Some successes are documented, like one hive of eight humans and one octopus (needed for routing). But it was immobile and incomprehensible.

Metaphors, like horses, only carry you so far.

a glass knife to cut a light ray, not along its frequencies like a prism, but across so that it shatters and can be harvested

Don’t be fooled by the parchments, I draw territories, not maps. Not sterile like the competition’s, alive! Kingdoms of ink could be yours!

“And what is this?“↵”The Critic’s key, a skeleton key to lay open all stories. You probably won’t like its results, best not to use it”

Like one of those moments when everybody in the room stops talking, sun and stars stopped shining for a minute. Left the sky perfectly dark.

A city arranged like a dreamcatcher: The citizens’ dreams wander into the center at night, come down with the morning dew and are collected.

An anonymous writers’ club where to be let in, you have to come up with a story the bouncers like (they’re unusually bookish for bouncers)

A lost letter looking superficially like an o, but actually an endless stairwell of ink viewed from the top↵Don’t walk down unprepared

Smoke clouds acquire names like rider and bird, helicopters visit the still intact (only tilted) tip, people still work in the lower levels.

Next to the police, the unlaw enforcement has its seat, a building that seems to overgrow its neighbours like ivy. Officers fly in and out.

What we now call the Shadow Sea follows the Moon across Earth’s surface like a lost dog, in a tide that travels both oceans and continents.

It also turns out magic is not picky about what space is made of: GPUs soak up magic like sponges when running certain computations.

Setting: The universe stops expanding and the arrow of time reverses, but unevenly, like a wave on a shore both advancing and receding.

It must have embedded itself in the crust like a wooden splinter long ago. Mountain ranges have splashed and broken against it like waves.

she shows you how to tickle the storm’s belly with radio waves, its purr thunders over you, nearly throws you off your feet↵”he likes you!”

A starfarer’s constellations are ephemeral like a surfacer’s cloud formations. As stars move, mythical animals emerge and vanish in silence.

should you survive multiple purges and not lose your eyeballs, you’ll be invited into secret meetings that do not look like meetings at all

facebo (n): like a placebo but for faces

My last trip through faerieland left me infected and now I sporulate little worlds. Like, I open a cupboard and find a tiny medieval city.

The production budget has run out. Tea is tasting stale, the animals are tired, the night sky shows stains like a run down cinema’s screen.

We return to paradise but like all the other places of our childhood, it has become smaller - it’s just a few ancient trees on a hillside.

you wake up in a hospital bed↵> look left↵occasional sloshing, tentacles probe under your curtain↵> look right↵a sound like a boiling kettle

his hat is a tiny storm cloud that flashes up occasionally when he’s concentrating↵you borrow it and it feels like cool wind in your hair

An extremely long earthworm was hidden under the rock, curled in a way as to look like a brain. Around it, a protective shell was hardening.

I find them sitting in a tree: it looks like a swarm of bats is hanging off its branches.

#roster uses a junction table for tags insteaf of like, so #graph does not match #graphite. Should have done that from the start.

she’s reading me like a book: staring at me, thumbing through pages I didn’t know I had, leaving coffee stains, discarding me for the day

The matrix has exceeded its monthly budget and is now running on reduced power. Flowers pixelate, clouds look like badly compressed JPEGs.

roots of earth, trunks of air, a canopy of clouds, birds of wind↵what looks like a desert is actually a jungle, camouflaged against harvest

burn the books, free the stories↵let the great herds of ages past thunder again↵and run among them like the old bards

@kas@enotty.dk aura akua sound a lot like a sentence from toki pona.

We sacrificed a cat (dying of cancer) to animate a pot and now the pot purrs loudly whenever we cook with it. Enjoys the heat, most likely.

A tree colony lives in the asteroid belt and occasionally catches one in its branches. From afar, it appears like a giant bath sponge.

flesh eating blankets that digest you in the night like amoeba↵some have found the feet of their loved ones in the morning↵and nothing else

A heavy cable is hanging from that storm cloud, ending in a power plug at my feet. I feel like it’s a bad idea to unplug it right now.

When it hits a city, it chews up houses and streets and leaves them remodeled in its wake: like a wave, or a giant slug teeming with people.

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

[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

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

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.

@krt@krt.marmaro.de I actually like it when tweets are short, but insisting on 140 characters and cutting the tweet is a little bit too strict.

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 ♫♪

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

it is so silent that you forget you ever had ears↵or nose, mouth, eyes, body, all obsolete now↵memories drop away like scabs off your skin

rivers, streams and rivulets have nothing to support them anymore↵they look like a nervous system now, stripped of the rest of the body

\me wonders if there’s something useful we can do with the referer header. We can put our own twturl there like in the user agent field?

this thought brought to you by the question: what does the axis orthogonal to organic/crystalline look like? [A: both are structure]

we can try to find more alien processes (like commerce) or try to smash the box: what would unstructure and antistructure look like?