I found Jule's story very depressing - like a lot of Fallout 4, it's a no-win scenario, and you, thanks to the inflexibility of voice acting, can't do anything clever to solve the problem.
You might be the most intelligent, scientifically and medically trained person in the Commonwealth, with access to the Institute and the Railroad's best minds - and it don't matter squat. You have the same choices in game as a moron.
Jule seems suicidally depressed at the end of her story. She keeps repeating that she has nowhere to go and can't trust anyone. She just sits in a shack, on the dirty ground, with no food, no water, exposed to monsters who will kill her in horrible ways.
So I said "Fuck that!", and built something decent around her. I don't have the skills to mod her behaviour, but by moving the 'rug' that has the scripted negative look, I feel like I symbolically removed that behaviour at least.
I gave her food and water, and cups of hot chocolate, and a warm shower she can use whenever she wants to - and she does use it, although - alas - the game reverts her to her grubby self.
I that imagine she gets so dirty from tending her garden. Or she's got Pigpen's curse, I suppose!
You can never have too many cups of hot chocolate.
I don't know if she's exactly happy - but she doesn't seem as miserable?
Is that a slight smile?
I popped down a deckchair for her to use...
and Piper snapped it up like the greedy chair-pig she is!
Tamed wolves act as guards.
The house training is a little spotty but nothing's perfect.
Jule's bed. I'd like one like that.
There was a glitch in the production run of this synth.
The view from the top of Jule's house.
Deacon's fixing up some turrets on the roof of the shed she likes to sit in, and watch the sunset.
The view from the wind turbine - I think I've really made Acadia's outer areas somewhere nice to live in, don't you?
Valentine and Deacon discuss the view, from above the fog - which we now suspect was caused by the Vim production process.
For all your dining needs, visit Jule's Place. Now with less random ghoul attacks.
I sort out my equipment, strapping on guns, guns and more guns. I'm going to need them!
Spoilers ahead:
Well, I went through Nuka World. I loved the scenery, and the funhouse especially.
I found the story about the quest to save people from turning into ferals enjoyable and moving - but found it frustrating that i couldn't mention being the leader of the Minutemen, that I had a settlement of ghouls, and was friends with GoodNeighbour who would have loved to have known of a solution, and all of them would have funded research.
Heck, I wanted to make Oswald live on an island with his ferals, and only deal with him via electronics, in case it was his presence that was turning them. That would have been a twist!
I kinda wish i could recruit Oswald to run this place again - he was a heck of a showman.
My career seems to involve a lot of joining groups, only to turn on them and kill off their members.
Looking down from my Penthouse view.
Wouldn't it be cool if they had made it all developable as settlements? I mean, there are mods that sort of work - but they are always buggy, and struggle with litter etc.
But I'd love to have looked down as the ruler of this town.
I just didn't want to rule over treacherous psychopaths. Sue me.
Perhaps I should stock the pond with carp...
But you don't get any of those choices - i guess the voice acting limitation won again.
Well, what about with the raiders? Are they reformable? Well, one tribe was, in an earlier game, but the three here just seem to be evil. The Disciples just seemed to be the worst, the Operators to have potential. But changing them is not an option.
Heck, changing Gage isn't either. In fact, he telepathically knows as soon as you kill one of the mob bosses, regardless of the fact I used the Sandman kill in the middle of the night.
All the raiders knew. Being stealthy or persuasive is out - it's time to slaughter until the streets run red.
I stumbled over Gage, who went from practically professing his love for me to insta-hate.
Hey, why was he loyal to the raiders, who made it clear they were going to kill him if his plan to have me as the new overboss failed?
Why wasn't there an option for him to walk in exile, or even be recruited as an agent for the Commonwealth? Worse men than him have served as agents of the crown.
So i shoot and I shoot and I shoot and I shoot and they are all dead. Jeez, even the Institute had some option for saving some of them.
There's beautiful artwork in Fallout, I love constructing settlements (especially modded) - but argh, it really disappoints me as a game.
Sometimes I find the panorama of my creations rather breathtaking!
(But I wish i could fix the bloody rooves!)
I dunno, maybe they should just sell the construction game separately from the shoot-em-up!
Still, the holes do allow for easy access if anyone wants to join me in my viewing pleasures...
I loot the bodies. Can I turn the place into a settlement at least?
Nope, not an option.
The traders inform me they'll be running the place for themselves, without joining the Minutemen even, despite remaining helpless; despite being ripe for the next group of thugs to take over.
So what was their big plan? The Raiders were going to take over the Commonwealth?
It was never going to happen.
The BoS have air power - they could have dropped nukes on raider towns from the sky, and every settlement would have turned to swear fealty to them if the Minutemen failed to protect them.
"So you freed me - am i supposed to feel grateful?"
And the Institute - well, the raiders didn't seem to even be aware of them.
The neurological weapons the raiders had - the persuasion gas, for example - wouldn't have worked on synths, but would have been refined even further by a hi-tech organisation that specialised in biochemistry. The Institute could have teleported them in everywhere they wanted...
I will say, I think the pink rifles are just adorable!
The Raiders were only good at pillaging weak groups, making them weaker, making them die, in a world where humanity was already struggling.
They might have caused the Commonwealth to implode, before they died out themselves at the hands of their many enemies. Which included themselves, they turned on each other very quickly.
So what did I think of it as a DLC? It was okay. I had a season pass, which did the job. I think if you wanted to play as an evil character, and had this right from the start, then it would be good value.
I found Automatron to be more engaging, and it had a little more choice involved as well - I'd have to rate it as the best DLC, followed by Far Harbour.
I prefer playing as the hero, because, well, evil's just ... mundane I guess. But that's my taste. If you want to let the darker side of your nature rip - this is the one for you!
Bert Williams. A black man doing blackface. I wonder what he thought of it all?
What is blackface? A caricature used in entertainment. Usually involves singing. Sure, the people are shown as buffoons, but that’s done of every ethnic grouping.
Even to poor kittens, alas. Always being stereotyped.
I’m Australian, and if you want to dress up as a silly caricature of my nation, I don’t care. Knock yourself out.
Preferably with the Adelaide ‘96, a smashing white wine with an lovely afterburn coming and going.
The thing is, it’s only racist if you genuinely believe that certain people are inferior on the basis of race.
Did Tim genuinely believe South Africans looked or acted like that?
Of course not. It’s a joke. It’s funny because it’s in bad taste.
When Snoop Dog does ‘white guy’, no-one gets offended. It’s a joke. We get it. There’s no malice.
A caricature of a popular celebrity? Oh no! How terrible!
Don’t care. It’s a joke.
This skit is geoblocked here, but it looks funny. Key & Peele In a sketch called "Das Negros" where two Black men are hiding from the Nazis--disguised as white Germans.
Seriously, the way to disempower things like blackface is to do blackface. Or whiteface, or yellowface, or Avatar-blue-face - it doesn’t matter.
By disconnecting the malice from the situation, by desensitising rather than the SocJus super-sensitising process... you change it from something that genuinely hurt people to a quaint reflection of a time that has passed.
When I hear jokes about Australians being convicts, i don’t find them funny, not because they insult my ancestors, but because that lacks wit. Genuinely looking into the absurdity of the time makes for good humour.
This is the sort of thing that was done to my ancestors. They would be put into masks designed to dehumanise them, and not allowed to speak to other prisoners. How that was supposed to make them better human beings I shall never understand.
But it’s funny too - because it is so fucking over the top.
Look at the size of those chains! Push that a bit further, make it caricature, and you have an excellent costume.
Desensitisation is important.
The reason this officer can endure the naked aggression of this woman is because he has had an officer shouting at him. He learned how to cope in a less dangerous situation and can now deal with her without taking his pistol and removing her brain from her skull, like most people would.
He is desensitised.
Here we have desensitisation training for someone afraid of spiders. (source)
Note: this is the exact opposite of how SoJus manages things, with it's trigger warnings and 'microaggressions' and 'safespace'.
And here we have the outcome. The phobia is gone. Until she visits Australia and something that size but venomous and aggressive spots her from across the room and runs her down like... but enough of my childhood...
We don't live in an era where white people are roaming about, looking to lynch a black man for touching a white woman. Black people have no sane reason to fear white people. If anything, in the US, black people should fear black people. Black on black violence is terrible, but it seems largely ignored.
The direction SocJus has taken instead is to make people neurotics, rather than helping them - to create a blind phobia, a fear and hatred of my kind.
The fact that many of them are white men themselves doesn't stop them in the slightest - these masters of doublethink imagine they are the exceptions to their rule, or that by punishing other white people, they eradicate the Original Sin of their birth.
Spoilers ahead:
