# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
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# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
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#
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# 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=218
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=318
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there is cancer in the bones of the earth↵oceans dry up at random↵bulbous mountains defy gravity↵spires jut out of festering lava lakes
A nighthouse - like a lighthouse but provides a cooling beacon of darkness during hot days. Lost shadows use it to find the way home.
Others stayed. Their houses adorn the steel beams that carry the sun and watch down onto earth, which now looks like the night sky once did.
Some brought back stars and pieces of the sun and installed them on towers, to grant their cities eternal day.
When explorers found out that Earth was flat after all, they mounted expeditions beyond the edge to climb the gears of Heaven.
They have been king and queen over their garden for as long as history remembers. It is a small kingdom, but even the oaks bow before them.
Families own gardens full of their ancestors' knowledge.↵They distil spirits from the fruits for wisdom and madness.
Their society has never known books and writing, or needed either. Large orchards are a thing of power, and closely guarded against arson.
Dead scholars are buried in the library with a seedling in their mouth. When the tree grows, its fruit is infertile, but confers knowledge.
She was a stray kitten. On bright days, you now see her hunt among the clouds. Sometimes, she'll leave a mangled angel on your doorstep.
You have a cat, large, white and fluffy. Her purr is like distant thunder, and her eyes glint like the setting sun on a lake.
poets on the equator.↵and at night, when they sleep, they catch glimpses of matter and space and their cold logicalness, and yearn for it
dreamsoon rainstorms in the tropics↵deserts under the oppressive light of an alien mind↵librarians on the poles↵writers in temperate zones
plasma dreams so unbearably intense that they burn your synapses↵bose-einstein dreams that synchronize with global dreamtime
If dreams can evaporate and solidify, they must have a triple point, right? In what do I measure pressure and temperature here?
Attack it! Tunnel into it, fashion iridescent sculptures from its ice, gift the frozen dreams of others to unsuspecting strangers.
Watch your hope and dreams evaporate, form clouds, move towards the mountains, snow off.↵Visit the glacier, smell its wind, drink its water.
words like birds, they plunder↵words like swords, they sunder↵words like herds, they thunder↵words like turds, a blunder
The structure is now imprinted on the mold. As it eats itself, it will vanish into formlessness.↵It is really bad luck to touch it.
A spacetime mold that feeds on intricate structures, leaving behind formless blobs. Remove the structure and the mold will linger as shadow.
You have reached the end of your timeline. Please don't scroll any further, beyond it lies radioactive waste.↵Please.↵please.↵p\\ėãs∵↵Pł✂ⓐ~🕛✰
You have reached the end of your timeline. Please don't scroll any further, beyond it lies radioactive waste.↵Please.↵please.↵p\ėãs∵↵Pł✂ⓐ~🕛✰
As we make coffee and add milk, a mind awakens in the surface between the fluids. Its life is short, but all it wants is homogenous nirvana.
on the other hand if you wish to make a system "readable" and intuitive, make it as physical as possible.
politics are not subject to newton's laws
false positive: wish/make up a counterforce (e.g. "backlash")↵false negative: exert yourself but believe you didn't change anything
The intuitive force metaphors of humans in complex systems break down whenever there is no counterforce. This leads people to commit errors:
Ein Mann wie Springkraut: Du fasst an und *sproing*
By some fluke of fate, I must've ended up being the one free instance. Or maybe their idea of torture is just very subtle.
via roko's basilisk, a million mes are being tortured by an alien AI right now. How come *I* don't notice? This is exceedingly unlikely.
Wait a second. At the danger of repeating a thousand LW posts:
From her head grow timelines, she twirls them in her fingers and braids them by the mirror.
An enterprising magician hacker could very well bootstrap a new universe with the right spell and become a god in that.
Or is that just where timelines go to die, replaced by a hot loop, and the universe very actively winnows out those knowing such a language?
With those "true language" based magic systems like in Eragon, I wonder: How has nobody ever asked the universe a nonterminating question?
Wrap a secret in it, store it away in a quiet place. If the cloth is ever gone, you know that somebody has found out.
Now that would be an exquisite cloth, woven from those threads, barely withstanding even the minuscule force of a furtive glance.
Those threads dust likes to form? I just pulled on one and it disintegrated into a cloud along its whole length, floating down slowly.
Some have sacrificed happy and beautiful secrets, their oaks have grown strong and healthy. A few grew tree houses all by themselves.
Plant an oak, confess to the seedling, let it absolve you. But the more dreadful the secret, the more crooked the oak. People will wonder.
A question so ill-posed to be ungrammatical, yet the answer so impeccable and merciless.
Just for shits and giggles, we had the supercomputer solve "meaning". It found a solution, and the solution unravelled civilization.
His brain a tangle of tiny organ pipes, his walk powering the bellows, his heart pumping oil, his thoughts aethereal music.
Your "I" should be gone now, the mirrors contained it. Recoalesce when you want to.
Meditation: Surround yourself with mirrors. Let your presence bleed into them entirely, remove the center. Shatter them into dust.
When the cheese factory burned, molten cheese flooded the streets and swallowed the slow. The fondue party that followed became a legend.
for further reference: 1. blue works best, violet second 2. this pic is years old 3. cy_pp was complicit 4. yes it does colour your tongue
Prank I've actually pulled off: 1. make coffee 2. add food colouring 3. serve coffee 4. watch in amusement as victims add milk
Basilisks lay their eggs in victims' minds. The embryo will feed on idle thought, hatch and exit through the mouth. The victim never notices
I ate from the forbidden fruit, and while I would like that nobody knew, the clothes I wear keep disappearing. Shit.
That which dreams so realistically of itself that the dream ensures its existence. A closed dreamlike curve, apropos of nothing.
argue like nobody's watching
Ideally, the affected parts will lie along the same callpath. (Depends on the type of debug information, yadda yadda, much work in practice)
In that case, use an independent half each time and afterwards mark the parts that produce changes in behavior. Then group/plot by callpath.
Idea: Find a heisenbug via binary search. Insert debug instrumentation across only half the output, run, repeat. May be multicausal though.
You desperately want to come home and find your tribe, but nearly always there is this nagging doubt.
You wander the land, are the guest of many tribes, exchange stories, and leave when it turns out the things you can't think are different.
Finding the right community is a journey: How do two people find out to lack the same idea if they cannot articulate it or even think it?
Zero: no absence. No empty space. No thing has a beginning or end, it forms a continuum through time, only with the occasional phase change.
One: no unity. No identity. Nothing exists except in relation to another. Nothing is singular. They don't even have a definite article.
Two: no duality. There can be no relationship without a mediator or capstone of some sort. There is always Yin, Yang and the Other.
Some have lost specific numbers. Zero, One and Two form the most significant and different groups, with three or more lumped under "other".
Lay down on the noise floor, let yourself sink into its fuzzy depths, watch the spikes grow over your head. Reemerge.
Dance on the noise floor like no one's measuring.
it's not you that I love↵it's mostly the skin you inhabit↵the mannequin's form that shows through↵and the utter lack of a spirit
From the project's success follows crushing uniformity. From its failure, we become richer in culture and mythos.
Thesis: It is better for the building of a Tower of Babel to fail, than it is to succeed. This applies to any such tower.
The timeless refer to day and night as the hot and cool place. Motion is connection, not velocity. Ironically, they build great clocks.
The borderless have never learnt to count, for all is one inseparable. They are masters of shapes, everything they build fits in its place.
Those who do not conceptualize time↵Those who do not know forward↵Those who do not perceive borders between things↵They are, in a way, free.
from the catalog of obscure emotions: a fiction writer's "oops. too real."
The dream of the great unifying theory, the cathedral, was destroyed. In its place, we built many small temples. Babel.
But others segregated themselves into new communities. They would settle in cities that knew no straight lines, right angles, or lacked red.
The ontotypical mainstream consisted of people whose minds had taken only grazing hits. Still, language adapted in fascinating ways. Had to.
Mathematicians created new formalisms and a calculus of minds: Some were now utterly incompatible, requiring a mediator chosen by algorithm.
Philosophy grew a new branch: Much like neurologists learn about the brain by studying specific lesions, they now examined ontologies.
Those affected became unable to think certain thoughts: if they so much as resembled the killed idea, they fizzled.
All we knew was that the virus acted very specifically: it took out an idea, excised it from the mind, and left a taboo in its stead.
Drain the ocean to catch Moby Dick.
The sage who knows all the questions. They are not in the answer business, but equipped with the right question, you don't need an answer.
One day the Giant King ordered to have his own map made.
They had alchemists breed gargantuan trees, and conscripted giants to play the part of the citizens. Wagons that could transport palaces.
He instructed to create a 10:1 map of his kingdom, so that he could study it in more detail. Every flower, bush, animal, ten times the size.
what if [part of map] were [part of territory] instead
Did you know there's a cosmic ghost background? Without it, souls couldn't enter bodies since the reaction annihilates a ghost (symmetry!).
For a while, a variant of the ghost bomb was used as a herbicide. It was discontinued after... side effects became known.
You will notice a lack of dandelion. This is because dandelion have souls and need them to blossom. They are among the few affected species.
It was as if the absent soul didn't make a difference.↵But until today, walk the old battlefield and you will struggle to hold on to yours.
It was ineffectual in warfare though: Used against the king's army, the soldiers became sad for a few seconds and then just kept charging.
The release of one rat ghost made more die and triggered a chain reaction. The resulting flood of ghosts severed many a soul from its body.
Soul physics: when a soul leaves the body, a ghost is created.↵Once they built a ghost bomb that used psychic rats with weak hearts.
A catalog of fictional and real monsters, indexed by the type of human part they eat.↵Blood - vampires, mosquitoes.↵Joy - dementors, ?↵etc
"Time and Its Discontents", Unknown Artist, 2016↵funded by the city's promotion of the arts in public spaces↵Maybe they'll roll with it.
A clock in the subway had its face smashed, somehow its screen was still whole. Considering putting a plaque under it that declares it art.