I recently wrote that I ordered a power supply from Newegg, and that I paid a little extra for it to arrive early. Unfortunately it hasn’t arrived yet, though I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised. Ever since Newegg was sold off to the Chinese market they just haven’t been the same quality. One of the largest complaints that I read about was paying for fast delivery and still getting it later, late enough that they should of just stuck with the cheap or free shipping. At the same time I also heard other people claim that they’ve gotten their packages on time, sometimes earlier than expected… so it’s more of a gamble if you think about it, which isn’t exactly a great business model to have when your competition offers better shipping service.
I’m pissed to have paid for the additional service and not get my item on time, but at least I’m more privy to how Newegg conducts their business, and will be less likely to use their website anymore. it looks like from now on if I need to order an emergency item I’ll have to depend on Amazon Prime or a really good Ebay seller. I used to use Newegg constantly when ordering parts, now I’ll only use them if they have the cheapest deal and I’m not in any hurry to get it.
Did a little holiday shopping today after getting off work. Just need to pick a few things up online and I should be good. Also paid a few hundred dollars in medical bills, and this was all before noon! Ended up falling into an unintentional coma. Got more video editing done today too. Should have quite a lot of content to release come January. If I have time tomorrow I’ll go through my edits and refine things further, and take notes for additional elements to add to the video… like if any of them call for Cigarette Snake.
Chances are though that I’ll be busy tomorrow if my power supply arrives on time… determine once and for all if it’s a power related issue or a faulty GPU causing my system to die whenever I put the pedal to the metal. Fortunately editing and rendering video game pornography doesn’t cause that to happen.
After further testing it turns out I may either have a problem with my power supply, or graphics card. The power supply is about 7 or 8 years old, though it seems to be running fine. Being this is the oldest piece of hardware in my current setup I’ve taken the liberty of purchasing a newer platinum grade power supply (my current one is bronze grade). It should arrive on Friday… hopefully. If the black screens continue after the fact that tells me it was the graphics card…. and as new as it is I really hope it isn’t the cause of my problems. I’d really hate to RMA the damn thing, though I’ve heard ASUS is better about dealing with RMA’s than MSI. Hopefully it’s just the power supply though, unfortunately I don’t have another system to plug my graphics card into. All the other computers in the house are going to either have an older hardware that won’t support my GPU, or they have power supplies that won’t even turn my card halfway on.
My weekend started out peaceful… I treated myself to an omelette and some toast, made up some green tea and worked on some recent Left 4 Dead footage. Wow… Normally when I edit video footage I have to do a lot of trimming. Like trimming down two and a half hours of Serious Sam footage into two minutes… with our most recent game of Left 4 Dead though? It’s an hour and thirty minutes in length and so far I have about 15 minutes worth of footage with more territory to cover. I believe this could be its own miniseries.
After awhile I finally decided to give myself a break and head into Windows… Just when I thought I made it clear out of Windows Update hell I came across an issue with my microphone. It was recognized by Windows but not a single program acknowledged its existence. After some web searching I found out that if you blanket disable all apps from having access to your mic it’ll completely cut you off (despite that little message on the right telling you that it won’t block the mic from Windows). After fixing that problem I launched Steam and discovered that Shadow Of The Tomb Raider needed an update. Then I changed my mind and settled on Quantum Break instead… that’s when I ran into another problem. After playing for a few minutes my monitors would go black. This happened again at the exact same point in the game. Tomb Raider finished updating and I launched it, same problem. I updated my drivers to the latest ones (because somehow during Windows Update Microsoft oh so kindly installed an older one) and the problem still persists even on the latest beta drivers. I tried Skyrim and that seemed to remain stable, but DOOM 2016 choked just like Quantum Break and Tomb Raider.
That was last night. Today/tonight I ran more diagnostics; turns out it actually wasn’t Windows 10 in this particular case, because upon further testing I could replicate the same issue under Linux. I’ve tried clean installs of Windows and a couple other tricks but merit the same result. The only other thing that’s been done recently is a bios update. I’ll save that for tomorrow, I’ve been bashing my head against this long enough…
I’ll nibble on some clouds and I’ll lay my weary head to rest.
Remember when Lara didn’t complain every other scene or hold your hand during particular moments during the game? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
After this week of holiday slavery, I decided to kick off my weekend by having a bit of playtime instead of tearing back into video production… I think I’ve earned it. I pulled out my controller and continued playing Tomb Raider III under Proton. Running it under Linux out of the box with only cutscenes being a real issue. It actually gives me fewer problems under Linux than under Windows, though there is a way to get it working properly under there too, its just that there’s more work involved.
Tomb Raider III was a hard one for me to obtain when it first came out. I couldn’t find it locally, there was no way for me to obtain it over the internet unless I pirated it, and places like Steam and GOG didn’t exist yet. So my only option for playing the game was to either go over to a friend’s house and watch them play it, or stick in one of my Pizza Hut CD’s into my PS1 and play the demo through to fruition. Technical issues prevented me from investing as much time into it as I have with its predecessors, and now I can at least enjoy the game play aspect until I decide to go under Windows and patch the game to run on a newer version of Direct3D so that I can have proper support for my Steam Controller (and take sweet screenshots).
I’ve left off at level three. I remember with each release of a Tomb Raider game they always added new features and obstacles to keep things interesting. This was the first game to introduce crouching and sprinting, tiny baboons that will slowly rape your ankles, random green crystals that give you health (and save points on the PS1 version), and you can get poisoned by darts and snakes… oh god the fucking snakes. I forgot all about them until tonight, managed to get poisoned a few times and had to backtrack. I was kinda surprised when the baboons turned into little ankle fuckers in level two; I went the entire first level being careful not to shoot any of them, then suddenly they wanted to get intimate with my lower parts, but not those lower parts. :v:
Speaking of legs, mine feel like jello right now… this was a rough week. I came home yesterday and basically read for awhile and inevitably passed out in bed basically until my alarm went off this morning. I never ate yesterday, in fact I still haven’t… well, an actual meal. I’ve just snacked here or there. I just haven’t had much of an appetite for anything since Thanksgiving, and its not like I’m bored of Turkey and the trimmings on the third day… I just can’t put my finger on it.
Work was surprisingly nice today. Everyone got free grande sized drinks from Starbucks (I had their new Praline Latte or whatever), work traffic wasn’t that bad AND we had full staffing for a change. Reminded me of the good times when there were more than just one or two of us at a time dealing with the masses. Now I’m loading up on Turkey before I enter my cocoon this early evening. I want to get a good night’s sleep, and I believe the Turkey will help with that, among other elements of relaxation.
The weather has been rather balmy these last few days, today and yesterday we got a well deserved amount of rain with the possibility of more to come. I might have to get under the covers and play a GPU demanding game just to get some heat into the room. 😛
I leave you with this disturbing video to commemorate the holiday:
Managed to upgrade my version of Windows 10 without anything hazardous taking place, though I did have to reinstall grub2 to get back into Mint. Leave it to Microsoft to snuff out any operating system that isn’t its own… It didn’t take too long, but between fixing the boot loader and taking care of other things around the homestead I didn’t have time to really do much else. I almost went back into Windows to play some Quantum Break, but ended up zoning out instead.
As expected work has been busier, so busy in fact that I had to wait in line to leave the damned building… I’m going to hate the next couple of days with a passion. I get the feeling I’ll need to load something violent and nonsensical onto my laptop to get through the day(s). It was mellow enough for me to chill in Sonic Mania for my lunch today. Amazing how well it runs, though for some reason on my Desktop the audio has been known to randomly distort itself upon launch.
I’ll have even less time tomorrow, but I’m not entirely too butthurt about it. I have to work on Black Friday at two in the morning, and while some may see that as horrific (which my face can look horrifying at 2am) I’m ok with getting away from there as soon as possible and return home to a sweet leaf.
We celebrated Thanksgiving a couple days early, since we’re all going to be working on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday… bleh. I came home from work today and was immediately greeted with the scent of a turkey rich holiday meal. I’ll sleep good tonight (even moreso than usual).
For the last couple of days I’ve been working on video footage. I sorted out all of the Quake Champions footage I’ve squirreled away, think I can get a couple good videos out of that. Now I’m working on our recent Serious Sam HD: Second Encounter romp recently. I’ve been working on a clip that’s almost two hours long, and I don’t even have a full minute of presentable footage yet. What little bit I’ve collected so far though has given me multiple braingasms that I’ll have to jot down on paper after I further refine my footage. After I finish editing this clip I’ll have another one to go through that’s about another hour long. Fortunately with good editing tools you don’t have to watch the entire video to get to where you want to be. :meeseeks: Then I’ll have Left 4 Dead footage to go through; Yutram and I played a custom campaign that truly lives up to its name. I know for certain with that adventure that we’ll have a good video on our hands.
I’m going to continue doing my new style of adding SFM footage (and other elements) into future gaming videos when applicable. It will take me longer to compile them, but I think the extra effort is worth it. There was something I enjoyed about Solid Snake magically growing a cigarette out of his mouth that I found enjoyable to animate in the derpiest style I could muster.
This may or may not be my final video for awhile. With Thanksgiving and Black Friday kicking off this week there’s a good chance that I’ll be extremely busy with work as well as other real life obligations. Though if I have enough time set aside I could start doing some Penguin themed videos if ya catch my drift…
Yes, this is real. On launch it will cost $99 and come with at least 30 games according to their Q&A. I seriously don’t know where to begin; to this day I still play games from the MSDOS era (Wolf3D being one of the more recent ones), and have even installed DOSBOX on my Amazon Fire for my own small amusement. Why would you spend almost $100 to get a tiny box that plays some of the oldest old school games that ever did old school, when you can do the same thing on hardware you already own? Including smartphones? If you do a search on ebay for a raspberry pi kit you’ll immediately see cheaper options for building your own.
You could also argue that people might want to buy these because they don’t have the time to build their own, or don’t have the knowledge of using a raspberry pi and installing operating systems and then configuring them to start/run accordingly. Normally I would agree, but most of the people that I knew growing up who liked to play MSDOS games were already people who tinkered with their PC’s, whereas with consoles you just plugged them in and inserted a cartridge/disc… done like dinner.
Can’t I just buy a Raspberry Pi, an enclosure, gamepad, keyboard, and mouse, 3D print a faceplate, install Armbian, buy 30+ games, build the source for ARM or install/configure in DOSBox for each and every game, create a menu system with game art, and tell everyone about it at parties?
No.
Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do! :zorak: I’ve actually been reading up more on Raspberry Pi’s and have contemplated getting some sort of kit… possibly of the portable variety. I’m just not sure what I would use it for. Perhaps make my own tablet if my Kindle catches fire?
