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Zggfrlg
17 years ago
We've been putting down gravel in the front yard, since it's not blessed with a direct line of sight with the sun, and grass won't grow upon its accursed ground. So, like, ten tons of gravel. Literally. Delivered on Thursday. It's Sunday night. I've been shoveling that crap every day. My shoulders are solid blocks of felsite, and I can't feel my legs. But it's FINISHED.
I'm planning on building a computer. I'm terrified. What if I buy the WRONG THING? Also, I need to back up all my crap. Figured I could buy a DVD+RW drive before I get anything else, hook it up to my current computer and use it to back everything up, but no! My PC is so hilariously out of date that it doesn't support SATA connections. I'll have to transfer everything to my mom's computer and burn it from there, I dunno. Everybody in the house has a DVD burner except me. Hmm.
I haven't drawn anything in a week. It's getting absurd. The faces of those I owe art to haunt me in my sleep! Nooo!
Spore's coming out in a few months. I KNOW it is! Will Wright told me so! Spore spore spore spore.
They say that, in Dwarf Fortress, "Losing is fun!". I'm still on my first fortress after nine years. By all accounts, my dwarves should have starved to death by the first winter, yet still they thrive. LolokErar is a bustling metropolis. Sure, there was that thing with the moat exploding, and the whole "my-woefully-underequipped-military-getting-massacred-by-goblins" incident, but STILL. Why isn't my fort a smoking hole in the ground? Where did I go right? *shame*
I'm planning on building a computer. I'm terrified. What if I buy the WRONG THING? Also, I need to back up all my crap. Figured I could buy a DVD+RW drive before I get anything else, hook it up to my current computer and use it to back everything up, but no! My PC is so hilariously out of date that it doesn't support SATA connections. I'll have to transfer everything to my mom's computer and burn it from there, I dunno. Everybody in the house has a DVD burner except me. Hmm.
I haven't drawn anything in a week. It's getting absurd. The faces of those I owe art to haunt me in my sleep! Nooo!
Spore's coming out in a few months. I KNOW it is! Will Wright told me so! Spore spore spore spore.
They say that, in Dwarf Fortress, "Losing is fun!". I'm still on my first fortress after nine years. By all accounts, my dwarves should have starved to death by the first winter, yet still they thrive. LolokErar is a bustling metropolis. Sure, there was that thing with the moat exploding, and the whole "my-woefully-underequipped-military-getting-massacred-by-goblins" incident, but STILL. Why isn't my fort a smoking hole in the ground? Where did I go right? *shame*
But hell, if you want to back up, just buy a USB hard drive. They're cheaper than bread these days, prices have crashed through the basement over the past couple of years.
If you get a 2.5" drive, you don't need external power, which is nice since the 3.5" enclosures usually have wall wars and proprietary power plugs, so if you misplace it, you'll have to take the drive out of the case. But, the capacity of 2.5" drives is low for the money you pay.
3.5" enclosures are what I use, because they're pretty cheap and offer tons of cheap space, plus, you can recycle an old hard drive for backups.
As for me, I'll be getting a solid-state drive sometime next year. Holy cow, have they gotten so much better in just a year! Next year they'll be awesome! They're still around $400, though. ;)
Ha, I remember when a solid-state drive was a jury-rigged PCI card with a buttload of RAM chips soldered to it that would give you a few hundred megabytes of space ... until you turned the computer off.
1) Internal hard drive, then remove it and transplant it - Cheap
2) External hard drive - still quite cheap - and you can even MORE easily move it from system to system.
3) Internal hard drive + External chassis - Still cheapish and you can get all kinds of bonus features such as a chassis you can connect to your TV and play DivX movies directly off of! With USB firewire AND networking ports!
I ought to post pics of my machine, I just added a pair of Zalman coolers for the video cards. It's pretty nice, pretty windy, and I can turn on Folding@Home and the 3d test program and heat my room up to 90 degrees within an hour.
Buy a good motherboard ($100-$150) and you won't have to worry about much else. I recommend Gigabyte and Abit. ASUS is way overrated. My dad only buys ASUS boards, and he has way more problems with them than I have with mine.
A good power supply ($50-$75), will also last pretty much forever. I have a Corsair. Enermax and Coolermaster are worthy names, too. It's worth paying more than $30 for power -- trust me. Oh, and "modular" power supplies are overrated. Get something with more guts on the inside.
Other than the motherboard and power supply, you're options are pretty much open.
Oh, and get a sound card. I highly recommend an MAudio card. Yes, on-board audio sucks away performance, but the major issue is the terrible drivers that will give you nightmares for years. Realtek should be banned from the market. Don't get a SoundBlaster card, though. Their drivers also suck and will cripple your machine. I think it's time to ditch my X-Fi card.
Still haven't settled on a motherboard. I've been looking over Gigabyte's and MSI's models, as per Malaka's suggestion.
Oh hey, a sound card! Didn't even think of that ... that can come later, though.
... That's what I'm gathering from the wiki, at any rate.
Thankfully that no longer happens. You can get a demon invasion still, but it's no longer spell doom for the fortress.
From what I recall, you can just seal it up and forget about it. The demon pit (if you are lucky enough to be on the same map as adamantium) are generated right away... and is infact viewable with some 3D viewers before you even found out about them.
The demons aren't impossible, just hard. XD
still think the funniest engraving ive ever seen personally was:
'The Distracting Stream'
on the wall is an image of a human and an elf. the human is committing a depraved act upon the elf.
... Wait, what? What the hell was that engraving BASED off of?!
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I HAVE AN IDEA!
Incendiary menstruation.
You can always make some penis monster, that eats through its appendages... hmm.
Be doubly sure of what you want, and IF you want it, and then find out how easy (or hard) it will be to return or exchange things, and how long it will take, just in case something goes screwy.
They want us to fill their database thingy with custom content, so that when the full game releases we'll have plenty of other peoples' critters populating our universes, instead of going in day 1 to find a completely empty universe, which would suck.
As for building a PC... yeah, getting the right parts is important. When I built mine, the first processor I tried putting in it was one intended for a laptop. IT. BLEW. UP.
I'm almost entirely sure I'm getting compatible parts ... I checked to make sure the chipset of the processor and mainboard matched, checked to make sure the drives used SATA cables and that the mainboard had SATA ports, made sure the mainboard and case were both ATX-sized, made sure the drives were the right size, and that the case had the proper bays ... the only potential problem I can see is that the video card uses a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 connector, and the mainboard uses PCI-Express 1.0 x16, but supposedly PCI-E is backwards and forwards compatible ... according to Wikipedia, anyway ... better double-check ...
Wow, it blew up? Literally? Like in those videos where someone overclocks their laptop to 15GHz and it literally explodes? Like, kablooie? Wow. I'm, uh ... I'm sorry for your loss?
Fortunately, NewEgg.com is SO leniant about the circumstances they'll accept returns in. I got most of my money back and was able to get the right kind of CPU after that.. but the video card thing, that was a bit more painful. It started off just little graphical glitches, but over time it just kept getting worse and worse and worse until everything on my monitor was COMPLETELY fuxored. But, hey, it was about time for a small upgrade by then anyways..
Of course, the video card I got to replace it doesn't have the shader module required to play Bioshock. And some of the newer games like to make fun of me by auto-detecting my graphics settings to minimum, even though it TOTALLY isn't THAT weak. D:
And come on. Creature editor goooood. Without it we won't have a universe full of muppets and walking penises when the game comes out. I'm gonna make evil nazi furbies!!
took all day long D: