# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
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The bridge has collapsed but its stones still remember arch and purpose. They sigh in happy fulfilment as I step over them.
Their senses and nervous system are purely mechanical: they home in on air disturbances. A few of these will keep your garden mosquito-free.
Flytree leaves are somewhat autonomous and hunt insects on busy evenings. Symbiotic fungi feed the prey's nutrients back into the tree.
You may call them imaginary but give them some credit: They imagine you back. It is mutually assured existence, no less.
A heavy cable is hanging from that storm cloud, ending in a power plug at my feet. I feel like it's a bad idea to unplug it right now.
in your backyard is a pond of kerosene and in the morning, tiny jet planes come to drink
wear glass chainmail to protect against laser swords
images of these predators (for us, indistinguishable from normal fire) are carved on some furniture to scare off the gentler vegetarian fire
Baba Yaga's teenage daughter had her house ride a pogo stick.
lesser known phoenixes:↵one liquefies on death. leaves a fetid mess↵one dissolves into noxious swamp gas↵one crumbles into sand and pebbles
someone has burnt all the bridges / but I travel by boat ♫↵locked up by the tower's witches / its key is in my coat ♪
knock pause knock pause knock pause knockknock pause↵who's there?↵rhythm!
ideas rust when stored improperly. put them out while they're fresh and gleaming.
don't carry that name for too long. it may grow in.
The uncircus' entrance leads us into the ring. The audience is all clowns and mimes. We sit down and they erupt in silent rustling applause.
Weeks of research until I plotted the data. Saw teeth, coming closer quickly. I closed the lid not a bit too soon, but my laptop was fried.
64 dancers enter, 65 emerge. Nobody knows who the 65th is.↵One can reverse the dance too and the missing dancer will be just as mysterious.
Unsure what to expect, you enter the freak show. Beautiful people are pointing at you with curious disgust in their faces.
I got time to kill, he says, loads his shotgun with gears and springs and disappears through the clock's smashed face.
my ingroup is very obscure, you've probably never heard of it
thick clouds pervade the tanasinn dens in the data haven↵you hear the junkies' muffled cries and someone is trying to sell you ringtones
and then there are the immortal faces: either because they are ugly and passed on as quickly as possible, or because they are regal insignia
those who are seen wearing the same face for years are either very virtuous or very lonely
"why are you wearing his face WHY DID YOU CHEAT ON ME" "I-I did not expect our faces to swap" "WHY AAAAH"
what if the first kiss between two people exchanged their faces?↵↵she comes up to you, "hey, want to trade?" [you try to ignore her stubble]
people have been swapping faces at random and your face blindness is suddenly a blessing because you still recognize your friends
ism (v)↵not only having an idea, but writing the book on it, founding a movement↵"I had this great idea but some guys ism'd it in the 19th"
They are hippies. They weave wires and cut up circuit boards into their hair, dance naked about plastic fires, trip on salvaged VR goggles.
attempted def: meme magic is internet mediated hyperreality's brand of magic. it becomes real wherever the internet is about itself.
alien magic betrays their own perceptual biases, so it is incompatible to ours and exactly as incomprehensible as their minds
fascinating possibility: we really are made in the world soul's image because its own kind are the patterns it is disposed to see
magic as tricking reality into seeing patterns in the noise↵magic as imposing human perception on reality
Commuting to work. To my right is an unfamiliar sea. The city comes into view, all the buildings are on stilts now, some are walking around.
Car chase scene: She bites into an apple, spits a seed out of the window. The police car crashes into a fully grown apple tree.
fake fire that mimics real fire to protect itself against predators
warning sign: open minds strictly prohibited, sparks may cause epistemic fire
Qualia was solved and we started cataloguing colors, postulated a periodic system, discovered a new primary color with a half life of a week
we caught the desert: lured it in with a big fat oasis, surrounded it with mountains, then reined it in with rivers
Lift the cow's skull against your ears and you can hear the desert, sand grinding down bones
the asphalten god of the streets slithers along the plains, leaving a slime trail of civilization
as the smog lifts, you briefly spot it three blocks away↵it looks at you and you smell spilled gasoline, hear the rumble of the subway
the god of the city wanders between skyscrapers, buildings aging by decades under its gaze, a dozen street signs sprouting from its head
Now that the cells are specializing, we do the same: Those living on the brain become prone to brooding, those on the skin grow scales.
We failed to stop the comet but then, it simply sank into the crust. We were relieved until a year later, Earth split in two. Then four.
When it hits a city, it chews up houses and streets and leaves them remodeled in its wake: like a wave, or a giant slug teeming with people.
On one end of the temple, the cranes stand and build. On the other, the demolition crews are at work. This way, it travels the land.
devolve :: delete↵evolve :: elete↵?
attach a plant fibre cable to the tree and tap into the secret forest radio: news from the front, fungus warnings, bird songs, tree dating
the narrative giveth [power] and it taketh away [autonomy]
did you know that everything you drink wine out of also produces music? wineskins (bagpipes), glasses (glass harps), your enemies' skulls (\n2016-03-24T22:22:35+01:00\tViolins nurse their young with a special milky song. To hear it, steal their mewling children and place surrogates in their stead.\n2016-03-24T00:14:04+01:00\tThe knife sings jubilantly as it slashes through reality and leaves ribbons that float... down? I've never seen that direction before\n2016-03-24T00:13:42+01:00\tTurned out there were many equivalent theories of everything, but each appealed to a different audience and required another consciousness.\n2016-03-24T00:04:33+01:00\tPicture of paper tiger↵in the wild (it's hiding in the gaps)
did you know that everything you drink wine out of also produces music? wineskins (bagpipes), glasses (glass harps), your enemies' skulls (
Violins nurse their young with a special milky song. To hear it, steal their mewling children and place surrogates in their stead.
The knife sings jubilantly as it slashes through reality and leaves ribbons that float... down? I've never seen that direction before
Turned out there were many equivalent theories of everything, but each appealed to a different audience and required another consciousness.
Picture of paper tiger↵in the wild (it's hiding in the gaps)
Recently it has been hunted for its fur: wild stories, written by no one.
The tiger is patterned/blank, striped in words and spaces, to hide better in books. It preys on weak sentences and unsuspecting readers.
the robots are bulletproof, but their heads make a satisfying ping when a bullet hits↵so fire away and play the soundtrack of your death
it's not strong AI if you can outdrink it
You would think that gutting and frying one would work? That's what the sewer dwellers used to think! No such luck.
This rat species feigns its death so well that many predators have died eating it: It claws its way out from the inside.
Kids these days don't know what they're missing, they should really get out into nature more.
Went for a walk in the forest today. Asphalt under my feet, telephone poles swaying in the wind, a smell of ozone, chirping wires. Sublime.
the monsters are having a party under my bed and I am not invited↵I don't mind them usually, they're cleanly, but sometimes...
avoids most of the icky math that underlies actual crypto, so it is no reader kryptonite. and different enough to not be cyberpunk pastiche.
I imagine merchant guilds and bankers would be right behind that and implement various baroque schemes, maybe even smart contracts
by giving away the knots (which look like wristbands when the secret is fully entangled) you can implement secret escrow and OTP
e.g. depending on how the knots work (can you exchange them and expect decryption to work the same?) you can implement different schemes
[At which point world builder brain piped up and was like "hey it works essentially like crypto! magic compatible!"]↵https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/712422004343840769
With the right finger movements, you can braid your thoughts or truss up secrets so tightly that nobody can extract them from you.
If you unknot these thoughts, the tangles will find their way into the twine again. Cheating is impossible. But that makes the knot useful.
The Thought (K)not tangles with your mind and is indestructible by force. Solve it with your fingers, pay in knotted thoughts.
What looked like dreadlocks were in fact finely machined braids, overall encoding roughly one megabyte of encrypted data.
Only much later, they found out how the spy had smuggled the documents and ironically, the proverbial comb would've helped catch him.
Ein Windzug geht durchs Zimmer, es klingt ein leises Horn und Schienen rattern. In der Tür siehst du gerade noch Rücklichter entschwinden.
A hermit treasure on the way won its heart (a large sapphire). But the order in its mouth proved stronger. When it left, the sapphire broke.
Along its way, it found much solitude, but also trawlers, sunken cities, the Kraken (fun guy!), more sessile treasures and once, love.
The golem had a lot of time to think: Was it still a treasure when there was nobody to appreciate it? What would happen when it arrived?
The pirates didn't bury the treasure, they golemified it: put the map in its mouth and told it to walk the seafloor to the other side.
Over night, remove your eyes and put them into the glass of isotonic solution besides your bed. You don't want them to grow into your skull.
A glance up to your room's light: The marbles orbiting your head align to eclipse it and the moths stand out against the shadows.
Over the weeks, you can see the plates shift and volcanoes rise and fall. You resist the urge to scratch, these jungles take days to regrow.
On your arm is an ocean. Clouds slowly swirl and form into a hurricane. It travels towards your hand, a continent full of fertile jungles.
A hourglass with multiple chambers that are connected like a 3D maze: You have to turn it on exactly the right side every hour to solve it.
A little land octopus that mimics native flowers to prey on bees and hummingbirds with its tentacular blossom.
The source of the mysterious blight in the outer provinces has been revealed: The kingdom's map had been stored wrong and gotten moldy.
As he is sitting on the chair, his arms and legs are dissolving into a swarm of colibris that settles on his head like a feathery crown.
♪ I kissed the sun / and liked it / and lived to tell the tale ♫♪
As a general rule, don't date anything with non-negligible surface gravity.
Your awareness fractures, a gnawing and buzzing fills your ears. The last thing you see is a skeleton, picked clean, receding under you.
Where he runs his fingers over your skin, it dissolves into maggots. It's like a zipper opening to reveal your actual flesh.
be the tentacular horror you want to see in your dreams
Carry the reality catcher around your neck and it'll protect you from misfortune and boring days: you will simply not remember them.
The bus must've taken a wrong turn somewhere, the stops aren't familiar at all: St. Cailleach cathedral, fishman ghetto, old cerberite mine
On once civilized planets lie the spores of a predator species, dormant until found by another civilization, who they then devour.
the shadow biosphere exists: living shadows that throw dead objects, shadow bacteria that break down yours into a diffuse undefined mass