No idea what to write about tonight. I have been having a lot of sleepy days recently, and that combined with the decidedly unseasonal (and unreasonable heat) has left my poor noodle utterly fried.

Mmm…. fried noodles.

Anyhow, when in doubt, share stuff. So I thought I would share this with you all.

It’s a video starring two puppets named Glove and Boot, and they are here to tell you all the reasons why time travel actually sucks mongoose taint.

Yup. Puppets again. But unlike the ones from Felt, these ones actually look great.

Wasn’t that two tons of fun? I love, love, love this vid. The energy and enthusiasm are contagious. The production values are superb. Everything looks fantastic. Great use of modern digital techniques. I love to see new technologies applied so well.

Too often, people get overwhelmed by their love of the technology and use it in a way that more or less just shows off its basic capabilities, and to me, that is dull, dull, dull.

The interesting stuff comes when people with talent and imagination harness the technology to their drive to create and in doing so, stretch the technology and really make it work.

And of course, the vid is all about one of my own science fiction pet peeves, time travel. I have a lot of objections to it myself. Granted, mine are more about the near impossibility of writing a time travel society that is actually logically consistent and that does not drag in a whole bunch of unspoken assumptions that are completely unsupported by the narrative, but still.

I think most of Glove and Boot’s objections are valid too. I thought the “in the future, you are gross” thing was a legitimate concern that they wasted on a cheap bathroom joke.

It would have been funnier to have a bunch of future people look at the puppet I assume is Boots and say “Eww, it’s covered in fecal germs!” and have Boots look horrified and say “Who? What? Me?”

And I don’t care if I don’t think my past self was cool. (Trust me… he wasn’t.) It would be worth it to get to tell him to fight like hell to stay in university.

Of course, if I had stayed in uni, I would not have become the person I am today, and therefore I would have no desire to go back in time and tell myself to fight to stay in uni, and therefore I would never go, and so then I would be back to wanting to go back in time, and therefore…

See what I mean about time travel? The simplest ideas instantly fall into irresolvable paradox. And I am a crotchety enough science fiction fan/writer that I demand all stories pass the basic logic test. Either your narrative circuit is complete and I can enjoy the story, or it is not, and it short-circuits and I have to start caring less about the story in order to continue with it.

And that means you have already set a hard limit as to how much I can enjoy the story because you have limited the amount I can invest in it.

let’s see… the “Ha ha ha, I can’t break a twenty” is total bullshit. Come on guys, that’s the best you can think of? The real problem with going back ten years and trying to spend money is that odds are, all the money in your wallet was minted within the next ten years and is therefore going to look mighty suspicious to people of the past.

But maybe they won’t notice, right? I mean, who looks at the year on bills?

That leads to the second problem, which is that, in order to stay ahead of counterfeiters, bill designs change relatively frequently. So your money likely will not look right to the people of ten years ago even on casual inspection.

As for spending money in the future, it’s not likely that inflation will ever be that high. But it’s eminently possible that by then, we will have abolished cash completely and trying to pay for a McRib with a twenty will be greeted the same as we would greet someone trying to pay their phone bill with sheep.

The past is definitely gross, though. I really don’t want to visit any of history before the era of modern sanitation and antibiotics. In the past, especially in cities, everything smelled like shit all the fucking time because there was shit everywhere all the fucking time.

I mean even in the steampunk era horses were dropping “road apples” (whoever came up with that term is a sick, sick bastard) all over the place.

So no. I don’t really want to go back much further than the period between WWI and WWII. And even that is dicey, what with all the influenza strains ripping through the population.

So even if I was to go back to kill Hitler (or better yet, get him laid and get someone to buy his art), I would not really want to linger.

Well, maybe just long enough to visit some steamy gay cabaret in Paris or something.

As for the whole “you’ll hate the music” rap, well, maybe if you have super narrow genre based tastes. But musical gourmets like myself have developed wider, deeper, richer palates than that, and I am pretty confident that no matter what era I was in, I would find music I like.

Honestly, I would worry more about losing my tiny mind from MP3 collection withdrawal.

I mean, in the past, you actually had to have like, physical media for all your music! And further back than that, you had to hope you liked whatever was on the radio.

And further back than that, the only way to hear music was to be within earshot of actual musicians.

I am pretty sure I would go completely bonkers without my constant access to my thousands of MP3’s.

I would end up being some sad sucker with a large collection of music boxes!

So yeah. Time travel sucks.