I'm spending more time on the PC than I have in a very long time, and it's a policy I can't help but maintain - my Steam list is full of orders so pre they can't be loaded in advance, like The Witcher 2, or the second Dragon Age, or Dawn of War II: Retribution, all of which are little more than file paths which redirect to the untamed future.
Gabriel's PC is, like sixteen million others, essentially a WoW console that he also uses to hammer on the occasional beta. He's got a fairly bad-ass major label Laptop, a real battering ram, and when it didn't run something as he thought it should have he fell ass over teakettle into the darkest corners of the living Internet trying to get his CrossFire configuration spun up properly. And he did. Eventually. Very eventually.
His experience felt so universal to me, both as an enthusiast and in my former life as a techpriest, that it felt like an image (perhaps in the .jpeg format) was in order. When I hate my machines, I "hate" them with the quotation marks firmly attached. It's like fighting with a sibling; we scrap, but our union is in the blood. This isn't true for Gabriel, who only started playing games on computers because I made him, and who I suspect may secretly resent me for it. Not that I could blame him, necessarily. There are people who wish to invest their leisure time engaged in leisure, not preparing for leisure, or engaging in pre-leisure rituals, or playing with lemurs. Apparently, I require abuse and leisure in equal measure.
Everybody's got a thing.
I'm not entirely sure what we're supposed to think of Sony's Next Generation Portable, an amazing piece of technology the dimensions of a Subway Club which they are afraid to name or price. The original PSP was built on incredible technology also, and it too featured major brands; I found it to be a device of almost shocking sophistication. Indeed, I felt confident that I was manipulating something of historic import when I squoze the various buttons and nudged the nub. It laid no claim to the future though, even with its famed lineage - those parting mists would belong to Nintendo's bizarre mutant, which nobody thought would be good for nothing. And even then, I suppose the PSP is only a "failure" when you compare it to the DS. Sixty million seems like a lot; if I had sold sixty million of something, I would be very proud.
(CW)TB out.
