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That’s, like, $80 of duct tape in today’s money
Fortunately, wages have increased to match, right?
Right?
Narrator: They hadn’t.
Yeah but just think of how much GDP has grown!
Line go up so good.
And just like that…I’m planning a LAN party for my birthday. Done. It’s been close to 7 years but I want one.
one of my great regrets (Of a great many, I’l concede) is that I never had the opportunity to attend a lan party in my younger days… In these days of the photo.
I have always looked at this picture with a mixture of jealousy and admiration.
The entirety of my career was founded on my ability to build stable network and systems to run Duke Nukem 3d at lan parties using 10base2 networks and Rendition Verite video cards with a side of 3dfx.
at lan parties using 10base2 networks and
“Anyone have another BNC terminator? Oh, also the IPX network number we’re using is 11111111.”
Rendition Verite video cards
Nobody could afford the Canopus, it was a room full of Sierra Screamin’ 3D cards at best
with a side of 3dfx.
A dedicated 3D card in addition to a good 2D card?! We’d dream, but didn’t have that kind of cash.
Full disclosure: I was in my mid 20’s and a factory worker in the later 90’s, so I had a little more cash to afford my hobby. It still hurt though.
I had one with a weird pass through cable. Mainly played EF2000 on it.
LAN parties were always a great place to hang out.
They still are! I throw two or three a year and never have an empty seat.
What about an empty ceiling?
Got it covered (Halloween LAN from last year)
Complete with a ribcage mounted AP
I would like to be your friend please
edit: Auto correct messed this up. 🌈
I just thought they forgot the original dude on the ceiling and this is him now.
Lan parties were basically the highlight of my highschool career. I learned how to set up and configure complex networks just so I could be ‘that guy’ that knew how to fix problems at lan parties. Sitting in someone’s garage all night with 12-16 sweaty, sleep deprived people playing Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament or Worms Armageddon was the absolute pinnacle of good times in a rural small town.
A bunch of people in the same room beating Serious Sam from start to finish while someone played an eclectic playlist of hiphop on the aux for over 24 hours. Those were the halcyon days.
Halcyon & on & on…
We used to do 12-hour, all-night Empire Earth games!
Aww, man - I’d forgotten about Empire Earth, that game was absolutely the shit at the time. Wish it’d gotten more attention and credit.
I never really experienced this, I was mostly a console gamer.
Curious what you do for work now? Related to IT or games in any way…?
I did computer repair for quite a few years after high school, then worked in IT at a game company, and currently work in the software testing industry, so… yes! Hah
Thank you for the reply! Amazing. I hope you’re still passionate about what you do!
Chad life.
With the current quality of MS products, every office drone works in the software testing industry.
I was once so broke that I couldn’t afford a case for a computer I had.
So I brought my computer to a LAN in a trash bag and set it up on the host’s electric stove.
I feel like the static buildup common on trash bags might not be the best for rawdogged computer components 😂
I’m shocked (haha pun) that it still worked but it did.
Also the cord from the power supply to the outlet ran next to the sink.
I love this, and I’m so glad nothing went awry lol
On the shelf next door is still the box with the hundreds of coax ethernet cables, the T-connectors, and 50 Ohm terminators from the LAN parties in the 90s. Before they were called “LAN parties” and used for gaming.
I remember making a serial cable so my friend and I could play command and conquer against each other. Good times.
Oh yes! We had those, too (as my friend had no networking card), and playing with the red and blue CDs was fun! This must have been somewhere '95 or '96.
And BTW: I made those networking cables myself, too. They had bright yellow sleeves, and the terminators and T-pieces had been painted yellow to tag them as mine.
Oh man, I remember after we got network cards trying to make an Ethernet cable out of a bunch of old power cords. The error rate was through the roof but it actually worked for like an hour. We eventually walked to the local RadioShack and bit the bullet on buying a cable 😆
I’ve done loads of coax cables back then, not just for those meetings, and later made quite a number of tp cables, too (as part of my job back then). But I had the tools for cutting, crimping, testing, and verifying them and the training, so that was not an issue.
I had some of those headphones like hat guy has. They were uncomfortable. Strange design.
Damn I miss LAN parties. Ultimately it was World of Warcraft that killed them in my social circles.
Weirdly, WoW was like a constant, ongoing lan party for us.
We would all lug our rigs over to one guys house and play, even if we were in separate raid groups
I had a pair too. They were roughly finished and would dig into your skin. Also didn’t sound very good. Cool idea though…
Can you imagine how bad his neck must hurt by the end of the night? They could have at least spared another loop to keep his forehead supported
He’s the only one with a flat screen: serves him right
Oh, give him a break it’s probably a dual scan passive. He’s playing Doom through a gray smeary mess. But you didn’t have to log a CRT to the basement… So there is that
I feel ancient that I was an adult when this was happening.
It is crazy how fast time goes by, especially if you deal with some kind of trauma. I swear, my divorce was almost a decade ago and I’ve been with my current wife almost as long. Feels like a year maybe. It just slips through your fingers.
I was around 20 when that pic started circulating. I was definitely addicted to counter-strike at that time.
Oh you said it. I am still struggling with the fact Covid lockdown began six years ago. Or that my kids are almost the age I was when they were born.
The LANs I went to tended to be Rainbow Six, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 3, and then Aliens vs. Predator 2000. That fuckin’ ping sound, before we all had headsets, coming out of three speakers at once, was wild.
We had a terrible old LCD projector we hooked the Dreamcast to for Quake III arena. It would overheat so you couldn’t keep the back on. To block the light and cool it down, we’d sit it in the window with a box fan behind it and taped cardboard up around it.
It lit up the entire street in front of my house.
Most of the guys i played with are dead now.
I’ve been playing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 a lot recently and I wish so bad I could go back with the skills I’ve devolved and beat them.
Time flies and nothing is permanent. I really miss those guys bad sometimes. Been hitting me hard recently.
Most of the guys i played with are dead now.
My friend, I am so, so sorry to hear this. I choked up reading it, I cannot imagine living it. If you want to share stories about them I would love to hear them.
Yo even homies headphones are a throwback.
You know he was using that with this on his trips to and from school every day.
that reminds me of when I was telling a friend about the kid who became lion king. he didn’t believe me and when I tried to find it, any trace of the story had disappeared from this plane of existence
Please tell us more
This one kid actually became The Lion King.
Oh I see, that clarifies it
What?? What do you mean with a kid became lion king?
You might be interested in this book https://readonlymemory.com/shop/book/lan-party/
So, I missed LAN parties, but me and my buddies used to all get together (normally at my house) and play console games and d&d, and I feel like it has pretty similar vibes.
Some seriously amazing times. The thing I remember most distinctly, though, is the smell. A dozen 12-15 year old boys who don’t yet understand the necessity of deodorant, all crammed into a bedroom, basically sitting on top of each other. The smell was loud. My room used to reek of it for 5 or 6 days, just in time for next Saturday to roll around and stink it up again. Lol.
Me and my pals were pretty good about hygiene, regularly showered when we all spent the weekend at our pal’s, but good God, when someone would forget a bowl of some food or other over the weekend, or it’d get shoved back behind a wall of empty soda cans and bulky monitors for the whole week? 🤢
I mean, I don’t think any of us were particularly bad about hygiene? It was more just sort of boy-stink. Lol. In fairness, it was coastal Virginia, summer time, in an un air conditioned room, with the only time the door got opened being when one of us had to pee. Lol. To be honest, I remember it almost fondly. Like, the stale smell of it when every one was gone was horrid, but the smell of the room, the hot TV and console, and all my buddies crammed together wasn’t bad when it was going on. Just during the week afterwards. Lol.
That said, I have some unique opinions on smells, so grain of salt and all lol
But also, yes, God, the moldy Chinese food-- yuck
