#and it gives a little more insight to barb in particular before the drop.

[vaulttecexec]

the barb side continuation to this theory and how it changes the relationship dynamic for the howard family:

disclaimer: these are all thoughts i've been thinking and in no way have any truth other than me thinking it is. under a cut, again, because while this is an addition to the main theory, i'm still long winded and do not want to clog your dash with my peabrain think train.

I ENCOURAGE READING THE OTHER PART OF THIS FIRST FOR ANY OF THIS TO MAKE SENSE.

so, now that i've dragged you all down my rabbit hole, we have to discuss how much barb potentially did or didn't know, and how all of this ties into the theory of him looking for her too.

this is not going to be an argument of if they truly divorced or not. that isn't the point.

personally, i don't think barb knew any more than the next guy until it was too late to do anything about it, like it was hinted at between moldaver and the pip boy scene. there is very little that came down to her idea, and she seems to be appeasing the suits more than anything. that doesn't mean she didn't know something was fundamentally wrong with what they were doing. it's quite likely that when she found out, there was very little she could do about it or was faced with a bigger issue at hand that needed dealing with. nothing about her character says she would have struggled with indecision. she simply made the choices that were best for their family when they came up.

could bakersfield, vault 12, and the necropolis be why she didn't think bakersfield was a good idea? sure. this one is one of the very few times barb played the villain. she knew something bad was going to happen there, because she knew there were good vaults and bad ones, but the extent of her knowledge still isn't common knowledge. she also broke it to cooper in a way that cooper could digest and would keep him from being angry at anyone but her. that shows her self inflicted guilt, too. she wants him to be mad at her. how she said it says she wants someone to react to what she's saying and ask questions and help her sort it out and potentially get out. it just didn't happen like that.

she never seems to make any important business decision or show any other outward sign of guilt and blame drawing in the show until she says the line (and that shouldn't even count, because she's looking to someone else for approval when she says it). This story isn't told from Barb's point of view, it's told from Cooper's so the skew would come from him seeing her differently. When they argued, you can clearly see he still has this belief she's a good person and would remain so to him.

I don't think knowing made her a bad person or a bad wife or mother. I think we can't keep group dumping that logic of vault tec bad so everyone else involved is too. there were some genuine good people, who thought they were doing the right thing, and they got caught up with the wrong company.

how did it affect the howard's?

first it's shown in her inability to touch him or allow him to touch her in the way she did at the start of the show. by the end of it, she seems almost hesitant to let him even hug her. and she is definitely in another place mentally through it. that is the first indication that she isn't cold and malicious. she's genuinely struggling with what's going on here.

it's also shown in how she immediately sets her shoulders like she's going to war with cooper. you can see her physically prepare before she speaks to him from the hottub scene on. it was subtle, but it was there.

so, if cooper was an experiment, what does that have to do with barb?

VAULT TEC HAS DEFINITELY DONE SOMETHING FOR HIM TO SEPARATE WHAT HE THINKS OF THE COMPANY AND WHAT HE THINKS OF HER.

first of all, if she knew about bakersfield, she was definitely trying to keep them from becoming ghouls. she'd have to know that was a potential for any of them. but, it would have been more than that.

cooper, at some point, would have had to come to terms with the fact that she was still making a good decision by not wanting that fate for them. he also would've had to reconcile his feelings with what she'd said and what he knew of her and about her to get to the point of considering her his family WITH janey.

he would've been receiving first hand exposure to exactly what she was trying to keep them from, and that likely had something to do with the reconciliation he'd done in regards to her. he's also spent a lot of years wandering the wasteland, so if his plan was to just die in the drop, he'd know that was NOT guaranteed either. he'd know that while a little twisted, she really was making the best choice for her moral code in that moment. he'd see people ghoulify naturally. he'd probably find out about cryopreservation and the amount of people saved from it. he'd learn everything they never talked about in all that time.

AND CONSIDER, all that time he spent with his memories if he was a science project.

i think his development to include barb in his hunt was one that was probably harder for him to deal with than the knowledge at least his daughter was safe.

again, this is not a review of their relationship. what that looks like seems way messier than how he got to the point to look for his family and not just his daughter post experimentation.

plus, we do get an idea of how long he'd been topside. it wasn't mentioned that cooper worked with that man's grandfather, he worked with his dad. that was said for a reason. it changes the topside timeline, but it would fit into the grand picture of cooper not being naturally occurring.

also, his clothing hasn't fully disintegrated from exposure? that means something, too.

i got sidetracked, but these are all things that affect the howards and how they came to the point they were by the end of the season

GDI ROCKI, TL;DR. PLEASE:

If Barb knew about good and bad vaults, she likely had an idea of what was going to happen in Bakersfield. I don't think she had the clearance to stop anything, but she could navigate a better future for them by keeping her head down. This would have to all be things Cooper learned after the fact, which likely helped him reconcile some with her. He'd done so enough to consider not just Janey his family, but her as well by the end of it. We also get the idea that he hasn't been gunslinging as far back as the drop happened based on easily overlooked dialogue. There's clues he wasn't.

[aparecium-hq]

Welcome to Aparecium, Wes! You have been accepted for Albus Potter with your planned faceclaim. We love the way you’ve crafted Albus to go against the grain of the rest of his family, and personally I loved your writing sample in particular. We can’t wait to see him around! Check out the new member checklist, and jump right in. 

Character Basics

               Age: 21 years old

               Birthdate: 15 March 2006

               Pronouns: He/Him

               Sexuality: Homosexual, homoromantic

               Blood Status: Halfblood

               Hogwarts House:  Slytherin

               Occupation: Lawclerk for the Wizengamot,

                             apprentice barrister.

               Faceclaim: Chance Perdomo

Any requested changes: Not really?  I took some liberties with the evolution in the Ministry and the apprenticeship for becoming a lawyer.  I figured it would be something of a long process with a lot of work in the guild system rather than going off to law school?  But I’m most interested to know if we need to tweak anything.

Biography:

The middle Potter, the second son of a hero, Albus Potter has lived a certain amount of his life in the public eye.  He’s always been conscious of attention, desiring it less and less as he grew older.  He finds respite in close acquaintances and good friends, small settings and familiar environments.  His family, though sometimes the very people he’s clashing with, are always his first source of solace and comfort.  Whatever tensions they might have, they’re his people.  And woe be told to anyone who crosses the line in his presence.

From a young age, Albus showed a taciturn bent and found himself at his Aunt Hermione’s side with frequency.  Books and stories became his companions as much as his brother.  And sometimes to better effect.  He devoured literature, asked his aunt and parents for lessons and primers, and had a raging row over the fact that other children could go to primary school.  He saw Hogwarts and education as the next great challenge, the next great adventure.  He saw it as where he truly belonged.

How wonderfully cruel that reality can be.

Hogwarts wasn’t the worst thing really.  It was a learning experience to be sure, in more than just the academics.  Sorted into Slytherin and falling into a different vein than his brother and father, he acquired more than a little gossip.  But Albus had been backed into an unfamiliar corner before, so he did what came naturally.  His tongue lashed, far faster than his wand ever could, and he caught trouble with it.  A black eye and a split lip were his reward, but the third year Gryffindor was on the ground and his opinion amongst his housemates was settled: he was a snake, through and through.

He learned quickly, taking in whatever he could from his housemates and classes.  He learned that his reserved nature was a gap people had to cross, that the masks he used out of indifference our out of annoyance with the press were tools at his disposal, he learned that his words were not just barbs, but arrows.  By his third year, he changed tones and temperaments like cloaks, dressing up for some and down for others.  He developed a knack for patterns that spread naturally to arithmancy while his ability to think on his feet endeared him to charms all the more.  They became his best subjects, followed rather quickly by history of magic.  Though that one?  That was a practiced study.  Especially after the Madley Properies came about.

The change of the world while he was at Hogwarts was sudden.  The access to more technology meant access to more information.  Muggle information.  Albus devoured it all, spending hours cross referencing magical history with muggle timelines, building comprehensive understanding of events and their influence on either side of the Statute of Secrecy.  How the pollical actions in the muggle world influenced the economic realities of the magically community, or how a magical malady could seep over into the muggle world and insight chaos because of the tiniest bit of other.  He learned that things were far more interconnected than most people thought.

And he realized how absolutely how absolutely mad changing anything quickly was.

He graduated with respectable marks in his favored disciplines, with his only truly problematic grade coming in Defense.  But he wasn’t looking to join his father in the Aurors.  But he had his eyes on the DMLE.  Eventually.  But first, well he needed information.  His classes were dreadfully sparse on the machinations that drove their society, and that’s what he needed to understand.  He’d never had to fake an interest in his Aunt Hermione’s work, and the right words had him there, running paper and writing briefs and other monotonous work in the danker parts of the Ministy.  But he was there.  That was the important part.  And it paid off, when two years later, the Wizengamot took advantage of his skills and put him to work as a clerk.

Now at twenty-one, Albus has become something of a fixture in the research apparatus of the magical government of England.  His pattern recall and gift for memorization has made him the place where most research inquiries start: ask Potter, he’ll point you where to start.  His analytical mind lends itself to complicated cross application of policy and precedent, and while he doesn’t have the bombastic personality of some clerks or barristers before the high wizarding court, his ability to shift gears and pull references makes him an adept ally in cross examination and questioning.

Sociability:

When he’s not picking at threads in the legal archives or catching up on muggle current events, he tries to still be there for his family and friends.  He tries to keep a social life, between work friends and his large family and the people that give him actual solace in life, he likes to think he keeps a full social calendar.  For Scorpius, his best friend and his roommate, he would literally drop the world to ash if it needed.  And he…tries not to dwell exactly on that why too close.  Somethings don’t withstand scrutiny after all.  He misses the closeness he once had with his siblings, long before Hogwarts and Madley, when things were simpler.  He does boast a large network of acquaintances that he knows only by their handle.  He took to internet culture a bit too well, making friends and associates that he only knows by online handles and pseudonyms.  Some have made the leap to personal acquaintances, especially the collection of muggles that helped him come to grips with his own burgeoning sexuality at Hogwarts, that took him to his first Pride.  He owes them quite a lot, even if they’re kept at arm’s length.

Personality:

Albus still resembles that inquisitive child he was, somewhat quieter and more reserved than his family and always searching for some new bit of information.  He’s lost some of the taciturn qualities however, finding his voice through reasoned arguments and biting wit.  He’s not afraid to speak his mind, but does try to find the path of least offense unless his ultimate goal is to cause offense and put someone on the back foot.  He wears his opinions and language like masks, speaking openly but not always directly.  It’s those that know him best, Scorpius and Rose and his closest family, that see the true Albus.  He’s a stack of books on a rainy Saturday morning, the smell of coffee and old leather in the air.  He’s a passionate debate over dry martinis, the smell of cigarette smoke mingling with gin and the buzz of conversation.  He’s warm cashmere and soft jazz while something bubbles on the stove top.  He’s good friends and late nights, fairy lights low and spirts high and flowing freely.

Appearance:

Much like he appropriated language and history from his housemates, he also picked up on their habits of dress.  Fine robes and well cut wizarding garb are key to his image at the Wizengamot.  But these days, he finds himself draping a cloak over well cut Savile Row suits in greys and blacks with stylishly bright ties in greens or violets.  Waistcoats with patterns shirts and small lapel pins that sing his causes: rainbows, circuits that spark magically, something called an x-wing.  Blazers and jeans with Doc Martens or stylish boots when he slips into muggle London for a drink or a date..  Jeans and hoodies and warm woolen jumpers round out his casual clothes.  He’s looked longingly at some jewelry the muggle university students have, all manner of piercing and decoration of ink on skin, but he’s yet to give into those temptations as they endanger the masks he needs a little too much.

Character Questionnaire (In Character):

What does your character value in a friendship?

Is it cheating to say discretion?  No?  Then that simply must be the answer.  When one grows up with a certain amount of notoriety… a name that is recognizable and splashed across the press of the realm near daily… a friend who knows when to bluff, when to keep things private is worth their weight in gold.  Quite literally.    And there is so much caught up in that word as well.  Discretion.  It’s not just secrecy.  It’s trust.  And with that I believe truly, there must be some level of affection there.  A warmth and familiarity that breed such a level of trust.  There are people for whom I have great affection, and even great trust, but for who I don’t believe are discrete.  It’s that bit extra, that pinch more wit and courage and resolve that make it the better value.

How would a stranger who has just met your character describe them?

Oh Circe, this is such a loaded question.  A stranger?  Well it really depends upon the circumstances you know.  Where are we?  Drinks is very different than a fundraiser than a friendly pick up game of Quidditch.  Though why I made mention of the last, I really haven’t a clue.  But the point remans; where did we meet?  I’d like to think that I leave people at least somewhat assured that I know what I’m talking about, even if that does mean I come off as a bit of an ass.  And as cold as it may sound, so much of this might come down to how I want them to remember me.  It changes the way one approaches a stranger, if they think it’s only for a moment or there’s something more there.  Whatever that more might be.  Well at the very least, it means I try not to burn bridges I’ve only just encountered.

What magical skill or talent is your character most proud of?

Can we consider memory a skill?  A talent?  I’m not sure it’s honed like a blade or conditioned like a muscle.  But I do think I’m very good at it.  Or with it.  Memorizing.  Recalling.  Things just sort of…stick up there.  Referenced and catalogued.  A font of utterly useless information.  But information that can be applied, brought forward when needed to dramatic effect or for some nefarious purpose.  Dreadfully useful, in work and in life.  I don’t forget birthdays.  Though I do sometimes forget to shop for them…so it’s rather an imperfect skill.  Talent.  Part of me, whatever.  

Para Sample

Albus tapped a finger against the stem of his glass slowly, letting the small sound of his nail making contact mark the time.  He’d been watching for the past half hour as patrons moved in and out of the space.  Fresh drinks, greetings, calls to join a group.  It was the happiest of hours and this particular bar was just getting started.

Then again, so was he.

It wasn’t a usual of his, though he found the ambiance quite charming.  Dark wood, shiny brass, and a Botanist martini that was so dry it could be a disaster area.  Start of a good evening.  And it put him on good footing for the chap that he was expecting.  A friend of a friend, a you-should-meet-him sort of person that did…something functionally important in Westminster.  No doubt it would be a topic of some conversation later into the evening.  Best to know enough going in to be interested, but not too much so as to be bored.  Rather like any project, dating was.

Merlin, Scor would chastise him for being so cynical and dry about it all.  He smirked into his glass.

The man that approached a bit before their appointed rendezvous was fit.  Albus raked eyes over the man, taking in the cut of his suit, the fit of his trousers, the twist of his laces.  Cambridge man.  He’d bet money on it.  Eaton too.  He saw a few coy grins flashed at other patrons, a crisp note slipped discreetly to the bartender, a lean up the rail to whisper across the bar.   Albus let his smirk grow as he finished his drink, slipping away to duck into the gents.

He dispelled the subtle notice-me-not once he was in a stall, wafting away the bits that kept him mostly undisturbed.  There was a lot you could see at happy hour after all.  People drinking too quickly, nerves when a joke failed to land, thousand-yard stares into pint glasses.  Frivolity as a mask.  Jocularity as a balm.  He checked his reflection, gave an artful tousle of his hair and straightened his tie, and slipped out with a beatific smile that never met his eyes.

Those?  He liked sharp.

[coin-river-blog]

“Fuck” is the first word uttered in Crypto. It might also be yours after watching John Stalberg Jr’s claustrophobic movie about an anti-money laundering agent caught in a web of deceit, intrigue, and bad beer. Copious cryptocurrency references have no tangible impact on the plot, but serve as a running gag for bitcoiners intent on scrutinizing the movie for the slightest sign of inaccuracy.

Also read: Bitcoiners’ Seastead in Deep Trouble With Thai Government

Beau Knapp Makes Compliance Look Sexy

Just as the shark’s arrival is heralded by that seat-clenching “dun-duuun, dun duuuun” music in Jaws, you’ll have no trouble deducing the bad guys in Crypto. The blast of Russian opera music every time their white van appears saves you from having to think for yourself, which is exactly how we expect our Hollywood movies to be packaged. In Crypto, the music builds the tension rather than the tension building the tension, and the movie’s sins don’t end there. Yet for all its flaws, including a nonsensical plot, Crypto is a fast-paced thriller that simmers nicely before spilling over in a ferocious finale.

Crypto was shot in better times for the cryptocurrency market

AML agent Marti, played by Beau Knapp, is the very personification of the New York Bitlicense. Lines such as “I demand a culture of complete compliance in my department” are prone to make the skin crawl for every bitcoiner watching. Marti gets booted from his big city job for being too good at compliance, whereupon instead of being appointed to the Ripple board, he finds himself exiled upstate to the small town where he was raised.

There, he discovers something has taken root, and it’s not dad’s (Kurt Russell) potatoes. With glamorous art gallery hostesses, sexy assistants, and Russian mobsters skulking about, upstate New York is more NY than NY itself. Upon arriving to find his father’s farm failing, Marti is all set on restructuring loans and bringing in silent partners to save the day. Kurt just wants him to grab a shovel. Metaphors for the gulf between old money and new are all over Crypto.

A Cornucopia of Cryptocurrency References

Five minutes into Crypto and you’ll be praying that goodie two-shoes Marti winds up on the wrong end of a Kalashnikov, such is his toe-curling obsession with doing everything by the book. Marti is so square that when bitcoin bro Earl (Jeremie Harris) who runs the liquor store tells him the beer’s on the house, he drops a 20 on the counter anyway. Naturally, Marti drinks Bud Light. He’s the sort of guy who’d show up at your party and then call the cops cos some people were smoking pot by the pool. Marti mercifully gets some of those square edges rubbed off him as the movie progresses, and it’s hard to find fault with Beau Knapp’s portrayal of the AML agent. In fact it’s hard to find fault with any of the acting in this movie, which is more than can be said for some of the plot points.

Everything has labels in Crypto. It’s like the whole film is an exposition, because the trouble with treating audiences to a movie about cryptocurrency and money laundering is that you have to explain things as you go. Thus we encounter Earl logging in to a cryptocurrency exchange named “Cryptocurrency Market,” in between dropping crypto bro lines such as “Hang on – time is of the essence. I’m getting in on this ICO!” The scene in which Earl explains to a woman how Bitcoin works is a particular highlight.

Early in the movie, Earl shills the hottest new ICO to Marti like it was a brand of potent crystal meth but Marti demurs, presumably because he hasn’t performed compliance checks on the company, and what if they haven’t filed a CTR exemption for those funds? You can tell Crypto was shot in the last throes of the 2018 bull market, incidentally, because XRP is still trading at 60 cents.

Crypto features a BTC logo that looks surprisingly similar to that of Bitcoin.com

Don’t Think – Just Roll With It

It’s not a classic by any means, but there’s plenty to enjoy in Crypto. My nocoiner mate described it as a “really good film” that was “solid” which, if nothing else, suggests that appreciation of the movie doesn’t call for a grounding in cryptocurrency. As Crypto progresses, we learn that Omni bank, which Marti is dutifully investigating, secretly invested $10 million in cryptocurrency in the previous quarter. The significance of this is unclear, but judging by the ominous music, it’s clearly A Bad Thing.

Omni’s dubious looking investment portfolio

“I’m not entirely satisfied with the way the DD was handled,” spits Marti, always a stickler for doing things by the book, even as the Russians begin circling and the body count rising. He’s a fast learner though, to give him credit: at the outset, Marti confesses to have only understood 5% of Earl’s ICO spiel; by the midpoint, he’s effortlessly dropping insights such as “My guess is they’re buying Bitcoin over the counter to avoid market slippage.”

Director John Stalberg Jr. captures the essence of a small town where everyone’s got a secret to hide, and as the movie nears its climax, there’s no denying that whatever the hell is happening, this is hella fun. It would be asking too much for a movie about compliance to end with anything other than an American three-letter agency riding in to save the day; the Russian mobsters never stood a chance against the barbed quills of Hollywood. Whether you read Crypto as an allegory for Bittrex’s struggle to obtain a Bitlicense, or a brainwashing exercise on why money laundering is bad is your call. Despite having very little to do with cryptocurrency, Crypto is compelling fare for bitcoiners. If only real life compliance was this fun.

Have you watched Crypto? If so, what are your thoughts on the movie? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Kai Sedgwick

Kai's been playing with words for a living since 2009 and bought his first bitcoin at $19. It's long gone. He's previously written white papers for blockchain startups and is especially interested in P2P exchanges and DNMs.

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