It appears that my week now will include a trip north to visit a son with car trouble, which might be tomorrow and might not be easy on any day.  I also apparently have a Collision rehearsal Friday cutting into my time a bit deeper.  So it promises to be a busier week than usual.  Id’ better get to it all if I hope to stay afloat.

Eric Ashley has been keeping atop his writing practice, with three articles published since my last entry.  Practise Bits:  Squad tosses a bit of the supernatural into a police procedural.  Eric cites the inspiration of the movie Next for inspiration for Practise Bits:  Impactor, a similar concept involving a precognitive who can see far enough into the future to attempt to choose the outcome he wants.  Today’s addition, Practise Bits:  Leaving, gives something of a fresh take on Feminism.

I believe that I have a Collision rehearsal on Friday.  Three of the team have confirmed to me that they will be there, but there is some confusion in relation to drummer John Mastick.  He sent me a copy of a conflicts schedule, and I chose a date that appeared to fit, and then he posted that I missed something on the schedule; but I double-checked the schedule and sent back that either he misread it or they changed a date and didn’t change the paper, and I have not heard from him since.  So I do not know whether he will make it to our rehearsal or not.

It also pops into my head that I’ve got car trouble that has to be addressed probably sometime this week.  It’s not my car–or rather, it is my car, but it is a car that belongs to me on paper which has never been in my driveway and I have never driven.  It was purchased by and for the use of one of my sons, whose drivers license says he lives here but who has not been home for quite a while.  It has some problems, and said son wants to junk it and get another used vehicle; but when I last saw it it was the best car I owned, and I do need another car, so I’m hesitant to junk a car that I can probably fix cheaper than I, at least, can replace, even if he can get another one as good cheaply.  But then, those pressing him to consider this also want to use the money from junking my car to pay for repairs for the new one, so I apparently have become the fly in the ointment.  I may have to take a day to go north and deal with motor vehicles issues, in any case, although I’m not certain when nor how I can do this.

So it looks like my somewhat disjointed day portends a somewhat disjointed week; let me see what I can do to hold it together for the present.

–M. J. Young

Meanwhile, today is Thursday, and I uploaded another article to the temporal anomalies series at The Examiner, Blackadder Back & Forth part 10:  repairs.  There might be ways to fix the past, but for several reasons Edmond cannot do so the way he does it.

Not yet having received 11 Minutes Ago and finding a bit of extra time on my hand Tuesday evening, I have started working on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.  I don’t much like it–I mean, it’s a decent fun movie, but as a time travel story it’s going to be a lot of trouble.  On the other hand, having seen it several (many?) times when my boys were younger, the single viewing with a notepad already made might be sufficient to cover the details.

–M. J. Young

Blackadder finally makes it home in this week’s Examiner temporal anomalies installment, Blackadder Back & Forth part 9:  home?, in which the issue is whether it is possible for the time traveler to discover that he has changed the past.  The film isn’t over, though, because Edmond will recognize the damage done and will make another trip attempting to repair it.

I have not started work on the next film (the one to follow Watchmen, which is ready to run), but I am not at the moment certain which it will be.  I have been stalling the start of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III:  Turtles in Time partly because I’ve been otherwise engaged, partly because I already know the story and think it’s not going to make a very interesting series, and partly because I’m not sure how much interest there is in it.  Meanwhile, someone wrote pressing me to analyze a film called 11 Minutes Ago, so I ordered it from Amazon (it really seemed cheap of me to suggest that he do so).  It sounds interesting, perhaps challenging, in that it appears the time traveler keeps hopping back earlier and earlier, which means that he’s rewriting his own history as he goes–definitely the dangerous way to do it.  It’s supposed to arrive around Thursday, so maybe I’ll do that one first.

Well, work awaits.

–M. J. Young

Meanwhile, I almost forgot that I had an Examiner temporal anomalies article to upload, and rushed to do it in the middle of everything else, getting Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel part 10:  partying in place and announced in what might be record time.

I know that there was something else I intended to mention, but my fogged brain can’t remember what, so I’ll turn my attention to the recent writings of Eric Ashley.  Practise Bits:  Advisor has a bit of a comedic element to it, as the hero summoned from another dimension is an accountant who knows how to correct the financial woes of the empire.  In Practise Bits:  Indispensable our idea of the scriff sense which gives you a straight line vector to your equipment is utilized by a clever character to coordinate a major battle.  Of course, it might be interesting to see what the character does in his next world when all those fragments of cloth and metal scattered across thousands of square miles go with him, scattered across thousands of square miles and reminding him when he relaxes that he needs to find them.

Don’t mind me; I’m tired.

Good night, I hope.

–M. J. Young

I am reluctant to mention that there is video of part of the concert.  My reluctance arises in part because I have seen none of it, and as I said when I hear it was going to be video recorded that it was a wonderful way to make fools of ourselves internationally.  If anyone wants a link, drop me a note, and I’ll get it–which is the other reason I’m reluctant, as I don’t actually have the link to the video at this point.

So the music is good, generally.

The Examiner temporal anomalies articles are also good, or as good as can be expected for a film not available in the United States.  Today’s installment, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel part 7:  frustrated, wrestles with a somewhat confusing problem.  Millie has to make her trip to kill everyone before (metaphysically) the boys travel to the future, or Pete won’t find a room full of dead people to scare him back to the past; but once the boys make their leap forward, her attack won’t kill any of them, so she must then seek them and send them home; but once she succeeds in sending them home she won’t know they weren’t there and won’t search for them.  The article manages to resolve this in a way that lets time, and the movie, continue.

I took my car in late this morning; a replacement muffler that had been installed a couple weeks ago was defective, so they had to replace it.  I asked if they could also do a desperately needed tune-up at the same time, but by the time they had the parts it was too late to do the work, and by the time I am able to know I have enough time to give them the car for a couple hours to do the job it’s going to be a couple of weeks wait.  So I’m continuing to guzzle gas and worry about the engine, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

Eric Ashley continues to write, but this time he’s writing reports of his own adventures at Constellation, a game convention within driving distance of his own home.  He gives a preview of his plans in Off to Constellation Convention, then produces a first look post with Day Friday of Constellation.  It appears that his rather lengthy wrap-up, An Interesting Constellation, got posted again here; I have not yet read either, but the similarities were so jarring that I copy-pasted them side-by-side in a table in a document and skimmed all the paragraph alignments to confirm my suspicion that they were as similar as one could tell without a very detailed inspection.  I intend to read it, but only once.

I’m also making slow progress on Source Code, but I do not expect it to be difficult so much as time-consuming, as long as I can find time when I’m awake enough to think.

–M. J. Young

I’m also pretty loopy at this point, because I got up early–well, early for me, on maybe three or four hours sleep–to take the car for repairs.  The little coolant leak in the heater has become something of a gusher, and since we’ve been meaning to replace the heater fan for a couple years now and they’re going to have to deconstruct the dash to fix the leak anyway, our failing old car is going to have a mostly new heater in it by tonight.  At least, that’s our earnest expectation and hope.  It also desperately needs front tires, oil, and a tune up, but there’s only so much money for car repairs and everything else, and when you’re getting thirty miles to a gallon of coolant you’ve got to address the problem.

The early start means I also uploaded today’s installment in the series, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel part 4:  edit.  This one brings Millie into the story, who travels to the past specifically to kill the three famous protagonists but fails to do so because one of them is not there and at that moment not anywhere at all.

I’ve also been trying to keep pace reading Eric Ashley’s work.  As Nikolaj observed, Practise Bits:  Farmer is a peaceful story of a man who “invented” wheelbarrows in the world he visited and traded them for lessons in farming, so he could make a life in a hard world.  Practise Bits:  Team starts a story of a rescue mission, in which the hero is trying to save the life of a little girl.  There’s an interesting layer of conflict here, because it’s obvious that the little girl’s family deserves whatever comes to them, but not that the little girl herself ought to be the target.  In any case, the man’s team has rescued a group of people from a mob and is trying to get them out.  Meanwhile, Practise Bits:  Team 2 is not the second team but the second part of that story, which flows into the telling of the story and an audience.  It gives Eric an interesting character group for his games, a team that he can bring into a story if needed, although I suspect such a team would overwhelm most player characters at least in the early adventures.

I’m unlikely to get a nap; I’m also unlikely to get much done in my condition.  I hope to be back on track soon, but then like Aslan, I call all times soon.

–M. J. Young

I think that my Friday super-rehearsal went well.  Nick was late.  Honestly, Baxter and I were also late, but Jonathan was practicing when we arrived and we weren’t that late.  We worked with vocals for something around two hours, then took a break to await the arrival of the pizza and Nick, and then returned to work each song several times until it was nearly three in the morning and we had done them all, including a quick run-through of the praise choruses we plan to have as the sing-along set we were asked to lead.  By the time we finished, my right hand plucking fingers were starting to blister, a thirty-year-old fuse blew on my Ampeg B-15 bass amp, and my left hand index finger was doing something it had never done before–I’m still not certain whether I exhausted all the acetylcholinesterase required to relax the muscles that flex that finger, or all the acetylcholine required to contract the muscles that straighten it.  I figure it was not a potassium problem because it did not feel cramped, as happens when the potassium is not there to replace the calcium and shift the muscle from contracted to relaxed, so it had to be in the neurotransmitters that cause the minerals to be released, and probably in the process that should have contracted the straightening muscles.  You don’t care about that, but maybe you learned something from it.

Incidentally, I have confirmed that the outdoor ice cream social at which we will be playing is an open event, in the sense that the community is invited.  It is scheduled for Saturday, September 10, from six to seven-thirty, outside behind the Silver Lake Community Church on Silver Lake Road near the corner of Dubois in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey.  So if you’re in the area and would like to hear how bad we are at our new debut, you’re welcome to come.

I have been reading what Eric Ashley has been writing.  I could quibble with Practise Bits:&nbps; Temporal and Practise Bits:  Temporal 2, particularly in that I coined the term “sawtooth snap” and he does not seem to use it the way I define it, but then, it’s his fiction and if he wants it not to make sense that’s his choice.  Practise Bits:  Friend was an interesting bit of politicking in a corrupt universe.  Finally, Practise Bits:  Journeys took us on a rough sea voyage made the rougher by the pessimistic prognostications of some wizards who seemed to get the wrong message from their auguries.

–M. J. Young

I forgot to mention that the last post was number 1017; some of you might remember why that is significant from the old Game Ideas Unlimited series.

The later part of yesterday was that trip out to The Lobster House in Cape May, which has excellent seafood; but I was disappointed, as they seem to have changed their previously delicious crabmeat stuffing recipe for their stuffed shrimp for something more like everyone else, which I cannot abide.  I’m not certain what I will order next time.

I’ve been very frustrated trying to catch up with the time travel articles for The Examiner; I wore myself out yesterday trying to make headway with them, and pushed most of the rest of the work into today.  I gave up on having a series ready, and posted Future Time Travel Film Analyses–2011, put together somewhat hurriedly around two or three in the morning, which gives something of a look ahead.  It occurs to me now that I had intended to include mention of various ways people can keep up to date on the series, but I should stop second-guessing myself and be happy that I posted something.

There’s more I could and probably should say here, but at the moment I should be in bed and still have several things I must do before I get there, so I’m going to stop trying to think of things to write and get out of here.

–M. J. Young

I’ll have to call them because I have a rehearsal tonight, so I’m going to need transportation.  It’s a strange rehearsal, really–we’ve moved Collision rehearsals to Friday so the drummer can make it, but that gives the rest of us two rehearsal nights; but keyboard player Jonathan is out of town this weekend at an out-of-state wedding, so he won’t be there on Friday or Sunday, and church acoustic guitar player John is also going to be absent on Sunday, so it will be http://gamingoutpost.com/blog/always-different-and-the-same/”>Baxter and I Sunday morning, and we were able to work out what we need to do then last night, so I’m giving everyone the night off except Jonathan, who apart from the fact he ought to go over some of the Collision stuff with me also needs to give me his key to the practice hall for tomorrow night, so I’m going to have a brief rehearsal with him covering Collision stuff and a longer rehearsal with Baxter and Nick tomorrow night, and Sunday we’re going to sort of wing it, doing stuff we hope we know well enough that an extra practice isn’t necessary.

Assuming I get my car back in the next hour or so.

Having finished the Examiner temporal anomalies series on Next, I dropped in a filler on temporal theory.  This one answers the question, Temporal Theory 101:  What is the Butterfly Effect?, examining this concept in chaos theory, why it does not mean that anything ever happens at random and still supports unpredictability, and how it relates to time travel problems.  It really is about the unpredictable, the unexpected.

I did expect that Eric Ashley would continue his story about mining the mountain, and he has done so with Practise Bits:  Legend 2, although he has still only scratched the beginning of this story.

I am far from ready to run the next series, on Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, but over the weekend I will either finish it or put together something else to stall for another week.  I have several things I could announce, related to future articles there, but I’d rather focus on films, not on talking about talking about them.

–M. J. Young