So, as you've probably seen in some of the photos I've been posting lately, the eMachines Box finally has its own setup. I already had the PS/2 keyboard that went to this machine, and I bought a cheap wired mouse from work partially because I needed another mouse, partially because I needed a spare even after I upgrade this one, and partially because the cheapness of the mouse seems to complement the low-end nature of the eMachines Box anyway. I also needed to get an extra long ethernet cable from work to be able to hook it into the router with the way my desk is set up now —this computer's from 2006, it doesn't have a wi-fi module, and I wouldn't want wi-fi on it anyway.

But it works! I'm actually typing and uploading this post entirely from the eMachines Box. This is a far more comfortable setup than before—no more having to share a keyboard and mouse and thus having to choose between my modern computer and Discord and the eMachines Box being, let's be real, locked off from most of the visible internet, and especially no more having to twist my neck to see the CRT placed way off to the side. I can sit facing the monitor now, and that's just astounding.

I wrote this thing off for gaming before I had upgraded it at all, but I'm learning now it actually can play some of my games really well! Granted, those games are minimum five years prior to when it was manufactured, but the fact that I can buy games off GOG, use the offline installer on XP, and then play those games on this setup with this CRT just like when they came out—that's so juicy. If you're curious, the eMachines Box has an integrated graphics chip called the Radeon Xpress 200, which is based on some of ATI's lower-end cards from 2004 or so. Good for media playback and DVDs and all the things this computer was sold to do, but up-to-date gaming is iffy.

Here's some of what I've tested that does work great though! From least surprising to most surprising:

• DOSBox: 32-bit XP can run some DOS games directly without an issue, but GOG always packages DOS games with DOSBox, and the version you get from the offline installer runs the games great. Must play through Tyrian.
• Doom: Chocolate Doom 3.x just locked up the entire PC, but I fell back to a 2.x version and it runs great. The music is obviously iffy, with either a very quiet OPL emulation or using the built-in XP MIDI stuff (and thus the crappy Wavetable GS Synth). I'll look into switching it out for VirtualMIDISynth, which is what I use on 10 to give myself soundfont support when playing MIDIs.
• Quake: I've been trying out various source ports; DirectQ had some horrific model stretching issues (gigantic piles of flesh! horrific, but not quite conductive to fast-paced action), DirectFitz ran okay, but regularly dropped below 30FPS for some reason, and Mark V, my former go-to anyway, runs great but can only play MP3 soundtracks (which have awful latency and crash the program occasionally) and CD audio directly out of the CD drive on the PC. The CD audio is speedy and stable, though that of course means wear and tear on the drive and my CDs (and I wasn't able to use Daemon Tools to trick it with a bin+cue). I'll just burn some CD-Rs and let the drive work as it will though, for reasons I'll get into in a moment.
• Quake II: Knightmare Quake II has been a really good XP-supporting source port. I still need to tweak it to get it perfectly visually accurate to the vanilla game, but performance is really good. I still need to beat Quake II; maybe this is the ideal opportunity to do it.
• Unreal Tournament 99: New to me! I grabbed the GOTY edition off the Internet Archive (I'll eventually buy my own copy too, no worries), and it installed quick, didn't even need a CD key, and played super slick. I only played one match with bots (because I was exhausted from work yesterday), but it was 60fps the whole time, smooth sailing. I actually really liked some of the maps I was playing, and I have a feeling I'm gonna get really obsessed with this one the more I play it. (I also got another Unreal 1 game going, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, mostly because I have such fond memories of the PS1 version. It makes me giggle, not the least of which because all the voice actors are still the knockoffs from the PS1 version, and hearing such familiar voices talk new lines at me is bizarre. The castles still fuck though. I wonder about streaming it.)
• Half-Life: The big one! I got the WON version and patched it for play on the community-run WON2, which seems to mostly be Counter-Strike 1.5 these days, but there's a few Half-Life deathmatch servers going on at any given time. Got into one with bots and felt all the grease, the grease, of connecting to some server in Europe and having your controls and aim be all funky and delayed because of server latency, like any good Half-Life deathmatch in the Current Year should. It was so good. dcb wants to get set up on WON2 too on his HP Media Center PC so we can hop in servers together sometime. Of course, WON2 also supports all the various Half-Life mods, so y'know, anyone wanna do WON2 Deathmatch Classic or Ricochet? Let me know. mariteaux@somnolescent.net. Let's play together. (All this implies that GoldSrc games as a whole run great on this thing; I'm also looking to give 007: Nightfire a shot, since any third-party Valve tech games make me intensely curious and I could always go for another Bond FPS.)

Obviously, I'd still like to upgrade it, and the PC and the keyboard need a deep clean still (coming from the borb household, are you surprised?), but right now, I just want to spend all day on it. I've come to the realization that a lot of my contrarian nature since my teenager years has come from being deprived of all the cool stuff I want to do (usually due to some combination of being poor and being stuck inside without a car), and every time another domino falls into place, I find myself excited for shit again. I'm just a boy who likes old computers is all, and tinkering with this one, installing Plus! XP on it, using MSN Messenger (Somnolians! hop on more blease), installing a buncha games on it, and eventually getting to those upgrades—more RAM, a proper graphics card, another hard drive, a secondary Vista install—I'm finally getting to indulge. Literally standing at work on the regular now thinking about this goddamn computer, excited to come home to it.

And part of indulging is also realizing that this machine, and everything on it, is both fleeting and also renewable. I was worried about wearing out the CD drive, but it's not a Mac where I can't switch shit out if need or want be. There's a million other CD drives I can put in here if it dies. I have that power now. Hell, if the motherboard dies or something catastrophic, I can just replace it with any number of period-appropriate motherboards and reuse the case and all the components. I want to use it now, not wait until some future date where it's perfect and then worry about it fucking up or needing more repairs. The tech might be subject to entropy, but that doesn't mean that there isn't life after death for it. If anything, that's half the fun.

I'm almost ready to post the trip diary. The pages are all done, and the group's already seen it. We're about three-and-a-half months past my departure, but all that's left is for me to finish up some BunnySetter drawings I'm doing for it (two more to do, one finished, one currently being lined right now) and everyone can come see it.

This has been a far bigger project than anyone could've imagined. 22 days, nearly a whole month, catalogued thoroughly with logs, doodles, lots of photos, project ideas, and whatever else was on our minds and wherever else we went. I'll save my final thoughts for when it's done. I just wanted to post some acknowledgement of how close I am. Work isn't wearing me out as hard, I've finally started physically getting used to it. Lots of Cammy projects will be rolling off the line soon. Thanks for your patience.

Dedicated journal readers, I am typing this at you from the comfort of my brand new desk I have spent the evening with my mom struggling to put together. It is so choice.

Peep the setup:

Click the image! You'll want full-size for this one.

I've been on the hunt for a new desk for literally years now. My old desk was a very cheap, very shitty, falling apart particleboard mess—the legs were particleboard, the top was particleboard, and the bottoms of the built-in drawers were like, flimsy sheets of wood. It was my sister's desk, and given how she abuses everything she touches, those drawers had already collapsed in on each other, the fake finish was wearing off the top, and the vinyl was peeled off in spots by the time it got to me. I dutifully stuck with it though, partially out of a lack of money but also partially because I don't like to replace things until they're literally unusable.

That said, the big reason I wanted to upgrade was because I needed a desk that could handle two PCs. The eMachines Box needed its own setup so I could use it at the same time as my main PC (currently an iMac, probably also getting upgraded in the next year or two), so not just any desk would do. I saw this one on the floor at my new job, and my heart was pretty immediately set on it. I mean, it looks phenomenal, it has built-in outlets and USB ports for charging stuff, the legs are much slimmer metal ones as opposed to full particleboard pieces, so I can clean around them very easily, and, oh yeah—it's an L-shaped desk. Those are cool anyways, let alone handling two PCs no problem at all.

It's normally a $290 desk, but I was able to get it for $235 thanks to my employee discount (and mandatory rewards account, thus giving me another discount on furniture). Our mild incompetence and impatience meant it definitely didn't go together perfectly—the angles are a bit wonky on the legs, though it's definitely sturdy as far as what I'm putting on it goes. Could not be more excited to get the eMachines Box back up and running; I'm using the eMachines keyboard it came with now, and I'm gonna get a temporary USB mouse from work tomorrow to complete the setup. Getting a new desk so I could set it up was phase one in its new life, and phase two will be accruing the parts for a build upgrade late this year into next year, most likely. So excited. The life really is full-screen Windows XP gaming on one computer and listening to YouTube videos on the other.

(Oh, and in closing: this did come with a little side stand and drawer unit, but I still need to clean up my room, so it's not in the shot here. That one, I'll stash our router and stuff on, most likely. Currently, they're on the floor, as I still need to clean up my room. Too busy using my new desk.)

So our power was out for two days! A popup storm on Monday littered the area with trees and branches and took out power for some 22,000 people at the peak, and 13,000 for two days. I was one of the 13,000. (At the moment, according to poweroutage.us, only 31 people in my county are without power, so all is back to normal just about. Rest in peace to the gamers in York County, though, they've still got 6,700 outages.)

This sure sucked! We have electric water, so none of the showers, toilets, or taps worked. We had to use water dispensers bought from the store to wash our hands, five gallon buckets to fill the cistern to be able to flush, and the part I like the absolute least, I had to pour jugs of spring water on myself to shower yesterday because I was prodded into going to work anyway. On the plus side, it might've been the fastest shower I've ever taken, 15 minutes to brush my teeth, get clean, and get dressed—but that's because the water, even at room temperature, was ridiculously cold, and I was gasping and laughing (I'm one of those weird people who laughs when they're in pain) and wondering if God was gonna turn the power back on right after I got out, just to be a dick.

The boredom was pretty bad too—lost an entire day off I wanted to use finishing up the trip diary or the Rediscovering ports to mari@macintosh.garden—but the power was back by 8 last night, so that's good at least. We had a generator, so at least our fridge was safe and we could charge our phones or whatever. I'm still kinda in a daze about it (not helped by me overworking myself at work to keep my mind off the power being out, so my body is a bit sore), but slowly I'm coming back online as well.

Lots of good news in the pipeline, though: aside from all the site stuff, I'll be bringing home a new desk from work, a really nice one which will replace my awful shitty old desk my sister destroyed before I even got it. It's an L-desk, so it should ideally accommodate two computers—and that means a dedicated spot to set up the eMachines Box, and that means I can finally get to cleaning that thing out, upgrading it, and using it again! Get all the games I bought at CEX in Wales imported, slap in more RAM, a GPU, and a spare hard drive, get a Vista dual-boot going, and finally enjoy some retrocomputing action like I've wanted to for, well, forever now, certainly since I got it in 2020.

Long time no see, journal readers—life's been good lately. My job is panning out nicely so far, though I'm by no means in any sort of comfortable groove with it yet. In fact, my body was screaming in agony last night after clearing two u-boats at the end of four days straight of standing all day working. I'll adapt, no worries.

I got trapped in my bathroom today! That was a lot of fun. It's been so heavy and humid lately that the door actually got stuck and I couldn't open it from either side. I had to climb in and out of the window to get in and out, and I wound up using a spare insurance card slid between the frame of the door and the latch to finally get the fucking thing open. I didn't even have my phone on me to text for help! Good thing I'm not morbidly obese and could fit through that window. (This isn't directed at anyone, I'm just glad I could get out.)

In more online news, the Wales 2023 trip diary is finally almost complete! I've got two days left, aiming for one left by the end of the night, and the cute cammy.somnol banner for it to draw. The supplemental photo galleries are already live on cabycammy.somnol. Consider it a nice primer for what's to come, not to mention just a lot of photos and materials that didn't make it into the full trip diary. I'm super stoked with how it's come out, and it's really gonna be nice to send it out to, ooh, everyone I know? Even if you were there, you probably don't remember everything I've unearthed, because I certainly didn't.

After that's done, I'll finish up the few site sections I have half-finished for mari@macintosh.garden (one's all my modding work and the other is an unearthing of all thirty Rediscoverings I did on the Scratchpad over the prior three years, with new commentary and in an easier-to-read format), and get back into drawing after taking a break last month. (Caby reassured me the one evening I didn't need to challenge myself with every single drawing like I'm pathologically obsessed with doing, and that was really nice to hear. Will remember that, promise.) I've been slowly coming to the realization that I was actually up to a lot of cool shit over the lockdowns, and it was just the misery of everything around me that prevented me from seeing it as such. Very glad of that.

(On a related note: I read "Under the Rain Shadow" for the first time since finishing it a week or two ago, and that made me smile huge. I was surprised how good it turned out! I'm starting to really like my stories now, and after many years of being down on them, I've more than earned that. Still would like to rewrite it, not to mention illustrate it, but it's definitely a lot stronger than I remembered.)