falloutcaldera

[falloutcaldera]

[falloutcaldera]

currently using antifandom

https://antifandom.com/fallout/wiki/Mothman

[falloutcaldera]

the nukapedia elder - a Fandom employee - compelled me to publish a confidential document for her without telling me it would have direct repercussions for the community and my personal reputation. she had that context and withheld it from me.

tag was the senior of the entire fallout wiki community. she is an official Fandom employee. i trusted her and she made me feel like i was special.

she asked me to publish the Fort Abandon design docs for Van Buren, which leaked to her while involved with a fan game who had permission to view the docs privately. she provided me with the converted wiki text and coached me on how to lie about it.

I had just started calling myself a professional researcher of this IP and its history. She positioned it as something that would help my career. In reality Tagaziel had specifically agreed to never allow these documents to be published at Nukapedia, because doing so meant Chris may withhold the rest of them from the community.

Tagaziel worked on the Fallout IP one time, editing for a tabletop book in 2023, after I personally reached out to the company and arranged this for her.

when i needed tagaziel to protect a minor of color from organized racist stalkers in our community, she threatened to ban him just to control me. I tried to talk to her about this for months and she only bullied me.

she disowned me when i pushed back against the white nationalists and organized abusers who have seized Nukapedia

in the year since Nukapedia was seized by her abusive friends, i've been very careful not to negatively affect her in spite of everything she has done to me and the community. i put great effort into respecting her space and attempting to forgive her.

this morning, she deleted an evidence document containing 180 images of misconduct by the three organized abusers who control the website. (wayback link, images broken but retrievable).

she did this despite not being directly targeted by any current tensions. she did this completely independently.

She did this while a teenage boy who cosigned that document is trying to defend himself from organized abusers slandering him, emotionally blackmailing him, and abusing their staff powers to punish and ostracize him.

Nukapedia, the Fandom Fallout Wiki, is a place of suffering and cruelty and darkness. I trusted my friend Tag to stop it. She told me to trust her. She watched them harm kids and she threw me away because I tried to do the right thing. She hated me for telling the truth because the truth was inconvenient to her.

I cannot express how much sorrow and loss and pain she and her community have brought into my life.

[falloutcaldera]

i am the primary author of the essay Themes of Gay Identity and Homophobia in Fallout: New Vegas and the original writer of the Disability representation page on Nukapedia, the Fandom Fallout Wiki.

The Fallout Wiki is a severe ongoing danger to the marginalized people and youth of our community.

The alt-right gang who have occupied Nukapedia for the past 12 months is trying to abolish voting. They have been talking about it for a month and this morning they announced their intentions to fast-track it. They want to do this so admins can efficiently silence all disobedient voices immediately without evidence or possibility of community assessment.

This morning, an authority used an unprecedented "admin decree" to excommunicate a teenage boy, admin of the Fallout Fanon/RP wiki. They are trying to demonize and excommunicate him because they were unable to privately pressure him into promoting an adult he was known to be uncomfortable with. They also explicitly condemn him because they discovered he had told adults what they did to him.

They are saying Fandom "dismissed" the Vote of No Confidence he cosigned, and call it a "campaign of misinformation." They argue this "dismissal" proves they are all innocent of all charges and insinuating they must punish anyone who challenges them, including anyone who signed that document 6 months ago.

In reality, one of their ringleaders buried the document without Fandom permission, and was subsequently issued a global ban and stripped of rights. They are simply lying and trying to intimidate everyone into complying to their abusive false narrative. The community was also told "the situation on the server has become so detrimental to the mission and wellbeing of the community that we can not permit our platform to be used as any endorsement of joining and participating in that server." The In-Group have aggressively pretended the server is still a formal function of the site. Fandom absolutely did not "dismiss" any criticism against these people whatsoever in the past year, they are simply malicious liars.

.https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/User_talk:UrbanAnge1#Clarification_about_comments_in_Discord

.https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/User_talk:Arcaneous#Notice_of_Affiliation_Termination

.https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/User_talk:Jspoelstra#Clarification_on_'admin_decree'_terminating_MD_affiliation

O'saa is a misogynist and a psychological abuser. Mara is a far-right bully who celebrated the purge of everyone who made white people uncomfortable. Urban has abused multiple minors. This will be illuminated for the community over the course of the following weeks. They all frame themselves as victims and anyone affiliated with me as subhuman because I tell the truth about them.

As their next project, they plan to fashion special pages for an 18+ server where alt-right talking points are explicitly allowed, and as well as discussion of beating and sexually degrading a banned woman. The admins of that server referred to the previous NP head as a "whore", an 'old crying bitch,' and a "street walker." They "joked" about finding her in real life, siccing a dog on her, and stabbing her. They shared old screenshots with NP staff of her being bullied to her face for being a "whore." Again, this will be unpacked in every bit as much detail as necessary.

multiple open catholic christofascists have been given egregious special protection by admins after blatant acts of politically radical harassment and vandalism, such as "Catholic Crusader," unbanned by the head admin unbanned despite his only contribution being malicious vandalism of the LGBT page.

They run their "lovebombing-gaslighting-emotional blackmail" routine on anyone who displays potential in the space, including corporate employees tasked with handling them.

In all my past PSAs I have urged the community to stay away. But kids keep getting hurt at Nukapedia. We cannot keep ignoring it or hoping it fixes itself. They have their next targets in their crosshairs and they will find another kid to torment. We have to do this.

For the safety of the youth and disabled of our community, I'm asking you to make a Fandom account with usernames different from your tumblr and Discord user names, and to simply speak up when you see anything concerning. Several community forums will occur soon, which will ping all editors, so make a contribution, poke around, and attend discussions. Ask questions. Do not let strangers pressure you into compliance without evidence of their narrative.

When you see the blatant consolidation of power in the hands of those who already hold it--AND YOU WILL--object openly and do not apologize.

The people orchestrating this number about 10, they can gather around 20 votes at most, and they survive on absolute and brutal narrative control. 3.4k people engaged with my first PSA about NP in a week.

They want you to think you are 'not a real member' and they are, but many of them do not edit the wiki at all. All you need to do is join and speak common sense in community discussions.

Today I'm just hoping to attract a few adults willing to speak sense and call out bullying when they see it. The goal is harm reduction, and in such a small room, every voice makes a huge difference. I recommend you coordinate with the progressive people you meet there, out in the open.

This is a minor PSA i'm opting for because frankly i've been awake for a long ass time watching this implode and the coming weeks are going to shape the future of the community. They intend to allow this to escalate tremendously, hopefully that won't be necessary. A structured project of resistance and accountability will be launched in the coming days and will continue until progress is made.

This is necessary because children are going to keep coming to the site through google and these people are going to keep predating on them. They single out talented young people and pressure them to join in their alt-right bully mob, and those who refuse are inevitably targeted with harm, harassment, defamation, gaslighting. Month after month they keep fucking with kids, disabled people, queer people, and people of color. Talented young people keep pouring out of this place, abused, pursued by white men fixated on slandering their name and finding them offsite.

As far as I know, they have purged all queer people and people of color out of any position of power or respect. Their tokens have slowly been purged, leaving them a coalition of MAGAboys, cryptofascists, and gamergaters united under casual White Nationalism. The very few remaining marginalized staff and elders simply maintain silence out of fear they will be next. They need you to change the temperature in the room so it will be safe to speak.

Some of the offenders have been there for over 10 years. They BRAG that they personally wrote "the policy" and have unique right to enforce it, and they stalk people offsite as a team to mock and provoke them. In October, an evidence document was posted, detailing many of their offenses. Today it was hidden from you. It cannot be allowed to continue.

[falloutcaldera]

As much as we rib on it, Both of us genuinely Love fallout, the absurd and the near misses and the incredibly engaging atmosphere, Hell, you don't write nearly 400 pages of content without feeling some kind of love for the source material.

Fallout is an excellent sandbox, with some truly moving story beats and absolutely breathtaking atmosphere at times, its a testimont to the love of so many of its writers, actors and set designers, to the love of its fans and players and those who have been meaningfully touched by it, including us. I don't often talk about it but, Caldera changed my Life, for the Better, being brave and stepping into the spotlight with cilantro, and being *well received* for it helped genuinely undo a small lifetime of trauma and fear, it gave me the chance to stop feeling like I had to hide under a rock, it gave me the idea that maybe, just maybe, theres a path out of my shitty situation. You were no small part of that Calder, Thank You.

So Yeah, Fallout is goofy, and contradictory, and sometimes it REALLY fucks up (coughcough, doggod, coughcough), but that has never made me love it any less

-Ren

I believe Fallout lore should be a little bit like comics: Something that inspires later writers to tear the canon apart, paste it back together, reinvent it, critique it, parody it, make a version that's better out of spite or passion or good natured ribbing on their part for their favorite silly or corny or edgy or just-missed-the-mark plotline.

It's a space with the potential to be weird and wonderful, especially with the directions fans and unofficial media take it - ancient cities & creatures out of pulp horror, eternal tempests & the storm chasers that ride the wind, competing sects & heretical worshipers, mishmash worlds & meta commentary, a looking glass to our own world & history through the lense of another, and what comes after.

More than anything, being able to communicate all these ideas, differing opinions, absurdly disparite directions and takes serves to inspire. Angles I can't see, ideas i could never articulate, worlds that are not my own yet i find wonderful to explore. Sharing these spaces hasn't just made me love Fallout, but made me able to engage with & explain AUs and personal ownworks i haven't been able to properly work on in a decade.

More than anything, though, all this helps me believe in a better horizon - that even this art can mean something, that things will change for the better in spite of hardships, that even after the end of something they'll be new life in the wastes left behind.

If i could be forgiven for being corny, maybe i could claim it's given me New World Hope :p

-cilantro

i rly love that people go back years on this blog and engage with my old stuff but also i was such a miserable rude cunt until around 2022 its often embarrassing to see how casually arrogant and negative i could be

[falloutcaldera]

No Gods, No Masters

Fallout nv is epic

[falloutcaldera]

Anon this took way to long for me to remember to do with, The Everything, that started happening shortly after this ask, but I fixed it. - Ren

Hey! hope this isn’t any trouble whatsoever, but i found that the third mouth option for the open smile doesn’t seem to work, just thought i’d let you know, great work on the picrew, very cute!

Awe fuck I thought I fixed that, I'll dig out the files and get on that soon, along with a better system for the hairline since people are always struggling with which ones go on which heads, Thanks for the heads up!

-Ren

[falloutcaldera]

Approaching fallout with even a relative layman levels of actual anthropological knowledge makes this more egregious, and is why we developed the framework of 'postwar neocultural groups', common parlance 'Clan', fo refer to what fallout calls 'Tribes' - and broke down how 'postwar paleocultural groups' or 'Tenants', those living in prewar ruins and reinforcing the remnants of prewar culture, are mainly a difference in pioneer population priorities directly postwar.

The diagnosis notes for our fallout 2 reimagining actually covers this - 80 years not being that long to develop a totally divorced culture, combined with the fact the 'Village Elder' is literally the Vault Dweller & Pats DAUGHTER led is to conclude it was in fact an artificially constructed Neoculture born from the Vault Dwellers traumas & controversial exile.

Breaking it down as such, things begin to make sense:

they constructed an elaborate 'trials' system as a family in order to avoid the situation the VD experienced of being forced into the wastes without proper training in self defense

by going with the low end in the potential canon-ages, the VD was 16, emphasizing the traumatic nature of fallout 1 & having the founding of the Arroyo Clan as a response to that.

albert, natalia, & max all have reasons to reject vault society & want to make their own as well

we had the vault dweller both dislike the bos & internalize some of their ideas about the dangers of prewar artifacts - especially poignant to combine it with their discussion with the master leading to the spark of 'what if we created a new, more unified society'

[vault dweller voice] quit your vault job. join me and my friends socialist commune.

so the vault dwellers legacy here is rejection of the old world due to trauma (thus mirroring the master)

Which in turn makes the Chosen One's path synthesis of that legacy with their own lessons.

It's extremely easy to make Fallout 2 is about coming to terms with generational trauma and coming out with hope & solidarity in the face of it. Your companions include super mutants, you can embrace technology, you lead the vault to your town & let them join.

The Enclave is glorification of the past, like what the Vault Dweller learned to fear - ut the chosen one rejects both paths in favor of fusing ideas of harm and ideas of help to forge a new one for a new world.

Or, from the village elders perspective:

the men who kicked your family out after traversing hell to save them came, and then you were taken to a metal hell like the ones your parent described battling the Master Of Unities in, stories that gave you nightmares of pulsating flesh screaming in your ears for decades.

now they speak of that dreaded fev, that horrific glowing goo that haunted your parents dreams and then yours. a horror that twists, breaks, amalgamates, flesh to bone to wire to flesh to pulsing screaming halls echoing.

but your child. your beloved child, chosen one, who you sent on a journey you couldn't make, battered from years of fighting the wastes to keep your safe haven home from all your inherited nightmares -

they've come here, across land and perils, clad in ancient armors and wielding weapons you've only ever heard of in stories, flying in on those damnable machines with a mutant, to fight side by side - as friends, against these mockeries of all the old world horrors your parent warned you about.

I’ve been rereading some of your Fallout posts lately and something in particular caught my eye. In a post from October 2023 you said that Fallout 1 and 2’s timeframe didn’t really work for the vibe they were going for, especially with regards to Arroyo. Is there any chance you could elaborate a bit on that? I’m interested to know where in the timeline you think the games might fit better.

My thinking at the time that I wrote that post-and, to some extent, my thinking to this day- is that Arroyo and The Brotherhood of Steel are depicting a level of cultural change and mutation that doesn't necessarily align with the time frame on which they're claiming it happened. What's depicted isn't strictly impossible, but the specific aesthetics they're using are usually used to indicate way more time has passed.

With the Brotherhood, the primary referent for their regression to neomedieval monasticism is A Canticle For Leibowitz, a novel from the 50s about a post nuclear monastery that's dedicated, half-successfully, to preserving technical and cultural knowledge in the new dark age; the book opens when they've been at this for about 600 years, with the attendant levels of ritualization, information decay, and historical misinformation about the old world that would imply. Fallout frames the Brotherhood as having ended up in a similar spot, structurally and culturally, after only 80 years, and under the leadership of the grandson of the guy who started the thing. It's not impossible, you can make it work, but ultimately they're using aesthetics that gesture at it having been a longer time.

Arroyo is the other big example of this; 80 years after fallout 1, they've developed a "tribal culture," complete with ancient traditions and mythologization of historical events, despite the fact that the whole settlement was founded within living memory by a person who isn't even confirmed to be dead when the game starts. It's only been three generations! Tandi is still alive and running the NCR! This one's even more egregious than the brotherhood, given the existence of that gigantic fuck-off stonework temple complex ripped out of Indiana Jones. Where did that come from?

Some of this might be is that the nature of 90s graphics prevents you from seeing what Arroyo culture looks like "on the ground" in higher fidelity , which would make the cultural continuity between "exiled vault 13 dwellers" and "sustenance farmers" more obvious. Part of it is that my understanding is that Fallout 2 had a much more disjointed production than Fallout 1, so it's possible different teams were operating under different ideas about the chronology at play. And some of it is that Fallout 2 is a game that, to it's frequent detriment, leaned way harder into 90s pop culture wackiness and, to be blunt, outright racial caricature, than Fallout 1 did. It's possible that having the descendants of Vault dwellers re-organized as a stereotypical "tribe" as envisioned in 50s pulp sci fi is just an extension of the same unfortunate impulse that resulted in the game's depiction of San Francisco as Kung Fu Movie Town-The franchise's use of "Tribal" as a category is already pretty fraught in ways I'm not the best equipped to tackle, but Arroyo's depiction might be wrapped up in that.

Either way, thematically Arroyo functions fine- it creates a fish-out-of-water from an isolated agrarian community who goes on a hero's journey that ultimately brings them into conflict with their aesthetic opposites- a mob of deranged, Americana-draped technofascists. Holds together perfectly well on that level- just don't look at the numbers too closely...

[falloutcaldera]

HI! I do stuff!

I have commissions open now! If you have change spare and want me to draw your weird furry, come poke at me over on My Ko-fi page or DM me to negotiate for something slightly more complicated.

My other relevant socials: Bluesky Toyhouse ArtFight Art Archive Blog

[falloutcaldera]

Esteemed Bethesda voice actor Wes Johnson is currently hospitalized. You know him from his impassioned performances as Sheogorraht, Fawkes, Mr. Burke, and the Silver Shroud. Johnson is a long-time friend to the Fallout fan community, and contributes his talents to the Fallout For Hope charity project.

His GoFundMe can be found here.

[falloutcaldera]

There are a lot--like, holy shit, a lot--of people in my notes asking questions about intersex 101 after my recent posts, and as much as I love that y'all want to learn, I don't have the time to sit and respond to every single one of you right now. I'm genuinely not irritated that you have questions, but please understand that I am not an expert on every intersex topic, I'm just some random intersex person, and I'm also super busy & stressed about a million other things today, too.

Here are a couple resources for y'all to check out and get started with on your own. :)

Medicalizing Sex: The Erasure of Sexual Diversity, authored by tumblr's own @dabwax. Check out the works cited page, too.

InterACT's "What is Intersex?" FAQ

InterACT's "Intersex, Gender, and LGBTQIA+" FAQ

InterACT's Intersex Resource Topics page

InterACT's Guide for Allies

Intersex Awareness Day

Human Rights Campaign: "Understanding the Intersex Community"

Bogi Takács' database of intersex #ownvoices books

Bogi Takács' database of books by Black intersex authors

[falloutcaldera]

HHS SUPPORTS INTERSEX BODILY AUTONOMY IN FIRST-EVER HEALTH EQUITY REPORT

Today, the USA federal Department of Health & Human Services released a groundbreaking report linking the ongoing practice of non-consensual surgery on intersex infants to harmful outcomes and health disparities.

This report is the strongest statement from a US federal agency on intersex bodily autonomy to date.

The report recognizes the “well-documented medical harms to intersex people across their lifespan resulting from childhood medical interventions performed when the child was too young to participate in decision-making,” yet observes that medical providers still recommend these practices against growing evidence.

HHS recommends changes to “promote bodily autonomy and informed consent” by “ensuring all non-emergent care is guided by the express wishes of the intersex individual themselves.”

Read the report, created with contributions from interACT staff and our Medical Advisory Group, and many intersex community members!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by interACT (@interact_adv)

[falloutcaldera]

Hey, I gotta ask something hard.

I don't like being to obvious about IRL identities out in public, for obvious reasons. But I can't quietly do this through my usual methods.

To people who know me, its no secret my life's been chaos after chaos since fall 2023, and last fall, the hammer swung 'round again and brought a lot of shit down on someone I love very dearly. https://www.gofundme.com/f/assist-raelyns-journey-after-loss This is my Auntie Raelyn, she's a close family friend who has always been there for me and my mom and anyone she could despite not having much to give herself as a multiply disabled person who spent a good few chunks of her life homebound. Last year, she lost both her parents after long drawn out declines. Her dad passed after being in care for a longterm degenerative disease and her mom due to slowly mounting complications after a severe leg fracture that left Raelyn as her carer despite not being equipped to be in that position.

Unfortunately, for that effort that caused her severe health issues to worsen Significantly, she's been left a mess of debt that goes up far higher then she thinks she can pay and keep her house, she doesn't feel comfortable asking for the full amount, or revealing that full amount, and we still haven't found All of the stuff her mother hid from her or just never mentioned, so the goal doesn't reflect the needs, if you have anything you can give it would be deeply helpful in keeping her from having to make the incredibly hard journey of saying goodbye to the place she's lived her whole life and find somewhere she can live that is safe or that she could even begin to afford.

Thank You for your time.

As well, if you show proof of a 5 dollar donation I would be willing to do a character piece for you in my simplier style (Such as for my icon or the other smaller detail things I've posted), and the more complex style for proof of 10. This is something I'm doing

[falloutcaldera]

[falloutcaldera]

"Hermaphrodite" has been used since the 1200s to describe intersex human beings, often in the context of routine infanticide of children born with ambiguous external genitalia. For quite literally centuries the word was used as something to describe monsters that ought to be ritually drowned or have their genitalia crudely removed. Intersex people were thought to be anything from omens of societal degradation to literal demons in many many cultures around the world. In more modern times, hermaphroditism was a medical diagnosis for intersex anatomy, which (to this day) is "treated" via invasive nonconsensual surgery with no care for the function of the intersex person's body and a sole focus on cosmetically appearing one of the two societally acceptable ways for genitalia to look. Though, they don't call us hermaphrodites anymore, they call us people with "DSDs" (Disorders of Sexual Development). There are no laws prohibiting cosmetic surgeries on intersex children, including newborns. To a perisex world our conformity is more important than our consent, our health, and our lives.

Anyway, the scientific community thought this would be a great word to use to describe snail reproduction for some fucking reason, and redefined it to refer only to cosexual animal species and insist its use against intersex people is only the fault of individual bigots and not literally the original use of the term. Effectively erasing our history and perpetuating the use of a slur. There's a reason that if you Google "Hermaphrodite", photos of human beings come up, not slugs.

(This was originally a reply but it makes a good stand-alone post too)

[falloutcaldera]

You know now that I think about it Maxson was most definitely groomed and manipulated to be the way he is Fallout 4. There’s no way he got to that position without someone whispering in his ear he was 10. Plus all of his achievements sound like made up propaganda. Like he did not kill a Deathclaw single handedly at 13 who does he think he is Mama Murphy? Although the Deathclaw story could unironically be a lie he told to sound cool and can no longer back out of because it’s gone on for so long I mean he’s canonically lied about getting a kill before.

But I don’t know. I just know there’s definitely some shady shit going on in the East Coast Brotherhood ever since the Lyons died.

[falloutcaldera]

Reminder PSA on Shi/Hir since there's recently been confusion

Shi/ were created as 'hermaphrodite pronouns' by a furry artist sometime in the 1990s, for a species known as Chakat - and have been used primarily in furry circles for either intersexist, fetishizing content or intersex reclamation content since. you should generally avoid using Shi as it is usually presumed intersex-reclaimation exclusive. Many people understandably feel extremely strongly on this.

/Hir however was a pre-existing pronoun in use as far back as 1920 by a newspaper in California, The Sacramento Bee.

Ze was created by 'a writer identified only as J. W. L' at least as far back as 1864.

Sie is a german pronoun which can be translated as she or they.

Ze/Hir, Zie/Hir, Zhe/Hir or Sie/Hir are thus all good & fine.