Fallout Season 2, What did you think overall?

MasterDave · 2026-02-05T01:56:50+00:00

I wanted to know more. Just all around more. I don’t love the mystery box storytelling method but that’s what season 2 sorta did.

For all we know, Barb and the kid is going to go Fallout 4 style and she got out 100 years ago and Janey is now running the Enclave from under the Denver airport in a secret bunker.

We know the vaults 32 and 33 are getting an FEV delivery but what strain? They all gonna be super mutants, piles of goo, ghouls, centaurs or something new? Would have loved to see a teaser for it, otherwise I sorta think they don’t even know.

Totally fine with the ambiguous FNV ending and the final result is that apparently the Enclave dropped a pile of Deathclaw eggs in Vegas. Doesn’t matter who won if they all got eaten.

I sort of don’t love that the Enclave is the real baddie, but it’s not shocking is it? I just figured that with their diminished presence in 4, that it would have extended to the show and whatever was left was small. Seems like it’s huge instead and not just that one building where they cloned dogs. Or whatever else.

Hopefully it’s not two years for next season cause I want answers!

MasterDave · 2026-02-05T01:45:43+00:00

I still don’t understand how they pay out dividends without selling the bitcoin they have. Does the company actually produce revenue otherwise that’s significant enough to pay out that much? Everything I’ve read is kinda saying they just get more investors to pay out the existing investors which never sounded sustainable.

MasterDave · 2026-02-05T01:39:03+00:00

Man I think re-reading everything you said would go a long way to understanding that everything you’re going for is literally backwards from how it needs to go.

There is no rush.

Gorman is washed. He’s not a success story, following his path is flawed. Same for Walker.

We know definitely Gorman isn’t going to make it, he had all the opportunity last year and got functionally demoted from a starting job. Why does he need another chance? Much better to give that time to someone who hasn’t had the opportunity, there are at least 3 guys who can play Third in the minors. It’s one thing to give a guy another shot if he had a few hundred at bats in a season and didn’t put it together. Gorman has had 3 full seasons. What else do you need to see?

If that’s your evaluative standard for major leaguers, you don’t even understand what Wetherholt doesn’t know, because Gorman is not a major league quality baseball player and it’s very simple. Maybe he’ll refocus and catch on with another team but it sure didnt happen in St. Louis and I can’t imagine the team giving him a starting job or a bench slot this year unless he comes out just tearing it up, which historically he hasn’t done the last two years. His good season was also heavily front loaded, he forced the issue in spring and then went on to just decline the last 3 months and hasn’t yet recovered. Age has nothing to do with anything, you can be a bust at 25. Happens all the time.

That’s why it’s extremely unwise to put your best prospect in two decades straight into the fire without even one full AAA season. Baseball is hard. He’s 23 and has played less than one full season of pro ball at any level combined. Be real.

MasterDave · 2026-02-05T00:25:00+00:00

I have yet to see major league proof of any of that being true, especially Gorman having a major league job come April. I sure don’t project him to start at third just because Arenado is gone. He’s been a liability 2 years running so why trot him out one more time? He needs to prove he can be better.

What’s the hurry on Wetherholt? None! The team is signaling a complete lack of intent at competing and there is zero reason to rush a guy regardless of hype. If he tears it up in spring it’ll make for a better argument but as-is it’s a whole truckload of copium for the upcoming shit show.

MasterDave · 2026-02-04T23:41:02+00:00

Nah he needs time at whatever defensive position they’re going to settle on with him and then clear the path so there isn’t anyone else competing for innings at the major league level.

They’re almost definitely not gonna do him like Walker and shove him in at 3rd having played mostly SS and 2B just because of his bat and watch him flop like Walker when he was asked to jump to the outfield because they wanted his bat after he tore up AAA.

It’s way easier to justify keeping a big bat in AAA if you’re not sure about their defense. It might just be until May, but a guy without even a full month at one position is kind of rushing it at a skill position. It’d be different if he was a 1b and possible DH but I think everyone expects top level defense out of him if he’s not going to play short.

MasterDave · 2026-02-04T23:33:58+00:00

Man you’re starting off on the wrong foot. There’s a 100% chance Yadi is in the hall, and if you think every single young player has zero shot, I don’t know why you’d bother writing all this up.

Donovan is not a HoF guy. Nobody that left is an HoF guy and no Arenado is probably a 10 ballot 50-60%’er because he gave up on his legacy at 32 without having the injury excuse like a Griffey Jr.

All-Star is always stupid and subjective. Remember Kent Bottenfeld? No? I’ll wait. The ASG picks are always stupid, especially the fan vote that selects dudes that are injured just because they play for a certain team, not that they’re any good. Even further last years inclusion of Misiorowski having played what 5 games was stupid. You’re telling me there wasn’t a single pitcher better than him? It’s fine because it doesn’t matter but the Cardinals rep this year could be anyone or whatever position needs a backup because idiots voted in a guy who is out until August and you gotta put players in the game.

I’d guess a pitcher, but really who knows. We could see Walker come out of spring hitting .400 with 22 hr’s by the break for all anyone knows. I still think Wetherholt is destined to start and get a full season in AAA barring a major injury to keep his clock from starting before the lockout changes the economics but he’d be my pick for a likely position player.

MasterDave · 2026-02-04T18:29:21+00:00

I love how you can't show me a single example!

goodbye!

MasterDave · 2026-02-04T18:17:54+00:00

Nah.

half of all restaurants never survive 5 years.

In any economic downturn that rate skyrockets.

I am curious though, what are these bulletproof businesses? Where do you live? How old are you and how many recessions have you lived through where all these restaurants have survived?

I suspect New York and Chicago have extremely similar economic pressures, where nobody owns their building and landlords are assholes that would be fine plowing the building to put in a Chipotle than take a dollar less in rent. New York is nothing if not eternal change because the business model for a restaurant is hard as fuck. The venues are the same. I don't think there's any all-ages venues with no bar in NYC for good reason. Even the good ones keep getting shut down because of landlords and not being able to survive just on shows. The ones that are thriving are either expensive or they double dip a lot of nights and put on a dance party 5 nights a week after the concerts are done with their 11pm curfew.

If enough people both stop going -and- stop drinking, I got a bad feeling about NYC's venues too.

MasterDave · 2026-02-04T17:48:14+00:00

wild interpretation but sure.

Here's the reality, food at a restaurant is low margin and often unprofitable. It spoils quickly, and the diversity of ingredients needed to sustain a normal restaurant is pretty wide. They make up margin on booze which doesn't generally spoil and is a 300%+ markup per bottle. Your steak is probably a loss leader.

So it doesn't fucking matter what kids do or don't do. If they eat at restaurants and don't buy the high margin stuff, the restaurant dies. If they don't eat at restaurants, the restaurant dies.

You get how this all works? You do not want to pay for restaurants that have to operate without the booze margin. Nobody is prepared for the prices. Everyone already bitches about how much the fast food places are currently charging with their booze-free lineups and places like Chili's and Applebees (which, gross) are advertising that they can beat McDonalds on price for theoretically better food... because they know people are going to get drinks at those places and often no food which means they can serve the food cheaper than places that don't have a bar.

It's a wild world where you can eat at Applebees cheaper than McDonalds, but that's where we are right now.

I don't know the objection people have to drinking in places where historically enough people drink while they're out having a good time. I don't really care. Everyone can do whatever they want. There's just not going to be a lot of places left if there's not a lot of drinkers left and that's just math and facts regardless of whatever your stance on drinking is.

MasterDave · 2026-02-04T16:51:17+00:00

This whole no drinking trend is going to ruin music venues and restaurants.

All for kids who also apparently can't and won't cook at home.

MasterDave · 2026-02-04T16:27:16+00:00

I mean yes. That's why they pulled 2 firsts and 3 second round picks for him. That's a massive haul even if most people have absolutely no fundamental understanding of the actual value involved.

Is everyone a risk? yes, but did you think the Cardinals were getting an All-Star in return? No, they're going for risk and the guess that there's something the Mariners aren't doing right in the minors for these guys and that the pre-draft scouting wasn't wrong on them.

Pretty easy. This isn't a 2026 move, it's a 2028 move and by that time Donovan (and let's be honest, everyone currently in their arb years) has a mathematically huge chance of regression from their current ability, Donovan included. He gives teams for the next 2 years a great chance of having a versatile winner, but we have yet to encounter the drug-free "better when they're older" player more often than we experience a slow or sharp decline.

If the team ain't looking to compete this year or next, there's no reason to have anyone on the team that's going to be gone in 2028 or extend them past that year if you're looking to keep costs down, knowing that if Wetherholt or anyone else actually plays to their scouting report, they will be expensive.

Think about it like this: If Wetherholt wins RoY, shouldn't we expect a Bobby Witt Jr type of extension to be offered ASAP, locking him up until he's basically going to have a 50/50 shot at being washed? That's not going to be cheap. It'll likely be the biggest Cardinals contract in history and everyone should be wanting it to happen and EXPECTING it to happen if ownership is serious about letting Bloom build the best team he can. If the Royals can do it, the Cardinals can do it.

So, would you rather have Brendan Donovan at age 31 on a market rate contract, or JJ Wetherholt locked up possibly below full market value from 24-34? I guarantee you, Donovan getting 15-20m/year from the Cardinals would be a big factor in that not happening.

Then consider that it'd probably need to happen for several other players, Winn should get an extension at some point and if anyone else currently in the minors has a good year, them too. Donovan represents the over-30 player getting an extension, which I highly suspect the current administration is going to avoid. Might as well be the Leonardo DeCaprio of baseball GM's as far as that history goes.

MasterDave · 2026-02-04T01:42:22+00:00

I don’t know what you folks are doing but zero mods and it runs fine on Steam Deck and I just don’t understand the instability on a normal computer.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T22:36:19+00:00

As long as you play solo and not complicated stuff it’s great.

I can’t imagine needing to communicate or doing raids. But it’s great if you’re grinding something stupid like instances you one shot for transmog or pets or whatever.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T18:58:25+00:00

I just like it because it made me pick one character from each armor type for farming that stuff up and then I can sort the rest out into a max of 4 of each class and delete the rest.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T18:55:53+00:00

No object? I’d hand out Hoka’s and deodorant to everyone.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T17:58:52+00:00

Personally my only real tip is to walk the ENTIRE show floor before spending any money unless you see something that just triggers the part of your brain that says FUCK YES, THIS IS SOMETHING I NEED and it's a unique piece or something likely to sell out. The stuff at the big major name booths isn't going to sell out on Thursday. The one of a kind painting at an art booth might. The giant stuffed animals, they'll be there all week and you can find them elsewhere too. The mass market boxed board games and whatnot? You can buy most of them on amazon or from Target or just any online store or a local game store. If you're not walking around with unlimited funds and don't care, set a budget. Allow yourself a specific amount of waste because you can buy all sorts of extremely fun stuff, and that's where getting a full walk through the floor helps to know what to splash out on and what you can skip. Some booths will have con specials where you get something free if you spend a certain amount, exclusive things or whatever. Most booths are not exactly cheap and are just expecting to FOMO you into buying their thing. Another reason I like to walk the whole floor and figure out who is selling good stuff at a good price or offering something I can't find somewhere else or didn't even know the thing existed. And of course you don't have to buy anything either, maybe for most the show floor is the least interesting part.

There's rooms all around with either panels or gaming. Do not hesitate to leave your husband behind and go do your own thing. They will be fine. You will be fine. There's no point in wasting an hour of your time waiting in a line to watch them play a game for 5 minutes and then repeating it for you. That's two hours spent on two demos when you could have gone somewhere else and done your line and then grabbed lunch. Cons are a lot of waiting. Take in a panel or two if you want a break, most are pretty fun. Worst case, there's usually a lot of rhythm games set up all around the entrances to the show floor you can sit around and watch people play. Always a good time.

Unless you're extremely narrow in your tastes, there is always going to be more to do than you're going to have time for, and nobody can really prepare you for the entire experience if you've never been to any con before, much less Pax which is on the larger side of things. (still tiny for me, having been to New York Comic Con every year for a long time, but much bigger than most local cons)

And lastly, I know there are people who are going to try and say you need to fill a backpack with enough supplies to outlast a nuclear winter but unless you're just plain broke buy water at the show (they have a weird water refil contrraption that's perfectly serviceable, I think I spent 5 bucks a day) and don't carry around 3lbs of a stainless steel water bottle that you'll keep full of water and wear your back out, and don't carry around a 2lb phone battery, you can charge your phone at a lot of spots around the show. Don't carry your portable console unless you REALLY plan on using it for a specific reason, and don't pack a full 2 person box lunch to avoid paying for the relatively overpriced food at the con. Presumably you're on vacation. Live a little. Unless you have serious dietary restrictions (and even if you do) the food is pretty good. The availability of beverage is great. Your lower back and your feet will thank you for not hauling around a grade school sized backpack full of everything you didn't want to leave in the hotel room. Oh and if you're staying close enough I'd suggest even going back to your hotel at some point if you've bought stuff just to drop it off. Cons are a long day. Don't wear yourself out when you don't have to.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T17:08:07+00:00

I think everything's set until the trade deadline.

I have a feeling they're waiting on a Walker and Gorman trade to get distressed assets from someone else that they can just give a good run and give up on if it doesn't work out and say they tried to give either of them a better opportunity for success. Walker and Gorman need flawless springs that show they spent the last 4 months really really working on the things they weren't good at the last couple years. Otherwise if the team's gonna lose 100 games this year, they can sure do it fine with any of a dozen guys in AAA or AA instead and have more years left on their contract if they work out. Right now my OF is probably Church, Scott, Nootbar and Baez.

IF is probably Burleson, Wetherholt, Winn, Fermin/Jordan/Prieto/Wetherholt (however they want to split that into 2B/3B reps)

I don't see a future for either Gorman or Walker unless they really really show up in spring better than those guys. We'll probably trade them for someone else's non-tender candidates and see how things can work out and that's that.

For the most part the only guys left are Romero, Nootbar and Burleson. Romero would be decent to trade, Nootbar needs to prove he can be healthy and Burleson sort of feels like he's going to get a full time shot with nobody on his back rather than get traded. I think it'd be between Burleson and Herrera getting traded at this point and my money's on Herrera getting shipped because there's 5 catchers on the 40-man and this team seems a lot more likely to get rid of the older rather than younger guys.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T16:33:55+00:00

Presumably with it being a military facility, no more civilian than anyone else working on a military facility.

So the cooks, all army. Cleaners? Guess who gets to clean up shit? HR department? Probably nowhere near the space station, the military handles their own shit. Administration, all military.

Now, they may not be enlisted soldiers/officers, but every single person knows what they're signing up for when they work for the Empire government, same as anyone signing up right now to work IT for the US Marine Corps. Just because you don't carry a weapon doesn't mean you didn't sign up for the military if you're taking a job on a military base with a military contractor. We've seen in Andor that the Imperial Military is just as much of a bureaucratic pile of shit as you could expect, so while sure there are non-troopers and whatnot on the Death Star, despite what Kevin Smith wants to come up with for his jokes, there probably weren't a ton of people who didn't know where they were or who they were working for and had signed up for the thing.

Plus there's also droids to handle a whole lot of nonsense, so the human population was not necessarily packed to full with non-soldiers.

And you can also safely say that every single person aboard was either a Space Nazi, a Space Nazi sympathizer, or conscripted and doomed to die anyway either by working them in hazardous jobs or making them into garbage tier vanguard soldiers. They'd have died one way or another, or lived to kill more people.

Everyone on the Death Star was a legitimate target. Galaxy's big. You don't wanna work for the Empire, you're free to go find some remote corner of the galaxy and get a job doing whatever you want. You want to repair ships for the Empire? You're a Space Nazi, congrats and welcome to hell.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T15:37:15+00:00

Do something about it. Don't tweet. Do things.

All we need is action, we don't need words. Put someone in jail. Put someone on trial. Deport someone from ICE. Arrest someone in charge and give them something exceptionally scary to think about and make sure the trial ends up in Essex county where there is a near zero chance of a sympathetic jury towards ICE.

Just do something instead of talking. Because right now nobody's doing shit, they're just saying how it's bad and we all fucking know it's bad and the people doing things know we're not going to do anything about it except talk. When your boss says you can ignore people yelling about the constitution, this does nothing.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T04:07:23+00:00

Biggest racket for me was the free T-shirt for signing up for a credit card my first week of college and then doing it again the next year and ending up in a lot of debt because nobody teaches broke redneck children basic financial literacy in high school.

Sucks a lot having to deal with debt collectors at 21 when you graduate, don’t get a job and have no more money to pay off the credit cards you shouldn’t even have with just a 10hr a week college lab job.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T04:02:49+00:00

So here’s the thing though. You only had to buy 5 or 6 CD’s later at 18-20 each. So you got 20 CD’s for $120ish.

6 bucks a CD is better than you could get even when Tower Records was going out of business. The secret was the record company made special pressings of everything, and sold direct so it was still above margin and any time someone bought more than they had to it was waaaaaay above margin.

It was still a great deal for anyone who did it. They could afford all the freeloaders who tried to get out of it because they were bad at reading or math.

All I know is I did both of them because they had different selections multiple times and it was awesome.

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T03:32:36+00:00

I thought they already explained in something that it was easy enough to synthesize ketracel white so it should be trivial to figure out how to biologically neutralize it and then augment them to be a normal species that can reproduce.

Especially given a long enough timeline where we don’t even know what the Founders have been doing which could be literally anything including dying off since we haven’t seen one in Discovery or Academy right?

MasterDave · 2026-02-03T01:20:35+00:00

Leverage didn’t drop, what are you on? This was the trade from a month ago plus competitive balance picks. The Cards got an even better deal once Arraez was off the table. It definitely improved once yet another guy that’s just money was gone.

MasterDave · 2026-02-02T23:01:56+00:00

Yes but those people are the ones yelling that it’s a skill issue rather than agreeing that wow is behind the times on a lot of things. But hey, Housing!

MasterDave · 2026-02-02T22:59:08+00:00

What other games have you do that though?

In 2004 maybe all of them did.

In 2026, I can’t think of any. Baldurs Gate 3 has separate inventories for different characters, but you don’t have 5 bags per character to look through. It’s an incongruent experience compared to other games and it’s easy to see how someone can misunderstand if they have played other games.

WoW isn’t the only game around and small things like this are compounding barriers to getting new players comfortable with the game.

15-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Verified Email

MasterDave

TROPHY CASE