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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.
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
Yo even homies headphones are a throwback.
You know he was using that with this on his trips to and from school every day.
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.
I had a pair too. They were roughly finished and would dig into your skin. Also didn’t sound very good. Cool idea though…
Funny enough duct tape ceiling guy is playing on an LCD monitor.
Probably they were the best player and they gave them all the handicaps available. 😅
That’s, like, $80 of duct tape in today’s money
Fortunately, wages have increased to match, right?
Narrator: They hadn’t.
Yeah but just think of how much GDP has grown!
Right?
We played Unreal Tournament mostly because it ran really well on Linux. Rarely had LAN parties but it worked fine over dial-up. Kinda wild. Miss those days. We did a lot of dumpster diving because people would just throw everything out when they left college.
We played the hell out of q3 starting with beta because it ran on Linux, macOS classic and windows, and my crew had all those. Riva tnt, g3 tower, amd k6-2, 10-base-T hub.
The TNT was a beast! I ran it on a k6-2 also. Unfortunately it crapped out and I replaced it with an MX400 which I still have (I have a problem). We all played with a myriad of platforms. One guy was on a friggin’ Alpha that he warmed his feet with under his desk (not sure if he actually played on that but it was a running joke). We also played Quake but for some reason we were obsessed with the silliness of UT. MMMMM MONSTER KILLL.
Bro did u even kali
Kali did not exist my son
First game that caused me to accidentally stay up until the sun rose (multiple times).
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…
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
With the current quality of MS products, every office drone works in the software testing industry.
Chad life.
Thank you for the reply! Amazing. I hope you’re still passionate about what you do!
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.
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
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.
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.
I had one with a weird pass through cable. Mainly played EF2000 on it.
Back in the early aughts, I worked for a company that did tech support for Adobe products. The company lost the contract to Adobe, and we all were laid off. For the couple of months before our final day we would play Quake while doing tech support. Our numbers were never better.
What if the guy had to pee?
Duct tape isn’t good at binding to skin, after it gets sweaty it can come off fairly easily. So this guy could wriggle free if he really wanted to.
Spoken like someone who’s made a harrowing escape or two.
Or witnessed one or two escapes
diaper
Most logical.
There’s a bucket on the floor
Give this party some good smells
