bunsen_h

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Last night I dreamed of running a game of Toon for my old friend David Q Conibear, dead by his own hand some 31 years ago... which seems like both a long time and a short one. More than half my life ago; more than Dave's own too-short lifetime ago.

All of the player characters, and the principal antagonist, were cows/bulls. Which led my dreaming brain to suggest that the game would end with a bos fight.

I wish that I wasn't coming up with bilingual puns in my sleep.

In the dream, Dave got the joke. The other players didn't.

One of the sillier tropes of science fiction is the race of beings who "age backwards", who somehow come into existence as elderly and feeble and then become younger and younger. If they are not literally going backwards in time relative to some other standard — moving backwards, perceiving in reverse, etc. — there are some obvious paradoxes. The Red Dwarf episode "Backwards" at least had a degree of internal consistency, but the Animated Trek episode "The Counter-Clock Incident" was just silly. (Alan Dean Foster's novelization of that episode lampshaded some of the problems.)

I had a strange thought: an interstellar empire of such beings. Their starships' engines are driven by antenatal infants' being yanked back to their mothers to disappear. Utilizing the power of paradox.