So just when we had awful SG elections, the Diversity Task Force, and tuition increases out the wazoo, I finally experienced a silver lining.
Gaming: The Housing people opened a lan center in the basement of Jester. It's surprisingly cool. 16 very well done Dell boxes with Logitech headsets and 21" monitors on Radeon 9800s, along with a couple plasma screens and vending machines as well as Bawls coolers. I went to a soft-opening party courtesy the TGA (of which I'm working on becoming an officer) and walked home with a flash drive worth $30 at Fry's. That'll almost buy me a copy of MGS Twin Snakes, which is out real damn soon. While TGA used to host weekly game nights in a lecture auditorium every Friday night (yeah, taking over projectors and plugging in consoles is awesome), they've been moved downstairs to what they're calling the LanCave. It's $5/hour, which is expensive as hell, but I'll show up for cheap-gaming specials and tournaments for sure. The place is quickly becoming a sort of safe haven / hangout for gamers all over campus, which is what I always wanted to see happen with TGA's help. I'm glad to be getting involved with it all.
Just to be sure, this puts my winnings this semester at $270, after knocking off the $10 I paid to enter the Mario Kart tournament.
Bawls: The University started selling Bawls in cafeterias and snack shops. At $2.25 a bottle, we really don't care how expensive it is since most people have excess dining money anyway.
Filesharing: Someone on campus started a DC hub that works across the whole University network. It's a crazy network they have here - you can only see computers in your own dorm, but you get internal transfer speeds (roughly between 600K/s-1MB/s) between any computers connected to the University at all. So, now all the l33t people who live in dorms are hooked up by DC with insanely fast transfer speeds that don't count toward our bandwidth quotas (between 4 and 8 gigs a week, depending on how much you pay). There's maybe 50 users connected on average, and there's roughly 2TB of stuff going around already - and this hub just got started. Since I found out about it earlier this week, I've managed to get 10 gigs of stuff I needed, including:
-another copy of Splinter Cell (old CDs got scratched)
-BT - Ima (a good rip)
-The full Cowboy Bebop soundtrack collection
-Initial D (which I couldnt fit over Christmas)
-Swordfish
-Two Eddie Izzard routines
-Two episodes of Extreme Elimination Challenge (I LOVE this show)
-Squarepusher - Music is Rotted One Note
-first two episodes of Final Fantasy Unlimited (haven't watched)
->Daft Punk - Daft Club - a brand new remix of Discovery, and it's awesome. Grab it. But, yeah. Lovin' it here.
-BT - Ima (a good rip)
-The full Cowboy Bebop soundtrack collection
-Initial D (which I couldnt fit over Christmas)
-Swordfish
-Two Eddie Izzard routines
-Two episodes of Extreme Elimination Challenge (I LOVE this show)
-Squarepusher - Music is Rotted One Note
-first two episodes of Final Fantasy Unlimited (haven't watched)
->Daft Punk - Daft Club - a brand new remix of Discovery, and it's awesome. Grab it. But, yeah. Lovin' it here.