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

3/2/2026 at 10:34:37 PM

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

by Muromec

3/2/2026 at 11:00:32 PM

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

by DiscourseFan

3/2/2026 at 8:56:02 PM

Good read. Feels like Lena was among inspirations.

by varjag

3/2/2026 at 9:09:14 PM

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

by hirsin

3/2/2026 at 10:12:12 PM

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

by Groxx

3/3/2026 at 10:26:20 AM

This is brilliant.

by mijoharas

3/2/2026 at 10:09:06 PM

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

by flobosg

3/3/2026 at 1:34:02 PM

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

by dtj1123

3/3/2026 at 8:50:48 AM

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.

by throw310822

3/2/2026 at 7:35:36 PM

This reminds me of "Calliope" in Sandman

by nh23423fefe

3/2/2026 at 9:08:34 PM

Interesting.

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

by the_af

3/3/2026 at 4:53:17 AM

[flagged]

by 1733282925

3/2/2026 at 8:08:26 PM

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.

by throw310822

3/2/2026 at 10:07:43 PM

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

by Groxx

3/2/2026 at 10:35:04 PM

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.

by mrec

3/3/2026 at 1:22:25 AM

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

by autoexec

3/3/2026 at 2:19:39 AM

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.

by jjpones

3/2/2026 at 9:08:35 PM

Save to Instapaper and read on Kobo ;-)

by cpill

3/3/2026 at 8:36:34 AM

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.

by FerretFred

3/2/2026 at 7:29:28 PM

This is a good one.

by DiabloD3