James

As I mentioned in another thread, I've been thinking of either buying or building a new PC recently; probably the latter. In fact, I could probably salvage a few of the more peripheral parts (drives, inputs, etc.) from the old PC I currently use and the newer one that died. Anyway, the question I'm asking is basically two-fold: What is a good set of specs? I'd like to be able to run stuff that's out at the moment (obviously), preferably at high-ish settings, and I'd like some amount of future-proofing (as in I don't want it to be a pile of shit six months down the road). I guess those are pretty vague requests. One thing that might help is that my monitor (which I have no intention of replacing) has a native resolution of 1920x1200, and looks like utter shit at anything less than 1280x768, so I'd have to be able to run things at those sorts of settings. I don't know how that compares to the average, but I was using a CRT before this, so running at non-native resolutions wasn't as big a deal, and I could get away with running more demanding games at really low resolution. What do I need to do to minimize the risk of all of this breaking? I don't know if I've just been unlucky with PCs, or if I've had bad set-ups, or if this happens to everyone and PC gamers just put up with it. I think at least one of my problems has been due to the PSU, which is something I'd never really considered before, and it occurred to me that I wouldn't know how to pick the correct one for a particular system. I mean, these were pre-built PCs, so it's not like I just threw some pieces together at random and complained when it blew up, but I'd added the occasional hard disk and swapped the occasional graphics card, and perhaps that caused everything to go wrong (I'm guessing the latter is a more likely culprit). Anyway, some pointers on common pitfalls would be nice, if you have any. Sorry if these are stupid questions, but if I'm going to try this again, I want to get it right. I used to feel like I pretty much knew my stuff when it came to PCs, but things have moved on somewhat since then, so hopefully a bit of advice will restore some of my former confidence. Thanks. If nothing else, I really need to play HL2:E2 one of these days (I thankfully finished Portal before my previous PC gave up).

I finally got around to listening to these today. Good stuff. I'd actually forgotten about the Id/Bethesda thing, so that was pretty weird, but cool. CONTINUE.

Or four hours of a silent black void followed by five seconds of actual video and sound slowed down by 16000%. Wait, that isn't "or".

I keep reading this as "Burning Down the Wolfram". Great 'cast guys. Famous' story was particularly enjoyable. Bring on next year or whenever! I'm trying quite hard not to feel sad about this!

So Worms skips the DirectX portion of the install completely and just assumes the player has it (a fair assumption) and it's the right version (evidently less so)?

But don't all Steam games update DirectX on install? At least, they say they're installing it, which I find weird, because pre-Steam what would generally happen was that the installer would reach the DirectX-installing bit, then tell me I had a newer version anyway and skip to the next bit (completion, usually). I don't know, weird.

I was going to suggest starting another group, but I decided it was probably a bit late in the day for that kind of business, and that there was a good chance I'd forget about it if I didn't order it there and then.

Well I just ordered it.

I've never had problems using UK devices with cheap adaptors in Sweden. I brought my netbook on my most recent visit and it charged fine. As far as I can tell I didn't die; if I did, death is so similar to life that it's really not anything to be worried about. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. I think Stockholm's a pretty nice city, but I have ancestral bias. MY LIFE IN SURBITON Pro: We have a nice big telly and a generally pleasant living room. Con: I'm having difficulty making the desk area in my bedroom feel "right". I guess I was pretty lucky to have a separate study-type-room where I was before. I'm having difficulty seeing myself doing much PC gaming here. I'm almost tempted to rig up some elaborate system to make my PC available on the living room TV so I can play through there when it's not otherwise occupied, but there doesn't seem to be a good way to get the video across. Also, that would be insane and stupid. I could just have my PC in the living room, but that seems to be losing some of the P, and probably isn't very fair on my flatmate. CON: I'm posting about this at three in the morning with no reasonable justification.

My PC is currently fucked. It started occasionally crashing with graphical garbage after I moved, and it got worse with (not a great deal of) time. Now it frequently won't get past POST before freezing (no graphical garbage in ASCII mode, though), and I've had it crash in the BIOS. I've also had it fail to initialize video output at all. It seems fairly severe. I suspect the motherboard may be on the way out. Or it could be that something got knocked out of place during the move and now it's overheating. I should get it fixed, but broken computers depress me a bit, so I tend to put it out of my thoughts. Any advice would be welcome, but I'm likely to take it into a shop and let them handle it rather than run the risk of making things worse.

That e-mail is amazing. I put DOOM: Repercussions of Evil through and it came out as Dan Brown, which may well be the most accurate option.

How about instead of trying to trick it with authors who are in the database, somebody enters some notoriously shitty prose? A celebrity autobiography or something? I would, but I pretty much only browse the web on my phone at the moment. Also, I'm quite lazy.

Even if it were accurate, saying which of a limited set of authors (apparently about 40) somebody writes the most like isn't tremendously meaningful without knowing the actual proximity. Of all these famous and generally talented people, it's quite possible that I write the most like someone amazing, because one of them has to produce the highest (or joint-highest) score with their algorithm, but it's also very possible that my writing is a thousand times more like patterns found in randmly smeared shit than any of the provided options. If there is no "you don't write anything like any of these guys" result, "surprising" results are pretty much guaranteed. Also, apparently it's sexist and racist (or at least ill-informed in the related fields), but I wouldn't really know much about that. I am, of course, taking this way too seriously.

Dr Rofucknic

Actually, I think it's a pretty popular favourite. Somebody loved it enough to do a crazy DHTML/JavaScript/whatever accompaniment that I can't be bothered to look up on my phone.

And I will steal some of Toblix's remaining money and pay that too. DO IT.

We'll always have goatse.

My favourite piece of music from the RDR soundtrack is one of the general mission pieces and disappointingly doesn't appear to be on the soundtrack. It also doesn't come up that often. I enjoy it when it does, though.

Is this like when people take photos on their phones of the murders and rapes they do and then get caught out because of it, only a lot worse because it's on the Internet for everyone to see? You should have read a book on proper murdering procedure first, Hermie.

I've got a friend who is pretty into cars, and he thinks it's gotten pretty stupid in recent years. I think he might still watch it as an entertainment show, though.

Forget these fools; what you really want to be doing is reading The Road. It's a feel-good romp packed with hilarious hijinx! It'll perk you right up!

Yeah, it was good to play it again. There wasn't that many of us, but the mayhem wasn't diminished a jot for it.

It's not for everyone, but I quite like 30 Days of Night. Regarding already mentioned films, The Orphanage is excellent, but possibly not really a horror. One of the things I like about it is that it's a little ambiguous about its genre for much of the film. Of course, it could just be that I've been conditioned to expect horror films to be gorefests or jump-scare bonanzas, in which case The Orphanage is an excellent horror film. Other than that, Alien is probably my favourite horror film, although the elements I like the most aren't really the horror elements. There's a lot of great stuff in that film that doesn't directly involve the alien.

ActionScript and JavaScript are from the same family, yeah.

Happy yesterday on Twitter! Good luck with your age! Try to keep it up until next year!