Mark Dominus2d ago

It's 1986. You've built a limited but working time machine. Every week, it materializes a small slip of paper with a news headline from 2026.

You arrange a meeting with a millionaire who might be able to help you exploit your source of future information. She looks skeptical, but you ask her to be patient while you warm up the machine. Presently, a bit of paper materializes from nowhere. The millionaire is impressed.

You hand her the slip, wondering what wisdom it will impart. The outcome of a major sporting event? An election result? The name of a successful company that doesn't yet exist?

But the millionaire's expression changes to a scowl. She lets the slip flutter to the floor as she leaves your apartment without another word.

You retrieve the slip and read the headline that your machine has produced.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7142152/2026/03/23/cornhole-player-amputee-arrested-murder-dayton-webber/

Quadruple amputee cornhole professional jailed on murder charges

Witnesses said that Dayton James Webber fatally shot a man during an argument in a car, according to the Charles County Sheriff's Office.

The Athletic
Show threadPete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫

@mjd
It was necessary to produce a headline that would terminate the project and prevent paradoxes. Causality MUST only go forwards in time. Leading to the worrying conclusion that the attempt to invent such a machine would *cause* events in the future with the necessary project-abandoning headlines.

So maybe someone did invent that machine in the 1980s and their constant futile attempts to get it to do something useful were what fucked up out timeline. But we can't go back and stop them.

Mar 24 at 4:32pmWeb