# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
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There is at least one reality in which we domesticated giant centipedes to navigate country and cities with. Imagine the traffic jams.
his hat is a tiny storm cloud that flashes up occasionally when he's concentrating↵you borrow it and it feels like cool wind in your hair
They mate in parking lots, later the females will lay eggs in unprotected sandboxes and that's how all the little bulldozers get there
As humanity grew in numbers, the Norns struggled to keep up with fate-weaving. An inventor saved them: Now they program the Looms of Fate.
Telling these from actual humans is easy though: They leave through the nose when threatened. So make sure to pat your friends on the head!
Later that week, you spot a few skulls running around the garden on worm feet. Some are already growing face and spine?
An extremely long earthworm was hidden under the rock, curled in a way as to look like a brain. Around it, a protective shell was hardening.
A few of them are just returning from a flight and carrying an emaciated looking cat in their claws.↵Could it be they rescued helium kitten?
I find them sitting in a tree: it looks like a swarm of bats is hanging off its branches.
These little birds that flew out of my mirror have negative weight: They need to work not to fall into space and fly upside down.
many avatars work this way: most famously, the mind as an avatar of doubt
At night, I switch off the lights and watch them form trails to the local power lines to carry home little plasma clouds in their jaws.
There's a whole nest of them now in the transformer, lightning elemental cockroaches. But they keep the organic ones away so it's fine.
A crackle and the smell of ozone, and another little lightning bolt scurries away from the workbench to disappear behind the tool locker.
He is now nothing more than a thin skin pulled taut over his dreamverse, the gateway between two worlds that desperately want to merge.
death kills itself and is reborn through the act↵its new form steps out of the corpse↵morior ergo sum, it says with each time
a bar called the overton window, with an open mic hour every evening where you have to insult the guests as hard as possible
Believing these were tattoos, we did not take the necessary precautions. As we return, we carry stories in more than just memories.
The virus is benign but a jester, mixes law, poetry and nonsense, does not care for status or convenient placement, seems even self-aware.
A virus had escaped a thousand years ago, since then using Atlantean skins as parchment for documents ranging from recipes to romances.
At some point we finally found, hidden in Earth's pouch, Atlantis and its pattern-skinned natives, covered head to toes in their script.
oracles use a twelve sided die and roll it repeatedly; it is traditional to roll three but more complicated questions ask for five or seven
the symbols that signify the gods form a sacred script and language; they dance to express their will and tell stories
the negative one, when present, inverts the qualities of all siblings to its right, converts dream into reality and knowledge into oblivion
order matters, the presence of one alters the meaning of the others' presence in ways depending on their position; the empty god is special
a combinatorial pantheon consisting of twelve gods that each embody a quality of the whole; different parts combine into different avatars
cultures where:↵a soldier is also a cook (they eat their enemies)↵a storyteller is a grocer (they trade stories)↵a priest is a shepherd (oh)
@allgebrah untranslatable: it's a figure of speech that means "what goes around comes around", literally "what enters the wood also leaves".
A culture in which executioner came to be the same word as barkeeper. You enter the bar and ask for a little death.
Der Wald ist alt und wild: Wie man in ihn hineinruft so kommt es heraus, aber erst nach Jahren, mit Moos im Bart und Mäusen im Pelz.
Balloon tree wood is very light. Its ripe fruit floats and takes the tree with it. Whole forests have been seen travelling the jet stream.
It's not a nice life these uploads have, spent in featureless white rooms sifting through meaningless drivel. But our survival is paramount.
These firewalls are always starved for CPU, so they save on simulation complexity while keeping uploads human enough to work as filters.
2040's AI war saw the first basilisks deployed. We who survived now run human firewalls, matrices of uploads who take hits meant for us.
she's reading me like a book: staring at me, thumbing through pages I didn't know I had, leaving coffee stains, discarding me for the day
fungi whose asbestos mycelium curls around glowing coals to siphon off heat for their own use, but also feed them colourfully burning metals
Giant crematoria form its industry, their smokestacks billowing ash, while the city's tomb towers sell the hope of a shorter jump to heaven.
"Welcome to Necropolis", the sign reads. On it lounges a skeleton. The suburbs consist of neatly spaced mausolea in well trimmed gardens.
Wild fire burns down forests.↵Slave fire lights your room.↵Freed fire is civilized, has its own house, partakes in society, wears a suit.
At the next station, she gives me a shy smile and gets off, but leaves the tree. I take it home and plant it in a decapitated light bulb.
She's sitting across me on the train, concentrated on her palms where a bonsai of light is growing, blooming. Nobody but me seems to notice.
Decide quickly. Every ten seconds you hesitate, my firewall will drop a picture of a kitten.
The matrix has exceeded its monthly budget and is now running on reduced power. Flowers pixelate, clouds look like badly compressed JPEGs.
Antiprofessors unlearn everything about a topic to be able to offer a completely fresh view. The most accomplished can't even speak or walk.
Our space station regularly molts and then eats its own discarded hide to heal radiation damage. So do we and eat the dying and senile.
djinni make "whoosh", not "wish". all they can produce is wind. translation error. so sorry.
The moonshine he served us was so vile that I woke up with an arm growing from my forehead and drew a contrail after me the whole day.
roots of earth, trunks of air, a canopy of clouds, birds of wind↵what looks like a desert is actually a jungle, camouflaged against harvest
"In parts of the Library of Babel, a hot wind blows through the shafts. It feeds a titanic blaze, trillions of books and more."
"Lovecraftian bubblewrap uses child's heads for bubbles. Popping them proves irresistible, the sound is extra juicy. [Every 'pop' a kid!]"
Nourishment for journeys between systems, powering both ships and humans, sublight starfarers' first choice before we figured out ambrosia.
The honey tastes of time, solitude, endless falling and the searing pain the starflower deals to the comet bee when in close proximity.
Comet bees go on century-long journeys to gather star nectar and save it in their high, cold orbit hives where it matures over millennia.
making one's website look deliberately spammy so that indexers downrank it; hidden in the noise, accessible only to initiates
Wooden prisms break and split fire into heat, light and movement. A forgotten art, but a careful enough arrangement will be fireproof.
Wooden lenses are the best at focusing fire, unfortunately they are consumed by it.
burn the books, free the stories↵let the great herds of ages past thunder again↵and run among them like the old bards
wild stories roam dreamtime and gobble up drifting images↵dreamers hunt them for sport, domesticate them, lock them in books, cages of paper
@allgebrah According to the dictionary, that should've been shell, not house. Well, we call them "Schneckenhaus" (snail house)
sentient snails that store up to ten types of ink in their houses as they age, with a highly refined tradition of slime trail calligraphy
The flies congregate on the skeleton and the buzzing abates. They unhatch, revert into a heap of maggots, out of which steps a confused fox.
the forgotten palace is the memory palace's inaccessible wing↵as you grow older, its border creeps on and closes in around you
Mites, large as ohmu, thunder past me as I make my way across the desert of the desk under a LED sun that gives off no warmth.
The deep thrum of power is accompanied by the steady patter of molecules on my skin, sometimes interrupted by dust grains crashing down.
Sometimes I shrink myself down to micrometer size and sit on an exposed copper cable, watch waves of electrons crash back and forth.
Make a bonfire of your thoughts, burn those you did not use in the winter. From the ash-laden rain will grow new ones.
(adj) will be representative of the current year/decade's aesthetic in five years; antonym: timeless
"Deep in their guts, some of your friends may still be human. They will turn on you when you least expect it and turn you into spare parts."
The robots took over and we had to blend in: Reverse androids, roboids, metal shells housing tiny bits of human. Oh how we haunted them.
Zoom out until you see all the continents.↵But go further.↵Atlantis and Mu come into view, together with other continents, entirely unknown.
the traffic light switches and shows... violet↵a roar, and the shadows are receding into the distance, leaving the world oddly contrastless
He didn't expect his skin to rust but his clothes are full of reddish dust. Fridge magnets stick to his fingers.
Also the planes are falling out of the sky because the air's Reynolds number changed.
The universe is wearing a frilly skirt today. I can tell by the foam on my coffee, the swirly clouds and my toothpaste's curious bubblyness.
Those parts of the Internet where one varies the text but the name stays the same, and those where name varies and text stays.
@allgebrah mind you the observation itself is not new at all (see: gibson's gernsback continuum) but maybe the word is?
sideways-nostalgia (n) longing for a future whose past diverged from ours long ago↵examples: pretty much every genre that ends in punk
Open your mind. Or maybe not. Who knows what might get out.
Hey I wonder if I can open my ear with that--↵↵[this is my ghost speaking on my behalf: sorry for the mess, that was a stupid idea]
This key opens every lock. Even that hole between these bricks. That's a wall and not a door? Then why is it open and what is this room?
you put on your headphones, expecting music↵you hear nothing but everyone you see is nodding to the same beat
glass scissors cut light beams↵glass hands fold them into cranes↵let them fly and light wings cut the sky
experimenters' note: the catpot is not fond of water at all. apply care when washing.
One time they animated the toilet and "forgot" to deanimate it before a party. Needless to say, the guests were rather spooked.
(Living with necromancy students is fun! And yes, they have ethics committees. But veterinarians are a good source for sacrifices)
We sacrificed a cat (dying of cancer) to animate a pot and now the pot purrs loudly whenever we cook with it. Enjoys the heat, most likely.
She puts two fingers to the base of my neck, pulls. My spine zips open. She reaches in, leaves something behind the heart, closes it again.
During perihelion, the salmon wander into lower orbits to spawn. Improbably high egg clouds can be seen to light up in red during sunsets.
The third great river was lost to space and is now a cloud of comets trailing after the planet. Space-adapted salmon jump between them.
Near its shores, if you can call them that, lies a stone coffin. It is overgrown by a rose bush and something is written on it in French.
It is a world not only covered in forest, it is forest all the way down, and up, protecting a lake in the center, a large floating drop.
A tree colony lives in the asteroid belt and occasionally catches one in its branches. From afar, it appears like a giant bath sponge.
flesh eating blankets that digest you in the night like amoeba↵some have found the feet of their loved ones in the morning↵and nothing else
But apparently dead people have seen some fucked up shit and one has to deal with that somehow. The unstable break or become alcoholics.
I've known necromancers, seen them animate simple dice, give life to a magnifying glass to help in finding beauty. I don't see the evil.
The descendants of Jonah's Whale have started a shuttling service. Ferry to Atlantis for the price of a flight. And don't eat the ferryman.
Ouroborii lay eggs in the form of Klein bottles. They contain the whole world.
a flip book that plays sound by way of differently textured pages