tangentiality

2.

“You gotta get your nobility in check”.

3.

“Diamond dyke”.

4.

So there was that paranoid schizophrenic person, a blonde girl with a buzz cut, and somehow she was a friend of mine. She used a Linux distro called “!!!!!!!!____!!!!!”, and convinced me it was the best distro out there. But the way she used it was… very specific.

She called me. She told me the new distro was out, this time it was called “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, and this was the best one. It finally allowed her to observe the area around her neighbourhood right from her PC, through some app, and make pits in the ground. It was done with a touchscreen of a Nintendo DSi connected to her PC with something that looked like an IDE cable. You touch the area of the screen, and the pit will appear outside IRL. This was needed to trap swine-looking creatures in those pits, as they infested the land and were attacking people in packs, turning them into dirty, greyish, half-transparent lumps of gel.

I went to see her, and somehow I knew exactly how it's going to end, as if I decided to replay a game level. She lived in a rotten, mouldy, dark, half-abandoned condo building. She was also a terrible hoarder. I approach the old wooden door of her flat. It was painted over 1000 times and was barely closing. She knew I would come. She rushed outside, looked at me with her moon-sized eyes, grabbed my arm and told me:

I felt a sudden crippling rush of anxiety. I woke up. My heart was absolutely racing. My sight became darker and darker. The chest pain was consuming me, and I could barely move. I almost vomited.

That was quite a night.

5.

There was this place somewhere in the ocean called “United Paper Island”, a bit like paper towns, but a real one. You could only get there via a private jet or a ship that came only like every three months or something. the island was small and… eerie. There was a large bus stop-looking hub in the middle of the island, and it also had streets/housing, but things looked off. Some streets resembled well-known places like Fifth Avenue or Champs-Élysées, but not quite. Everything was half abandoned, and felt like Half-Life 2 maps. A small town that was just a bit too silent. The plot was that we moved there temporarily, and I went for a walk trying to convince ppl that it was okay, it was fine, just a regular place. But I had a gut feeling it was not okay at all.

Then my stupid brain decided to imagine what it would feel like to be buried alive on this island, specifically waking up inside the coffin underground. Then I felt like I was suffocating, and I finally woke up.

First thing I did was immediately grabbing my laptop, opening google maps and trying to find this island. “Paper Island” and “United Paper Island” yielded nothing, obviously. But I *knew* the location.

As I was scrolling around the map, it felt like that knowledge was being erased. I felt that. Just like someone connected to my brain, selected certain files and hit “delete”. After 20 seconds, it was over.

Now I don’t know where this island is.

7.

So, basically, I’m at some mall with Violet Parr, but I’m not Dash. I’m someone else entirely, but still a Mr. Incredible’s child. Producers connect to my thoughts and say “Go to the bathroom”. I oblige, go in and see Mr. Incredible naked, absolutely destroying Frozone’s asshole bareback. He doesn’t see me.

Then, I go meta: “Well, producers now probably want me to find another bathroom!”

Mens' one is closed. Ladies one is open though. “Wait, if Mr. Incredible is there, and we’re in The Incredibles universe, we’re probably not in Russia, and no one will bully me, a little trans kid, if I go to the ladies' bathroom”. I go in and lock myself inside a stall.

Music plays. A hellish hybrid of Tessa Violet from “Crush”…

…and Orla Gartland…

enters the bathroom. The movie suddenly becomes a musical.

As she approaches my stall, she sings:

🎵 Deep down inside, we’re still transphobic 🎵
🎵 Deep down inside, I’m still transphobic 🎵
🎵 But it’s my way to tell the world 🎵
🎵 To shut 🎵
🎵 The fuck 🎵
🎵 UUUUUP 🎵

She proceeds to demolish and twist the stalls.

Suddenly, we see her flashback (well, technically a flash-forward), and there she gives a Ted talk. But it’s a Klan rally, and it’s Ted x KKK. She says the punchline:

“Well, isn’t it nuts 😏
that I twisted steel beams into a thousand knots 😏👉”

The audience erupts into laughter.

We’re back. I run away from her. Cops arrive, and I’m connected directly to Barely Sociable’s video from the future (relative to my present) about Ruth Price, the phone call segment. The original audio is replaced by Tessa/Orla’s voice. She calls cops and says “We’re placed into custody for bullying a trans faggot kid!”

The cop replies, mocking her: “That’s baaaad 🤣, that’s probably baaaaaad 🤣”

Off-screen laughter.

Roll credits.

8.

My drunk grandpa decided to cook fried eggs by just throwing them as-is on an electric burner. They started to explode, smoke filled the small room with no windows. I took my younger sister and we ran away, but the smoke made her turn into a red cat.

Meanwhile, my actual cat slipped into a cavern of quicksand. My cat sister stumbled and started to slide into it too, but I was able to save her. Now she’s crying.

A rabid raccoon attacked me. He has a voice of Nick Wilde from Zootopia, and dirty needles for his teeth. I hold it by his neck, my older sister appears out of nowhere. I don’t know what to do to make the raccoon go away.

For context, she has confirmed IQ of around 140 in the real world. She tells me that the most efficient way to do that is to remove its eyes. Raccoon disagrees. She tells me she’s about to patent a device that removes rabid animals’ eyes easily with no hassle. She then proceeds to pull out a crudely fashioned rusty thing which is just an altered door hinge and proceeds to pop out raccoon’s eyes. She throws them away. Raccoon gets calm and wanders off, stumbling into everything.

I go back to my trailer. I try to park it into a better spot, but it falls on its side. As I escape it, a living rubber helper bolus, a good sibling of the felonious bolus from a PilotResSun’s video, is already there. He tells me it’s a rapist-only zone, and I should be careful.

9.

At 4am there was some random youtuber in my head that reads reddit posts and he presents me one but it's blurry and he says hi there how you there are stupid but how stupid you are, humming hammers, MOMMY THATS SWEET MIAMI MOMMY THATS SWEET MIAMI he's insecure go back then hayeens HIGH WINS HIGH WINS HIGH WINS HIGH WINS and he never stops.

11.

Bam Margera and Macaulay Culkin levitate and rapidly stomp-kick a poor girl that spilled her beer over a ramp.

12.

Tiny rat puppies, but waterborne. They don’t have mouths, but their whole face unfolds like a sheet of paper.

13.

A small instant cocoa package. Pink and blue. It said “Mine. Autonomous. Immaculate.” My sister gave it to me. It was made from human female skeletons, because you can't make them from male ones. Eat it as-is, or dissolve it in milk. It tastes like ketone bodies.

14.

A Garand with forward assist.

15.

“Mucmullan Cabbage”.

16.

I visit the website where every major block has a dashed grid around it. I can move grids, but it doesn’t change anything else. They’re just… there. Victoria Arduino, VP of Deception, sporting her iconic lesbian-esque look. A picture of a white glove, the evidence, with RICH BITCH RICH BITCH RICH BITCH RICH BITCH RICH BITCH RICH BITCH RICH BITCH DIDN’T PAY. “I didn’t sleep, the black sauce almost ruined the evidence, thank GOD I sent it in time”.

17.

I remember that wet-carpeted half-abandoned office floor. Future was sitting there on top of a pile of hard drives, trashing local government.

18.

— We arrange surgeries when in-person interventions are not recommended.
— So…, — I press the pause button on the handrail.
— The perfect maiden. Inside the plastic shell. 80 years old underneath.

19.

Had a dream about computers on earth mostly stopping working for no apparent reason, yes, again. But this time, they still work on Mars, so we go there, at least some of us. UAC-esque, Doom 3-ish aesthetics, but in a good way, no death and no darkness. No hell plot though, we’re all fine. Both earth and mars are equally semi-livable, but in different ways. For some reason, we can’t ship new CPUs to mars, and 775 pentium considered a good CPU. We use SQL and HDDs. Elon is also there, but he’s nothing, a peasant compared to other scientists and engineers who are a part of the exodus. I had some problems with food and shelter initially, but [a certain person] helped me.

20.

Unreal Tournament, but in real life, and you're Lady Gaga.

21.

That rabbit in my grandpa's left table drawer, in the home I grew at. I wanted to finally catch it, and kill it. I was bad with animals all along, especially this one. My grandpa died the year before I was born, and my grandma said we would've got along really well. So much to talk about, a scientist to an engineer. So, I travelled back, but my home somehow turned from a city stone-walled house into a half-soaked, decaying wooden one. I caught that rabbit though, but while I was holding it at its neck and twisting it, it somehow disappeared, distributed evenly as if I were twisting a crayon. I was trying to find it, but in that left drawer, among century-old pencils and that red liquid thermometer I played with as a kid, only a faded out, dusty duckling resided. I picked it up, and unlike the rabbit, it was paper, no, cigarette paper thin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to run away. It just turned from yellow to grey, feathers leaving my fingers covered in fine dust. I realized it will never die, dwelling and decaying there forever, happy.

I did my calculations, and I knew for a fact when and where the rabbit should've appeared. It was the middle drawer, not the left one. I opened it and looked in anticipation how something chewed through the bottom. I caught it, but it was no rabbit, it was an alive, rubber rat. The rubber was white turned grey, old, aged, dusty, probably Soviet. I poked the rat's eye with a pen rod, but the rat's body inflated a bit, leaving it invincible. It was mocking me.

Of the same white rubber, a ball appeared. I knew for a fact it was alive too, I felt the bones inside holding it. I found its lips, and was prying it open. The massive, dry mouth emerged, with a full set of human teeth, albeit wider and nastier ones. Huge eyes looked at me. It was alive, it was intelligent. It was my grandpa's personal financial assistant all along. It told me to leave the rat and the rabbit alone. He told me not to worry about the ducking, as it was in safe hands.

It made friends with my brother during the “blue epoch”, when he was wearing thin, worn out rugs instead of clothes, tiny faded blue flowers on them, screaming and annoying my grandma he lived with in that room, not a single person other than the two in sight. The house was slowly submerging. The water was rising.

22.

Joel Spolsky told me I looked “submissive and breedable”.

23.

Rick Flair’s voice saying “ostentatious, yeeeah” over and over again slightly changing the tone like in that “Doctor Deuce dot com”.

24.

I had a dream about the end of the world. Corona won. Almost nothing works, almost all the people are dead. But we are, with those who are still alive, chilling and having fun looking at destroyed, burning Golden Gate.

26.

This night I had a fever and seen a weird dream. So, scientists discovered that our whole perspective is wrong, and the notion that anything is but a sum of its parts is now completely irrelevant. One can’t disassemble a thing and know how it works and what it consists of. Basically you want to build a computer, you buy all the parts you need, but you can’t assemble it anymore — it just doesn’t work, and nobody knows why. Same is true for cars, industrial machines, software and pretty much anything that have something to do with engineering.

So, earth went into riots, massive layoffs occured, world economy collapsed, and the forces of what used to be USA, China and Russia joined to tackle the problem. A research was started and we found out that we now have complexity cores (!) that distribute emergence (!!) in an ephemeral way (!!!) and that is what makes things work. Theory of New Complexity (!) emerged, and all the engineers were required to go back to universities to attend lectures about how complexity works and how to make things in that new reality.

27.

“Tom stands for Tom Holland the airport hero that I passed by at the age 7”.

28.

I just had a nightmare like I open the fridge and there is a cup with rotten slices of ham inside it and I look around and there is my ex with 8 hands telling me to E A T I T

And there is a feeling of complete helplessness and immense fear like I'm going to die right there. It was like you’re suffocating in your sleep. It was awful.

29.

“WINDOWS REMORSE CENTER”.

30.

It’s midnight and I clearly remember having a graphing calculator with every button saying “SISTER” instead of whatever it needs to say.

31.

It’s 3am. Now in my head I see the TV ad of some kind of flu medicine that has the “Sardisj – that’s all we have” as its slogan and a happy smiling family in it.

32.

I gave an interview about my ex and why she died.

My other ex got involved in huge marketing campaign of a new laser surgery by receiving said surgery but they somehow completely evaporate her pelvic and hip bones with laser. I saw her body after that happened.

I somehow live in 2003 Netherlands and work for some scientific lab as a frontend developer. All that ie and ancient JavaScript shit but I like that, processes and culture are flawless.

Many other weird shit regarding self-driving vehicles being a mainstream and me owning one, my grandma turning evil and send swat to take me down, also I met a lot of hipsters at DEFCON and I don’t know why are they there.

33.

It’s 2am. This is what I think about: a baby head but it’s a cheaply made plastic toy toilet that is somehow narrow like a pez dispenser, I put some green plastic stuff in its “mouth” and close it and I’m like oh no why I did this he’s gonna swallow it and there’s kanye in the background screaming “grand theft auto grand theft auto we’re in a game we’re in a game”.

I’m scared. I can’t sleep. My heart goes like 180bpm for no reason.

34.

Someone says “wrap your head around” something, It happens every time.

It’s always 50/50. The one times the head of the person inside my head turns into a play-doh kind of sausage that wraps around a random object, usually a cube, and his face looks confused. It’s hard to separate his head from his neck and it terrifies me.

The other times the head appears extremely solid and has an overall round shape, then I subconsciously try to forcefully wrap it around that object but it doesn’t work and that person screams. It terrifies me even more.

I don’t know what exactly I did wrong to become like this and I can’t remember when it all started.

36.

(Yes, it's in Russian. I wrote it down right after I woke up. I have no idea what it means.)

(Rough translation:)

Did you watch. An old advertisement with [nonsence] type
The head is put on its side on top of a table when the cafe is closed, and is being posted in Telegram
The persistent information storage/stretcher turn people into zombies
[nonsence] Depp robot on Mars Doom can [nonsence] act deliberately

37.

The criminal stench.

38.

The son's knife.

39.

40.

Нож сына
Криминальная вонь
Вещи почему саможив

41.

We're running near the uni. There are a lot of suspiciously slender kids laying on the ground.

One kid is buried. His legs stick out of the ground. He's not breathing.