No Idea what I’m Doing Here

Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it “sounds AI-generated.”

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.

Mini lore snippet lol: at first I just doodled the cat alone in the middle of a page, but I loved him so much I just turned the page and drew the whole thing. He's so great.

If anyone had ever drawn fanart of this moment, I would use it with credit but without asking them for permission and you would not have a problem with it. But nobody has ever drawn fanart of this moment. No concept art of it exists. The only images of it are screencaps of an Xbox 360 game, with Xbox 360 model and texture quality, where no single frame actually captures all the elements of the event (the laser only fires when nothing else is in frame, the Savior and the demons getting lasered are never in the same frame, the lighting is really bad and the Savior's details can't be made out). In order to use this card I designed, I have exactly two options:

- I can use Gemini to synthesize the pose and framing from one frame, the laser from later on, and the detailed design from a frame where it's clearly visible, redraw it in a more painterly style, and create an image that does not look like complete shit and conveys what moment the card represents.

- I can use an X360 screenshot that looks like complete shit and doesn't actually get across the visual of the event it depicts.

by Christopher Burdett