# 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.
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# Options:
#     uri     Filter to show a specific users twts.
#     offset  Start index for quey.
#     limit   Count of items to return (going back in time).
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# twt range = 1 3418
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=418
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=518
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.synkretie.net/twtxt&offset=318
transpose X from environment Y to environment Z↵(via https://twitter.com/ctrlcreep/status/707291326631579648)
"And she did really steal a street?"↵"Yeah! It was gone even from the maps!"↵"I wonder what her hoard looks like with loot like that?"
On my shelf, unsolved, sits a rubik's cube. It consists of only one cube.
Markovian writing, in which you try to sound like a Markov chain while still making sense on another level.
A glitch in the GPS signal lures unwitting drivers onto uncharted field roads, where it ties them into a reality knot to slowly digest them.
The monks only leave the field for one hour each day to follow earthly urges.↵They weave their lives into the Dream and dream of its fabric.
Dream's temple is an empty field, but on it the monks dance day and night in a never-repeating pattern and sing a never-repeating song.
Each spire contains a central room in whose floor a series of concentric bronze rings is embedded, the smallest one invisible to the eye.
Space's temple is a number of stone spires arranged on a straight line, each twice as far from the first than the one before.
Around it, oaks grow in a circle, ever older as you walk along it, the oldest replaced by a sapling. A stele keeps track of its revolutions.
Time's temple is a giant hourglass. Every morning, an acolyte fetches a bucket of sand from the bottom, trudges up and refills from the top.
Contacts lenses for a hyperopic mind's eye, which finds it difficult to focus on concrete concepts and perceives only abstractions clearly.
What is the world? A miserable pile of voids. A bubble bath, vast bubbly superstructures containing more bubbles down to the immeasurable.
A vocoder but for thoughts: it removes their humanity and lets you modulate them onto the emotions of a machine.
The clouds overhead are forming a constantly shifting maze that traps the eyes and won't release them until you've solved it. Don't look up.
less cynical:↵split what was one
We are caught in a submarine storm. The sky is clear, but the sea lights up irregularly. The waves are inverted, thunder shakes our ship.
A beam of light is jumping from cloud to cloud as I watch - what is it looking for? Or is it just delivering mail?
No wonder he was pissed and kicked them out: They shattered the idealist world spirit's unity of mind.
In Genesis, Eve and Adam split the Monad when they got their own consciousnesses. Since then, we've only become better at splitting things.
The spell strips the meaning off things while leaving them physically intact: a chair becomes some sticks, a human a bag of dirty water.
You idly watch a plane drawing its trail across the sky. One cloud is moving faster than the others and... pounces. The trail doesn't go on.
The storm is closing in. Its winds are going strong, tugging at the horizon which is flapping like a tarpaulin.
snow is falling in my mind, muffling any noise↵silence↵↵but the world returns↵I shake my head vigorously to stir up the snow once more
you find the load bearing pillar upon which the universe rests↵out of an impulse, you kick it and it breaks↵good job hero
Their god withers when you believe in it, but thrives when you emphatically do not. So they publicly commit atrocities in their god's name.
The Leviathan's air bladder is large enough to have weather. Surviving crew members of swallowed ships have founded a civilization in it.
Category theorists have a hard time distinguishing nuts from coconuts.
Change your skin once in a while to appear new and fresh to your friends. Befriending them again is part of the fun.
In some cultures, the symbiosis goes further: apply sugar and yolk to part of your skin and they'll cover it in silk. Little spider tailors.
If you're worried about squishing them, you can also wear the nest around your neck in a tiny cage. It's quite the fashion item.
Spider bodyguards that nest in your hair and in turn protect you from mosquitoes in the evening.
The time scorpion reaches out with its tail, stings you five seconds in the past. You had never had a chance.
[go through all possible permutations of a small amount of ideas]
A winter storm's snowflakes are all letters in a very large alphabet: Every snowfall tells at least a thousand stories per square meter.
When a storm has a flash of insight, it is followed by thunder. I ask, have you ever thundered with your brain? HAVE YOU?
Storms are sentient: Every eddy from the atomic level to the hurricane's eye is a thought. They view us solid masses as psychically inert.
Atoms are small but are a big idea. More exotic are the large things that are small ideas: you could be bathing in them and not know.
That which is so small that it can't be perceived and passes through everything. Even in the platonic realm, it is too tiny to be found.
It has few nerves: an intricate system of bony levers provides faster signal than nerves could. This allows it to react extremely quickly.
It does not have an exoskeletal skull around its brain, instead an endoskeletal support structure. One thought moves a hundred tiny bones.
Behind your back: "Yo her momma so fat her children come out three-dimensional" "Poor child, what did her father DO to his sperm?"
What if everyone you know is two-dimensional, but very good at faking the third dimension? And nobody told you so as not to embarrass you?
The book literally captures your imagination, conscripts it until you've added another chapter. That's simply the price of reading it.
Objects that have no Adamic names cannot be addressed in Enochian, making them immune to magic. This includes a lot of our modern world.
An armillary sphere so complex, its spinning rings play the original music of the spheres. Not that anyone would recognize the real thing.
other bot idea: https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/698488822892519425↵tweet gibberish at it and it will try to find it in the noise.
bot idea: crop circle generator↵bonus if the circles can encode ~140 bytes (yes, that won't fit some unicode tweets)~
the eye in the wall opens, takes you in↵you see your image on the other side↵whatever mind is behind that eye, you're part of it now
painting numerous legs on the ouroboros to get the self-devouring centipede
Thomas Steinmetzinger's great work "The Lego Tunnel"
@allgebrah retcon: the firegrass grows only after the fire, what burns down before is all the other grass.
The firestorm carries the pollen far and wide. The day after the fire, the grass fruits small and very hardy seeds, withers and dies.
Firegrass grows so quickly that when it burns down, it can regrow while the fire is still raging and steal its heat. Ideal conditions.
Parasitic flowers that nest in the blossoms of other plants and trick bees into taking their pollen instead of the host's.
not so much immortal as dying all the time, ALL the time.
Crayons made of transparent coal leave iridescent lines.
Diamond lenses on fire focus their own light.
Antitime orders events in antispace: A time-carpet that is missing a thread between any two related events.
Antispace is subject to antilocality: At any point & time, whatever occupies the point is not at that point. Instead, it is everywhere else.
I may be entirely wrong about greek but I like that there are puns like iconoclast/iconoplast (one who destroys icons vs one who makes them)
As the chronophage and the chronoplast find each other, embrace and kiss, we find our present in the brief instant separating their maws.
Hinter Kristallgittern - caught in a crystal's lattice (figuratively)
(fun fact: In German, lattice, grid and prison bars share a word: Gitter)
your thought crystallizes and becomes regular, symmetric and repetitive↵you desperately look for a heat shock to break the lattice again
They build radiant hexagonal cities, forge and lose entire empires spanning the void between the snowflakes, while you sit inside and read.
The secret golem stays out of sight of anybody but those that know its name. To the uninitiated, it appears as a swirling mass of rumors.
The police had major difficulties drawing a chalk outline of the necromancer's body - every time they finished one, it ran away.
As the ontological vampire goes unfed, it loses quality after quality, fades into a concept. Mathematicians have resurrected it so often.
The ontological vampire feeds on your specific qualities, leaving only an abstract husk. Freshly sated, it appears painfully hyperreal.
He could've ruled us, but his only edict was that we stop bowing to him.↵When he died, we buried him in the kings' crypt under the school.
We used to pull pranks on him, secretly declared him king and guide star. Fanfares heralded his arrival, but he only got angry and confused.
Merfolk fortresses float against the ocean surface, exposing their bottom to the air. At times, from below, air rains on the fortifications.
lullaby:↵take your crown and sceptre, the blanket is your ermine coat↵from your throne rule dreamtime, extend its reach to the most remote ♫
macroscopic kingdoms of life: animals, plants, fungi, protista, roboti, mechals, fire, golems, storms, religions, stars, ...
The real trouble came when it figured out how to float and started obscuring the sky: We had to flee into virtual reality to starve it out.
Kudzu that literally feeds on attention: It prospers in public places and on billboards, famous tourist destinations are nearly overgrown.
Cockroaches so large that we use them as tanks, hunt them for their shells and build houses out of them.
Atlantis didn't sink. The ocean just eroded its foundations until it started floating like a giant raft. The pieces ended up everywhere.
Open the door and see a huge page blocking the frame. Read it. Turn it over. Another page. It seems you will have to read them all to pass.
dreams are the world that travels you
One time it had hidden in my closet overnight and I had nothing to wear that day. At least it doesn't rain on my electronics anymore.
I caught a cloud in the park this one foggy morning and took it home. Still shows no signs of dissipating and follows me around the house.
It's done the same to sleeping persons but the screaming puts me off.
I put my hat on a mannequin and my pet slime mold creeps out, engulfs its head and vanishes into the joints. The mannequin shudders to life.
Being a stone is peaceful. As I'm slowly ground into dust, ever lighter currents carry me around. Not being life, I'm content to watch.
They let it into their cities while they make their homes waterproof and repurpose balconies as doors. Their children may leave, they won't.
Even though the dikes have stopped being useful, people are still too stubborn to leave. Some have accepted the sea, are even welcoming it.
I left my copy of Ficciones unattended near one once. Babel's library has been overgrown by a jungle and its inhabitants are now farmers.
Don't place seed books in your library without adequate quarantine. Or do you want the plants to spread and Asimov's robots to become mossy?
Fictional plants can germinate in minds, so books about them are special, more akin to seedbanks than books. Other books provide the soil.
If asteroid mining takes off in my time, I may claim a medium sized asteroid and build a lichen garden on it.↵http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Lichen_survives_in_space
tumblelichen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_lichen↵potentially extraterrestial lichen: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063313002055↵chthonic lichen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endolithic_lichen
It's like Solaris, only with an endless desert instead of an endless ocean.
lichen scientists altering Earth's orbit just enough to stay within habitable range of the dying sun
These are a very slow form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction ↵So, arguably the far future has lichen thinking at a glacial pace under the red sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plants_flowers_ice_rocks_lichens_230.jpg *squees*↵When lichen are the last surface life on earth, these will run cellular automata. http://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/703329264326807552/photo/1
status: reading about lichens growing on various metals↵(lichens are so cute)
She opens her mouth and smiles at you radiantly. Her teeth glisten, red.↵They're rubies.
webs that catch musical notes drifting by↵the spider will eat them to sing in stolen voices↵shake the web and they will all fall out at once