The following is based off of real events, but elements may be exaggerated or even fictionalized.
Editor’s note: It’s been one week since Valiant Puck returned from his assignment in Las Vegas. This blog was supposed to be published as a live report from DEF CON, but as you will read, things at the notorious hacker conference never go as planned. We attempted contact with him every day since he supposedly returned to Oklahoma, but Puck had fallen off the map completely, not responding to emails, texts, or phone calls. Until we received the following narrative at 3:48am this morning.
We were barreling east on 344, the Beamer howling like a banshee in heat, toward that godforsaken slab of concrete they call Will Rogers World Airport — a name so grandiose it could only be a joke. “International,” they say, as if three ticket agents and a snack bar full of expired sandwiches at $14 a pop qualifies you for global status. But there it was, squatting in the Oklahoma heat like a sunburned toad, named after a dead humorist who sealed his own doom in a plane crash. The punchline? The only other guy in the cockpit — Wiley Post — is who the other local airport is named after. Two men, one crash, two airports. That’s America for you.
Bee slid the car into the departures lane with the grace of a stunt driver on ketamine. I took one last lungful of that thick, swampy Oklahoma air — the kind that clings to your skin like guilt — and yanked my bags from the backseat.
“Try not to get arrested,” she said, smiling in a way that was half-joking, half-not.
“Yeah, see you Monday,” I muttered, telescoping the handle on my carry-on like a man cocking his rifle for war.
Inside, the airport was a mausoleum. Empty. Quiet. The kind of place where time folds in on itself and you start to question whether you ever existed at all. I scanned the QR I received from checking in through the app into the kiosk and printed my boarding pass.
We’d stopped for lunch at some networking mixer, a social meat grinder disguised as a professional event, where I’d downed a tall, blue rum monstrosity with a name like “Island Bliss” or “Tropical Mirage”, I can’t remember. It tasted like regret and sunscreen, but it did the job. Six hours until my flight but my nerves were already shot, and the altitude demons were already circling.
If there’d been another bar between check-in and security, I’d have crawled into it and never come out. But no — straight to the TSA cattle chute, where the agents barked orders like prison guards on a double shift.
“Shoes off. Hoodie in the bin. Pockets empty.”
I locked eyes with the woman at the conveyor belt. She looked like she’d seen some things. I leaned in.
“Listen… there might be some stuff in there that looks… strange.”
Her eyes narrowed. I could see the gears turning. I pulled out my business card like a magician revealing the final trick.
“Just computer parts. LEDs. Circuit boards. I’m in cybersecurity and forensics. The card proves it. I’m on a mission to find the meaning of community, to see if it still exists, or if it has changed into something else.”
I didn’t mention DEF CON. No need to invite suspicion. No need to explain why a “Marketing Director” was hauling enough lock picks, door shims, and blinking circuit boards to make a bomb squad nervous.
She nodded slowly, barely looked at the card, then turned to her colleague. “Joe, this guy’s law enforcement. Let him through.”
Law enforcement? I never said that. But I wasn’t about to correct her. Not when the alternative was a full-body cavity search and a lecture on federal aviation law.
Joe didn’t even blink. He shoved my bin through the machine like it was a sack of potatoes. I was through.
I made a beeline for The Hatch — the only oasis in this desert of despair. A brunch joint with cocktails strong enough to make you forget your own name. I ordered two mules — vodka, blackberry, lavender — and slammed them like a man trying to outrun his own blood pressure.
Then Tango showed up.
Tango hates flying. Thinks it’s an affront to God and gravity. He’d rather be in the woods, chasing Bigfoot and living off pinecones. But here he was, the Xanax kicking in, ready to board a metal tube and defy physics.
I closed my tab and followed him in search of food, something better than the $14 turkey deli meat between generic wheat the grab-and-go’s were offering.
Thirty minutes later I was elbow-deep in a Russian Reuben, a greasy, glorious monstrosity of meat and fermented cabbage, while Tango was shoveling eggs and hollandaise into his mouth like a man trying to outrun a hangover. The Hatch was humming with the low buzz of travelers and the clink of brunch cocktails, when Shins limped in like a wounded war correspondent returning from the front.
He had the look of a man who’d been through hell and brought souvenirs — backpack strapped tight, eyes bloodshot, walking like every step was a betrayal. He’d tweaked something in his back a few days ago, and by all accounts, shouldn’t have been flying. But this was DEF CON. You don’t skip DEF CON unless you’re dead or in federal custody — and even then, there’s a chance you’ll still show up.
Shins is a minor celebrity in this world, one of the O.G. voices of Secure AF, our podcast of real-world threats and cybersecurity gospel. Turns out a lot of people recognize that voice. It echoes through the halls of hackerdom like a war cry, and it usually translates into free drinks, sticker exchanges, and the occasional awkward fan encounter in a casino bathroom.
He dropped into the seat across from us and flagged down the waiter like a man who’d just survived a plane crash. “Jack and Coke,” he said, voice gravelly, like he’d been gargling sandpaper.
Then came the TSA stories — war tales from the front lines of airport security. Apparently, my little business card sleight-of-hand had worked like a charm. Meanwhile, both Tango and Shins had been pulled aside, prodded, questioned, and scanned like radioactive livestock. TSA was especially suspicious of the medical girdle Shins was forced to wear to keep his guts in check.
“Boarding starts in twenty,” Tango muttered.
We stood in unison, a ragtag trio of black-clad misfits, each dragging our gear like sherpas on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The terminal awaited — a sterile tunnel to the neon chaos of Las Vegas, where the real madness was just beginning.
Two hours later, we landed in Vegas like a trio of caffeinated fugitives — eyes bloodshot, nerves frayed, and brains still vibrating from the altitude. The airport was a circus of slot machines and lost souls, a place where dreams came to die and get resurrected in the form of overpriced cocktails and bad decisions before you even hit The Strip.
Outside, the desert heat hit us like a brick wall wrapped in sandpaper. But hey, at least it’s a dry heat. That’s when Johnny pulled up — our chauffeur, our guide, our spiritual liaison to the underbelly of Sin City. Short, stocky, and built like a bulldog in an ill-fitting black suit with greasy black hair slicked back, Johnny had the kind of energy that made you question whether he was real or just a hallucination conjured by jet lag and suppressed anxiety.
“What’s the craziest ride you ever had?” Shins asked as we buckled in.
“One time I did acid with CarrotTop.” he said like a fisherman throwing out a line with a big juicy wad of bait on the end.
Before we could even respond he launched into the story with the kind of wild-eyed conviction that made you believe every word — a tale of psychedelic chaos, prop comedy, and a hot tub full of glow sticks. Meanwhile, his Cadillac Escalade, a black behemoth of chrome and leather, roared to life blasting 90’s nu-metal band Korn like it was the soundtrack to the apocalypse.
“Falling Away From Me” indeed.
We cruised through the Vegas sprawl, music up, and Johnny narrating the city like a man who’d seen too much and lived to tell about it. First stop: the liquor store. Shins limped inside like a man on a mission and emerged with a jug of Jack Daniels and two cases of Modelo like he was stocking up for a siege. I wandered in and bought an almond and coffee-flavored cigar from 1990, a relic of questionable legality, and in a rush, accidentally grabbed a Las Vegas-branded bottle opener, thinking it was a cigar cutter. The clerk didn’t correct me. Nobody corrects you in Vegas.
Back in the Escalade, Johnny handed us each a Heineken like communion wafers. “You boys look thirsty,” he said, grinning like a devil in his bulky black suit.
Then came the dispensary. Only I went in, the others stayed behind, sipping beer and listening to Limp Bizkit like it was a religious experience. I emerged with a pack of infused diamond dust pre-rolls, three little sticks of cosmic enlightenment wrapped in foil and promise that should make any headache induced by the gallons of alcohol go away.
Finally, Johnny dropped us at the Horseshoe Hotel — a towering monument to gambling and regret with uncomfortable furniture in the rooms that force you to want to hang out down on the floor. He handed us his number scrawled on a business card that smelled faintly of motor oil and menthols.
“If things get weird,” he said, “call me.”
Things were already weird. But they were about to get weirder.
We stumbled into the Horseshoe like three wind-burned pilgrims arriving at the gates of some neon temple. The air inside was cool, artificial, and smelled strongly of cheap perfume designed to override the smell of desperation and smoke. Slot machines blinked like dying stars. Somewhere, someone was already losing their mortgage.
At the check-in desk stood our CISO, calm, collected, dressed like a man who’d seen the abyss and decided to file a compliance report about it. He wore a straw fedora with a polo shirt and nodded at us with the quiet authority of someone who knew exactly how many firewalls were burning at that very moment.
Then came our infamous leader, Ven, moving with the precision of a man who’d been awake for 36 hours and still hadn’t missed a beat. He pulled us over to a self-service kiosk to check us in. Tango’s, as well as our CISO’s, keys came right out but something was off with Shin’s and mine. Ven broke into an abrupt walk to the concierge desk to straighten whatever the mess was out, and spent the next several minutes in line.
When it was his turn he stepped forward, only to have the N95-wearing lady behind the desk panic and retreat. She shrieked for him to stand six feet back and he begrudgingly complied.
A few minutes later he delivered our room keys to us like sacred relics… each one a ticket to temporary sanctuary.
Tango and our CISO had already peeled off toward their room, probably to strategize or collapse, hard to say which. Shins and I were bunking together, in a room containing two queen beds and a curtain the color of arterial blood, but not much else. There were paper cups, but no coffee. At least we had something to mix drinks in. We dropped our gear and barely had time to breathe before Shins got the call.
“Ven is downstairs. He wants us to meet him at the bar.”
We descended, finding Ven already posted up at a small round table in the lobby with the kind of posture that said this is not my first whiskey. He ordered us Woodford and Diet Cokes with a lime wedge.
“You boys need to catch up.”
Once the last drop had slid from our glasses, it was high time we began the pilgrimage to find food. It was after 10pm Vegas-time, but past midnight by our internal clocks. The choice was made by proximity… the closest restaurant open was Guy Fieri’s “Flavortown”, advertised to make you feel it’s a culinary fever dream wrapped in flames and frosted tips. We ordered their Trashcan Nachos to start, as well as more whiskey and mounds of BBQ for each of us.
The nachos took forever. I made the comment, a bit loud, that nothing pisses me off more than an appetizer that appears AFTER the entree. Shins remarked how he always “sends that shit back.” The waiter overheard and apologized, eyes darting like he was being watched by the ghost of Guy himself. When the nachos finally arrived, after the entrees, they were glorious. They outshined everything else on the table.
Ven was unimpressed. “For this price, I could’ve bought a gold-dusted steak and my own distillery,” he muttered, stabbing at his meat with the kind of disdain usually reserved for companies that don’t keep even the most basic security hygiene.
Maybe it was the waves of anarchy rising up in me, anticipating what the next few days were promised to bring, or maybe it was the Jolly Roger-like skull of Guy Fieri with the crossed fork and knife emblazoned across the face of the napkin across my lap, but as we wrapped up, I rolled up that thick linen napkin tightly and slipped it into my pants, a souvenir of our descent into high-priced culinary madness.
I was feeling that spirit of community starting to come alive. I was starting to feel like I belonged. We had been to see the mayor of Flavortown, and it felt like he had done one over on us. But at least I had made off with one of his prized towels.
Despite the sticker shock we still left full, slightly drunk, with cartons of leftovers and already wondering what fresh chaos tomorrow would bring.
My internal clock was still tangled in the wreckage of time zones, so I came to at 4 a.m., wide-eyed and cursing my luck with sleep. Sleep has always been a scam, a cruel joke played by biology. I’ve scraped by on 4 to 5 hours a night since adulthood began, and no matter when I crash… midnight, 4 a.m., doesn’t matter… I wake up at 6 like some cursed automaton. Today was no different. The machine was running, whether I liked it or not. I got up, showered, and downed some electrolytes.
Breakfast was a sad, greasy affair, leftovers reheated and devoured like war rations before we ascended to Ven’s suite. And what a suite it was. The genius had once again bent the laws of social engineering to his will, upgrading himself into a two-story palace of excess. A master bedroom with a granite bathtub that looked like it had been ripped from Nero’s private spa. Ven was a magician when it came to hacking the human brain.
“Come in, boys. Time to catch up!” he barked, already pouring Woodford like it was holy water. Two glasses hit our hands before the words had even finishing echoing off the high ceilings. It didn’t matter how savage the night had been or how ungodly the hour—Ven was always ready to chase the next high, the next story, the next glorious challenge.
Tango and our CISO were already in line at the convention center. Three-hour wait, they said. We relayed that we’d wait as well. Right there in the suite—in quiet and comfort, before floating into the eye of the storm.
I nursed the drink like it was medicine, slow, deliberate, and stared into the glowing abyss of my analytics dashboard. Tabs everywhere. Numbers climbing upward like on a stopwatch counting to the millisecond as a car races round the track. I’ve got what the shrinks might call “an additive nature,” a compulsive thirst for refreshing, watching metrics twitch and climb like stock tickers. It’s a sickness, but it’s mine.
Then—bam—a lead. A name I knew. Familiar. A client from another life in my past. The kind of thing that jolts you upright like a gunshot in a quiet room. I was down the rabbit hole in seconds, chasing digital footprints like a bloodhound on amphetamines. Where had they come from? What twisted path had led them to our site, to that form, to me?
I was no longer sipping—I was hunting. That is until a voice called me back to reality, asking if I was ready to go. I packed up and headed over to the kitchen area. Shins and Ven were packing small bottles of a nasty little liquid into every spare space of their bags.
“I got a steal from my dealer on this,” Shins confessed with pride. A hundred bottles. Under two bucks a pop. Madness. He jammed another tiny bottle into his duffel with the precision of a smuggler, while I cradled a boxed set of six recognizing the label. Jeppson’s Malört, the sacred swill of DEF CON. The box was the size of a softball but carried the weight of legend.
Malört. A liquor born in the shadows of Prohibition, masquerading as medicine, flavored with wormwood and regret. The company distilled the stuff under the guise of medicine during Prohibition, and describe the palette of it now as “a type of brännvin flavored with anise or wormwood.” Shins, ever the poet of pain, had once described it on the Secure After Dark Podcast as “tasting like a distilled tuna fish sandwich strained through grave dirt.” And he wasn’t wrong. It was the kind of drink that made your ancestors wince.
I asked if they needed help moving more of the stuff. Of course they did. Soon I was elbow-deep in my canvas rucksack, stuffing bottles into every crevice like a mule preparing to run through customs. DEF CON wasn’t just a convention—it was a ritual. And this was our sacrament.
We peeled out of the hotel just before 11 a.m., half-awake and half-alive, riding the northbound monorail like fugitives on a steel snake. The air was thick with caffeine and residual paranoia. The Las Vegas Convention Center loomed ahead like a concrete temple of chaos.
The walk from Westgate Station was a war zone—construction fencing, concrete barriers, and the kind of half-finished sidewalk detours that make you question the existence of city planning. Something was happening behind the fencing… machines, men, noise… but we didn’t care. The herd moved forward, a mass of DEF CON pilgrims trudging through dust and confusion.
Inside, the building swallowed us whole. Endless hallways stretched like arteries, sterile and humming. We snaked our way into the West Hall, and suddenly…boom… the place exploded into scale. A monstrous lobby, escalators climbing three stories like mechanical vines, and a dvLED screen nearly the size of a football field. Ninety feet tall, nearly two hundred wide, pulsing with DEF CON sigils in radioactive pinks and purples. It was alive. Breathing. Watching.
This wasn’t just a tech conference. It was a cathedral of madness.
DEF CON is not a conference in the usual sense, it’s a controlled detonation of the human psyche. A swirling, chaotic vortex of paranoia, brilliance, caffeine, and code. Imagine a thousand minds wired on Red Bull and alcohol, all converging in the neon belly of Las Vegas to poke holes in the digital fabric of civilization.
The atmosphere? Electric. Unstable. Beautifully deranged.
DEF CON is loud. DEF CON is quiet. DEF CON is a place where you can be surrounded by thousands and still feel like you’re being watched. Because you are. Everyone is watching everyone. Everyone is logging everything. You don’t connect to the Wi-Fi unless you have a death wish. You don’t plug in a USB stick unless you want your soul extracted.
And yet, it’s exhilarating. It’s the edge of the edge. The place where the future is being rewritten by people who refuse to play by the rules.
And I had arrived.
We rolled into registration expecting the usual DEF CON chaos…lines, sweat, confusion…but the place was eerily calm. No wait. No stampede. Just a few goons behind the check-in desk, scanning tickets and handing out badges. We flashed our tickets, got the beep of approval, and were handed our loot bags.
We found a quiet corner, the kind of place where you could breathe without being surveilled, and started rifling through the swag. The usual DEF CON stickers, the first of what will end up being hundreds collected by the end of the week.
There was also a physical guidebook in the style of a graphic novel, a sort of “Field Guide to DEF CON 33”, thick with dystopian art and cryptic info dumps. I flipped to the music section, heart twitching. Months ago, I’d thrown a couple of tracks into the DEF CON soundtrack submission pile, hoping for a free ticket and a sliver of recognition. No reply. No rejection. Just silence.
Every year, DEF CON releases a soundtrack for the conference to raise money, with hundreds of hopefuls sending in tracks. The chosen ones get immortalized on Bandcamp, where DEF CON disciples donate what they can and soundtrack their pilgrimage from talk to talk, village to village. I had been checking the DEF CON Music socials like a man waiting for a verdict. Nothing. No news. Just static.
Shins shrugged. “Yeah, it’s more or less a techno album. Mostly drum and bass, trance music.”
“Well,” I chuckled, “next year I’ll just resubmit the same songs with some extra clappity-boom-boom-tiss high in the mix.”
One last desperate search. I opened Bandcamp, typed “DEF CON 33,” and there it was, freshly dropped that morning. I scrolled through the list of DJs and digital sorcerers until—holy hell—track #32. My band’s name. My track. I was on the damn soundtrack.
I jumped like I’d been hit with a taser. Hollered. Shoved my phone in Shins’ face like it was a winning lottery ticket. “I made it. I’m on the soundtrack!”
Shins grinned, cool as ever. “Wow, really? Good job… you know there’s like 40,000 people here who are going to hear that, right?”
I blinked. The room tilted slightly. It was time for another drink.
The high wore off but I felt like I was still on clouds. We drifted to the side of the video wall like desert rats chasing shade, linking up with a few fellow Okies near the edge of the massive DEF CON lobby. Plans were made.
Ven and I had to run upstairs to check-in at the Social Engineering Community Village. We had entered the Vishing Competition and out of nearly a hundred submissions, made the cut of 15. Tomorrow I would be going into the booth with him to make some calls in front of a live studio audience. But this afternoon we had mandatory onboarding to make sure we were clear on the rules and expectations.
We gave our names, got our swag bags, and headed back downstairs. Along the way, a couple of goons approached to see what we were about.
Ah, the DEF CON goons, those mythical gatekeepers of hacker lore. In the legends, they’re painted as shadowy enforcers, black-clad and stone-faced, like bouncers at a cyberpunk speakeasy. But the truth? The truth is far stranger and far kinder.
These weren’t the cold-blooded sentinels of paranoia I’d been warned about. No, the goons were shockingly human, despite the irony of normal con attendees being referred to as humans, and anyone with a different badge (speakers, vendors, goons, artists) was labeled “inhuman”. But these goons were smiling, helpful, even approachable. They wore radios and bright red morale patches that screamed “GOON”, sure, but they also wore patience. They answered questions without sarcasm. They directed traffic with grace. They didn’t bark orders—they offered guidance.
I handed them one of our infamous “No clicky on phishy” stickers—bright, bold, and dripping with paranoia. Ven handed them an assortment from his own stash bag. They loved it. Laughed like kids at a carnival. Then, like a back-alley dealer of joy, they pulled out a nickel baggie of enamel pins. I reached in and grabbed a Van Gogh self-portrait, the one where he looks like he knows something you don’t. It felt right.
These weren’t enforcers. No jackbooted thugs or silent watchers. These were caretakers of chaos. Guardians of the weird. The kind of people who could defuse a meltdown with a joke, a zip tie, and maybe a sticker shaped like a giant taco with the phrase “Will hack for tacos” emblazoned across it in a fun, scripted font. In a world built on paranoia and protocol, the DEF CON goons were the unexpected balm—living proof that even in the belly of the hacker beast, kindness still had root access.
I felt good. Suspiciously good. Like maybe this whole quest to find community wasn’t just a fever dream created by mixing Modelos with halls of hacker villages. Ven and I parted ways with the goons and descended the escalator buzzing, bonded, and slightly more patched than before.
The next target: The Fontainebleau. Across the street, unimpressive from the outside, just another Vegas monolith, but inside? A fever dream of wealth and architectural ego.
Layered ceilings shimmered with golden strands of light, jellyfish-like and hypnotic. Abstract sculptures loomed like alien relics—eighty-foot golden nuggets dropped by some intergalactic mining crew. The place reeked of money and intention.
We pushed past the maze of overpriced retail shoppes and slot machines humming like electric sirens until we hit the food court, a sampling of different cuisines from lobster rolls, to tacos, to pizza, and burgers… a half-circle orbiting a circular bar, dimly lit and bronzed like a Roman tomb. Everything reflected. Everything gleamed. It was like eating inside a Fabergé egg.
Ven and I made for tacos, Shins peeled off with one of his crew for pizza.
I was walking forward, minding my own business, when suddenly, bam, badge components exploded like shrapnel across the floor. It was mine. Of course it was mine. A screw and an aluminum post had come undone, the only things keeping the colored lenses together, now vanished into the ether. I clutched the pieces like a man holding his own broken identity, frantically digging through my bag for salvation—wire, zip tie, chewing gum, anything. I was MacGyvering in real time, sweating, swearing, trying to reassemble the sacred DEF CON talisman.
I eventually gave up, for now, put the shards in my shoulder bag and joined Ven in the taco line.
We got our food and found a quiet corner, tucked behind fake shrubbery designed to dampen noise and simulate nature in a place that had none. Once the trays were cleared, we hopped the wall like bandits and hit the circular bar. Old-Fashions all around. The kind of drink that makes you feel like you’re in control—even when you’re not.
Shins and his crew joined us at the bar. I hadn’t seen Tango or our CISO all day.
“They’ve spent the entire day in tabletop exercises and policy workshops. Can you believe that? Only they would come to Vegas and immediately dive into compliance and policies.”
I could believe it. If there is such a thing as a “structured anarchist”, Tango might fit that description.
I had two old-fashions, and something called a “Bettie Lemonade” with vodka added as sort of an anti-anxiety medication before heading back to the third floor of the convention center and the SECVC Village.
We walked in through an entrance into a hall we hadn’t seen before. DEF CON’s SOMA FM radio was set on the stage looking longways down the hall. I approached the closest goon and extended my hand.
“Hey man, I just wanted to thank you guys for adding my song to the soundtrack. It was quite a shock.”
As we shook hands, the goon, who’s badge identified him as “ChrisAM” looked down at my own badge and remarked “You’re on the soundtrack? Why don’t you have an artist badge?”
I explained that I hadn’t known I was on the soundtrack until it was released that morning because no one had notified me.
“Well you should talk to djDead. He’s in charge of the music and could get you an artist badge.”
I thanked the goon and turned to head upstairs. Ven had went ahead and I soon joined him in the back of the Social Engineering Community Village.
We stumbled into the mandatory meeting like we owned the place, but wanted to keep anyone else from knowing. The room buzzed with nervous energy — a mix of energy drinks and false confidence topped with the faint scent of panic. This was the Social Engineering Community Vishing Competition, and the rules were about to be laid down like the commandments from behind long tables set upon a two foot tall stage.
Before the formalities, a guy approached us — wide-eyed, grinning, clutching a sticker like it was a backstage pass to the revolution. “Secure AF podcast?” he asked. “You guys are legends.” We traded stickers like contraband, a silent nod to the tribe. It was beautiful.
The judges took the stage, a panel of seasoned operators, half rockstars, half referees… all past winners. The Q&A was a mix of genuine curiosity and tactical probing. “Can we film our entrance?” someone asked. “What if the target volunteers sensitive info?” Another asked if impersonating an AI agent was actually a believable pretext. The judges answered with the kind of calm that only comes from years of watching chaos unfold.
Then came the paperwork. A solemn sheet of legalese reminding us that fear, threats, and unethical tactics were strictly off-limits. No psychological warfare. No emotional terrorism. Just clean, clever manipulation. We signed the papers and turned them in, eager to show our willingness to play by the rules just this once.
Finally, we were ushered into the booth, the purple foam-lined chamber where the magic would happen. It looked like a big soundproofed black box, padded in our company colors, like fate had a branding department. This was the arena. The place where voices would twist reality and targets would unknowingly dance to our tune.
We were ready. Or at least whiskey-soaked enough to fake it.
Later that evening we wound up at a bar called the “Velveteen Rabbit” in the Arts District of Las Vegas. A section of town that reminded me more of the French Quarter in New Orleans and less of Sin City. The Velveteen Rabbit is a fever dream stitched together by hipster alchemists and cocktail sorcerers in the cracked heart of Downtown Las Vegas. A place where velvet couches and vintage lamps conspire to lull you into a false sense of security before the absinthe hits and the walls start breathing. It’s not a bar—it’s a psychedelic rabbit hole disguised as a lounge, tucked away in the Arts District like a secret whispered by Bukowski and painted by Warhol. The drinks? Botanical spells brewed by mixologists who look like they just stepped out of a Kerouac novel. The music hums like a low-grade hallucination, and the clientele ranges from tattooed poets to tech refugees seeking salvation in a glass. You don’t go to Velveteen Rabbit to drink—you go to remember what drinking used to mean before the Strip sold its soul to neon and slot machines.
We ordered two whiskey drinks called “Coked Up Cowboys” that came served with a giant rock that had a generous line of what probably would be described as powdered sugar from end to end with a fake hundred dollar bill rolled up and balanced on the edge. I picked up the bill and took one long snort.
Yep. Powdered sugar indeed.
We got back to the hotel pretty early and I went upstairs to start writing. Shins was who-knows-where partying late. As much as I wanted to stay up and work on this article, yes the one you are reading now, my eyes grew heavy and slumber soon came.
I was in the middle of a fantastic dream where Tango, Shins, and I were roaring down Flamingo in a bright red Chevrolet Impala Convertible. We had just hacked the MGM and made off with millions in cash when there was a knock on the door. Wait… a knock on what door? We were flying down the strip now, heading out towards the desert.
The banging came again and shook me from my sleep. I groggily got up and walked to the door. It was Shins. He was drunk AF but highly alert. You see, alcohol doesn’t shut Shins down. He doesn’t get drowsy like the rest of us. Instead it heightens his focus. It energizes him. And at this hour, 1:36am, he was at peak form.
He bolted past me into the room. The RFID card didn’t work. He’d have shimmed the door but hotel security was walking past. So he had to wake me up to let him in. His eyes scanned the room as if searching for something. He was grinning. He then started on about a party across the street that he might go over to.
“The f––– you are!” I thought. I hadn’t been woken up in the middle of the night for him to leave and not be able to get back in, again.
He hit the shower and I decided to sit back down at the keyboard. After what seemed like an hour, literally an hour, of hearing the water run… Shins emerged from the bathroom.
“Holy hell, I fell asleep!”
“Yeah, I’m not surprised! I was wondering if I should go check on you.”
By the time I turned to face him, I found him face down on his bed, snoring. Night one of DEF CON was officially over.
… Tune in next Wednesday for Part 2 of “Fear of Hacking at DEF CON Vegas.”
When a law enforcement agency (LEA) investigates an incident—whether it’s a suspicious death, a cybercrime, or an allegation involving digital forensics evidence—families, defendants, or legal teams often expect transparency, thoroughness, ...
