Loki is very handsome. He is plausible, convincing, likable, and far and away the most wily, subtle, and shrewd of all the inhabitants of Asgard. It is a pity, then, that there is so much darkness inside him: so much anger, so much envy, so much lust.
Loki is the son of Laufey, who was also known as Nal, or needle, because she was slim and beautiful and sharp. His father was said to be Farbauti, a giant; his name means “he who strikes dangerous blows,” and Farbauti was as dangerous as his name.
Loki walks in the sky with shoes that fly, and he can transform his shape so he looks like other people, or change into animal form, but his real weapon is his mind. He is more cunning, subtler, trickier than any god or giant. Not even Odin is as cunning as Loki.
Loki is Odin’s blood brother.
The other gods do not know when Loki came to Asgard, or how.
He is Thor’s friend and Thor’s betrayer.
He is tolerated by the gods, perhaps because his stratagems and plans save them as often as they get them into trouble.
Loki makes The World more interesting but less safe.
He is The Father of Monsters,
The Author of Woes,
The Sly God.
Loki drinks too much, and he cannot guard his words or his thoughts or his deeds when he drinks.
Loki and his children will be there for Ragnarok, The End of Everything, and it will not be on the side of the gods of Asgard that they will fight.”
"How does it work? Off the central timeline we just left. Events of importance often cause divergent “tributaries” to branch off the main timestream.
But what’s astounding is there’s far more to it than that. On occasion, these tributaries return—sometimes feeding back into the central timeline, other times overlapping it briefly before charting an entirely new course.
An old friend is suddenly recalled after years of being forgotten.
A scrap of history becomes misremembered, even reinvented in the common wisdom.
There are hazards to Hypertime, of course....
Artifacts carried into differing hypertimelines dangerously break down the barriers between kingdoms... but you’ll learn more about that in the months and years to come. "
— (Rip Hunter, The Kingdom #2, 1999)
One reassuring thing is that, despite the fears of some, the timestream seems capable of absorbing paradoxes.
“Some would have you believe that time is a house of cards, and that if you remove one card, the house collapses.
The physics of time, however, allow for another possibility: remove that same card, and the house rebuilds itself— but never to its original form”
— (Chronos #9, 1998).
BRUCE BANNER: [Disgusted]
First of all, that's horrible...
RHODEY:
It's Thanos.
BRUCE BANNER:
...And secondly, Time doesn't work that way.
Changing The Past doesn't change The Future.
SCOTT LANG:
Look, we go back, we get the stones before Thanos gets them...
Thanos doesn't have the stones. Problem solved.
CLINT BARTON:
Bingo.
NEBULA:
That's not How it Works.
CLINT BARTON:
Well, that's what I heard.
BRUCE BANNER:
What? By who?
Who told you that?
RHODEY:
[counting with his fingers]
Star Trek,
Does not apply to Capt. Benjamin Sisko/Gabriel Bell,
Emissary of The Prophets,
or The Prophets of Bajor themselves —
It is Not Linear.
Terminator
Terminator actually exploits a Deterministic Bootstrap Paradox.
TimeCop
Time After Time -
Nobody Travels into The Past in Time After Time —
Jack The Ripper travels into The Present, pursed by H.G. Wells
SCOTT LANG:
Quantum Leap -
This is, in fact, exactly how Time Travel in Quantum Leap works — it's the entire premise for the whole show :
It's The Observer Effect —
You Change The Result by Measuring It.
The only reason Dr. Sam Beckett is able to make The Journey of crossing his own timeline, be an actor in events of The Past and change established history is because he has no memory of history, as a consequence of making The Journey.
That's also the reason why his range of travel is restricted to The Past within his own lifetime - he is not actually travelling history to change it, he is re-visiting events in Living Memory, making new memories and Remembering it Differently.
He is only able to do this, because he has completely forgotten The Past — or, at least, is far-from certain he is remembering it correctly
Meanwhile, Al, "The Observer" either does remember the original history, or is able to access it's records via Ziggy The Computer's Database — he is able to project an image of himself into the Memories of The Collective Unconscious to communicate information (in the form of stochastic Quantum Probabilities) to Sam, whilst being unable to directly affect any change himself)
It is significant that when Sam is able to recall memories of History or his past life, he invariably misremembers them, until 'corrected' by Al, who remembers Sam 'accurately'.
Sam initially misremembers Ziggy as being the 'Little Guy, with The Bad Breath.' But no, that's Gouschi, as Al correctly informs him.
Sam then misremembers Ziggy as being the Male Personality of the Quantum AI Supercomputer controlling Project Quantum Leap, for the next 3 Years —
Al never corrects him.
Ziggy is Male — until he swaps places with Al, arrives back home at his Point of Origin and Ziggy has become a female supercomputer (programmed with Barbara Steisand's ego).
And Sam is now a married man.
Which he wasn't before.
He returns to find himself released into The Present,
Facing Mirror Images that are finally his own,
And driven by manifest necessity to rescue his friend from History.
Where Christopher Reeve travels into The Past via Deep Trance Hypnosis.
SCOTT LANG:
Hot Tub Time Machine -
The Theory of Time Travel in Hot Tub Time Machine actually plays to The Bootstrap Predestination Paradox —
You can visit The Past to create The Present, but you cannot create any outcome that hasn't always been True.
RHODEY:
Hot Tub Time Machine.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Again, Bill and Ted can cross their own timeline to create their present circumstance, but they can also generate future events and consequences simply by an Act of Will, through sincere intent —
'Once I and My Friend Have Succeeded and Triumphed,
I Will Go Back in Time After Now to Steal My Dad's Keys,
Therefore I Know Where They Are
and So Once I Collect Them, I Shall Have Them'
Small wonder it is then, that the people of the society of Rufus' era come to regard William S. (Hey, I only just noticed that one! —) and Theodore Logan as Nietzschan Superman —
Thus Spake Zarathustra : —
'No Way...!'
Basically, any movie that deals with time travel.
SCOTT LANG:
Die Hard? No, it's not one...
Now, There's a line to be pondered-over for decades to come, if ever I saw one....
If I was to speculate at this point, I would maybe suggest that Scott suggests this because he is remembering the line
'How Can The Same Shit Happen to The Same Guy Twice?'
Now, that's just a guess — and I am a good guesser, generally.
But I am certainly not prepared to commit myself emotionally to any answer on this, and definitely not at this stage, at a point so early into The Game —
Time May Tell — it usually does.
RHODEY:
This is known.
BRUCE BANNER:
I don't know why everyone believes that, but that isn't True.
Think about it: If you travel to The Past,
that past becomes Your Future.
And your former Present becomes The Past.
Which can't now be changed by Your New Future...
NEBULA:
Exactly.
SCOTT LANG:
So... Back To The Future's a bunch of bullshit..?
Well, Back to The Future Part II certainly isn't — and nor mostly is Back to The Future Part III, which is also fine, because it involves journeying into History beyond Living Memory (which is precisely what Dr. Sam Beckett is unable to do —
except for that one time when he was flung back into The Civil War, into his Family History, by swapping places with his own ancestor.)
So, how is it that Marty and Doc Brown are able to interact and commune across time in safety so relatively freely in 1955, and interact with Marty's closest blood relatives and immediate antecedents, whilst avoiding many of the most serious hazards (unless you happen to be a Pine Tree, of course), and have those interactions affect stable and lasting change in The Present?
Rather alarmingly, it appears to have much to do with suffering concussive head trauma —
Marty Mc.Fly gets knocked unconscious a lot....
Almost all of the major characters do, at some point or another, whether by means of Chloroform, gut-rot whiskey, the Doc's Delta-Wave sleep inducer, a bolt of lightning, getting chased by a bear over a cliff.....
But if you pay careful attention, almost any change in temporal location for Marty is usually either accompanied by, or swiftly followed by a severe blow to the head, which renders him completely unconscious for several hours — almost every character comments upon this, but Doc Brown's initial encounter with Marty in 1955 and all of his subsequent interactions occur beginning on the day he slipped, standing on the wet edge of his toilet and cracked his head against the sink, whereafter he first conceived of the Flux Capacitor as a vision in his unconscious stupor.
This is initially speculated to be the cause for his apparent failure to remember the subsequent events of November 5-12th 1955 whilst Marty stayed with him, and failure to prepare for What is to Come, in spite of giving him privileged access to and future knowledge of the finished and completed time vehicle he hasn't built yet.
Of course, as we all know, it eventually transpires that he does remember them (although whether or not he did before, and all along is somewhat open to debate, given the evidence of Lone/Twin Pines Mall), and the Doc's freedom and capacity to choose a New Future for himself ultimately hinges solely on his decision to trust his friend, and have faith in Marty's love and affection for him, irrespective of the fact that he is a friend who has not yet actually met yet, in a strictly linear sense of the causalities involved.
Just for good measure, at the start of Back to The Future III, now that things have become really complicated causally with respect to Doc Brown's memories, he throws in the additional piece of speculation, whilst Journaling about the previous evening's successful time experiment, that the consequence of having electromagnetic flux (fluxing), when having been stood directly next to a bolt of lightning striking a copper cable (with quite a considerable jolt of that old 1.21-JgW. likely having passed through his body) had erased part of his memory and induced a degree of retrograde amnesia of the past week's event — which is all very sound scientifically.....
Magnetic Pulses of relatively minute flux density, directed towards the frontal cortex and cerebellum are proven to produce (or rather, induce) profound subjective sensory and perceptual synesthesia, and can most certainly block formation of new memories, and even erase, re-contextualise or re-write existing memories, both recent and long-term.
“Why do we hate those guys [The Police] when we put them there?
Why do we hate ourselves for creating this society?
Why are so many people in America obsessed with Marilyn Manson; corpses; dead people; misery; John Wayne Gacy… John Wayne Gacy’s a fucking prick. Y’know, he killed a few people and did some shitty paintings. What’s that? Why should we be engaged with that? And yet that has become.. what, “Apocalypse Culture“?
Where do we go from there, that isn’t that? Where do we go that isn’t playing with our own shite?
The Answer… back to the individual.
If the individual doesn’t work – if Patrick McGoohan was wrong; Number 6 was wrong to stand on that beach screaming “I am not a number, I am a free man!” – what do we have left?
Because ultimately the guy who’s not a number and not a free man experiences neurosis, the longer he goes down that path. I’m sure there’s a bunch of people here, like me, who eventually… you’ve worked your way through this stuff; you’ve read the books, you’ve done this shit; you’ve taken the drugs; you’ve been there, you’ve seen it. We’ve all experienced enlightenment in little bits. You know it’s out there; you know this stuff is True: the consensus doesn’t explain our lives.
But what does?”
Let Me Tell You a Story.....
I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both the Greeks and the barbarians, fail of their report, and together, with all of this, the reason why they fought one another.
"Don't you remember what I said about The Truth?
Stories are Truer than The Truth."
It turns out “Jest” doesn’t mean “Joke” —
A Jester is a disguised Bard passing for a Fool.
It turns out “Jest” means “narrative” — or “history”, or “ideology”, or “WorldView”.
" And I want to quote for you, to you, from the oldest history book in Western Civilisation.
Not just because it’s a book, but I think this is a point one can make about any history course, it doesn’t matter what the subject is.
It can be Social History, Political History, Intellectual History, any history.
It can be the History of Ancient Rome, it could be Post-1945 United States, it could be any history.
But any history course ought to do the two things that Herodotus named in the opening sentence of the oldest history book we have.
This is Herodotus, The History.
Isn’t it great when you’re writing the first book, what are you going to call it? The History!
No subtitles, nothing fancy, just —
“I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both the Greeks and the barbarians, fail of their report, and together, with all of this, the reason why they fought one another.”
I don’t know how closely you listened to that, but what has Herodotus just said? He’s basically said history is two things.
It’s The Story, it’s the color, it’s the great deeds, it’s the narrative that takes you somewhere;
But it’s also The Reason Why, it’s also the explanations.
That’s what history does. It’s supposed to do both of those things.
Some of us are more into the analysis, and we’re not so fond of Story.
Some of us just love stories and don’t care about the analysis —
“oh, stop giving me all that interpretation, just tell me the good story again.”
This is what goes on, of course, out in public history all the time:
“just tell us the old stories and just sing us the old songs, make us feel good again.
Stop interpreting, you historians, and worst of all, stop revising.”
You notice how that word ‘revision’ has crept into our political culture?
When politicians don’t like the arguments of people who disagree with them they accuse them of being revisionist historians.
It was even a poll-tested word for a while when Condoleezza Rice was using it.
“Revisionist, revisionist.”
As though all history isn’t revisionist.
My favorite story about revisionism is my buddy, Eric Foner, was on a talk show once.
About 1992. He was on one of those shouting talk shows with Lynne Cheney, who at that — Dick Cheney’s wife — who was then head of the NEH.
And this was a time — you won’t remember this — we were having this national brouhaha over what were called National History Standards.
And Lynne Cheney, if you remember, a real critic of these National History Standards. She didn’t particularly like some of the ideas that the historians were coming up with.
So on this talk show — it was Firing Line where you get two people on and they just shout at each other for an hour, or a half hour, and the producers love it.
And Foner is pretty good at rapid fire coming back, he’s pretty good at it.
Anyway they had this set-to and she kept accusing him and other historians of being “revisionist.”
And Eric says the next morning he got a phone call from a reporter at Newsweek and she said,
“Professor Foner, when did all this revisionism begin?”
And Foner said,
“Probably with Herodotus.”
And the Newsweek reporter said,
“Do you have his phone number...?”
Never underestimate the ignorance of the American people.
" The more I looked into it, the more I began to see that we have these mutants living among us, right now. The people from the 21st century; from the end of the 21st century are here. But there is no context for them. In the same way that – y’know, if you lived in… Tunguska two hundred years ago, and you were an epileptic, you would be a shaman. There was a context for you. In this society, you’re an epileptic. It’s quite simple; it’s a disease, and nothing you say is of any worth because it’s considered pathology.
If, on the other hand, you look at these people, who are the mutants… and what do they call it? Multiple Personality Disorder.
This is what lies beyond the personality; the “I”; the bullshit.
Because if you take “I” to the limit – and like I said, I’m sure a lot of us here have done this – it becomes… all that happens is that self questions self. Endlessly; repetitively. “Am I doing this right? Is this the right way? Should I think about these people like this? Should I approach them this way; should I involve them this way?” Self questions self, endlessly, and it reaches a peak… it goes nowhere.
On the national scale, that same thing – self questions self; self encounters not-self; equals borders, war, destruction.. that’s where it goes. That’s where it ends. That thing ends in disaster.
It ends in neurosis on a personal level. And it ends in war on the national level.
So I began to think: “What could we replace that with?” And I was looking at these poor MPD fuckers. And I realised they just don’t have a context.
What would happen if we decided to abandon the personality, and replace it with a multiple personality complex? Because as we all know – everyone in here, I’m sure.. I mean, I feel as if I can say this for certain, knowing human beings as they are: sometimes you do things that you don’t want to do. Sometimes you do things that are contradictory to what you think. Sometimes you fuck yourself up.
Why? Because there’s not one person in here; there’s hundreds.
And if you start giving them names, and you start shuffling them about; if you start playing with them, you become a bigger human being. Because you’ve no longer allowed yourself to stop at your boundaries.
Imagine the personality as… let’s choose Windows, even though that’s a contentious one. Imagine the personality as Windows. Instead of the personality.. there’s so many people, I’m sure you’ve met them.. you talk to them, and they say “No, this is the way I am. I’ve worked on this. This is me. And I won’t change. And you’ll just have to work with that. This is me; this is important; this is what I’ve come to, and this is what I’ve Made Of Myself.”
Bullshit. It’s a trap. They don’t go anywhere; they’re stuck there.
What if those same people were then given Personality 2000? Which is an upgrade, and an add-on? And here’s a bit of your personality that likes hip hop? Here’s a bit to your personality that likes ballet? And because we’ve all got them. And we’ve got the fucker.. we’ve got the serial killer inside; we’ve got the wonderful new-age bastard… we’ve got whatever we like. We’ve got James Bond in there. We’ve got Pussy Galore in there. They’re all there.
So what I’m suggesting is that we start working with that. Abandon the personality; abandon the individual; abandon the “I” because it’s a lie, and it has held us down; it’s been like a weight round our necks. It was useful for the last two thousand years of history, because it created this out of the chaos that was – and this is more coherent; more useful; more meaningful. It has its problems; everything does; every system has – but we’re getting better. "
" The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.
War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter--set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a State of War. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a State of War should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of DOUBLETHINK. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance--meaning, in effect, war and police espionage--the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre. "
'The Thing About British Libel Law is that defendants are presumed Guilty until they can be proved otherwise — so this gave Maxwell a natural advantage.'
