A long time ago, in a Florida far, far away, there was a young rapper who showed up on MTV and turned into an overnight star.
He didn’t really have other hit songs–the one from TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES does not count–and no, I’m not a giant fan of Vanilla Ice, who later became some kind of home improvement channel renovator and such, but not on the show with the two redheads in Indiana.
HOWEVER: the lyrics on this song are actually interesting, and worth going into, line-by-line.
I did so, using a keyboard, in a previous post. Now, I’m teaching myself how to use Adobe After Effects and such, and the new Evil Supercomputer happily renders videos. So here’s my first video, and yes, this is janky and terrible in spots. My video editing skills are small and young, but I will feed them small videos, then medium-sized ones, and one day, we will kill a Godzilla-sized film and feast upon it for days.
Next: I’m thinking of interpreting the lyrics to the classic song, ELECTRIC AVENUE, the first one I remember seeing on MTV, and no, I don’t care if some other video was officially first. This was way back, right after Spanish American War, and they played ELECTRIC AVENUE using telegrams and such. It was glorious.
Usually, a headline beginning with the words “Florida Man” will end with mayhem. You know, “Florida Man goes on three-day meth spree, robs 7-Eleven with Klingon sword”–that sort of thing.
I do not come to bury Florida Man.
Not today.
I come to praise him.
Because we have a feel-good Florida Man story, one so pure and joyous that THERE ARE NO WORDS.
As in, this video has no words. Our hero, Florida Man, doesn’t say a thing.
Check it out.
The ingredients to this warm, soft, viral news cookie are pure and delightful.
Our hero is a janitor with an impeccable goatee who’s good on camera.
His invention is something any of us could do, right now, by telling the Dog “you wanna go for a ride?” It wouldn’t take twenty minutes to hop in our large metal horses, which sleep and sleep unless the Dog sees me using my Pale Wizard magic to wake them, and take us places Very Fast, then buy a bucket and leaf blower.
And sure, you could even improve on this invention with a cushion inside the bucket, and maybe some bolts and duct tape to hold the umbrella. Except we didn’t think of the simple idea in the first place, right?
This man looked at the bucket he used every day, and the leaf blower, and he got those suckers married to an umbrella.
My favorite parts of this are (a) how he steers by wiggling, and moving the umbrella slightly, and (b) the speed this Blue Collar Limousine can go. It would have been funny if it moved at all, or went walking speed. Nope. This sucker flies.
Florida Man, we salute you, and look forward to seeing what you can do with a weed trimmer, handcart, and a box of garden staples.
Documentaries can be amazing, or put the B in Boring–it all depends. Kinda like straight-to-streaming movies. YOU NEVER KNOW.
This, now, is completely educational while being insanely good and hilarious. I could not love it more. Seriously.
Take a look, then we’ll talk snail smack.
What’s so good about this?
The best thing is how the narrator doesn’t skimp on the science. At all.
It’s easy to do a Honey Badger video, where you go all SNL skit and continue to riff on the same joke. Still funny. Just not a ton of science there. We learned that honey badgers are tough, resistant to cobra venom, and willing to take on anything. A classic video, but that’s pretty much it.
This killer snail video, now, crams in tons of science. An amazing amount. The full Latin names of species, the specific names of weird snail body parts, the chemicals involved in digestion and such. It’s crazy.
You truly learn about tons of different species of snails, and in a way that would help you remember those details on that BIO 245 test. If I had to study for that thing, I’d be watching and rewatching this video at 3:30 a.m. in a dorm room instead of staring at the same pages of a textbook trying to memorize the differences between all these snails.
The real trick is how skilled the narrator is at interweaving joke after joke–unique ones, not the same solitary riff–in clever ways.
He never stops informing you, and entertaining you. Which is an incredibly hard thing to pull off.
Also, it’s shocking how violent and crazy these snails are, and how they’ve developed all these different methods of surfing and preying on things. Did you ever think of snails as being secretly badass? I never did. Thought they were slow little vegetarians. NOPE.
VERDICT
I’ve always loved the True Facts series, and this one is an unlikely treasure, a total gem.
Please keep making these. It’s a public service to get us stoked about science, which kinda matters if we want to (a) survive the covid zombie apocalypse, then (b) beat climate warming without (c) giving up and building WATERWORLD-style sailboats like Kevin Costner.
Michael Jai White is one of the best action movie stars, period. I put him up there with Jason Statham and Scott Adkins.
His fight scenes are always inventive, and he’s simply fun to watch whether it’s a straight thriller like BLOOD AND BONE or a comedy like BLACK DYNAMITE.
So what felt off about WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH, which is a sort-of sequel to a Jean Claude Van Damme movie with the same premise: DIE HARD in a sports arena.
Check out the trailer before the customary smack talking begins.
The Good
There are good fight scenes in this movie, and Michael Jai White is totally likeable in here, as usual. There’s also good comic relief his cowardly sidekick, another arena employee who is super reluctant to take on a bunch of professional bad guys.
The Bad
Something seems off through the whole movie.
It looks fake–too well-lit, too in-focus. Maybe they shot it with some kind of cutting-edge 4k camera and we’re used to some film grain. Dunno. Worth thinking about, seeing how I remember they had the same sort of problem with THE HOBBIT movies being shot in 60 fps or whatever.
Compare that first trailer to a scene from probably the best Michael Jai White movie of all time, BLOOD AND BONE.
Notice how the camera moves, how it puts certain characters in focus while blurring the background, and how things don’t seem perfect without being clunky?
It just feels more real. Like you’re somebody in the crowd watching the action.
The Ugly
The other thing that bugged me was the villain, who was a little too jittery and on-the-nose with his dialogue to be truly scary. One of his minions, a fighter with a shaved head who said hardly anything, actually was super scary. Make that guy your baddie and we’ve got a better movie.
VERDICT
But hey, things to quibble with in a movie during the global zombie apocalypse are far less important than the only question that matters: Should you fire up the Series of Tubes and watch it?
Yes. Anything starring Michael Jai White is basically (a) Watchable, (b) A Popcorn Fest, or (c) So Knowingly Bad It Circles Back to Good.
It’s a cheesy action movie, not two hours of a black-and-white French existentialism flick that you talk about with your bestie until the sun comes up at Denny’s and the waitress gets sick of you drinking endless coffee and ordering your fifth side of fries because it’s been five hours and she knows you’re a starving college student or starving artist/writer type and the tip is going to be a joke.
Fire it up and watch this thing. Then watch BLOOD AND BONE for the first time, or the second, before closing your eyes later this week and picking a Michael Jai White movie totally at random, as required by law.
Anyone today can make music, then jack into the Matrix and upload their creation–along with a video–for the world to see.
If they can find it.
I scoured YouTube and found this thing, so let’s take a peek before we talk smack.
First, I have to say the music is fine. Don’t hate it, don’t love it, but perfectly listenable. Nothing super strange or unique about it.
The video is what interests me, because they obviously (a) had a decent CGI budget and (b) put some real thought into a storyline that’s (c) pretty funny and effective.
Who doesn’t like monster movies, and a bit of Godzilla-like smashing of a metropolis or three?
And who won’t enjoy an unlikely hero, in this case a motorcycle-riding old man, riding in to fight the monster even though it’s suicidal?
My only quibble with this video is a longer fight would have been enjoyable. Also expected, which is probably why they subverted that by having the Ancient Biker Anti-Hero kill the monster in this unusual and non-heroic way.
VERDICT
Hey, this is art, and it is both interesting and different. Give us moar.
Creative types today need more than a typewriter or any old computer that can run Word.
You have to do social media, and maybe some video, which means having a computer that can run things like the Adobe Creative Suite, which wants you to have a supercomputer that can model nuclear explosions, even if all you want to do is add captions to Ice, Ice Baby.
If you haven’t read Part 1, which is about why this is smart, and how to pick out all the parts, go do that now, then come back to read this post while you wait for the Postal Service–which always, always delivers.
Once all of your precious, fragile, and magical parts have arrived, it’s time to unbox that stuff and build, right?
This is where things go wrong. Totally normal.
Keep the boxes and receipts in case (a) parts are broken or (b) you screwed up and there are incompatible bits.
The Case: You can’t have a Black Box of Doom without a black box
Retrieve all the wires they may have snaked all around. THERE ARE MANY.
These wires are actually Important, since they’re the ones that make the Evil Supercomputer turn on when you push the power button, or connect your USB ports and such to the actual computer bits that make them go. Those things are not wireless.
Thus the wires.
If you bought a bare case with no fans pre-installed, now is the time to screw some fans.
Your Motherboard is the Matriarch of All Power
Everything connects to the Motherboard, which has to corral all the random parts and make sure everybody gets fed power and data. She basically runs the world.
Treat your Motherboard right by having the correct number of Weird Little Bolts (I believe they are called stays, but who knows) to screw into your case to support the MotherBoard, which then is secured to your case with more normal-looking black screws through holes pre-drilled through the layers of silicon.
I say the word “pre-drilled” intentionally. You will not be drilling any holes today.
Double-check this step very, very carefully.
If you just put Weird Little Bolts wherever the hell, and not in the right spots for your size of Motherboard and case, things will not end well. Having random bits of metal poking in spots it’s not designed to poke can short your Motherboard, zap, goodbye, goodnight, game over.
Not having enough Weird Little Bolts can make it so your bendy and fragile MotherBoard isn’t fully supported. I made this mistake because the old components I took out were a little smaller and needed fewer bolts and screws. This could have been a disaster, as you need to press pretty damn hard to make the graphic card, sticks of RAM and such connect.
I got lucky. Nothing broke. But I should’ve gotten more Weird Little Bolts, which leads us to this pro-tip: No, do not order them online and wait two days for amazon.com.gov.org to deliver more tiny shebangs while your dining room table is covered in computer parts and half-opened cardboard boxes. Head on down to the hardware store, which will have them on that long aisle full of every screw, bolt, and nut ever invented.
Install the Hyperdrive
You are required by law to have bought one of those tiny and fancy M2 drives, the kind that connect directly to the Motherboard and make her extremely happy because now homework gets done A BILLION TIMES FASTER than connecting a stupid cable upstairs to the attic where an obsolete thing known as a Hard Drive lives, playing eight-track tapes of Billy Joel, who is fine and all, but please listen to something new because none of us can hear Uptown Girl on endless repeat, that is the torture.
There is a trick with these M2 drives. They come with a tiny, tiny screw–get a microscope, seriously–that is insanely easy to drop and lose. Also, this screw didn’t seem to fit in the hole.
I finally read the instructions again, and found a Silver Weird Little Bolt hanging out on the Motherboard, asking strangers if they’d buy him some beer, I’ve got money, come on, man, a six pack of whatever, please. Put him in the right spot, dropped the tiny screw for you know, six hours, and finally secured the Hyperdrive.
Other drives, they are optional
If you are smart, and starting from scratch, using an M2 Hyperdrive means two fewer cables to worry about: one for power and one for data.
This becomes important.
Since I saved money by reusing the same Black Box of Doom and FOUR DIFFERENT DRIVES (optical, SSD, then two big fat spinny hard drives), that means wrestling eight different cables. It worked, eventually, but it was not fun.
Try to connect the power cables first, then the smaller data ones are a lot easier because of the orientation of cases and drives. I had the data ones all hooked up, making me happy, and had to undo them all from not being able to see a damned thing when trying to shove power cables into tight spots.
Learn from my stupidity, and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Has the moon lost her memory?
She is smiling alone.
Sticks of memory–RAM, build Dodge tough–do not like being alone. They also hate dust and cat hair, so be aware.
You gotta install RAM in identical pairs, like junior high kids who synchronize outfits and go everywhere together, even the bathroom.
If you’re only putting in two sticks of RAM, they gotta go in specific slots. Listen to the Motherboard and re-read her patient instructions.
I put in four sticks of 16 gigs apiece. If you want to upgrade later, you gotta use identical sticks again.
Pinky and the Brain
Your CPU is itty bitty. A little square. Make sure you do all the things and put it in correctly, given the fact that bending the pins is a sin against the tech gods, who will punish you with the Slowness, the Black Screen of Death, or the eternal damnation of This Thing Won’t Even Turn On.
Put it in the right way. Read the damn instructions, for brand new CPUs cost many dollars.
CPU’s have sidekicks called coolers. Your own Brain may have come with a Pinky cooler, with the manufacturer designing them to get along. Maybe these things got ordered separately, and you’re hoping this arranged marriage will work out.
The CPU is easy, as long as you don’t flippantly put it in the wrong way and bend all the pins.
Coolers these days are like oversized carburetors on muscle cars, giant air-breathing contraptions with metal tubes running everywhere. I will bet you the deed to my house that the the people who design CPU coolers drive muscle cars, or have posters of them on their wall.
You gotta have thermal paste between the Brain and its cooler. Read the instructions. Do not cook Brain or you’ll be eating the cost of a replacement.
All the random non-power cables
I would suggest this as the time to put the funky cables coming from various parts of the case, along with any cables you might need for drives and such.
Manufacturers, hear my plaintive cry: this part does not have to be so hard.
Connecting fans isn’t bad. Same deal with the cables that make your USB ports talk to the Motherboard without pissing her off.
What’s truly awful, and The Stupid, is a set of cables every case seems to have that ends in a nightmare of a rat’s nest. Some need to get plugged into single pins, others double, except they all go into the same array of pins and there’s no room to see what you’re doing and whether it worked and OMGWTFBBQ.
If you do this wrong, pushing the power button and such will do nothing.
Please, please, manufacturers of cases and Motherboards, pick a standard configuration of pins and that Rat’s Nest Cable from Hell, and make it so it’s all together and you simply plug it into the right spot instead of wanting to drive to whoever designed and engineered this and put a flaming bag of donkey doo-doo on their porch.
The Graphics Card
These things are pretty big. Get that sucker in there before you go wild with the power cables, which will totally get in the way.
That’s it. I’m not even making jokes here. Pretty simple.
Power Station
Nothing runs without the power supply, and it knows. Oh yes.
When you order one of these bad boys, the photos are deceiving. A square box, no big deal. Except when you take it out, there are all these fat cables coming out of the end. Tons of them. And they are long.
If you only have one M2 Hyperdrive, and maybe a big old obsolete spinny hard drive as your storage, the number of power cables you need is way down.
Since I had four–FOUR–different drives already in the case to hook up, my cause was lost. Cable management? Hah! We were shooting for Yes, This Looks Messy, But the Evil Supercomputer is Happy and Turns On.
The instructions here are a little tough. Be careful. There are what seems like 25 different types of power plugs. I will not go into it here except to say a giant plug goes into your Motherboard, another feeds the CPU, and your graphics card may get TWO plugs, because he is a selfish dweeb who drinks straight from the milk carton no matter how many times you tell him that’s gross and will tell you he plans on going pro playing Call of Duty when really that’s an excuse to spend all day wearing a headset and talking smack when he should be not failing Pre-Calculus already when the school year is only a month old.
Will it turn on?
Unless I’ve forgotten steps, which is possible, all the parts should be installed and fed a steady supply of power and data.
This is where you hook it up to your monitor, keyboard, and such, and get out the USB drive of Windows 10 to install. You pretty much buy the DVD for the product activation key, then stash that thing in a shoebox full of CD’s from way back that you plan on converting to MP3’s someday.
And the magical moment arrives: you hit the power button.
It will not turn on.
I mean that literally. Unless you are lucky, and smart, and have spent the time to locate and sacrifice a TRS-80 to the tech gods, your Evil Supercomputer will sit there and laugh at you while you swear in languages you did not know until now.
This always happens.
Unplug it all and open the thing back up. Check every single cable and plug.
Did it happen to me this time? Oh yes.
I checked every data cable and power plug. Nope. Then I considered the unthinkable: unplugging that rat’s nest of connectors, the ones that go to the power button and such. Except getting to that was impossible with all the power cables and data cables clogging up the works. Couldn’t see a thing.
After talking to my brother, who is an actual Tech God, I figured out one stick of RAM was rebelling and poking out. Once that thing was fully connected to the Motherboard and listening like a good stick of memory, the Evil Supercomputer came alive and asked me if I wanted to play a game. You know, tic-tack-toe or Global Thermonuclear War.
Final thoughts
Though the hour or so the new computer would not come alive was maddening, overall this time wasn’t that bad and I could not be happier with how much faster this thing is than the old Black Box of Doom.
It’s not even close. Most of that is because of the M2 Hyperdive, but doubling the RAM and having a modern CPU and graphics card doesn’t hurt a bit.
Economically, building your own is smart, and having thought about and researched trying to upgrade the old one, building a new one every three years or so makes sense–but only if the current one can’t handle the latest requirements of Adobe and such.
If you’re not focused on creative things, and are more concerned about hitting 140 frames-per-second as you play Call of Duty on a 4k monitor that takes up an entire wall of your house, that’s a different deal.
I hope you find this useful, and if you do go down this path, please remember me when your 3D-printed army of robots designed on an Evil Supercomputer starts taking over the world.
Everybody uses computers these days, unless they work with their hands, making things out of wood, or ride a horse as they bring a herd of cattle from dusty Texas to the stockyards of Kansas City with only a harmonica and a fifth of Jim Beam for entertainment.
And all of us who use PC’s–or bang on a keyboard connected to a Mac, which cost more than many automobiles I have owned–encounter the Slowness.
Maybe when you’re surfing the web. Maybe when you’re opening applications, or editing photos. And if you try to edit audio or video, God help you, the Slowness will drive you to dark thoughts and homicide.
So: this thing will have TWO PARTS.
In Part 1, this here post will go into how to do the blueprints and pick the parts for a Black Box of Doom, one that lets you design a robot army to crank out with 3D printers in your garage.
Then in Part 2: The Reckoning, we will dive into actually putting the parts together. But first you have to use the Series of Tubes to order such parts, and give your friendly and competent unionized U.S. Postal Worker a nod and a wave and a smile as he or she delivers all these boxes to your front porch with gentle care. Some private companies tend to chuck boxes, which will ruin the precious, fragile, and expensive things you paid for with real monies. I will not name these companies. You know the deal. Try to get this stuff delivered by your postal worker, especially if they know your name and go to the same church on Sunday, or drink coffee at the same diner. Better yet, try to marry a postal worker before you start this journey. They look amazing in shorts, right? Because they walk all day. Public servants, too–god bless ’em.
Why building an Evil Supercomputer is better than buying some boring pre-built box at Best Buy or whatever
Buying a pre-built thing, something that can actually blow through the Slowness, will cost you far more than Any Old Thing that Will Surf the Web and Run MS Word.
Building your own evil supercomputer, now, is far, far cheaper. Crazily so. Plus, who wants to own a pre-built computer where some corporate person decided what you wanted and needed, when they don’t even know you, and five million other people have the same exact thing on their desk?
So yes, build one if you can.
Hear me know and believe me later in the week: I am the perfect person to talk you through this, standing before you not as a total expert who’s built zillions of computers, a gear-head who will make you all confused with jargon, skipping basic steps you ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW while expecting you to spend $5,000 on a liquid-cooled, overclocked monster with LED lights. No. I’ve done this three times now, and therefore have hit the sweet spot where (a) I know enough to be dangerous while (b) still happily making common mistakes, the same mistakes you will, and therefore (c) know how to solve some common stupid mistakes.
And no, it’s not completely easy. There are tricky bits. But nothing worth doing is easy.
How to pick the components of your own Black Box of Doom
Do not jump on over to amazon.gov.com.org or whatever to start ordering parts based on how cheap they are. That will not work. There are crazy technical reasons for that.
It could also take you days, or weeks, to sort through which CPU’s are compatible with which motherboards and memory sticks and such. You will go insane and I will not visit you at the mental hospital, because we may be internet friends, even good ones, yet driving 1,500 miles during this apocalypse to show up and sign a visitor log is not going to happen. My wife will wonder where I went, and why our VISA has charges at gas stations from here to Kansas.
The way to avoid wasting all sorts of hours doing research online, then learning Japanese to read the technical manual, is simple: hop on over to a site like pcpartpicker.com, which is what I did.
First thing: Choose your CPU, which is the most important decision, I kid you not. If you’re a creative type like me and want to edit photos, edit video, and do cool stuff with Adobe Creative Suite, the CPU is everything.
I know, that seems weird. My previous Supercomputer had 32 gigs of RAM and a solid-state drive (way faster than your traditional Hard Drive, which spins around), yet the CPU was about five years old and Adobe did not give one single tiny poop about how much RAM was there, or how fast the hard drive was, or whether my graphics card could render five billion triangles per second or whatever.
Adobe only cared about the CPU, and told me Adobe Premiere would not render more than one frame per century until I got a new one. Maybe there’s some kind of dark alliance between Adobe, Intel, and AMD, or the graphics card people totally hit on Adobe’s girlfriend at that wine tasting last month, the one where Tyler thought he was being funny for bringing boxed wine and everyone told him that joke hasn’t been funny for years, please buy a real bottle, twist-offs are fine, and bringing a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos also does not make you a comedian, either, it just means you are cheap bastard who spent zero time on this while Heather over here baked a pecan pie from scratch and brought a bottle of sake she picked up in Tokyo and saved for this very night, you nitwit.
So: the CPU is everything.
Also, you don’t need to spend time researching the best CPUs, because I found folks who ran tests on video editing, using all sorts of the latest AMD and Intel CPUs at various price points. IT WAS EDUCATIONAL. Go read it.
The TL;DR of those tests is pretty damn simple. Yes, if I was a Hollywood film editor, it would be worth the extra $1,500 to splurge for the top chip and another $1,000 the Largest SSD on Planet Earch plus $1,600 for a graphics card that weighs more than my house. Yet spending way, way less–$339 on an AMD Ryzen 7 3800X–would totally do the job.
Say goodbye to those old spinny hard drives
Physical hard drives that spin aren’t really the thing anymore. They’re not quite eight-tracks, but getting there.
I thought SSD’s were still the king, since they’re tiny and way faster than traditional hard drives with spinning disks and such.
HOWEVER: the breaking news is SSD’s are old and busted. The new hotness are itty bitty drives that attach directly to the motherboard. These suckers are so new, nobody has figured out a single name for them. You might hear them referred to as M2’s or NVME internal drives. And yes, you gotta have a motherboard (I can’t say mobo more than once, too weird) that can get hitched to a fancy M2, which are little sticks.
You would think these suckers would be expensive. Not really. I bought a 1TB shebang for $99, and though it’s not as fast as more expensive ones, this thing will talk to the CPU and transfer data up to 2 gigs per second.
Is that fast?
OMGWTFBBQ, you have no idea. If you’ve ever copied a ton of files, like photos and video, you’ve seen Windows tell you it’s gonna be five hours with that little chart showing how many megabytes per second are getting copied. Just did that last night before building the new Evil Supercomputer, and my old hard drives were averaging maaaaybe 100 megs a second. Even the SSD one.
Two gigs a second is so fast is should be illegal.
Which means you MUST pick a CPU and motherboard than can use these beasts. Not doing so is malpractice.
Fire up pcpartspicker or whatever. If your CPU and motherboard can’t do M.2 drives, choose a different kind. It may be an Intel vs AMD thing, and that used to matter. Since AMD chips are better at editing video, I divorced Intel this time and have no regrets.
You can, and should, think about a super M2 drive with a cheap sidekick, maybe an old obsolete 4TB spinny hard drive that costs you tiny amounts of paper decorated with dead presidents. That’s smart. Run everything from the M2 superdrive and use that big, old, slow fellow as your sidekick and backup drive. Stick your docs, photos, music, and videos on that sucker.
I sorta did this on steroids by re-using my old case along with four drives: the optical drive, an SSD, and two spinny hard drives with lots of space. This was both brilliant (saving tons of money!) and stupid, since it upped the difficulty, which I’ll get into in the next post, Part 2: The Reckoning.
The RAM, it is important
You can never have too much memory.
It’s pretty standard to have at least 8 gigs these days, and 16 gigs for higher end, and 32 gigs if your going all muscle car with flames on the sides.
So I went with 64 gigs, because I plan on keeping this thing running for years and absolutely hate opening it up and doing open heart surgery, seeing how things can go wrong, and wires can get knocked loose, making you spend hours trying to connect some tiny cable back to the motherboard except you put it in backwards because you can’t see a thing in there. My hands are big, and the space is small, and the pain is real.
Graphics cards are meh
Sure, they matter if you want to play Call of Duty on a 4k monitor at 140 frames a second or whatever. Not interested in that. If you’re a creative type like me, and are looking at editing photos and video and such, the graphics card doesn’t mean much. Get something, sure, but don’t break the bank. There are tons of good options. TONS.
I did a Radeon 570 with 8 gigs of RAM that was $160, and I probably could have done way cheaper without Adobe looking sideways at me–unless I was running After Effects, which will use your graphics card some. Might be some other apps that tap the graphics card. Be safe on this one. And don’t listen to anyone who tries to talk you into the latest, greatest graphics cards, which can cost more than what I spent on this entire Evil Supercomputer and require adding extra concrete under your house to handle the weight and cooling demands.
Everything else is up to you
Once you pick a CPU, motherboard, RAM, drives, and graphics card, everything else is pretty basic and a matter of taste, as long as pcpartpicker or whatever says it’s all compatible.
A few tips:
Get a full-size case. Itty bitty cases would be a pain, because it’s hard enough to do all the wires and such in a big case. Don’t go for one of those cases with transparent panels or whatever, since despite your best intentions, the cables will not look nice and neat, and your Black Box of Doom will not get its own centerfold in Custom Computers Monthly. You will be thrilled–THRILLED–if all the cables are plugged into the right spots and this thing works. Save the cable management OCD for your second or third shebang.
If you’re not sure about a certain random items–cooling fans, power supplies, and such–look for one that has tons of positive reviews and doesn’t cost much.
Splurge on some extra fans. They’re super quiet these days, and modern motherboards let you control the fans if you do it right. I got two extra fans (case already had two) which means there are four case fans, a power supply fan, a CPU fan and fans on the graphics card. Not gonna count those up because you and I know that’s a lot of fans. Expected it to be crazy loud. Nope. Quiet as a mouse.
There will be blood
Maybe not literal blood, though you can cut yourself on the inside of the case and such. But you will run into problems, and frustrations, and want to smash things.
I will not lie to you and say actually taking all these parts out of the box and making your first Evil Supercomputer is no big deal.
Read all the instructions. Twice.
Then read them again.
Keep a phone or laptop handy to look up things online, including YouTube videos on how to do certain parts. Because it is not abnormal, especially on your first try, to have a shiny and freshly built computer not turn on and work.
There will be a plug that you knocked loose, or a part that isn’t fully seated in the motherboard. Something won’t be right.
And that’s the joy of doing this. It isn’t successful right off. You have to learn to do it, and figure out how to fix problems.
Next post: actually building an Evil Supercomputer, and then finding out, Will it turn on?
What if I told you there was a movie starring Batman (Ben Affleck), The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal), the dude from Sons of Anarchy (Charlie Hunnam) along with Poe Dameron from the Star Wars movies?
You’d say “Nuh-uh,” and I’d say, “Yeah-huh” and we’d argue about who was drunk until I fired up Netflix and started showing THIS ACTUAL MOVIE THAT EXISTS.
Here is the trailer. Watch it, then we’ll talk smack.
The immediate question is, “Who is that other blonde dude who I sorta recognize?” and the answer is Garrett Hedlund, who played the lead in the TRON remake and is in other motion pictures I will not list right now because you know how to use the googles, if you care that much.
But there is more to talk about, and yes, this will involve spoilery spoilers.
The big issue is, “Did our dream team of ex-special forces experts make nightmarishly stupid mistakes?”
Yes. Yes, they did.
Let’s go into the Top Four Mistakes made by our superteam.
Mistake No. 4: Not splitting up
After they found all the money and took it from the drug cartel boss, they took the cash in a single van.
Then they tried to exit the country in a helicopter, with most of the cash carried in a cargo net dangling beneath. A long list of bad things then happens, based on this single decision, with their pile of cash shrinking each time.
All of the Bad Things could have been avoided if they split up, right away. Have each team member take their share of the cash and go in different directions, alone or in pairs, by sea or by train. Whatever.
Mistake No. 3: Not hiding the money
Hey, what’s in all those bags hanging underneath the helicopter flying low and under the radar? Any farmer, police officers, soldier, or drug cartel member who saw their chopper would not think “Basmati rice” or “every known VHS tape of The Star Wars Christmas Special.” They would hear that helicopter from far away, then see it, then notice all the bags, and think “scads of drugs” or “mountains of cash.”
And word would spread, like it did, making it hard for the team to escape.
The first rule of heists and capers is simple: Don’t get caught with the loot.
The second rule of heists and capers is: Don’t get caught with the loot.
The third rule of heists and capers is: Hide the loot in multiple places, you ding dong.
Another smart idea is to transfer or hide your precious stolen treasures immediately, so there’s nothing on you that’s incriminating, and the loot is safe even if you get detained, arrested, or thrown in jail for a year. Because when you get out, the first thing you’re doing is safely retrieving ALL THE CASH from a storage unit or whatever, then living a nice life as you sail around the South Pacific in that sweet sailboat Kevin Costner had in WATERWORLD or drink mojitos on a white sand beach with Red and Andy Defrusne.
Mistake No. 2: An exit route over ginormous mountains
Yes, it may have been the shortest route to the sea. However, big helicopters and little airplanes both have trouble getting over towering mountain ranges, especially when carrying too much weight.
This was the Stupid, and also led to many other problems, like crashing the chopper (bad), getting into a shoot-out with local villagers (very bad!), and eventually going over the ginormous mountains by foot (terrible).
If you avoid Mistake No. 3 and hide the money, you can put away the guns and body armor and also avoid Mistake No. 1 (not splitting up) and have folks leave the country by train, plane, car, truck, or whatever. You’re a normal person going home. There will be food and warmth and no need to get into firefights, or freeze your hiney off in the mountains while villagers track you down and KILL BATMAN because he shot their villager father and such.
Mistake No. 1: Not wearing masks
This may seem silly. What a small thing, wearing masks? How could this be the biggest mistake?
Except wearing masks is everything.
How does the drug cartel know to look for them, specifically? Because they left witnesses, being unwilling to kill women and children, the family members of the cartel boss. That’s honorable and good.
HOWEVER: If they wore masks, and stuck to the rest of their plan, there would be no witness description. They did kill the guards and the cartel boss, so nobody would know what their voices sounded like. Plus, it’s pretty hard to tell all your cartel minions with guns to be on the lookout for a guy who sounds like Batman, another guy who sounds like he was on that biker show, plus a dude sorta sounds like The Mandalorian.
Wearing masks means even if the family members got a glimpse as they passed each other on the road, they wouldn’t know who hit them. Was it an inside job? Did another cartel come after them, or police officers? Those would be the first three logical suspects. A superteam of American ex-special forces folks would be last on the list.
VERDICT
Wear masks. Don’t go over stupid deadly mountains in a helicopter. Hide the money, or at least get it out of the country five different ways when the team splits up after the job.
Seems pretty simple, right?
HOWEVER: This isn’t really a traditional caper or heist. It’s almost an anti-war movie, like PLATOON. The closest thing I can think of is the damned excellent Chris Pine-Jeff Bridges bank robbery caper, HELL OR HIGH WATER, with a similarly mixed ending. They successfully pull off the heist. But it comes at a high price, due to hubris.
TRIPLE FRONTIER is actually a cautionary tale of the downfalls of greed and violence. Unlike most action movies, where the heroes blow stuff up and show the glorious thrills of killing bad guys with abandon, this movie is meant to make people question those decisions. Because people do die. Was it really worth it?
Your average action movie doesn’t pause to consider this question at all. Though I’m a giant fan of thrillers and action movies, there comes a point where most of these movies jump the shark on this issue. So many bad guys, zombies, or alien invaders get shot, stabbed, and blown to hell that you lose count. And it loses meaning.
This is why movies like JAWS, ALIEN, and PREDATOR are so memorable. There isn’t a sea of bad guys dying left and right. There is one Very Bad Guy, who seems invincible, and he’s winning until there’s one hero left.
Which means my armchair quarterbacking of the big mistakes made by our superteam isn’t casting aspersions at the screenwriter or director. They totally intended for the characters to make all kinds of mistakes, based on their greed and character flaws. Batman wanted all the monies, despite the fact that it made them spend too much time at the drug cartel house, and that it made the helicopter overweight. So if you really wanted to pin the blame on a single character, he’s most at fault, and he gets punished the worst for his sins, seeing how a villager shoots him in the head from long range as revenge for Batman killing poor villagers who wanted some of the money they found after it fell from the sky. Don’t blame them for that at all.
Back to the verdict: it is the apocalypse, and you have watched Every Possible Thing on the Televisions Already, which means tes, you should fire up the Netflix and watch TRIPLE FRONTIER.
And if you haven’t watched it, do HELL OR HIGH WATER while you’re at it. 11/10 would recommend.
It’s crazy rare to see one of these Vorpal Flying Green Elves up here in the temperate rain forest where Bigfoot roams alongside mountain lions and bears.
This little warrior was totally chill about me taking photos and shooting film. Like, “Oh, will this be a documentary, then? Carry on.”
I am curious whether the windstorm brought him north, or if this is just one more Sign of the Apocalypse, seeing how 2020 just needs zombies or an asteroid hitting LA to top off the year.
There is one mystery: look close and there’s some kind of symbol on both arms/chest. Egg sack? Superhero symbol? I HAVE NO CLUE. Tell me if you have heard the prophecy and recognize the signs
This is not one of his more famous roles–it’s kind of an obscure movie. A hidden treasure. And because this week is where we pay tribute to the King, there’s no better way than to talk up movies he made that people may not know about. Especially this one.
Here’s the trailer, then we’ll chat.
What makes this so good?
I mean, Chadwick Boseman could have gone grocery shopping in Safeway with a short list, and I’d still watch 40 minutes of film about him talking to the woman at the seafood counter about sea scallops and clams.
MESSAGE FROM THE KING isn’t a big-budget movie. I doubt there’s a single frame of CGI in this film. More and more, I appreciate films that rock without an ounce of CGI.
What makes this so special isn’t just Boseman’s acting, which is always stellar. I like how this thriller sets up our hero as being badly outnumbered and outgunned, in a foreign land, and still winning–not because he’s faster and tougher than the bad guys, which is the typical path of any action movie. On occasion, they’ll mix it up and have the hero win by being more brutal and bloodthirsty. You know, DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY style.
This movie shows our hero do clever thing after clever thing. And yes, he gets into fights, but he does it smart. In the final confrontation, instead of taking on all the bad guys on a rainy rooftop, outnumbered 10-to-1, minimum, he uses the greed of the villains against them. It’s so well done.
Chadwick Boseman was an amazing talent and it still hits me that he’s gone.
Note: If you like the accent he used when playing Black Panther, his character in this movie is from South Africa, and he does the accent so damn well I freaked out when seeing him speak at the MTV Awards show, kinda like hearing Christian Bale’s natural Welsh accent for the first time and your brain is completely befuddled.
It’s worth watching the clip for what he does during his acceptance speech for Best Hero–what a decent, honorable, good-hearted man.
VERDICT
Fire up Netflix, watch this film, and raise your glass in Boseman’s memory.
The Red Pen of Doom 