160 books and Master of Magic

GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY was my 160th book, and I’ve noticed that 160 just sounds unimpressive compared to 150, even though 160 is in fact the larger number. If you’ve written 150 books, it’s only logical that you’re gonna write ten more. Like, at that point, there’s abundant historical precedent to back up that assumption that you’re gonna write ten more. 🙂

Anyway, to celebrate book #150, which was GHOST IN THE VEILS, I got a portable monitor. Basically it’s an LCD panel from a laptop, and you put it on a kickstand like a tablet. I used it to play my Xbox comfortably on my couch, and that means I’ve basically spent the last year playing STARFIELD.

Something I’ve wanted to play for a while is the remake of the 1990s classic MASTER OF MAGIC, which came out in 2022. The trouble is that the game is pretty processor-heavy, so playing it on a laptop means the laptop’s fans kick into overdrive and laptop itself gets quite hot. It was just too uncomfortable to play for more than 10 minutes or so at a time, so I never really got into it.

But like most computer people, I have a closet full of computer parts and half-dead computers I’ve accumulated over the years (I might need that DVI to HDMI cable JUST IN CASE!) and then a thought occurred to me. Why not use some of those parts to build a small desktop PC that would fit on my end table, and then I plug my portable monitor into that? I could then comfortably play MASTER OF MAGIC.

So that’s what I did to celebrate my 160th book. I assembled a PC out of old parts and have been playing MASTER OF MAGIC with my portable monitor. It’s quite comfortable.

I’m looking forward to finally beating the MASTER OF MAGIC remake, and I’m also looking forward to trying some PC games that just don’t do well on a laptop. At the end of 2024, Steam had an interesting report that of the total playtime on the platform, only 15 percent of it came from games actually released in 2024.

I have to admit I would definitely fall into the 85 percent!

-JM