Friday, November 21, 2014

Battlestation Components (3)

The last components to show you for now. Still waiting on a good SSD sale. I'm not one of those iProduct buy-a-new-one-every-three-months kind of guys. I plan to pilot this battlestation for a while so I'm going to get exactly what I want to put in it. No substitutes.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Battlestation Components (2)

You remember this guy, huh?
Speaking of things that could only store one game, does anyone remember those demo discs that came with issues of PC Gamer magazine? You know, those CDs that had game demos on 'em? The first discs I have (I'll post a pic if I can find where I put the stash) contain at least 10 demos on them. That's 10 different games you can sample! Then over the years you can see the number of games per disc shrink as the game files get bigger. You can only fit so much data on a damn CD, eh? The latest one I have has only 4 games on it, 5 tops, if I recall. I'm pretty sure they simply stopped issuing demo discs before they ended up with only one game to try out. These days I'm pretty sure you can just download any game demos you wish from their website. But then, do people still play demos even? I sure don't. I just read the reviews from other people who play the game and decide if I'm going to buy the full thing based on the consensus.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Battlestation Construction Project 2014

My dad built all the computers in our house from scratch. It's a side-hobby of his. He'll see a good sale on a part and he'll pick it up and upgrade our designated King Computer. The old part got stowed away. This process repeats itself with different components until he has enough parts set aside to build an entire new(old) computer. The spawning action happens at irregular intervals but over the years the computers have accumulated. As a result there are many, many PC towers just sitting around the house but only three are in use. If you were to look over all of them and examine their components you'd find an amateur history of PC technology as you went around the house. There's a perceptible gradient of obsolescence on display. The King Computer has the best stuff and everything else trickles down. The latest upgrade it received was a second monitor for a dual-screen set-up. Meanwhile I have the #2 computer, the chamberlain in this scenario. It's been a stalwart fellow, this one. It runs all games well on at least Medium settings and it isn't obstructively noisy under load. That's been enough for a long time, but not anymore.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Milestone

So it's been about three years since my university days... Let's ruminate on that for a moment. (╯ヮ╰)
If I were inclined to be trite I could throw in some platitudes right now, e.g. "Seems like only yesterday", "Man, time flies", "Feels like so long ago", etc. And those don't all express the same sentiments either. Viewed to scale, three years of lifetime isn't long at all. Then again, 3 years is 12% of the total lifetime I've lived so far.