Lizzie the Pink-Haired, known to her 1.2 million subscribers as LDShadowlady, is a silver-tongued Minecraft (or ShadowCraft, as she calls it) enthusiast with a penchant for self-deprecating and sometimes surprisingly dark humor. I initially stumbled upon her doing a playthrough of The Sims 4, in which she drowned a small family of unsuspecting neighbors in order to woo the Grim Reaper (a very “notice me, Senpai” moment). So, it can be said that Lizzie is not afraid of getting her hands dirty. Speaking of which, today’s let’s play is her attempting to survive an onslaught of dangling elderly bits in the Android App game, Towel Required.
Towel Required falls within the zombie-hunter genre, save that instead of zombies, the player constantly fends off portly, balding Bank of America executives, whose ineffectual rage can only be dampened by the feeling of terrycloth. The player is a sort of Securities and Exchange Commission or IRS middle-manager with no real prosecutorial authority. With no ability to indict or arrest the ever-growing criminal class of sauna-wanderers, the player is left only with the option of compromise; offering them a nominal fine, a scrap of cloth to cover up their wrongdoings, leaving them to continue to plunder the economic landscape, albeit in a less ravenous fashion.
In playing through the game, Lizzie refers to it as “nightmare fuel,” no doubt identifying with the impotent role of the towel-thrower/regulator, who knows that ultimately, she is ill-equipped to change a short term-profit seeking culture in which every decision hinges on capturing a quarterly bonus, rather than on providing sound financial management over the long term.
To quote Matt Taibbi in a Rolling Stone piece:
Bank of America has systematically ripped off almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers. It brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, “robo-signed” evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. And when it wasn’t ripping off workers and pensioners, it was helping to push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages.
And no, throwing a towel over this phenomenon won’t make it go away. Slowing down time, or gaining a speed upgrade, that we may more efficiently throw ever more towels over ever more abuses will not change anything about the underpinnings of a fundamentally exploitative system. Short of a Reinstating Glass-Steagall power-up, or an Eliminate Bailout Possibility Bomb, these ravenous, zombified, execs will continue to over-leverage their assets, and fractional-reserve-system-us into a never-ending brinksmanship above the crater of financial ruin. All the while, the dangling fiscal genitalia coming ever closer to our faces, until, when our towels are completely exhausted, we must face the unkempt, rotten-walnut-scented underbelly of collapse.
