Using Time Travel For Procrastination
When you have all the time in the world, no task is really urgent.
But even if tasks are not urgent they may be extremely important. They may be so important that you don’t like to think about them, they make your heart weary and afraid.
If these tasks fail, everything fails, your life is in essence over, you are a failure in the only important and meaningful thing that you have ever attempted, and worse, probably nobody will know, nobody will feel anything for your failure but contempt or even more likely — not caring at all.
You need to do these tasks, they are your whole reason for being, they pull at you, but they can be done at any time, you can approach them sideways, through the back-alleys of history, because you have all the time in the world.
And your enemies that want to stop you, the organized, well-managed and non-procrastinating people who see as their most important duty to stop you, they cannot really move to stop you until you move. Time Travel combat is like a strategy game— it is often not worthwhile to counter moves until they are made or in process, indeed you should not counter a move until you can see its eventual shape.
So you move slowly, so slowly, doing everything but what you should, and your opponents on the vast gamespace of time do not see all your minute movements and so many things you do seem nonsensical — is there a plan, is there a goal!?
Procrastination in the Contests of Time appeals so much because it is often an effective strategy.
So, what methods of procrastination do I prefer?
Of course a primary source of entertainment for me is Music
but also literature that has vanished from the world, great books no longer found.
I used to have someone I care for very deeply, she was a librarian, and so I often gather these books and albums and movies from alternate realities in the hope that someday I should meet her again.
Agent 19 and a couple of the other Agents, that young punk #9 especially, often raid my bins to catch the great tunes of other realities
I let them, I know they talk a bit of shit about me but it’s ok, that’s kids for you.
I don’t know why I’m writing this here right now actually, I am in a maudlin mood.
Of course one of the more common forms of procrastination with Time Travel is just straightforward sightseeing.
I know it sounds weird, with the ability to go anywhere in time why would you take sight-seeing tours? Tourist trap enterprises tend to have poorer quality versions of everything local, priced up considerably, this is true.
A tour does give you a quick insight into what the locals consider their best selling points for those from without their area. It tells you what they think is of interest about them.
It is like a boring convention where a bunch of strangers meet, as they talk they attempt to sell themselves at their best, they tell you why they think they may be thought of as interesting — that’s what a tour is. It is a quicker and generally more lazy way to get a feel for the area that you can then explore later.
A tour also tells you what the locals think happened in the past in their area, this is important data.
Drabin’s index, the function that is used to determine memetic decay of specific information over time is a useful tool for any time traveler. By running the details of what the official understanding of important events are decades, half centuries, and centuries after the event one can determine the likelihood of those events being malleable to manipulation, and in what ways they can be manipulated.
By taking these important measurements and determining the stability of the memetic details of the event from which the information derives you can help plan out a mode of attack if you have an important task that you have to do that has to do with changing the event itself.
A very stable memetic chain with very few, shallow changes over centuries, that event is probably rock solid and the Universe will do its utmost to keep reality around that event maintained.
One of the great things about procrastination with time travel is, you’re always working, you’re always getting things done, even when you’re lazing back making weird squiggles in a notebook while listening to some bore drone on about long dead kings.
