‘Tis the bleak midwinter, and the timbers of Tentaclii Towers drip and shiver in the icy blasts. The mournful wailing of anti-Brexiteers is sometimes heard, far out across the Stoke-on-Trent wastelands as they trudge toward sanctuary in Scotland. But the Towers’ robust truffle-pig herd has been out-and-about… and thus daily posting has resumed here. In January 2020 the blog offered readers a wide range of freshly-snuffled posts, though my in-depth research and reviewing is in abeyance until the early summer. The range of January posts was wide, and as such there’s little coherence for me to pick out here in the usual sort of summary survey.
My thanks again to my Patreon patrons. The monthly total remains stuck at $53 a month, but at least it hasn’t dropped further. This month my patrons have helped fund a purchase of the Lovecraft Annual for 2018 and 2019, bagged at a bargain £15 for both inc. shipping. Half-price, basically. Please encourage others to become my Patreon patrons, if you know of likely Lovecraftians. All it takes is as little as $1 a month.
My patrons have also helped contribute to the cost of my new workstation. This is a decade-old refurbished HP Z600 with 24Gb of RAM and dual Xeon 5670 processors. Originally around the $10,000 mark for a third-generation Z600 circa 2011, they can now be had for £245 including efficient delivery and a cross-over networking cable. They combine a tank-like build-quality with slimline design values (tool-less case and layout, designed by BMW) and should have a decade of life left in them yet. With the original Windows OS and its HP drivers correctly installed the machine is still a beast for those who have specific needs on a very tight budget. Such as a second offline PC as a cheap ‘render farm’ for 3D rendering from Vue 2016, Poser’s Firefly and DAZ’s iRay (contrary to popular belief, iRay can run fine on CPUs). My tests show its 12 cores and 24 render-threads tearing through Vue scenes like it was made for the software, and it does very nicely on iRay too. The Z600 is also still good for junior video-editors in need of a ‘pocket money’ starter rig; and for videogamers on a tight budget who also have a free hand-me-down graphics card for it.
I’m in the Vue/Poser creative camp, and as for videogames I’ll give theHunter and perhaps Morroblivion a try and see how visually buffed and fast they can get. [Update: they chug, because the Z600’s specialist CAD-friendly Quadro graphics-card is both old and not geared for games]. The Z600 purchase was partly enabled by a small bonus from my magazine work, and a surprise $25 from my Lovecraft ‘travel poster’ sales over at RedBubble. After producing a puny total of about $4 in income over the last year, such sales suddenly came to life again. I imagine that someone somewhere was opening a Lovecraft-themed bar for Christmas, and wanted a set of non-gory art posters on the walls. Anyway, there will be a full guide to the Z600 for Vue / Poser / DAZ iRay in the March 2020 Digital Art Live magazine, if you’re interested in such things.
So that’s about it for January 2020 at Tentaclii Towers, apart from my commanding the truffle-pig herd to deck the halls to celebrate our glorious Brexit on the 31st. Hopefully I’ll still be here in February, and won’t have been carried off by either mutinous anti-Brexiteers or the looming plague.
