicely.

Speak into this little box here to start the engine. If your idea is any good, its spark should ignite the fuel-soul mixture and off you go.

“that is some really nice thunder here” he says, “early harvest, grown under an evening sun, rocky start, smooth finish, admirable stamina,

There’s a chlorophyllic vampire bat that is symbiotic with trees: During day, its green wings feed the tree, at night it detaches and hunts.

Earth’s core is under us, Fire’s core over us. Sea’s and Air’s are hidden, inhospitable howling maelstroms only accessible through theory.

The day advances and the ghostly structure changes shape, grows and loses pillars, shows different aisles, caresses the frescos on the walls

The light beams fall through the cathedral’s windows onto cleverly placed mirrors and form a second cathedral out of light and shadow.

An influential Latin dictionary once published a revised edition and broke 30% of spells. This led to wizards’ adoption of versioned Latin.

The reason you use dead languages for magic is that they don’t move. Spells in living languages spoil within years due to semantic drift.

Words fall to the ground behind you as you speak, every night the sidewalks are full of words and every morning, street sweepers clean up

Your pet flame runs up to you enthusiastically as you return home, along your arms, under your clothes [you smell hot breath and burnt hair]

A house made only of sound: floor boards creaking, a door closing, the hum of a fridge↵Close your eyes and you’ll even hear the mice

Night’s little sister, it devours, transforms. But also leaves behind myriad transient and beautiful dreams, one in every dew droplet.

What we now call the Shadow Sea follows the Moon across Earth’s surface like a lost dog, in a tide that travels both oceans and continents.

Bereft of its shadow, moon grieved. Now always full, it did not sleep anymore, took on a sickly color. Tides became erratic, wolves howled.

It struggled, oh it did. Left swathes of land in eternal dusk, created a sea of darkness as it bled out. But this was it: The last eclipse.

But his ambition was not sated. He brooded. Planned. Consulted astronomical tables. Waited. And then it came: Solar eclipse. Moon’s shadow.

Shadows are hunted for their pelts and sold to tailors. He, the greatest hunter of all, once caught a mountain’s shadow. Crashed the market.

The tree of oblivion is wrought of glass from roots to leaves. It does not seem to move, but is never twice the same when you look at it.

Clouds have been reproducing asexually since angels died out. Meteorologists currently race to preserve the remaining breeds in a cloudbank.

You hear tales of spirits in the untamed parts of the net, data nixes that sing to you and pull you into virtuality when you come too close

Antichaos, in which no matter what you do, the outcome is stable.↵Achaos, in which nothing you do reaches farther than the immediate change.

Neat side effect: the semantic resonance between digital magic and your digits makes keyboards unreasonably effective in its control.

Apart from this, digital magic has quantization artifacts from low resolution that leave glitches. And lacks a certain analog warmth.

Similarly, even professional boards grow veins and nerves with time. Above a certain number of tiny beating hearts, they become unusable.

Oh and please, do not eat that bread. That is, if you don’t want a tree growing out of your stomach later (and that’s a harmless outcome).

Breadboards for example are known to become literal bread. If your room suddenly smells of bakery, you know you’ve just burned your circuit.