Tuesday, October 25, 2005

There are compelling reasons to upgrade our printing press, this coarse forum where we convene night after night, and those reasons basically rhyme with F.E.A.R. You see, my computer will be a decade old soon, which in tech years doesn’t even translate into anything remotely intelligible. I don’t think you can express this phenomenon in English, never mind alphanumerics.

But don’t think me disrespectful. Underpowered as this machine may be, I’ve rebuilt and tinkered with it again and again, to the point where only a few stickers hearken back to a time when you asked not what you could do for your country, but what could MMX™ do for you? Of course, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if the primary responsibilities of my box were word processing and, on holidays, possibly playing an entire MP3.

Here’s the problem. I have a weakness for games, particularly tense and spooky games. This wasn’t always the case, but that’s the way things are now. And F.E.A.R.? It’s a rare breed that commands approbation from professionals and real people alike. Click intently enough and you will discover an entertainment upon which horror extraordinaire John Carpenter has stamped his imprimatur. The best thing to do, I believe, is simply to see the full thing in motion.

That’s the temptation: to spend hundreds of dollars on a glistening altar of technology for the sole purpose of sacrificing more money in pursuit of shiny trivialities. The only issue is computers don’t exactly hold their value. Buy a brand new one, and you might as well invest in a type of gold that rapidly transforms into Monterey jack the moment you sneeze.