My endeavours in Las Vegas were successful! I made some new contacts, spent lots of time exploring, and relished the experience, taking a lot of time to wander and see what it's really like, on-strip, off-strip, and yet further hidden away.
I gave my physical security talk to a couple groups of people, and it went over quite well. Didn't get a lot of questions, but I did get a lot of thanks from the lawyerly-looking types. Seeing my expertise be suitably acknowledged feels good, even if it's on a small scale and a couple of decades late.
Still. I don't think I like Vegas.
Somehow, the casinos manage to feel both organized and organic while the general miscellany comes across as hopelessly dissonant and artificial. Further still, the noise and spectacle outside had me feeling like I was at a riot that used to be a house party.
There's no cohesion to anything outside of the casinos when it comes to entertainment, just endless effort through visuals, audio, and advertisement to get attention- whether the attention is positive or not.
Shock value seems to translate quite well to cash value, in Vegas, and I do not like such notions at all. It speaks quite strongly of the educational and ethical deficiency of large numbers.
The street theatre was a mix of astonishingly impressive and poisonously unpleasant. Some of it was truly incredible, but in equal measure there was dreck best discreetly tossed in front of a train. Likewise for the shops and omnipresent souvenirs, from keychains to clothing, it had the feel of a flea market made by dumpster diving and designed by /b with some /pol thrown in. I have a 'novelty' shirt or two- most people do. But a great deal of what I saw there, I cannot imagine EVER being worn. Even seeing it exist was staggering.
And then there were the dark corners. Vegas turns up the lights and the noise so nobody looks too hard at the many broken fragments and castoffs that hover around the edges of the scene.
Yeah. I don't think I like Vegas much at all.
