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g a damn in the first place all helsinki metro stations are equipped with elevators for accessibility otherwise platform access is primarily by escalator some of them seemingly as tall as good sized buildings unlike so many stations in toronto where the designers figured that one up escalator and one down escalator was sufficient the central city stations are equipped with banks of three or four whether they re mostly up or mostly down can be adjusted depending on traffic patterns but in my experience all but one of them were set to go up and in a faq that warms my heart helsinki city transport the operator of the metro specifically requests that people stand right and walk left refreshingly in a nod to environmental stewardship the escalators aren t left constantly running if they don t detect people for long enough they will stop signage across the system is easy to follow destination signs on the trains and above the platforms tell you which tracks go where even if in august the destination of westbound trains was often hidden beneath blackout paper at the time one of the few indications that the länsimetro actually existed signs pointing to the exit and the emergency stop buttons are easy to find and each station also comes equipped with an information display that has a map of the station itself with exits marked a map of the local area and any surrounding points of interest and a summary of how to ride the metro in finnish swedish and english the information display at mellunmäki station somehow i get the impression that not many tourists bother to travel this far i can t imagine why i mean northernmost station in the world included in that summary is a request that riders take note of the metro train s precise stopping place on the platform what this means is that the metro was like toronto s sheppard line built with future passenger numbers in mind and four car trains are often swallowed by platforms that could easily accommodate six cars the stopping areas are indicated with floor stickers and blue lights but they re easy things to miss or just not notice if you don t think to look for them conclusion elevated tracks soar overhead outside siilitie station before my first sight of rautatientori station when i was worn down from jet lag and the discovery that my baggage had liked keflavik international airport so much that it took its own impromptu vacation there i had no preconceived notions everything i knew about the helsinki metro came from wikipedia and wikipedia is no substitute for experience for those first few days the metro was my familiar refuge a place i could find some peace and connection while i tried not to dwell on whether i d ever see my big green suitcase again it was familiar in a way i hadn t expected there are spots in rautatientori where all the words you can see are in english from the simplicity of the system to stations that made me forget i was underground to an integration of art to the extent that one of the entrances to helsingin yliopisto replicates a cave complete with cave art i was impressed granted helsinki locals who have to use the network every day would have a more nuanced opinion but at no point in the days i used it did i have to deal with stress or troubles that weren t ultimately self inflicted the metro carried me far from the perspectives i usually have further than any other metro can go and that s always something to be thankful for previous tunnel visions the kc streetcar the docklands light railway the detroit people mover seattle s link light rail portland s max light rail the seattle center monorail bay area rapid transit san francisco s muni metro phoenix s metro light rail the kenosha electric railway vancouver s skytrain the toronto subway and rt the los angeles county metro rail the chicago l the montreal metro posted by phoebe barton at 11 14 1 comment sunday november 5 2017 the empires we choose not to see i m going to start with a statement empires are bad this isn t something i would have expected to be controversial five years ago because i would have expected people to know in the same way that pain hurts and fire burns that empires are bad there are plenty of people who are well aware of how bad empires are of course but they tend to be the victims of empire the primary beneficiaries of empire for those of you keeping score that s white people in the western world tend to be ignorantly innocent about it at best and willing participants at worst it s true that the last five hundred years is in many respects a history of empires because when you have these organizations exerting their will across oceans and continents impoverishing some to enrich others they re going to leave a mark in the historical record the modern legacy of empire is like the iridium concentration at the cretaceous paleogene boundary a global reminder of devastation and destruction but you wouldn t really get that impression from reading science fiction space empires have been a fixture of science fiction for practically as long as there has been science fiction and while they were often meant as enemies take the eddorians in the lensman series science fiction s origins in imperialist states meant that the influence of empire would always be there the venerable rpg traveller is anchored around empire whether it s plucky terrans fighting against and replacing the aging vilani empire or the star spanning third imperium literary settings like jerry pournelle s codominium fills the future with a hegemonizing empire that seeks to incorporate all human worlds into its authority with no exceptions and the play by mail games of the late 1970s and early 1980s the may june 1983 issue of the space gamer reviews three of them galactic conflict starlord and star venture and imperialism is in their bones take starlord where the players goal is to capture the throne star and become the emperor after which you get to play for free for everyone else it cost 2 50 to submit a starlord turn 6 11 in 2016 us dollars which may make starlord one of the few games where the player had a real monetary incentive for imperialism yeah you might say but those are just games i d argue that games can shape the way we think and view the world just as much as anything else and that these play by mail games were the precursors of modern 4x games a genre designation which itself seems pretty innocuous until you think about it e x plore e x pand e x ploit e x terminate the standard playbook of the earth based empire and there it is copy and pasted into interstellar space giving you opportunity after opportunity to commit atrocities in the name of winning the game practically encouraging you to do it at times take for example the stellar converter in master of orion ii by the time you ve researched this late game weapon you don t need it but it lets you follow the example of the one science fiction empire everyone knows it lets you destroy planets using it rewarded you with this video and nothing else no political slaps on the wrist no anger from the galactic community just a fresh asteroid belt i can t count the number of times i did it because it was easy and quick and i didn t need that planet anyway but that s the thing about empire it compromises you it whispers in your ears like brian aldiss said in his introduction to the 1973 galactic empires anthology morality is all very well but give me luxury every time which brings me to stellaris stellaris is the most recent of the 4x games released by paradox entertainment just last year and may well be the most dense and complex computerized 4x game as a game it has a lot going for it but like everything it has its own unspoken political assumptions one of those is empire not in that the game allows you to build an aggressive galaxy spanning empire should you so choose but in that it uses empire as the default no matter whether you re fanatic egalitarians running a space united nations materialist xenophiles advocating for the light of science or a pacifist spiritualist nation seeking to commune with the secrets of the mental realm the game refers to you as an empire just as it does the xenophobic authoritarians who dream of galactic conquest it s baked into the tutorial tips and even into the news updates that appear in steam before you boot up the game itself funny i d have thought an empire was scary enough on its own the concept of empire is further rooted in the way the game works too the best government building you can build which you can have only one of is called the empire capital complex there s an imperial form of government authority but in structure life terms and hereditary rulership it s just a monarchy just because a state is democratic doesn t mean it can t also be imperial but the way they re set up as orthogonal here echoes an idea that s been made to percolate in the western consciousness for a long time now hell even if you re a fanatically xenophilic democracy that has embraced interstellar immigration for decades the game still requires you to research a specific technology to get leaders who aren t of your founding species it s not so much that this is outright nostalgia for empire i think so much as it is divorced from the actual nature of empire unlike hyperdrives and psionic realms empires are real things and yet stellaris treats it as if it s as neutral as using lift instead of elevator but there s a lot of hidden nostalgia here the sort that aldiss meant when he wrote about luxury up until recently the general public tended to remember empires more easily because empires were the ones who wrote the histories when they did they remembered the accoutrements the displays of wealth and power and didn t stop to think about where that wealth came from and what that power was used for for those of you keeping score at home the wealth was plundered from other people using that power what gets me about stellaris is that to me there s a fairly evident disconnect between what was put there consciously and what slipped through unconsciously one event for example has your scout ship discover a planet in the grip of an ice age but with industrial ruins with the event text commenting on how nobody could understand how a species could be so foolish as to alter their own environment to uninhabitability another is how the humans are presented the default united nations of earth the hero humans begin with a black woman as leader and the default human species portrait is of a woman when in every other game i can think of it s been a man fun fact originally humans had quick learners as a trait they were only switched in a later patch to being wasteful but you have to look beyond that to get to the unconscious choices like the use of empire as something that s value neutral take the in game blockers these are meant as stumbling blocks to your developmental aspirations where mountain ranges dense jungles toxic kelp or noxious swamps need to be cleared away with advanced technology for you to make use of the resources on the tile they occupy you re trained for this by the inclusion of unique blockers on your homeworld there are two kinds one is industrial ruins left over from a past age of progress this is the other one yeah nothing political in that choice of description am i right you have to look at stuff like this to get a sense of the unconscious choices you have to look at how martin wiz anward one of the people who built stellaris apparently saw nothing wrong with wearing a red make space great again hat during the pre release streams in early 2016 when the orange one had already told us everything we needed to know about him you have to look at the things that are as far as the person who created them are concerned are so obvious that they don t need any special attention drawn to them you have to look at the people who believe uncritically that empire is a good thing posted by phoebe barton at 19 27 2 comments labels empires are evil science fiction society monday september 11 2017 star trek the orville quest this past sunday night i hunkered down and watched the premiere of the orville seth macfarlane s new sci fi series because i hate myself and believe i deserve to suffer none of the trailers or previews led me to expect greatness and it certainly wasn t great i tweeted many of my impressions at the time and if you re really interested you can do an archive dive but i feel my first impression is the most critical it s aggressively mediocre still it s been nibbling at the corners of my brain since i turned off the tv and it s at least worth talking about the orville is a unique show in that it is so transparently a star trek parody homage ripoff this isn t unique across media with 1999 s galaxy quest being the first thing that came to mind when i heard of it but it s different here first galaxy quest was a one off this is a series though at least it being live action means it can t stretch across decades the way family guy has second galaxy quest knew what it was doing the orville doesn t the fundamental problem with the series is that it s too galaxy quest to be star trek and too star trek to be galaxy quest galaxy quest is that it gleefully deconstructed trope after trek trope from the captain s penchant for losing his shirt to casual interstellar exploration to things that only exist to put the heroes in danger the orville on the other hand is one of the purest examples of the second artist effect i ve yet encountered if you haven t run up against it before it s a phenomenon described by charles stross the first artist goes outside beholds the landscape and paints it but the second artist goes to the gallery beholds the first artist s painting and paints that it s the artistic equivalent of clone degeneration and the orville is shot through with it why does the orville have a navigator and a helmsman because the enterprise did why is the orville s bridge at the top of its primary hull with a big honking skylight in the roof because that s how the enterprise was why does half of the bridge crew go down on away missions because that s how things were done on the enterprise the orville isn t a parody of star trek even though it has so many opportunities to be the episode s climax has the orville under attack from a totally not klingon ship and the daredevil helmsman flies the ship on a death defying series of attack runs that look like the video half of a motion simulator ride weaving around the enemy ship blasting all the way it s a lot like a scene that was the climax of a deep space nine episode where the defiant makes a death defying series of attack runs weaving around the enemy ship blasting all the way it was ridiculous then it s ridiculous now and yet both series play it completely straight but even ds9 knew enough to keep that bit down to twenty five seconds in the orville it went on for so long i m surprised seth macfarlane didn t cut aw...
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