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"That Shape Had None" – A Horror of Substrate Independence (Short Fiction)

98 points by casmalia 2 days ago | 19 comments

Muromec 2 days ago

Thanks, it was refreshing to feel the imaginary horrors instead of living the ones that are happening.

DiscourseFan 2 days ago

But the truth often lies in the form of a thing, not its contents.

varjag 2 days ago

Good read. Feels like Lena was among inspirations.

hirsin 2 days ago

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo, for those unfamiliar, not the namesake of that story from digital graphics.

Groxx 2 days ago

And for the digital graphics people, consider using a modern variant instead: https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/

mijoharas 14 hours ago

This is brilliant.

dtj1123 11 hours ago

This belongs on the front page. I read it over an hour ago and my skin is still crawling.

flobosg 2 days ago

Discussed here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999224

throw310822 16 hours ago

Frankly it seems to be saying the exact same things except in five times as many words and a rather boring exposition, that contrasts with the cold but ominously normalizing one of Lena.

nh23423fefe 2 days ago

This reminds me of "Calliope" in Sandman

FerretFred 16 hours ago

I need to read more of that! What's the copyright on the files? I run a public-access gopher server with a small eBook section and that's the kind of material that I'd like to feature.

throw310822 2 days ago

I usually don't leave this kind of comments, but I really can't read yellow text on dark red background for more than 20 seconds.

Groxx 2 days ago

Oddly, I don't get the reader-mode option in Firefox for the site... one of these days I should probably figure out why that sometimes happens

mrec 2 days ago

It's an odd site design. Stories are loaded dynamically by script based on the URL fragment identifier; I'd imagine Reader Mode isn't geared toward that sort of thing.

I also wonder why they decided that hiding the scrollbar was a good idea.

autoexec 23 hours ago

That explains why the page was blank when I loaded it. No text without JS enabled.

jjpones 22 hours ago

For me it wasn't the color, but how smooshed the post body is. I had to override the max-width and added some letter-spacing.

cpill 2 days ago

Save to Instapaper and read on Kobo ;-)

the_af 2 days ago

Interesting.

Lots of parallels to the (very good) videogame SOMA.

1733282925 20 hours ago

[flagged]

DiabloD3 2 days ago

This is a good one.