Yeah I know I know...

There have been huge gaps in time between blogs, this I know, and I apologize to you my reader for this. And by you I mean the one or 2 people who actually read this god forsaken blog!
Just hold on loosely folks...but please don't let go!
I will blog again today, for reals.

Time Travel Bitch!

Bon jour y’all!

So yeah I know I said I was going to blog a lot last week to make up for the week before but honestly I just couldn’t think of anything interesting enough to waste anyone’s time with. ‘Cause you guys gotta know that the simple fact that you have visited this site you are wasting time. Time that could be better spent at your job, (which I bet you guys are at right now…procrastinating) at your home washing your baby or blow drying your pompadour or whatever you people do in your spare time, or even doing something really productive like working on your own blog…I know you’ve got one so stop lying!

But instead you’ve chosen to waste your time on my thoughts and opinions…time you can never get back…or can you?

I just finished a really remarkable book that is largely about the idea and application of time travel. Now I am a really big fan of thinking and talking and discussing the idea of time travel because again it is such a ridiculous waste of time. Anyone who understands the nature of time knows that you cannot move backwards in it, and anyone who knows the nature of time travel understands that there are so many inherent paradoxes that even if time bent in such a way to allow such a thing, it would still never work, unless say your time machine has paradox absorbing crumple zones.

So I don’t really want to get into a review of this book aside from saying it was total fun on a bun super fantastic righteousness and that you should all just go out and read it yourselves. It is just toooooooo chock-full of awesome that I wouldn’t really want to give anything away. It’s called Rant, it’s by Chuck Palahniuk, writer of Fight Club and others, and it is the best thing I have read in years, and that includes The Deathly Hallows.

So yeah you guys might want to get on that.

What I would rather do here is talk about the different time travel paradoxes and different uses they have had over the years.

Grandfather Paradox-

This one is simple enough to understand. You, our time traveler, go into the past and accidentally kill your grandfather before your father was conceived. This negates your dad’s and your existence. Paradox? Well if you don’t exist then there is no one to travel back in time to kill poor old grandpa (or I guess it would have been poor young grandpa at that point). If grandpa isn’t killed then he is free to conceive your father and your father is free to conceive you, so then you can go back in time and kill him, so then you don’t exist, but then if you don’t exist you are can’t go back and kill him, so then you do exist, and so on and so on.

The only time this sort of time travel works is when you do horrible disgusting things to become your own grandfather. And yes folks that means doin’ it with Grandma.

See Example: Philip J. Fry. Though it is defiantly debatable whether in Fry’s experience it is a case of the Grandfather Paradox or our next contestant Predestination Paradox.

Predestination Paradox-

The self-fulfilling prophecy of paradoxes. Simply put, when traveling backwards in time to change something, it was because in the grander scheme of the make-up of the time line you were supposed to. This is why it can be argued that Fry’s travel back in time to become his own grandpa, (ep. 3:19 Roswell That Ends Well) was actually predestined by the fact that in becoming his own grandpa and losing his Delta brainwave he was able to defeat the horrible brain spawn (ep. 3:07 The Day the Earth Stood Stupid and ep. 4:10 The Why of Fry).

But I will be getting into this much more in my next blog so let’s move on.

Bootstrap Paradox-

As in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It is similar to predestination paradox in the way that it is this seemingly endless time loop where in there is really no original incident to set the whole thing off. It’s sort of like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure rules. Say we are both captured and in handcuffs. We say to each other, “When we get out of this let’s remember to go into the past before this happens and put a handcuff key under this bucket that conveniently happens to be sitting here.” So then we pick up the bucket and the key is already there, and we escape. Now I love both of the Bill & Ted movies, but they were always a little sloppy in the way that they never actually had to go back and do any of these things. In a clearer example: I want to build a time machine. Before I start working out how a me from the future comes up to me and says “Don’t worry you already built it in the future, and here are the schematics on how to.” So I build my time machine and then go back into the past to give the plans to myself. But you see the issue is pulling myself up by my own bootstraps. Doesn’t quite make sense because there is no original me who did work out how and actually built the first time machine. Each time the me in the present is just handed the schematics by a me from the future. This just goes on and on forever, one version of me constantly having to go back and give another version of myself the plans. Plans, I might add, who don’t have any true origin.

So there is my little spiel on time travel. Hopefully you will all use this information and think twice before traveling into the past and killin’ your grandpa or anything.

Where've I been?

Yeah sorry guys, for any regular readers that do exist. I have been sort of M.I.A for the last couple weeks. I am going to try to do a bunch of new posts this week to make up for the lack of posts in the last 2 weeks. Hope I didn't totally lose you guys!