Richard Feynman and the Message of Christmas

I often come across as a Grinch during Christmas.  It isn't that I don't like the holiday, it's that I find the actual celebration of the holiday so small compared to the actual ancient reason for celebrating.

The phenomenon of Christmas, as it exists today amongst moderns,  is largely a commercial platform to sell you movies, toys, electronics, and honey baked hams.  We sing about snow and various foodstuffs eaten and herd animals, we share some presents, spoil our children, and eat a lot of food.

To most modern people, this is what it's about.  Its about time with family and the magic of Santa and having fun singing Christmas songs.

I don't think modern people really understand Christmas.  I don't think they get it.

To explain Christmas, then, let me begin with a quote by Richard Feynman (from this video interview):

I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large. They seem to be… too simple to conn- too local, too provincial! The Earth! He came to the Earth! One of the aspects of God came to the Earth mind, you. Look at what’s out there! It isn’t in proportion.

Richard Feynman gets Christmas.  In his own way, as a nonreligious Jew, Feynman understands the celebration of Christ's birth better than most people alive today.

The Christian religion properly centers itself, and distinguishes itself from other theistic religions, by two scandalous errors about God.  Two propositions about the divine that are rightfully offensive to the pious.  Two dogmas that are nothing short of pure blasphemy.  Statements which no human being should ever rightly dare to say about the Most High.

Christmas is the celebration of one of these blasphemies.  (The second is celebrated on Good Friday.)

Richard Feynman properly understands the blasphemy of Christmas.

This holiday commemorates the day when Christians claim that God came to Earth in the form of an infant baby -- what is called the Incarnation.

Those words may have lost their sting to you.  To many Christians it is a bromide that they've heard so many times they forgot what it means.  And many modern nonchristians don't understand what is meant by the word "God."  They confuse the ineffable creator of time and space with dudes in the clouds, or comic book characters, or weird tentacled things that live in space.

But Feynman was a major theoretical physicist, from a Jewish cultural background.  He was in a better position to understand what exactly the word "God" means.  Studying the universe and the mind-boggling complexity of the patterns obeyed at lower and lower levels, Feynman would not be capable of confusing what is signified by the proper noun "God" with something like a man in a cape with a big hammer — that is, with some regular ol' god.

When Christians say "God", they are not talking about a bearded dude in the clouds.  They are talking about the mind that first dictated and ordained the sort of phenomenon that Feynman struggled his entire life just to bring to a first-order approximate description.

Feynman also was not able to think provincially.  Humans have always had trouble understanding the stupefying scale of the Universe at large, but physicists are usually given a better feel of it.  The universe is so large that its size can only really be properly expressed with scientific notation — there are too many 0's otherwise.

When we talk about the Earth and humankind, we don't know anything else, so it is easy to have an inflated view of ourselves.  But in the cosmic sense, we are slightly above nonexistent.  We live on just one planet in our solar system.  Our sun is not particularly interesting, as far as solar properties go.  It's a pretty normal star.  In our same galaxy, there are some 250 billion (billion with a B) other stars, and we now believe most of those probably have their own solar systems like ours.  Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just one galaxy amongst trillions suspected to exist in the observable universe (trillion, with a T).  Cosmologists often just model entire galaxies as point particles -- as insignificant atoms in a giant cosmic fluid.  And beyond the observable universe, who knows what else exists.  We are a speck in a speck in a speck in a speck compared to the Universe, and the universe itself is just a speck within the mind of God.

We are really nothing important, and Earth is nowhere special.

While this is a scientific truth, it is also a biblical truth.

Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
    and are accounted as the dust on the scales;
    behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust.
...
All the nations are as nothing before him,
    they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.
    -- Isaiah 40:15-17

All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,
    and he does according to his will among the host of heaven
    and among the inhabitants of the earth;
and none can stay his hand
    or say to him, “What have you done?”
  -- Daniel 4:35

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
         The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
What is man that You take thought of him,
         And the son of man that You care for him?
  -- Psalm 8:3-4

In the Bible, all the nations of the Earth and all the inhabitants therein are accounted as nothing.  They are dust on a scale -- when you go to trade silver for grain, you zero out the trays, check the balance, remove the crumbs left over, but the dust is what you don't even bother brushing off.

Christians teach and celebrate that the infinite being to whom the Earth is but dust, this being who is immaterial, invisible, and who exists without limitations, this being took to himself a human nature and entered into the physical world, born as an infant child inside a tiny little town on this tiny little speck of dust we call a planet.

This is blasphemous, scandalous, offensive, absurd, and violates all notion of scale or proportionality.

And that scandal is precisely what makes the message of Christmas such a beautiful one.  It is why Christians have traditionally celebrated Christmas by great acts of charity.

God has no reason to care about us or to stoop so low to us.  Yet he did.

The infinite, finite.  The immortal, mortal.  The transcendent, physical.  The omnipotent, helpless.  The glorious, an infant child in diapers.  The self-sufficient, crying to be fed.

The Jewish priests of Jesus' time understood this blasphemy.  Jews and Muslims today still understand it.  Richard Feynman understood it.

To truly understand Christmas, you must hold both; that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is blasphemous and preposterous and entirely out of proportion; and that nonetheless, it is a blasphemy authored by God himself.

This Christmas, I hope you and your family will again be shocked and offended by the message of Christmas: that the Word became flesh, and dwelt amongst us.

Alternative to the d20 System

Early D&D used to be a mishmash of various different rules. Roll this die for this, that die for that, look on a table for this other thing. Thieves rolled a percentile die (two d10s with one treated as the "tens" place) and compared to a table on thieves skills; fighters rolled a d20 and looked up their result on a table organized by their level and the targets AC; later fighters rolled a d20 and compared THAC0 and AC to the result; some traps you rolled a d6 and found it on a 1, some doors you rolled a d8 and forced it open on a 1, some checks you rolled a d20 and tried to get under your ability score like STR.

It was kind of a crazy, scattered mess.

They started fixing this with the mentioned THAC0 system, which took the look-up tables for striking an enemy and condensed them down to a simple equation based on your roll on a d20. This simplifcation inspired centering the entirety of the rolls on a similar mechanic: roll a d20, add some modifiers, compare to a target number. Rather than tons of crazy rules and tables and different dice for everything, any time you wanted to check if you character succeeds at an event you had one basic mechanic you could turn do:

 d20 + Modifiers >= DC, 

where DC is "difficulty class", a target number meant to encapsulate how hard a task it. This is the d20 mechanic, and is usually listed in quick start and players guides as "the most important rule," or the "core mechanic."

It was such a powerful simplification that most D&D clones use it now. Even RPGs attempting to emulate the original 0E rules of D&D still rely on the d20 system, rather than duplicating the To-Hit tables and Thieves percentile tables.  So systems like DCC or OSRIC or Basic Fantasy all use the d20 core mechanic, despite being "old school" games trying to emulate an older version of the rules.

The d20 mechanic is still a table, though; just a very simple, linear table that can be written as an equation. It is a table where each entry differs from its nearest neighbors by 5%. A +1 sword means a sword that has an additional 5% chance to hit. An additional 2 to your (ascending) AC means the chance to hit you decreased by an amount of 10%. A lock with a DC of 15 and a lock with a DC of 10 differ by a step of 25% in the chance to pick them (that is New Chance = Old Chance + 25%).

The simple equation for your chances of succes is :

 Chance success = (21 - DC + Mods)*5% = (21-DC+Mods)/20

In tabular form, the DC system would look like this:

Mod	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
DC 9	45%	50%	55%	60%	65%	70%	75%
DC 10	40%	45%	50%	55%	60%	65%	70%
DC 11	35%	40%	45%	50%	55%	60%	65%
DC 12	30%	35%	40%	45%	50%	55%	60%

which is such a boring and simple table that you've probably never seen anyone bother to write it out. It's just down 5% for higher DC, up 5% for higher mod, constant steps of 5%. A DC of 10 is considered "baseline," and an average character has a 55% of success, higher or lower from there. 

The d20 system is a really good, simple system. There are alternatives out there. Understandably, most alternative systems try to use six-sided dice, because those are the only dice most normal people know of. Apocalypse dice is one alternative, which uses 2d6. Tunnels and Trolls runs on d6s. The Hypereon systems use d6s.

 I recently discovered an alternative system that sort of goes in the opposite direction. I saw it first proposed on the Goodman Games forum by the author of the blog PeopleThemWithMonsters (described in the linked post, somewhat expanded here).  It's a bit of a crazier system, though it produces probability tables very similar to those for the d20 system. It has some benefits to the standard d20 system and resolves some problems, and overall gives games a more wild "feel", even while sticking pretty close to the original d20 chances of success.

I'm going to call this the Target Dice Chain system. It is not prefaced on a single die, but on a long list of dice. Several games use this list of dice, calling it the "dice chain." It is as follows:

  d0-d1-d2-d3-d4-d5-d6-d7-d8-d10-d12-d14-d16-d20-d24-d30-d48.

You may be thinking, "Hold on now, there's no such thing as a d3 or a d48," but you are wrong.  Most of these odd dice can still be simulated using "normal" polyhedra, as I detailed somewhat in a previous post.  You may be thinking "What even is a d0 or a d1?" You aren't likely to find them in your friendly local game shop, but you can simulate them by taking a blank d6 and marking every face with a "0" for d0 or "1" for d1.

 In each check, there are two dice that get rolled: a target die and a check die.

The GM rolls the target die. Increased difficulty corresponds to moving to a die higher up the dice chain, starting at d6.

The player rolls the check die. Modifiers correspond to one step up (or down) the dice chain, starting at d6.

In checks, the smaller die is always rolled first. This helps maintain the tension and makes sure both parties roll.

Your baseline check for an average character corresponds to rolling one d6 for the GM, one for the player, and player wins if his die meets or beats the GM's. This corresponds to a check with a DC 10. 

If the character has a +2 to his check, then roll a d6 for the GM and a d8 for the player (two steps up the chain), and player wins if his die meets of beats the GM's. This corresponds to a  DC of 10 and a +2 bonus.

If the check is actually fairly difficult, and the player has a -2 to this check, then you roll a d12 for the GM and a d4 for the player, and the player wins if his die meets of beats the GM's. This corresponds to a DC of 15 with a -2 bogus.

The underlying mechanic works like this:

The GM picks a target die (TD) according to the difficulty of the task. The player rolls a check die corresponding to his ability, starting at 6 and doing up or down one step in the dice chain for each point of modifier. You then make an opposed roll with the check die against the TD, and tie goes to player.

You can express the die roll symbolically as:

 d6 + (MOD)d >= TD

 where +d is a way of saying "up one step in the dice chain", and +3d means "up 3 steps in the dice chain", and +(MOD)d means "up (MOD) number of steps in the dice chain."

The TD can be chosen sort of arbitrarily, but should correspond to the difficulty. A d6 is the baseline TD (TD 6), and corresponds to a DC 10. A TD 12 (that is, a d12 as target die) is a fairly difficult TD, and corresponds to a DC 15. For even more difficult checks, doubling seems to work, with a TD 24 being close to a DC 20 and a TD 48 being close to a DC 25 (though the correspondence weakens at higher DC). A TD 3 is pretty close to a DC 5. Use dice in between for DCs in between. Maybe a TD 8 for a DC 12, or a TD 20 for a DC 18.

But why would anyone use this system, anyway?

This system is a bit "swingier" than the usual d20 system. In d20, certain DCs are simply impossible unless you have a bonus for that check: so, even with a +3 bonus, a DC of 25 is simply impossible. You will never succeed. In the TD system, there is always a chance for success. Even for a TD 48 check, with a -4d, there is still a chance for success. Contrariwise, in the d20 system, you can reach a point where failure is impossible. If you have +10 to a skill, then you always succeed on a DC 10 check. In the TD system, failure is also always possible. Even the best mess up and fail, even the most difficult task can be bested by a stroke of luck. The whole system sort of spreads probability around, leading to more unpredicted outcomes.

Here is a chart for comparison, showing the probabilities of success for different mods to a check for different DCs and the corresponding DC.

Normal dice chain, d6+(MOD)d to beat target

MOD	-3	-2	-1	0	+1	+2	+3
DIE	d3	d4	d5	d6	d7	d8	d10
DC5	65%	70%	75%	80%	85%	90%	95%
TD3	67%	75%	80%	83%	86%	88%	90%
DC10	40%	45%	50%	55%	60%	65%	70%
TD6	33%	42%	50%	58%	64%	69%	75%
DC15	15%	20%	25%	30%	35%	40%	45%
TD12	17%	21%	25%	29%	33%	38%	46%
DC20	0%	0%	0%	5%	10%	15%	20%
TD24	8%	10%	12%	15%	17%	19%	23%
DC25	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%
TD48	4%	5%	6%	7%	8%	9%	11%

As you can see, it actually sticks pretty close to the usual d20 results.

One major issue this resolves is the opposed check mechanic. Sometimes in D&D, you may find yourself grappling with an orc. In the simplest resolution of this, you'd just make an opposed STR check; you roll a d20 and the orc rolls a d20, add the modifiers to the respective rolls, meet or beat the orc's roll. While this maybe has the feel of a battle of strength, it's actually identical to a base DC of 10 (proven mathematically here), plus your mods and minus the orc's mods, in terms of probability. If you are at +2 on your STR and the orc is at +3, then it's just

 d20 + 2 - 3 >= 10. 

It turns all opposed rolls into static DCs. You could replace opposed rolling with a constant DC and get the same statistical results.

In the TD system, roll a die corresponding to where you are in the dice chain. In the example of a player at +2 and orc at +3, you roll a d8 and the orc a d10, meet or beat the orc. Here an opposed roll is central to the mechanic, and you get a more immediate feel for the power mismatch between the player and the orc in terms of the physical dice being rolled. Imagine then a dragon rolling a d30 vs an average human's d6, or an advanced player rolling a d12 against a d4 mook.

Another major advantage is that it tracks so well with the d20 system. In any game using the d20 system, you can just slide the target die system right in the d20 system's place without a lot of difficulty. If you use the TD system and want to have some particular check be a DC check instead, just slide that in there, keeping the same bonus. It converts almost instantly.

But there are a few major drawbacks to the target dice system.

One, you have to get all those dice. And they aren't very cheap. If you use a computer dice roller like Roll20 then this isn't even an issue: typing 1d48 will work just fine. But if you like the feeling of physically rolling, you'll have to buy more weird dice. I don't know if a GM should be opposed to owning more dice (who doesn't like newer, weirder dice?), but the availability is an issue, as is the money. Luckily, you can find the "off" dice in the dice chain (d3, d5, d7, 14, d16, d24, d30) from several sets offered by Koplow or Impact! miniatures intended for games like DCC RPG which use the dice chain already, usually for around $8 or $12 -- which is still expensive compared to the standards, but about the same as an adventure module.

Two, is that there is no way to make something impossible. Even if you had the ridiculous TD 120, with a d1 check die, there's a chance of success 1 in 120 times. I reported this earlier as a benefit, but maybe in some instances it's a drawback. Maybe you want that lock to be impossible to pick. Maybe you want that armor to be impossible to hit. There's also no way to make something guaranteed. Even if your PC rolls the ridiculous d120 against a TD2, you can fail 1 in 120 times. The swinginess of the system can be a cool and exciting way to mix things up, or it could topple tough challenges through sheer stupid luck of the draw.

Advanced Berenst#in Bears Theory - Complex Euclidean Space

I wrote a blog post several years ago about the Berenst#in Bears that, somehow, against all odds, managed to get picked up on the internet.  It's been posted on Reddit and other outlets several times, and accounts for about 95% of all traffic to my blog.

The post is of course intended to be silly, but part of the silliness is that hidden inside this ridiculous proposition of universes merging over children book names is a very mathematically complicated thesis about the nature of space and time.

I don't think I did a very good job explaining what that thesis is, because I often see my blog being referenced as claiming either time travel, the many-worlds hypothesis, or something else about quantum mechanics are responsible for us finding ourselves in this piteous state of being in the wrong universe with the wrong cartoon bears.

In this post, my goal is to outline what exactly it is that I was "claiming," so that if the story gets picked up again (unlikely now that more major outlets have picked it up), maybe people can actually at least summarize what I'm saying correctly.

TL;DR the theory is about changing the geometry of spacetime by allowing all four dimensions to be general complex numbers.

Let me start with what the theory is not.

A Rule for Shields from Descending Armor Class, Applied to Ascending Armor Class

I've been playing 'D&D 'ever since I was a young boy and found my dad's Dungeon Master's Guide on his bookshelf (the original, by Gygax).  I was still too young to understand a lot of it (Gygax opens with a discussion of uniform vs binomial probability distributions...), but I spent hours of days flipping through the pages, looking at the pictures and reading the descriptions of a fantastic world.  It inspired me to make my own games about exploring through planned dungeons with friends and having them use ability scores to get through.

By the time I was old enough to try to really figure out the rules, version 3.0 was out, which made a lot of changes.  One of the biggest was replacing the original Descending AC and THAC0 system with the slightly more intuitive Ascending AC system.  This system always just made sense to me, whereas DAC and THAC0 always seemed weird and complicated.  I never understood how DAC worked, and never really saw a good explanation of it, and so just never used it.  It was only recently, when getting into old school tabletop RPGs, that I decided to look up an explanation of how DAC and THAC0 used to work.

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test for commenting

Update: I think I figured it out.  Comments should work better now.

From my phone I can comment.  From my computer, I'm only able to  comment if I use a separate page for  comments.

The Baker and the Beast

I have an idea for a movie.  It's a moving tale of passion and vocation.  I've pitched it to my wife and a few friends, and all agree, it's pretty brilliant.

Since it infringes on all kinds of Disney copyright, and since the premise is kind of ridiculous, it will never actually be made into a movie.  So I figured I'd just pitch it here.

The genesis.

So, I hate pop music.

I am very susceptible to having songs stuck on my head.  And I absolutely hate it. For this reason, I despise pop music with the burning fury of a thousand suns.  I will not enter stores playing pop music, because then I'll have these obnoxious jingles stuck in my head for months.  Solid months.

So I developed a coping mechanism.  When a song gets stuck in my head, I gradually deform the lyrics to make the song stupider and stupider, until it more accurately reflects the worthless string of noises it so truly is.

It's kind of childish, but it makes me feel better.  If I have to be infected with these memetic viruses from every store corner and coffee shop, at least I can mock the virus.  I'd mock the flu too, if I could.

Back to the movie idea.

I went to see Beauty and the Beast a few months ago when it came out.  They repeat the animated Disney version with the classic soundtrack, but in live action and with some slight tweaks to the story.  They seem to have attempted to answer some of the fan speculation questions that Cracked reposts every four months, like why the enchantress cursed all the servants for what the prince did, and they added a lyric here or there, but mostly the same story and same songs from my childhood.

One of the songs from the film got stuck in my head.  The opening song, "Bonjour," where Belle is walking through the village openly dsparaging the simple townsfolke as "provencial" for having to actually work for a living to support their families, instead of getting to read books all day and refuse to do chores.

The song isn't really as dumb or obnoxious as pop music, but it was in my head, nonstop for weeks.  And when I have an earworm eating my brain I start getting a tad resentful.  So I started changing the words to the song.

But by changing those words, I changed more than just the intro song.  I actually changed the direction of the entire plot, which lead to a completely different movie.  A movie called:

The Baker and the Beast

Replies not working

I just want to apologize to people who have commented and I haven't replied.  For some reason, Blogger is eating my reply comments, so that after I hit "submit" the reply doesn't get saved to the server.

A similar problem also happens to people trying to comment on older posts with lots of comments.  I can't complain about Blogger, it being free and all, but I will need to look into my server situation and perhaps go with a different hosting platform.

UPDATE: I think the problem is my computer's browser (safari).  I tried updating all of my computer's software, but it still doesn't work very well with Blogger.  I have tried responding to some comments three or four times now, and this is really frustrating.

I am a monotheist about Zeus

Growing up in the time I did, I have had plenty of chances to hear atheists -- on talk shows, PBS documentaries, classrooms, debates, YouTube videos, internet forums -- present their arguments, and I've heard almost all of them by now.  There are especially some arguments that get brought up rather frequently, and then keep getting repeated for years later.

There's one in particular I want to address, the "One God Further" argument.  I believe the argument originates with Richard Dawkins, but I have certainly heard Christopher Hitchens and others make similar arguments on stage.  This argument is that we are all atheists about most of the gods anyone has ever claimed to believe in.  I'm an atheist about Zeus, Hercules, Mithras, Minerva or any of these other figures.  Dawkins simply goes one god further than I do.

And so, to clarify this issue once and for all, let me just resolutely state that I am not an atheist about Zeus.

I'm really not.

I am a monotheist about Zeus.

My issue with Zeus isn't that he's clearly ridiculous and there's no evidence for him.  I mean, yeah, Zeus is pretty ridiculous and there's no evidence for him.  But that isn't really my objection to Zeus worship.

My objection to Zeus worship is that Zeus isn't the kind of thing that should be rightly called a god, or the kind of thing that should be worshipped.

Easier way to replicate funky dice for DCC RPG using regular d6s

I recently came across the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG and have been pretty hooked by the game since then.  The game introduces a lot of very interesting new mechanics into an over-troped hobby, most notably the magic system, the level-0 funnel, the Warrior's Might Deeds, and the dice chain, all of which bring back some of the spice of adventure and originality.

Learning Fortran is a waste of your time

Suppose you are an advanced student of physics, and you're just beginning your first research experience with a new professor.  You're excited about the opportunities this means for your future, fascinated by the implications of the research, and anxious to please.  Your professor tells you you need to run a computer simulation, and this is also exciting; you've never used a computer as a computer before -- usually just as an internet browser.  To get you started, he points you to a reference text with some sample code, or sends you one he has on his hard drive somewhere.

This code will be written in Fortran.  They all are.  All legacy codes are Fortran.

So what is Fortran?  Fortran is a high-level programming language designed back in the 50's.  Here "high-level" means that it is not assembly language, and the programmer does not directly interact with machine elements like bits, bytes, or memory addresses, though Fortran is much "lower-level" than most modern languages like Java or Python, meaning it is only just a step or two above machine code.  The name "Fortran" is short for "Formula Translation," as the language was intended to more directly translate a mathematical formula into computer code; Fortran allowed, for instance, an entire mathematical expression to be written out as a single line of code, as opposed to assembly, which would require multiple lines of register swapping and simple operations to acheive the same result.

You'll get the sample code and look at it, and it will be completely incomprehensible.  They all are.  All Fortran codes are incomprehensible.

Why is this?  There are a lot of things that contribute to the issue.

The Ukrainians From ZRus Who 'Read' My Blog

If you are a fellow user of Blogger or a similar platform, then you have probably noticed that you get a significant amount of traffic from websites in Ukraine or Russia, many with the specific domain name zrus.org.  You're probably curious about who these Ukrainians linking to your blog might be.  You may even be a little bit flattered that your tiny blog is getting international recognition.

Don't get excited, and whatever you do, do NOT click any link to these websites.  This is a well-known scourge on the blogger community, and clicking the links could infect your computer with malware.

These sites are a malicious scam.  Let me explain how this scam works.

Why does so much time pass in Interstellar?

While on a quest to save the human race, astronauts in the film Interstellar travel to a foreign planet orbiting closely around a supermassive black hole.  Due to the strong gravity, time on the planet is distorted, being artificially compressed.  Seven entire years here on Earth are squeezed down to just one hour of time on the planet.

This is one of the many bizarre effects of Einstein's general theory of relativity, referred to as gravitational time dilation.  I had some students from my physics class recently ask me to explain this phenomenon.  So I prepared what I think is a fairly straightforward explanation of the phenomenon, assuming only a knowledge of 1st semester physics and some simple calculus.

The Past Two Years of My Life

I was looking just now, and realized it's been two years since my last update.

This blog is kind of a weird thing. It started as a way for me to vent my thoughts on fantasy and science fiction books, then got kind of science-y. At one point I had a spike on my post about the vampire movie Let Me In.  Then I had that viral Berenst#in Bears post that got passed around the web a lot, inspiring lots of kookiness. I was getting lots of traffic for a while -- until Vice basically rewrote my same idea but on their own website with their names attached.

Since then my traffic has slowly dwindled down to numbers that actually make sense for what my blog is.

Really, what gets me isn't that another site gets my traffic, but that in all the traffic that I got, almost none of them read what I think are some of my coolest posts -- the stuff about using Gauss' Law to calculate the width of Narnia, or using volume contracting spacetimes to travel to other dimensions, or why everything cool in physics is impossible, or how time travel is understood to work within physics.

I haven't posted much (anything) since things sort of died down. I still check in frequently, but never find the impetus to start to writing. Maybe it's the weight of former glory intimidating me.