Modren

Hypnosis/MC erotica writer


JuniperTheory
@JuniperTheory

Inspired by the stupidest anime i'm watching this season (16 bit sensation, which i adore), a question:

If you could go back in time and change the development of one video game, movie, album, or other piece of modern media; what would you change in order to make the world as a whole less shit?

We're not talking about "oh well i'd get PT uncancelled cause that would be cool" we're talking about trying to alter history as a whole through your actions, when all you can do is change the development path of ONE piece of media in a relatively reasonable way. What's your plan?


surasshu
@surasshu

(art credit: Thdark101 on twitter)

idk if this counts since its not a single piece of media but i'd do this--make the psx use minidiscs for its cartridges instead of CDs. since the ps2 was backwards compatible, logically it would have minidisc support as well, making minidisc the carrier for the most popular console of all time and making minidisc hella popular forever

this would not really make the world that much less shit but minidisc rules so its at least marginally better

serious answer: stop whatever loophole created SUVs


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in reply to @JuniperTheory's post:

you know for all the handwringing about moral content in art, it's so weird to me that Call of Duty doesn't get singled out more as deeply, deeply noxious as a cultural and political force.

still wild to me that call of duty modern warfare 2 II based its plot on the "prayer mats at the border" conspiracy, which should obviously fall flat on its face because there's no reason why the profit motivated, non-ideological Mexican cartels would ever want the heat generated by harboring military opponents of the US

the justification given in the game is fucking stupid. "if America is focused on the war on terror, they will be distracted from the war on drugs" is a stupid thing to say considering the protagonists used a AC-130 to shell the everloving shit out of Mexico earlier in the week.

I am supportive of where you’re going with this but as big a deal as it was in video games, I get the impression Modern Warfare was a symptom and not the cause of the thing the entire US indie games movement of the early 2010s emerged to stop

Imagine a world where CoD flopped and S.W.A.T. or ARMA took its mantle in that era, or the Counter-Strike remakes took off in the US the way they did in Eastern Europe. It’d be almost completely indistinguishable from the present timeline

Homestuck :(

that, or idk, give Project Wonderful such a huge hit that it reshapes the history of internet arts funding? possibly merge this and option 1 to create a juggernaut web production arts co-op using the lost kickstarter money??

the real wild card answer is "get Tatlin's Monument to the Third International built and somehow leverage that into a greater internationalist bent to communism and a push against Communism In One Country" though hooboy that seems like a real long shot for a LOT of reasons including, possibly, basic engineering feasibility reasons lol. but god. just imagine it.

see unlike a lot of people I didn't interpret this at all as "get rid of" but "change its production history"

just, like, make it so the kickstarter money went to the right people, that the bookkeeping happened so people got paid on time, make it so the Viz deal is never necessary in the first place and the late period of the comic isn't defined by weird middle men hovering around everything, nuke the fucking reddit from orbit... like Homestuck has already shaped so much of culture but it could've shaped the actual way we do art online if things had gone just a little bit different/better.

Me, I'd convince F. Orlin Tremaine to choose someone other than John W. Campbell as his successor editing Astounding. That probably stops Scientology or at least makes it a lot smaller, and likely leads to science fiction being a lot more interesting and diverse

I would kill Keiji Inafune's career as a Director/Producer in the crib. Make Mega Man 8 (blue) bomb hard enough that it kills his directorial career but not hard enough that it kills the Mega Man Franchise. Probably means no Mega Man and Bass, but also no Inafune taking credit for the franchise and using it to elevate his projects. Also, would kill his raising voice of "Japanese games bad" in the late 00s early 10s. Maybe even make Mega Man Legends 3 development less of a drama in the background.

Though the real cannon event/tipping point for Capcom and modern AAA games in general is doing anything to the development of Resident Evil 4. Interfere with it early enough you kill both Naughty Dog's pivot to Uncharted/Last of Us and Capcom developing Devil May Cry.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was rejected by 12 publishers before it was finally picked up by Bloomsbury. It seems a fairly small change to imagine that Rowling and/or her agent, Christopher Little, got too discouraged to continue somewhere in those 12 publishers.

I don't know how apocryphal this part of the story is, but at some point, an executive's kid at either the publishing house or related somehow to an agent got their hands on it and didn't put the book down and asked for more. We hand that kid a Gameboy with Pokemon on it.

Stop Blizzard from nerfing Warlocks in the WoW 3.1.0 patch.

Although knowing techbros that's likely just a lie made up after the fact to seem more clever than "I just really wanted to scam people."

Just one thing, ehh?
Ya know what? Change Super Smash Bros Melee to have no clones and just have Wario instead of 8 repeat character. Also make it so it has some semblance of jumping ability, some semblance of actual balance, some semblance of actual stability, and none the glitches that made the most toxic fandom ever happen.

Either that or criminalize EVO.

Art never changes history until it’s far too late. It cost me my livelihood, my health, and some of the best years of my life to learn that lesson the hard way.

(To use an example that is not me: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator did better than any time traveler could have hoped for, it is one of the greatest films of all time and an enduring influence on political comedy today, and it ultimately did fuck all to stop the Holocaust.)

That said, can you imagine if someone had pulled enough strings in Hollywood so that Kim Kardashian could produce a successful movie about the Armenian genocide like she wanted, instead of a vapid reality show? It probably wouldn’t have prevented the genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh, but it might have led to more effective diplomatic pressure against the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, the Russian invasion in Ukraine, and the genocide in Gaza.

in reply to @surasshu's post: