Rigged for Streaming – Because I don’t Care About Gaming

Battlestation 3 is all rigged for my next arc of livestreams, scheduled for Sunday February 19th through Tuesday the 21st. But a few weeks ago it did not look like Battlestation 3 would ever be used for livestreaming again. Or much of anything. I was having a massive heat problem in the box, which I had only discovered while chasing down a failed GPU. The heat problem left me wondering if I should build a new rig or if there was a cost-saving salvage op I could pull off, but that would be a low enough level of effort that it would feel worth it to save the elbow grease over building new. Too far above the critical path activities that a new build takes, and I would just want to start over. And most of the work surrounding swapping out a cooling system, which would include removing the cooler from the CPU and cleaning the lid of the proc, and then re-applying thermal paste and seating a new cooling block would be a lot of the heavy lifting that goes into a new build.

I felt that the CoolerMaster Heat Sink and Fan assembly that CyberPowerPC (the original builders of this particular unit) had used was underpowered. And the RGB fans that they’d used were failing, sometimes refusing to light up, or lighting dimly, and always failing to follow the inputs from the teeny remote they came with. That and I also had low confidence in the Power Supply; both the fans and the PSU were made by Apevia, and I’d had an Apevia PSU fail before. I decided that swapping these three parts out would be less than half the level-of effort of building a new box, so a salvage op got the green light.

After all of the change-outs (not really calling it an upgrade because CyberPowerPC should have sent me a proper box, but what they sent me was shoddy workmanship, including a poor thermal paste application that left half of the AMD Ryzen 5-56000X CPU uncovered), the PC is the quietest of the four builds I run in the studio. So quiet that I sometimes have to shine a flashlight in the small bottom window on the front panel where I can see the lower of the three fans of the front-mounted AIO to visually verify that the AIO fans are spinning.

And yet, despite all of that, I am at one of my lowest points of caring at all about the industry and the various games it is putting out. I mean, I still love to game. But I have fallen into one of my PvP Shooter phases, and am given little care to notice things like Hi-Fi Rush, Forspoken, Hogwarts, or, more importantly, the controversy surrounding them. Since leaving Twitter, I check in now and again just from the browser without logging in. Console wars. And more console wars. While I keep an eye on the Microsoft-Activision merger goings on, I do so out of a compelling need to keep up with current events, but not out of a desire to talk to anyone about it. What used to fuel me to discuss the business and finances of the industry has fallen low in my ladder of concerns. I just want to play competitive shooters.

It also keeps me focused on wresting every drop of ROI from my gaming PC builds. But it, to a certain extent, also keeps me from diving deep into flight sims, racing games, and from getting use out of my other hardware. It is something I continue to ruminate over, even as I try to make small wedges within my sessions of Call of Duty and Halo to play my Steam Deck and other things. But for now, I’ll just accept that I am going to be playing a lot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. And reading all of the tips, and watching a healthy chunk of the videos. That will be my faith for now. My temple. At least that will keep me focused and righteous for now. Like the year I spent in exile reading and writing reviews out of the limelight, it is time for a cleanse from all of the nonsense.