So, OMGCHAIR has been delayed for a little bit (I have fortunately located a spare dinner chair cushion to lessen the ow as a temporary measure), and instead I must attend to Yggdrasil. Awesome old man box is 2 years old, which puts him on schedule for some kind of mid-life upgrade… typically for my machines this means RAM/video card, but in Yggdrasil’s case, it means standing by with a spare replacement hard drive because the one he’s got is grinding like he’s some kind of aspiring dubstep DJ. Considering this dood is my house LAN’s media machine, having him die would be, um… no.

So, Yggdrasil will have this thing on standby, but in addition to that as a more immediate measure, and also because one can never have too much external storage, I’m also looting one of these drives. The best parts: solely powered through the USB port (yay no power brick needed) and it comes in blue. :D

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Oh yeah, it’s, like, 2012 now. If the FX channel has any sense of humor, it will spam the everloving smoo out of the disaster flick of the same name–
…wait, it’s not, but Starz is! HAH! They should just have a freaking Roland Emmerich day and spam all his blatantly-disaster movies. :)

But yeah… if we’re going to hype this year as the end of the world, I hope to all things awesome that we get a bunch of kickass new disaster movies out of it.

Not only does Blastoise’s chair have to go, it’s probably why I haven’t been on him the past week. The seat of the chair is starting to come apart, and there’s something in the middle that’s poking me from underneath. It’s already kind of ow, and if it were to come up anymore… well, yeah, butthurt would be the LEAST of my problems.

I recall brendala mentioning possibly going to OfficeMax soon-ish. That would be nice so I wouldn’t have to wait on shipping, but if this is the case, I would hope it’s sooner rather than later. One way or another, this thing will become my new throne on Blastoise. Yeah, boo $300 but on the other hand, bad chairs suck and affect just about everything down to even the quality of Instant Ramen Sketchbook, so I’d rather shell out and get a nice chair. I would drag my freaking barrel over to Blastoise and use it as temporary seating, but it’s too low to the ground to be of much use. :(

Also, it appears normal hard drive prices are returning to normal, and the timing could not be better. Yggdrasil’s drive is starting to get all grindy, which as you know is NEVER a good sign, so I need to loot at least an internal drive… likely a WD Caviar Green (from what I hear, Caviar Black-series would be better suited for Blastoise). Wee~

Short version that probably isn’t: Gopher-series balls (the type that Leo Laporte uses on TWiT) are… adequate for sitting on when playing video games, but not so much for painting or involved computer-y stuff. And I should probably get the bigger silver ball, too, since blue isn’t quite enough for the big-and-tall like me. :P

Yeah, my current office chair on Blastoise is reaching limits on how much I can tolerate. Old chair is old, creaky, has lost most of its arm padding, is rather stiff on the butt support and sinks too easily, so I tried using my blue Gopher ball for the day. It was slightly less annoying overall, but… yeah, looks like I need to start hunting for a new office chair. Considering how much time I spend on Blastoise, this needs to be a really freaking awesome chair. The one I’m using now I’ve had, uh… maybe 10 years? I know I got it before Blastoise’s first transmigration.

Speaking of things related to TWiT…

So, apparently I must be made of AWESOME or what-have-you, because this thing I did for NSFW got turned into a print and sent up to the TWiT Brickhouse as a gift for the technical staff and editors. :O All I had to do was provide the original PSD, someone else from the audience who works at a print shop had the print made. Hopefully the doods at TWiT know to unbox this thing on the air, since that way I can do an archive extract from Justin.tv and repost it here for lulz and glory.

This chair I’m sitting on is bothering me tons, and I need to change out of these itchy-as-GTFO pants, so I’ll have to do the ink job of this Snowscheme tomorrow. For now, a midnight Disgaea 4 session in my bedroom~

It’s officially Black Friday. Time to order me some parts for Blastoise’s next body!

And holy crap, waiting until Black Friday paid off indeed. Lookie!

CPU: Core i7-2600k ($300, DOWN from $315) replaces the Core i5 I had picked earlier
Mobo: Asus P8Z68-V Pro ($180, DOWN from $210)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Blue 16GB ($85, DOWN from $93)
Video: MSI N560GTX Twin Frozr II ($200) uh… this one’s sold out, dood. Wondering if I should wait, or get the 560Ti that I was originally looking at., or something else entirely..?
HDD:
- System: Crucial 128GB SSD ($210)
Optical: LG Super Multi Blue ($0, Reused from previous body)
PSU: Corsair Enthusiast TX750M ($115, UP from $110…? sure, okay)
Case: Thermaltake Chaser MK-1 ($145)

I have everything but the video card sitting in my cart… and, hell, during the process of loading up, I saw the CPU’s price take a small dip! I think I’ll let things sit until later today just in case anything else takes another price dip (and if there’s any input re: the video card) but so far so good.

Current total minus the video card is $1035. I’m also adding on a stupidly-cheap RAM upgrade for Dinah to cap her out at 4GB– stupidly cheap as in it would cost me less than $30 to do it, so why not? Even ninjas can have loot, too. So the grand total for my little Black Friday party’s sitting on $1060, and I’ll officially put in the order later today.

And now I snooze.

Ah, Blastoise. Even death by viral headshot can’t keep a badass down. Next week I’ll be looting the parts to resurrect him in a new body. I mean, I was going to do it anyway, but, you know, him getting torpedo’d makes it a bit more urgent that he gets revived…. yeah.

The parts list again for those who are interested, this time with Amazon links (no tax + Prime-level shipping = do want):

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 ($210)
Mobo: Asus P8Z68-V Pro ($210)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Blue 16GB ($93)
Video: MSI N560GTX Twin Frozr II ($200)
HDD:
- System: Crucial 128GB SSD ($210)
Optical: LG Super Multi Blue ($0, Reused from previous body)
PSU: Corsair Enthusiast TX750M ($110)

Case, if needed: Thermaltake Chaser MK-1 ($145)

Dropped the secondary HDD because… holy crap, I heard non-SSD drives got a price hike due to flooding in Thailand, but I didn’t think it was that bad. I can pipe in what I need over the LAN from Yggdrasil for the time being, as I’ve been doing since my old secondary tanked.

It would be nice if these parts got some sort of price drop as of Black Friday, but otherwise… looks like about $933 (without the case) / $1078 (with). Not bad. I’ll see what I can dig up as far as rewards points via Wells Fargo to spawn any Amazon eCerts but I’m not expecting much there.
Of course, if anyone has any last-moment tweaks they’d like to recommend, by all means. :)