themeatbridge

I think, since future Bill and Ted appear to the earlier Bill and Ted, and Rufus directly assists in creating his future, I think we have to assume that all of those historical figures always experienced those things, and then returned to their timelines with knowledge of the future. Napoleon rode the waterloops before Waterloo. Socrates played catch with Billy the Kid. Those are historical events, as much as Rufus and Future Bill and Ted helping present Bill and Ted pass their classes.

With one linear timeline, you basically have Back to the Future rules. You can go back and change things, even if it rewrites you out of existence. Of course, there are some logical paradoxes that arise from that theory of time, so most versions rely on some delayed repair mechanism, like how the photo of Marty slowly disappears, or how The Ancient One explains the Time Stone to Professor Hulk. Time Cop, Butterfly Effect, and Looper do the same, with changes going into immediate effect like old injuries becoming later scars in real time, but erasing yourself really ought to be devastating to spacetime itself. I liked the concept in Butterfly Effect where the time traveler experiences all the memories of their new life in the altered timeline with every new change, but then they abandon the hard sci-fi aspect to get cute with stigmata. Donnie Darko probably handles it the best, where time travel itself creates a universe-ending paradox that requires the destruction of the time traveler.

Essentially, you jump from now back to another location in spacetime where you didn’t exist the first time around. If you overlap with yourself, you’re either going to gain a new retroactive memory, or there’s some magical maguffin that erased the memory (like the Tardis does for the Doctor), or some universal force reconciles the timestream and eliminates the paradox.

It depends on how you imagine time travel and causality. Is it a stable time loop? Or do you visit another version of reality with different outcomes? When you travel, are you unraveling the course of history to be redone? Or are you visiting an unyielding etching of the timespace continuum? If time is a set of dimensions, as all modern physics supports, then theoretically it wouls be possible to move through those dimensions in all directions. Special relativity confirms that movement affects how you move through time, but if you go backwards in time, you are still moving forward from your own reference point. That’s the only way to retain your memories.

“Narco-terrorists” isn’t a thing that existed until Trump and Hegseth wanted to murder people on a boat with missiles from the stratosphere without involving any available legal system.

sudo chown ./castle;/titles;/sexlaves

I oppose it simply because it doesn’t work. It is not a deterrent, and it does not serve justice to put people to death, and it costs far more to execute someone than it does to rehabilitate them (the most expensive alternative - I’m not suggesting rehabilitation is an option for everyone).

And sometimes we execute innocent people. Like, how many of your family members would you be willing to put to death to keep the death penalty? Every innocent victim of the death penalty had a family, and that family never imagined it could happen to them.

I would argue that it would impact the effectiveness of the effort, but the intention is just as important.

Like if you want to make the world a better place, you can pick up litter in your local area. You could volunteer at the library or conserve energy in whatever way is easiest for you. The desire to move forward is critical, because nobody has all the information. Nobody can know all the angles, and be aware of every impact. Everyone is just doing the best they can with the information they have.

Wanting to be better informed is also a progressive ideal. Know better, do better. We might discover that something we thought was beneficial is actually harmful. The difference between a conservative choice and a progressive choice is that when new information demonstrates that behaviors conflicts with values, the progressive changes their behaviors while a conservative changes their values.

I don’t think it’s helpful to think in terms of left and right. That presumes that each side is roughly a mirror analogue of the other.

Think in terms of forward and backward. Will your ideas and political leanings push society forward? Will you be making the world better than you found it? Or are you trying to resist change, fighting against progress because the status quo, or the recent past, benefits you in some way?

It would be more believable if it said he was keeping count on his fingers.

Looks neat. I’m a comic book fan, so I’ll probably pick it up eventually, if it ever goes on sale. Or not, if it sucks.

Damn, I remember when consoles got less expensive over time, and when free speech was a thing.

How about news so ridiculous you wish it were satire, but we actually just live in a dystopian hellscape run by madmen and thieves?

Check out Immich next. It’s sort of like a self-hosted Google photos except it allows you to own your photos.

You can just block whole communities and even instances, if you prefer. I use the blocking feature for forums in foreign languages. It’s not like an insult or anything. You can just hide all the F1 and comic book stuff.

But the Nazis have found that inserting Trump’s name into the playbook is more likely to hold his attention.

Nothing wrong with Swift, but she’s not a political though-leader. Best I can tell, the conservative vitriol has more to do with misogyny than any particular message she’s putting out into the world.

Who’s that lady that wrote the folk song “It’s not going away”? There are like three or four folk groups and troubadours writing protest songs for tiktok. Mon Rovia with Heavy Foot, Jesse Welles with The Poor, stuff like that.

Taylor Swift sorta got under Trump’s skin, but she’s not particularly political.

Cause nobody has any money, and people want to make decisions about paying for stuff based on how much stuff actually costs.

Like if you went to a bookstore, and the book was $10, and you go to pay, and the store was like "akshually, if you don’t pay $12, the clerk doesn’t get paid, and the clerk is OK with that because maybe you’ll pay $13.

If the book costs $12, then maybe I’m still interested in that price. But if I expect to pay $10, and then the amount is more, then I’m feeling differently about that delta.

Learning a language is easiest when you have opportunities to speak it. Which one are you more likely to use? A book might not be as effective as an app, like Duolingo or similar. Duolingo is free for a single language.

French phonetics is a bit more different from English, but both Italian and French are romance languages (based on Latin). Many English root words are Latin (also German, Greek, Dutch, and Indigenous languages). English also borrows loanwords from French and Italian, but pronunciations vary. I’d say both are relatively easy to learn as an English speaker (as is Spanish or Portuguese).

Grammatically, sentence structure is close to English. French introduces an extra word for negation which takes a little getting used to. “I cannot” becomes “Je ne peux pas” while Italian conjugates the verb to remove the subject “Non posso”.

One big difference with French is that there is a governing body that determines official French spelling and pronunciation. L’Académie Française was founded in the 17th century by the bad guy from the Three Musketeers, and is committed to maintaining linguistic purity. They tried for years to get French people to say “le courriel” instead of “email” but I don’t think anyone actually says that. Italy also has Accademia della Crusca, aka la Crusca, which had a similar function until the early 20th century when they were made more of an philology organization.

The benefit to both is that, once you understand spelling and diacritics, reading a word tells you precisely how to pronounce the word. The downside is that the languages have been basically stagnant for 350 years, so there are many strict, archaic phrases and sentence structures. English is notorious for homophones, homographs, and homonyms, which aren’t nearly as common in either French or Italian.

That said, reading from a book will never be the same as speaking with and listening to a native speaker. If you don’t have someone to practice with, there are online resources and probably local community options to find people who will help.

But then how can you create an artificial divide and pit one generation against another?