{"id":1792,"date":"2013-03-28T21:22:53","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T20:22:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/2013\/03\/28\/choose-your-own-adventure\/"},"modified":"2016-03-08T07:30:30","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T06:30:30","slug":"choose-your-own-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/2013\/03\/28\/choose-your-own-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"Choose Your Own Adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For those not playing video games: Fallout series is located in a post-apocalyptic world, many years after the nuclear war. The last two releases were located in the bombed-down versions of Washington and Las Vegas. This is how the world looks in-game:<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I played Fallout 4: Madrid<\/em> today. In real life.<\/p>\n

It started innocently enough. After visiting the Railway Museum I took the metro towards the local university campus: both because I like visiting universities – they are guaranteed tourist-free – and because it was a potential source of cheap food. Except that when I arrived there, something seemed… odd<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Ciudad Universitaria<\/em> metro station was empty<\/em>. Not empty in the “no passengers” sense – it was ghosttownesque<\/em>. Stores closed, rubbish bins not emptied for days, gates half open and swinging in the wind. Not discouraged, I made my way toward the nearest institute.<\/p>\n

Closed.<\/p>\n

Next one: the same. And so on. At some point I realized there must have been some student vacation – and Spanish do treat vacations seriously. To the point that I walked across the campus for miles and didn’t encounter a single human being.<\/p>\n

I bet you never saw a university campus that<\/em> empty. I was mesmerized.<\/p>\n

In one of the previous posts I mentioned that Spanish navigate by observing other people. Since there was no one there – and hardly any directions – I was free to wander in whatever direction I wanted. My instinct never fails when I set it loose; I crossed a little forest area and soon found myself atop one of the highest hills in town. I wish I could tell you the view was beautiful, but it was what it was – a view of a huge city, stretching to the horizon in almost all directions.<\/p>\n

At the foot of that hill I encountered an old man feeding pigeons. He wanted me to photograph him, but I didn’t manage to get his address so that I could send the prints.<\/p>\n

It was reminiscent of Fallout on so many levels. Without the students, the campus looked haunted – the institutes which used to host so much knowledge were now just old, boarded-up buildings full of desks, blackboards and strange devices. Roads and signs made no sense any more – they used to lead to arbitrary locations, and now all I was interested in was getting from A to B without getting killed by the raiders and drug fiends. Of course, there were no real bandits in my adventure – but at some point I inadvertently crossed the homeless territory. They eyed and ignored me, thankfully, but in my mind I was preparing an escape plan.<\/p>\n

No self-respecting Wastelander would start his adventure without a Pip-Boy. Mine featured a color screen and was made by HTC – and it kept losing coverage just like the original. It also shared the same questionable map quality.<\/p>\n

Upon returning to the more civilized areas I came upon two buildings which could have as well been standing in the Wasteland as-is: Museo de Am\u00e9rica<\/a> and Faro de Moncloa<\/a>. I just wish I could have continued this exploration experiment further, but at that point the second part of my quest – finding food – took over, so I shelled out some bottle caps<\/strike> euros and ate a hearty meal at McDonalds.<\/p>\n

It sucks to be brought back to reality from such a fantastic daydream. I liked the post-apocapolyptic version of Madrid much more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those not playing video games: Fallout series is located in a post-apocalyptic world, many years after the nuclear war. The last two releases were located in the bombed-down versions of Washington and Las Vegas. This is how the world looks in-game: I played Fallout 4: Madrid today. In real life. It started innocently enough. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2205,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions\/2205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosma.pl\/diaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}