Sunday wrap-up

[kathleen_dailey]

My phone, let me show you it. I finally stopped procrastinating and bought a new phone. I'm apprehensive about figuring out how to disable, remove, or subvert all the AI and privacy-violating gimmicks that Android imposes (it's been 10 years since I've had a new phone). The very nice and quite sympatico lad who served me in the phone store was dismayed that I expressed anti-AI sentiments. "It's so helpful, it gets you started thinking, etc., etc." I didn't have the stamina to enter into a full-blown debate (and to what end, anyway? He was clearly a true believer), but I told him that I was still booting up my brain whenever I needed to start thinking, TYVM. When he fetched the charger cable and adapter for the phone, which are no longer included with most smartphones, we agreed that the manufacturer's "it's better for the environment to sell chargers separately" blather was indeed bullshit, and that latter-day corporate capitalism sucked. Despite his stance on AI, that was enough to make me hopeful for his generation.

* * *

Tomorrow I'm accompanying a friend on a tour of a retirement residence. According to her, this place is reputed to accommodate "our kind of people"--former academics, musicians, filmmakers, writers, editors, and random lefty hippie-dippie know-it-alls. It's supposedly racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. We'll see. All information is valuable, I guess, and spouse and I will need this type of accommodation sooner or later. I'm just glad someone else is trying it out before I have to.

* * *

The first step towards replicator technology? "The researchers say the results are exciting as they suggest plastic waste can be converted into biological material." This is more or less the way I've always imagined it would work: a supply of undifferentiated sludgy raw material that's converted [by a technobabble molecular/subatomic "identify, recombine, and transform" process] into an entirely new thing. Insert your worn-out space boots, retrieve the captain's Earl Grey tea, for example.

* * *

Now that I've had a few decades to think about it, I'm pretty sure that if I were writing my TOS stories today (and if I had the mental capacity to internalize all the Romulan-Vulcan lore in all the post-DS9 Treks, which I don't), the Vulcans--not the Romulans--would be the self-exiled cultish faction that rejects the dominant society. That would account for (in my Trek headcanon, anyway)

(1) the self-righteous doctrinal rigidity that appears to characterize mainstream Vulcan culture;

(2) the status of Surak-adherent Vulcan as a non-aligned, inhospitable planet, unremarkable until it connects with Earth (hoping to proselytize, maybe?) and somehow goes on to become a founding world of the nascent United Federation of Planets; and

(3) the status of the Surak-free Romulan Empire as a powerful interstellar civilization whose territory and colonies occupy a significant chunk of the galactic neighbourhood.

Too bad I didn't listen to my beta readers who suggested that idea back in 1993!