
"Ben, will you say something? Have I been talking to myself this whole time?"
"No, I AM listening Ma."
"Then say something, how long are you going to keep ignoring us and live your life like this?"
"I am doing just OK with my life, Mom."
"And OK is all you are doing with your life. We had so many dreams for you. When are you going to get a real job? Come back home, your cousin says he can get you an internship at his company."
"I already told you, I am doing what I love and it is enough to pay my bills."
"Enough to pay YOUR bills but that is not enough, how are you going to start a family like this?"
"MOM, I told you I don't want to talk about marriage, I am hanging up."
"At least tell me if you have a girlf…." *CLACK*
*SIGH*
I am tired of having this conversation again and again. Long story short, I am a disappointment to my family. "Why?", you ask. Well, that is because just like every other brown kid who grew up in a middle-class family, I only had three choices in life, become a doctor or an engineer or a disappointment. I, for the first time in my life, showed courage and choose the third option.
But that is not the worst part, I only became a disappointment after I quit my first engineering job and decided it was time for me to pursue my passion.
You see, I decided to become a freelance artist. I did mostly digital stuff but took up painting jobs in the neighbourhood too. I started small but slowly I grew my portfolio and made connections and after putting a lot of work into polishing my skills I finally managed to make enough to sustain myself. I always wanted to do this but growing up, I didn't dare to tell my parents that the life they have planned for me is not the life I want.
I always had good grades in school even though I never really studied much. I know that it was because I never forgot anything I learned in class. I didn't have an eidetic memory or photographic memory, but it was easy for me to focus on things and remember them. So I always had the praises of my teachers and I was on my way to being an engineer, I never could go against my parent's word. I was a coward like that or conflict-avoidant as I would like to call myself.
When I finally went to college and finally got away from my parents, I finally got to spread my wings and worked on my craft in my free time and I got a lot better. I didn't neglect my studies though and in the end, I even got a well-paying job which I quit just after six months, I still don't know what I was doing at my job, to be honest.
Now, I live in a small one-bedroom apartment that has its walls covered with sketches I made cause I wanted to save some money on painting my walls and I also had a lot of sketches piling up. I have everything here, characters from my favourite games to landscapes of all the places I'd like to visit someday, there are even sketches from the time I was practising anatomy. They look awful now that I look at them again. The only thing of value in this room is my PC. This is the best I could afford, i7 9th gen. Maybe It isn't very impressive to others but I had to save a lot to buy this and it does the job.
So anyway, after the not-so-pleasant talk I had with my mother I wanted to relax a bit and I turned it on. Five minutes in, I am doing what every Skyrim player is guilty of doing. Enjoying my time as Dragonborn murdering the people of Whiterun.
It all started when I came in to sell/dump some cabbage, cheese and other junk at Belethor's General Goods and buy some potions and alchemy ingredients from Arcadia's Cauldron but then Nazeem decided to be a dick again.
"Do you get to the cloud district very often? Oh, what am I saying? Of course, you don't.", is what he said.
So I burnt his ass to a crisp and sent him flying towards the clouds with a "FUS RO DAH" or the "Almighty push", as I like to call it. And now I am slaughtering Whiterun guards and by that I mean I took an arrow to the knee and am about to be slaughtered by them instead.
No worries though, it's not like I am going to die forever. I will get Nazeem some other day.
That is when it happened. My PC just dropped dead and I was staring at myself on the black screen.
'I need a haircut and a shave huh.'
*WOOSH* *CRACK*
"Looks like a storm is brewing," I say as I look out of my now open window. The power is out and I can see the clothes that I had hung out to dry earlier about to be flung away by the wind.
"Great, it just keeps getting better and better," I say running out to catch my now flying clothes.
Good thing I live on the ground floor. There goes my favourite hoodie. I was going to wear that to the movies tomorrow. Washing them again is going to be such a pain. I guess It's my fault for being too lazy to use cloth pins.
I bend down to pick up my least favourite white T-shirt that somehow looks the same as the day I got it. It is the obligatory deathly hallows t-shirt every Harry Potter fan must buy. I used to be very fond of it at one time, but I guess I got bored of it at some time. It has the figure of death at the centre of the deathly hallows, spreading its wings and its arms. It is all black except the white elder wand at the centre.
As I pick up the t-shirt, I can not help but stare at the figure of death at the centre of deathly hallows. I have always thought that it looks too realistic but right now it feels as if the figure is moving.
*RUMBLE * *RUMBLE*
"I should get back inside."
Inside as I sit in my chair, I cannot help but stare at the t-shirt again. The mist that was previously only around the figure of death has now covered the whole t-shirt and is making its way out of the t-shirt. I can only stare at it with my eyes wide open in horror and disbelief as the thick black mist surrounds me and everything around me.
'Am I high right now? WTF was in my coffee?'
I can feel a slight pulling sensation at the bottom of my stomach towards the shirt as the dark mist in the room starts to swirl like a whirlpool towards the centre of the deathly hallows.
"Ughhh"
'Mother fucker, can this day get any worse?'
*RUMBLE* *RUMBLE* *BOOM*
AND THAT'S WHEN I KNEW THAT I FUCKED UP.
'Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Murphy's first law.' I remember thinking as I saw a bright flash of light making its way towards me through the swirling mist as I got pulled towards the centre, and the last thing I remember is this all too familiar music coming from my computer as it too was getting pulled along with me.
Dovahkiin, Dovahkiin
naal ok zin los vahriin
wah dein vokul mahfaeraak ahst vaal!
Ahrk fin norok paal graan
fod nust hon zindro zaan
Dovahkiin, fah hin kogaan mu draal!
One They Fear · Jeremy Soule
Engineer: check
Freelance artist: check
Got good grades without studying much: check
The MC sounds way too similar to me, except my mom is always excited to see my art and I do it on the side of my engineering job (which I have had now for 7months). Oh and I'm scandinavian.
The only thing of value in this room is my PC. This is the best I could afford, i7 9th gen. Maybe It isn't very impressive to others but I had to save a lot to buy this and it does the job
oii Im stuck with a I3 shitty *ss thing with 3.9gb ram 230~ storage that's running 2005 prossecing stuffs cuz it's that outdated with the newest one being 2009 the pc itself is probably a 1990s (Grant I'm gonna be getting wifi next month then the month after a better pc but still)
I have an i5 and I feel like I belong to the upper middle class in my country, my PC was a gift that all my relatives gave me for finishing high school, in exchange for all the gifts that year and that I didn't take any subjects, although I did I think about it now it was money but not that much, I mean, I think now I could afford an upgrade (Damn Age of Empires 3, they have to optimize the graphics of that game because after 20 minutes of opening it all my components get hot)
@Belisario Bro, my laptop heats up like a frying pan.
@DreamyApe It depends on the game for me, I think I need a better graphics, but I also need more Ram, I have 16, but I play a lot of strategy games that do a lot of calculations so I guess 16 more will do the trick, then I need a new screen urgently, the Mine is so old that it doesn't even have HDMI and it looks a bit ugly, last but not least for some reason the function of receiving sound from my computer was broken or disabled, it doesn't matter what microphone or microphone with a headset I put on, no it captures the sound, the issue is that I think I have to change the sound card and since they are now integrated into the Mother board I have to change it all.
@Belisario Yeah, they just don't repair anything these days and force us to buy everything new. It's all a scam, a huge conspiracy. 'Maaa, where's my tin foil hat?'
@DreamyApe ha I got a 12gb laptop recently on sale for $450 thou i plan on buying a USB stick for more storage the thing only has like 256gb of storage litterly I have to choose between ark and ESO ESO is a bit smaller my PC thou I had to wipe Everything+ some it's got ESO and the things that make a computer a computer as my PC only gets 127gb ESO is 115~ I litterly had to mess with it to the point the reboot is about 5 times longer just so I'd have enough storage for both games split between both devices luckily best buy has 2tb ram sticks for $20
@BlakeChoasStorm I used to play my strategy games (now I play more things) with the pirated game inside a tera disc, if it hadn't been a pirate I would have about 7,000 more hours to my steam account of a specific game (Europa Universalis 4), that since the memory had 6 Gigs of RAM it was damn slow, the game has 5 speeds and with the fifth speed I was slower than speed 1 is now.
Damn... A family of programmers, and we kind of iterate through computers at least once a decade, at the latest... A four year cycle being the shortest. I mean, their jobs gift them computers, they also bought some of them cheap from their friends old stuff... Then, last year, they bought me a laptop for 700, kind of got a bargain for a potent one that could last a decade for working purposes. My brother uses a laptop with possibly more than 10 years of age, and the dual core, no hypertheading, integrated graphics... Barely loads. Is your pc even usable? I mean, I can imagine it loading a web-page for a minute, just to run out of ram... Or YouTube barely loading... Orz you know, the ethernet on it being kilobits per second, instead of at least two megabits, which I already found frustrating for anything other than plain text webpages... And... Would the programs even compile there? What the hell, if you use your pc regularly, you should really consider getting something newer for cheap. I'm pretty sure you can get something decent for internet browsing and other less intensive workloads under 100. Not to mention, but older hardware is less energetically efficient, so it heats more and does less stuff for a higher electric bill. Though, if you wish to exonomize on electricity, better get accustomed to Linux... Ubuntu has been friendly to me for many years, and it's not bloated with spyware, unlike windows.
@BlakeChoasStorm Careful with cheap persistent memory tech. It is not bad, or unreliable per see, but the tech on usb sticks and SSD, if I sm not wrong, has the bit storage forned by multilevel elctron trsps, the more levels an electron thrsp hss, the more dats it csn store, with exponentislly diminutive returns of course, but it often times gets a cheaper price per bit. But it so happens that the more layers there are, the more prone to failure is your memory. So you should avoid a constant write/overwrite to your high data density devices. You can more reliably check and compare the lifespans of various storage devices by reading their write lifespan in their specs sheet.