Embers / Joseph Dunphy

Writer's Block: It happened one night

blackrockcity — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:31:18 GMT

Being born. It's going to be hard to top that.

Writer's Block: MVP awards

blackrockcity — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:26:10 GMT

The truth, of course. Given that, all else that is of value follows.

Writer's Block: Blast to the past

blackrockcity — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:16:14 GMT

Nothing, probably. Causuality would probably be a good thing to leave alone.

Think about the basic implication of the question: that there is a cosmic do over button of sorts, and that you pushed it, just by going back. So time starts fresh, and history begins anew, from the point of your casual interference with the past. What just happened to everybody conceived after that point? Poof! Gone! They never existed. What are the odds that the right sperm would find its way to the egg, even in the case of those who were going to be conceived within seconds of that reset you just did on all of creation? Think of the hundreds of millions, if not billions of people any of us would have snuffed out of existence, leaving behind not so much as the memory that they had been, just so that we could, what ... tell ourselves not to wear checks with stripes in our class photos, because the cousins will be cracking wise about that in a few years? What could a ten year old have to hear, that would be that urgent?

Think of it - you would have found a way of inflicting a fate that literally is worse than death - the dead at least have the years they had. Your victims would denied even that - in changing the past, however slightly, you would have managed to commit a moral offense worse than murder, and inflicted it on countlessly many innocent victims. Also, you restart the cosmos, time goes on, and then what happens? You get presented with that choice, again? So time goes in a circle, revisiting the same years over and over, until what breaks the cycle? No, time is linear for a reason. Leave it alone.

Hello

blackrockcity — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:29:26 GMT

This will be a comment blog. I've set up a livejournal membership, so that when I read posts on livejournals of possible interest to readers of my Burning Man pages, I can post comments. Discussions follow, and I discuss those and some of the blogs I've found on Livejournal, here. Everything gets interlinked, and fun and traffic follow, or something like that.

For now, I'm shutting off comments on my own livejournal, at least until a few cyberstalkers get tired of trolling me, and decide to go troll somebody else. I hope that I'll be able to change this setting in the near future, but I can't offer any promises about the progress of somebody else's dementia. The primary - indeed, almost the exclusive - focus of this blog will be on the art and ideas one can get from it, so if you're hear wondering "what went down in this camp last week" ... you're in the wrong place. I don't know, and I don't want to know. I just want to do my little scribbles and a little soldering, maybe a few amateur theatre projects, and otherwise just be left alone.

How about you?