Editorial – Feb 2022: An oddly-shaped world whose people pass through a square hole.

Hello everyone,

As geeks, we see the world as oddly-shaped. Not the actual world per se which is still a somewhat top and bottom flattened sphere, but the people who claim to possess it. It would hardly be surprising that many people are like square pegs trying to fit in a round hole and not always succeeding. Something easily recognised by us as geeks as are seen that way by ‘normal’ people but then we are also best described as we tend to be good observers. People might think geeks are odd but, as outsiders, we see normal people as odder because they don’t recognise their own oddities as being a bit twee and, if truth be told, even crazier than us.

We can tell the difference. No wonder we escape into escapism. We need some escape from a reality that has slowly gotten ever crazy in two years of lockdown. Much of what is currently going on would have been regarded as too impossible for fiction than really happening.

With the now added threat of Putin posing over creating a potential war in the Ukraine that will bring in other nations or for them to appear weak if they don’t, I can hardly write an editorial and be light and fluffy or on a non-world topic when Armageddon could be around the corner by the end of next month. Little wars become big wars in such situations as they escalate when big nations are involved, unless there is some manoeuvrability for the aggressor to back down. Scarily, Putin would see it as weaknesses if the west backed down, so we’re seeing a Catch 22 situation developing and no easy solutions. I could discuss viable solutions but I doubt if any country would be reading about them here, let alone use them.

All of this insanity couldn’t be put down to covid lockdowns but it is also leaving a lot of people in power with too much time on their hands deciding how they want to leave their mark on the world. Now that is an SF trademark of dictators that has been used regularly in our genre. The amount of craziness developing is just as bad if not worse from all these isolations and people reacting differently. If it wasn’t so real, it would be laughable. We are all locked in the same asylum with different levels of sanity, both as individuals or nations. With some leaders, restraint becomes a lot harder. They are now seeing covid as an opportunity to fulfil their own ends while they think other nations are having their own problems.

For the individual, the cards are on the table as to whether to take covid vaccinations or not and then forgetting many third world nations have still been given privy to any choice at all, despite promises of inoculating them as well. If ever there was a choice of stand up and be counted or just being paper tigers, all promises and no delivery. I suspect the political landscape for democratic nations are going to change radically with general elections, especially as we want doers not orators. Making the right decisions and implementing them saves lives. Delaying doesn’t. None of the precautions are rocket science and the majority of people do the right things simply because they understand the dangers of not. A demonstration of how quickly we can adapt, no matter how much we might not prefer it, but our survival mechanism kicks in to protect us.

With the course of various lockdowns and covid variants, we are seeing how different groups of people and nations are reacting, much of which is borderline insanity from the top down. Many want ‘normality’ without really knowing what ‘normality’ might mean. If anything, these people lack a certain amount of patience, ignoring the rules of masks, thinking inoculations are enough and ignoring basic rules. When you also consider the sabre-waving of certain country leaders, you do have to wonder if they just want to take advantage of the situation far more than looking after their own people.

In many respects, I doubt if there will ever be or a need for a world president as some SF realities have depicted. There’s far too many issues that can’t be dealt with at a world level. To get the entire world equal would take forever or at least longer than any number of terms of office. Human wars tend to be divided over territory, religion or both, a consequence we have all seen or read about over the centuries. The only difference is how deadly the weapons have become and total annihilation has been the only deterrent. That is, until it become a game of bluff or poker and knowing your opponents. Again, all familiar SF plots and we are indeed living in one where several things are going on at once that rarely happens in our fiction, although one can hope some authors will take clues from our current reality if we survive that long.

Again, with all the problems the world has right now from covid to climate change, do we really need a war potentially able to escalate out of control where any superficiality we have right now will be driven back to the stone age and serve no one, lest of all the few survivors. For the less geek, no mobile phones and computer technology, let alone limited food supplies. The only thing it might do is remove mankind from the mix and nature will slowly resolve itself, even though I doubt it will note intelligence as a evolutionary deadline to avoid in the future.

It’s almost at the state where if all those UAPs turn out to be watching over us, we would welcome some sort of intervention to make all world leaders take note our own insignificance in the universe. If that happens, then the world will really change forever, although it will answer the one question we geeks and scientists have been asking in that are we the only sentients in the local star systems. Now that would really be a turn up for the books, especially if it brings a whole new type of player to the table.

Even so, we habitually also try to find patterns in anything and putting the human jigsaw into some semblance of order does take some practice and experience in, so we do tend to be a witness to events and puzzle out some of the insanity that is going on about us.

Hopefully, we are all going to be here next month with a sigh of relief that common-sense prevails and all nations back down. To do otherwise would make the covid infection mild in comparison.

Thank you, take care, good night and lets hope we’re all here for the next end of the month editorial and I have time to think a happier one up.

Geoff Willmetts

editor: www.SFCrowsnest.info

A Zen thought: Good grammar is the language of writing.

What Qualities Does A Geek Have: Good observational skill.

The Reveal: Very few humans can fit into a square hole. They are simply too rounded and fall through. The hole needs shaping more than the human.

Observation: Now here’s a dilemma. We know that we have to submit to some tracking on our tastes when preparing to buy something on-line but you would think the AIs would be programmed to spot when you’ve bought it and not show ads of what you could have bought instead as if that will make any difference in your decision process on things that should last a long time. Maybe they aren’t so smart after all.

 Observation: Going back to ‘Thunderbirds’, the criminal logic in ‘Alias Mr. Hackenbacker’ doesn’t make sense after the fashion show. I mean, the designs and secret of Penelon has already been revealed to the reporters so whoever they could sell it to could not go public and claim it was theirs or even use it.

 Computer Observation: Getting fed up with using Ctrl Shift V in Microsoft Edge and finding it turns off all of its Edge’s open windows? Me, too. I found instructions in Google but it was slightly wrong. So, here’s the adjusted version with my correction in bold.

  Run cmd.exe from the Windows Start Menu and then right-click on the title bar of the command prompt window as seen below. Select Properties. Click the Options tab and enable Use Ctrl+Shift+C/V as Copy/Paste. Click OK to save the option and close that window.

  It should never happen again and you do have to wonder why this isn’t a default option. Saying that, it appears that doesn’t work with the website window link line. Even so, it does reduce the number of times all the Internet Edge pages are turned off.

 Feeling Stressed: Wait until your TV dies and you need a replacement and find how much things have moved on since that last purchase. Yep, in my case 15 years. Advice: Decide on your specs and look for a match than the other way around. It takes less time. Then think of the insanity of a manual that is digitised in the TV or on-line than a genuine paper edition.