No Stupid Questions

Use all the science i know from school to helpfully quicken scientific progress and spread trans propaganda

find the nearest sword and belly flop on its pointy side

I become a scribe or accountant, since I can write cursive, do math, and know some Latin.
There was a monastery within walking distance of my home at that time, so that's where I'd head first.

Prophecy some major upcoming events, subsequently market myself as a saint, grab a comfy church position, sell indulgences, profit. Works in pretty much any era.

I'm in Japan and while I can speak modern Japanese I don't know shit about classical Japanese so I'd be screwed. I'm also not Japanese so good chance I end up getting killed or some shit

Assuming I’m snapped back to the same part of the earth, climate-wise that’s ideal in the US PNW coming out of spring. Plenty of berries and food to forage, and I’ll probably impress the natives with my watch and well made clothes. I can probably get the native tribes to metals, and gain acceptance with my magic hand tool that will briefly shine light at night for a few weeks. I don’t know offhand where copper would be, but I know gold is in the streams, and I know how to placer mine, so I can get some electricity going with that and magnetized rocks from lava flows.

I think first contact would be the key.

I'd be fucked. I'm not succeeding in the present, I see 0 reason to believe that would be different in 1375.

650 years ago this place was a sea. So I’d end up having to swim at least a couple of kilometers. Considering the current sea temperatures, I’d probably die of hypothermia before I could reach the shore.

There's a former nunnery down the road. I suppose I'd try to join. Or maybe find a farmer who's looking for someone to look after his kids because his third wife died in childbirth.

Fly under the radar as much as possible, find a cute girl and settle down and have a lot of kids.

Anyone else a fan of Nate Bargatze?

Good thing I binge isekai anime

This is very A Connecticut Yankee in King Author's Court

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur%27s_Court

I hated that book. So pretentious.

Probably not the answer you thought, but succeed by knowing there are wild animals that could easily kill me. It's either I die by that, or wait until the lack of my blood thinners kills me, sl I'd definitely take the quicker death than the slower one.

First I would seek the attention of the local ruler by cooking interesting dishes with modern knowledge.

Then I would ask him to create an akademy. I don't know the details but I know what can be known. Intelligent people will reinvent the knowledge.

Some side businesses should make enough money that the akademy and thus further development doesn't entirely rely on the king.

Build cities with public transport and no cars, because there is no car.

Success.

Well, staying in the same location? I'm in the US, so... I'd probably try to get writing invented. To my knowledge, besides some of the Central American empires, there's no evidence or even claim of there having been any kind of writing or system for making information durable. I know there's a lot of clay here, I'm pretty sure we could bake clay tablets to store down information. There's also tule reeds here that were already being extensively used, and those could probably be made into a kind of paper as well. As to whether the people would accept that, I have no fucking idea at all; what we know of the California tribes suggests they were always semi-nomadic, but that's all very well into the post-contact period and much of what we know was written down by the Spanish while being the biggest bastards they possibly could to the locals. I dunno how useful record-keeping would be to a nomadic people. It's also entirely possible the people would be like "uh, yeah, we know how to write, dummy", and it was just lost in the multiple waves of pandemics.

I think probably something that -might- be achievable is figuring out glass. I'm mostly sure that if the native Americans had glass, we would have seen some sign of it in the archeological record by now. I'm sure some smarty pants is going to come along and tell me "you can't just throw sand in a kiln and make glass, you need a special kind of sand blah blah blah and here's 99 reasons why that won't work". Yeah, you're probably right, but I don't know any better, so I'd still definitely try. I also remember reading that clear glass was a thing figured out near Venice when they started adding grass ash or some shit to the sand, so I'd definitely experiment with that, too. Glass is just dead useful -and- pretty, so I'm fairly confident I'd get some acceptance that way.

I would say metal smithing, but the only metal deposits nearby that I know of are mercury and gold. You can't make nails and tools out of mercury and gold.

Also, maybe water wheels? To my knowledge, we have no record of native Americans using water wheels for work (I.e. grinding corn or acorns into flour). I think if I managed to put a basic water wheel together, I'd be pretty popular.

Start a cult.

Everything I've seen for the last decade indicates it's pretty easy and highly profitable.

Basically start digging my grave, wondering if I'm gonna die from my asthma or my dermatitis first in that era. I'm betting on my asthma.

Well, I'm in America, so...

I guess I'd prep the natives to help put up a proper fight. Find a way to teach them that white people (like myself) carry diseases and to stay away and keep them away. If they land on your shores, drive them back. Never let them get a foothold. I'd try to convince them that I was a demon that got away from the other demons to warn of our coming.

I'd do my best to make it so nobody remembered the name Christopher Columbus except as the idiot that died because he thought the world was much smaller than it is and never returned from his voyage.

Depends what clothes I'm wearing when it happens.

If I'm wearing anything that could remotely be seen as fancy back then (which I mean a lot of modern clothes could pass off as), since I'm near the ocean, I'd immediately run into the water not seeing anyone, and then pretend I'm a royal foreigner who ended up shipwrecked. Since I usually wear a watch, have a tungsten (Wolfram) crystal wedding band as well, that would help me in passing off as royalty as well. This is assuming the people helping me aren't brigands. There's things we do and know of that we take for granted that could be used to pass off as someone upper class too, like reading.

Then next steps would be to get to an aristocrats home, and eventually I'd imagine somewhere where I could work with scholars so they can teach me the language and we can work on translation so we can understand each other. Would have to be extremely careful of smallpox during all this of course.

Once we could, that's when I'd finally whip out my phone to trusted scholars and pull up my survival books, books on plumbing, etc specifically, and to explain that this is a special metal and glass book that can hold many books that's common in the land I'm from, and that I can teach them how to build them. But that we'd need to build plumbing because I'd like a shower by then.

Try to use some type of boiling water technique to invent drinkable sanitary drinking water that doesn't get me drunk (might not be necessary in some parts of Asia)

Most parts of the world that is not North America: try to convince some wealthy persons and bar owners to sponsor me to getting a bunch of bread molds and rats/mice, possibly even pigs, to conduct antibiotics and vaccine research, otherwise I might die from random sources...

Not sure if I could reasonably do those given my limited biology knowledge, but I guess they are worth trying. Besides that I'd just try to be less blunt/offensive so I don't get sent to jail and try to live my best life I guess

The Ring of Fire series which is about this concept was such an amazing read. Unfortunately the infinite branching plotlines became way more than I could handle.

Slowly and with plenty of witnesses invent the toilet. But like out of wood pieces like a barrel or ship. Rain barrel on the roof for water. Start suggesting more contained sewage.

Should be just enough to not get dead for heresy or something but live comfortably and help a shitty situation.