Unmissable technology #Blaugust2020

Somehow August has all but melted away rather quicker than I could have imagined. It is Day 27 of Promptapalooza, this blog’s prompt. The schedule for the event is over at aggronaut.com. Yesterday’s prompt was over at the Leaflocker blog, one I’ve discovered through this event. I’ve enjoyed reading their posts about strategy games, a genre that I played a good deal back before I discovered MMORPGs.

My topic is “What piece/s of technology would you have the hardest time living without?“. The obvious answer is my personal computer. It’s currently in the guise of an aging but perfectly functional Alienware 15 laptop, but in a sense the specific hardware isn’t that important. To me it is more the access to a functioning computer that makes all the difference to my life.

I use my computer for a whole heck of a lot of different things, much more than I use my smartphone: I’ve never made that transition to staring constantly at my phone as so many have, but I do spend quite a lot of my time staring at my computer screen. Of course, that’s been intensified because I work four days a week at home in the current COVID situation so that’s a whole load more hours on this PC and not the cheap Dell desktop that I have to use in my company’s office.

The PC is one of my main sources of entertainment – gaming, and thesedays almost exclusively MMORPG gaming. It also is my chosen medium for writing when I’m working on tabletop roleplay adventures whether for my own personal campaigns or for publication. I use it for social media access, e-mail, surfing, Youtube watching and a host of other minor tasks. I could use my phone for a lot of the latter things, and do sometimes but not usually by choice. If I’m in my home, I immediately go to my PC for almost anything digital. I still prefer a proper mouse and keyboard for searching or writing. I also really like having two screens so my laptop & external monitor is a good setup for me.

We were talking over the weekend with relatives who are gamers and who are all excited for the Playstation 5. I’ve never been that much of a console gamer, I’ve no wish to start a ‘platform war’ in the comments, but honestly I need a PC for writing and work so do not see any reason to buy a separate piece of hardware for gaming as well. The kinds of games my husband and I tend to play the most, MMORPGs, would require us to get a console each to play multiplayer so that’d only multiply up the hardware we’d need beyond the PCs we already have.

A computer as something you can’t live without has a lot of caveats. I could almost as easily have said my Internet router as my piece of technology. A computer in 2020 is almost useless without a half decent Internet connection, Windows 10 is built around having such a connection. Much of what I do with my PC involves the Internet, I use cloud services a lot to sync or backup work. I need the Internet to play MMORPGs or to browse the web. A computer is the sort of device that would not be allowed, I imagine, as my sole luxury for living on a desert island since without an electricity supply and an Internet connection I’d not have much use for it.

Tomorrow’s post will be by Sandrian over at Aeternus Gaming, do remember to check out that for more Promptapalooza reading!