Hi uh this is a place for me to write short stories and stuff. I've wanted to write a book about 4D several several times, but could never figure out a plot. Hopefully, because short stories are allowed to have simpler plots, and I feel less pressure to make something good, I can make a good story about 4D. I hope I give one person that feeling I get every few months with something 4D like "wow that's so 4D". I don't know how to explain it lmao. It usually comes from a sense of novelty and bewilderment, and often a little bit of "creepiness". Not to get too love craftian, but it feels like I'm getting too close to gazing at beauties forbidden for human eyes. The feeling is accompanied by shivers down my spine. (Is there a way of saying that without sounding cringe?) It's usually caused by stuff being unique in 4D/some weird new way of intuitively grasping 3 dimensions being perpendicular to a line, or two dimensions being perpendicular to two dimensions, etc. Anyway, at this point (like, idk, a year of having 4D as an autistic special interest?) I've gotten pretty good at visualizing and thinking in 4D, so I hope these short stories are accurate enough to withstand the test of time. And as you might imagine, as I learn more and more about 4D, it stops being as weird, so this feeling is exceptionally rare. Which makes me chase it all the more. Also, not every short story is gonna be about 4D. Probably. I don't know, most likely I won't even write one short story.
As you're seeing this, I did manage to write one short story!
My alarm clock woke me up at 8 AM. I groggily got out of bed and looked around at my room. I lived in an average apartment often referred to as an "ant hill apartment". They were called that because they were so damn flat. I was living in a planar hallway, the floor plan was like 3m by 3m by 1m. I couldn't stick my arms straight out in that direction. But it was okay that it was this cramped, because the other two directions were fully spatious.
You might think that living on a roughly two dimensional floor plan would be frustrating as a four dimensional being because living in a hallway would be difficult for you, but I assure you it's very different. With a one dimensional floor plan, you can't walk around obstacles. So you could only really have two things. One at each end. But with a two dimensional floor plan, like the one you live in, you can walk around things, and typically you put things on the edges of every wall. Which gives you 4 spots, each holding 2-4 things each. Roughly. Depends on the furniture of course.
Granted, I would like a nice expansive house someday, but these apartments are very spatially efficient, as each room is stacked side by side in a long row. There's 6 of these living spaces in a row, and then 4 of those rows go together in a square. This makes a 63 meter floor footprint of the entire building, which houses 24 people. 4D has crazy spatial efficiency options. Anyway, a 1x3m section is dedicated to the bathroom, shower, and closet, and then I've got my bed and my fridge in the 2x3m space. The microwave is partially set into the wall, not one of the thin walls, but one of the two really big ones. Remember, my room has six walls (technically it has seven because of the bathroom wall divider, but I'm not including that). Four of them are the four you're familiar with, but then there's two more, each 3m x 3m and 3 meters tall. The microwave is right next to the fridge.
I made myself some food and used plates that were in a cabinet in one of the two big walls. The walls in this apartment are actually fairly thick, so it probably adds another meter or two to that axis when you stack six of them.
After breakfast I put on my four shoes and went outside to walk to work. There were no cars, as cities were more compact, a kilometer or two in diameter at max. You can fit a lot more cubes in a sphere than squares in a circle of the same radius.
I'm a sixth grade math teacher. Today I was teaching a bunch of 12 year olds about how to calculate the volume of a duocylinder. (The formula is π2 × r12 × r22, by the way. Literally just the area of circle one times the area of circle two.) I also taught them the equation for the surface volume of a tessoid. (xyz2 + xyw2 + zyw2 + xzw2).
Our hands look kind of weird compared to a 3D human's hand. Well, certain slices look identical, but we have 13 fingers instead of 5. You guys have 4 fingers and a thumb, but we have 4 groups of 3 fingers and a thumb. Some cultures of the world use base 13, and some use base 12. Fewer still use base 26, base 39, and 52. In the country I live in, we use dozenal. Not the best, but certainly not the worst.
Some slices of our hands are nightmareish. There's a slice that looks like a small palm, with 3 middle fingers coming off of it at 90 degree intervals, making three quarters of a square. They curl inward.
After work I walked back home. My apartment is very narrow, but it fits everything I need. Especially with the two 3 dimensional walls on either side. Goodnight world.