jimko

Unsatisfying, by Parallel Studio, is about "unsatisfying situations: the frustrating, annoying, disappointing little things of everyday life, that are so painful to live or even to watch." [hats tipped: Bert Froeba and @Outstarwalker]

Join the Unsatisfying Challenge Here : unsatisfying.tv/
Direction Animation and illustration : Parallel Studio
Sound Design : Zelig Sound
Music : Samuel Barber
Special Thanks to : Hugo Leick

Click to view the below full-size; or download as a a high-quality digital poster (4MB) for detailed scrutiny; or proceed for the plain text, abstract and analysis...

“What’s going on with Kit Kats Dave?”

TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS MORNING’S CONFERENCE PROCEEDING DISCUSSION, WITH COHEN AND NG.

BC: What’s going on with Kit Kats Dave?

DN: I was about to ask you the same.

BC: Something’s going on with Kit-Kats.

DN: But what?

BC: That’s what I asked you.

DN: Something weird, that’s all I know.

BC: Because we have to start accepting a consensus result. Not counting the full-sized candy bars or hard cash—which are gimmes, we don’t even need to ask that—the year-after-year consensus has a pretty stable top 4.

DN: Kit Kat, Peanut Butter Cups, Twix, Snickers.

BC: Huge news there—Kit Kats put Peanut Butter cups in their place, kicking them down a notch.

DN: I’m sure that pleases you. So we can talk your peanut butter thing now.

BC: My Big Peanut Butter thing. I see two problems with Big PB, neither of them acceptable to me.

DN: You haven’t shut up about this for about five years. You’re about to go into your Mint ra—

BC: CHOCOLATE-MINT COMBOS ARE SUPERIOR TO ALL OTHER CHOCOLATE COMBOS, PB included.

DN: Thank you for screaming. And notice there is not one choc-mint combo in the top 20.

BC: I wasn’t listening, what?

DN:

BC: Doesn’t matter. I have other concerns. Like allergies.

DN: Medical science. You’ re trying to get us legitimacy?

BC: Yeah. We’ve come up to speed in most public eating forums on peanut allergies. But not Halloween. What gives?

DN: I have no reply to that.

BC: What’s the other big news this year?

DN: Yeah, let’s pivot.

BC: We have some good health news. People prefer “whole wheat anything” to “white bread.”

DN: Maybe. But people would also prefer Person of Interest Season 3 Box Set to a Box of Raisins.

BC: It’s not even their best season.

DN: You’re preaching to the choir.

BC: Bonkers the Board Game is preferable to Bonkers the candy.

DN: Most Just Born brand candies are mid-tier—

BC: Your Mike and Ikes, your Hot Tamales, your Peeps, right.

DN: Actually, Peeps didn’t fare well, and we forgot Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews (though someone wrote it in).

BC: And I just realized we didn’t put Hot Tamales on there.

DN: Political results were interesting.

BC: Do tell.

DN: I don’t think we’re telling tales out of school to announce that people prefer Blue M&Ms to Red M&Ms by a 2-to-1 margin. Although to be fair, most folks didn’t seem to care one way or another.

BC: I don’t think we’re telling tales out of school to say that Red folks preferred Skittles more than Blue did.

DN: You’re really extrapolating beyond statistical validity, I fear.

BC: I like how now you act like that’s a concern.

DN: Speaking more scientifically, people who chose the “Yahoo! Finance” headlines at the bottom preferred cash too. That makes sense.

BC: Plus, BoingBoing readers are overwhelmingly scientifically curious (choice of “Science” in the last question, n=983 out of 1232). That’s hopeful.

DN: Yeah, you don’t get that scientific anchoring in those off-brand polls, like the Influenster one I saw last week. Besides, I think they invalidate their own survey since Candy Corn was highest rated with their metrics.

BC: Speaking of scientific legitimacy, I can’t believe we haven’t talked about the results that are already shocking the world.

DN: You’re talking about the Friday/Sunday question, I assume.

BC: Of course, Dave, yes, I’m talking about the Friday/Sunday question. Last year we had a near perfect 67:33 ratio of a Friday-to-Sunday preference.

DN: But something happened, because this year we had a sea change, to 65:35 Fri:Sun.

BC: I don’t even know what’s real anymore. We’ve continued that survey at Various Breads and Butters for a year now, with lock-tight 2:1 results.

The Platinum Ratio, as people call it now.

DN: It could be bad data. Or campaign fatigue.

BC: Would explain why people are definitely poll-weary, that’s something.

DN: Good point. We only had about a fourth the respondents as last year, at close to 1300. It’s the political season. People are done with it.

BC: They’re done with apple questions too.

DN: Yeah, I’m still struggling to figure out what that East-West apple-eating question is.

BC: Most people are. It just shows that you eat apples from side to side, not bottom to top (core and all).

DN: Why is that even a question?

BC: There’s some freak in my hometown that does it that freak way, and then some guy in Northern Virginia. Outliers.

DN: Tell them to eat apples 10,000 times, they’ll learn.

BC: Donny P said “I hope they print my manifesto about the correct way to eat an apple,” but nimelennar knew the sticking point “I doubt they will. The apple lobby is dominated by in-ciders.” This entire line of reasoning has been redacted.

BC: Any other insights to offer.

DN: Not really, but how about lots of graphs.

BC: And more footnotes?

DN: Yes, footnotes galore.

BC: I can’t go on like this.

DN: Well? Shall we go?

BC: What?

DN: Shall we go?

BC: Yes, let's go.

They do not move. Cos of the candy? Sugar crash.

In honor of Halloween, the Boing Boing Store is featuring an awesome Egg/Cookie Mold Set. Naturally, many have tried and many have failed to use egg molds in the past - and today we're celebrating those that have "Nailed It"! 

#1 One of these things is not like the other...

#2 No kidding...

#3 YUM

#4 Nailed it!

These molds are supposedly easy to use—just place the mold in your frying pan and crack two eggs into the rings. In the time it usually takes to cook your eggs, you’ll either have an awesome creation or a total fail. Either way, you're a winner in our book.

For a limited time, the Skull & Owl Egg/Cookie Molds are 40% off retail, just $11.98—grab yours before they're bought up by internet meme enthusiasts everywhere.

Andrew McGill's internet-connected toaster isn't really a toaster: it's a "honeypot" designed to resemble the insecure "internet of things" gadgets— cameras, LED lightbulbs, fridges, etc—that make up the vast botnets behind recent internet attacks. The honeypot was hacked within an hour.

I switched on the server at 1:12 p.m. Wednesday, fully expecting to wait days—or weeks—to see a hack attempt.

Wrong! The first one came at 1:53 p.m.

Lots of the hacking attempts use the password xc3511, the factory default of many old webcams. Amazing. I love the little bot's eye view of the toaster!

Red Dwarf never gets old! Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat are back!

I just watched season eleven's kick-off episode, Twentica. Reminiscent of Star Trek's famous The City on the Edge of Forever, the crew travels back in time to prohibition America. Oddly, they find the prohibition is on science!

I could not be happier! Red Dwarf is back! Now just give me the Mighty Boosh and Black Books.

Matt “Circuitbeard” Brailsford is the creator of this 80's inspired "cocktail table" retro graming center.

Read more on MAKE

The post This Two-Player Mini Arcade Is Powered by Raspberry Pi appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Just look at it. (Thanks, Sandro)

The reverse Oreo doesn't belong here.

For your sworn enemies

Everything went according to plan

Sometimes the crime is the punishment.

You don't need fancy digital fabrication tools to make high quality props, you just need some paper, a pepakura program, and some Bondo and resin.

Read more on MAKE

The post Build Props and Costume Armor with Paper, Pepakura, and Bondo appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

The fun-lovin' hackers at Adafruit banged together this teensy weensy MAME cabinet over a weekend; it's more of a kludge than a project, and they didn't document the build in its entirety, meaning that making your own is a challenge that the Fruits have thrown down before you. (more…)

Lotus Dimension is a tabletop, D&D-style role-playing game in which characters advance through nonviolent means -- a game that incorporates "amazing sci-fi and fantasy storytelling while also incorporating principles of nonviolence inspired by peaceful protests, historical leaders and the tenets of peaceful philosophical practices." (more…)

Professional domino artist Hevesh5 does a lot of great domino builds, but this colorful triple spiral is both beautiful and relaxing to watch. (more…)

I watch YouTube on a near-daily basis and if there’s one thing that absolutely annoys me, it’s how terrible the subscription system is. I would certainly use it if it was anything close to useful. But it isn’t. So I don’t. In fact, I’d prefer it if every YouTube channel had its own RSS feed that I could subcribe to so that I could instantly know about any new interesting videos just by checking my RSS reader. But here’s the good news: even though YouTube itself doesn’t publish any RSS feeds, you can cobble some together for each channel you...

Read the full article: How to Create an RSS Feed for Any YouTube Channel

Benjamin Cheh and Jeffrey Kong made this prototype Lego typewriter a couple of years ago: "a perfect example of how LEGO elements can pack so much detail in something so small. A retro creation for both the young and the young at heart – imagine this typewriter on your desk!" Their site's a treasure trove of Lego creations. [more, more]

If you’re new to PC gaming, you might not have ever explored video game graphics settings. Most people know that higher settings are better, but what do all those game settings actually do?

We’re here to explain the most common video game graphics settings. We’ll see how they work and how they affect your system and games.

1. Display Resolution

Resolution is the amount of pixels present on your screen, which dictates the overall quality of the image. You’ll see this expressed as two numbers, such as 1920×1080 (1080p) or 2560×1440 (1440p). The first number indicates the width of the screen in pixels, while the second is its height in pixels.

All monitors come with default resolution settings, which you can change. If you have a 1080p monitor, you can display in resolutions lower than 1920×1080, but not higher.

Independent of this, you can change a game’s display resolution. Setting a game to display higher than your monitor can handle is pointless, as you’ll lose the extra detail.

Higher resolutions bring a noticeable bump in image quality because there is more graphical information per frame. Of course, increasing the resolution will put more stress on your GPU. Increasing resolution is one of the simplest and largest quality upgrades you can make, so make sure you have a GPU that can handle high resolutions before cranking it up.

Below are two images, zoomed in 200x. One image was taken at 1440×900 resolution (roughly 720p); the other was taken at 1920×1200 (roughly 1080p). Note the added detail to the hair and lines around the eyes.

Some games and software tricks use special methods to render output at a higher resolution than is normally possible. For example, the image below shows the Nintendo DS game, Animal Crossing: Wild World.

The left side below displays the regular 256×192 resolution, while the right has the same game using 1024×768 resolution downsampled to the original 256×192 screen. You could achieve this effect using an emulator.

2. Refresh Rate

When you change your resolution in the game settings, you may see another number beside it. This represents the number of frames per second (FPS) the game sends to your monitor. The FPS that your monitor can display is known as the refresh rate, which is measured in hertz (Hz).

Most standard monitors have a refresh rate of 60Hz, which means that they can draw a new image on the screen 60 times per second. Your graphics card (and game) may be capable of sending a higher FPS than your monitor can display. However, your monitor’s refresh rate effectively acts as a cap on your game FPS, as a 60Hz monitor can’t display 144 frames per second.

60FPS is the generally accepted standard for smooth gaming. A higher refresh rate will produce smoother-looking images, which is more taxing on your GPU. If you’re not sure, you can check your monitor’s refresh rate at UFO Test. We’ve explained how to fix low FPS in Windows if you’re not satisfied with your results.

3. Texture Quality

Texture quality is just what it sounds like: how good elements of the in-game environment look. Textures are skins that sit on top of the basic blocks of the three-dimensional environment.

Increasing the texture quality will enhance the quality of the game’s graphics. Doing this is often rather intensive, as a texture quality change will usually adjust all the textures in-game. The results are sharper and less blurry images at the cost of a heavier load on your video card.

For example, a photograph on the wall might look blurry and indistinguishable on Low texture settings, but have enough detail to study clearly on High. See the below comparison of a shot in BioShock Infinite for an example:

All quality settings work in a similar fashion, so we won’t go over them individually. This includes shader quality, which adjusts how clear light and dark balance in the game.

The particular enhancements made through quality bumps are difficult to pinpoint, since they vary from game to game. You can typically adjust a single slider on levels like Low, Medium, and Ultra, or dive into advanced settings and tweak everything individually if you prefer.

For general use, medium settings are often a good idea, as they balance an immersive landscape with playable performance.

4. Anti-Aliasing

Before explaining anti-aliasing (AA), it’s helpful to understand what aliasing is in the first place. Aliasing occurs when low-resolution images produce pixelated (rather than smooth) lines and curves. This is a result of using square pixels to represent rounded real-life objects.

Anti-aliasing injects blocks of the same or similar color around the lines of an image, creating a smoother effect. This reduces the blocky look around the edges of items in your game. There are different kinds of anti-aliasing techniques; your GPU’s drivers decide which to use. However, you can often change the quality of anti-aliasing you want in your game options.

Depending on the AA methods used, it may tax the GPU a small or large amount. Try turning up the AA effect if you notice jagged edges all over the place, especially on elements like foliage and grass.

Anti-aliasing is more effective at lower resolutions. At higher resolutions, like 4K, the pixels are so small that any aliasing effect is negligible.

5. VSync

VSync (short for Vertical Synchronization) synchronizes the FPS output of your game with the refresh rate of your monitor in order to prevent screen tearing. Screen tearing (one of the most common PC gaming problems) occurs when your GPU outputs more frames per second than your monitor can handle. Thus, the card sends a new frame before your monitor has finished showing you the previous one.

You can see an example of screen tearing below. Notice how the image is split into three pieces that don’t line up. Although screen-tearing isn’t always obvious while playing a game, you’ll likely notice it if you watch slowed-down playback of recorded games.

Enabling VSync removes virtually all screen-tearing from your gameplay. However, it has two downsides. The first is that it can introduce input lag, which is when your button inputs don’t immediately take effect in the game.

The other problem is that if the game’s FPS falls below your monitor’s refresh rate, it locks the frame rate to a lower synchronized value, like 30FPS. This can lead to games stuttering unnecessarily—jumping between 30 and 60FPS is much more jarring than just staying at 59FPS.

To deal with this issue, GPU manufacturers have created separate modules for monitors which sync refresh rates dynamically with frame rates. These alternative syncing options, such as Nvidia’s G-Sync and AMD’s FreeSync remove any stuttering associated with VSync.

However, these alternative syncing methods do require a compatible monitor and GPU, which limits the exposure of this innovative technology. In most cases, unless screen tearing really bothers you, you’re better off disabling VSync and enjoying higher frame rates.

6. Tessellation

In-game textures are comprised of quads—polygonal shapes made of triangles—which form over the shape of objects. Tessellation allows graphics cards to repeat quads multiple times over any given surface. The repeated patterning allows for texture displacement, which creates bumps in landscapes.

You’ll notice this most clearly when looking at surfaces like brick walls. With high tessellation, these will have realistic bumps and curvatures. Without it, they’ll look smooth and less believable.

In most games, tessellation is not that taxing on your GPU. It’s worth a try to enable it and see if it improves your game without impacting performance, but it’s not the most vital graphical game setting.

7. Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion creates realistic shadow transitions between different physical objects. Ambient occlusion in-game, while noticeable, will not dictate the shadow quality. This is why ambient occlusion is usually a separate option from shadow quality.

Instead, ambient occlusion will lighten or darken shadows in relation to other objects. In the example below, ambient occlusion darkens the shadow underneath the table to create a more realistic lighting effect in the room.

In a lot of cases, you probably won’t notice the effect too much. It makes light more realistic, but won’t blow you away with additional detail.

8. Anisotropic Filtering

Filtering allows games to smoothly transition between high-quality textures near the player, and low-quality textures farther away, where you can’t see them as clearly. A sudden change from clear to blurry looks terrible, so filtering is important.

Anisotropic filtering reduces the amount of texture blurring at far distances. These anisotropic filtering effects are best seen at oblique angles (angles that indicate far distances) rather than directly in front of your character.

Before anisotropic filtering, bi or tri-linear filtering was common. This type of filtering slowly degrades texture quality over distances. Anisotropic filtering, on the other hand, replicates similar texture quality at close and far distances alike.

You can see a sample below. Using it is not too demanding on your hardware, and many games nowadays even enable it by default so you don’t have to adjust it.

It may appear as though anisotropic filtering lowers shading effects at far-off distances. That is due to reduced blurring, which reduces the dark spots created with smoke and texture effects.

9. High Dynamic Range (HDR)

While it isn’t typically a setting you can change, HDR is an important graphical term you should know. Essentially, HDR improves the contrast between light and dark portions of your display. This makes the dark parts look darker, and the bright parts look brighter.

You’ll need an HDR-capable display to take advantage of it, so you might want to shop for an HDR monitor when it’s time to replace yours.

10. Bloom

Bloom is an effect that attempts to make light in games “feel” brighter. Of course, your display can only get so bright, so bloom uses other visual methods to increase the effect. You’ll notice bloom when you see light spilling over the edges of objects, like characters and walls.

It’s supposed to replicate the feel of extremely bright light overwhelming your eye or a camera. Used in moderation it can be effective, but some games go overboard with it.

11. Motion Blur

This is a straightforward graphical effect. Motion blur introduces fuzziness to the image when rotating the in-game camera. Like bloom, it’s typically used for cinematic effect, as it mimics similar properties seen in movies.

Many people prefer to turn motion blur off, as it reduces the quality and adds to natural blurriness.

12. Field of View

Field of view, often abbreviated to FOV, defines how wide of an angle your character sees in a first-person game. Increasing this lets you see more of the world at once (essentially enhancing your peripheral vision), but can make aiming more difficult as it squishes more information into the same screen size.

Generally, you should increase the FOV to a level where you can see as much as possible, without it affecting the rest of your gameplay.

Using AMD Radeon Settings and Nvidia Settings

We’ve generally looked at settings you can adjust in individual games. However, you can also change many of these in your graphic card settings menu. Open the Nvidia or AMD app on your computer, and you can adjust some of them on a global level.

Whether you change them in-game or through your video card app, all of these (and more) graphical settings can be difficult to manage. If you don’t want to play around with them on your own, both Nvidia and AMD provide tools to optimize games for your available hardware.

Inside AMD’s Radeon software, you’ll find three AMD Radeon Advisor tools. You can run Game Advisor inside any game to get suggestions for better performance. Settings Advisor scans your system and provides recommendations based on your setup. Finally, the Upgrade Advisor will help you determine if you can play a particular game.

If you have an Nvidia GPU, Nvidia GeForce Experience provides similar functionality. You can use it to automatically apply the best balance of quality and performance for many games.

How to Get the Right Gaming PC Setup for You

Now you have a basic grasp on what PC graphics options mean and how they affect your game. In general, the more powerful hardware you have, the further you can afford to crank up these settings for a prettier game.

If you’re lost, try using the assist tools we mentioned above. Otherwise, a little experimentation can help you strike the best balance between performance and visuals. You definitely want your game to look pretty, but you shouldn’t sacrifice a smooth experience for looks. This is especially important in fast-paced multiplayer games.

To help you get the best results, here are the ways to optimize your PC for gaming.

Read the full article: Video Game Graphics and Settings Explained

Who the fuck is my D&D character generates succinct character concepts for you to roleplay. It's clever how evocative it is! It's by Ryan Grant; the underlying code uses the WTF Engine. (more…)

The wonderful stop-motion filmmaker PES is back, this time with five retro arcade game death sequences.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.

Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City
by Joseph A. McCullough (author) and Dmitry Burmak (illustrator)
Osprey Publishing
2015, 136 pages, 7.7 x 9.9 x 0.6 inches (hardback)
$17 Buy a copy on Amazon

With the great success of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, the popularity of shows like Stranger Things riding a growing 80s nostalgia wave, and the success of game-based YouTube channels like Tabletop and Critical Role, there’s no doubt that we are in a tabletop/RPG gaming renaissance.

Two of the hallmarks of modern fantasy, sci-fi, and horror games are faster game play and more streamlined rules. The skirmish game, played with small numbers of miniatures, and the hybrid board game, combining miniatures and a game board, are all the rage these days. Into this moment of 80s D&D nostalgia and newfound enthusiasm for tabletop gaming comes a game that seems designed to hit all of the sweet spots: Osprey Publishing’s Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City.

Everything about Frostgrave is about economy. The book itself, gorgeously and profusely illustrated by Russian artist Dmitry Burmak, is compact, under 8 x 10, and only 136 pages. The backstory is simple, but highly evocative, the rules are basic and concise, trading off realism for fun. To play, you need only this inexpensive rulebook, around ten miniatures for your warband (taken from any 28mm fantasy range), and whatever terrain and random monsters you might encounter during the game. And some 20-sided dice and a tape measure. Frostgrave can be played by up to 8 players (2-4 are best).


In the world of Frostgrave, a thousand years ago, a flourishing city of magic, called Felstad, was plunged into a deep freeze after a spell massively backfired on a careless wizard. Now, a millennium later, the city has mysteriously begun to unthaw. Wizards from all over the land are flooding back, flanked by small warbands to protect them as they loot the city of its treasures and ancient magic.

 The Frostgrave game does an impressive job of boiling down the dungeon-delving experiences that many of us remember as D&D-playing teens. The goal of the game is to take your wizard (armed with a series of spells that you have chosen) and his/her warband into the city to try and recover as much treasure as possible. You have to locate the treasure and move it off to your table’s edge. Along the way, you fight competing wizards and random monster encounters and you overcome traps. There is no Dungeon Master in Frostgrave. The monsters are generated on a random encounter table. Even though the rulebook is modest in size, they still managed to pack in a campaign system and a number of scenarios. There’s a sweet little bestiary, too. Frostgrave gets most of it narrative/RPG elements through campaigning over multiple games. You also get to spend your acquired treasure between games so that you can hire better warband members, buy magical items, etc.

Frostgrave is not D&D. It’s a miniatures game, not an RPG. But it still manages to offer a lot of the essence of the retro fantasy RPG experience in a tabletop game that’s quick and easy to play, without a lot of upfront investment. If you’ve been thinking about getting into (or back into) tabletop gaming, Frostgrave is a perfect place to start. – Gareth Branwyn

There are few things that go together better than Minecraft and the Raspberry Pi, and the little microcomputer meant to teach kids coding can do even more with Minecraft. The folks at MagPi, the official magazine of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, have a free PDF that teaches you everything you need to know.

Read more...

Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It's practically a rite of passage.

I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my driver's license, my first thought wasn't about the girls I would take on dates, or the road trips I'd take with my friends. Sadly, no. I was thrilled that I could drive myself to the arcade any time I wanted.

My two arcade emulator builds in 2005 satisfied my itch thoroughly. I recently took my son Henry to the California Extreme expo, which features almost every significant pinball and arcade game ever made, live and in person and real. He enjoyed it so much that I found myself again yearning to share that part of our history with my kids – in a suitably emulated, arcade form factor.

Down, down the rabbit hole I went again:

I discovered that emulation builds are so much cheaper and easier now than they were when I last attempted this a decade ago. Here's why:

1. The ascendance of Raspberry Pi has single-handedly revolutionized the emulation scene. The Pi is now on version 3, which adds critical WiFi and Bluetooth functionality on top of additional speed. It's fast enough to emulate N64 and PSX and Dreamcast reasonably, all for a whopping $35. Just download the RetroPie bootable OS on a $10 32GB SD card, slot it into your Pi, and … well, basically you're done. The distribution comes with some free games on it. Add additional ROMs and game images to taste.

2. Chinese all-in-one JAMMA cards are available everywhere for about $90. Pandora's Box is one "brand". These things are are an entire 60-in-1 to 600-in-1 arcade on a board, with an ARM CPU and built-in ROMs and everything … probably completely illegal and unlicensed, of course. You could buy some old broken down husk of an arcade game cabinet, anything at all as long as it's a JAMMA compatible arcade game – a standard introduced in 1985 – with working monitor and controls. Plug this replacement JAMMA box in, and bam: you now have your own virtual arcade. Or you could build or buy a new JAMMA compatible cabinet; there are hundreds out there to choose from.

3. Cheap, quality IPS arcade size LCDs. The CRTs I used in 2005 may have been truer to old arcade games, but they were a giant pain to work with. They're enormous, heavy, and require a lot of power. Viewing angle and speed of refresh are rather critical for arcade machines, and both are largely solved problems for LCDs at this point, which are light, easy to work with, and sip power for $100 or less.

Add all that up – it's not like the price of MDF or arcade buttons and joysticks has changed substantially in the last decade – and what we have today is a console and arcade emulation wonderland! If you'd like to go down this rabbit hole with me, bear in mind that I've just started, but I do have some specific recommendations.

Get a Raspberry Pi starter kit. I recommend this particular starter kit, which includes the essentials: a clear case, heatsinks – you definitely want small heatsinks on your 3, as it dissipate almost 4 watts under full load – and a suitable power adapter. That's $50.

Get a quality SD card. The primary "drive" on your Pi will be the SD card, so make it a quality one. Based on these excellent benchmarks, I recommend the Sandisk Extreme 32GB or Samsung Evo+ 32GB models for best price to peformance ratio. That'll be $15, tops.

Download and install the bootable RetroPie image on your SD card. It's amazing how far this project has come since 2013, it is now about as close to plug and play as it gets for free, open source software. The install is, dare I say … "easy"?

Decide how much you want to build. At this point you have a fully functioning emulation brain for well under $100 which is capable of playing literally every significant console and arcade game created prior to 1997. Your 1985 self is probably drunk with power. It is kinda awesome. Stop doing the Safety Dance for a moment and ask yourself these questions:

• What controls do you plan to plug in via the USB ports? This will depend heavily on which games you want to play. Beyond the absolute basics of joystick and two buttons, there are Nintendo 64 games (think analog stick(s) required), driving games, spinner and trackball games, multiplayer games, yoke control games (think Star Wars), virtual gun games, and so on.

• What display to you plan to plug in via the HDMI port? You could go with a tiny screen and build a handheld emulator, the Pi is certainly small enough. Or you could have no display at all, and jack in via HDMI to any nearby display for whatever gaming jamboree might befall you and your friends. I will say that, for whatever size you build, more display is better. Absolutely go as big as you can in the allowed form factor, though the Pi won't effectively use much more than a 1080p display maximum.

• How much space do you want to dedicate to the box? Will it be portable? You could go anywhere from ultra-minimalist – a control box you can plug into any HDMI screen with a wireless controller – to a giant 40" widescreen stand up arcade machine with room for four players.

• What's your budget? We've only spent under $100 at this point, and great screens and new controllers aren't a whole lot more, but sometimes you want to build from spare parts you have lying around, if you can.

• Do you have the time and inclination to build this from parts? Or do you prefer to buy it pre-built?

These are all your calls to make. You can get some ideas from the pictures I posted at the top of this blog post, or search the web for "Raspberry Pi Arcade" for lots of other ideas.

As a reasonable all-purpose starting point, I recommend the Build-Your-Own-Arcade kits from Retro Built Games. From $330 for full kit, to $90 for just the wood case.

You could also buy the arcade controls alone for $75, and build out (or buy) a case to put them in.

My "mainstream" recommendation is a bartop arcade. It uses a common LCD panel size in the typical horizontal orientation, it's reasonably space efficient and somewhat portable, while still being comfortably large enough for a nice big screen with large speakers gameplay experience, and it supports two players if that's what you want. That'll be about $100 to $300 depending on options.

I remember spending well over $1,500 to build my old arcade cabinets. I'm excited that it's no longer necessary to invest that much time, effort or money to successfully revisit our arcade past.

Thanks largely to the Raspberry Pi 3 and the RetroPie project, this is now a simple Maker project you can (and should!) take on in a weekend with a friend or family. For a budget of $100 to $300 – maybe $500 if you want to get extra fancy – you can have a pretty great classic arcade and classic console emulation experience. That's way better than I was doing in 2005, even adjusting for inflation.

If you want to tie a tie quick, this trick gets it done in about five seconds without needing anything or anyone to tie the knot around.

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Your boss just pulled you into another surprise meeting. You’ve got a case of the Mondays. And your raise got rejected. Why not leave it all behind and roll the dice on a new career in video games?

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