Shel

@shel

The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim

she/her
shelraphen.com/

Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.

I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.

I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock

Website (RSS + Newsletter)

shelraphen.com/

Website League

soc.lizard.tools/@shel

Shel @shel12/15/2023, 3:13 PM

Nire Bryce @NireBryce

Juniper Bug @JuniperTheory12/14/2023, 11:57 PM

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?

Nire Bryce @NireBryce12/15/2023, 10:53 AM

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

Nire Bryce @NireBryce12/15/2023, 11:22 AM

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

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/movie-plot-the-rock-inspired-mi6-sources-iraqi-weapons-claim-chilcot-report

Shel @shel12/15/2023, 3:13 PM

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.

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in reply to @JuniperTheory's post:

Misty @dog12/15/2023, 12:03 AM

I'd convince Wagner to give up music

Juniper Bug @JuniperTheory12/15/2023, 12:04 AM

fair, although that's a bit older then I expected lol. goin WAY back there

Nire Bryce @NireBryce12/15/2023, 11:19 AM

oh fuck that's a good one

Bruno Dias @bruno12/15/2023, 12:06 AM

I guess I'd figure out how to make Jodie Foster convince even more guys to shoot Reagan

@rotopenguin12/15/2023, 3:33 AM

*shoves a bunch of unobtanium time-machine fuel into your hands* your proposal is the winner and you have my complete support

Heather "hthrflwrs" Flowers @hthrflwrs12/15/2023, 12:13 AM

I feel like getting Call of Duty cancelled before it got off the ground would have done a fair amount of societal good

@SamKeeper12/15/2023, 12:19 AM

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.

fingerless @fingerless12/15/2023, 2:51 AM

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

fingerless @fingerless12/15/2023, 2:55 AM

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.

the harmonious blend of tradition and modernity @verticalblank12/17/2023, 4:57 AM

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

Eat @eatthepen12/15/2023, 12:16 AM

Cut down Atlas Shrugged to be just an OK potboiler about running a railroad. No John Galt's speech, none of the horrible sexual politics, none of the sci-fi stuff.

Christian Simmers @Xuelder12/15/2023, 2:10 AM

At the very least it would have prevented a bunch of my CS major classmates wearing "John Galt Was Right" shirts.

@SamKeeper12/15/2023, 12:18 AM

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.

Christian Simmers @Xuelder12/15/2023, 2:00 AM

I think @hthrflwrs said it best describing Homestuck as games' Velvet Underground. Like getting rid of it would create a seismic shift in the timeline.

@SamKeeper12/15/2023, 3:06 AM

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.

Christian Simmers @Xuelder12/15/2023, 3:17 AM

Oh yeah, your post also had me thinking about the initial hand over of the Kickstarter to The Odd Gentlemen. Like, I have heard rumors about how troubled the production on that front was.

graham @graham12/15/2023, 12:23 AM

Brother Rat (1938) would have had far more dangerous stunts and the leading role would have been gravely injured

cosmicspear @cosmicspear12/15/2023, 12:33 AM

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

Juniper Bug @JuniperTheory12/15/2023, 12:37 AM

That's a good one; also makes me wonder what you could do by helping find an actual successor to Gene Roddenberry who isn't fucking rick berman

Lou-E @LouE12/15/2023, 1:24 AM

Would make 1968's Head become a commercial success and become the highest grossing film in that year.

Alice Over Zero @AliceOverZero12/15/2023, 1:33 AM

Make the original Final Fantasy flop hard enough that something else gets the spot of being the most common skeleton that the majority of RPGs are built upon.

Janine @pizzaforfree12/15/2023, 1:43 AM

We already know FF's replacement would be Dragon Quest.

Alice Over Zero @AliceOverZero12/15/2023, 4:26 AM

Time travel movie voice You're right, we need to go deep enough that both sides are prevented from winning.

UnregisteredHyperCadence @UnregisteredHyperCadence12/16/2023, 4:31 PM

Richard Garriot never makes Ultima.

Christian Simmers @Xuelder12/15/2023, 2:36 AM

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.

Christian Simmers @Xuelder12/15/2023, 2:54 AM

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.

ꙮ tatybara ꙮ @tati12/15/2023, 3:19 AM

tragic “accident” at the plaza hotel during the filming of home alone 2

Setsune @Setsune12/16/2023, 1:11 PM

I'd let him film his scene, as a "positive" send-off. Then have it happen shortly after backstage. He'd become obscure trivia.

Kirby “Isaac” Macintosh @kirbymacintosh12/15/2023, 3:32 AM

I would try to cause some kind of bureaucratic nightmare at Marvel Studios in 2010 that ensures The Avengers remains in development hell forever

i'm alice @HEYimHeroic12/15/2023, 3:38 AM

two words: Pokémon fails. self-explanatory, we'd be living in a societal utopia

Th Esteemed Deed Commemorator @spineflu12/15/2023, 1:12 PM

what if Dennis Ritchie died and C never existed? that's my answer.

Binary @binary12/15/2023, 3:11 PM

Cancel the production of Birth of a Nation.

pastell @pastellexists12/15/2023, 4:40 PM

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.

Christian Simmers @Xuelder12/16/2023, 8:07 PM

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.

Setsune @Setsune12/16/2023, 1:15 PM

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."

Lizardguy @Lizardguy6412/16/2023, 2:20 PM

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.

Remi Erin Autor the remeranAuthor @remeranAuthor12/16/2023, 2:57 PM

I would convince Hironobu Sakaguchi not to attempt to direct Final Fantasy the Spirits Within.

the harmonious blend of tradition and modernity @verticalblank12/17/2023, 5:16 AM

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.

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