I have a friend in Japan who I have been trying to get online with as well. I know it will be hard.

Glad you two are doing good. Even if we just found each other to chat for a bit it's nice to have friends from so far back (we have known each other for 14 years now dude) to hang with.

As always if Bees sees this: You rule for keeping these forums around for so long. I do come back and poke around and I know that at least 15 others do as well.

If Tahiti or someone else sees this, I have heard of a discord that was being used by our folks and would be interested in joining it.

Nice Dart, good to hear you are doing good during the pandemic. Very nice PC's and monitor as well.

Here in Western Australia, we're very lucky. We have been basically back open for close to 2 months I think because we only had about 600 infections in the entire state. Inter-state travel is closed, so all those plague-infested Melbournians can't come here.

I have kept my IT job as well, however our boss is using the pandemic and looming recession as an excuse to cut hours back to 4 days per week forcing us to use our vacation time, despite revenue being up 23% from last year. Bit of a dick move if you ask me.

Ameerah and I play games as a lifestyle as well, at least if you can call it that when it's only for an hour per day due to the kids and work. Right now we're playing Borderlands 3 and it's a blast.

We tried Ark survival evolved because it was free on the Epic store but due to having so little time to play, we didn't like when you die and have to run back to get your stuff, sometimes very far away, and the dino who killed you is still standing right there, preventing you from getting your stuff again. It just took too long to recover from that and felt like a waste of our available hour of play.

That said if you're not on Epic, you should get on it just for the free games every 2 weeks. So far I've gotten Ark, Civilization VI, GTA V, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Darksiders 2, Just Cause 4, Metro 2033 and so many more for free. The platform sucks compared to Steam, but I'll take free games thanks.

I've sent a friend request, but being in AU might make it difficult to play a the same time.

So the pandemic has been pretty good to Laura and I. We kept our jobs and we can both work from home easily. The hardest part is loss of social life. She is fine being at home, but I am a huge extrovert (had any of you ever noticed??) and miss bars, parties, basketball and seeing people on the regular.

I have a coworker who games with his wife as a primary lifestyle and she convinced Laura to start playing Terraria, which lead to The Raft, and on to a whole host of survival and other games. Problem is, she was using her work computer and it is a MacBook Pro. Strong enough for a few games, but it wasn't sustainable.

She is not a Windows person, and did everything she could to avoid the inevitable. We had an eGPU, two GPUs, two different MacBook Pros, and multiple weeks of tinkering before it became apparent that Mac gaming, even with Bootcamp and eGPU just isn't a thing. It's more expensive and less reliable and we gave up on it.

I am not in any mood to build a PC, so now we have two matching Alienware desktops. More than enough horsepower and got a great deal through her company and my veterans discount.

My Steam name is rsdeuce and you can find me playing No Man's Sky right now. We are on Discord with multiple different people (even got my Mom gaming again) and it has been great for scratching the social itch that I can't get during Covid-19. I don't know that I am ready to sniff an MMO anytime soon, but I would love to play something with the old crew if everyone is still active out in the multiverse.

I am really happy with my setup, although the monitor isn't a 'gaming' monitor. This was my Covid present to myself.
[img]https://imgur.com/LDg4YOl.jpg[/img]

Here is the beast itself:
[img]https://imgur.com/1Im5hp2.jpg[/img]