Starfield ng+ could be a great meta game system, like in one of travelings to Unity you get greeted not by yourself but someone from TES or Fallout or other Bethesda and/or xbox games and you can just start playing that game from there... if you want to get back you can choose going back to starfield from some menu. And then you get some new options in dialogues bragging you've been to totally different worlds and experience stuff so incredible (but nobody really believe you not even other Starborns lol)

it probably requires game pass but...hey, that's a good business opportunity and Xbox should consider it.

JUJUTSU KAISEN, CHAPTER 216 THOUGHTS. 

Chapter 216: Bath reveals to us what exactly the “Bath” is and how Sukuna plans to use it to drag Megumi down further into the murky depths of his own conscious. This scene is soaked in Jungian symbolism, as Megumi’s control over the body (his consciousness) is superseded by Sukuna who take complete control of him. Sukuna  and Megumi fighting over control of their own body greatly resembles Jung’s idea of the “Persona” and the “Shadow”, and is highly symbolic of Megumi’s personal arc as well. Which I will now detail under the cut. 

1. Still Waters Run Deep

For a brief overview of Jung’s ideas, both Jung and Freud theorized the psyche (consciousness) was made up of three components. Freud’s iceberg theory of the unconscious likened the mind to an iceberg, as the most important part of the mind is what you cannot see. 

Similiar to Freud, Jung divided the mind into three areas. While Freud named these unconscious, preconscious, and conscious, Jung divided the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. 

Briefly, the Persona is the topmost layer of the psyche presented to the world 

 “A kind of mask, designed on one hand to make a definite impression on others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual. (Jung, Two essays on Analytical Psychology). 

WHhhle the persona is what one thinks as well as others think one is” the shadow is 

“that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-kladen personality whos’s untimate ramification reach back into the realm of our animal acestors. (Collected works of C.G. Jung Volume 9) 

Finally, the Collective unconscious the deepest layer of the mind sometimes referred to as the “objective psyche”, refers to the idea that a segment of the deepest unconscious mind is genetically inherited and common to all human beings. The collective unconscious is made up of knowledge, instincts, and imagery that every human is born with. 

He posited because of this collective unconscious, there are recurring motifs and symbols he termed “archetypes” which appear in mythologies from different cultures around the world. This was his reason why two cultures who never had any contact with each other, could have myths with similiar stories. One of his greatest examples of this was the “flood myth” which recurs in many cultures, such as the biblical account and the flood in the epic of Gilgamesh. 

This is where I tie it back to Jujutsu Kaisen and Sukuna’s “bath” because for Jung, water was the most common symbol of the unconscious. 

“THe lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath the consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious”, usually with the perjorative connotation of an inferior consciousness. 

Water is the “valley spirit”, the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resebles wayer - a yang embraced in the yin. 

Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious. 

So the dream of the theologian is quite right in telling him that down by the water, he could experience the working of the living spirit like amiracle of healing in the pool of Bethesda. 

The descent into the depths always seems to preced the ascent  (Collected works of C.G. Jung Volume 9)

Above Jung references collective mythologies from different cultures to make his point, Taoism, the concept of Yin and Yang, and the pool of Bethesda from the New Testament where Jesus miraculously healed a paralyzed man. Rather than describe it as an inferior consciousness he likens it to the other half of the mind, the yang to the higher mind’s yin. 

Obviously, Jujutsu Kaisen is making use of water symbolism as well, Sukuna is soaking Megumi to push him down deeper in his mind. This chapter is literally showing us Megumi’s “Descent into the depths.” 

Shadows, and Water have always been a recurring symbolism for Megumi, though. Beginning with early on, Sukuna suggests to Megumi the real strength of the “Ten Shadows” technique is not the Shikigami he summons but the fact he uses his shadows as a medium.

It becomes apparent early on Megumi has what is easily the greatest technique in his clan, and yet he doesn’t utilize it properly nor does he realize its full potential. Megumi’s strength comes from his shadows, but Megumi does not even seem to be aware of his full potential. 

When Gojo suggests that a Zen’in Clan Ten Shadows user defeated a Six-Eyes user in the past Megumi denies the fact he could ever be stronger than Gojo. When Megumi remembers Gojo’s lecture on how quick he is to give up and sacrifice himself in a fight, rather than “swinging for the fences” look what his newly formed domain expansion resembles. 

His domain expansion “brings forth the deepest shadows” and when he uses it, it looks and moves like water. Megumi’s greatest power comes in utilizing his shadow, and yet paradoxically he is Megumi is a highly repressed individual character who always ignores and looks away from his shadow. 

"Still waters run deep” is a phrase often used to describe the Jungian Shadow. Megumi is so much more than what he appears on the surface, you step forward in the water expecting it to be shallow and then you sink down into an ocean. This is because Megumi’s most common tactic is to suppress and hide his true feelings about things in any kind of stressful situation rather than dealing with him. 

However, his eyes that were as deep as the night that peeped out from the bottom of a deep ditch became even more lifeless.

Fushiguro tried once more to switch off his self-awareness.

Numbness was the safety feature of life. If he did not think of a way to protect his spirit, it would not be strange if a curse was born.

In a wy, what Sukuna is doing right now is an extreme form of what Megumi always does. Megumi feels very helpless and out of control of his own life. His parents abandoned him. He didn’t want to be a sorcerer but was forced into it by a situation out of his control. When he did decide to become a sorcerer to stop Tsumiki from going to the Zen’in, he couldn’t protect her and Tsumiki was attacked by a curse despite Megumi being someone whose job it is to exorcise curses he was completely useless in that scenario. 

Part of the reason Megumi was tricked so easily into losing possession of his body to Sukuna, is because Megumi has so little regard for his health and well-being. Yuji warned him multiple times that Sukuna was planning something for him, but Megumi didn’t even think about the danger to himself if he kept Yuji close. Megumi is someone who actively refuses to take control of his own life, and therefore, Sukuna takes it away from him. 

However, Sukuna’s attempts to take control of Megumi’s body may not have completely succeeded. Just like there is no yin without the yang, there is no persona without the shadow. A person’s mind isn’t one or the other, it’s both. 

The shadow isn’t the “true self” it’s merely the hidden self. Persona matters in identity too. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are what we pretend to be.” 

Sukuna immediately decides to target and kill Tsumiki’s body, because the bath did not work in completely submerging Megumi’s soul. 

As stated above, the descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent. 

It’s revealed the same chapter that Megumi’s body was taken over, that Megumi always had the potential to be a vessel just like Yuji did, which is why Sukuna needed to break his mind first before he tried to take control because there was always a possibility that Megumi could take his body back and seal Sukuna within rather than giving up control. 

The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent, in a way this is what Megumi needs to do. It’s always what he’s needed. He needs to plumb the depths of his shadows, and then crawl out of those murky depths and back to the surface. Megumi needs to self-actualize and self-reflect as a human being rather than trying to keep everything in the dark because that’s the first step to taking control of his own life. Fighting back for control of his own body, is just Megumi facing his inner demons because he is literally fighting his inner demons in the form of Sukuna. 

To further tie in this idea let me quote @theanimepsychologist

Also I know I sound like a broken record but Jacob’s Ladder is a HELL of a rabbit hole. It’s not just Urizen, it’s the implication of Jacob going through hell and then going up the ladder. Makes me wonder if Megumi will follow that since some of the current symbolism is totally about going into the unconscious where he’s having to face evil (Sukuna, the bath).

Remember, Jacob’s ladder is the technique that Hana / Angel tried to use to exorcise / reach Megumi and it seemed to be working until Sukuna tricked her. 

If Sukuna manages to kill Yorozu / Tsumiki and that is a big if, I believe even Megumi can come back from that. Because Megumi has always tried living for the sake of others, doing things for Tsumiki or Yuji’s sake, when what he really needs to do is live for his own sake. 

2. The Collective Unconscious

So, the Jungian symbolism associated with Sukuna baffled me for a long time. Originally, I thought Sukuna was supposed to be Yuji’s shadow because he lives deep within Yuji, he resembles him almost exactly (even Sukuna’s true four-armed form resembles him) he can take control of his body when Yuji’s willpower and consciousness wanes. However, when he switched bodies with Megumi in a way none of us saw coming that seemed to disprove that idea. 

Then, was he supposed to be Megumi’s shadow all along? In the same way, Sukuna was only ever interested in Megumi and was always planning to take Megumi’s body from him, does that mean he was meant to reflect Megumi’s suppressed side? 

However, after thinking about it I’ve come to a different conclusion. He’s not the shadow for Yuji, or Megumi, he’s both of their shadows. Rather, he represents the third part of the psyche buried deep within us, the collective unconscious. 

The collective unconscious is shared by all of humanity, populated by instincts we are born with and contains the symbols that occur throughout all of mythology. Similarly, Sukuna himself is not only “Ryomen Sukuna” someone who is regarded as a myth in the story itself but turns out to be a real person. He’s also “the disgraced one” the enemy of “angel” a character who is clearly drawing from Jewish and Christian mythology. (The Jacob’s Ladder is from the Torah, whereas jewish and christian mythologies have wildly different ideas of satan, and “disgraced one” seems to have a resemblance to Milton’s depiction of Lucifer). 

Which means Sukuna as a character draws symbols from both eastern and western mythologies. This is where Jung’s ideas also differ from Freud, he believed that people have a “collective unconscious” which influences them rather than just a “personal unconscious.” 

Not only is Sukuna a sorcerer, he is “The Greatest Sorcerer”, he’s “The Honored One” (throw Buddhism into the mix with the polytheistic legend of who Ryomen Sukuna was). Sukuna was the peak of sorcery in the Heian era, and also the sorcerer all other sorcerers are compared to. A lot of the sorcerers of the past like Yorozu and Hajime agreed to the culling game, just for the chance of fighting Sukuna. Yuji even says “I almost forgot these guys are and will always be curses.” 

Curses come from the collective pent up negative feelings of humanity, they are human emotions given physical form, they are born from the collective unconscious and Sukuna is the truest example of a curse there is. He is also an advocate for people living as selfishly as possible. He is pure instinct. He has a giant mouth on his stomach. The one and only servant he tolerates is a chef who is good at cooking them food. He’s a walking appetite who consumes everything including human flesh. His technique is based on cooking. His inner domain is on top of a massive stretch of water. 

Sukuna isn’t just a product fo the ocean of the collective unconscious, he is the ocean. 

My good friend @theanimepsychologist, the Jung to my Freud (this is a joke I don’t believe in Freud’s theories) also pointed out to me that 

Psychologist: But at the same time it sort of fits with my own suspicions that sukuna is mara. he has his own agency but he exploits and corrupts because of the character's inner evil. we shall see Spooky:  What is Mara exactly?? Psychologist:  Mara = Satan. something about Buddha sitting under the boddhi tree and when he's about to reach enlightenment, Mara is like "hey what's up dude, but you could have all of these amazing hedonistic pleasures if you hang out with me"

Sukuna is someone who encourages every character to turn their back on enlightenment and live more hedonistically like he does, he scolds Jogo for relying on others instead of just focusing on getting stronger by himself, he quite literally takes control of Yuji and Megumi’s bodies to do evil things (slaughtering people in Shibuya, and now his attempts to kill Tusmiki) and makes them feel physically guilty for allowing him to take their bodies. 

The whole purpose of the bath is to be near evil. 

So, there you go my idea of what Sukuna is in Jungian Terms. He’s not the shadow of Megumi or Yuji, but the collective shadow of every sorcerer. By being the ideal of sorcerers. He’s not just based on the myth of Ryomen Sukuna, he’s a recurring myth in several different mythologies. He’s not human, he doesn’t want to be human, he’s like a living calamity, the truest curse there is. 

Is Bethesda committed to Starfield? (or are the pie holes correct?) There's an update today. And I wanted to check in with Sargent Yumi to get a good look at his blotched decal. That's it. UCSEC. See how blurry it is? This must be patched. I have a theory. That if this gets fixed by a Bethesda update, it's a good indicator that Bethesda is fully committed to the development of this game. And all the people lambasting the state of this game will have to shut their pie holes. Let's check out Karson Endler, Chief of UC Security in The Well. Fuzzy also. Hmm. A very unprofessional job if I say so myself. The average person sees this, and thinks, W T F. I look at it, and realize the enormous job it is to create a triple A open world game. Don't get me started, if you think it isn't open world, stop using fast travel so much. A waste of a huge amount of time, if you ask me. Okay. I've completed the latest update, which is still a part of the beta update.Oh my. Look at that. Crystal clear decal. No fuzz at all. Who knew? Thanks Bethesda. Your game rocks, and many of us really enjoy the hell out of it. That's it for now. Hope to see you next time, in the Starfield.

‘There’s still a presence out there reminding people not to speak about JFK’s killing’

Oliver Stone is not a fan of “cancel culture”. “Of course I despise it,” the Oscar winning filmmaker says, as if utterly amazed that anyone needs to ask him such a dumb question. “I am sure I’ve been cancelled by some people for all the comments I’ve made…. it’s like a witch hunt. It’s terrible. American censorship in general, because it is a declining, defensive, empire, it (America) has become very sensitive to any criticism. What is going on in the world with YouTube and social media,” he rants. “Twitter is the worst. They’ve banned the ex-President of the United States. It’s shocking!” he says, referring to Donald Trump’s removal from the micro-blogging platform.

It’s a Saturday lunchtime in the restaurant of the Marriott Hotel on the Croisette in Cannes. The American director is in town for the festival premiere this week of his new feature documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, in which he yet again pores over President John F Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963.

“I am a pin cushion for American-Russian peace relations… I had four f***ing vaccines: two Sputniks and two Pfizers,” Stone gestures at his arm. The rival super-powers may remain deeply suspicious of one another, but Stone is loading himself up with potions from both sides of the old Iron Curtain.

He has recently been travelling in Russia (hence the Sputnik jabs) where he has been making a new documentary about how nuclear power can save humanity. He also recently completed a film about Kazakhstan’s former president Nursultan Nazarbayev which – like his interviews with Vladimir Putin – has been roundly ridiculed for its deferential, softly-softly approach toward a figure widely regarded as a ruthless despot.

Dressed in a blue polo shirt, riffing away about the English football team one moment and his favourite movies the next, laughing constantly, the 74-year-old Oscar-winning director of Platoon, Wall Street, Natural Born Killers et al is a far cheerier presence than his reputation as a purveyor of dark conspiracy thrillers might suggest. He is also very outspoken. For all his belligerence, though, Stone isn’t as thick-skinned as you might imagine. I wonder if he was hurt by the scorn that came his way when his feature film JFK was released in 1991.

“I was more of a younger man. It was painful to me,” the director sighs as he remembers being attacked by such admired figures as newscaster Walter Cronkite and Hollywood power broker Jack Valenti for listening to the “hallucinatory bleatings” of former New Orleans DA Jim Garrison when JFK came out. “It was quite shocking actually because I thought the murder was behind us. I did think there was a feeling that 30 years later, we can look at this thing again without getting excited. But I was way wrong.”

Garrison, of course, was the real-life figure portrayed by Kevin Costner in the film; he was the original proponent of the theory that the CIA were involved in the killing of the US president, after his 1966 investigation. Garrison wrote the book On the Trail of the Assassins, on which the movie was partly based.

Even the director’s fiercest detractors will find it hard to dismiss the evidence he has assembled about the JFK assassination in the new documentary. Once I’d seen it and heard him hold forth, I came away thinking that only flat-earthers can possibly still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy all on his own. It’s that convincing.

Stone blitzes you with facts and figures about the Kennedy killing and its aftermath. At times, he himself seems to be suffering from information overload. “I am sorry. There are so many people,” he apologises for not immediately remembering the name of Kennedy’s personal physician, George Burkley, who was present both at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy was first taken, and then at Bethesda, where the autopsy took place. Burkley was strangely reticent when giving evidence to the Warren Commission.

“I think there’s still a presence out there which reminds people not to speak. I’ve heard that in, of all places, Russia,” Stone says. He was startled to discover that the Russians knew all about his new documentary long before it was discussed in the mainstream press. “They said, ‘We heard about it.’ I said, ‘How?’ They said, ‘We have our contacts in the American intelligence business. They are not very happy about it.’”

Stone believes that no US president since Kennedy died has been “able to go up against this militarised sector of our economy”. Even Trump “backed down at the last second” and declined to release all the relevant documents relating to the assassination. “He announced, ‘I’m going to free it up, blah blah blah, big talk, and then a few hours before, he caved to CIA National Security again.”

The veteran filmmaker expresses his frustrations at historians like Robert Caro, author of a huge (and hugely respected) multi-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson, for ignoring the evidence that has been turned up about the assassination.

“I can’t say [LBJ] was involved in the assassination,” explains Stone, “but it certainly suited him that Kennedy was not there anymore and he covered up by appointing the Warren Commission and doing all the things he did.”

Stone tried to cast Marlon Brando in JFK in the role as the deep throat source Mr X, eventually played by Donald Sutherland.

“I realise now I am grateful that he turned it down because he knew better than I that he would make 20 minutes out of that 14-minute monologue and it wouldn’t have worked.”

Nevertheless, he filled the film with famous faces. He thought that having familiar actors would make it easier for audiences to engage with what was an immensely complicated story.

Getting Stone to stop talking about JFK is like trying to pull a bone from a mastiff’s jaws. To change the subject slightly, I ask if he is still in touch with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He is and is utterly horrified at how Assange is being treated, especially given that Siggi the Hacker, a key witness in the extradition case against Assange, admitted recently that he lied. Stone praises Assange’s partner Stella Morris as “the best wife you could ever have. She really is smart, she’s a lawyer … he has two children. He can’t even touch them or see them. It’s barbaric. It indicates America is declining faster than we know. It is just cutting off dissent.”

The mood lightens when I invite Stone to discuss some of his favourite films. He recently tweeted a list of these, which included Darling starring Julie Christie, Joseph Losey’s Eva starring Stanley Baker and Jeanne Moreau, and Houseboat, a frothy comedy starring Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. “I love films, always have. People don’t know that side of me. I could go on forever.”

Between his darker and more contentious efforts, Stone has made a few genre films himself, for example the underrated thriller U-Turn starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez. He notes, though, that even when he tried a sports movie, he ended up right back in the firing line. The NFL was furious about his 1999 American Football film, Any Given Sunday. “They (the NFL) are arrogant, very rich people who close down any dissent, so I had to change uniforms and names… but they got the point.”

Last year, Stone published the first volume of his autobiography, Chasing the Light, which took him from childhood up to his Oscar triumph with Platoon. It was well received but it didn’t make nearly a big enough splash for his liking. “There was a curtain of silence about that. Maybe it is Covid… it was not reviewed by many people,” he says. “I wish the timing had been better. The publisher was terrible. They didn’t really promote anything. So now I have to start over again if I am going to do a second book, which I would love to do. But I have to find the right publisher.”

The book contains a barbed account of Stone’s experiences as a young screenwriter working in London for British director Alan Parker and producer David Puttnam on Midnight Express. “I wrote about it in the book, so you got my point of view. They were not very friendly people. I gave my criticism of Parker that he had a chip on his shoulder. He was from a poor side of the English. There is this phenomenon you see in England of hating the upper classes until they approve of you.”

No, they didn’t stay in touch. “And Puttnam is a Lord, right? He reminds me of Tony Blair. He is such a weasel.” For once, Stone feels he has overstepped the mark. He doesn’t want to call Puttnam a weasel after all. “Put it this way, Tony Blair is a weasel. I wouldn’t trust Tony Blair. Puttnam is a supporter of Blair. Let’s leave it at that.”

On matters English, he isn’t that keen on soccer either. He watched the semi-final between England and Denmark but had no intention of tuning into the final.

“Soccer is a different kind of game. It’s a different aesthetic. It is constant movement. The United States game allows you to re-group after every play and go into a huddle and so it becomes about strategy. I still enjoy it although people think I am brutal.”

Ask him why he so relishes American Football and he replies that he “grew up with violence in America … we were banging – cowboys and Indians, a lot of killing and that stuff. How do you get away from that? We weren’t playing with dolls.”

Stone’s feelings about the US are deeply ambivalent. He is old enough to remember a time in the late 1940s and early 1950s when “everything in America was golden” and part of him still seems to love the country but his mother was French and he talks about the US as a nation now in near terminal decline.

Perhaps surprisingly, his real political hero isn’t JFK. It’s the former President of France, Charles de Gaulle. “He said no to NATO and he said no to America. He understood the dangers of being a satellite country to America. You have no power in Europe. Don’t kid yourself. The EU is just an artificial body that was amazingly stupid in cutting off Russia and cutting off China too now.”

He doesn’t much like Boris Johnson either. “Boris, listen. He’d simply throw you in jail in a second.” He rails against the English for holding Assange in Belmarsh prison.

When he is not on a crusade or unravelling a conspiracy, Stone relaxes through Buddhist meditation. “Moderation in all things,” the man who came up with the phrase “greed is right, greed works” says with no evident sense of irony. He enjoys hanging out with his friends. “I have a nice life. I’m lucky,” he says before quickly adding, “I wish I had been more honoured and respected in my lifetime, but it seems that I took a course that is in conflict with the American Empire.”

Stone’s films have had relatively few strong female characters. Ask if he welcomes the #MeToo movement and the challenging of old gender norms and he gives a typically contrary answer. “It cuts both ways, though. There are reasons for patriarchy through the centuries,” he says. “Tribes tend to have a strong leader. You need strong leaders, but I do see the feminine impulse as being important, especially when situations become too militant. The feminine impulse, I’m talking about the maternal impulse not the Hillary Clinton/Margaret Thatcher version of feminism. They’re men. They’re not women,” he says. “I don’t want women in politics who want to be men. If a woman is a woman, she should be a woman and bring her maternalism. It’s a leavening influence.”

The director deplores the rush to judge historical figures about past misdeeds from a contemporary point of view. “I am conservative in that way… don’t expect to rejudge the entire society based on your new values.”

He met with Harvey Weinstein in Cannes a few years ago to discuss a potential Guantanamo Bay TV series. “At that point, maybe he knew he was on the ropes; he was delightfully charming and humble.” The project was scuppered by the scandal that that engulfed the former Miramax boss, who is now behind bars as a convicted sex offender. Stone’s gripes with Weinstein are less to do with his sexual offences than with the way that he attacked films like Born on the Fourth of July and Saving Private Ryan to boost his own movies.

“The press loved him [Weinstein]. Don’t forget, they loved him in the 1990s,” he says, remembering the disingenuous way in which Weinstein portrayed himself as the underdog taking on the big, bad Hollywood system.

“I think he robbed Cruise of the Oscar, frankly,” Stone huffs at the intensive Weinstein lobbying which saw Daniel Day-Lewis win the Academy Award for Best for My Left Foot, denying Tom Cruise for Born on the Fourth of July in the process.

Stone acknowledges his status in Hollywood has diminished. “All that’s gone. The people have changed,” he says of the days when the studios doted on him and his films were regularly awards contenders. Now, he’ll often finance his work out of Europe. He is developing a new feature film (he won’t say what it is). “Never say die, never say it’s over,” he says of his career.

Stone is based in Los Angeles and also has “a place in New York”. During the pandemic, he still managed to travel to Russia to make his nuclear power/clean energy documentary. “I got my shots over there because the EU is so f***ing stupid,” he says of the of the Europeans’ refusal to recognise the Sputnik vaccine. “It’s ridiculous, part of the political madness of this time.”

Now, he is putting all his energy into his new documentary about nuclear power. He waves away the idea that the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters show what can go wrong – they were accidents.

“Accidents you learn from. If there were not a few crashes, how would you fly?” he says. It’s a line that somehow seems to express his entire philosophy of life.

-Geoffrey Macnab interviews Oliver Stone, The Independent, Jul 15 2021 [x]

Thalmor Theories

So, we all know the theory that Thalmor “wants to destroy the world by using/destroying the Towers”-theory, right? Well, it’s just a fan theory that got popular and isn’t really based on anything, so I don’t particularly like it (but if it reaches enough consensus in fandom it might end up being turned into canon by Bethesda. Canon in Elder Scrolls is kind of influenced that way).

So with that out of the way, I will present to you my current favorite Thalmor Theory:

The Thalmor were founded by Ayleids.

And not just any Ayleids, but the Alessian Ayleids who aided in the slave rebellion against their kin, only for the humans to turn against them and forcing them to either die or run away and hide in provinces other than Cyrodiil.

Now, understandably, these Ayleids weren’t happy with being run out of their homes for daring to help humans by humans. The ones who survived to other lands were also powerful, probably mages, and as such very long-lived (and thus probably one or two or maybe even three survive well into the 4th Era and the Dragons’ return).

A large number ends up in Summerset. Where they lick their wounds and work on getting over their traumas and whatnot to salvage what life they can. They might marry Altmer and have children and families and friends and things look up.

And then Tiber Septim rolls in and commits genocide against the Altmer until the Altmer king/queen bends the knee to the Empire. And then the Empire forces the Altmer to worship Tiber Septim as the god Talos.

The Ayleids and their descendants, having lost family and friends on a massive scale once more to the Empire, has had enough. They found the Thalmor, but because it is a very Ayleidic in its undercurrents, they have trouble attracting pure Altmer, and in combination with bending the knee to their oppressors, the Ayleids starts to dislike the Altmer as well. They start to pick part-Ayleids as future spouses to preserve the Ayleid way/genes instead, which is what they really mean with “purebred” (most Altmer does not know this and think they’re breeding pure Altmer with their arranged marriages).

Ayleids, unlike Altmer, were also known to worship daedra, which was how they knew how to make it look like they saved the world from the Oblivion Crisis, on top of that, they have Ayleidic cousins among the Boiche to help them incorporate Valenwood into their new Dominion.

And, of course, Lord Naarifin had a dremora right hand wielding the artifact of Boethiah, while using the Orb of Vaermina, and then being carried away by winged daedra (winged twilights?) from his imprisonment after he lost the Imperial City.

It should also be noted that in Legends (after Oblivion), the Imperial City is shown with the Temple of the One and not the petrified Avatar of Akatosh.

I believe that Naarifin (an Ayleid, or part-Ayleid, Thalmor leader) had the Avatar of Akatosh removed, pending destruction, (if it maintains, or in any way supports, the liminal barrier against Oblivion, it would be in both Boethiah’s and Vaermina’s, and, indeed, all daedra’s, interest to destroy it. Or it might be the key to reopen the barrier), and the Temple of the One rebuilt. Because the Avatar is the symbol that Martin Septim, not the Thalmor, had ended the Oblivion Crisis (and the Temple of the One would have been mentioned many times in literature, and changing it to giant dragon statue in millions of books is harder than getting rid of said statue and rebuilding the Temple), and would have cost them most of their Summerset support.

And it could have been payment to the daedra the Thalmor are allied with for their artifacts and underlings, alongside the Culling (which, without the Avatar, might have reopened the barrier by number of souls alone, many of them daedra worshipers in this City of a Thousand Cults, going to the Planes of Oblivion).

But basically, what the Ayleidic Thalmor wants is not to destroy the world. What the Thalmor wants is to destroy the Empire, and possibly, Men, for what they’ve done to them. Outlawing Talos worship might have started the rebellion with the Nords, but was just as much motivated by their sheer loathing of him and his empire.

i feel like people need to get a better understanding of how certain reactionary memeplexes, particularly those relating to conspiracy theories, work.

okay, remember how westpal shut up real quick when i mentioned that his avatar was from the cover of Behold a Pale Horse? i suspect that’s because he has some level of self awareness, in spite of it all- here’s a brief summary of the book’s relevant segments, swiped from wikipedia:

In Behold a Pale Horse Cooper proposed that AIDS was the result of a conspiracy to decrease the populations of blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals.[8] In 2000 South Africa's Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang received criticism for distributing the chapter discussing this theory to senior South African government officials.[13]Nicoli Nattrass, a longtime critic of AIDS denialists, criticized Tshabalala-Msimang for lending legitimacy to Cooper's theories and disseminating them in Africa.[10]

UFOs, aliens and the Illuminati

Cooper caused a sensation in Ufology circles in 1988 when he claimed to have seen secret documents while in the Navy describing governmental dealings with extraterrestrials, a topic on which he expanded in Behold a Pale Horse.[6] (By one account he served as a "low level clerk" in the Navy, and as such would not have had the security clearance needed to access classified documents.[14])  UFOlogists later asserted that some of the material that Cooper claimed to have seen in Naval Intelligence documents was actually plagiarized verbatim from their research, including several items that the UFOlogists had fabricated as pranks.[15] Don Ecker of UFO Magazine ran a series of exposés on Cooper in 1990.[16]

Cooper linked the Illuminati with his beliefs that extraterrestrials were secretly involved with the United States government, but later retracted these claims. He accused Dwight D. Eisenhower of negotiating a treaty with extraterrestrials in 1954, then establishing an inner circle of Illuminati to manage relations with them and keep their presence a secret from the general public. Cooper believed that aliens "manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religions, magic, witchcraft, and the occult", and that even the Illuminati were unknowingly being manipulated by them.[6]

Cooper described the Illuminati as a secret international organization, controlled by the Bilderberg Group, that conspired with the Knights of Columbus, Masons, Skull and Bones, and other organizations. Its ultimate goal, he said, was the establishment of a New World Order. According to Cooper the Illuminati conspirators not only invented alien threats for their own gain, but actively conspired with extraterrestrials to take over the world.[6]  Cooper believed that James Forrestal's fatal fall from a window on the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Hospital was connected to the alleged secret committee Majestic 12, and that JASON advisory group scientists reported to an elite group of Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations executive committee members who were high-ranking members of the Illuminati.[2][3]

Cooper also claimed that the antisemitic conspiracy theory forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was actually an Illuminati work, and instructed readers to substitute "Sion" for "Zion", "Illuminati" for "Jews",  and "cattle" for "Goyim".[3][17][18]

okay so you get the gist here. the usual dumb shit you see in the right-wing conspiracy theory zone.

now, to be clear, i’m not dismissing the idea that people, and the ruling class in particular, might, at times, conspire- indeed, i’m about to go out on a limb here and suggest there may in fact be something to the notion that AIDS was deliberately manufactured, or at least that the government was guilty of severe purposeful neglect.

this is not synonymous with believing in illuminati or UFO crap without evidence- though the purpose of this book, i suspect, is to try to tie those two things indelibly together in people’s minds. not to mention the obvious barely disguised buildup to antisemitism at the end there.

the purpose is twofold- the first to discredit any investigation into there being more of a story behind AIDS, the second to try to lure left-wing leaning people toward right-wing extremism, the mechanism being obvious- first, they’re lured in by wanting to know more about the possibility that AIDS was deliberately engineered to target black and gay communities, something which obviously would have more appeal to those on the left. once lured in, it hits them with the alien bullshit, as well as the inherently reactionary illuminati nonsense, then tops that off by presenting literally the entire text of the protocols of the elders of fucking zion to really start bringing them into the reactionary worldview- but, knowing that the person reading is likely from a left-wing background, an extremely weak effort is made to disguise the antisemitism- “oh, it wasn’t about jewish people, oh no, it was about uhhhhhhhhhhh illuminati” and then if they swallow that, it’s only a short hop from there to “nevermind, it was about jewish people after all.” it’s a tactic used to gradually acclimate people to antisemitism. manipulative “milk before meat” tactics.

you can see the results of this play out in action with Tila Tequila- obviously she didn’t pop out of the womb seig heiling, and there was quite a bit of buildup in the form of new-agey anti-illuminati conspiracy theorism before she became a full-fledged genocidal neonazi.

and the thing is, if there had been an intervention at the right time, she could have been saved from that, before becoming completely conditioned into an ideology which is immensely harmful to so many people.

so, if possible, it’s good to try to ascertain how deep in someone is- have they been completely re-conditioned into a hardline reactionary? or is there still time to help them see what’s happening to them, and stop it?

for example here: [link] this person is clearly deeply in the clutches of reactionary psychological warfare, but it seemed to me like there might still be some hope for them, so i tried to intervene to help them get a better understanding of the nature of the ruling class and so forth.

but, if you’re going to intervene in this way, you need to do some background research first- just going in there and shouting “illuminati fake!” won’t cut it, especially because there was, in fact, an actual historical group called the illuminati, and to effectively grapple with this kind of thing, you’re going to need to have an understanding of what that group’s history was, and how they became such a boogeyman in the reactionary narrative in the first place. to explore this, let’s look at what Behold A Pale Horse has to say about it- which, interestingly, is shockingly little- the name “Weishaupt” (the founder of the actual irl illuminati) appears only 10 times in the whole text:

Adam  Weishaupt,  a  young  professor  of  canon  law  at  Ingolstadt  University  in  Germany,  was  a  Jesuit  priest  and  an  initiate  of  the  Illuminati.  The  branch  of  the  Order  he  founded  in  Germany  in  1776  was  the  same  Illuminati  previously  discussed.

the “branch” in question is actually just. the illuminati. it wasn’t a “branch” of a larger pre-existing movement, as Milton here is claiming, and indeed, he never provides any meaningful evidence of any pre-existing illuminati before weischaupt’s group. in fact, he points to the lack of evidence prior to then as proof of how strong their oath of silence was. of course he does.

Weishaupt  advocated  "abolition  of  all  ordered  national  governments,  abolition  of  inheritance,  abolition  of  private  property,  abolition  of  patriotism,  abolition  of  the  individual  home  and  family  life  as  the  cell  from  which  all  civilizations  have  stemmed,  and  abolition  of  all  religions  established  and  existing  so  that  the  Luciferian  ideology  of  totali-  tarianism may be imposed on mankind."

In  the  same  year  that  he  founded  the  Illuminati  he  published  Wealth  of  Nations,  the  book  that  provided  the  ideological  foundation  for  capitalism  and  for  the  Industrial  Revolution.  It  is  no  accident  that  the  Declaration  of  Independence  was  written  in  the  same  year.  On  the  obverse  of  the  Great  Seal  of  the  United  States  the  wise  will  recognize  the  all-seeing  eye  and  other  signs of the Brotherhood of the Snake 

this is interesting here because there’s a strange tension between the anti-communism of contemporary reactionism, and the anti-liberalism and anti-republicanism of the earlier reactionary movements, which anti-illuminati ideology is an echo of.

the first anti-illuminati conspiracy theorists was the reactionary monarchist priest Agustin Barruel, and all anti-illuminism traces back particularly to his book Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. inerestingly, he did not at any point in this book accuse them of ruling the world, or wanting to establish “totalitarian” rule! quite the opposite in fact- the illuminati and other enlightenment movements of the time were accused of  "conspiracy of impiety" against God and Christianity, the "conspiracy of rebellion" against kings and monarchs, and "the conspiracy of anarchy" against society in general. if you understand anything about Augustin Barruel’s politics, you’ll understand that Augustin was if anything, profoundly in favor of “totalitarianism”, particularly that of the king and the church. he wrote angry screeds against the illuminati precisely because they were anti-totalitarian, and espoused democratic values.

but over time, this reactionary social current had to change with the times. thus the strange tension between accusing weishaupt of both wanting to abolish private property and being behind the publication of Wealth of Nations.

for the record, no, i can’t find any evidence that weishaupt published Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations- but that accusation is nonetheless much more in the spirit of Augustin Barruel’s original accusations that the illuminati were behind the spread of enlightenment values, while the accusation he was against private property sits as an obvious later attempt to incongruously graft anti-communist reactionary talking points onto  framework which originated in a reactionary anti-republican pro-monarchist context.

its interesting to see how a rectionary memeplex which was, in it’s origins, overtly pro-ruling class, and overtly anti-populist- as anti-illuminism was in it’s origins in the work of Augustin Barruel- over time get dressed up more and more with the character of a kind of artificial class-consciousness, where a short-lived progressive discussion group has been mythologized into this sort of decoy mirage stand-in for the ruling class, to divert people from developing any real understanding of the actual capitalist ruling class.

at any rate, it’s important to understand the origin an nature of this reactionary social current if you want to effectively help people who are caught up in it- to show them this history so they can see how, in their attempt to oppose the ruling class, they’ve been suckered into a reactionary ideology which is, in both it’s historical origins and contemporary functions, engineered to uphold the ruling class. 

Fallout nv is a perfect game in every respect for 7 big reasons.

Seriously. In everything It tries to do, you cant improve.

And it does so many things that most games wont even think about doing.

For example.

1. A shitload of well represented lgbtq+ characters.

And no, it's not just peoples headcanons and theories. They're all canon. And their sexuality is just treated as a part of who they are. Not some defining trait making them be like "hey I'm a lesbian that's my entire personality" and they also arent just "that one lesbain dude" they're "that badass military sniper who's hiding their trauma of being raped by a man they were sent to kill, who you can convince to go to therapy to heal.

2. A perfect and unique cast.

Every character you meet is a likable, unique, and flushed out character.

I'll never forget the senile, blue hulk grandma who immediately adopts you.

Or Boone, the mourning, revengeful sniper who you can share a hatred of the legion that enslaved his wife, and when you first meet him, he hires you to find the person who sold her so he can kill them.

Or veronica, the punchy brotherhood of steel lesbian with a power fist who just wants a dress

3. Sex workers are treated with absolute respect.

They arent just soms horny wh*res you can fuck because oh boy are they sluts who love sex and your penis.

They're actual characters with stories and jobs.

Fuck man, the game even shows how they're abused by their corrupt employers who get them addicted on drugs so they cant quit their jobs, they say that their employers have sexually abused them and taken advantage of them under threats of firing them.

Just to reiterate that.

This game, in a corrupt wasteland full of primal urges, made the decision to respect sex workers and shed light on how in real life what their lifes are like for real, and not use them as a tool for the player to jack off.

4. You can do absolutely anything and be absolutely anyone.

This is one of the few RPGs I've seen where you can truly be who you want to be. You can choose any alliance, you can kill absolutely anyone, no matter who, and still beat the game.

No one is essential.

You can choose what your character is talented in in all respects, and choose what kinda abilities they have. What kinda physical attributes, how smart they are, lucky? Perceptive? If they're a mechanic, if they're a scientist, a genius, the human equivalent of the hulk, fucking anything.

You can even be a fucking cyborg.

You can be gay, and flirt with other gay people.

You can be a lesbian and flirt with other lesbians.

You can be bisexual, and pansexual, and flirt with anyone.

You can even be fucking asexual and/or aromantic and flirt with no one.

And depending on what and who you, or your character is as a person, you can complete nearly any quest in nearly any way they could solve the issue.

YOU CAN LITTERALLY PLAY AS WHATEVER KINDA PERSON YOU ARE, OR WANT, BEFRIEND ALMOST ANYONE YOU WANT, TRAVEL WITH THE KINDS OF PEOPLE YOU OR YOUR CHARACTER WOULD WANT AND NEARLY ALL QUESTS ACCOMMODATE WHO YOU ARE SO YOU CAN COMPLETE THEM YOUR WAY.

5. ALL THIS, AND IT WAS DEVELOPED IN GAME PRODUCTION HELL.

EVERYTHING I SAID ABOUT THIS WAS TRUE, AND I COULD GO ON FOR SEVERAL ESSAYS IF THERE WASNT A CHARACTER LIMIT ON TUMBLR.

BUT SERIOUSLY.

AND ALL THIS, AND THE GAME WAS MADE WHILE BETHESDAS IMPATIENT ASS RUSHED THEM CONSTANTLY, TOLD THEM TO REDO A LOT OF SHIT, AND BASICALLY MADE PRODUCTION HELL. AND IF MY MEMORY SERVES CORRECT

WAS MADE IN A LITTLE OVER A YEAR

ALL THIS,

AND ITS ACCEPTED AS THE BEST GAME IN THE SERIES.

THE BEST FALLOUT GAME WASNT EVEN MADE BY THE PEOPLE WHO OWN IT, BUT PEOPLE THEY HIRED.

Are you starting to understand now?!?!? This game should go down in history as one of the best games In all respects.

6. THE MODDING COMMUNITY FUCKING ENHANCED THIS GAME EVEN FURTHER.

THERE ARE OVER AROUND 11298 MODS FOR THE GAME AND AROUND 1000 PAGES OF MODS ON THE NEXUS. THERE IS A MOD FOR EVERY POTENTIAL THING YOU COULD WANT FOR THE GAME. MORE WEAPONS? CHECK. BADASS ARMORS? CHECK. MODS THAT ENHANCE THE GRAPHICS TO FALLOUT 4? FUCKING CHECK. MODS THAT GIVE ALL THE IMPROVED GAMEPLAY MECHANICS TO THE GAME? CHECK.

A FUCKING HOVERBOARD MOD!?!? CHECK!

7. SO MANY POC CHARACTERS.

THEY DIDNT WHITEWASH SHIT. THERE ARE MORE POC CHARACTERS THAN WHITE PROBABLY. THEYRE SHOWING THE WORLD LIKE IT IS, AND IT MAKES SENCE WITH THE STORY FOR THEM ALL TO BE REPRESENTED.

IN CONCLUSION FALLOUT NEW VEGAS MAY BE ONE OF THE BEST CONTENDERS FOR BEST VIDEO GAME OF ALL TIME.

[This is a little blurb of personal HCs I hold about synths, the Institute and the general bullshit, conflicting lore we’ve got to work with. However, I am not a biologist. I’m not even a university graduate. This is me bullshitting to the best that I can figure out.] 

Humanity, Redefined

Synths are, essentially, 3d-printed, fully grown humanoids. Their tissues are entirely lab-grown and assembled, piece by piece, into either partially randomized algorithms or based on data from kidnapped humans from the surface. Of course, one can tweak a synth’s appearance to resemble someone without their DNA or body, as well - it’s just more imprecise, based fully on appearance rather than actually matching the original on an almost cellular level. 

[This is the case with the human Darla takes her appearance and name from - she died long before synths were being produced, of course, but her appearance lived on in holotape, which inspired Doctor Savel to suggest just such a synth to a friend in the Robotics department.]

Thanks to the unique nature of their synthetic tissues and the implant embedded in the brain of every synth, they are able to subsist without food or sleep within the walls of the Institute. However, every being needs energy exchange in order to function, whether organic or not. 

Thus, the Institute has a host of ‘charging pods’, small, almost shower-like units where synths are expected to semi-regularly ‘power down.’ The synth component in their brains responds to the commands of the pod, making it release hormones and chemicals necessary to keep the tissues of the synthetic body healthy and functioning. Think of it as ‘taking out the middleman.’ Humans need food, food that subsists on plants, or plants themselves. Plants need sunlight. Synths go straight to the source, in this case, powered on actual energy - which may explain why the Institute is having such a hard time with electricity usage.

However, synths are still modeled on humans, and in many cases are expected to go to the surface and take the place of one, or live amongst them. Thus, they needed to be designed capable of some of the same common processes as humans, including eating and the inevitable results, sleeping, and sex. (It would be rather suspicious if your partner was suddenly unable or unwilling to share a romantic dinner with you, or go to bed with you anymore.) And since outside the Institute synths of course lack access to the charging pods they’d use there, and since again they are modelled off humans already, it makes sense they’re capable of drawing required nutrition from food and sleep while on the surface, just as a born human would.

Finally, synths can, in my opinion, get sick. They may have more resistance to common illnesses and radiation, but they are not immune, because while their tissue is synthetic, it is still grown, and based off of human tissues. It isn’t plastic or metal made to look and feel like tissue, it IS tissue, and thus still has some of the same pitfalls. The price the Institute paid in pursuing something as close to human as they could get. 

Now, as for what synths cannot physically do - synths, canonically, can’t gain or lose weight. Makes no fucking sense, but alright, Bethesda, I’ll try to play ball. Our brains have been shaped by time and nature, by what we had to do to survive, by evolution. As far as I’ve been told it’s a stubborn fucker, and easily goes into a panic when it loses weight because of how important it was to hold on to precious fat reserves back in our caveman days. My theory would be that synth brains are different - modelled after the human brain, certainly, but without so many of evolution’s hangups. Maybe it, or the implant, or both, are more capable of telling synth bodies to simply mantain status quo, rather than desperately hold onto weight. However, that might explain the lack of weight gain, but not so much loss in a starvation situation.

My best stab there would be, again, different priorities. Maybe synths don’t have time to lose weight by starvation, because their bodies instead attempt to subsist on energy from their implants, rather than the fat reserves and eventually muscle tissues in their bodies. Maybe a synth that’s starving wouldn’t lose a pound, but instead, when starved enough, simply drop dead when their implant ran out of juice. Why the Institute would design it this way I haven’t the faintest, but with all the conflicting lore it’s hard to say. Also, again, I am not a biologist.

Synths also can’t reproduce. This is easy enough to explain away - the Institute wouldn’t want synths themselves to have the ‘means of production’ for their kind, even if they were capable of making it so they could. It’s not something that would necessarily cause troubles with blending in on the surface, either, as conception is never guaranteed, and I’m willing to bet difficult for many, given the unhealthy state of the world. 

OKAY. That’s enough talking out of my ass for one post. PLEASE forgive me any inconsistencies - I don’t know what I’m doing. If you have thoughts you believe make more sense, please feel free to message me! I won’t necessarily agree, but I’d love to hear and, chances are, other people are a lot more educated than me. 

All the World’s a Stage

In 1988, a socio-linguist at the university of Pennsylvania posted a note on the departmental bulletin board announcing she had moved her late husband’s personal library into an unused office. Anyone who wanted any of the books should feel free to take them. Her husband had been the chair of Penn’s sociology department. They’d married in 1981, and he died the following year at age sixty. Normally you’d expect the books and papers to be donated to some library to assist future researchers, but she’d recently remarried, so I guess she either wanted to get rid of any reminders of her previous husband, or simply needed the space.

At the time my then-wife was a grad student in Penn’s linguistics department, and told me about the announcement when she got home that afternoon.

Well, had this professor’s dead husband been any plain, boring old sociologist, I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but given her dead husband was Erving Goffman, I immediately began gathering all the boxes and bags I could find. That night around ten, when she was certain the department would be pretty empty, my then-wife and I snuck back to Penn under cover of darkness and I absconded with Erving Goffman’s personal library. Didn’t even look at titles—just grabbed up armloads of books and tossed them into boxes to carry away.

As I began sorting through them in the following days, I of course discovered the expected sociology, anthropology and psychology textbooks, anthologies and journals, as well as first editions of all of Goffman’s own books, each featuring his identifying signature (in pencil) in the upper right hand corner of the title page. But those didn’t make up the bulk of my haul.

There were Catholic marriage manuals from the Fifties, dozens of volumes (both academic and popular) about sexual deviance, a whole bunch of books about juvenile delinquency with titles like Wayward Youth and The Violent Gang, several issues of Corrections (a quarterly journal aimed at prison wardens), a lot of original crime pulps from the Forties and Fifties, avant-garde literary novels, a medical book about skin diseases, some books about religious cults (particularly Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple), a first edition of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, and So many other unexpected gems. It was, as I’d hoped, an oddball collection that offered a bit of insight into Goffman’s work and thinking.

Erving Goffman was born in Alberta, Canada in 1922. After entering college as a chemistry major, he eventually got his BA in sociology in 1948, and began his graduate studies at The university of Chicago.

In 1952 he married Angelica Choate, a woman with a history of mental illness, and they had a son. The following year he received his PHD from Chicago. His thesis concerned public interactions and rituals among the residents of one of the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland. Afterward, he took a job with the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. His first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which evolved out of his thesis, came out in 1956, and his second, Asylums, which resulted from his work at N.I,M.H., was released five years later. In 1958 he took a teaching position at UC-Berkeley, and was soon promoted to full professor. His wife committed suicide in 1964, and in 1968 he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as the chair of the sociology department, a post he would hold until his death in 1982.

Citing intellectual influences from anthropology and psychology as well as sociology, Goffman was nevertheless a maverick. Instead of controlled clinical studies and statistical analysis, Goffman based his work on careful close observation of real human interactions in public places,. Instead of focusing on the behaviors of large, faceless groups like sports fans, student movements or factory workers, he concentrated on the tiny details of face-to-face encounters, the gestures, language and behavior of individuals interacting with one another or within a larger institutional framework. Instead of citing previous academic papers to support his claims, he’d more often use quotes from literary sources, letters, or interviews. He created a body of work around those banal, microcosmic day-two-day experiences which had been all but ignored by sociologists up to that point. After his death he was considered one of the most important and influential sociologists of the twentieth century.

Without getting into all the complexities and interpretations of Goffman’s various theories (despite his radical subjective approach, he was still an academic after all), let me lay out simpleminded thumbnails of the two core ideas at the heart of his work.

Taking a cue from both Freud and Shakespeare, he employed theatrical terminology to argue that whenever we step out into public, we are all essentially actors on a stage. We wear masks, we take on certain behaviors and attitudes that differ wildly from the characters we are when we’re at home. All our actions in public, he claimed, are social performances designed (we hope) to present a certain image of ourselves to the world at large. The idea of course has been around in literature for centuries, but Goffman was the first to seriously apply it in broad strokes to sociology.

His other, and related, fundamental idea was termed frame analysis, the idea being that we perceive each social encounter—running into that creepy guy on the train again, say, or arguing with the checkout clerk at the supermarket about the quality of their potatoes—as something isolated and contained, a picture within a frame, or a movie still.

He used those two models to study day-to-day life in mental institutions and prisons, note the emergence of Texas businessmen adopting white cowboy hats as a standard part of their attire, analyze workplace interactions and the complicated rituals we go through when we run into someone we sort-of know on the sidewalk.

I first read Goffman in college when his 1964 book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, was used in a postmodern political science course I was taking. In the slim volume, Goffman studied the conflicts and prejudices ex-cons, mental patients, cripples, the deformed and other social outcasts encountered when they stepped out into public, as well as the assorted codes and tricks they used to pass for normal. When passing was possible, anyway. At the time I was smitten with the book and these tales of outsiders, being a deliberately constructed outsider myself (though as a nihilistic cigar-smoking petty criminal punk rock kid, I had no interest in passing for normal). I was also struck to read a serious sociological study that cited Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—my favorite novel at the time—as supporting evidence.

Thirty-five years later, and after having read all of Goffman’s other major works, I returned to Stigma again, but with a different perspective. Although my youthful Romantic notions about social outcasts still lingered, by that time I’d become a bona-fide and inescapable social outcast myself, tapping around New York with a red and white cane.

Goffman spent a good deal of the book focused on the daily issues faced by the blind, but in 1985 those weren’t the outsiders who interested me. Now that I was one of them myself, I must say I was amazed and impressed by the accuracy of Goffman’s observations. He pointed out any number of things that have always been ignored by others who’ve written about the blind. Like those others, he notes that Normals, accepting the myth that our other senses become heightened after the loss of our sight, believe us to have superpowers of some kind. (For the record, I never dissuade people of this silly notion.) But Goffman took it one step further, noting that to Normals, a blindo accomplishing something, well, normal—like lighting a cigarette—is taken to be some kind of superhuman achievement, and evidence of powers they can barely begin to fathom.

(Ironically, he writes in Asylums that the process of socializing mental patients is a matter of turning them into dull, unobtrusive and nearly invisible individuals. Those are good citizens.)

Elsewhere in Stigma Goffman also points out—and you cannot believe how commonplace this is—that Normals, believing us to have some deep insights into life and the world, feel compelled, uninvited and without warning, to stop the blind on the street or at the supermarket to share with them their darkest secrets, medical concerns and personal problems as if we’d known them all our lives. He also observed the tendency for Normals to treat us not only like we’re blind, but deaf and lame as well, yelling in our ears and insisting on helping us out of chairs.

Ah, but one thing he brought up, which I’ve never seen anyone else mention before, is the fate awaiting those blindos (or cripples of any kind) who actually accomplish something like writing a book. It doesn’t matter if the book had absolutely nothing to do with being a cripple. I’ve published eleven books to date, and only two of them even mention blindness. It doesn’t matter. If a cripple makes something of him or herself, that cripple then becomes a lifelong representative of that entire class of stigmatized individuals, at least in mainstream eyes. From that point onward he or she will always be not only “that Blind Writer” or “that Legless Architect,” but a spokesperson on any issues pertaining to their particular disability. I was published long before I developed that creepy blind stare, but if I approach a mainstream publication nowadays, the only things they’ll let me write about are cripple issues. Every now and again if I need the check, I’ll, yes, put on the mask and play the role. But I’m bored to death with cripple issues, which is why whenever possible I neglect to mention to would-be editors that I’m blind. And I guess that only supports Goffman’s overall thesis, right?

Well, anyway, a series of four floods in my last apartment completely wiped out my prized Goffman library (as well as my prized novelization collection), so in retrospect I guess that professor at Penn probably would have been better off donating them to the special collections department of some library.

by Jim Knipfel

On the debacle with Fallout 76

 I feel like the debacle with Fallout 76 has become a testing grounds for a lot of the dominating theories and myths about video games and video game consumers in general, as well as more specifically about Bethesda studios and Bethesda gamers. I apologize for the LONG post ahead, but there’s a lot to unpack here and I want to make sure everyone’s on the same page before I try and make any big points. For those not in the know, I will attempt to summarize: - Bethesda released Fallout 76, a multiplayer installment in the Fallout franchise, with a set release date of November 14, 2018.  - The game was announced with the marketing that it would be playable and enjoyable as singleplayer, that every person you ran into would be a real person, that it was a new Fallout experience, that its graphics would improve upon Fallout 4′s graphics by 16 times, and notably, one collector’s edition which cost $200 was marketed as coming with a wearable helmet and a canvas bag.

The beta was shaky and riddled with bugs, and upon release, the game itself was still pretty much broken -- far moreso than other Bethesda titles, and this coming from a company where the running joke since Oblivion has been that the bugs are so prevalent that they are a feature, not a flaw. An enormous patch was released shortly after launch, which was larger in size than the game itself, and which not only didn’t fix almost any of the bugs, but created hundreds *more* bugs, as if they didn’t playtest the patch at all.  For players like me who can go a surprisingly long time in a Bethesda game without seeing any bugs at all, I will note that these bugs include: - T-posing enemies which either spontaneously assume their correct animations only when you get close, or never do, or which teleport suddenly into you to try and display their attack animations - Horrendous enemy A.I. where a lot of them will just stand in one place looping an animation - Enemies spawning out of thin air directly in front of you due to slow loading - A bug where enemies spontaneously heal the exact amount of damage you deal to them, making them invincible - Falling through the ground out of nowhere - Clipping through and getting caught in the world - Frequent server crashes, often due to in-game happenings (the game eventually gives you access to nuclear bombs, but the same bombs can crash the server if you drop them) - Frequent disconnects - Frequent game crashes (with no ‘save game’ function) - Body horror bugs like the Wendigo Bug which have been present since Fallout 4 and haven’t been fixed by Bethesda yet, even though modders were able to fix them weeks after Fallout 4 came out. Three years ago.  Moreover, the game directly ported over most of its visual assets from Fallout 4. Most of the landscape elements come from Fallout 4, almost all of the weapons come from Fallout 4, almost all of the outfits and armors come from Fallout 4, most of the monsters come from Fallout 4, the physics and gunplay is directly ported over (minus the ability to pause the game to open your inventory, of course, and minus the time-slowing aspect of V.A.T.S, which makes V.A.T.S almost completely useless), the character creation is ported over, the loot is ported over, the base-building system and all of its assets (walls, floors, anything you’d use to build a base) are ported over. Basically, other than trees and certain monsters unique to West Virginia, you’ll have a hard time spotting content which isn’t directly ported over from Fallout 4, often without palette swaps. Is the promise of better graphics fulfilled?  Well, the lighting is significantly improved, and even very pretty and atmospheric -- though occasionally light will shine through solid far-away objects, like mountains. Modders had done this almost immediately with Fallout 4, too, though, so it’s not really a huge achievement. And the landscape is much more colourful than in any other Fallout game, which is admittedly a nice change of pace, even though it makes no goddamn sense why the trees would survive while everything else dies around them. But other than those two elements... yeah, it just looks like Fallout 4, but usually doesn’t render as well due to being on a multiplayer server and due to the graphical glitches. How about the promise that every person you run into is a real person? Well, that was true all right, but how anyone thought that was a good idea is beyond me. It’s one of those things that sounds really cool and innovative until you think about it for literally any length of time at all. Why would that be a good thing? Unless you have quite a lot of friends who you’ve somehow got onto the same server (which, by the way, I don’t think has much functionality in Fallout 76), you’re not going to be very interested in those people, and you have no reason to be. They’re just big lumps of immersion-breaking, as I seriously doubt many people are going onto the game to vocally roleplay their way through the game experience.  Moreover, this means no NPCs besides monsters and robots. No quests from anyone but robots and holotapes. Now, I like holotapes. I’m one of those unbearable players who listens to every holotape and reads every computer terminal. My favourite part of Fallout games is usually finding out the big stories behind Vaults or unusual locations. But when you are doing this quest for someone you will never meet, and have complete certainty of this fact, the reason to do quests in the first place starts to ebb away. You just get holotapes or robots telling you to go to a place, kill something there, rinse, repeat. That’s the entire game. Nothing is achieved; everyone who recorded those holotapes is dead, or a monster now. You’re not doing anyone any favours. There’s no one to help, there’s no one to hate, there’s just you (and whatever people you’re playing with, who, again, aren’t really part of the story as multiplayer gamers don’t typically roleplay). The main quest of the game revolves around trying to find the previous Overseer of the vault. There’s zero suspense, interest or urgency, because as a player, you know with complete certainty going in that if you find her, she’ll be dead or a monster. When you remove the NPCs, you remove all our reasons to care about quests. You also remove all interactions in the game besides “kill thing, loot thing, make stuff with loot”. And killing monsters with such laughable AI and glitches, AI designed for Fallout 4 where V.A.T.S could pause the game and dropped into a game where it doesn’t, isn’t nearly enjoyable enough to make that game loop anything but ghastly. How ANYONE thought this was a good idea is beyond me, and I’m pretty sure at this point that they didn’t do it because they thought it was a good idea, they did it because having NPCs function like they would in a singleplayer game, while in a multiplayer server, is an incredibly daunting task. When literally no one asked for the game to be multiplayer in the first place, but hey. Is the game fun to play alone? Not from literally anyone I know who has, no, and this is due to the above factors. Is the game, as the marketing said, more fun to play with your friends? Well, yes, but the same could be said of cleaning out a moldy garage alone versus with friends. Being with friends makes anything more enjoyable. The game does not cease to have all its serious underlying problems when you play with friends, you just have someone to commiserate with and witness this bullshit with you. Is this a new Fallout experience? Not really. It’s Fallout 4 with a prettier landscape, story constrained to holotapes and therefore constrained to the past (and not the present the player is actually playing in!), and it’s arguably not even a Fallout experience at all. It wears a Fallout skin but the core roleplaying, choice, and narrative features of the game are gone, and all that’s left is a world that’s much bigger, but where all the new space is pretty much empty anyhow.  Oh, and the canvas bags for the collector’s edition were cheap vinyl when people got them, Bethesda just went “yeah canvas was too expensive lol, u can have five dollars’ worth of the game’s microtransaction money for free tho if you want, just file a complaint”. The amount of the microtransaction digital money wouldn’t even buy a virtual canvas bag, mind. Then someone threatened a lawsuit, and it looks like people are going to get their actual canvas bags. But they still need to file a complaint, and WHOOPS! They accidentally doxxed everyone who filed a complaint, to some other people who filed a complaint! The absolute cherry on top. (Yes, it really was an accident, it’s even stupider than it sounds.) So what can we take away from all this? Well, I wouldn’t take away much hope for Fallout 76 as a game, for one. It’s a dumpster fire, and they keep pouring gasoline onto it. But the game has scored abysmally low basically everywhere. People have noticed, and they’re not pleased. The game’s price has dropped 30%, and that’s in the first couple weeks after launching, which is completely unheard of for a AAA game. Returns are going wild. Youtube is FULL of videos taking Fallout 76 to town. So clearly, gamers won’t lap up whatever you give them just because it’s a sequel to something they love. The sunk cost fallacy hasn’t run that deep, and people are suddenly extremely skeptical of whatever Bethesda releases next -- which at this rate, is going to be either The Elder Scrolls: Blades, or their new sci-fi game, followed by The Elder Scrolls VII (title as yet unannounced).  I would also suggest that studios may finally have been given a good indication that clumsily slapping multiplayer on something that had success as single-player isn’t the greatest idea. This is a lesson that probably should have been learned years ago, but better late than never.  I would also hope that game studios, Bethesda especially, develop a touch more respect for their fanbase and realize that player bases can be lost. Bethesda has relied upon their fanbase to mod away their bugs, laziness, and incomplete content hampered by release dates for many years now, but faced with a multiplayer game with no mod support, they are put in a position where they have to realize how heavily they’ve been leaning on those mods. But there’s another part of the story that isn’t being covered so much -- one which challenges the assumptions which has led Bethesda and the players to such a disaster in the first place. Red Dead Redemption 2 has been in the makings for a long time now, but was released something like a year late in comparison to its originally announced release date. The new Kingdom Hearts has been repeatedly delayed. I’d expect the fans would have reacted with nothing but outrage! But they ... haven’t, for the most part. There’s been some frustration and groaning, especially with people who have pre-ordered the games, but for the most part, the fans have been pretty understanding. It turns out they’d rather have a game come out finished than come out on time.  That seems simple, and even obvious, but for close to twenty years, it has been the prevailing logic that for a game to sell well, it has to come out at a pre-defined and specific date, and if it isn’t done, that’s just how the process of making games work, and we’ll fix it in bug patches, or wait for mods to fix it. This is such an assumed phenomenon that it shows up repeatedly in Extra Credits, a show which talks in great detail about the production of video games, and I’d be hard-pressed to name a game that I own or play which doesn’t have unfinished content, even if it’s fairly bug-free. But here we are, Red Dead 2 is out, and it’s a roaring success, despite considerable delays. The conventional wisdom is simply wrong. And it gets even better. This is the trailer for The Outer Worlds, a game made by Obsidian. I urge you to watch it. First of all, the game looks good. The graphics are good, the human characters are expressive and dynamic while still looking realistic. The backgrounds are great. The humour is great. The world-building, what we see of it, looks very promising. And oh my god, the shade they throw at Bethesda is gorgeous. Not only does Obsidian highlight themselves as the creators of Fallout and Fallout: New Vegas -- that is, the two most-loved Fallout games -- they play with the concept of a cryogenically frozen player character (possibly lampshading the use of the same concept in Fallout 4), and they point out that player choice isn’t just about a binary “who do you shoot” moment -- another moment from Fallout 4, and one of the few real choices you get to make in that game -- and implies that variety of choice, including non-combat choice, is going to be a Thing in this game. Look at the comments section for that video. You will see hundreds, nay, THOUSANDS of comments praising the trailer, talking about the shade it casts on Bethesda, making New Vegas meme jokes, praising the music, lauding the humour, wondering about the characters it shows us. You know what I didn’t see? Even one single, solitary comment complaining that there’s no definite release date shown anywhere in that trailer. Seriously, watch it again. It doesn’t say exactly when it’s coming out. Just 2019. No month. No date. Just sometime next year. You know... when it’s done. What you might not have known was that The Outer Worlds was originally estimated to come out this year. You didn’t know that because they didn’t release the trailer until just recently -- when they were far enough in production to produce such a great trailer, for one, but also once they were far enough to be certain they would be finished with production within a year.  No one cares when it’s coming. They care that it looks like a good game with so much original effort put into it. That’s what matters. And maybe if the game studios can realize this, we’ll finally see an end to the exploitative bullshit that happens -- exploitative of not just the gamers, but of the thousands of overworked employees it takes to make a AAA video game -- in the service of an absolute deadline above the game itself. God, now that’s a thought. So don’t be discouraged by the failure of Fallout 76. There’s way better on the horizon. The myths that studios need a firm deadline to put out a good game, the myths that players in some way demand a firm deadline, the myth that players will sit there and take any level of bullshit, they’re all being thoroughly, publicly debunked. Feels good, man. Feels good.

Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2018

Congratulations dear reader. You survived 2018. And you know what that means. It’s time for another best of/worst of list. Welcome to Quill’s Swill 2018. A giant septic tank for the various shit the entertainment industry produced over the course of the year. The films, games, TV shows and various other media that got on my bad side. As always please bear in mind that this is only my subjective opinion (if you happen to like any of the things on this list, good for you. I’m glad someone did) and that obviously I haven’t seen everything 2018 has to offer for one reason or another. In other words, sorry that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald isn’t on here. I’m sure it is as terrible as some have been suggesting. I just never got around to watching it.

Okay everyone. Grab your breathing masks and put on your rubber gloves. Let’s dive into this shit pile.

Hold The Sunset

The news that John Cleese would be returning to the world of BBC sitcoms was incredibly exciting, being a massive Fawlty Towers fan and all. Unfortunately Hold The Sunset was not quite what I had in mind. It’s one of those rare breed of situation comedies that chooses to offer no actual comedy. It’s not a sitcom. It’s a sit. Like Scrubs or The Big Bang Theory.

An elderly couple plan to elope abroad only for Alison Steadman’s son to barge in, having left his wife, and forcing them to put their plans on hold. Hence the title ‘Hold The Sunset.’ It’s like a cross between As Time Goes By and Sorry, but if all the humour and relatability were surgically removed by a deadpan mortician. The characters are weak, the plots are thin on the ground and the humour (hat little of it there is) feel incredibly dated. The middle aged mummy’s boy is something that hasn’t been funny since the 90s. It’s an utter waste of great talent and what hurts even more is that this tripe is actually getting a second series. I can only assume the people watching this are comatose. Either that or there’s an epidemic of people in Britain who have lost the remote.

Avengers: Infinity War

Yes this is one of the worst movies of 2018 and no I don’t regret saying that one little bit. Avengers: Infinity War was fucking terrible. Period. There were too many plots and characters going on, which made the film hard to follow (and what staggers me is that the so called ‘professional’ critics have condemned movies for having too many characters and plots before. Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice and even Deadpool 2. But because this is an MCU movie, it gets a free pass. Fuck off). The characterisation was weak due to sheer number of characters they try to juggle, resulting in characters coming off as one dimensional caricatures of themselves and scenes where characters such as Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Star-Lord sound completely interchangeable. The villain, Thanos, is a stupidly and poorly written villain, but that’s hardly surprising considering what a shit job Marvel have done building him up over the course of these 20+ movies. And let’s not forget that pisstake ending. A bunch of prominent Marvel characters die and it’s all very, very sad... except all these characters just so happen to have sequels planned, which makes this ending fucking pointless and have less impact than a feather on a bouncy castle.

I don’t know which is more shocking. That Marvel and Disney think their audience are that stupid and gullible, or that their audience are actually validating their view. Fuck you Disney.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery

I’ve always wanted a Harry Potter RPG, where you could customise your character, choose your house and actually live a full school life at Hogwarts. This year, Warner Bros and Jam City gave us just that.

That was a mistake.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the mobile gaming market right now. The gameplay is boring and involving where you just tap images on a screen until a progress bar fills up. Wizard duels are little more than rock-paper-scissors challenges that require no kind of skill. Bonding with friends and caring for magical creatures just consist of pathetically simple pop quizzes and yet more boring tapping. Oh and of course you only get a certain amount of energy to complete these tedious tasks. If you run out of energy, you wait for it to fill up... or pay up for the privilege. So determined are they to extract your hard earned cash from your wallet, there’s actually a bit where Devil’s Snare strangles your eleven year old avatar and the game effectively tries to guilt trip you into paying micro-transactions to save them. It’s sleazy, gross and manipulative. Honestly, you’re better off just playing Candy Crush.

Agony

When the developers of this game said they wanted to give the player a trip through Hell, they had no idea how true that statement really was. Agony is dreadful on a number of levels. The design for Hell itself, while visually interesting at times, is often not very practical and gets quite dull and repetitive after a while. The stealth mechanics are a joke and the AI of your demonic enemies are pitiful. All of this alone would have been enough to put this game on the list, but then we also have the casual misogyny. Agony is a gorefest trying desperately to shock the player. We see men and woman get tortured, but it’s the women that often get the extreme end. The violence inflicted on them is often sexual in nature and the game seems to go out of its way to degrade and dehumanise women at every turn. The orgasmic cries of ‘pull it out’ quickly become a staple of the game’s experience as we see naked women raped, tortured and murdered, all for the purposes of ‘entertainment.’

I would call Agony sexist, but honestly that would be giving it too much credit. Agony is like a little child trying desperately to be all dark and edgy in a pathetic attempt to impress everyone around him, and we should treat it as such. Go to your room Agony. No ice cream for you.

Peter Rabbit

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Beatrix Potter rotating in her grave.

Yes we have yet another live action/CGI hybrid, but instead of something innocuous like the Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks, Sony instead decides to adapt Peter Rabbit, with James Corden in the title role.

It’s about as bad as you’d expect.

Their attempts to modernise the story are painful to say the least with pop culture references, inappropriate adult humour and twerking rabbits. Plus rather than the gentle, but slightly mischievous character we got in the source material, here Peter is a sociopathic delinquent who seems to revel in making the farmer’s life a living hell. He’s unlikable and unwatchable as far as I’m concerned and the film doesn’t in anyway earn the emotional moments it tries so desperately to sell to the audience. And the worst part is it’s getting a sequel.

Wait. Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of Beatrix Potter tearing out of the ground, ready to kill whatever idiot came up with this shit.

Fallout 76

I was excited for Fallout 76. A MMORPG where players band together to rebuild society after a nuclear apocalypse. Could have been great. Pity it wasn’t.

Fallout 76 is a dreadful game. Not only is it a buggy, glitchy mess that requires a constant online connection to play, which could result in you losing hours of progress if your WiFi went down, it’s also unbelievably tedious, and that’s because there’s nothing to do in the game. There’s no other characters to interact with, the various robots and computers you come across are really little more than quest givers, there’s no actual plot so to speak, and because of the sheer size of the world and the number of players allowed on a server, the chances of you actually meeting any actual players is remote. And let’s not forget all the behind the scenes drama. Bethesda falsely advertising Fallout themed canvas bags and players getting shitty nylon ones. Bethesda accidentally releasing the account information of various players trying to get a refund for said bag. Bethesda failing to program the year 2019 into the game code, meaning that the game’s nukes don’t work.

Maybe there’s a chance that Bethesda could pull a No Man’s Sky and fix everything over the coming years with various patches and DLCs, but the damage has already been done. It’s incredibly disappointing. The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have be fucking incredible to win everyone back.

Mama Mia!: Here We Go Again

I can’t stand jukebox musicals anyway, but Mamma Mia was always one of the worst. Its boring, meandering story with its one note, obnoxious cast of characters screeching out ABBA songs like they’re at some drunken karaoke session at some poor sod’s hen party has always grated on my nerves. So imagine my delight when they announced we were getting a sequel. Ever wondered how Meryl Streep met her three lovers and founded her hotel? No? Well tough shit, we’re going to tell you anyway.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is basically just Mamma Mia again. The actors still can’t sing, the characters are still annoying and story is still boring and meandering, completely at the mercy of the chosen songs rather than the filmmakers using the songs to compliment the story (you know? Like proper musicals do?).

How can I resist you? Very easily as it turns out. Gimme, gimme, gimme a fucking gun so I can end my misery.

The Cloverfield Paradox

A lot of people were unhappy about the direction Cloverfield was going. They wanted a continuation of the found footage, kaiju movie from 2008, not an anthology series. I was personally all in favour. Partially because I thought the first Cloverfield was a tad overrated, but mostly because I thought it would be a great opportunity for more experimental film projects and could be a great launchpad for new writers and filmmakers. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a great start. Then The Cloverfield Paradox happened.

The Cloverfield Paradox is basically JJ Abrams trying to have his cake and eat it too. Maintaining the anthology format whilst connecting everything together in a ‘shared universe’ (yes, yet another shared universe). The result was a cliched, poorly edited and idiotic mess of a film that actually took away from the previous two films rather than added to them. Everyone hated it and, as a result, 2018′s Overlord, which was totes going to be part of the Cloververse, was made its own standalone film and Abrams double pinky promised to make a true sequel to the original Cloverfield. A complete and total disaster. No wonder it was a straight-to-Netflix film.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Season 2

This is probably going to be the most controversial entry on the list, but please hear me out because I’m not the only one who has a problem with this season.

I was reluctant to watch The Handmaid’s Tale simply because of how gruesome the original book was, but I forced myself to watch the first season and I thought it was pretty good. It remained faithful to the source material for the most part and included some nice additions that helped to expand the story and mythos. If it was just a one off mini-series, everything would have been fine. But then they made the same mistake as The Man In The High Castle and Under The Dome did where they commissioned another season and attempted to tell a story that goes beyond the book.

There’s a reason why the original story ended where it did. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t meant to be an empowering story about women sticking it to the patriarchy. It’s a cautionary tale about how fragile our civil rights truly are and how easily they can be taken away from us. It’s designed to shock, not to satisfy. So seeing a handmaid blow herself up in a suicide bombing feels very incongruous and just a little bit silly. It would be like doing a TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 where the first season followed the source material and then the second season turned Winston Smith into this heroic freedom fighter trying to overthrow Big Brother. It would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what the book was about in the first place.

And then of course there’s the increased level of violence in Season 2, which many have complained about. In Season 1 and the original source material, the violence was justified. In Season 2, the motivation behind the violence has gone from ‘how can we effectively demonstrate how easily a fascist patriarchy can happen in the West?’ to ‘what brutal act can we inflict upon Ofglen to shock the audience this week?’ It’s purely for shock and nothing more. And with the showrunner (who I feel I should mention is a man) announcing that he has planned ten seasons of this, it seems that The Handmaid’s Tale is going to go even further with this depravity until it effectively becomes the equivalent of a Saw film.

The Handmaid’s Tale exists as a way of shining light on and critiquing misogyny in its most extreme form. Season 2 however demonstrates that there is a serious risk of it becoming the very thing it’s criticising in the first place.

The Predator

I love the Predator franchise, but The Predator is the worst.

People thought that this would be good because director Shane Black had actually starred in the first Predator movie back in 1987. Instead we got this bloated, confusing, obnoxious and insulting mess of a film that seems to go out of its way to ruin everything that makes Predator so good. There’s no tension. No suspense. No intrigue. Just a bunch of gore, explosions and shitty one liners from annoying and lifeless characters. They essentially took this big alien game hunter from outer space and turned him into a generic monster from a bad summer blockbuster. It no longer hunts for sport. It wants to take over the world and splice our DNA with theirs. But don’t worry, a rogue Predator doesn’t want to kill humans (even though he himself kills a bunch of humans), so he gives us a Predator Iron Man suit to set up a sequel that will probably never happen because this movie was a box office bomb and it fucking SUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKEEEEEDDDD!!!

This film also has a very nasty streak towards those with disabilities. There’s a lot of jokes at the expense of a character with Tourette’s and it has an extremely ignorant and patronising view of autism, portraying the main character’s kid as being a super genius who can decipher the Predator language and even going so far as to say that he represents ‘the next stage of human evolution.’ Presumably the Predators want social communication difficulties because apparently it helps them hunt somehow.

What with Disney acquiring 20th Century Fox, the future of both the Alien and Predator franchises were very much in question. This film needed to be a success in order to make a case for Disney to keep making more of them. It wasn’t. Congratulations Shane Black. You might have just killed off this franchise for good. Thanks arsehole! :D

So those were my least favourite stories from 2018. Join me on Wednesday where we shall discuss something more positive. Yes, it’s awards season. Who shall win the coveted Quill Seal Of Approval? Watch this space...

Or don’t. It’s up to you. I don’t want to force you or anything. It’s a free country.

#20 from the angst prompts?

Paradox: fic

20: “Notwith the person from the past in tow.” 

Sorry it took a while to get to this. It’s a bit angsty, a little tiny bit NSFW but not too much and a little bit fluffy? Tagging @today-in-fic

It’s a paradox. That she’s more in love with him now thanshe has ever been. Than she should be. There’s a thesis there somewhere, shethinks, as she’s driving to the restaurant. Something about time dilation andvelocity. How he has propelled her forward and held her back. How he has beenboth a burden and a blessed relief.

She parks and wonders if this is the right move. Or if it’sjust an ill-considered attempt to recapture something from the past, like theX-Files. It’s not the same. It was never going to be the same. It should neverbe the same. Life’s journeys should look and feel different, even if they aretaken on the same path. You’re supposed to learn. Learn something.

It’s a paradox. She knows so much about him, but he’s alwaysa surprise. He’s holding a book in his hands, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief Historyof Time. It’s got a gaudy yellow bow tied around it. And under the ribbon istucked a slip of paper.

“You are now a paid-up member of the Book League ofBethesda. Two years, no less.”

“You bought me a membership to a club I don’t want to belongto.” His arrogance is not even arrogance, it’s just the way he is. His is aspecial brand that has no apt descriptor. Though she does imagine the Germanswould have a word for it.

He holds the door open as though his generosity counters hisego. It’s a paradox.

“You sound like Groucho Marx.” He is grinning. It softensher edges. Every damned time.

She slips past him and the Maitre’D leads the way. The book doesn’tfit on the beautifully-dressed table. She puts it on her lap.

“Their next reading book is Go Set a Watchman.” He is still grinning.She is still softening.

“Mulder, what sort of reading club leaps from an explorationof the structure of the universe to a novel of dubious provenance that isprobably just an early draft of the magnum opus of the author?”

“I don’t know, Scully, but I bought you a copy of A BriefHistory of Time because the one you left at our house got ripped to piecesduring the altercation with those Russians. It’s not on the Book League ofBethesda’s reading list.” He sips water. “Well, not for the next six months.See,” he says, stabbing the paper, “there are the coming titles.”

Our house. Ours. She orders sweet and sour salmon. Hechooses grass-fed beef. As they wait, she watches the orange flame of theelegant crimson candle on the table, wave and snap. Wave and snap. Slow, fast.Slow, fast.

“Something plain, Scully. Sometimes life is so complicatedthat food should just be simple.” He’s back to grinning.

The wine leaves a purple film around the glass. It slidesdown the curved sides and she watches, fascinated by the pattern.

“Wine legs,” he says.

“I’ve only had one glass, Mulder.”

“Or wine fingers, or curtains or even church windows. It’sbecause the alcohol has a lower surface tension than water. Capillary actionmakes the liquid climb the sides of the glass and both the alcohol and thewater evaporate.”

“But the alcohol evaporates faster,” she says. “I know,Mulder. But it’s still a wonder, isn’t it?”

He’s not grinning anymore. He’s serious and her stomachcoils. “Do you ever think about twins, Scully?”

Her mind flashes back to the St Rachel Motel. She fuckedMulder. At the time, it felt so good and it just a bit a wrong. It felt soself-loving and just a bit selfish. Then the bizarre events of Mulder punchingthe daylights out of his other self and her giving her own doppelganger a peptalk about psychic manifestations and latent hostilities. The whole case hadleft her flying on a high and weighted down by guilt.

               “I can’tsay I do,” she tells him, swallowing the flame of shiraz and her lie. She wasfire under his touch that night. That morning.

               His footis tapping the floor. “If twins are separated at birth what makes them seek outlives that are so similar, marry people with the same names, feel the pain of injuriesof the other?”

              “Sometimesthey don’t, Mulder. There have been studies that show…”

              His facesets. His foot stills. She stops talking. An image of him under her, face openfor the reading, lips reddened by hers, hips bucking up so she was filled withhim. She dips her chin to her chest and tries to suck in air without it seemingdesperate.

              “Arethose two people themselves or are they individuals?”

              “Andhere I was thinking you’d asked me out to wine and dine me.” She can stilltaste the salt-tang of his and her own arousal, coating her lips and her throatas she took him in her mouth. Joining.

              “What ifwe have two selves and each grows at a different rate?”

              “Twoselves?” She sips more wine and snaps back to the now. “Is this a pop psychologyquiz?”

              “What ifthe person I was before is not the person I am now but I am still just one?Where does the other self go?”

              “Isn’tthat just experiential learning, Mulder? We all change as we go through life.You can’t separate what you’ve lived from where you are heading.”

              “Andwhat if your future is joined with another?” His hand slides across the tableto take hers. His fingers are always softer than she expects. It’s a paradox,that for all his suffering and pain, Mulder’s touch is so gentle. “What if youwant to shuck off your old self completely so that this other person can seethe new version of you. The one that is better, more fully rendered; the onewho is ready.”

              His eyesclose a moment, flicker shut like he’s waiting, defensive, for the blow. Thearrogant self has disappeared, she thinks. He’s a paradox, this Mulder, thisman she loves too much and not enough. How would she ask him to ever not be hisconfusing, bewildering, multi-faceted self.

              “Then Iwould say that the future looks bright,” she says, drawing herself closer tohim. Wax, transparent from heat, tipples down the side of the candle and theflame flickers. The wax settles at the base like petals. “For this otherperson. And your freshly-shucked self.”

              “Ithink,” he says, “that you are ready, Scully. I know I’m ready. I think it’stime. Come back.”

              She leansback, letting his words sink in. The bow catches her eye and she glances at thebook, solid on the floor. “There’s a section in A Brief History of Time thatdiscusses Feynman’s theory of sum over histories. Where each particle has many histories.”Come back. Come back. To go forward means to go back. It’s a paradox. She feelsa sting of tears and shivers. “If we have many histories, does it not go thatwe have many futures too, Mulder?

              He’salmost back to grinning. Framing the narrative of their relationship in thesafe haven of supposition and theory. “And that we need to start down one pathto see where it goes. But that any number of forces or influences or chanceoccurrences can disrupt that journey?”

              Shenods. “We’ve had a similar conversation before,” she says and thinks againabout bodies joining, about curves and contours and planes and angles. “Aboutfate, about destiny.” He remembers. She can see it in the slight dip of hisforehead, the way his eyes darken a shade in the glow of the candlelight. “Hawkingposits that there are arrows of time. The first is thermodynamic, where theoverall disorderliness in the world increases over time, so despite our bestefforts to create order, the energy used has created more disorder.”

              “Soundslike my life, Scully,” he says, chuckling.

              “But thesecond arrow is psychological, where our sense of time flows in one directiononly – that’s why we only remember the past.”

              “So, that’syour complicated way of saying that we can only go forward if we learn from thepast?”

              “It is,Mulder. Life in the past is complex, but the future is simple. Because we can’tsee it yet.”

              “We cango forward but not with the person from the past in tow?”

              “I trulybelieve that we can go forward safe in the knowledge that wherever that personis, that other self, from the past, they stay behind us. They follow, but they’llnever overtake us.”

              He isgrinning again. Full on wide smile, teeth on show, dimples striped across hischeeks. “I like the thought of you always being on my tail, Scully. Whip inhand, ready to get me up to speed.”

              Shelaughs then. “What would Freud make of us, Mulder?”

              “I’m notsure I’m that ready, Scully.”

She walks up the stairs and checks out the covers of thebooks wedged against the banister. It’s only when she gets to the fourth stepthat she sees they are all the same – different covers, but the same novel. MobyDick. The story of two men: one obsessed with the hunt, the other desperate tounderstand what to make of the prey and the predator.

              “Youknow, Mulder. There are some theories that Moby Dick is much like physics. Ahab’snarrative is linear, his velocity is on a straight, immoveable line and Ishmaelis a force of digression, a disturbance.”

              “And yetit’s a book of everything that makes us human,” he says.

              “It’s aparadox,” she whispers.

              Hesnakes his arm around her waist and kisses her head. “Welcome home, Scully.”

I think I’m starting to understand the difference in philosophies that underlies the two kinds of video game RPG better. I think of them as the Bethesda and the BioWare RPG, but more accurate terms would be the simulationist and the character-driven RPG. Which is not to say that the two categories are exclusive--they’re different points on a spectrum. The extreme simulationist RPG would be Dwarf Fortress’s Adventure Mode, where the entire world is procedurally generated ex nihilo, including attempts to procedurally generate things like history and politics and whole systems of magic. I’m not sure what the opposite would be--maybe something like the original Mass Effect, whose levels are quite cloistered, or the first Deus Ex, where you’re playing a character who is extremely defined as a person, but you still get to choose how the plot unfolds.

Each has aspects I like. I like that in character-driven games I have a strong narrative I get to operate within, and I get to make choices which affect the emotional outcome of the game. Bethesda games lack that, because for all the influence that in theory you have over the world, the ultimate outcome is usually always the same: Mehrunes Dagon is defeated, Alduin is killed, you’re sitting on a pile of treasure. What outcomes you do control tend to be binary yes/no levers (did you do the College of Winterhold quests? Congrats, you can add “Archmage” to your extremely long list of titles an honors), and moving through the game’s programmatic implementation of the plot feels more lack racking up Steam achievements than anything else.

Buuuut the price you pay for actually feeling like you inhabit these worlds is feeling like the worlds themselves are pretty two-dimensional. Skyrim was the first RPG I played where I felt a strong sense of place, like even though the experience was mediated by a computer screen and a mouse and keyboard, I could imagine what it would be like to stand on the road outside Riverwood and feel the cool breeze and look up and the foggy mountains. At the time I thought it was just the (then) shiny new graphics, but I bought Morrowind the other day just for fun, and I don’t think it is--I think placeness is just a thing Bethesda excels at in their games, because they pay close attention to it like BioWare does to characters. Morrowind’s graphics are much more primitive than Skyrim’s, but Vvardenfell definitely still has many of the same qualities Skyrim does in that respect, even with its blocky character models and super-short draw distance.

(Also, playing a little Morrowind has made me appreciate just how much the Dragonborn DLC is a love letter to Morrowind fans, which is neat.)

Are the two approaches compatible? Like, is one side of the spectrum necessarily exclusive of the other? I think they might be. The problem with the simulationist world (and this is a problem STA:GOB2:DF(AM) has in spades) is that you run the risk of a world a million miles wide and a millimeter deep (see also Elite: Dangerous, and No Man’s Sky reportedly but I haven’t played it myself), but Tarn Adams’ extreme fetish for procedural generation simply throws into relief the problem of a lot of these games, which is that random is not actually a substitute for complex, and even conceptually sophisticated Perlin noise is still just... noise. Utterly interchangeable. You can generate a million Dwarf Fortress worlds, and they’ll all be superficially identical.

Even a world like Daggerfall’s, which is the size of Great Britain, is mostly nothing. And it turns out (as fast travel and compass markers have shown us) that for most people, working your way over miles of empty country road and hunting for quest objectives is not the fun part of epic fantasy narratives, which is why most epic fantasy narratives... skip those parts.

(Tangent 1: I understand the impulse to huge fantasy worlds in video games, and I think it’s a positive one, mostly. Theme parks don’t feel real, which is why Azeroth has no sense of place. It could--it has some wonderfully atmospheric zones--but everything about the placement of NPCs and the way you interact with the world screams animatronic Presidents, Disneyland with the Burning Legion, so it lacks... worldlikeness. The problem with big, detailed, simulationist worlds is that if you’re inhabiting them from a pedestrian’s viewpoint, 99.5% of all that is going to go to waste. Either you will fast-travel past it or it will be Desert Bus With Dragons, but honestly, you don’t need to simulate weather fronts and biomes and a realistic medieval economy if all you’re doing is trying to assemble the Staff of Chaos so you can whack Jagar Tharn over the head with it. As soon as your viewpoint becomes even a little bit more elevated, though, that stuff is interesting, and even important. The fact that every merchant in Spira will buy your stuff for exactly one half the price you sell it for is an irrelevant triviality if all you ever see is one merchant’s storefront at a time. But as soon as you begin to piece together anything like a bigger picture, the world needs to make sense. I would combine this observation with the fact that no matter how important you become to the world of Skyrim, you never actually wield any political or administrative authority. Sure, nobody wants to play Dean of the College of Winterhold or have to spend half their time playing Skyrim marking freshers’ essays on the elementary principles of transmutation, but it’s also weird that you can be one of Skyrim’s foremost property owners, thane of nine holds, political counselor of the High King, and you can’t get a guard to so much as hold your horse for you while you pop into the blacksmith’s. A game where accomplishment actually translates into political authority is a game where the worldbuilder’s urge to detail every element of the life-cycle of the lesser mana stoat becomes a little more important, if, say, you need to manage the mana stoat farmers. Although that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate nods towards believability--Skyrim’s tiny-ass farms that couldn’t feed a family of four in a wintry climate, much less a tenth of a goddamn continent, are a major failure on that point. Visual believability is important. Noteworthy here also is landscape architecture: one reason Skyrim does well at placeness is that it feels reasonable, even though it’s a geographical absurdity. Something like the world of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, where even the “plains” regions are wacky moonscapes designed to maximize walking time, so as to substitute boredom for size, are failures in level design.)

(Tangent 2: I once had the idea for a fantasy film or comic book that involved all the usual players: a Scheming Villain, a Terrible Macguffin of Power, a band of Plucky Heroes, romance, war, intrigue, excitement, etc. Except all the big, exciting moments would be entirely implied; the actual story told would be of all the quiet moments between the battles and confrontations and tragic death scenes. The sitting around the campfire singing songs. The tossing and turning on hard ground or in lumpy, unfamiliar beds. The quiet conversation or the anxious exchange of looks before a battle. The moments of reflection or subtle self-doubt before committing to a course of action that could save or doom the world. I don’t actually know if it would make for an interesting story, but I think it would be a lot of fun to write.)

Bethesda for its part is firmly committed to the tabula rasa silent protagonist, and I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think you increase player agency in a world where your protagonist must remain mute, I think you only highlight the disconnect. I may be unusual here, but one of the things I love most about BioWare games, and which makes me feel most embedded in their plots and connected to their characters, is the fact I get to hear both sides of the conversation, and how I choose to respond has a lasting effect on the kind of person the other characters seem to understand me to be. That feels much more interesting to me that the cipher that moves through Bethesda worlds, about which little can be known, because little can be specified. Yes, such a cipher can have any history you want, but only because such a cipher can have no substantive history--so, like the details of a procedurally generated world, the history of such a protagonist, their motivations and intent, is rendered trivial. And for escapist fantasy, where part of the goal is to not be trivial, but to be important, vital even, I think that’s a failure. Unless your goal is to, like, RP a cabbage merchant, in which case--success!

What I really want, what I really feel is a seriously under-appreciated possibility in video game RPGs, is an open world with some of the simulationist aspects, but built around, or laid on top of, a strong central plot skeleton. One with rich character interaction and consequential, emotional choices (and no, Dawnguard does not qualify), and I think the payoff would be that we are so used to vast worlds that are ultimately quite shallow that even a few substantive concessions in this direction would feel like we had suddenly discovered benthic depths.

Game Awards highlights

Highlights of the awards are as follows: Roger Clark (Arthur Morgan) won best voice actor, God of War stole Game of the Year from RDR2 as well as best game direction. Fear not, Red Dead did take the award for best narrative, score, and audio design. Celeste won best indie. Deadcells snuck away with best action game. Monster Hunter World took best RPG and...I agree but I also think Nino Kuni, Octopath, Pillars of Eternity and Dragon Quest 11 fans are rightfully mad. Dragon Ball FighterZ takes best fighting game. Fortnite took best multiplayer game, shocker. 

What I wanted to talk about were the announcements and trailers that came between the commercials and cringe-inducing antics of the event. There wasn’t a lot going on but what was announced was very interesting.

Atlas: Pirates and cannons do not excite me, seafaring and swashbuckling just does nothing for me. All that said...wow Atlas really looks impressive. Made by Wildcard and the team consists of many people who put Ark together. This appears to be a full pirate sim mmorpg that plans to hold 40,000 people on one server. Yes. Forty thousand. Is that MAG level hype? Yeah that and then some. This seems to be one of those situations where a game comes out, it flops, and another studio swoops in to capitalize on the disappointment (see Fortnite to PUBG, 2k to Live, FIFA to PES etc). That game I’m referring to is Sea of Thieves and Wildcard appear to be working hard on making the game Sea of Thieves should’ve been. You can watch a trailer here.

MK11: I am so conflicted by this trailer, lemme tell ya. The actual look of the CG trailer was nice, visceral, even cheeky at some points (awful big emphasis on weapons in that trailer). Another obscure and mysterious aspect of this game is time and how that plays into characters and the story potentially. New Scorpion is killed by Evil Raiden, only to be killed by Old Scorpion himself...hmm. Now that makes me think. It was a quintessential Mortal Kombat trailer top to...wait...is that 21 Savage playing in the background?? The song choice did not fit at all, it was like someone at NetherRealms plugged in their phone last minute to compensate for a glitched audio. Literally, anything would’ve been better, Wu-Tang, Freddie Gibbs, Earl Sweatshirt if you had to go the rap route. Yeah, I could be making a big deal out of nothing but I’ve also seen games make unnecessary focus on soundtrack and losing focus on the actual game. All in all, interesting. trailer here

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: Oh boy, oh fucking boy. X-men Legends (stick with me here) was the first of top-down arcade hero brawler type that really got my jimmies jumping. So when Marvel Ultimate Alliance came out it was something of a true actualization of what me and my friends thought up back when Legends came out. Two titles, both of which I owned and played through thoroughly unlocking characters and finding cheats. So imagine my surprise when initially I think this is the Marvel Avengers project by Square Enix. No! Wrong! Bad Chayton! It’s UA3 by...Ninja Theory?! What is going on? We got a little gameplay that unfortunately didn’t look too impressive. I’m still excited and with it being a Switch exclusive...I just have more reason to get one. trailer here. Speaking of reasons to get a Switch...

Joker joins the battle: Hi, huge Persona 5 fan here. Very excited to see our boy join the scuffle. He will be included as a DLC character (meh) but it raises some very interesting questions as to who else could be added. Goku confirmed! really cute trailer here

Far Cry “New Dawn”: This screamed Rage 2 to me. It is a cool idea to play so directly off the last released Far Cry title. I’m sure the games are going to be very different but the trailer seemed to take direct influence down to the shade of pink they used in their cooky-wacky post-apocalyptic looking setting. The game will even have you run into Joseph Seed and this is where I think it will diverge heavily and start to focus more on the Far Cry aspects of the game. Interesting villains as per usual but I’m hesitant. Even if it’s an expansion from FC4. trailer here

Rage 2: Now this is the post-apocalyptic open world I am looking forward to exploring. As I have stated before, Rage was underwhelming but had potential, this new trailer expanded upon what was already explored but didn’t really show off anything new. Regardless of the utter turmoil BGS seems to be in I am still excited to get my hands on this game and rip shit up .trailer here

Psychonauts 2: This is big, many many fans have been dying to see where Rasputin’s adventures take him. The look hasn’t changed much, but the polish of modern tech is doing wonders for the world of Psychonauts. We don’t get much info but just the glimpse is more than enough to get me thinking about the possibilities. trailer here

Dragon Age 4 teaser: this is a teaster trailer for Dragon Age 4... not much more to it. trailer here

The Outer Worlds: This is the big one, Obsidian are coming out the gate hard. In the wake of Fallout76 this was the last thing Bethesda could afford; for another studio to come along and do their games better than them. A space oriented RPG that appears to focus heavily on decision-making and character development. Two staples of Obsidian games that I can’t wait to take part in when this bad boy drops. With Obsidian being acquired by Microsoft I was concered this would be an exclusive but thankfully they can’t deny the PS4 audience, at least this time. Next gen (or title even) we might not be so lucky. trailer here

Fallout 76

Okay... I won’t talk a whole lot about it because it’s not even out yet. So, the hubs signed up for the BETA and he got to play a little the other day... if you don’t want to know anything about the game, this is where this post ends... but if you want my initial thoughts on it and are okay with MAJOR spoilers for what’s out there now? Well... 

It’s boring. It’s like... okay... so, the graphics look... pretty much the same. The same facial structures, the same hairstyles. Nothing note-worthy at all about that. The controls are the same, which is to be expected in a franchised game. But... okay, let’s just make this easier on everyone. 

1. The World

It’s... Fallout 4 with color and leaves. To be blunt, it looks like Fallout 4 with a mod on it, nothing new... like... at all. Okay, so maybe one thing is new. The pip-boy, but technically that’s “old” compared to FO4. 

2. Caps and Loot

I’m hoping this is a BETA thing because wow... just... wow. Probably 80% of the containers/cabinets etc that I saw hubs open were empty. Nothing. There’s like... nothing there... caps are proving to be hard to come by which isn’t that big of a deal because there’s no one to buy anything from. 

3. NPC;s

Don’t exist. There aren’t any. The only “other people” that you deal with are robots and voice recordings. You don’t see anyone else outside enemies. The other people you see, are just that, other people. It’s an MMO, we all knew this, but damn... that’s... all. 

4. No Pause/Safe Place

Because it’s an MMO, you can’t pause the game. This, in itself, is nothing new. But... there’s no where ‘safe’. You have to hope you won’t be attacked when you’re changing your equipment, checking your stats, or agonizing over which Perk card you’re going to use. 

5. Perk Cards

What the actual fuck. Okay, so... the idea is that instead of a perk chart, you get perk cards and these cards can be leveled up (so they say). But... you can only equip a set amount of these cards (I think it’s 8, but don’t quote me). Now, these cards do show their information in a more clear and concise way than the perk chart did, and the cards are nothing to balk at but... you only have so many slots and you have to choose which ones you want to equip. Which... can be challenging when there’s no safe place for you to do that. 

6. C.A.M.P.

Your camp. It’s like a portable workshop... it gives you a little parcel of land that you can build on (provided you’ve found enough materials... took the hubs awhile just to find enough wood to build 4 floors and three walls). Now, you do have one safe storage option. Your stash. (Or, any container you build but don’t quote me there because that’s just what I’ve heard). Your stash is only accessible by you, if you look in someone else’s stash box, you’ll see your stash. So, that’s how that works. You only get one camp... and it costs you 5 caps to move it each time you want to. Oh, and, there were a few new things in the building menus, but a lot of them were locked because hubs wasn’t a high-enough level. But there were also a lot of the same stuff... was.. kind of expecting more new stuff... but whatever, they’ve only had three years. 

7. Content

So far, and this is just BETA so I’m praying they’ll have more content come release day but I doubt it. There’s... no story... there’s... nothing. You wake up in the vault, you leave... you’re supposed to find the Overseer. That’s it, so far. Nothing backing anything up, no clear line of what the goal is... not even a hint. The only thing that’s been pushed a bit is the nuclear launch thing, which we’ve seen in trailers and other information put out by Bethesda. It kind of sounds like the goal is to get those nukes, launch those nukes, and... try to kill everyone? I don’t know. It’s very vague. In previous Fallout games, you started the game with a basic goal. How you got there was up to you but the goal itself was fairly clear once you left the vault. 

8. Events

Like other MMO games (-cough-Destiny-cough-) they are trying to do live events. Now... there’s a petite problem with this idea from the get-go... they’ve already said that there will only be a limited number of people on the same server at any given time. That limited number is 24. Now... the map, the world? It’s pretty damned big. And these live events are designed to have multiple people participating. Hubs tried doing a few, but even with three people in one, it was impossible. There were specific locations that people needed to defend, and all were getting hit at once. The players were quickly overwhelmed and over-run. Hopefully this is something they’ll work on. Unlikely, but they might. On a side note, I saw the final boss for one even was that moth-creature thing... level 50... so have fun all low levels out there! 

9. Destiny

Okay, this may seem like a duh but the game really does feel like a cheap knock-off of Destiny, as far as the MMO goes. They have “emotes” in there, your “team” is usually slotted for three people... the live events... there are just some similarities here. Now, that’s not a bad thing... except... it’s Fallout... not Destiny, not Fortnight, not WoW. This is just my personal pet peeve, but there it is. If you’re going to do things that another, successful, game is doing? At least do them better... or at the very least, on the same level. 

10. Skyrim

It’s very Skyrim-esq. Remember playing Skyrim? You could play for a few hours and be utterly alone, run into no one, nothing but a few animals and maybe a dragon or two out in the wild. Unless you went to a town, you were pretty much only going to run into enemies out there. It was a massive map, a huge world, and you were just... kinda out there... like at night... alone... kind of wasn’t that fun when it was like that. 

11. Weapons/Armor

Okay, so, obviously we haven’t seen the big ticket items. But... I will say this, your weapons break, you have to fix them... your armor? You don’t find it, you make it. In fact, looting seems to just be skimpy all around. A few things that the hubs found weren’t really armor, just clothes. The armor itself? Up to you... and the materials you’ve managed to gather. 

12. The Food/Water thing

So, they’ve leaned on almost a survival type setting here. Your character gets hungry/thirst... everything except prepackaged food/drink will give you some rads, some more than others. If you don’t drink/eat then you’re character will suffer. Also, a lot of items have a disease percentage attached to them. Hubs ate something that had a 7% chance of giving his character a disease and sure enough, bam. Now, this might be a BETA thing though. There are disease cures out there though, he found one. 

13. V.A.T.S.

Ah, vats. The saving grace of so many Fallout players. Now, this is probably a BETA thing but VATS are slow to activate... and because it’s MMO, it doesn’t slow time, just helps you aim. Or, it should. You need perk cards, see... to make it so your dude will actually hit that target. No perk card? Barely any damage done because they’re just firing willy-nilly, no more separate limb/body location selection. 

14. Congrats on Level 5, now die!

At level 5, it becomes open season on your character. At level 5, you can now take damage from other players... and they can kill you... and take your junk. All those precious materials you’ve been collecting, they can get them. When you die, there’s a little bag that appears on the ground with all the junk you’ve been carrying, nothing else as far as I can see... but anyone can just come along and pick that up. It’s their’s now. Now, there is this whole murder thing they are going to do, supposedly, where if you kill another player there’ll be a bounty put out on you and you, in theory, will be hunted down and murdered back? I’m not sure how that’s going to work. But... at level 5, you take damage, from all sources, including team-mates - though the damage is supposed to be reduced from them. That’s... going to result in a lot of accidental kills. 

Final Thoughts:

I’m nervous. I’m worried, for all the fans of the franchise. They’ve already come out and said “this isn’t a Fallout game” (could have fooled me with that name, though). It feels like they completely ignored the things that made Fallout 4 such a success... and instead, embraced the things that people didn’t like about Skyrim. I’m worried that what happened to Mass Effect, will happen to Fallout. People have been waiting for this game, super excited about it, couldn’t wait for it! And... the game they’re going to get is more... Fallout-esq. Not the next Fallout game. Like they wanted to cash in on the MMO thing but didn’t want to actually come up with anything new. Which leads to the next thought and worry... micro-transactions. Playing the game and seeing the lack of content... the skimpy supplies and loot... you can very easily see them adding micro-transactions and DLC’s that should have been a part of the main game. Which is just not a good idea right now, not ever really... when you pay $60 for this, which feels like it is, quite literally, a “base” game. 

But, it’s not all bad... 

There were a few things that I did like about it. The photo/selfy mode is cute, though wholly unoriginal... and they have instruments around the world that you and your friends can play together (like a band). You see your character performing some actions that you didn’t before (laying down)... though, there isn’t any “sleep” to speak of, your character just rests, but that’s because your character never leaves the public space of their MMO world. Even in their own home. 

Now, I don’t know what they’re going to do come release day, it could be totally different (probably won’t be) but it might. It could suddenly drop a whole main quest line because they wanted to keep it all hush-hush from people like me (who will go and post about the BETA). Who’s to really tell... but as it stands... I’m glad we didn’t buy a second copy so the hubs and I can play together because... it just seems... like a huge waste. Such a shame.