Low Spec Breakdown

My scuffed setup.

This post was a long time coming, but not in a way it'll most likely end up being. It's going be kind of "off-topic"... again. I was always kind of a retro gamer, especially nowadays. Multiple factors played their roles here: those games are cool, fun, and they can run on pretty much everything. Latter part is something I wanted to talk about for some time as I think it could be interesting to view how someone like me tried to play some games.

With a "screenshot inside" from my Slayer Arc post, its pretty obvious that I'm sitting on weak and old machine. So, I would start from here and share some insight on other similar examples and stuff like that. I think it's still important for second half of this post. After that, I'll walk even more about some other personal things as I think I just need to do that, despite me thinking that's a bad idea and wouldn't make me feel any better. Even though, some might say it should.

Thematic Prelude.

Sometimes I'm pretty stubborn, which is proven by that DOOM screenshot. Even though I'm legitimately afraid of pushing the limits of my laptop, there were a few times when I did just that. That's a pretty damn thing to do when you think about it: my good old Lenovo G505V was actually dead at some point. It was sudden, I don't know what caused that, but then I managed to turn it on. Keyboard stopped working and I used the one on the screen via mouse, but my one awesome friend gave me his old keyboard for free and I use it ever since. My dad and I both agreed that taking laptop apart to see what's up there is too risky, although it could've used some good cleaning.

I'm telling you all of this on top of the thumbnail just to emphasize how impressive it worked at times. Main bottleneck, to me, seems to be the amount of RAM I have (4 GB) against the industry standard of today (8 GB)... Although in this example, I think my machine just isn't modern enough. If you need any indications of how great my genius mind is, then you should know that I tried launching demo of Ghostrunner. Yup. Of course, I didn't get to the game itself. Intro was lagging and main menu... worked relatively. Other than that, I stuck with an error.

Error I got after trying to launch Ghostrunner Demo.

All of these are on Unreal Engine 4, which is a funny coincidence and reminds me about how annoying it is that for some reason most of these games had the highest settings turned on by default. You would've thought that there's no way I would've been able to play AMID EVIL, but I actually beat it and got all achievements. To be fair, I picked Normal difficulty out of concepts of getting stuck in case game becomes unplayable down the line and closest to it were graphical bugs in The Void maps (Should've made a screenshot). Also, ~5 minute loading when launching the game. Despite that and a few minor issues I had with it, I had pretty good time playing AMID EVIL on lowest settings and mostly stable gameplay... It was tolerable, okay?

Last but not least, GRAVEN! Game Awards demo of it and, as with previous example, I had it working. Downgrades had to be made due to unstable version of Unreal it used, but overall I was relieved by the results. On top of that, unchanged minimum system requirements on Steam and reported stability improvements in Early Access version keep me rather hopeful. Although there's one moment that stood out for me since I played that old demo.

I remember having a short discussion with a friend of my who works in the industry about the game. About how I really should update my setup instead of working within my current limitations and I said that "Yeah, I'll get there eventually..." Even at the time that response sounded like bullshit to me because that's what it is. While it would've been nice for retro releases like that have more "fitting" requirements, expecting Unreal Engine 4 games nowadays run on ~8 years old machine is stupid. And while I got used to this environment I'm in right now... I think at that moment I truly started to realize that I don't want that to be the case anymore. That's not like I'm happy with all that though, but for the most of my life I just "deal with it".

Losing the Path.

Well... From now on I'll do a complete 180 and turn other part of this post into immensely extended or even the opposite version of "A Humble Beginning". What I mean by that is I just let myself go loose and write a lot about how my life has been for the last few years up to the days when I'm writing this post, which is gonna be... odd, let's just say that. Because of that, I will refrain from mentioning anyone specific when I can.

For a background, I'm in a family of 5 (I'm the youngest child; We also have four cats) and we were always on poor side of things. Didn't have any big struggles at first, but couldn't afford anything fancy. Long story short (as there's no point in pointing fingers at this point), things got more complicated and we ended up with an apartment debt that persists to this very day. In last four years, live became just suddenly harder for me, and it affected my studies in last two years of high school to a point where I've seen a psychologist for short period of time due to reduced grades & attendance on top of abdominal and nerve problems.

During the "troubled" second half of 2017, my mother moved to another city to sit with her mother after some odd situation that happened there. It was pretty rough for her and my brother that visited her at some point as my grandma had dementia. She took care of her until May 3, 2018 when she passed away. Gladly, I visited her a couple of years early when she was alright: it was nice to hang out with her at better times and get to know her and my grandpa (that is also no longer with us). And I visited mom during that summer. Plus our financial situation got only worse and it was harder to make ends meet.

So, after my terrible graduation from high school... I shut down. Stopped talking with my old School & Internet friends for a while, abandoned everything (studying, therapy, etc.) and was generally on bad mod. Didn't ceased my communication with the world though: I talked with more recent komrade friends from WoW and foreign peeps I meet on Twitch. Despite how bad it could sound, I met many wonderful people and I really glad for that as I think they helped me to not totally lose my mind in these times. Went to various sidejobs with various degrees of success... Rare success, especially in 2020.

Although, someone we went through it... well enough, I guess. There were even a few great moments during that year and, despite the terrible state around the world, things seemed to looking up. As weird as it sounds. 2021 comes by and I tried to slowly recover. Aimed to look at several trainings, actual job, go back for therapy and all that...

That's how this blog came to be as one of the first steps on this slow endeavor where I just keep getting off course.

Scuffed Cycle.

Now, I would like to take a moment to describe how exactly my life was going recently... or, actually, kind of always. More I thought about it, more I started to notice a certain pattern that persisted through most (if not all) of my life. A balance of absolutely terrible and not so bad.

Recent two weeks have been very shitty for me. Lack of income are very crucial now since prices in hypermarkets and shops have risen yet again. On top continuous pressure from my family due to my "shameless laziness", I was sick. After I started to feel better, a side job appeared. It was successful: I got it, did what I was asked to do and got paid. Excellent... if you don't count the fact that all three of us got sick shortly afterwards. Plus my dad returned late at night beaten up in the same day and felt terrible for a few days. Surely it was an exchange for my short success as that's too much to ask for. And now second week goes by in the same vein. We're very short on food supplies. Everyone is sick. I keep failing at getting some money.

That sounds bad and weird, but the most stable time period in my life lately was at the pick of an epidemic. That makes me feel even more terrible as it feels like that was a greater change off: like, I did say that "things seemed to looking up". Because, at some point, that was true.

At the beginning of these bad times we again didn't have enough money. Internet wasn't a priority for me father, but it is for me: without it, I'm even more useless. Then suddenly my friend comes it "at the last moment" and offered me to do some copywriting, which helped me immensely. Other moment like that happened more recently when I asked him if there's anything. He said "nope, not right now", but two days later — there he is again. Yet another twist. As always.

My Awful Nature.

In order to complete this bad picture, I'm going to make things worse and mention just how utterly greasy I am. Perhaps its unnecessary details that should've been left out, but I already committed to being pretty honest about myself here.

I just didn't care about my hygiene for a long time now. Like, I'm literally worse version of Asmongold... Not going bald yet, so at least there's that. My teeth are terrible and me rarely brushing them doesn't help it. My usage of bath is even worse, trust me. On top of all that, I almost never wash my cloths and sit at home in greasy shirt and pants, which makes me taking a bath kind of pointless, I guess. It's not that bad when it comes to underpants and socks... until recently.

I always knew that this is just fricking awful and wrong. Why am I treating myself like that? Because I don't care. I don't respect myself. I don't deserve normal human treatment. Not until I'll do things right and fix everything I've caused either directly or not.

Point of Desperation.

I don't know what else to do in order to make things better. Donations? Who would send them and why? I kind of made this option, but it really is pointless. Crowdfunding? Doesn't work for me because all common platforms are either against this type of campaigns or don't support Russia directly. And I don't want to relay on someone to pull this off, which I think is a mutual feeling. Find a job? I'm trying. It's difficult to do when I know that something will go wrong. Same for studying, although in this case I also don't know where to go. Go into gaming industry? Journalism? Writing? Game design? That's absurd. Maybe I should go back to my childhood dream of being a chef, but I have doubts here as well. I have them regarding everything. Truth is that I just can't relay on anyone else and wait for some kind of miracle, especially when I can't help myself.

Why am I writing about all this? Even though I was very reluctant to open up like that and still don't feel confident enough, but it just feels like something I should do. I never really talked about that because it's silly, wild and unbelievable. Instead, I should laugh it off or keep it to myself. Not to mention that a lot of people are living in much worse situations and I even have a friend in that unfortunate state. Talking about my issues after that just felt wrong in my head.

However, I'm just tired of sitting right here à la "This is fine". This is my scream into the void as I know that only like 2-3 people will read this post. Which is fine by me as posting this post literally frightens me. It will either make things even worse or a slightly better. As much as I want to believe in the latter, there's no reason to. But, despite all of that, there's no turning back now. So this is going to be yet another sin I'm guilty of. Just like everything else, literally.

Thank you for going through this mess and I'm sorry for wasting your time.