what if [the counterfactual]

We end up in tight symbiosis, taking it along in our starships, it becomes our signature. The last black hole to die looks slightly green.

Biologists discover a moss that feeds on entropy and crushed hopes - physics lies in shambles but world hunger and energy crisis are solved.

change your middle name as a sign of affiliation

Those that like to solve mysteries, and those that leave them. Which will leave the world richer?

One variation uses xenon and turns the speaker upside down for safety reasons since xenon is heavier than air and else won’t exit the lung.

Cheaters have been known to train at home to be able to fake helium voices while talking with normal air.

Real world implementation: Poetry slam with helium balloon for each speaker on the mic. Once the helium voice runs out, their turn is over.

Meatspace Twitter: you may talk about whatever you want, but only use half a lungful of air.

. (punct.) - grammatical breath↵Like real breath, you can use it less often as would be sensible, but you appear slightly breathless without

dangling thread identification↵dead character elimination↵cultural reference counting↵plot hole optimization

those who write their novels in a typesafe language so the compiler would find plot holes↵http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/excuses-excuses.html#comment-1990861

tbh I lied about the mirror

A game in which, after beating all the bosses, you are cursed to be the next.

I went to the abyss, but brought a large mirror. The abyss stared, and recoiled at its own sight. That is how I crossed the abyss.

acquired a sample of this potion that made you fly↵mixed it into ink, did not drink↵the words flew away as soon as the paper dried

those whose thought resembles a bonfire↵those who think like a river↵those who contemplate the fire’s reflection↵those who douse the fire

now the cyberspace pulls in the world, and the world pulls in the cyberspace, and they will finally merge. an end to progress as we know it?

the cyberspace and its ideology have been congealing on us since way before the internet, it started with the first external memory devices

its society values the never-seen-before over that recorded (progress), when our previous societies were cyclical in nature and worldview

in a cyberspace, where every interaction has become copyable and replayable, your every action can suddenly become a performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SdqOC8NA7s when did our future go wrong when our present doesn’t look like this

And then there are the decamillenia old structures and you wonder who exactly is keeping these remembered for they resemble nothing.

Cicero’s memory palaces are still out there by the way. They are well touristically developed these days.

I helped build estates in some of the far edges of dreamscape, for pay. Some have been deserted but refound by curious dreamers. And things.

It was an experiment we did not repeat and we had to sign a non-proliferation treaty.↵That dull sense of loss? Yeah. That’s what’s left.

endeavour - devour

Humans dance their bodies around things to infuse them with meaning, e.g. a sacrificial fire↵They do the same dance with words, around ideas

some emotions famously last forever - bottling one took an eternal cage↵”love” had a cousin once that is now removed from our timeline

Time was part of the blueprint: some emotions had a length of seven years↵Enclosing them for shorter would crush them and spoil the content

We had a wine cellar for storage. The bottles had no inside but were intricate glass cages around volumes of space and time.

The humans, like many other races, bring tiny bits of their world along against homesickness↵https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/flowers http://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/688513453921816576/photo/1

Mind you he was a sweet person and very intelligent. But a dog. (You wouldn’t have been able to tell at a glance)

Our testers were exquisitely sensitive people who could distinguish between nuances you don’t even know exist. Also one was a dog.

The immortals sit on a lot of memories to pay with, and have experienced emotions believed extinct. We often cut those with lesser produce.

I have many stories of working with that person. We counted many of the super rich among our clients - super rich but not in money.

Of course I kept the unrestricted copies for myself.↵A burglar may one day find them in my basement and let them loose upon the world.

I was hired to come up with a DRM scheme for their output.↵you wonder how you can’t understand even those closest to you?↵that’s why.

inventor of emotions↵their workshop full of discarded prototypes↵patents in a drawer↵tools that you can’t look at for longer than 5 seconds

$ mkfifo notapipe

The grammatical I has about as much claim to reality as grammatical gender.

forgive me for I have cosinned

That ear splitting wail from a badly set up microphone hooked to a sound system? That is the sound of a life, all lived over a few seconds.

soul is now stuck in a brain case with exceedingly low bandwidth to other souls↵talk about bad luck↵you could’ve been a world soul instead

parasitic souls possessing the first feedback loop they find↵some end up in humans

the toxoplasma of love

friendship is emergent from information exchange

chat with hot alien civilizations in your local group!

metaphorism: a ghost’s equivalent of a metabolism