I recall watching a Youtube video a few years ago (maybe I even got the link from here), but can’t find it anymore. So I hope you guys (or whatever is the term for women and men) may help me. It was a humorous cartoon/animation style video about why it is not a good idea to go back in time to kill Adolf Hitler. It had something to do with how there were repercussions, other people would also time travel to try to undo your effort and so on. The animation style was more in the vein of videos like In A Nutshell/Kurzgesagt. Does this ring a bell?
I can’t help on your vid, but there is this famous comic on-point:
Any chance you are misremembering this short story as an animation?
I use “folks”. That’s a pretty common choice.
This is a very common trope but you may be remembering Alternate Histories from Love, Death, and Robots.
But if you go back and kill Hitler, people will forget fascists are bad…
Never mind.
You wamna kill him late enough, but not too late.
Yep, timing is everything. The timing of the xkcd cartoon you linked to upthread is obviously far too late. You kill baby Hitler? Then everybody’s all like “you monster, you just killed a baby!”
His struggling artist days are probably the best window of opportunity. Nobody likes or will miss another broke, mediocre yet pretentious art student.
Side bar:
« BRB, killing Hitler. »
What’s « BRB », please?
ETA: @solost 2 posts up.
One bullet or random artillery shell into a German trench in 1917 and a lot of trouble is happily and uncontroversially avoided. What’s one more faceless dead German Imperial infantryman among the hundreds of thousands of others?
In this context, “be right back”. As in “wait a minute; I will return promptly.”
BRB = Be Right Back
Thank you both.
There is so much popular culture that has passed me by.
Fear not, oh learned one; you are not alone.
Was it something to go with that “Wikihistory” short story? The original story did not have an illustration to go with it, or did it?
The earliest documented (in the Wikipedia page) assassination attempt was in 1932, but who knows. Popular fellow.
I used this question in a quiz in my beginning computer programming classes, just to see how nerdy my students were: Complete this quote: “You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun. What the hell – let’s _____ ______!”
Of course the answer was “kill Hitler”. Not too many of my students knew the quote was from Doctor Who.
Drop into Vienna 112 years ago and make a busy night of it: Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and to (maybe) pull the fuse out of the powder keg, Franz Ferdinand
As far as I know, the BRB came from text messages on phones and in video games. Brevity tends to be valued in those short informal messages.
Older than that. The OED’s first print reference to BRB is from PC MAG in 1988.
But apparently BRB is fading away because people now are rarely AFK.
As always, there’s a TVTropes page for it.