Game Room Ver. 4.0 Completed!

It took longer than anticipated - two additional months to be precise - but everything is finally in place. Whether I will be using this space for a short period of time or longer, I am happy with the way things worked out. The larger room scale virtual reality space is definitely a big plus for me and I plan to indulge in more VR action while I am here.

Entertainment center.

Left wall.

Left wall close up.

More left wall close up.

Back wall with open closet.

Back wall close up.

Right wall.

Right wall close up.

And the Winner of the Cutest Box Ever Is...

As you may have known, the Internet struggle at my new place is real. I used to be able to watch my own broadcast to monitor the video while streaming to twitch.tv. That's a luxury I cannot afford anymore because of my horrible bandwidth limit. I usually have a visual queue in my live video when my mic is muted but since I cannot see anything now while streaming - and no, I am no longer interested in a dual screen setup - I have found myself soundless for half of my broadcast sessions pretty darn often. I have always wanted to get a better microphone for a while now and this finally pushed me to go ahead and just do it. I have been using the Blue Snowball, which is a great mic that is just perfect for my open mic, no headphones setup. What it is missing however is a darn mute button - a feature that can give me a physical cue when I am not capturing any sound during my broadcast. So I decided to just upgrade to the Blue Yeti but if you just happened to be in my shoes, you know that finding one of these has been really difficult thanks to the pandemic. Apparently, people being stuck in the house is a boon for the condenser microphone industry. After waiting for such long time, Amazon finally had it in stock several weeks ago. I had to pre-order it ahead of their incoming stock - I just checked today and it looks like this has sold out again. Today, I finally received my order.

When I opened the Amazon package, I seriously thought that Amazon had punked me good. This was the side of the Blue Yeti's box that I saw. I was like, what the freaking heck is this crap?!

This gave me a serious collector's figurine vibe.

Once, I ordered a log of Mopani Wood from them and I received a green wig instead so ordering a condenser microphone and getting some specialty collector's yeti figurine - which I thought was inside this thing by just looking at all the cute pictures on the panels - is not that farfetched. I panicked for half a minute, frozen there in front of the box. Then, I took it out of the package and was pleasantly surprised that it was indeed the Blue Yeti mic. For something so serious and so expensive, I didn't expect for them to go cutesy cutesy animated yeti for their mic art. You know when you browse items on Amazon, you normally don't see the box in which the products would be coming in and all you see are the images of the products themselves. I would never have expected this mystifyingly confusing super kawaii box.

A mute button. Thank the galaxy for that mute button.

As for the mic itself, just look at it. Sexy, sleek, professional. It definitely sounds better than the Snowball but I need to play around with it a lot more to really gauge the improvements. But yeah, you would expect that the box for such a product would not include a cartoon yeti. I am pretty impressed though at their boldness. High risk, high reward I suppose because I would definitely be mesmerized and convinced to buy this if I saw this box design at a retail store.

External HDDs Make for Easy PC Transition

As someone who was spoiled by fast fiber internet without any bandwidth limit now finding himself stranded in the boonies with a horrible internet plan, the prospect of transitioning to a new Personal Computer comes with its own hassle on top of all the excitement. My first thought, because of the way I handled this in the past, is just to redownload all of my PC games, which would be very easy to do if you don't have a data cap! Because of that reason, starting from scratch would have been a time consuming nightmare since I will only be able to download a set number of games per month and I would really rather use the remaining bandwidth to download my newer acquisitions. Then, I realized that I have 16 TB of external hard drives, which already contain a majority of Steam games - and all my Epic games - and I feel so much better about the situation.

It's funny thinking back 4 years ago when I hesitated playing games off an external hard drive. Surely, there will be performance impact, I told myself, and that load time would quadruple. But that is not the case at all. I use USB 3.0 connections for the 2 external HDDs and there is no difference compared to playing games off an internal HDD. I have not installed any games on my solid state drive since I don't mind a slightly longer load time. With future games now looking to abuse the SSD speed not because it's necessary but just because it's the cool thing to do (we can thank Mark Cerny for that, whose latest console design is again a failure since its ONLY prominent feature, the SSD speed is already crushed by faster new SSDs on the PC), I am sure that I will find myself installing those straight on the SSD but for a while, I can see myself just playing off the external HDDs. I love that Steam and EA Origin clients both feature an option to move all the game install files to another drive, and in this case my external HDDs, prior to my transition. It helps out a lot.

Deathwing approves!

RTX 3080 Is Here: Time to Upgrade

Today is the official launch date for Nvidia's latest graphics card, the RTX 3080. Of course, scoring one of these just by itself seems to be an impossible thing right now thanks to those annoying scalpers. I have been eyeing the card's rumors and developments for a while after purposely skipping all the hype surrounding Nvidia's first generation of RTX cards. When it comes to upgrading your personal computer components, it is always best to skip a couple of upgrades anyway because the boost in performance, for the most part, is never truly worth it. I am however, ready to jump in this time around.

They never have enough available. Of course the scalpers make the situation worse.

My current 4 year old PC is equipped with an i7-6770K CPU and the GTX 1080. It's still a competent gaming PC, able to ace everything at max up to 1440p. It is able to get incredible performance at 4K if the games are not too demanding. The only title I can think of that my system struggles with, outside of those games that are just horribly optimized, is Red Dead Redemption 2. That game is an absolute monster, certainly the most beautiful game to date, though I am able to push my current setup to give me a stable 1440p 30fps performance with only small graphical sacrifices. Thankfully for me, I didn't plan on just replacing the GPU alone for my next upgrade so I am able to skip the availability frustration of those looking to just changing their graphics card and instead, I have decided to just get myself a new pre-built. It just so happens that CyberPowerPC, the guys who were responsible for my current system, is accepting orders for RTX 3080 powered PCs. I have opted for their "Creator PC Ultimate" build, complete with the dazzling Syber Cube case, an i9-10900K CPU, and the RTX 3080. The new PC will be arriving sometime in October. I am really looking forward to playing Control again without settling with the current setup performance of 720p @ 30fps when I turn all the ray tracing bells and whistles on!

It looks so avant-garde. Can't say no to that.

The Digital Age and Bad Internet

It has been a struggle for me these past couple of months, oh yes it has been. Having the global pandemic is horrible enough, but imagine having bad Internet on top of that? Yes, it's more horrible than you think. So you're stuck inside the house and you want to binge on your favorite streaming services but you have a data limit... The horror. It's definitely something you would wish upon your worst enemy. So you may have deducted that I have moved to a remote area, definitely leaning heavily towards the countryside and the Internet options that I can choose from are severely limited. The speed, strangely, is insanely fast. As a matter of fact, it is doubled when it comes to download from where I was from, which was a dense metropolitan area. It's quite counter-intuitive really, having super fast download coupled with a data cap. Alanis Morissette would have sung about that if Ironic was written today. Being a person with obsessive compulsive disorder, it has not been fun at all to keep checking my bandwidth consumption multiple times a day. Then there's the upload speed, which is just 3% of the download speed. It's pretty disgusting really. I had to severely reduce the quality of my twitch.tv broadcasts. Oh how I miss my old Internet.

What are the benefits of country living you ask? Well, you get bad Internet and a lovely morning sky.

For a gamer who favors the industry's progression towards digital distribution, it's a devastating scenario. Modern games are big. Like 10+ GB big. Larger titles averaged around 50 GB per download. To put things in perspective, the recently released Marvel's Avengers has a recommended requirement of 110 GB space. Then there are the patches. Oh the constant patches. 10 GB worth of patches a day, especially for someone like me who has a lot of digital games downloaded locally, is very typical. Of course these things were never a problem before. But they are now. I have started to delay patches and to selectively download only the games that I know I will be actively playing. I now have to wait until the end of the month to see if I have enough bandwidth to download my new games - my desire to get them hasn't slowed down even though I am not able to try them out immediately anymore like I did before.

One of my favorite games gets a new expansion! Oh wait... 61.4 GB patch?! There goes my bandwidth.

The fact that there is nothing I can do about this situation is probably the most frustrating part. If I ended up staying here for a longer period of time, my only hope is that Google Fiber will make its way to my area because it is already available in a city just an hour away from me. In the meantime, I have to make do with this crappy connection, regardless of the impact. Internet availability, access, and dependability were privileges that I apparently have taken for granted. I never thought that I would ever encounter this issue. Life is so very unpredictable. It is best to remember that.