craigslist Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Craigslist Fails Me

I have had a strange relationship with Craigslist over the last few years. Sometimes it is the source of truly amazing things… other times the source of nothing but frustration. When it comes to buying laptops for example I have had a high rate of people flaking out on me and simply not showing up with the merchandise. When it comes to console systems however I have a pretty damned stellar experience getting a PS4 for $200 and a Vita for $100 for example. Hell right now I am typing on a $150 Logitech G710+ Keyboard that I got for $40… so generally I have some phenomenally good luck there. I’ve always felt like if I can keep from taking the initial depreciation hit on an item… I might as well do it. I have no problem with second hand goods, and while I don’t get to pepper the internet with unboxing videos… but I think we are both better off for that.

Several months back I found a Power Color r9 290x for over half off the price it should have been for the card. I figured it was worth the shot because that was way more video card than I would normally allow myself to buy. The problem with buying something like a video card is… there really is no way of knowing if the card is good. It could be burnt to a crisp and unless there are visible signs of damage there is no way of knowing. When it came time to meet the guy, he said that he replaced the card for a dual Titan Black setup… so that seemed legit at least as to why he would be getting rid of an otherwise solid card. I take the card home and install it and it caused my machine to reboot after a few minutes of running any game. When I started watching the temperature on a monitoring app it would just start climbing, and no amount of manual fan control would bring down the temp. The card would overheat and freak out my system.

Frosty Machine

At the time I was a bit forlorn but didn’t give up heart. I ordered a few things to increase the amount of cooling in my case and there they sat in the floor of my office for months. Part of me didn’t want to install them because deep down I think I knew that I essentially got ripped off on the first card. This weekend I tore apart my machine and installed all of the extra cooling and I have to say the processor now runs at a frosty 21* C with a recorded maximum of 28* C during gaming load. I am pretty happy with that but after installing the R9 290X it went through the same cycle as before. Load up any game and a few minutes later my system is rebooting. Chances are the guy was using it for bitcoin mining, which quite literally burns out a video card. I point blank asked him if that was the case he and said no… but people sometimes lie.

To get a good after market cooler to slap on the card it would end up costing me around $100 for one that fit this particular card… and it just didn’t think it was prudent to throw more money at it when the end result might be the same. I have mostly stuck with GeForce cards because quite honestly they are what I know. I know how they perform, I know how to tweak the settings. This was a brief foray into the concept of owning a Radeon but I am now retreating back into the realm of things I understand. I ordered a MSI GTX 960 card over the weekend and hopefully if everything works out as planned it will be here Tuesday. While this is not the screaming card the r9 290x should have been… it is at least stable, reliable and a significant upgrade over the 750 ti I currently have. I just want games to run without much futzing, and this card should allow me to do that. Also due to a promotion I apparently get a copy of Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt to play around with on it, a game I likely would have picked up anyways.

Most Improved

Marvel Heroes is one of those games that I have avoided like the plague for reasons I don’t fully understand. I played a tiny bit of it in beta and was not extremely impressed. However over time it has racked up a wide array of “most improved” titles from the various gaming sites. I always thought this was a funny concept to be touting… but in truth it is really well deserved. Earlier in the week I had decided to install the game through steam, because I kept seeing friends of mine playing it. I figured I would give it a shot and check it out to see how enjoyable it actually was. The end result was me spending three hours straight playing it last night without really realizing it. The game has the super hero feel down perfectly, and it actually does a better Diablo than Diablo at this point. When you start you are given a choice of several heroes, and after reading the descriptions of each of them… it seemed like Captain America fit my desired mode of play the best.

The irony of this is that other than enjoying the movies, I have never really been that big of a fan of Captain America. At the very least it was not a comic I ever read or spent much time on other than his involvement with the Avengers. Character wise however he is just about perfect a mix of a solid melee, solid ranged, and lots of defensive cooldowns. I guess you would assume that a character with a shield as a weapon would end up feeling pretty tanky right? My favorite thing about him is the shield throw and the ability to use it similar to Sivir in League of Legends to sweep the room and take out a bunch of bad guys. At this point I think I am level 11 and am actively looking forward to playing more of it. There are times it feels so much like a top down City of Heroes, so maybe this is the game that is going to finally give me my superhero mmo fix. I’ve heard the end game can get pretty grindy… but then again so does Diablo, so I guess it makes sense. In any case I threw some money their way for the X-Force pack through steam and look forward to trying all of those characters as well.

Aversion to Sports

It started yesterday with a random dumbass quip that I am known to occasionally spout towards the end of the day. Watching the internet be enthralled about the World Cup is a really surreal experience when you are living in the United States and soccer never actually makes the sports page other than during the World Cup. I figured surely someone would give me shit about my statement, but I expected them to hone in on the World Cup portion. Instead my friend Liore latched onto the root of the comment… asking why exactly I found the appeal of sports bizarre. I rattled off a half truth and said that I just was not born with what I call the “spectator gene”. I love league of legends for example, but no matter how many times I have tried to watch the LCS I find it completely boring. All it does it make me want to boot up League and play it, instead of getting completely caught up in the matches like my friends do.

My aversion to sports however goes far more deeply than that. When you grow up in a small town in Oklahoma or Texas… your entire school life revolves around the sports team. I grew up in a town of 2000, with a graduating class of 60… and even though we had a horrible football team… the entire damned town revolved around it. Growing up a big kid I was stalked from middle school on by coached that wanted to make me part of their “lineup”. I played little league ball and gave an attempt to play football… but I just didn’t enjoy it. Additionally I have never bought into the bullshit drill instructor act that all coaches perform. While that might motivate some people, all it does is make me want to flip them the bird… because I had so many other options for spending my time. It completely baffled them that anyone would not want to play football.

On top of that over the years sports have come to represent what was wrong with a small town. You might have duct taped together supplies in the science classroom, and classes meeting in portable huts instead of actual buildings… but by god if the field house needs renovated that is going to happen, and there is nothing that will ever stand in the way of our losing football team from getting shiny new equipment every year. The focus on football means other things slide and the school as a whole graduated a ton of barely functional adults. In my graduating class of 60, I would say 2/3rds of the kids who went to college flunked out their first year and are now working menial jobs in the same town. Then we get to the problem of the coaches themselves… who always seemed to be History or Mathematics teachers. My Geometry teacher was the head football coach, and would spend exactly five minutes writing something on the board… and then spend the rest of the hour as we worked on our homework assignment with the football players huddled around his desk talking about plays for the “big game”. The history teacher, while a nice guy was equally incompetent. He once told us that “Old Iron Sides” was named that because it was made of Iron not Wood. So how can I respect sports when I grew up in this situation.

I realize that huge swaths of the population love sports, and love cheering for their team. I try my damnedest to just ignore it, because I really don’t want to be a buzzkill. Every now and then one of these quips slips out, and as I said while I really do not have the spectator gene… there is a lot more driving that attitude. I played little league ball, but for whatever reason the indoctrination never really took. Which is humorous because I used to work in a baseball card and later comic shop. I even collected cards… but then it was more about the artwork on the card or the value of a specific rookie… and not about me actually caring about the game itself. I will say though that to this day Baseball is the only game I will really willingly watch. There is something untainted about that sport, because at our high school they never got any attention either. They had to play in old uniforms and on a crappy field… because the football and basketball programs drained the system dry. So in a way I felt almost a sense of kinship with them, since they too were damaged by the system.

Next Gen Achieved

I have for the most part avoided the “next generation” of consoles, and as all the hype surrounded them leading up to the launch I didn’t think much about any of them. Then something happened… and I saw the 2013 E3 presser from Sony. During the current generation of consoles I started out an XBox 360 fan… but over time I gravitated towards the Sony Playstation 3 when I picked up one used from a friend. The primary reason behind this shift in allegiance was the phenominal deal that is the Playstation Plus membership. For what is roughly $50 it gave me access to a massive game library of I think a dozen different playstation 3 titles at a time. So not only was the service cheaper than Xbox Gold but worth way more value in that it actually just gave me a curated collection of games every month for me to download. One of my good friends Ashgarshowed me a nifty trick that allowed me to log into the website and “purchase” the free games to add them to my account each month. After watching the E3 press conference last year, I knew sooner or later I would be getting a Playstation 4, but I was mostly waiting for the price to come down. Nonetheless this meant every single month I would add the new PS4 game to my account knowing that sooner or later I would get one and have a game library ready to play.

Awhile back on the AggroChat podcast, my friend Tam introduced me a rule he uses for the purchase of new console systems. He waits to buy a new console until it has at least five games, either currently released or releasing within the next six months that he wants to play. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was an excellent and logical way to decide when to jump into a new console. For me right now the list of games I am excited about looks something like this.

Infamous: Second Son
Assassins Creed 4: Black Flag
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Last of Us: Remastered
Destiny
Kingdom Hearts III
Final Fantasy XV
The Order: 1886
Guilty Gear Xrd
Bloodborne

While many of those are not Playstation 4 exclusives… I am devoted to the playstation family of consoles thanks to the warm fuzzies I have about playstation plus as a whole. In the time I have been subbed to the service I have gotten 151 games, and have a library of six PS4 titles waiting on me. Granted most of these are not exactly AAA titles yet, but one of them at least is something I have amped to play since the moment I saw game play from it. Microsoft on the other hand… really has nothing to offer me. As far as Microsoft Console exclusives… the only two that I am interested in that are not also coming to the PC are Killer Instinct and Sunset Overdrive. Neither of which are going to be games I play enough to make that console worth my time. Then again… there is just a lot I don’t like about the target of the XBox One. I was watching an excellent rundown video about the two consoles yesterday, and the guy admits that while he used the Kinect and TV integration features for the first month… he hasn’t used them at all since.

Getting the Goods

When it comes to buying hardware especially… I am a cheap bastard. I rarely if ever buy game systems new… in fact the only game system I did buy new was the 3DS, and only because I had pretty much exhausted all options. So when I started kicking around the notion of maybe picking up a PS4… I hit craigslist like normal. I did a search of the site and noticed that someone had a PS4 incorrectly posted in the barter section for way less than normal. They were wanting $280 and it came with two sports titles. Since I have zero use for those… I opted to try and talk the guy into a price without them. I honestly expected nothing to come of it, so when it texted me back a day later saying he would do $250 without the games… I was absolutely pumped. I joked during the day yesterday that I hope I didn’t get killed meeting a stranger on craigslist… which apparently disturbed Rae considerably. It was a little odd because generally I am not alone when I meet people from craigslist, but my rule has always been that we meet at one of the many QuikTrips in Tulsa… since they are ALWAYS busy 24/7.

The guy was running late… as in he was an hour late at the time he finally arrived. For awhile I was thinking that it was going to fall through like so many other “good deals” from Craigslist have. However he arrived with a PS4 in hand, with the original box and everything that came with it. It seemed that once again I was benefiting from the flighty nature of teenagers. He bought the PS4 and games with High School graduation money… and then decided he needed that money to move into an apartment. It is funny the stuff that folks you meet from craigslist will tell you, like when we bought my chromebook we found out that the guy grew up in the same town as my wife… and that they knew some of each others family. I think maybe this stuff only actually works out this well here in Oklahoma… where people are generally well meaning and rather polite about everything. But once again I am more than happy to take advantage of a good deal when I can find it. I took the machine home, booted it up and everything works awesome. It feels as though the dual shock four hasn’t really even been broken in. The guy had not even registered an account on the playstation network, so after a wipe of the system it is now set up with all the plus games.

So far I am mostly playing Resogun and Infamous Second Son. I would like to find a cheap copy of Killzone Shadowfall because it looks pretty cool. I am also kicking myself that I did not sign up for the Destiny Alpha. At that point I had no clue I would actually be getting a PS4, so of course hindsight is 20/20. Here is hoping I can figure out a way to get an alpha key and play it as well. So far I am loving the system, and super happy with the purchase. It is actually good timing considering my allergies are going completely haywire and right now I can barely breath. Seems like the perfect time to hibernate with a console and play some games. I might even try streaming to twitch later, just to see how well the service works.

#PS4