• they/them

Variously known as NotE0157h7 and Zero_Democracy elsewhere.


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?


NireBryce
@NireBryce

hard choice but I'd probably strive to make either Birth of a Nation or Triumph des Willens just completely cringe to all audiences somehow

edit: I may have misunderstood the scope of "modern" but those are two of the biggest timeline pivots in terms of both culture and impact on media


NireBryce
@NireBryce

alternatively I'd make the movie The Rock way less cool, potentially preventing the second US-Iraq war


shel
@shel

Whatever was the first piece of marketing media to refer to people who play video games as “gamers” and frame it as a cogent identity. I would replace the word “gamers” with something normal like “customer” or “fan.” This would potentially avert gamergate and the subsequent mass radicalization of young nerds into the extreme right wing.

Another option is modifying either the instructions for the voting machines used in the 2000 US presidential election to make them more coherent or maybe the marketing materials for those voting machines to make them lose their bid for the state contract. Maybe could swing the 2000 election and I don’t really know if a Gore presidency would’ve actually been that much better a timeline given how Democrats can be but at the very least the guy cared about climate change. Getting that taken seriously earlier in the timeline has gotta help something.

Another option is making whatever was Ronald Reagan’s first big hit just totally tank. Write all of his lines to just be fucking awful and impossible to perform well no matter how strong the actor. His makeup? Atrocious. Tank his career before he became a household name.

Ultimately though the material conditions of society drives media more than the superstructure drives material conditions so for all of these changes I suspect that the same outcomes would still likely happen just slightly differently.


estradialup
@estradialup

I broadly subscribe to trends and forces. Guys like Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes were always going to happen. The powers that be can always find a guy. Public sentiment will always be reactionary and punitive, in the absence of meaningful socialist choices. We were always going to invade Iraq - we spent the '90s laying the groundwork. Our current border regime is basically a development of Operation Gatekeeper and the detention centers under Clinton. Do a web search for the former, or "Guantanamo Haiti ACT-UP." Look at the CIA, Pamyat, the Russian media class, and the statue pull-downs.
Media, language, and even presidents, are mostly downstream from what certain people want, barring the occasional fluke like Clinton just deciding to not campaign in Michigan and Iowa, thus failing to girlboss it through expanding the violence in Syria and liquidating Medicare, or whatever small variations in the horror were "supposed to" happen. Whoops.
It still would have been funny if John Hinkley Jr. had used a 9mm or better with real hollowpoints, or of the Proud Boys had actually pulled Pence's head off, though. Likewise, everyone responsible for Tom Clancy's Modern Medal of Warfare: This Time It's Personal having something funny happen to them circa ~2002 probably wouldn't make things worse, if only slightly differently bad.
Maybe I would get all the nascent OSINT guys on Something Awful into extreme kink instead.


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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 @estradialup's post:

I have a specific theory on OSINT guys in particular, where there's a fork in the road that leads to either giving yourself cPTSD with the computer because you only process dense and esoteric information in high-pressure contexts, and desperately want to belong to some sort of club (the Tom Clancy effect,) or you just get into, like, gender-nonconformity and being shocked with frequency generators. Close, but more extreme, cousin to people who just listen to noise music constantly to get stuff done.

i often hypothesize about what a gore presidency would have looked like, and generally come to the conclusion that 9/11 and its reaction would have largely happened the same with a president gore, down to the patriot act and all. glass steagall was already repealed and credit default swaps were becoming a thing, so the late 2000s recession was already set up. wouldnt have been that different, except on the culture war stuff. we'd have signed on to the kyoto protocol but not meaningfully changed towards more climate conscious policy. the republican policy of deliberately tanking everything even that they support just to make the president ineffectual probably would have started much earlier