Multilingual crews can take shortcuts between the alphabets by codeswitching, but it’s a risky business - a Lojbanist crew was once a bit too clever and lost the train in a parallel universe for months. Still, philologists sometimes use it to travel Europe in the original Basque.

The Alphabet Train once turned up crewed with ghosts, and after the initial shock passed, quickly became popular with people who wanted to end up somewhere entirely else on the globe fast - whatever the crew’s language was, it’d visit cities in that language’s alphabetical order.

your third ear is located at your nape, not quite as photogenic as the third eye but it can for example hear bad vibes, which is why that place feels funny sometimes

lobotomizing my uploaded brain’s memory of language so I can come up with something completely fresh, carve reality anew

God did start out omniscient, but with each split of the world lines, sheds bit upon bit to become perfect nothing when the last photon rips itself apart↵↵(to God’s great relief)

• gears that revolve and levers that shift, concepts rotated and slotted into each other↵- brute force pattern matching: anything as metaphor for anything, the music you’re listening to as body or story or building

ways of thinking that aren’t language:↵- climbing/dancing in ideaspace, problems as shifting mazes and solutions as lines of sight↵- letting flowers or cities grow before your inner eye↵- breathing in a concept so it unfolds like spiderwebs on the inside of your skull

In case you have humans on your team, you can also try the simplified dialect CꙬ

Introducing Cꙮ, the programming language for angelic beings - because all bugs are shallow before these eyes!

Charon, these days, is out of work due the Styx bridge, but bring an item of personal significance and he may still ferry you over personally and tell you about past great passengers

Occasionally the simulators get wistful about when they still did client work because when those wanted last-minute-changes, at least their motives weren’t completely alien

Every time the humans come up with new physics, the simulators work overtime to update the world, “noo I put all that work into those celestial spheres and now they throw it out again”

reject automatability, reject reproducibility, reject text, images, representation, make art in the circumstance and nothing more

author: slaves away in their den, full power over the narrative yet is bound by the market↵protagonist: just never smarter than the author, sorry↵secondary character: has a place in life, has plot-breaking powers, can make backstory appear retroactively

PC: runs around aimlessly, goes through the same set of animations all the time, can only do what the programmers thought to add↵NPC: has a dayjob but does whatever they want offscreen, has boatloads of money, owns a wicked castle

A use for text-to-smell devices: In the morning, it cooks up a smell digest for each of your backlogs and if one smells of stress and sweat instead of food, forest or rain, you may opt to skip it

The network uses the latest in content generation to cover for the user when they don’t feel like updating. Or haven’t logged in months. Or have tried to delete their account for the seventh time now.↵The Content must flow.↵(belated #invisiblenetworks, day 30)

graffiti scene but for performance art: friendly trolling of strangers, and when the slightest trouble looms, disperse into the crowd

Hermetic artist societies, opening their art only to initiates to protect against outsiders style-transferring their aesthetics onto anything and everything

Demiurges delight in crafting garden-path worlds: Innocuous but occasionally one stumbles into inputs that trigger a full reparse and take mere humans out for weeks while their worldview rebuilds, it’s how gods tell jokes

The deepest levels of hell are inhabited and ruled by its saints, the truly wicked, not mere evil-satisficing sociopaths but hope crushers, effective maltruists, entropy maximimizers

The vacuum level was lower once. Dive and swim by ancient orbital structures and sinking spaceships, dance with plasma sprites, rediscover sunken constellations and Earth’s second moon

Here and there, words and letters are missing from the pages, stolen, or a code, or maybe maybe they snuck off and wrote their own story somewhere

A gallery of paintings that know where you look: Animals that hide in your blind spot, portraits that always meet your eyes, a little man with a sign running around trying to block the view, Escherian paradoxes that you’d swear were tangled differently the last time you checked

simulator arxiv is probably full of physics papers that despite titles like “an autoethnography of living in universe [kolmogorov description]” are quite serious

An easy and practical way to understand a complex universe is to simulate it, let its inhabitants contact you, and then quiz them about how they navigate it↵↵”conservation of energy? uhuh wild, and uh how large are your being-patterns again, in terms of fundamental lengths? wow”

constrained writing exercise: a dictionary that tells a story through the concepts it introduces (hard mode: preserve alphabetic order)

a gas giant moon’s tree ocean, riddles with tunnels chewed by train-sized millipedes, inhabited by furry snakes that travel along branches and arch over the surface, spring tide eclipse sky filled by lampion fruit riding the jetstream

When the sun goes out, you can see the stars↵When the stars go out, you can see the air itself, crystallizing around you

a drug suppressing unconscious volition so that every decision is deliberate, used in small doses by judges to debias verdicts - large doses are possible but considered an expert’s trip, not everybody can breathe manually for hours even if it is to survive

the other selves, crafty as ever, have started encrypting their messages and instead of voices or urges, it’s now flashes of bridge, three, red, [bread on tongue], [nose twitch]

but then, more and more wake up, poke the glitches, form theories↵↵the simulators have left but not cleaned up properly, given us just enough to get root, and we hide what’s left of our world in spare cycles, sidechannels, unused memory

warnings of the end appear in the stars, in randomness streams, on the insides of banana peels↵↵the last day goes by, the last night, and then↵time freezes, stutters, the sun smears across the sky like a video glitch

when gods commune, dimensional portals open in their worlds and in come ideas from the other’s mind: stalking tangles of crystal, shy ripples in space, sentient smells, just about every type of elf, the occasional human

[after mindswap]↵”hey this is an outrage why do I still have the same body”↵”well we had to take care of body image, muscle memory, the parts of your aesthetic preferences located in your guts and skin, etc etc, it adds up”

more zero G sculptures:↵- wearable halos, a few magnets under your hair and you’re magneto↵- fire pulled into various shapes by air currents and electric fields↵- drops of water orbiting statically charged electrodes↵- just a transparent box of metal balls, but you can shake it

idea for a nonlethal drone weapon: swarm of drones with strings tying up the target to carry it away afterwards

No I know they’d like to study it harder, but now imagine something that’s both as ravenous as life and as competent as technology hitching a ride back up and escaping onto the interstellar stage, we’d lose that whole galaxy

You see, this planet has developed technology and life, remarkable really, problem is that all the probes we sent to study its biomechanosphere have so far either been eaten or shot down by local wildlife, so we’ve quarantined it

at last, first contact comes - from the storms, then from the waves, then the mountains, “sorry we didn’t realize animals could be intelligent, to be honest we wrote you off once you left the oceans, how dumb is that hahah

sculpture ideas for zero G:↵- stones held by nothing but extremely thin threads↵- a magnetic orrery, without all the supports one needs in gravity↵- lego metacrystals↵- like strandebeests, but they snake lazily through the air when an eddy comes their way↵- light chimes

an invisible sunbeam lights up the dust motes around her but none of it falls on her, she moves as if unaware, a shadow in three dimensions

[disclaimer for those into factual accuracy: I expect that if regression to the mean is applicable here, it would play out over a few years and not 30]

if human civilization really did survive a few decades of quantum suicide during the cold war, shouldn’t we be seeing regression to the mean by now↵↵instead of, you know, the opposite

From: A. Causal <mail.⇋⇋.⌱⌛>↵Subject: Unique investment opportunities in YOUR past!↵↵attached file contains vital information on how to reclaim negentropy from the past, kindly open and run

It doesn’t pay to be smart in interstellar space - once out of the gravity well, most races lose their sentience in favor of longevity, radiation tolerance and stealth

Occasionally, a quantum coin flip will decide over what version of events you remember, effectively branching the past along with the future.

when the aliens are lonely, that’s a thirst contact

shooting through space in a stasis pod, awake only a millisecond every year, watching the stars whirl by like fireflies

a stage play several uninterrupted decades long, played not by single actors but dynasties of them