Altered Carbon: Race doesn’t matter! It’s what’s on the inside that counts. That’s why we have a white dude playing a character named Takashi Kovac. It totally works!
let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.
When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:
“Your regulations are written in blood.”
These regulations were not written on a whim.
They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.
They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?
Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Do we also need to fucking talk about the Radium Girls again who slowly fucking rotted alive because the company they worked for deliberately hid knowledge of radium’s effects on living matter?
I’m gonna talk about it. It’s depressing and dark as hell, but if anyone ever thinks to themselves that companies will just regulate out of a sense of civic duty or basic human morality, and don’t need outside enforcement, then they need to keep this story in mind.
United States Radium Corporation
that knew radium was lethal, and hired factory girls to work at painting watches with glow-in-the-dark radium faces. To emphasize – they knew radium was lethal and dangerous. Scientists who worked with it wore safety equipment and knew better than to touch it with bare skin. The factory girls, on the other hand, were instructed by their employers to keep the tips of their paint brushes pointed by sucking them between their lips. An act that guaranteed that they were ingesting small amounts of radium daily. They were told that radium was safe, and in small doses even good for you –
United States Radium Corporation
had paid for ‘studies’ and promoted other products which used small amounts of radium, and had branded at as, basically, a medicinal curative that just need to be doled out in appropriate dosages.
This was bullshit, and not even bullshit which the company higher ups could reasonably be expected to actually believe on all levels, with the information that they had readily at hand. What they knew was that a small amount of radium wouldn’t kill you right away, and that there was a two year statute of limitations on workers compensation claims. When the girls began dying and the finger was pointed at radium, the president of the United States Radium Corporation
had an independent researcher investigate the claim. The research established that the link between the girls’ deaths and radium was clear. The company, not liking that result, covered up the independent research and hired other people to simply state that this was not the case.
Of course, by this point there were dying factory workers who were literally glowing in the goddamn dark, whose bones had become so infused with radium that they were visibly radioactive in their autopsies (when said bones weren’t just falling out of them while they were alive, anyway), so of course the company was forced to admit – oh wait, no, they started stealing dead women’s bones from morgues so that they could dispute their causes of death.
Like. Let’s be clear.
United States Radium Corporation
didn’t just fail to keep their workers sufficiently informed, they didn’t just not investigate things well enough, which would have been bad enough on its own. They told their employees to ingest a deadly substance, and when those DYING WOMEN got together with their last breaths to try and make the world aware of what was going on, purely to try and keep it from killing all the other girls who might get jobs in factories (because they were all doomed to painful cancerous death themselves), they paid for hush-ups and cover-ups and fake studies, and stooped to full-on grave robbing to keep people from finding out that they were killing women in droves.
There were factory workers giving testimonies as they physically fell apart on their death beds. The company’s response was not to even revise workers’ regulations to be more safe. It was entirely, 100%, to lie about it, so they could keep making money and keep killing their workers.
And do you want to know what happened to that company? To the United States Radium Corporation?
It eventually became The Safety Light Corporation, and was decommissioned in 2005. The radium girls were dying in the late 1920′s. The company that killed them didn’t even go under with them, didn’t even die when their efforts to raise awareness actually resulted in better and more stringent regulations. So the prospect that better regulations will hurt a corporation are laughable. Even the corporations that deserve to be destroyed by them still manage to do alright when they’re forced to make less money and kill fewer people. Boo hoo, how sad for them.
But inadequate regulations will kill actual human people. Full stop. Some companies will still adhere to ethics, sure, some will have people in charge or on various levels who care and can intervene. But not all of them. And the United States Radium Corporation was just ONE company. One company, that had no regulations to hold it accountable, that decided it didn’t care – and so many women died horrible, horrible deaths for it.
Do not ever let anyone kid you about the ramifications of deregulation. And do not forget that people who died, with their dying breath, fought to establish regulations to keep you safe. Anyone who takes them away is spitting on their graves.
I’m reading Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which is a direct, reporterly look at the development of several recent games, including Dragon Age: Inquisition. The whole book is interesting and entertaining, but here is the summary on the DAI chapter:
(I’m sure it’s been summarized elsewhere already, but it was all new to me.)
Cut for length:
– DA leadership conceived Inquisition after Origins, but only had 11 months to develop a sequel (from conception to ship!), which is why DA2 was so laser-focused on Kirkwall. DA2′s 10 year time period was the narrative result of needing to develop less art assets and reuse environments.
– The engine switch to Frostbite was the Biggest Thing. The old DA engine was not up to modern standards, esp. graphics-wise. Also, the ME trilogy was on a different engine than DA, which meant Bioware developers could not easily go between ME/DA, so Bioware needed a new, modern engine that could be used studio-wide. Unfortunately, their best option, Frostbite, was not created for RPGs at all. Things Bioware created, among others:
Conversation systems! Skill systems! The search tool! A save system! (Shooters can use a checkpoint system.) 3RD PERSON VIEW!
– Because all these systems had to be built, there was often no time to make prototypes to test ideas, and a lot of gameplay decisions had to be made quickly and/or without being able to test them to see what worked and/or without knowing how long it would take to build, if it was possible at all.
– Because of this, the 2013 PAX demo (the one with the burning boats and a choice to save Crestwood village or keep), was a hand-scripted demo of the idea of what the developers thought might be in the game, not an actual slice of the game. As we now know, none of those panned out. (And nothing was “cut.”).
–
The art team LOVED Frostbite–and were often designing art assets for empty levels because the gameplay hadn’t been worked out.
– DAI was developed for 5 platforms because analysts thought the XB1 and PS4 wouldn’t sell due to mobile games, and this was a huge undertaking. XB360 and PS3 hardware capabilities limited some of the things that the developers could put into the game.
– The Dragon Age team really wanted to prove themselves, especially after the negative reception of DA2. Also, at the time at Bioware, there was the star “Mass Effect team” and “everyone else.”
–
Games are definitely a corporate product with all the negotiations inherent to a major product launch or delay. DAI was falling behind in the schedule, and the leadership pitched playable races as something that would increase value/sales to get another year of development. Ie. delays have to be justified with more value. Mark Darrah on this meeting with EA leadership: “There was some yelling.”
– EA’s president wanted ride-able dragons.
– The prologue was rewritten at least 6 times, and the team ran out of time to spend that kind of attention on the ending.
– Jump was added in the last few months of development.
– The game was so big, it was difficult to QA everything properly. There was one bug where you could jump on Varric’s head to get to inaccessible areas.
– DAI beat EA’s sale expectations within a few weeks.
funeral-biscuit 