{"id":37983,"date":"2017-04-07T04:44:11","date_gmt":"2017-04-07T08:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=37983"},"modified":"2023-12-16T13:04:06","modified_gmt":"2023-12-16T18:04:06","slug":"stuff-that-is-happening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=37983","title":{"rendered":"Stuff That is Happening"},"content":{"rendered":"

My daughter Bay (who you probably know from the podcast \/ Spoiler Warning, if you’re into those) is visiting the family this week. You might remember I visited her last December<\/a>. (The header image on this post is from that visit.) Now she’s here for a week and we’re catching up.<\/p>\n

The girlsMy wife Heather and our daughters Bay and Esther.<\/span> are going to Tekko<\/a> this weekend. They’ve made themselves some cosplay costumesIs “cosplay costumes” redundant? Can cosplay be used to refer to the costume itself? As in: “She’s wearing cosplay.” That sounds wrong, but I dunno.<\/span> and will be doing whatever it is otaku do at these things. Probably going to panels where anime voice actors joke around and sign stuff. If you’re curious: Bay is going as Deadpool in a wedding dress. Heather is going as Kiki<\/a>. They have other costumes they’re doing on other days, but I’m not familiar with the characters in question. All I know is they’re pretty happy with how it all turned out.<\/p>\n

I actually had a bunch of content I wanted to post, but, see…<\/p>\n


\nI just finished playing through all three Borderlands games for the big write-up I’m doing on the series. It looks like it’s going to be about the same size as the Arkham City writeup<\/a>. (About half the size of Mass Effect<\/a>.) So then I figured I should take another stab at finally doing my big write-up on Fallout 4. To make that happen, I figured I should play through the game again. And to get into the proper mindset, I figured I should play the vanilla game with no mods. You might remember that I tend to play with a lot of mods<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Just as I was about to purge the mods and start fresh, I ran into this article: The Sim Settlements mod for Fallout 4 is so good it should be an official part of the game<\/a>. I figured I should take that for a spin before I returned to vanilla Fallout 4.<\/p>\n

That was a little over a week ago, and it’s all I’ve accomplished since then. With the mod installed, it feels like there’s another entire game inside of Fallout 4. You lay down Sim City style plots of residential, industrial, commercial, and agricultural space. Settlers move in, take jobs, and build homes for themselves. They upgrade their homes over time. I’ll roll back into town after a days-long trek across the CommonwealthI usually don’t use fast travel.<\/span> to find new buildings and faces in town. I spend a lot of time gathering up resources to keep the town going.<\/p>\n

Everyone has a designated house. No more random communal beds.<\/div>
Everyone has a designated house. No more random communal beds.<\/div><\/p>\n

The game is eating a ton of productivity. In a good way. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed Fallout 4 this much. Sadly, I’m barely engaging with the vanilla content, so very little of this time will be useful for my eventual write-up.<\/p>\n

The mod works really well when combined with the mod “Don’t Call Me Settler”, which is one of those “Why isn’t this part of the base game?” kinda mods. It automatically gives settlers unique names and lets you clean up dead bodies from your settlements.<\/p>\n

Warning: I just noticed that the author of “Don’t Call Me Settler” has taken down the mod<\/a>. Apparently it’s bugged and will kill your settlement. Eventually settlers will stall and stop taking action, and will just stand around forever. Hasn’t happened to me yet, but it’s a serious bug and there’s no known fix. (If you uninstall the mod, the game will likely crash.)<\/p>\n

Fallout 4 is a deeply flawed and conflicted game, but it’s an amazing framework for building other, better games that are far more interesting but no less buggy.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

I’m planning on doing one more public test of Pseudoku before putting the game on Steam. Hopefully that will happen next week.<\/p>\n

Between the Fallout 4 relapse and Bay’s visit, content might be a little thin next week. We’ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My daughter Bay (who you probably know from the podcast \/ Spoiler Warning, if you’re into those) is visiting the family this week. You might remember I visited her last December. (The header image on this post is from that visit.) Now she’s here for a week and we’re catching up. The girlsMy wife Heather […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37983"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56834,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37983\/revisions\/56834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}