broken timelines

When I was a kid we didn't have anything like internet. We had radios, bulky tape recorders, basic public television, shared land lines, and books.

I don't know how much my parents spent on the set of encyclopedias we had, but I pored over every single one for years. World information could be purchased in that stack of books and stored on a bookshelf and retrieved at any time, but it never changed once in print like that. We call it hard copy nowadays.

The internet changes. I have found people who document these changes, checking daily for updates to a variety of sites. Some updates are added information, some are more stringently corrected, some are reworded to change the tone, some get entire paragraph wipes.

Most people don't notice these things. Even the 'news' is corrected, line by line, word by word, sometimes until an entire document has so drastically changed that it doesn't look at all like the original publish. Most people don't pay that much attention, many people don't notice a sentence or paragraph changed or went missing, and usually people assume it's for the better when they do notice it. After all, knowledge is knowledge, right?

Some of us notice. Some keep track by screenshotting the public pages, some by screenshotting or copy/pasting the source code, some print out each new change as hard copy. Over time, some of us build libraries out of 'knowledge' changes.

If you are not the type of person to be this obsessed or concerned with minor changes over time, you probably think this is crazy. We all have busy lives, who has time to worry about a minor syntax change, much less the cumulative tiny revisions made over several years. What does it matter, right?

Gear switch, entertainment. How many people do you know who will pursue canon over fiction to the point of lengthy heated discussion over the course of a decade? I don't know about you, but I happen to know a lot of people like that. Every jot and tittle in a franchised approved movie or book will be thoroughly dissected and boundaried from a slew of fan fiction, or fanfic. (Yes, boundaried is a word.)

What is knowledge? What is shared knowledge? What is world knowledge?

Who decides what knowledge is?

Oh, this is fun. I didn't do this.

When I go check to see if it is really published.

And now it has updated while I was doing this. Is this a new thing with blogger? Each new draft is now timestamped while I'm working? Because this is not published yet.

How have I been using blogger since 2014 and not seen anything like that yet?

Ok, yep, every time I preview, that changes. Wow. That is really bothering me.

Remember that time I was trying to find a way back into drafts to find something I lost and wound up losing an entire page in one fell undo swoop? Yeah, woulda been nice to have timestamped drafts back then. I never did rewrite that page. I was too brokenhearted over the amount of time and emotional investment I'd put into it.

Ok, that was a big diversion, where was I. 

Knowledge is transient nowadays. People get into big fights on twitter, kinda like big brawl dog packs, because most people will fail to find more permanent actually sourced knowledge and just slay the heck out of anyone who simply doesn't agree with them. We have become that. We instantly dismiss or try to save people we don't agree with because they obviously don't have the right knowledge.

What if everything in your life was so transient that your very being wasn't rooted in original source code? What if your consciousness was so transient that you could be shattered and restructured without your awareness or consent?

Better yet, what if your lifelong timeline that you think is solid is really a jagged set of memories shooting off a trail of consciousness that regularly gets 'reset' back to a baseline? What if you are nothing more than a default algorithm with an ability to be internally overwritten?

And what if what you create in your life disappears over and over and you don't remember it?

I used to think this way when I was about 12. I was constantly thinking of time in ways of being broken. How would we even know?

Why in the world would I even be thinking like that?

Bigger question- Why is scifi so obsessed with this, and could this mean that millions of us are inherently aware on a subconscious level that we keep being reset back to default?

I have memories of things that aren't in this lifetime. They are me, but in an alt way. Same people, different outcome. The worst ones are my child dying early (those started around twenty years ago). One timeline in a dream I had wrecked me so badly that to this day I will weep and nearly shut down for the rest of the day when I remember it. In another she's fine, different husband, no children, whole different life going on, and I feel so sad and empty in that dream because something feels like it's missing even though she's happy, and when I wake up I realize it's her son.

I can see history changes. I've been seeing them for a long time. I know other people who are also coming to realize this has been happening for a long time. They are few and far between, but we are running into each other on the internet and comparing notes.

I started hypothesizing to myself many years ago that maybe broken brains can see things other people can't. Then I ran into a few scientists and researches postulating the same thing. I wound up going deep into brain studies, everything from ESP to NDE, science, metaphysics, intuitive studies, everything I could get my hands on. I was deep diving long before internet.

Something has changed / is changing in scifi. I'm trying to put my finger on it. I'm having a hard time finding words and defining what I mean. It's vague but very real.

I'm going to say something madcap and way off the wall now. Years before Mandela effect was ever a thing, I used to complain in fan forums that this or that needed to happen, why didn't they this or that, the writers blahblahblah, and you've gotta understand that I was the sort of fan who would run entire movies in freeze frame or backward multiple times just catching everything recorded. I drive people crazy with a little tiny pause button. I sometimes found and brought up things no one ever had before in all kinds of movies. Again, way before internet. TV sets were still crap, no mobile phones yet.

I'm aware of all the industry changes, digital effects, storyboard evolution, marketing. I drank that stuff like kool-aid. Even with a crap tv and a rented VHS player, I knew so much about everything I watched and felt like I had no one to talk to about it until internet came along. I spent my entire childhood with thoughts most people never dream of in whole lifetimes, all jam packed together setting my brain in fire. I thought so hard about everything.

I remember the day years and years ago I suddenly realized that future affects the past. It came out of nearly nowhere, ripped a new rabbit hole in my head, and there I went. I was way ahead of published science, philosophies, religion. I was all alone with a brand new idea, working out how it could be possible without us even knowing.

And you know what? It's happening all the time now. People don't even notice it. All kinds of things in our lives are changing, sometimes minutely, mostly vaguely, and we are so distracted or 'bored' or despondent about something that most of us can't imagine we are literally living out our fictions.

This is really hard to write. I walk all around the edge of it, dripping words, and none of them mean anything.

We exist and don't exist. It's all real, wonderfully, horribly real. Everything we are experiencing is real. Experience IS real. Even if we are making it up, it is real.

Reality is what we create. On the most basic level, we live in a shared reality that is created moment to moment by overarching groupthink. We dream the same dreams together when we watch TV, experiencing created realities together. Those of us who read the same books growing up have a way to plug into a shared reality together. Everything around us is about realities and experiences. Coworkers share a reality that is different from families. The groupthink changes from one set or subset to another. There are overarching realities containing the more local realities. A few years ago I'd have called these social constructs, but 'realities' feels more experienceable.

When we share realities with other people, we build histories together. Someone outside my reality cannot have a history with me. Unless I share it as a story on a blog. When I take someone on my journey, they can add some of my reality to theirs. It's interesting to note this doesn't go the other way. I don't experience you guys tagging along. By the time your eyes arrive here, my entire world has already rolled away to other things, and you have no idea what I'm doing in 'real time', but you can see where I've been.

When we experience created fiction realities together, it's like we join in a dream. We may not see each other, no clue who else or how many are dreaming, but from the point of view of that dream, there are viewers or readers from all across time and space. We are all connecting to that dream. We are all seeing a history, processing experiences in our local real times that connect back to that reality, so that at any point in our lives if someone says 'Star Wars', we instantly find out who all has shared that reality and lived those experiences.

Living vicariously.

I feel like I've lived many lifetimes in this one life because I have lived vicariously so much while I had to deal with unbearable pain. Many of us do that, I think. Distraction is a survival tool. Thinking is escape.

I guess that brings me back to Thawne. If you haven't seen that or know what I'm talking about (pic at the top), I'm not going to rehash. Anyone who's felt like their life was stalled out on sticky tape for years on end would get it, and I daresay that's probably quite a lot of us. I live for the 'think' moments, when years of this or that thought trail congeal into a rush of knowledge. 

One day a very long time ago, I wondered how no one creating a fiction to share could seem to grasp the idea that a self on its own timeline could affect its past. The Thawne escape arc is brilliant, thank you for making that dream exist for us to experience a reality together in, guys.

Now I'm going to ask- Does anyone else ever make decisions based on outcomes they know will or won't work out? Or is that just me? Because I feel like this entire lifetime has been spent fine tuning a reset to default loop that I'm very ready to escape, and I think this time I'm doing it right.