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
Анти кольца
Вещи почему саможив
Влад мочалка

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.

42.

You jailbreak phones by strapping them to firecrackers.

43.

A house with an elevator that is just wide enough for one person standing sideways, and it can also travel horizontally between houses. Also, near an entrance, there is an orchestra pit, but it's filled with expired smoked meat. There is also a garbage chute, but it's just a well right in the middle of the house between staircases. It also has bars and mesh instead of walls, so everyone can smell everything. It can only be emptied from the roof.

44.

There was a war. We lived in a leftist camp inside an abandoned railway station. The only thing that could break the siege was BLA

[dream fragment lost]

So they lined us up. There was ten of us.
— Do you want the leftist future?
— No…, they made me say.
— Do you love capitalism?
— Yes…, they made me say.
— Ты готова присниться?, they asked my female comrade (“are you ready to come to our soldiers in their dreams to support them?”)
— Yes.
— Ты готов расшибиться?, they asked me (“are you ready to work your ass off, dying in the process if necessary?”. It also makes a perfect rhyme with the previous russian sentence)
— Yes.
Then, they tied our hands and hung us onto a rack. They doused us with gasoline.
— Look. Czechoslovakia had Jan Palach. We have ten Jan Palachs now!

They set us on fire. I feel an unimaginable pain. I wake up for ten minutes.

When I fell asleep again, I found out I survived it. But, my body underwent modifications: first, I now had a vinyl shell for my skin. Underneath it were raw muscles. Second, I no longer had vocal cords. I no longer had voice.

In this world, we were slaves (“Тяговые люди”) ruled by BLA. There were no prisons. Instead, there was only two punishments: the “light” one and the “heavy” one. First one is your shell getting ripped off. You die in around 20 miinutes of agonizing pain, like mink that is skinned alive in Chinese leather tanneries. But, compared to the second one, that was a slap on the wrist.

The "heavy" punishment was them injecting you with “The Ferment”. Immediately, your mind is altered into total obedience. Then, your body begins to turn into corpse juice. To outside observers, you die in 30 days. But for you, it feels like forever, as time speeds up indefinitely, and you're drifting into endless sorrow. When you die, no one notices, as your shell is still there. But instead of you, there's now nothing but corpse juice inside.

I now worked in some location that resembled Duke Nukem 3D's first map. My job was to remove those plastic shells. I had no bottom — it was replaced with a concrete cube that felt pain just like damaged tooth enamel does. An endless queue of shells moved in front of me. I had to remove their shells, to peel them off like vinyl.

Some people were alive underneath. They still had their skin. They thanked me, smile at me and wander away. Some of them were alive, but had no skin. That means I was the one to execute a “light” punishment on them. Some of them weren't there. I pop the shell open, and it deflates as corpse juice pours out.

One of my previous dreams was the following: “— We arrange surgeries when in-person interventions are _not recommended_. — So…, — I press the pause button on the handrail. — The perfect maiden. Inside a plastic shell. 80 years old underneath.”

Now I understand it. The first speaker was a BLA researcher. “I” was an investor. The “perfect maiden” was me, but way in the future from my today's dream. It all fits together.

45.

The default girl. A girl without name. Blonde, young, in high school. Her name is whatever the most popular female name is right now. It changes. She must dress in the most popular clothing, she must accept name changes, she must shape her entire being around zeitgeist. Otherwise, she's punished severely, and sometimes it's cruel even, by no one other than her own parents. Raising a kid like this is a part of the ritual.

— Gotcha. I caught this cat, and because it makes its own replicas, you must release the cat you caught, as we should only catch one cat one time.
— No. Look closely! I wasn't lying when I told you cats of this breed had life expectancy of two years. There are clones of two cats, not one.
— Oh… Yes, this one is kinda… dim? Sad?
— I brought you a new cat. It's the same breed. Sorry that you're learning about their real life expectancy just now. Now get that damn girl and bring her to the facility.

46.

Plastic rugs.

47.

Because I lacked a portable storing solution (pockets weren't allowed), I couldn't find anything better than using my own skull as a storage box. It turned out it had way more room than expected. The brain itself is quite small, and the whole frontal lobe & the space around the brain is completely empty. Initially, opening the skull was scary and cumbersome, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. Once upon a time, when I tried to pop an acne on my forehead, the hole was revealed, and it led to the storage space beneath. I have no idea how it happened, but apparently the skin is too thin. The bone also looks much thicker from the inside. There were two wires — red and black — leading to a standard PC speaker every old computer had. I wasn't a cyborg, mind you, I merely put that speaker there for storage. The acne hole healed with those wires exposed, leaving a permanent mark due to the wire coloring pigment dissolving in my skin.

I used that storage space to hide the contents of some parcels I was processing back then. I was stealing things. Eventually, my coworker — Bruce Willis — confronted me, and I had to strangle him. My arm became very flexible, and I was able to wrap it around his neck several times during a chokehold. It didn't end well for both of us.

48.

A Miloland metro system. It's extradimensional and shapeshifting. When you enter it, it adapts to your needs. The people inside (they're probably just vinyl shells), the social circumstances, all generated for you.

When you enter it, it knows where you want to go. It spawns exactly one train just for you. It will be the first, it will be the last. You have to catch it to go where you need. If you miss it, there will be no more trains, and you have to wait till the metro station closes for the night and reopens.

It's always you entering, catching the train that arrives just in time, going to where you need to go and exiting. Because of its extradimensional nature, you cannot agree to meet someone there — every person has their own personal metro generated just for them every time, with exactly one train going exactly to the station you need.

It's used by BLA as a form of control. When they don't want you to go somewhere, the train won't spawn. Or, it might diverge and get you to some other place. It isn't known whether the map can be altered on the fly or not. So far, the consensus is that the map is persistent and is a public knowledge, and it's just the metro itself that is extradimensional. But, no one ever saw the real metro in its real form, and not the top layer that protrudes into the three-dimensional world you can interact with. It might be the case that they can make people disappear by creating ad-hoc stations that don't intersect with the real world, trapping them in places that are nowhere in particular.

Miloland also has a school, and it always had it. I befriended a chemistry teacher there. His classroom is small — exactly as deep as other classrooms, but really narrow. There are no desks there, just his desk and some bookshelves. Chemistry isn't a priority there — his class exists only because it should. No one attends it. This is why he was so pleased to meet me. Despite his classroom being located on a busy floor, its door is overlooked by students, and no one ever enters it. He just sits there, waiting for students to arrive, but they never do.

He has a secret, though, because of course he does. In the game Control, if you complete the main storyline before you complete some side quests, one of the main characters will be sitting in the C-suit hall, doing her things, waiting for you to come and talk to her. But at the same time, she will be waiting for you deep down the oldest house's mines, again, just sitting there, waiting for you to take the quest. This teacher is the same.

If you have a good relationship with him, and you attend his class, the classroom will change to a tunnel entrance, with him being the security guard. He's your friend, he'll let you in. It looks like Fallout's vault entrance. This is how you enter the real Miloland metro.

49.

Tiny waterborne rat puppies whose mouth is their entire face unfolding like a piece of paper with teeth covering it as a grid. They are tiny, a bit like tadpoles. Also, like tadpoles, they die if you touch them out of water. As I was flying over some mountain resort (I routinely fly in my dreams, but it feels more like a very low gravity falling I can control, like using a parachute in GTA San Andreas), I dumped them to a location that resembled the garden level of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for my cat to eat. It didn't want to.

50.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”

After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.

Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. Spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speerdun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!
“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Mattias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”
It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

51.