80s? Get as big of a loan as you can from anywhere you can, then buy Hasboro, Nike, Disney, McDonald's, Walmart. Then sell off Hasboro in the 90s to buy Apple or Cisco, sell McD's and Nike in the 00s to buy Sandisk or Nvidia, and sell Disney in the 10s to buy Tesla, and enjoy your fuck off money from there out.
Assuming I'm transported back as myself at my current age?
Figure out the whole identity issue (no paperwork), but then invest in Apple and Microsoft, wait it out a few years, stop my mom from marrying my dad, and help her figure out her medical troubles early enough to change things.
Nah, Mama found out she was pregnant less than hour before walking down the aisle.
She said many times she wished she had not gone through with it once she knew. And while I love my dad, he was not good for her, or her business, or a great dad during his dad-ing years. He's a lot better now, but all of us, including him, would have been better off if he'd been the guy we saw on weekends, y'know?
Other than Save Sara Connor, everyone has this wrong.
Faking an identity is easy. Back then it was all paper, and for Americans, SSNs were only just barely standard. Say you grew up in some rural bumblefuck place and sign up for everything fresh. Full Tara Westover story would work.
Next, find your grandparents. Convince them you know them from something through a friend they've mentioned to you and crash on their couch long enough to get a basic job, then apartment, car, and grow a moustache. Which should take about 3-4 weeks. Restist your mom's advances and attempts to take you to a high school dance.
Next, get to the west coast and start selling and buying up real estate. Buy and sell Hollywood back to itself until 1988. Then start buying real estate in New York. On the side, buy stock in all the classic tech companies, Nintendo, and in the military industrial complex. By 1993, you'd be a millionaire. From there, do whatever you want. Buy early and sell AOL stock. Blackberry. GE.
Then do good things in the world. Pull the fire alarms in the WTC at 8:45am on 9/11. Get a certain orange therapy so he stays with Ivanna for the kids. Invent Paypal first and steal the other half of it from Peter Thiel. Convince Woz, Gates, and Jobs that the future is in open source software. Find Linus Torvalds and mail him a billion euros. The morning before the Citizens United decision, bribe Clarence Thomas to abstain and pull the fire alarm. Mail Bernie Sanders $52 every week, anonymously. Get the pilots of Pam Am 103 super hammered the night before so the fight gets cancelled. Organize a London public transit boycott for 7/6/2005 lasting 3 days. Find the people that cancelled Firefly and murder them, wear their faces as a mask, and make sure the series goes at least 5 seasons.
I grew up in a place not too dissimilar from how she grew up, with plenty of fundy LDS nearby. My wife read her book and was telling me about it, and the whole time I was thinking "Oh, good for her. Wait... do I know this person? I don't know anyone named Tara..." Anyway, the world isn't as wrote and straightforward as people think.
Great idea until you realize that the architects of project 2025 would have found a replacement that would be smarter and more capable to bring Fascism to America. It would actually make things worse.
What is my living situation? Do I have money? If I have the resources I'm gonna be planning a roadtrip to remove a bunch of future problems from the timeline.
First I'd bask in all the social and financial safety nets that Reagan and the Bushes hadn't been able to destroy yet. Watch some pro-union TV ads. Then try to meet Mr Rogers and Ramblin' Rod.
Then I'd probably try to invent rechargeable lithium tetrahydride batteries a couple years ahead of time, use the money to invest in MS and Oracle, and funnel the profits to Enron and Bernie Madoff before their bottoms drop out. Once I'm too rich to jail, I'd have some other people I'd want to "meet"... while armed.
I know the chemistry and I know some of the universities working on it in the 70s and 80s. I don't know how I'd get in the door with no credentials. I like to think I could talk myself into Oxford... it's delusional, but I like to think it.
Jork it to some bushy tri folds then look for a T-top to cruise. Find some of that good cocaine that the CIA is selling for the road trip to all the nearest Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, etc. shows
To my existing body?
I guess I would shit myself. It’s gonna be a bit before I can walk and talk and tell everyone of the horrors to come. I won’t really have autonomy until the 2000’s.
In my current body?
I guess I take what little I know of that time period to try to send people to prison for Iran-Contra/prevent the crack epidemic, try to help blunt the HIV epidemic, get renewable energy moved forward, and other pro-social things. I’d give OJ a flat, so SUV’s wouldn’t have gotten popularized. I’d prevent the election of Bush in ‘00, and would give several politicians little nudges here and there. I would of course also become filthy fucking rich by using knowledge of the future (that I was actively changing).
None of that would be reliable anymore, unless you can bet on geological events. Your presence would have a ripple effect that alters events more and more as time goes on. Every interaction with you knocks people off their original timeline, and every person they interact with is knocked off their timeline. This begins localized around you but quickly spreads until even uncontested tribes are no longer on their original timeline. The timelines diverge more and more as time goes on. Something as volatile as sporting events become hard to predict very quickly. The stock market probably follows similar trends for a few years but becomes more difficult to predict, your knowledge of successful products is probably still helpful. After 10 years no babies originally born in that year will be born, the chances of the same egg meeting the same sperm is incredibly unlikely. The world is unrecognizable.
Fucking panic, try to get a life together, and watch the whole world lose their complete shit at 9/11 again. But like. I'll buy popcorn this time you know.
Did the whole world lose their shit? I was in primary school at the time which might be part of it but I didn't really notice that much in the UK as far as day to day life goes.
Two years later the UK joined the US in invading Iraq. NATO Article 5 was invoked for the first time. Afghanistan was invaded with again, help from the UK. The war on* terror began in earnest, leading to millions of deaths and ten times the displacement of people. All over the world bombings, kidnappings, torture sites were opened and used for decades, some ran by the UK.
Assuming my wife would be gone so I'd probably grieve for a very long period. Or is there a way to go back? Or is she there too? MARIE??? WHERE ARE YOU MARIE????
Not knowing the specifics of how this game works, but assuming I'm 17 again and everything is the same as it was, I go to my first GF's house and... yeah.
Because that was one of the best years of my life. I hope the game is that I get to live my life over from that point, knowing everything I know now, because I would do a lot differently.
Move far away and do as little as possible for effectively the rest of my life, to prevent some butterfly effect shit from interfering with the birth of my child. Become a fucking hermit in Spain or the Philippines or something.
Run away from home, go to a large coastal city. Fake up a head injury, play the amnesia card. Bide my time. Finish school with stellar grades, get a scholarship. Take my same degree, network better. Graduate, get the dream job I wanted originally. Invest, retire early. Disappear.
After kind of freaking out I'd remember all the information I've accumulated over my previous lifetime and be pretty happy. I'd know what the future holds and use that to my advantage.
To me it seems, even if we were plopped down into the moment and everything is again exactly as it was, that from that instant forward things would change. Nothing would play out the same way, and the farther we moved along the timeline from that point, the more things would be different. Five years after you arrive, it's a very different world from the one you knew before, or read about. It's chaos theory.
So, the idea that one could shape the future, by stopping expected future events is silly, apart from the immediate future around the instant you appeared, but good luck remembering any of that, if you were even alive then before. Everything will spin off in different directions on a second pass, nothing will play out the same exact way.
The really big things like the climate issue and the eventual fall of USSR are still going to happen, but no one will listen to you, same as today. There might still be a big terrorist attack around 2001, but exactly what and where will be unknown to you, but more likely it will be years before or after, or not at all. Lottery numbers won't be the same, there won't be the same companies on the stock market. The knowledge about the future-past you experienced is useless.
The only thing that helps is your knowledge about life's universal principals, and a better understanding what you do and don't want for yourself. Your life will be different, because you'll be able to make better choices, but everything else will be different too.
My instant and extremely violent suicide would go down in history. They'd write songs about the cloud of bone talc I'd disappear into like a jihadist ninja. Studies would be performed to discover just how finely my corporal form was disassembled, firing my few remaining atoms around the Large Hadron Collider with such force that I break free of time and space and enter the 4th dimension, but even the 4D scientists living there will have no clue how I managed to die so fucking thoroughly.
115 replies
Buy some stock.
Buy Apple
Or oranges, produce used to be mad affordable
I guess I don't know the rules around this time traveling adventure, but hopefully you're in it for the long haul.
I'd buy Microsoft myself. Perhaps sometime around the very late 90's sell it then buy Apple.
80s? Get as big of a loan as you can from anywhere you can, then buy Hasboro, Nike, Disney, McDonald's, Walmart. Then sell off Hasboro in the 90s to buy Apple or Cisco, sell McD's and Nike in the 00s to buy Sandisk or Nvidia, and sell Disney in the 10s to buy Tesla, and enjoy your fuck off money from there out.
Stop my parents from meeting.
Save Sarah Connor
Best answer by far.
You'll have to wait for the terminator to move on her before you zero him.
Assuming I'm transported back as myself at my current age?
Figure out the whole identity issue (no paperwork), but then invest in Apple and Microsoft, wait it out a few years, stop my mom from marrying my dad, and help her figure out her medical troubles early enough to change things.
But what if you stop your mom from marrying your dad and then you just cease to exist because you've paradoxed yourself? 🤔🧐
Nah, Mama found out she was pregnant less than hour before walking down the aisle.
She said many times she wished she had not gone through with it once she knew. And while I love my dad, he was not good for her, or her business, or a great dad during his dad-ing years. He's a lot better now, but all of us, including him, would have been better off if he'd been the guy we saw on weekends, y'know?
What if having never been born they become outside of time and can never die!
Say “why’s it so dark in here?” from my dad’s nutsack
The boys are back in town!
Might as well talk some shit to the other sperm about what a bunch of slow-ass lames they are.
Other than Save Sara Connor, everyone has this wrong.
Faking an identity is easy. Back then it was all paper, and for Americans, SSNs were only just barely standard. Say you grew up in some rural bumblefuck place and sign up for everything fresh. Full Tara Westover story would work.
Next, find your grandparents. Convince them you know them from something through a friend they've mentioned to you and crash on their couch long enough to get a basic job, then apartment, car, and grow a moustache. Which should take about 3-4 weeks. Restist your mom's advances and attempts to take you to a high school dance.
Next, get to the west coast and start selling and buying up real estate. Buy and sell Hollywood back to itself until 1988. Then start buying real estate in New York. On the side, buy stock in all the classic tech companies, Nintendo, and in the military industrial complex. By 1993, you'd be a millionaire. From there, do whatever you want. Buy early and sell AOL stock. Blackberry. GE.
Then do good things in the world. Pull the fire alarms in the WTC at 8:45am on 9/11. Get a certain orange therapy so he stays with Ivanna for the kids. Invent Paypal first and steal the other half of it from Peter Thiel. Convince Woz, Gates, and Jobs that the future is in open source software. Find Linus Torvalds and mail him a billion euros. The morning before the Citizens United decision, bribe Clarence Thomas to abstain and pull the fire alarm. Mail Bernie Sanders $52 every week, anonymously. Get the pilots of Pam Am 103 super hammered the night before so the fight gets cancelled. Organize a London public transit boycott for 7/6/2005 lasting 3 days. Find the people that cancelled Firefly and murder them, wear their faces as a mask, and make sure the series goes at least 5 seasons.
You know, chill stuff like that.
Who is Tara Westover? Nevermind, I'll just Google i- FUCK.
Yeah, wild, isn't it?
I grew up in a place not too dissimilar from how she grew up, with plenty of fundy LDS nearby. My wife read her book and was telling me about it, and the whole time I was thinking "Oh, good for her. Wait... do I know this person? I don't know anyone named Tara..." Anyway, the world isn't as wrote and straightforward as people think.
I have to say, this plan is well thought out.
Like my house blips to 83, or I'm 8 again?
House: sports bets
Me: sports bets
"bet it all on green"
"sir this is horse betting"
"GREEN"
"And the winner by a nose is GREEN THE BROWN HORSE!"
WOO-HOO!
visit New York and take out some trash before it gets too orange
Find evidence of Trump's crimes and try to get him convicted, or at least discredited, before people even think about electing him
Great idea until you realize that the architects of project 2025 would have found a replacement that would be smarter and more capable to bring Fascism to America. It would actually make things worse.
I don't think you understand the part he plays. A smarter replacement may not have been so easily manipulated to follow their plans.
They still would need a charismatic leader in a position of power to do anything.
If time travel exists, this is the optimal timeline.
It's funny that this has become the new "kill Hitler" move.
Visit new born me and …
What is my living situation? Do I have money? If I have the resources I'm gonna be planning a roadtrip to remove a bunch of future problems from the timeline.
You must be fun at city councils
See my brother and mother again.
Oof. Sorry.
First I'd bask in all the social and financial safety nets that Reagan and the Bushes hadn't been able to destroy yet. Watch some pro-union TV ads. Then try to meet Mr Rogers and Ramblin' Rod.
Then I'd probably try to invent rechargeable lithium tetrahydride batteries a couple years ahead of time, use the money to invest in MS and Oracle, and funnel the profits to Enron and Bernie Madoff before their bottoms drop out. Once I'm too rich to jail, I'd have some other people I'd want to "meet"... while armed.
Do you know how to invent rechargeable lithium tetrahydride batteries right now?
I know the chemistry and I know some of the universities working on it in the 70s and 80s. I don't know how I'd get in the door with no credentials. I like to think I could talk myself into Oxford... it's delusional, but I like to think it.
I think things sometimes too. Its comforting.
Your mom does
Freak out coz i didnt exist then and dont know whose house i woke up in
Cease to exist
Fuck off even harder than I ever did, enjoy bikes and the woods and frogs and friends and arcades even more (if that's possible).
Then in the 90s, invest in stocks, real estate, more stocks, then bitcoin.
Wait 3 years and tell my mom to get an abortion.
Same
That's peasant talk.
Steal his future.
Then we'd just have an other Musk to kill.
"No, with me, it'll be different!"
Sure it will, buddy. Sure.
Go to kindergarten, same as always
I was born in 1983, so everything?
go back to sleep, too early for that bullshit.
Ur mom
Top kek, xXxButtMuncher69420xXx
Jork it to some bushy tri folds then look for a T-top to cruise. Find some of that good cocaine that the CIA is selling for the road trip to all the nearest Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, etc. shows
To my existing body?
I guess I would shit myself. It’s gonna be a bit before I can walk and talk and tell everyone of the horrors to come. I won’t really have autonomy until the 2000’s.
In my current body?
I guess I take what little I know of that time period to try to send people to prison for Iran-Contra/prevent the crack epidemic, try to help blunt the HIV epidemic, get renewable energy moved forward, and other pro-social things. I’d give OJ a flat, so SUV’s wouldn’t have gotten popularized. I’d prevent the election of Bush in ‘00, and would give several politicians little nudges here and there. I would of course also become filthy fucking rich by using knowledge of the future (that I was actively changing).
Go back to sleep. Finally I can get the 43 years of sleep I always wanted!
I'd be broke af because I dont have the right currency and probably start a pandemic with some ultra resistant virus.
Invest in CD players.
Sell my hockey cards and buy Microsoft.
Wish I had memorized winning lottery numbers
You did, they're called the Fortune 500
I'd miss my wife.
nothing because my parents were barely in elementary school
I stop existing
The dream
Buy stock in all the obvious companys
Be me
Wake up in 1983
Realize I've got the opportunity of a lifetime
Reach into my wallet: Empty
Check my bank account: Empty
Check couch cushions: $1.47
Feel kinda hungry.
Remember what you can buy at Taco Bell for $1.47 in 1983.
Have lunch.
Go get a job at Blockbuster.
Kick back for the next twenty years.
Immediately make a list of everything that will happen in the future that I can bet on or invest in.
None of that would be reliable anymore, unless you can bet on geological events. Your presence would have a ripple effect that alters events more and more as time goes on. Every interaction with you knocks people off their original timeline, and every person they interact with is knocked off their timeline. This begins localized around you but quickly spreads until even uncontested tribes are no longer on their original timeline. The timelines diverge more and more as time goes on. Something as volatile as sporting events become hard to predict very quickly. The stock market probably follows similar trends for a few years but becomes more difficult to predict, your knowledge of successful products is probably still helpful. After 10 years no babies originally born in that year will be born, the chances of the same egg meeting the same sperm is incredibly unlikely. The world is unrecognizable.
Marty McFly has entered the chat.
Ohhh so THATS why all the airlines were shorted
buy bitcoin
Have fun doing nothing for almost 3 decades.
…in 30 years.
Sterilize one of my parent, whichever, then fade out of reality in peace.
Shift in the womb. Maybe kick a little to let my mom know to eat something for the both of us.
Oh no I'm back in the nutsack. A shitty situation to be aware of things
Fucking panic, try to get a life together, and watch the whole world lose their complete shit at 9/11 again. But like. I'll buy popcorn this time you know.
Did the whole world lose their shit? I was in primary school at the time which might be part of it but I didn't really notice that much in the UK as far as day to day life goes.
Two years later the UK joined the US in invading Iraq. NATO Article 5 was invoked for the first time. Afghanistan was invaded with again, help from the UK. The war on* terror began in earnest, leading to millions of deaths and ten times the displacement of people. All over the world bombings, kidnappings, torture sites were opened and used for decades, some ran by the UK.
Yea they lost their fucking marbles I'd say.
That depends: am I my current age or the age I was in 1983?
Seeing as I was born on the penultimate day of 1982, I wouldn't have a lot of choices if it's the latter 😁
Get Jodie Foster's attention?
Write a letter to the lead singer of Anvil, tell him that it's time to give it up & hire a fucking songwriter.
Not exist I guess.
Begin existing somehow because i wasn't born for about a decade
Acquire drugs and go see Koyaanisqatsi.
Assuming my wife would be gone so I'd probably grieve for a very long period. Or is there a way to go back? Or is she there too? MARIE??? WHERE ARE YOU MARIE????
I'd put out what I can remember of 'Graceland' and beat Paul Simon to the punch.
Steal Graceland from Paul Simon and give it back to Los Lobos.
Not knowing the specifics of how this game works, but assuming I'm 17 again and everything is the same as it was, I go to my first GF's house and... yeah.
Because that was one of the best years of my life. I hope the game is that I get to live my life over from that point, knowing everything I know now, because I would do a lot differently.
Check what season of TNG is on and get ready to leave home early.
Season -4
https://xkcd.com/1245/
Sounds like Q did it again!
Perfect, I didn't exist yet. I'll stop my parents from having me
Appropriate username
Move far away and do as little as possible for effectively the rest of my life, to prevent some butterfly effect shit from interfering with the birth of my child. Become a fucking hermit in Spain or the Philippines or something.
Weird, this image has all the artifacts like if it's on its 30th screenshot&repost, but I never saw it before
Run away from home, go to a large coastal city. Fake up a head injury, play the amnesia card. Bide my time. Finish school with stellar grades, get a scholarship. Take my same degree, network better. Graduate, get the dream job I wanted originally. Invest, retire early. Disappear.
Get really confused because I've never been then before
After kind of freaking out I'd remember all the information I've accumulated over my previous lifetime and be pretty happy. I'd know what the future holds and use that to my advantage.
Start doing food prep. Guess I'll have to start making my own oat milk and tofu.
To me it seems, even if we were plopped down into the moment and everything is again exactly as it was, that from that instant forward things would change. Nothing would play out the same way, and the farther we moved along the timeline from that point, the more things would be different. Five years after you arrive, it's a very different world from the one you knew before, or read about. It's chaos theory.
So, the idea that one could shape the future, by stopping expected future events is silly, apart from the immediate future around the instant you appeared, but good luck remembering any of that, if you were even alive then before. Everything will spin off in different directions on a second pass, nothing will play out the same exact way.
The really big things like the climate issue and the eventual fall of USSR are still going to happen, but no one will listen to you, same as today. There might still be a big terrorist attack around 2001, but exactly what and where will be unknown to you, but more likely it will be years before or after, or not at all. Lottery numbers won't be the same, there won't be the same companies on the stock market. The knowledge about the future-past you experienced is useless.
The only thing that helps is your knowledge about life's universal principals, and a better understanding what you do and don't want for yourself. Your life will be different, because you'll be able to make better choices, but everything else will be different too.
I'd still be in the womb so... Try and get the umbilical chord to wrap around my neck.
My instant and extremely violent suicide would go down in history. They'd write songs about the cloud of bone talc I'd disappear into like a jihadist ninja. Studies would be performed to discover just how finely my corporal form was disassembled, firing my few remaining atoms around the Large Hadron Collider with such force that I break free of time and space and enter the 4th dimension, but even the 4D scientists living there will have no clue how I managed to die so fucking thoroughly.
Cool! Hard reset
Am I the age I was in 1983? Because that would make me an unfertilized egg waiting for ovulation.
A lot of people think they can change the world in major ways from the past but not in the present around here again.
Change my underwear
Get a "hoard bitcoin" tattoo on my thigh.
I wasn’t born yet, but I’d invest every dime I could, I’d be retired by 40 and travel the world, play golf, fish and enjoy life
Just in time to keep my parents from making me :D
Enjoy my childhood again. I have no major regrets in life and I'm happy. Why fuck that up?