# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
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She is of all ages at once↵Look at her and see toddler, woman and crone↵Hear a baby crying, a rousing speech and a story at the fireplace
Attempts have been made to travel the river, but it ignores most ships. The only vessel that works is a small paper boat from old books.
We are now weaving one of the most sophisticated webs of all. Not long until the star spiders notice and come down to build their nests.
The zodiac signs were originally spiderwebs, but the minds they caught were heavy. The webs were pulled down to Earth and became part of us.
tiny spiders of light that draw threads between the stars to catch the eyes of those looking up
impossibly intricate heirloom webs passed down the generations that catch even cosmic rays and refract light to dazzle predators
vegetarian tree colony spiders that still weave webs because they serve as memory, ears and calculators now
a living web that traps spiders that attempt to mate with the decoy in the middle
a spider that leaves its web between timelines to feed on its alternate selves
a spider so large that it needn't weave a web - it just spreads out its legs in every direction and the threads unfold between them.
Spiders, but seen as an organ of their web.
You can bathe in the river if you don't care much for your mind - it'll be washed away. Reforming it takes days, but for some it is relief.
What we didn't know about hollow Earth: it was a great resonator. When the comet struck, the crust rang for days like a cosmic bell.
The river's waters flow through everything, unimpressed by mere matter. From space, it enters earth and exits somewhere yet undiscovered.
A new one has rolled in. Sleek, modern, no conductor or passengers. Can I hijack that? Whose thoughts are these and where will they take me?
I think I found a train yard. Some of these look as if made for a different atmosphere. Graffiti and rust everywhere. Who lost these?
I didn't even lose my train of thought. I missed it entirely. The platform was empty when I arrived. Currently wandering along the tracks.
My hand weighs the stone, feels its rough texture, edges lost to water and time↵blink↵The soft touch vanishes and I fall to the ground, mute
Be careful with those plot threads. Lose enough and resourceful characters will weave them into plot armor to protect against your writing.
In the inner courtyard grows a tree. Both sapling and ancient, it is rooted in its own decaying stump. One of its holes houses an ouroboros.
Once a thief got lost and tried to smash her way out. A future self slew her before the deed, paradoxing herself out of ten years of limbo.
A fortress dazzling time itself: Its curved walls, mirrors and prisms induce eddies in the flow, corridors branch into different timelines.
Moondust ink, by the way, is white during gibbous/full moon, transparent during crescent/new moon, and glows in a deep red during eclipses.
Your mug blinks in and out of existence since that time you mixed moondust ink in it. Be quick to drink or your tea will end up in your lap.
Spin the top fast enough and the movement will separate from the moving: a frozen colourful whirl below, a wildly flittering nothing above.
In the right reader, the parts will align again and click into place. The author is reborn in the reader's body and free to write again.
One has to decompose one's mind into its constituents, place them in the writing in a careful arrangement of mirrors, lenses and gems.
Authors understand that their writing grants them a kind of immortality. But some of the skilled and ambitious reach for the real thing.
Look up from the screen. The door has just closed, a few dust motes are still running for cover. Ponder the door, then return to the screen.
Effects on dreamtime, should it be completed, will be devastating. Only years til bitter rain scours a dying wasteland and poisons dreamers.
The governments are only looking to hoard strategic nightmare fuel reserves, but the companies are building the nightmare combustion engine.
Sent by unscrupulous media companies and black operations, they map dreamtime and drill for promising wells.
Nightmare fuel, like regular fuel, has fossil reserves left by our precursors, untapped so far. But dreamers have been spotting prospectors.
lullaby:↵breathe quietly, they won't hear you↵lie still, they won't spot you↵think not, they won't enter you↵wear your dreams as disguise ♫♪
Its honey is less dangerous, but the words are filtered through the beehive's consciousness. Beekeepers eat it as an initiation rite.
experimentator's notes: it was black tea I left for a bit too long (nearly cold), and the mug already had a patina from previous teas.
"Sorry but I must drink you now"↵[convects in frantic chaotic motion]↵"glug glug"↵[last convection cells are dying off]
I wish this were less impossible to film but my tea is clinging to the inner side of my mug in a thin film and just kinda... convecting.
During a rainstorm, one can find shelter under a tame skyjelly. The rain makes a very particular sound on them, like it makes on mushrooms.
When the jellyfish first rose from the ocean into the air, we were alarmed. But now, tamed, they float around our cities to light them.
felt the mace↵melt my face
You watch your thoughts like water flowing over stones under sunlight, fascinated. But increasingly, the water takes on a dirty reddish tint
There's always this quarter that never produces news and that nobody has a memory of. It is as if something other than humans lives there.
Bottle your overflowing emotions for times of need. Oh yeah you'll surely have a use for that shelf of crushing lethargy one day.
Raw physics would do the job but feels like its abstraction level is too low.
It would be nice to have a calculus (to account for translation, friction, perturbation, etc) to explore the design space programmatically.
Does clockwork have an analogy to circuit diagrams? All I see is finished assemblies and explosion diagrams which fall short of this.
they rush in panicked stampede, crushing their own underfoot, thought blood seeping into the soil↵those that make it have gashes and bruises
horror vacui's obscure sibling, horror abundantis: the writer's ideas pile up against the mind's floodgates and they can't write fast enough
A petting zoo for tiny volcanoes
It is considered very poetic justice. Speaking of which, some judges work poems into the verdicts, to be said with a man's last breath.
her bones are twigs, her muscles grubs, her brain chrysalides, her skin butterflies↵a thousand wings form her voice↵she eats trees whole
Notably, this ship will not take you anywhere. Step on, step off, nothing will change. It is anchored with respect to all reference frames.
In a murder trial, one resides on the judge's bench. Those guilty smoke it to recite their entire trial, then fall dead from lack of breath.
The firefig is rare, but even quicker: Bushfires have been known to be overgrown by them. The empty cores then preserve the fire's negative.
Never sleep under a hunter fig. A relative of the strangler fig, its fruit will quickly engulf sleeping animals in roots and feed on them.
There is an orchid that looks like a human ear. Smoke its leaves, and all words ever spoken near it will force their way out of your mouth.
"For a proper dance, children, the down must follow the up and be enclosed by a swirl." "What if I do a little jump there?" "NO NO NO WRONG"
In which folk dances are analyzed for their inherent grammar, and names put on the silliest little details, to be taught in school later
What do you put in a paper golem's mouth?
Neurologists trying to find consciousness ~ Taking apart a human body to find the part that makes it human.~
The original meaning of "see with the naked eye" has been lost to obscurity. They used it literally: Just a disembodied eyeball, perceiving.
We have met no aliens because none share our megalomania. Where we cover ever greater distances, they colonize the space between the atoms.
reify/embody [concept], make it tangible and/or give it agency↵(this one is as old as the gods)
(We then put a document in its mouth, called "The Law")
The society golem would be created through an intricate dance. The dancers end up bound by invisible strings, unaware of their presence.
I suppose there is no emotion golem yet? Write a stage play and weave your audience's emotions into something that smells of flowers&death.
Judah Low's last golem was not the time golem: It was a language golem. The story of the Iron Council.
Most kinds of golem I could come up with have been anticipated by Miéville though: Earth, water, paper, sound, light, even time.
It appears that I have inadvertently invented a word: Golemistics (the art and science of golems and their creation)
golem inscription: go forth and destroy↵golem inscription: go back and rebuild↵bind these two together with rope: endless fun
Earthworms, larger than buses, latch onto sewer pipes like leeches, sucking the city's lymph fluid. Some have simply replaced the pipes.
It was his synesthesia that made him taste faces he saw, he thought. Until the day he tried to swallow one and its owner dropped, soulless.
@allgebrah pro of having a banshee mother: her lullabies work wonders↵con: people you love randomly die under mysterious circumstances
She seethed. That was the third guy she had confessed her love to to have died. Maybe her father shouldn't have married a banshee after all.
@allgebrah "it sounded great in my head!" "it's not how you english though!"
poeting in a non-native language is hard, I constantly worry that I've ruined an awesome line with yet another silly blunder
The audience was enraptured. When, softly, the virtuoso put down the human, their bells, strings and skins erupted in cacophonous applause.
Sound waves converged on the violin's strings and forced the player's bow and hands. Nobody had ever played a human so skilfully before.
The perfection of rain dance, a critical component, required no less than three fields: Meteorology, anthropology and choreography.
Meteorology and Architecture were among the last fields to merge. Only with weather manipulation at hand, cloud castles came within reach.
what if X were normal/how would society adapt to X
One by one, the clouds fall out of the sky, the last becoming a large shaggy dog at the shepherd's side. Time to drive home the flock.
Sitting on a rock, he idly stares into a flock of cirrocumulus, lazily lifts a whistle to his mouth and blows. Enthusiastic thunder answers.
A second sun is shining on the imaginary-numbered frequencies, into our thoughts, casts them in a light the trained eye can tell the time by
As a plague was carrying off the homunculi, vacant bodies grew in numbers and started posting ads: BODY (WARM, F) SEEKS HOM, LOVELY VIEW
@allgebrah when my "parapsychology of speech recognition" tweet draws an AI newsletter bot follower↵is this what they call intersectionality
fishing for your ancestors' raudivian voices with HMMs and semantic neural networks - a primer
The number of moons you see depends on your number of eyes. Those of us with a third eye will see a second moon, while spiders know seven.
[fire - water - earth - air]
rise into the air as scent and pollen↵impregnate a cloud↵a storm is blowing in from dreamtime↵to fan the glowing embers of philosophy
seep away into the ground↵find a thousand seeds↵help them grow↵your army: flowers as far as the eye can see
throw open the floodgates of the mind↵overwhelm the standing armies↵conquer dreamtime wearing a crown of sea foam↵lose yourself on the plain
make a stand against time↵smash language↵kill your ontologies↵inflict epistemic violence
But furious when she found out, she inverted the gears in his clock. He was thrown into a different timeline and never seen again.
A jester and admirer once exchanged the faces on love and truth. It took her years to figure out. Not that their relationship was unhappy.
Her watches don't measure time. Truth, love, beauty, thisness, spirit, inspiration, ghost background, name it and it is in her toolbox.
In the old city, even the buildings have evolved parasites. Disguised as rooms, they enter houses and can stay there for years, undetected.
She tucks you in with strands of her hair, sings you a lullaby of empty space and giant balls of fire, casts you a loving glance↵"wake well"