Against my better judgment: The Computer
Here’s something I could actually be considered to be qualified for: computer hardware. Between ruining the family Vista PC and getting a minor in the field of IT, I’ve become quite the pedantic over these machines. While home consoles like the PlayStation’s and the occasional handheld Nintendo’s will forever have a place in this house, I have been resting on the laurels of PC gaming for about 10 years at this point and I frankly don’t see myself parting ways with it regardless of how bad the technology sector gets. Sorry about the eventual hair loss I will experience further down the line due to this commitment.
Towards the end of 2024 the first PC I’ve owned that can actually be considered a gaming device was showing signs of hardware failure, and given that we’ve had moved to the next platform of chipsets (AMD’s AM5 and Intel’s Arrow Lake) it would make more sense to start with a fresh build instead of trying to Frankenstein it. Fortunately, I had the intuition to grab a MSI laptop that was on clearance in my Walmart to serve as a temporary replacement until all the pieces for my new project fell into place. Unfortunately, everything else over the last two years happened.
The hallucination machine
You’re probably very familiar with the current situation with the US tech market. After all, I can’t stop bitching about it over social media whenever the news rears its ugly head. “Artificial intelligence” (or, machine-learning algorithms coded to do something else than just recommend you bad YouTube videos) has become the hot new thing that is being pushed to every single part of your daily lives that uses a PCB. It is still sub-optimal versus real labor, everyone constantly lies about it, and it was responsible for causing a mass shooting in Canada. But also, video games can’t get enough of the shit as publishers see it as the convenient solution to its concurrent job market crisis by attempting to replicate video games that now have budgets well into the multi-millions of dollars.
However, as an eerily reflection of cryptocurrency’s previous impact, video games and the AI boom have a very asynchronous relationship as the latter requires high-end computer engineering which is normally reserved for the former. LLC’s who were looking to break into AI presented a very big paycheck to parts manufacturers for years worth of product stock, and those manufacturers gladly took it. Thus, seemingly overnight, every major DRAM producer including Samsung and Micron Technology (previously Crucial) had abandoned the consumer market, and prices for computer parts gaming or otherwise had responded with what I can only translate as the guttural screams of the damned.
Here is the big takeaway of this post before you continue reading: do not buy a gaming PC right now. Do not loan a pre-built machine; those terms are explicitly made to go against your budget. Do not consider “buy now, pay later” plans. Hell, exercise caution when buying simply a video game console or even a smartphone, as parts shortages (as well as Washington D.C.’s ongoing tour of incompetency) have also caused these things to go up a whole tax bracket. Go buy like a Chromebook or something and just post Letterboxd reviews for the time being.
But as the saying goes: do as I say, not as I do.
The real PC simulator
As much as the laptop had saved my sanity after the old PC died, it couldn’t last forever as I hate working on such a smaller device (I didn’t like writing for this blog on it so that’s why new posts are taking forever) and it runs uncomfortably hot even with a fan strapped to its bottom all day. So, after a few months of scouting parts, and having to deal with an awkward return at Walmart because the third party seller shipped the incorrect CPU specs, I have a bunch of overpriced computer parts sitting in my room, a precision screwdriver kit, & a large Mountain Dew Baja Blast from Taco Bell.
Rearranging a computer’s guts will seem intimidating to a lot of people, but building a PC is not very hard at all besides being time consuming. You’re not dealing with Linux where any solutions online are either outdated by several years or is just the person telling you to go use their distro instead. It really is a matter of just plugging it into where it’s supposed to go. Everything has a weird acronym for it, but at the end of the day it’s still a name you can associate something with and thus quite literally put two and two together. All the parts involving calculus were already done for you back in some poor engineer’s lab… wait, you thought I was talking about sex?
The only stupid shit you have to worry about is cooling. CPU’s run very hot when under duress and tend to die quicker as a result, so there are steps needed to be taken to minimize heat such as understanding the airflow between your case’s fans. One of the fancy new things I’ve never really handled before was all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooling, which is basically a fan attached to a bunch of other fans that are pumping cool air into your CPU through a sealed liquid formula. Very cool in concept, but very annoying to map out case clearance with your other parts when you have two giant cables with “liquid” in air quotes running through it!
The hardest part of building a PC is the software end when you have everything put together and now you need to turn it on and hope you end up in the BIOS. The BIOS is the actual intimidating part of configuring a PC because most motherboard manufacturers are jackasses and turning on the nearest Pro Gamer setting you find is probably going to unnecessarily overclock your parts. Just turn on XMP to unlock your RAM speed (this is “factory overclocking” and should never damage gaming-grade RAM sticks unless they were built poorly) and flash your OS.
Worse than fifteen Windows 11’s
This is the part where I yell about Windows 11.
Among AI hallucinations, fears of semi-conductor shortages, and the emerging American oligarchy, we have Windows 11 which is like Windows 8 except it was kind enough to give you the Start button back in exchange for your fucking patience. I have tolerated Windows for years because I’m not bourgeoisie enough to pay for an Apple product and up until these days there were no practical use cases for Linux, but oh my god talk about phoning it the fuck in because you’re too busy helping Israel figure out where they can do the most collateral damage with their carpet bombs.
Win11 has had a pretty rough run through the consumer market so far with poorly implemented cumulative updates which can do anything from messing with BIOS settings because they weren’t actually expecting you to know how to enter it, to bricking your entire operating system because their living calculator couldn’t do the one job it’s supposedly made to do. Windows Defender was a miracle antivirus software on Win10 that made Norton and McAfee look like adware but here it’s more like a parole officer with how you can’t download shit because Microsoft couldn’t care less what an ASI file extension is. Window’s patented bloat has reached a new height where Win11 has goddamn system requirements now to even run because kneecapping the surplus on memory storage wasn’t enough of a blow to recreational computing. If you gave a Linux anon the last laugh in an online argument, you’ve made a bad operating system.
I pirated my Win11 install, and while I’m probably not allowed to help you in that same journey I will say it is one of the easiest things you could possibly pirate online because I am not the only one who is fed up with Window’s iron grip in home computing. Fuck you Microsoft. Free Palestine.
Loving something that can’t love you back
It’s a miserable time to be a computer nerd. “Vibecoding” has hit the software scene like crack did in the ‘90s and now on top of malware that actively hides itself in systems to discreetly steal personal information instead of doing something funny like a fake bluescreen, I now have trust issues with Nexus mods that may be so incompetency coded it ends up damaging my game installs. It’s not like the better idea is go back to exclusively gaming on consoles, as nowadays PlayStation 5’s and Xbox Series what-the-fuck-ever’s are about as much as a mid-grade gaming laptop. I’m not disclosing the total budget on this new PC because quite frankly in five years I don’t think that’s going to even matter anymore. I just hope it lasts as long as the old one did.
I guess the reason why I decided to bite the bullet on building a new PC is that I also don’t want to be a Debbie Downer in such pivotal times. Call it my own form of computer hallucinations but I don’t think pessimism is the correct response to the Everything that is going on. Better things are possible if we take the time to figure out what exactly is wrong so we can decide how we’re going to fix it. It’s just that first part is taking a long while because there are a lot of things wrong right now.
But what about the video games?!
I suppose now that I have a proper workstation again I can start putting more effort into Lozravee. You would be amazed how much productivity you can get out of two monitors at once!
I will try to go back to monthly posts and I will try to crank out reviews of recently played titles. I am still juggling a retail job as a means of survival and I am still vehemently against the idea of monetary donations as I don’t believe the work on this page simply deserves it. Instead of ETA’s on anything I find remotely interesting in the moment I will simply say that new posts will be made when they are made. I think it makes for more lively essays anyway. If you are reading all of this due to some crazy happenstance, then thanks for sticking around.