Building a PC #1: Why bother?

What's the point of actually making my own computer?

Well, friends, I’m doing it, I’m biting the bitter bullet and doing the damn thing and building my first ever PC.

Because this is The Rectangle and I’m Not Quite Right™, I decided to turn this into a series of articles. And this, pals, is the first.

Last week I talked about the ebb and flow of my lifelong relationship to gaming. Although it’s something I enjoy, there are periods where I won’t really play much of anything. Yet, since going on a LAN weekend, something awakened in me like a Lovecraftian horror. That wants to make want to squander my money.

Basically, I couldn’t stop thinking about building a computer. The goal of this piece is to try and dig into why I decided to transfer this from a daydream into a reality.

At the start came desire. I wanted it. Then the logic. Reasons.

The first two are both self-explanatory and intertwined: work and entertainment.

As a technology journalist, “creator” (god, I hate that word), and novelist, having a Windows PC is getting more important. Not only for testing and reviewing purposes, but also as a way to explore different types of storytelling.

Of course though, the more I pondered it, the more deeper reasons were unearthed.

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It may be silly, but building a PC is a bit of a rite of passage for the nerdy and tech-obsessed. Putting together a computer that does exactly what you want of it is a personal challenge, both in an external and internal sense.

All these points alone weren’t enough for me to pull the trigger, nor did they fully explain my insatiable urge. Until I had a realisation: it’s a type of time travelling.

When I was a youngster, I was fixated on PCs. I loved them. I absorbed everything I could about them, reading magazines and hanging around the components section in electronics stores, flicking through the boxes. I would read reviews of graphics cards and motherboards and CPUs and put together a draft of my dream computer.

The problem is I never had the money to actually buy a PC. And, as time marched on, this fascination drifted into the background.

But things change. Now I do have some money. And — here’s the exciting part — money can be exchanged for PC parts.

The best way I can frame this rediscovery is through another rekindling journey I’ve been on: football.

For a good 15-or-so years, I didn’t really care for the sport. I’d watch the big tournaments or a specific match with friends, but I was deeply ambivalent. It wasn’t always that way though. I was a huge Newcastle United fan as a child, going as far as having multiple scrapbooks filled with clippings I took from newspapers about the team.

That feeling faded. Until I went to St. James’s Park. I watched a game there with my partner’s family and it was revelationary, like a born again experience. There was a swell of nostalgia and contentment to such a degree that it was like waking up. Since that moment, I’ve watched almost every Newcastle United game.

This, pals, is akin to the emotion I’ve experienced getting back into computing.

Let’s return to the original question that kicked this whole piece. Why am I building a PC? Well, it’s to make that weird little kid happy.