Doomsday Machines With Nuclear Historian Alex Wellserstein
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2024
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/
Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein stops by Angry Planet this week to tell us all about his new project Doomsday Machines. It’s a deep dive into the weird post-nuclear futures we’ve built in pop culture.
- How Warcraft orcs got ICBMs
- Matthew confuses Camus and Sartre
- Food poisoning as practice for the radical acceptance of death and suffering
- Is there any hope in The Road?
- Alex is hung up on the cannibals
- The video game aesthetics of the post-nuclear world
- Debunking gasoline futures
- Working for the authoritarian government to get the petroleum industry back on its feet
- The Civil Defense truncheon
- Deep thoughts on the Fallout franchise
- The American libertarian lone survivor
This American Life - Ends of the Earth
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature |
| 0:05.1 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So Alex, I was thinking about you yesterday when I was watching a YouTube video. |
| 0:23.0 | About Slavjank, do you know what this is? |
| 0:27.0 | Are you familiar with this term? |
| 0:29.0 | No, I don't think I do. |
| 0:31.0 | It's a term people used to describe the way a certain kind of video game feels, |
| 0:35.8 | ones that were probably developed in Berlin or in Ukraine. Eurojank is also another popular term, but they got into the history of the development of the video game Stalker who there's a sequel being made by the same people if |
| 0:55.2 | they can finish it up in the war zone that they're in but there was an early the |
| 1:02.1 | way they one of the legend goes that the way they raised money to develop Stalker, this kind of, this Ukrainian video game that set the tone for a lot of other nuclear themed of video games, is that they had pirated |
| 1:19.2 | Warcraft and modded it where they added nuclear weapons to |
| 1:26.2 | Warcraft complete with pre-rendered cutscenes where aliens come down |
| 1:32.4 | and gift the |
| 1:33.4 | orks ICBM silos. |
| 1:36.6 | And I was like, oh, well, lovely. |
| 1:40.1 | I'm going to be talking about video games and nuclear weapons and art with you very soon |
| 1:46.3 | and I thought I would use that as the intro anecdote. I have no idea how much of that tracks to you |
| 1:50.8 | or the audience or if it's interesting at all. But something about the bad 90s |
| 1:56.3 | cut scene of aliens giving an or can I see B. M. Silo really struck me. |
| 2:02.0 | That's wonderful. That's a really, I really don't know what to say, that's wonderful. |
| 2:04.0 | That's a really, uh, it, |
| 2:06.0 | I, I really don't know what to say about that. |
| 2:10.0 | The high and the low of both the, the, the, the ICBM and the fact that we're talking about essentially a like |
... |
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