Introduce Shakespeare to D&D, and encourage him to popularize it.
Not only would the campaigns he ran be amazing, but goooodlord imagine the subversive effect it would have socially. Unpinning good/evil from lawful/chaotic in the public perception that early on would be a Big Deal; bringing the idea of consumer-generated content would shift attitudes to art and literature away from a purely top-down concept, and the resulting rise of Victorian fan-fiction would be so amazingly terrible it would rip its own hole in the spacetime continuum.
is it confirmed that shakespear was a real guy and not a pen name?
give my bro harambe a bullet proof vest
In before it’s a self correcting timeline, and now it’s the best that gets him killed
Id show up at the time travelers convention.
force Florida to count the ballots in 2000 in favor of Al Gore. People want to talk about stolen elections? They literally wouldn’t count all the ballots because of a technology flaw.
It’s Florida how do you expect to be able to force them to do anything?
I’m dumb, thought it was about stealing something from the past to the present. So these answers do fit the prompt
My first reaction was “bring a T-Rex to the year 2000 and threaten them with it”. Ended up pestering AI till it agreed to answer a similar question, here’s a summary of those answers:
Advanced Surveillance Technology: Bringing back highly advanced surveillance technology from a more technologically developed era could be a game-changer.
This one makes some sense. You go back to 1999 (or future if possible) and bring equipment that can detect and prove the fact beyond reasonable doubt. Enough to cause the count.
Influential Evidence from the Future: Bringing back concrete evidence from the future, such as detailed records of the government’s planned election fraud, could be used to expose and prevent these actions. This could include documents, videos, or other irrefutable proof of planned malpractices in the election.
Now this one goes against the prompt somewhat, but it would be the most effective. Although the butterfly effects from proving time travel may cause new issues…
The first time Heinrich Kramer tries to show someone the Malleus Maleficarum, I appear directly in front of him and set the book on fire. Not only is the book destroyed, but a clearly supernatural event took place to put the fear of god into him. Bam. No witch trials.
More likely outcome: he takes a person in strange clothing appearing from thin air only to set his book on fire with a magical implement as clear proof of witchcraft existing and posing a huge danger. Get ready for turbo witch hunts on crack
He wasn’t going to be any MORE nuts. Everyone knew he was a crackpot who hated women, and it was heretical for him to claim anyone but God could grant anyone powers. I make sure to do it in front of people and there’s suddenly an audience to see him be condemned by a divine agent. If they try to say it was anything else, they’re heretical too.
At the very least, it can’t get WORSE.
Or, the first time he steps foot in Innsbruck, he slips on a banana skin and slides down the street, much to the comedic delight of the locals. Helena Scheuberin even giggles and praises him for his comedic wit and skill. With high praise from an affluent local, and a natural penchant for comedy, Kramer leads a cult following in banana-skin comedic antics, and kick starts surrealist humour centuries before Monty Python.
I’d save RFK and give him a full two-term presidency. Just because I’ve always wondered how much a difference it would have made in the course of American history. It definitely seems like things took a severe turn for the worse in the late 60s and the American political system has never recovered.
I personally believe there were conspiracies to assassinate both him and JFK because they were not susceptible to being controlled by their donors or political mentors, as is the case with the vast majority of politicians. They were rogue elements with a strong potential to disrupt the status quo (i.e. gravy train) for the rest of the oligarchy, so they got taken out.
Reagan is where things got fucked. Give Carter two mandates instead.
Por que no los dos
Carter?
I wasn’t alive for these events and I am possibly missing context. But I just see an inflection point in the 60s and I don’t know if another term from Carter in 1980 would have been enough to turn things around. I also feel like he was a less impactful character than RFK
The main turning point was 1971, as referenced by the website (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/).
Nixon was the president then, and the main force was that the economy was decoupled from the gold standard
Edit: president
It makes me sad the site seems to be pushing crypto. Or maybe it’s that crypto bros keep referencing the event? Chicken and egg? I dunno
Nah that was Nixon. If RFK had been elected, withdrawn from Vietnam earlier and not been corrupt, things may have gone differently
My brain goofed, I knew that. Thanks for the correction!
Introduce radio to the Romans. They had the metallurgy to create coils. Even a simple Morse code system would easily keep their empire going. Probably end up like that Star Trek TOS where Centurions are carrying sub-machine guns, though. If want to read what a great SF writer did with this (guy from 1938 ends up in 535AD), read “Lest Darkness Fall”
I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think–to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I’d assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I’d also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I’m less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they’d react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
The first thing that pops into my mind is Bioshock: Infinite’s Albert Fink and his Magical Melodies. If you haven’t played the game before, Fink uses portals that are rips into the future to hear modern music and then recreates it with period appropriate instruments and vocals, which is set in 1912. Hearing “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” coming from and Organ Grinder booth and “God Only Knows” by a barbershop quartet (just to name a few) was a highlight for me, so I can only imagine what something would be like with your suggestion.
The temptation would be to play “Raining Blood” and get extremely excommunicated. “South of Heaven” you could argue is a musical Hieronymus Bosch painting. “Disciple,” less so. For apostasy that cheeky locals could reproduce on a lute, do “The God That Failed.”
Probably the least riot-inducing song that’d still leave the aristocracy struggling to deal with the experience is Anamanaguchi’s “Endless Fantasy.” To people intimately familiar with wind and string instruments, and for a song that Jackson Parodi managed to decently reproduce on a goddamn accordion, it’s juuust enough to leave everyone wondering how the hell humans made those noises. It’s also obscenely energetic. Nevermind concert halls, play this at cafe that’s just imported tobacco and watch some men in hosiery get off their asses. All of that goes double for “Prom Night.” None of these people have ever heard a square wave.
Somewhere in-between, I’d suggest any Flaming Lips album. At War With The Mystics might go over quite well, at first.
Idk sneeze on a dinosaur or something.
Dinosaur: “bruh? 🤨”
hands you a tissue
I would bring a sandwich for Gavrilo Princip.
This remains my favorite answer.
Id go back and push a kid into the gorilla enclosure at Cincinnati zoo, just for a laugh.
If I went back in time, between stoping hitler or stopping you the choice is clear.
NYT: Adolf Hitler somehow killed by gorilla, onlookers horrified but supportive.
Here’s a darkly hilarious one, because you could do it by accident: give smallpox to the native Americans a few hundred years early. Right around 1000 AD, show up to shake hands and teach metallurgy or whatever, maybe planning to jump-start their resistance to colonization… and their resistance to slaughterhouse-borne diseases, the hard way.
This would of course completely fuck up their population numbers, much the same as would happen in Europe in the 1300s. But by the time Columbus showed up to be the absolute worst person who could possibly discover a new continent, they’d be largely recovered, and they’d get to trade whole new strains with the seasick lemon-sucking weirdos who kept asking where the spices were. The returning ships would offer tomatoes and potatoes and another Black Death. Hopefully preventing Malthus from being such an influential bastard, and causing the first engineered famine in Ireland, whose population did not recover from the potato famine until this century.
New England colonies would presumably still take hold, but wouldn’t steamroll all the way to the west coast. Hopefully they’d be limited and northern enough that slavery is less prevalent, less absolute, and - ironically - still a matter of trade. Because what ended the triangle trade to America was the treatment of African captives as livestock to be bred. The politics of this alternate timeline would be hilariously complex compared to now, and probably result in more and stranger wars than we can imagine, but there would be so many averted times where atrocities happened, effectively unopposed.
Just take them a couple horses and some cattle. That would mess with the Europeans when they show up.
You wanna fuck up the timeline? Somehow mess something up so plastic was never, and never will be invented. That would change sooooo many things.
It would also stop much of the progress humanity made. Unfortunately, plastic is pretty much the cheapest and easiest solution for a lot of problems, specifically for packaging food and stuff like that.
You may very well travel back to a world that no longer can build that time machine.
When the fork I use for lunch and throw away will outlast my civilization, I’m very much ok with destroying that technology.
I’d swap some of the first clay documents around until I ended up with a timeline where we live modern life with a gift economy rather than a money economy. We’d all have a lot more options to pay off our debt rather than the streamlined ridgid money system.
I wanna go back and be part of the Fallador massacre!
