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Things Blowing Up Everywhere

January 14, 2010 in Blogs

The latest entry in the temporal anomalies Examiner articles posted late today as Butterfly Effect part 12:  out with a bang.  It covers the penultimate history created in the film, in which Evan kills Kayleigh with the explosive and winds up in the asylum in a world in which his journals never existed.  There is a major issue in this particular history concerning what it is that happened to the people of this history yesterday, and particularly what it was that Evan Treborn might have said yesterday in this history of the universe.

Meanwhile, I have been working with our hosting company to resolve the difficulties with our web site, but it’s been slow going.

And while I’ve been writing this, I got distracted by the post tags collection we’ve gathered, and took more time than I really ought to have taken to delete an uncertain but unreasonable number of tags about finance, real estate, fancy dress, gambling web sites, and many others which were attached to no articles, apparently created by automated Spammers trying to build links to their sites.  I’m sure my time could have been better spent, but maybe it will clean up the server a bit.

–M. J. Young

Interesting Reading

January 11, 2010 in Blogs

I lost most of today to a trip to a lawyer–there are still tasks to complete in connection with the death of my mother-in-law.  However, on days when I do e-mail I am exposed to information from a variety of sources, and several of them caught my attention today.

One of the more notable concerned a ruling in a Kansas court allowing a man who killed a doctor who performs abortions to present a case for voluntary manslaughter rather than murder, based on the assertion that he believed that the lives of unborn children were being endangered and that he was saving them.  What intrigues me most about this is that several years ago I explored the possibility that the conflict would escalate into violence much on the same basis as John Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry did (the web site is currently experiencing trouble, I’ll get back to you with more on that).  This is a subject over which it is probably fairly common to have mixed feelings.  After all, everything that can be said against the pro-life protesters could have been said about the anti-slavery protesters before the Civil War, some of whom resorted to violence to protect the rights of the slaves.  We count them heroes now; the question in our day is very much whether those who defend the unborn will be heroes in the future or merely villains in the present.

There was another piece that caught my eye.  Apparently Brit Hume made a comment publicly that Tiger Woods ought to seek forgiveness through Jesus Christ instead of through the Buddhist faith of his mother.  This has stirred some serious outrage; but I agree with the columnist who defended Hume:  is it not possible in America for a public figure to speak positively of his own faith in public?  If Tiger Woods prefers to believe that forgiveness is neither possible nor necessary (the Buddhist position), nothing that was said will change that; but if Woods feels a need for forgiveness, telling him that there is a faith which offers it puts no one under any obligation to embrace that faith.  Neither of the two arguments that remain against Hume seem all that cogent to me.  One is that Hume is a news analyst and ought to be “unbiased”; but “unbiased” (apart from being impossible) does not include leaving behind your own knowledge of the world.  If a news commentator suggested that a judge ought to consider Dworkin’s arguments for judicial activism or Bork’s arguments for Constitutional originalism, those statements fall within the realm of the commentator bringing his knowledge of the field to bear on the circumstances in the news.  In the same way, if such a commentator suggests that a man who appears to be seeking absolution look for it in Christianity (where it is offered) rather than in Buddhism (where it is nonsense), that is a similar application of knowledge to the circumstances.  The other is that Hume ought to have made his suggestion privately; but just because two individuals are well-known does not mean they know each other in the way that enables them to chat in person.  Hume seems to me to have acted appropriately.

All of that, however, is just a part of my reading for today, and I would prefer to pass to you information about some writing published earlier today for your reading pleasure.  The Examiner has another short piece on temporal anomalies, entitled Butterfly Effect part 11:  on the edge, dealing with the trip to the past in which he tries to arm himself with a knife.  I hope some of you enjoy it.

–M. J. Young

I Didn’t Really Have Time

June 1, 2009 in Blogs

I previously mentioned having posted here A Draft:  Toward Two Dimensional Time, which was to be updated and posted on the Temporal Anomalies web site.  No updates were made, and it now appears there as Toward Two-Dimensional Time.

At the same, er, time, I received a paper on the subject of time travel, mentioned in the comments to the draft here.  That, too, has now been posted as a page on the site, under the title A Critique of the Spreadsheet Theory by Sergiy Koshkin; as promised, I have responded to it in the rather laboriously named page A Response by M. Joseph Young to A Critique of the Spreadsheet Theory by Sergiy Koshkin.  I am rather pleased with myself in connection with these two pages, because I managed to create the response such that you can if you like read Koshkin’s critique and then read my response, or you can if you prefer click on asterisks in Koshkin’s page which connect to sections of my response, and then click on links in my response to return to Koshkin’s page, and catch everything either way.

As I say, I did not really have time to do this; it is something that I was dabbling at over several weeks.  I uploaded the new pages a few days ago and alerted Mr. Koshkin to this, and he has since continued our conversation by e-mail; today I uploaded the other Theory Section pages with updated links and the new pages added to the index, so people would begin to find the new material.

–M. J. Young

Oddlink

November 28, 2008 in Blogs

It is, of course, part of producing Multiverser that I also promote it.  It is to this end that Valdron Inc provides me with web space to host pages on a wide variety of topics, including Dungeons & Dragons™, Temporal Anomalies, and even Bible materials.  The hope remains that some, at least, attracted by one or another of the pages on that site, will take an interest in the game and the books.

How well that works is not at all clear, but it is clear that it creates connections.  Today’s e-mail brought me word from a previous correspondent, a doctor somewhere in the Chicago area who has an interest in time travel, who spotted and recognized my name on someone else’s web page and wrote to inform me that I was being cited.  The citation includes the fact that the site designer lifted one of my web pages entirely and dropped it into a file format unfamiliar to me to store on his own web site–but he kept all the internal links intact, including the banner which advertises my current specials and the e-mail link.  The site goes by the name Devil’s Matrix, although oddly seems to be a mask for a section of a site called timephysics.com; my link is on a page about human female anatomy.  The site is a rather detailed discussion of the dangers of contracting disease from sexual contact, and that is the second page of that information.

I am prominently identified at the bottom of that page for my article (found on my own site) Why Shouldn’t You Have Sex If You’re Not Married?.  I’m flattered; the page has gotten very few responses over the years, but it is interesting to see it noticed here.  It also surprises me, because one of the points I make in that article is that the danger of disease, while a good pragmatic reason not to engage in sex indiscriminately (or even less discriminately), is not a sufficient moral reason.  Yet I maintain that there is a good moral reason, that God commends marriage not as a killjoy but because it is better for us.

I am wandering into the content of the article itself; you can read it, if you wish to know more.  For now, I am pleased to have the link, and hope it will bring at least a few more to my site and my books.

–M. J. Young

Unanticipated Time-Consuming Addition

June 27, 2008 in Blogs

Someone discovered the Temporal Anomalies site this week.

Actually, it might have been last week.  He read so much of it that he must have spent several days working with pages from the site.  Then he posted comments, and questions, to his own blog, and dropped me an e-mail inviting me to respond.  I did.

That has in fact been a substantial part of what I have been doing today.  It didn’t help that I had written several hundred words when a storm came through abruptly and knocked out the power; I used the blackout time to do some grocery shopping, and returned to start afresh.  I also decided that since I was uncertain exactly what LiveJournal’s response posting system would permit, I would do the answer as a web page on my own site.  Thus I tossed the pieces I’d already composed into the framework of pages for that site, finished the rest of the response, and tossed it on the site under the title Response to Vazor’s Time Travel Questions, and posted the link to his blog.

There is more work to do with this–the page is on the site, but it’s not really incorporated into the site; I have to decide in which section to include it, and then add links on other pages to connect it appropriately.  For the moment, though, I’ve done too much, and have too much more to do to mess with it, so I’m just going to leave it as it is.

–M. J. Young

A Limited Continuation

June 18, 2008 in Blogs

I have been pressured by several people who want to know when the blog will return.  I have wondered that myself.  Can’t you, they ask, write the blog without talking about the people who don’t want their lives made public?  No, I can’t, really, because the blog makes my life public, and they are part of my life.  There’s not much I can do about that.

Well, there is, really–I can stop talking about “my life”.  The point of the Blogless Lepolt, ultimately, is to let you, the Valdron/Multiverser fanbase, know what is happening with forthcoming product.  It is incidentally to let what might be called the Mark Joseph Young fanbase know about my other creative work being produced outside the Valdron/Multiverser stable.  In all this time, it has also been a place for talking about what has been in the way of producing such work, and thus the events and distractions of my personal life.  Part of that was because I was writing this every day, and I wasn’t getting anything done every day (or sometimes even every week), so I had to say something, and I felt I had to explain why there wasn’t any time to get something done every day.  One of the comments noted that this was something of value to him, to have some understanding of the conflicts that prevented me from writing so much.  That, though, is the part that gets personal–and thus the part that has to go.  Similarly, since I’m not going to be explaining why things have not been done, I will no longer be writing the blog daily–there will be posts when there is something to post; it won’t always be much, and it won’t always be very informative, but at least it won’t be about the progress I did not make.

It will also move that last blog post off its prominent position on the front page of this site, which will make me feel a bit better.

All of this suggests that I have something to tell–and indeed I do.  As I have been typing, I have realized that there is more than one thing to tell.

The impetus for resuming is that there is a new page in the Bible Studies section of M. J. Young Net, On Sabbath.  The brief story behind it is pretty much stated on the page as an introduction.  For those curious as to how someone who has always “regarded all days the same” justifies being part of a Seventh Day Baptist church which very clearly “regards one day above another”, there’s some insight into that there.

As I was typing, though, it occurred to me that I did not mention having made progress on the Multiverser Triple Play:  Horror.  I did what I am hoping will be the last text edits (and neither Jim nor John have commented on them, so I’m feeling fairly secure in that hope).  That puts the ball in the court of our art director.  He, however, takes an extended visit to family overseas every summer, so he might not get to the artwork as soon as he would like.

There was a third thing that came to mind while I was typing, and that is that Collision, the band, now has its own MySpace site.  There’s nothing there yet–not even a picture of the band, and no music–but it’s a start.  I had been thinking it was a necessary step, but that I did not have the time to do it and we weren’t really ready for it, when Baxter asked me about it.  He and Brittany have been overseeing it (I’ve not yet even had the chance to log in to the editing page–but I’m not particularly good at maintaining MySpace sites), and it’s progressing.  What do you think–should our lyrics be posted there somewhere, somehow?

Anyway, that’s the situation.  I will post again when I have something to tell.

–M. J. Young

I Couldn’t Sleep

May 6, 2008 in Blogs

I did not really get enough sleep last night; however, when I returned to bed this morning I was antsy.

Part of it is that I’ve been thinking I’ve got to make a change in an arrangement of one of the Collision songs–I’m demanding too much of my bass guitarist, and if I want to get the six core songs down I’m going to have to take some of the riffs from the fifth on myself so that I can push him to learn the sixth.  Thus I was lying in bed trying to make sense of riffs in my head–where are the notes on the fingerboard, on the staff, in that nebulous tonal recognition center in my brain.  After lying in bed for half an hour locked into this, I got up, set up the coffee for later (which I should have done sooner), and picked up a guitar.

Fifty minutes later, I was satisfied with that and had run through a few other guitar parts, and decided that I was no closer to going back to sleep than I was when I got up, so I might as well find my glasses and start my morning.  That’s not to say I’m not tired; only that I’m not sleeping.

It also occurred to me that I did some work I neglected to mention.  Sunday night, after doing the weekly file backup, I created a new specials page, uploaded to the site for the M. J. Young Net site, complete with a descriptive banner.  It announces throughout the site the availability of the new books Faith and Gaming and Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1, which hopefully will help sell the books.  Meanwhile, I also did a fair amount of updating of the pages on the Multiverser site, but have not uploaded these.  The changes include adding links to our other Cafe Press storefronts, the new Game Ideas Unlimited store and the long-neglected Nagaworld store in addition to our standard Multiverser merchandise.  I also did the work to launch the announcement of Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1 on the Multiverser site, but am awaiting a banner from our art director before uploading all of this.

So I did a fair amount of web work, but it doesn’t all show yet.

If I’m going to make this early rising thing work, I’m going to have to get something done, so let’s move to it.

–M. J. Young

Technical Hiatus

January 5, 2008 in Blogs

Yes, I missed a few days. It was technical difficulties–I was perfectly healthy, but could not access the Internet from my computer. Of course, there is a close link between technical and financial problems–generally most technical problems can be solved with sufficient money, but there was not sufficient money at the time to solve this one, so it took a few days to scrape something together.

I’d like to tell you all that I accomplished in my down time, but actually I did not accomplish all that much. I wrote a song. I started it late last week sometime, and kept poking at it, and by Wednesday I was putting the final touches on a lousy recording (the vocals are terrible because of the rush) so that I would have it to play at the Collision rehearsal–which did not happen, because Baxter was sick and Brittany had car trouble. However, I really like this song, and am hoping that they will want to include it in the band’s expanded repertoire.

I also poked a bit at the Multiverser web site, but became frustrated when I couldn’t get some code for table cell background images to work right, and abandoned it. I had intended to get more pages ready for upload, but wound up making some minor changes to the pages already present and barely starting another, none of which have made it to the site yet.

I did get my mother-in-law to the bank; she provided a loan which was a major factor in getting us up and running again. Since late last night, when contact was reestablished, I have been trying to catch up–and thus am working on a Saturday to make up for the lost time.

So I’d better get to it.

–M. J. Young

Kapow!

September 24, 2007 in Blogs

The big deal, if there is a big deal today, is that last night I completed the recoding of the Martial Arts in Role Playing Games site, and managed to post it on my web site, available to all. I expect to add a new category to the Multiverser support site (which is here), which will include this and a few other links to useful but unofficial materials. I’m still considering what ought to be included in that.

I also did a bit of editing on my Romans notes, but the fact that I had to take my mother-in-law shopping put a pinch on my time today. Here’s hoping I can get through the rest in a timely manner, and get some sleep tonight.

–M. J. Young

Passing a Milestone

September 23, 2007 in Blogs

The stockholders meeting went reasonably well; congratulations to Jim Denaxas on being re-elected to serve another three years on the board of directors. Our present secretary, Joshua Martin, was nominated to run against him, and would have been an excellent director, but Jim has a track record with the company since before its beginning, has been very supportive of all we have done throughout that time, and has never failed to do what needed to be done to make things work. It’s not that I doubt Joshua would have done as well, but that I know Jim has done it all already.

It incidentally marks ten years that the company has existed.

That has been the focus of my attention over most of the weekend; even after the meeting ended, I had to clean up the premises some. Thus although it is true that I pushed forward on the pages for the martial arts web site and the Romans notes editing, I do not feel as if I did much else this weekend. It is already late in the day tonight, and I doubt I will do more than the basics, but at least the big step, the annual meeting, is over.

–M. J. Young