First off, all awards are made up.

Secondly, I have won none of them.

100% agree. A youtuber once summed up the setting pretty perfectly imho. They said something to the effect of

"Fallout isn't just a post-apocalypse. It's an example of retro futurism. Specifically, it's the year 2077, as the people of the 1990's imagined the people of the 1950's imagined it. But then, that society got nuked, and the post-apocalypse imagined by the pop-culture of the 80's and 90's rose from it's ashes."

3's more standard "post-apocalypse vibes" don't really nail the vision of the original Fallout. This is especially a negative if you are coming at Fallout from the standpoint of a long time fan. Like I said in my first rant,

"New Vegas has richer world-building, themes more aligned with Fallout 1 and 2, and a more realistic sense of a society rebuilding after centuries"

And yeah, it seems pretty obvious that 3 was meant to be set much earlier in the timeline originally. With Rivet City being the most advanced "from the ground up" society in terms of agriculture simply by having a small hydroponics lab, most of society surviving by scavenging, attempts to cleanup and rebuild at an extremely early or nonexistent stage, etc.

Though I assume that for folks who prefer 3, these are not hills they particularly care about, and that the more generic post-apocalyptic vibes (that were really in vogue when 3 was released) hit the exact fantasy they wanted to play through.

But yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with your points.

Fight me.

Okay, sounds fun.

I could argue that there are more Fallout games than just 1 and 2, and that we should probably admit that if Fallout 2 gets to sit at the “true Fallout” table, Fallout: New Vegas should probably get a chair too. A bunch of the original Black Isle developers who worked on Fallout 2 helped make it, and it continues the same regional story and factions. But then again, maybe having the Fallout 2 developers is not enough to make something “truly” Fallout. Maybe it is the isometric (actually skewed trimetric) view, classic CRPG style. Although once we open that can of radroaches, we get a whole new pile of questions.

So maybe we can swing the other direction entirely and say there are fewer “true” Fallout games, and that only Fallout 1 really qualifies. That does have some logic behind it, since the original creators, Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson, left during Fallout 2’s development. Their absence changed the whole design philosophy, shifting the tone, with way more pop culture references and absurdist writing, de-focused the tight world design of 1 so we got a ton of fluff dungeons and encounters, and gave us a more scattered writing experience thanks to the team being split up to work on different sections of the game (Tell me San Fran feels even remotely in the same universe as New Reno). Honestly, the jump from 1 to 2 kinda reminds me of the jump from 3 to NV. They feel the same on the surface, but are radically different experiences once you actually play them. But even then, Fallout 2 still uses the same engine and gameplay loop, so you could just as easily argue it stays true to the original formula.

But if that's the case and we double down on the 'gameplay matters more than the writing and development teams' point of view, then Fallout Nevada and Fallout Sonora belong on the list as well right? They are fan-made, sure, but they run on the same engine and play almost exactly like Fallout 1 and 2. So now we are up to four “true Fallout games.” So our definition needs to rules those out to get back to "only 1 and 2".

So maybe the fan-made games do not count because they are not official releases? But if it being an "official release" is the only rule, then Fallout 76 suddenly joins the “true Fallout” club too, which probably tells us that the bar has to be higher than that.

So if we say that a “true” Fallout game needs a mix of all the things above, like the original devs from the original studio working on the original engine with the original tone and the closest connection to the original story, then we come full circle and land right back at "Fallout 1 is the only true Fallout game."

No matter how I slice it, I can't find a definition that only includes Fallout 1 and 2...

You know... thinking about it, I guess the only constant of every single Fallout game since 2 has been that fans of the previous entry look at it and say "this is too radical a departure, this isn't a true Fallout at all!"

The subtle but important difference between "has 100% been astroturfed" and "has been 100% astroturfed".

Sometimes the |ine between G-ness and stupidity is very thin.

Been looking at Niri, seems really cool. And I greatly appreciate the level of comments in their config files. Can't be sure I'll like the "scrolling wm" style, but only one way to find out! Thanks for the rec!

Good point, and I'm going to hold on to that. I've been on Arch so long I've forgotten how to spell dnf...

Sooo... I guess I was outta the loop pretty hard. I just spun up Omarchy on account of all the hype surrounding it, and had just enough time with it to fall in love with the workflow before stumbling on this post.

So does anyone have a recommendation for a good tiling window manager that isn't created by racists, transphobes, mysogonists, or any other kind of bigots? Or is this just a... time to run back to base Arch with KDE sorta day?

Edit: And if you are going to inform me that Arch or KDE is run by or support bigots... can you wait until the weekend? Please?

80% of violent crime? Cute. Lesbians are busy cornering the space crime market (allegedly).

Sure, but I can hear em now. "If you can't prove a system using the system, then this universe (i.e. this "system") can not create (i.e. "prove") itself! It implies the existance of a greater system outside this system! And that system is MY GOD!"

Torturing language a bit of a speciality for the charlatan.

The world is not good enough for those eyes.

What was his name?

Yes. But also, lets remember most countries are still in the kiddie pool of "is food a basic human right?". So you know, dream big, but keep expectations in check.