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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Shoot, maybe I really underestimated how hard it is to do this.

I've had this fantasy of traveling a thousand years into the past and trying to teach monks and engigneors modern technology with just my layman's understanding. I was pretty much going to try experimenting with feeding moldy bread to dudes with the bubonic plague.

Welp... if I ever get a time machine I guess I won't be doing that.

You could write a whole genre of fiction about that.

The destiny's crucible series by Olan Thorensen is like this. The writing is not amazing but if you don't care too much about that it scratches that kind of itch.

Axis of Time which is WW2 focused.

You can introduce the spinning wheel, four field system, new world crops, and printing press and see big QoL improvements though.

I've had this fantasy of traveling a thousand years into the past and trying to teach monks and engigneors modern technology with just my layman's understanding. I was pretty much going to try experimenting with feeding moldy bread to dudes with the bubonic plague.

Just try to get everyone to wash their damn hands and you're golden.

That is not how the plague spread- the plague, typhus, etc are spread by fleas carried by rodents. As it turns out, most people don't like drinking dirty water or eating with dirty hands for 'ew' reasons, even without germ theory.

It's possible that the premodern custom of controlling cat populations by killing them for sport was an exacerbating factor to the plague, but rat and mouse overpopulation also kinda just happens in densely packed slums.

Hard to do when everyone is shitting in the water supply.

Better be careful it's the right sort of mould; not just useful penicillin grows on stale bread, the wrong species of aspergillus will make you very sorry you tried it. And again, without the theoretical knowledge and tech to identify "is this blackish mould the right one or not?", you're taking a big chance.

Some Aspergillus species cause serious disease in humans and animals. The most common pathogenic species are A. fumigatus and A. flavus, which produces aflatoxin which is both a toxin and a carcinogen, and which can contaminate foods such as nuts. The most common species causing allergic disease are A. fumigatus and A. clavatus. Other species are important as agricultural pathogens. Aspergillus spp. cause disease on many grain crops, especially maize, and some variants synthesize mycotoxins, including aflatoxin. Aspergillus can cause neonatal infections.

Yes. There's a whole sub branch of my fantasy that involves me getting chased down as a warlock (male witch) representative of Satan because of failed Galileo things.

Edit: there's no weird arse fetish about this. I just expect that this is how this sort of thing would go down.

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