Totally Awesome! Really, Dude! It's Super! (In Which Bob Documents His First PC Build.)

Finally!

Here for your reading pleasure on Holy Shit NO!!!, is an account firsthand of the building of a computer written by someone who has hobbies other than building computers. (I kid, overclocker geeks, I kid.) If you're looking for a how-to, this probably isn't the place. I pretty much just winged it from the user guide of the motherboard and what meager (if any) installation instructions came with the other components. Even so, it was pretty easy. Lemme show you some pictures, I guess.

This is my chassis, the Cooler Master CMStacker 830SE, with my 750 W power supply, the Silencer Quad Blue by PC Power & Cooling already mounted. I bought both of them quite some time ago and just recently (after much saving of monies) bought the guts of the rig. Shown here is a lovely feature of the Stacker: the removable motherboard tray.

Here's the tray sitting on an anti-static mat on a table.

And now with some spacers to hold up the board.

Bad lighting here, so it's hard for you to see it, but my anti-static gloved hand is holding the screwdriver with which I have just finished screwing down the motherboard. (For those wondering, it's an ASUS P67T WS SuperComputer board.) Funny story here. The plate that goes in around the motherboard's back panel connectors is only mentioned once in the manual. All they say is that it's in the box. Yes, it is in the box. What they don't say is that you're supposed to put it on as you're placing the board onto the spacers. I didn't even notice the damn thing until the chassis was closed up and I was ready for First Boot. Fuck, that made me feel like a dumbass. As I write this, the plate is still in the box, as I have not yet figured out a good way to ghetto rig it into place. I'm not going to take the whole computer apart just for that little thing.

Detail of the LGA1366 CPU socket.

The same, with the lid open.

The protective cap is removed. Look at that sexy, sexy mobo. Don't you just want to stick your processor right into that wide-open socket?

And that's exactly what I did to 'er! There it is, the Intel Core i7 930 2.80 GHz CPU. (Yeah, I know. That sex joke was pretty half-ass. I'll try better next time. Maybe.)

If you squint a lot, maybe this blurry photo of a syringe of thermal grease preparing to dispense onto the processor looks vaguely sexual? But wait, if the processor was supposed to be the penis in the last gag, does that make this some kind of kinky bisexual orgy?

Thermal grease applied to processor.

The socket now closed, I prepared to install the heatsink.

Here's the heatsink (a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus) in place after much convincing with a screwdriver. Funny story here. Turns out this particular heatsink mounts by means of a backplate that you have to bolt to the back of the motherboard behind the CPU socket. Of course, I didn't figure this out until after I had already installed the CPU. So then I have to unscrew the mobo, bolt this little plate on behind the socket, being very very careful not to touch the CPU or the thermal grease on it (contaminated contact between processor and heatsink is bad,) screw the board back down, and finally operate the tricky means of screwing this heatsink into position. I put some more thermal grease on the heatsink for good luck. Probably ended up using more grease than I needed to, but no excess gooshed out of the contact point, so it's all good.

Then I added another fan to the heatsink to improve airflow. This one's a Scythe S-FLEX SFF21E.

Now to give my rig some RAM! This is 6 GB in triple channel of G. Skill DDR3 1333.

The EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 GPU, or as I prefer to call it, "M'ah big-ass honkin' huge graphics card!" Takes up two expansion slots and is damn near as long as the mobo is wide.

This is my system drive. It's a solid state drive (an Intel X25-M Mainstream 80 GB, to be exact.) It has no moving parts, so it's faster and more durable than a conventional hard drive. It's slightly bigger than a credit card. It's screwed into an adapter bracket to fit a 3.5 inch drive bay. The bracket has no proper screw holes with which to mount it in the drive bay. That is duct tape you see there around the back of the bracket so that there is more holding it in place than just gravity. Ghetto fucking fabulous.

My optical drive, mounted in one of the Stacker's no-tools-required 5.25 inch drive bays. It's a LITE-ON DVD burner in case you were wondering.

This is my data drive. It's a Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB hard drive. Screwed to its sides are a pair of adapter wings to make it fit into a 5.25 inch drive bay.

And here it is mounted in one such bay. I later had to move it down a bay to optimize its position along the power cable.

"What the hell is that?" you might be thinking about this strange camera angle. Well, the point of the photo is the fan. The Stacker has a fan bracket at the top of the case, so I put a fan in it. It's another Scythe fan, just like the extra fan on the back of the CPU cooler.

I had ordered a 250 mm fan, planning to ghetto rig it somehow into the side panel, but my CPU cooler turned out to be too tall. So for my side panel air intake, I have three 120mm Apevia fans with blue LEDs.

My one complaint about my motherboard is that it wasn't running my CPU fans or my front and rear chassis fans any faster than about half their top speed. So I went out and got this Aerocool Touch 1000 LCD touchscreen fan controller. All my fans run at full speed now.

And here I am, chillin' out with my new PIMPIN' PC! After I save more monies and buy more gear, this computer will be part of an audio workstation. That in mind, I have decided to name it after an amazing piece of technology from a long-running TV show whose main title theme's original 1963 arrangement was one of the earliest pieces of electronic music. I shall call my computer the TARDIS. What does it stand for in my case? Terrific Audio Rig Developed In Stacker.

But wait, there's more! I mentioned earlier that my solid state drive is faster than a hard drive. The result of this is that the computer boots faster and programs load faster. Here's a video of the TARDIS's incredible boot time:

Oh the angst... Or is it ennui?

Just a few random musings here that I feel must be voiced to all who happen to find this:

Has anyone ever actually sung "99 Bottles (of Beer on the Wall)" all the way through without interruption?

As the so-called "tea party" is too fucking dumb to be a real grassroots movement, who's funding this Astroturf? Big Insurance? Big Oil? Big Banking? The KKK? People stupid enough to think that a government can be too big and too small at the same time shouldn't be able to successfully pick their own noses, let alone organize spontaneously.

Breasts are both functional and beautiful. Moobs (a.k.a. man-cans, bitchtits, etc) are neither.

I needs me some more motherfuckin' money!

This sort of crap is what people use Twitter for, I guess, but fuck that noise. I already have a twitter; I don't need another one.

How is babby formed? Guns first! (That one should only make sense to the C-Unit crew.)

You can believe everything you read here. Really. Why? Because I'm on the Blagonet!

Your mother is a whore.

I wish I were drunk right now. Then I'd have an excuse.

Does society reward incompetence actively or just because it has no choice?

Fuck your comfort zone. All the way to hell.

Save a tree. Eat a baby.

Bob's Badass List #1 - Five Badass Guitar Solos that Totally Wail, Bro!

Here at Holy Shit NO!!!, bitching about bullshit is our number one concern. But it's not all we do. That in mind, I am proud to introduce a new occasional feature: Bob's Badass List! In it, I, Bob, will spin out positive rants about things that are totally badass. So get ready to rock out with your cock out and/or jam out with your clam out, because we're gonna kick this bad boy off with Five Badass Guitar Solos that Totally Wail, Bro!

1.) Guitarist - Jimi Hendrix
Band - The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Solo - All Along the Watchtower (between 2nd and 3rd verses)
Any of Hendrix's solos could easily have been chosen to appear in this list, but I picked this one because it is a particular display of his talent not only as a player but also as an arranger. Sure, it may not be loaded down with all the shredding and sweeping of today's metal masters, but it is still a gold standard of rock glory: the compositional genius of Bob Dylan blended perfectly with the raw, soulful power of Jimi Hendrix to make one of the greatest covers of all time. I'm really trying to come up with more to say about this solo, but I'm just getting stuck at "DAMN!"

2.) Guitarist - John Petrucci
Band - Dream Theater
Solo - The Best of Times (end of song)
Speaking of today's metal masters, and speaking of raw, soulful power, prog virtuosos Dream Theater have done it again with their new album Black Clouds & Silver Linings, giving us technique nerds plenty to drop our jaws at while producing music of amazing emotional power as well. This solo stands out as one of the highlights of the record, with its epic melodies and masterfully constructed sweeping arpeggios bringing a fantastic conclusion to an extremely moving send-off for the man who named the band.

3.) Guitarist - Nabana Tomomi
Band - detroit7
Solo - Mr. Kato on the Road (after first chorus)
Have you ever wondered "What if Grace Slick were Japanese and could play the guitar like Hendrix?" Neither had I until that question was answered for me when I saw Tokyo power trio detroit7 at SXSW last year. Totally mind-blowing experience, that show. They wailed so hard I just had to buy their CD, and this solo is one of the best examples of the pure unstoppable energy with which Nabana and her band present their massive blend of classic hard rock and old-school punk.

4.) Guitarist - Emppu Vuorinen
Band - Nightwish
Solo - Gethsemane (end of song)
Damn, I love me some old-school Nightwish. Love their new stuff too (no substitute for brilliant songwriting,) but there was something different about their approach to arrangements before they started hiring orchestras. For a grand finale on a Nightwish song from Century Child onwards, the orchestra is likely to be heavily involved, and maybe the choir too. Back in the day, though, this solo was what a Nightwish grand finale sounded like. The lyrics finish, the band chugs through the progression a couple times, and then Vuorinen frees the metal beast.

5.) Guitarist - Matthew Bellamy
Band - Muse
Solo - Hysteria (after second chorus)
First there's the trippy staccato progression that follows as an alternative extension of the intro riff (instead of the signature pre-verse lead,) then it seamlessly walks down into the second part of the solo, the big legato lines that wail on into the drum break before the end chorus. It's a great example of Muse's phenomenal ability to pack extraordinary amounts of compositional flow into a standard pop song format.

Well, that was some good fun, wasn't it? More Badass Lists (maybe one of them a direct sequel to this one) will appear in future updates, peppered in among the usual senseless bitching and gratuitous profanity that you've come to know and love, or at least expect from this blag. Until next time, from all of us at Holy Shit NO!!! to all of you out there on the Internet, pass out with your ass out!

Avatar Sucks.

I really couldn't come up with a better title for this post. I just got back from the moviehouse with a really bad taste in my mouth because that's what happens when you spend three hours eating a massive, steaming plate of gilded shit.

I suppose I should begin by stating my expectations when I entered. I had heard that sci-fi snobs were tending not to like the film, but everyone else liked it. The reasons for the sci-fi snobs disdain centered mostly around the typical problems with movies billed as sci-fi that really aren't sci-fi: an unoriginal plot in a fanciful-futuristic setting with non-humans who act just like humans. Okay, I thought, so it's not really sci-fi, and it won't be original. But that doesn't keep it from being entertaining, right?

Wrong. Disney has come up with better plots than Avatar. And I don't mean the kick-ass Disney of old that produced shit like Dumbo and Peter Pan. I don't mean the Disney that made all those great movies about classic fairy tales (Aladin included.) I mean the Disney that, seeing the success they had with turning Hamlet into The Lion King, decided that they should rake in obscene amounts of dough by taking any piece of classic literature at random; mutilating the plot as much as necessary to make it have a happy ending, fit the MPAA's "G" rating, and be understandable by children just old enough to be self-aware; mutilating the plot some more to fit in a weapons-grade-stupid joke every forty-five seconds, things like necessity or historical context be damned; slapping on a heavy layer of Judeo-Christian moralism, original cultural context be damned; and coercing some big-name talent into the cast so that the critics have to take it seriously. The Disney for whom Pixar was an artistic godsend. That Disney had better plots than Avatar. It's just the same old plot about a guy who gets sent to convince the natives to give up their land and ends up going native and fighting against the Manifest Destiny fatcats who sent him. Nothing added, nothing changed, just that straight-up, tired old formula. Cinematically, it shouldn't need any more than thirty minutes.

So what was done with the two and a half hours not spent advancing the plot? It certainly wasn't character development. I just saw the damn movie, and I don't even remember anybody's name. Every character was either a stereotype or a nonentity. I was expecting the natives to be the most cartoonish thing about the film, but no. It was the human villain whom I will call Colonel Hardass because I can't remember his fucking name. And therein lies my greatest disappointment with Avatar. If you're going to make such an airheaded movie, at least put Star Trek - level effort into designing and developing the villain. (And I mean the Original Series, not the recent film.)

No, the entire three-hour runtime was spent saying "Hey, look what we can do with all these shiny new toys!" There is no denying that Avatar is a visually spectacular film. But that's why I called it a massive, steaming plate of gilded shit. It's shiny, it looks pretty on the surface, but it's still shit. If I wanted fantastic visual effects, they have plenty of trippy kaleidoscopic screensavers aimed at the stoner market. There are professional fireworks displays visible from my backyard every Independence Day. But that's not what I'm looking for when I go to see a movie. I want an entertaining story with vivid characters.

Yes, James Cameron, your special effects penis is bigger than anyone else's. Now spend a little less time waving it our collective faces and a little more time making a decent fucking movie.