Computer Time :3

[shickdits]

Holy crap... I finally got one. No longer shall I have a laptop awkwardly plugged into a TV sitting on a step stool with various USB doodads attached to it like a first-gen Sega Genesis with all the add-ons. Now, I have a box that emits obnoxious rainbows in the dead of night. I can finally.... have a reason to clean this stupid desk up. I was originally planning on using this space to repaint HotWheels cars and assemble gunpla, but all that plastic and die cast crap is starting to take up too much space in my room.

This machine pictured above is the Nitro 60-641-UB21, a mid-range, modern desktop PC equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, an Intel i7-14700F, and, uh... i dunno. Look, I don't know computers. I know more than the average person, yes, but less than anyone who, say, has ever programmed anything or built one. I know how to press ctrl-alt-delete, but I had to ask a friend how to format a hard drive, because believe it or not, this thing had the same default storage space as my 7 year old laptop.

So what have I been doing now, unshackled from the limits of portability in 2019? Not much, really. Just getting back into my old Cyberpunk 2077 save file and finally experiencing it at 300 fps rather than 20. Not that the monitor can refresh that fast, but hey, anything new is better than an Acer Nitro 5 laptop with replaced fans connected to an old Funai brand TV, sitting on a 30 year old plastic step stool atop four folded pieces of cardboard to allow its vents space to move air through its poorly snaked cooling system, with a vast majority of storage left to a $50 external HDD plugged in via USB, sitting underneath, storing nothing but fansubbed anime ripped from japanese blurays and dozens of PS2 games, with the same bluetooth mouse and keyboard you see in the image attached above, as i sat cross-legged on my bed, or even laid down. And fell asleep while in late-night discord livestreams. At least I could catch up on Ima, Soko ni Iru Boku without a Criterion Collection subscription...

So... uh... anyone reading this got any, like, recommendations on... i dunno, cool games I could comfortably play at a desk rather than hunched over cross-legged like a freak? Or maybe what The Kids Are Doing These Days that's something like making maps in Hammer for Trouble in Terrorist Town in Garry's Mod... I used to do that, but I only ever shared those maps with my high school friends by sending them the map files directly. Each one was me making a gimmick out of figuring out a new tool in Hammer.

The only one of those I vividly remember is what i called ttt_in_da_club_2000. It was a nightclub location that played that one slow part of Darude's Feel the Beat diegetically on the dance floor, with a dev texture labeled 40% REFLECTIVITY repeating on its white grid played off as interior decoration. There was a quieter looping track in its bathroom across the bar, right before the dancefloor, where I placed repeating audio of cartoon fart sounds and my voice groaning and saying "ooouuuggghhhh- the demons are inside meeeeee~". The last one is actually on the Steam Workshop right now, where I figured out how to add custom texture files to a map, and it's... not pretty to look at. ttt_glompo_island. I think it's best if you look at it on your own, if you can. A snapshot of my 2010s era irony poisoning era. I think there's also a floating cube of water to swim through because I wasn't patient enough to build an elevator, and a secret room with a giant half-torus shape made of brush, flashing a yellow light inside and playing a sample of Timmy from The Whitest Kids U Know saying "MACARONI!!"

Mapmaking for games was almost a hobby for me in my time as a NEET with a functioning laptop. I was twisted over, awkwardly on my bed, with the lamp on the floor, and my mother's Windows 7 machine spending hours compiling absolute garbage for my friends' late-night entertainment. It was like I was The Dungeon Master, even though when the games began, I was as powerless as they were, being Players. What's the new hotness in doing Something Like That? Seems like everyone's moved onto live-service multiplayer games these days, and not catered experiences akin to dungeon exploration. I used to even make maps and levels just for myself in Timesplitters on my PS2! I didn't even have anyone to share those with! I was cranking out really short proof-of-concept experiences with player controlled vehicles and characters in LittleBigPlanet 2 for an audience of 1! Me!!

Ok, but seriously, how the hell do I make the CPU stop fucking glowing