Gimme gimme gimme (Black Flag cover)

Here's my folk rendition of Gimme, Gimme, Gimme by Black Flag. I'm particularly proud of my depiction of Henry Rollins in the video. Apparently you weren't a real Black Flag fan unless you saw Henry's balls dangling from his basketball shorts. Unfortunately time machines don't exist. Yet the internet does.

Pointless Venture's Top 10 Games of the Decade

 

The past decade was very good for gaming. Here's my top 10, a list which is completely subjective. There were plenty of titles that had a tremendous impact, such as Minecraft or Fortnite, that I have never played. Let's start from 2010 and go from there.

Civilization 5

My first 4X title, and my most played game in Steam by quite a margin (over 485 hours, although more than half of that time was spent by my wife). There's nothing quite like taking a stone age tribe to the space age. We never quite clicked with Civ 6 (the cartoony graphics are a turn off). My wife still boots this up from time to time.

Portal 2

Although its main campaign is only about 10 hours long, Portal 2 is a great comedic 3d puzzler and an excellent example of Valve's Midas touch. GlaDOS is a much better villain that Shodan, mostly because you have to haul her ass around in a potato. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then play Portal 2 immediately. I'm probably going to have to do the same.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

Man, Bethesda's taken a beating in the realm of public opinion since 2011, but there was nothing quite like booting up Skyrim and stumbling through its Nordic open world. One of the few games on this list that I have no desire to return to, due to the fact that it's about as deep as a puddle, but those first 60 hours were pretty awesome. Kind of crazy that Bethesda hasn't released a sequel in 10 years.

 

 Dark Souls

 Dark souls made me love hard games. The common refrain is "Darks Souls is hard, but it's fair." That's kind of bullshit (those goddamn archers in Anor Londo; the fucking Capra Demon and his dogs) and I won't begrudge anyone who quickly concludes that dying forty times to a boss is not fun. That said, who doesn't want to have another go at the Four Kings or Smough and Ornstein? The last quarter of the game is kind of poo, though. Love the art style.

Alien Isolation

An incredibly tense survival game that succeeds in making an overexposed monster scary again. I don't think any game has ever completely captured the look of a film like Isolation does with its 70's space trucker aesthetic. Another title that I need to replay.

Witcher 3

Still the best open world third person action game. Would we get to gaze at Henry Cavill's muscled physique if not for the Witcher 3? My most played game after Civ 5 with almost 200 hours spent steering Geralt through CD Projekt's incredibly detailed world. 

Dishonored 2

The true successor to Looking Glass Studio's Thief, Dishonored 2 is the best steampunk stealth action game ever. Worth playing just to experience the genius of A Crack in the Slab and the Clockwork Mansion missions. Really anything Arkane makes is the tits.

Prey

Prey should've been a colossal hit, the game that vaulted Arkane to legendary status. It does everything that Bioshock did but better, and unlike that game, Prey successfully continues the immersive sim legacy of System Shock and Deus Ex, and it does it without any Ayn Rand references. We can only blame Bethesda's lack of marketing and their inexplicable decision to tie this title to Human Head Studios' 2006 FPS for this game's utter lack of impact. Probably my favorite game of all time.

Subnautica

You know, I never even beat Subnautica. I got to the end game and just abandoned what was basically a glorified scavenger hunt. Still, the twenty or so hours I spent in those alien oceans were a fantastic experience. Do you know what thalassophobia is? You will after playing Subnautica.

 Doom Eternal

Doom Eternal is a heavy metal album cover come to life. A glorious update to id's classic, and my most played game of 2020.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Review

 

Lara looking romantically at the moon.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a good ole fun time, if you like playing as a sociopathic adventurer with a rocking behind (boy do I ever). The latest in the reboot series of Tomb Raiders (released 2018), Shadow features a little less combat than previous entries, while upping the amount of tomb raiding, making it a bit more like the original games. If you've played Rise of the Tomb Raider, everything is very familiar. Lara has a pair of pick axes that she utilizes to climb dizzying precipices, and now her grapple hook has a repelling function, allowing you to run alongside cliff sides and descend from great heights. The platforming aspect feels great, and it's always a joy to make Lara leap like a manic from a narrow edge into a great abyss, with only a last minute throw of the grapple to save her. Similarly fun are the Challenge Tombs and Crypts. The former are presented more or less identically to how they were in Rise; you find them, solve their puzzle, and receive a reward, in this case an unlock on the leveling tree. Most are pretty easy, although one features a light reflection puzzle that forced me to use my brain a bit. Really, these don't need to be too difficult; the original Tomb Raiders had some pretty daft puzzles, and this is a series that's focused on as wide an audience as possible. Crypts have Lara traversing spooky terrain in order to receive some cosmetic item, which kind of sucks, but they're usually appropriately creepy and have a lot of underwater sections. A lot of this game takes place in translucent pools or submerged ruins, and the water effects are second to none. Really, this is probably the best looking game I've ever played. It's kind of amazing that nearly three years after its release, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is still being used as a benchmark on tech sites. My 5700 xt runs it at highest settings over 60 frames per second at 1440p, and man, I made a lot of use of the screenshot function. Graphical spectacle is one of the reasons for buying this game.

There is less combat in Shadow than in Rise or the 2013 reboot, but it still is an action game, and now Lara can hide against vine covered walls and pop out to grab baddies like Rambo. In a nod to Predator, she can also cover herself in mud to make herself less noticeable. The combat works best when you're playing stealthy, popping in and out of hiding spots while crafting bombs on fallen enemy corpses. Even on One with the Jungle difficulty, this isn't a hard game. Lara can only take a couple rounds, but the enemies give you plenty of time to shoot them.

Storywise, Shadow is better than Rise, although it still suffers from Michael Bayesque cheese. Lara travels to Mexico and then Peru to obtain a magic Macguffin that can keep the sun from rising, or some such nonsense. Jonah is back, still stuck safety in the friend zone, following Lara around like a lost puppy (I like Jonah, but man, Lara is gonna get you killed, brother). Trinity, of course, are the bad guys, and because they are bad guys, Lara has permission to unleash her barely contained sociopathy. I complained about this ludonarrative dissonance in my Rise review; it's still present here, but I've learned to live with it. 

If you're looking for a great triple A semi-open world action game, and you haven't played the Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, Assassin's Creed 100, Zero Horizon Dawn, God of War, Jedi: Fallen Order, or any of the other million big budget single player collectathons, then give Shadow a try. Despite my snark, it's pretty good. I've spent 24 hours on it so far, and I'm not quite finished with it. Screenshots below.

 

 

A Brief History of all the PCs I've Ever Owned

 

This is what our 386 was used for.

I've been building computers since I was a kid, so I thought I'd review every single system I've ever possessed in the interests of jogging my memory as well as producing that all important content for the blog. So I'm going to take a trip down memory lane and see what I dredge up.

Prebuilts

i386/i486--We definitely had a hand-me down 386 or 486 PC that we used to play shareware such as Wolfenstein and Commander Keen. It had no internet connection, so it was basically used as a word processor or gaming machine. This would've been in the middle nineties when I was a kid, so my memory is really foggy.

Mystery machine--I feel as though we may have had another PC, possibly a 90 to 166 MHz Pentium, likely another hand me down. It's even possible that I'm confusing this hypothetical Pentium computer for the i386/486 machine. All I know is that I had something that I played Dark Forces and its sequel Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 on, and it certainly wasn't a 486.

Compaq Presario with a 300 MHz Celeron processor and an ATI graphics card with 4 megabytes of memory (likely a Rage 3d Pro). This was the first real PC we owned as a family. I still remember playing Tomb Raider 3 on it Christmas morning. This was likely in 1998. I actually purchased a four meg upgrade for the built-in graphics card, which is hilarious in retrospect, since I doubt that it made a substantial difference, this still being the era of 3dfx (before the Geforce TNT 2, 3dfx was the only reliable 3d graphics card maker). I eventually put a Voodoo 3 PCI in this computer, which got me through the rest of the of the nineties and many hours of Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 3. I still have that Voodoo 3, by the way. It sits in a place of honor on my mantle.

Custom Builds

Mystery PC 2. Somehow, I can't remember the first computer I built. It may, in fact, be the next computer on this list, but I believe I had a K6 AMD based PC for a couple years. Oh well. We'll never know.

Athlon XP Thunderbird 1000 Mhz based system with a mystery graphics card, probably a Geforce 2 GTS or a Geforce 3 200 ti. Fairly certain I had a Geforce 3 200 ti in this system, which lasted me about three years. This was around 2000 or 2001, so I was a freshman in high school when I built this PC. My main games of this era were Half-Life and its mods (Counter-strike, Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat).

Athlon XP 2000+ with a Geforce 4 ti 4600. I went through my entire college career with this PC. I remember buying a Geforce 4 ti 4400 at Best Buy and then opening it and finding a little note that said "Congratulations! You've been upgraded to a Geforce 4 ti 4600!" which was cool as hell. Since I built this PC at the end of high school and kept it till almost the end of college, I played all sorts of games on it, from Unreal Tournament 2004 to Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4. I was a low spec gamer for quite some time there.

 This was the Mac version of the Geforce 4 ti 4600, but the PC card looked similar.

Athlon 3000+ with some type of ATI graphics card (likely Radeon 9500 or 9700). I built this PC for my parents around 2002 or 2003, but I made sure it would play Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Was a little mini atx case that was about the size of a shoebox. 

Athlon X2 6000+ dual core 64 bit processor with a Geforce GTS 250. I can't remember what card I initially had in this PC, but it was definitely an ATI card that couldn't run Crysis on High Quality. I soon upgraded to a GTS 250. Played Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Turok, Unreal Tournament 3, Orange Box, and many more on this PC. Was still rocking a Samsung 19 inch CRT. I still have the monitor and this PC today; I recently did a post on how I installed Windows 10 on it. This system now enjoys a second life as an audio recording station and a retro gaming PC.

i5 2500k with 16 gigs of memory, a solid state hard drive, and a Radeon HD 6950 graphics card, eventually replaced with a Radeon R9 380. This is the best PC I ever built, in terms of longevity and performance. I built it in 2012, and used it until 2020, and during that 8 year span it was a decent gaming PC, even at the end. It's now on its second hard drive and serving as my parents' desktop. I also purchased my first LCD monitor with this PC, a 1080p Viewsonic that still works great. I played everything from Skyrim and Mass Effect 2 to Jedi Fallen Order and Prey on this computer.

Ryzen 7 3700x with 16 gigs of DDR 3200 ram, a 5700 xt graphics card, 1 terabyte ssd drive, and a 27 inch 1440p 165 hertz MSI monitor. This is my current system, built last year before everything went to hell and three year old graphics cards ballooned in price to 500 dollars. I'll probably replace the 5700 xt when something affordable comes along in order to take advantage of the higher refresh rates of my monitor, but this is the most expensive PC I've ever owned, and I'm glad I built it when I did.

Happy Man (Sparklehorse cover)

Spent most of my free time this week recording a cover of Sparklehorse's "Happy Man." The original is a great pop song sabotaged by distortion as though it were a radio transmission going in and out of range. I've been wanting to do this one for a while, and I believe I did a fine job adhering to Mark's vision while giving it my own spin. Recorded with my Strat, Epiphone Dot, Epiphone Blues Custom, cheap Casio keyboard, and Propellerhead's Reason Essentials.

Weightlifting: Three Ways to Push Press

 

Due to chronic pain in my right shoulder, I've momentarily swapped out strict presses for push presses, which is fine, really, because my strict press wasn't going anywhere, and my push press seems to be moving pretty nicely. There are three ways that I push press, usually all in the same workout, and although the differences are minor between each variation, I thought I'd share my experiences because this is a goddamn blog and what is a blog without needless content? Thus, I elucidate.

First variation: The slight push. This is a push press that is eighty percent upper body. You basically just get the bar moving off your shoulders with a little jolt from the knees. This is an excellent assistance exercise for the strict press. The weights used should be comparable. This is the best push press for upper body development. The little boost at the start somehow bypasses whatever shoulder pain I have while strict pressing.

Second variation: The true push. This is a true push press in that you drive the weight up mainly with your lower body, with your upper body assisting. A great full body exercise, I usually switch to this method after loading the bar with weights that demand a little more leg assistance. Best used as a full body exercise.

Third variation: The push jerk. Now all we care about is moving the most weight overhead that we can. Drive the weight off your shoulders with your lower body, then dip slightly to catch it past the midway point, and then lock it out with a tiny press. It's that dip that differentiates the push jerk from a push press. I did it instinctively, and I think it's just a natural reaction when you are attempting to push weights overhead that you can't with any other method.

And that's all I got to say about that.

Writer's Block: Madness in a Time of Plague

 

Winter is a time of rain

of slush and sleet and minor pains

A time to sleep in waking steps

A time for love and hate in death

A time for moons and alcohol

A time for watching big and small

We wait and wait and wait some more

We wait until our fingers bore

Into our skulls to give relief

From wakefulness and dearth of sleep 

Our eyes they watch the hidden clues

That tell of dark and restless news

A world that we will soon ignore

Though nothing comes from useless lore

The answers that we need to hear

Are kept from us by mangled ears

We see and see and see some more

We see what never was before

Until our eyes have left our skulls

We will not know how to unknow

And so the winter sets us down

Into the grave where we will drown

Pile up the sodden ground

Leave us in the lost and found

We will not dream forevermore

Nothing dreams that is no more

Fixing a Hot, Noisy Graphics Card

 

Last April when I built a new PC, I chose an MSI 5700xt Evoke OC as my graphics card. I usually don't keep up with PC tech until I need to build a new computer, and so I went with Rock Paper Shotgun's best graphics card for 1440p recommendation. I purchased the cheapest 5700 xt I could find on Newegg, and at 400 bucks, the Evoke wasn't exactly cheap. Unfortunately, I had no idea how loud my card was--at 100 percent rpm, the fans sound like an aircraft taking off. Lowering the fan curve through AMD's Radeon software resulted in a card that frequently reached over 90 degrees Celsius while gaming. 5700 xts run hot, but that's way too hot, and every once in a while, usually after gaming over an hour, my computer would suddenly shut down, which was probably the 5700 xt shutting itself off before it cooked. Right now there's a global shortage of graphics cards due to high demand and economic complications from Covid, so upgrading isn't an option, unless I want to drive thirty miles and camp out in front of Best Buy every morning. The Evoke actually is a fine card performance wise--it hits over 60 frames per second at 1440p at high quality in every game I play--so if I could just figure out how to cool it without the fans making my ear drums bleed, there's no reason to switch it out. Here's what I did.

First, I upgraded my case fans. My Fractal Design Meshify C came with two excellent 120 mm fans which I used for front intake, but the screw holes for 120 mm fans aren't set low enough to allow airflow under my graphics card, so I purchased two 140 mm Cooler Master silent fans. One of these fit perfectly at the bottom front of the case and helped quite a bit. I have them on a smart curve that's pretty aggressive, and at their max rpm of 1000 they aren't noisy, as advertised.

Secondly, I underclocked and undervolted my card. This is very easy to do in the Radeon software. My card's default clock is 2150 Mhz, and its default voltage is 1200 mV. I found that reducing the core clock to 1900 Mhz and the voltage to 1000 mV was stable and significantly impacted temperature. I went from 89 degrees C in Amid Evil to the high 60s and low 70s. Performance wise, I didn't seem to lose more than a frame or two per second in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead Redemption 2. I think most of us would sacrifice a couple frames for a fifteen degree reduction in graphics card temperatures. I want this baby to last! Who knows when we'll be able to buy a decent GPU for less than a Playstation 5? 5700 xts are going for nearly 1000 bucks on Amazon! That's fucking crazy, considering I bought mine for only 400 dollars nearly a year ago.

Lastly, I adjusted the fan curve. This is also easily done in the Radeon Software. I went 30 percent at 30 degrees, 45 at 50, 55 at 70, 60 at 80, and 70 at 85. The fan is bearable at 60 percent; at 80, you can bear it with headphones. This is just a loud card, but since tempertures stay lower with my underclock, my fans usually don't go over 55 percent now.

So now my GPU doesn't drive me crazy. The lesson here is to read the reviews before you purchase, and to also scour the internet when you have a hardware problem, because there's usually a fix out there.

Writer's Block: Winter Trees

 

The winds hits

On the hill

Slipping my feet

Cutting my face

In my hands

Saw and shears

It is time

For more trimming.

 

Cankers, rots

Branches broken

By fecund spurs

A tumor

A spot for feeding

It all

Has to go.

 

What do I think

While my shoulders ache?

I think about people

Politics

Ancient video games

My wife

My last days

In the sun.

 

Every season

Is a circle

Some hate this

And spend their lives

Running out of the loop.

I've been in a circle

For a while.

It grows larger

Every year.

How I feel about it

Changes

From season to season.

 

We are in the dying times

But we'll soon be elsewhere.

There's nothing left to say

There is plenty left to do.

 

New Video: Factory Work

A piece of music intended to evoke the mindless grind of an Amazon warehouse. I did it years ago for a grand total of two weeks. If I'd kept at it, I'd have no soul. My sympathies go out to anyone who has to work a job like that. Human beings weren't made to toil like robots.

Amid Evil Review

 

This game's aesthetic is ridiculously appealing to the fantasy nerd in me.

Amid Evil is a 2019 retro shooter released by New Blood Interactive (who also released Dusk). It's easily described as an updated Hexen; for those who never played that title (I'm one), it's basically a dark fantasy skin of Doom, although Amid Evil definitely adheres closer to the Quake archetype. Its pixelated graphics also bring to mind id's mismash of fantasy and sci-fi. However, Unreal is another title that comes to mind, with Amid Evil's copious colored lightning and its arsenal's secondary firing modes. Suffice it to say that Amid Evil is thematically a mix of 90's shooters, and if you've played any of the aforementioned titles, you won't be lost.

There are seven episodes, each consisting of four levels with the last level being a boss fight. Each episode is thematically distinct. My favorite was the Arcane Expanse, a trippy sequence of dark fantasy cathedrals often traversed through floating rivers of ether. My least favorite was the Sacred Path, a labyrinthine maze full of ugly elementals, stupid-looking plant monsters, and giant rock beasts. All the episodes are fairly solid, although Dusk definitely has Amid Evil beat in the level design department. The arsenal is the best part of the game, with your typical selection of firearms being replaced by magical swords and staffs. You start off with an ax, which isn't completely useless, and you soon find the Staff of the Azure Orb, which shoots tracking missiles. The Whisper's Edge is my favorite weapon. It's a sword that flings green energy that can hit multiple enemies, making it a good replacement for the shotgun, and its secondary power up mode reminds me of the razorjack from Unreal. The Celestial Orb is also awesome. It's basically Quake's rocket launcher, but instead of firing rockets, it shoots random planets pulled from other dimensions. Pretty metal, eh? Rounding out the selection of guns is a trident that is functionally identical to Quake's lightning gun, a mace that does serious damage, and a messy tangle of ribbons called the Aeturnum that fires a slow moving ball of energy that destroys everything in its path a la Doom's BFG. Every time you kill an enemy, you absorb its soul (a Dark Souls reference?), and when you hit one hundred, you have access to alternate firing modes for all of the weapons. These are ridiculously powerful and fun, but you'll often find yourself unsure when a situation calls for such carnage. The game pace is more similar to Quake than Doom, and you'll seldom find yourself overwhelmed by a horde of monsters. After playing Doom Eternal, Amid Evil is certainly the more laid back affair.

All things considered, I enjoyed hunting keys and slaughtering knights in Amid Evil's many gorgeous levels. It's about a ten hour experience, give or take, and if you're hunting for a good shooter with a dark fantasy vibe, you can't go wrong. Dusk is a stronger experience, but Amid Evil's a much prettier game with a better arsenal. Feast your eyes on the screenshots below.