I wrote a mock obituary for myself yesterday.
No, I’m not going through a depressive episode; and no, it’s not out of any macabre of doom. Rather, it was meant to help me figure out what I want my life to have looked like when it comes to its end. Writing one’s own obituary can actually be an exercise in self-reflection, one that can help a person take the first few steps toward a more intentional life.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you do realize you’re using data center resources every time you stream a movie or music, right?
To answer a recent meme, you also use a bottle of water every time you stream a two-hour movie. Do a marathon of eight episodes of your favorite show? Four bottles of water. Put Spotify on in your office for a workday? Two or three bottles of water. I can go on, but you get the idea.
Now, I’m not saying the concerns about data centers are misguided. They aren’t, and the advent of AI will demand the building of a lot more of them.
But here’s the deal. Some are already experimenting with ways to keep water consumption to a minimum. To possibly generate at least some of their own power. To be as light on the local environment as possible.
Been messing with my electronic stack lately and I miss 7-inch tablets. I have a Lenovo Tab M7 that I use as an e-reader on steroids (it also lets me read from places like FanFiction and AO3) but, of course, the OS is deprecated and unsupported at this point.
My Z Fold 6 just does not give me the same experience. The dimensions are wrong, it’s hard to hold in tablet mode, and it keeps trying to put text either on lines that are too long, or in two columns that jump around too much. I find that I keep reaching for the M7 anyway.
Responding to: Meet the Americans who choose to live without a car in the US: ‘It takes some doing’
Last fall, when I was rearranging my life, I intentionally set it up so that I could be as car-free as possible. Right now, I’m probably around the 95% mark; I can do most things without driving, but not all. At this point I don’t believe I can make it to 100%.
I’ll admit that my reasons weren’t altrustic. I was tired of paying for gas and maintenance. I wanted/needed an excuse to get out and walk more places. After nearly 20 years fighting Atlanta traffic, I’ve somewhat burned out on driving. Not traveling, mind you — driving.
I sometimes quip that I might be in a minority of one: when I first encountered Star Trek, I thought it was a book series.
It happened sometime in 1983, the year I turned eight. I’d been a precocious reader, and was reading at a fifth-grade level by the age of 5. I progressed to standard adult-level reading during that next year; and by a couple of years after that was actually starting to get bored with reading. I could get through an “age appropriate” chapter book in an hour, and through a “teen” level book in an afternoon.
The problem? While my reading ability was well above my chronological age, my social and emotional development were both right in line with it. So was the amount of life experience I’d had at that point. As such, despite the fact that I was hungry for more complicated books, there weren’t that many out there. True “adult” books discussed themes and situations that I didn’t understand — not because I couldn’t read the words, but because I wasn’t yet able to pick up the context.
One afternoon, as I was noodling about being bored, my father was reading M.S. Murdock’s Web of the Romulans and laughing out loud at some points. Intrigued, I asked if I could read it too. Dad thought about it for a moment and decided that it was probably all right for my age. While he finished it, he told me, it would be a good idea for me to go through the Blish Readers he had on our bookshelves.
I did. And I was entranced. To this day I can still remember that the very first episode adaptation I read was “Arena.”
I didn’t know about the omegaverse until several months ago, when I was doing some research about fan fiction in general. For those who aren’t aware, in these types of stories, the characters have a defined and hierarchical biological role (alpha, beta, or omega). The relationship dynamics thus resemble those seen in packs of wolves. It originally emerged in explicit stories, but has since moved downstream into less explicit stories. Some might even argue that it’s become mainstream.
I don’t care for it.