Fallout 4: "Survive..."

I'm having a rough time of it right now.  I've just killed a couple of super mutants, but my salvaged power armour is in shreds and its stolen fusion core is almost drained. I can't carry any more weight, I'm dehydrated, starved, and haven't had enough sleep, weakened by an infection and suffering from a minor case of radiation poisoning, low on food, water and ammunition, and my canine companion has been injured so badly that he's gone back to our base to recover because I don't have any stimpacks left to heal him.

My only hope is to sneak between the killer sentry bot on the hill and the nearby Gunner base without running into any radscorpions, feral dogs, ghouls or bloodbugs, eliminate all the raiders at the captured listening post to complete my mission, and then carefully retrace my route in hopes of getting home without being killed and having to start all over.

All in all, just another day in the Wasteland for Fallout 4's Survival Mode.

When Bethesda Games came out with Fallout 3 in 2008, they introduced an innovative open world gaming strategy which has stood the test of time, as demonstrated by the success of Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, 2011's Skyrim*, and Fallout 4 in 2015.

The basic system is simple: there is an overall plot line made up of many discreet missions, combined with side quests and random encounters.  The player initially explores the map on foot, but as new locations are discovered, they can be revisited by instantaneous fast traveling rather than having to retrace the entire route.  Weapons, clothing, armour and supplies can be found in abandoned buildings, purchased from vendors, or looted from the bodies of opponents, and there are a variety of crafting stations so that the player can upgrade their equipment, cook food or create lifesaving drugs. As the player accomplishes different tasks and completes missions, they accumulate experience points that allow them to level up and chose different perks that enhance their abilities or give them new ones.

The different games in Bethesda's library have built on this system in a variety of ways.  Fallout 3 rated your character based on whether or not they were a good person or a bad person, and modified the game's options based on that profile. Fallout: New Vegas introduced different factions that could either be allies or enemies depending on how the player interacted with them, and Skyrim allowed players to chose from a variety of species, and then select a political alignment in the course of gameplay.  Fallout 4 added the option of managing settlements by creating radio beacons to attract settlers and then constructing buildings, beds, water pumps and defensive structures to support the settlement's new inhabitants.

I worked my way through Fallout 4 from the start to the resolution of the main plotline, and then started to replay it so that I could do some side missions that I'd missed the first time by failing to join the Brotherhood of Steel** when I had the chance.  Sadly, after completing the game once, it wasn't as challenging the second time, and I found myself starting to lose interest.

However, there was another option.  I'd been playing at Very Difficult, the most challenging of the standard difficulty settings, but there was still another level:  Survival Mode.

Survival Mode changes Fallout 4 into something which may be a little too close to real life.  The player loses the ability to save the game whenever they want to - the only way to save your progress is to find a bed of some sort and sleep.  And regular sleep is a definite necessity, as is food and water, not to mention that eating uncooked food increases the chances of getting sick.

Fast travel is no longer an option: if a mission requires you to walk across the entire Wasteland and back, you do it the old-fashioned way, no instant jumps.  It's harder to locate supplies to scavenge, and trying to carry more than your rated load capacity will reduce your health and eventually cripple your legs.  Ammunition, which has no weight in the other modes, becomes a definite factor in your burden, and your companion's ability to help you out by carrying things is reduced.

The result of all these restrictions?  A much more challenging and gripping experience which has renewed my interest in the game.
 
Survival Mode requires caution, patience and planning.  Gone is the option of just saving a game if it looks like things might get dangerous, then charging in with the confidence that if you end up getting killed, you can just restore your game and do it again.  There's no more skipping across the entire map to sell a full load of looted weapons and armour to different merchants, and no more jumping to a location with a power armour maintenance rack every time something get banged up and needs repair.  Cooking stations and water pumps go from being somewhat pointless bits of scenery to crucial elements in staying alive, and the random beds, mattresses and sleeping bags scattered around the map suddenly make a lot more sense.

In Survival mode, you carefully select the things you take with you, and keep a constant eye on your surroundings as you travel, because it's very very easy to run into something unexpected that will kill you long before you even get close to your destination.  Finding an empty bed is a triumph, and the allied settlements become desperately sought refuges rather than micromanagement challenges.

Now I find that when I log in to play, I pay much more attention to my surroundings, looking for movement and moving cautiously along the roads and through the forests.  When I could fast travel from place to place, I had no feel for the map, but now I have a keen awareness of what's where, to the point that I'm surprised to discover that certain destinations were actually quite close to each other, even to a person limping along in damaged power armour.

Difficulty management is one of the great challenges of game programming. Too easy, and players become bored; too hard, and players may just give up.***  Ultimately, you need just the right amount of frustration as the final spice required to make a game completely appetizing, and, as with any spice, too much of it results in an unpalatable experience.  I'm pleased that Bethesda was able to add just the right amount of frustration to Fallout 4 in order to suit my personal tastes.

- Sid

* At this point, my gaming snob nephew Chris says, "Actually, Uncle Sid, it's Elder Scrolls V, not Skyrim."

** There are female members of the Brotherhood, but there's no option to ask them how they feel about gender-biased organization names.

*** A gaming experience which has actually happened to me - twice.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: "You will always be my sister."

"Can we put the bickering on hold till AFTER we survive the massive space battle?" 

Gamora, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

And now, my sister Dorothy offers her take on how to pose with the Guardians of the Galaxy.  We welcome your comparative critiques.

- Sid

Gunpla 04: With a little help from my friends.

Arms and the man I sing...

Virgil, The Aeneid, Book I

Two days later*, and I'm back, working on Gundam arms. There are three pages of instructions just for this section - and everything has to be done twice.

As anyone who owns a cat would expect, Jaq the Cat has been very curious about what I've been doing, and he's eager to become involved in the process, in spite of my best attempts to discourage him.

He does eventually make his way onto the table as I set things up to continue working, but I manage to restrain him before any real damage is done other than a couple of relocated sprues.  He's actually a bit scared by the rattling of the plastic - we've speculated extensively as to the events in Jaq's previous life that would have made him skittish about things like this.

After a few minutes of conciliatory chin scratching, I move my disappointed assistant off the work surface.  Cats being cats, this process ends up being repeated a couple of times before our frustrated feline decides that it's easier to just lie on the couch and go to sleep.

The instructions for the arms start off with components that appear to have nothing to do with arms as they are commonly known, but I'm willing to accept that giant warbots adhere to a different standard.  As with the torso assembly, there are rubber pieces that are probably part of the connection and articulation system.

The next bit of assembly is equally mysterious, and considerably more challenging.  After combining some sliding pieces that actually aren't connected to each other, just held between rectangular collars, the instructions tell me to sandwich the results between a pair of plates and a strangely shaped armature.

I did some research online for hints and advice when I originally purchased this Gundam kit, and one of the posters specifically commented that the elbows were the most challenging part of this model. Hopefully that's what I'm working on now, because if there's something worse than this, I'm in trouble. It might actually be easier to do this with full scale metal parts and a crane - at least then there would be some weight to hold things in place.

It seems to require an extra hand, and lacking that** I struggle unsuccessfully with the parts for a little while. I finally figure out a method of setting the large holes in the sub-assemblies over the pins in the lower plate, then use the top plate as a guide for the other pieces.

Magically, it all very suddenly snaps together.

Next, a pale grey piece of armour has to go over one end of the assembly, which involves bending part of the joint that I've just created.  Again, the part seems to suddenly find its place and snap into position.

Thank god that's done! Unfortunately, now I have to do it again.

Fortunately, I have the piece I've just finished to use as a guide, so the second iteration goes much more easily and quickly than the first one.

I've used up my allotment of modelling time for today, and perhaps the month - time to fold the laundry and do some vacuuming.* An hour and a half of painstaking work has resulted in four enigmatic assemblies which will hopefully start to make sense as things come together for the arms - literally. 

- Sid

* Isn't it sad how life makes so many non-geek demands on our time? Over the last couple of days,  I've gone clothes shopping, had dinner with my friend Joe, done the laundry, and otherwise taken care of business.  I've also done some extended computer gaming - after all, man does not live by bread alone.

** This is when the cat's help would actually have been useful, although the infamous feline lack of thumbs might have limited his contribution.

Gunpla 03: "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes..."

The first part of my Gundam RX-78 build has been a bit tedious and time consuming, but now I have a feel for how the parts go together. Down side - there are a lot of sprues left...

Surprisingly, one of them is a rubber moulding, which contains some of the parts required for the torso segment.  The assembly of the first element in the instructions puzzles me for a moment - what are these things supposed to be, anyway? - until I realize that they must be shoulders, and the rubber parts are required for the connection and articulation of the joints. I gather that the final model will have a large range of motion, assuming that I put everything together correctly.

Not the least of my challenges in that area is that the instructions are in Japanese, which is why I don't know exactly what it is that I'm building right now. Similarly, I'm certain the sentence with the exclamation point at the top of page 9 is alerting me to something important, but hopefully things will go together as they should in spite of my lack of comprehension.

 

It does go fairly smoothly, although I'm temporarily baffled by how to put the two pieces of the chest together - until I realize that one of them is upside down.  Fortunately, there's a certain logic in the process:  tabs will go into slots, pins will go into holes, and so on.  It's rather like a jigsaw puzzle, where you can tell instantly whether or not you have the right piece to go into a gap.

 

And, like a jigsaw puzzle, right now it doesn't quite look like the box yet.  But it's coming along, the Gundam's torso is beginning to come together as I locate and detach each of the multicoloured pieces from the various sprues. (Obviously camouflage has become irrelevant on the battlefields of the future.)*

I'm momentarily stumped when I can't find one of those specified sprues, which makes me feel like someone who is missing a crucial screw for the IKEA dresser that they're trying to put together. To my relief, I finally locate it - in my defence, it's transparent.

 

The instructions for the head are a good example of the complicated techniques used to hold the parts together. It's made up of 16 parts from six sprues, and I gather that should I wish, I could add an LED to the head in order to make the eyes light up. 

Having seen exactly how that looks full sized during our visit to Japan, I'm a little tempted.  However, it's not an option which is included with the kit, so I'll have to do some aftermarket research.

After the head, I complete the neck module and decide to call it a day.  I'm stiff from sitting crouched over the table for most of the day, but I'm pleased with my progress:  core fighter, chest, neck assembly and the distinctive Gundam head.  Next, arms and legs - and maybe hips.

- Sid

* Which actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The sort of complex electronic sensors used on ships like Star Trek's Enterprise would make any sort of painted camouflage pointless.  On the other hand, there was that Star Destroyer that couldn't find the Millennium Falcon when it was hiding right under their noses on their hull, so who knows.

Gunpla 02: Let the games begin.

It's been several months since my Gundam RX-78 model arrived, but I somehow just haven't been able to find the time to start on it.  Part of the problem is that it's quite an intimidating array of parts and instructions, and I feel that it's not the sort of thing that you approach casually.  As such, I've been unable to find an adequate block of time that I can dedicate to the build.

However, at long last an opportunity offers itself.  Karli has planned a weekend away at Harrison Hot Springs with her two sisters and a cousin, and it occurs to me that this is the perfect time to make a start on assembly.  Feeling that I should make the most of it, I end up booking a vacation day for the Friday in order to give myself as much time as possible.

Friday morning arrives, and I bid a regretful farewell to my lovely partner - she's heading out directly from work, so I won't see her until Sunday afternoon.  I have breakfast, make a fresh cup of tea, and take a seat at the official workspace of hobbyists around the planet: the dining room table.

I have my tools ready on my cutting board:  hobby knife, files, scissor style eyebrow tweezers - some of the parts are VERY small - and what I think of as sprue* cutters, although there may be a more official name for them.  I'm a bit surprised to realize that I've owned the hobby knife since 1983 - that's a long run for an Olfa cutter.  I would rather work with an emery board than my selection of battered metal files, but sometimes you just end up using the tools at hand.

How hard can this be?

Opening the box for the first time, I'm a little intimidated by the number of parts involved in the assembly.  When I was in my early teens, I used to build Airfix 1/76 scale tank models, which max out at about 50 or 60 parts.  This model has over 400.

However, it's all done very logically: everything is labelled and numbered, with each sprue labelled by letter and/or number, each part individually numbered, and the instructions clearly indicating which parts are required from each sprue at every step.  It's a snap-together model, which means that at least I don't have to worry about all the problems related to using polystyrene glue.  On the other hand, I expect that there will be some complicated solutions to the problem of holding things together securely.

Bandai starts you off easy by having you assemble the Core Fighter, an integral escape/combat ship used by the Gundam pilot in emergencies.  It's a relatively simple stand-alone piece, and as such it makes a good introduction to the process.

My tea grows cold as I cut, file and assemble the tiny parts.  It's somewhat unnerving - it would be very very easy to break one of these little pieces of styrene.  

Some of the parts are connected to the sprues so that the removal cuts are quite obvious, and it's challenging to file a nub on a flat panel down so that it's invisible without damaging the surface of the piece. Usually you can rely on paint to cover the flaws in a model, but the whole reason for the multi-coloured spectrum of the Gundam sprues to to remove the need for painting, so it's important to do as neat a job as possible.

At one point I cut the wrong part off a sprue and panic a bit - I really really don't want to lose track of part numbers, that's my only line of defense against error with such a huge selection of parts. Fortunately it's a distinctive enough piece that I can recognize it when the time comes, and it's used in the same section of the model.  In a few minutes, it's snapped into place and I don't have to worry about losing track of it.

 

The final challenge is to connect the cockpit to the fuselage.  As initially suspected, there are some interesting solutions to the problem of glueless assembly, and this is one of them: a combination of pin and socket that allows the cockpit to rotate downward when it's pulled out of the fuselage (I think).  Fortunately, my choice of weapons makes it relatively straightforward to push the two parts together - I can't imagine how you'd do something like this without some kind of tool other than your fingers.

With the addition of a transparent undercarriage, the Core Fighter is finished. In some ways, I'm not impressed. I believe that the ship is articulated so that it can be folded up and placed inside the body of the model, but the hinges for the wings don't hold them in place very well.  (Subsequent online investigation reveals that I'm not the only person who is unimpressed by the wing attachment mechanism.)  I'm also disappointed by my own work on the model, the filing marks on the top of the cockpit are far too obvious for my tastes.  Nonetheless, it's complete, and I have a much better idea of how the process of Bandai snap-together modelling works - it's been a very useful warmup exercise.

The core fighter done, it's time for lunch.  One empty sprue, many more to go...

- Sid

* A brief explanation in case there's someone reading this who is unfamiliar with the process: 

Model parts are cast en masse using an injection molding process. The channels through which the molten polystyrene is injected into the mold are called sprues.  Generally model parts are cast in sets and left attached to the sprues, and as such it's necessary to cut the parts away from the sprues to assemble them.  Sprue cutters are a specialized modelling tool with flat angled blades that allow modellers to cleanly cut the sprues without damaging the parts, and with as little remaining plastic as possible left attached to the part itself.

May the Fourth: Shouldn't this have been the ministry of consumer affairs?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, an announcement from the Canadian Federal ministry of transportation:

#Recall All-Terrain Armored Transport the hydraulics could fail in extreme cold causing the #ATAT to fall https://t.co/5fTSLgdPJt #MayThe4th pic.twitter.com/axE5xmIprF

— Transport Canada (@Transport_gc) May 4, 2017

 

Between this and the Stats Canada announcement regarding Wolverine's military records, it just make me feel that we have the right people running things in this country. Let's face it, it's difficult to imagine that anyone in the Trump administration* is making Star Wars jokes today.

- Sid

* A little research reveals that President Trump has (apparently un-ironically) signed an executive order on religious freedom today as part of the National Day of Prayer in the United States. Hopefully that includes the countless thousands of Americans who identify as being members of the Jedi religion - countless because the US Census refuses to recognize them. Given that Jedi is the seventh largest religious group in England with over 175,000 members, and there are about ten thousand Canadians who list themselves as followers, there must be a few Americans who would like to have their faith in the Force recognized. After all, what better day to make that change, Donald?

Sightings.

 

Time is a structure relative to ourselves. Time is the space made by our lives, where we stand together forever. Time and relative dimension in space. It means life. 

The Doctor: The Pilot, Doctor Who

As I was sitting at my work computer first thing this morning, drinking a cup of tea and reading e-mails, our front desk person Kate came running into my office, all but dancing with excitement.

"I saw someone unloading a blue police box from a van this morning on my way to work!  It was just down the street!  What if it was for Doctor Who?!  You have to go look!!!"

"But Kate, I have a fresh cup of tea..."

She pointed a trembling finger at the TARDIS outline on my Doctor Who mug and exclaimed, "It was just like that!  Your tea doesn't matter!!!!  QUICK!  GO!  Take your phone for pictures!!"

To the best of my knowledge, shooting for the 2017 season of Doctor Who has long since finished.  The long overdue tenth season* started two weeks ago, and as such I don't think that the production team would be back in Vancouver - that is, if they ever were, I have yet to find any solid evidence that the BBC actually did do any shooting here (and some evidence that they did not).

Regardless, I would no more say no to Kate at this point than I would kick a puppy, so I quickly shrugged into my jacket and headed for the door.  Fortuitously, my manager is out of the office, so there's no need to explain my precipitous departure.**

Regarding the new season, we're only a couple of episodes in, but so far the chemistry between the Doctor and his new companion Bill Potts has been wonderful. I have to give full credit to Pearl Mackie for her portrayal of Bill, and to the writers for the creation of such a marvelous character - it's gratifying to see good writing and good acting combine to become more than the sum of their parts. Mackie's excitement and energy take over the screen, and it's a credit to Peter Capaldi's strength as an actor that he is able to balance out such a strong performance with his more deliberate style.

Bill Potts is clever and curious, but it's also clear that life has not been kind to her. I hope that the writers continue to have the Doctor respond to Bill based on the very human tragedy of her life, as when he offers to tutor her in the physics course that he's teaching, which she's been sneaking into on her spare time from her dead-end job in the school's cafeteria kitchen, or when he surreptitiously visits her past to take pictures of her almost forgotten birth mother and then hide them in her closet.

There's a very significant exchange at the end of their first episode together where the Doctor is preparing to wipe her memories of recent events to protect his anonymity, and Bill bitterly begs to be allowed to remember for just one day, or "just for tonight. Just one night! Let me have some good dreams for once." It's a poignant moment that reveals quite a different aspect of Bill's personality, and it bodes well for upcoming episodes. 

But what of Kate's police box sighting?  Sadly, I found no evidence of a Type 40 TARDIS in spite of doing quite a comprehensive search of the nearby neighbourhood.

But she must have seen something.  Perhaps a rogue port-a-potty?  Or private ownership is always a possibility, people do build TARDISes.  Ultimately, we'll never know.  I'd like to pretend that it was actually Bill and the Doctor, touching down for a moment to grab breakfast at Deacon's Corner before heading back out into the timestream, just as a change from all those English greasy spoons.

- Sid

* It's really the 11th season, although it's been 12 years since they restarted the series in 2005, and Capaldi is the 12th Doctor, but there have actually been 13 Doctors, 14 if you count the two 1960s Doctor Who movies that featured Peter Cushing, although generally those films aren't considered to be canon, so really just the 13, except for the Shalka Doctor who was voiced by Richard Grant in 2003, and Rowan Atkinson, who did a completely non-canon 1999 Red Nose comedy special as the Doctor, along with Richard Grant again, come to think of it, and Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent, not to mention Joanna Lumley as the first actual female Doctor ...you know, never mind, it's not important.

** And even if he had been here, I'm certain that anyone as fundamentally decent, understanding, intelligent and yes, as handsome as he is would never stand in the way of something like this. ( I'm reasonably confident that my manager has never once looked at my blog and never will, but better safe than sorry.)

"Now that I'm in love with a geek."

As I was leaving work one day last week, I bumped into Steven, the boyfriend of our admin manager, Wendy.*  Steven is a talented artist who has been involved in the production of several major animated series such as The Avengers, as well as writing and drawing several independent one-off comic books and developing other personal creative projects.  In addition, he's an ardent comic book fan, and as such our conversations tend to turn in that direction.

We chatted for a few minutes until Wendy came downstairs, and then I walked along with them on my way to the bus.

As part of the conversation, I commented to Steven, "I've been waiting to say this to someone who would know what I was talking about - my god, Bernie Wrightson died!"

Steven replied, "Yeah!  I didn't even know that he was sick until I heard that he was dead, but apparently he's had brain cancer for quite a while."

At this point, Wendy piped up with, “Wrightson defined the look of the modern zombie, didn’t he?” ** 

I'm reasonably certain that until she met Steven, Wendy would have never heard of illustrator and comic book artist Bernie Wrightson, let alone be able to cite his contributions to the aesthetic of the undead.  It touched me a bit to think that, as part of their relationship, she'd learned and retained this bit of arcane trivia regarding Steven's interests.

 I couldn't help but think of my wonderful girlfriend Karli, who bought us tickets to Science World for our first date, and who has in our two short years together happily joined me in visiting giant robots in Japan and Star Trek exhibitions in Seattle, texted me Star Wars jokes, stood in a Borg regeneration alcove, taken me to Game of Thrones improv, listened to astronauts sing, slept in haunted houses, watched episodes of Doctor Who with me, purchased me a 75th anniversary edition of The Hobbit and a Halo UNSC M6 sidearm, helped me relive my childhood, and even contributed to this blog.

So, on behalf of geeks everywhere, I'd like to express our gratitude to all of the significant others like Wendy and Karli who have endured, enabled and embraced the fandom of their partner. Thank you so very VERY much - it makes us feel loved.  For a lot of us, that hasn't always been the case.

- Sid

 

* Wendy is a fine person who has an unfortunate habit of hiring people with no knowledge of Star Trek.

** If any Walking Dead fans out there were wondering why the final episode of this season was dedicated to Bernie Wrightson, now you know.

Kaedama!

What does the well-dressed geek wear for ramen?  That's right, a Mighty Atom/Astro Boy t-shirt from the Nakamise-dōri market in Tokyo.*

- Sid

P.S.  Shout-out to Ramen Danbo at Fourth and Burrard!

* Hopefully my sister Dorothy will not comment that it isn't really Japanese enough.

Marching for Science.

 

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

Carl Sagan

Distrust and violence against science is one of the standard post-apocalyptic themes in science fiction: civilization collapses, due to either a pandemic, thermonuclear warfare, drastic climate change, or d) all of the above, and the remnants of humanity turns their anger on the scientific community for either causing the catastrophe or failing to stop it.

The current situation is an odd reversal of this plot.  Rather than an angry mob venting its rage upon scientists after the world has fallen apart, instead there has been a sort of general denial of the validity of science as it attempts to warn the world of potential future disasters.

For the most part, this seems to be an American issue - I don't think of science denial as being as strong in any other part of the world.  However, the degree to which anti-science has become prevalent in the USA certainly makes up for any shortfall elsewhere on the planet.

But what is science?  It's more a question of what science does rather than what it is.  The scientific method allows us to develop an understanding of the nature of the universe, from the smallest particle to the ends of the cosmos, with a basis in fact rather than belief.  Experimentation proves or disproves theories:  every experiment advances our knowledge of how things work, and that knowledge allows us to advance as a species.

And yet, somehow this crucial foundation of our society has fallen into disrepute - the Trump government has slashed funding to the sciences, climate change denial is widespread, anti-vaccination exemptions have become commonplace, and apparently there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark.*

The March for Science is a celebration of science.  It's not only about scientists and politicians; it is about the very real role that science plays in each of our lives and the need to respect and encourage research that gives us insight into the world.  

This coming Saturday, a total of 517 Science Marches in support of science are taking place in 54 different countries all around the world, including one here in Vancouver.  (For complete information about the March for Science Vancouver, visit the event's Facebook page.)  It's gratifying to see such a widespread display of support for science and scientific research - but more than a little sad that it's necessary to call for such a display in the first place.

- Sid the Science Kid

* Adolescent dinosaurs, so that they wouldn't take up too much space and crowd out the other animals. No, seriously.

"Only he didn't use 'frikken'."

I've been a lot of things: starship captain, Gundam pilot, Time Lord, Borg drone, ruler of Westeros - and now, one more...welcome to the frikken Guardians of the Galaxy.

- Sid

Which everyone knows is actually in Toronto.

I was surprised and a bit excited to discover that the centre of the universe is apparently located in Saanich on Vancouver Island. Having persuaded Karli to do a U-turn to investigate, I was then more than a little disturbed to find out that it was closed.

- Sid

P.S. I was going to just stop there and leave this as one of those mystery postings, but in this case, the story behind this sign actually deserves a little more attention.  

The Centre of the Universe is - or more accurately was - the educational facility of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, located on Observatory Hill in Saanich.  Sadly, the Centre was closed in 2013 following budget cuts, but the National Research Council has subsequently licensed the Centre of the Universe building to the Friends of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, a local Saanich non-profit group that wants to restore public programming at the Observatory, as well as re-open the Centre of the Universe.  For more information, visit the FDAO website or take a look at their Facebook page.

Much thanks to Kevin Farris at the National Research Council for the information on the FDAO!

Rocket Man.*

"I really think this concert will be out of this world."

Victoria Symphony Orchestra conductor Guiseppe Pietraroia

"And then I left earth.  I like saying that.  Because I can."

Colonel Chris Hadfield

Saturday night in Victoria, and we're ready for our night out at the Symphony with ex-astronaut Chris Hadfield.  After a quick but delicious dinner at Foo Asian Street Food, Karli and I cross the street and pick up our Rocket Man tickets from the box office at the Royal Theatre.

The attendees waiting in the lobby represent the full range of clothing options, from suit and tie to jeans and a Mouseketeer t-shirt.  The audience also includes one person actually dressed as Colonel Hadfield, complete with pompadour, fake moustache and NASA jacket - a sort of hipster Hadfield, if you will.**  My lovely companion is attractively (and thematically) clad in nebula-patterned pants and spiral galaxy earrings - I've broken under the pressure of conformity and opted for blazer and jeans.

Our seats are a bit back from the stage - the consequence of waiting a little too long to decide to make the trip to Vancouver Island to see Commander Hadfield.  Regardless, they're centrally placed and we have a good field of view, so no real reason to complain.

The programme for the evening is very much in the line that I expected:  movie themes mixed with selections from Hadfield's album, Space Sessions: Songs from a Tin Can. The orchestra opens with Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra - better known to most people as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, followed by the Mars movement from Gustav Holst's Planets suite, after which the guest of honour steps onto the stage.

Hadfield is no Beyoncé, but he's an experienced performer and story-teller, and his style lends itself well to his folk-influenced songs. And, to be honest, I didn't expect his show to be quite so funny.  In fact, I find myself wondering if he had hired professional help to massage his delivery, but finally decided that it was just natural talent coming to the forefront.  After all, his guitar has a Space Invaders strap, which indicates to me that he's not taking things too seriously.

His description of the process behind his recording of David Bowie's Space Oddity and the video which he shot on the International Space Station is hilarious - and, frankly, quite a bit different than the way it's described in his book.

 

There is also a very effective bit of business where the conductor announces that the orchestra will be performing excerpts from the various Star Trek themes next, and expresses his regrets that there is no one there who could deliver the iconic opening voiceover...perhaps someone who had commanded in space...maybe a Canadian...at which point Hadfield pops out from stage left and waves his hand to get the conductor's attention. 

His reading of "Space...the final frontier..." is impressive, and afterwards he talks about his affection for the series, commenting that "...Star Trek gave me permission to imagine things that didn't exist."  I hope that the producers of the new Star Trek series were paying attention, having Chris Hadfield make an appearance would be a great idea, as well as continuing the tradition of astronaut cameos in the franchise.

However, there are serious moments to the show. During an unexpected question period, Hadfield delivers an impassioned speech regarding the evolution of space exploration, from its roots as an expression of political power to the collaborative process that led to the International Space Station: 

"It took a long time to evolve past planting a flag, into what we should be doing as a species...the greatest legacy of space travel is that it brought us together...the ISS is irrevocable evidence of what we can do when we do things right."

The show ends with an unscripted moment.  An audience member interrupts Hadfield's closing speech by shouting that there is a five year old astronaut there with a question.  The commander acknowledges that a five year old astronaut deserves to be answered, and asks what the young explorer's question is.

A tremulous voice replies, "Will you sign my book?" ***

A  wave of laughter sweeps over the audience, and the boy is escorted backstage and then brought out onto the stage, where Hadfield signs his book, after wryly observing, "Step one of becoming an astronaut - having the guts."

If you'd like to see Commander Hadfield yourself - and I strongly recommend that you do - look for him in his upcoming Canada 150 tour in May.  He'll also be returning to Vancouver to perform with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on October 6th and 7th of this year.  Look for us there - space pants may well make a followup appearance.

- Sid

* It's taken over ten years, but I knew I would eventually use this as the title to a blog posting.

** Credit where credit is due - the term "hipster Hadfield" was contributed by Karli Thomas.

*** Hadfield is somewhat of a Renaissance man. In addition to his autobiographical An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth and You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes, his collected photos of Earth from the ISS, Hadfield has also published a children's book, The Darkest Dark.