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omination campaigns like how right now in toronto dundas station is entirely given over to a radio station advertising its all christmas playlist to such a degree that the ads have escaped the poster borders and are coming out of the walls advertisement in the stations tends to be limited to wall side posters that aren t packed nearly as densely as they could be given the space and the video ad screens that line the escalators in the deep underground stations what struck me most about advertising in the metro was how much of it and here much is greater than 0 was in english granted most of them were by the same company and you could make the argument that it takes more mental effort to process something that isn t in your native language and so english language ads in a non anglophone country get more unconscious attention for free i couldn t help contrasting it to toronto though where despite the galaxy of languages that lights up this city pretty much the only things you ll find in the subway that aren t exclusively english are very occasional safety instructions and the rare government advertisement fortunately advertisements aren t the metro s only diversion there s a lot of art to be found in the system from the tiled labyrinth motifs at ruoholahti to the sharp metallic roots of the city at kamppi and to riikka puronen s interactive sirenan kielet sculpture just outside myllypuro the metro hasn t been lax in taking advantage of its own blank canvas it s something to think about while you wait for your next train unstressed because you know exactly how long you have to wait perhaps with a drink you got from one of the platform vending machines those machines are everywhere in the system selling chips chocolate bars bottles of pop and energy drinks and they accept euro coins and credit cards if only i d thought to dump all of my leftover change in one before i left the eu whatever you sip just make sure it isn t the hard stuff the metro specifically prohibits drinking alcohol aboard equipment m100 car 142 leads a train bound for mellunmäki at kontula station my first and honestly lasting impression of the helsinki metro s trains is simple such orange orange exteriors orange interiors orange dominant advertisements and even the lighting felt tuned to emulate a k type star maybe it s a simple case of complementing colours blue is one of finland s national colours and in the eighteen hour long nights that helsinki gets in winter orange must stand out there are three varieties of trains running on the system the oldest m100 cars came with the system when it opened the m200s appeared in 2001 and the m300s only entered service in 2016 and their differences reflect the last thirty years in metro design from a traveller s point of view the differences are slight the seats are universally hard plastic without upholstery and look like the sort of furnishing ikea might make if they were in the train business i found the m100 and m200 trains most reminiscent of vancouver s mark 2 skytrain sets with trains consisting of multiple individually articulated cars rather than the whole train articulation you see on the toronto rocket the london underground s stock and other bombardier movia trains only the new m300 trains have that kind of end to end access and while they re as orange as the others observant transit riders can recognize them from the dotted white bicycle silhouettes and from the car numbers that start with 3 what these trains have in common is that you can hear them coming from a long way off in toronto i m used to trains announcing themselves with their headlights reflecting off the tunnel walls and the rails or perhaps a faint gust of wind in helsinki they re preceded by a sharp distant keening screech considering the vast airiness of the underground stations it s only natural that the gust front created by an oncoming train would have plenty of space to dissipate boarding a helsinki metro train feels not so much like stepping into the future as it does stepping into a future perhaps one that diverged from our timeline at some point in the 1980s the free internet offered in the stations extends to the trains themselves though the station based and train based networks are both named metro entertainingly enough and rather than a banner of advertisements along the tops of the walls the ads were served up on video screens it was a very total recall vibe by which i mean the objectively superior 1990 version that movie s scenes were filmed on the mexico city metro but if you wanted to depict a futuristic non specifically located but presumably american transit system you wouldn t go wrong with helsinki s the only thing that really tripped me up about them was how often the doors opened while the train was still gliding to a stop nothing that would imperil rider safety considering how long those doors take to open but when toronto s subways can stop and hesitate for five seconds or longer before the doors wheeze open it struck me as a bit overeager ease of access and ease of use an array of ticket machines at the entrance to rautatientori station if the helsinki metro ever used turnstiles they re long gone now in another hint to its modernity there are no fare barriers in any of the stations and in fact not even a hint of where you might put them passengers ride on the honour system tapping their fare cards at readers on the way in and enforced by occasional fare inspections my experience while limited implies they happen fairly regularly i first encountered inspectors on my fifth or sixth metro trip whereas in the two years i relied on vancouver s skytrain which at the time used a similar barrier free regimen i don t recall encountering inspectors even once with no fare barriers it falls upon riders to make sure they ve paid their way before they reach the platform the ubiquitous r kioski stores sell fare media and you ll find at least one ticket machine at every metro station though in a pinch you can buy tickers from bus or streetcar drivers and with the hsl s mobile ticket app you can buy them on your phone as well as of this writing single use mobile and machine tickets cost 2 90 4 39 canadian 3 41 usd which sounds a bit steep at first but these are all zone tickets that let you travel everywhere in the helsinki metropolitan area i got around on a three day ticket clocking in at 18 this lack of barriers adds to the stations feeling of openness though it does mean the sort of integrated transfers that toronto s in station streetcar platforms and bus bays don t happen in helsinki instead bus transfers are organized similarly to the transit exchanges run by translink in metro vancouver particularly at itäkeskus and vuosaari perhaps as a result of being designed later in the 20th century and perhaps just because of giving 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...
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