Buy Apple.

[gridlore]

I've seen several friends posting variants of the "my life needs a reset button" comment recently, and one of my favorite Turtledove shorts is the paired time travel stories, 20, Counting Up and 40, Counting Down. Which leads to this question:

Through a quirk in the space-time continuum you are able to communicate with yourself at 13. You can leave three messages, and your younger self will have sufficient evidence to accept that they really are from the older version of themselves. What do you tell yourself? Each message can be fairly detailed, but has to address a single concept.

1. School matters. Don't try to be Craig, don't worry about Craig. Learn to ask for help in class.


2. You have Hodgkin's Lymphoma. It will probably start to develop sometime in your early twenties. Catch it early.


3. Take shop classes and work with your hands. It's what makes you happy. You are never going to be a scientist, you don't have the mindset for anything other than an amateur's depth. But learn to repair an engine, or lay tile, or be an electrician, and you'll be happy and successful.

The drawback is that if I followed my own advice, I would probably never meet Kirsten. Bad trade.

Comments

I reject your quiz and substitute my own!

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

I've actually thought about this scenario (or a similar one) quite a bit, with the result that my answer(s) are both too detailed and too personal to really post here.

I also have a persistent fantasy about mailing two anonymized packages to NASA and the FBI, the contents of which can be summarized as "How to Keep Your Shuttles From Blowing Up" and "How to Keep The WTC From Falling Down."

The latest thought is an exercise in constructing a message to last Thursday (one for me, one to be relayed to my boss) in the minimum number of characters while conveying the essential information, presuming that the timehole has a bandwidth limit that puts Twitter to shame.

Re: I reject your quiz and substitute my own!

[kengr]

The problem with the Shuttle one is that the decisions that led to the first shuttle loss were made by *Congress*. They forced NASA to go with solid-fueled boosters by refusing to pay for the original liquid-fueled design.

Re: I reject your quiz and substitute my own!

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

We've had plenty of other SRB launches that went fine.
I figured I'd just point out (again) that O-rings have a tendency to become brittle at low temperatures, such as when you try to launch on a cold morning in January, and that this can result in burn-through of exhaust. "For a demonstration of what this can do to the ET, apply a blowtorch to the side of a propane tank. Or just turn the page."

(Next page: splash photo of the forked cloud)

"That's a spacecraft and seven brave souls. Some people still argue whether they died instantly or were still conscious when the crew cabin hit the water. Let's try to never find out, hm?"

hope the embed works

[murphymom.livejournal.com]

[murphymom.livejournal.com]

Just a minor observation - you and Kiri met through fandom, and that wouldn't necessarily change because of the other changes.

[mikkop.livejournal.com]

I think I could still meet and marry my current wife, especially if told "marry this girl", but any advice would probably mean that my child wouldn't be the same person.

I'm not sure I could bear erasing the kid. Of course the kid that would spring up, if any, would probably be just as great, but, still, no.

If I could get over that I would probably just tell me to invest on Google (or something else. Apple?) at a proper time, and probably tell myself to go abroad if possible. That'd be three - the wife, invest, go to a different country.

[seawasp]

That's the problem with these scenarios. If you can change something significant, you are likely to destroy precious elements of what you DO have. Only people who've pretty much ended up with nothing they value could reasonably afford that route.

For instance, let's say I got to tell myself to put that thousand dollars into WotC back in 1991. And even scraped together some other money, so by the end of the buy-out I'm a several-millionaire. I'd like to think I'd still have MARRIED Kathleen, but would I have ended up somewhere else? The identical same kids wouldn't have been born. All sorts of things would change. And that's a much more RECENT change.

At 13, it would have been 1975-1976. Any advice that 13-year-old me would or could remember to act on at the appropriate time would probably utterly change "me". Oh, I'd still recognize alternate-Ryk, but he would in all likelihood never have met ANY of the people that I now consider my best friends (including the best friend I married).

Such advice could NOT include "marry x" because the very knowledge that this is a GOAL will completely change how you approach the person.