# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
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We genetically modified the centipedes to have wheels for feet, then set them on model railway tracks.↵choo choo~~
karaoke in dead languages: sing along to the ruin of other races, rendered toothless by time, in sounds your throat can barely produce
The undercity's scrap dealers deal in body parts as well: A dog's nose, near as new! Fungally reinforced bones! Faces, lost in shame!
Would their space look smoother than our wrinkly, walled and doored one? Would they talk of paths to take instead key insights?
Note that we employ a great number of door/lock metaphors when talking about our minds. What would be the metaphors of a doorless society?
Interstellar: Actually About Doors!
Volcanoes are actually a skin condition caused by uneven flow of the earthly juices.
Annoying writer emotion: "Nah, I did that already", even when maybe one other person would notice. It's worse when you see the abstractions.
In this sense, wormholes are archetypical doors: space is the wall, the hole is the doorway, and it spans a great spatial/temporal distance.
Also doors, together with locks, separate what is here from what is there more effectively than mere distance can. Compressed distance?
Theory: The symbolism on doors is so heavy because passing through one coincides with a change of environment (and accordingly, mind).
Only in these memories can you enter. So they ensure, if necessary by force, that no book about the city tells of the gate unguarded.
The gate watch's oath binds them even as the city has long crumbled to dust. They sit here, guarding a passage that exists only in memories.
Isn't a platonic relationship literally the ideal relationship? I mean, you know.
door without wall↵street without destination↵smile without face↵government without society↵light without anything to show
This clock doesn't bother with measuring time, it doesn't need to. It only, unfailingly, tells you whether it is time or not.
"A civilized society needs to specialize", he explained. "The Workers of Work, the Sleepers of Sleep and us, the Dreamers of Dreams."
in the abyss it just travelled, all that was lost still floats↵aligns↵everything collapses↵↵And you find yourself awake again.
you lose even the direction of your fall, but eventually it stops↵there's nothing left except an atom of awareness↵it looks up
it is so silent that you forget you ever had ears↵or nose, mouth, eyes, body, all obsolete now↵memories drop away like scabs off your skin
fall into sleep: colourful dreams surround you↵but you fall further into black tar↵fall further: a deep violet pulse↵further: no more sound
How to use public transit in the solar system:↵1. find comet stop in your vicinity↵2. wait for comet↵3. show ticket↵4. grab comet's tail
rivers, streams and rivulets have nothing to support them anymore↵they look like a nervous system now, stripped of the rest of the body
earth is raining upwards: loose crumbs of soil fall up, chunks of turf peel off and follow, trees cling to the ground with their last roots
rocks of everyday life:↵noolith - book (usually nonfiction)↵oneirolith - book (usually fiction)↵sociolith - building↵cryptolith - hard drive
Their insides are reconfiguring themselves, gears are turning and levers moving. (didn't they feed on gas? must have evolved recently)
You see their larvae eating trails into the handrails. Around the corner, a few dozen cocoons are hanging off an exposed wire, red hot.
Turn off your flashlight and sit still: Hear the clickety clack of clockwork wings, see them illuminated by the gentle glow of the antennae.
When they fell out of fashion, the moths largely died out. Some populations persist in old sewers: Enough metals and swamp gas to survive.
For them, it made actual sense to swarm around lights. Gas lamps were a critical food source, leaked just enough to feed a moth for the day.
Mechanical moths were common once: Their metabolism was powered by their antennae, made of the same fine metal mesh that gas lights use.
[GLITCH HAZARD]↵contents may:↵scramble memories↵duplicate your cat↵pixelate important body parts↵make you conceive yourself retroactively
intergalactic tumbleweed, blown about by the exhaust of quasars↵its gentle nature is unhelpful when it hits your ship at many dozen km/s
someone with write access to the platonic realm put it there but somehow you think it's a good idea to solve the labyrinth
the minotaur lurks in a conceptual labyrinth, every wrong turn of thought guarded by a basilisk
this thought brought to you by the question: what does the axis orthogonal to organic/crystalline look like? [A: both are structure]
we can try to find more alien processes (like commerce) or try to smash the box: what would unstructure and antistructure look like?
it is entertaining to force one process into the other's structures: mushroom houses, crystallizing cities, mycelium crystals.
[musings]↵crystals, fungi, buildings are all structures created by a value-giving process (entropy, evolution, human volition respectively).
a chasm splits the continent↵under it, a restless eye crying lava↵it focuses on Orion and blinks, once, then vanishes↵Earth caves in
Freshly picked jawberry bites your tongue and gums with thorny teeth when eaten, mixing its juice and your blood into a delicious cocktail.
In fact, a popular dismissal spell for lesser fire elementals is: [you are now burning manually]
When the fire gained consciousness, it was so surprised that it forgot to burn. Needless to say, its awareness didn't last long.
you close your eyes and float↵just don't open your eyes with your feet pointing at the sky, that is if you don't intend to fall into space
The Landing of Columbus was faked. But we've all been playing along for so long that it doesn't matter anymore.
gravity has failed and nature has to work by sight in the meantime↵you set up mirrors in the garden, it confuses the hell out of the rain
Fires so slow that we put them in flower pots. They glow at night and make great bonsais.
writing technique: glitching narratives
Wake up, dismiss your night form, put on your day skin, drink a coffee, check in the mirror that you don't wear your face the wrong way.
The choir begins to play, the audience finds itself speechless and indeed thoughtless at certain words. They experience only what remains.
The Silent Orchestra's kettledrum produces sudden, then receding silence. The strings a softly muffling one, the trumpets cutting.
in the recesses of your mind, memories compost into fertile soil for invasive dreamweeds↵is your grandma green & leafy? maybe that's why
The Internet is an aquarium and we are each on both sides of the window.
Languages can be alloyed like metals: Wordsmiths like to add a little French for elegance, or German for philosophic toughness.
the aliens left us powerful artifacts but we mistook them for overcompressed jpegs
The Moon is the portrait that ages in Earth's stead.
shave your identity regularly with occam's razor
Other flows exist that one isn't anchored against by default (like culture).↵But what are the non-obvious ones and their respective anchors?
Whatever anchors you in time, throw it over board. Lose your friction and your sense of time. Drift.
What you do and don't have names for is an important feature of your ontology. Un-naming things is an underused technique.
a river of ink is drawing itself across the plain, it is its own map
Two-way endings act as narrative beam splitters and you can use them to set up quantum entanglement between your readers.
white light that refuses to be split into colours, passing through prisms unbroken
a car's fifth wheel is like our third eye: used for travelling other dimensions
Cthulhu is not an entity, it is an action: civilizations commit Cthulhu and are eaten by their cyberspace instead of exploring the void.
the skyscrapers are swaying in the storm like a field of grass
kaleidoscopic writing: take [collection of shiny things], let it tumble about and assume many different configurations, describe them all.
the wood of freshly felled hashed quadtrees makes excellent spaceship material (among others, ⠨⣀⣱)
But you can also always wander into the city and be welcome, while villages are suspicious of newcomers.
Cities scale better, but are somewhat anonymous and amorphous: you can wander into a different part and just not know anybody anymore.
The distinction being that villages have one to a few well defined centres (fora) while cities are just these large sprawling masses.
Idea: Cohesive communities are the villages of cyberspace, pluralistic sprawls like twitter/FB the cities. It's a difference in philosophy.
he's an antiquity dealer, but not in furniture↵sells what was forgotten when our grandparents died, their smells, hopes, rituals and dreams
Thought superconductors are impermeable to memories due to field interactions. The mind inside experiences everything in the same instant.
waiter, I'd like a glass of sparkling water please↵oh but without the glass and the water, just the sparkle against the roof of my mouth
force with no reaction↵a bubble in water, without the water↵a border separating nothing↵time going in only one direction
Collect some of that frost before the sun does! Keep in a ziploc in the freezer, fashion an ice bird from it when winter comes. Let it fly.
The late cold caught even the birds' songs in hoar frost. As it thaws in the sun, thousands of thin bird voices pipe up from the grass.
The sun clucks happily as her children throw off their shells and unintentionally incinerates most of what is left of humanity.
Lately the quakes have been many and devastating. One morning, a titanic beak breaks through the pacific. The sun's egg has finally hatched.
So you have a sleep cycle? Yeah? That's cool but do you have a sleep bicycle? Guaranteed to get you around dreamtime at ten times the speed!
The morning after, you pass the house. It has a huge crack going up to the roof and the police are currently evacuating its inhabitants.
The flames are clearly eating him, but the tear isn't widening. The only sounds he makes are the crackle and whine of a burning log.
In the mud, a hole appears, much like a tear in paper. Flames lick at its edges. He steps forward, grabs the edges, pulls them together.
It tastes metallic, sand crunches between your teeth. Before you, the wall and the entire house around it collapse slowly into mud.
He stops at a wall, seemingly unaware of you. "Why are you here?". You do not answer. "Not you. The wall." Water starts seeping through.
He slowly walks towards you, past you, onto the street. You see no cars, or anything else that moves for that matter. "Wait for me!" You run
You enter the alley and see him, transparent. He turns, fixes his gaze on you, gains substance while the world loses its colour. "Finally."
This is especially evident in sacral architecture which encloses/protects/directs religious service. But every building knows its rituals.
Architecture is ossified ritual, alternatively its exoskeleton.
Your timekeeping device literally keeps time, in a battery. You can discharge it to gain one hour of contemplation.
He sells them in sets of five, together with ideas for rituals. Priests are encouraged to trade their temples and find new ways of worship.
But no less consideration goes into them! They are carved out of metal with micron precision and interrelate in endless and surprising ways.
He once designed entire cathedrals, but his clients ran out of money. Now he specializes in portable microtemples, no bigger than dice.