DEFCON 17

Depart Black Hat, Arrive At Riv

We arrived at the Riviera with our usual huge compliment of gear. This is just the first carload consisting of just Babak's and Dasiy's and my stuff. So many other TOOOL people drove into town with trucks and cars packed full.

The hotel staff were more than happy to accommodate us, as always. It's a shame... so many people at the Riviera are great but their goddamn desk staff and management are fucking bastards.

More Equipment & Supplies

At the local IDN distributor. Sometimes we find even old-school brands that have surprising new products.

Look at the money we drop on equipment all for you, people!

Electronic equipment. When we get a bigger budget we'll fuck around with even more of this gear, too.

Interchangeable cores for the win. Put them in an Abus padlock and you have some serious security.

07:00 is an early time to roll out, but it's worth it.

Getting ready on the firing line. Sereyna got to introduce Doodle to all sorts of new hardware.

The new M1A. It shoots amazing with the iron sights.

Watermelon pureé in 3... 2... 1...

Marksmanship contest... 5 rounds in 30 seconds through a vintage .22 bolt-action Remington.

Top winner... Nuclear Steve.

2nd place... Sereyna. They both won Black Talon range bags.

Merlin was indispensable in helping me with planning, gear, and being a place where i could ship stuff like the shirts, ammo, and loads of other equipment.

Merciless Mike ran the super-long-distance marksmanship challenge... they may have been working at 500 or even 800 yards by the time they wrapped up that morning.

Sadly, i didn't get to run the Titanium Chef Challenge this summer (scheduling was just too rough with the Shoot, DC101, etc) so all the teams were rather happy to just relax and hang out for fun this time. Here we see team Smoke, who along with the others still showed up and cooked, but in an unofficial capacity. Good times all around.

Team Sockwell. icemon and drolley... energetic, adorable, and able to recover in the face of various degrees of fail.

Their device made impressive amounts of fog as it cooled... but line freeze wound up hitting them hard.

Team Ad-Hoc sets up.

Great artwork on their contraption.

The rules this year didn't allow any significant "reservoir" systems... but Ad-Hoc got around that with their "blast beer" system. Check out the video online of the day's events for a more in-depth overview of their work and the other teams, too.

Frosty and tasty. Win.