The Nerdface

I thought I heard you stridulating. I thought I heard you chirping . I think I thought I have eight eyes

FOTA POSTER YAAAYY MY FAVOURITE GROUP IN ALL OF FALLOUT!!!

‘Or?’

‘Or my Andalite friend here twitches.’

'You won’t do it. You’re looking at your mother’s face. Her eyes. You can’t. You’re just a human, with all the usual human weaknesses.’

Marco stood up, but even standing he was only a little taller than me, sitting. 'You know what it says on the New Hampshire license plates?’

I shook my head in confusion.

'Access the memories,’ he said. 'My mom knows. We talked about it. At the time we thought it was kind of corny. But then, the more we thought about it, it wasn’t corny at all. It was…inevitable.’

I accessed the memories. 'Live free or die?’

'Live free or die,’ Marco echoed. 'My mother walks out of here a free woman, or she dies.'”

wow sorry, did i say andalites were important? i meant hork-bajir

If this cruel experiment from Microsoft fails, it may be lights out for id, Obsidian, and maybe even and Bethesda within the next ten years.

God fucking dammit Microsoft, yes we want Fallout and TES games to come out faster but not at the cost of thousands of people's jobs and their financial safety and well being.

The issue of course is Microsoft/Xbox will 110% be breathing down the necks of Obsidian in the absolute worst way.

Its very likely Obsidian's future/continued existance will determined by the potential success of this game and that is far too much pressure to place that team under. Not saying they cant handle it, they are professionals after all, but is that fair? Fuck no

Let them develop their game on a healthy timeline and treat it like any other game that company could be making. I pray to god that im wrong but every instinct I have tells me that Obsidian will be under ungodly pressure from Microsoft during the development of this game

Controversial opinion incoming: I don't like the end of this book.

Like, this post really sums it up:

Animorphs is not that bad. Cassie's not related to anyone important, at least, and Jake's tie to Tom is mostly just inconvenient. HOWEVER. It's still canon that the Ellimist "stacked the deck" by recruiting Animorphs who are relatives of people like Eva and Elfangor and Tom, and the implication about ~*~superior genes~*~ is still in there.

To me, the reveal about Tobias being related to Elfangor:

Cheapens the message about these being ordinary kids — dumb jocks, bully magnets, screw-ups — who are literally in the wrong place at the wrong time when superheroism gets thrust upon them. Jake is my favorite because he cuts against type for SF heroes: he's not an outsider nerd, he's not talented; he's just some dumb jock who is also kind and brave and optimistic. Giving Tobias the classic SF backstory makes him less relatable, in my book.

Undercuts Tobias's friendship with Ax. Along with the backlash to "they're such good friends they must be in love", I'd like to start a backlash against "they're such good friends they must be related." Because it's still implying that some types of love are more valid than others. The shorms are family before they find out they share genes; do we really need that added element?

Undercuts Tobias's own call to action in the first book. Tobias makes this instant connection with a stranger from another species, in a way that Jake notes only Tobias could ever do, and it ends up pulling all five human kids into the war. There's heartbreaking power to the idea that Tobias is this overflowing with empathy and also naïveté. But whoops, nope, turns out it was a genetic connection all along!

Straight up doesn't make sense? It's a rare case where Animorphs' otherwise pretty good continuity slips up big time — Loren's three husbands, Chapman's contagious amnesia, both Tobias's parents going from "dead" to "missing", Ax's childhood suddenly being illogical. There are so many ret-con gymnastics going on that this twist doesn't feel worth it.

Loses the realism. Animorphs has my love forever for details like Marco not being able to afford admission to the Gardens and Ax fighting tears at the thought of disappointing his dad and Rachel having to be the second parent to her sisters. Tobias having a dogshit home life, just because, and using morphing as a desperate escape hatch — that's realism. That feels perfectly in line with the themes of the series. It feels like things I saw as a kid that no adult, and no other kids' book series, would talk about. Tobias having a dogshit home life because his dad's an alien prince who got time-warped off to fight a cosmic war while his mom was attacked by his dad's ancient enemies and given fantasy!amnesia because of her former role as the first human ever to be mind-controlled... Fuck off. If I wanted fantasy escapism, I'd read a different book.

I would 100% no questions asked become a voluntary controller ASAP as soon as i realized they were invading earth. Not only that, but I'd take it as life insurance. They're going to kill EVERYONE except hosts? YES PLEASE SIGN ME UP

And another thing: That yeerk would have me fixed up so fast. I genuinely think that ANYONE else could manage my life better than I am currently doing.

Also I get to have a little friend in my head? We would become besties or they would get so annoyed at my constant chattering. I bet the cafeteria food is good too!

POLL TIME!!! Would you be a voluntary controller or nah?

Maaaan, you're like so perfectly demonstrating why the Sharing's cult model works so well. And all the other cult models for that matter. You get thrown into a society that demands that you "excel" somehow through money-making, baby-making, meaning-making... and then gives you no tools for doing so. And then treats you like dirt for not hitting those bars, and blames you for it.

But the Sharing says that you don't have to feel like that anymore, because they've found a way out. A yeerk can take everything away from you, and can do something "better" (certainly more violent, anyway) with it than you ever could. And like, obviously the Sharing is a lightly re-skinned Scientology, but this is why the yeerks are going after people who are lonely or homeless or mentally ill — they know that an offer of control will seem like a mixed blessing rather than a curse.

I've never personally felt that temptation — for me, the bad mental health days have me wanting to pull a Chris McCandless (giving away all my possessions and going off to die in the woods) because the brain demons think that's how I can best help the world. But when the meds are calibrated and the sun is shining and the grief of it all is at bay, I have time to understand that that's unhelpful and to arm myself for the next time those fuckers come out of the mental woodwork.

This was a tremendously widespread belief; in my anecdotal experience, it would not shock me if, in 1990 (the crest year of all this), 2 in 5 blond women believed dolphins were ultra- intelligent and/or psychic. Among “gray pony tail” guys who look like the Dad from Family Ties, this belief was near 100%. Among Californians, this belief was also close to universal. 

The belief in superintelligent, enlightened alien dolphins was everywhere in the 1970s and 80s. David Brin’s Uplift books like Startide Rising had a future where mankind colonized the universe with dolphin best buddies with robot hands. Larry Niven’s Tales of Known Space identified dolphins as the second sentient race on earth. And do I even need to mention the Hitchhiker’s Guide? Hell, even the crew of the starship Enterprise went back in time to save cetaceans able to communicate with an unknown space probe. Leonard Nimoy, who directed the Voyage Home, said many wise things about the importance of ecology, but also ultra-cringey things about cetacean intelligence being greater and that they had higher spiritual development (Nimoy was very much a California guy sometimes). 

In short, intelligent cetaceans became, like hyperspace or teleporters, a part of the LINUX-like, “open source” well of ideas that scifi writers drew on by default when worldbuilding.