Hey redvector, two people are already in line. This could have been us.

Voted this morning. Went to work. Watched everyone freak out about it all day long. Heard from friends elsewhere that jack shit was getting done in their offices as everyone sat on their hands. Heard the theories, the confident, and the nervous.

Headed off to the city for some mouth-kickin' sweat-inducing Chinese with dasubergeek. After dinner we walked to Rockefeller Center, and watched the results come in with thousands of patiently waiting tourists and New Yorkers. When he crept past 270, the crowd exploded. Chanting, cheering, and celebration filled the crowd.

We fought our way past the crowd to get a drink at a nearby bar, where dasubergeek looked up California proposition results and shared them with two fellow Californians. We parted ways, and I headed down into Times Square. Thousands of people filled Star Junction, cheering and chanting and going nuts. A fire truck played "Yes we can" on its horn. Cops hugged each other. People formed conga lines. It was fucking nutty.

Took a lot of pictures and videos, and now I'm on my way home. The PATH station is full of celebrations. In writing this I was asked for a bottle opener and offered a couple of drinks.

Now, to try and not wake up a sleeping jedimentat.

My Pip-Boy 3000 didn't adjust for DST! If Black Isle Studios had done it, clearly it would have.

This day? The day of more sleep? The best day of the year. Better than my birthday, Halloween, New Year's Eve, Christmas, and all the rest.

Last minute costume after getting the Survival Edition of Fallout 3 - Vault-Tec jumpsuit!

Called graye to confirm which number should go on the back. 13, 69, or 101? He insisted I go with 13, which I did.

Discussed the game with the two students working the helpdesk while nabbing a donut. One joked that he'd ask where I was, but it being an open ended game, that wouldn't matter. But despite it being an open ended game, we realized we were all on the same exact side quest, and on the same step of the same side quest.

That being said, it's fun. Expected it to be a bit bigger, but I'm used to the scope of the past two four three. Combat's fun, not at all what I feared. The FPS-ish post-apocalyptic feel has me thinking I'm playing Half-Life 3 more often than Fallout 3, but that's just a mental association with theme and stylization. So far, having only played it for an evening, I dig.

Want to know what graye's dressing up as for Halloween? MTV has the scoop!
Sorry, yeah, I know it's old. But it's MTV, so it's like sorta new and different but not really and I'm just gonna go ahead and shut up now.

I've got a long history as a gamer. Those of you who know me well, know that. Beyond early Pong/Atari/ColecoVision/Commodore memories, it was the Apple ][ that really got me into gaming. And while the submarine simulator that took half an hour to load and the Olympic games with their tinny rendition of the Soviet anthem were fun, it was role playing games that hit me hardest. Eternal Dagger, picked up on the way back from a family trip to upstate NY, really bit me in a major way. Once we got an 8088 IBM compatible PC the SSI "gold box" games wasted away many of my evenings. I still have vivid memories of clearing out certain sections of Phlan (particularly Sokol Keep) while listening to Metallica's …And Justice For All. The Ultima series, when I finally got into them through Ultima III for the NES, would end up becoming a major influence on my development.

But Wasteland was always my favorite.

It was a post-apocalyptic RPG, where you played a squad of desert rangers tasked with bringing order to the chaos and ultimately saving the world. Witty humor, beautifully written jokes and plot points, and vast improvements over the Bard's Tale engine that had already wasted so many of my evenings. Bard's Tale III was a wonderful game that kept me hooked from world to world, but Wasteland kept me hooked and replaying the same world over and over again. What originally hooked me on cybersphere were the Wasteland references.

My first play through was rather rocky. I wandered north into Darwin Village, way out of my league. Then I tried to actually assault the Citadel instead of get around it. Finally, I found challenges appropriate to my level, and ultimately fought through the Las Vegas sewers through a painful war of attrition. When all was said and done, I was proud to have beaten that game. One summer, I played Wasteland over and over and over again, resetting the game world and keeping my characters. I had it down pat, and could cut shortcuts to beat the final area in no time at all. By the time the summer was over, my characters were a group of grizzled veterans who could walk into Vegas and beat the Scorpitron apart with their bare hands.

Years later, I was excited to hear about Fallout, the spiritual successor to Wasteland. Sure, there had been the Wasteland sequel Fountain of Dreams, but we'd all like to forget that one. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 both came out during my initial time at drewuniversity as a student, and I played through the latter in my quadmate's room while he and his girlfriend watched television. From the epic intro, I was hooked. ( War never changes under the cut. ) Beautifully stylized, full of the irreverent Wasteland humor, and open-ended in the way only the best of Ultimas were. Slaughter bad guys across the field as a sniper, sneak in and turn their own guns against them, talk your way past them, go in guns blazing, send your faithful allies in, whatever. You got to explore, come up with solutions to problems that might have been different than your friend also playing the game, and experience consequences for your actions. The endgame movies, telling you what happened to the local area due to what you did, were freakin' awesome.

The two games came out in the late nineties, then we waited. A long time. The dumbed-down tactics came out, which I enjoyed playing just because it was Fallout. We had our moments of hope. After Van Buren died, the population became angry. Moreso because all they had to play was a dumbed-down advertisement-filled console adventure game that seemed an insult to everything Fallout was in their minds. Oh were they pissed. Impossible to placate, probably. We got a teaser, the tenth anniversary passed, and today Fallout 3 is released.

The fanboys won't be pleased. I've already read their rabid angry comments on sites such as NMA. Every time someone complains about hardware issues or DRM or their game crashing, the angry rabble yells a bit more. Even a seemingly loving tribute such as this one is picked apart for its factual errors and the narrator not sounding excited enough. Even if Fallout 3 was released with the ability to fix the economy, peak oil, and climate change? They would still be pissed that some plot element they thought was cool from Van Buren was left out (or included (because they're impossible to please)).

While rabid fanboy graye is probably shirking work to play his copy today, my Amazon exclusive collector's edition doesn't arrive until Halloween. And it's arriving a bit too close to WotLK. But I'll give it a chance, expecting no more than fun, yet secretly hoping for a game that at least tries to follow the theme of the originals. There's a shot that might happen, and Bethesda has proven their ability to do open-ended well. Worst case scenario, I've already played this. And just like watching Episode 1 after seeing the Star Wars Holiday Special, things just don't seem that bad once you've sunk that low. If things are that bad, I might just forgive Molyneux and give Fable 2 a shot.

"Long story short, if it's got a battery and a switch, it must be turned off."

"If your travels plans do not include Newark tonight, this is your last chance to get off."

In a town I've never been to before in my life, thousands of miles from my roots. Dinner with two friends last night, drinks with three more tomorrow night, and meeting yet another friend the following day.

I'm just glad so many guildies live here. Between this and Blizzcon, I'll have met over half a dozen out of the hundreds. Slowly making a dent.

---

If someone gets you with a sticker promoting next year's SIGUCCS, take a shot.
If they say, "if it's your first time here, you don't have to go to every session. If you're returning, please try to go to at least one." Take a shot.
If someone clearly hasn't tested out their presentation's additional components (video, etc), take a shot. If it's the opening or closing speaker, take three.
If people bring up last year's tofu travesty, take a shot.
If someone talks about how cold Edmonton was, take a shot.
If two people try to relate while one's supervising 250 students for a major state school while the other's supervising 6 students for a tiny rural private school, take a shot.
If your Birds Of a Feather session runs over, take a shot.
If someone makes a snarky comment about the operating system in question when the speaker has problems displaying their presentation, take a shot.
If you see someone you've met at at least four different SIGUCCSes, talked to at least a handful of times, and you're still looking at each other's name badges? Take a shot.
If you find someone with the same exact technological/administrative/whatever problem you have, take a shot.
If you're at a presentation and think, "Wow, we did this, I didn't know I could write a paper about it!", take a shot.
If you can sum up a paper in two lines, take a shot.
If you learn far more during the Q&A session than during the presentation, take a shot.
If the presentation title is yet another refence to the conference's theme, take a shot.

Yeah, that's my SIGUCCS drinking game so far.