sleeper rig

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STARSTRUCK
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sleeper rig

Post by STARSTRUCK »

Cain and his Daddy-O were not so different. Each possessed a connection with computers and all the exuberant social graces of a bivalve. It was a wonder how the old man had managed to breed, let alone pass his major malfunctions down to his youngest child so completely. The main difference between them was that Daddy-O'd been a Gamer, ass-over-heels married to violent computer games to the point where he'd spent at least two thirds of his life's waking hours stomping Goombas rendered in ultra-realistic VUXQHD+ resolution or whatever, whereas Cain never really caught the bug. The other thing was that Daddy-O had already offed himself but Cain hadn't yet. Perhaps there was a connection here.

What separated Daddy-O's addiction from less pathological gamers like Marie and Vidman was that Daddy-O had been a gamer in denial. Actually, maybe it wasn't even that. Daddy-O might've lived if he'd only denied it in a way that made sense. "Oh hey you know what, I'm a fourty year old man. Rumors of my adventures with Super Mario have been greatly exaggerated!" he might've joked at parties, solidifying his adultness with every self-abasing jab. He could've split his time with a more erudite hobby, like engine-spotting (Okay, that would be worse.). Sadly, such compromising measures just wasn't enough for him. He had to tackle the root of the problem (or rather, his own perception of it).

In illuminating Daddy-O's descent into madness, it's useful to consider the way gaming hardware is designed and marketed. You should already know that it's difficult or impossible to enjoy the latest, most graphically- and mechanically-intense Layer 2 video games without the fastest hardware available. When you go from components intended for office work to components intended for gaming, you see a slow shift away from the product design conventions of the era (be it ribbed beige plastic or false wooden trim) towards the queer yet seemingly timeless design language known as 'Gaming'.

Once solid-looking IBM shitboxes become angular polygonal behemoths infested with LEDs and energy-squandering CCFLs: an amalgamation of the most thoughtless cliches of military and sci-fi concept art, built to appeal to children and crows, both easily swooned by shiny objects. Smooth computer mice that sit comfortably in the palm? Fuck those-- let's put a toy stealth fighter into your hand! It doesn't matter if all the sharp edges dig into your skin. You're hard-core. You're a Gamer. Fuck the police. Even livery isn't safe from gamer-fication: A particularly notorious case was the transformation of the Corsair insignia from a trio of main-sails (Get it? Because pirates!) into a spiky but meaningless marriage of crossed swords and vagina dentata. It's easy to see how one could become disillusioned with this drivel, but to most power users it remained a non-issue: an unfortunate concession to be made in the heliotropy towards faster processors, more robust air cooling and so on.

Nevertheless, on certain tech-related BBSes and imageboards (namely, the ones Daddy-O frequented), there existed an unspoken rule to the effect that its members ought to shun these low-hanging visual fruit and instead seek more refined enjoyment. In other words, you were to shove your 'sikkkkkkk' gaming rigs into boring, featureless office shitboxes or be laughed out. Cain himself did not understand the point of it, but he supposed they'd thought up a meta-game of sorts. Upon further research, he became certain that the original founders of the BBS had really loathed gamers in general. These were the monk-like UNIX purists of Bobby Lang's caliber, disgruntled with the misdirection of countlesss teraflops of processing power towards such self-serving ends as virtual reality computer gaming.

Eventually these ranty old men were chased out by less opinionated newcomers, but some twisted fragment of their original ideology had survived in the form of the gaming machine stigma. There was even a recent shift towards bulky multi-monitor setups in the name of 'productivity' and 'enterprise-level observation'-- really just any old way to spend money and pretend they weren't just playing video games, a level of self-deception that was rare even on the Internet.

In the months before Daddy-O's suicide, he had resolved to take it one step further than the rest of them. He'd moved his pride-and-joy 'sleeper rig' from his bedroom to the unused guest room, installing it in an office desk with peeling wood trim he'd acquired from Salvation Army. He branded the room his 'study' and declared it off-limits to the rest of the family, not that anyone ever wanted in in the first place. Cain soon found him importing such bizarre objects as plastic office-plants and an actual water cooler, which perplexed him, but didn't raise any real alarm bells at the time. Maybe Daddy-O was too lazy to go to the kitchen for a glass of water? Yeah, that must've been it. It came to a head when he'd erected an actual cubicle around his desk and its uncountable monitors, the majority of which were impossible to drive from the rig's four graphics cards. He'd spent several hundred dollars on a professional D-SLR camera w/ tripod for the express purpose of uploading hi-rez pics of his 'battlestation' on the BBSes. Even Momma had started to find the old NEET's behaviour unnerving.

How could one not? Every morning, he'd kit himself in a sharp dress shirt and freshly-ironed slacks and shoulder the black messenger bag containing his 'EDC': a collection of ultra-masculine tidbits which included
1) a 2.4 kg IBM ThinkPad (bricked)
2) a high-tech vaporizer pen w/ tobacco carts
3) a full first-aid kit
4) imitation Swiss Army Knives and multi-tools
5) a stolen Mercedes key fob
6) a loaded Glock 26 (airsoft)
all in preparation to forge the long journey from his bedroom to the guest room on the far end of the corridor, whistling tunes as he strolled. Lord only knows what was going through his mind on these micro-commutes, but one can only hope he was proud of himself.

One night, Cain had come home from cram school in a somewhat... ablated state of mind. His dealer had spiked his Alphabet with something raw just to screw with him. The dots fucked with his depth perception to the point where he'd forgotten which door opened to his bedroom, and so he wound up encroaching into the 'study' unwittingly. Fortunately, Daddy-O was still gloved and goggled with the new 600-line Ikegami vacuum tube HMD that'd come in the mail yesterday. He hadn't heard his son come into the darkened room. Cain decided to take a look around, and what he saw fucked him up like nothing else.

The cubicle was pasted to hell with notes from imaginary co-workers, all with white people names like 'Eric' and 'Robert from HR'. Passive-aggressive warnings, meetings scheduled three weeks in advance, toner orders for 'that god-damned printer!'... it was as if he'd become so engrossed in that illusion of definitely-not-playing-video-games that he'd fooled himself into believing that he actually went to work, all while rotting at his desk at home and still playing video games. But the worst part had yet to come: when Cain's eyes adjusted to the darkness, dark humanoid shapes soon resolved on the cubicle walls. They were mannequins, male and female, all dressed as office workers and lying in heaps on floor. Cain stormed out of the room, fearing for his sanity. He hoped to God the Alphabets were still fucking with him.

The next morning, Cain, Momma and Big Sista found their Daddy-O dead in his study, hanging from the ceiling by an improbably long DVI cable tied into a noose. There was a Post-It note on his forehead, containing only a big red cheesy ink stamp that said 'FIRED'. All around him, the countless monitors of his sleeper rig were static with snapshots of anime-style tentacle pornography, their vulgarity somehow mute in the faux-office environs. Maybe he was into that kind of stuff.

In that respect, if nothing else, Cain and his Daddy-O were not so different.
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Anna
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Re: sleeper rig

Post by Anna »

... it's actually about ethics in videogame journalism?
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