Some people were asking about my particular console / gaming setup. Ok, two people asked. But I want to put this up so I can link back to it later.
I haven’t had this setup running since the HD crash a few weeks ago, but when things are working right my gaming environment is thus:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Console Gaming on the PC”
…is a lot of years to be old, or not, depending on who you ask. In any case, it’s how old I turn today.
Thirty seven? How did I get to be thirty seven? I have this vivid memory of standing outside my first-grade classroom, looking at all the other doors I’d never gone through. To my right was a door with a brass “6” affixed to the front. Grade six! I couldn’t imagine. Would I ever get there? It was eons into the future.
The distance between those two points – between grade one and grade six – seems much larger than the distance between right now and the point where I graduated from high school in 1990. It’s not just that things are speeding up, but the rate at which things are accelerating is also increasing. At this rate I’ll be fifty by Wednesday.
Pay this no mind. I have these little Almost Mid Life freakouts every year around my birthday. I’ll straighten out in a few days.
…Assuming I’m spared. You can’t plan too far ahead at my age.
Some more MC Frontalot for your Saturday morning:
T w e n t y S i d e d
Notice: If you emailed me today, please re-send.
Let me just say that while I love Firefox, its email counterpart, Thunderbird, is a constant irritant. I’d change email clients, but…
You see, I have every email sent to me since 1997. (Uh, except for today’s. And a few other one-day gaps from things like HD crashes, computer migrations, and whatnot.) My archives are now just over 6GB. Now, 99.999% of that is stuff I’ll never need, but once a year I have some reason to reach back into the archives that sort of justifies keeping them around. Moving to another email client at this point would be only slightly less difficult than (say) getting divorced and re-married. To a complete stranger.
Anyway, I know there were 5 unread, non-spam emails in there before the thing went kablooey. So if you sent me something today, please re-send. Sorry.
I want to say some nice things about The Escapist. I hope this doesn’t sound too hollow coming from me, since I’m a contributor now. The following is in earnest, although I certainly can’t claim to be disinterested and unbiased. Adjust your perceptions accordingly.
Here goes: The Escapist is a fantastic site.
Over the past decade or so I’ve come to think of gaming magazines (and their website counterparts) as deafening hype machines infected with juvenile thinking and rampant fanboyism. Their process of reviewing a game is:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Escapist”
It was difficult to pry myself away from World of Warcraft. It’s simply impossible for me to play the thing casually. It eventually came down to an all-or-nothing deal, and so I had to shelve the thing so that I could move on to other games. I could have done a ten-part comic series on the game, but there are limits to my self-indulgence. With uncharacteristic restraint, I’m packing a few of the unused ideas into a three part series, and letting the rest go.
This is my extended farewell to the game: Azeroth Travelogue, Part 1.
I’m probably still a couple of weeks from my XBox acquisition, but I wanted to solicit some advice as I contemplate the purchase. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “XBox Advice”
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?