Last night I dreamed I was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Sarafina was there too and between us we kicked many asses. But it was hard to figure out which of the main characters I was supposed to be, and therefore what I was supposed to do on that bridge at the end.

Flying felt wonderful, though.

By now I'm sure you've heard of the Super Mario demonstration of the Many Worlds hypothesis; it's fun to watch and makes me want to play Super Mario World, which hasn't happened in a good long while. One of the problems that comes up in all this Many Worlds talk is that if every single particle is creating multiple parallel universes every time anything happens, the number of parallels is so large that it's actually inconceivable to the human brain. Which doesn't make the theory implausible, because what do infinite variants matter to a whole darned universe? But my recent experiences with simulation and game design have me wondering if the whole thing doesn't get solved by the endless iterations of existence collapsing back in on themselves to form single straight lines again. I mean, if you're standing on a rock crossing a river and there are two rocks equidistant ahead of you, and a third rock beyond that, you'll pick either rock A or rock B to get to rock C but you'll still always end up on rock C. That seems to happen to Mario repeatedly in the example above, and it certainly happens in all the simulated conversations I've been working on for the past 10 months. Sooner or later, inviable paths collapse into nothingness or reconnect to the main group. Timelines are like bison that way.

Meanwhile, what I really want to know is: how do the laws of causality work in the James Bond universe? I mean, even before Casino Royale things were goddamned weird, what with the guy traipsing through 40 years of adventures while always in his mid-30s. (I mean, there are continued and specific temporal references throughout. Bond always knows what year he's in.) Then there's the moment in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where Bond is aware that he is now being played by another actor; what inter-cosmology glancing action is this? And even if you can excuse all of these actions, how can Judi Dench be assigned to head of MI6 while Bond was already an agent there (in Goldeneye), and then already be head of MI6 when Bond becomes an agent there (in Casino Royale)???

I do not know. I do know that in normal timelines it's acceptable that a character could say "Chris I miss the Cold War" five films after intimating that she was glad the Cold War is over, but somehow in the Bondverse it just feels like a refutation of self. Perhaps M, too, has jumped onto rock B.