I don't think anything could have made me more confused than before. The visualizations certainly help, the other idea with an image to explain things I've seen is that timetravel wouldn't create forks nor entirely different realities, but changes sort of "ripple" in all time directions, altering everything, or if the timetravel manages to be of the internally consistent kind the ripples would be there but the actions cancel each other out like in an interference pattern or something like that, so that the future and past away from the incidents wasn't changed.

You are very welcome to check my journal. And thanks for the well wishes for my rat. I'm just about to go drop him off with the vet for the operation, so I hope he'll get through that okay.