❤️

So cute!

And the people who ARE irresponsibly delaying it and softening it and dragging their feet about it, I think, maybe actually want it to succeed.

Like you said, don’t say it in a milquetoast way. The corporate owned media aren’t maybe doing interference for fascism, they are. They don’t want to cause panic because that will hurt shareholder interests and make it harder for the rich to avoid the public’s wrath for backing fascism.

The liberal establishment is also not being honest about how fucked things are because they don’t want to admit they have no power anymore. Liberalism is dead and can only be rebuilt, not saved. They don’t want to admit that it’s dead because that might actually cause people to want to fix the problems that let this happen in the first place. At a fundamental level, they don’t want to recognize that the myth of the American dream is what led to Trump. They don’t want to admit that an ideology of privatization and free markets was the deathcult all the commies and anarchists told them it was.

America will never move forward until it is humbled; until the myths of American exceptionalism are dead and buried. The post Trump era will not be recovery unless people reject the desire to return to the past.

We STILL haven’t even seen the worst of it. People consistently lacked the willingness to recognize that it could happen here, even when the threat was imminent. They don’t want to think unhappy thoughts, don’t want to think their world is crumbling, don’t want to acknowledge that things will never go back to how they were. It’s incredibly frustrating how much people delude themselves so they don’t need to stare into the void.

crashes if you use more than 4GB of RAM for one

“Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there,”

That’s not how AI works even on a good day. All the current tech could allow programers to do is add another layer of abstraction, just like they’ve been doing in various ways for the entire history of computer science. It can’t replace labor, only increase productivity like every technology ever has done.

We are not close to general AI and even if we had it, it wouldn’t be as groundbreaking as the capitalists think. Labor will adapt, markets will adapt, and it will not fundamentally change the challenges anyone faces. Technology can not fix social and political problems and it will not create perpetual motion machines.

Thanks. I just grew up in SoCal and am generally curious about the environment and history.

I also understand a lot about how television is written and the pressures the industry puts on storytelling. This is why I can confidently say that Fallout does the best job it can realistically do with the lore. Featuring factions, locations, and lore this accurate to the games is an absolute achievement that required the creators to know and care about the source material.

I think I’m in love

This is what I’m talking about. I would have liked to see evidence of these smaller population centers. In S1, we see barren desert, a few weirdos, a junktown, and nuked Shady Sands. Where are the farms, the outposts, the trading routes, or the tertiary settlements that would have naturally come from proximity to civilization? Only Shady Sands got nuked, where’s all the other evidence for civilization? That’s what I mean about no evidence of NCR. It’s not that I wanted to see the faction I know, I just think there should be more evidence they existed in that region.

Given the entire first season takes place around Los Angeles, probably not there. California supports such a large population in real life thanks to water from the Colorado River, the use of which has turned lush valleys into toxic dustbowls and destroyed rich wetlands. Combined with being badly nuked, the whole region probably wasn’t the most habitable thanks to it now having irradiated toxic dust storms.

This is even shown in the show with the Shady Sands residents efficiently tapping into the same water resources as vault 33, the act of which was what inspired Lucy’s mom to leave in the first place. The area also wasn’t shown in Fallout 2, was overrun with super mutants in 1, and was likely underdeveloped compared the settlements in the San Joaquin Valley. My guess is there is more civilization near San Francisco and Sacramento, as that area is an irl breadbasket with its own independent water supply. This is notable because the showrunners were specifically told to avoid San Francisco by Bethesda. Having Shady Sands near Fresno like in the games would make it harder for them to adhere to that mandate.

As far as them possibly choosing another area as the setting, my guess is they simply wanted to tell the story of the fall of irl America, and therefore the fall of the NCR. Rather than building whole new factions that would always be compared unfavourably to those on the west coast, or be stuck dealing with recent lore on the east coast, why not follow the decline of the NCR shown in New Vegas to its logical conclusion? Like I said before, I think this direction is fitting and that the show would have a harder time if it tried to do something else. It would have a harder time keeping the identity of Fallout without the commentary on America.

A British fascist

At the crux of why there is more connection to prewar than postwar is just how much the show needs to introduce to a new audience. It’s not easy to build up a setting in such a short amount of time without compromising the characters’ stories. The audience might know 1950s America, the cold war, and nuclear armageddon as familiar shorthand, but they do not know a constitutional Republic with a 2 headed bear on its flag or how advanced robots powered by nuclear technology work together with it. That shit takes time to set up, and that lore can never be the backbone of a show; any show.

Lore cannot be dumped upon the audience because it isn’t what people engage with stories for. The lore needs actual characters who you actually care about to get you invested in lore in the first place. Stories that don’t put characters first not only don’t sell as well, but also aren’t very good. Games can cheat a bit by having you be the narrative thrust and everyone else be minor characters, but any non interactive medium does not have that luxury.

All this is to say that it’s a miracle the lore comes out as well as it does. Most of the places where it was compromised was so it wouldn’t take up more time in the relatively short 8 episode runtime. Directly showing Shady Sands destroyed conveys the fall of the NCR far more quickly and more effectively than anything else. Having a deeper reference to One For My Baby than Cooper misremembering Carla’s name and how long ago she was there wouldn’t have been worth it for people who didn’t play New Vegas. Them not making these changes would’ve hurt the story they were telling, and that is never a good idea.

never let them force you to wear pants

To me it seemed like the showrunners were far better aquatinted with the games than most writers are with their source material. A lot of things get changed in writers rooms for practical reasons, like moving Shady Sands next to the Boneyard so the protagonists don’t have to travel over a hundred miles over mountains to visit it, or changing Novac to fit with the filming location and action sequence. For the most part, these retcons don’t absolutely break the stories of the past, while providing enough benefit to the current story to be worth it.

This isn’t to say that everything works, but what doesn’t work for me has less to do with lore and more to do elements just not working. My biggest problems with this season stem from the writing not being as tight as the first. I’m also worried that Nolan and Joy will make the mistakes they made in Westworld where they didn’t have a narratively compelling long term plan.

At the same time, none of what they’ve done with the factions surprise or disappoint me. The Brotherhood are jackasses who only had benevolent leadership in 3, the Legion were doomed without Caesar, and House was an eccentric weirdo who thought he was more important and capable than he really was.

Most controversially, the direction of the NCR makes way more sense than some fans want to admit. The NCR has reflected American liberal democracy in every game in which it prominently features. In Fallout 2, it’s a promising force with cracks in its ideals, mirroring the perception Americans had in the late 90s. In New Vegas it’s stuck in an imperial quagmire while wealth inequality weakens the country from the inside, mirroring the war in Afghanistan and the neoliberal post recession “recovery.” Finally in 2024, on the eve of America’s collapse at the hands of oligarchs, liberals who refused to change, and fascists who took advantage, the NCR has collapsed at the hands of Vault-Tec, the NCR’s established problems, and the Legion and Brotherhood (who fuck it all up because they’re fascists).

Honestly, them going in this direction is more compelling, better commentary on our current politics, and more in line with the best that Fallout has to offer. I think a lot of people were too attached to their favorite factions to see the bigger picture, and the writers not doing the same has made the show better.

I think chicken fucker is a better mc candidate that squirrel ranger. The rangers are cool, but they’ve always struck me as companions rather than protagonists.

The bed of a femcel X3