At least, you’ll have an idea of what’s going on in your new dimension
Yeah fuck food or clean water, let’s read
Reading history books is the right thing to do, in every dimension you are
Checks to see if it’s titled Bearinstein Bears or Barenstain Bears
First thing you do is find a public library. If the concept of a public library exists in this reality, you’re likely not completely fucked.
If there is no public library, and no one has ever heard of one, you are DEFINITELY fucked.
what if all they have are libraries, the concept of one not being public is alien to them
Then you’ve won the dimensional jackpot and you should immediately start trying to thwart any misguided attempts from folks in your original dimension to “rescue” you.
how you gon read alternate dimension language?
you’d probably have to find several by different tyoes of people, to make sure you aren’t reading a biased account :p
If your only goal is to find out the current culture of the place you’re currently in, the biased one would likely be better.
Exactly, depending on the world/kingdom/government you’d find yourself in, the local history books may be propaganda.
Hot take, but the propagandized version would likely be better, since your goal is to find out the present day conditions rather than actual history. What a government wants its citizens to think (and more importantly, how it expects them to behave) is probably more important than finding out actual details of history that early in your stay.
Even so, you may not have the real truth, but you’ll know what you need to navigate the society you are currently in.
Perhaps even written by Victoria.
Not sure how many people in this dimension have read one.
(Obvious comment is obvious)
I can think of 77 Million who haven’t.
I’m sure they’ve read the Bill Cooper collected works.
Like looking at a git log when you clone a new repo.
Make sure to assume it’s all propaganda as well
Good idea. You should also figure out if the new universe is in the past. Could give you some nice foreknowledge.
The gambler!
You should read Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein. This is basically the main theme
funny that Heinlein is mentioned. dude was a libertarian Nazi propagandist.
take all his works with a pound of salt.
Uh, curious where you got that from, especially since I don’t see how you can be both a Nazi and a libertarian. Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?
I don’t see how you can be both a Nazi and a libertarian.
there’s a whole bunch of Ron Paul supporters that certainly turned out that way…
Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?
yes!
Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?
yes!
There’s your problem. Just because an author writes a book with a world building premise does not mean they fully endorse the world created. In Stranger in a Strange Land, which came out less than two years later, the main character creates a free love hippie movement. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a few years later, is about a revolution against authoritarian oppression.
If a person names as his three favorites of my books Stranger, Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers … then I believe that he has grokked what I meant. But if he likes one—but not the other two—I am certain that he has misunderstood me, he has picked out points—and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks 2 of 3, then there is hope, 1 of 3—no hope. All three books are on one subject: Freedom and Self-Responsibility.
Heinlein wrote thought experiments. He wrote about the relationship between people and the society they live in. To that end, he wrote about a number of different kinds of society, and how people related to them. Insofar as you could ascribe any particular political ideology to him based on his writings, he was broadly anti-authoritarian. Nothing remotely close to a Nazi.
First you have to realise you infact are in alternate dimension.
Easy. Just look for how to spell “Berenstain Bears”.
That’s not how it’s spe…
…wait a minute!!
I’d go with water.
Sorry the dimension you’ve been transported to has laws of physics that don’t allow water to exist.
Which means you’ve got a few precious seconds to get yourself home before you violently erupt as your water molecules each individually break apart in to hydrazine.
Oh no, it would be way worse than that. If water can’t exist, then it’s very likely that the concept of molecules as we know them don’t exist either, or at the minimum, either hydrogen or oxygen doesn’t exist.
The printing press is a very new invention in our universe. Before then books were for the rich. Often too history is written by the victors and so it missing a lot of important details that might or might not matter.
Come to think of it intelligent life such as could write books seems to be new. (but we have no ability to detect life elsewhere if it exists so who knows)
Or a newspaper from a seemingly trustworthy source
Then you find out that it is a pseudo-rational populist newspaper (like WELT or anything in the US I guess) and you are fooled.
