Then either download the ones you're interested in manually as packs, as IA makes that very easy. Or, search through GitHub to find one of the bunch of IA downloading tools available.
I modded my case of course, and it was crappy. I'd integrated a glass window on the side, so people could (would!) look at my custom water cooling setup. And of course, the glass (held by hot glue), would fall down at the most unfortunate time. Great memories!
But thinking of it in the context of lugging your PC to a LAN party, now I'm picturing a fork of Fast and Furious but instead of all the tricked out cars revving their engines with their hoods popped, its a row of gamer PCs running DirectX benchmarks, and the length people go to make an original piece of art out of their motherboard suddenly make sense.
I know it was twitch and them giving free chairs away to get more people to buy them. Great marketing.
Writing this from my aeron tower.
I don’t get it either but I appreciate that we are not all the same. I enjoyed marvelling at someone bringing a huge rig, oversized ultra wide screen monitor and loud custom keyboard + LED headphones that resembled a light show.
Even if one were to recreate the events, I feel lots of the activities of these meetings (meeting the selected few gamers face-to-face, sharing media, and only finally gaming) are somewhat obsolete or not needed anymore.
Part of me wishes we still had these but that would mean removing lots of improvements and putting up barriers to entry to computers, games and the Internet.
Dunno, I might be rambling but perhaps one should just be happy to have been part of that scene back then and move on?
For me, the closest I got to that has been participating to hackathons (although many misses) even though those tend to be more stressful than the LAN parties.
I'm quite sure you will still be able to find such events, if you want to try. I know a couple of friends who still do that.
Speaking of something which has a similar feeling: There are the hacker events, such as the CCC, which is even right now: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/infos/index.html
(Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend any of these since a while due to having small kids... But I definitely will join them sooner or later again. Maybe then with my kids.)
Also related: https://lanparty.house/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977)
There’s usually D&D at those stores but it doesn’t scratch the same itch imo.
Though on the opposite end, locals are still common for 1v1 fighting games. Shared screen games that doesn't require everyone to bring their own setup, just their controller, for a lower barrier of entry.
We were playing Warcraft 2 over a LAN between my house and the neighbors home and then we d run to the other house to discuss the game over a drink.
Or playing Warcraft 2 on laptops using some power inverter hooked to the car s battery in a truck, at night before going to sleep, on a surfing trip.
If anything gaming today is way less social, with most people playing online with people they ve never met.
A LAN meant we were physically close.
Citation may be needed. Phone cameras today are still pretty crap compared to DSLR/mirrorless cameras due to physical limitations. Particularly in challenging scenarios like night. Except now, instead of getting a totally grainy mess, you get a moderately grainy mess crippled with excessive sharpness, local contrast, and whatever other algorithmic hallucinations the phone manufacturer dreamed up. Bad photos will always be bad photos, I reckon.
Just thinking out loud, as someone who's recently picked up film photography again to see how it changes what pictures I get. Thanks for the effort collecting all these in one place.
That's because you'd want to be able to see what's going on on the monitor without the sun getting in the way. It also happens to be a fact that LAN party types tend to be part troglodyte and thus prefer the darkness of caves and such.
==
Instant group nostalgia, a $100 Craigslist success.
My first LAN Party was sponsored by the Uni... Quake3. The two dept sysadmins took on the freshmen class (16 of us) and smoked us. Was hilarious.
Back then we relied on games offering LAN support (without needing a dedicated game server) but nowadays people just run the game servers locally.
It's crazy how regionally the internet spread across the USA absolutely massed from California.
They might have a family PC in the living room for research and papers but everyone used consoles.
In 2024 some of my genz friends have grown up doing their research/papers on their iphones. I could never. I get mad typing on mine, I need a keyboard and an ultrawide.
I guess a recent model of iphone or flagship android phone is more than capable for running 12 instances of quake at 30fps in parallel?
