What I want is to run and hope it falls away
The majority of my day so far has been emotionally and physically excruciating, but I want to appreciate ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch for listening to me speculate this morning on the subject of whether Voyager's Doctor is Jewish. Obviously the question itself presumes some biographical facts on the part of his creator-template, but I feel the odds are better than not in the case of an AI designer named Lewis Zimmerman who does most of his communicating via sarcasm: "Congratulations. The first trans-galactic phone call." So how does patrilineal descent work when it's photons? Fortunately, since I do not have the space in my life to explore the argument seriously, I am confident the answer is covered by either golem minhag or the same kind of fannishness that runs with the halachah of descent from Magneto. I did check rabbinical opinions on the Jewishness of robots and was entertained that professional-type people also think of Star Trek and whether a golem counts in a minyan. Personally I think that in the era of Zoom shivas and services, a sentient hologram would at least know how to dial in on time. Did this train of thought cross my mind in time to exploit it for Purimgifts? Nope. But it's one of the few things I did with my brain today that didn't make me miserable. And a package from minoanmiss arrived for my niece, who I will be seeing tomorrow. And that's really nice.
spatch for listening to me speculate this morning on the subject of whether Voyager's Doctor is Jewish. Obviously the question itself presumes some biographical facts on the part of his creator-template, but I feel the odds are better than not in the case of an AI designer named Lewis Zimmerman who does most of his communicating via sarcasm: "Congratulations. The first trans-galactic phone call." So how does patrilineal descent work when it's photons? Fortunately, since I do not have the space in my life to explore the argument seriously, I am confident the answer is covered by either golem minhag or the same kind of fannishness that runs with the halachah of descent from Magneto. I did check rabbinical opinions on the Jewishness of robots and was entertained that professional-type people also think of Star Trek and whether a golem counts in a minyan. Personally I think that in the era of Zoom shivas and services, a sentient hologram would at least know how to dial in on time. Did this train of thought cross my mind in time to exploit it for Purimgifts? Nope. But it's one of the few things I did with my brain today that didn't make me miserable. And a package from minoanmiss arrived for my niece, who I will be seeing tomorrow. And that's really nice.
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Photonic beings and their rights are a thing later on in the series, but they never go into it as fully as they could.
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I am increasingly gathering with Voyager that it hardly ever went into any of its worldbuilding as fully as it could, so I am enjoying what I can enjoy in it—which is a scattershot but surprisingly not small amount—and trying not to be twenty-five years too late frustrated with all the things it didn't do, especially since I have also gathered that under the circumstances of network micromanagement/showrunner conflict/writers' room in a sufficient state of chaos that it famously forgot a supporting character wasn't dead for seasons, it's kind of amazing that it didn't just suck across the board.