342

Breaking Benjamin frontman pauses concert to rant about Fallout 4 modding beef: 'There was a modder in the community that was really mean to me' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

One attendee shouted: "Play some music!" Others in the crowd were loving it. Burnley kept going, telling the audience to wait for his new update to drop before downloading the mod.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top new old

[-] Salamanderwizard@lemmy.world 31 points 1 day ago

Imah be real. I love B.B. they make good music and I haven't heard anything bad about him.

So glad this wasn't a racist rant or some shit.

[-] Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone 16 points 1 day ago

Yeah it went rather wholesome instead of pro maga or something insane haha

[-] Microtonal_Banana@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

Cringe. What a petty and insecure person. I hope the modder who was mean to him ends up being 14 years old.

[-] raspirate@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago

I watched an extended breakdown on YouTube of this dude who's been an absolute villain of the Skyrim modding scene for like over a decade. I honestly can't recommend anyone watch it because it'll just make you angry. I was happily playing modded Skyrim for years without knowing anything about him. After I learned of his existence, I realized that some of the issues I'd had with modding Skyrim over the years were actually deliberately caused by this guy when I'd assumed it was due to the general flakiness of modding.

[-] filcuk@feddit.uk 8 points 1 day ago

Was this down the rabbit hole?
https://youtu.be/q6OqJOSmDrY

If not please link - I like listening to this whilst working, the anger keeps me going

[-] raspirate@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Yup that's the one. If you've got the stomach for it, by all means go ahead. For me, I kinda regretted watching it after because despite being a well-made video, I realized that all I was left with afterward was a lingering anger and and an unintentionally curated list of things that will probably remind me of that douchebag every time I play Skyrim from now on.

[-] maturelemontree@lemmy.zip 2 points 23 hours ago

Is the douchebag the BB front man or the potential 14 y/o who gave him beef?

[-] raspirate@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago

The Skyrim modding anecdote I mentioned isn't related to the story from this post. I see now my wording is a little unclear on that. This post just reminded me of the Skyrim thing.

[-] qarbone@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

The only person I can think of who fits that description is Arthmoor.

[-] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 28 points 2 days ago

tbf probably the best thing that a singer from a late 90s/early 2000s band could stop a concert to say at this point.

[-] JackTea@piefed.world 15 points 1 day ago

So torn. On the one hand, kinda ridiculous to stop a show for this. Yet...I totally relate.

[-] starblursd@lemmy.zip 60 points 2 days ago

Sadly his mod is vibe-coded tagged AI assisted... But that rant is fucking hilarious as someone who's seen them in concert three times

[-] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 25 points 2 days ago

There are definitely levels to the ethics of AI in general and vibe-coding in particular... but I think for me mods for games you like feels like maybe the least bad? It still has issues around training and sourcing of input, and part of the associated environmental impact of training.

But on the other hand the game was already proprietary, and most modders don't make a career out of it, and there isn't the same kind of "maintenance" as a normal project, and a busted mod isn't dangerous to society, so those parts of the ethics don't apply as cleanly. And there is something nice about the idea that some random person who likes this game, and has an idea about how they'd like it even better, can tweak some other company's game to better fit their desires.

I've been a professional programmer for like 20 years, but I don't think I have the bandwidth to learn how to mod each game I like individually. I've never written any mod for any game, despite having made (gamejam) games before! So if we could hypothetically solve the input problem, I think people having the freedom to personalize their gaming experience from what Microsoft provides is kinda nice. But that's obviously a big thorny "if" 😛

[-] nightlily@leminal.space 1 points 22 hours ago

Nah, good modding communities are just that - communities. They unfortunately generally aren’t as open as Open Source (though it depends on the game and mods) and have plenty of drama as a result, but vibe-coded slop just ruins that community even more. Can’t effectively build off each other’s mods if no one understands them.

[-] urthoughtsrbad@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

I don’t think this comment is made if the ranter with ai code was musk instead of a guy from a band we all like.

[-] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

I didn't actually listen to the rant in particular, and I don't know the band. If Musk was pitching why he should build more data centres or why people should invest in his company, yes that would be bad.

But if Musk was saying he was playing a videogame last week and he vibe-coded a mod to make the game better, I'd probably think that was the most relatable thing I've heard about him in a while 😛

[-] Kangae_Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.org 1 points 1 day ago

The problem is more technical though.

A badly programmed mod, just as any badly programmed program, is going to cause security issues, as well as resources issues (i.e., memory leaks or memory and/or cache fragmentation) and severe performance issues.

You may think that it's not that bad, is simply a game, but it could make it easier for an attacker to fuck up your system, and even if we don't count this, there's still the fact that it can (and will) damage your OS and even your PC (for example, due to overheating, or to the disk[s], memory, CPU or GPU overworking).

[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Reasonable take. Fallout mods… I can’t think of many contexts in software where the stakes are lower and the existing human-created stuff is already pretty polluted with mixed quality.

But you know. Hating on AI is not exactly a subtle art around here.

load more comments (4 replies)

[+] artwork@lemmy.world -7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

May I ask, have ever actually developed anything in these "20 years", you smiley person?

It's so fun right? Well, until your work gets defaced, fed into a yet another random LLM, and damaged to random particles not a single person will ever know or care about, and now sold being an LLM's output, not yours idea nor human precious life time and love you invested into it to keep it all organized, careful, and with heartfelt gratitude to the miraculous, ineffably magnificent video-game, Universe (e.g., The Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout, World of Warcraft), dear Art... you discovered someone else brought to the light... and wanted to participate in hopefully improving it, or just... loving it...

Have you actually ever participated in a video-game mod/development oriented Communities out there?
I have. I have been since at least 2016. I am still, at this very moment.
Your effortless unsupervised artless awful dead sorrowful "AI" fudging sucks, and your stance on it, and of people like you - sucks, too.

I've been professionally into security, military, and both embedded and desktop software and web development for more than 20 years, too, now, so I have an idea who you may be.

Yet... You? You are not a developer, I believe. It shows. You've been in it for 20 years for nothing, and learned nothing. I am sorry about your current views on art, people, a human attitude for discoveries and adventures, the dear infinitely marvelous Human History we all develop... as best as we all can... There's no "AI" that damages the history and ruins human love. Fudge your "AI".

Some artists, including these very developers construct, shape, leave their dear expressions, unique ideas, miraculous art... for the very future... in hope... it will support someone else, too, to learn from and pass further.
This is for a human by human. This is art. A timeless communication.

You may join us right now on Discord, Matrix for ESOUI, and ask your questions about your awful "AI" or dead LLMs based on stolen art, effort, history of now unknown people. The fudging white noise machine of screams and cries of now defaced artists...

[-] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

Jeez, tough read. 😛

Anyway, I love community! I do! And maybe it could be that it's impossible to have any kind of AI, and community, on this Earth at the same time. Could be, in which case I'd choose community.

But while mod communities are very cool, there is a kind of threshold to them. Maybe not gatekeeping specifically, but they are niche and technical. So, again, if I could choose between a community that makes some mod that everyone loves and supports and a cold AI mod, I'd pick the community. But I'd bet 999 out of 1000 players of a game has had some thought about how the game could be different, but isn't setup to learn how to mod it. But I don't think that means they don't "deserve" a tweak, perhaps.

Anyway, I do agree with you that the way AI is being developed right now is problematic, at least in terms of concentration of power. And so these things are maybe just philosophical for now given that the ethics of building the AIs probably outweighs the ethics of the freedom it provides a videogame player.

Sorry to have upset you! 😘

[-] boonhet@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 day ago

If you think about it, with open weight LLMs... Concentration of power is reversed if anything.

Used to be if you didn't know how to program and you needed a super specific tool for your own use case, you better have tons of money. Need artwork for your startup on an already tight budget? Pay up.

Things that were accessible to people with either skills or money, are now accessible to people with a few dollars to throw at GLM or Qwen or a beefy enough machine to run a good model at home. Still not free, but much cheaper than contacting someone.

My Claude subscription ran out and I ran GLM 5.3 flash to do a review on my gigantic PR (massive refactoring to keep up with upstream changes, not adding a ton of vibe coded "features") and it gave me a pretty good analysis of the weak spots. It costs 1/100 of Claude Fable or 1/50 of Claude Opus to run, API pricing to API pricing. More amazed with this than anything Qwen right now. Beat Deepseek V4 Flash which I was really fond of for a while due to its price to performance ratio.

[-] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Welllll, I wouldn't go fully that far either. There's two kinds of power here, power of some monster megacorp. Probably bad. But also a startup not wanting to pay an artist for their skill and taste... I'd say isn't the same power dynamic. If anything this is actually the part of AI I'm most worried about.

Because I think there is value in freeing people up to pursue their interests on the one hand, but on the other hand if there's no collaboration between people at all, and everyone does their own thing and relies on the machine to fill in the rest... that I think is actually a major risk to humanity.

As in, if the musician uses AI to make album art for their music, and the indie filmmaker uses AI to make music for their score, and the screenwriter uses AI to make a video from their script, and a videogame programmer uses AI to write their dialog, and on and on, we end up with a lot of people "freed up" from depending on others, but we also absolutely shred any sort of community or cooperation and the whole of human expression becomes a hub-and-spoke with the AI at the centre of all things rather than a web of collaboration. And I think that's a risk of a different kind.

But each step, each use, one by one, feels like "well why shouldn't I.. just this once" 😉

[-] Kangae_Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.org 1 points 1 day ago

There's also the problem that some of us do try to make a living through our art because we don't want to be alienated into office or physical work.

[-] Nihilore@quokk.au 85 points 2 days ago

That’s fucking hilarious

[-] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 30 points 2 days ago

Clicked on this thinking oh no, I like this band. Don't ruin for me.

Watched it and I agree. It's fucking hilarious.

[-] lath@lemmy.world 89 points 2 days ago

We all need some public space to rant in, for our mental health.

[-] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

I don't have a super popular band. This is the next best thing.

[-] yakko@feddit.uk 42 points 2 days ago

That's... Why I'm here.

[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

It’s more than that - he waited until he was in his place of power to address his enemy.

[-] dummyboymc23@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 days ago

Right? Like, I get it. Lol

[-] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 2 days ago

i heard his mod was ai slop though

[-] artwork@lemmy.world 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The following, found in the article references, is a freaking neat analogy regarding vibe-coded awful sorrowful nonsense out there...

- Benjamin Burnley makes gaming mods?! The f*ck? That’s awesome!
- Well he vibe codes gaming mods. idk if i would say he makes them. ~ That_Cripple
- He made it. Constructed it. Whatever you want to call it. You didn’t. Vibe coding isn’t doing nothing.
- He ordered it. When I order a steak at a steakhouse that doesn't make me a chef. ~ SpacePrez

Source: https://redd.it/1w9vfue (Benjamin Burnley interrupts a Breaking Benjamin concert with a rant about his True First Person 1.2 Fallout 4 mod...)

Meanwhile, of course, the music/art of the Breaking Benjamin, the Fallout Community, and the art around all the Universes, including The Elder Scrolls, Starfield, Fallout... of the artists/developers at Bethesda, Zenimax, Id... is infinitely, ineffably magnificent...

[-] Seppo@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 day ago

I just made a Breaking Benjamin song

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] mappe@moplemmy.fyi 21 points 2 days ago

Is there a mod that makes Fallout 4 half as good as New Vegas?

[-] Famko@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

Yeah, Fallout London

[-] doingthestuff@lemy.lol 4 points 2 days ago

Does it work now? I gave up on it about a month after release.

[-] Famko@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, it works, on release they had issues with crashes but then they bundled in the Buffout mod and that seems to have fixed it.

They even came out with a DLC sized content update later on, though even base London is big enough imo.

[-] tio_bira@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago

Agreed, those days my Fallout 4 copy is just a meaning to install Fallout London

[-] AgentSeven@lemmy.zip 14 points 2 days ago

There is a way to do it with several mods that I did. It works great.

[-] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago

Any change for a copy/paste or screenshot? R*ddit blocks me from access.

[-] AgentSeven@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Fallout 4 Script Extender This mod list is PC only and requires F4SE
Silent Protagonist Get rid of the annoying voiced protagonist
SCDC - Subjective Cinematic Dialogue Camera Camera no longer focuses on you during dialog (goes with Silent Protagonist)
Extended Dialogue Interface Get rid of the abbreviated choice wheel, get a full dialog like FNV, spells out what you will actually say
Start Me Up - Alternate Start and Dialogue Overhaul Start the game as any character you like, Sean quests remain but become third party
Start Me Up - Patch for Silent Protagonist Required for Start Me Up to work with Silent Protagonist
Classic-Overseer-Monofonto Font Replacer Brings back the FNV font for dialog
HUD Plus Plus Not FNV related but really useful for gathering crafting mats
HUDFramework Required by HUD Plus Plus
Improved Map with Visible Roads Makes the Pip Boy map more like the FNV map
PerkPointsPerLevel Makes character progression more like FNV by doubling your perk points
Faster Terminal Displays Speeds up terminal displays so they are more like FNV
Deadlier Deathclaws Makes Deathclaws fearsome again
Preston Garvey No Radiant Settlement Quests Self explanatory
Mod Configuration Menu Required by several mods
No More Creation Club New Gets rid of Creation Club note on the splash page
Achievements Allows achievements despite mods

[-] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

graphic design is my passion

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] aReallyCrunchyLeaf@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 days ago

go off king

[-] M137@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago

Wow, haven't heard or thought about this band for a damn long time. Got major nostalgia for the song they made for the Halo 2 OST.

[-] starchylemming@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Awww did the meanie break your benjamin?

[-] Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

At least I know the music I have from the band wasn't AI generated, since it's all well over a decade old now and before LLMs were a thing. But i probably won't be bothering with any new stuff they put out.

load more comments

this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026

342 points (97.0% liked)

Not The Onion

22456 readers

2053 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

Links to news stories from...
...credible sources, with...
...their original headlines, that...
...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

kescusay@lemmy.world