Somewhere in IL a Ghoultown is missing its mayor

Illustration commission for @differentquincy featuring Pre-war Nick and Jennifer! Coming up with a fake Live and Love magazine was super fun!

Illustration commission for @differentquincy featuring Pre-war Nick and Jennifer! Coming up with a fake Live and Love magazine was super fun!

Event Rules: HERE

Twice in the last couple of weeks now I've had random accounts try to pull the same con on me, so I figured I would warn people in case the same thing happens to them. It starts with them replying to a post with something exactly along these lines (regardless of whether your DMs are open or not):

The first time it happened, I DID message the account, and it became immediately apparent that it was fraudulent and trying to steal my information.

They claimed that they and several of their friends had mistakenly reported my account for fraud because they mistook me for someone who scammed them out of some money. Automatically, I didn't find this believable, and their story fell even further apart when they then sent me a screenshot of a Discord link to "Verified Tumblr Dispute Support" and asked me to message them in order to fix things.

Obviously I didn't do this and proceeded to block/report, but there is a 110% chance that if I had, they'd have sent me the "claim form", which would have asked for my password. Then they'd have stolen my account. This is the fake screenshot I was sent to try and prove that they'd reported me:

FOR THE RECORD: SOCIAL MEDIA SITES LIKE TUMBLR (AND ALL OFFICIAL BUSINESSES LIKE YOUR BANK, GOVERNMENT AGENCIES LIKE THE IRS, ETC.) WILL NEVER ASK YOU TO CONDUCT COMMUNICATION THROUGH A THIRD PARTY PLATFORM LIKE DISCORD. DO NOT GIVE OUT YOUR INFORMATION.

Please note that a "ticking clock" element (notice the statement at the bottom of the message claiming that my account has already been "queued for deletion" and will be gone if I don't submit a "form", also implies I'll be in legal trouble if I don't do what they ask) is an incredibly common element of scams to try to get you to act before you think things through.

Also notice the numerous grammatical errors throughout the fake screenshot they sent (starting with the title; "you submitted a fraudulent report" is not the phrasing a native English speaker would use, because it implies the claim itself is fraudulent, not fraud-related). This is another scam identifier.

Assorted Concepts

Concept art for Fallout Tactics

Prompts:

- Day 1: 10 Years Later or Pre-Game & Post-Game

- Day 2: Companion(s) or Faction(s)

- Day 3: Memory or Raison D’être (the most important reason or purpose for someone or something’s existence)

- Day 4: Favourite Weapon or Patching Up

- Day 5: Pinup or OC x& Canon

- Day 6: DLC or Radio

- Day 7: Free Day

Rules & taglist under the cut <3

The posts that inspired this response are linked below, and are screenshot throughout for essay flow purposes. Please do not harass OP, they are entitled to their opinion, even if I disagreed enough to write all this.

Post 1

Post 2

Let's get into it.

OP is making an assumption here that playing Fallout 4 with the radio on (probably Diamond City Radio, given the later mention of Atomic Age music) is the default way to play. Anecdotally, sure, many Fallout players enjoy listening to the pop songs of yesteryear while they hack and slash and explode around the wasteland, but that doesn't mean that the game's composed soundtrack wasn't given the attention and care it deserved. If it wasn't expected that the player would turn off the radio at some point, they wouldn't have bothered hiring professionals to compose and record it, and they wouldn't promote it the way they actively do. The below video of the lead composer for five separate Fallout games playing the main theme of Fallout 4 to promote the game's release doesn't really tell me that Bethesda "lacks confidence" in its creative staff.

Speaking of Inon Zur, though:

Inon Zur deserves the criticism he gets for his Zionism, yes. OP's assertion that his soundtrack gets relegated to second place behind the songs on the radio is still highly circumstantial. Again, both options are there for players to listen to, and one overshadowing the other due to personal preference does not mean that what is compelling about the game's composed music has been trimmed down. If OP prefers the soundtrack to the radio, they can listen to it, it's there. If OP has evidence that the original soundtrack was crunched and/or reduced because of the development of the radio stations being prioritized, I'd love to see it.

This is a lot of words to say, I think, that people who make games leave their individual stamp on their projects through what details they choose to include, and that modern game development with larger teams tends to flatten those details through tighter deadlines, strict management, and erasure of the individual in service of the project's overall vision that may or may not have space for individual expression. True, from what I know about the gaming industry.

OP continuing on here to say, I think, that individual Bethesda employees' creative flourishes and details get cut or flattened by the overall vision of what a Bethesda game is. Again, true, but I am lacking context here about why OP thinks that Diamond City Radio's inclusion somehow flattened the composer's creativity on Fallout 4's orchestral pieces. I don't know too much about the development of the Elder Scrolls and Starfield, but OP appears to be insinuating that the known cut content for Fallout: New Vegas (dialogue, companions, characters, weapons, locations, etc.) was cut largely because of the constraints placed upon the Obsidian development team by Bethesda. This is technically true, but it's missing some context: Much is made of the 18-month-long deadline that Obsidian created Fallout: New Vegas under, but people tend to forget that the deadline was not only requested by Bethesda, it was agreed to by Obsidian, and senior designer Chris Avellone and project director Josh Sawyer have both said that the "evil, hard-to-work-with Bethesda" narratives forcing Obsidian to shrink its scope are untrue.

They had agreed-upon, set timelines and budgets, and sometimes content didn't fit within those constraints. Would I have loved to play the version of Fallout: New Vegas where Ulysses was a full companion? Yes, absolutely! The problem with Ulysses was that the Obsidian team wrote and recorded his dialogue before they started incorporating it into the game, and discovered that his full recorded dialogue wouldn't fit on the game disk. Obsidian can't violate their contract just because Ulysses won't fit on the shipped CD, and Bethesda can't be blamed for every cool idea that hit Obsidian's cutting room floor.

Again, I don't know much about the Morrowind development team, and I'm not going to disagree with the assessment about Bethesda placing its trust in one person to head development and direct everyone toward one vision and hopefully, success and acclaim, but this sounds like OP has a bone to pick with Todd Howard and his bosses, not Diamond City Radio.

This is the part that really baffles me, because I'm still not sure why OP has an issue with Fallout 4's in-game radio stations. I'm not even sure if it's all of the radio stations, because the criticism here is reserved for Diamond City Radio, and not for Radio Freedom or the Institute's classical music station: And that's not even getting into the character-focused stations, like Kent Connolly's Silver Shroud channel out of Goodneighbor or RedEye's Raider Radio in Nuka-World. Before I launch into some kind of explanation of themes in the Fallout series and how its post-apocalyptic, atompunk setting reflects them, let's look at OP's follow-up post.

Okay, I can't speak for the Fallout 3 development team "trendchasing GTA" as an explanation for creating Galaxy News Radio, but I really don't think it matters that much if the team saw a feature they liked in another game and thought they should do something similar. OP admits that they liked Galaxy News Radio, but appears to be lamenting the fact that this piece of set dressing they liked was carried forward at the expense of hypothetical soundtrack alternatives. Again, I ask, how does the existence of the radio station(s) curtail the creative composition of ambient music in Fallout 4? How is it prioritized, and how is it monopolizing space? I need evidence before I can get onboard with this accusation, and I don't have any, and OP seems to be extremely forgetful or ignorant of why Fallout 4 fans enjoy Diamond City Radio and the other stations in the first place. I'll focus on Diamond City Radio for simplicity's sake (and because OP is mostly focused on that station anyway), but there are a multitude of reasons that fans love it and choose to listen to it, not in spite of, but alongside of the orchestral soundtrack.

For starters, Diamond City Radio has a DJ that you can meet, get to know, and change the life of. Travis Miles' growth from a timid, sheltered guy into a confident wastelander because of the sole survivor's actions is a direct way to influence the game's world, which is something RPG players tend to like. His news reports provide story hooks for players to go check out, or commentary on the sole survivor's actions as they move through the world, often with incomplete information that invites the player to consider their actions from an outside perspective.

Regarding the Atomic Age songs on the radio, they're part and parcel with Fallout since the Ink Spots appeared in the promo for the very first game in the series, as OP notes in their second post. It's music to color the setting, to illustrate the retro-futuristic, post-WWII Americana that curdled and culminated in nuclear war. It's a time capsule for the people living in the ruins of the nation that produced that music. It's a cue for players to imagine the kind of culture that forcibly holds up an aesthetic as proof of their perceived excellence, and as justification for the atrocities they commit to preserve that image. It's an echo of pride and excesses past, and it's proof that the anxiety about living in the shadow of nuclear weapons is something that influences art, no matter who, or where, or when you are. And yes, if you're not the kind of person who pays a lot of attention to themes and how the setting reflects them, it's a fun set of songs to listen to while hacking and whacking and smacking. And maybe I'll shake my head a little at the people missing the point of including the song "Civilization" as sung by Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters as a surviving piece of pre-war culture, but that doesn't mean that less thought and care went into using that song in the radio track listings than went into composing the ambient soundtrack.

As for the inclusion of radio stations at all, it is, again, a way to color the setting. Some stations play music, some don't. Some broadcast propaganda, some broadcast news, some broadcast radio dramas or calls for help or whatever the hell the radio operator feels like saying that particular day. Radio is a popular method of communication and connection in post-apocalyptic stories because, even without a setting that uses the Golden Age of Radio as a major influence, it's a hobby for amateurs worldwide and doesn't require a whole lot of infrastructure to set up and maintain a signal compared to other methods of media broadcast. People who know more about radio and its history, feel free to hop on here and add your thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

The really frustrating thing for me about OP's post is that there are real critiques to be made about the radio stations of Fallout. Travis Miles' growth as Diamond City Radio's DJ has no progression, it's just flipping on a magic confidence switch in the man with some story quests. Magnolia's the only musically-inclined wastelander getting any airplay in the Commonwealth. The stations get insanely repetitive during the late-game, like most in-game radio stations do. There was an idea pitched during Fallout 3 development for a quest to seek out new music for the radio to play, perhaps even from the saved music files on each player's computer, that was scrapped by good old Todd Howard due to copyright concerns, but could have been a fun way to encourage players to explore and seek out characters making contemporary wasteland music. ZeniMax Media Inc. (Bethesda's parent company) didn't square things with Dion DiMucci, the singer-songwriter who wrote and recorded "The Wanderer," before adding the song to the Fallout 4 soundtrack and heavily using it in advertising campaigns for the game. I just don't think that Diamond City Radio's inclusion in the game is somehow taking away oxygen from other aspects of the game's development, including the orchestral soundtrack. I could be wrong about this, but as I said before, OP has offered no proof.

You're allowed to not like Diamond City Radio and its track list. If you prefer the original soundtrack, you can just say that. You don't need to say it's underappreciated because Bethesda didn't cater to you, personally. This is not a case of radio vs. soundtrack, and Bethesda cruelly chose to squash its creatives and cater to its fans: They green-lit two different music projects for players to choose between, and Fallout 4 is better for it.