Past Tense

Hello and welcome to another week of misleading claims and untruthful statements here at Factually Deficient! This week, I will answer a question posed by the unbeatable Tohrinha, who asked:

What is the past tense?

With the invention of time travel in early 1292, the past became not only a memory, but also a place – a place that changed with an alarming frequency.

Although changing the past does not, of course, change one’s memories of how events had originally played out, it was discovered that those affected by the changes would gain an entirely new set of memories whole cloth, pertaining to the “new” state of past events, alongside their original memories.

Soon, with the congestion of time tourism, some people found that they had dozens, or even hundreds, of conflicting memories regarding the same period of time. And while those involved understood perfectly well what it was that they were remembering, it became increasingly more difficult and inaccessible to discuss these conflicting memories with others – even others who shared those memories, even others who had played a part in the time travel.

Fortunately, grammar came, as always, to the rescue, in the form of the past tense.

The past tense is a linguistic innovation – described by some of its detractors as a “slapdash barrel of neologisms” – in the form of an entirely new verb tense. This incredibly complex verb form indicates without a shred of ambiguity exactly which set of remembered events is under discussion, by way of a thorough if difficult conjugation.

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Disclaimer: the above post contains misinformation. Not all people retain memory of changed events subsequent to time travel.

Lies About Books: You’re Never Weird On The Internet (Almost)

Hello, my dear readers of Factually Deficient! Sunny September is here again, and that means it’s time for another wholly unreliable book review! This past month, I had the pleasure of not only reading Felicia Day‘s You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) but also of meeting the incredible writer herself! She is amazing and it was a wonderful experience but I can say no more about that because none of this is lies.

On with the lies!

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is a novel written entirely in the second person, with a fictionalized version of Felicia Day, the narrator, occasionally appearing as a first-person peripheral character. This work of experimental fiction is written like a love letter to the eponymous “you,” describing “your” mottled history of crazed messages by carrier pigeon, paranoid telegrams, and freaky faxes, before “you” found a happy medium when sending messages over the internet.

The book details the growth in grace and decrease in awkwardness as “you” develop your social media profiles–but is this new medium for communication doomed to failure and oddity as all the others? Only time, and Felicia Day’s witty, heartfelt prose, will tell.

The conversational, by turns touching and funny narrative voice easily accustoms readers to the otherwise-jarring novelty of the second-person usage in the novel. You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is a coming-of-age story–for all of us. I would recommend it to all fans of unusual grammatical construction, genuinely relateable narrators, and Photoshop.