Paulo Seabra

On the 30th of september, two thousand and twenty-one years after the birth of a fella went by the name of Jesus Christ, I wrote a comment on a YouTube video about Joshua Graham, a video simply titled after Joshua's famous quote – In the end, there is light in the darkness. The video clocks in at a brief but powerful one minute and thirty-eight seconds, and it consists of various aesthetically-pleasing images from various sources, such as Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, and a few others I don't exactly recognize, all shown along the tune of spliced dialogue lines from Joshua Graham, all in honor and remembrance of the filmmaker's sister sometime after her untimely death. It is my understanding that the filmmaker made the video for very personal purposes, expecting to reach a whopping ten views, five likes, and one comment, but somehow it instead reached, at the time of writing, over three million views. I suppose that's just the internet, and that's just the ga...

This will be one of those posts that kinda defies classification. Is it gonna be about video game storytelling? Or more about a bunch of religion and morality stuff? When the game in question is the insanely good Fallout: New Vegas it's often hard to tell the difference because it's a game that does so much so darn well... In a world filled with misery and uncertainty and deathclaws, we find multiple tribes trying to live life the best way they know how. Some of them have fallen into utter nihilism, others have given way to their violent desires, and others still believe in God's love... Though different tribes have very different ideas it is still true that all of them have to contend with the sheer brutality of the wasteland, but naturally this proves more complicated for the godly tribes. For how can you love and obey God, as well as love your fellow men and women, when the world around you is so brutal? How can you truly love and seek to preserve, or at least to refrai...

I don't think I'd wanna live under the Legion, but then again, I don't think I'd wanna live in a nuclear wasteland to begin with. And therein lies the big question. We could go on and on about the barbarity of the Legion, and of course, almost every single action they perform will appear as, at the very least, offensive to our sensibilities, and at worst, as a complete nightmare. However, that is something essentially seen from our modern perspective, a time when, compared to the utter violence of the past, we have it pretty good. It's not perfect, no time in human history ever was or ever will be, but we can count our blessings in that we don't really have to worry about running into radscorpions or deathclaws whenever we go to the supermarket. So, in a nutshell, why do I consider the Legion to be the right choice? Because, as Caesar says, when the bombs fell, society's progress was effectively set back to zero, and as such we need to rebuild by going all t...

This is a game that I love but that I don't really love to play, if that makes any sense. Though a masterpiece of storytelling, it's sadly flawed, and even if most of those flaws have been more or less corrected and the overall game can be greatly improved with mods, it's still not really a game I particularly love playing these days. I dunno why but immersion and escapism are, ironically, escaping me, so I can't really lose myself in a game the same way I used to during some of the happier days of my ever-fleeting youth... But I digress. My point is that, though I don't really play this game anymore, I still think about it a whole lot, and that is because it is so expertly written that it's almost scary, and certainly enviable. So many aspects of this world are so deeply layered and rich with meaning that it's almost a crime that the creators didn't get enough time to complete their true vision. I'd go as far to say that they were set-up for failure...