Unmade Man

A Fallout 4 duology—written in the style of a 40s detective noir!

1. Dead Man Talking

There are three Nick Valentines; the brilliant detective, the fractured snapshot of a grieving man and the aging Synth in Diamond City. But when a prewar woman with an impossible case demands his help, Nick is forced to confront everything he’s borrowed and everything he owes.

In the Commonwealth, a debt is one hell of a thing to forgive.

(x)

2. Dead Woman Walking

Two years after throwing in with the prewar hothead with an axe to grind, Nick Valentine works another routine missing persons—an overbearing father, a resigned mother and a daughter who just can’t take it anymore. Dime a dozen; up until she declares herself a synth, hops on a boat and flees three hundred miles north to Far Harbor, where Fog lays thick and hopes run slim. But between the dogged harbormen, the radioactive death cult, the machine claiming to be his brother, and his own hard-headed partner, something has to give.

(x)

i started a new save to poke around at sim settlements for the first time (i go nuts for a city builder) and i don't know if it's a bug, or a mod conflict, or what, but when time slows in fallout 4, your voice slows with it, right. like with jet, or in VATS. somehow, and don't ask me how, somehow my character's voice has doubled in speed when the time slows down. the pitch changes, too. i have to find out how to fix this because if i kill another enemy and hear gloria bark out a tiny, extremely fast ˢʷᵉᵉᵗ i'm going to laugh myself into a stroke

i think my ideal video game is just the sims with all its building tools and furniture, but there's no people in it to manage. actually wait no there should be people in it to do sims things like yell EEBLE WABA YAY and piss themselves not so i can pay attention to their needs but because that's a really funny thing to happen during a normal home renovation

gamers! GOG is doing a games preservation program, which is super cool. the tldr on it is for an old game to be in that initiative, it has to work, as-is, no modding or changing needed to make it run on a modern pc. fallout new vegas is in there but i'm not sure how the changes actually work. if i installed fnv through it, would that totally eliminate the need to use viva new vegas? or would i have to use it anyway because fnv, at its core, is just that unstable even with the updates

to enjoy the dizzying highs (shadow generations being one of if not the best game sonic team has ever put out and making the character really cool again) one must endure the not all that bad lows (my least favourite character theme being the recurring leitmotif moving forward)

easing back into comics and while i won't show you the thumbnail for the whole thing i WILL promise you. there are some powerful gloria faces in this

you're in luck, i'm not super well-versed in fantasy just in general. nothing against it at all, i just haven't read enough of it to form a strong opinion. but for sci-fi noirs, easy pick for me, the body scout!

hugely, hugely recommend. tightly written, tightly paced, just a joy to read. lincoln michel i am your strongest soldier

if you want a fun one, then night mayor. way on the sillier side and with a specific caveat: it expects you to be very, very familiar with a lot of the movies, i don't think this is a good 'i'm dipping my toes in' pick

the fun of this is that characters in the real world have to dive into his world and get typecast as a result. the real detective is forced to be a hardboiled detective, which means he's psychologically prevented from swearing due to the hay's code. he'll think 'how did i get into this?' and suddenly be subject to newspaper spinning and stock footage that makes him violently ill. sometimes i'll complain about pastiches and parodies being written by people who think they're better than the genre they're tackling. this isn't that. it's very, very loving

it's noirvember! i've been starting a lot of posts with that recently, turns out a month is one month long. in the spirit of earth-shattering information, if you've got any questions (getting into the genre, reading/writing it, stuff about dead man talking etc etc) i'm all ears

i've been wanting to poke around at the frost mod, set in the nuclear winter after the bombs, especially since it's fallout 4's birthday (or was) and was cooking up a little character and struggling for ideas, and it hit me

Judith!

i figured i'd branch out this year and get into coffee, the hot drink i never conquered. i drink a lot of tea and thought you know what. how bad can coffee be really. they say it's an acquired taste. i ought to acquire it. problem with this: you have no say in how good you find it after you drink it for days in a row. you're now a coffee drinker. this fucking sucks, i say, drinking it, which i am going to do until i straight up die. i don't know what the lesson is here. never do anything new ever

i KNOW the balatro maths. i know it. i'm creeping into orange and gold stake and i KNOW high card scales and flushes are deceptive and some builds are doomed to fail because they're reliant on chance in a way that will ruin you. but i see the little shiny holo card and go teehee........