Super Mutant Swings a Sledgehammer

 

Off to Vault 101

 

Doomsday Coins

 

The Ghoul

Here's the Fallout: Wasteland Warfare version of The Ghoul, played by Walton Goggins in the Fallout television show. For once, I'm completely happy with a face; it's just as gruesome and mottled as Goggins' makeup. 

Signs of the End Times

 

Here are a couple of cobbled-together post-apocalyptic road signs, along with some miniatures for scale. Drybrushing the raised letters really makes the text pop.

Here's what they look like from behind. 

Where Is the Epic Put-the-Fear-of-God-into-Them Climate Change Film?

When nuclear holocaust was humanity's greatest fear, a handful of key films explored what effect a nuclear war might have on civilization. Dramatic pictures such as Threads and The Day After and documentaries like If You Love This Planet painted pictures so unbelievably grim that some people my age still shudder with dismay at the memories. It's hard to say how much films like these pressured the world's peoples into making nuclear arms less acceptable and therefore led to the nuclear arms reductions of the 1990s, but there was at the very least some subconscious impact on the public consciousness. 

The movies I mention above were released in the early 1980s, one of the heights of the Cold War, a time when nuclear war seemed to some not only possible, but perhaps inevitable. 

Why then, I wonder, has there not been a single big-budget, mainstream drama about the end of the world due to climate change? I'm not talking about farcical disaster films, but serious dramas that truly capture the existential threat.  

I suspect that one reason is the different natures of the catastrophes. Nuclear war happens suddenly, with worldwide devastation wrought in mere minutes. Climate change is, in human terms, more of a slow-motion crisis. Plus, it's easy to understand the immediate threat of big bombs; the threat of drought, crop failure, sea level rise, and a rising number of extreme weather events feels less like a disaster and more like something that might happen, sometime after I'm dead, in places far away from me. 

I won't be surprised when someone makes this movie, though; a sprawling epic told across decades, from the days in the mid-20th century when the danger was first recognized to the end of days when the world's societal and economic systems can no longer cope with the increasing rate of change and we collapse together into barbarism. 

I hope whoever it is makes it soon, though, because the general public and world's movers and shakers need the emotional gut punch of a Day After or Threads to push us back on track. It may already be too late, of course, but one can hope otherwise. 

Death Train Doesn't Bomb

Death Train (David Jackson, 1993; also known as Detonator in some territories) is better than I expected. A low-budget thriller made for TV, the story follows a small team of counter-terrorists who must foil the plot of a rogue ex-Soviet general who's made two atomic bombs and wants to blow them up for reasons unknown, putting the bombs on a hijacked train rolling across Europe. Patrick Stewart and Pierce Brosnan have to recapture the bombs before ultimate disaster. 

Stewart and Brosnan are in fine form, and they make a great team. The villain has reasonable motivations (from his point of view). And the planning, action, and tactics are compelling but still realistic. Production values aren’t spectacular, but it almost feels like the low budget forced the creatives to improvise and come up with clever solutions that fit the need. 

For some reason, Patrick Stewart's character has a cast on one arm for at least the first third of the movie. After that it vanishes. At no point is there any explanation for the cast. A strange choice. 

Death Train does feel something like a failed pilot for a TV series in the style of Mission: Impossible, but that’s okay; one feels as though this might have been a pretty good show had it been extended into a series.

Unpainted Sentry Bot

Earlier this afternoon I assembled a Sentry Bot miniature from Fallout: Wasteland Warfare. This model is made of resin, which allows for greater detail than 28mm miniatures made of other materials. Indeed, it's so detailed that I'm a little scared of painting it. 

Before I can paint or even prime it, though, I need to wash the mini in soap and water to get rid of the releasing agent that covered the model so that it could be taken out of its mould. If I don't do that, paint won't stick to the mini. 

Another consideration: the characters in Fallout are all a bit worse for wear, so the models shouldn't look pristine. This means I'll need to figure out how to add weathering, grime, and damage to the minis for a true post-apocalyptic feel. This may be why I've been painting pretty much anything but my Fallout minis. 

 

The New Nuclear Nightmare

Since the mid 1970s, I've experienced a number of recurring nightmares that cycle through time. One of those is my first nuclear nightmare, in which, to sum up briefly, I lead a column of friends and relatives through the forests near Leaf Rapids to a high cliff representing safety from atomic holocaust. I alone reach the summit, and safety, as the bombs go off, and watch in horror as the throng I led is vaporized.

That dream was bad enough, and probably worse, in truth, than the new nuclear nightmare I experienced last night. But this new nightmare still haunts me in its temporal proximity, and I'm just now getting over the physical illness left in its wake.

In the dream, I'm walking east down the Leduc avenue that leads home. Around the time I reach the block where East Elementary sits, a hydrogen bomb goes off behind me, perhaps 20 kilometres away. I turn to watch a gigantic black mushroom cloud rise to the heavens. Then, an instant later, another bomb goes off, this time about 20 kilometres due east, producing a second mushroom cloud of the same horrific magnitude.

I know I don't have time to run for the safety of Mom's house, so instead I dash toward East Elementary, only to be hit by a wave of ash and darkness so black I have to feel my way to the door. Once there, I hammer on it desperately with my fists and Mom opens up, ushering me inside; she'd been volunteering at the school.

I run to the gym to shower, scrubbing away all the fallout, and then I join Mom at a meeting in one of the classrooms. The desks are all full, but with adults scratching notes about survival plans.

A day passes. Pete and Mike are in the school, and I encounter them in a hallway. Stupidly, I ask them if they saw the bombs yesterday; of course they did. I try to check my phone for news, but it's been contaminated by an endless series of popup ads that refuse to go away even if I power off the phone and reboot. Suddenly, we hear rockets flying overhead, and impossible as it seems, we speculate that the two nukes going off here in Alberta must have somehow triggered a global war. I realize that my old high school friend Daryle Tilroe set off the first two bombs as an experiment, and now the world will pay the price. I realize I'll never see Sylvia again, or Sean, or any of my other loved ones.

When I woke up this morning, my head was pounding and I leapt out of bed. Sylvia was already awake.

"Is this the real world?" I asked. "Is this real? I can't believe this is real. Are we alive?"

I went to the bathroom and managed to avoid vomiting, though I was covered in sweat.  It took some time for me to accept this reality over the one I'd just endured.

I went back to bed and passed out, sleeping until noon. I still had a massive headache. Sylvia found a Tylenol for me. I felt hot most of the day. We watched a couple of movies in the late afternoon, and then I passed out again, sleeping until 7:30.

Only now am I starting to feel a little better, and that this might be the real world. I sure hope it is, even with COVID-19. Some disasters are survivable; the one I experienced earlier today wasn't one of them. 

Watch baremetalHW Create a Hot Wheels Mad Max Diorama (Video)

This guy has a lot of talent, imagination, and patience. 

The Ramshackle Shack

I've been rediscovering my love of Lego for a few years now, but only this weekend did I finally break free of instructions to try my hand at building something uniquely my own - at least, for the first time as an adult. I deliberately limited myself to working with two bags of parts, one composed mostly of red and tan bricks, the other mostly of grey and white. I also pledged that I would use each and every piece.

I call it a Ramshackle Shack. Sometime before the fall of civilization, the little building at left was a workshop or perhaps a store for automotive parts. At right, the remains of a playground. Once upon a time, it was a nice neighbourhood, until the bombs came. Note the old engine block left to rust next to the barred and alarmed door.

The main edifice at left has been fortified and boarded up, though the wastrels who have made it their redoubt haven't fixed up everything yet; witness the collapsed roof.

They installed a fence, both decorative and defensive.

The rear gate opens and closes. Note the bin full of junk near the centre of the image; a bit of a cheat, as I used it to store the pieces I couldn't use anywhere else. Now it represents the various odds and ends you might find at a junkyard.

Only the merry-go-round remains of the playground.

A look at the building's west side. 

Fallout 76 Teaser

Looks like Bethesda is skipping Fallout 5 through 75 and jumping straight to Fallout 76! Word in the Wasteland has it this'll be an MMORPG experience taking place just after the first vault opens many long decades after the nuclear war of 2077 destroyed civilization. Whatever the setting or story, I'll be there. 

Tweety Burned

This is the way the world ends -
This is the way the world ends -
This is the way the world ends -
Not with a bang, but a tweet

Into the Wasteland

I finished painting the Fallout board game miniatures I featured here a couple of days ago. You may not see much difference, but I added washes to the Super Mutant on the left and the person in power armour second from the right; the washes help bring out some shadows and highlights. 

I also used art pens to add some fine detail, like shadows on the clothing of the other figures and to shade in the phosphorescent screen of the Pip-Boy the character on the far right is wearing. (The Pip-Boy isn't visible from this angle, but I think it looks pretty cool.) 

The centred figure is a wasteland wanderer; I tried to give her American Indian skin tones, but I'm not sure if I succeeded. The ghoul (second from left) is supposed to be mutated by radiation and slowly decaying, so I added some different, mottled colours to his skin. Maybe you'll see some of these details if you click to embiggen...

I'd say these guys are now ready to go. Trying to improve them further will probably just mess them up, given my limited skill. Back into their Fallout board game box they go! 

Fallout Minis

Works in progress: miniatures for the Fallout board game. I wish there had been a character in a Vault suit; maybe in the inevitable expansion. 

Orb-It

Into the Wastelands

The long sleep ends now
Exit the vault, gun in hand
Into the wastelands

Frantic 4 Fallout 4

Long-time readers will know that I'm a huge fan of the various Fallout computer role playing games. I'm thrilled that soon there will be a brand new Fallout game to play, Fallout 4, set in post-apocalyptic Boston.

In the run-up to the game's release, Bethesda Softworks is releasing amusing promotional videos to welcome players old and new to the whimsical world of Fallout. Here are the first two videos in a series explaining the seven primary attributes of your Fallout character...Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck...or S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

Mad Masterpiece: The Fury of George Miller

Our species' hold on civilization is tenuous. On some level, every human being knows we live on the edge of disaster, but we carry on regardless, for it seems there's little any one person can do to forestall it. The Cold War may be over, but it's still possible that nuclear fire could rain down on our heads, and even if that never happens, there is still climate change, resource depletion, disease. The Fermi Paradox hints that few civilizations last; we may very well be doomed.

And yet we fight. Every day, millions of idealists toil for a better world, sacrificing lives of comfort and ease in order that they may help build a brighter tomorrow. And great artists, meanwhile, remind the rest of us how eagerly we drive, at breakneck speed, toward catastrophe.

George Miller is such an artist. Since 1979, when the first of his apocalyptic Mad Max movies was released, the Australian director has, over the course of four films, created a war-torn landscape of oil-starved, bloodthirsty savages at war with the tattered remnants of civilization. Miller's vision reaches its apex in the magnificent Mad Max: Fury Road.

The plot is simple. Mad Max, a lone road warrior haunted by the deaths of those he loves and his entire fallen civilization, is ambushed by a pack of car-worshipping cultists and turned into a "Blood Bag," a source of fuel for the radiation-diseased maniacs. He is ultimately, though incidentally, rescued by Furiosa, a former disciple of the cult leader, Immortan Joe; her mission now is to rescue a small group of women from Immortan Joe's clutches. A frenetic car chase begins, a long action sequence with only brief but critical pauses, followed by a final confrontation and the hope of not only redemption, but reclamation of what little good is left of the world.

A plot synopsis cannot do justice to Miller's richly textured world. The characters inhabit a landscape blasted to bare sand and rock by nuclear fire, a place where little grows, where pathetic wretches scrabble for poisoned water in dank swamps. Immortan Joe's followers and slaves live in one of the rare oases of relative beauty and wealth; they have access to fresh water and even grow crops. The elites of this damaged society are bleached pale, living "half lives" of slow radiation poisoning, bald, thin, lips chapped; they look like skeletons. They worship the chrome, symbolic of the heavily tricked-out cars they drive, spray-painting their lips silver before going into battle or performing a particularly dangerous stunt; each driver has his own Wheel, which he carries to his vehicle and snaps into place before driving off.

In the shattered, diseased world they inhabit, Immortan Joe and his crew chase the perfection of humans unblemished by radiation poisoning; they jealously hoard the few undiseased women, breeding them in the hopes of raising a generation untouched by mutation. But it rarely happens, and when one henchman's mouthless son is born and dies on the road, he cries out defiantly to the other road warriors:

"I had a brother. I had a baby brother, and he was perfect, and he was beautiful."

How many other screen villains are portrayed with this level of sympathy or understanding? Mad Max and Furiosa and their band of women are unquestionably the heroes of the film, but their struggles are all the more compelling because the villains they face have genuine, heartfelt motivations that anyone could understand. Yes, they're barbaric; yes, they enslave people; yes, they murder. But after the apocalypse, what choice do they have?

There's a brief respite in the long chase sequence. Max, Furiosa and the freed slaves encounter Furiosa's old family, a group of aging, kickass women. Resting by starlight, they watch as a satellite passes overhead. One of the elders points and explains what the satellite was for. I paraphrase:

"Back in the time of plenty, there was no war, there was no hunger. They just relaxed and watched their shows. Everybody had a show."

More than any other scene, this moment illustrates why Fury Road is an important film, because it shows us, in the starkest possible terms, how lucky we are and how much we have to lose. The great tragedy here is how the elder misinterprets or misremembers the past; we do indeed live in a time of plenty, and there should be no war and no hunger. But there is, because we are foolish and wasteful, fearful and selfish, and that's why we stand to lose it all, to stumble blindly into the abyss, into a world very much like the one Miller envisions.

It's delightful that this is a film driven by women. They have agency; they take the initiative, moving the plot forward, making the hard decisions. Mad Max himself is the catalyst for the story, but he exists almost outside it, a temporary sidekick to Furiosa and her valiant crew.

The film is also, it must be said, wildly entertaining. The action sequences are crisp, beautifully executed and edited, with incredibly imaginative setpieces enhanced by cinematography epic in scope and scale. The art direction is spectacular; the vehicles in this film are like characters themselves, particularly the rock-concert-on-wheels, a flamboyant contraption that includes massive stacks of speakers, a full percussion ensemble, and a flamethrowing electric guitar.

Max Mad: Fury Road stands so far above modern action movies that it creates a class of its own - the thinking person's blockbuster, the action message film. Long after this year's crop of "important" Oscar-bait movies is forgotten, Mad Max: Fury Road will withstand the test of time, remembered not only as a genre classic, but a film worthy of critical analysis for decades to come.

I'll be very surprised if this doesn't turn out to be the very best film of the year. It is triumphant. It is sublime. And with every gorgeous frame, it shows us how much beauty there is in the world, and how easily we could lose it all.

Fallout 4 Trailer

The Fallout games are among my favourite diversions, rich in choice, challenge, lore, irony, humour, tragedy, action and worldbuilding. I'm very, very excited about this, and I can't wait to play it.