I wouldn't read this, it's about c0/\/\p|_|734z

I am fairly certain it will rain this entire week. I have acquired this surity not from the weatherman, who chuckles menacingly in his Thunder Fortress above the clouds, but from a realtor. I am absolutely sure it will rain every day this week, mostly when I get home from school, because I have to work, passing out flyers. I do like money, I suppose. The feeling of joy I am experiencing is nearly unbearable.

I hate Nvidia. I have always hated them, not only before, but after they bought out 3dfx, proclaiming to preserve the flawless old-school performance of the Voodoo's visual hardware. Assholes. Now, along with ATI, who I have also always hated due to their unsavory driver bugs, Nvidia is, like, the shit. It's what you get if you play games and the games aren't seven years old, like all of mine (and my operating system).

What I'm getting to is that awhile ago, I went out and picked up a Geforce FX 5500. Believe it or not, the motherboard I may as well have found in a Goddamn Cracker Jack box supports it, being 4x AGP.

I can't run a single motherfucking piece of software that uses Direct3d. I've tried everything; BIOS settings, different monitors, different versions of DirectX, different versions of the Nvidia drivers, third party drivers, disabling my sound card because some bullshit FAQ told me to, and reinstalling windows. Twice.

Technically, my grudge lies with both the chip manufacturer and Microsoft, since anything running on OpenGL works just fine. In other words, I can play games that run on the old Unreal engine (Rune is actually quite a bit of fun), Counter-Strike, and a handful of other things. It may sound like a bit of a silly lament, but it is utterly sad that alternative renderers like Glide simply don't exist anymore. Not only did cards like the Voodoo3 run old games and the games of its time well, but it was adaptive to work with games that came in the future which ran solely on DirectX. And no bugs. No "I'm totally gonna kill the final boss if the motherFUCKER doesn't just turn itself off" crap. You could play Tribes or Total Annihilation or Half-Life for hours and nearly forget what your medium of enjoyment was.

Now, I suppose developers and programming-savvy gamers would argue, games are more complicated. Bullshit. Now we've got crap like Halo which looks fine and all, but is boring and really kind of mentally unchallenging. Come on. Did we play Nethack because we quixotically admired the aesthetics of the little "@" which represented our character? I don't know, but I sure lost sleep over it. Was System Shock 2 one of the best games of all time for its stunning, um, zombie faces? It was badass because it was made by good fucking writers--when you picked up the logs of the confused passengers of the Von Braun, it made you identify with characters that developed throughout the entire game, and actually put you in motion with a real story. Where the hell are adventure games? Where are the people that would still play EverQuest if it were a text-based MUD? Does the community that once wrote the priceless literature of the Diamond Sword and Blood Eagle just play World of Warcraft now? I've really kind of fear that computer gaming would steer carelessly into virtual-reality eye candy and nothing more than a thousand Battlefield 1942 sequals: more of the same with a few more polygons. Games like Quake 3 where the single player campaign is to battle Sarge and his friends in a conquest for... something.

Off on a tangent. What I meant to say is that

I HATE NVIDIA.