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GenHavoc posted:
That's really not that uncommon even today if people are working two jobs, or are working as an intern.
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Oct 29, 2013 13:53
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GenHavoc posted:I haven't gone back to look, but I remember her referring to Elizabeth as "Comstock's Bastard". I can see your interpretation, but I still think it means that she's not Comstock's daughter. After all, we've no-one else in the cast so far who could plausibly serve as Elizabeth's mother besides Lady Comstock. Though I do see how that makes it curious that she'd want Elizabeth locked in the tower. I thought that usually if a child is referred to as someone's bastard, that means it's their child, but illegitimate. (Like Ned Stark's bastard.) After all, that is the one parent you know.
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Oct 29, 2013 14:05
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GenHavoc posted:[T]he workers are running 16-hour shifts. I may be naive, but it seems to me that's not physically sustainable, at least not without amphetamines or some equivalent. It wasn't. And no, the workers didn't get amphetamines, they got replaced by the countless people waiting for some work, any work at all just to feed themselves and their family. Have you not ever read The Jungle or something?
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Oct 29, 2013 14:23
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Yeah, a bastard child generally means it's the fathers child but not his wife's child. In other words, like Jon Sneouuuugh.
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Oct 29, 2013 14:25
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I didn't get the impression the size of the segments on the clock had anything to do with how long each "phase" lasts in real-time. The clock's hands don't move in time with any tick; rather the hand spins into position like a ship's engine-room telegraph.
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Oct 29, 2013 14:55
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Edminster posted:It wasn't. And no, the workers didn't get amphetamines, they got replaced by the countless people waiting for some work, any work at all just to feed themselves and their family. No I haven't. But while I'm aware that the gilded age was a horrible time to be a member of the working class (not that there are many ages where that wasn't true), there's a difference between long hours and fatal ones. If the clock is proportionately accurate (which we do not know it is), then the conditions here are not merely hard but lethal. You cannot sleep for one or two hours a night for an extended period of time, no matter what the compulsion, not without a total physical breakdown or a psychotic break. If, as suggested above, the clock is not proportionate but merely an indicator of what was to be done at that moment, then that's another matter entirely, but my impression from looking at it was that it was intended to be approximately true to life. So since I do know that bad as the Robber Barons got, they were not in the habit of working their entire labor force to death every two months, I was wondering what the actual breakdown in labor time and conditions were back then, and if the scanty evidence in Columbia seems to contradict those of the real world. I ask because I have no idea myself. After all, this is a flying city powered by SCIENCE with magic potions in bottles that let you hurl fireballs and lightning bolts through the air, filled with spacetime portals and cybernetic giants and music that seems to compel masses of people to move in sync with it. Is it really that far fetched to suspect the presence of some other means of "enhancing" labor efficiency? GenHavoc fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Oct 29, 2013 |
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Oct 29, 2013 14:57
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GenHavoc posted:[*]Fink seems to be the first person here who's intelligent enough not to react to Booker's presence by immediately trying to either kill him or mortally inconvenience him. I assume he'll betray Booker at some point, but hopefully not for a bit. Do you remember one of the broadcasts out on the docks earlier where Fink was talking about how there was talk of a strike brewing? Well Fink must obviously know that Booker is a former Pinkerton...and wants to hire him as a strikebreaker 
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Oct 29, 2013 15:02
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What's pretty cool is at the start of the section, and until you enter Finkton Proper, Elizabeth is still annoyed with you, and she does everything she can to avoid your gaze, if you try and look at her, she immediately turns away with her arms crossed and an amusing pouty expression on her face.
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Oct 29, 2013 15:04
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GenHavoc posted:No I haven't. But while I'm aware that the gilded age was a horrible time to be a member of the working class (not that there are many ages where that wasn't true), there's a difference between long hours and fatal ones. If the clock is proportionately accurate (which we do not know it is), then the conditions here are not merely hard but lethal. You cannot sleep for one or two hours a night for an extended period of time, no matter what the compulsion, not without a total physical breakdown or a psychotic break. GenHavoc posted:So since I do know that bad as the Robber Barons got, they were not in the habit of working their entire labor force to death every two months, I was wondering what the actual breakdown in labor time and conditions were back then, and if the scanty evidence in Columbia seems to contradict those of the real world. I ask because I have no idea myself. Go read The Jungle. When Teddy Roosevelt sent a group of inspectors to debunk it, the best they could say was "Well, nobody fell in the rendering vats when we were there". Conditions and life was every bit as horrible and soul-crushing as the novel depicts.
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Oct 29, 2013 17:20
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Kai Tave posted:Do you remember one of the broadcasts out on the docks earlier where Fink was talking about how there was talk of a strike brewing? Well Fink must obviously know that Booker is a former Pinkerton...and wants to hire him as a strikebreaker I always thought they were saying "finkerton", like maybe booker had worked for Fink before the latter's turn to industry (which was financed by his detective money).
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Oct 29, 2013 18:19
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GenHavoc posted:I haven't gone back to look, but I remember her referring to Elizabeth as "Comstock's Bastard". I can see your interpretation, but I still think it means that she's not Comstock's daughter. After all, we've no-one else in the cast so far who could plausibly serve as Elizabeth's mother besides Lady Comstock. Though I do see how that makes it curious that she'd want Elizabeth locked in the tower. That makes no sense. Why would you refer to your own child as your husband's bastard (eg. his child) if A: she's actually an illegitimate child, B: she's not his bastard.
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Oct 29, 2013 18:32
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BioMe posted:That makes no sense. Why would you refer to your own child as your husband's bastard (eg. his child) if A: she's actually an illegitimate child, B: she's not his bastard. Posession can mean multiple things. If I have 4 orphans, who are bastards, they would still be my bastards, even though they're not spawned from myself. Also, Lady Comstock is kind of a bitch. She might have just hated Elizabeth, regardless of any kind of family setup.
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Oct 29, 2013 18:48
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Vegetable Melange posted:I always thought they were saying "finkerton", like maybe booker had worked for Fink before the latter's turn to industry (which was financed by his detective money). Nah, Pinkertons were an actual thing. Edminster posted:Go read The Jungle. When Teddy Roosevelt sent a group of inspectors to debunk it, the best they could say was "Well, nobody fell in the rendering vats when we were there". Conditions and life was every bit as horrible and soul-crushing as the novel depicts. Unfortunately what got most peoples' attention at the time was the unsanitary conditions of the products, especially the food. Upton Sinclair was rather pithily quoted, "I aimed for the nation's heart, but I hit its stomach."
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Oct 29, 2013 21:18
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Dr. Buttass posted:Unfortunately what got most peoples' attention at the time was the unsanitary conditions of the products, especially the food. Upton Sinclair was rather pithily quoted, "I aimed for the nation's heart, but I hit its stomach." Huh, look at that, early evidence of the Monkeysphere in action. Laborers working in horrible conditions? "Meh, not my problem." The food that you and your family eat, made in horrible conditions? "This is an outrage, something must be done!"
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Oct 29, 2013 21:30
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Dr. Buttass posted:Nah, Pinkertons were an actual thing. Booker also definitely has a card identifying him as a Pinkerton (shown early on among his effects, and it also gives other personal details).
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Oct 29, 2013 23:58
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Edminster posted:And that's exactly what happened! Workers would slip and fall into machinery, or lose limbs or fingers when someone else stopped paying attention. I seem to recall the "pay your workers in tender only valid at the company store" was a thing, too, but I can't recall the why of it.
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Oct 30, 2013 02:53
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Flesnolk posted:I seem to recall the "pay your workers in tender only valid at the company store" was a thing, too, but I can't recall the why of it. Because it means you keep all the money. If I can get everyone working for me using tender that can only be exchanged for my goods I can jerk wages and fees around all I want. You get a 10% raise and everything at the store's more expensive! It also keeps them from leaving. No saving up to start somewhere else.
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Oct 30, 2013 02:55
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Well in retrospect that was pretty obvious. Whoops. Wouldn't that be kinda impractical unless you happened to store every possible human necessity in enough quantities for your entire workforce, though?
Flesnolk fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Oct 30, 2013 |
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Oct 30, 2013 03:04
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Flesnolk posted:Well in retrospect that was pretty obvious. Whoops. Wouldn't that be kinda impractical unless you happened to store every possible human necessity in enough quantities for your entire workforce, though? Why would you want to do that? It's not like you care about them!
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Oct 30, 2013 03:48
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Flesnolk posted:Well in retrospect that was pretty obvious. Whoops. Wouldn't that be kinda impractical unless you happened to store every possible human necessity in enough quantities for your entire workforce, though? If by "every possible human necessity" you mean "just the bare minimum so Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Oct 30, 2013 |
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Oct 30, 2013 03:50
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Makes sense, I just found myself going "hey wait a minute, if you can only buy things at the company store that is an almost unliveable arrangement since there's no way you'd get enough food or supplies for day to day use"
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Oct 30, 2013 04:13
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Flesnolk posted:Makes sense, I just found myself going "hey wait a minute, if you can only buy things at the company store that is an almost unliveable arrangement since there's no way you'd get enough food or supplies for day to day use" Industrial Era workers didn't form unions just because they liked the snappy names, catchy tunes and getting shot at by private armies.
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Oct 30, 2013 04:19
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Capitalist barons were used to thinking big. Buffalo Bill was hired to feed the railway workers and personally killed 4200 bison in eight months, if you believe the tales he told about himself. A lot of these work areas (depending on the industry) were towns in their own right, so the boss provided the food, the lodging, the transport... not a situation where you can just pop over to Safeway for some tomatoes. And it let him skim off every side.
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Oct 30, 2013 04:22
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Well now don't I look stupid, but at least it's an interesting topic. Thanks for bearing with me.
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Oct 30, 2013 04:31
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Flesnolk posted:Well now don't I look stupid, but at least it's an interesting topic. Thanks for bearing with me. Oh yeah, I meant things more as teaching than admonishing. A lot of the major American fortunes (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, the kinds of names you now see in PBS credits) were made in this era between the Civil War and the rise of the unions and workers' rights, it's kinda both fascinating and horrifying what they got away with.
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Oct 30, 2013 04:37
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Keeshhound posted:Industrial Era workers didn't form unions just because they liked the snappy names, catchy tunes and getting shot at by private armies. And being bombed by their country's air force  Battle of Blair Mountain Rand Rebellion
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Oct 30, 2013 04:57
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Gorilla Salad posted:And being bombed by their country's air force In fairness, the Rand Rebellion took place in no small part because the mine operators were allowing blacks into supervisory and skilled-labor positions. One of the conditions of the strike was the preservation of "white labor". Sounds vaguely familiar...
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Oct 30, 2013 08:29
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Now that we've got the Hand Cannon I'll post the official names of the weapons: Pistol = Broadsider Machine Gun = Triple R Shotgun = China Broom Carbine = Huntsman Sniper Rifle = Bird's Eye RPG = Barnstormer Volley = Pig Volley Gun Hand Cannon = Paddywhacker Crank Gun = Peppermill
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Oct 30, 2013 09:10
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Why does your auto-save never work, Sundowner?
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Oct 30, 2013 10:25
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second-hand smegma posted:Hand Cannon = Paddywhacker I'm gonna assume that's meant in a slightly more literal fashion?
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Oct 30, 2013 10:58
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Szurumbur posted:Why does your auto-save never work, Sundowner? drat it, did I miss cutting one of those out? I have no idea why it happens and it's infuriating because the autosave DOES work, the game just seems to think it doesn't. If anyone does have a solution PLEASE post it because it's driving me crazy and they make it pop up at the most ridiculous times, like when Elizabeth is speaking or something important like that.
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Oct 30, 2013 12:27
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Flesnolk posted:Makes sense, I just found myself going "hey wait a minute, if you can only buy things at the company store that is an almost unliveable arrangement since there's no way you'd get enough food or supplies for day to day use" You haul sixteen tons, and what do you get? You get another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go; I owe my soul to the company store. Back to the game proper, it's kind of hilarious how Fink exudes this whole air of being Budget Comstock. His elevators spiel at you, they do their elevator pan over his little city, he's constantly broadcasting to his own employees even if he's less than charismatic over the radio, and he's got his own statuary. Perhaps he's gone mad just with power, as opposed to from drinking too many vigors or whatever.
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Oct 31, 2013 10:09
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Glazius posted:Perhaps he's gone mad just with power, as opposed to from drinking too many vigors or whatever. Perhaps he's just an extreme 'gently caress you, Got mine' ideologue. Remember what I mentioned before, about every ideology in this game being taken to it's extreme?
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Oct 31, 2013 10:19
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GenHavoc posted:Chen Lin Sounds kinda like a girl's name to me. 
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Nov 2, 2013 10:25
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I don't see the problem, Lin is his surname and Chen is a perfectly masculine given name for a Chinese person. If it were the other way around it would be pretty feminine, yes.
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Nov 2, 2013 11:02
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Sundowner is doing a perfectly fine job showing how to play the game, but the discussion in the thread about history and how the game relates to it is like 10x more interesting (and I'm still catching up). This game is just begging for someone/s who knows their stuff to LP this game and do some kind of American History Commentary. Edit: OK caught up on the videos! Not the thread though, so I'll just comment on the most recent video. It's a shame Sundowner didn't wait long enough to listen to the auction at the beginning of Finkton. I wouldn't describe it as "pawning off their hours"- if you listen to it, iirc, what's happening is that the auctioneer is actually taking lower and lower bids from workers- where the workers are underbidding each other just to get any kind of pay. I think they're saying who will do the job in the shortest amount of time. It's interesting that we see a Chinese person in Finkton- Gunsmith is a pretty highly skilled career I imagine, so it seems like Lin and his wife are getting a "pass" to live in Columbia. Otherwise Chinese folks seem non-existent, which makes a kind of sense because in US history Chinese laborers are mainly associated with railroad building, which Columbia wouldn't have any association with. However there are plenty of black and Irish people in Columbia and they seem to make up most of the underclass. I can easily imagine that Columbia attracted them with the ideals of a better life above the clouds, and when they arrived essentially trapped them. How are you going to leave a flying city? Finkton is very much a company town, as others have noted. Fink (what a name) is definitely paternalistic towards his employees while essentially making them slaves for their own good. That is more of the old-style company town, which became trouble in the US before 1900 with the Pullman strike (and after which company owners actually had to try a little harder to make their towns more liveable)- so Finkton is behind the times in that respect, but it's understandable considering that with its location, its population is probably divorced from social developments on land. I imagine it's also much easier to lock down a working populace in a policed floating city. Company towns didn't really die in the US until national intervention in the 30s though- which I don't see happening in Columbia. Fink is surely interested in Booker because of his military and Pinkerton history. I'm sure someone by now has explained that Pinkerton's weren't "oh hey cool, turn of the century detectives" but corrupt hired muscle used to crush labor strikes and infiltrate unions and break them down from within. That kind of man would be danged useful to Fink. GenHavoc posted:[*]The music emanating from the tear in the clothing factory is Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son", off their Willy & The Poor Boys album of 1969, another anthemic song, this time from the Vietnam period. To call it anachronistic at this point would be redundant, given that it's literally emanating from a tear through time and space. But if that particular song has some meaning in the greater scheme of things, it's opaque to me. Metal furnace! Regarding Fortunate Son, that's a song from the Vietnam era as you said- but it's all about how there's an upper class of people who support the war but don't actually have to do most of the fighting or pay the costs, which is left to the lower classes. (And some wealthy groups even profit from war.) Even if an upper class man (a fortunate son) were to join the military, he'd probably be made an officer or whatever, and be relatively safe from the frontlines. It's a social commentary. You could apply that to Columbia via the thinking that the Columbia upperclass reap the benefit of the work and manufacturing of the lower class, so it's an appropriate song to hear in Finkton. skoolmunkee fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 16:43
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Sorry this is a doublepost, kinda OK. I'm going to make some posts which will be comments on things up through the LP/thread so far. Just stuff I noticed or can comment on that no one else has mentioned, as I go through it. Sooooo I guess this is relating to like the first three videos? Seer235 posted:Columbia is inspired, both in design and philosophy, by the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. The design is simple enough to see There is also a little nod to this in one of the first areas- when Booker is in a shop just after leaving the arrivals area. The man who is getting his shoes shined is complaining about how the workers just need to do the landscaping faster. That's a direct reference to the troubles that Olmstead had with the landscaping of the Fair. If you read up a bit on the World's Fair, you'll probably see a number of things you could compare to the game. Most obviously the origins of the Fair was the dream of one man, who wanted America to create something which be so large and impressive that it would outshine anything else the world might be able to offer for years to come. Everything about the Fair was said to be impossible, but somehow (with some serious backing) it was all accomplished and the Fair became something which impressed and influenced the world with its scale, ideas, presentation, science and industry, and entertainment. At the same time, the Fair was a splendid utopia in the midst of a really difficult time for the US socially and industrially. Visitors could forget about things like the Pullman strikes while they were taking in the fair- Columbians in the game are like people living in the World's Fair, living in a fantasy land where all worries are ignored or hidden from view. There was also a massive workforce dedicated to its creation and maintenance- 24 hour crews, lots of problems with safety and labor and pay, all that. Women had a positive presence at the Fair, although of course it was much smaller than men's. One of the Fair's most prominent buildings was designed by a woman architect, and women ran a really successful pavilion and series of lecture events. One of the major backers of the Fair was a Chicago socialite (and I think also a reformer?) So perhaps Columbia's positive view of women mirrors that. Black people also were overtly excluded from specific jobs and so on, if they did get a public-facing job it was probably on the midway or in nearby restauraunts etc. Although at the time there was a lot of social discussion about African-Americans and the Expo, events, and some prominent people, the most enduring image of black people at the Fair was of sub-Saharan African villages from the Midway (a number of countries were invited to set up pavilions). There was also a mass murderer running rampant at the Fair quote:Founding Fathers I thought it was interesting that new arrivals are presented with the Founding Fathers worship, but that's almost immediately abandoned in favor of the pervading Comstock worship. Reverence and believed infallibility of the founding fathers is a thing pretty heavily associated with political conservatives (sorry)- the Declaration is inviolable and although the Constitution can be troublesome, the nation was founded by gods because it's so great and they're so great. When in reality, they had some pretty big imperfections. I think Franklin in particular was kind of a black sheep, but amongst them there were illegitimate kids, anti-slavery sentiments, problematic religious views, etc. but those are things that a lot of people don't know. I doubt any of them would have appreciated being revered in that way. it's pretty safe to say that Columbia is a heavily conservative city-state and I think that the intro with the founding fathers worship is a pretty good soft-introduction to Columbia's ideology and politics. Also interesting - Comstock talks about being spoken to by the archangel Columbia, a woman. Aside from the names of archangels (only a few are official in religious literature), they're always men as far as I've seen. However Columbia is female- this is because Columbia is an old name referencing America, because Columbus 'discovered' it. (Like a precursor to Lady Liberty.) So Comstock has turned the imagery of Columbia into a religious figure which gave him divine messages and missions. His city-state, with the founding fathers and Columbia as an angel, has literally made a religion which is America-worship. (Yet apparently the nation itself is misguided, so they had to break away.)
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Nov 3, 2013 00:02
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skoolmunkee posted:
When I watched the video, I had this wild uneducated theory that Fink was the one who hired Booker to grab Elizabeth in the first place since he already knows so much about Booker (instead of an "Awww poo poo some crazed rear end in a top hat with a gun is in my workshop town, let's drag him somewhere so we can figure out who he is." type of situation.) However, this makes a whole lot more sense.
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Nov 3, 2013 01:06
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Possibly there is something meaningful about Columbia avoiding the West Coast and having an apparently important role in the Boxer Rebellion that is specifically related to their (or Comstock's) views on the Chinese. It does seem odd that even in Finkton Lin would be advertising with his name like that, though. You'd expect him to just say 'Gunsmith' but perhaps he's using it to filter out people who don't want to deal with him because he's Chinese. Kangra fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 3, 2013 01:46
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Oops, you're right. I wasn't paying very close attention to that part of the video, sorry I edited my post. Could I be rude and ask you to please edit where you quote me?
skoolmunkee fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 3, 2013 02:18
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