Cuils and related absurdity
Originally posted on 9 June 2024
Grouping all these things into one post because they occupy the same space in my mind, and I want to introduce them to those that wouldn't have ever seen them before.
CW: unreality
Cuil theory
(sources: original Reddit post, wiki with slightly more context and the 7 Cuils addition)
One Cuil = One level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation.
Example: You ask me for a Hamburger.
1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.
2 Cuils: If you asked me for a hamburger, but it turns out I don't really exist. Where I was originally standing, a picture of a hamburger rests on the ground.
3 Cuils: You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.
4 Cuils: Why are we speaking German? A mime cries softly as he cradles a young cow. Your grandfather stares at you as the cow falls apart into patties. You look down only to see me with pickles for eyes, I am singing the song that gives birth to the universe.
5 Cuils: You ask for a hamburger, I give you a hamburger. You raise it to your lips and take a bite. Your eye twitches involuntarily. Across the street a father of three falls down the stairs. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. I give you a hamburger. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. You cannot swallow. There are children at the top of the stairs. A pickle shifts uneasily under the bun. I give you a hamburger. You look at my face, and I am pleading with you. The children are crying now. You raise the hamburger to your lips, tears stream down your face as you take a bite. I give you a hamburger. You are on your knees. You plead with me to go across the street. I hear only children's laughter. I give you a hamburger. You are screaming as you fall down the stairs. I am your child. You cannot see anything. You take a bite of the hamburger. The concrete rushes up to meet you. You awake with a start in your own bed. Your eye twitches involuntarily. I give you a hamburger. As you kill me, I do not make a sound. I give you a hamburger.
6 Cuils: You ask me for a hamburger. My attempt to reciprocate is cut brutally short as my body experiences a sudden lack of electrons. Across a variety of hidden dimensions you are dismayed. John Lennon hands me an apple, but it slips through my fingers. I am reborn as an ocelot. You disapprove. A crack echoes through the universe in defiance of conventional physics as cosmological background noise shifts from randomness to a perfect A Flat. Children everywhere stop what they are doing and hum along in perfect pitch with the background radiation. Birds fall from the sky as the sun engulfs the earth. You hesitate momentarily before allowing yourself to assume the locus of all knowledge. Entropy crumbles as you peruse the information contained within the universe. A small library in Phoenix ceases to exist. You stumble under the weight of everythingness, Your mouth opens up to cry out, and collapses around your body before blinking you out of the spatial plane. You exist only within the fourth dimension. The fountainhead of all knowledge rolls along the ground and collides with a small dog. My head tastes sideways as spacetime is reestablished, you blink back into the corporeal world disoriented, only for me to hand you a hamburger as my body collapses under the strain of reconstitution. The universe has reasserted itself. A particular small dog is fed steak for the rest of its natural life. You die in a freak accident moments later, and you soul works at the returns desk for the Phoenix library. You disapprove. Your disapproval sends ripples through the inter-dimensional void between life and death. A small child begins to cry as he walks toward the stairway where his father stands.
7 Cuils: I give you a hamburger. The universe is engulfed within itself. A bus advertising hotdogs drives by a papillon. It disapproves. An unnatural force reverses Earth's gravity. You ask for a hamburger. I reciprocate with a mildly convulsing potato. You disapprove. Your disapproval releases a cosmic shift in the void between birth and life. You ask for a hamburger. A certain small dog feasts on hamburger patties for the rest of its unnatural, eternal endurance. Your constant disapproval sends silence through everything. A contrived beast becomes omnipotent. You ask for a hamburger. I give you a hamburger your body becomes an unsettled blob of nothingness, then divides by three. The papillon barks. The universe realigns itself. You, the papillon, and the hamburger disapprove. This condemnation stops the realignment. Hades freezes over. A pig is launched is launched into the unoccupied existence between space and time with a specific hamburger. You ask for a hamburger. I give you a hamburger. It screams as you lift it to your face. You laugh maniacally as I plead with you. You devour the hamburger as it pleads for mercy. I disapprove and condemn you to an eternity in a certain void where a certain pig and its specific hamburger are located. The Universal Space-time Continuum Committee disapproves of my irrational decision. You are locked away and are fed hamburgers for the rest of your natural existence. A pickle refuses to break down during the process of digestion. You die in a freak accident. A certain pickle lives the rest of its life in a comatose state. Your soul disapproves. Down the street a child cries as a hamburger gets stuck in, and climbs back up, her esophagus. You ask again for a hamburger. I refuse to reciprocate. You demand a lawyer. I remind you harshly that this is the new world order. Lawyers no longer exist. Only papillons. Your name is written on a list of sins. Blasphemy. You ask for a hamburger. The comatose pickle vanquishes your soul from this universe. Realignment occurs. You beg for a hamburger. A certain papillon's name is written on an obelisk in Egypt. Mumble. Peasants worship the obelisk. Your soulless corpse partakes in the festivity. Hamburgers are banned universally. The sun implodes. All planets cease to have ever existed. Mercury. Venus. Earth. Mars. Jupiter. Saturn. Uranus. Neptune. Pluto is the only mass in existence. Conveniently, you are on vacation here. Your need for hamburgers re-establishes space-time. Earth is recreated under your intergalactic rule. Hamburgers are your army. You wake up. Clowns. Clowns everywhere. Your dream rushes to meet you. You are kidnapped. You ask for a hamburger. They hand you a hotdog.
Absurd xkcdb logs, including references to cuil theory
(Logs from the official xkcd IRC; sources: The Pirate, Jon Lovitz, Summer Glench; "Randall" is of course xkcd's Randall Munroe, "khmer" is the James referenced in Snapple and Snakes on a Plane 2, the briefly referenced "emad" is Randall's friend as referenced in Mispronouncing)
<&snark> This pirate walks into his doctor's office with a steering wheel in his pants and the doctor says "Jim, this is ridiculous. You're over 25 years old and you're pretending to be a fucking pirate." <&snark> Jim notices his reflection in the mirror in the corner of the office and starts to weep. His doctor prescribes 30 minutes on a Thanatron and everything is right in the world again. <Shrdlu> 1.5 cuils. I give you a hamburger. <&snark> I start screaming only to have special sauce fly from my lips. Across the road a father of three slowly begins to tumble down a staircase. <Shrdlu> The staircase is made of ennui. The stairs are made of repeated meaningless experiences. The experiences are made of ground beef. Across the road a father of three gives you a hamburger. <&snark> My eye twitches involuntarily as I reach out for his hamburger. The stairs stretch into yarn as gravity begins to weep silently. You covet gravity, but do not respond. As you give me a hamburger, three children look mournfully upon the staircase. Within every tomato, a thousand years. I try to refuse the hamburger, knowing the price. Endless figures stare from the expansion of a normal number. The beef is going cold. Resolute but repentant, I take a bite of the hamburger. <&Lingrush> uh <&snark> You realize that the hamburger is too perfect to be real. It is the idea of a hamburger, and there is only one observer. You are a dream and the burger is the dreamer. You awaken and try to blink the sleep from your pickles. A man tumbles down the staircase towards you. I hand you to the youngest of his children, and begin to weep. Lingrush's eye twitches involuntarily. <&Lingrush> I <&Lingrush> I have to go <&Lingrush> now * &Lingrush (~Raclette@hide-40FD8673.reshsg.uci.edu) Quit (Quit: I've had a lovely evening-- this wasn't it.) <Shrdlu> snark: As your teeth pierce the bun, they find inside another hamburger. Biting through its bun, you discover another. Your teeth progress through an infinite number of buns, searching fruitlessly for the beef and produce. You try to stop, and fail. I give you a hamburger, and within it I give you the universe. <&snark> The stars are a thousand sesame seeds, and every seed is a hamburger. As I take a second bite, life is born, and a million miles away a child's tear falls upon a stair of ennui. The hamburger is not mocked. As if in response, a distant mooing wakens the dawn of 400 billion suns. I try to return the burger, but you are the burger. The universe is hungry, and I am its mouth. <Shrdlu> Each seed is the universe, and every planet a hamburger. Across 400 billion planets, the sun rises in unison. The universe is hungry. The mouth forms words. You ask for a hamburger. I give you a hamburger. <Shrdlu> Zero cuils. Fin. <&snark> \o/ * Tortoise \o/
<&randall> khmer: remember when you told me that next time you started talking about the intersection of economics and political theory, it will mean you clearly have too much time on your hands, and so I should go take you to get drunk in vegas? <&randall> khmer: what are you doing this weekend? <@khmer> randall: man, i'm looking at my Todoist, and it's just 48 straight hours of talking about the intersection of economics and political theory on the internet! <&randall> khmer: tickets are cheap right now <&randall> khmer: or do you just want to hitchike like last time? <@khmer> randall: can we travel by montage? <@khmer> fading back and forth between lines being drawn on a map and footage of planes flying back and forth? <&randall> khmer: depends whether we can get the rights to "Oklahoma!" <@khmer> hot air balloon, dogsled, rickshaw, pedicab, sedan chair, hiking <@khmer> randall: and at one point we're in this weird dusty pawn shop and you keep shaking your head and waving your hands, and i keep nodding and pointing offscreen and you keep saying no and finally you yank me out of the shop and march away, and the camera pans to what i was pointing at, and it's a bobcat with a saddle <&randall> khmer: and a part where we hassle increasingly young children to show us where to find a good time, to the point where we're having tea in a backyard with two adorable kids and a stuffed rabbit <@khmer> randall: and at one point we're both holding drinks with like five separate slices of fruit in each one, and we smile and clink our glasses, spilling tropical cocktail all over the organ grinder monkey <&randall> khmer: one of us is standing up through the sunroof of a rental car, holding a bottle of gin and shouting and whooping, and we go under a too-low overpass, and everyone's cringing because they think it's going to hit the standing one, but some people remember Top Secret and think that as a sight gag the person will crash through the bridge. instead, at the last minute, the car screeches to a halt and Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapses. Now, ... <&randall> ... jump cut to Ron Paul, in the studio. <&randall> khmer: and the part where we stumble home with a drunk woman, but then can't decide who actually gets to take her up to her room, and decide to cut her in half. <@khmer> randall: ron paul applies the last daub of paint from his wooden palette to a sweeping canvas that depicts you in a wetsuit with huge swim flippers, hang gliding, and i'm clutching your foot <&randall> khmer: we're both being dropped over a huge forest fire caused by cutbacks in federal forest-management programs <&randall> after a mistaken bucket-copter/hang-gliding/scuba-diver accident <&randall> khmer: in a dream sequence, you walk down a path in a forest, smiling animals everywhere, toward a field. As it comes into view, the tinkling opening of Buddy Holly's "Everyday" begins to play. You step through the trees into the sunlight, and in the center of the field, you behold: a gigantic Pez Dispenser with Barack Obama's head. <&randall> khmer: Smash cut back to reality. You're in a jail cell, scratching a calendar on the wall. It's a Far Side joke-a-day calendar. You cannot, of course, tear off the only page. <@khmer> randall: With a start, you wake. You fumble your way to the bathroom and see your beard growing at about an inch a minute. <@khmer> randall: With a start, you wake again. This time, you are a cartoon. <&randall> khmer: Morning breaks over our hotel room. There's a depressing Requiem for a Dream montage of us stealing a skillet from the hotel kitchen and painstakingly frying a single strip of bacon. <&randall> In a picture-in-picture box on the screen, Jon Lovitz flips a pancake in slow motion. <@khmer> randall: Due to an accident with a sunlamp and a whiskey sour, my hand is welded to a slot machine. In an lingering, Oscar-worthy shot, you painstakingly feed me nibbles of bacon while I mumble "three cherries, three cherries" <&randall> khmer: Jon Lovitz, now growing frustrated, ties the pancake to the skillet and tries to use it like one of those elastic-band paddle toys. <@khmer> randall: We are forced to accept indentured positions as showgirl fluffers to pay back the house. Jon Lovitz regards us balefully while we scramble around the boa-littered dressing room floor. <&randall> I befriend one of the showgirls with my hapless ways, and she vows to take me away from all this. You grow jealous, and attempt to replace her. Your wig and falsetto are surprisingly convincing. I am torn between you both. <@khmer> randall: A slow screen wipe to Jon Lovitz, sweaty and furious, complaining about our antics and hijinks to a shadowy figure behind a mahogany desk whose face we can't see. Lovitz demands that we be run out of town on a rail, or on a django should ruby not be available. <@khmer> randall: Due to a rogue dangling participle that made its way into production, we zoom back to see that the shadowy figure is a mannequin and the front of the desk has an actual human face. It looks like Billy Corgan. <&randall> The shadowy figure stands. It is another Jon Lovitz. There is silence. David Lynch walks in front of the projection screen and flips off the audience. <@khmer> randall: Smash cut to a barren, mysterious mountain landscape, barely in focus. We zoom back to find that we were extreme close-up on the surface of a pile of quarters in a cup. You are hovered over the pile of quarters. You shudder and retch. <@khmer> randall: At least $18 more in quarters tumbles out of your mouth into the cup. <&randall> khmer: satisfied, I gather the quarters into a sack, hoist it over my shoulder, and begin the long, slow march to the Apple Store. <@khmer> randall: You slam the sock full of quarters on the countertop and demand a "bluetooth Ipod". Jon Lovitz, t-shirt-clad, behind the counter, regards you with suspicion. <@khmer> randall: You glare at him. "It's legal tender, you know." <@khmer> randall: He responds: "That's not change we can believe in!" <&randall> khmer: a newspaper with a giant headline spins rapidly toward the screen. before we can read it, it crashes into the camera and drops to the ground. behind me, every iPhone switches to that shot of the kitten caught on the ceiling fan. <@khmer> randall: Smash cut to me on my deathbed, attended to by a hushed team of doctors and orderlies. I gaze wistfully at a snowglobe in my hand and, near-inaudibly, whisper a single word before a tremendous spasm steals my last breath and the snowglobe breaks on the floor. <@khmer> The word: "Blogspot." <@khmer> randall: Zoom in on the contents of the shattered globe. It contains only a single, glimmering quarter, with the face of Jon Lovitz in profile. <&randall> We fade in, quiet and pastoral orchestral music playing, to me riding my horse across a prairie. The horse is obviously two men in a costume walking backward. I spur the horse forward, but the two men have clearly become engaged by a rousing in-horse backgammon match. There is an awkward pause. <@khmer> randall: As the bucking horse sends you flying into a nearby poplar tree, the tree suddenly resolves itself into the collapsing hulk of World Trade Center 7. <&randall> Ron Paul sits bolt upright in bed and shakes his wife, announcing "I've *got* it!" <&randall> His wife is a RealDoll. <@khmer> randall: The demolition team pulls a pile of rubble away from the remains, to reveal you, dressed in a French Field Marshal jacket and Spongebob boxers, curled up in the fetal position and clutching a pink stuffed rabbit with an LED countdown display for a face. <@khmer> randall: Aided by CGI, the camera plunges into the lifeless eye of the RealDoll. There is a tiny control room inside its head, full of monitoring stations and a forest of levers and wheels. Jon Lovitz is at the helm. <&randall> He leans forward toward a microphone on the control console, presses the red button, and pauses dramatically. <&randall> You see a fire flicker in his eyes. <&randall> khmer: Around the hospital bed, all the monitoring machines jump to life. <&randall> You sit bolt upright, reach into your dressing gown, and remove a Pok-e-Ball. <&randall> Offscreen, you hear Jon Lovitz whisper, "Go."
<@Glench> Randall: imagine summer glench! <@Glench> Randall: imagine me poking my head out from a long line of statues, trying desperately not to be noticed in the wax figurine museum <&Randall> Glench: I'm imagining you perfectly still, dressed as Queen Elizabeth the First <@Glench> Randall: imagine me sighting a crossbow at the famed professor of psychology marshall weathers, only to feel a hint of remorse before I pull the trigger. I hesitate, not ready to shoot, yet a gust knocks a stray emad into my hand and the bolt leaps from the end of the gun <&Randall> Glench: imagine me holding a scimitar made from modeling clay, standing over you, furiously blowing on a dog whistle. I am wearing a coonskin cap made from a live raccoon. <@Glench> Randall: imagine me with your previous 3 boyfriends, the latest indie pop song blaring in the foreground, a separate version of me glaring in the background, and a trashbag's worth of handmade blown glass spiders strewn throughout the midground <&Randall> Glench: Imagine there's no heaven. It isn't hard to do. Imagine me in the wax museum, but for some reason I'm wearing an evening gown made of porcelain cats. I am misunderstanding the mafia hit order and trying to have you "waxed". You are annoyed, aroused, and a hologram. <@Glench> Randall: imagine me as yo mama, much easier to do, but harder to do than her, staring whistfully into the mcdonald's play place, a pack of 3rd graders in one hand, a sack of parkinson's disease in the other <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me over you as you sleep, dangling from a strand of spiderweb. I carefully draw a police chalk line around your body as you, still fast asleep, stuff sardine after sardine into your packed mouth. Gravity is replaced by electromagnetism and we are the last two people on earth. <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me and shoofle, each pulling on one of your arms. You grimace and stretch to many times your normal armspan, a-la Stretch Armstrong, until you finally burst. Obama Inauguration tickets spray everywhere. Ron Paul rides past on a cybernetic horse. <@Glench> Randall: imagine me quivering, invisible, high above mars' thin atmosphere. The contents of a wallet and several small wolves' stomach are strewn about me as I inhale the fresh vacuum. It is time to pick the cuttlefish, for they are ripe. <@shoofle> Randall: Imagine me watching, horrified, as you take a shot, in violation of the ancient and decrepit, now rotting, rules of the '04 presidential debate drinking game. <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me reclining on a sofa in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. A column of meltwater lifts me higher and higher as I sing a single pure note. Shoofle furious works the levers on the waterspout machine as Santa watches helplessly, bound and gagged. I give you a hamburger. <@Glench> shoofle: imagine me, incarnate this time, jetski past a crowd of delighted walruses, their rockets firing each in turn with wonder, a few sputtering and falling to the ground where several young iberian slaves harvest the newly-gotten physics. Albert Einstein will be pleased with this load. <@shoofle> Glench: I'm imagining you inside a dresser, with each shelf in it emptied and with a hole cut in it so that you fit in with no room to move. In order to get you out we have to pull out each shelf an inch at a time, slowly inching you out, before removing you with a crane. The crane is operated by President-Elect Barack Obama. <@Glench> Randall: imagine me giving you the hamburger you had previously given me. It is a slightly different hamburger, different in some subtle but impenetrable way. You penetrate the hamburger and turn your blog inside out. <@shoofle> Glench: Imagine Randall, standing over a blood-drenched ball pit. His hands red already, he dives in and starts digging, searching for the lost body parts. He comes up with a single red ball, cut in half, blood still pouring out of the middle. He turns it, and you see an alien face. It mewls, and your view pans down and out the door, where blood is slowly trickling out and down the stairs. <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me peering up at you from inside a breadbox. You, maintaining eye contact, slowly raise the axe. I smile and you become a statue. Suddenly, I am on a shelf in a bakery. Shoofle, dressed as a middle-aged woman, is purchasing me. We are in 9th-century Kiev. <@Glench> Randall: imagine me situation in hand (also in mouth), several hamburger-hours already wasted, turning to you with a look of constipated batman, and mouthing the words "information superhighway" <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me, but with all the color knobs twisted at random. I spread my arms wide and the planets spin dizzyingly overhead. You are riding a cat through space. shoofle melts into a pool of toffee, slurps across the ground over to the podium, and begins to engulf Barack Obama's leg. <@Glench> Randall: imagine me, thighs glistening in the cool light of nuclear holocaust, wearing a poncho, holding an umbrella, eagerly conversing with the onslaught of nuclear fire headed my way. You hear me utter the words "I didn't like taco bell that much anyway" before I burst into chocolate-flavored ash. My remains are soon turned into edible panties. <@shoofle> Glench: Imagine me, peering down at you from a helicopter. I start climbing down a rope, but it expands before me at a constant rate even as I move along it at a constant rate. Assuming it starts as being three meters long, I start at the one meter point, I move one meter per second, and the rope expands two meters per second. How long does it take me to reach you? Express in kilograms per kilopascal-fortnight. <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me as hard as you can. You are wrapped around the blade of a ceiling fan set to 'high', clinging for dear life. Hungry cats circle beneath you, waiting for you to lose your grip. One of the cats looks up. It has Ron Paul's face. Cut to a shot of World Trade Center 7 collapsing. <@Glench> Randall: imagine me, IT department incarnate. My goatees collapse to a singularity as the world rejoices at its destruction. Spiderman grips your ankles gently and peers up at you from a veil of gummy-bear-wrought fumes. <@shoofle> Randall: Imagine me, but I'm the filament in an incandescent bulb. And I'm made of tungsten. I break out of my conductive, glowy prison only to find I am locked in a cloudy gas bulb. I slowly begin to suffocate, before smashing my way out with my heavy, high-melting point fists. I shoot you with a nerf gun. <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me, clutched by a giant housefly, soaring above the amber waves of grain. It would be beautiful, but you can't see it. You claw madly at the inside of the dishwasher, praying desperately that the 'rinse' cycle comes soon. Outside, the acorns are piled to halfway up the second-story windows. Obama is sworn in in reverse as Ron Paul hurls a wad of toffee into World Trade Center 7, causing it to collapse. <@shoofle> Glench: Imagine me, gently weaving in and out of a massive space battle. I appear to be riding a unicorn. The horn is tipped with a brass eagle; below it flies an american flag. The unicorn's face is Ron Paul's. It darts and weaves, leaving twin trails of red/white/blue and rainbows. Gold pellets are rapidly fired at a TIE fighter, which bursts into an entirely new universe. The universe is populated with Summer Glau clones. <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me watching the space battle as you scan the personals ads desperately. The world slowly becomes two-dimensional as the unicorn's horn grows at a constant rate. You slither across the floor, unhinge your jaw, and begin to swallow a gigantic wad of toffee. From within the toffee, we hear Ron Paul's muffled voice frantically defending the gold standard. <@Glench> Randall: imagine me, undulating across the multiverse, a pinstripe suit spontaneously generating and criticizing a full concert piano's rendition of the x-files theme song. I sit down at the bench, crack my knuckles, and begin to blog. <&Randall> Glench: Imagine me standing over your comically-lopsided corpse, retching. I vomit a huge number of Vicodin tablets over your body as your spirit ascends and becomes tangled in the ceiling fan. The cats on the wallpaper detach and begin to circle. I am gone, and in my place is a 1:15 scale model of the universe. In that universe, Ron Paul becomes president. World Trade Center 7 is rebuilt and your blog is published in hardcover, selling an infinite number of copies. Summer Glau weeps into her coffee, humming through her sobs a single pure note.