The Museum of Failed Universes
Alter the constants and conditions of nature, inspect realities that collapse, remain empty or lose familiar chemistry, and encounter the anthropic-selection problem from inside the exhibit.
Enter the museumInstruments, simulations and suspect archives
Experiments & Archives
Not everything in the City is an essay. Some arguments are better encountered as scales, orbits, projections, fractals, simulated universes, moving geometry or archival records whose stars have developed administrative objections to being where astronomy says they are.
Project Azathoth
A simulated cosmos that continues whether or not anyone is watching. Stars form, biospheres arise, civilisations become detectable and disappear, and the universe records no opinion on the matter.
Enter the observatoryThe Places That Should Not Be
Investigate anomalous geographic records, maps, historical documents and hidden correspondences drawn from the City of Dis geographic names archive, where apparently mundane places begin to suggest a pattern that may be descriptive, causal or entirely of your own making.
Begin the investigationThe Coherence Engine
Audit the internal consistency of your religious, philosophical and metaphysical commitments. Thirty-six propositions expose tensions between epistemology, religion, mind, free will, morality, meaning and cosmic significance without privileging any particular worldview.
Audit your worldviewThe Things Beyond the Dawn of Time
An Asteroids-style incursion in which the rocks have been replaced by procedurally drawn eldritch horrors. Thrust, rotate and fire while your sanity, current score and the shared overall high score measure how long human geometry continues to inconvenience the abyss.
Confront the incursionThe Rabbit Hole
Source-critical Lovecraftiana, forbidden books, fictional scholarship and other material from the less well-lit staircases of City of Dis. Its first restricted-shelf monograph reconstructs Lovecraft's Necronomicon from his own writings alone.
Descend into the archiveThe Atlas of Human Insignificance
Cosmic scale, deep time, radio reach, extinction and the fate of human traces presented as an exercise in proportion rather than nihilism.
Enter the atlasThe Fractal Abyss
An infinitely zoomable Mandelbrot explorer: a simple iterative rule producing structure that no useful human intuition could enumerate in advance.
Open the abyssThe Observatory of Incorrect Stars
Photographic plates, notebooks and correspondence from a private observatory whose recorded sky does not quite agree with the one above it.
Enter the archiveOrbital Mechanics by Iteration
A force-diagram explanation and simulator showing how an orbit accumulates from repeated local updates rather than from an instruction to draw an ellipse.
Run the orbitWhy Spacecraft Don't Go Straight Up
Explore why reaching orbit is chiefly a problem of acquiring sideways velocity rather than simply climbing. Configure spacecraft velocity vectors and compare vertical, angled and tangential launches.
Explore spacecraft launchDimensions in Motion
Choose two-, three- or four-dimensional objects, rotate their coordinates and watch higher-dimensional geometry arrive on an ordinary screen by projection.
Animate the dimensionsRotating 4D Shining Cube
A four-dimensional hypercube projected and animated in MATLAB, accompanied by its source code and the image used in the experiment.
View the cubeThe Earlier City of Dis
A curated route into the site's Computational Demonology ancestry, retained as provenance rather than allowed to become a second, obsolete catalogue.
Open the earlier cityThe Examination Beyond the Threshold
Sixteen questions test your fictional affinity with eight eldritch powers, from Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep to Dagon, Hastur, Azathoth and Shub-Niggurath. The safest result remains administrative indifference from all concerned.
Submit to the examination