New Year, Same Fear

Happy new year folks!

I’ve been working on a number of projects lately (should be ready to reveal one in a few weeks) and as such have been neglecting the Wyrmlog a bit. But I figured I should jump on and let people know I’m still alive.

So let’s see…

Trump has invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president. I have reached the point where I am no longer surprised by anything the maniac in the Whitehouse does – each new atrocity just makes me feel even more tired and even more sad. Maybe the mid-terms will castrate the orange monstrosity, or maybe we’ll be stuck with him wielding absolute power until 2029, who knows?

The Bondi terrorist attack. Appalling. Just fucking appalling. And what’s worse is all sides of politics jumping on board to exploit the hell out of it. I think it’s fair to say that Albanese has made a major fumble by not calling a Royal Commission and has now been painted into a corner where the opposition can tear him to shreds for resisting a Commission, or tear him to shreds for ‘flip-flopping’ if he does call a Commission. Zionists and pro-Israel Fascists are jumping on the attack to label any criticism of Israel or support for Palestine as antisemitic, while the genuine antisemites are cackling with glee over dead kids and shattered families. And the Jewish population are caught in the middle and living in fear. The whole thing is utterly fucked, which is of course why the unspeakable scum that carried out the attack did it.

(For the record. Disliking Israel because they’re Jewish – antisemitism. Disliking Israel because they’re behaving like a bunch of cunts – not antisemitism.)

On less serious matters, a major storm swept through Perth (on the Sunday of the attack as it happens) and knocked out power to huge areas of the state, and the city, including my complex. I was standing at my window just after 4:00 in the afternoon watching the horizontal rain switch back and forth when the power went out. I didn’t mind so much at first as it had been a disgustingly hot day and the storm pulled the temperature right down. The initial estimate for restoration (checked on my phone) was only a few hours so I did some reading, then got the bus over to Morley (which still had power) and had dinner at Varsity. I then decided to kill even more time by walking home.

Walking through the suburbs as it got darker and darker, with fallen branches and occasional uprooted trees everywhere was distinctly eerie (I tried to capture the mood with some photos but my stupid phone lightened them all). The weirdest bit was when I passed a guy doing some work in his yard by the light of LED lamps mounted on his ute. I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to go and sit in the light to get relief from the oppressive darkness – a feeling I suspect dates back 2 million years to the African Savannah when we’d huddle around the fires to stay safe from the lions and hyenas.

By the time I got home they’d revised the time to restore power until the early hours of the morning, so I went to bed and without my fan and CPAP machine slept extremely poorly. I eventually crawled out of bed at around 5:00am, and on noting there was still no power had a cold sponge-bath and caught the bus into work.

Power was restored mid-morning, but my fridge had been off for about 18 hours, so I had to throw out a whole load of food I’d only just bought on Saturday. Thankfully I was able to claim $120 from the power company for it, so all’s well that ends more-or-less well.

Oh, and the rather lovely tree that the council spent so much money moving from the train station to the library to save it from redevelopment was snapped clean off at the base, so that’s sad.

On another matter it has come to my attention that the Wyrmlog has lost all styling. This is what happens when you modify a Theme directly rather than creating a child theme (because you have no idea what you’re doing) and then maybe ten years later absentmindedly turn on automatic Theme updates, causing your changes to be overwritten. I will get everything re-styled when I have a minute, which could be any time between today and the Unix Timestamp Epoch (did I mention that I have been semi-officially diagnosed with Inattentive ADHD?).

The second season of Fallout has dropped and I’m very much enjoying it. So far it’s not quite as good as the first season, but it would be insanely difficult for it to be (in my opinion the first season is just about the greatest TV series ever made). I can’t help wondering if the two Mr Houses are a way to keep Mr House alive after the events of New Vegas – the Courier may well have killed a Mr House but did they kill the Mr House? Time will tell…

I have voted in the Hottest 100. Expect a post about my choices soon.

That’s about it I guess. Go make your own entertainment!

Operation Sunburst

The Fallout fan film Operation Sunburst is pretty good!

The dialogue probably needed another round of editing to handle exposition in a way that doesn’t have characters telling other characters things they should already know, calling rocket-launcher armed troops ‘sappers’ seems odd, the mutant qilin cavalry are a bit silly (and why are they using cavalry to attack a fortified building?), and it’s weird that the NCR don’t seem to have reinvented the mortar, but overall really well done! Highly recommended for any Fallout fan!

Roll on the 17th!

Further Thoughts on Fallout

Having binged my entire way though Fallout, I have some further thoughts (spoilers ahead!).

WOW. Like, seriously. WOW.

They’ve done an amazing job. There are only three things that stood out to me as inaccurate, and two of those are fairly accurately explained.

The first is ghouls using a drug to avoid turning feral. To my knowledge there is no mention of this in any other Fallout media. Ghouls are tough, get healed (to some extent) by radiation, can live for centuries, and sometimes go irreversibly insane and turn into mindless, cannibalistic monsters. There seems to be some link between age and going feral, but it’s very vague – some ghouls remain sane for centuries, whole others lose their mind within a few years.

To my mind there’s no reason that ghouls in California couldn’t have stumbled over a pre-war drug that fends off going feral, or even developed such a drug. We know that Dr Barrows in D.C. is looking for treatments for the ghoul condition, there’s surely similar researchers in California. If it’s a comparatively recent development then it wouldn’t have had time to spread to the rest of the wasteland, which would explain why it doesn’t show up in any of the games

The second issue is Maximus getting stuck in his power armour after Thaddeus stole his fusion core. This should be impossible – from the games we know that you can easily get out of power amour even when your last core runs out, and you can move (albeit very slowly) in non-powered power armour.

This is easily explained by the fact that Maximus has never actually been trained! He’s using armour that he stole and has very little idea what he’s doing. There’s probably a release somewhere inside that opens the suit without power, and another one that allows the suit to articulate, but he has no idea where they are, or that they even exist. So when the power goes out, he’s screwed.

The final issue is the big one – the location of Shady Sands. Shady Sands is supposed to lie directly east of Vault 13, which is in the vicinity of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada. It absolutely cannot be over 300km south west in the Angel’s Boneyard. I can’t think of a single way to deal with this – maybe it’ll be explained in Season 2 (we’re gonna get a Season 2, right?) or maybe it’s just something we’ll have to live with.

Anyway, spectacularly well done to everyone involved, and roll on New Vegas!

Initial Thoughts on Fallout

Some thoughts after watching the first two episodes of Amazon’s adaption of Fallout (includes spoilers)…

Spending 20 minutes rotating pictures of wheelbarrows is an oddly Vault-Tec method of accessing the Prime free trial.

Holy guacamole! I thought the trailers looked good, but didn’t dare hope they’d get everything this right!

Ella Purnel is adorable.

The tension in the wedding scene was nail biting.

I LOVE the fact that they’re playing stimpacks straight. Suffered a horrifying, likely fatal injury? Just grab a stimpack and you’re fine!

I’m pretty sure they did a bunch of shooting in Namibia.

They’ve managed to strike the perfect balance between realism and silliness with the violence. It’s ludicrous, but not so much that it takes you out of the story.

Knight Titus was a dick, even by the high dickery standards of the Brotherhood.

Putting all his points into sharpshooting definitely helped with the Yao Guai, but Maximus probably should have spared a few for the Power Armour Training perk.

The brahmin looked so good I didn’t even register them for a second. Cow with two heads? Yeah, that’s just background.

I was furious when the Ghoul killed Dogmeat! But then he fixed him up, so I shall forgive.

Copies of the Wasteland Survival Guide in the shop – perfect!

I am very much looking forward to continuing the series!

Just a Bit of Zurvár

Gur, gur beltàdlet kert ná…
Ròmanár gur pevgetslá koro modá ibiŝan darak pevnánûglá.
Spanolár badmâ pevorklá kâ aknà iskan badrokâ itatâ.
Itlá Dîŝlan idráurn pevorestlá poro admo bárizûurn darakâ.
Garad, gur beltàdlet kert ná.

Gur, gur belt-ayed-let kairt nah.
Roman-ar gur pev-gets-lah, koh-roh moh-dah ibishan darak pev-nan-oo-glah.
Span-olar badmor pevor-klah, kor ack-nay iskan bad-rockor itah-tor.
It-lah Doysh-lan idrah-urn pevor-est-lah, poh-roh ad-moh bah-riz-or-urn dara-kor.
Garad, gur belt-ayad-let kairt nah.

WAR, WAR WILL-CHANGE-ITSELF NO !!
ROMAN-PEOPLE WAR DID-PERFORM TO PLURAL SLAVE MONEY DID-SEIZE.
SPANISH-PEOPLE EMPIRE DID-BUILD BY THEIR DESIRE TREASURE-CONCERNING LAND-CONCERNING.
HITLER GERMANY BROKEN DID-REPAIR CAUSE COUNTRY VERY-POWERFUL MONEY-CONCERNING.
DEPSITE-THIS, WAR WILL-CHANGE-ITSELF NO !!

What Happens in Vegas

Because I’m the sort of person who gets obsessed by stupid wastes of time, I’ve spent far too many hours over the last couple of weeks plotting locations from the computer game Fallout: New Vegas into Google Earth. Not content with simply plotting the easy ones, I’ve been obsessively researching the more obscure places and turned up some interesting information that doesn’t seem to have been posted online previously. So what better place to put it than on my blog?

Gypsum Train Yard: The Gypsum Train Yard appears to be based on the Pabco Gypsum facility to the east of Las Vegas. This so obvious that I’m surprised it doesn’t seem to be recorded anywhere.

Morning Star Cavern: This cave is fairly close to the abandoned Morning Star Gold Mine.

Walking Box Cavern: This cave must have got its name from the nearby Walking Box Ranch.

Samson Rock Crushing Plant: This facility may well be based on the Las Vegas Paving Corp aggregate plant in Arden. It’s southwest of McCarran Airport and adjacent to the railway line, just as in the game.

Some other fun stuff I found. The entrance to Fort McCarran is based on the historic entrance to the airport – located on South Las Vegas Boulevard just south of the Fabulous Las Vegas sign. A bit further west on I-15 is a giant Miller Beer bottle, which might well have influenced the entrance to the Sunset Sasparilla factory. The game states that Freeside is located around the intersection of Freemont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard – what do you find there? A gateway just like the one near the Atomic Wrangler. Jacobstown is not just located on the slopes of Mount Charleston, but is clearly modeled on The Resort on Mount Charleston, even down to the big sign at the entrance.

There’s no doubt plenty of other stuff to be found, but I’m all burnt out on it now 🙂

You got to walk that lonesome road alone…

As one who on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread…

In my continuing quest to eventually complete Fallout:New Vegas I started my first add on last night by entering the Divide – the setting for Lonesome Road. My first impressions? Fething hell!

The Divide is sheer, fething madness. I’m not going to post any real spoilers but the environment, the enemies, the whole atmosphere is downright terrifying. That first view when you step through the canyon wreckage – yikes! I’ve actually considered turning tail and heading back to the Mojave – but Corvus Jones (my Courier is named Corvus Jones – deal with it) don’t run! Or at least he hasn’t run yet, and if I’m going to beat the game I’ll have to finish Lonesome Road at some point, so it might as well be now. But jeeze! The Divide is one hell of a creepy place and I’ll be very happy when I’m done with it and can head back to Vegas where the worst thing that can happen is an ambush by deathclaws.

Shudder!

Forciable Detox

My monitor has forsaken me!

Well, my home computer’s monitor has finally crapped out on me.

It’s been dying for a while. The power button hasn’t worked for about six months, and for the last few months it’s been refusing to wake up once it goes into sleep mode. I’ve been dealing with both problems by rigging up a monitor extension lead so I can directly cut and restore power without getting out of my chair, which has been serving to wake it up again. But yesterday morning nothing I did could get an image to appear. Dang.

Apparently the thing that most often goes bye-bye on Viewsonic monitors is the capacitors. These can be replaced, but unless you’re willing to do the work yourself the cost for parts and labour is generally about that of an entirely new monitor. So I guess I have some shopping to do.

On the plus side, this enforced break from using my home computer (I don’t have a spare monitor, so I can’t do squat) will serve as a nice detox from Fallout: New Vegas, which I’ve recently got back into and have been playing way too much. I’m getting seriously tetris-affected – I saw an agave plant in a garden over the weekend and had a sudden urge to harvest it. Not good. Not good at all 🙂

(As long as I don’t start seeing people’s body parts highlighted I should be OK though :))

Over and out.

Notes

Wandering the Mojave

Some notes concerning Fallout: New Vegas

1: The first time I saw a Bighorner my reaction was pretty much the same as 40 seconds into this video.
2: I am most pleased that they’ve made an effort to have Caesar’s Legion speaking with classical pronunciation.
3: Blackrock Radio is hilarious!
4: Most amusing bug – I dropped some armour and it went shooting off across the floor at high speed. If I’d been outside I would have had to chase it across the desert to get it back.
5: Most annoying bug – the Monorail. The bloody monorail. You know what I’m talking about.