This rat species feigns its death so well that many predators have died eating it: It claws its way out from the inside.

Kids these days don’t know what they’re missing, they should really get out into nature more.

Went for a walk in the forest today. Asphalt under my feet, telephone poles swaying in the wind, a smell of ozone, chirping wires. Sublime.

the monsters are having a party under my bed and I am not invited↵I don’t mind them usually, they’re cleanly, but sometimes…

avoids most of the icky math that underlies actual crypto, so it is no reader kryptonite. and different enough to not be cyberpunk pastiche.

I imagine merchant guilds and bankers would be right behind that and implement various baroque schemes, maybe even smart contracts

by giving away the knots (which look like wristbands when the secret is fully entangled) you can implement secret escrow and OTP

e.g. depending on how the knots work (can you exchange them and expect decryption to work the same?) you can implement different schemes

[At which point world builder brain piped up and was like “hey it works essentially like crypto! magic compatible!”]↵https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/712422004343840769

With the right finger movements, you can braid your thoughts or truss up secrets so tightly that nobody can extract them from you.

If you unknot these thoughts, the tangles will find their way into the twine again. Cheating is impossible. But that makes the knot useful.

The Thought (K)not tangles with your mind and is indestructible by force. Solve it with your fingers, pay in knotted thoughts.

What looked like dreadlocks were in fact finely machined braids, overall encoding roughly one megabyte of encrypted data.

Only much later, they found out how the spy had smuggled the documents and ironically, the proverbial comb would’ve helped catch him.

Ein Windzug geht durchs Zimmer, es klingt ein leises Horn und Schienen rattern. In der Tür siehst du gerade noch Rücklichter entschwinden.

A hermit treasure on the way won its heart (a large sapphire). But the order in its mouth proved stronger. When it left, the sapphire broke.

Along its way, it found much solitude, but also trawlers, sunken cities, the Kraken (fun guy!), more sessile treasures and once, love.

The golem had a lot of time to think: Was it still a treasure when there was nobody to appreciate it? What would happen when it arrived?

The pirates didn’t bury the treasure, they golemified it: put the map in its mouth and told it to walk the seafloor to the other side.

Over night, remove your eyes and put them into the glass of isotonic solution besides your bed. You don’t want them to grow into your skull.

A glance up to your room’s light: The marbles orbiting your head align to eclipse it and the moths stand out against the shadows.

Over the weeks, you can see the plates shift and volcanoes rise and fall. You resist the urge to scratch, these jungles take days to regrow.

On your arm is an ocean. Clouds slowly swirl and form into a hurricane. It travels towards your hand, a continent full of fertile jungles.

A hourglass with multiple chambers that are connected like a 3D maze: You have to turn it on exactly the right side every hour to solve it.

A little land octopus that mimics native flowers to prey on bees and hummingbirds with its tentacular blossom.

The source of the mysterious blight in the outer provinces has been revealed: The kingdom’s map had been stored wrong and gotten moldy.

As he is sitting on the chair, his arms and legs are dissolving into a swarm of colibris that settles on his head like a feathery crown.

♪ I kissed the sun / and liked it / and lived to tell the tale ♫♪

As a general rule, don’t date anything with non-negligible surface gravity.

Your awareness fractures, a gnawing and buzzing fills your ears. The last thing you see is a skeleton, picked clean, receding under you.

Where he runs his fingers over your skin, it dissolves into maggots. It’s like a zipper opening to reveal your actual flesh.

be the tentacular horror you want to see in your dreams

Carry the reality catcher around your neck and it’ll protect you from misfortune and boring days: you will simply not remember them.

The bus must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere, the stops aren’t familiar at all: St. Cailleach cathedral, fishman ghetto, old cerberite mine

On once civilized planets lie the spores of a predator species, dormant until found by another civilization, who they then devour.

the shadow biosphere exists: living shadows that throw dead objects, shadow bacteria that break down yours into a diffuse undefined mass

We genetically modified the centipedes to have wheels for feet, then set them on model railway tracks.↵choo choo~

karaoke in dead languages: sing along to the ruin of other races, rendered toothless by time, in sounds your throat can barely produce

The undercity’s scrap dealers deal in body parts as well: A dog’s nose, near as new! Fungally reinforced bones! Faces, lost in shame!

Would their space look smoother than our wrinkly, walled and doored one? Would they talk of paths to take instead key insights?

Note that we employ a great number of door/lock metaphors when talking about our minds. What would be the metaphors of a doorless society?

Interstellar: Actually About Doors!

Volcanoes are actually a skin condition caused by uneven flow of the earthly juices.

Annoying writer emotion: “Nah, I did that already”, even when maybe one other person would notice. It’s worse when you see the abstractions.

In this sense, wormholes are archetypical doors: space is the wall, the hole is the doorway, and it spans a great spatial/temporal distance.

Also doors, together with locks, separate what is here from what is there more effectively than mere distance can. Compressed distance?

Theory: The symbolism on doors is so heavy because passing through one coincides with a change of environment (and accordingly, mind).

Only in these memories can you enter. So they ensure, if necessary by force, that no book about the city tells of the gate unguarded.

The gate watch’s oath binds them even as the city has long crumbled to dust. They sit here, guarding a passage that exists only in memories.

Isn’t a platonic relationship literally the ideal relationship? I mean, you know.