Fallout 4 gets me through the holidays

I have been playing Fallout 4 for several months now. The holidays are very stressful for me, so I decided to pick up some creation club add-ons to spice things up.

My last play thru, I sided with The Minutemen against the Institute, took on The Brotherhood of Steel, and freed the traders in Nukaworld. Minutemen vs. The Brotherhood is a spectacular way to finish the main quest line. Also, removing the slave collars from the traders caused everyone’s outfits to glitch, turning Nukaworld Bazaar into a nudist colony. Enjoy your freedom you kinky bastards!

This time thru I sided with The Railroad. The quest line is ok, if a bit stressful. There were moments where I thought I had accidentally backed The Institute.

I also picked up the sentinel power armor addon, the settlement ambush kit, and some of the free armor and weapon skins. I normally don’t go for DLC, but it was a little Christmas present to myself. Skinning armor is nice because it unifies the paint scheme for disparate pieces of armor, which makes your outfit look nice even though the pieces are mismatched. Surprisingly, it’s not that big of a deal for my player character, but it’s nice when outfitting settlers and provisioners. Putting Minutemen or Railroad logos on mismatched armor helps me to not accidentally shoot friendlies during raids. Seeing an armed person walking down the road in Minuteman armor is nice from a role-play standpoint. Like order is being restored to The Commonwealth.

The Sentinel Power Armor

The Sentinel armor is interesting in that it effectively adds a second companion. Much like how Skyrim let you have both a dog and a human companion, this lets your “pet” be a full suit of power armor. You can equip it like a companion, and it’s default weapon is full auto laser rifle. Probably the best feature is the personality mode, which lets you choose between the Protectron, Assaultron, or my personal favorite: Mister Gutsy. My nickname for him is “War Machine.”

Having a companion with you long term can get annoying when you hear them say the same things over and over, especially Preston’s judgmental ass criticizing me for picking up scrap. You know that sniper scope on that bad ass rifle you carrying? I made it with junk I be scavenging. I put this shit to good use, Pres, so shut up. The Mister Gutsy personality option doesn’t talk much, it just mostly accuses all hostiles of being Communists. It’s pretty awesome, except when I am trying to creep up on a target to back stab it and he suddenly yells “IS THAT SOMEONE THAT NEEDS ME TO KICK THEIR ASS!?!?!”

You can load the sentinel up with gear too, but once it’s been outfitted with a full set of power armor, his carry capacity isn’t great, and it’s a pain accessing the menu for it, so I just use it in extreme emergencies. Also, the sentry armor doesn’t get damaged the way that wearing power armor can, so there is way less to maintain. Putting a companion in power armor sounds good in theory, but they get shot up and you end up repairing their shit all the time. I am not sure if the quality of the armor matters for the sentinel, so I just throw basic armor with Minuteman or Railroad paint on War Machine and roll out.

My current play thru is on “Very Hard” mode, which means that a lot of enemies could one-shot me at the lower levels. Having a War Machine with me is nice because he rushes in to the fight and draws out enemies so I can snipe them from a covered position. He repairs himself, but not very quickly, so it’s possible for him to get shutdown, and you have to physically access his console to jump start the repair process. This is different than having a robot companion that you can use a repair kit on. It’s not as fast as using a repair kit, but it doesn’t take any materials. Once you get used to his cover fire, you can notice real quick when he and the companion are down, because suddenly everything is shooting at you.

Automatron

Speaking of robot companions. I think that my favorite expansion is Automatron. I am a sucker for pet robots, and building a robot to protect a settlement is one of my favorite things to do in the game. I especially love the Mister Handy torso, and using it to make my own varieties of Mister Handy, like one with giant caliper hands and pincer legs that I call “Mister Pinchy”, or one with giant saw blades for hands and buzz saw legs that I call “Mister Slicey”. Other models include “Mister Shooty” who has minigun arms, and “Mister Tradey” who has all of the storage mods, and works as a Provisioner.

I also built a Sentry Bot for The Castle that I named “Sarge” after the malfunctioning robot in The Castle basement. I wish you could repair him specifically so that he could have a real personality. But he looks pretty cool rolling around The Castle keeping his big red eye on things. The other thing that would be great is to put faction paint on robots. Mister Shooty would look pretty awesome with a Minuteman paint job.

Once you have done the Mechanist quest line, you end up with Jezebel as a kind of settler. She refuses to interact positively with you, so while you can assign her to jobs at a settlement, and she will do them, she makes a lousy shop keeper because you can’t buy or sell anything. She just complains about you. I just put her to work at Graygarden as either a farmer or security. I would send more robots to live and work at Graygarden, but I think that having a bunch of companions at one settlement is a waste. I like to send Codsworth to live there, until Ada shows up, then I send him off to another settlement. I guess I could return him to Sanctuary and send Preston to The Castle, but I kind of like having Preston at Sanctuary for some reason.

I don’t know if having multiple companions at a settlement affects how many settlers that you can attract, but I like to wait until a settlement is maxed out population-wise before I add robots. Companions seem to make better security personnel than regular settlers, so that is the job I usually give them. Good security becomes a major deal when you start provoking raids with the Settlement Ambush Kit.

Settlement Ambush Kit

The settlement ambush kit adds a couple of cool things. You can add walls and a special guard tower to your settlement, which makes defending it a lot simpler because your guards stay in one place, rather than roaming around. You can also add remote view video cameras that let you kind of fast travel from one site to another without actually leaving. A funny glitch with the sentinel armor is that it will physically go to the site you are viewing, so switching camera views makes War Machine run all over the place to stand in front of your camera.

A really cool feature of the kit is the ability to send out fake distress signals that trigger raids. So far I have only fired it up once, but it just sends wave after wave of raiders to your settlement, and it keeps score of how many waves you have survived. I am assuming there is one for ferals as well, but I haven’t tried it yet. I re-rolled my character not long after getting it and right now my settlements are ill-equipped for a massive raid.

The Tipping Point

Now that I have done two full re-rolls, I can say with relative confidence that the game balance shifts when your character level hits the mid 40’s. If you have been doing settlement building and Minutemen quests consistently, they should be producing caps, food, and salvage to the point that you are crafting most of the things you need (oil, adhesive, stimpaks) and mostly buying ammo, aluminum, and steel. My first play-though went over 100th level, and the game was fairly easy to play at that point. I had settlements that had nuclear reactors, multiple industrial water purifiers, and laser turrets protecting everything. The main story line can put you in front of Kellogg pretty quickly, and he can be really tough to beat at low levels. Having multiple combat perks combined with high end weapons and armor make a big difference.

I think a challenging play through would be to use no companions or Sentinels, and to skip the Minutemen all together. You will still end up with settlements, but you probably wouldn’t have nearly as many. I might try that when I re-roll again, supporting either the Institute or the Brotherhood of Steel. I think that both of those factions also want some form of settlement, so you may end up with them anyway.

Being Addicted to Fallout 4

In the past, I have written about playing video games to cope with depression. It’s that time of year again, so I am playing games a lot. I basically love 4 kinds of games:

1. Open world RPGs with various factions, families, and morality systems (like Skyrim or Fable)
2. First-Person Shooters with engaging single player stories (like Half-Life)
3. Farm management games with community, friendship, and/or romance dynamics (like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley)
4. Tower Defense games where you manage funds/materials/etc to build steadily stronger fortresses
5. Pretty much anything where you have robot minions

Fallout 4 is basically a turducken of these various game elements. It’s pretty much the most addictive thing I have ever encountered. Imagine a dish made by the guys from Epic Meal Time, using only ingredients provided by the guys from Breaking Bad. Fallout 4 is basically things I like about Skyrim, dialed up to 11.

I picked up the full Fallout 4 suite on a ridiculous Steam sale a few months ago, and I have spent pretty much all of my non-sleeping, non-working, and non-child-rearing hours playing it. I know the game is like 5 years old. My gaming hardware is also 5 years old. Fight me.

In Skyrim, I loved helping kids and dogs. I basically forgot about the dragons and focused on amassing gold in order to build a house for everyone. Then it turned out that Lucia is afraid of the swamp where I built the house, so I had to win a civil war for her so we can live in peace and safety in Windhelm.

Well, in Fallout 4, not only are you searching for your lost son, you meet Dogmeat within the first 10 minutes and he’s way more bad ass than Meeko. I did a ton of work to ensure that Dogmeat was safe at Sanctuary Hills, under the watchful eyes of Codsworth, while I searched for Shaun.

Another thing I loved about Skyrim was meeting, marrying, and traveling with Mjoll the Lioness. She was a total bad ass, and so she and her dude Aerin come to live with me, the kids, the dog, and the House Carl in some kind of weird Nordic polyamory version of The Brady Bunch.

Well, in Fallout 4, I was able to seduce Preston. We took on the raiders, ferals, and supermutants of the commonwealth while building settlements together. *Then* I was also able to seduce Piper, Curie, and Hancock. I was like some kind of post-nuke/pan-sexual version of Captain Kirk, getting in fights with and/or boning robots and shit. Again, taking something I liked from Skyrim and turning the volume up to 11.

As much as the memes liked to dunk on Preston for never shutting up about helping settlements, settlements fucking rule. Which is the other way that Fallout 4 got me: Building. Fucking. Farms. I set up a bunch of settlements, planted crops to feed the settlers, and built shacks and shit for them to live in. Oh, and I surrounded them with automated turrets. There’s nothing greater than hearing on the radio that a settlement needs help, just to fast travel there and watch the attackers get shredded by my sentries.

Life in The Commonwealth is much easier when you have large supplies of ammunition and caps. A holdover from my Skyrim days is my tendency to sneak about, shooting targets from a distance. My survivor is a decent sniper, but he really only gets to clip a couple of targets at proper sniper range. After that, he has to creep up a bit closer. At sniper range, I like to use a .50 cal hunting rifle. While closing the gap I like to use a custom .308 combat rifle that I call “Quickshot.” It’s great for putting things down with two or three rounds, and it’s silenced. If I have time to line up a headshot, like in VATS, I can put most things down with one round. The problem is that .50 and .308 ammo is kind of rare so I am constantly purchasing it. One way to make lots of caps and to buy ammo at a discount is to set up vendors at the various settlements. I put up a weapons stand and I can usually buy 50-100 rounds of .308 every couple of days. Every time I come to a settlement to drop off salvage, I hit up the emporium for .308, .50 cal, and shotgun shells.

I tend to hoard .45 and 5.56mm to hand out to settlers that work security. I build out combat rifles and assault rifles for the provisioners and settlers assigned to guard posts and to scavenging stations. These dudes get my hand-me-down weapons and armor, as well as stuff I’ve looted off of Raiders. When a settlement gets attacked all of the settlers will run to fight, so it doesn’t hurt to outfit even the farmers with armor and upgraded weapons. When you are 80th level or so, your settlements can have like 20 people in them, so that’s a lot of gear to be handing out. There are like 20 settlements in the Commonwealth proper, plus the ones for Far Harbor and Nukaworld, which means that the endgame for me is all about dealing arms to your peasant militia.

Another luxury item to have is large amounts of salvage. Most vendors will let you buy large shipments of salvage for a thousand or more caps. When you are maxing out the defenses of a settlement, or building lots of robots, you tend to run low on aluminum, steel, and oil. One way I get steady access to lots salvage is to set up trading emporium at my settlements as well. This lets me buy salvage in bulk. One particular item that you need tons of is adhesive. You can craft vegetable starch at a cooking station by combining corn, mutfruit, and tatoes. So putting folks to work farming these items at your settlements is important. Once you have a large supply of vegetable starch, you can sell off the excess that appears in your workshops. Once your local traders are out of caps, you can go to the Diamond City Market to unload the rest. If you set up a clinic, you can also buy bloodpacks which you will need to make stimpaks. Depending on your selection of perks, you can keep your survivor going on just stimpaks.

The other advantage of numerous settlements is provisioners. With the Local Leader perk, you can add a settler to a trade route. This lets you share the salvage that you have with all of your trading settlements. Provisioners will then walk the roads between their trading settlements on a regular basis. Obviously, this is very handy for building out new settlement, or for getting supplies to smaller settlements, but there are two other advantages:

1. If you find a provisioner out in the wild, you can dump any excess items or salvage on them, and the items will eventually find their way to a settlement workshop.
2. If you arm and armor a provisioner, he or she will engage the random spawns that happen out on the road, making The Commonwealth a tiny bit safer for you and your other settlements. I tend to use Sanctuary Hills and The Castle as my main trading hubs. It’s funny when a random attack happens on one of these places when there are half a dozen traders standing around. It’s like having extra security. Building custom arms and armor for provisioners and settlement security is a good way to safely earn XP as well. If you combine building settlement stuff with crafting while abusing the “well rested” perk, you can level yourself a bit without getting killed constantly.

The morality system is fairly strict as well. I have rolled back a game more than once because I chose poorly at a critical juncture. I will go back through and play the other way, as a bad guy or whatever, at some point. I must have played through Skyrim a dozen times trying to create the perfect play thru, or at least as perfect as I can get it before something bugs out 🙂

I am on my third re-roll, each time siding with the Minutemen, working with the Railroad, and against the Institute and the Brotherhood of Steel. I also decided to wipe out the gangs of Nukaworld. Nukaworld is great fun, even if you are being a good guy. Although taking on the gangs does feel a bit genocidal at times.

MCU Captain America is Best Captain America

Film as a medium is in a state of decline and it’s the fault of people like me. I don’t turn up to the theater except for big productions like Star Wars and The Avengers. That means that market forces have driven films into being flashy CGI messes. I accept my responsibility for that. I am not perfect, I just don’t have the time and money to turn up for films that I can more easily enjoy on my TV at home. I’m flawed.

In talking to a friend about Flawed Paladins I remarked that taking the whole Dudley Do-Right idea and adding flaws and nuance made MCU Cap one of the best characters ever. I love that MCU cap is an exemplar of the American Spirit who is now at odds with modern American society and government. He’s a manifestation of our WWII American Exceptional Narrative of the US saving the world from insensate evil. Cap is fictional, but so is a good deal of the narrative of American Exceptionalism. Cap is an all-American kid from Brooklyn, desperate to serve his country in the face of unfathomable evil. He sees people being hurt, and he steps up. Like 70 years later, he gets thawed out and he’s appalled by what he sees. He says “When I went under, the world was at war. I wake up, they say we won. They didn’t say what we lost.”

In Cap’s heart, and at the heart of the narrative, is the idea of freedom. I would define this freedom as the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from need. I would posit that modern America runs on religion and fear, is perplexed by freedom of expression, and actively hates the idea of freedom from need. Obviously you need the press and courts and all that other bullshit, but the blueprint is those four basic freedoms. MCU Cap is the personification of the idea of America and his “America is great, but this shit here isn’t America” struggle makes him perfectly imperfect. He has to do what he thinks is right, even if it means working for a group like S.H.I.E.L.D. that he doesn’t trust.

MCU Cap’s internal conflict between his duty as an American hero and the shift in American society after The Avengers [a metaphor for 9/11] is absolutely brilliant. He is at odds with Tony Stark when he hacks S.H.I.E.L.D.’s computers but ends up at odds with Nick Fury by the time he sees what Fury is really up to [a possible metaphor for Snowden/Manning]. Then all that gets pushed aside by the attack on New York. By the time we see cap again in The Winter Soldier, Cap has made a compromise: he is being a hero for America by working for S.H.I.E.L.D. but he is deeply uneasy about the duplicity he keeps seeing. By the time we see him in Civil War, Cap is completely done with S.H.I.E.L.D. (and presumably with being a hero) in order to help Bucky, and they’re coming to get him.

I can’t think of a better criticism of corpofascist America than an all-powerful private army trying to take over the country, and hunting down two of America’s original war heroes in order to do it. Sure, there’s Hydra and Ultron manipulating everything, but the real story is Cap trying to reconcile loving his country, mistrusting his government, and looking out for his best friend, none of which ever truly get reconciled. I can’t think of anything more human than that.

In other posts I have bemoaned aspects of our government, our society, or our political process. I don’t know that I have ever stated that the reason that I hate all of it: the NSA, the TSA, the drones, the torture… Obviously it violates our privacy, free speech, and our freedom from fear. But I also hate all of it because that’s not what America means to me.

The Nature of Freedom

A few cultural events have caused me to think a lot about freedom lately. Of course our new Presidential administration has had an effect, but also some films, television programs, and documentaries. Also, I have been assisting my local political community and the results are pretty depressing.

One film that I saw was “Arrival“. It is based on a short story called “The Story Of Your Life” which goes into more philosophical detail than the film, and centers on the idea of free will. The aliens in the film can see time in a planar rather than linear fashion. Because of that, they have no concept of free will. Knowing what is coming leaves them with no choice but to play their parts to contribute to the known outcome. Speaking to others isn’t so much an exchange of ideas as it is a declaration or codification of events, like announcing a winner, or pronouncing someone dead. Reading the story left me feeling that I had broken my brain in some fundamental way.

Not long after that, I started watching “Westworld“. The hosts in West World are driven by code which is interpreted by their central processing units. Because they store memories digitally, they don’t remember things, and instead reload (relive) them. As a mercy to the hosts, their memories are erased on a regular basis. Something within the code that governs the hosts causes them to start remembering and all hell breaks loose. Again this idea, while fictional, made me think about the nature of freedom.

The idea of reality as a lived experience, the cognitive lens that we see the world through, is based on recollection of previous experiences. Our human memories are not perfect; we cannot retrieve bit-for-bit copies of stored data the way that a computer can. We cannot go back and relive an experience the way that a host from Westworld can. As we experience something, it is colored by a complex mix of emotions and bias. These imperfect and colorized recollections then shape how we experience new things. These new experiences, perceived through our flawed cognition, are then stored using that same flawed mechanism, making it even more flawed. As humans age and grow, their cognition becomes a kind of degenerative corruption of observation. Your lived experience might actually just be shitty encoding.

As I watched these works of fiction, I have also begun to listen to intellectuals dissect the ideas of freedom. I watched a series of documentary films by Adam Curtis. The idea of this series, is that efforts have been made to reduce the idea of humanity into self-serving automata. This numeric representation of humans relies on a kind of rational strategy that guides us. The problem with this simplified view of course is that it ignores the shitty encoding that guides human decision making.

The documentary series points out the use of Zero Sum Game Theory in modern political, economic, and even biological research. This cynical approach led to the dissolution of the idea of human individuality and the rise of popular psychology which uses drugs to manage human behavior. Oversimplification of human behavior leads to a kind of segregation based on small sets of variables, rather than meritocracy. The result is the corporate-run caste system that we have today. More importantly there are two varieties of freedom: one of struggle and coercion based on violent radicalism, and one of meaningless consumerism. Meaningless consumerism is how The West operates without violent revolution; people are free to do whatever they want, so long as all they want to do is watch TV and buy things.

This my issue with the western idea of freedom. It is a comfortable existence; it’s largely devoid of bloodshed, but it is also largely devoid of meaning. Buying new things – says the guy with 4 laptops – isn’t making yourself any happier. Watching TV – says the guy who came to this conclusion by watching movies and TV – doesn’t help you to improve yourself. Being a radical freedom fighter isn’t the alternative, and it’s not like you can bring down corporatism in a bloodless and market-friendly manner. What you can do, however, is diversify. Instead of using violence to coerce others into your idea of freedom, I think that you can build communities around ideas other than meaningless conformity and draconian order. Organizing into communities is the start, but you have to go much further.

Paradoxically (or perhaps ironically), I criticize the tendency for governments and corporations to reduce humanity into numerical figures, yet I cannot help but to see political and economic systems as complex networks. I am an avid proponent of peer-to-peer networking, of decentralization, and the mistrust of authority. In a peer-to-peer network, there are no clients and servers, there are only nodes. The power of the Internet is not that it connects nodes, but that it connects networks of nodes. We, as individuals, have to organize ourselves into networks that pursue and produce meaningful things. Individuality is important, but agency may actually be more important. Having freedoms that you do not make use of is pretty much the same as not having freedoms to begin with. If you are a corporate-run fascist state, it’s probably a better for you if your subjects ignore their freedoms. Convincing them to do that might be part of your game plan.

This is the idea that I am moving around in my mind. What is freedom? Do we in The West actually have it? Did we lose it or did we give it away? The thought process is similar to the Orwell vs. Huxley debate, but I think it goes further because it should take into account human tendencies. Huxley kind of does with his societal focus on people being distracted from the importance of the self, but Orwell does not because he is more focused on the politics of violence and fear. My fear is that both Huxley and Orwell are right. That we are being duped into willingly ignoring essential liberties so that a powerful and violent elite can manipulate everything to their benefit. Honestly, I prefer pondering the nature of cognition, the nature of free will, and the nature of humanity because the idea of “Huxleying your way into full Orwell” scares me to death.

Volunteering at Heroes And Villains Chicago

It’s been a couple of weeks since the Chicago event, and I am just now getting around to writing about my experience. I went to Chicago expecting to be more comfortable volunteering, but Chicago was an entirely different beast. Because Chicago is so much closer to Cincinnati than New York, we decided to leave early on Friday morning. This meant leaving at 5 AM, and doing setup upon arrival. We walked into the convention center thinking that we would start assembling booths, and discovered that in Chicago, this was a union job. This meant the primary focus of the volunteer force would be assembling the merch booth.

The merch booth is a large 5-piece structure that ships in dozens of pieces. The experience is not unlike assembling Lego. The primary differences are that the merch booth weighs close to a half-ton when assembled, and unlike a Lego kit, there are absolutely no instructions. Not only are there no instructions, there is no one who recalls seeing a successfully assembled merch booth onsite, so the experience is something like assembling a puzzle, which may or may not be missing pieces, with no picture on the box to guide you. It’s like a logic puzzle and a jigsaw puzzle had some sort of psychotic baby. Assembly was fraught with peril. Thankfully I had the foresight to bring a multi-tool with me, which made things go a little more smoothly.

We determined that there were two essential tasks: first, to figure out what the various pieces did, then to ascertain some sort of idea of the finished product. Chrisha set about trying to find a picture of the finished booth via Google. I worked with some dudes to deduce the functions of the various pieces, Sherlock Holmes style. After about an hour, we had the three major sections assembled, but the overall picture was still a mystery. All Chrisha had been able to find on Google was pictures of Esty’s boobs. Chrisha was eventually able to locate a picture, and we kind of saw how the sections came together, after zooming in on a grainy picture. No matter how many times I said “ENHANCE!” I just couldn’t get a crystal clear pic. I think that maybe the IT on CSI is BS.

So once the merch booth situation was handled, Chrisha and I finished the day working in ticketing. I enjoy working there because I can clown around with the attendees and volunteers. I especially love finding a volunteer who is very serious about the job, or stressed out, and playing little good-natured pranks. Like saying that an error message on the TicketLeap app means we need to call the police, or telling the attendees the password to get into the con was “cantaloupe”. I also put together all the gold badges for the event, and had a bit of fun with them. One volunteer was sick or something, and wore one of those mask things that Japanese people wear on the subway. I made sure to address her using my best impersonation of Bane, every single time I talked to her. By Sunday she was probably ready to kill me.

The next day was the first day of the con, and I guess the number of volunteers was short. I was supposed to work at the merch booth, which I did for a couple of hours, but then I was diverted to work line control for Brian Tee. I had never worked line control before, so I was sort of making it up as I went along. Brian was really nice, and spent lots of time with his fans, a lot of whom were kids because he’s playing Shredder in the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. I screwed it up pretty badly on Sunday when I got bored and waved a few people over to go through the line, but other that I think I did OK. I am definitely not cut out for line control, it takes a kind of attention to detail that I just don’t have. I am much better suited for jobs that require interacting with people.

Saturday night was the Nocking Point party. These events are always awesome. This particular party had Brother Sal and The Devil May Care on stage. It was great fun dancing with Chrisha. I don’t dance so much as get drunk and sway back and forth, but at many events that is good enough. Brother Sal complimented our dancing, and my kilt. I was not aware that Neal McDonough was a Blues musician and played an amazing harmonica. Well, he played a number of songs, sang, and did a tremendous job of making the night amazing. At one point he decided to dive off the stage, and wanted some men up front to catch him. I and some other big dudes made our way up front and caught him. It was insane. His wife also got on the piano and danced, and Neal tried to get her to jump off as well. I am half disappointed and half relieved that she didn’t jump of the piano and into our waiting arms. A highlight of the evening was getting to shake hands with Neal and tell him what a huge fan I was of Band of Brothers. It was a short interaction, like many that I have had with celebrities, that I assumed he forgot about.

I guess maybe he doesn’t get a lot of recognition for Band of Brothers, maybe? I don’t really know why, but the next day I came up to Neal at his booth and he remembered me. It started when I saw a guy in full Easy Company cosplay. He was dressed head to toe in vintage WWII gear, down to the steel pot helmet and brown jump boots. His costume was amazing. I managed to get a picture with him, and he was really excited that I liked his costume. We chatted for a minute, and I told him the brief tragic tale of my short stint as a U.S. Army Paratrooper. A bit later, when Neal arrived at his booth, I ran up to to tell him about this Easy Company guy.

When I get up to Neal, he asks me where my kilt was. I was taken completely off guard by that. I just sort of went “Uhh…” but in my mind I was like “Not now Neal McDonough, we don’t have time!” I showed him my picture of The Easy Company Guy and asked him if it was OK to bring him up to see him. Neal said he had to see this guy, so I went back to my post at Brian Tee’s line and hoped to spot The Easy Company Guy again. In a little bit, I spotted him, and took off to get him.

I am sure The Easy Company Guy was startled and confused when I ran up to him and was like “Yo Easy Company! You gotta come with me!” and I grabbed his arm. On the way to Neal’s booth I explained that I showed Neal my pic of his costume, and that Neal was eager to see him. I ran him up the VIP line and explained that while I can get him through the line, I couldn’t get him past the manager. When I turned to explain, The Easy Company Guy was totally in shock that this was happening. Again, I had to return to my post, so I didn’t get to see what happened after that.

Apparently it went very well, because The Easy Company Guy came to find me. Turns out his name is Dustin, and he was absolutely pumped that he got to meet Neal 🙂 I got a hand shake and a big “THANK YOU!” which was easily he highlight of that day. As the con was closing down, I went back to get Neal to sign my shirt. I said to Neal, “How excited was that guy?” Neal said The Guy was visibly shaking and Neal gave him a moment to collect himself, which I thought was just awesome of Neal. Neal shook my hand, thanked me, and said “You’re a good man, Chris.”

I had no idea that was on my bucket list, but it was, and I got to cross it off 🙂

Volunteering at Heroes And Villains New York/New Jersey

I just ended a day of volunteering with Heroes and Villains Fan Fest in Seacaucus, New Jersey. It was quite a treck to get here (10 hours in the car) but we arrived ahead of the storm. We had a lot of fun despite The Great Blizzard of 2016 that caused New York City and the state of New Jersey to declare states of emergency. We arrived Thursday and spent the morning and afternoon of Friday doing setup. It was also a great experience in the power of social media following a disaster. I live in a very boring part of the country, so I have never been part of that kind of event. It’s clear to me now how important platforms like Twitter are to getting people organized.

Setting up a con is a lot like being in the military and deploying to the field. Things have to be unpacked, set up, and logistical issues abound. Hardware was disassembled and packed in a rush at the end of the last exercise, so things are missing, mislabeled, or broken. This is true of military units, and it’s equally true of conference volunteers. In these situations I usually take charge of something, partly to help others, but mostly to be able to focus on something and not be bossed around by others. In this particular case, I played a role in building autograph booths. Each autograph booth consists of a series of railings that form a kind of human corral, similar to the line at a bank or a roller coaster. I gathered a small group of volunteers, whom I later named “The Booth Bandits” and we set about building or helping others to build booths. It quickly became apparent to me that the details and precise measurements that go into booth building are not my forte. Diligence and attention to detail are my wife’s bread and butter, so with her as the architect of each booth, I shifted my focus to getting the materials needed to keep that bandits moving. It was fun, we had many laughs, including establishing our base of operations, known as BanditHQ.

The next day, Saturday, was when the storm hit. Nearly 3 feet of snow buried the New York Metro Area, and the Governor of New Jersey initiated a travel ban for the roads until 7am Sunday. Not to be deterred, social networks were engaged, and the people stranded in their hotel rooms began having informal parties in the lobbies of their hotels. People began to travel to other nearby hotels, and before long people were cosplaying, playing games, and generally having a good time without the con. We played Fluxx for a couple of hours and it was a blast. The climax of the event was Saturday afternoon, when Stephen Amell, John Barrowman, Katrina Law and Robbie Amell were spotted at a local restaurant (one of the few restaurants that was still open). Within minutes the restaurant was packed with fans, and the harried but good natured staff did their best to seat and serve everyone. Outside the restaurant, people were making snow angels, including Katrina Law and John Barrowman.

Saturday night, after much work to change venues to the closed Expo Center, we attended the Nocking Point Winery Mixer, hosted by Steven Amell and his partners at the winery.  There were drinks and live music, including a few duets with Stephen Amell and John Barrowman. Before I say anymore, I want to convey that these dudes aren’t just actors, they are entertainers. The medium matters not. If you put these cats in front of an audience, they will entertain. Rather than describe the shenanegans, I will just embed some videos, but I doubt that they will capture the magic of the evening.

One interesting story from the evening was that a woman who attended the party enjoyed herself a bit too much and her girlfriends were having a bit of trouble getting her back to the hotel. I offered to help her, since I have lots of experience carrying injured soldiers and kick boxers, as well as drunk hackers and twinks. I got her to the elevators at our hotel, since we were headed the same way, and she and her friends were very thankful.

On Sunday, the Expo Center re-opened, and the con was on in full. We had to show up for orientation at 7AM, all of us nursing hangovers. I would put my physical and mental health for that day at about “Thursday at Defcon.” I had been assigned to work Katie Cassidy’s booth, but to be honest, the prospect didn’t intrigue me, mostly because I am not a fan of hers. I am sure she is a great person and everything, I just ship Olicity and that’s that. Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) was a better Black Canary in my opinion, and Caity couldn’t get a flight, so I just wasn’t into the idea of celebrity work. Fortunately, I got the opportunity to work at the information desk where I was able to enjoy myself quite a bit.

The information booth was a lot of fun. I got to answer questions and help people find things, and after a while I figured out how to joke with people coming to the con. My favorite gag was to tell the people who needed to find the ticketing booths to walk up to one of the ticketing people and tell them that their hair looked nice before handing over their confirmations. Then once they got their badges or wristbands, I would tell them that the password to get past the door was “cantaloupe.” My goal was to have one of the Expo Center’s security people ask someone why the attendees were talking about cantaloupes. It didn’t work. The other great thing about working the information booth was that I lucked my way into a free staff photo op, which let me, my wife and our friend get a photo with Stephen Amell and John Barrowman.

The best moment for me was when a young Japanese girl came up to the booth. She was completely lost. She had never been to a con before, and she had no confidence in her ability to speak English, even though she spoke English very well. Rather than give her a bunch of directions, I just helped her with her wristband and escorted her through the exit on to the expo floor.

Later in the day, when I went to talk to my wife, Chrisha, she told me about her own encounter with a young Japanese girl who was a huge John Barrowman fan, but she was so nervous about meeting him that she was in tears and just froze up in the autograph line. Chrisha talked to her as she went through the line and then basically pushed her in front of John. When it was over, the girl was so glad that Chrisha encouraged her that she gave her a big hug and followed her on Twitter.

I told Chrisha my tale of a nervous Japanese girl, and I wondered if they were the same person. A couple of hours later, the girl that I had escorted came up to thank me for my help. She was positively ecstatic about meeting John, and showed me a picture from her photo op with him. John had his leg around her, and she had her hand on his butt. It was the cutest thing ever. And to top it off, she said “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t help it. I touched his butt.”

The girl went on to mention that another volunteer helped her get to John Barrowman, and when I mentioned that Chrisha was my wife she looked stunned. Then I took her over to the ladies in ticketing to show them her picture with John, which was met with a chorus of gleeful screams as every one of the ticketing ladies gushed over the photo.

As the con ended, we helped tear down the booths and pack things up. Again, it was reminiscent of my days in the Army. Watching the HVFF staff trying to roll up the giant bouncy castles to fit into their bags for transport was like watching a someone going through your own childhood trauma 🙂 In retrospect I should have snapped a picture of their ordeal. We loaded things up as best we could, absent a lot of direction in the chaos. Everyone was thankful for the help with tear down. I enjoyed the experience immensely. I think that working a con might actually be more fun than attending. This has also been my experience at Defcon. Working a booth for Dualcore is way more fun than standing in line for talks that will end up online anyway.

I didn’t choose the conlife, conlife chose me

I just got back from having a wonderful time at Wizard World Comicon in Louisville. A couple of years ago, I was was pretty active in the hacker community, attending hacker conferences like Defcon and giving talks at smaller conferences like Notacon, Nolacon, and Skydogcon. My involvement has led to some great friendships, and to opportunities to do crazy things like appear in a rap music video.

In the past couple of years my wife has become seriously interested in sci-fi cons, and so most of my free time has been wrapped up in that for the last couple of years. I won’t say that it’s better than attending hacker cons, but it’s definitely less exhausting. When I get together with hackers, we tend to get super drunk and engage in various shenanigans. When I hang out with my wife at sci-fi cons, I still drink and have a lot of fun, I just don’t seem to have multiple concurrent hangovers and exhaustion to boot. This trip to Louisville was especially great because I got to meet most of the cast of Arrow.

I am a big fan of Arrow. There are some real parallels with Batman, but they are mostly superficial. The primary difference is that because Arrow is a TV show, there is way more exploration of the characters, their interactions, and their stories. Of particular interest to me is the number of strong female characters. Felicity Smoak, Sarah Lance, Nyssa Al Ghul, the list goes on. The show is full of women who fight beside and against men, and they often, but not always, come out on top. It’s not perfectly gender equal, but it’s a real accomplishment for a prime-time TV show about a male superhero. I also love John Diggle, because I feel that he represents how someone like me would react to finding himself in the DC universe. He is a warrior in his own right, but he is suddenly facing threats from supervillains, metahumans, and magic. He also falls back on his military training, for better or worse, until he learns to embrace the insight of his teammates.

So on this trip to Louisville, I got to go to panels and stand in line at the celebrity walk, and all the usual things you do at a sci-fi con, and then on Saturday night something amazing happened. While having drinks at a hotel bar, my wife got a Twitter alert about Stephen Amell being at a dueling piano bar, of which there is only one nearby. Within seconds she and her fangirl pals took off. Not only did they ditch me, they left me with the check 🙂 When I caught up to them, most of the cast of Arrow were on stage singing karaoke. I was able to shake hands with Paul Blackthorne and Steven Amell, and I managed to get a picture with David Ramsey, the actor who plays John Diggle. I also engaged in some other shenanigans with John Barrowman, but a picture is worth a thousand words, so I will let that do the talking for me 🙂