.
Ask for the gun and the bullets.
Before I’m sent back, shoot the time travel master (nerd!) in the head. Shoot their attendants, too (nerds! nerds!).
Grab all the other options, and load them in the time travel car. VERY IMPORTANT: the Moog will be playing the Knight Rider Theme until further notice.
Time travel back to the Vatican, Apostolic Palace. Driving the motorcycle up to The Pope, I do a jump that involves me turning upside-down OVER the Pope, during which I look down, shove the LSD down the Pope’s throat, and then do an Akira-slide right in front of him.
In fluent Latin, I explain to the Pope that I am a messenger from God who has been sent to deliver a Mighty Revelation. For the next several hours I use all the other options I brought back to astound and amuse The Pope during the LSD trip. During this phase of the experience, the Moog will be playing selections from Pink Floyd, focusing on music from Dark Side and before. The key message of The Revelation is that I am an agent of God to be protected and revered.
After the Pope comes down, I scope out the Vatican’s Cardinals. (The Moog will be playing Guile’s Theme during this phase.) The spices are covertly swapped for hashish and opiates, which I use along with the Warheads candy to bring mini-Revelations to those Cardinals who seem friendly. Those Cardinals who seem hostile to me, are fed bits of the Uranium. I am declared a Cardinal. When the time is right, The Pope is also fed bits of Uranium.
After the Pope dies, a conclave is convened in the Sistine Chapel to select the next Pope. The Moog will be playing Objection from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2001) during this phase. As a Cardinal, I attend, and will use the motorcycle to pop wheelies and do donuts until I am elected.
When I first appear on the Papal balcony, to be revered for the rest of my life as an infallible being whose words must be obeyed without hesitation, the Moog will be playing the instrumental version of We are Number One from Lazy Town, and I will be doing an appropriate dance.
What astonishes me most is that at least half of you are probably highly paid engineers that are debating this on company time instead of using your brainpower for actual problems.
I like it!
Also I choose spices for instant riches and laser for burning out the eyes of my enemy to solidify my identity as a magician. After that we can finally focus on growing weed and mushrooms because y’all know 5 tanks ain’t gonn last long.
Being unproductive is a form of radical resistance that transcends simply materially impacting your employer and their unrealistic expectations on your labor and extends into destabilizing the fundamental narratives burned into your brain by society about what makes you a valuable human and what the basic pursuit of happiness really entails.
I couldn’t agree more. However I do think the revolution would be more accessible with some punctuation now and then.
Tell that to Thomas Pynchon
Kinda surprised there aren’t a lot of people choosing the castle. Could probably donate that to the royal family for enough cash to get reasonably started and probably get awarded some kind of title or at least a court position with a generous salary.
10 jars of spices and the motorcycle. Selected properly and in big enough jars, I could become a very rich man selling those spices.
The bike I’d have an artisan painstakingly disassemble while documenting it for recreation.
It’s bound to have a battery, lights, alternator, and some semiconductors. Use them to bootstrap electronics.
The engine could be retrofitted to run off alcohol, or use it with steam. Don’t know how possible that is.
The springs would make for killer crossbows. Tire rubber, too.
Really, the motorbike is a mountain of treasure.
These are all terrible options.
Motorcycle isn’t abad choice. You get an alternator and a battery out if the deal. You can rig up a simple water turbine to charge it easily enough. You also get a bunch of steel, rubber/plastics, some wire, tubes, and a couple of pretty good lightbulbs (possibly even an LED one depending on the headlight/taillight). Taking the magic Moog as the 2nd option seems like the best idea considering it’s magic.
Sure, but they’re terrible options because of how dumb people used to be. Like, you’d probably have to keep it secret or get called a witch or something.
Something I think would be more useful would be seeds for crops, specifically resistant to plant diseases that would have been devastating back then. Like, take some potatoes that are resistant to whatever caused the Irish famine. That wouldn’t be as likely to get you burned at the stake for being in service to the devil
You might have some issues with potatoes in the medieval period. The Irish potato famine happened because potatoes radically changed the amount of calories you could grow on a set peice of land. The population spiked and crashed because of land efficiency dependancy over the course of years but that all happened well past the medieval period that was more the Industrial Revolution.
The potato was not really a thing in the medieval period. They started showing up in the Renaissance as a curiosity from the new world and took a long time to actually take off since they were very unpopular as a food… Like strangely unpopular. They actually started gaining popularity first as a decorative plant.
Mind you they are dead easy to grow so if your intention is to farm them for personal use for food security they are a solid pick. Still since they are something nobody around you would have seen before you would probably need to construct an adequate lie about how you got them.
The potato famine happened because Britain stole all of Ireland’s potato’s. There were ships full of potatoes leaving Ireland regularly. There was no actual issue with growing food, except that potatoes were too cheap for the capitalists to profit off ofby selling them back to the Irish.
Well… No. It’s more complicated than that. The Irish potato famine happened because the lack of genetic diversity in the crop and a wet humid year caused a massive viral collapse ( scientific name for the blight :Phytophthora infestans) which caused the crop to turn to sludge in the ground. The effect wasn’t limited to Ireland, big chunks of England, Wales and Scotland also had the crop collapse… The fact it was so deadly though and why we call it the “Irish Potato famine” and not the British / Irish /Welsh and Scottish Potato Famine ", that was mostly capitalist bullshitery. There was a lesser known " Highland Potato Famine " but Scotland got away mostly unscathed by comparison by basically holding landlords highly to account for famine relief early and received greater charitable relief due to better solidarity between Scotland and England.
The flashpoint was all caused by the fact potatoes grow in much poorer soil than other crops the population which had seen an overall increase due to the caloric production increase. Basically the population rose because of production of the crop and then saw massive hardship because the crop when it failed could not be easily replaced by sowing other alternative crops. The viral collapse of the potato crop lasted practically a decade. If it was simply the matter of one bad year the supply and storage of other food stuffs would have softened the impact and they would have recovered over the next couple of years while they sowed other crops like they were used to doing when other crops failed… but the land literally couldn’t support other crops because the soil was way too poor. It was potatoes or bust and the potatoes were damn near impossible to propagate unless you were lucky and your tiny potato patch was properly isolated… Which most people’s weren’t.
Other crops like cereal grains (including some of the less popular ones like millet and corn) were bought up in bulk and imported by the British back to England but they basically diverted everything they could from Ireland early and once they had secured a sustained cereal grain supply to England from the colonies they never distributed anything back to Ireland despite the ongoing humanitarian crisis. The British were bastards who actively and “passively” contributed to the famine deaths via tremendous greed… But the potato crop failure was real and there were more than a few extra steps in the plot that was more about grain import/exports to make up for the shortfall than moving potatoes around… Because the potatoes were basically just rotted slime.
