"I don't want to set the world on fire..."

According to the Steam™ game management system, I've spent 1,405.4* hours in the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout 4, not to mention extensive untracked time in Fallout 4, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas before switching to Steam™**.  (Sadly, my Fallout 76 online experience has not led me to a return visit.)  

As such, it's safe to say that I'm more than a little familiar with the alternative future of the franchise, which fully prepared me to bring a critical eye to the new Fallout series which made its streaming debut on Amazon Prime Video this week.  To my intense relief, the adaptation is excellent, using all the building blocks from the source material to combine drama, humour, action and violence into a clever, gripping storyline.

For readers unfamiliar with Fallout, it takes place in an alternative version of the United States which diverged from our timeline somewhere in the 1950s. Atomic energy has become a commonplace power source, to the point that even cars are powered by small atomic reactor units.

In 2066, China invades Alaska in order to seize its oil reserves, and eventually the conflict escalates into a merciless exchange of thermonuclear weaponry that destroys the world in 2077, leaving behind a legacy of death, chaos, and conflict. The series is set in 2296, just over 200 years after the disaster.

The opening scene in the first episode is a disturbingly realistic introduction to the end of the world, as mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud rise over the future Los Angeles, after which we are taken to the post-war paradise of Vault 33, one of the underground Vaults created by the Vault-Tec Company to preserve a chosen few survivors whose descendants will eventually emerge to rebuild civilization.  

The writers have chosen to focus on characters from three areas of the Fallout world: Ella Purnell plays Lucy Maclean, who has left her secure home in Vault 33 in search of her kidnapped father; veteran character actor Walton Goggins is the Ghoul, a victim of severe radiation poisoning which has left him a damaged and distorted parody of humanity but granted him near-immortality; and Aaron Moten takes the part of Maximus, an aspirant in the Brotherhood of Steel, a paramilitary organization dedicated to restoring civilization by any means necessary.

As in the game, Fallout uses the naive character of Lucy the Vault Dweller, and her quest for her missing father, to introduce us to the post-war Wasteland and its various perils, monsters, inhabitants and communities. The show does a superb job of evoking the look and feel of the game, and is loaded with background Easter egg references: Vault Boy bobbleheads, laser rifles, two-headed mutated Brahmin cattle, raiders, cannibals, and feral ghouls - not to mention the beloved Dogmeat the dog, a stalwart companion for any quest. 

As with the games, the series has stories within stories, plots within plots, and mysteries within mysteries.  The quest-driven nature of the computer versions translates well to the narrative format, combining a larger overall storyline with smaller sidebar interludes.  The episodes alternate between the post-war plot and a pre-war storyline about Vault-Tec, in which Goggins portrays Hollywood cowboy Cooper Howard before his transformation into a mutated monster.

The writers make full use of the same oddball humour that characterizes the game dialogue - and the same level of violence, perhaps more than expected by some viewers. To be fair, the source material is a first-person shooter computer game, but even so, it's a bit more graphic than the standard television fare in terms of gore.

Based on the final episode, Season Two will take its cast of characters to New Vegas, a logical step from the Los Angeles setting of the first season which will allow the writers to integrate material from Fallout: New Vegas, which is generally considered to be the best of the Fallout game franchise. 

And, finally, the season ends on an appropriate note with Walton Goggins uttering the franchise's iconic motto: 

"War.  War never changes."

Let's hope that's true, at least in terms of future episodes.

- Sid 

* To give some perspective to this, if playing Fallout 4 was my job and I worked seven hour days (with an hour for lunch), five days a week, I've spent about seven months living in the Wasteland.

** I actually started all three back in the days of installing from physical media.  (Oh, sorry - for the younger readers in the audience, games used to be sold on discs - originally floppies, later CDs, finally DVDs - all of which involved switching out disc after disc as prompted by the installer, and then requiring that the first disk to be in a drive for the game to run.)

Little Conversations: Tainted Love.

These little conversations
Well for me they'll never do
Now what am I supposed to do with
Broken sentences of you?

Concrete Blonde, Little Conversations 

Retrograde childhood trauma is the WORST.

- Sid

Space Crawler II: "UNLIMITED POWER!"

Home at last after our fun five-day Victoria vacation - we've apologized to the cat for being away, he's reluctantly accepted our apology, we've unpacked, made dinner, done some laundry - time to get serious with the Major Matt Mason Space Crawler that I stumbled across at Cherry Bomb Toys.

The rotating leg/wheel mechanism may not be unique, but it should be - as it turns out, Mattel filed a patent for the whole thing in 1970 under US Patent #3529479A.  (Funny that I've never found any reference to this elsewhere.) To be fair, the patent also defines the complicated gearing mechanism that makes the whole thing work, and refers to "wheel substitutes" rather than attempting to define that part of the toy.

The battery contacts are a bit corroded, which, sadly, is the most common cause of death for toys that have been stored with the batteries in place. Over time the cells eventually self-deplete, after which pressure from gas buildup splits the casing and the subsequent leakage destroys the working parts.

However, early days - the upper and lower contacts aren't particularly clean, but it appears to be primarily just surface buildup, let's hope for the best.

The next day, I pick up a set of D batteries* on the way home, and after dinner return to the fight.  I gently open the power compartment (pro tip: always be careful when dealing with any 58 year old toy that uses compressed plastic for hinges) and, after taking a moment to decipher the insertion directions, pop in the batteries.  

The mechanical power switch is the simplest thing in the world, just a plastic plate that rotates in and out of the gap between the battery and the contact.  I close the compartment, move the switch - and nothing. I test the drive/winch control just in case, still nothing.  I'm a bit disappointed, but again, early days.

A search through my toolbox produces a torn sheet of emery paper, and I use a piece of it to carefully scrape away at the upper battery contacts until I see bare metal instead of corrosion. The lower contacts are less accessible, so I decide to do a work-in-progress test before building some kind of tool to get at them.  

Batteries in again, and I move the switch - success!  The motor grinds into action - "grinds" being the appropriate term, it's a bit loud - and the paired legs begin to rotate.  I test the winch control, and it works like a charm, both forward and backward. 

However, when I carefully place the crawler on the floor, only one wheel - leg? - rotates, the other one does nothing.  There's a plastic friction mechanism that acts as a sort of primitive differential release, so that if either wheel is blocked or jammed, the motor can continue to operate.  The mechanism for the right wheel is too loose to engage, and as such there isn't enough friction for the drive unit to move it. 

I test it with some tape, and once the right wheel is secured to the friction tab, both wheels rotate to drive the crawler noisily across the hardwood floor - to Jaq the Cat's initial dismay but eventual indifference.

I'm a bit foolishly pleased by the whole thing - it just adds to the serendipitous nature of this purchase that the crawler actually still works after so many years. It's a bit jerky, but you know, as the saying goes, it's not that the bear dances well, it's that it dances at all. 

- Sid 

* Yes, surprise, D batteries - am I alone in thinking that everything is AA these days?