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[Video game still from Life is Strange, Dontnod Entertainment and Square Enix]

It’s August 31, which means that Life is Strange: Before the Storm is upon us! This prequel to one of 2015’s breakout video games, Life is Strange, tells more of Chloe Price’s story. If you played LiS, you probably remember this blue-haired rebel, whom protagonist Max Caulfield saves from a murderous prep schooler by rewinding time.

LiS is all about Max and Chloe’s exploration of Max’s new powers, which come in handy for the pair. They’re searching for Chloe’s friend Rachel, but ultimately dig up way more dirt than they intended on the small town of Arcadia Bay…which puts them in danger. Often.

As we waited for Before the Storm, we got to thinking: what other characters would’ve benefited from Max’s powers? Plenty, we realized. Here are six characters whose lives would have been much easier if they’d just been able to travel a few minutes into the past.

[Image from book cover of Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, Penguin Random House]

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian short story writer who paved the way for magical realism, would be 118 years old if he were alive today. Since he passed into the great labyrinthine library in the sky in 1986, though, we wanted to honor him by writing about all the ways this literary visionary lives on.

Borges, who grew up in capital cities all over the globe, pioneered a dreamy, surreal kind of fiction that made him one of the most famous writers of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. He helped sci-fi and fantasy grow into the booming genres they are today, and he influenced writers as diverse as Grant Morrison, Italo Calvino, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, and Harlan Ellison.

Here are a few examples of all the books, movies, and comics Borges made possible. Cheers, sir!

[All TV stills from X-Files, 20th Century Fox Television]

When The X-Files TV show premiered in 1993, cutting-edge technology included cell phones, the computer game Doom, and the Internet (yes! The Internet!). It's been 24 years since Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully first tackled the strangest situations in the FBI caseload. Since then, we've seen the invention of the DVD, the iPhone, social networking platforms, and the Internet of Things.

But what if X-Files hadn't premiered until this year? How would the show have unfolded its complex storyline? Plenty of the scrapes Mulder and Scully landed themselves in wouldn’t have turned out the way Chris Carter intended. After all, the 2016 reboot showed us that Mulder and Scully's world would have been vastly different with modern technology.

Let's take a look at five episodes that would have ended much differently if Mulder and Scully were first cracking cases today.

[Movie still from Cleopatra, 20th Century Fox]

On August 12, 30 B.C.E., Cleopatra VII Philopater died in what we now call Egypt. You might be familiar with Cleopatra because of her renowned wit and intelligence, her beauty, and the way she died. When her enemy Octavian won the Battle of Actium, Cleopatra killed herself in the most metal way possible by inducing an asp (a highly poisonous snake) to bite her.

[Image by Виктория Бородинова from Pixabay]

Convention season is starting, but maybe you’ve told yourself that you’re not going this year. I don’t have time, you say. I’ll save myself some money. Then you find out that the cast of your favorite show is speaking on a panel, an author you admire will be signing books, or the next game you’re aching to try will have a demo available. Before you know it, you’ve bought a con pass and made plans with friends…but you still have nothing to wear! And you can’t show up at a con without a cosplay, right?

[Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay]

This past Monday was World Goth Day, an opportunity for goths of all creeds and subcultures to come together and celebrate the goth community as a whole. That idea took many of us down a trip to memory lane: specifically, to the early 2000s, when we were in high school and expressing ourselves with goth music and fashion meant we were cutting edge. As we tossed around recollections of saving up for a lace-trimmed skirt at Hot Topic or an album by The Cure, we wondered: what if some of our favorite authors were in high school at the same time? How would they act? How would they look?

The following, friends, are our best guesses at how six beloved authors would make out as teenaged goths.