Fallout and Home Safety Hotline
Plus, my LIVE reporting from the path of totality!
It’s been an exhilarating, disorienting week.
First: Fallout. It’s actually good! As Polygon’s Austen Goslin points out, the Prime show “smartly adapts Fallout’s world and setting without attempting to retell any of the stories from the game series directly.” It’s not a pious recreation like HBO’s The Last of Us — rather, it’s closer to Netflix’s Arcane, in that it stacks familiar building blocks into a new shape.
I booked NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans to discuss the show on Here & Now (while Morning Edition discussed it with Dmitri M. Johnson, one of the producers of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies). While I’m not quite finished with its eight-episode run, it’s gotten me more interested in the franchise. I’ve long admired the original Interplay games and New Vegas (I could take or leave the Bethesda titles) — and I’ve decided to acquire all the Magic: the Gathering Fallout Commander decks, to show off with glee to my much more invested brother-in-law.
I also logged many gaming hours over my trip to Vermont to see the eclipse! The highlight: Home Safety Hotline, which presents itself as a 1990s call center simulator. It’s delightfully weird and features filmed sections from locations I recognized from my years in Utah! Best yet, you can play it in under three hours.
Speaking of brevity, I joined NPR for a few minutes LIVE during the totality. My delirious reaction is now trapped in radio amber for all to hear (it starts around the 16-minute mark): https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/04/08/eclipse-coverage-second-hour
A droning fatigue besets my brain. I bid you farewell, so that I might rest ahead of my wife’s birthday celebrations on the morrow.