Zenoc2

Alright, I've finally caved and given up an old childhood prejudice.
It used to be that when I wrote about myself, I would talk about events and cool things
I'd learned or discovered.  I'd occasionally touch on emotions, but I made sure that they weren't the focus of my writing.  My writings were my "Journal".  They were NOT a diary.  Diaries, I believed, were for girls, and guys a little too in-touch with their feminine side.
 That belief changed tonight, with this discovery: When you're at you're lowest, writing down your feelings in a place that no one else will read, and that you'll probably never want to return to, really, really helps. Having to express exactly what you're feeling helps you figure out just what it is you're feeling.  It makes you confront the way you're thinking about things, and either accept it, or change it.  And when God breaks in in the middle of your writing, you tend to end up with a surprisingly different perspective on things.
 
So my old prejudice -- that keeping a diary is for girls and sissies -- is gone.  

Whiteboard drawings are really the most artistic thing I've done outside of class for a while.  I know, I know, I'm slackin'.  I've been hard-pressed to find free time and creativity at the same time lately.

Anywho, I've uploaded my favorite sketches and whiteboard drawings to my Scraps folder.  Hopefully they'll make you smile.

I finally got my pictures off of the family camera's SD card.

I have sooo many pictures I've meant to post but haven't been able to. Until now.

This should be fun.

Short entry FTW!

Every now and then, my brain turns out a what-if situation that just begs for a little pursuit.  This happened today.   So, if you're looking for some theoretical fun to think about, read on!  If you're looking for one of my regular real-life-update Journals... well, sorry to disappoint, but I'm having fun here.

So, without further ado, here's my new, possibly occasional feature:

Curious Question For Today:
Ignoring Hollywood-style artistic license, the creation of quantum realities, and overall improbability, would time travel into the past actually allow you to change the future?  I would say yes, but you probably wouldn't like the change, in most cases.  In fact, unless extreme precaution is taken, (and I mean way more than just trying not to touch anything. I'm looking at you, Ray Bradburry. ) I would argue that time travel, if it ever became a reality, ought to be banned altogether.  The reason, somewhat surprisingly, is biological.

As long as the human race has been around (perhaps minus the first few days/ however long the first two of us stayed in Eden) there have been microorganisms that are very fond of living inside us.  Some, like the bacteria that normally inhabit our stomachs, live symbiotically with us, helping us with digestion and other processes our bodies have learned to lean on them for.  Others live in us as harmless parasites.  People can carry innocuous strains of normally harmful microbes around with no ill effects- usually without knowing it.  We sure know it when we pick up some of these microscopic parasites that do cause us harm, though.  Sickness is nothing new to us.  But it can be.

Consider the dark days Europe went through from 1348 to 1350.  The Black Plague swept in, killing thousands upon thousands of people.  No one knew where it came from, or how to stop it.  Today we've made huge developments in epidemiology and medicine, to track diseases and cure them.  We know the likely source of the plague (most , and we even know what bacteria caused it (Yersinia pestis)¹ and what antibiotics to use to kill the bacteria.  It only took us a few hundred years.

Now consider this: every new generation of bacteria has a new batch of mutations in its genome, which it passes on to the next generation.  That's just how evolution works.  Now, before you say, "OMG, Zenoc2 - self-defined conservative Christian - said 'evolution'?!", let me clarify: By "evolution," I mean "a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations²," which you can literally observe on the microscopic level over a period of days.  Not "big bang and monkeys and no God," to over-simplify what I used to believe evolution was.  The origin of the species is a different matter entirely, with evolution being part of the explanation most of the scientific community uses to explain how we got from there to here (so my Creationist friends can quit typing angry replies now ).

So, we have these bacteria, which produce offspring with new mutations every generation.  Most of these don't survive to have their own offspring, but the ones that do have mutations that help them along- resistance to certain antibiotics, for example.  Lucky for us, our bodies are growing and changing at the same time as the bacteria, granting us immunity to different strains as we encounter them.  It's only when we encounter a strain that slips past our immune system that we get sick.

Now, suppose we finally invent it- our very first time machine!  Where shall we go?  How about back to mid-1300's England.  We'll go a few years after the Plague has died down, just to be safe.  Except, we won't be safe.  Not because of any immediate danger to ourselves (besides being persecuted as witches and warlocks for popping out of thin air wearing strange clothes and holding cell phones).  No, we're in way bigger danger than that.  Because even though 700 more years of natural immune system development coupled with modern medicine keeps us blissfully unaware of it, each of us is carrying billions of germs on our bodies.  Germs that wouldn't have shown up in England until 700 years later.  And they're way ahead of the immune systems of the people living here.

From 1358 to 1359, the population of the British Isles is decimated, and all of Europe is in a panic about a mysterious new plague, the likes of which the world has never seen before.  It could be something as harmless as E. coli- because it's a strain from far in their future, the Europeans of the 1300's haven't had time to adapt to it, and wouldn't for another 700 years.  Except now they won't, ever.  And it just so happens that we have some Caucasian scientists on this trip, of European descent.

Uh-oh.  We just killed off their ancestors.  What now?

Alright, so maybe we'll give a point back to Hollywood-style artistic license.  Maybe time prevents us from creating paradoxes like that, just so we can avoid creating plot-holes in reality.  But just in case, we ban time travel into the past, to prevent our theoretical nightmare from happening.  How about the future?  Surely our offspring will be immune to the germs that we face today, right?  Yeah, probably, but that still won't help us, so long as we intend to come back to our present time.  Because now we're facing the same problem we would have thrust on fourteenth-century Europe.  Our great-great-grandchildren have germs, the likes of which we've never seen.  We spend just a few seconds talking to our offspring's offspring, then pop back to the present, and wouldn't you know it?  We've brought their germs with us, and we end up decimating our own population.

Uh-oh.  We just killed off our great-great-grandchildren's ancestors.  What now?

So, moral of the story, and for people who would rather say "TL;DR": ban time travel before it's invented, so we don't have to find out whether we survive it or not.

Updates with sources:
¹MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia: "Plague"
www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/en…
²TalkOrigins Archive: "What is Evolution?"
www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolu…

Slender.  Dude...

Mark J. Hadley is a master of horror-game development.

Yes, I finally downloaded it, because I had to see for myself what made the game so scary.  And now I know.  If you don't mind spoilers, or if you've already played it, read on.

Slender plays like the perfect nightmare.  It's dark.  You're in the woods.  You have a flashlight- a real flashlight, with a real, limited battery.  You walk around looking for something you know you have to find, but you're walking so slowly.  You press on, determined not to let any of this get to you.

You find a landmark, and you find the first page.  And then the drums start.  It's spooky, but you're still doing alright.  You shuffle off through the woods, starting to wish that you could walk just a little faster, until you find another landmark.

And you see him.

He's tall.  You've heard stories about him- his too-skinny form, his long arms, black tendrils that he can stretch to impossible lengths. But now he's in front of you.  He's about 20 yards off, and it's dark enough that the flashlight doesn't help you as try to see his extra limbs or his skinny legs. But you see him. The stiff white lapel and black tie, black suit... and his face.  His lack of face.  A perfect oval, pale as the grave.  Slenderman.  And the static fills the screen, but you can still see the white of his shirt under the jacket, his head.  And you know he's coming closer.

So you run.  You turn the opposite direction and you run, but your legs are still so slow.  You know you're getting farther away, because the static is clearing, but it's still there.  It's not clearing fast enough, you're not running fast enough.  You keep going until it clears.

You continue walking through the woods.  You don't see him anymore, but every now and then the static comes back, clouding your vision, and you take off again.  At least you're ahead of him now.  The other stories you've heard start running through your mind.  How his lanky form and branch-like arms help him blend in to the forest at night.  How, when he stretches out his arms towards you, you can't look away, and he draws you in.  How any video of him has static, or some visual glitch, or is wiped completely.

You find another page, and you walk off to find a third.  And suddenly, he's in front of you again.  He's closer this time, you're sure of it.  You see two of his arms, stretching all the way down to his knees.  His black tie, perfectly straight on his white lapel.  And there's his head- that horrible, hideous, faceless white head.  So you run again, until the static clears, but it's taking so long- why won't your legs move faster?!  

You stumble across another page, and wonder to yourself if it's getting darker.  And then the realization hits you:

It's not getting darker.

Your flashlight is getting dimmer.


That's the end of my tape.   I chickened out and quit the game there.  I probably only played for ten minutes, but it felt like half an hour.  So, what would make this game a seller for me, if I were in to horror games?  Not the dark night in the woods.  Not the creepy abandoned brick buildings, or the giant dead tree.  Not the fog or the static or the pounding drums.  Not even Slenderman himself (because he's not exactly hyper-realistic. You can see the polygons that make up his model if you get close enough).  

It's the fact that you can't run like you want to. You can't get away fast enough.   Well done, Mr. Hadley.  Well done.