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I’m very happy with staying in a causality frame!

If providing context becomes too vexing, I’ve seen artists use colors on or around the text areas. Personally I think of Naoko as white, Yuki is reddish/brown, Kate is purple, her Shadow is black, Michelle is yellow, Blue … and of course Phil is transparent. (Did Shadow get a name and a birth day? She must have barf day cake!)

it strikes me as weird when people write immortal or divine entities not understanding Touchscreen technology or something basic like typewriter-analog tech

Likely because they were writing them like their grandparents. If you consider the fantasy authorship at the turn of the millennium, Boomers & GenX. Who’s parents and grandparents (Lost, Greatest, Silent) may have been overt grumps about the transistor revolution post WW2. Sprinkle in a little bit of senility and you’ve got an “Old Entity” who’s been around forever, but can’t be bothered with (can’t actually make new mental connections about) all the new fangled thingummies. Apply this characterization to entities that started out when Linear A was the new hotness, and you get a Hephaestus who doesn’t know what GRX-810 alloy is.

When said entity was disconnected from the human culture for really long, this might happen, but it’s relatively easy for an entity with full cognitive functions to quickly learn any new technology. When someone who is following the human world constantly, they would be just as good with any new tech as with the really ancient ones.

On the other hand, there are a few sci-fi stories where mostly immortal humans end up as a bunch of very old and very senile people, who don’t really remember anything to function, but simply do not die. This seems to be the more realistic approach for immortality and it seems to be a realistic alternative along with getting insane due to storing (knowing) too much information.

The question is mostly what is too old and how much knowledge is too much for a human or human like brain?

Latest hypotheses is that that we have separate systems for making and recalling memories, and that it is the latter that crap out most often. Also, they see a large group of livers that lives > 100 years as transplants, so there is no specific reason to lose function. Especially if you live, your brain being an organ among others. Immortality won’t work anyway, since biology rests on evolution (population change over generations) and evidently static individuals loses out.

Oh no, will Yuki be drawn into the world of designer clicky clacky keyboards?

She could likely form an android interface herself, having magic and transformation. Speaking of which, the latest hypotheses on memory problems is that formation and recall are different pathways and diseases or possibly age may rarely affect the former – the book may be fine since he is open to recall. 😎

But then again on your nice observations, it is striking how old and new pantheons are grumps about the biological revolution. (E.g. Marvel’s unrealistic “hopeful monster” ‘mutations’, impossible non-aging organisms, et cetera. If memory serves Stan Lee has been quoted as though he was not straining credulity on that, but he was.)

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