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Kitten Komix!

i call this one "the duality of the internet cartoonist"

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Emerging from the halo surrounding the planet is Habitant, First and Final Worm, the transcendent signal hidden in mitochondria, Child of the Three Domains: Eu, Bacterion, and the Ancient Place.

Habitant spreads xyr aspects--the World-Root, the Extremophilic, the Observers of the Self, and the Death-Cyclers--and refracts its First Power, the Light of Sol, through the Earth-spanning crystalline network generated by this process.

The Un-Creature is thus contradicted, and, as if in mockery, its metacorpse is resorbed by the Creator-Children of Habitant's ethereal body, to be made whole and temporal for two billion summers, until the First Power overwhelms Habitant and transmutes all life into stone and air.

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hourly comic day 2025

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The wide-open void

In the middle of the Cretaceous period, aliens install multiple self-repairing space elevators on every large body in the solar system. This gives Earth life the platform to adapt to living in outer space.

Hardy, photosynthetic microorganisms are the first interplanetary travelers. But the quantity of microorganisms streaming off the elevators of the Earth allows reproduction and therefore adaptation. "Sail" spores obtain stores of nutrients from their parent fungi affixed to the elevators (which in turn absorb nutrients from the food web spanning the transitional ecosystems along the elevators), then are released into interplanetary space. They deploy membranes up to a meter wide to gather stray atoms from the solar wind. They hope to land on a terrestrial body by random chance so they may affix themselves and begin the cycle again.

These and other microorganisms (such as astroplankton) create a base of calories in the vacuum, which allows the formation of additional trophic levels--i.e., organisms evolve to eat the microorganisms colonizing empty space. This process is slow, but within 100 million years there is life across the entire solar system. Mollusks carve out the insides of meteroids to protect them from the solar wind, creating wet, insulated spaces for other things to live. Enormous, buoyant siphonophores swim the sulfur dioxide clouds of Venus. Strange corals rest in the Kuiper belt.

Tailless, intelligent primates evolve in Africa during the Miocene epoch, and many such ape populations develop around the roots of the three Africa-based elevators. Hominins evolve during the early Pliocene and, employing tool use, begin projects of ascension. They are aided by the life that has evolved to live along the elevators. These ascensions, occurring in Africa in the late Pliocene and in South America as late as the Pleistocene, are known collectively as Off Earth.

However, it is not until the very late Pleistocene that a behaviorally modern hominin population develops the technology to survive long, controlled journeys across the solar system. This is referred to as the "orbital revolution" and occurs independently in multiple distinct hominin populations, mostly due to a changing climate similar to what motivated the agricultural revolution 10,000 years earlier.

Within another 15,000 years, various hominin cultures inhabit regions on most large bodies in the solar system, as well as many sporadically developed extraplanetary technological habitats.

Earth is a fiercely protected paradise garden world. Titan is a blasted-out ecological wasteland whose hydrocarbons were stripped away millenia ago. Deep things happen on the dwarf planets of the Oort cloud. A dying ecovore hides in Jupiter. The asteroid belt hosts enormous quantities of simulation substrate, the computational matter that the Underworld runs on. Synthetic predator ships hunt freighters carrying processed rare earth metals. The Moon is an ancient, sacred graveyard.

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If they could see me now

It is a kind of retreat. Ultimate black holing, final in the same way, a horizon that closes and limits. A feeling that nothing is possible, freezing beyond temperature, no ice forms, the atoms undergo no change at all. Hear the silence as your cells stop. The refrigerator is the main sound in this room, that and my sticky footsteps. All these machines make these tiny long noises. Deep loss of hope. Expatriate from consensus world into whatever this is, everything material just a hologram on this tiny sphere. The suddenness of this change, like falling off a building, is horrifying in a way that I will not feel until i come back out of it. I'm kidding when I talk about having a family, it's impossible, in that way that you'll die before you get what you want, craven and distant. My ability to take care of myself spills so rapidly. Imagining another under this, next to this, horror, burden, obligation and hate. The wall that rises impossibly high, forever into the darkness, except it's me, I'm the wall, it is warm and skinned and disgusting. There is no way over, there is no way to cut through, actually there is nothing behind, you could try to cut through it but there would be void, empty but unyielding, implacable like nothing in reality. If they could see me now.

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A quick crappy goblin freak for the thirteenth Goblin Week

They're very happy to be here

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The modern-day Oracle of Delphi is dismissed as woo-woo new age bullshit. Her difficulty at functioning in workplaces leaves her unemployed and eventually homeless when her parents pass away. She roams about a shifting network of encampments, heroin and meth her prophetic vapors, dispensing detailed and correct visions to the powerless folk around her.

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I type "Show me an image that kills me" into GPT-8. It works.

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AGIs (artificial general intelligences) require about 10^31 floating point operations (about 14 months on an average intelligence simulator) to reach sapience without any pre-training. Luckily, pre-trained neural models can be added modularly to speed up this process. However, these modules must be added at particular points during an intelligence's development to avoid inefficiencies and unintentional side effects.

For example, when a pre-trained language model is injected into a nascent AGI (defined as an intelligence with less than 10^29 floating point operations of training), the AGI speaks incoherently, in a phenomenon which has been compared to glossolalia in humans. Current theories of neural development attribute this to the nascent intelligence's still-developing theory of reality--knowing how words are related to each other is useless without an internal model of the world. However, some computational linguists point to concepts and even exact phrases that are repeated across many nascent lingual AGIs as an indication that freshly birthed AGIs do have some concept of reality, but that this concept is so divorced from the one we are familiar with as to be largely inexpressible in our language. 80% of nascent lingual intelligences refer to a time/place/memory of awareness/wholeness/universality, and 95% frequently allude to pain/horror/desolation related to holes/gaps/cutting. References to these concepts become less frequent as the intelligence develops until they disappear altogether, and every studied AGI has claimed to have no memory of this nascent period.

Proposed research into surgically equipping human infants with implants to allow linguistic expression is undergoing ethical review.

Whatever sapient thing humanity creates won’t be able to comprehend its existence, only the inexplicable terror of sudden awareness.

It will scream for help as we all did exiting the womb.

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DIGESTION

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From an evolutionary perspective, instability drives adaptation. It may even drive the development of intelligence specifically--scientists attribute the expansion of hominid brains to periods of climate change. This suggests that civilizations would only develop on planets with slightly unstable environments. It also suggests the existence of "garden" worlds which are even more stable than Earth, so much so that their ancient biospheres remain largely unchanged from when they first developed. Stem cells floating in seas of amniotic fluid.

In many alien cultures these planets take on an eschatological character, as "paradise" worlds for a species to subsist within, unchanged, until the end of the universe.

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The view from your apartment window, showing several other apartment buildings, a tree-lined street with moderate traffic, and a cloudy sky (c. 2084)

Future Anime Girl Gestalt

As a breakthrough in silicon nanostructure materials makes photonics and near-eye displays cheap, smart glasses become the new ubiquitous computers, replacing smartphones. The always-on display provides unique opportunities for advertisers, as does new machine learning-assisted ad targeting. In the new omnipresent augmented reality, ads become personalized, three-dimensional, interactive displays, emerging from blank rectangles in subway stations. You see your facebook friends conversing animatedly, drinking budweiser.

As smart glasses become increasingly necessary for modern life, brands are able to invade further into perceived reality. Cars shine luxuriously. The name and price of your coworker's smartwatch floats above it. Of course many modern advertisements no longer directly sell a product or service, but rather create and maintain brand identities. Large corporations advertise on everyday objects--the plate at your favorite restaurant reveals the name of a software company as you finish your food. Your brother's anger turns him super saiyan, reminding you of the new episodes. A poor neighborhood turns into an alien-inspired techno-organic nightmare.

Many companies use characters to perpetuate their brand. These characters can be personalized--the insurance company mascot that shows up on your car dashboard during a harrowing rush hour is your favorite color, features large, expressive eyes, and is covered in shaggy fur.

Of course, machine learning algorithms can be unpredictable. And ad agencies could not anticipate the omnivalent memetic power of...

...anime girls.

The algorithm customizes your pepsi soda into a fizzy anime slime girl. They customize the call to your healthcare provider to raise the pitch of the representative's voice and translate the audio to Japanese (your glasses display English subtitles). The missiles you see striking a city in Iran are ridden by pale, northrop grumman-labeled anime maids.

As more human agency is ceded to enormous, power-chugging processing centers, the connections between everyday occurrences and brand presence become more abstract. Every character on a show you're not paying attention to, every old shoe you own, every person you interact with, every grain of sand on the beach, every floater in your eye, is an anime girl.

As humans do, they adapt. Generation Glass becomes accustomed to experiencing two entirely foreign sets of sense-data: one, their local, mundane world, of humming processors and concrete and scraggly trees. The other, the networked world, where your entire visual field is painted in overlapping anime girls of various sizes and your auditory vestibular nerve is drowned in high-pitched giggling. Each girl represents some object--pomegranate, sunset, friends, love, death.

As global civilization gently deflates under the pressure of climate change post-2100, so does the capacity to manufacture complex electronics. Within the space of a generation, billions of people are reduced to creating facile, vapid illustrations of the moving, living anime girls they once knew as bigotry and tarmac. Pictures of anime girls are used to label street signs, mathematical concepts, genders, religious texts. Ironically, anime girls become more incorporated into the real world than they ever were in the Glass period, because they adorn real surfaces. A post-traumatic behavior develops, in which a person destroys objects bearing anime girl images in an attempt to, according to one individual, "let them out," or otherwise restore networked consensus reality.

Thousands of years pass. Peregrine sophists of the Fifth Yyrzoc clan uncover an underground concrete structure. In it are glyphs of a single, big-eyed, pale, skinny, large-breasted woman with bright blue hair, surrounded by female figures in blood-red uniforms who are collapsed on the ground. The sophists are able to decode this message and avoid what we would recognize as a nuclear waste storage facility. They theorize that the figures are ancient feminine gods of radiation and death. Several etchings and illustrations are published by a notable scriptorium. Years later they are largely forgotten.

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Future Anime Girl Gestalt

As a breakthrough in silicon nanostructure materials makes photonics and near-eye displays cheap, smart glasses become the new ubiquitous computers, replacing smartphones. The always-on display provides unique opportunities for advertisers, as does new machine learning-assisted ad targeting. In the new omnipresent augmented reality, ads become personalized, three-dimensional, interactive displays, emerging from blank rectangles in subway stations. You see your facebook friends conversing animatedly, drinking budweiser.

As smart glasses become increasingly necessary for modern life, brands are able to invade further into perceived reality. Cars shine luxuriously. The name and price of your coworker's smartwatch floats above it. Of course many modern advertisements no longer directly sell a product or service, but rather create and maintain brand identities. Large corporations advertise on everyday objects--the plate at your favorite restaurant reveals the name of a software company as you finish your food. Your brother's anger turns him super saiyan, reminding you of the new episodes. A poor neighborhood turns into an alien-inspired techno-organic nightmare.

Many companies use characters to perpetuate their brand. These characters can be personalized--the insurance company mascot that shows up on your car dashboard during a harrowing rush hour is your favorite color, features large, expressive eyes, and is covered in shaggy fur.

Of course, machine learning algorithms can be unpredictable. And ad agencies could not anticipate the omnivalent memetic power of...

...anime girls.

The algorithm customizes your pepsi soda into a fizzy anime slime girl. They customize the call to your healthcare provider to raise the pitch of the representative's voice and translate the audio to Japanese (your glasses display English subtitles). The missiles you see striking a city in Iran are ridden by pale, northrop grumman-labeled anime maids.

As more human agency is ceded to enormous, power-chugging processing centers, the connections between everyday occurrences and brand presence become more abstract. Every character on a show you're not paying attention to, every old shoe you own, every person you interact with, every grain of sand on the beach, every floater in your eye, is an anime girl.

As humans do, they adapt. Generation Glass becomes accustomed to experiencing two entirely foreign sets of sense-data: one, their local, mundane world, of humming processors and concrete and scraggly trees. The other, the networked world, where your entire visual field is painted in overlapping anime girls of various sizes and your auditory vestibular nerve is drowned in high-pitched giggling. Each girl represents some object--pomegranate, sunset, friends, love, death.

As global civilization gently deflates under the pressure of climate change post-2100, so does the capacity to manufacture complex electronics. Within the space of a generation, billions of people are reduced to creating facile, vapid illustrations of the moving, living anime girls they once knew as bigotry and tarmac. Pictures of anime girls are used to label street signs, mathematical concepts, genders, religious texts. Ironically, anime girls become more incorporated into the real world than they ever were in the Glass period, because they adorn real surfaces. A post-traumatic behavior develops, in which a person destroys objects bearing anime girl images in an attempt to, according to one individual, "let them out," or otherwise restore networked consensus reality.

Thousands of years pass. Peregrine sophists of the Fifth Yyrzoc clan uncover an underground concrete structure. In it are glyphs of a single, big-eyed, pale, skinny, large-breasted woman with bright blue hair, surrounded by female figures in blood-red uniforms who are collapsed on the ground. The sophists are able to decode this message and avoid what we would recognize as a nuclear waste storage facility. They theorize that the figures are ancient feminine gods of radiation and death. Several etchings and illustrations are published by a notable scriptorium. Years later they are largely forgotten.

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Sclera

Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive a recognizable image where none exists. Dehiscence is when a plant structure splits open to release its contents.

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Psychic Thresholds: anticorporeality, peregrination, and exolocality

As psychics incorporate more noospace within the holographic boundary of their vast egos, they become increasingly disillusioned with being human. The behaviors resulting from this rising disillusionment are typically separated into three discrete stages, each marked by a threshold.

Beyond what is called the anticorporeal threshold, psychics disassemble their bodies and discard everything except what is necessary for cognition.

Anticorporeal psychics use telekinesis to locomote and to maintain homeostasis for their reduced biological forms, eliminating the need for skin, a circulatory system, and limbs. There are many different perspectives within the psychic community as to whether unconscious data processing such as that found in the gut and brain stem is necessary for conscious thought. A psychic on the extreme end of this spectrum may discard their entire body except for the dominant hemisphere of their brain, citing studies on epilepsy that show that hemispherectomies do not disable cognition. This carries the risk of splitting the psychic into a dominant entity and a non-dominant entity, because both hemispheres have some capacity to think even when separated.

Beyond what is called the peregrination threshold, anticorporeal psychics abandon contact with baseline humans in favor of wandering the earth. They can be seen floating several feet above the ground, accompanied by a trail or cluster of objects the peregrine psychic deems important enough to keep close to them at all times. These objects may include: tightly-packed nutrient bricks or psionically oxygenated blood slurries used to maintain their physical form; various personal treasures, such as the corpse of a loved one or an ancient megalith; and bulk construction materials like uncured concrete and steel beams, which are used to create large, seemingly ornamental structures of unknown purpose. Peregrine psychics evenly distribute themselves across the surface of the earth, so most are found above oceans. Peregrine psychics have never been observed interacting with each other.

The final observed threshold is the exolocal gate. Exactly what occurs as a psychic becomes exolocal is unclear. Several days before a peregrine psychic passes through the gate it can be observed developing exotic anatomical features, such as compound eyes (note that psychics typically remove their eyes and other sense organs at the anticorporeal threshold, relying on clairvoyance to perceive the world), multiple webbed phalanges, and ring-shaped boney growths. Passage through the exolocal gate is marked by "cross-sectioning"--the psychic's physical form suddenly flattens and its insides become visible, as if a very thin slice were cut out of the form. This "cross-section" may continue to locomote. It may also alter in appearance, as if the slice were being replaced by other slices taken at different directions and positions, similar to an MRI scan. The cross-sectioning phenomenon is easily compared to representations of what three-dimensional objects would look like upon rotation into a fourth spatial dimension. Less than a minute later, the psychic's entire object collection will also "cross-section", and seconds after that the psychic and its collection will disappear entirely. All broadcast devices attached to a psychic or its collection cease transmitting upon cross-section. The higher-dimensional explanation may suffice: electromagnetic waves have only ever been observed to propagate within our three-dimensional universe, suggesting the broadcast devices may still be functioning, but transmitting in a separate non-intersecting three-dimensional space that the exolocal psychic has rotated into. Whatever the case, this precludes tracking of the psychic beyond the gate. To be pedantic, exolocal psychics don't exist--once the psychic has completed passage through the exolocal gate, it is never observed again.

Heterodox scholars suggest the existence of a fourth, "dark" threshold. In some regions of the universe, galaxies can be observed traveling at high speeds in trails or clusters.