Well the PC is done. i'll try not to go on and on again because i think it might be boring when i natter loads. SO:
Thanks to all you guys who never mentioned the cpu fan was on the wrong way round. In the end, I did notice, but only after I put up the pictures :s I did briefly think, 'is this right?' at the time, but somehow did it wrong anyway. Embarrassing newbie mistake- i blame it on the lack of fitting diagrams, of course. Anyway, after attaining some isopropyl alcohol- an experience that led to meeting the world's most terrifyingly efficient shop assistant- and some thermal paste, the problem was fixed most easily. If anything, it added some extra fun to project.
....
It Fucking Works!
(The DVD drive is disconnected here because i was hearing a kind of squeeling, shuffling sound and was trying to work out what it was. In the end i found it was a power saving feature on the motherboard which could be turned off)
This was my favourite moment. When windows and all the drivers had been installed, i was able to see what it thought of the system hardware. It got everything right! So wonderful.. It's self aware.. I nearly cried!
Just because it works, of course, does not mean that in any way it's finished.
Fuckin light sabres! UV ones! Yaaaaay!! Oh man.. What the hell is wrong with me.. The cables are bound in uv reactive pvc. It was actually some feser tube meant for water cooling, but i cut it in a spiral (my finger did get split as well.. it's healing quite well though) and used it for this instead. I've no interest in water cooling before anyone asks.
The side panel has been given a window. I went to my parents this weekend, so me and my dad spent a day cutting into it with a jigsaw, and drilling holes into the plastic. Drilling every one of those holes was most tedious, we had to do it in shifts to make it bearable. It doesn't look like a lot looking at it, but it felt like forever. It probably won't let a lot of air through tbh, but i've found i don't really need to use that side fan anyway. Also, handy hint of the day: Don't bother trying to cut plastic sheets with a jigsaw.. the plastic melted behind the saw and welded itself back together! Amusing, but pretty fucking unhelpful. Anyway the window:
And now with the UV cathodes:
It's still looking quite dull, uninspired (and messy) though. One idea i had was to paint some design onto the window in UV reactive ink. The stuff is surprisingly hard to find though. Also i'd like to arrange the cables better somehow (that IDE cable pisses me the fuck off) and put some more colour/ UV ness inside. This something i like:
Same place, different poster. Think this one lasted about a week at most.
It says "Youtube common people" which i think refers to the multitude of youtube videos mocking the tories to the soundtrack of the common people:
On the other side it says "We can't afford the toffs" which i think refers to things like the time he claimed over £80,000 for various stuff on his second home in oxfordshire, including things like clearing the wisteria, repairing a leaky washing machine and replacing the outside lights.
Not that all other politicians are any better of course, i've little faith in the system so this is by no means an endorsement for anyone, i would never do that. You're all clever enough for me to not have to do that.
On the train today i was listening to a track close to my heart. It's a 45 minute long IDM mix that evokes a sensation the of cold, distant digital communication of satellites venturing into the dark unknown. I first listened to it on a night i spent the whole evening reading aboutearly space exploration, which is probably why, but still i cannot imagine it making sense with anything else. I may load it up and add it on here, if any of you are actually interested in listening to a 56mb track anyway.
This is really only a few thoughts (fleshed out since with links and videos) about the prospect of human life on other planets. Like most people space exploration really interests me. At least thinking about it does. Imagine the awesomely surreal things we might find, and imagine personally being amongst the first to see it- how far you would be from old human civillisation at that point, both in body and mind. Inevitably though, any practical colonisation destroys that very beauty of those worlds. Any planet that we settle on will have to be similar to earth for us to exist comfortably on it, and if it isn't, we will have to make it so. On Earth, gravity is 1G, days take 24 hours, water covers 71% of the planet, humans are at the top of the food chain. Our civillisation- and the technology that sustains it- rely on these kinds of fundamental facts and profound changes will have to happen in any culture that settles where it is different. Colonising other worlds are not events that will happen overnight, they may take generations to happen.
Take Mars for example. Mars is actually pretty similar to us in some fundamental ways- the days are only slightly longer than ours, and its tilt (which defines variations in daylight hours) is only 2° more extreme than ours. However.. it's gravity is only 0.38G, air pressure a fraction of ours- and much, much thinner than humans can handle without suits. Mean temperature is -63°C, meaning even if you managed to raise the temperature by 60 degrees, water still freezes. Also, the years (and seasons) are twice as long, though that's probably more a novelty than a problem. Maybe taller buildings could be built on Mars, on account of lower gravity, but fuel would be in higher demand because of the lower average surface temperature.
More fundamental though is the impact on our biology. If astronauts struggle to stand or sit up when they return from only a week in space, I wonder if children born on Mars could ever visit Earth, with the dramatic increase in gravity that they have never been exposed to? Perhaps after a few generations the ability to gain enough muscle would have been lost? And what about height, would martian children grow taller? If the weight of the head on the shoulders is a limiting factor to its size, would martian offspring be able to develop bigger brains?
Then there is interplanetary communication. Empires must be well connected to stay strong. Radio messages, sent at the speed of light, take between 3 minutes (when mars is next to earth) and 22 minutes (when it's on the other side of the sun) to transfer. Double that time if you're waiting for a reply (maybe more if they're crap at getting back back to you right away). That really renders everyday communications like telephone conversations, internet connections, live broadcasts etc between planets impractical, though it's still enough time for more general information to transfer and stay relevant. If we are fortunate enough to find a habitable planet around Alpha Centauri, the next closest star (a binary system in fact), a one-way radio transmission takes 4 over years- a goverments' turn in office could be completed in that time. That planet would pretty much be on it's own.. 8 years is too long a lag for any kind of interplanetary consultation, let alone to call for back up in a crisis. And that is the next closest star to us. Our methods of travelling and sending information through space seriously needs to be reformed if we're going to make any realistic stab at this. Maybe even to involve portals and wormholes.
Anyway back to Mars. As this rocket scientist explains, the toughest part of Martian (and any space) colonisation is actually getting stuff there, especially living things. Aside from travel to Mars taking months, the actual landing of heavy equipment is a problem, as descent parachutes wouldn't do enough in such a thin atmosphere. But don't panic.. A solution to this is the very sexy space elevator:
So what to do with Mars if we do get there? It's cold, dry, the atmosphere is thin and unbreathable. Apparently, you can terraform it. The process will take several generations, so it's quite a selfless futuristic investment. Some ideas on how this insane process might work is discussed here, on this otherwise awful documentary:
(Really? I mean "humanity in 7 billion years time"? Really? Isn't the earth only supposed to be 3-4 billion years old? We're talking a timescale twice as long as life could have even existed for.. If there is any single species that can in someway be identifiable as 'humans' in 7 billion years time, something has gone horridly wrong)
Other planets like Venus have also been discussed. Given Venus has an atmosphere 90 times denser than ours, full of sulphur and carbon dioxide and gets as hot as 500°C, you can see how laughable that suggestion is.. though, only by our current capabilities. The easy answer is 'terraform it!' to get this result:
..you kinda see how every planet in our wake is just going to be turned into another earth. I think thats a bit sad, yknow? 'Colonisation of alien worlds' my arse, it's just turn any bit of rock into an earth look alike.
Well, some nutter called Geoffrey Landis came up with a solution to both problems: instead of trying to live where it's 500°C and 90 Atmospheres down on the surface, just live where it's 1 Atmospheres and 0-50°C instead: in the Venusian cloud tops. Breathable air (for humans) is bouyant on venus, like how helium is on earth. If our cities were enclosed, they would float with the clouds, above the acidic ocean. We could sail about and drop an anchor, like a ship in the sea, only without any land i guess. but still that's cool, amirite?
Even so, the year and days are very different on venus. Years are 8 months long, and a Venusian year has.. wait for it.. less than two days a year. Thats over two months of daylight, followed by over two months of night. Sunset and sunrise probably last a whole earth day or something.. and given its coloured, hazey atmosphere, theyre probably very ambient and pretty.
Something i often wonder about is how our sense of time will be changed on other planets. Our current units of days, months and years are based on Earth cycles. What will we do on other planets? carry on counting out minutes as if nothing had changed, or start working to new systems? Remember there's some real weird ones out there. Uranus spins on its side, like a wheel, so while the day/night cycle is rapid at the equator, at the poles it is the same as a year, and by that we're talking 84 years. What will these new timescales to our heads? I'm not aware of any experiments that reveal how well humans adapt to longer (or shorter) sleep/ wake periods, though having said that, i seem to end up doing it to a certain extent quite naturally.
I get this feeling it's time to shut the fuck up now. At this point i wanted a picture of Spider Jeruselum on Mars talking about the terraforming program to finish off the post, but i'm lending that book out to a friend at the moment so i can't scan it right now. As a substitute, i tried finding a picture of Invader Zim on Mars, but google images was fruitless on this. So instead, have summa this:
If any of you were wondering where i might've been last week, i'm sorry. Guys don't hate me! I was mostly "checking my PC worked", and i've got some screenshots to show you that it sure fucking does. While installing programs and games, i stumbled on a message informing me that, as i haven't played on WoW in a jolly good long time, i've got 7 free days of playtime and all i had to do was click on the big gold button saying "Activate Now!" below.
I was physically unable to prevent myself.. Everything went on hiatus..
I really like a game you can play for [a total of] a year, and still not see everything. This week i achieved the title 'The Explorer' (Rothki is now 'Rothki the Explorer') which means i have finally visited every (major) part of every region in the current universe, even if only briefly. Some areas are pretty easy to miss- asteroids floating several hundred feet above the zone, for example- and some are just plain hard to get to, like the tree-island in the ocean that is only accessed through a portal in an enemy city (turned out getting out was an even bigger pain in the arse than getting in). I'm not sure how common the achievement is, but i've only seen a couple of other people on my server with it. There is an option not to show the title of course, but sadly i think it's more likely that many wow players have little appreciation of the skill and inspiration that has gone into the vast universe created for them, and never really bothered to explore a lot of it. I say this and of course, i myself have only been into a handful of the dungeons and only 3 out of the 6 battlegrounds, so there is still plenty yet for me to discover.
While exploring led to many fun times, like stowing away on enemy ships, parachuting from high places, checking out the weather systems (now my pc can handle it) and discovering a list of horde base camps i never knew about, i was still doing plenty of the old questing. Oh god, have times changed in the way blizzard does things. 'Classic wow' (the 6 year old stuff) is barely recognisable- or comparable- to the current content, not just in the graphics but the quests themselves. Frankly, the old quests were lame. "Go kill 10 boars" "Go kill raptors til you get 10 hearts".. How the fuck did we put up with that? Jeez, our lives must've sucked. While there's still a bit of that going on, the quests are essentially mostly mini-games now. Things like shooting dragons out the sky with turrets, hijacking planes and dropping bombs, possessing eidolons to assassinate targets from the spirit world, riding storm giants and stomping out zombie armies, that sort of thing, which is all a lot more fun. I went back and started a new character for fun and the difference is just jarring. This hasn't gone unnoticed by the developers- "later this year" (so 2011) cataclysm will rip up the old content and start over again to a higher standard.
Quests seem to be more directly telling the story this time, too, and are more single-player orientated, since most people quest solo anyway. In one of my favourite quest chains so far you get turned into a ghoul and have to start working for the scourge. Turns out the caged troll you helped in a previous region- but then transpired to be actually subverting his tribe to get in with the lich king- is now your undead boss. He mentions that "the lich king has plans for you" and hints that higher powers have been observing your potential. The chain ends in a platform-game like boss fight when you betray him, but the hints of lich kings' pursuit of you don't stop there. I've been getting whispers from valkyres for one thing, but also.. I've been having a couple of visitations from a ghostly boy who seems to be luring me into some kind of sympathisation with arthas. Yesterday he appeared while i was mowing down zombies in a siege truck on the glacier, to tell me i could never win that way. He sent me into a trance where i was arthas addressing the human army, and had to fight them and raise them all as zombie minions. When i woke, i found myself stranded in the middle of the glacier fighting off zombies.. nice move ghost boy, you douche! i survived, but still, he's a bastard.
Actually most of the best quests have involved the lich king. I played the death knight starting zone over a year or so ago. That was great. It was full of details. All the villagers would act differently in your presence, only some would dare try to fight back, most would sit and cower unable to move, some would run around the building screaming like psychotic headless chickens- sometimes before you even made a swipe at anyone. And the lich king.. he knew everything you did and he would be whispering to you about it. Commands like 'finish it!' if you dared pass up an opportunity to take an innocent life. Also the instancing.. going into the underworld to collect your horse after you'd sacrificed it and the general stages of zone progression as everything living in the area is gradually wiped out.. this all worked. More stuff like this, please.
Actually, one piece of advice to blizzard. Please.. the website? Ergh! The content's alright, but those awful little graphics and banners.. ok so a few players do act like 6 year olds (sadly the most loyal clientele, i think) but we are not all actually 6 year olds. You can do so much better. Hell, get your fans to do the artwork for you, it's not like you ever get a shortage of it right? Ok, im glad i got that out.
Anyway, i managed to take a couple of pictures. These aren't all of my favourite levels, i wish i had been able to take pictures of more, but i never think of it at the time, and besides, you try worrying about screenshots with frost wyrms on your ass. I was thinking perhaps in the future if i visit azeroth again i may compile a Travellers Guidebook, complete with postcards, tips, and listening notes for tracks that match the atmosphere of each region, which so far is very varied. One region i want to see more of- but only briefly got to visit- was storm peaks, partly because.. i kind of felt like i shouldn't be there. It's a high, dark, icey, forbidding place, with mysterious giant-size mansions in the side of mountains, and can only be traversed by flying. You know as a kid you think things like, maybe the world is just a dream in a giants head, or we're all invisible giants' toys, or (a friend had this one) the tower blocks are where they live? One of the things i used to think was in the east, north, south and west there were giant machines that made wind and that's where wind came from. When my dad asked where i thought they were and why no one has ever seen them, i didn't know. I guess i thought they were in a place too far away for anyone to have ever known about. Well.. storm peaks is that place. I flew around the back of a mountain and found a mechanical hole, I went inside and it was all huge clockwork.. like huge huge, i was just flying between the tiny gaps in the cogs.. I had to turn back for fear i would never find my way back out again. There's probably a dungeon or a city or something in there, i don't know, i'll have go back and find out another time.
Anyway, i digress. Here's some damn pictures.
Yay @ my new PC
Hey guys, I'm back in the real world again. Explanation on where i've been tomorrow- long and short of it is i've been testing the new pc, which is all dandy, posts soon on that too.
So for the last 2 years i've been going around moaning like a whiney bitch because i need a new PC. Thats right, i've needed a new PC for 2 fuckin years!! People have had new PCs and upgraded them in that time. Thing is my computer isn't old, it's just crap. It can't even play Half Life 2 and it was built like 3 years AFTER that fuckin game was made. Jeez! Though of course this computer has been deeply important to me. This laptop has been here for me sharing all my experiences of the bizarre last 4 years, and it will always hold a special place in my heart, and it is because of this laptop that you've been getting these posts every whenever i do them. But this post isn't about silly 'Girl + Laptop 4 Eva' sentiments! This is about what happened after that time i was all "i need a new PC!" and james was all "build one!" and i was all "shit!" and then stuff was happening.
So i spent a few weeks doing my research and a spreadsheet was born. The first and most painful decision was the case. I wanted a case that had a window, a nice looking front and was something fairly original. After driving myself crazy trying to pick one i eventually chose the Antec 300, which is absolutely none of those things. I'll explain why later.
Yesterday was the day The Motherboard and the cpu were supposed to arrive, so yesterday was one of those days where i couldn't shower, cook, go outside, listen to music loudly or do anything in case they came and i missed them. That was how much i wanted them to come. BASTARDS. They didn't come! I didn't know what to do with myself. In the end the only way i could relieve the pain was to mock film trailers and cut up old graphic design books and cover my wall with trippy pictures. It was alright i guess.
I let them off cuz it was Easter and today they came. The delivery man called me Love but it didn't really make up for it. My enthusiasm was long gone, drowned in the misery of yesterday. Then i opened the package and pulled out the motherboard box and i stopped giving a fuck about being a mopey cow.
I was all well excited. Why was i excited? Look at the packaging! It screams "Bitch! THREE!! be EXCITED!!!!" and who argues with three, right??
Fucking THREE! though i'm still not sure about the relevance of most of the 3s on there.
Eventually i calmed down about all the 3's after all of about 2 seconds, and was ready to go ahead with the next stage: opening the box and looking at it!
I'm gonna be honest, it took about an hour- and a half can of relentless- to build up the courage to get it out of the anti static bag. I wasn't just staring at it that whole time mind, i was reading the manual too. Anyway it finally happened.
Naturally this is the very moment when Pippin starts yeowling at the door begging to be let in so she can express her desperate need to rub her staticy furs all over it. True that she was at the door all day anyway, which made trips to the toilet a bit like some stupid game from when you were 5. Anyway, i won, and that's all you need to know.
The little magic box of tricks:
Naturally the CPU, the most precious, important and expensive part of the computer is packaged in a pathetically thin fold of generic plastic and shoved at the bottom of a thin cardboard box. All i can say is i'm grateful that when i opened such reinforced, waterproof, anti-static foolproof packaging, the cpu dropped out onto a soft bed and slipped between the folds of my duvet so no one had the chance to accidentally stand on it or kick it across the floor.
Again, it took guts but i finally got the cpu strapped in, the humongous cpu cooler over the top of it and all seemed well. I hadn't even fucked up and touched the contacts or anything, i think. Everything was swell.
Human vs the I/O Panel:
Still doesn't fit right.. fucker.
..and that's when the I/O panel perked up and was like "Whats that? Going 'swell' huh? Ahem, then i believe that is my cue!" and so things started going shit. Thing is the I/O panel has these pokey things that are intended to help you line up the motherboard. I understand that's their intention, but they actually made life a lot more bloody difficult because no matter how i bent them, they were all somehow still in the way. In the end i figured screw you panel and just forced the board into position, but when i let go, the pokey bits pushed the board back and it scraped on the brass standoffs on the back. When i checked the back there were a few scrapes. Or maybe they were more scratches. Probably somewhere between scratches and scrapes. Scrapetches? I was going to take a picture to get a second opinion, but holding the mobo and the camera is kinda awkward. Anyhoo i'm not sure how serious it was, i guess we'll have to see. I mean all over the board (and the box) it does say ULTRA DURABLE and allegedly the 'UD' in 'X58A-UD3R' stands for 'Ultrafuckin-Durable' so hopefully that means it can handle a little scrapetch on the back. Hopefully..
Inside the computer, as modelled by blue hattifattiner
Ok so question time! Now I'm not saying you guys don't know how to ask questions, and you are of course welcome to, but i'm gonna let my subconscious save you the trouble. It's my subconscious so it kinda gets dibs. You know how it is.
What. That is not a full computer I know, still to go: DVD drive, Graphics card, RAM, Hard drive, another fan, a monitor, essentially all the shit thats not whats mentioned above. I've got a spreadsheet with the models and prices so it's all planned out.
Careful you don't drop any screws into that PSU. Despite noting this danger and deciding to only touch screws when it's laid flat on its side, it still happened. Don't worry, i got it out again, eventually..
What about that case? are you gonna mod that case? i bet you're SO gonna mod that case! Damnit, why do i hang out with people that know me so well!? anyway, You're RIGHT. Turns out my dad is happy to let me use the equipment to put a window in it, and i spied some UV cathode tubes on amazon.. and the fans have blue LEDs, so you can see where this is all going. If i find some white paint i can use, i think you see the plan. This is why i got the Antec 300: it's good for modding.
Whats happening to the old laptop? If the PC works out and is still running ok after a while, I'll relieve this laptop of all the horrible software it's gathered over the years that's been dragging it down and let it be reborn again anew with Linux.
With What? Linux.
Oh right, i've never tried that. Yeh. We're the same person, remember?
I'm never sure. Do you think this PC is gonna work? I have no idea! I'm saying that right now. I'm sure building a PC is not so hard since people are doing it all the time; however i don't have complete faith in myself not to fuck something up. Also, i am kinda bothered about things like the scratch. And what if i did touch something i shouldn't've, y'know? i'm probably being paranoid because it's my first time, and you know how you beat yourself up more if you go wrong first time. I guess tune in next week (actually lets be safe and say two weeks) to find out if i'm cutting myself with despair or if i've gone clinically insane with happiness!
Cool. Well, er.. that's all i have to say. Good, it creeps me out when we talk.
Well guys, thats it for now. Obviously this is all still under construction so i may bore you with it some more in the near future. In the meantime, i will try to contain my excitement. I mean fuck.. I might be able to play HALF LIFE TWO!!!
Ok so i figured Anonymous has been going on at me for a bit about doing some naked pics. He even made an adorably heart wrenching cartoon :D which actually made me feel quite bad tbh. So, i figured i may as well give him something.
