Vertical alienation

The law about TikTok ban is going into the US Senate. It’s quite interesting in its own right, along with the law about possible snatching of Russian frozen reserves. Interesting in the sense that both provide more possibilities for negative side effects than vice versa.

But I’d even be slightly inclined to support TikTok ban in the US, if only it helps somewhat to stop the proliferation of the vertical video format, tee-hee.

The chances look slim, though. ಠ‿ಠ

One of the most successful predictions about the dire straits of the future in history:

In Falling Stars by Michael Flynn (reviewed here in Russian by me), when the long-abandoned, though still active, monitoring station of aliens is discovered in the Main Belt of asteroids, Earthmen try to deduce what physical shape the Visitors may have been of, judging from exclusive reliance on handles where humans would have used a screw wheels, and on rockers and toggles where humans might have used rock-and-pinion or knob: one scientist comes to hypothesis (unfortunately not long before his death) that twisting and rotational movements were difficult to the Visitors.

Some alien civilization of the future might discover a trove of vertical videos in the remnants of human probe, or a colony for that matter; perchance they’ll come to conclusion that humans have vertically aligned eyes?

Such a question seems particularly palatable to the mind in the day of Voyager 1’s resurrection. To our collective luck though, it was launched long before TikTok.