Dear Bethesda, Hi! It’s me! Austin! Yooou thought I was done with you, didn’t you? Well, you were FUCKING WRONG. Asshole. I’m just kidding. You’re not an asshole.
You’re cute! I mean, look at Todd Howard’s face? I just wanna pinch his widdle cheeks and smother baby oil all over his body while I rub myself up and dow- NO AUSTIN. Anyway. I know. I’ve been breathing down your necks about your artistic choices in the Fallout Franchise for, SHIT, months now, but in my defense, I’ve given you quite a break. I mean, our audience loves Fallout, and they won’t, I tell you, they WON’T stop badgering me about it.
So, who am I to deny them what they want? I am, after all, a slaaaaave to the almighty view. No, na-, not THE View, like, YouTube views. Jesus fucking Christ. Today, I’m writing to you about something I’ve been asked about a million times, and have, until now, avoided.
Why? Because today’s topic can’t be easily quantified with formulas, math, and numbers. It simply can’t. It’s too big and too complex. And I like numbers.
Numbers are simple, clean, and they let me easily articulate precisely how something works. Anyway. With today’s video, I can’t do that, because we’re edging allllll the way into human biology, and human biology is FUCKING, COMPLICATED. This week, Bethesda, we’re finally taking a cold, hard, throbbing look at your medicines: Stimpaks, Radaways, and Rad-X.
They aren’t glamorous, by any means, but without them, your games would be really, REALLY short. Because we’d be dead. Actually, Stimpaks and the like aren’t your invention. They grandfathered into your games from the original two Fallout games, Fallout 1 and 2.
Let’s take a look at stimpaks first. For those of you who don’t remember, let me give you a quick refresher: someone’s shot you in the fucking arm, and you’re like “OH SHIT, SOMEONE SHOT ME IN THE ARM!” So you whip out a Stimpack, a pressurized syringe filled with mystery jizz, and you shoot it into your body. Then, like magic, your wounds heal before your very eyes. Just in time for a Raider to pop another round into your leg.
Great. Dicks. So this is impossible, right? Accelerated healing? Well. Maybe.
Maybe not. Let’s take a look at healing for a second so we can understand exactly what it is we’re talking about. For extra fun, let’s take me as an example. About three years ago, I used to work at a small newspaper (Company).
Every year, there was this three-day-long street festival that brought all kinds of B-Rated bands to town and the best greasy food you could find all year round in central Illinois. It was a big deal, locally, and part of my job was to document all the different acts and entertainment that came through. One that caught my eye was this incredibly attractive group of gymnasts who were doing cool things with ropes. So there I was, flirting with them under the guise of interviewing them even though I had a girlfriend at the time because I’m not perfect human being, and after I was done, some sort of Cosmic Karmic Justice struck me, and I tripped over a cable.
I fell face-first into the concrete. My glasses smashed, and my temple got torn THE. FUCK. UP. I was treated by EMS people who were hilariously stationed five feet away, and then went to the ER to get sewn up. 14 stitches and two weeks later, my wound had closed, and it was time to remove the stitches.
So what happened in the two weeks, beginning the instant my body hit the pavement, and ending when my stitches came out? The moment my head made contact with the cement and the shattered plastic of my glasses shredded the skin and fat covering my temple, my body went into red alert. Nerves started sending signals to my brain shouting “HOLY Shit, somethings happened!” and my brain was like “Well wtf was it?” so my nerves were like, “Oh, shit!” “Well, there’s blood everywhere” okay this gag is getting old. Anyway, when you injure yourself there’s definitely pain. Pain serves a few roles in wound management. It sucks but it’s also pretty damned important.
One, it lets you know something’s completely FUCKED, and it even gives you an idea of how BADLY fucked it is. Pain discourages you from causing further injury, and also serves to emphasize how god damned foolish it is to try and show off how nimble you are in front of two beautiful circus sisters. Pain is the least important part of the healing process, though. It’s terrible, sure, but it doesn’t DO anything.
Immediately upon injuring yourself, your body begins the very, VERY long process of healing, which is broken up into four distinct phases: Hemostasis, Inflammation, Proliferation, and Remodeling. These phases can last anywhere from a matter of minutes to years, and are all INCREDIBLY important. Hemostatis, from the New Latin “hemo” meaning “blood” and “stasis” which means, basically, “stop,” means, simply, the stopping of bloodflow. In the case of injury, this is, effectively, clotting.
It’s the first thing your body does in order to keep you from bleeding to death from a papercut. Your body creates an extracellular matrix which is basically a big net for your blood cells. They get caught in this net and your bloodflow slows and eventually stops. This stage is over in a matter of minutes, and then the real fun begins.
After your blood has stopped leaking out of you super bad, the inflammatory phase begins, where, about 20 minutes after your body has figured out you’re not going to bleed out like a stuck pig, it does the opposite of restrict blood flow: it engages in vasodilation, which means opening the blood vessels wider than my legs when Daniel Craig walks in the room, letting blood flood the area. Your body needs all this blood to deliver nutrients to the shitty area, and to bring polymorphonuclear neutrophils to the scene: they’re a special kind of white blood cell whose sole job is to remove debris and murder the fuck out of any bacteria with judgement poor enough to take up residence in your body. There’s a lot more to it, but the general purpose of the inflammatory phase is pretty simple: remove damaged cells, keep the wound free of bacteria, and pave the path for the next phase: the proliferation phase. Three days after splitting my head open, completely ruining what I was pretty sure was a signed, sealed, and delivered three-way situation, my body entered the proliferation phase of healing.
During this phase, cool cells called fibroblasts start laying the framework for new cell growth and deposit collagen to strengthen the area. Finally, FINALLY the actual repair starts to happen and new cells are put into place. Scabs break down, and you’ll start to see progress, albeit slowly to begin with. About two weeks after the proliferation phase starts, my stitches are out, but my healing? My healing process has just begun.
Right now, two weeks after healing has begun on a major wound, the area is at roughly 20% the original tensile strength. As the body eases into the fourth and final process of healing, we learn that healing from an even comparatively small, mostly-embarrassing injury can take up to TWO FUCKING YEARS, as as the body removes collagen and scar tissue and replaces it with the cells that are supposed to be there. That’s why scars fade over time. After about three months, a wound is effectively healed by most people’s reckoning, although it’s still only 80% of its original strength.
Why is it important to review this? Well, because it’s important to know exactly what kind of task we’re asking our Stimpaks to accomplish when we jam them into our bodies. Do Stimpaks accelerate the ENTIRRRE healing process so that it takes less than a day? If so, we’re asking them to condense up to TWO YEARS of biological processes into just a few hours. Best case scenario, that’s an increase of over 73,000%. That’s fucking absurd.
But, I don’t know, what if Stimpaks are just designed to heal you “well enough?” and hit the 80% target during the reallllllly early reparation period, and leaves your body to accomplish the rest? Well, that’s an efficiency increase of 9,300%–still a lot, but a hell of a lot more manageable than 73,000% But…how the hell would they even work? *Suspense* Stimpaks, in order to be effective, would have to bring a LOT of stuff to the table. Nutrients, drugs, hormones, oh my! You see, your body destroys and replaces old cells on the daily. This is a pretty much regular part of its maintenance. But healing from trauma puts a much, much higher tax on your system.
It doesn’t just replace old cells, but it has to completely build an entirely new framework and sort through bullshit that doesn’t belong there. That’s why it takes over two years to completely heal from even minor wounds. Over time, you don’t really notice the increased energy demands. Since healing takes so long, your nutritional budget gets spread out over a ton of days.
But if we’re condensing this down, that means the first thing Stimpaks have to deliver to your body is a shit ton of vital vitamins and minerals, specifically, Vitamins A, C, E, and Zinc. Vitamin A is essential for epithelial and bone tissue growth and cellular differentiation, Vitamin C is a cornerstone nutrient in the formation of collagen and an assload of other matrixes used to hold the wound together through a bunch of the phases, and Vitamin E helps build healthy skin and Zinc is, like, in fucking EVERYTHING from DNA, proteins and just, FACK. It’s super important. Add in an assload of complete protein to serve as the meat for the healing process and a few other chemicals, and you have yourself all the materials to build yourself a new deck.
That’s not enough though. You need blood. LOTS of blood. Remember, you’ve got months worth of materials to ship out of the affected area, and unless you’re thinking about increasing your heart rate until it explodes, you’re gonna need more blood.
This is…problematic considering most Stimpaks are over 200 years old by Fallout 4, but whatever. Clearly they’ve mastered the art of preservation, since food lasts for-fucking-ever. Okay, so, like, an assload of blood. Half a liter’s worth, maybe? That’s about all you could take until your veins burst.
But that’s STILL not enough. I mean, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink–meaning all these nutrients and blood (presumably O-negative, ask your mom why) can be in your body, but it doesn’t mean your body is going to know what to do with them. There needs to be a starter pistol of some kind–SOMETHING to let your body know that “IT’S TIME TO HEAL, MOTHERFUCKER.” And for that? Well, for that we’ve got Transforming Growth Factor Beta. Which granted, totally sounds made-up, but it’s not.
Modern science has figured out that T.G.F.B, a cytokine, basically a type of protein, is responsible for signaling to your body a whole bunch of things, not the least of which is “Hey! it’s TIIIME to heal some shit!.” So, while it’s obviously uncertain still whether or not healing could be sped up using this protein specifically, it’s been shown that something like this MUST exist, and whatever it actually is, a stimpak has to have it in spades. So. Stimpak. Feasible? FUCK YES. So onto–OOH SHIT. FUCK. I FORGOT, DAMN IT.
*Sigh Okay. So. We’re talking about condensing three months of healing materials into one massive shot, right? Well, the body requires, like, a bunch of nutrients. DAILY, to heal you. It’d be too many to say them all here, but all-in-all, if you take half a liter of blood and mix it with a cocktail of everything you’d need to heal a SINGLE bullet wound in a day, you have a shot that weighs over 50 kilograms, or over 112 POUNDS! And EVEN if you OMIT the blood, you’re still talking about 4 and a half KILOGRAMS or over TEN. POUNDS.
All in ONE stimpack. FUCK. Those contents would be under SEVERE pressure. I mean, say you even found a way to fit that all in a syringe, you’re talking about a density of over 24 THOUSAND kilograms-per-cubic-meter.
No wonder when you shoot up it sounds like pressure is being released. Letting this thing loose into your body would probably blow a fucking hole through your arm. Sending 10 pounds of ballistic protein and solid vitamins and minerals blasting through your body sounds KIND of counter-productive to the healing process. *Even MORE FUCKING SUSPENSE* But whatever.
Stimpaks are bullshit. WHO KNEW. What about Rad-X and Rad-away? Well. Surprisingly, they’re way, WAY less bullshit than stimpaks.
Their roles are pretty simple: rad-x reduces the amount of radiation damage your character takes when they’re berated by gamma rays and radioactive Fallout, and Rad-Away regenerates your health by removing radiation damage that’s already been done. So…how does radiation damage the body? Well, in a few ways. Ionizing radiation can outright destroy your cells. Get blasted with enough gamma radiation? YOU’RE DONE.
You’re just a pile of carbon and hydrogen ions. But even if gamma radiation doesn’t outright melt your cells into goo, it can warp your DNA. This is…bad. Best case scenario, your cells die.
Worst case? They function just enough to replicate. So they replicate, but instead of replicating into another skin or muscle cell, they replicate into some kind of bullshit garbage cell that’s not really good at anything except using nutrients and dividing into more garbage cells. These shitty cells can spread into organs and disrupt all of your bodily functions. There’s a term for this shit-cell-replication: CANCER.
The second kind of damage radiation does is more insidious. When a nuclear fission bomb detonates, not all of its contents are converted into energy. Actually most of the uranium used to create the explosion is dispersed into the environment in the form of, duh duh duh DUN: Radioactive Fallout. This is the entire premise behind the Fallout franchise, point of fact.
Radioactive Fallout is dangerous for two reasons. 1: you can inhale, ingest, or somehow get this fallout into your body through a wound. Your body, while it’s pretty awesome, can be FUCKING terrible about some stuff. And one of those things is figuring out what elements are okay to build your cells with.
Uranium, like many other heavy metals and nuclear elements, can be metabolized into your body in your skeleton, muscle, and even fat tissues, where it can stay for, well, your entire life, irradiating nearby tissue and causing the nearby shit-cell-replication disease known as cancer. 2: if the radiation doesn’t kill you, these materials can still disrupt your body’s functions sufficiently enough that you’re unable to produce white blood cells to fight infection, red blood cells to transport nutrients and oxygen, or your muscles can just stop working. Muscles like, oh, I don’t know… YOUR HEART.
Either way, you’re fucked if you are exposed to too much radioactive rays or materials. So…how do Rad-X and Rad-away work? Well, probably pretty similarly. For instance, iodine has been known to prevent the metabolization of radioactive particles in the lymph nodes, and Prussian Blue, an incredibly popular and OLD pigment used in paints and dyes, can actually bind with ionized particles in the body and deposit them in the colon (more on that in a bit), reducing the half-life of your body’s exposure by over two thirds. Essentially, rad-x would work by binding with radioactive materials and depositing them directly into your asshole to be shit out.
Now, reducing damage done to your cells from ionizing rays that’s…trickier. One potential option is that you fart out high concentrations of ozone and create an isolated atmosphere around your body that attenuates incoming radiation, but since ozone is incredibly toxic to humans, this probably isn’t the case. Honestly, the only thing I can think of is that rad-x somehow immediately diffuses a high-density material throughout your skin which absorbs incoming rays before they can affect your internal organs. It’s also possible that it works similarly to stimpaks in that it greatly accelerates cell regeneration while simultaneously increasing your body’s ability to scrutinize cell damage as to avoid permanent damage and cancer.
Rad-away, on the other hand, would work almost identically to Rad-X, with the need to block the body’s metabolization of radioactive fallout into different organs. Now, obviously iodine and prussian blue aren’t enough, in it of themselves, but I’m giving the world of Fallout a bit of a benefit of the doubt here. They’ve been living in fear of nuclear apocalypse for over 100 years, after all. Anyway, the key difference between radaway and rad-x is that, instead of increasing cell regeneration rates, it would be doing the opposite: suppressing cell division.
In short, it’s a dose of chemotherapy, along with fallout-expelling elements and metals. Of course, if you’ve ever met anybody undergoing chemotherapy, you’ll know that it’s highly likely that radaway would make you feel like total and complete shit. Ah well. Such is life.
Of course, Rad-X, Radaway, and Stimpaks all work in a matter of minutes. This brings to light a brand new problem, one I’ve been loathe to talk about. A problem that, no matter what, is going to be a big, BIG problem. Even if you solve the problem of the 4.5 kilogram shot of nutrients in the stimpak that’ll enter your body like a goddamn cannonball, EVEN if you avoid the extreme toxicity and blood pressure problems associated with accelerating your metabolism.
EEEEEEVEN if you manage to undo both physical and radioactive damage to your body without somehow throwing cell generation out of control and giving yourself thousands of different cancers. Even if you somehow find a way to mend your bones in seconds without your bones healing crooked, EVEN IF THIS ISN’T ALL BULLSHIT, there’s still one, huge, HUGE problem: with both radiation treatments AND stimpaks, you’re essentially condensing months of treatment into a few hours. Things your body spends days and days and days doing, it does in less than one. When it comes down to it, all those dead cells, that radioactive material, it’s gotta go somewhere.
And where do things your body wants to get rid of go? That’s right. Your asshole. Guaranteed, each stimpak you shove in your body, each packet of Radaway you give yourself, there’s one, guaranteed consequence: you’re absolutely, positively gonna SHIT YOUR PANTS. As your body speeds up its metabolism to close that wound in moments, and all those dead cells flood your colon, you’re gonna SHIT YOUR PANTS.
When your body dumps all the cancer and radioactive metals clogging your body, you’re gonna SHIT YOUR PANTS. When your bones recalcify out of NOWHERE, you’re gonna SHIT YOUR PANTS. The Sole Survivor has gotta be running around the wastes going through diapers faster than my baby will in November. WHY HAS NOBODY TALKED ABOUT THIS?! BETHESDA.
I DEMAND THAT YOU TELL ME. TELL US THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SHITTY PANTS. Sincerely, Austin P.S. Well.
That was gross. And longwinded. Good thing we have a sponsorship this week. It’s Squarespace again! Honestly, I love Squarespace.
I had a bunch of completely failed podcasts and blogs on Squarespace, projects that I’m way, WAY too embarrassed to share with you. They’re just… terrible. They’re the worst. Squarespace was awesome though. They made it super easy to make a website that made my really, really terrible blogs look awesome.
They also made it really easy to make some of you salty about the inclusion of Agumon in my list of pokemon. THAT’S THE JOKE YOU GUYS. Anyway, Squarespace is always ahead of the curve when it comes to design trends, and recently they incorporated the ability to have video backgrounds on web pages. If you want to try out Squarespace yourself, head on over to squarespace.com/shoddy for a 10% discount.
Thank you everyone for watching my video on STIMPACKS! and Raad-Awaaay! Sorry if its a bit… “Echo-ier” than normal I’m Still- I’m trying, i’m in a new space! n’ i’m trying to find a solution to make everything work! and’ its ah… kinda a beta-test. Next week, maybe a little bit less “Echo-ey”? ehm… still trying to figure it out ,ANYWAY THANK YOU FOR WATCHING, Lemme throw out a personal “Thank-you!” to our Patreon Supporters! They make this show possible, REMEMBER!: “WHEN YOU PUT STIMPAKS IN YOURSELF YOUR GONNA SHIT YOUR PANTS” ~ Austin 2016 I- Juh- This is the main reason i made this video, just because i had that random thought the other day. Like… Thats where your waste goes… There’s a couple other things i didn’t talk about. Erm…
*Lip Smack* Like, theee chance Stimpaks probably give you Cancer n’ that um… But- We Di- It actually doesn’t technically matter. Because the Fallout games have a really short Timeframe? You only play like for, AT MOST a couple in-game years if you REALLY spend a lot of time playing it, so… Like, you don’t actually know, your character might be getting Pancre- Y’know Pancreas Cancer.
Uh, but IT DOESN’T MATTER! Because they saved the world already. Bi- Di- Uh… I’m betting that these things are not supposed to be used as much as they are, N’ YET THE ARE! Uhm… Yea! I’m ‘onna go! I Love you guys! (No homo) Watch my other videos… Subscribe to our channel if you haven’t yet! DO IT! I’m HANDSOME! You never see my face… But…
i’ma change that eventually… Not today though… Alright… (TAKE MY MUSIC)
Nature’s Way Sambucus Black Elderberry Gummies with Vitamin C and Zinc, 60 Gummies
Source: ShoddyCast
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