Notes On “Irradiated Notebooks”

Me and Heinlein

These are “The Irradiated Notebooks of Lazarus Long,” and that’s a name that bears some explanation. I habitually name my game characters after characters in Robert Heinlein’s novels, notably those in his “Future History” series of books centering around “Lazarus Long” (multiple aliases applicable, the oldest known continuously living (i.e. subjective time measured objectively) human being of some two thousand years).

As part of the whole process of setting up this section of my website, I rolled an all-new character by this name for Fallout 4, and will be chronicling his adventures through a bunch of screenshot galleries, blog posts, and so forth all collected under the banner of “The Irradiated Notebooks Of Lazarus Long,” a play on the title of the book-within-a-book in Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love.”

(There are long-standing urban legends and rumors, never confirmed, that the idea of the “World’s Oldest Man” was a snarky thought Heinlein had after listening to L. Ron Hubbard bloviate for several hours – that for anyone to have actually done what Hubbard claimed to have, he’d have to be two thousand years old.)

Wassupwitdat?

No, I don’t mean I’m going to role-play and story-tell through it, I don’t really game like that. I use those names because I lack imagination.

I’m going to play through the main storyline of Fallout 4 with Lazarus, catching screenshots and writing about interesting little oddities and easter eggs that I find. The game’s seven years old or something as of the moment I’m starting this; spoiler warnings and walkthroughs would be a waste of time.

That’s one reason I decided to do this new character. I have an existing game, “Dora Brandon (*).” I’ve been picking away at that game for about 6 years. You’ll see some of Dora’s stuff turn up in other parts of the Fallout 4 section here, as I’ve done a ton of work building settlements and so forth with her that are great showpieces for some mods, plus I hate to dump half a decade of casual game time.

Much of this content will be a screenshot parade, and I’ll likely work in some video over time as well, but I doubt I’ll be doing any livestreaming, at least not with my current rig; it doesn’t have the room to stream a high-quality cap of an ongoing game, I’d have to turn all the visuals down to nothing. Also, I’m running out of drive space and don’t want to overload it with video game videos.

I’ll also use ol’ Laz here to explore various aspects of the game and mods I use and so forth, eventually we’ll get him all the way through the main storyline and main DLC storylines and start building big ol’ settlements and managing those, which to me is the most fun part of the game.

At some point I’ll likely do an entirely separate article just on Bethesda‘s game console, which is consistent across two entire game worlds (Fallout and Elder Scrolls) that I know of and has been for over twenty years, give or take a few technological developments.

I’ll probably throw in a little narrative as I post ongoing bundles of screenshots of his progress through the game as well, because in the end I am after all a game nerd and general geek on top of the rest of it, but mostly this is just a fun little project making something useful of my hobbies.

I’m pretty sure there will still be plenty of suck in the world to talk about at my real job, don’t worry.

(* Also a Heinlein character. I tend to roll female about 80% of the time, too – when I do actually “game” rather than using someone’s game software as a manic ADHD playground, I enjoy trying to put myself in the brain of someone not like me and try to understand how they’d handle various things. It’s good mental exercise and helps develop my empathy muscles. A storyline-rich game like Fallout 4 is great for this. In this case, however, our protagonist bears some physical resemblance to his controller…)