orthogeeks

You’ve seen that ad before. But it’s all part of a greater thing. Emacs vs. VI? (git Vs. subversion?) Among fans and devotees of anything, there is what you might call a turf war. But this – this ad you see above? It’s not the turf war. But a clever marketer figured out that if you can personalize a turf war, you can make it seem a lot bigger than it is. But wait a minute, isn’t the idea that Macs are used by hip people and PC’s are used by stodgy dittoheads? (No offense to the chill actor who plays the part of the PC) But to be realistic, Mac could be represented by one person (maybe) but to represent PCs – a concept and not a single company or line of computers – you would need a legion of people.

In any case, the reality is that in order for there to be a turf war, the two things must be to some extent comparable; and for the turf war to continue, one must not be vastly superior to the other – or what I’m saying is, they really aren’t that different. The Jets and the Sharks? Other than being of a different ethnic origin, we’re talking about dudes cut from the same mold. What I’m trying to say is this –

- but the reality is that this has always been the case. As soon as we were able to make that comparison between Mac and PC reasonably, the comparison was and will always be… stupid.

I have always found intriguing post-apocalyptic worlds, because they are a very unique kind of fantasy. Specifically, during the past century they were in some way the chief fantasy; the chief myth. In the same way the ancient Chinese believed in the Golden Age, people were certain that post-apocalytia was possible and perhaps inevitable. If the nuclear weapon is one of the gods in the pantheon of the modern, then post-apocalyptia is his myth. It seems that in working hard to de-mythologize the past, we’ve succeeded only in mythologizing the future. If ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ is not a vision of this very thing, then there is hardly cause to speak of it.

Enter Fallout. It is certain that Fallout is serious story; it’s not a comedy. But yet, at the same time, there is much that is intentionally absurd about it. And maybe this is purposeful; if you take a lot of the conventions of modern cinema, pulp fiction, television and video games seriously, what results is quite delightfully absurd.

Fallout bills itself as fantasy; which is what Post-apocalytic literature is. (There are probably some real exceptions, though.) But yet it does not have the same kind of forced feel of most modern fantasy, which tries to unironically ape Tolkein, Lewis and MacDonald. What is good among it is still good, no doubt, but it lacks the same qualities that Lord of the Rings has. At least in my day when we played D & D we did because it gave us a chance to feel like we were in a Tolkien story. (And perhaps this is why spin-offs are less successful; D&D IS Tolkien; most other settings are recycled Tolkien.)

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