While the story was a little more predictable in this season (all of the most popular characters go to the North to form a Friendship Brigade) I think part of the reason that people are starting to turn on the show is that several of the episodes were very poorly paced relative to the last several seasons. There was also one episode that had like sub-college film student level cinematography I think it was #3 where it constantly jump cut to super tight shots of peoples faces whenever they spoke - likely because the proper actors weren't on set at the same time. Granted, seasons 1 and 2 had lots of good and bad stuff kinda mixed into the same episodes and then the show really hit its stride, and now it's regressing somewhat. But it's still plenty fun - I could come up with a lot worse ways to spend an hour.

I took their advice and have a BenQ am very happy - requires a bit of fiddling though otherwise everything looks like ultra-bright CS1.6 lol.

I really enjoyed Mayweather's strategy of letting Mcgregor punch his gloves over and over for about 20 minutes until Mcgregor was too tired to fight. The best parts were when Mayweather just walked at him with his gloves in front of his face and Mcgregor just kept punching them - it's like he didn't know what else to do with himself lol.

Hey now there's nothing dumb about professional wrestling - it's great fun - but yes this is a nice retirement pot for both men regardless, so why not give people a bit of fun.

My first ever ESEA match was against a team with some pretty well known players, so I decided to be a big nerd and watch their first game of the season on live STV. What I witnessed went like this:

The opposing team was named KFC. They all had various iterations of the Kentucky Fried Colonel as their avatars. They logged into the server *far* earlier than Thrasher and friends did. About 4 minutes into the pregame, one of the KFC players says "I'll brb I'm going to run to Taco Bell really quick" unreadies, and logs out of the server.

about 10 minutes go by and Trahsher and friends show up, KFC begs for a reprise as their comrade was on a TBell run. Numerous jokes regarding the possibility of a combination KFC/Taco Bell are exchanged.

Server warning comes up after a 25 minute pregame. They decide to start and pause out of courtesy.

20 more minutes go by. Thrasher et al ask if they can just get on with it and pause when their Taco eating friend returns. KFC agrees. They get quickly rolled in 6 minutes on snakewater, taking it to half time. Taco Bell man still hasn't returned. An offer is made to wait a bit at half time for the eater of tacos to return, but it's rejected. The KFC team leader announces that this player was going to be cut from the team for betraying KFC and his/her 5 teammates.

They quickly lose 2 more rounds. I check the roster of KFC the next day, and the team had died.

KFC was killed by Taco Bell.

#2 Marlin does have a nice ring to it
#3. That was kind of the point of the post lol. I literally hid from the outside world in my swamp with the aid of this computer lol. Oh yeah the specs for the 2010 (what I'm using now for the last time hopefully lol).

OS: Win 7 Home premium 64 bit
HDD: WD Blue 1 TB blu (216 gigs left empty!)
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5
CPU: AMD Phenom II (slight OC to 3.2 ghz 6 cores)
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon 6800HD, 1 gig vram, 256 bit.
PSU: Corsair 850 Watt - I had big plans for running dual graphics cards, buying an aftermarket cooler, and OCing the Phenom II harder, I also OC'd the RAM, and a myriad of other things - none of which I ever did because it simply wasn't necessary.
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaw 8 gigs in 4 sticks of 2gigs each OC'd to 1866.

#4 Boris would certainly hold the theme, but I had a laptop in college that I named Boris because its processor had been modified by my Bulgarian friend Georgi :D lol.

#5. I might, but the plan is to build a bread-box light case into my wall, and hide it back in there, so that should I want to play some old game and can't get it to run on the win10 system, I'll just open the bread box and plug my peripherals, otherwise it'll be entombed there until I have confidence that win10 isn't awful lol. Then I'll likely strip its HDD out, and do what I do to all old things - shoot it a lot, and then drop it off at the land fill.

Some of you like my stories or at least, so I'm told so I will relate the one of my PC, which will be getting replaced tomorrow, forever.

The year was 2010, I'd graduated from University - and that was about the only good thing that happened. My mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, my girlfriend of 2 years - who I had been living with for some time - left me and moved to the opposite side of the planet, I was working in a job I hated, and which eventually did me great bodily harm from which I have only recently, finally, recovered, and to add to all that, I drank a *ton*.

The only other bright spot was I'd made some great friends on SourceOP 24/7 Goldrush, and we'd resolved to get into this comp tf2 stuff for real this time. But my computer then (an HP I'd bought at best buy in 2005) was simply not going to cut it. So, I'd heard, if you wanted some real shit; some *real* gaming computer, you had to do it yourself. So, naturally, to be a good gamer, one had to fork out the money and learn some skills.

I spent roughly $1,500 on the computer, all the latest and greatest stuff that seemed reasonable to pay for, and a few extra frills that were totally pointless excesses. I named it Doris.

The trouble started the day I got home from work and found all of it lying on the floor of my garage. I set to putting the MOBO into the case, a massive full tower ATX case, complete with open side, a massive fan occupying most of it, and *all* steel construction - no plastic for me. As it turned out, there had been a mistake the day it was made at the factory, and whatever press responsible for drilling out the holes for the motherboard were slightly off - only 2 of the 8 screws lined up properly. I checked my order just to make sure I wasn't an idiot that had ordered a board that didn't fit the case, and indeed, nothing was wrong there.

I e-mailed the company and got a response fully in what I'll assume was some variation of Chinese. I gave up hope that they'd respond in a language that I could read. So, I decided, screw it, I'll just put 2 screws in the thing, and I'll get around to fixing it later. I never did. The company died about 7 months later perhaps I was not the only one.

Then after more assembly, it came time for the GPU. I'd been into PC gaming for a while so I knew my way around GPUs. I'd even bought the last ever AGP card for 256$ the day it came out - you even had to plug it into your HDD to get it to power on. But this thing, was a 1gig card, a number that then seemed astronomical. I'd used a 32mb Geforce 2 for AGES as a kid, and the idea of 1gig was just absurdity. The card was gigantic, and it did not fit into the back panels, so I had to go to the hardware store, buy tin snips, and cut the back of my case off. It still didn't fit into the back of the case. So I took a pair of pliers and bent the big honkin' metal mounting plate on the GPU. Warranty now almost certainly voided; but at least it fit.

Myself and that computer played TF2 virtually nonstop for the next 4 years, met just about everybody there was to meet in comp tf2 at the time, and then I got into casting and doing my youtube channel. But father time is undefeated, and my escape was starting to wear down. The fans on the GPU were starting to seize up. OK, I said, I know how to oil a damn fan. Nope, in this brave new world, Gigabyte saw fit to make that impossible. Replacements cost 12$ a piece. 24$ for new fans, when it should be free to drop some oil in there. Nope, it was then I decided that I was going to drill my own stupid holes. So armed with a rather sharp drill bit, I just pressed down on the middle of the fan and slowly burrowed a hole into the fans, into which I poured some nice knitting machine oil. I covered my holes with scotch tape, and went about my business. From then on, for the last 3 years, I've been occasionally pulling the card to add additional knitting machine oil to its fans to keep them from seizing. So far, great success.

But now components are starting to slowly die. I've had to oil all the case fans, the CPU cooler, and the DVDdrive (cannibalized from the 2005 HP) no longer functions. When I get into windows I have to wait 45 seconds before the computer will accept input. It was time for a new computer. I actually asked for advice this time, and our resident hardware guru Setsui set me on the right path and prevented me from making the same mistakes over again.

So, while I may be in a much, much better place now, I'll always fondly remember Doris the monstrosity, and all of the highs and lows that it brought me. From playing in the first and only season of main, overseeing massive growth in the UGC 6s community, playing on a team with one of my favorite players from before I started playing, introduced my son to heavy, and he independently discovered MGE, and became a rager, and the death of SourceOP. Not to mention winning UGC platinum in my first season, and lording over the BIG GOLDRUSH LEAGUE for multiple seasons! Or casting the last (probably ever) ESEA GPIT match, the last (maybe ever?) ESEA LAN, and getting to cast with virtually every well known caster from TF2 history excepting DJC and Leogeo. It wasn't a terrible use of 7 years.

But now I have think of a new name for Doris' replacement....

It's super cloudy here today, so it's dark already. Nice try moon.

Seppuku (called Hara Kiri in the West) the 1962 version. Followed very closely by The Communist (1958)

Sounds good :D The case is definitely something I'm going to look into when I go to buy this stuff during the week - it was just a decent placeholder in the 50-70$ range that I figure I'll end up in. The reason I picked the black is because I was 100% set on a blue (I've had really really good experiences with WD over the last 16 years or so, so they've earned me as a fanboi lol) but the black was only like 15$ more so I figured it couldn't hurt, but I could also just save 15$ I suppose lol.

The RAM rabbit hole is not a place I like to be because naming conventions are so wacky now it's damn hard to find RAM off of the approved list in quantities that aren't absurd lol.

Thanks for all the help!

Alrighty, here is the mostly finished build - https://pcpartpicker.com/list/2pWQJV

I'm fairly happy with everything as is, but I'm very open to suggestions. It's funny, when I built the PC I'm using currently HDD's were SUPER expensive because of the tsunami that hit Thailand, but now graphics cards are super inflated by cryptominers and RAM is inflated because of peoples' phones lol.

I'd be particularly interested in hearing RAM suggestions (can confirm this RAM is said to work by gigabyte) because 150$ for ram feels downright absurd any time past the 1980s and I have my doubts that ram rated that fast actually would make much of a difference in performance - but I'm hardly an expert. I'm also open to suggestions on the PSU, I feel like 650w gives me a lot of wiggle room for eventually OC'ing the processor once it may need it, and/or any other stupid thing I'd want to do or plug into it. I also live in a very rural area where power fluctuations are a fact of life, so I very much want a PSU with an extended warranty.

Once it finally comes down to it, I'll fish for better prices on particular items - just trying to see if anybody has suggestions on similarly performing items that may be a bit cheaper in the main or if I've hit some kind of land mine and am screwing myself lol.

Being in the market for a GPU that's a question I've been looking into - the basic answer is nobody knows, but it looks like the crypto-currency goldrush is nearing its end so maybe 5-6 months, though I am not at all familiar with the GPU production pipeline so that could be wildly inaccurate, but I assume they make a bunch in a given month particularly given the recent high demand.

1k range as in 1,000 $ I can go over but I've set a hard limit of 1.5k no more than that is reasonable to me.

My objective is basically two fold. Play games of whatever type I choose for the next 5-8 years without having to care much about it or worry about my specs barring some kind of massive change in hardware (I doubt that will occur but you never know).

Also ease of maintenance, but I won't ask that here because they tend not to mention it on spec sheets so it'd be hard to know unless you owned the stuff - I'm going to call the companies directly, because I got burnt pretty badly on my Radeon HD 6800 not having oil ports in its fan (gigabyte) and I will never again custom drill holes in a graphics card fan's bearing just because the company decided I should have to buy a new fan when it got noisy.

Why not just be exemplar - that sounds even more evil than paragon with all those consonants and there isn't a former invite player with that name for which you would be made fun of endlessly for.

Alright, after finally getting everything situated and seemingly having enough cash I'm looking to execute a build that is somewhere in the 1K range. But I have a few questions that maybe you hardware hounds will know better since the last time I really kept up on hardware was nearly 8 years ago, and a lot has changed.

CPUs: I know Ryzen is all the rage right now, but ultimately with gaming, in the past the big selling point was the mhz/ghz rate (or when AMD did that weird alternate counting system, and then you had to convert it to ghz) and then roughly a decade ago people really went over the top for cores. But now I see threads are supposedly important as well outside of hyper-threading? So when deciding on what kind of a CPU to get, given that I will mainly be using said device for gaming, which of those 3 things should I really be the most interested in? Say for example a marginal price increase of 30$ nets me additional of one of the three, in which case would it be the best use of 30$? Are there yet even more factors that I should account for?

PSU: Years ago, when I built my first system (2010), a well meaning friend purchased for me as a gift a 900 watt power supply. My assumption is they just picked the biggest fanciest sounding one and bought that given that, at that time, PSUs were not very expensive - it's also corsair branded. It has never given me any problems whatsoever. I know that older PSUs can be a bit of a gamble in so far as a dying one can damage your other components, but exactly how stupid of an idea would it be to shove a 7 year old PSU in a new build given that, as far as power output goes, it will likely never be too little power in my lifetime? Is there a way to safely clean the thing and not kill myself in the process or a test I could run periodically to check on how its doing?

Future proofing: How many cores is it thought will be needed for gaming in the next decade? In ye olden days, it was always thought best to surpass whatever the current console generation was by x2 or more, but I know that the PS4 and Xbone have 8 core processors inside them. Is it at all likely that eventually, at the end of their life spans, gaming companies will start making games that can even utilize such a large number of cores in a PC environment? How necessary is it thought that things like crossfire and SLI may become? In general right now, and in the past, they were mostly things for hobbyists just to have to say they've got em'. Is it foreseeable that today's 1070's may need to be doubled up on in say the next 5 years?