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by M. J. Young

Caught in the Cycle

April 23, 2012 in Blogs

I find myself wondering whether the theological notion that time goes around in an endless loop was inspired by the experience most people have of each day being a repeat of the previous one.  It is, of course, an illusion; yet it seems sometimes that we all do, do, do, what we’ve done, done, done, before, before, before, as someone’s saying goes.

That seems to be the case with Pack Eoling, in a way.  That is, according to the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article, 11 Minutes Ago part 3:  return, the reason he comes back at 8:30 is that the film crew told him at 8:45 that he told them to tell him he has to, and the reason he tells them this is that they told him it was important and–well, I shouldn’t rewrite the article here, since you can read it there.

And of course since it’s Monday, I uploaded an article and announced it on several venues, then waded through a weekend e-mail backlog, and now am here posting and hoping to get through the game threads quickly so I can run the next errand on time.

It took a while for me to recuperate from back-to-back Collision rehearsals, Thursday here with lead guitarist Kyle who couldn’t make Friday and didn’t want to skip rehearsal, and Friday at the church (which means hauling equipment) with keyboard/vocalist Jonathan and drummer Nick (which means enough equipment to hear the vocals over the drums).  Drummer John did not show and did not call, and I’m wondering what’s happening with him yet again.  But all of this is relatively familiar territory, except that I was more tired from the double rehearsal than I am from single rehearsals.

Also familiar, Eric Ashley has added another piece to the fiction collection, Practise Bits:  Hunter, in which it seems the immortal has the job of delivering justice, although he was only just starting the mission.  Less familiar but not unknown, James T. Marsh gives us an action adventure set in an alternate universe, in which the Revolution is trying to overthrow American communism in the name of democracy.  Stranger things have been imagined.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Finding Time to Make Things Work

April 19, 2012 in Blogs

I am doing things rather out of sequence today, because it seems I have back-to-back Collision rehearsals–one tonight with lead guitarist Baxter, who might not be able to make it to the one tomorrow night with keyboard/vocalist Jonathan and drummer Nick, and I still do not know whether drummer John is going to be there and (as usual) cannot reach him.  Thus, in terms of workload, today will be bad, but tomorrow worse, and I’m hitting as much as I can while I’m still having my morning coffee in the faint hope that I can clear the forums before the rehearsal.

I have uploaded today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article, which is also about trying to get tasks to fit in time, and the failure to do so:  11 Minutes Ago part 2:  failure explains why Pack makes a second trip to the past, when we see him succeed in obtaining his desired air sample and there can be no previous history of his presence the first time he arrives.

Also for your reading pleasure, Eric Ashley has again contributed a couple pieces worth reading.  There are some unanswered questions in Practise Bits:  Avalanche (why does no one stay on the island overnight?), but it’s an interesting bit on what happens when you interact with people who know your doppelganger.  Practise Bits:  Close is an action adventure piece with some tense moments.

I’ll return in a couple hours, Lord willing, to complete my work here before the rehearsal.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Organizing Moments

April 16, 2012 in Blogs

I am having a somewhat disjointed day, and I am not certain quite why.  However, I launched the beginning of a new Examiner temporal anomalies series with 11 Minutes Ago part 1:  three stories, a brief synopsis of the plot and time travel elements of one of those gems you might have missed I mentioned last Thursday.  I am still awaiting word as to whether they will publish my Birther issue article, so you’ll have to be patient a bit longer.

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

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by M. J. Young

A Side Trip

March 8, 2012 in Blogs

We continue our Examiner temporal anomalies consideration of those crazy turtle kids with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III part 2:  dimension hopping.  It begins by considering whether there might be a parallel dimension solution to the film’s timelines, makes the analogy I have been looking forward to making about why parallel dimensions are not time travel, and uncovers a problem with the device itself that impacts any consideration of what happens.

Meanwhile, I have been banging my head against the wall all week trying to reach drummer John Mastick to tell him to come to a Collision rehearsal tomorrow night, and tonight I get a message from Jonathan that he can’t make it so we don’t have the hall; but Kyle says he can practice with me, which will be time well spent and will save me moving so much equipment.  I still have to reach John, though, if only to work out some better way to reach him–for four days straight, every one of perhaps thirty calls went straight to voicemail.  Today his phone finally rang, but no one answered the several times I called.  So I am a bit frustrated, but at least I don’t have to get hold of him to tell him never mind don’t come after all.

(He tells me that he has a lot of trouble getting calls, that he often gets notifications that someone attempted to call or text him several days before.  AT&T tells him it’s his I-Phone; Apple tells him it’s the network.  It has confirmed my belief that I want neither an I-Phone or an AT&T contract.)

Eric Ashley has again contributed to the fiction collection here with Practise Bits:  Cassandra, borrowing, I think, the mythical person whose true predictions of disaster are never believed and who is punished for trying to prevent those disasters, but who hopes that the arrival of the dimensional traveler will give her someone who will be able to believe her and avert the trouble.

I’m hoping to get through everything else quickly and tonight have time to get to that movie I’m trying to analyze (I was stymied several times already this week), so I’d better move.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Not Knowing What You Know

February 16, 2012 in Blogs

It has been a frustrating week of sorts, because I am supposed to be at a Collision rehearsal tomorrow night and the drummer and old friend John Mastick is supposed to be there, and I have been unable to reach him by phone or e-mail or any other means for a week or so, so I don’t even know if he knows.  Ah, well; we will see what happens.

Meanwhile, I have been examining the temporal anomalies in Watchmen, and have been grappling with the peculiarities involved in what Dr. Manhattan knows and does not know.  That is the focus of today’s installment, Watchmen part 2:  consciousness, where we struggle for an explanation of how he can know that he is going to learn something and not already know that which he is going to learn.  Read about it at The Examiner.com.

I am further frustrated by the fact that the movie I was watching, of which I watched half the other night, 11 Minutes Ago, tonight does not play on my DVD players; they do not even recognize it as a disk.  I have had to download software to my computer, which means I will have to watch it in my office instead of somewhere comfortable.  Ah, well–at least it runs.

Now I find, too, that my night has just changed abruptly; after planning all day to be free to work this evening, I am not free to work this evening.  Well, we’ll steal as much time as we can, and then there’s no telling when we’ll be back, but it will probably happen.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

The Wellington Impact

January 16, 2012 in Blogs

In today’s installment in the Examiner temporal anomalies series we examine the impact Blackadder has on history when his time machine has an impact on the Duke of Wellington–quite literally.  Blackadder Back and Forth part 7:  Wellingtons suggests that this would have been significant, but not in the way expressed in the movie.

Meanwhile, I have completed the draft of a short series on Watchmen, and posted the anticipated episode titles to the index site.

Friday we had an interesting meeting at a diner whose bar crowd was too loud for our preference and whose prices reflected the fact that they drew a clientelle there for the nostalgia.  Most of Collision was in attendance, plus a few family members of the members.  John, the drummer I had hoped to introduce to the rest who chose the location, did not appear and has not been in contact with me since; I am again beginning to worry about him.  Hopefully it’s nothing serious.

We have illness in the house, and already my effort to get my work completed has raised ire that I should be able to skip work and attend the sick; but Monday is a bad day for that, so here I am.

–M. J. Young

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What Are the Odds?

December 29, 2011 in Blogs

After what I estimate to be a year in absentia, John Mastick dropped me a note a few days ago to wish me a merry Christmas, and after a three-hour phone conversation (I’m going to have to buy more minutes, I never talk that long) he is eager to resume playing Multiverser (those on the forum know that I call him “John 4″ and his handle is “Johnny Angel”) and to get down here to play with Collision.  There’s a story there, because Baxter and I had found a drummer, and then John had contacted me and said he wanted to play drums, and persuaded me to try running two drummers; I said I would if the other drummer agreed, but we lost him, and then we lost touch with John.  When Nick appeared, I said that we theoretically had a drummer, but we wanted to run two drummers, and he was cool with that, so hopefully sometime in January we’ll see just how it works.

Meanwhile, my readership for the Examiner temporal anomalies articles.  Whether people are finally finding them, or the volume of past articles is building a growing audience, or the new films are of particular interest, I could not say, but today I published Blackadder Back & Forth part 2:  the bet, giving a quick overview of all the convoluted time travel in the film and eliminating the possibility of a fixed time resolution to the story.

I read the recent Eric Ashley piece as well.  Practise Bits:  Locked is a new take on the dead man in sealed room motif with a few fresh insights along the way.

I’ve had a few interruptions today, but hopefully still have time to finish what needs to be done if I hurry and encounter no further delays.

–M. J. Young

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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

Overlooked Repairs

June 30, 2008 in Blogs

Yesterday I mentioned having made a few minor changes to the Temporal Anomalies section of M. J. Young Net.  I did not mention, because I forgot completely until I was answering an e-mail today, that I also updated the Other Films page, where I list movies I have not yet analyzed, and give some idea of whether I am going to and what I think in brief.  It came to me because there was an e-mail awaiting me today asking if I planned to analyze a movie I just added to that page, Premonition, which is sitting on my television awaiting my attention.

I also dropped a note to Grey Vanaman of Audio-Clear, the man and the company who have (has?) helped Collision, and before that 7dB, so much with equipment, about getting an amp for our P.A.  I got his response today, and he’s got just the ticket, so I’ll probably try to pick it up when I go out a bit later.  This will make everyone happy, but particularly our distant drummer John, who has been told repeatedly that I can’t really bring the drums to rehearsal until I can hear the vocals over them.  We just moved a lot closer.

I’ve much to do, so I’d better turn my attention toward doing some of it.

–M. J. Young

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Eat, Sleep, Drive

March 18, 2008 in Blogs

…Not necessarily in that order.

As I mentioned on Sunday, yesterday’s plan involved driving north so that a son could spend his girlfriend’s birthday with her. This also would give me opportunity to visit my sick father, who although home from the hospital seems to have lost his voice (vocal chords not responding for some reason), and to connect with our drummer to give lend him the electronic drum gadget he’s been eager to use. It has also meant that the Monday workload got pushed into today atop the Tuesday workload, which is a lot of work.

The plan did not go entirely smoothly. I believe I got almost three hours of sleep by five in the morning, when the first to need to catch a bus was looking for his morning medicine, and then in somewhat disrupted and disjointed fashion pieced together my morning study and was on the road around quarter after seven. We grabbed breakfast at the gas station (which is not as bad as it sounds, since although Wawa has recently established a strong place in the retail gasoline market they are traditionally a deliconvenience store) and so reached the northern destination very shortly after ten.

Having fought for consciousness over the last leg of that journey, I locked the car and slept, fitfully with the CD player running, for about two hours. I then was unable to reach the drummer, who I think had not anticipated his wife and her Irish family monopolizing his time on St. Patrick’s Day–but my mother called, wondering why I was not already there, so I went there, ate lunch, and by around two was reading clippings cut for me.

Then, perhaps near three, I fell asleep again, and slept until my cell phone awoke me, my wife calling to see what arrangements I had made for several things she had expected me to address. Since it was by then almost six, my mother turned her attention to feeding me dinner and packing my car full of groceries. I still could not raise my drummer on the phone, I settled in to wait for someone to call.

The son called first–not the son for whose call I was waiting, but the son who hoped I would pick him up from his brother and bring him home for a few days. That was agreed, although the timeline was still uncertain. Then the anticipated son called, but to tell me that he was going to have dinner nearby before he was ready to go home. Then the drummer called, and the end of the stay up there was a somewhat awkward juggling of conflicting connections–but we made it.

The return trip put us in the driveway around two in the morning, if memory serves, and then there were some things that could not stay in the car overnight which had to be unpacked. My online work was limited to posting to the Corinthians list, and then I got to bed about an hour before I would be getting up again–but at least this time I correctly anticipated being able to return to bed after people were rousted and driven from the house. I think I’m reasonably rested at this point, but do not know whether I will be caught up by the end of the night or not.

To add to the confusion, my mother-in-law called. We just solved her banking problem so she can pay her bills, but now she has no stamps. Thus I have promised to bring her some tomorrow. Here’s hoping that’s not too disruptive.

–M. J. Young

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