Be careful ...

At the message board for his webcomic Home on the Strange theferrett has started up The Open-Source Wishing Project. "That's right; we all know that as nerds, you've spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decide how to phrase your wish for when the genie comes. (Or when you stumble across that Ring of Three Wishes.) But what happens if you finally get your wish, then phrase it poorly and get Monkey's Pawed? ... So it is that I have posted eight common wish topics with their suggested wordings, and I request that anyone who feels like dissecting and improving the current wish branches go tweak them until they are so bulletproof that no omnipotent being could possibly misinterpret them."

Under the announcement in his LiveJournal I commented, "I've had mine memorized for years.

"I wish that, whenever I filled out the label on a blank piece of communication media - videotape, CD, box of typing paper - and initialed the label, and circled the initials, then that media would then contain the work described by the label, whether or not the work previously existed."

More than one of The Ferrett's LJ readers suggested a clause to guarantee that the work appears on the medium in a format that I and/or my machines can read, which is certainly a worthwhile innovation. I'm working on the wording.

The Ferrett suggested wording to guarantee that the whole work in question appear on the media. I responded, "Oughtn't I be able to control this at the user level? That is, with what the label is filled out to read? If I were to write on a videotape T*R*E*K II: The Wrath of Borelli and the trickster magic supplied only the main title, I ought to be able to write on another [attempt] - or add to this one - something like (full theatrical release; 119 mins) and solve that problem.

"It's a good idea, like tashiro's [Tashiro being the advocate of format specification who'd actually offered sample wording]. But I'm looking [for] a tradeoff here between how much I have to have already memorized in case the genie only gives me two minutes to think, and the built-in user-friendliness of the end spell. (Can you tell I took GUI Design this semester?)"

whipwreck suggested the wish verbage needs to specify magical licensure of any copyrighted works duplicated. I responded, "Um. As the clause whether or not it previouly existed - or the film title in my response to The Ferrett's response - may suggest, the things I'd do with this magic ability would tend more toward (allowing for the diversity of media) fanfiction. Bruce Timm animations of my existing fanfiction stories, home video of the high school plays I did in the 70s, the season finale of the sitcom I'd be doing right now if I was the tv actor I hoped and believed I'd be when I was seventeen, that sort of thing. Yes, I'd zap up the missing Doctor Who so I could return it to the BBC archives. Yes, I'd zap up tv crossovers I'd like to see. But the reason I covet this power isn't so that I could watch something I could almost as easily catch on cable or rent from Blockbuster. And I would have enough sense to show The Mote in God's Eye starring Jimmy Stewart and Audrey Hepburn to Jerry and Larry before I showed it at cons." At which point I was dragging The Ferrett's discussion away from its topic and began assembling this entry for my journal.

So here's the amended version as it stands now, subject to editing later than the date of this post:

I wish that, whenever I filled out the label on a blank piece of communication media - for example: videotape, CD, box of typing paper - and initialed the label, and circled the initials, then that media would then contain the work described by the label in whole, whether or not the work previously existed, in the standard language and format readable by me and by my reading device for that media respectively.

Also, since I brought it up: Who would you cast in The Mote in God's Eye? If you had this power would you, as I imply above I would, restrict yourself to actors who aren't using their likenesses themselves any more? Wouldn't Alan Alda have made a great Renner?

(This is what I spent today writing instead of tomorrow's AKOTAS. Perhaps The Ferrett's true purpose in this is to distract all his competition.)