We’ve had HL2 for ages – Sabriena originally got it when I was playing TF2 with some friends, and she wanted to play. Very shortly after, they had the entire Orange Box on sale for $10 (half the price of TF2 at the time) so she picked it up. We’d never played HL2 at all, and over a year later I picked up HL2 for free as part of an AMD giveaway. I’d still never played it.

A few months back, a friend of mine decided to drag me, kicking and screaming, through HL2 and episodes 1 & 2 via Synergy. I won’t lie, we had a blast with it. I’d since put it on the backburner, forgetting about it, until recently when I discovered the achievements. I guess I always knew they were there – I’d heard about the one that’s something about getting garden gnomes to the moon or something – but I’d never really thought about it. So I’ve been going back through HL2 to pick up the achievements I never got via Synergy.

It’s amazing how much fun such an old game is.

I set up a server a while back, but it didn’t work out very good. Nick and I share an account (I mainly bought it for him, I just jump on it from time to time) so we can’t play at the same time anyway – so it really wasn’t worth having a full-time server set up on my FreeBSD box just for one person to mess around on.

But man, some of these servers are starting to look cool – entire villages, huge castles and churches, houses, gardens, pools (with pool fences to keep the creepers out), towers, and everything. The new rivers thing looks pretty awesome too.

There’s just so much making me want to play it, but I don’t feel like sitting in one spot for 6 hours.

I’ve done my share of painting and windows and so on – I actually painted the inside of my crappy HP case so it would match everything else: the aftermarket PSU is jet black and so are most of the other components, but the inside of the case was naked metal so I painted it with a $2 can of paint and it looks 800x better.

But I want something neat, something bigger, something with good cable management. Something with modding potential. Maybe something with casters. Maybe something to put a window in the side of, but more than likely something with good airflow even if the side of the box is off.

Something I can’t afford at the moment.

She started getting upset the other day when it looked like her two favorite adults were about to get flattened by a large meteorite, in a panic about the children who are inside who would no longer have parents. Won’t someone think of the children!

Sabriena downloads all kinds of things for it as well – it’s not uncommon to see her dressing up sims in weird and wonderful outfits. Guys in assless chaps, girls in cupless corset. Weird stuff.

Then there’s the inevitable three-hour hunt for whatever item she downloaded that’s making her game crash.

I’d buy up the baby food for next to nothing, list it in my shop for sometimes 50x what I’d paid for it, and they’d write me an angry NeoMail before buying it back from me. I also played the stock market over there, buying up stocks at 15NP (the lowest legal buy price) and sitting on them to make a nice fat profit.

It was such an activity that got me to log in today – I saw a post on Reddit about someone who had logged in after 8 years to find a 6000% return on one of their stocks. I’d bought that same stock for 2 points lower than they did, and netted a nice tidy return on it. Unfortunately though, I’m to understand that 1,000,000 NP is not very much money at all in the game anymore, but it’s still funny to think about.

I bought up another stock at 15NP, exhausting my limit of 1,000 shares per day, and took a look around a few places before signing out. Sabriena and I used to send each other crap back and forth, unique christmas gifts, anniversary presents, birthday gifts. Things like bottles of sand and fairy shit and so on. A few years back I logged in and found some crap in my safety deposit box and sent it to her, and she never signed in to pick it up.

It’s not because I particularly want to sue them at all. I might have gotten an email or two from some raleigh nc lawyers about this class action or that. I don’t really even give a shit that I can’t put Linux on my PS3 (though in retrospect for Sony, pulling that functionality was a really bad decision) – in fact in the entire time I’ve had it, I’ve had no desire to put an alternate OS on it at all. Make no bones about it, it makes a really shitty Linux desktop with the hardware access you’ve got.

I don’t care too much that my details were exposed – pretty much everything that could get released on me is public knowledge already anyway. The cat’s out of the bag, man. I didn’t even use the identity theft protection coupon they gave out.

No, the only reason I’m bothering to fork over the stamp to send this letter is because I want Sony to know that I’m paying attention to their bullshit. If enough other people do it too, then hopefully they’ll pull their heads in. I know that personally, I am probably not going to buy another Sony console. PC gaming master race all the way now!

What a loser I am.

Unfortunately, the chipset that’s in my PC has that stuff neutered (Realtek make the exact same chipset with the letters “DD” after it, indicating it supports this feature), so I’m stuck with SPDIF pass-through or analog 5.1. Bummer.

I’ve been trying to find a reasonably priced card that supports it and is PCI-E x1, but so far no luck. If I could have 5.1ch audio out through my home speakers instead of my headphones, I’d be a really happy camper.

Zombie games are great, no need to spend all your money on the best weight loss pills when zombies chase you around. Cardio. “Poor fat bastard”, and all that.

Turns out only about 15 people entered, and there was 11 games up for grabs, so my odds were pretty good. I wound up scoring Doom3, which is cool because when I first got Steam the demo was one of the first things I ever downloaded (Yeah, I got into the Steam game late – I was a console gamer up until then, but it’s okay I’m all better now).

I’ve not even got as far as you get during the demo, because of time constraints but that’s okay – I’ll get around to trudging my way through it at some point.

Steam is having their Summer Camp event on at the moment, and I’ve been collecting as many tickets as I can… nothing would make the gamer in me happier than winning things like Portal2 and Homefront for free as well. Of course for the most part, I’m about as lucky as an afore-mentioned Mars lab scientist calling up about term life insurance quotes on the day the demons come to town, but hey it could happen.

It gives me something to do as well – it’s an excuse to revisit games like Day of Defeat and Counter Strike: Source that I’ve not played in months.