And we're here. An enormous amount of energy, engineering, and time, and we've actually breached the barriers of time, not just breached, but reshaped, to make habitable what would be unusable, a corridor where there was a line. Years ago, an office building, a path not taken, empty, a moment in that time, unused, we claim it, and stretch that moment out to centuries. Since understanding the machinery of the cosmos, and that, like a machine, it does speculative branching, and leaves the stubs, our kind has left the homeworld, to flee those that make our research illegal. Into space, under the surface of the dark side of Luna, or, in our case, towards Sol, lost in the vastness of space. All our efforts, all to capture a moment here, an hour there. Imagine the irony, in escaping the backwards theocrats that accuse us of playing god, we have, in a sense, their world headquarters in which to raise our society. We continue to weave time as best we can, and since moving in, have almost doubled the strength of the effect, but it's not a certain thing what will happen to us if/when we hit the end of the time branch we've inserted ourselves into. Perhaps we'll simply stop, all our transitions to/from the trunk of the tree of time ended at that moment, or perhaps, by being here, we're forcing this branch to continue. If the second is true, we predict a gradient of transition barrier strength, and we're putting a number of our resources to tracking this. Some of our more theoretical research suggests that we may be able to force a loop, either way, between this branch and the trunk, and although that seems very strange (it would be ambiguous how the spatial overlaps would resolve, unless we could cause the areas to swap (which has its own difficulties)), it's certainly research worth looking into. We hope to eventually build cellular devices that can be built into the body and manipulate time -- the power management challenges are formidable, but the idea of being truly at home in the deep folds of the universe in which we now live is one that sustains us.

So, some thoughts about compulsive blogging, or at least frequent blogging, which I do ... why do I do it? In a sense, it helps me feel more real, as without people to see me regularly, it somehow keeps my life real, in a sense. Again, those social needs that we cannot deny, the need to somehow feel part of a pack.. the feeling of meaninglessness if we don't have our days matter to someone else.

An old couple sat together near the fire, in their lodge. Laura said to Jim, if you had it all to do over again, keeping what you know now, would you try something different? I love you, and give us all of what remains of my life, but in those circumstances, I would want to try something new, for the variety of it. Jim prodded at the firewood, thinking.

Recently, some strange old videogame music popped into my head, and it took me awhile to place it. It's interesting how they, with the limited hardware they had available to them, often created music that was more interesting than what's suggested when composing for a richer medium, like a CD. This isn't unheard of -- often the need to stay in a particular style, e.g. the traditional rhythms in Hindi music, can provide the structure for a creative task that would be hard to create from the ground up. For those curious, it's from Zelda2, the music for the final temple. You can dig for it here.

I actually fell asleep last night while writing the entry, so this entry spans several hours of sleep (it's now 10:32 the next morn). Last night's geek movie night went well. The movie, Henry V, was surprisingly good (although the thick accents made it a bit tough to understand what the foo was going on), and the main character actually reminds me a bit, appearance-wise, of an Israeli coworker. We had pizza, and after the movie, chatted over tea and delicious ... hmm... crosses between cake and brownies.

Finally, in the "thank you for sharing" spirit, last night, after I got home, I took a big drink of grape juice, and for some reason, some of it went down the wrong pipe. Result? I immediately started to choke, put down the container, and coughed like I was mount vesuvius, spraying grape juice all over the kitchen. I'm glad I had a lot of paper towels :)

Well, I think I'm going to take a nice walk before I get all cleaned up and ready to do whatever I do today. Yesterday's walks were nice, and I stopped by a used bookseller in town.. today, it's all parks. Huzzah.