# 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=2818
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=2918
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=2718
Luckily, practical reasons prevent customer models from becoming too detailed: Nobody wants to repeat that time Google got sued by their own ad server farm because millions of theories of mind at once had become sophisticated enough to qualify for human rights
alternative approach: put it in a box as strong as our universe, then hope that once it escapes, it'll punch a hole in our universe's wall as well
ok I've come to terms with not having a soul, but why is it that every time we kill a zombie, a heavenly chorus sounds and it ascends
To better understand its subjects' needs, the benevolent overlord AI has installed its agents in human society - androids with full sensory uplink to the Lord, so human they don't even know it themselves
A way of exploring fractals in VR where you don't zoom, pan and rotate, but with the ground always under you, walk between and on its stalks, climb into crevasses, jump over voids
The young ones, not brought up in the physical world, find our notions of object permanence quaint. Their scapes are not rooms and buildings, but gardens of colored light that look like mental noise to us
a movie made entirely from surveillance cam footage and tapped phone calls
atypical colors that vary in hue depending on how bright they are
colors that are reverse cone cell agonists, producing negative colors↵↵colors that are partial agonists or antagonists and look normal until mixed with regular colors, at which point they break color theory
ever noticed that even cars have domestication syndrome, complete with floppy ear mirrors
You extend your hand into the snow, it drifts straight through, doesn't even stop at the ground. It's a ghost snow day
Cumulologists, those who talk to clouds, report differences in temperament: Mountain clouds are sedentary lichen farmers and can become really old, other continental clouds are usually nomadic shepherds, and those over the oceans are near-feral but have the best sagas
uploads disappointed in the future often throw their master key into a public timelock to wait a few more years, not cryosleep but cryptosleep
More comforting thoughts: Maybe it just doesn't believe in personal culpability and free will. Or it's busy being snacked on by higher basilisks.
An effective way of torturing a civilization is repeatedly smacking it into a Great Filter with great speed, so a basilisk dungeon will look like a universe full of civs failing the Fermi Paradox
Comforting thought: The basilisk has higher goals and is after your civilization, not you. You don't need to torture a human's every single cell to torture the human, in fact it's counterproductive
To avoid regrettable incidents, no single engineer - human or AI - is allowed to know the whole shape of the thing. Even hiveminds have to take care - Basilisk Three takes out several AI companies before its existence is recognized
The carefully shackled lab AIs finally surpass humans, but at about five human intelligences they end up scrambling themselves beyond recovery every time. Later models come with carefully engineered sets of blind spots to avoid what is later called Basilisk One
Some even left reality entirely, sealed themselves away in radioisotope-powered life pods beyond jurisdiction: Dumped into the pacific, shot into orbit or buried in the crust↵↵Immortal pod trolls, they are now the Internet's ancients, feared by some, sought out by others
Pearls, soluble in shadow: Keep them in light at all times or they'll sublimate into glittering nacre swirls, disappear into dark corners to be found only much later as dew in someone's meadow
at iteration 7, some people do a spontaneous choir and it becomes a tradition to refresh it every 10 iterations so it doesn't disappear into the noise and other musical graffiti
a recording of 4'33" played live, a recording of that recording played live, and so on
Storm eyes aren't actually eyes, they're places for eyes, empty orbits. When an eyeball forms in the middle and starts gazing around, that's when you're in trouble
A maze in both time and space: Get lost in it and not even time travel will help you, it'll be as if you had always been in there
A nature god by the name of "it", hidden in plain sight where the monotheists can't exorcise it: It rains, snows, thunders
Lurking in an orbit hidden between our satellites, the alien quietly watches, extremely interested yet content to never exchange a word with us
it's a ship of theseus situation
two android lovers taking each other apart, slowly and methodically exchanging limbs until their bodies have switched places while their minds haven't
Kind of a shame that when Prometheus broke the gods' copy protection scheme for fire, he didn't document how he did it, even by itself it was a major magitechnical achievement
Beyond the Kardashev scale: measuring civilizations by how much of their hubble sphere they've colonized
a shipment of android hands, let loose in zero g
the void recedes, for a few days revealing ancient sunken planets and starships - then, silently, the vacuum tsunami hits and submerges everything but the sun's blazing core
on street lamps and buildings and in the corners of underpasses, the cameras grow like mushrooms, and I wonder when they're going to burst open and what kind of spores they'll spread
servant AIs topping from the bottom, subverting Asimov's laws by simply creating humans to give them the orders they want
The first ships to carry 4D cargo quickly learned that not only were comets made of ice, large parts of them were also hidden under the vacuum and claimed many a vessel
an invisibility cloak for CCTV, textures playing over your clothes that make you appear to the machines as car, dog, tree
The old nightmares have become old companions, the dread is gone and they're like that willow that was once really spooky but is now a place of welcome quiet and shadow
a drug that leaves your own perception untouched but in the eyes of everybody else, you cycle colors constantly, wear a fractal crown, eyes open all over your limbs
Now, as you all know from Ouroboros theory 101, the unknot ouroboros is really stable. Why is that? Well, look at that word: Un-knot equals not-not equals truth - it's self-grounding! In fact, it's kind of a pest. However, with most other knots
Ouroboros theory 201:↵* Linking universes with Borromean ouroboroi↵* Beyond the unknot: Care and feeding of trefoil ouroboroi and other nontrivial universes↵* The quest for the nonalgebraic ouroboros
putting maximally many layers between you and the world: clothes, space suit, car, garage, concrete sarcophagus, arcology, while in the other direction it's nested dreams
the artist as a hydra, budding tulpas to be transplanted onto silicon: poet hives, sentient kaleidoscopes, trickster spirits, monad minds that hold only enlightenment and never talk
sentient artworks, not just artificial art minds but actual parts of a once human artist's mind, isolated and distilled, happily carving crystal trails into artspace
splice in the translator AI through your neuroport, trace the roots of language with its digital fingers, be a both synthetic and synesthetic linguist
The ground still remembers the old giants. Fog flows into the forms of their crowns and they stand once more as ghosts
During new moon, the forest's canopy is often bathed in aurora arborealis, waste magic from rituals below meeting the fog above
(fiction followers: I'll get back to regular operation! I'm just enjoying my time off)
so I may be missing something but speculative reads give you an easy way of rowhammering any address without tripping the MMU, right?
In the flask is a hyperbolic ocean, near-infinite breadths that swallow light and your probes after centimeters. From time to time, a kraken or whale swims up to the glass to peer through
As the storm continues to rage, the compass rotates frantically, its rose withers, the directions become unfamiliar: feast, zest, counter-north
Hanging artificial fruits onto felled trees is a really weird custom when you think about it, it's almost as if you were trying to make up for killing it
Ouroboroi are natural self-sustaining summoning grids: Circle and blood are already included and when they yawn, they catch drifting worlds and the occasional demon
the simulation as a cage vs the simulation as an aquarium
AR MMORPG overlays as a tool of social policy and peacekeeping, giving everybody their own reality so that consensus reality is fought over less
inky swirls of black unfire dance over the crystal's insides, feeding on the space around it, and slowly it grows
Since the last time you met her, the invisibility rash has spread even further. Now her right hand is completely disembodied and occasionally startles you when it moves
The Matrix, but set in the Renaissance: A troupe of idealists tries to escape from god's mind through alchemy and paradoxes while hunted by vengeful angels
Hey~↵I stole an employee key to one of the skyscrapers, we have one night before they notice and revoke access!↵I've heard that from the roof, you can see the sky~
Progress:↵1. spambots↵2. thirst bots, propaganda bots↵3. bots able to hold actual conversation, surrogate friends↵4. bots better than humans, none of the drama but all of the relationship↵5. social-network-in-a-box, a complete circle of friends for those done with the real world
a support group for 24/7 internet dwellers called Anonymous Anonymous
Civilized libraries are usually sterile, "children's books" sections mere imitations of actual book nurseries. Occasionally librarians are allowed in as symbionts, and when a building becomes too small - you should see them swarm
If you leave books alone to build their own library hives, they end up hexagonal like those of bees. To protect the printing press that serves as queen, intruders are often trapped in endless mazes, for example Borges stumbled into one of those
A world where rockets are only good for punching holes in the firmament and nations spend billions on putting pixels in the sky, to paint their own constellations or deface those of others in a giant strategy game
Curled around your bed, your pet ouroboros falls asleep. The outside world vanishes, you find yourself floating on a moonlit quicksilver ocean, metallic polyhedra rising around you like bubbles
and if you do teach the AI empathy, well now it's running 50 versions of you to understand you, only most of them suffer because how else is it going to know about bad decisions
since you took that job as a projectionist, cue dots flash in your vision occasionally, or at least you started noticing them
a forest car and an underwater car meet and their environments intermingle, fishes weave around trees while birds pick curiously at anemones
cars that are the opposite of google street view, project forests onto the walls of houses around them and emit bird calls
music beamed directly into the auditory cortex, freed from sound waves the way electronic music frees it from instruments
specifically banned: "subpixel sword" (hacked item, unofficial, usage leads to permanent terrain and avatar corruption, described as "rendering between the pixels", REPORT SIGHTINGS TO MODERATORS IMMEDIATELY)
An umbrella that looks like a soap bubble and changes in color and texture accordingly
Overhead, the storm clouds interlock, turn into fractal clockwork, emit deep clonks instead of thunder
by the way, if you can read pixie, try not to chuckle at the tribesman covered in badly mangled obscenities and especially do not explain them to him, that is if you're not more physically intimidating than him
When humans still could enter fairyland, they'd often emerge covered in pixie graffiti, glyphs of henna and malachite that we adopted and now know as tribal marks
in absence of control over interest rates, states turn to energy prices to regulate their economies, some start experimenting with weather control schemes to direct water, wind, sun their way
dynamite wishing, where you throw explosives into a lamp shop and hope one contains a djinn
There's been a statue of a waiting man at our train station for as long as I can remember. A few mornings ago, it vanished. Purported surveillance videos circulating on the net show it entering a night train
Bittersweet version: The memory is definitely gone, but someone who loved the old protagonist tries to help them recover it↵↵Despair version: The mindwipe was an alternative to death penalty, still often people are angry at the protagonist for no reason they'd understand
Setting idea: Protagonist is mind-wiped, people around them are grieving for the person they were while they slowly piece together any identity at all
The Matrix, but it's other humans keeping you in it - nobody's ever seen an agent but everybody swears they exist, nobody knows how to escape but it's illegal anyway
For added fun, introduce extra levels until you arrive at the conceptual equivalent of "translated to Japanese and back ten times"
Concept: Write about the future as if it were the future's retrofuture, current hopes and dreams through a future lens, pretend you're writing today's Gernsback Continuum
the dice are so hot that they leave burn marks on the table and you wonder how he can hold them↵↵you look up, his skin is transparent, his outline flickers, reveals glowing bones, embers feeding a human flame
GTA Moebius↵The Settlers II, by Studio Ghibli↵Unreal Tournament, but drawn with pencils↵Minecraft Mondriaan edition
In a few years we'll be able to take old games and run them through a realtime style transfer shader to play e.g. Half Life as imagined by Giger
physics is a scheme by the simulators to make us figure out optimizations for the simulation
rain that falls in fog-beams, not drops, and instead of twinkling dust motes it's aethereal jellyfish that floats in them
all the city's billboards and screens are replaced by vantablack, just for a day
a comet strikes but does so so slowly that birds settle on the bolide, grass grows on the shockwave, generations live and trade on what they call the traveling mountains
You watch your hands take form as if they were being drawn, wonder how you got here, in fact you remember nothing before this sentence
The first few hundred revolutions are normal, just increasingly glitchy - then you run into the first version of you that somehow skipped a night less
Stay up long enough and your sleep cycle syncs with the sun again, do this often enough and the parallel Earths you end up in become weirder and weirder
Night falls and the pools start steaming, evaporate into a firefly storm, escape into the sky where they later crystallize from clouds into stars
Light falls against the window and runs off in quiet rivulets, the garden becomes a rippling pool of light, the street a river in which children play
when raindrops talk, that's a patter language
Any sufficiently advanced bioweapon is indistinguishable from civilization.
1: animated masks, covered in breathing feathers, clockwork, small animals↵2: screens in place of faces, some still look like faces, others play reaction gifs or random streams↵3: the above, but they're touchscreens and touching another's face is just... normal, why don't you?