iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

emily s. @emily.news · 16/10/2026

anyways, bad news is that I was up early enough to see the sunrise. the good news is that the sunrise was great.

Sunrise over Portland, Oregon. A pale yellow sky fades to soft blue at the top, with thin streaks of cloud and a few birds in the distance. Layered blue-gray ridgelines run across the horizon above dense, hazy forest. In the middle distance, the cranes and conveyors of the Ross Island gravel operation sit along the water. In the foreground, a line of tall cottonwoods, their leaves just turning gold, stands in silhouette against the bright surface of the Willamette River.

Early morning sun lights Portland’s Southwest Hills in warm orange and gold. Houses, a brick apartment tower, and long low apartment buildings are tucked among fir trees and autumn foliage in red, orange, and yellow. A red-and-white broadcast tower rises from the ridgetop against a clear pale blue sky. At the bottom, a multi-lane freeway with a few cars and green highway signs for South Waterfront and Lake Oswego runs past the flat white rooftops of a modern apartment complex.

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emily s. @emily.news · 16/10/2026

oh nice, I just saw an entire wing of Rothkos last Sunday

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emily s. @emily.news · 15/10/2026

I didn’t realize this before, but the iPhone apparently can now “spatialize“ a photo into a 3D scene. Kinda neat?

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emily s. @emily.news · 14/10/2026

Star Wars Battlefront II keeps getting multi-hundred-megabyte updates (maybe three in the last couple of weeks?) and i just want to know why

Update in Steam waiting for install, for Star Wars Battlefront II

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emily s. @emily.news · 13/10/2026

did a double-take when I saw this on DoorDash because I thought they actually HAD invented Mr. Beast Personal Wipes for a second

"Mr. Beast Feastables" product image showing a peanut butter and chocolate bar in a blue-ish wrapper

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emily s. @emily.news · 12/10/2026

check out this neat tree :3

A framed watercolor painting titled "Ghost Gum, MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia" by Indigenous Australian artist Albert Namatjira (1902–1959). The painting depicts a prominent, light-barked ghost gum tree in the foreground, set against a rugged, rocky landscape under a soft sky. The artwork is displayed on a deep blue wall alongside informational plaques detailing the artist's life and his significance as a renowned painter who blended European landscape techniques with his deep connection to Country.

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emily s. @emily.news · 11/10/2026

even the most obtuse modern art comes with a tiny plaque next to it

Photo from Portland Art Museum's new Mark Rothko Pavilion, which features Rothko's art (color field paintings with irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color). You can, indeed, in this blurry photo, see little plaques next to each with attribution.

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emily s. @emily.news · 08/10/2026

the part of their site that says "Delta: Now in Beta" gets me every time.

Logotype of the "Delta" product with a subheading saying "Now in Beta"

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emily s. @emily.news · 28/09/2026

real ones open ffmpeg and create IMAX quality GIFs

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emily s. @emily.news · 27/09/2026

in case it helps: this is a feature called Universal Control that works on most newer Macs and iPads. there's a little icon in my menu bar that warns me about it.

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emily s. @emily.news · 26/09/2026

people don't just want to write programs. people want everything.

Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us TO the thing. (So says this character in Halt and Catch Fire.)

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emily s. @emily.news · 19/09/2026

i haven't found out anything about Jev but hearing about it feels like this

Homer and Bart see a mysterious commercial on TV that simply advertises the name "GABBO" with no explanation

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emily s. @emily.news · 19/09/2026

not sure if I should spend today playing Diablo IV or working on Stardrift some more

My character in Diablo IV, named Fupacabra, seen here in a cut scene standing on the deck of a ship looking outward with determination and hope. She's a Spiritborn, which means she looks a bit like a warrior monk.

A three-body problem visualized in 3D in Stardrift, its octree visible as a grid of 3D cells around each body.

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emily s. @emily.news · 18/09/2026

i am *really* bad at naming Diablo characters

Character selection screen for Diablo IV. I've selected a Spiritborn character named "Fupacabra". Most of my previous characters have the same name ("Est"), and there's one named Hyzenthlay.

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emily s. @emily.news · 15/09/2026

something's gotta give

in macOS, I have the default screen resolution selected, but I'm mousing over the lower resolution

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emily s. @emily.news · 15/09/2026

okay evidently you gotta waitlist yourself for it in the Apple Settings > Siri

A promotional dialog box invites me to join the waitlist of Siri with Apple Intelligence.

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emily s. @emily.news · 15/09/2026

Siri on macOS opens maybe half the time I click on it?

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emily s. @emily.news · 06/09/2026

incredible things happening here

The Safonti extension's app page. It explains how the extension works and shows a button to open Safari's settings.

Safonti's current options page. It shows its overall settings and some font replacements I've specified for serif and sans-serif.

The Wikipedia article for "Typeface" rendered in Charis (for serif) and Barlow (for sans-serif). The extension icon is visible in the toolbar.

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emily s. @emily.news · 06/09/2026

i've been playing Destiny 2 since July. first time i have really spent *months* enjoying and getting into the game. finally hit rank 10 last night (thanks for the carry, @demarko.org and @mcjones.bsky.social). i think my journey is drawing to an end, and i might return to...Diablo IV?

my destiny 2 character kneels before the Ironwood Tree in the Tower area, which is what happens when you hit a new rank. it's very glowy and showy.

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emily s. @emily.news · 06/09/2026

if this doesn't curdle your blood, nothing will

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emily s. @emily.news · 04/09/2026

when I switched back to safari, the one thing I missed was being able to change the default fonts. so I created an extension called Safonti that does this. do you think anyone would pay USD$1 for this?

Demonstrating changing the default font on Wikipedia to Barlow

Safonti's settings page, with two fonts imported (Berkeley Mono and Barlow) which have been set as the default sans-serif and monospaced fonts.

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emily s. @emily.news · 04/09/2026

love having the opposite accent of everyone I know on this site

The mydialect map of my accent shows most accent most concentrated around Georgia and Alabama.

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emily s. @emily.news · 04/09/2026

I tried to visit fandom.com and this is what I saw

The website is covered with ads and other modal dialogs. I can't see the actual page.

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emily s. @emily.news · 02/09/2026

I appreciate that, perfectly timed to the start of September, Portland's weather flipped like a light-switch from summer mode to autumn mode

The weather app shows a large swath of rain across the Pacific Northwest, and it's cooler than average (62°F)

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emily s. @emily.news · 29/08/2026

LM Studio basically selects good models for you to try that fit on your machine by default. what is "the best" is too squishy to do. but it looks basically like this for me Ollama is fine. its UI is a lot simpler. runs the same models (more or less).

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emily s. @emily.news · 27/08/2026

because of the mergers, in a typical simulation what you'll usually see is a bunch of bodies combining into a few in the middle-ish and then several other bodies that got ejected from the system.

As described in post. This screenshot also visualizes the octree used for Barnes-Hut optimization.

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emily s. @emily.news · 27/08/2026

Stardrift fans: I've finally returned to working on the project, and I've made numerous improvements to mathematical accuracy and GPU performance! Plus I've implemented simple collisions that merge bodies (finally), with more to come. stardrift.run