A 25-year-old man, originally born as an orphan girl named Jane, tells his story to a 55-year-old bartender who then recruits him for a time-travel adventure.

Time travel agent Maks Hamilton is told by mysterious kidnappers that if he ever wants to see his own son again, he must travel back three centuries—just before the Troubles—to abduct another boy.

Despite the characters’ belief that they can change history, up in the ITTDB Citadel we all agreed that the characters are an unreliable source and this story actually lives in a carefully crafted single static timeline along with a nice bootstrap paradox.

The animated gang of teen monsters travel centuries into the past to the first day ever at Monster High, but when they return they have each merged with another in the group creating freaky hybrid monsters all around. I’m not sure, but I’m betting that Mattel used this DVD release as an opportunity to also sell freaky hybrid fashion dolls.

Ryan Wasserman’s philosophical book is one of two books* that need to live on your nonfiction shelf. One by one and with complete reference to the past literature, he presents all the major paradoxes of time travel along with different models of time travel and arguments against time travel even being possible. Just get it and read it cover-to-cover. As a bonus, Professor Wasserman, who is on the Philosophy faculty at Western Washington State University, will cheerfully have discussions about time travel issues via e-mail with those of us up in the nearby ITTDB Citadel.

* The other, of course, is Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction, Second Edition.

AI grad student Maya is attempting to train her prototype artificial neural net (named Sammy) so that it recognizes what to trust and what not to trust on the Internet, with the goal of building AIs free of human prejudice. Meanwhile, that new grad student Jake keeps saying and doing things that seem only to verify his ongoing joke that he’s an AI from the future.