lapisnev

Don't squeeze me, I fart

Things that make you go 🤌. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!

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I have always loved the process. I love spending hours on cable management, tracking down hard-to-find amazing old parts, making the perfect little adapter cable for an elegant solution to a problem, looking for deals on stuff...

But to what end? The modern gaming landscape is full of scummy monetization practices that I could go off about on a separate longchost. The parts have gotten wildly more expensive too, GPUs being the most egregious, with new high end parts in excess of a grand whereas a decade ago $400 was A Lot. And everyone around me has nVidia Brain Rot, they either have a 4080 or lament being poor..? (I wish I was exaggerating way more than I am.)

I'm way more excited about working with my 2008 time capsule build and using it to play games over a decade old. It's just new enough that everything is familiar but it's just old enough that going full ham on the period correct aesthetic makes people do a double take. Everything in it is recognizable while still being filled with color and bathed in CCFL light. And the games can be installed, patched, and played fully offline!

But here's the crazy part: the guts were like $300. I paid more for the still-in-production-at-the-time case than the entire system inside of it, and it absolutely rips for the majority of my older game catalog, which still has countless hours of enjoyment left to reap.

So I look again at modern gaming computers and it feels like there's no point. No one cares anymore. This hobby has been very heavily monetized and the entire process has been optimized. You buy a bunch of parts that fully integrate with each other right out of the box and make the really rewarding parts trivial. It's not about what an incredibly neat and clean cable management job you did, you used cable channels built into the case, of course it looks fine! It's about showing off that 4080 you bought at full price.

So why are we doing this?


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in reply to @lapisnev's post:

yeah, well said. we remember when we were kids people were just starting to experiment with water cooling, and at first you couldn't even get a kit for it, you'd have to cast a block to go over the CPU out of resin or something absurd like that, and there was a very good chance it would leak. that's, you know, it was never something we wanted to do but it was clearly a creative undertaking that people were rightly proud of.