“I don’t want much,” I said. “I don’t want power. I don’t want to rule over others. I don’t want love. I don’t want anyone dead. I don’t even want to hurt anyone.”

The genie smiled blandly.

“All I want is a healthy retirement fund,” I said. “And I want it without any tricks.”

“Without tricks!” The genie rose to his full height, taken aback. “I am no magician! Tricks indeed!”

I said, “Well, you know what I mean. Without…you know, strings attached.”

“Without consequences, you mean? There can be no such thing.” The genie smiled broadly without using his eyes, and he once again settled into the armchair. “There are simply natural outcomes you must expect from any good fortune.”

All right, I figured—so long as no one gets hurt. I get to decide the terms. That much the genie had made clear.

The genie asked, “Have you decided?”

“Yes,” I said, “all right. I’ve decided.”

The genie fixed me with his eyes and waited.

“I want a million dollars…”

The genie smiled.

“…in United States dollars, tax-free…”

The genie’s smile widened.

“…legally…”

The genie’s smile widened more, his eyebrows lifting in expectation.

“…which will actually be available to me, and to me alone…”

“Yes?” the genie crooned.

“…without anyone having to lose anything for me to gain it…”

The genie’s smile somehow grew still more.

“…and without anyone getting hurt.”

I began to wonder whether anything I said could possibly disrupt the genie’s unflappable sangfroid. None of my conditions had so far seemed to ruffle him in the slightest.

He asked, “Will that be all?”

I mulled it over, trying to think if there were some possible way this could backfire, and I could not think of anything. “Yes, that’s right. That’s what I want.”

“Very well,” the genie said, seeming to suppress glee. “Nothing could be simpler.”

I waited expectantly. I wondered whether I was supposed to close my eyes or something. After looking around, I asked, “Well? What now?”

“I’ve granted the wish, just as you asked,” he said.

“Really? How? Where?”

“It’s being deposited into your checking account. I thought you might find that convenient!”

I picked up my phone and opened my banking app. I didn’t know why I was so tremulous. Maybe I was overwhelmed with the unreality of what I expected to find. I pulled up my balance, and it looked unchanged.

I sighed and said, “I don’t understand. There’s nothing here.”

“Of course there is! It’s being deposited as we speak.”

“Being deposited…?” I looked at the transaction list, and I noticed a handful of new credits—each for only one cent.

“Yes,” the genie said, “do you see?”

“But these are for one cent each,” I said.

“Precisely! You never asked for the amount now. Indeed, you mentioned a ‘retirement’ fund. I merely took it on my own initiative to amortize the funds over the rest of your life, and that is precisely what you will receive: one cent every twelve-point-oh-two-five-six-eight-three seconds. Over the span of the rest of your life, it will total exactly one million dollars, in U.S. currency, tax-free! Quite as you asked.”

The genie laughed in a dry, inward way.

At that moment, a new deposit arrived. My phone’s banking app showed that it was another cent. So far I had six cents out of my million. He was right—the genie had granted my wish in the most frustrating, useless, and maddening way possible.

Then my initial frustration fell away, as if through a trap door into a bottomless terror, as I realized what the genie had actually given me. This wasn’t just a million dollars. Each cent was like a grain of sand falling through the hourglass timer of my newly circumscribed life. A simple multiplication would reveal the exact moment of my death.

I looked down at my phone as another cent rolled in. When I looked up, I saw that I was alone.

“Oh, no.”

I have a pretty clear idea of the writing app I want, and I don't think it exists. What I'm looking for is an app which lets me control a document's content, structure, and presentation separately from one another, at composition time.

Usually, content, structure, and presentation are all mingled together. Word processors combine all of them, using rich formatting to represent the presentation of the content, inseparably from its structure and meaning. In a word processor, a heading is only a heading because it happens to be bigger and bolder. The application doesn't know it's a heading. You can often define preset "styles," allowing you at least to control their appearance consistently, but you can't do things like re-order the document based on the heading structure. You can't decide to put headings on a separate page without literally changing the content (to add a page break). A word processor prioritizes the final output's presentation above all else.

Minimal text editors (like iA Writer) do not emphasize control over the output, but instead they comingle structure and content by usually requiring something like Markdown. Markdown is a syntax, meaning that the content itself dictates its own structure. For example, line breaks separate paragraphs. Headings have special punctuation. Blockquotes have indentation. This system has advantages like letting you choose the font in which you write without changing the final document's appearance or structure, but you still can't focus solely on the content without also paying attention to the syntax.

The worst part of any Markdown-like editor is that they envision writing as a kind of programming process. You're not writing a document; you're writing instructions to write a document, which must then be compiled. I find this to be a moribund approach to creation, leftover as an artifact of early computers that used primarily text-based interfaces. The technology exists to let us create more directly, with less technology as an intercessor, and we should demand it.

Outlining apps solve for much of this, allowing real-time manipulation of a non-linear structure, but you lose too much control elsewhere. Most outlining apps have only the barest formatting. Structure remains only as discrete, hierarchical nodes, and everything you write must be coerced into it, no exceptions. This makes it much harder to adjust the boundaries between sections, or create more complex documents like chiastic structures or hypertexts.

In a hypothetical writing app which lets me handle structure, content, and presentation freely and separately, a much more direct and non-linear creative process emerges. For example, I often want to build a document structure, starting from a simple list of points, structuring that into an outline, restructuring that into a matrix or timeline, and then arranging the elements of that structure until it builds the full document. Then having built it, I still want access to the structural elements I used, even while controlling the final output.

I can cobble together a process from many tools to get close to my ideal, but the process itself can become a distraction and an impediment. I still haven't found one application that has met all of the above criteria, and most of them still have significant problems, or at least an unimaginative take on how writing can work.

It's cold, dark, and wintry just now, so obviously I'm watching old Twilight Zone episodes (from the original series run) to feel cheery and festive.

In any case, I was watching the episode "Escape Clause" when I thought to GIF this brief reaction.

Back in September, I rewatched Severance. I had intended to make more GIFs from this rewatch, but in the end, I only made a couple of Irving from the episode “Defiant Jazz.”

I've included these below so you can download and reuse them. (Hotlinking would be rude, though.)

I've officially made something in 3D for the first time. I'm posting just to commemorate the occasion because I'm bizarrely proud of getting started finally with Unity.

Unity is a framework for making video games, and the first thing I've done is play with rigid-body physics. Specifically, I created a plane with small domino-like shapes that topple one another.

Since I first created this demo, I've had so many ideas, most of which involve playing with the physics engine. If I come up with something neat, I'll post it here.

Social media chaos reigns. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Anyway, this post is just to update on where I am attempting to have a social media presence of any kind:

• Website: emily.news (obviously)
• Mastodon: est@emily.news
• Bluesky: @emily.gay
• Discord: emilyst
• Twitter: emilyst (I removed the apps—notifications won't reach me!)
• Twitch: emilylilylime

Unclear to me at this point which of these, if any, will “stick.” Beginning to suspect we're entering a world where everything and nothing will stick—the idea of everyone using the Big Social Media sites will fade away in the next few years. People have learned from Facebook and Twitter what they actually want, and they're going to look for that.

See the silly Kirby image above? I'm trying to put this little guy on most of the profiles I have so you can recognize it and know it's me. If you don't see Kirby, you might see a space photo I took.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a wonderful movie for a hot summer night. I'm astonished at how well Steven Spielberg was able to capture the vibe. Making

GIFs from the movie is especially hard, given the limited color palette I was working with.

I went back to Contact to make a nice GIF of a short reaction that nevertheless lives rent-free in my head. This movie is great for evincing the human reaction in the face of the unknown, awe-inspiring, and numinous—which is great for overreacting on Twitter.

I've made two recent breakthroughs in my video2gif technique:

• I've realized that I can get HDR tonemapping working pretty well if I use this combination of options: --tonemap mobius --saturation 1.5. This seems to compensate pretty well for whatever I've messed up in my tonemapping code. The Predator GIF is a good example.
• For captions, I've begun using the "Black" (heaviest) variant of the SF Pro Text font, which really pops against a busy GIF.

I did make a couple of other GIFs recently, so maybe I'll follow up on this post with a second one soon.

Not sure if or how I want to try to use this website, but I am going to add a list of my current hyperfixations to the site.

"Hyperfixations" is probably not exactly the right word. This is more about my ever revolving Lazy Susan of special interests. Seems like a more accurate reflection of what I'm about than a fixed list of stuff I'm into.

You can just assume cosmology and writing are always on the list.