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by M. J. Young

Deadlines, Delays, and Divergences

August 15, 2011 in Blogs

I have more on my plate at the moment than I can juggle, and I’ve never been very good at plate juggling; even with juggling balls, I can handle two easily and three not at all.  But the plates are spinning, and I can’t get hold of them.

I crossed a milestone this morning, finishing an analysis of the script for A Long Tomorrow; already I’ve received a thank-you note and the bulk of the promised payment (which will take a couple days to make it from PayPal to my bank account), but I have promised to answer any additional questions so the work might not be complete.

I uploaded the final installment in the Examiner temporal anomalies analysis of Next, Next part 7:  divergence, which gives consideration to whether any kind of multiple dimension theory could be used to have the protagonist see the actual future of another world, coming to the conclusion that our previous conclusion is correct.  I have, somewhere, a theory article to post on Thursday, but I do not yet have a complete analysis of Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which I need to finish by Monday or have something else ready to run instead.

Meanwhile, I perhaps foolishly agreed that Collision could perform in less than a month, and that with a new drummer who just really started with us, and difficulty getting everyone together even once a week.  The drummer is pushing for a couple of all-night rehearsals, which are going to cut into my time significantly, although the first will be not this week but next week because the keyboard player is out of town this week so we’ll keep our rehearsal shorter.

I’ve also got some car pressures this month.  The locking mechanism for the tailgate has finally died, and will be replaced when we have money at the end of the week; but I have to register two cars before the end of the month, and the one that has to go through inspection needs exhaust system repairs, which is the only thing they still inspect, so I’m going to be scrounging to get everything working on that end; there’s also an insurance payment overdue on that.

On the brighter side, Eric Ashley has provided us with two more fiction entries in the Gaming Outpost library.  The first, Practise Bits:  Waiting, is different because the main character seems to be a sentient rock or island of some sort, living at an extremely slow rate while people, like insects, race over its surface.  The second, Practise Bits:  Legend, is set in a strange universe, but if there’s a dimensional traveler in it I don’t know who it is.  It is an interesting character sketch, though, and worth reading for the setting, too.

We had enough of a rain storm yesterday that several bridges were still out today, and you have to know your way around to get around.  The particularly odd thing in the midst of it was that when our driveway was under several inches of water the well stopped pumping water to the house, and we were without water from sometime midday Sunday until midday today.  The plumbing company sent someone over who took the cover off the relay, jiggled it, and got it working, admitted he had no idea what was wrong or why it was working now, and charged us nothing but the promise that we would call if there was more trouble.  Thus far there hasn’t been, but I did have to make a laundromat trip yesterday which again got co-opted into an extended shopping trip that left me exhausted and ate all my time.  Hopefully I have enough time left today, and enough energy, although I was up unreasonably early to await the plumber, and am running down quickly at this point.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Always Different and the Same

July 11, 2011 in Blogs

We continue the Examiner temporal anomalies series with another problem posed by waves of change which move through time, and that is their ubiquity–the fact that anything which travels through time at a rate other than the speed of time must exist in every moment of time through which it passes, and thus that once it reaches us in our time it must be something we have always known, always experienced all our lives.  Thus A Sound of Thunder part 13:  ubiquity brings us a touch closer to the end of the series.

As is often the case, though, I am becoming concerned about future articles.  The next series, that happens to be the Next series, is ready to go, but I’ve been stymied in the middle of the one after that, and that one is not going to run long.  But hopefully I will get that in order.

As previously reported, our car is back, tenuously, on the road; Baxter’s car is off, probably for a few days, and thus I am back to transporting him to and from work, a much too early morning and a late afternoon interruption.  Meanwhile, the individual who was injured is hoping that tomorrow’s medical appointment will give permission to return to work, which will put that back on my chores list but relieve some of the financial worries.

The spanner in the works of my schedule has me a bit uncertain of what I am doing, that is, I keep forgetting things; but what I just remembered having just forgotten is that Eric Ashley has again submitted two more articles to the Gaming Outpost vault, which I read on previous visits.  Practise Bits:  House gives a glimpse at a type of game world we don’t see very often, but which fits the character nicely, as he gets to experience the American Suburbia Dream (one of several American Dreams).  For others, that would be a horror setting.  Meanwhile, Practise Bits:  Roles is a slightly different suburbia, perhaps a bit more upscale, with coaching kids’ soccer and attending art exhibits with backbiting colleagues–a scene I don’t recall seeing in game to this point, but then, Eric has run a lot of games I have not seen.

I have some to run myself; hopefully I can keep alert long enough to do so.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Meaningful Changes

July 7, 2011 in Blogs

Let’s start today by introducing A Sound of Thunder part 12:  meaningful, the latest in the Examiner temporal anomalies series.  At least one reader has expressed the opinion that I have sufficiently eviscerated the film and should move to the next, but I think this article illumines one of the serious problems that often arise in shoddy thinking about time travel.  That is, why should some changes to history be considered “meaningful” and others not, and more importantly how can the world itself tell the difference?

The car returned today, perhaps not fully functional but at least sufficiently functional for our purposes.  Meanwhile, Baxter’s car apparently decided to quit yesterday, and he’s been scrambling for transportation we were not able to provide; we’ll see where that leads.  There is no rehearsal tonight, because the man who has the keys to the practice hall also has company from out of town; he was talking about practice tomorrow night, but the complications at the moment are formidable, and I do not see it happening.

I read three pieces from Eric Ashley since I last posted.  Practise Bits:  Academe is an assault on the stronghold of Yale University, in another universe.  Practise Bits:  Ark takes some descriptive liberties with the antediluvian era, but finds an interesting way to involve a verser into a moment in history.  Practise Bits:  Grit is a western setting in which the central character is not the interdimensional traveler, but is rather the lady to whom said traveler proposes.

Let me go do something meaningful on the forums.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Diverse Complications

July 4, 2011 in Blogs

Today’s contribution to the Examiner temporal anomalies series, A Sound of Thunder part 11:  interference waves, fails to make sense of any reason why a change in the past would interfere with trips to times subsequent to that change but not to times prior to it, and thus concludes that it is another flaw in the logic of the film.  It is yet another complication with the analysis.

I am similarly vexed in my efforts to wrap my head around the work I’m doing on Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which has been a lot of fun to watch and to consider, but is starting to bog down in my brain.  I should probably watch it again, but one of my sons borrowed it promising to make a copy that will run on the DVD player (and I suspect my trial copy of the program that will play it on my computer is going to run out before I get it back) and has not yet done so.  He is elsewhere celebrating Independence Day.

Which reminds me:  to all who celebrate such holidays within these United States, happy Independence Day.  I might get in the pool, but not because it’s a holiday.  Most of the holiday celebrations I have seen boil down to “it’s good to have an excuse to mix fire, gunpowder, and alcohol”, which doesn’t seem a good plan to me.  I’m not a holiday person generally, though, so maybe I just don’t get it.

The car is probably the biggest complication–Thursday night when left practice it blew a hole in the radiator, and it was a two-hour effort to limp it home five miles a hundred yards at a time with such bottled water as I had in the car (not bottled water, but water in old coolant bottles).  Complicating it further, the bank account is about depleted and we have not yet heard whether disability is going to consider sending us money on the new claim, so we’ll be scrounging loans from family (not all of which we have repaid from the last disability delay) to pay for the repair.

That rehearsal introduced its own complications:  the new drummer, Nick, has trouble with weeknight rehearsals, but Baxter doesn’t want to sacrifice his weekends; but then, he has had a lot of trouble with rehearsals for Collision and for the church band, to the point that I’m concerned whether he’s still interested in doing music at all.  More complicating, I’ve noticed in recent recordings that I get too tired trying to play and sing, and mess up rhythms and tempos terribly, so I am definitely going to need people who can help hold the beat together.  The old drummer, John Mastick, seems to be ignoring me, although I have not given up hope that it’s just some kind of technical snafu that prevents him from getting anything from me.  There are a lot of other complications, but this is getting long, and I’m hoping to do a bit of swimming before I finish the rest of the work today.

Eric Ashley has offered three articles over the weekend, worth a quick view; he courteously posted them on different days, with the result that I could read them one at a time and still have them clearly separate in my mind.  Practise Bits:  Apartment was a bit of fun with a super-human character trying to modify available real estate to suit his training needs without causing undue problems with his neighbors.  Practise Bits:  Ghost was a bit of high-tech commando work, perhaps inspired on some level by his early Multiverser character, who took the name “The Ghost” when he single-handedly defeated the Army of Eight using a few tricks and guerrilla tactics–although I’m still not sure why the charging dogs did not break the laser beams he was so carefully detecting.  Finally, Practise Bits:  Unease is another untrained kid verser trying to struggle through being a hero and not doing well at it.

So on that note, I’ll let you read those articles (don’t miss mine, of course), while I get wet and then return to tackle the forum posts.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

A Bit of Scouting

June 27, 2011 in Blogs

Today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article is entitled A Sound of Thunder part 9:  scouting, and discusses a problem with the film that occurs when Dr. Ryer explains to Dr. Rand what would have happened to the allosaurus had they not shot it:  how could he possibly know that?  The article explains it.

Meanwhile, our poor dying car suffered another problem over the weekend, losing a ball joint in the rear end and so dropping the drive shaft while we were driving.  It should be fixed tomorrow.  It has made life more complicated again today.

It appears again that Eric Ashley is intent on posting more articles than I, but he does this in spurts and I’m not too worried that he’s going to catch up with my thousand Blogless Lepolt entries and couple hundred Game Ideas Unlimited articles, even with his impressive World-a-Week series.  I am enjoying the new series despite its inherent discontinuity–snippets of stories that leave one wondering what would happen next.  The new three are worth comment.  Practise Bits:  The Man On Horse is moody and brooding, following the path of a mercenary in a post-apocalyptic world.  Practise Bits:  Quest is something of a meandering opening that starts with a normal medieval world and then slips in bits of peculiarities to make it different.  Practise Bits:  Eating Alone puts a modern man in a magical setting and suggests work he might do and how the world might see him.

I’ve got new players on the forums, and much else on my plate, so I’d better get to it all.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

One Foot In Front of the Other

June 20, 2011 in Blogs

First, congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Kyler Young, celebrating their honeymoon in Atlantic City, and it was good of them to make the extra hour trip to see us while they were somewhat more than usual in the neighborhood.  We did not discuss when he will return to the games, but I did give him a Multiverser coffee mug obtained from our merchandise at Cafe Press.  He was supposed to receive it for Christmas, but things have been just that crazy.

Speaking of crazy–well, we’ll get back to that.  First, let me mention the publication in the Examiner’s temporal anomalies series of A Sound of Thunder part 7:  missteps, which tackles more problems with the notion of history changing in waves.

Now back to the crazy.  I was unable to do much typing yesterday because one of the cats bit me rather severely when I attempted to prevent it from escaping out a window I had taped shut but someone else had opened.  When I overused the hand it would start bleeding again, so everything was kept to a minimum.  I have a much too early appointment tomorrow to get a tetanus booster, so I’ll have to curtail my work tonight so I can be up at an indecent hour.  Meanwhile, and before that, the brand new gas tank we had installed in the car started leaking Friday night, and we had to limp it through the weekend and the distant wedding and take it to the shop this morning–where they said of course they will replace it free, but unfortunately the parts supplier won’t have one until tomorrow so I’m dependent on others for transportation for a day, and of course a day on which I have to get somewhere early.  I am the more apologetic, because I have had several people respond to the routine letters I send when someone applies for Gaming Outpost membership, and am certain that there is a spate of new posts awaiting my attention that are not going to get it as quickly as I would have liked, but hopefully someone will let them know that I’m not really ignoring them and will get to them as soon as the smoke clears and the dust settles.

I also want to make a point of reading Eric Ashley’s articles, so often filled with interesting ideas, but I think tonight all I can do is call attention to them, Practise Bits:  Ship and Practise Bits:  Knife, and remind myself to read them when I have a moment.  At least I caught up the e-mail.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

The Impact of Butterflies

June 6, 2011 in Blogs

The pipe that popped over the hot water heater last week has left us still without hot water, but there are problems that prevent addressing that fully and completely, one of which is that over the weekend the car quit yet again and the people working on it finally admitted around six thirty that they were not going to be able to finish it today.  That means that the ride I arranged is unnecessary but I will need to arrange another for tomorrow.  We’ve scraped together enough money to pay for the car repairs, but with other recent expenses our food stocks have not been replenished and we’re getting to the end of anything that makes an obvious meal.  But that’s not why I’m posting; it just happens that little problems compound into big problems.

I am posting because of a little problem covered by the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article, A Sound of Thunder part 3:  butterfly effect.  I find it highly ironic that in Bradbury’s short story, preserved in the film, it was crushing a butterfly into the soles of a boot that altered the history of the world centuries in the future, that Bradbury happened to pick the death and removal of that specific creature as the impetus of a chain of change stretching across eons to alter the present.  The irony is that the phrase “butterfly effect” actually has nothing to do with that, arising instead from a computerized weather experiment.  According to the experiment, a researcher was running a computer model of Caribbean weather and before he left for lunch he saved the data point.  Upon returning, he was so surprised by the position that had been reached that he saved that, and restored the system to the save point from before lunch to run again.  He got completely different results, and when he finally determined why it was because the program did calculations to (if memory serves) sixty-four decimal places but the save only preserved thirty-two, and somewhere in the fractions that began as ten to the minus thirty-three the change in the numbers changed everything.  The researcher concluded from this that a factor as small as the flapping of the wings of a single butterfly in the Amazon delta would be sufficient to change whether or not a hurricane was created in the Caribbean, and thus that it was impossible to have enough information to track all the causal chains necessary for weather prediction.  This, then, is the foundation of chaos theory:  you cannot know what any small change will change.

That also is the premise here, that the death of the single butterfly changes the future entirely.  The problem this article addresses is whether such an effect is possible given the death of this particular butterfly, whose conditions were such that the answer would seem to be–obvious to me, anyway.  Read it to see if you agree.

Speaking of reading, Eric Ashley has been writing again, with three pieces I would call character sketches of dimension-hopping versers more than anything else.  The first, Practise Bits:  Soldier, gives us a person who understands how to fight better than anyone in the world he visits, such that he fights better than anyone and has the medals to prove it.  The second, Practise Bits:  Haute Couture, gives him some practice describing fashion, but is more about the one observing the fashion, a girl who finds the early twentieth century a pleasant change from the early twenty-first.  Finally, Practise Bits:  Chameleon paints an adventure of in which the hero uses technological and body skills beyond the imagining of the modern world for some political-industrial espionage.

It’s early, but I still have to solve the supper problem and that without a trip to the grocery store or a further depletion of our bank account.  Still, let me see about our forum first.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Things Change

March 10, 2011 in Blogs

A lot has happened in a short time, and most of it for the better, although things are still a bit uncertain.  Long-anticipated funds have arrived, and the car is being repaired, hopefully to be back on the road today.  As soon as I am finished here I will be checking on that.

Meanwhile, I am progressing with the solutions to Los Chronocrimines with TimeCrimes part 10:  a first change, in the temporal anomalies series at The Examiner, outlining part of the history which is created when Hector travels to the past once but not twice. I have about two weeks left in this series, by which time everything should be resolved; then I begin Timeline, which is now officially complete but for the links that have to be added as the articles appear (that is, I do not know the form of the link to the first article until after I have published the first article).  So that’s good to go, but now I need to start considering which movie I will tackle after that so I can get started on it.

That is also about the time that our recuperating patient will be officially recuperated, and things might start returning to normal around here, for better or worse.

This evening is another rehearsal at the local church that asked me to help with their music; I expect to meet more of the band (many of the young people were away on a retreat last week), and see what we can do with them.  That also crimps my time, as I have to find a ride to get the car and be back in time to make sure that people are fed before I go to the rehearsal, but I don’t yet know when the car will be ready.

So it’s time to turn my attention elsewhere.

–M. J. Young

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Bell, Book, and Double-ended Candle

July 19, 2010 in Blogs

A car abruptly and unanticipatedly was disabled over the weekend, with the result that someone needed transportation to and from an overnight job.  I got the from end of the deal, an errand that had the alarm ringing by five this morning (that’s eleven at night on the nine-five equivalent) (that’s the bell), but I also was serving supper around two to the person who got the to end, so my sleep was short (that’s the double-ended candle).  I also had a regularly scheduled errand at ten, and since being three quarters of an hour away from home at six had me home around seven and expecting to be rousted afresh around nine, I just got an early start instead.  I cleared a fair amount of work out of the way before collapsing for a couple more hours before noon.

One thing I did early was upload the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article, continuing the series with The Lake House part 15:  Persuaded by a Book (and there’s the book).  Alex returns Kate’s copy of the book Persuasion by putting it under a loose floorboard in the bedroom of the apartment in which she is going to live in the future–but if the floorboard was loose all that time how did she not know it, and if it wasn’t loose how did it get that way?  The problem of the floorboard is considered.

I’ve got other irons in the fire, but if I manage to keep my computer stable in the heat I might be able to move ahead on some of the pressing projects, which would take some of the worry out of me.

So, let’s press.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Equivalences

October 5, 2009 in Blogs

I thought I had mentioned but cannot now find a note with reference to my recent notion of a scale for explaining life, which I call the Nine Five Equivalent, abbreviated 95e.  In essence, it is determined by taking the time an individual ordinarily reports to work, calling it effectively nine in the morning, and then referencing all other times by their relationship to this.

I mention it now because I had car trouble–last night the alternator died on the car on which we rely for our own transportation.  I spotted the problem in time to cancel any evening travels and managed to drive to the garage early this morning so they could repair it.  That means that I was out of bed around eight thirty.  For someone on a nine-to-five schedule, that’s probably sleeping in a bit.  I, though, am on a three-to-eleven schedule, dictated by my wife’s employer.  Eight is seven hours before three, and thus I was up at 95e two-thirty in the morning.  I spent the worst part of the day falling asleep over a book and several cups of coffee in a diner that has a no sleepers policy, and settled the bills in the early afternoon.

Under the heading of what else could go wrong, I decided that since I was passing the inspection station on my way home, I would stop and ask how I get the car reinspected if I lost the paper that said for what it failed originally.  They were very helpful, having no one waiting, and said that they could print a copy from the central computer and bring me through right away.  Although it had failed for bad tires, apparently they had to drive it through the inspection line, turning it off, starting it, turning it off, starting it, turning it off, starting it, as it moved to the end, where they turned it off.  When I went to drive away, there was nothing left of the battery to start it yet once more.

Thanks to the generosity of my parents, I have Triple A, so I called them.  I know that in our part of the world it can take as much as ninety minutes to get emergency road service, because the approved service stations are some distance away and are often busy.  However, it was barely ten minutes before a vehicle, a large flatbed, arrived, and I thought I would be headed home.  Wrong again.  It seems that this particular truck was passing through the area and got a call from his dispatcher to check on me, but he had no jumper cables and no jumper pack–the tow truck could not give me a jump.  I could wait for him to drive back to his base, probably half an hour away, and return with cables, or for someone else to get to me, or I could let him tow me wherever I wanted to go.

On reflection, I had him tow me the mile or two back to the garage that had done the repair.  They found my story of the inspection station running down the battery entertaining, and set about charging the battery for most of an hour while I sat this time on a bench in the sun.

It drove home fine, and the gauges and lights all looked good, but as for me I wandered about a bit trying to get oriented and finally collapsed for a nap in the nine-five equivalent of about noon to three.  I am now attempting to get up to speed on some of what I missed in this disrupted day.

I hope you found it entertaining.

I did have the foresight to upload the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article before I left for the garage, although I am only this evening announcing it (you should subscribe if you want to be notified, but I have no idea how that works).  This was an answer to Primer Question 1:  the disappearing Abe, treatment of one particular doppelganger in the cult-popular film.  It remains to be seen how the readers will respond to these question-and-answer articles, but I had been planning to do a third viewing of the Futurama movie Bender’s Big Score so I could continue the analysis, and the car trouble disrupted those plans as well.

So at this point I think I’m pushing most of Monday into Tuesday and trying to get back to some semblance of sanity around here.

–M. J. Young

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