While any vision of society is a spell to bring itself into existence, society, unlike computers, is wicked hard to program and code usually is the easier route

Where did all the utopias go? Well, nobody writes utopian novels anymore, but everybody writes utopian code

Many replies go unposted as commenters find that they prefer the sphinx’s conversation to that of the other commenters

Eventually, captchas are replaced by fully fledged sphinxes, always a little smarter than what they’re supposed to let pass because that’s what it takes to come up with Turing tests on the spot

can’t have a doomsday if you kill the sun

Libraries are modern faerieland:↵* full of mythical creatures↵* time passes at a different rate↵* deceptively cute guardians that come after you with wrath if you take something and don’t return it↵* under no circumstances should you ever eat anything you find there

if you watch closely, you’ll see that snowflakes don’t melt on warm metal, they just sink through the surface

load mobile datacenters into solar-powered zeppelins - store your data truly in the cloud

and without warning, the world goes quiet, shadow drips up from under trees, behind houses, between snowflakes and slowly rains upwards, pools in the sky against unseen architecture

raised by machines, the feral kids of the robotic undercity recite ads as greetings, talk in beeps and whirrs and modem chirps, go still and make fan noises when stressed

A god and its domain are one and the same, however for dealing with it, one generally chooses the most convenient representation. In metatheology, one calls this god-domain duality, or more abstractly, a theomorphism.

the best voicechangers are those that hit the timbre of the other’s internal monologue

signs of a passworld:↵- either embarrassing, or near-impossible to make sense of↵- very secret, only rarely shared between gods, usually monodeic↵- sometimes the echo of a past world, or a very slight variation of one

gods use passworlds

Merfolk have legends about lost oceans, mythical fishing grounds displaced by rising continents, mighty civilizations that did not fall but merely retreated to inaccessible inland seas

sending up private space probes to stealthily nudge large asteroids onto collision courses with Earth so that governments keep maintaining their space programs

why is it “cow-abducting ufo” and not “bovipositor”

Suppose you have a Newcomb predictor. More interesting than posing one-two box problems would be to predict the subject’s actions and do them before the subject becomes aware them. Eventually, their mind may adjust to the backwards causality arrow and we will learn many things

a popular prank among adolescent werewolves is the “fool’s moon”, where a moon lamp is placed near the victim’s window when they least expect it

81: normal. except, if you pop off ‘esc’, there’s an actual key under it. like, metal. I think it fits this keyhole in my screen?

80: innocuous-looking, but refuses to output anything. instead, random things in my room go bump. ‘u’ reliably closes the curtains, while the first ‘del’ the made my room shake with generator hum. have yet to figure out where it is. help I can’t sleep

61: just one key labeled ‘sentience’. types out passable novels and essays when pressed, sometimes lewd chat messages. one time it was code in a language I didn’t recognize. locked it away after that.↵70: Egal was ich versuche, es kommt in der falschen Sprache raus.

54: normal, except ‘end’ has so much travel that I lost a pen and a folding rule trying to determine how deep it went.↵55: keys are strangely soft and my fingertips come away red after a while of usage. once a fly landed on it and was digested

23: battered, but has actual any key. produces random character when pressed, useful for generating passwords. shift+any produces •, have yet to find a password box that didn’t accept it. useful, will keep.

17: visible but cannot be typed on, fingers hit emptiness.↵1?: invisible, produces characters indistinguishable from spaces. except when I try to run binary analysis tools on the output, which invariably crash.

13: expensive-looking. space runs some evil curlbash, return some similarly evil cmd line. have yet to find out what systems the other keys are supposed to infect, but I think I identified grub and plan9 already? whispers to itself at night. extremely cursed.

KEYBOARDS FOUND IN DUMPSTERS:↵2: great to type on. return randomizes the keyboard layout.↵4: black and white keys in weird arrangement. produces sound but no letters. may not be a keyboard.↵7: has a ticklish ‘a’ key and tries to edge away when I come near it↵10: enochian alphabet

If you sample your own thoughts at twice the Nyquist frequency, you can theoretically achieve full-fidelity introspection - but only for a very short time, since that frequency doubles every few samples

Many buildings have wings but after millennia of domestication, they’ve lost the ability to fly. However, in remote mountain valleys, some wild buildings survive, tended to by monks and occasionally traveling the world disguised as clouds

Others are more subtle about it, exploiting pragmatic ambiguity or encrypting themselves, hiding in externalities so that down the road, someone may come up with the same flawed spell again

Rare but dangerous are spells that compel the caster to cast them again and again, burning all their mana if a counterspell is not found quickly

Beware parasitic spells: Drawn to conduits of mana like practitioners, they attach themselves to larger spells to hitch a free ride, force themselves into invocations as intrusive thoughts

The great cosmic voids are not lifeless but rather the opposite: Domains of hibernating civilizations, stars extinguished and tucked away in hyperspace as future fuel, with galaxy cluster filaments as mere demarcation lines

you pretend to sleep and not to notice your guests while they climb into your bowl and greedily drink from it, its light pulsing through their veins and painting maps onto their skins

you sit at the bottom of the well as the noon sun peeks in, hold your bowl into the ray to fill it with light, a liter of photons usually enough for the night

The trick to making biospheres small is to increase their topological genus to set lower bounds on the number of feedback loops and reduce internal interaction surface, e.g. cycle through temperature/light/moisture conditions and let inhabitants timeshare through hibernation,

Slower-than-light biosphere arks start out large but become smaller with tech level, some of the most advanced interstellar ships look like bottle gardens that just happen to travel at 0.1c

the part in a scientific paper where the formulas start is called “the drop”

As the familiar websites start timing out, you flee for the more obscure places but even they vanish between refreshes, and as something moving in your blind spot chews up an old webchat you remembered, you finally

dra := number of angles on a dragon (not to be confused with the drahedron, its dual)

Among the many mysteries of ouroboroi, two stand out: What do they eat, and how do they molt? Fittingly, those questions answer each other,

When the world was young, Chaos created vacuum. Space took a look and at that moment, learned what horror vacui was. Even though it only creates more vacuum this way, it’s been running ever since.

slaps drum this bad boy can fit so many standing waves

Once you’re well-established as a protagonist and have survived multiple books, you can blackmail the author into giving you plot armor, try it out

When you die, your homunculus dies with you, and so does its homunculus and so on. What stays behind are nested skeletons, matryoshka skulls down to nanometer scales if the conditions are right

further uses include:↵* psychoforensics: finding out which of your experiences are the bad ones, and editing them out↵* forcing subpersonalities: maybe you want to share a brain with that artist whose mind you found on a torrent site↵* mind tattoos

being somewhat low-dimensional and interpretable (unlike sets of network weights), it’s also a popular mind interchange format among AIs and post-humans, who need to be extra careful about what or who they empathize with lest the thought turn out to be a logic bomb

a set of inputs that when played back to a fresh brain, will make it hallucinate a full-qualia world forever with no further input required - a popular infodrug even among already-formed minds, though it often leaves you with new subpersonalities

Characteristic for planets in certain stages of civilization are weather patterns that look like stock markets

The time between “good weather models” and “weather models good enough to make weather manipulation cheap” is the only time there will be accurate weather forecasts, after that it’s up to the highest bidder