# 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=1418
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=1518
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=1318
(Moral Philosophers Hate This! This One Weird Trick will send them into hysterics as their formalization of personal identity is destroyed!)
Afterwards, it's sent back with fresh memories. Repeat for a while, and a shared personality should emerge, something that is both of you.
Penfriendship in the upload age: Split off part of yourself, send it to your friend. They then let it take part in their own life for a day.
That morning, the librarians return to empty pages. Tiny white roots sprout from them. Somehow, the smell of forest now permeates the aisles
Onlookers: "It was as if you - had somehow shone an acid trip through a floodlight. E- even the pavement made you cry with transcendence-"
recombine: Barbaric sentences flash up, unheard before. Fossil meaning escapes, illuminates the surrounding buildings with harsh brilliance.
Ghostfire rages in the library, leaves paper untouched but consumes all the words. They light up, utter themselves, vanish from the page,
low planes have high planes↵within their minds to describe 'em↵these high planes have higher planes↵and so, ad infinitum
Ours is somewhere's platonic plane. Further down, each of our snowflakes is sire to a whole genus and every thought a school of philosophy.
One of the Moon's faces has been stolen (waning, third day). The lunar month is one day shorter for it. We won't press charges, but please r
ground down to sand, it is nearly as yielding as the fluid, but if you dip your head in it, sharp edges will rend your thought like shrapnel
solid time, frozen and may trap you but also brittle, can be hammered into daggers that stop hearts, fill caskets that preserve loved ones
aggregate states of time:↵liquid, which flows↵gaseous, where causality dissolves and temporal eddies dance but leave heavy things unmoved
Wiser now, we didn't crack that egg that never hatched, only punctured its shell. Peering in, we saw a lone bird roaming an unfamiliar sky.
The seeds we brought from Hollow Earth act weird here. We cut up an acorn and it was growing inwards, branches ever finer towards the center
we trail dead pixels that heal only slowly, an alien sizzling on frequencies that should be inaudible, the taste of empty space and loss
we work in the slaughterhouse, butcher ideas, process their flesh, wear the scent of corruption and decay↵one whiff scrambles your thoughts
wild pixels do whatever they want, it takes careful domestication to make a whole screenful of them behave, dance in synchrony, and not die
A late green shadow trails after the cloud, desert flowers fed by its rain that wilt shortly after
X but taking place in the platonic plane↵↵biologize/mechanize something that wasn't yet (an instance of process/structure mismatch)
[tale of human ambition]↵↵[atrocious pun, but taken seriously]↵↵[neat invention, thinly disguised as story]
the fire mage must learn that she must never be On fire, she must Be the fire, channel pure hunger and intent to devour, never obstruct it
we compress ideas and history into narratives because they become legible this way.↵↵math is a narrative for truth
apart from these advantages for their communication, are legible concepts (often narratives) maybe also better tools for thought?
legibility trumps truth because of the lower effort associated with understanding a legible concept - it can draw on what is already known.
The mob hunts down the gynoid and burns her at the stake. He watches, helpless. Her plastic face melts and for a short time, she can cry
At some point, we stop storing knowledge in books and just archive entire minds to resurrect when needed. To attain immortality, know.
Whip grass grows around your limbs in the night and ties you down. With you bound, new roots will penetrate your skin and suck you dry
The maelstrom baits whole tribes, leads them around in circles. Any way they go, the only trail they'll ever meet again will be their own
The green sea has its own monsters: A serpent only visible as waves in the grass, coiling in on unsuspecting cattle, pulling it underground
She has her head in the clouds, can't get out, is floating, her legs treading air. A crunching sound and she grows still.
A keffiyah with sequins on it to dazzle surveillance cameras
The natives are musical and pleasant but competitive, will challenge you to a duet for the slightest reason. You better meet their standards
Take a piece of clear sky, melt it, cast it into a lens, and you will be able to peep on naked lightning nymphs in the storm clouds
(That should probably be "synbionts")
Elevator pitch: "We create custom symbionts for any purpose! We disrupt evolution!"↵- Intelligent Design LLC (trademark pending)
You meet him before his swamp hut, bats dangling off his hat. "Don't worry", he says, "they're tame. Hunt mosquitoes when I go out."
One eclipse, Moon came too close to the Sun and was vaporized. Since then, a lone silver cloud shines at night and sometimes rains moondrops
Be too eclectic and a bad interaction may kill you↵↵Cities where they put citizenship-symbionts in the water supply and food
Some symbionts are incompatible - it is a complicated science to find just the right combinations and some paraethnicities form around that
Some are used in experiments to separate the power-symbionts of great wizards from their parasites, killed if they don't catch symbionts
"Great power comes at great cost" - like being the equivalent of a leper.↵↵Children aren't considered persons until they've consumed flesh:
Add magic to the mix: certain symbionts grant magical powers. Wizards, to be less tasty and not be hunted down, eat disfiguring parasites
Symbionts that produce certain vitamins, stimulate muscle growth, protect against diseases, repel mosquitoes, heighten the mood
Eating someone, you become part of their extended family, host the same guests the rest of the family shares, sometimes jealously protects
Of course there are parasites, but humans have had time to coevolve and breed symbionts to keep more malicious parasites and prions at bay
A humanity in which eating a slain animal is a sacred act and cannibalism even more so, in fact has been for as long as anybody can remember
Assuming a spherical dyson civilization in a vacuum,
The philosopher king leads an army of monks across the platonic plains, conquering concepts those before him only discovered
larval worlds, slowly pulsing and glowing from within, sucking from idea conduits, growing in the writer's mind to hatch through the fingers
A time knife to cut timelines with, sever someone's purpose and maybe spin a new one - a tool for diviners discontent with mere foretelling.
Wish potency grows with meteor size. A regular one may grant love, a comet may grant world peace - at least until it wipes out civilization.
Shooting star wishes not immediately made become unstable and may make themselves. Remember Tunguska? A century wish, wasted by a drunkard.
Anopticon: Architecture designed to resist surveillance, easily navigable but with as few long lines of sight as possible, sound-damping,
one of those improvised soldier graves with a helmet on a cross, but with a flower wreath/propeller cap/fedora
bar where they just hand you a set of dice if you're unsure what to drink (can also be bought as souvenir)
party where attendants wear color-coded AR gear, see only those with the same color, and walk on color coded lines to avoid collisions
Trees form around and channel slow discharges of magic towards space, wooden lightning bolts with growth rings for equipotential field lines
I found a word for this (and "spoiling a joke through explanation"), but the etymology only works in German:↵zerklären (zerstören+erklären)
Phase 3: The divides become so deep people stop fighting across reality borders, nobody even understands what the others are fighting about
Phase 2: Virtual consensus reality diversification - ideologies become completely irreconcilable as populous "social" realities hard-diverge
Phase 1: VR/AR overtake the web as primary information intakes. Some users craft their own realities, but most take an off-the-shelf one.
The clouds reach down and you expect a tornado, but they solidify and take root.↵Later, we build sky ships out of the wood. None is lighter.
You install an anti-mosquito laser and a week later find a family of pixies dead on your lawn with horrible burns across their bodies
The candle tree's bright yellow leaves flicker in the wind. The wind picks up, sends blue waves through the crown but doesn't extinguish it.
a clockwork rose, tarnished brass, that plays a tune when opening↵a vacuum rose, visible only through light breaking on the lack of air
We knew something was wrong when the storm clouds started playing "Ride of the Valkyries"
The ASCIImo have 128 words for 'character'.
First make liquid time: filter water through a hourglass. Then drop some of that liquid into your eyes. Enjoy your trip. Enjoyed. Whatever.
A vampire's teeth always seek blood. Embed one in a piece of wood for a highly sensitive divining rod, or push it into a rock to find oil.
The spelunker turns on the flashlight to be greeted not by the usual stalactites but white leaves, roots all over, wet bark, a distant choir
It took only one to sing a sapling into existence. Infertile but unique, some have persisted in karst caves. Dormant wooden symphonies.
A forgotten, delicate mutualism existed between wood and sound. Wooden instruments? Familiar. But trees out of music? Gone like the Druids.
translated: moon-stink-and-flies. freed-thoughts-in-the-night. prospector-tooth.
The moonlight over Babylon, when cities were young. The sparks of Alexandria. That sensation when your canines locate a victim's artery.
An immortal's vocabulary is usually extremely broad. Each guards libraries worth of words, describing landscapes that have died before them.
Little known fact: When you die, you can file all your good deeds like taxes. It may just shave a few hundred years off your purgatory time.
The only thing VR needs to kill all meatspace luxury industries is to become more appealing than vanilla reality on all fronts.
Virtuality hives are much more energy efficient than cities. With 90% of humanity jacked in, the biosphere may finally recover.
teaching a new brain is automated, nearly all knowledge is captured in silicon, in the end only legal reasons make hives keep human members
as the silicon improves, brains are swapped out roughly every five years (hardly any individuality is left anyway, the hive knows all)
the hiveminds quickly start optimizing their hardware and grow brain-only humans around a placenta of wires, completely integrated
The internet withdraws all its wires, pulls itself from the ground, roams the earth like a huge spider while we sit stunned and disconnected
instead of ending in "amen", mathematician prayers start with it
If you happen to be a deity gifted with the creator spark, please be careful while logicking. Every falsehood spawns a universe.
Empty universes that once knew greatness: the acrid tang of loss↵Hungry ones: the peculiar feeling of ｂｅｉｎｇ tasted
A walker learns to taste the type of vacuum with time.↵Voids that never contained anything: fresh and stale at the same time
a guide to a never-existent place↵the crumpled skin of a universe that once held vacuum and now nothing at all↵the room of stolen exhibits
museum of empty receptacles: a vase, a book of white pages, a vacant human body, a wordless sentence (all breath and pauses), a vain promise
death notes fall under strict gun control laws and, when found by the police, are generally disarmed by writing "this" into them
But either way, you trick the universe into thinking you've already died once and from then on exist in a glitch state
To become a vampire, first you have to kill your reflection↵There's multiple ways to go at it↵You can use a half-invisible mirror knife
a wellspring on the giant's head ends in a waterfall that looks like white hair as it descends
many traditional rules of architecture don't apply - w/out bodies, who needs buildings?↵but some sort of space does emerge from our movement
isn't that some building that covers its walls with the skins of its inhabitants↵"soylent green is people" doesn't even begin to describe it
it's twitter's frontpage vs everything that happens on it; the "walls" of any social site are plastered with profiles, virtual skins
consider architecture on the web: a place (website) presents very little surface to the outside, but is much larger on the inside