This week on Geek Therapy Radio, I did build a new gaming workstation PC
small form factor, but we'll talk about that way towards the end of the
show. But let's just geek out about art art in the box, in
art out of the box, I'll tell you what I mean. Welcome to
Geek Therapy Radio. You've got your mental curator. Who else, Johnny Hamburger.
I finally finished building my small form factor gaming slash workstation PC, the
power Efficient Beast. I guess is what I'm calling it. I have no
official name for it. Maybe y'all out in the Geek Therapy Radio Peanut gallery
can email me or send me a message on Twitter or Facebook or instant like
whatever, and let me know what I should call this thing. It's a
small form factor PC. It's in a what is it a silverstone Off the
top of my head, oh gosh, oh yeah, silverstone MLO six dah
e HTPC case ur HTPCs still a thing home theater personal computers. It's basically
just a computer you build in a much smaller form factor aka SFF small form
factor PC case. It's reduced in the interior volume. You can't put as
many expansion cards in whatever else here you put into PC's in an HTPC case
or a small form factor case. But who's using who among the general kind
of audience is using a PC in which you have tons and tons of expansion
cards. I think for most people, For most people, Thunderbolt and Type
C and every prepheral you can imagine under the sun is using a USB interface
of some sort or Thunderbolt interface of some sort. So that the days of
kind of having each of your PCI slots and going way back, I see,
I say slots, each of your expansion card slots and your motherboard filled
up with you know, uh graphics processors, with Ethernet processors, with Wi
Fi wife processes, with expansion cards. You can get them saying there's all
sorts of in serial interface cards. Those days are kind of behind us.
And I had to realize admit that to myself, and I'll tell you how
you can reach me again here in a second. Just Johnny at geek therapy
radio dot com j O h n n Y at geek therapy radio dot com.
I had to admit to myself recently that you know, I used to
look at motherboards and say I need as many expansion slots as I can.
I used to look for motherboards and this is probably the latest you could get
a motherboard like this. The most recent you could get a motherboard like this
in any with any sort of ease probably would have been at least ten years
ago. I would look for motherboards with PCI slots, not PCIe slots,
not like PCI e x one x four x eight x sixteen whatever. No
PCI slots, the stuff that came after i SA slots back in the eighties
and nineties, PCI slots. I would look for motherboards with at least one
or two PCI slots. Because I was still using an audio interface card uh
the m Audio Delta oh gosh, what was it? Delta ninety six twenty
four ninety six was a twenty four bit ninety six killer hurts uh dsp card
audio card because I would hook it up to my audio mixers and that's how
we record myself and record bands. It had eight channels in put eight channels
I'll put technically ten if you're counting spit if. But it was. It
was on the PCI protocol, used a PCI slot, and it was a
card that I still used a lot. So I used to look for motherboards
every time I was upgrading a PC, even up all the way up until
my forty seven nine DK Intil like the fourth gen Intel chips. Like in
fourth gen Intil I seven, I had a a PC motherboard, a full
size at X motherboard that had at least one PCI slot still on there.
So imagine that motherboard with all the PCIe slots and then you had a PCI
slot. Weird. It's kind of weird that it didn't have an AGP slot
on there. Just I had to admit to myself. All that to say
is I had to admit to myself pretty recently, is like, you know
what, maybe instead of holding on to twenty twenty five year old expansion cards,
maybe it's time in my professional workflow to just you know what, given
to thunderbolts in USB. And there's no problem with that. Maybe, I
don't know the only reason I can tell those of you old school audio engineers
might be listening and nothing. I don't mean old school like there's anything wrong
with you or like hey boom or anything like that. Nothing like that.
No, no, no, I am very much an old school audio engineer.
I realized that fact. When I interview Jonathan Morrison like a year or
so ago and I was asking, hey, so do you mix in the
box or do you mix with a mixer? What do you do? He's
like, yeah, I'm mostly in the box, and like, yeah,
that makes sense. Most audio engineers these days, music producers these days are
they're not They're not sitting in front of a sixty four fighter you know,
SSL or NIVE console. They're not sitting in front of a thirty two channel
console, even a sixteen channel console. Most of them, including myself nowadays,
are mixing in the box, meaning I'm just using my USB audio interface.
In this case, what I have is a task gam Us twenty by
twenty. It is awesome. I'm feeding it my word clock with my Universal
Audio Mike Pre the four dash seven ten D so I'm keeping it locked to
my Mike Pre that has the built in word clock and eight at light pipe
everything out of it. So I but I'm still in the box, like
I'm I don't sit here mixing the podcast, especially because it's only a couple
couple channels, really mixing the con mixing the podcast with physical controls. It's
just we've moved past that most people are mixing in the box. And unless
you go to a recording studio or somebody or like an old school engineer's house,
which is an endearing term, old school engineer near's house or home studio
that is using an outboard console, they maybe are still using PCI expansion cards
like that m Audio Delta twenty four ninety six. That I it's still it's
in a box somewhere. I've got it within arm's reach of where I am
right now, somewhere. It was my workhorse for a long time. But
most of us, even a lot of us quote unquote old school audio engineers,
have moved on to just to mixing in the box, to doing our
audio work in the box using the USB protocols or thunderbolt using USB type C,
using USB Type A, and we don't have all the outboard gear anymore.
We we bring it into the mix, We plug it into a physical
shirt every once in a while if you have like an actual you know,
oh gosh, I'm blanking out lexicon reverb like laying around if that you want
to use, and you can plug into the digital realm through an insert on
a QUSBODI interface. We still do stuff like that, but most of us
have kind of decluttered in our mixing in the box. I didn't know I
was going to go off in that tangent. And I'll wrap up that segment
that thought, at least by saying, whether you mix in the box or
you mix with outboard gear, all that really matter matters are your fundamentals,
the fundamentals of mic placement, the fundamentals of equeuing, the fundamentals of compression.
Whether you're in the box or mixing out of the box with outboard gear,
all that is still way more important than all the plugins and all the
high tech gear. Knowing what you're doing makes up for everything and is the
most important thing, just knowing what you're doing. Anyways, more Get Therapy
Radio, don't go anywhere. Welcome back to Geek Therapy Radio. You've got
your mental curator, Johnny Hemburger. Let me expand on that what I ended
the last segment with as I kind of go through this stream of consciousness that
is geek Therapy Radio. And if you haven't noticed already, if you've been
following me since maybe twenty seventeen when I started the show, or you've followed
me more recently and you've listened to a few episodes by now. That geek
therapy is is that that's like the main cruxt of this show. It's not
that every week I'm going to dive deep dive into like a product that comes
out, Like I'm not going to deep dive into Samsung Galaxy Fold five.
I'm not going to deep dive into you know, the rt X forty sixty
or rt c X forty sixty t I I'm not gonna deep dive into nitty
gritty specs, you know, like Gamer's Nexus or like Linus Tech Tips or
something like that. That's not really what I do here. Sometimes I do
sometimes I'm really geeking out about something and I do kind of a deep dive
into the specs of a thing or give a little bit of kind of consumer
electronics device. But really it's that therapy word, and that therapy is as
much for you as it obviously is for me. That geek therapy. So
this geek therapy stream of consciousness topic that I want to get to is what
I ended the last segment with, which is I was referencing audio engineering like
home recording studios, professional recording studios, podcasters, YouTubers using cameras and audio
equipment and all sorts of things like that. What I touched on at the
end of the last segment is that no matter if you are what I was
saying, you know, mixing in the box or mixing out of the box,
like you're mixing, you're mixing music. You're mixing your own music.
You're mixing in this case a band's music. But in this scenario, I'm
talking about mixing music in general, the art of music mixing, whether you're
inside the box mixing in the box, it just clicking the mouse and scrolling
and using the cursor and a computer screen to do all a mixing. You
know, mix the kick drum track with the snares and the overheads and then
the bass and the electric guitar, acoustic guitars and vocalists and singers and EQ
and compression and reverb and slap back delay and whatever you're doing, whether you're
actually putting your hands let's use the reverb for example, whether you're using a
Lexicon plug in Lexicon rever plug in, or you're using an actual physical you
know, world famous industry standard Lexicon outboard controller for your rack mount gear.
Whether you're using physical gear or you're just clicking a mouse. What's really important.
The only thing that actually matters, and the only difference between something that
sounds good and sounds bad are the fundamentals are no what you're doing. An
audio engineer who has been in the industry since this nineteen sixties is going to
get a still get a good sound with a plug in. Let's say he's
using a UA eleven seventy six compressor plug in versus using a UA eleven seventy
six physical outboard compressor. Whether it's the compressor it's a digital representation as a
plug in, the engineer is still going to have good fundamental knowledge of what
an attack ratio is, and what a release ratio is, what a hold
ratio is, what a three to one ratio four to one ratio or mash
all the buttons in to get that effect, or a twenty to one ratio,
ten to one ratio, what a knee is, what attack and release
and what all those different knobs and settings do. So, no matter whether
he's adjusting attack in, release or the ratio or the knee or the thresholder
or whatever with a mouse or with his fingers out the actual you know,
threshold knob and put threshold knob or output gain or whatever. They're gonna know
what that function does, whether they're doing that function digitally in the box or
they're doing it physically out of the box. There. I would imagine that
most just by nature audio engineers, of which I count myself on because that
is what I originally went to school for and music is what got me started
down this entire career path. I do as much as I mix in the
box, I still like getting into a real recording studio and if I can,
the cherry on top would be using like a real two inch twenty four
track like atari tape machine would be awesome. I like getting physical. I
like pulling the chair up to a thirty two channel or sixty four channel NIVE
console that's worth three or four times as much as my house is worth.
You know, we're talking hundreds of thousands up to a million. You can
spend a million dollars on an SSL console easily. Like a professional recording studio.
You know, you can spend a million dollars on an audio console and
a professional recording studio, no problem. But I like, I like to
pull up to a desk like that too, or a console like that with
all the faders in one hundred thousand buttons on it in knobs. I feel
at home there too, because that's where I got my starts. I've moved
on to mostly in the box, but every once in a while I like
to get out of the box because by nature, audio engineers and anybody who's
kind of technically or artistically minded like that, we do like to put our
hands on physical things. There's nothing like twisting a physical knob, pushing a
smooth physical fader field indentation and a potentiometer, feel the resistance and one hundred
meter fader or bigger than a hundred meter fader like There's nothing like that.
There's nothing like I want to adjust the compression on the lead singer's voice.
So I'm gonna reach over my head or behind me to the rack behind me,
and I'm gonna justus the threshold, oh that eleven seventy six with a
knob. I'm gonna adjust the ratio of the eleven seventies Eiggs with a button.
You know, I think, man, this singer is really just going
hard. This is a hard heavy rock song. I'm gonna try something crazy,
and I'm just gonna do it a ten to one ratio on this compressor,
and then you click the button that says ten colin one. You click
it with your physical hand. It's a more cathartic way to make music.
And some would argue, some would argue a lot of old school engineers.
And again, oh, I'm not saying old school in a derogatory way at
all, because I feel like I feel like people born in the you know
when around when I was born. I was born nineteen eighty three. I
think we're like the kind of last generation that did it old school outside of
the box. That we did anything old school outside of the box. And
also we as we go through time, we're like we are. We rode
like surfers that wave of tech technology. We started by leaving our bikes on
people's lawns because we couldn't just text each other to see we're all hanging out.
Nobody had smartphones or cell phones for that matter, certainly not kids in
the eighties and early nineties. We just it was old school. It was
old school. It had it was the way it had been for generations.
Is what us eighties baby still experienced, but we got our first cell phones
and smartphones and everything after high school. I got my first cell phone,
my first Nokia cell phone, not a smartphone, in two thousand and one
or two thousand and two. So we Facebook started off when we were going
into college, like social media was like when we were actually in college.
We were growing up literally with technology. But we also have our roots in
the old school. So a lot of old school engineers still prefer to mix
out of the box in the real world. And we'll swear up and down
that you make better music, And of course I agree with it that part
of the music making process is to stay in the real world with real gear.
I mean, no matter how well, I can't even say that anymore.
I was gonna say, you still have to use real instruments. That's
not true. That's not true at all. You can have a electric guitar
plug in and just just smack in whatever notes with your keyboard that you wanted
to play, and then it's gonna sound like a human guitar player more or
less. That's debatable how real something digital can sound. But you get what
I'm saying, Like, you don't need to be a drummer you just use
a drumming plugin kind of select the beat that you want, and there's no
drummer in the room. You certainly aren't a drummer, and now you have
a drum beat, so you don't actually need instruments anymore. But a lot
of the best music is still made, is still made completely organically. One
of my friends that I work with at the museum, maybe some of you
might know his name. He's a legend, an absolute music legend. His
name is Chuck lay or Layah. I scull him lay Chuck lay He's just
look him up. Look up Chuck lay l e a H. I really
want to get him on the show, but look him up. But he
is hard and fast. Everything is mixed and recorded onto tape, and if
you mess up, you do it over again, like usually from the beginning.
There's not usually a whole ton of dubs happening. That's my power inverter
fan coming on. It'll kick off here in a second. But there are
still musicians out there that mix completely real world onto magnetic tape. They never
touch anything digital. They never mix an album in the in the box.
The only time it becomes digital is after the mastering process. When it's finally
uploaded to like Spotify or something like that. But the music is made in
the real world, and there is something to be said for that. And
I'm on that line where I'm just just comfortable mixing in the box, making
music in the boxes, and I'm making music outside of the box, real
world, recording to tape more Geek their period of coming up, don't go
anywhere. Welcome back to Geek Therapy Radio. You've got your mental curator,
Johnny Hamburger. If you're listening to the podcast, you can hear a little
bit of the noise floor in my room here. I still have my air
conditioner set to eighty degrees. That's the highest I'll set it while recording a
podcast in here because any it's unlivable. Anything below that. But even setting
the thermis out of my window AC unit to eighty degrees still going to make
some noise. So that's that's the noise floor. If you're listening on AM
radio, you're not going to hear that noise floor then I'm talking about.
So to continue my point that I've been talking about unbeknownst to me, but
that's just where my stream of consciousness goes here on Geek Therapy Radio. The
point of mixing in the box and outside of the box, and that warding
music to real, you know, analog tape and never touching anything digital,
never running anything through pro tools or or logic or reason or cube bass or
cakewalk or reaper that I'm using right now to record the podcast with that if
you record in the real world and just put magnetic waves down onto magnetic tape
and you never touch anything digital, that that makes for good music, and
it certainly does. There's nobody can say that the music would be better if
you were to use a little bit of a auto tune safety net Antari's auto
tune safety net. There's there's nobody to say that it would be better,
and so it certainly for folk music like Americana Chuck Lay who has talking about
good friend of mine. When you're using acoustic guitars and banjos and steel guitars
and dough bros and real acoustic drums with with brushes and bass guitar guitars and
all that Americana, you know, folk music, bluegrass music, there's nothing
wrong with recording that stuff in the box just digitally, just plugging your rajo
into the audio interface and recording into pro tools. There's nothing wrong with that
at all. But there is something to be said for recording straight onto magnetic
tape, that the signal never touches anything digital, that the signal is never
quantized digitally into millions of different samples, hundreds of thousands of samples per second,
that it's just pure. There is something to be said for that purity.
And I'm not going to go into this audio file diet tribe or anything
like. It's not about that. It's about what inspires you to make great
art. And that's what I wanted to get to in this segment. Was
one of the side effect kind of problems that we run into when you do
mix music or create art, you know, with a with a stylists or
something on a screen, on a tablet or on a computer or whatever,
whether you're making music in the box or you're actually like making drawing art in
the box, is that you have infinite options makes you feel like you have
no possibilities. I'm going to repeat that. When you record digitally into the
computer, you have all these plugins and all these effects you can use,
and all these different virtual instruments you can use. And all these. If
you're painting, you have virtual paintbrushes and different effects you can do, and
this and that in one hundred million, as many layers as you can do
in photoshop as possible, and animation anything like that. That when you have
infinite options, can feel like you have no possibilities. So one of the
things that I recommend to budding to artists who feel like they may have musicians
or feel like they have writer's block, they have creativity block. They can't
push through. They're on a plateau. They're either on a plateau. They
don't feel like they've done anything. They haven't had any ingenuity, they haven't
had any sort of creative spark, they haven't felt that feeling when they create
something new and unique and that that thrill, that rush that no drug can
ever come close to reproducing. When they haven't made something like that organically,
that they're in a rut, they're on a plateau, or they're stuck.
What I ask, And it's not like, you know, I can't just
give unsolicited advice, but I would ask, you know, so, when's
the last time you stepped out of pro tools? When's the last time you
stepped out of Adobe or Photoshop or whatever. When's the last time you stepped
out of the box. Maybe you're boxed in. Maybe that's it. Maybe
mixing and making music and making art in the boxes it made you boxed in.
The infinite possibilities or the infinite options feels like you have no possibilities.
So when's the last time, Let's say you are a graphic artist, when's
the last time you just stepped away from the computer, got a piece of
paper or a physical canvas in some colored pencils or acrylics or whatever, and
just made art without the infinite options infinite digital paint brushes and infinite colors you
can can pick from. And when's the last time you just used your hands
to make something real in the real world with limited options. Because with those
limited options, when you put those limits on you, that's often when you
find that breakthrough of creativity. And also with musicians I've made, I've just
been I have two hundred projects open and pro tools, and I can't finish
one of them. I just I don't have the inspiration. I don't know
how to finish these things. I haven't had a breakthrough in ten years.
I have all these projects hundreds of projects and pro tools or reason or cue
base or fruit loops or whatever you're using. When's the last time you just
sat with an acoustic guitar and a piece of paper and a pencil and just
wrote music, just you and an instrument and a pencil, just created something
or a little slightly even further. And this is kind of harder to do
nowadays. Yes, I know, but you can still get them pretty cheap
on eBay, or you might know somebody, or if you're a long time
musician, you probably have one laying around that you haven't used in a while.
Bust out that old four track cassette recorder, the stuff that you and
your buddies would jam into and make those little demo albums back in the nineties
and early two thousands. Dig that thing out. You've got four tracks to
work with. You can only fill those four tracks with so many instruments.
Yes, you can bounce them down and sum them down to tracks and whatever,
but I'm saying you have four tracks, you have limited option. A
lot of these four track recorders, these four tracks set recorders back in the
day, barely had much past EQ. Most of them certainly didn't have any
onboard compression. If they did, that was high falutin. But the point
is it's almost like the most the more stripped down version of a four track
asset recorder you have, Like even if it doesn't even have XLR input,
Like even if it's just quarter inch input and you have to plug in that
old what is it realistic tandycore radio shack mike into that sounds like trash,
But that's all you got. You got the microphone and you have four tracks
on a cassette tape to work with. Make something with those limitations, and
you often find that it's liberating and inspiring and you make something truly amazing.
Yes, and you make something truly amazing, and then you can expand upon
and then you can go back in the box. You can go back to
the computer with that and expand on it. But those those outbursts of creativity
often come under severe limitations. So get away from the infinite, step into
the limited or the finite, and you'll often find your creativity in your inspiration
there in the finite, where it will be otherwise lost in the infinite.
That's geek therapy, Radio Baby, that's geek therapy right there. That felt
so good to talk about, so good to put out in the air.
We are slaves to this digital age, as much as we don't want to
believe it. I am on my phone all the time, I'm reading articles
all the time. I'm I wanted to talk about room temperature super connectivity in
LK ninety nine last week, but I thought, you know, I'm gonna
wait a little bit on that super room temperature super connectivity front because it seems
too good to be true, and of course it is. Lots of labs
around the world have have tested it, and I had to make their own
LK ninety nine or whatever, and it's just it doesn't work. It turns
out that it needs to be a much, much, much, much much
lower temperatures that you can't just reproduce easily to become super conductive. So the
search for room temperature super connectivity still remains out of reach. But we are
all slave to technology in one way or the other. I'm recording this podcast
digitally in the box because it's just that's the most convenient way to do it.
You know what's going to happen. I'm gonna render out this radio show
and podcast. I'm going to render it out of reaper. Here, I'm
recording at twenty four bits forty eight killer hurt sample rate. I'm going to
render it out to a forty eight k twenty four bit wavefile for archiving,
and then but I'm going to send the radio. The radio station is going
to use a three twenty killer bits per second MP three that I send them,
and then the radio station software is going to further compress that down to
like one sixty one twenty eight something like that before it gets broadcast. The
point is the only thing organic right now as I'm recording is me recording real
time and putting actual sound waves into the molecules of air that hit my large
diaphragm condenser microphone and travel electronically down my XLR cable. Still we're still organic,
We're still we're still real here going into my preamp. But then out
of my preamp, it gets converted to a d at audio digital analog tape
is that what it stood for it there's no tape involved, it's just the
ADA per format. But the point is it's converted to pulsals of light.
It becomes digital at that point, the moment my voice turns into light and
becomes digital and then goes to the audio interface and then goes out the USB
and then goes into the computer. And the only thing real is what I'm
saying right now. This is trippy. I promise I haven't had anything before
this show here. But let me let me talk more about that. Let
me talk about finding the realness I guess in the digital age more geek Therapy,
don't go anywhere. Welcome back to geek Therapy Radio. You've got your
mental curator, Johnny Hamburger geek Therapy radio dot com. If you want to
learn more, get into instant contact with me. Somebody sent me a message.
If you're a listener and you sent me a message that just says get
back to me, please. No. I don't mean to be rude here,
but no, if that's the only thing that the header or the subject
of the message sedges get back to me. Please About what no is that
says scam in spam and fraud all over it? Absolutely not? Who does
that? And I don't mean to be coming down if you're the person who
sent that just innocently thought that I would just get back to you, not
knowing what about in this information age of fishing and scams and hacks and everything
like that. It's just not happening. Don't reach out to somebody that you've
never talked to you before that and just say get back to me please.
That's that's, that's all, And that's the only message. I saw this
person who sent me this message. Person, I say, person, it
could just be a bot. Get back to me please. And I scrolled
around. I was like, did they send me something a while ago?
And I didn't get back to it. I feel really bad and I looked
like, no, this is the very first time I'm hearing from this person,
and all it says is please get back to me. No, not
gonna happen anyways. Geek Therapy radio dot com is how you can connect with
me easily. It's just the very first thing you see is a get in
touch with me contact form. It doesn't sign you up for Jack Squad.
There's no mailing list, nothing like that. It's just it's basically just another
way to email me, or you can just email me directly. John E
jail h n n Y Did I say Hamburger earlier? No, it's not
Johnny Hamburger geek Therapier. It's just Johnny j O h n n y at
geek therapy radio dot com and all the social media and YouTube geek Therapy Radio
podcast. Just type it into anything. Just type geek Therapy Radio podcast and
anything look for the red, white and black color scheme. That's how you
know he got me for sure. Anyways, I talked to him last segment.
I've been going on this very geekily therapeutic rant about how good it feels
to step out of the digital box once in a while, especially if you're
a creative person, like you're an audio engineer or musician, or an artist
in the medium of paint or sketching or graphic artist, something like that,
How good it feels, and how beneficial and how critical sometimes it is to
turn off the computer and just get a pad of paper and pencil and just
be as creative as you can with that. Or you're a musician and you
just pick up a guitar, an acoustic guitar, and be as creative as
you can with just that guitar and your voice and maybe a piece of paper
to jock down some notes or lyrics onto, or use a four track a
set record, or dust your old four track a set recorder off. You
feel stuck and stagnated in pro tools because you have a million different options,
and you know what, did I say? Infinite options makes you feel like
there's limited possibilities conduct kind of thing. You got two hundred projects open and
pro tools, but you can't commit to one because you're stuck in your plateau
ing. I'm just trying to talk over my power inverter. Okay, finally
it stopped. It's just good to step out away from the technology. Maybe
you're driving around right now or listening to this obviously on some sort of digital
device, your phone, your smartphone, your tablet, your computer, whatever,
it's good once I give you full permission, turn off this show,
turn off geek therapy radio whenever you want to. It can be right now.
And just what is it like use your five senses to sense the world
around you, to ground yourself in the world around you a little bit,
But especially if you're a creative I think if you're a creative person, it's
even more critical to turn off the screens once in a while, to just
unplug and be creative with whatever is physically around you. I don't know why,
I'm just thinking about this right Now this is the way my brain works.
What are the pebble artists? Look up like pebble art or rubble art
or whatever. Basically what it is I'm seeing on Instagram speaking of technology and
glue to screens, I was like pebble artists, and basically it's somebody.
Let's say they walk they're walking down a path and there's just a bunch of
hundreds of thousands, millions of miscellaneous just pebbles and small rocks laying around.
They'll group them into shades and everything, and they'll make the cool list looking
artwork, like they will literally make the Mona Lisa out of random pebbles.
So you just be walking along the path somewhere and all of a sudden,
you see this brilliant work of art. Oh did somebody paint these rocks?
No, those are the rocks. They just took the rocks that are this
kind of shade of brown. They kind of grouped them together and then they
used them to make this to to shade the artwork and to shade this and
that, and these these rocks are black, So these are going to be
used to kind of define lines and things and the actual like shading ingradients.
These are the ones I've seen are the artistic style of realism. Realism.
If you remember from your art classes, was your teacher saying, paint this
apple on this on this table, just setting an apple on the table,
and say, painted as realistically as possible. Don't paint it like a Garfield
cartoon, don't pay it like a X Men comic book strip. Make it
look photo realistic. Try to imagine you're taking a photograph of it on your
phone or whatever, and just just draw it as really as possible. That's
that's realism and real light and everything like that. This pebble art that I've
been seeing is it's mostly realism, and it's crazy good, crazy good,
And that is such a perfect example of an art form that is in the
real world. You're really moving pebbles around. The artist is really seeing this
blank canvas of completely random pebbles on the ground and then taking thousands of them
and arranging them into the most beautiful art you've ever seen, just on the
earth, on the Earth's surface itself. The Earth's surface is the canvas.
It's amazing to get out of the digital and get real with your hands and
make art that way. So even if you are an amazing digital artist,
if you ever feel stuck or uninspired, I cannot encourage you enough to shut
down the tablet, shut off the computer, shut off the smartphone, grab
a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, and just make something with your
hands and with that pencil and with that piece of paper, and then you'll
find that inspiration that you can take back into the digital realm that you're most
maybe most comfortable with, or most prolific with. I do in these last
remaining minutes, I promise I would talk about the computer that I recently built.
It was kind of a headache. It's a success now, and I'll
just go over the specs real quick. Motherboard B five fifty M motherboard AM
four amdy socket. The processor is a fifty nine hundred I sourced a OEM
fifty nine hundred rise of nine off of eBay for like two hundred seventy something
dollars or whatever. Pretty really good deal. Thirty two gigabytes of RAM A
thirty six hundred megahertz d d R four of course, and the v two
terabytes MVMA solid state drive for the OS and whatever, and then a one
terabyte solids two hundredf inch. So I'll say it drive as a cash scratch
disc, you know, for video editing and whatever else. I think at
my dropbox linked to that drive a couple of not to a fancy keep it
coolt in a small form factor case, the Silverstone m L six dash E.
It can hold the graphics card. The small four factor half height,
low profile graphics card. In my case is the awesome RTX A two thousand
who and I've got an overclock three hundred mega hurts over clock one thousand mega
hurts memory over clock still just pulling sixty nine watts nice from the bus itself.
This set up scres and it is efficient. The reason why I did
the fifty nine hundred the rise of nine fifty nine hundred is that it's a
sixty five watt TDP chip. By the way, just because it's a fifty
nine hundred and not a fifty nine hundred X doesn't mean you can't overclock it.
You most certainly can. It's got a sixty five watt TDP, but
you do the precision boost over drop clocking it go. It runs out one
hundred forty six wats all day, just like a fifty nine hundred X.
It is an absolute baller. I did update the BIOS accidentally to a BIOS
that was not validated for the fifty nine hundred, so I did have to
purchase a forty six hundred g with built in graphics Radion graphics so I could
see the BIOS again, and then downgraded back to BIOS one point one zero
so that it would recognize the fifteen nine hundred. Again. That was a
pain in the butt. I shouldn't have button up the computer. I had
to take the computer all apart to do that process. But the bottom line
is now it works, and it pulls under two hundred watts from the wall
in its kind of normal state, seventy wats for the graphic car, sixty
five wats for for the chip under normal circumstances. Efficient, powerful, awesome
video editing, awesome gaming. It's great. You are worthy of love,
You're worthy of giving love, and you are worthy of receiving love, and
you are worthy of your own self respect. Thank you so much for listening
to Geek Therapy Radio. I'll talk to you next time. Take care,