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
