#i wish there was an optional quest line where you could realize youre a synth and search for clues about youre real past life

[fallout-terminals]

I really love the idea of synth Sole for fallout 4 because it allows narrative reason for the aggressively nostalgic opening while still allowing for roleplaying and more diverse headcanons.

Like of course you're depicted as a loving spouse who cares deeply for your child. Your memories are a direct creation of your "son" and what kid wouldn't imagine the family that they could've had as idealistically as possible? It's way easier to treat the opening as wishful thinking instead of what actually happened.

[ddrkirbyisq]

You'd think that being unemployed I'd blog more often instead of less often...but I guess it's more just that the days of me feeling like i NEED to say something about =everything= are past.  I definitely remember that stage in high school where I just found it really nice, theraputic even to just type everything out as a way of processing it and to distill any of those leftover thoughts and feelings that I had.  I'd like to (?) think that I am a little bit better at being able to acknowledge my thoughts and feelings as they happen and "let them pass", so to speak.  Kind of like meditating, you know?  Where you don't necessarily feel obligated to act upon every single thought or feeling. Speaking of which, I think I'm really feeling a lot better so far about (not) stressing out about things in general.  Of course there is still an internal alarm bell (or whatever metaphor you want to use) that starts going off whenever I haven't gotten to one or more of my responsibilities for a long time, but I think it's been easier to not stress out about that alarm going off (and trust that I will be able to get to it).  Perhaps more importantly, it's also been easier to manage that alarm in the first place, since I really feel like I am doing a better job of keeping up with things in general now, with letters, music, etc.  Things will never be perfect and my plate will never be fully empty, but as long as I'm making forward progress I'm happy. I did some tai chi for the first time in forever the other day!  It felt nice, just went out to the park after doing some stretching and such at home.  I'm super out of shape of course, but actually not =as bad= as I thought, so that was nice.  It didn't take a ton of time either, so hopefully that's something I can start doing randomly a bit more often.  Though it is a bit less fun doing it alone compared to when it was with others.  But it's sort of fun to be alone in its own way, too, I guess. Worked on a bunch of music stuff today!  Got started on an interesting request to remix Gliding Dance of the Maidens, which took quite some tries to get started on, but I think I'm making headway there, yay.  Also did OHC today, in which I tried to emulate puru's progressive sounds.  I was eh...about halfway successful I think.  I managed to get pretty tight drum sequencing, which I think worked really nicely -- I'm going to have to push this "clean" style of drums more in the future.  I really stumbled on making the proper trance pluck sounds though, something which I feel like I used to be able to do but I guess I've gotten out of practice with it.  After OHC ended I spent some time experimenting with that, trying to get the hang of it not only with the classic 3xOsc synth, but also with Harmor and Sytrus.  I actually might start trying to use Sytrus a bit more often for this type of supersaw sound, as it's fairly easy to get a good unison saw sound out of sytrus and the filters actually work pretty nicely.  Harmor can do it too, of course, but...I dunno, the UI in harmor just feels more clunky and confusing, really.  Both Sytrus and Harmor are capable of doing subtractive synthesis, even though Sytrus is built for FM/ringmod and Harmor is built as an additive synth.  So maybe more Sytrus is in my future when I want to play around with synth stuff...?  Anyways, it felt good to be doing so much work on music.  It's just as well too, since I already have a commission lined up for next month too! Xmas letters are progressing smoothly!  I've gotten 25 of them done, and also took care of some birthday letters along the way as well.  Only 6 more days left!  I still have some of the longer ones left to do though, so hopefully I can schedule them in at good times.  I still have to do my Japanese letter too, which will probably take a while, haha.  Once all the letters are done I have to make sure to not relax -- need to get all the gift shopping done early otherwise deadlines will sneak up on me before I know it... Progressing further and further in Dark Souls, which has been keeping my interest pretty well!  I've also started listening to the Bonfireside chat podcast (that, the "Analog" melee podcast, and Limited Resources for MtG are my 3 podcasts to listen to while driving) alongside my playthrough, which...well, I wouldn't say it's the =greatest= podcast in the world, but it's enjoyable enough, for a drive.  Anyways, the main cleric character (Sayuri) has a bunch of points into Faith and uses lightning spear in addition to the Jagged Ghost Blade (currently reinforced to +4), which fortuitously dropped from one of the ghosts in new londo ruins.  It's just as well too, because we spent a LOT of time down in those ruins fighting those ghosts wayyyy before we were supposed to...we ended up clearing the ENTIRE area out and got confused because there was nowhere else to go (turns out I had just completely missed the door to the lower undead burg, argh).  Anyways, it's been serving really well, as it's got really nice base damage AND procs a nice bleed effect as well.  The only thing is that it doesn't do too well in narrower spaces or against short or flying enemies as it mainly has horizontal slash attacks, so occasionally we'll switch to the good ol mace (one of the better weapons in the game actually) and use those vertical attacks to smash things. The jagged ghost blade doesn't have much scaling, so eventually we'll replace it with some sort of divine or just regular reinforced dex scaling weapon.  Our scimitar is currently a divine scimitar although we haven't needed it yet (once we go into the catacombs, I guess?), and we just picked up a falchion so that could be a candidate.  Some sort of katana would actually be great -- apparently there is an Iaito somewhere in blighttown that you can get to by jumping to a platform, so maybe that, if we end up going back there.  I might just do some backtracking through blighttown (ugh) anyways, as I'm sure I didn't get everything there.  I actually also should go back to the lower burg since I apparently completely missed Griggs there, lol. Anyways, we actually made our way all the way through the depths, through blighttown, and beat quelaag, rang the second bell to presumably unlock sen's fortress (?) and are now near the ruins of chaos.  There are quite a few different directions we can explore go at this point, though I guess sen's fortress is the next real progress area (?).  There's no shortage of unexplored areas, at any rate, as there's the bridge in valley of drakes that i don't know where it goes (shortcut to somewhere?), there's the crest of artorias door which I don't know where it leads to, and a bunch of stuff in blighttown probably.  There...is certainly a lot of stuff in this game, lol.  Also, we accidentally killed the Chaos Servant guy guarding Quelaag's sister, whoops!  Didn't see the option to talk to him since I was holding my shield up.  Fortunately that doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, just sort of unfortunate.  Wish somebody had left a message there that indicated something about that dude though.  We also missed beating Kirk in the sewers -- didn't realize he was an NPC to be beaten.  Whatever, there's no way to expect to get everything right on the first playthrough. My second character is a sorcery-focused int build, which is a drastically different playstyle, as she gets to really nuke things with hard-hitting magic attacks, but it requires a different set of tactics as she's sort of fragile and the magic takes time to cast, so it's tricky sometimes to find a good window of time to fire them off.  I've beaten the Gaping Dragon with that character, so next is to head down to blighttown. Third character is sort of a lolzy one, just focusing on strength and two-handing huge weapons.  I haven't played with that one very much at all, I think I only beat the taurus demon so far.  Don't know if I'll continue, though it does seem funny to just hold really huge weapons around haha. Cleared a Space Alert mission successfully for the first time in about 3 years, which was fun!  Really gotta keep your wits sharp to succeed in that game...it's still fun though. I've started playing through Hollow Knight as well!  In earnest this time, as the last time I tried I didn't get very far at all.  Currently just got to the Fungal Wastes...man, a LOT of attention and detail went into the art for this game, it's pretty insane how fully-featured all of these environments are and so far the different feel of all the areas is coming across really well.  It's been fun so far. Things that are coming up (a.k.a. things that I have to get done, lol)...besides stuff that is not really worth mentioning (getting my flu shot at some point), I actually still might want to do a short post-mortem for Bath Time, lol.  Speaking of which, there's a pretty annoying touchscreen bug, so (sigh) I probably will try to fix that up and make a new mobile build for it.  At SOME point I'll have to try to actually get back to development on Rhythm Quest, though it is certainly intimidating since there is so much that needs to be done there.  Besides all the content, I want to redo how the map screen works entirely if possible, maybe the main menu as well, but also have to make a calibration screen of some sort, etc etc etc. For anime, Inuyasha (lol) is on hold at the moment, but I finished off Evangelion for reals (yay).  I didn't expect the ah..."change of direction" at the end of the series to be so...SUDDEN...but thinking about it, it makes sense.  For some reason I expected that to start happening earlier, but it really was compacted into the last little bit.  Anyways, now I'm making my way through the latter parts of Onii Sama e...which has had some quite nice episodes.  I don't really know what to say about it without having to explain a lot of other things about the anime, so I won't really bother, but it has been good. Not much melee these days, but one thing that is exciting is that Rishi and KJH made it into summit!  Woot!  Should be a good lineup!  That's pretty exciting. Also been catching up on going through random music that I've got backlogged on my drive, including Chronology (jazz rearrangement album of Chrono Trigger, it's pretty nice!), as well as Harmony of Heroes (super smash bros giant rearrangement album) and the Final Smash extension (those two didn't have that much that was to my liking, but a few things here and there were nice).  As I said, it just feels nice to be making progress on things.  I even went through all of my accumulated deviantArt notifications the other day, haha.  I'm actually trying to get back into my habit of using my little batch script to open up a bunch of websites every morning for me to check for updates!  Anyways, all of these things feel great to be going back to.  I should also be putting out my "Monthlies" release for this month relatively soon too!

[zhaoly]

ok really long post ahead, sorry for mobile users since i dont think the spoiler break works on mobile iirc

i finally finished the main quest for fo4.. um.... was that it?? that was kinda my first reaction lol. ok i have SO many thoughts as i always do when i finish a game.. maybe more for this one tho

so i ended up doing both the minutemen and bos endings because they split relatively late in the story so i just made two separate saves... they were basically the same except i thought following liberty prime was kinda fun lol. i liked watching him pick up a behemoth and then just throwing it to the ground

so now that i’ve like... finished the game.... i guess i can see why people complain that fo4 is more of an fps than an rpg

like.... i’ve dumped a ton of hours into this game, but that’s mostly because i’ve spent a lot of time building settlements lol. besides that, the story does seem to be lacking a bit. i think it definitely had potential, but nothing was really fleshed out that well... like if i try to think back on what i did, i’m like.. ??

maybe part of that is because four main factions was a little ambitious? i just feel like there wasn’t much opportunity to actually get to know each faction and like actually feel like you were involved with them

1) minutemen - i mean, you got a shitton of radiant quests from preston (which drove me crazy very early on and got modded out)... and then what? you claim settlements and that’s about it. reclaiming the castle is as deep as the story gets. besides that all you have is radiant quests

also there were like... zero named characters besides preston who were actually really involved with the minutement. like there was ronnie shaw but she just ends being a merchant later, and i didn’t even get the proper armory quest from her because my game glitched out. so basically she was just a unique merchant for me

and like... who else is there?? there’s the sanctuary crew and some named settlers but none of them are really part of the “minutemen.” so like you didn’t really get to talk to members of the faction and stuff and actually feel like you were immersed in the story. like i know that the story is that you’re rebuilding the minutemen so there’s supposed to be no one but preston, but later on as you claim settlements and expand the minutement and stuff there’s still nothing... no new story, quest, npcs... you have to do some dungeon clearing quests for some of the named settlers but that’s literally it.

i liked their general “for the people” thing but like... they never really expanded on it... they did end up being one of the two factions that i sided with because of their cause but i just think the story (or lack thereof, really) with them was pretty bland

2) railroad - well i was considering joining them very early on cause i do think their cause is decent, i like deacon, and i accidentally spoiled for myself that danse is a synth (i like danse because i mean you know me and my beef)... but then i felt like they were a little too focused on the synths. like that was literally just their entire cause. and i just felt like that was just too narrow.

and you met these characters that you really just.... met and then nothing ever happened later with them! like high rise, mister tims, idk what the point of drummer boy was, etc..

and again there were just a ton of radiant quests... at least they were all finite, but like there was what? helping that one safehouse (forgot the name), mila quests, and pam’s caches. the ticonderoga quest was kinda interesting but i wish there was something more besides “here’s ticonderoga. oh whoops it gets destroyed later. haha!”

3) institute - well i disliked them right off the bat because they were the ones who not only MURDERED MY HUSBAND but also KIDNAPPED AND BRAINWASHED MY CHILD (yes i consider it brainwashing)????? like come on. i take this stuff very personally man. it’s the same reason why i joined the stormcloaks in skyrim (before realizing what a bunch of racist assholes they are but.... i digress) cause i was like WHY tf would i join a group that tried to execute me with absolutely zero cause

so i’m just like why would i join a group that murdered my husband (right in front of my eyes i might add) and kidnapped my child. hello??? like yeah i hated the fact that they gave you a goddamn baby in the first place, but since i had it i was like WELL I AM OUTRAGED THAT THEY DID THIS TO MY CHILD.

then there was the whole deal with them actually taking real people (and presumably murdering them) and replacing them with synth copies. i HATED that a lot and it was a big turnoff on top of all of my personal grievances against them. their elitist attitude towards the commonwealth was annoying as fuck as well as their manufacturing of gen 3 synths for what was basically slave labor. also there were like random conversations that would occur between scientists and synths and the scientists were such assholes.

oooooh and the part where you ask shaun why he decided to let you out of your cryo pod and he’s like “well... i suppose that i just wanted to see what would happen” and i was like BITCH WHAT?????? EXCUSE ME?????? THAT’S YOUR REASON?? 

like the shaun/father thing was an interesting twist in the story... but it def was not enough to make me want to join the institute. esp with that craphole reason that he gave me for letting me out of the cryo pod. and like the dude is basically a stranger to you, why tf would you just join the institute bc he’s “”””family””””? i suppose they tried to make it a more difficult dilemma by really trying to push your character’s story in the “i’m looking for my son!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” direction before you actually find out what happened to shaun, but i didnt find that a very compelling plot point in the first place.... so it had pretty much no bearing on my decision

also. the synth shaun. he made the synth shaun which is like super weird and a little creepy. like this kid’s never gonna age.... i mean 50 years from now he’s gonna be a 60 y-o in a 10 y-o’s body!!!!!!!! who tf thought that was a good idea?? i mean i’m on the “gen 3 synths are truly sentient” train cause the game basically does nothing to show you otherwise. you have institute scientists telling you that they aren’t, but literally everything in the game shows you that they are. also danse

and then their cause... they say they’re the “best hope for humanity” and stuff but like what are they actually doing to help humanity. the only beneficial thing they did was create gmos like that huge pumpkin (while replacing roger ww in the process which as i mentioned before was something i hated). besides that, wtf are they doing besides hiding away in their blindingly white laboratories experimenting w/ synths?? 

anyway yeah i hated the institute but i guess in terms of “story” they did a little better than the railroad and minutemen. but they honestly got a helping hand from the fact that shaun was involved with them and a large part of the story early on was looking around for information about shaun and being able to ask npcs about the institute. however once you proceeded past a certain point they also fell into a very boring routine of having a handful of radiant quests available and not much else involving them

4) bos - well.... i def felt like they were super culty when i first went onto the prydwen. and i really dont like their stance on gen 3s and non-feral ghouls. but i do like that theyre out and about clearing the commonwealth of super mutants, ferals, and raiders lol. 

i really really hate the whole danse thing tho and how close-minded they are about him :( i did see that there was actually cut content where you could challenge maxson and danse would get his rank back and i kinda wish that they actually implemented that. i dont really want the elder role but i’d like the chance to do something where you could shift the bos’s opinion on gen 3s, even if only slightly... like THAT would be a good story element, come on! 

but w/e. i really didnt like them at first but i like their aesthetic compared to everyone else and their general cause (at least theyre not like opening fire on the slog, right... ?) ..

anyway i might just stick with their ending as my “main” playthrough cause afaict they’re not much diff from the minutemen ending except i get the sentinel rank, and you actually have some named people that you can interact with about your choice.

ok im actually really tired of writing this post... i actually have so many more thoughts haha but i dunno if i’ll be able to get them all out because as if on cue i’m getting tired around midnight.. anyway

yeah so the story was eh and i wish it went more in depth. like, even though i wasnt super fond of fnv’s story, i did think it was more immersive and detailed... i think fo4 had a lot of potential but sadly didn’t quite deliver. tbh i think the game couldve gone without the railroad if four factions really did just spread them too thin while in development.

like i think the part of the story with kellogg was good... the whole thing about trying to find the identity of this guy, searching his home, searching for him, looking through his memories, etc was pretty interesting. i liked how we were able to see his backstory and something about him that wasn’t just “dude who murdered my husband.” like that was all good stuff! but the story REALLY deteriorated after that... i mean you just end up having to kill the guy and then he’s just out of the story completely.

oh and like related to that--what was that whole deal with nick speaking in kellogg’s voice briefly after you finish in the memory den??? why would they just throw in a line like that and not expand on it at all???? that bugged me SO MUCH because again there was so much potential there!!! if kellogg had somehow gotten into nick’s mind you could be presented with so many new options. like how do you get him out? can you get him out? who do you go to for help? etc etc etc NOT JUST SOME THROWAWAY LINE THAT ACTUALLY DOES NOTHING AHHH

speaking of which. fo4 seems to do that a LOT. like maybe it’s recency bias bc i really dont remember all the details of fnv to be able to compare, but i feel like fo4 has a ton of little throwaway things that are interesting details but aren’t expanded on at all. like not even a little bit. i think there needs to be a certain balance between details and mini stories... like fo4 dangled SO many of these little details in your face that you just never got to expand on at all.. i love an interesting world where you can discover things that dont really have an impact on the main story or anything but these scraps just drove me crazy.

also there were like... no vaults??? i feel like fnv had a lot more... fo4 has vault 95 for cait (and a kinda boring purpose/story imo). the vault of triggermen where you find nick. the vault for refining human genes. vault 81. and that’s it.. i felt like i spent a lot more time in vaults in fnv? and they had some creepier stories/experiments too

ok like my brain... is really slowing down but i will at least get a few more thoughts down before i go to sleep

SETTLEMENTS. LORD HELP ME. again, a great concept with so much potential but poor execution. i really enjoyed settlements--with mods. vanilla settlements are just so horribly lacking. for one thing not being able to clean up your settlement is just terrible. you really would just have to leave piles of trash, garbage, debris, 200-YEAR-OLD SKELETONS, etc, lying around your settlement!!!!! where you’re supposed to have people living!!

settlers themselves also have some pretty terrible ai. theyre stupid af. their pathing is godawful. i am extremely proud of them when they actually are able to successfully navigate a structure i built because it is such a goddamn struggle for them! like they’re literally coded to take the shortest possible straight line path so i get tons of them walking into walls trying to get to their destination instead of walking around them, going through doorways, using stairs etc (yes theyre all navmeshed)... it’s actually so aggravating

also settlements themselves are incredibly and frustratingly buggy. the resources getting messed up in your pip boy bug is super annoying. there’s a shit ton of other bugs with them that i’m just too tired to list but i’m like ahhh god i feel like i’m playing a beta version of this shit! also what’s up with them spawning on top of buildings in sanctuary?

ok yeah i have a lot of crticisms for the game so it may not seem like i enjoyed it but i actually did. i think the story was decent up until after you finished kellogg’s part, cause after that it just got really boring (which is lame because seriously, the story gets boring after you can start decided which faction/s you want to join??)

but mods def contributed a lot to my enjoyment, esp my settlement mods... like most of my mods are settlement mods lol. so like... if i played vanilla fo4 i do doubt that i’d have enjoyed it as much. i do actually like the fps aspect of it, but i think there are too many places that are overloaded with enemies.. so you’re constantly fighting shit. it gets kind of annoying after a while.

OH THAT JUST REMINDED ME. GUNNERS. another thing that had potential but ended up just being... ??? raiders but fancier??? you could literally switch out all the gunners for raiders and nothing would change. when i first encountered them i was really excited cause i thought it was a new side faction but they’re literally just... raiders. but fancy. it’s disappointing af. there’s no story behind them... you can get into gunners plaza and find some holotapes from the leader and some members but then there’s nothing else! you don’t ever get to find out what the story is behind all of it! again with dangling some details in front of your face and then just never expanding on it at all. ugh gunners were seriously a big disappointment for me.

okay i’m actually done now cause i’m tired and typing this out actually took a lot of time lol. i still have a ton of thoughts but i need to sleep. lame