Day 1: (Link)

Prompt: A free pass to change your past
“Today you get a free pass to go back and change anything in your past. What did you change and why?”

It’s complicated. While there have been times I would have loved to go back in time and change some small thing, to tell myself to Turn Left instead of something else, I also realize that I am the sum of my experiences. I am who I am because of what I have failed to do as much as those times I succeeded. Learning from both situations, achieving and not, is something that makes me, me.

Changing that, tweaking some details, would fundamentally change my personality. It is not a matter, as many time travel narratives would have you believe, of resolving past guilt or righting some perceived wrong, but of substantially changing the probabilistic outcomes of all of your future events from that pivotal moment. You wouldn’t be just changing yourself to feel better, either, but mutating your every future interaction and their consequences.

In other words, time travel is selfish. I mean, sure, in a better light maybe “voyeuristic” might be better word, but really all that reveals is watching some event considered important for personal pleasure. Changing your past self would, inevitably, change everyone else’s future too. That cannot be stated enough.

Plus, though, and here’s the real problem, how would you ever know? The assumption that, in changing your past, you would keep the guilt that fueled you to initially go back in time and fix something, is false. That breaks from an epistemology that centers the person in a material present. It’s something I don’t truck with. Therefore, I disagree with the premise.

A far better question is this: instead of thinking that time travel might one day be created, consider the far more likely outcome that time travel will never be possible because it doesn’t exist now. That is, if time travel was possible, we would have already seen evidence of it. Or, alternatively, time travel will have existed in the future and our universe has forever been changed by temporal observations. There might have been an original timeline that we are not now nor will ever be aware of existing because of the invention of time travel and the present of observers has changed the systemic outcomes permanently. Both possibilities are terrifying.

Day 2 (Link):

Prompt: Emoji come alive!
“It does not have to be an animated gif (although you would make the DS106 shrink very happy if it were). You can find more inspiration if you need it, but you might just go with your first idea!”

Day 3 (Link):

Prompt: Tell us your signature style
“Tell us your personal history through significant signatures in your past. How have you made your mark?”

I haven’t. That is, I have shied away from using my real name for a very long time. It has only been in recent years, really, maybe the last two or three, that I have linked my name, Dan Cox, to my various online accounts on different places like Twitter, GitHub, and my blog. Before that, I was just “Videlais” everywhere.

I mean, while I am supposed to write about my signature and “making my mark” here, honestly, for the most part, it was my performance as Videlais that many people knew and still know to look for in various communities. Far more than the people I interact with on any regular basis, probably in the dozens at the most, I have left countless messages on forums, composed tweets, and written hundreds of blog posts across seven years of writing under Videlais. That’s how people know that it’s me: it came from Videlais, not from Dan Cox.

In that way, I guess, I could easily write that my signature became that name and its associated actions. The person behind the avatar, behind the signature, was me, of course, but it was also, in a way, meaningless. Connecting my name has grounded me some — I’ve certainly gotten in my trouble from “local” responses than I ever did “globally” — but it has also not meant a great deal to people who know me as Videlais. For them, I’m always that user, not some other name they have never interacted with or even care about.

Day 4 (Link):

Prompt: What is it?
“Make an interesting indoor photo with the blinds closed so your audience has to guess your subject. Be creative!”

Day 5 (Link):

Prompt: Write a few zeugmas, perhaps as a poetry.
Zeugmas are “are figures of speech in which one single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence.”

I wrote words,
edited them,
tried structure,
and mostly succeeded.

What? More words? Okay… sure.
How about a haiku? Good?
It’s not a zeugma.