#steammachines

Rarely is there free time to jam out some personal writing, but I felt obligated after watching last night's communal sports happening. I whipped up this quick list of interesting/insane/inane/other words that begin with the letter I stuff I learned while watching Super Bowl 48:

Pizza Hut's biggest new innovation is making actual fucking pizza. Seriously. And that's for a "limited time only." Then they'll go back to exclusively creating pizza some other way I guess? I sincerely couldn't grok this, which either shows how disconnected I am from regular TV adverts or that I have a lot to learn still in terms of being surprised (or both). 

The Super Bowl is sort of about football, but also about attempting to bizarrely fuse the hardcore world of sports with patriotism and entertainment. This is a pretty obvious observation I realize, but the incongruity of themes sticks out way more as I get older. 

Sports music is the actual worst music in the world. I don't mean the music playing in the stadium from Top 40 artists (which is pretty terrible by itself), but the stuff playing behind broadcasters talking, as the broadcast leads to commercial, etc. So dramatic! So silly! Rings pretty false when you're watching a game where one team has eight points and the other has over 40, and rings cliché when it's applied to actually dramatic moments. Either way, if I were a sports fan, that shit would drive me nuts.

Freaking out about Richard Sherman pseudo-freaking out is nuts when you consider the canned bullshit that came out of Russell Wilson's mouth after winning the goddamn Super Bowl. It's not quite the direct ad campaign that is, "I'm going to Disneyworld!", but it's pretty close.

You can totally watch the Super Bowl on *anything* at this point. Like, tablet, phone, laptop, broadcast TV -- WHATEVER YOU WANT. It's insane. We streamed the whole game, commercials and all, through this sorta-Steam Machine. Our friend didn't even know! THE FUTURE! We are in it!

Steam Machine Prototype Specs Unveiled

Written by IamErikMan

Valve will ship out 300, small yet powerful, prototype Steam Machines to beta users. Although there hasn't been any announcement of prices yet, one thing we do know are the specs to these machines. There will be three machine types; low-end, mid-range and high-end and the prototype is built entirely from "off-the-shelf PC parts," and is "fully upgradeable." We hope to hear the final specs in the near future but for now here is what we are looking at:

GPU: some units with NVidia Titan, GTX780, GTX760, or GTX660 CPU: some boxes with Intel : i7-4770, some i5-4570, and some i3 RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600 (CPU), 3GB DDR5 (GPU) Storage: 1TB/8GB Hybrid SSHD Power Supply: Internal 450w 80Plus Gold Dimensions: approx. 12 x 12.4 x 2.9 in high