![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethIt starts out saying to just pack for exploration and think of it like visiting the third world. Which seems problematic. It also reminds you that your phone won't work there. While telling you to pack a handheld computer. So, your phone won't phone, but it can do all the all else they recommend.
Says to pack as much data as possible.
"Don’t neglect guides to low-TL medicine and chemistry. The Way Things Work, A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual, and Henley’s Formulas can start you off."
Henley's Formulas is from 1900, but available to download from multiple sources. Seems to me a tad out of date though. ... yeah, reading teh reviews says there's an updated one in 1927 but it's from when science thought mercury was good for you, so, few problems there.
There's several editions of The Way Things Work, a new one coming in October according to amazon, and a CD (so presumably a download from somewhere) from the 2000 version. ... hang on, there's a completely different The Way Things Work from another author as well. It's still about a decade old.
As for the Barefoot Doctor... I'm kind of hoping I'm not finding the one they mean, because it's coming up chinese herbal medicine.
Librarians? Better recs? Purpose is a concise and portable guide to tech, chem and health, suitable for time travellers who may have to live by their wits.
I should find a librarian group to ask.
GURPS also recommends bringing plain gold rings, as a way of bringing money that's solid and yet easy to carry and sell.
Call my brain twisty, but rings imply fingers, and if someone completely new, with no recogniseable origin or family ties happens to turn up in a region, it seems to me they're already suspicious. And if they then have more rings than they personally have fingers, especially if they're a bunch of plain gold wedding rings, well... Bluebeard isn't the half of it. So possibly a bit more variety and a sob story needs to go with one's personal wealth?
It has a bunch of suggestions for cross world trading but a lot of it is just 'more gold. even more gold. more.' And that's got some flaws in it. And even if you say instead other precious metals or suchlike, well, it's going to do things to the economy at both ends.
It also has a section on parallel world culture trading. Movies you 'made' in an alternate Hollywood, sort of thing. Which is epic scale piracy. And you'd have a deal of trouble both making money and keeping your source secret. And if your source was known, I'm pretty sure the Guilds would have words with you about using their members' likenesses, and indeed their alternate members' work. Some form of licensing agreement seems likely to be necessary. And even then, it's not a straightforward venture. You could go the straight to DVD route and just buy a disc and copy it, or try and sell downloads, but even legit avenues are having trouble with that of late. It would be a sight easier with such a very low investment. But there's probably reasons why that particular film didn't take off over here. And with parallels with different histories you'd very swiftly run into differences far more jarring than simple international difference, yet we know movies don't travel between markets that well even on one Earth. Finding that one movie that truly doesn't exist here yet - not in production, not with the script registered somewhere, not in some producers back pocket - and then getting it out into the world in such a way as to make a ton of money... now that's an adventure.
You're probably better of 'discovering' lost episodes. Travelling the multiverse in search of the missing Doctor Who might seem like a bit of an extreme solution, but lets face it, many of us would, if we thought we'd have a chance. And as for finding a 'verse where it was never cancelled... Except then we're getting into the realms of well funded fan films and epic arguments about what constitutes canon, and would the BBC be interested in alternate 90s content? Though come to think the TV might be a better market for such things from current elseworlds, given the budget constraints plus the endless stretches of schedule to fill.
GURPS also reckons that discovering lost classics would make bank. And okay, maybe, but you'd have endless problems of verification, even if the technology was known about. It would probably be treated like ghost written or fraudulent material by most literature specialists. It would look like particularly well written pastiche or fanfiction. Because the value of classics isn't just that they're inherently good - I've had to read a bunch of them, they're pretty frequently not all that good in themselves - it's where they stood in relation to culture, and how they got woven in to other texts. They're intertextually significant. A lost text, by definition, couldn't have influenced anyone else. It's insignificant. It might be of some interest to specialists and particular fans, but it won't be the regular pillar of the curriculum that other works by the same author can be. I mean, see how much of Shakespeare is treated as a living relevant text, compared to how much there actually is. I studied for a whole bunch of years and there's still a ton I've not seen. Discovering a new play isn't going to distract from the endless reworkings of Hamlet.
You'd be better off making quiet deals with the estates of recently deceased megastars, finding 'last' texts by people who died that little bit later in other timelines. And even then I imagine some of them would be having none of it, or would just publish it as alternate world work anyway.
Movies have the most advantage in turning a really expensive thing really cheap, but a lot of that expense is always the advertising that makes it big anyway. Television is hungry, and increasingly skint. Books you can publish a bazillion ways, but I don't see them being more relevant than any other fanfic. And you could try importing some Next Big Thing from an alternate, but there's always so many reasons why things do or do not make it big, you'll be gambling still. And anything from an elseworld is going to be to some degree foreign, and therefore to some degree rejected by the Hollywood machine.
Not easy money.
The other assumption built in to almost all of this is that people will be going from a better place to a worse one. White saviour paradigm. That comment about the third world above, how is it their imagination goes there first of all? Because okay, arriving at a random location may well involve wilderness survival, but it might also be like landing in the middle of the university campus. And Infinite Worlds just kind of rules that out in one because it decides that keeping the secret is the most important thing and generally people don't go to near neighbours of similar tech levels. It builds in the fantasy of superiority. Not at GM level but that was what bugged me about these bits of the rulebook.
If you're travelling to a parallel world, one with any kind of noticeable change at all, there will be a thing they know that you couldn't find out on this Earth. And that's the thing you need to learn. Alternate economic decisions leading to different economic outcomes aren't going to be individually significant, because chaos, but stack them and you could start to get an actual science of economics. And as for scientific research, you really want to get into the pharmacy of every local, because you want to see what antibiotics they've got and what they haven't. Which is also broadly why you don't want to do travel at all, because wow the plague possibilities, but if you can quarantine your actual travellers or only send information back, possibly you won't destroy your world with superflu. And they might have had different research paths, or funding, and not be facing the end of the antibiotic age.
It does feel more fun to imagine time travel to someplace where you're the clever one, rather than to a future where you're more ignorant than the tinies. But it's more useful to go find all those clever discoveries and bring them back. If the clever place will let you at all.
So you'd get time travellers from both directions with different agendas, some of them looking for what they can con out of you, some of them hoping to use your library.
Some of their alt worlds do creep me out though. Casually mentioning that colonisation is probably reserved for empty worlds, but some civs will think Australia and America are fair game... well yes, but that would be what is known as evil. Obviously games need a bit of evil to thwart, but, they could be clearer about that.
An alternate where nobody invented the idea of Empire though, that'd be big different. Enough different it made me think of an SF short where they altered human nature in the hope they wouldn't war and it accidentally made them not culture neither. That's depressing though.
I really do need to start taking some plot bunnies as far as first draft, instead of fiddling around with rulebooks for ages then deciding everything is too problematic.
Says to pack as much data as possible.
"Don’t neglect guides to low-TL medicine and chemistry. The Way Things Work, A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual, and Henley’s Formulas can start you off."
Henley's Formulas is from 1900, but available to download from multiple sources. Seems to me a tad out of date though. ... yeah, reading teh reviews says there's an updated one in 1927 but it's from when science thought mercury was good for you, so, few problems there.
There's several editions of The Way Things Work, a new one coming in October according to amazon, and a CD (so presumably a download from somewhere) from the 2000 version. ... hang on, there's a completely different The Way Things Work from another author as well. It's still about a decade old.
As for the Barefoot Doctor... I'm kind of hoping I'm not finding the one they mean, because it's coming up chinese herbal medicine.
Librarians? Better recs? Purpose is a concise and portable guide to tech, chem and health, suitable for time travellers who may have to live by their wits.
I should find a librarian group to ask.
GURPS also recommends bringing plain gold rings, as a way of bringing money that's solid and yet easy to carry and sell.
Call my brain twisty, but rings imply fingers, and if someone completely new, with no recogniseable origin or family ties happens to turn up in a region, it seems to me they're already suspicious. And if they then have more rings than they personally have fingers, especially if they're a bunch of plain gold wedding rings, well... Bluebeard isn't the half of it. So possibly a bit more variety and a sob story needs to go with one's personal wealth?
It has a bunch of suggestions for cross world trading but a lot of it is just 'more gold. even more gold. more.' And that's got some flaws in it. And even if you say instead other precious metals or suchlike, well, it's going to do things to the economy at both ends.
It also has a section on parallel world culture trading. Movies you 'made' in an alternate Hollywood, sort of thing. Which is epic scale piracy. And you'd have a deal of trouble both making money and keeping your source secret. And if your source was known, I'm pretty sure the Guilds would have words with you about using their members' likenesses, and indeed their alternate members' work. Some form of licensing agreement seems likely to be necessary. And even then, it's not a straightforward venture. You could go the straight to DVD route and just buy a disc and copy it, or try and sell downloads, but even legit avenues are having trouble with that of late. It would be a sight easier with such a very low investment. But there's probably reasons why that particular film didn't take off over here. And with parallels with different histories you'd very swiftly run into differences far more jarring than simple international difference, yet we know movies don't travel between markets that well even on one Earth. Finding that one movie that truly doesn't exist here yet - not in production, not with the script registered somewhere, not in some producers back pocket - and then getting it out into the world in such a way as to make a ton of money... now that's an adventure.
You're probably better of 'discovering' lost episodes. Travelling the multiverse in search of the missing Doctor Who might seem like a bit of an extreme solution, but lets face it, many of us would, if we thought we'd have a chance. And as for finding a 'verse where it was never cancelled... Except then we're getting into the realms of well funded fan films and epic arguments about what constitutes canon, and would the BBC be interested in alternate 90s content? Though come to think the TV might be a better market for such things from current elseworlds, given the budget constraints plus the endless stretches of schedule to fill.
GURPS also reckons that discovering lost classics would make bank. And okay, maybe, but you'd have endless problems of verification, even if the technology was known about. It would probably be treated like ghost written or fraudulent material by most literature specialists. It would look like particularly well written pastiche or fanfiction. Because the value of classics isn't just that they're inherently good - I've had to read a bunch of them, they're pretty frequently not all that good in themselves - it's where they stood in relation to culture, and how they got woven in to other texts. They're intertextually significant. A lost text, by definition, couldn't have influenced anyone else. It's insignificant. It might be of some interest to specialists and particular fans, but it won't be the regular pillar of the curriculum that other works by the same author can be. I mean, see how much of Shakespeare is treated as a living relevant text, compared to how much there actually is. I studied for a whole bunch of years and there's still a ton I've not seen. Discovering a new play isn't going to distract from the endless reworkings of Hamlet.
You'd be better off making quiet deals with the estates of recently deceased megastars, finding 'last' texts by people who died that little bit later in other timelines. And even then I imagine some of them would be having none of it, or would just publish it as alternate world work anyway.
Movies have the most advantage in turning a really expensive thing really cheap, but a lot of that expense is always the advertising that makes it big anyway. Television is hungry, and increasingly skint. Books you can publish a bazillion ways, but I don't see them being more relevant than any other fanfic. And you could try importing some Next Big Thing from an alternate, but there's always so many reasons why things do or do not make it big, you'll be gambling still. And anything from an elseworld is going to be to some degree foreign, and therefore to some degree rejected by the Hollywood machine.
Not easy money.
The other assumption built in to almost all of this is that people will be going from a better place to a worse one. White saviour paradigm. That comment about the third world above, how is it their imagination goes there first of all? Because okay, arriving at a random location may well involve wilderness survival, but it might also be like landing in the middle of the university campus. And Infinite Worlds just kind of rules that out in one because it decides that keeping the secret is the most important thing and generally people don't go to near neighbours of similar tech levels. It builds in the fantasy of superiority. Not at GM level but that was what bugged me about these bits of the rulebook.
If you're travelling to a parallel world, one with any kind of noticeable change at all, there will be a thing they know that you couldn't find out on this Earth. And that's the thing you need to learn. Alternate economic decisions leading to different economic outcomes aren't going to be individually significant, because chaos, but stack them and you could start to get an actual science of economics. And as for scientific research, you really want to get into the pharmacy of every local, because you want to see what antibiotics they've got and what they haven't. Which is also broadly why you don't want to do travel at all, because wow the plague possibilities, but if you can quarantine your actual travellers or only send information back, possibly you won't destroy your world with superflu. And they might have had different research paths, or funding, and not be facing the end of the antibiotic age.
It does feel more fun to imagine time travel to someplace where you're the clever one, rather than to a future where you're more ignorant than the tinies. But it's more useful to go find all those clever discoveries and bring them back. If the clever place will let you at all.
So you'd get time travellers from both directions with different agendas, some of them looking for what they can con out of you, some of them hoping to use your library.
Some of their alt worlds do creep me out though. Casually mentioning that colonisation is probably reserved for empty worlds, but some civs will think Australia and America are fair game... well yes, but that would be what is known as evil. Obviously games need a bit of evil to thwart, but, they could be clearer about that.
An alternate where nobody invented the idea of Empire though, that'd be big different. Enough different it made me think of an SF short where they altered human nature in the hope they wouldn't war and it accidentally made them not culture neither. That's depressing though.
I really do need to start taking some plot bunnies as far as first draft, instead of fiddling around with rulebooks for ages then deciding everything is too problematic.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-19 10:29 pm (UTC)Yes, I wonder about these things.