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Well, DEFCON 26 has come and gone and I made it out alive. This year was my first year attending. At the last second, I decided to create an indie badge, which was a functioning NES Cartridge that was also a Brainf**k interpreter. Through my adventures, I finally got to meet many of my online friends and make new friends along the way. Everyone had a story to tell and wanted to hear my story and the stories of others as well.
Because I decided to join the #badgelife movement this year and get over 100 badges created (hand programming, assembling, soldering in under 10 days time), I had to make sure people who pre-ordered the badges could pick their badges up. The saying I have been using quite a bit was "I'm running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to get badges to people." At the moment of writing this, I only need to ship out badges to 2 people who missed picking up their badge, which I consider pretty good considering I had 45 pre-orders that needed to be redeemed.
The official badges for DEFCON 26 were created by the Tymkrs, who run the local hackerspace that I attend and created the badges for every CypherCon. Just as with the CypherCon 3.0 badges, people were enamored by the official DEFCON badges. I have seen people go from casually trying to connect the badge to their computer to obsessively trying to finish the badge challenge in a matter of a few hours.
Unfortunately, with so much stuff going on, I really didn't have any time to watch any talks except for a sky talk Soldier of Fortran did and the closing ceremony. Next year, I hope to come back and experience more DEFCON has to offer, but I would say this year was definitely exciting and stressful, but in a good way. Now time to relax and recover a bit from ConFlu.