liquid comets inhabited by space whales, occasionally leaving and traveling the vacuum for another flying ocean

Only the best illusionists can cast illusions that fool themselves. Sounds academic but makes them highly sought-after - True Resurrection is expensive and settled inside a zombie brain, such an illusion is as good as any soul.

Nothing says that the other room has to be static, imagine for example having your morning coffee in there, setting down your cup, and the cathedral’s pillars curl up like ferns to reveal the sky

Idea for a room: It’s empty save for a number of mobile screens that follow you around and with a little bit of head tracking, act like windows into a completely different building.↵You could fit a cathedral in there, if so inclined, or maybe an Escherian maze.

the only thing that’s better than dancing naked in the rain is dancing naked in the meteorite rain

house where you can extend flaps so that it makes more rain sounds

unicode 2040 features (3):↵- MIDI ligatures that play notes as you read them↵- unicode block characters (shy, aggressive, deceitful, …)↵- unicode block [alien script reconstructed from fossil graffiti]

unicode 2040 features (2):↵- support for 2D writing systems, lines can now turn by multiples of 45°↵- in-band parsing directives for ligatures (finally with context-free grammar support)↵- in-band layout directives↵- camera glyph can now store up to ten seconds of video

unicode 2040 features:↵- amoji: emoji, but abstractified like any ideographic writing system in active usage↵- hypermoji: animated, holographic, interactive, moody, you name it↵- U+FFF6 ᴄʜᴀʀᴀᴄᴛᴇʀ ᴜɴᴀᴠᴀɪʟᴀʙʟᴇ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴊᴜʀɪsᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ (usually a transparent square)

Bits of frozen smoke still drift through the room: Broken plumes, translucent shards, kármán streets slowly twisting up

When they sense death approaching, they withdraw into pocket universes, unmoor, and die there so that their remains may be a Garden of Eden to whatever follows

Confirming the intelligent designer’s existence, and using its intelligence to solve otherwise intractable problems by making them look like niches for life to settle

Computability theory but for telos:↵* What can be achieved with certain overarching goals like Survive, Understand, and Profit?↵* How would a society balance them to get off this rock?↵* And how would you deal with something like Profit emerging?

Humanity’s nascent hivemind, so far, is a blind writhing mass of pain and reflexes, simply not conscious enough to warrant contact yet

do you ever get wistful about having a merely human body plan because you’re listening to a track you’d need a dozen, maybe a hundred legs for do it justice, just some proper undulation

Hackers figure out how to inject 𝑖-likes and the algorithms are high on complex math for days before the network’s developers even figure out the problem↵#invisiblenetworks (day 20)

Nobody knows if there really is a network behind the terms and conditions or has even found their end, but there is life: In a box in the lower right corner, squat communities have sprung up (“35 other people also stymied by § 4.23.7, chat now”)↵#invisiblenetworks (day 16)

“maddening beating of vile drums” - heart, check.↵”thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes” - breath, check.↵”outside the ordered universe” - past heat death, check.↵Conclusion: Live long enough and you get to be Azathoth.

When offered eternal life, take it. No matter your mind’s fate, come heat death, your body may be what sustains all that’s left of life, maybe even some civilizations.

You can trap even powerful gods in the right language: Well-hidden ambiguities will allow you to bind them, provided you can get the scripture translated that makes up their fabric

> when your thoughts are regularly interrupted by captchas because your implant’s subscription expired a month ago and you have to use the ratelimited public APIs

Sechs Uhr morgens, die Stadt erwacht, derweil liegt die Nacht in den letzten Zügen und schläft ihren Rausch aus

The more accurate a cartesian demon’s model of your mind, the less effort it’ll need to trick you. However, if the model’s fully accurate, there’ll also be a reference version of you inside the demon’s mind that hasn’t been deceived. You don’t have long, escape

out of this grew hieronymity: your handle is a sacred name of god so that anybody who has beef with you will need to take it up with god as well↵↵egonymity: each of those posts was made by you, the whole Internet is your diary↵#invisiblenetworks (day 5)

alethionymity: you’re online with your arcane name; the idea was that people would be nice and polite if they knew they could be cursed by anybody with a grudge, but somehow that didn’t work out

the concept of soul is subject permanence

any species gifted with introspection and object permanence (the instinctive search for invariants) will eventually generalize the two into physics

a world in which homunculus theory is true and you can swap bodies by exchanging homunculi, be a robot or live directly inside dataspace with the right body prosthesis

The gods have profiles just like us, except when they retweet stuff, it comes true and we both eagerly await and dread these moments↵#invisiblenetworks (day 3)

Hyper-aligned AI: Has internalized human morals and aligns everything else with it, for example society and physics

Aligned AI: Has internalized human morals, but still has unforeseen transformative effects because any technology that powerful does that↵Super-aligned AI: Has internalized human morals, plus it has no transformative effects, really why was it created at all

Humans are natural magic-users because their cognition is grounded: Whenever they meet an ungrounded cognition (say a spirit), that spirit is grounded through them and the resulting flow of energy can be harnessed

Object level: Stone↵One below object level: The stone’s rough weight in your hand and roundness in your eye↵Two below object level: The feedback loops that maintain your grip on the stone and your eye’s focus↵Three below object level: The homeostasis maintained by these loops

and yet he escaped, revolted, won, forged his crown from what were his cage bars

And if the world’s been already tiled with hedonium and we’re just epiphenomena of globally optimal happiness who could do nothing to improve it or detract from it, do we just let the atoms sing in peace then

When she comes into contact with water, all the colors wash off her in ink swirls and she has to steal it back from trees, flowers, stones, sunset

also don’t panic when you leave a hivemind and everything is fluid and gives way when you give it serious thought - that’s the normal state of the human mind, you’re evolved for this, chill

don’t panic when you join a hivemind and all the concepts feel rigid - you’re not trapped inside its thoughts, consensus concepts just have higher inertial mass

an autoiconic language of words that are only themselves, spoken not because it ‘means’ anything but because it’s a joy to have on the tongue

outtakes:↵* expensive will↵* will loans↵* if you’re not paying for your decisions, you are the product (of your decisions)↵* will isn’t free, the afterlife is for paying off your decision debt

it’s free software, as in free will, aka not really free but you won’t notice

also, many ghosts migrate with the seasons, with the right eyes you can spot them in the night sky as spectral clouds moving against the wind↵https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/990418487758807040

don’t stick your head into something in VR, you’ll be picking the polygons out of your skin for hours

also if you play genesis backwards it’s about someone cleaning their room and turning off the light

if you play any eschatology backwards you get a mostly fresh creation myth

forget ethical considerations, the real reason you should leave primitive civilizations alone is that they provide critical input to the drake equation and allow you to estimate the likelyhood of an attack by a more advanced civilization

Solar eclipses are hard to come by on Earth but common in space, so offworld magical research stations modeled after orreries offer bespoke nights, engineered syzygies, and break new frontiers in topological astrology

Provided one can catch up, generation ships are an anthropologist’s treasure trove: Some are past societies preserved in amber, others are, for lack of a better word, highly fermented, have been invaded by aliens or entered some weird new symbiosis with stowaway mushrooms

Additionally, the chief steward would usually carry a talisman containing a sealed fire of Vesta, signifying the unbroken connection with Rome, lightyears away

When you throw a coin into Earth’s gravity well, both you and the person that sees your shooting star get a wish