FALLOUT: 1x01 - "The End"
↳ "War... war never changes."

Genuinely, what is the point of setting the Fallout show on the west coast if it was just going to invalidate everything that happened in the West Coast Trilogy. Shady Sands has fallen, the NCR is a memory, New Vegas is a crater in the ground. The New California Republic, Caesar's Legion, The Enclave, Mr. House, all brushed to the side for a wasteland with no semblance of human society beyond shanty-towns; with no semblance of the legitimate cities of Fallouts 2 and New Vegas. All to what end? To allow the Brotherhood of Steel to make an undeserved comeback?

If anything, I think the series should be the final nail in the coffin that Bethesda fundamentally misunderstands Fallout. In a franchise whose very nature is defined by the Atom Bomb and how it was used as a means to an end by a corrupt Capitalist system; how humanity rose from the ashes of a broken world with the dream of building something better; how our only hope for the future is to learn from our past mistakes and create a world where they can never be made again; Bethesda seems determined to keep us stuck in the past. That we should never advance past the ideals of the nation that led us to this nuclear landscape in the first place, that we should never try to make something new atop the ashes of what came before. That we should just forever stay rats scurrying in the wastes, amongst the shattered visage of Ozymandias and the fruits of his labor, looking up to what he left behind as an example of the kind of existence we should strive to create. Very telling indeed.

Communities closed beta is here

Hello again! We’re back with an update on Communities, a big idea we had last year that we’ve been working on steadily since then. We’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re beginning a “closed beta” phase of this new feature, which means many of you will get to play with it soon!

We want to build this whole thing together, with as much input from all of you as possible. We’ve read and re-read the feedback from our previous post, and we’ve been surveying and interviewing people about this idea for a few months now. But it’s time to open this up even more for hands-on testing.

We’ve already begun reaching out to most of you who interacted with our previous post, as promised, with a survey asking whether you’d be interested in helping (check your email!). Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be using the results of that survey to narrow down who we’d like to help test Communities in these initial batches.

The process is looking a bit like this:

1. If you received a Communities survey email to your registered Tumblr email address, fill it out! If you’re interested in helping us in this beta test period, that’s your way of potentially getting early access. If you did not receive an email with the Communities survey, don’t fret! Communities will be rolling out to more people as we expand our testing. 
2. We’ll go through the results and choose a diverse range of community ideas to gather a wide array of feedback.
3. Selected testers will receive a second survey with more detailed questions about their proposed community. Very practical stuff, like the name, title, and description, whether it should be public or private, the About page contents, its own community guidelines, and more.
4. We will create the new Tumblr community on your behalf using the information supplied. We’re building the tools that will let people create and edit communities themselves, so eventually you’ll be able to change them without needing our help. But for now, we’re creating and editing them for you, as needed.
5. After we’ve created the community, you’ll be made its first admin. Everything from here on out is up to you – Tumblr staff won’t be in your community (unless you invite us, of course). You’ll be able to invite anyone on Tumblr to your community. However, your community will have a population cap to start, limiting how many people can be in it and invited, as a way of keeping this beta test somewhat contained and manageable for us. We’ll be able to raise that population cap for communities that are growing and if we want to test further in that direction.
6. And throughout, we’ll be asking for feedback, both in some special communities for everyone in the closed beta, and via more surveys and the Support tickets we receive.

This closed beta version of Communities is far from finished, and that’s part of the reason we want to start opening it up to more of you for feedback. There are a lot of rough edges and known issues, but we think it’s far enough along that it’s usable enough for testing. We need feedback in order to feel like we’re building the right thing.

The very first public community is called “Communities Feedback” for this reason! We want everyone helping us test out communities to tell us about it, so people in this closed beta will be in there by default. We want to use that space to be more public and real-time about new pieces we’re building, bugs we’re fixing, things we know are broken, and answers to common questions. There is an additional, private community for community admins, to help shape how administrating and moderating these spaces will work. And if you don’t want to use those spaces, you can always use the “Feedback” category in our Support form.

Stay tuned for more, and keep an eye on that Communities Feedback space if you’d like to see how things are changing over time.