I bought a brand-spanking-fresh-copy of the FPS game, Prey, after waiting for it for almost a year. All the videos, screengrabs and rants I’d seen had me thinking it was going to be the coolest shit since duct tape.

After installing to my desktop’s XP partition (and subsequently spending 40 minutes running updates and patches since I never boot Windows anymore), I gave it a whirl and was greeted with a jerky, shitty looking game with the lowest frame-rate I’ve ever seen. A little deeper digging and I found that my NVidia GeForce 5200 wasn’t supported and closest I could get to smooth gameplay was by running at the lowest graphical settings, which were horrible. I wasn’t happy.

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For the past month and a half, I’ve been spending a good chunk of my free time in Second Life. Stripped from the official website, Second Life is described as “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.” Since it’s user-run, it’s hard to peg, since everyone generally moves to groups and cliques they identify with and do or create whatever the hell they want. In short, from pervert to programmer and from gamer to shut-in—there’s something for everyone. Second Life is definitely some pretty whacked out shit, worth at least a quick look.

Touring about the territories of Second Life, you see seemingly endless 3D creations. Houses, vehicles, stores, giant purple dildos, whatever you could possibly imagine seems to be represented there in one form or another. Users are given the use of a 3D modeling program while having the benefit of still being in-game, allowing you to create objects while playing or possibly as a form of play. Some objects are incredibly beautiful and painstakingly crafted to be as aesthetic or realistic as possible, while others are mediocre or downright lame. Being a self-created reality, there’s quite a varying amount of quality out there.

Everything made in Second Life can be sold to other players, using game dollars known as Lindens. In turn, this virtual money can actually be exchanged for real hard currency. The last time I checked the exchange rate, twenty US dollars made the equivalent of around four hundred Linden dollars. Some people—prolific and talented ones, actually make a tidy chunk of cash of this virtual business. I’ve met one individual who nets about twenty thousand dollars annually from in-game sales of items, scripts and real estate, nicely supplementing his teacher’s salary.

While I’m impressed with Second Life, I don’t really know what to make of it. There’s some really smart people, very talented artists and professionals and a huge mass of idiots, perverts and all-around trashy people. There seems to be bondage shit everywhere you look and everyone seems to be trying to make up for their shortcomings through their avatars. Everyone’s got big muscles, huge boobs and all the trappings. It’s pretty seedy and more than a little bit gross. Where are all the fat, bald people? Personally speaking, blindingly beautiful person that I am, I spent a good chunk of time getting my avatar to look about as close to the real-life me as I could. I just don’t understand why so many people need to look like rejects from a Florida nightclub. Who wants to see that shit?

A good defense of this good, bad and ugly is the fact that it is truly user-run. All this crap is from the great masses. While a kind of exhilarating example of digital democracy, it doesn’t do much in changing my belief that the majority of the human race would be better served as food to the smarter individuals. Brains, it’s what’s for dinner, but I digress.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick with Second Life. My PlayStation is much more inviting and requires much less actual work, but if you find yourself in-game, stop by. My game-name is David Sleestak. I’ll show you my house and we’ll kill a few beers and bong-hits. In-game, of course.

My nearly brand spanking new computer kicked it’s heels up and died on me this weekend. It looks like my power supply is shot for some reason. Luckily, I had the forsight to buy one of these extended manufacturer warranties. I spent an hour or so on the phone with a support guy who ad me ripping boards and wires out left and right, trying to get the thing to turn on. Finally, after eliminating any other possibilities, the guy set me up to have someone come to my apartment and replace the busted parts and get me running again. This is good. But, seeing as I’m leaving for a vacation in Vermont on Thursday and the replacement parts need to be mailed to me, I’m looking at having to spend over a week without this computer running. I have another computer that I run as a backup, but that too is completely fritzed. It’s just old and has needs to be taken behind the shed and shot. That leaves a G5 that I can use, but no Linux and no video games. Un-fucking-acceptable.

So, I did what any self-respecting antisocial computer junkie would do, which was immediately buy a new computer. I have a brand new laptop being express Fed-Ex delivered to me tomorrow morning. I intend to plug it it and immediately install Linux, throw out my old backup PC and use it as my new mobile/backup system. This should tide me over until my main beast of a machine is back up and running as it should be. I’m tempted to try running one of the preview releases of Ubuntu’s “Breezy Badger” (developers should never name distros. It sounds like an animal with gas.) as it’s got the latest hardware support and the final release is only a few weeks away. All the impending geekdom has me sweaty already.

This week, I decided to play mad genius and attempt a dual installation of Linux and Windows on my main computer. I already run Linux on my old computer, but it’s slow and I wanted to see what it would do on my souped up beast of a machine and besides, other than video games, Windoze sucks armadillo balls. I only keep it around because I’m a video game junkie and it’s just easier for me to boot up XP than deal with trying to get a game to run on Linux.

I’ve been using the Ubuntu distribution of Linux for about a year now and I decided I would stick with it for this install. I like it,but will admit that my experience with other packages is minimal. I’m definitely not one of those guys that after many long years of trying every flavor of Linux, thought really deeply and settled on one. Ubuntu works pretty good for me, at least so far.

No problem for a daring genius like myself, I thought. I have two hard drives in my main PC, so I figured I’d leave the one with XP installed on it alone, clean off the other, format and install Linux on it. This way, if there were any problems, my system and my files would remain intact on the main drive. No need for any real backing up, right?

Wrong. So very seriously wrong. Sometimes I can be such an overeager hairless chimp of a fucking retard.

In an effort to keep a long and boring story short, I’ll cut to the basics. I fucked up. I tried again and fucked that up as well. I ended up with Linux completely screwed and waking up next to grandma, buck naked as well as being unable to boot XP. After taking some advice from a support forum, I attempted a Windows repair. However, instead of repairing, it completely fucked me, resulting in a permanent blue screen of death.

So there I was with no working operating system, completely screwed for not having done a proper backup. For several minutes, I contemplated jamming my keyboard up my nose, strangling myself with the mouse cord or shoving my head through my monitor. I had five years worth of photos trapped in there, along with all my game save files. Horror!

Luckily, I had the poise to download and run a live CD so I could boot Linux and run it from the disc drive. I ran a little script called winmac_fstab that searches for and mounts NTFS drives or partitions. Bazoom! I had access to my files. XP is so fucking unsecure. It took me five seconds to bypass my login completely and get at my user folder, or any other folder I needed.

Armed with a USB flash drive, I reenacted the fall of Saigon and evacuated as many files as I could and pretty much got everything out and safely stored on a different computer. Finally, after rescuing everything important, I completely wiped both drives and tried again…and again…and yet again. All told, I think I ended up wiping my PC about three times.

Then, as if sent from a higher power, a thought came into my thick skull: Why not look for a fucking tutorial, you stupid fucking renegade herpes sore?

A minute or two of searching Google brought me to this tutorial on dual installing Ubuntu and Windows. I reinstalled XP and with the help of this rescue CD, resized the partition, leaving about 10 gigs of free space which I subsequently installed Linux into. It worked perfectly.

I now have the glorious experience of being asked which operating system I wish to boot, every time I turn on my computer. I can laugh my most evil laugh and say no to Windoze every time. Ubuntu loads and runs about ten times faster than XP and so far works great. All is well and back to normal. Next time, I swear I’ll consult a tutorial first.

After playing off and on for over two years, last winter I finally decided to wean myself away from EverQuest 1, also aptly known as EverCrack.

For those of you not in the know, EverQuest is a MMORPG, or an Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game a.k.a. HFNWC or Heroin for Nerds With Computers. There’s no shame here, daveb waves his freak flag high and mighty. Admittedly, it’s not the best conversation opener if you’re looking to get laid later in the evening. “I have a level 36 Mage and last week, my guild killed two dragons” just really doesn’t do much for girls. But hey, what’s a sex life compared compared to slaying a mythical winged beast?

On Friday, I finally bit the bullet and picked up a copy of EverQuest 2 at a store near my office. No big deal, I thought. I’ll head home, install it, futz with it for a couple hours and then walk away having spent an appropriate amount of time playing and go do something wholesome like ramming splinters under my fingernails or writing angry, illucid emails to the Pope.

The next thing I knew, it was Sunday night and I’d once again joined the ranks of EQ crackheads. I was virtually running all over the place, grouping with other people and slaying all manner of minor creatures. I was working on making potions, scribing spells, making tea, earning money, paying rent on an apartment and all sorts of mundane things, only these things weren’t real outside of the confines of a game server. I’d slept a total of no more than six or eight hours the whole weekend and on upon hitting the street this morning to catch the subway to work, I was taken aback by reality. Shit, I’m thirty, human and I live in the ghetto and cannot grow thistle-like spiked armor out of my skin using arcane means…right.

Fucking EverCrack. At least it’s not like I don’t know a shitload of other thirty-somethings who are completely addicted. Still, being a fan of online RPGs sort of entails you having to relinquish any plausible deniability over the fact that you are a hopeless, gibbering nerd. I feel myself just steps away from the pocket-protector and duct-taped glasses. I have EQ running on one computer and Linux on another with a KDE switch so I can bounce back and forth with ease. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, give yourself a hug and understand that you are indeed a fortunate human being. Just understand that in daveb’s Apartment of Doom, the geek meter registers pretty fucking high and that’s…okay.