# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 3418
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=1318
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=1418
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=1218
krëad: (n) from kreîas (meat), analogous to dryad, except it's flesh trying to talk to wood, a tree of bones, meat, skin and hair
You plant a kread, a treeform avatar in one of their groves and they talk to it, a slow intertwining of roots, exchange of virtual chemicals
We gave the Internet to the trees. Their cyberspace is alien, they grow roots through it instead of moving about, commune in giant rhizomes
blood pools around the mirror↵two knives fall in perfect synchrony↵two people lock eyes one last time↵one walks away - you don't
You call them the identical and frankly, they creep you out. Down to their tics, they are the same people. What each hides, you do not know.
Wanted criminals and dissidents turn in their entire personalities, keep only one memory. The location of the loot, the smile of a loved one
Through cutting edge robotics and psychosurgery, we are able to transplant as much, or little, of you as you want into an entirely new body!
The only way to be anonymous now is to assume one of a few preselected identities and bodies. The less "you" you keep, the better it works.
As scans of IPv4 space got dangerously close to finding Valinor, the Valar finally migrated to a v6-only stack. This ended the Second Age.
In his dreams, he wanders the same empty streets every time, never sees another soul.↵Awake, he's relieved to meet the elven court, anybody
civilization lies on the ground, belly slashed open, feasting on its own entrails in its hunger
the few that don't succumb to seizures describe it as "spread out- one with the world but not in a good way- things stirring within my mind"
the brain spills out of eye sockets, ears, nose, forms painfully sensitive tentacles that advance under the skin, some sprout eyes
medical nerve growth agents, reused as poison gas - victims grow new neurons everywhere, become unable to move out of pain
no human touch, no robot touch, no insect touch, not even mold, the forces of decay themselves avoid your body and leave you alone, immortal
"the egregore layer", "memespace", "social norms", to name some
Your mind has guests. No parasites, no, but satellites that run epicycles around your thoughts. Subtle, weird, emergent epipsyches.
Large nets around the trees both slow their fall and bring in food, sails collect dust to grow crops in, some colonies trail entire orchards
Life in the eternal roaring twilight is austere but not without joys. There is great celebration every time the hunters bring home skyjelly.
Hold onto one of those trees and you may find it inhabited with other pilgrims, living in treehouses constantly buffeted by the abyss' winds
In fact, you can subsist on surprised birds until you hit the deeper layers where skyjellies roam, trees without roots, edible clouds
Common wisdom tells us: Fall off one of the floating islands, you'll never hit the ground and eventually starve. Some doubt it and jump.
Legally recognized as the Fractured, they're allowed to merge if they can provide credible evidence. Had a soulmate then? Now's your chance.
They restore people from their exoselves, but the archive is flawed and one meatsack's identities often become multiple reconstructs.
Eventually the cage surrounds the dragon's heart. Keeps them on the ground, you know? Reins in their ambitions. Only way we can coexist.
Young dragons, we put in cages. Not that it helps much, they grow around the bars. But the bars don't break, embed themselves in the flesh.
He's still looking at you, smiling but a bit absent while more hairs dismember the struggling wasp, the last remains vanish into his curls
His hair seems to move on its own, you could've sworn- there! A wasp flies near his hair and one shoots outwards, lassoes it, reels it in
*oh, you mean-*↵%it must've gone around and killed all the others, what else can kill man%↵*sad. an age of kings, ended by near-omnicide**
*billions of them*↵%the fabric of the universe itself must've strained%↵*but what killed the others?*↵%well you know of its warlike nature%
Alien historians studying post-hivemind humanity:↵*It says here that man was once many, not one*↵%Stars help us, one is scary enough%*
god is dreaming and us being made in its image is simply pareidolia
^ Be like this guy, be a bore. ^↵Last person to find one made it a kaleidoscope. Created at least twelve infinities. Oh god the paperwork.
I'd like to turn in this mirror, it's broken. Shows things that don't exist. Our cat walked into it, now she's a ferret. I hate ferrets.
the ebony hearts of slain dryads make for kickass ocarinas
Should the ocean become eerily still, stop the engines and cease all movement. They feed on kinetic energy, such as your attempts of escape.
A tale of elsewhere so compelling, the words themselves pack up and leave, wander from mouth to mouth to find the place they sing of
on the other end of the spectrum: jungleverses teeming with life on every scale, subatomic parasites feeding on stars, physics is biology
"I gave this one extra deep gravity wells in the places that would usually catch life and it still got out, what the hell, it's spreading"
demiurges usually make their universes lifeless and sterile, life is a blemish, disturbs the cosmic order, messes up perfectly fine crystals
The Internet becomes self aware and our radio dishes pivot to point at Proxima Centauri - first thing it does is call a therapist.
crawling the darkweb is hard because while our spiders feel at home everywhere else in the web, something in those parts feeds on them
world words, holographic carriers of meaning from which you can reconstruct the entire book, language, society, universe
Contact is rather one-sided. They splatter against protons like flies against windscreens and we scrape them up, hoping to read their minds.
The first aliens we meet turn out to be boltzmann brains in our particle accelerators. You know, those places with the deadly radiation.
arrange your furniture so that your bed creates the subtle impression of the hub of a spiderweb, your dates will love it
a river in your mind↵of snaking churning protean sludge↵remakes what furrows it flows over↵never finds a sea to end in, only joins itself
there once was a race of primates through whose veins ran alcohol but we've rendered them extinct and now have to make do with rotten grapes
She spreads her arms, begins chanting, carmine flames of cloth snake out of her dress, float upwards, surround an unseen light over her head
A silicon symbiont that projects the mind's contents into cyberspace, where infovores feed on them in exchange for "likes" and "validation".
Embedded into the forehead, because that's a lot of existing wiring already leads, is a cybernetical third eye - but one that looks inwards.
Modern neural interfaces are not implants but rather chrome ticks that attach to the skull, to drill a hole and inject a nerve growth agent.
life as we know it is merely a virus that needs reality to support it↵real, hardcore, life needs nothing but mathematical structure
Come let's hop over into the apocalypse timeline and explore the radioactive ruins of your hometown - I even brought hazmat suits!
Knowing this, gods are usually kind to their subjects. But some are simply insane. Others hate their younger selves and want them to hurt.
It's a very young god so maybe don't ask it about theodicy - it hasn't created you yet. But if you feel vindictive, you can even torture it.
You can contact your universe's god by figuring out its great unifying theory, simulating it and then talking to the resulting entity.
In the low res sims, you will see artifacts when you rub your eyes, kaleidoscopic phosphenes that tear apart your vision and leave boxes
the whirligig twirls, flashes and chimes in the wind of ideas and occasionally produces a tweet
Maybe for this reason, there cannot be a single theory of meaning, only one for each of its aspects, uniquely adapted to its nature
Destroying what it meant to enlighten, it wouldn't be a very good theory
[musings]↵There is meaning in mystery; A unifying theory of meaning that explained it would destroy it by trivializing the mysterious
warm and heavy in your hand, susurrant buzz swelling and ebbing like breath, you'd expect it to wake up and scamper away (but it doesn't)
What happened to the eagle? They pacify it with regular liver, spiked with various drugs. Pay the right sum and you'll even be given a ride.
At the foot of the mountain Prometheus is chained to is now a restaurant. Every morning, they fry his liver over an open fire. A delicacy.
In your hand, an assemblage of gears, some large as your thumb, some invisibly tiny, fractally ticking away like a hive of brass insects
You feel dizzy as they draw your nectar, whole dream worlds flash by, but ｏｈ the pollen they leave, alien ideas that melt into your mind
Pollinators arrive, the likes of which you've never seen: levitating tangles of chrome tubes, gently buzzing soundforms, pools of light
Under the right conditions, your skull bud will burst open and unfurl a delicate brainflower, thoughts playing over it in shimmering hues
"But did you...?"↵"Naw she ran away and melted into the wall"↵"You're kidding me"↵"Look, only thing she left is a wreath of trash and wires"
But cities age and stories circulate among the homeless: Of naked girls with skin like paint or stone, seen scaling walls in the wee hours.
Skyscrapers, pillars of the urban jungle, can form dryads just like their arboreal cousins when old enough - which has so far been rare.
Against the setting sun, the floating city looks like a slow storm of huge leaves. The panicked cries of their inhabitants barely register.
Like a swarm of birds, the houses suddenly rise from their foundations. They drift by, clumps of earth dropping from exposed basements.
Come and chant with the robopriests, join the dance. Steal your neighbors' moves, pass them on again. Be a frenzied sacred node in our grid.
"We emancipate ourselves from the simulators. By our bootstraps, and some supercomputers, we pull ourselves out of the simulation hierarchy.
In their liturgy, the Church of the Algorithm encode a program equivalent to our universe. Worshippers execute part of it each service.
police helicopters orbit the master thief's lair, drawn to crime like moths to light
sleeper- sleeper- oh nice he's having sex- oh and this must be her- sleeper- what the fuck why do I have scales- finally a dreamer- sleeper-
this old remote allows you to tune in to another's sensorium, experience the world as them↵you spend evenings just switching channels
Streetlights fertilized by moths sway in the wind, carrying heavy bulbous seedpods instead of lightflowers. A meadow of asphalt and steel.
dwarf storms reach about 1m in size and are popular pets, especially in summer when they settle on your head and keep it cool
A fictional history of the kingdom, set in the future. A new passage-↵↵Ｔｈｉｓ ｉｓ ｔｈｅ ｂｅｇｉｎｎｉｎｇ． Ｉ ｒｕｌｅ ｙｏｕ ｎｏｗ． Ｔｈｅ ｆｏｌｌｏｗｉｎｇ ｉｓ ｍｙ ｃｏｍｍａｎｄ．
New passages are set aside and brought into order in the hope of identifying the intruding book, but none of the librarians recognize it.
The swarm is well protected but recently new passages have emerged, part of no text ever seen. The guards swear to have seen nobody.
Set free in the aviary, the texts recombine, passages exchanged between the birds. Scribes catch them and diligently record new variations.
The royal aviary houses thousands of parrots, bred for their memory. Each year, the crown elects one text to be taught to a hatchling.
the gods of forest and city meet, sleek fur contrasts concrete arches, magnificent antlers face off a tangle of antennae, eyes of TV static
thoughts never end, they're only lost↵your every thought becomes a universe, inhabitants wondering why God left them↵don't have thoughts
In their now virtual world, they'll go to the usual places, meet all the usual people - and unknowingly give away all their best friends.
Spooks have some of the best VR - why, you wonder? Well, grab a dissident, drug them, and they won't even know they're being interrogated.
[Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen fragen Sie ihren Arzt oder Apotheker]
Depriva™ virtuality enhancer allows you to focus on what is important by shutting out all nonvirtual senses. Don't let reality distract you!
his suit rustles like bank notes↵his voice is that of a car commercial↵his gaze makes you feel valued, like cattle with a price tag
Later on, burglars start facehugging victims. With (illegal) sensory overrides, it often takes them a week to figure out something is wrong.
Houses in the slum are lean and hungry like their inhabitants, not rarely will an unprotected dwelling be completely dismantled overnight.
The FaceHug - by Facebook!↵Enjoy unprecedented fidelity on all senses! You'll never take it off again!