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Shitty Alternate History Thread - If only the Romans had AK-47's they would've survived...
- Thread starter ICametoLurk
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MS Paint Gigachad
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Thanks for this! Some spergy part of me gets triggered when characters try ex-nihilo'ing modern tech in fiction because they always handwave the details or something
it's probably gonna be like
20th century guy: "alright so you spin a magnet aligned with a bunch of wires according to right hand rule" (IDK what i'm talking about here, I forgot my high school physics)
10th century guy: "cool, let's do it"
20th century guy: *fuck, how do I get a strong enough magnet? How do I convince these guys to spend half their GDP on shitty copper wires? How do I invent a lightbulb??*
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You can teach people of the past a lot of tech, but the issue is like the meme says most people actually have very little idea how the tech they use on a daily basis actually works. Even then they do have some idea a lot of the time they cannot actually fill a number of gaps they might not even realize existed. Like with electricity example: How do you get a strong enough magnet? How do you refine the copper well enough for wiring, and once refined how do you actually stretch it into wires? How do you actually go about making a light-bulb? Glass is fucking hard to work with, you need to have it super thin and transparent and fill it with inert gas is you want such a light bulb to last anything more than a few minutes and where the fuck will you get that?
One of the first stories to deal with the fact, and the one The Man Who Came Early was riffing on, Lest Darkness Fall actually dealt with some of the issues. The guy who time travels has to find a way to fund his experimenting to get shit working so he end up "inventing" brandy. Making Brandy is actually quite easy, and he can get it done with very little hassle. He just befriends a dude who funds the initial experiment and has a copper smith build a simply distilling setup of a large copper vessel. Then he buys a bunch of OK wine and gets it done. However later on he tries and make a rudimentary cannon to turn the tide of a small battle with ease but fails miserably because making black powder is a lot harder, and just because you know "charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate" doesn't mean you can just mix those and get anything close to ready to use (in the end of the book he has managed to get it work, but it took a long time and he had to do pretty much months of trial and error to get it right).
One of the first stories to deal with the fact, and the one The Man Who Came Early was riffing on, Lest Darkness Fall actually dealt with some of the issues. The guy who time travels has to find a way to fund his experimenting to get shit working so he end up "inventing" brandy. Making Brandy is actually quite easy, and he can get it done with very little hassle. He just befriends a dude who funds the initial experiment and has a copper smith build a simply distilling setup of a large copper vessel. Then he buys a bunch of OK wine and gets it done. However later on he tries and make a rudimentary cannon to turn the tide of a small battle with ease but fails miserably because making black powder is a lot harder, and just because you know "charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate" doesn't mean you can just mix those and get anything close to ready to use (in the end of the book he has managed to get it work, but it took a long time and he had to do pretty much months of trial and error to get it right).
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Another colossal issue of going back in time and introducing them to modern tech is getting the minerals needed to produce the most base components of certain tech. Good luck trying to convince the local fuedal lord to contact a empire half the world away to dig up uranium with pickaxes in a place that might be too deep to reach without modern equipment...
And that's not even touching chemical side of things. Even if you are a 50000 IQ engineer who knows perfectly how to build every device in existence to kickstart many basic industrial processes you will also need to not only be an expert in chemistry but you will also then need to perfectly articulate the most minor details to a people that at most learnt a small number of useful things from alchemy otherwise you will just end up with worthless liquids and a lot of poisoned peasants.
And that's not even touching chemical side of things. Even if you are a 50000 IQ engineer who knows perfectly how to build every device in existence to kickstart many basic industrial processes you will also need to not only be an expert in chemistry but you will also then need to perfectly articulate the most minor details to a people that at most learnt a small number of useful things from alchemy otherwise you will just end up with worthless liquids and a lot of poisoned peasants.
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And that's not to forget that you need precision manufacturing first of all. Good luck making a steam engine if you cannot make an airtight tube.
That requires a lot of hands on skill that no amount of knowledge can replace.
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Soooooo is this the thread we can gossip on AH.com losers and cows versus the more serious AH in General? I vote this be the thread for that.
Anyways, gee, what a surprise, Worffan in that Troon support thread in Chat dropped this. What a bombshell! What a shocker! What a faggot! What's darkly funny is that AH.com's surprising number of trannies are likely the chuds and incels from five to a dozen years ago obsessed with putting badass hot chicks into stories focused around WW2 or other hardcore wars.
Anyways, gee, what a surprise, Worffan in that Troon support thread in Chat dropped this. What a bombshell! What a shocker! What a faggot! What's darkly funny is that AH.com's surprising number of trannies are likely the chuds and incels from five to a dozen years ago obsessed with putting badass hot chicks into stories focused around WW2 or other hardcore wars.
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This thread started out focused on the stupid timelines and stories but it is the go-to place to laugh at AH.com user sperging as well since they go hand in hand.
I do not even bother with Chat in that site. I strictly stay on the actual AH forums and consider the chats complete black holes. The political chat might as well be a ban speedrun for anyone with a brain given how retarded the talk there is. Fuckers are literally the NPC meme. I once tried to take a look at the political humor thread they have and it is honestly reddit r/politicalhumor level of "jokes", sometimes even worse.
Yep there is one now.
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Every single kick I ever had was from there, so you're right. I told myself it's time to move past any posting there ever and remember it's a disturbing neolib/IDpol echo chamber.
I think what's vaguely interesting is you can tell all of those people balls-deep into it get hints here and there, or hint at it themselves, they know there's not just a world outside of their politics but that their own policies aren't the most productive or popular - but it's so dominated by the IDpol cabal that they can't help but go along with it anyway. Beyond that is when they chimp out over conservatism getting wins. I'll never forget the sheer hatred the forum spewed forth at anything not a bourgeois liberal in an east coast metro area when Trump won, up to and including arguing to take away voting rights from conservatives or nuking red states or regions. Disgusting.
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Outside of politisperging, I noticed this amusing drama where a guy rigged a vote for "best TL of the year" using a Discord server. How pathetic.
archive.ph
archive.ph
Or how someone decided the world needed to see this map of his highschool lobby in the morning but the damn dirty AH.com jannies didn't like it.
2023 Turtledoves - Best Early Modern Timeline Poll | alternatehistory…
archived 6 Mar 2023 11:51:29 UTC
2023 Turtledoves - Best Early Modern Timeline Poll | Page 2 | alterna…
archived 6 Mar 2023 11:55:37 UTC
2023 Turtledoves - Best Early Modern Timeline Poll
There and Back Again: The English Journeys of Catherine of Aragon; @Awkwardvulture The Jaguar’s Roar - An Aztec Timeline; @Vinization Nobunaga's Ambition Realized: Dawn of a New Rising Sun; @Ambassador Huntsman An Imperial Match: Anne Boleyn marries Charles V; @pandizzy No GNW (or “Peter...
www.alternatehistory.com
Or how someone decided the world needed to see this map of his highschool lobby in the morning but the damn dirty AH.com jannies didn't like it.
Natural consequences of gender ideology at work. He can't just think, "damn this smutfic I wrote is hot, sure would be nice if I were that girl" and move on. Because he's read the same thing happening to other "women" (and probably because his smutfic is creepy and would get him labeled an incel), he now has to psychoanalyze his entire life and further convince himself he's "always" been a woman. Many such cases, sad!
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S.M. Stirling put a copious amount of lesbian sex in the Domination-trilogy, and he didn't troon out. Well, the 80s were definitely a different time... Anyway. When Worffan is not a massive troon-faggot, he is part of the fun police telling others how their countries should be run, lol.
2016 and its consequences have been a disaster on AH.com. Lots of minds were melted down to subatomic ash.
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I'm going to come down decisively and say that Yiddish Policemen's Union is the top of the genre.
We have that vague term literature or literary fiction, that really doesn't mean much of anything besides "I think this is quality" or "this doesn't have a genre." But there are things where you can just tell there's a stark difference between how it writes and thinks about its subject matter, usually in that its not so much referential to other genre fiction as it is to real life. One way you might think about it is if the book is something that you could credibly assign as reading for an English class.
I consider that one as clawing its way out of the alternate history ghetto. There's other ones I've liked, but I don't feel like they get out of the genre ghetto.
We have that vague term literature or literary fiction, that really doesn't mean much of anything besides "I think this is quality" or "this doesn't have a genre." But there are things where you can just tell there's a stark difference between how it writes and thinks about its subject matter, usually in that its not so much referential to other genre fiction as it is to real life. One way you might think about it is if the book is something that you could credibly assign as reading for an English class.
I consider that one as clawing its way out of the alternate history ghetto. There's other ones I've liked, but I don't feel like they get out of the genre ghetto.
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- Aug 17, 2020
Does anyone know about any 'Byzantine survival' timelines, where instead of being some wholesome chungus superpower, they just take the place of the Ottomans as 'the sick man of europe'?
Like, from what i gather, one of the reasons for the Europeans being so eager to settle the Americas was due the Ottomans placing heavy charges on good flowing out of Istanbul to europe via the silk road.
Now in a world where a christian power still acts as the gateway to chinese products, i'd imagine The new world being discovered later (possibly by accident) and European powers not having as much interest in it. Tho, once reports of all the gold and silver begins to circulate around europe, i can see the colonial rush occuring much like in our timeline but delayed by a century or so. Just like that, Byzantium's greatest strength ends up being its greatest weakness as its ancient trade routes wither away from being made obsolete...
Like, from what i gather, one of the reasons for the Europeans being so eager to settle the Americas was due the Ottomans placing heavy charges on good flowing out of Istanbul to europe via the silk road.
Now in a world where a christian power still acts as the gateway to chinese products, i'd imagine The new world being discovered later (possibly by accident) and European powers not having as much interest in it. Tho, once reports of all the gold and silver begins to circulate around europe, i can see the colonial rush occuring much like in our timeline but delayed by a century or so. Just like that, Byzantium's greatest strength ends up being its greatest weakness as its ancient trade routes wither away from being made obsolete...
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The TV Tropes side of AH.com is far funnier than the TDS side.
DareToBeStupid!
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DareToBeStupid!
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The only good thing about PolChat are Wikiboxes and Leaders lists, rest is crap.
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Here's a great thread (requires login) envisioning an "eco-socialist future setting" with the "Democratic Socialist Confederation of North America." Apparently the writer wants a nice universe to write stories about hunting down "right-wing terrorists."
One day everyone decides to overthrow the government because muh climate change and muh pandemic and creates theNAU DSCNA. They go oppress all those dirty right-wingers but keep some around for whatever reason. The government has a huge military and is actively engaged in state-sponsored terrorism democracy promotion.
Private property and free enterprise exists only for Native Americans and people the government likes.
There is no First Amendment--gender ideology and BLM-style "antiracism" is the law of the land, and those who have ever opposed it and their descendents are subject to cancel culture. Most people are forced to move intobughives "Domiciles" to claim their "free" house. Suburbs and private housing is bulldozed. The government actively dictates religious doctrine, infiltrates all churches, and has proudly committed human rights abuses against Evangelical Protestants (and Scientologists lol)
The government has banned all cars and demands you take an Uber instead. Land used for agriculture has been greatly reduced because most farming is now vertical farming. The government has banned fishing and demands you eat the lab-grown fish. The economy is ran by AI who spend your money to resurrect extinct species.
While it's obvious the writer treats this setting as a utopia and only begrudgingly tries to put in "drawbacks", I think this setting makes for a decent dystopia. Although it's rather unrealistic given there's no mention of mass famines from their farming policy or how the government somehow affords all the high-speed rail they build while they clone dead species back to life.
One day everyone decides to overthrow the government because muh climate change and muh pandemic and creates the
Private property and free enterprise exists only for Native Americans and people the government likes.
There is no First Amendment--gender ideology and BLM-style "antiracism" is the law of the land, and those who have ever opposed it and their descendents are subject to cancel culture. Most people are forced to move into
The government has banned all cars and demands you take an Uber instead. Land used for agriculture has been greatly reduced because most farming is now vertical farming. The government has banned fishing and demands you eat the lab-grown fish. The economy is ran by AI who spend your money to resurrect extinct species.
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"Guys, this is totally NOT Gilead-"