SnapSlav Posted September 18, 2017 Posted September 18, 2017 On 9/16/2017 at 10:19 PM, Siegfried von Walheim said: It's not that complicated beyond the idea that evil does evil for power's sake. Like Animal Farm, once you get it the magic wares off. Also a book I read in early High School back when I was a Communist. Well I'm not necessarily looking to read it to have my mind blown. That's already well into the past. You can't red pill when you've already been red pilled, unless it's because you discover that your previous "awakening" was a deceit and you were in fact being brainwashed. But I quite doubt that these days. Figuratively speaking, I always notice the zippers and the seams and see a costume; I never see the monsters everyone else perceives. On 9/16/2017 at 10:19 PM, Siegfried von Walheim said: All this I completely forgot. Very interesting and definitely makes sense of the otherwise strange story. And THIS was the abridged version! I had to cut out details in multiple edits to get it down to THAT small, and even then, it just isn't small enough. Suffice it to say, Ulysses is quite possibly my favorite character out of the entire series, for obvious reasons. Although Elijah makes for a damn respectable second. He's not as sympathetic of a villain, but he has amazingly complex layers to him. It takes a very confident writer to allow a character to lie to the audience without telling the audience that they're being lied to, and leave it to the audience to figure out the character's true motives and flesh them out. Whereas Ulysses just brushes off mentions of his past and wishes to forget, Elijah straight up belittles every attempt you make at outsmarting him, and you might not even realize that he's a massive hypocrite and much more vulnerable than meets the eye, if you don't pay very, VERY close attention to the little things. On 9/16/2017 at 10:19 PM, Siegfried von Walheim said: My only qualm is how could the Enclave nuked Hopeville when they no longer exist...unless the player is in his 30's. Which I consider a bit of an imposition on the whole "role playing" aspect of the game. No no, the Enclave didn't nuke Hopeville. The detonator was just an "Enclave" device. Either that or Pre-War American, but if that's the case, then it makes an already-mysterious device even more of an enigma. Regardless, New Vegas makes it clear that after the destruction of the Oil Rig, what little was left of the Enclave's infrastructure was largely acting on auto-pilot. There was no organization anymore. It's even entirely possible that ED-E's journey is all a lie, because Navarro doesn't exist anymore. (It makes "saving" ED-E in the end of the DLC even more of a hollow victory when you know this. But that's also part of his character: the joy is not the destination, it's in the journey.) The likelier explanation is not that the Enclave had anything to do with the Divide, but that NCR prospectors scavenging the ruins of Navarro found the detonator, and from there it was delivered to Hopeville. It could all have been a great, big, tragic accident, if they had no idea what it was for, and they just assumed it was useful "military electronics" and sent it to the NCR's major supply line into New Vegas, which was Hopeville. Whatever the case, the cause of the delivery of the detonator is a mystery. On 9/16/2017 at 10:19 PM, Siegfried von Walheim said: I'm hugely skeptical of any group claiming to be founding a mico and experimental society, mainly because of what the motivations and mindsets of the leaders might be, as well as the consequences of trying to assimilate into such a group. It could very well be a cult. I think the idea of this one in particular is interesting. Or at least would have been interesting if what you thought they were about was the truth rather than a masturbatory hippy-dippy commune of doom. I think it would be cool if a city like Rapture could be built and sustained; humanity's ultimate ego trip. I mean the city, even as a ruin, was pretty cool in the game and seemed like it would have been a nice place to live minus the added crap Bioshock 2 revealed. I mean, the godlessness of the society left it vulnerable to religious extremists. I think for AnCap to really stand the test of time (arguably Rapture was a hypothetical AnCapia) it needs a moral backbone based on Classical Liberal and Christian principles as well as, especially for the inherently duplicitous and stupid, a God-figure to be the moral stick which keeps the donkey from lazily sipping carrot juice. (What a wonderful metaphor I made at midnight, eh? Point being good people need not a disincentive for bad while "neutral" and bad people do). Without a doubt, I'm much more dubious of its claims nowadays than I was when I heard about it roughly 5 years ago. I love the idea of it, but recent history has shown that attempts at making man-made ocean platforms have pissed off almost everyone. Lefties get ornery that their precious "environment" isn't remaining perfectly "natural". Neocons get fired up because they think any action by foreign groups in (what they consider) international waters amount to acts of war. But really I'm more concerned with how fixated they are on the "save the planet" ideas they exhibit, rather than "save civilization". Following tried-and-true models of successful societies to create a better society sounds promising. But advocating unproven and utopian idealism of a super society that can provide for the rest of the world sounds like a burden nobody asked for, that will never succeed, and will only amount to another massive tragedy.
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