What's that blogger? A new post? The first in almost 4 years? Shit, it sure as shit looks like it. Let's get started.
Today was not a very productive day. I shaved my beard off last night and I'm thoroughly convinced that this is the best I'm going to look probably ever. The beer gut isn't going anywhere, male pattern baldness is in my genes and my only real supermodel trait, having good skin, isn't going to last forever. In fact, although I don't have anything in my bathroom apart from my soap/shampoo/conditioner/toothpaste set or as I like to call it, "the stuff society expects you to habitually apply to your body if you want to participate", I'm starting to think that pretty soon I'll either have to stop caring that bits of my face aren't where they were 2 years ago or start plastering myself in chemicals. Luckily for me my laziness outweighs my vanity, so I can still stick it to the man (who is undoubtedly behind all these moisturiser commercials) without having to lift a finger.
Anyway, I woke up at 2 p.m. disappointed that it has been nearly a month since I went from being a student to being merely unemployed. Well actually I wasn't disappointed that I'd been freeloading for so long but that I'd failed to get anything at all done apart from planning my Euro trip and getting bronchitis. To get over this disappointment, here's a list of accomplishments that I think I deserve a pat on the back for.
1) I built and maintained my own PC.
2) I graduated.
3) I helped with my brother's wedding.
4) I had a job and quit that job.
As far as lists go, this one isn't very impressive or long but the important part is that I feel better already. (And to think I wrote a whole post condemning lists the last time I published a blog post!) I'm sorry but I have to justify the back-pats from at least one of the things I've listed now by going into detail.
I named the PC I built "Gipsy Danger". If you're a fan on Pacific Rim, you'll understand, but just in case you're not, here's my short review of the movie so you don't think that I have bad taste.
Pacific Rim is a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters. The tone suggests it was for children, meaning the closest competitor to this film is anything off the Transformer movie series. Anything off the Transformer movie series comes across as loud, busy, motivated by the need to sell toys, which of course is what Hasbro wants to do when it funds a Transformers movie. Pacific Rim felt like a movie I'd like to have watched when I was 5. Almost every scene and character felt like it was made by someone who was trying to accomplish something. Although ultimately it's just another Hollywood blockbuster about as shallow as a puddle of rat piss, I liked that it felt as though the director and his team were trying to create something to enjoy rather than something that the director and his team were paid to make. End of review.
Thankfully, my brother felt the same about the movie as I did. We decided to name our PC projects after the two main giant robots because even though our CVs state that we're fairly well educated middle class men in our 20s, we're actually 6-foot tall children who still prefer playing with toys than talking about our country's political situation and what that means for our potential offspring. This is probably because as children we were promised that we could have all the toys we wanted once we were adults and we stuck to that dream with so much adhesion that one of us forgot that to grow up and take responsibilities seriously.
Wait a minute, I was talking about Gipsy Danger to feel good about myself. Let's get back to that. In fact, let's agree on what I'm going to talk about just so I don't get into too many boring details. No, in fact, I'll decide on what to talk about and I'll take your not closing the web page as implied consent to the structure. I began by showing you why I chose the name. Next, I will speak about my history with PCs, how and why the project got started and how it feels to have gotten it done. Finally I will touch on my brother's PC, Striker Eureka.
PCs have always been a big deal for everyone in my family. Up until 2007, the arrangement was that my dad would buy a new PC every couple of years and we'd be given his older one. It was a great arrangement but my brother moved out and I was only good at breaking things and playing games. The first Call of Duty Modern Warfare game had at this time become very popular at school and I had to be competitive enough to enjoy gaming with friends. Up until then, gaming was something I did in isolation. The multiplayer experience made video games feel so much bigger than it did before and I still feel like the best years of gaming are behind us. I don't think that's just me growing out of gaming because I still play more games than I ought to. Anyway, this last PC I had wasn't a beast, but I had learnt enough tricks to make the most out of it until high school ended. Then came the Xbox 360.
The Xbox changed everything about how I played games because Xbox games were
1) cheaper to buy so I had almost every game that was popular
2) dumbed-down so I completed more of them in less time
3) reliable so I didn't have to worry much about whether it would work
As a result, between 2009 and 2012 gaming became less of a passion and more of an addiction. When I moved to Wales for a year, I had to leave the Xbox behind and that was overall a good thing. Instead of shoving down dozens of games a month, I had to choose a handful of games to download before-hand and then buy a handful when I was there because piracy in Malaysia is a very different thing from piracy in the UK despite the empire's foundation in pirate booty.
I learnt to love and obsess over PC games again the way I used to. Company of Heroes, Team Fortress 2 and Hotline Miami suddenly seemed more like pieces of virtual art than pointy-clicky-shooty-software. Upon returning to KL, I found that even playing GTA V on the Xbox had become more like an achievement to unlock than a fulfilling experience even though the game was quite well made. There's something very personal about playing on a PC.
My old PC had been put back into shape by my brother in his spare time and I had busted all my laptops and netbooks so it seemed only natural to try to get back into the swing of things. The only problem was that PCs tend not to age very well, and what was decent in 2007 was stupidly obsolete in 2013. The graphics card had been upgraded in 2011 but it was still freezing, hanging and burning up on a monthly basis. When I moved back to Johor in 2014 I decided that I could try and make PC gaming MY thing again. And why not? Consoles are glorified, closed-PC systems made by Entertainment corporations to control niche markets anyway, and the latest batch of consoles are altogether unimpressive. Both major consoles are probably going to be difficult for pirates to crack, so games are going to be priced ridiculously high, both require some sort of paid or always-online service that will get on my tits when the wifi eventually breaks down.
I started with the parts I had from my old PC that could still be used without much of a performance drop. The casing, the monitor, the 2011 graphics card, the mouse and keyboard, the hard disk and the audio setup. But that left the motherboard, RAM and CPU, or to give them their technical name, "The Bloody Expensive Bits". Thankfully, I was only partially employed and had quite a bit of my last salary left, so there was enough time for research and experimentation. The budget was a real concern, but I knew that if I'd planned it just right, I could get as much bang as a new generation console for a little less buck.
Be warned, the next 2 paragraphs are pretty boring.
First I had to decide between Intel's very impressive 4th Generation Core series and AMD's slightly aged but powerful FX series. Because buying a CPU dictates the kind of motherboard you get stuck to, I had to go with the AMD, but boy did I get one hell of a processor. 6 Cores, running at 3.5GHz that boost up to 4.1GHz when they need to. Not a very elegant piece of tech though. Temperatures would go up to 80 degrees celcius when pushed and overclocking would fail every now and again. I went with a very small motherboard, very old motherboard from Asus. No USB3 on it, but all the other essentials are there and research showed that the performance gains between an expensive motherboard and a cheap one are almost non-existent. After doing some research on RAM it became clear that 8GBs was very safe, so I settled on a single stick of that with the option of doubling up later on.
I stuffed all of that into my old casing and it booted up on my first try. I was mighty proud of myself but after a week the temperatures were REALLY getting to me, so I eventually got a new casing, experimented with fan layouts and speeds and eventually upgraded the graphics card and power supply. Just this month, my dad got a new monitor, so I got his old one which was a very nice upgrade. My brother found an extra 500GB hard disk, so I set up a striped RAID drive with my other hard disk, which means that instead of having a separate C drive and D drive, it treats both drives as a single space, splitting data between the two drives, doubling read/write speeds (theoretically, in practice it's just a few seconds faster). I still need a mousepad because the white surface of my table keeps messing with my optical mouse and there's still a bit to experiment on in terms of the fan layout as it's either too noisy with the 4 120mm fans or too hot with just the one.
That's about all I have to say about Gipsy Danger. It's nice to finally be able to play PC games on maxed out settings and the fact that I hand picked what went in and actually put those things in makes me feel very invested in the whole thing. Admittedly, anyone can build a PC and they may as well run on pixie dust and unicorn farts because I don't know how all of it comes together exactly, but almost no one I know outside of my family has done this, so give me that damned back pat.
Oh yes, and my brother's PC, Striker Eureka, was put together in a much more professional and elegant manner. It's a beautiful machine and I just want to show you pictures of it but that's a bit weird, so just google "Corsair Carbide 500r White" and you'll get an idea of how nice it looks. I like the contrast between our two systems. Mine's a badly put together black AMD system full of tacky LED lights that just about puffs it past the finish line and his is a precise and polished Intel/Nvidia galaxy eating machine. What I like even more is that despite the difference, I'm not at all jealous he's got a shinier toy, I'm proud that we actually built two machines that would have made our 16 year old selves tear in awe. Of course the sky doesn't open up and congratulate you when you fulfil a goal the way we did (in our tiny, materialistic way). Nobody ought to congratulate you upon accomplishing something, it just happens when you take action and you feel happy about it later and that's a lesson that I'm going to ridiculously tie in to this next paragraph.
I had a very unproductive day but I got this post done. I got this post done because instead of writing something I wanted to be congratulated on, I wrote it with the intent completing it.
I have never been very good at writing but there was a time where I would practice writing every day here on blogspot. I do not doubt that if I read through any of my posts here I will be embarrassed, but I know that there are also posts that I'm proud of and that people have enjoyed reading, and if I want to enjoy writing again I have to start by practising how to complete pieces before getting ahead of myself.
There are no resolutions to post daily here, and definitely no apologies for not keeping to old resolutions. What there is, I hope, is a bit of commitment towards something that I think I want to do for the rest of my life, even if I am bad at it. Blogspot's a lot quieter now than it was in 2008 but maybe that's because most bloggers have moved to other sites or like me, have let Facebook, 9gag and Youtube take over what it means to be online. It's sad that I've spent the last few years moving towards consuming as much as I can and contributing only 'likes' to this great thing in the sky we call the internet, but I'm back. Hopefully for good this time.
