Vtyjkyuk

This was a post I read a few years ago (I can't remember which website).
It was a typical quiz of "which power would you choose?", but someone took it to the next level and posted a short story that had 8 (or 6) characters who all chose one of the powers, and the story was pretty amazing IMO. The writing style was reminiscent of Wildbow's Worm.

The powers that were offered that I can remember were:

• super strength


• looking one week into the future


• reading minds


• speaking to animals


• making people fall in love with you by touching them once and again to make them fall out of love again


• learning any skill by watching it (maybe, can't remember)


• invisibility


• flight


• breathing under water

These are pretty foggy in my mind but that's what I remember.

More details about the story:

• a woman took the love power and made the super strong guy fall for her to do her bidding;


• the looking into the future guy decided to write a diary depicting everything that happened in the past week and thus was able to view years into the future up to the heat death of the universe;


• the guy who could read minds somehow found a picture of god and then went mad or his head exploded or something.

Does anyone remember this existing and knows how to find it?

Big huge thanks to Stackstuck's comment about the story.

I remember something like this. It was pills, not potions. Unfortunately, I don't have a link to it and I'm not 100% sure of the author. So I can't really help. I want to say Yudkowsky. But I doubt it.

He was right, it was pills and not potions and I found the post quickly after he mentioned it. It's called "...And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes" by Scott Alexander, and can be read here.

Here is a picture of the original post with the powers that inspired the story:

And a transcription:

• 
  Yellow Pill Gives you the ability to read and search the minds of anyone you can see, even if it's a picture. You can also turn their minds "off" to put them into a coma.


• 
  Green Pill Gives you the ability to shapeshift into any animal.


• 
  Blue Pill Gives you the ability to fly, swim and teleport to any area while being impervious to any physical dangers.


• 
  Orange Pill Gives you the ability to instantly master any sport, job, activity, martial art, etc, that a human can do.


• 
  Red Pill Gives you super speed, super strenght [sic] and rapid regeneration (not invincible).


• 
  Pink Pill Gives you the ability to make any person love you with a single touch. Can turn off the effect by retouching the person(s).


• 
  Grey Pill Gives you the ability to control any machine or electronic using only your mind. You also have the ability to generate powerful electrical discharge by touch.


• 
  Black Pill Gives you the ability to see up to one month into the future.

Quotes supporting the story bits mentioned in the question:

• a woman took the love power and made the super strong guy fall for her to do her bidding;

One night you’re in a bar drinking your sorrows away when a man comes up to your table. “Hey!” he says, “nice hair. Is it real? I’m the strongest person in the world.” He lifts your table over his head with one hand to demonstrate. You are immediately smitten by his BRUTE STRENGTH and ALPHA MALE BEHAVIOR. You must have him.

You touch his arm. His eyes light up. “Come back to my place,” you say. “But don’t touch me.”

• the looking into the future guy decided to write […] and thus was able to view years into the future up to the heat death of the universe

You are so delighted by your omniscience and your ability to make near-optimal choices that it takes almost a year before you realize the true extent of your power.

You resolve, on the first day of every month, to write down what you see exactly a month ahead of you. But what you will see a month ahead of you is the piece of paper on which you have written down what you see a month ahead of that. In this manner, you can relay messages back to yourself from arbitrarily far into the future – at least up until your own death.

When you try this, you see yourself a month in the future, just finishing up writing a letter that reads as follows:

[omitting most of the letter here] I am sending this from the year 963,445,028,777,216 AD. […] The sky is black and without stars; the inevitable progress of entropy has reduced almost all mass and energy to unusable heat.

• the guy who could read minds somehow found a picture of god and then went mad or his head exploded or something

Black is unfazed. “With the help of Orange, who among his many other accomplishments is the current Pope, I have obtained the Shroud of Turin. A perfect photographic representation of Jesus Christ, created by some unknown technology in the first century. And Jesus, I am told, is an incarnation of God.”

[…] “[…] God must have made these pills, which means He must know how to do it. If we can read His mind, we can steal his secrets.”

This sounds a good bit like some installments of Gnome's Journal, a side link of Orc and Gnome's Mild Adventures web comic. Gnome (that's all the name he remembers) collects potions, and periodically includes them in his (illustrated) journal, along with what they do. Over the run of the comic (several months, so far), this comes to quite a collection of potion entries.