The History of History Engineering (HE-X) on Alex's blog

HE-3: The pastaverse and parallel timelines

Alex Mihnev — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The spaghetti model

Our protagonists had the idea for a time traveler’s scheduler locked in so we could remove some of the scaffolding used to get there. Since the brain had a strong interest in cinema, this presented an excellent opportunity to distill decades of wild fiction into stuff which actually tracks.

I don’t hate this as much as I thought. Only somewhat.

Okay, let’s play along (only so I can shoot it down later). Why would a time traveller need a scheduler? Isn’t it irrelevant? Or why wouldn’t it have been invented already, or maybe it will have been (hehe)? Since we’re in a loop anyway…

What if we’re not in a loop? What if we’re on a straight and infinite vector.✓✓

Where does SciFi stand on this?✓✓

You know – the best explanation for time travel I’ve ever heard used pasta. It was the scene with Bruce Wayne playing with spaghetti in The Flash. It boiled (no pun intended) down to going back in time and changing something which results in not actually changing the timeline you started on.

Instead you, the time traveler, get seamlessly shifted onto another alternative timeline which intersected the original one at the point of that event you changed.

And our actions cause us to jump onto different vectors at any moment. Like a bowl of spaghetti.

Thus began the famous association of time travel and pasta in our fictional world. This is a stereotype, you know? Pasta is not universally craved among the diverse time travel community, carbs are.

HE-2: Socratic dialogue with my brain, over text messaging

Alex Mihnev — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Introduction

Our story begins with a random dude when the shadow of an idea started knocking on his mind’s door. Before you start with the jokes – the knocking wasn’t due to a lose screw! Not before too long our guy realized that, to understand what the idea wants from him, it may be necessary to employ his brain – surprising, I know. Naturally, just like others from his generation and extroverts in general, he had outsourced most of his critical reasoning skills to stuff he saw on the internet and his social network in general. Luckily, our hero lived in a timeline where his own brain was part of his social network.

HE-1: So you want to be a time traveler? ⏰

Alex Mihnev — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Congratulations, you’ve been volunteered!

If you’re here reading this then you’ve most likely discovered that time travel is not only possible, but quite common too. If you haven’t discovered this yet then you were pretty close to it anyway, trust me.

Regardless, the stuff in this series is an essential study material for your time travel license which, by means of knowing about time travel, you now MUST obtain. Or else. We can’t have you running wild with sanctioned knowledge of the future, nor spreading rumors about the past.