Category Archives: Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Memories, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#513: Another Year

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #513, on the subject of Another Year.

Once again, as we did last year in web log post #490:  Looking Back and in previous years linked successively back from there, we are recapping everything published in the past year–sort of.

I say “sort of” because once again some material is being omitted.  There have been a few hundred posts to the Christian Gamers Guild Bible Study which can be accessed there but aren’t really fully indexed anywhere.  Meanwhile, the dozen articles in the Faith in Play series and the similar dozen in the RPG-ology series were just indexed on the Christian Gamers Guild site in Christian Gamers Guild 2024 Index, and won’t be repeated here.  I also posted several days a week on my Patreon web log, which announces almost everything I publish elsewhere on the same day it’s published, but again omitting the Bible study posts.  There is also a bi-monthly review of my work at Goodreads under the title The Ides of Mark, now at eighty-six installments, which does include some information about those Bible Study materials.

I continued posting the tenth Multiverser novel In Version, featuring Robert Slade, James Beam, Joseph Kondor, and Derek Brown, from chapter 92 through the end, and then after uploading support site character papers turned to the eleventh, Con Version, continuing stories for Derek Brown, Tomiko Takano, and a new character, Brian Cooper, through chapter 122.  Behind-the-writings posts on these two books dominated the web log this year:

Late in the year my collaborator Eric R. Ashley and I finished the fourteenth novel, Verse a Tile, and began writing the fifteenth, When Verse Comes to Versed.  I finished setting up the twelfth, A Dozen Verses, and have begun that work on Multiverser:  The Thirteenth Story.

Depending on how you count I published two or three books this year.  That’s because An Analytical Commentary on The Book of I Corinthians had to be released in two volumes due to its size.  Before that, my little light horror novella Corpoise was released.  I am working on editing and setup for the II Corinthians commentary.

There was some time travel work, in web log posts:

A couple decades back I told a story in an installment of Game Ideas Unlimited.  That series was lost, almost entirely, so I retold the story in an installment of RPG-ology.  Then Regis Panier and the staff of the French edition of Places to Go, People to Be found many of the lost articles in The Internet Archive, and I began restoring them through RPG-ology–but when I got to this one, it was too like the previous retelling to include in that series, yet too different to allow it to fade into obscurity, so I republished it as web log post #497:  Game Ideas Unlimited:  Vivid Recovered.

When I hit the five hundredth entry in this mark Joseph “young” web log, I decided to take a look back in what I dubbed #500:  A Five Cent Review, in which I listed, linked, and briefly identified sixty-three of the previous articles I thought were memorable.

I was asked a couple questions which warranted web log level answers.  The first was a bit of a biographical, #504:  Why I Started Writing, somewhat self-explanatory.  Then a Pagan friend (thank you again, Harry) challenged Christian legalism, so I wrote #508:  Christians and the Law.  I also wrote #507:  Something About New Jersey’s 2024 Election in advance of the event; I did not follow it up, because there were no surprises and nothing of interest.

Early in the year Ken Goudsward of Dimensionfold Publishing put me on their podcast, as the Time Travel Episode with Mark Joseph Young.  I was also in another podcast a month or so later, Christian Music Network Presents–Season 4, Episode 17 with Mark J Young, so if you wanted to see and hear me, that’s two ways to do so.

I wrote a couple book reviews on GoodReads, but didn’t read that many books this year, really.

In other news, my youngest got married on a beach in September.  AnimeNEXT wasn’t held due to some administrative error.  While I was hospitalized for two weeks my wife broke a leg, had surgery, and went to rehab, and is presently not permitted to walk.  Valdron’s directors decided to move toward republishing Multiverser, and had me create a Valdron/M.J.Young Linktree to that end, although our art department is holding up developments there.  I edited the third book in my friend’s trilogy, BeautyAndTheBell.

So as we begin 2025, there’s a lot behind and more ahead.  You can keep up to date through Patreon and other social media.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Law and Politics, Memories, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#504: Why I Started Writing

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #504, on the subject of Why I Started Writing.

Someone named Jay Oluwabukunmi contacted me (via LinkedIn) and wrote:

I recently came across your profile and was highly impressed by the quality of your content. Could you kindly share what motivated you to begin writing?

That’s an interesting question with a complicated answer, so I decided it would be better to share it here.

Scratch a writer and you’ll almost always find a reader.  I read quite a bit from a very young age, including a fair amount of science fiction and fantasy, but also mysteries, and the Bible, and quite a bit more.  I especially enjoyed C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, and had a vague notion of writing the next great fantasy novel.  I suspect, though, that I was one of thousands who had that notion, and I wasn’t all that devoted to it–I was a musician, and envisioned my immediate future as heading into Christian contemporary records.

Still, I took a class in college entitled Creative Writing:  Fiction, partly because I needed to fill a slot and it fit my schedule, partly because I had this notion that when I retired I might write that novel.  I even started working on a novel while I was still in school, although it wasn’t all that good and I abandoned it.  However, for quite a few years I maintained, intermittently, the practice of keeping a literary journal.  My friend C. J. Henderson says don’t do that because you’re never going to sell such a thing, and you shouldn’t waste time writing something for which no one is going to pay you.  However, it is not only good practice, I have more than once remembered something I wrote in those journals and used it to write something new.

Pursuing my music career I got a job on the air of a small but significant contemporary Christian radio station, and eventually became the program director.  At some point we compiled a mailing list, and management decided we should send out a monthly newsletter.  It became my job to create this, so I wrote a fair amount of the content (my degrees in Biblical Studies helped immensely at this point) assisted by our overnight DJ for a time.  I also was introduced to the associate editor of a local newspaper, who liked my style and invited me to write some satire for his paper; two columns were published under the name M. Joseph Young, to avoid confusion with the Mark Young who was on the local radio station (also me).

Along the way I discovered role playing games, specifically beginning with Dungeons & Dragons™ but also playing several others in a variety of genres and settings.  Largely through this I was introduced to E. R. Jones, who needed someone who could write (and by this time I had finished a juris doctore, so I could certainly handle the technical aspect of writing) to help create a role playing game on which he had been working for half a decade.  We put a lot of work into that, he dropped out of the process before the final edit, but I’d made promises and so I pushed through and published Multiverser:  The Game:  Referee’s Rules along with Multiverser:  The First Book of Worlds.  I continued on that line, with Multiverser:  The Second Book of Worlds, and along with some people working with me on that (artists, supporters, gamers) we tried to make a go of that.

Then someone came up with the idea of creating a Multiverser comic, and as the in-house writer it fell to me to do the text.  I created three characters with two stories for each of them to be the basis for three issues, but then the artists said no, it couldn’t be done with our resources.  That fell into the back burner, and then emerged as Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  I learned quite a bit about structuring a novel by doing that, and have followed it with more than a dozen additional novels continuing those stories.

I was also writing web pages on a wide variety of subjects, mostly to get attention to sell the game.  I wrote about Bible and law, in which I had my degrees, and time travel, which had been discussed extensively in writing the game, and several other subjects, and suddenly one day I felt that I needed to put together a book, What Does God Expect?  A Gospel-based Approach to Christian Conduct, because it seemed to me that a lot of people didn’t understand the basics of Christian living.  After this, my wife suggested that one of my web pages should be expanded, and that resulted in About the Fruit, and I was now writing Christian non-fiction books.  Most of those came from a sort of compulsion, that this needed to be said and I was going to have to say it.

Along the way someone asked me to write a series for a new web site, Game Ideas Unlimited.  The site never materialized, but Gaming Outpost grabbed the series for a redesigned site.  At the same time I decided that since I had been elected Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild I should do something, and so I launched the Faith and Gaming series.  That subsequently got published in book form, and then a publisher approached me to release an expanded edition.  I was established as a writer in the role playing community.

More recently a publisher contacted me and asked if I would write a book for him, and we agreed that I would create The Essential Guide to Time Travel based on my internet writings on that subject if he would publish my at that time just finished apologetics book Why I Believe, and that established a continuing relationship which got several books back in print and introduced my New Testament analytical commentaries.

I’ve linked several of the books that are still in print.  The Multiverser books should be back in print soon; we’ve created a LinkTree which will be expanded as the new material goes online.  Other books both in and out of print are listed here.

That’s probably more than Jay wanted to know, but I’ve often said in my mouth all stories are long, and this was obviously going to be a long story.  I hope it helps.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Memories, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#500: A Five Cent Review

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #500, on the subject of A Five Cent Review.

As I was posting the four hundred forty-ninth mark Joseph “young” web log post, I realized I was approaching half a thousand, and wondered whether I should do something to note that milestone.  I decided that a quick look back picking out some of my favorite posts might be worth the effort.  If you missed these, well, I won’t say that there weren’t other good posts nor even that these are all necessarily the best, only that they are the ones I remember fondly.

Unfortunately, on my first pass through those original four hundred forty-nine posts, I marked sixty-five as significant in one way or another, and realized that I would be publishing another fifty before I hit the milestone in question, so I was going to have to go back and read quite a few articles and pare down the list a bit.  I did remove some of those originally included, but I added one or two as well.  Hopefully I’ve succeeded in producing something of quality.

Of course, I have made a practice since this mark Joseph “young” web log began of posting an annual review of almost everything I published over the previous year, here or elsewhere.  The most recent one was #490:  Looking Back, and the previous ones are linked from there.

  1. I test, politically, as a moderate slightly left of center, but I hold a number of more conservative views; one of those is on abortion.  I somewhere suggested that conservatives needed to find way to promote and explain their views to people on the fence, and this, #7:  The Most Persecuted Minority, was a proposed television spot.  It was eventually turned into a radio spot and aired on Lift-FM for a while.
  2. Also on the subject of abortion, #9:  Abolition compares the pro-life movement to the abolition of slavery, in an unexpected way.
  3. #10:  The Unimportance of Facts is my proposed explanation for why voters don’t care what the facts actually are, only whether the politician holds the same views as themselves.
  4. Written a few days after my father died, #51:  In Memoriam on Groundhog Day memorializes him with my recollections.
  5. Having read that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg (now deceased) believed that abortion should be strictly a woman’s decision as an equal protection right (and not a privacy right to be decided by her and her doctor), I wrote #63:  Equal Protection When Boy Meets Girl, suggesting that in regard to unexpected pregnancies most of the advantages are with the mothers.
  6. I’m glad I wrote #65:  Being Married, because I have referred quite a few young couples to it in the years since.  It is a collection of some of the best marital advice I ever received, and worth a read even if you’ve been married as long as I have.
  7. #72:  Being an Author discusses how to identify such a person, that is, how to know whether you can call someone, including yourself, an author, or indeed a poet, artist, or musician.
  8. Having read that Neil DeGrasse Tyson stated it was highly likely that the universe was a similation, I suggested in #76:  Intelligent Simulation that this was entirely inconsistent with his assertion that the theory of intelligent design was not scientific.  The article quotes from my then-pending book Why I Believe.
  9. A satirical article becomes the springboard for a consideration of #79:  Normal Promiscuity, which looks at the fact that what were once identified as illicit and abberant sexual liasons because they were dangerous are now embraced and encouraged as normative.
  10. I genuinely enjoyed writing #83:  Help!  I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body!, a satirical look at the notion that our gender is dependent on something we believe about ourselves.
  11. #84:  Man-Made Religion challenges the notion that the diversity of religions demonstrates that they are all human inventions.
  12. A famous landmark ice cream shop in Milwaukee faced a protest and a boycott when the owner would not permit customers to order in Spanish, and in #87:  Spanish Ice Cream I explain why expecting him to do so is unreasonable.
  13. #88:  Sheep and Goats explains why the popular parable is so badly misunderstood and what it really means.
  14. I almost cut this one as I reread it, but it struck me that #90:  Footnotes on Guidance, as a recounting of my own experiences, might be useful to those whom God is leading to places they did not expect to go.
  15. #93:  What Is a Friend? describes two different understandings of what constitutes friendship, and how that matters.
  16. The notion of government taxing the rich to help the poor is put into perspective in #105:  Forced Philanthropy, asking whether we want the government eagerly awaiting our deaths so it can spend our money.
  17. I wrote what I consider a very valuable nine-part series about ministry, how to recognize and identify it, and how music sometimes fits into it.  The last of those, #107:  Miscellaneous Music Ministries, is not the best of them nor the most useful, but it does briefly identify and link the other eight, and so is the easiest to include here.  I would recommend the entire series, but usually find myself recommending specific entries in it which relate to particular ministries.
  18. Reacting to a discussion of my previously mentioned article on forced philanthropy, #108:  The Value of Ostentation looks at how ostentation actually helps the poor, and why it is a bit illogical to object to it.
  19. I explain why so much current popular Christian music is comprised of simplistic songs, and why this is not so bad a thing as good musicians tend to think, in #109:  Simple Songs.
  20. #114:  Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles responds to the argument that God cannot exist if He allows priests to abuse children.
  21. Inspired by a television show, #115:  Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference applies it to reality, noting that people who deny a connection between environmental factors and homosexuality are ignoring facts.
  22. #120:  Giving Offense is primarily about tolerance, that it does not mean declining to state opinions but only willingness to respect those with whom we disagree.
  23. #126:  Equity and Religion addresses the argument that governments should not provide funding for pre-school education run by religious organizations.
  24. #130:  Economics and Racism explains why racism, by and against everyone, rises when economic conditions fall.
  25. #132:  Writing Horror gives a few tips on writing horror stories and running horror in games which must be worth reading, because Places to Go, People to Be republished it in French as Maîtriser l’Horreur.
  26. A misunderstanding of what it is to be “racist” inspired the composition of #135:  What Racism Is, clarifying that blacks and other non-whites can be and frequently are racist against whites, and that assuming that because someone is white she is racist is a racist assumption.
  27. I wrote a four-part miniseries on the sin and judgment in the first chapter of Romans.  The fourth part, #141:  The Solution to the Romans I Problem, links and summarizes the first three, and gives the solution, that we Christians need to repent of our hidden idolatry.
  28. Responding to a foolish statement from PETA, #162:  Furry Thinking discusses the proper relationship between humans and animals.
  29. In the 70s and 80s I asked a lot of major contemporary Christian musicians their advice for anyone wanting to do what they do, and in #163:  So You Want to Be a Christian Musician I consider the best of that advice, and what we should really want.
  30. I refer people to #168:  Praying For You frequently–whenever someone asks me to pray for them–as it explains what I think is a correct understanding of the obligations created by such prayer requests.
  31. I was hesitant to write #193:  Yelling:  An Introspection, which discusses the futility of yelling and the negative counter-productive impact it has, but several readers thanked me for it.
  32. I would be remiss were I not to mention at least one article about temporal anomalies, and my list includes #199:  Time Travel Movies That Work, a few films in which the outcome is not disastrous.
  33. #200:  Confederates actually argues that the American Civil War was about modern issues like state drug policy and immigration rules.
  34. #207:  The Gender Identity Trap suggests that the idea that someone can be a different gender inside than their physical sex is entirely about prejudices and stereotypes, with nothing to support it in reality.
  35. #208:  Halloween is one of two articles I wrote about the holiday (the other Faith in Play #11:  Halloween) examining Christian attitudes toward it.
  36. Following up on #207:  The Gender Identity Trap, #212:  Gender Subjectivity observes that no one can know that he feels like the wrong gender inside, because that isn’t more than that he doesn’t feel the way he thinks society expects him to feel, and in this case society is simply wrong.
  37. #215:  What Forty-One Years of Marriage Really Means is an addendum to the previous #65:  Being Married, providing an important understanding of what it means that marriage is a covenant, not a contract.
  38. #216:  Why Are You Here? answers the existential question, that is, why do we exist.
  39. #230:  No Womb No Say challenges the notion that men, not having uteruses, should not be able to express an opinion about abortion, by raising a different issue in which men lack the requisite anatomy but still are expected to express an opinion.
  40. #239:  A Departing Member of the Christian Gamers Guild answers suggestions that involvement in fantasy role playing games is detrimental for Christian faith.
  41. #245:  Unspoken Prayer Requests explains why I think they are theologically invalid.
  42. In June of 2019, after attending The Objective Session of The Extreme Tour, I began publishing my songs on this web log.  I ranked about forty of them based on music, lyrics, and the quality of the performance and recording I had available, and began with the one I thought (with a bit of input from one of my sons) best, #301:  The Song “Holocaust”.  It includes a link to a recording of the song.  Additional songs are chained beginning with the second, at the bottom of the article.
  43. #309:  Racially Discriminatory Ticketing highlights and explains a blatant example of racial discrimination by blacks against whites.
  44. In March of 2018 I began a miniseries about early contemporary Christian and Christian rock musicians, still ongoing, with Larry Norman.  Two years later the thirty-ninth entry in that series focused on one of the best bands of the eighties, #342:  Fireworks Times Five, with extensive links to videos from all four of their excellent albums.  It also links the previous thirty-eight such articles.
  45. In 2020, after COVID-19 caused the cancellation of the live Origins game festival, Black Lives Matter protestors demanded that the corporation running the gaming convention make a public statement in support of their position or face a boycott, which shut down efforts to launch an online convention.  #344:  Is It O.K. Not to Make a Statement? attacks this divisive and destructive policy as a blow against the constitutional right not to speak about something.
  46. A frustrated musician asked the question on a Christian music Facebook group, and I offered an answer in #352:  Why No One Cares About Your Songs, which I think might be a must-read for those who aspire to any creative endeavor.
  47. In the discussion of the polarization of America, I suggest in #375:  Fixing the Focus that many Christians have our eyes on the wrong things.
  48. The old economic principle derived from sheep grazing on common land finds a new and problematic application in the world of online retailing, elucidated in #377:  A New Tragedy of the Common.
  49. Normally I link reviews, but this one was sent to me privately, and was the first review I saw of my book Why I Believe, so I feel I would be remiss if I failed to mention my reprinting of it in #386:  An Unsolicited Private Review.
  50. A popular song, a friend’s pregnancy, and the recollection of a spoiled surprise party prompted me to write #394:  Unplanned, suggesting that there aren’t really any accidents, and, again, talking about abortion.
  51. The question was asked, specifically in relation to worship, and I offered an answer in that context which extends beyond it, explaining #396:  Why Music Matters.
  52. #406:  Internet Racism gives reasons for rejecting the call (in Great Britain) that those who post racial slurs against the poor performance of black athletes should be brought up on criminal charges.
  53. I was personally asked to respond to a long article giving ten reasons why the Biblical account of the exodus was untrue, so I wrote an eleven-part miniseries.  It concluded with #425:  Do Similarities Between the Accounts of Moses’ Birth and Certain Myths Make Him a Fictional Character?, which also links and briefly summarizes the ten previous articles.
  54. One of my patrons asked me for #426:  A Christian View of Horror, which suggests that to some degree it can be embraced, but ultimately there is one insurmountable problem.
  55. #429:  Luther College of the Bible and Liberal Arts speaks of the legacy of a small school whose campus has been almost completely obliterated by time.
  56. A couple decades back, the respected Australian role playing e-zine Places to Go, People to Be launched a French edition, and asked my permission to translate articles I had written for them to release in another language, and subsequently to do so with articles I had published through other sites.  Late in 2021 I finally got around to compiling a linked list of what was was then twenty-six translated articles, in #431:  Mark Joseph Young En Français.
  57. #434:  Foolish Wisemen draws a lesson about celebrating Christmas versus the rest of the story from the account of these visitors.
  58. #444:  Ability versus Popularity discusses contests in which the public is asked to vote for the best, and contestants encourage friends who know nothing of the competitors to vote for a friend.
  59. I had recently seen the argument that laws restricting abortion were an impingement on the religious practice of Jewish women, and since I had heard the same argument decades before in Senate hearings I wrote #446:  The Religious Freedom Abortion Argument, and decided to include it here.
  60. #449:  Cruel and Unusual is not exactly about the death penalty and expresses no opinion on it, but does find fault with the protest that opposes it by attempting to make it more painful.
  61. #459:  Publication Anticipation provided a list of my books recently published in 2021-2 plus my expectations for 2023 and beyond.  Those mentioned there which have been published since are listed in the 2023 review article mentioned at the top of this page.
  62. I’m listing #469:  Church History because it was an answer to the last question I was asked by my long-time friend John Mastick which I answered in a web log post before he died.  His question was about what distinguished Calvinists, Pentecostals, and Charismatics from each other, and I threw in Catholics, Lutherans, and Evangelicals for clarity.  He had previously prompted #413:  The Abomination of Desolation and #465:  Believing in Ghosts.
  63. The issue arose in our study of the Gospel According to Mark in the Christian Gamers Guild’s Chaplain’s Bible Study, leading to an expanded exploration of it in #475:  The Mother of Jairus’ Daughter, which I contend is the woman cured of bleeding in the healing nested in the middle of that miracle account.
Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#499: Temporal Anomalies in Dean Koontz’ Lightning

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #499, on the subject of Temporal Anomalies in Dean Koontz’ Lightning.

A time travel fan wrote to me praising a book and asking me to review it.  The book is by thriller author Dean Koontz, and it is a compelling and exciting story–however, I was less enthused about the time travel elements.  You can read my book review at Goodreads, if you wish.

I was suspicious from the start.  We have in essence two central characters, Laura and Stephan.  Stephan is a time traveler.  I’m not certain that this is obvious from the beginning, because of course I was told up front that it was a time travel story, so I was anticipating that.  However, we begin with Laura’s birth.  Her mother’s obstetrician had become an alcoholic, but had kept that secret, and apparently in the original history the delivery of Laura went very badly–we ultimately learn that she was born paralyzed from the waist down, and her mother died.  In the version of the story we see, Stephan arrives at the doctor’s home and forces him to call the hospital and report that he cannot come perform the delivery because he is drunk, and the doctor on call would have to do it.  Although her mother still dies, Laura is born healthy.

The complication I have is that somehow Stephan knows that the doctor is going to botch the delivery, and so travels to this time and place to prevent it.  That means he is relying on information from the future to change the past, and in so doing is erasing the events in the future which are the basis of his knowledge.

Koontz attempts to get around this by stating that a time traveler cannot change his own past and indeed cannot travel to his own past, he can only travel to points in his future and return to his own time, but he can always change his future.  Stephan is part of a World War II German experiment in time travel in 1944, and all of his visits to Laura are in his future, in that sense.  However, if he travels to 1964 and discovers that Laura was murdered in 1963, how is that not his past, and if he then travels to 1963 and prevents that murder, has he not changed his past–and how is it that his visit to 1964 can reveal a murder that never happened because he traveled to 1963 to prevent it?

The book is full of such complications.  It also has a few more difficult ones.  It is an interesting twist that when the German secret service is trying to find Laura they travel to the future and search police reports and newspaper archives looking for a time and place at which she will appear.  However, ultimately they learn that she was pulled over by a patrol car on highway 111 at a certain date and time, so they launch a team to meet her there and kill her, and on the way they kill the patrolman who was going to file that report.  How, then, did they read the report?

There were two other quirks, both based on the notion that nature or fate is self-preserving.

Stating that nature prevents paradox, Stephan explains that it is not possible for a time traveler to travel to a time and place he has already been.  However, in the critical scene he arrives at the critical location, realizes he is too late, returns to his own time, and reprograms the machine to deliver him five minutes sooner–but it won’t, which is explained that if he arrives five minutes sooner he might still be there in five minutes when his other self arrives, which would create a paradox.  How, though, would the machine, or nature, recognize that although he is not present at the desired coordinates, he will be there in a few minutes?

The other quirk is that it is often repeated that fate tries to reassert itself–what was meant to happen, if prevented by a time traveler, will happen later a different way.  That occurs sometimes during the story, and sometimes it looms over the story as a threat but is somehow avoided.  I can’t help feeling, though, that this fate, or nature, or whatever it is, has elements of a divine being, someone who knows what was supposed to happen and has the power to make it happen.

Were I to name one other problem, it is evident that Stephan has seriously changed Laura’s life.  The weird thing is she is still a best-selling author, but the books of hers which he read are not the books she wrote.  Further, he fell in love with the character of the author, but I can’t help wondering whether that character would have been altered by such details as that she did not spend her life in a wheel chair, and she was not rescued from a rapist-murderer by a mysterious stranger as a young girl.  I can’t help thinking she would have been a different person, but it seems she did not change.

Overall, poor marks on the time travel elements despite being a very compelling book.

Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#492: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Temporal Anomalies

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #492, on the subject of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Temporal Anomalies.

As this picture starts to settle in my mind, it reminds me of Safety Not Guaranteed, in this regard:  for most of the picture the idea that time travel might be possible is dangling in the air, then at the very end it happens, and it is so insignificant an event in the broad sweep of the film that it’s over before we know it.  Don’t get me wrong–it definitely is a time travel movie, it’s just that the time travel, while critical to the plot, is not that major an element.

Before I proceed with the spoilers, I should probably mention that I was interviewed about my book The Essential Guide to Time Travel by its publisher Dimensionfold for their podcast series, available online as the Time Travel Episode with Mark Joseph Young.  It’s eight minutes longer than an hour, but time travel fans might find it interesting.

I’m not sure I can say as much for this entry in the Indiana Jones series.  Don’t misunderstand–I’m fond of Indie.  I thought the fourth movie about the crystal skulls was way out of character for the series, but this one seems to have gotten back on track very nicely.  This is the old Indiana accompanied by Sallah and getting into archaeology that is ultimately in some way magical despite his skepticism.  In this case it’s connected to a machine built by Archimedes, which rumors claim can transport someone through time.  Toward the end of World War II a scientist working for the Nazis discovers half of it, and the theory is that Archimedes broke it in half so that the invading army couldn’t take it.  Ten years later that scientist is set on obtaining both halves so he can travel back to the end of the war and make himself Fuhrer, win the war, and establish a German empire.

At first he succeeds, outwitting the CIA and Indiana and calculating how to travel back to the time he wants.  Indiana winds up on the plane, and his sidekick for this movie hijacks a plane which follows them, but the joke’s on the villain:  Archimedes designed the machine as a way of bringing help back to his own time to save them from the invasion.  In that sense it works, because as the bomber flies into the harbor it opens fire on the attacking fleet before crashing.  Archimedes meets Indiana, who wants to stay, but his sidekick knocks him out with one punch and loads him on the other plane to return to the present.

The film has the flavor of fixed time.  A couple of artifacts from the future are buried with Archimedes when they find his tomb, but these are delivered by the crashed airplane.  It could be resolved under replacement theory with a fairly brief sawtooth snap into an N-jump termination, but there’s not enough time travel to make it worth the effort, and probably anyone who has read The Essential Guide or spent much time on the web site can see how to do that.

So as I say it’s a good movie, but not much to speak of in terms of time travel.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Logic and Reasoning, Memories, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#490: Looking Back

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #490, on the subject of Looking Back.

Once again, as we did last year in web log post #461:  2022 in Review and in previous years linked successively back from there, we are recapping everything published in the past year–sort of.

I say “sort of” because once again some material is being omitted.  There have been a few hundred posts to the Christian Gamers Guild Bible Study which can be accessed there but aren’t really fully indexed anywhere.  Meanwhile, the dozen articles in the Faith in Play series and the similar dozen in the RPG-ology series were just indexed on the Christian Gamers Guild site in 2023 At the Christian Gamers Guild Reviewed, and won’t be repeated here.  The RPG-ology and Faith in Play series were both released in book form this year, along with two other books, RPG Theory 101 and Other Essays in Role Playing Games and An Analytical Commentary on The Book of Romans.  These are all available in paperback and Kindle format; follow the links for more information about them.

I also posted several days a week on my Patreon web log, which announces almost everything I publish elsewhere on the same day it’s published, but again omitting the Bible study posts.  There is also a bi-monthly review of my work at Goodreads under the title The Ides of Mark, now at sixty-two installments, which does include some information about those Bible Study materials.

This year saw the last of the web log song posts, at least as an ongoing series.  These included:

I continued posting the ninth Multiverser novel Con Verse Lea, featuring Lauren Hastings, Tomiko Takano, and James Beam, from chapter 27 to the end (chapter 85), which are indexed there along with several behind-the-writings posts about it, and after posting a few character papers to the support site I continued with the tenth novel, In Version, featuring Robert Slade, James Beam, Joseph Kondor, and Derek Brown, through chapter 91.  Behind-the-writings posts on these two books included web log posts:

Collaborator Eric R. Ashley and I have managed to finish the twelfth novel, A Dozen Verses, and the thirteenth, Multiverser:  The Thirteenth Story, and are working on one called Verse a Tile.  Separately, I picked up the horror book I dropped, Corpoises, and wrote a bit more, and will probably finish it shortly.  I’m also continuing setup work on the analytical commentary series.

I think the rest of everything is a bit miscellaneous and disorganized, but here’s what I find.

Mark Joseph “young” web log post #465:  Believing in Ghosts considers whether ghosts exist and what attitude Christians should have about them.  It was an answer to a question from a friend.

Another question from the same friend led to post #469:  Church History, rather narrowly focused on distinguishing Reformation Protestants from later Evangelicals and both from Pentecostals and Charismatics.

Responding to a question from a time travel fan, #474:  Preliminary Temporal Thoughts on Paper Girls looked at the description of a television series and the time travel implications.

In our Christian Gamers Guild Chaplain’s Bible Study the accout of the healings of Jairus’ daughter and the woman who touched the hem of his garment arose, and when I suggested the woman was the girl’s mother I was asked why I thought this.  That seemed too big a question for the Bible study, so it became web log post #475:  The Mother of Jairus’ Daughter.

A few years ago someone had written to ask me what I knew about Bernice Wurst, an artist who was a friend of my mother who gave me two of her paintings.  I had featured one of them in an article in the Game Ideas Unlimited series.  It bothered me that when I looked for information about her on the web, there wasn’t much, so I decided to record the few reminiscences I could recall in post #486:  Bernice Wurst:  Impressions of an Impressionist.

In other news, I made it to AnimeNEXT this year, and expect to be invited coming up in June once again; I edited and subsequently reviewed two books for a friend–the BeautyAndTheBell trilogy–and expect to start on the third soon; and I posted a few recipes and some other images to Instagram.

I think that summarizes the year; the new year has already gotten started, but you can keep up by following my social media sites including Patreon.  I’ve already started something new this year, but maybe I’ll tell you about it next year once I see how it goes.

Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#474: Preliminary Temporal Thoughts on Paper Girls

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #474, on the subject of Preliminary Temporal Thoughts on Paper Girls.

Reader Scott Curtis contacted me to ask,

I am a longtime reader of your articles on time travel cinema.  My wife and I are watching the short lived show Paper Girls on Amazon Prime, and I was wondering if you have taken a look at it?  If so I was wondering if you have considered turning your analytical eye on it.

Quite a few years back I wrote an explanation of Why Not Analyze Time Travel Television Shows? much of which still applies.  Granted, it appears from the Amazon description that Paper Girls is only 8 episodes, but that’s quite a bit of material, and in my current circumstances getting the opportunity to watch a two-hour movie is challenging.

However, I did take a look at the blurb, and ran into an obvious problem.  It tells us that they have to interact with their adult selves.  Let’s consider this.

If they left from 1988 and arrived in 2019, they ceased to exist in time in 1988 and don’t exist in 2019.  Before they can interact with their future selves, they have to return to the past and create future selves.  That means they need an N-jump resolution which they’re not going to get, because the second problem is once they’ve returned to the past and so replaced themselves in history, the world changes drastically around them–let’s face it, four fifteen-year-old girls who live to be forty-six is going to mean some of them marry and/or have children, and we hit the genetic problem in spades.  Further, the selves they meet in the future are going to be the ones who made the trip they are currently making but didn’t find themselves in the future.  This then sets up the problem that they have to return to the past–we need a stable sawtooth snap–and we have to repeat history with versions of themselves who did make that trip, who then are different from having met their older selves when they were younger.  Getting this to stabilize is very complicated.

Further, telling stories in this temporal morass means choosing which timeline, and the only one that will exist beyond their return to the past is the last one.  However, the blurb also says that they have to deal with warring time traveling factions.  Assuming these come from the yet further future, they cannot come into existence until our first anomaly is resolved–our girls have met their younger selves and remember having met their older selves–because only after that can there be a tomorrow.  Then time has to advance to a moment in the future when one of those factions travels into that history between 1988 and 2019, which again changes that history and forces a repeat of their anomaly, which happens again when the other faction arrives attempting to alter history again, and every time one of those future factions travels to any point in the past, even points after 2019, they create ripples in history reaching all the way back to 1988 (because if in 2050 faction A sends someone to 2030 who impacts persons in faction B, when faction B sends someone from 2040 to 2019 that person will be different, impacted by the 2030 visit, and so will impact our four girls differently, changing events flowing from 1988).

I see very little hope for a satisfactory temporal resolution to such a morass, and expect that it’s going to crash into an infinity loop at some point, the end, no future.

If it is not obvious, though, I need to caveat that I have not watched the show; this is entirely based on the descriptive blurb.

Much of this is covered better in the book The Essential Guide to Time Travel, available in paperback and Kindle formats.

Scott adds that the handling of time travel is unlike anything he has seen elsewhere, so I might try to catch a few episodes and that might inspire some additional thoughts on it.

I hope this helps.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#461: 2022 In Review

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #461, on the subject of 2022 In Review.

Each year I try to post an index of everything I published in the previous year.  I’ve done it before, obviously, so working backwards you can find previous years (and in the early days of the web log, partial years) at:

It has been an unusually productive year–in the sense that it has been productive in unusual ways.  In the wake of the release last year of my comprehensive apologetics book Why I Believe from Dimensionfold Publishing, they put to print my summary of time travel theory, The Essential Guide to Time Travel:  Temporal Anomalies & Replacement Theory, and republished three earlier books, Do You Trust Me? summarizing salvation by faith as the only way of salvation ever, What Does God Expect?  A Gospel-based Approach to Christian Conduct about living a Christian life without following rules, and About the Fruit, a study of the famous passage in Galatians and its place in that book and in the history of the first century church.  There is a long list of pending titles moving toward publication next year, beginning with a printed collection of the Faith in Play series–more on that later.

There were twelve entries in that series this year, including several on archetypes, a few on bringing divine acts into the game, some about spirits and the afterlife, and a couple about Christianity and role playing games.  The companion series, RPG-ology, also slated to be compiled and released in book form next year, gave us eight recovered Game Ideas Unlimited articles from the old Gaming Outpost series, plus one more originally in the e-zine Daedalus, and a few new suggestions for running games.  All of those are indexed at the Christian Gamers Guild, 2022 At the Christian Gamers Guild Reviewed, along with a few other articles at that site.

There were also many posts on the Chaplain’s Bible Study, which finished the Gospel According to John and began working on Mark, along with several Musings posts.

The Multiverser novels continued in serialized form, finishing the eighth, In Verse Proportion, featuring Joe Kondor, Bob Slade, and Derek Brown, and starting the ninth, Con Verse Lea, with the return of Lauren Hastings, Tomiko Takano, and James Beam.  These were accompanied by behind-the-writings peeks as mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

In collaboration with author Eric R. Ashley, I’ve got the tenth and eleventh books fully drafted, and we have started on the twelfth.  I also posted updated character sheets for Joseph Kondor, Robert Slade, Derek Brown, Lady Shella, Ezekiel Smith, and Amira Vashti, and am working on the next set of these.

The web log also posted eleven songs–not twelve, because due to government red tape tangles I was off line for a full month, but it only cost us a bit.  We saw, and heard (there are audio files linked from the pages which contain the lyrics and a story behind the song) including:

  1. #436:  The Song “Trust Him Again”;
  2. #438:  The Song “Even You”;
  3. #441:  The Song “Fork in the Road”;
  4. #442:  The Song “Call to Worship”;
  5. #445:  The Song “How Many Times”;
  6. #447:  The Song “When I Was Lonely”;
  7. #450:  The Song “Rainy Days”;
  8. #453:  The Song “Never Alone”;
  9. #455:  The Song “King of Glory”;
  10. #457:  The Song “Greater Love”;
  11. #458:  The Song “All I Need”;

Other web log posts included:

There was a new analysis added to the Temporal Anomalies site, Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies unravels The History of Time Travel, a clever mockumentary in which time travel was never invented because its inventor prevented it.

Those upcoming books include compilations of the first five years of articles in the Faith in Play and RPG-ology series, plus a book of collected essays on role playing games, and then I hope to see a series of commentaries on the New Testament, one book at a time.  I began with Romans a decade and a half ago, worked my way through the end of Revelation, then doubled back to do John, Mark, and Matthew, and am currently working on Luke.  after that, I will be going through Acts, which will complete the New Testament hopefully within my lifetime.

On the web, I have a few Faith in Play and RPG-ology entries queued to post and a couple more waiting for me to set them up.  There will be more web log posts, and hopefully I’ll get to some of the time travel movies I’ve noted are available on various web streaming services.  Of course, the novels continue, and the Bible Study will be around for a while yet.

I have an Instagram account, and early in the year I decided to post some of my Gazebos in the Wild photos to it, along with some other things there.  They are mostly in the categories of nonsense or personal, but you’re welcome to look.

Those who wish to stay current on what is being posted can get that from my social media outlets, but particularly Patreon, where I announce everything that posts on the day it posts, other than the Bible Study; and the Goodreads web log The Ides of Mark which publishes twice a month and includes the Bible Study posts.

There are also still more songs to come, and one should be released later today.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#459: Publication Anticipation

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #459, on the subject of Publication Anticipation.

Because of a computer hiccough I lost a few files, including the index of this web log; my backup copy was almost three years old, so I have been rebuilding it.  In the process, I stumbled upon a post I wrote in anticipation of the release of The Essential Guide to Time Travel, and realized that at this moment I am anticipating the release of several books and should mention them here.

Before I look forward, I should look back.  The past year or so has seen the release of the apologetics book on which I was working for well over a decade, Why I Believe, the aforementioned time travel book, and new editions of Do You Trust Me?, What Does God Expect?, and About the Fruit.  Meanwhile, I continue to post chapter-by-chapter the Multiverser novels, currently publishing the ninth, Con Verse Lea, and having collaborated with Eric R. Ashley to finish the tenth, In Version, and make significant progress on the eleventh, Con Version.  There will be fiction coming out for quite a while.

There will also be more books in print.  Dimensionfold Publishing has decided to release the first five years of the Faith in Play series in book form–it is difficult to believe, but the sixtieth article posted in November, and there are more to come.  The book will feature a foreword by “Geek Preacher” Derek White, and also includes two articles from The Way, the Truth, and the Dice, Magic:  Essential to Faith, Essential to Fantasy, and Real and Imaginary Violence, plus two posts on the Christian Gamers Guild site that were never part of a series, Christmas and A Christian Game.  The publisher is planning to put it together in January.

Coupled with that, but scheduled to follow it, I am currently editing a companion volume covering the first five years of the companion series, RPG-ology.  Because many of those articles are reproductions of entries in the lost Game Ideas Unlimited series at Gaming Outpost, they are on average longer, but I plan to include two other essays, one the recovered original introduction to the Game Ideas Unlimited series as a reference point for recovered articles from that series, the other the first article of mine ever published on someone else’s web site, which happens also to have been Gaming Outpost, Morality and Consequences:  Overlooked Gaming Essentials.

I realized as I was compiling that book that there were quite a few articles that might be included–enough that Ken Goudsward agreed they should form their own book.  Thus I am also working on a collection of such essays under the tentative title Theory 101 and Other Essays on Role Playing Games.  Tentatively it will open with the three-part Theory 101 series from Places to Go, People to Be, System and the Shared Imagined Space, The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, and Creative Agenda, followed by my contribution at The Forge, Applied Theory, then recover the earlier three-part series Law and Enforcement in Imaginary Realms, also from Places to Go, People to Be, The Source of Law, The Course of Law, and The Force of Law, followed by my RPGnet article I’m Not a Lawyer But I Play One in a Game, and also from RPGnet Intuition and Surprise.  Also included is Re-educating the Power Gamer, which I wrote for Wounds Unlimited and wound up at RoleplayingTips.com, and three entries from the mark Joseph “young” web log, Writing Horror, A Christian View of Horror, and A Departing Member of the Christian Gamers Guild.

I’ve written quite a bit more for various sites.  Some of those articles are lost to web sites that ceased to exist; some have been preserved either in the books already mentioned or in Faith and Gaming Revised and Expanded Edition.  I have a couple months before I’m in a position to finalize this book, so if you’re aware of something I wrote that I might have missed, let me know.  Also, I’ll be looking for people to write forewords to these two books, and I’d rather avoid the embarrassment of asking people I think I know in the RPG world, so I’ll start by saying if you’re interested in doing that let me know.

I suggested that I have a lot of books on the drafting table at the moment, and three hardly seems like a lot–and indeed there are more.  I have for the past decade plus been writing in depth Bible studies for the Christian Gamers Guild Chaplain’s Bible Study, and my publisher likes the look of the short one I sent him so I’ll be starting on setting up an analytical commentary on Romans once I’ve got these under my belt, after which I will proceed through all the epistles through Revelation and then bounce back to the beginning.  I have three Gospels completed and am working on Luke, leaving only Acts as the last book to tackle.  That’s twenty-three commentaries if we do them all individually, which I think likely, and a lot of work for me to set them up.  I hope that they find an audience.

I’ll continue writing here, of course, and at the Christian Gamers Guild, and in other places as they arise, so stay in touch.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#435: Hindsight is 2021

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #435, on the subject of Hindsight is 2021.

Once again, as we did last year in web log post #371:  The Twenty-Twenty Twenty/Twenty and in previous years linked successively back from there, we are recapping everything published in the past year–sort of.

I say “sort of” because once again some material is being omitted.  There have been a few hundred posts to the Christian Gamers Guild Bible Study which can be accessed there but aren’t really fully indexed anywhere.  Meanwhile, the dozen articles in the Faith in Play series and the similar dozen in the RPG-ology series were just indexed yesterday on the Christian Gamers Guild site, along with everything else published there this year, in 2021 At the Christian Gamers Guild Reviewed, and won’t be repeated here.  The RPG-ology series began recovering articles from Game Ideas Unlimited, the lost four-year weekly series at Gaming Outpost, so I republished its debut article as web log post #384:  Game Ideas Unlimited Introduction, for the sake of completeness. 

I also posted several days a week on my Patreon web log, which announces almost everything I publish elsewhere on the same day it’s published, but again omitting the Bible study posts.

Similarly, we finished posting the novel Re Verse All, featuring Lauren Hastings, Tomiko Takano, and James Beam, from chapter 58 to the end (chapter 156), which are indexed there along with the several behind-the-writings posts on it:

  1. #373:  Nervous Characters covering chapters 55 through 60;
  2. #376:  Characters Arrive covering chapters 61 through 66;
  3. #379:  Character Conundrums covering chapters 67 through 72;
  4. #381:  World Complications covering chapters 73 through 78;
  5. #383:  Character Departures covering chapters 79 through 84;
  6. #385:  Characters Ascend covering chapters 85 through 90;
  7. #388:  Versers Climb covering chapters 91 through 96;
  8. #390:  World Facilities covering chapters 97 through 102;
  9. #392:  Characters Resting covering chapters 103 through 108;
  10. #395:  Character Obstacles covering chapters 109 through 114;
  11. #397:  Verser Challenges covering chapters 115 through 120;
  12. #401:  Characters Hiking covering chapters 121 through 126;
  13. #403:  Versers Innovating covering chapters 127 through 132;
  14. #405:  Versers Converge covering chapters 133 through 138;
  15. #407:  Versers Integrate covering chapters 139 through 144;
  16. #409:  Characters Cooperate covering chapters 145 through 150;
  17. #411:  Quest Concludes covering chapters 151 through 156.

Then there were several related character papers in the Multiverser Novel Support Site, and we then began posting In Verse Proportion, bringing back Joseph Kondor in fantasy Arabia, Bob Slade in industrial age bird world, and Derek Brown on a lost colony spaceship, at this point having reached chapter 39.  It included one behind-the-writings web log post, #432:  Whole New Worlds, covering the first twenty-one chapters.

Yet there was quite a bit more.

Forgive me for burying the lead, as it were, but just as Why I Believe came out late last year, it was followed this year by the release of The Essential Guide to Time Travel:  Temporal Anomalies & Replacement Theory, the long-awaited book on the subject, at the end of June.  This summarizing of much of the information on the Temporal Anomalies web site includes updated analyses of four films and a comprehensive presentation of time travel theory.  Dimensionfold Publishing interviewed me about it by e-mail, which they published here.

Related to that, a reader sent a letter with comments on Why I Believe, which I edited a bit (removing personal references) and posted as web log post #386:  An Unsolicited Private Review.

Now, getting back to other publications, there were another dozen songs published this year:

  1. Web log post #372:  The Song “Heavenly Kingdom”, inspired by the verse about cutting off your hand;
  2. Web log post #378:  The Song “A Song of Joy”, a frenetic bit of musical excitement;
  3. Web log post #382:  The Song “Not Going to Notice”, a bit of serious eschatological humor;
  4. Web log post #387:  The Song “Our God Is Good”, with political overtones;
  5. Web log post #393:  The Song “Why”, one of my rare worship songs;
  6. Web log post #399:  The Song “Look Around You”, an old evangelistic song;
  7. Web log post #404:  The Song “Love’s the Only Command, one of the generally early ones;
  8. Web log post #408:  The Song “Given You My Name”, written for my wife;
  9. Web log post #412:  The Song “When I Think”, which I hope will play at my funeral;
  10. Web log post #414:  The Song “You Should Have Thanked Me”, the title self-explanatory;
  11. Web log post #428:  The Song “To the Victor”, another rare worship song;
  12. Web log post #433:  The Song “From Job”, calling believers to repentance.

And there will be another song published today, but since that’s 2022, we’ll not say more about it yet.

I touched on Christian music otherwise in web log post #374:  Christian Instrumental Music, where I raise the question of how to recognize it.  My series on contemporary and rock Christian music in the 80s also continued briefly with web log posts #389:  Brother John Michael Talbot and #391:  Pat Terry.  A question asked on a Christian musicians group on Facebook prompted the writing of web log post #396:  Why Music Matters.

It was a not insignificant election year in New Jersey, but my first political post, #375:  Fixing the Focus, took a more general view, suggesting that Christians need to get our eyes off politics and on faith.  Closely following that, #377:  A New Tragedy of the Common looked at how online shopping was impacting brick & mortar retail.  Another political post with religious connections was #394:  Unplanned, about pregnancies.  With rules related to COVID in flux, in the late spring I posted web log post #398:  New 2021 Face Mask Rules in New Jersey to help a few of my readers.  The really political stuff began with #400:  New Jersey 2021 Primary and #402:  New Jersey 2021 Primary Results, but before the election an issue across the pond in England called for a response in #406:  Internet Racism, asking whether online social media criticism of black athletes should be criminal.

Then as the election loomed I offered #427:  The New Jersey 2021 Ballot, including a quick look at the public questions, followed a few days later by #430:  New Jersey 2021 Tentative Election Results.

I was given a book for Christmas, which I read and reviewed at Goodreads, God Is Disappointed In You, by comic book creator Mark Russell.

Then early in May someone (and I don’t remember who, how, or why) persuaded me to register as a Goodreads author; or maybe I did that earlier, but it was in May that I was persuaded by Goodreads to launch yet another web log, this one entitled The Ides of Mark because it appropriately posted at the middle and end of each month, updating readers on what I had published during that period.  In that sense, it is somewhat redundant, as the aforementioned Patreon web log covers that as it happens, and this annual review recaps it all eventually.  However, Ides also covers postings in the Bible Study and omits a lot of the personal detail about what I’m doing besides writing which the Patreon blog includes, and gives less information about what I am writing that has not yet been published.  This year’s entries have included:

  1. #1:  New Beginnings, May first through fifteenth, launching and explaining the series;
  2. #2:  Establishing Patterns, May sixteenth through thirty-first, featuring several web log posts;
  3. #3:  The Charm, June first through fifteenth, around the primary election;
  4. #4:  About Time, June sixteenth through thirtieth, announcing the publication of the aforementioned time travel book;
  5. #5:  Going Somewhen, July first through fifteenth, citing an Amazon review;
  6. #6:  The First Quarter, July sixteenth through thirty-first, with a scattered batch of articles;
  7. #7:  Getting Noticed, August first through fifteenth, citing evidence that the blog was being read by someone;
  8. #8:  Ends and Starts, August sixteenth through thirty-first, with the end of Re Verse All;
  9. #9:  Quiet on the Surface, September first through fifteenth, including character sheet posts;
  10. #10:  Before the Storm, September sixteenth through thirtieth, with the remaining character sheets;
  11. #11:  Looking Busy, October first through fifteenth, with the launch of In Verse Proportion and the beginning of the series on Exodus, listed below;
  12. #12:  A Frightening Output, October sixteenth through thirty-first, finishing the Exodus series;
  13. #13:  Slowing Down, November first through fifteenth, including the index of the articles in French translation mentioned below;
  14. #14:  Holiday Season, November sixteenth through thirtieth, as activity winds down;
  15. #15:  Not Much Said, December first through fifteenth, continuing the quiet;
  16. #16:  Years Go By, December sixteenth through thirty-first, with my post-Christmas post.

Not all of that is repeated here, but the bulk of it is.  I also answered ten questions there, which you can find here.

Half a decade ago I wrote about those musicians who influenced me; this year it occurred to me to do the same of writers, and so posted #380:  Authorial Influences exploring that.

Quite a few Bible questions came up and were answered, beginning with web log post #410:  When to Pray, followed by a somewhat technical question about a passage in Matthew, #413:  The Abomination of Desolation.  Then another reader asked me to address a long and complicated collection of issues in an article that claimed the Exodus, as reported in the book of that name, never happened, and I produced an eleven-part miniseries of web log posts in response:

  1. The introductory article was #415:  Can the Exodus Story Be True?
  2. It was followed by an answer to the first objection, #416:  Does Archaeological Silence Disprove the Exodus?
  3. Turning to the second objection about whether such a departure could be organized, we offered #417:  Is the Beginning of the Exodus Account Implausible?
  4. The third objection was that given the number of escaping Israelites the line this would have created would have been too long to outrun Pharaoh’s chariots, to which we offered #418:  Are There Too Many People Escaping in Exodus?
  5. The fourth objection was summarized and answered in #419:  When Escaping in Exodus, Did the Israelites Have Too Much Luggage?
  6. In response to the fifth objection we wrote #420: Were the Hygiene Requirements in Exodus Impossible to Observe?
  7. The sixth objection asked and answered #421: Did Moses Write the Torah?
  8. For the seventh objection, we addressed the issue of anachronisms, and particularly those related to place names, in #422:  Are There Anachronisms in the Torah that Invalidate It?
  9. The absurdity of the eighth objection is displayed in #423:  What Kind of Infrastructure Did the Wandering Israelites Need?
  10. We looked at the penultimate objection in #424:  Did the Earth Really Stop Turning?
  11. Finally, the point was raised that there were similarities between the life of Moses and earlier accounts of Sargon, which led to the conclusion Do Similarities Between the Accounts of Moses Birth and Certain Myths Make Him a Fictional Character?, which also addresses a few final points.

After that, a Patreon patron asked about horror, so I produced #426:  A Christian View of Horror.  Comments on a Facebook group page related to one of my colleges concerning the fact that the campus is almost completely obliterated led to the writing of #429:  Luther College of the Bible and Liberal Arts, about the legacy such a place has without any memorial markers for the site.  I also finished the year last week with a post-Christmas post, #434:  Foolish Wisemen, something of a pre-epiphany epiphany.

Finally, I’ve had a long-standing relationship with the people at the French edition of Places to Go, People to Be, under which they have translated and republished quite a few of my articles.  I finally took the time to organize these into an index in English, at least for my own reference, which I made available as web log post #431:  Mark Joseph Young En Français, with links to such English versions as are available.

The writing of course continues, with more articles already in the queue, more work being done on the next novel, and more posted every week.  Thank you for reading, and particularly to those of you who have encouraged me through posts and reposts and likes, and who have supported me through Patreon or PayPal.me and the purchase of my books.