I finished recoloring the various sections for the Daily Prophet, but only one of them is online: http://www.dprophet.com/middleearth I think I like the green, but I’m not sure. My laptop monitor has a way of shifting colors ever so slightly so I’m a bit worried the green is really pukier than I can tell. I have to double check it on my other monitor to make sure the greens are okay. Anyway, thoughts anyone? My guestbook’s always open and I need encouraging words. I’m feeling a little weak and puny while facing this huge undertaking. I feel I may be losing steam, but I suppose that’s just silly. I’ll get to it once I convince my parents to help pay for webhosting. 🙂 Then I can learn PHP, feel all accomplished, then get to work on the DP.
I watched ‘Kate & Leopold’ today cause I got to rent it for free at Blockbuster. It was okay, it met my expectations of being a silly, implausible romantic comedy. And it kind of made me want to go back to the 18 hundreds until I realized how awful it would be to wear a corset, have to be a lady at all times, be most likely a member of the dirt poor society, and not have equal rights. But the men would most likely be gentlemen, unless they were part of larger percentenge of chauvinistic people. So, all in all, despite my century’s set backs as far as manners and gentlemanly behavior are concerned, I’d much rather be living in 2002 than 1876.
And speaking of time travel, last night I watched ‘The Time Machine.’ (What is it with movies and their recent obsession with the time space continuum?) Even though that movie was entirely weird, it got me thinking and introduced me to a whole new brand of heebie jeebies. The fabric of time seems so thin, I don’t it’s anything anyone should ever screw around with. I had a long conversation with Chinese Sam and his friend Eric about quantum mechanics when they came over. First off, I was delighted to find out I wasn’t as ignorant about quantum mechanics as I had originally thought, but furthermore I’m convinced that time travel is highly implausible. It would create all manner of impossible loopholes in time, creating multiple versions of ourselves. Or, like Chinese Sam explained, that time travel isn’t really travelling back in time, just finding a hole in the space between alternate realities (not alternate dimensions, that’s another matter entirely, people just get them confused), stepping into another place where one small decision made by one person led to a different version of our reality. For example, let’s go back to a seemingly stupid and insignificant decision I made in January of 2000. I was really bored, couldn’t sleep, and wandered onto the message boards of HarryPotterFans.net. At the time I hate message boards, so imagine if I hadn’t made the decision to go there at all.
Anyway, so, I’m at the message board, browsing around. I see a thread subject header, a simple request for a penpal. Do I ignore it and keep moving, or click on it? I clicked on it. And there was a message from a girl named Julie, talking about how she wanted to talk to someone else who read Harry Potter, liked it, and wanted to talk to someone who liked the villains in the book. I read it, then I had another decision to make; do I write to Julie or not? I did. She and I became friends, two or so weeks later we started the Daily Prophet. It all started with me not being able to sleep and a whole chain of little decisions that led me to a message board.
Imagine I had changed just one of those decisions. How would my life be different right now? Would I have a web site at all? Would I have gone to MIT? Would I have a blog? Would I have met my new friends? My life would be entirely different. Who’s to say it would be worse? Maybe it would be better, maybe I would have conquered the world by now. I’m immensely curious about what I would have done without the DP, but I don’t really want to go messing around with the fabric of space and time. I like to imagine time as a bolt of satin – you put one snag in it and that snag grows and grows, until the entire bolt is just a bunch of loosely tied fuzzy threads. It’s a wrinkled and useless mess. You can’t make anything out of it, its lost its shine, and it is completely useless. So yeah, that’s my big scientific thought for the night; the space time continuum is a bolt of satin. 🙂
I think there’s a reason I’m not going to MIT. I may think I understand this stuff, but I certainly can’t explain it.