Atomesque

And it's set up so you can adjust the spacing between images, add a signature/logo, add the Square Enix copyright, and a lot of other stuff. It handling the auto-spacing for me made me LESS inclined to tear my hair out.

how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)

“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”

She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”

Another line of his is “democracy is non-negotiable”

Yeah, New Vegas has a terrible no good very bad ending and three mostly morally grey endings. Point being that sometimes neutrality isn’t possible even in imperfect circumstances. You’ve gotta choose a side eventually even if that means some bad things happen.

Also I’ll admit that the institute’s deal isn’t immediately apparent. They should’ve made their deal a bit easier to find for people who don’t wanna dig into every holotape there is.

The institute is what happens when a community is isolated for so long that they don’t view outsiders as human. They’re convinced that outsiders are doomed to die out and that they’re allowed to take what they need from the surface without question. They take supplies, take test subjects, take energy, power, and water.

The institute is an example of a bad guy who thinks that they’re morally in the right because they speak calmly. Because they don’t look angry. And I do kinda wish that it took a little less digging for that to become clear to people.

There’s a lot of nuance and social commentary to be found in Bethesda games but in my experience most of it isn’t in the main story points that are thrown in your face. It’s in side quests, environmental storytelling, and notes and books you can find scattered around.

And you might very well think that this type of more ambient social commentary and worldbuilding focus is inferior. It might be for you. For me though, it feels profound. It feels like it seeps into the cracks of everything in the world.

I’ve played New Vegas and I like New Vegas but almost everything in that game goes back to the conflict between the legion and the NCR and that isn’t my favorite type of open world game. Bethesda fallouts have a lot of stuff related back to the main quest but they also have things in the world that are unconcerned with the main quest.

Like that “normal American suburb” of people in Fallout 3 that are a) cannibals and b) republicans. That’s funny. That’s social commentary. That’s completely unrelated to the conflict with the enclave. I love it. I love it so much.

The Bubonic Plague

Vampire Folklore

Tree frogs.

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

Bowie stupidly emerging from the laundry hamper after a NINE HOUR kip because i said the word dinner. To my HUMAN FAMILY!!