I started building gaming PCs in 1999. I had to get a PC for grad school. Interestingly enough, being in a curriculum that was oriented around people who would hold fiduciary responsibility for procuring technical equipment, the school felt it was important that we understood how a computer was built, along with some minor web design. I took the store-bought Packard Bell that I’d purchased from the local Circuit City and started modifying it. That fall, I moved it into an industry-standard ATX case, divested myself of any proprietary parts (it was quite an experience as I was exposed to what a proprietary motherboard was and why the hell it did not mate with an industry-standard front-panel connector harness 😂), and started to become very familiar with the stretch of California highways that lay in between me and the Fry’s Electronics in San Jose. Good times.
In 2010, I got rid of my XBox 360 Elite, having experienced my 5th Red Ring of Death after having been in the XBox ecosystem for nine years. I was still a PC gamer as well, and I wanted to replace the XBox 360 with a new device, but was not up for building a new PC. There were some life paths coming up ahead that would make building desktop PC’s impractical; a second tour in grad-school was one of those. So I ran out to my local Best Buy and procured an Asus G73. From there, over the next six years, I ran a few gaming laptops in what was growing into a gaming studio, oriented predominantly around a few gaming workstations; a Gateway P-6000 series laptop, a Compal, a few Lenovo gaming laptop units, and I Bootcamp’d my MacBook Pro 15-inch into a Windows gaming machine. I would continue to stock and refresh those workstations with gaming laptops over three moves, eventually regaining the lifestyle where the gaming studio was a dedicated space separated from other parts of the household.
I was still gaming on consoles; three generations of PlayStation and two of the XBox have come through the studio in the time since. And I got into livestreaming, finally having moved to places where I had and continue to have access to bandwidth that readily supports it without workarounds and compromises.
The lifestyle has meant getting very little sleep, as I continue to work in a field where I have been granted yearly increases in responsibility. On the side, in addition to just gaming, I have thrown myself at times into writing, having worked for several paid sites, as well as a handful of fan-supported ones. And done stints as a game reviewer, hardware reviewer, and livestreamed my own personal gaming diary of sorts along the way. I completed that second tour of grad school to earn my Masters in Software Engineering; but despite the work and family and house, there has always been gaming, and specifically there has always been PC gaming as my primary.
I was born in the Mid-West. Grew up in the South. I’ve been a nerd all of my life, and do not see that changing. My parents did not always directly support my gaming hobby, but they never minded as long as my schooling got the attention it needed. I don’t know why I got attracted to building PCs. I’ve never been mechanically inclined. I do not work on the cars or the house myself. Sure, I was a kid who took electronics apart.
But my life would definitely be easier if I just bought gaming PCs. Or even just consoles. The side-gig has had its downsides. The expectations of everyone to fix their computer problems. My role as the wider-family cell-phone device and plan administrator. But building PCs has had professional knock-on effects in keeping me more in tune with how industry technology is moving. It’s actually been directly beneficial, as I have had to change-out parts or do significant changes in the field for navigation and machinery control PCs. And it’s given me a thing to write about to honor my commitments to my college Creative Writing professor.
I grew up in those early years reading the likes of Gordon Mah Ung, Greg Vederman, and Norman Chan. Some of my favorite podcasts have been Buzz Out Loud, and the Engadget Mobile podcast back when it was Myriam Joire and MWC was a thing. I also read copious amounts of Andy McNamara, Andrew Reiner, Dan Stapleton, Matt Bertz, Andy Mahood, and Thom McDonald across Game Informer and PC Gamer. I’ve had the opportunity to interview Cliff Bleszinski and do a few other neat things. Being a gaming journalist, or just a journalist in general, would have been a neat junket. But I was always focused elsewhere for work, and PC building and gaming has just been a hobby. A really great hobby.
I dunno. As you get older, you start forgetting more than you remember. But you also start focusing on the people that are important. And less so on the ones who don’t matter. And in doing so, reassert your orientation to a trajectory that constantly drives you forward, and continuing a path of discovery. There are people who are small, and reside within their own snide bubble, and you remember how irrelevant they are. And so I felt like taking this trip down memory lane for whatever it’s worth. To remind myself why and how this whole thing started. And to remind myself about the importance of the things I get out of it. And to push down the irrelevancy of all the BS that gets in your windshield along the way.
Rounding Off Infinity 