The Vapor Chamber Part 1: The Steaming

I spent much of my life without HBO. Even after I stabilized finacially in the late 20s, it was still too expensive. Then HBO finally created their streaming service that wasn’t tied to some archaic cable plan, rebranded to the confusingly named “Max”, re-rebranded back to the appropriately named “HBO Max”, and landed a deal with Hulu and Disney+. At this point I realized it was time and got the bundle, and while basking in the 30 years of amazing HBO content (folks, the backlog really is that great — Mr Show, The Wire, Deadwood, GoT, etc) last year, I finally realized I had over 20 years of Curb Your Enthusiam to watch. I finished a watch of the entire series from start to finish over the last nine months or so, watching a few episodes every week. This show is incredible, its like Seinfeld never stopped and started cursing. Since I came so late, I also didn’t need to wait the interminable years between the seasons (especially the later ones). Big recommend on this show, if you ever enjoyed Seinfeld, Its Always Sunny, or thought Michael J Fox deliberatley spilt a soda on you.

So why am I talking (at length) about Curb? The season 10 arc revolved around Larry being annoyed at the local coffee place having wobbly tables, lukewarm coffee and dry scones. He engages with the owner (long time character “Mocha Joe”), and gets banned for life. Since Larry is a petty, spiteful and rich man, he eventually rents the space next to Mocha Joe’s, and opens his own “Spite Store” (the titular name of the last episode of the season). This made me laugh so much, and I heartily enjoyed the season, especially with all the petty things Larry did to “one-up” Mocha Joe’s like making the bathrooms “defecation free”, and “no chat and cutters”. The term “Spite _______” is also one I use frequently when doing something for a petty reason.

Recently, reader, you may have been aware of the launch of the Steam Machine, a very sleek, nice piece of hardware with a pretty high price point, aimed at enthusiast gamers. At around USD $1600 (at the time, 07/2026 — future readers forgive me if we have burned far past that point in ridiculous hardware costs), for the highest end model, this was not an easy investment for most folks. Or so I thought. Naively, I kept thinking the high price point (for the model I wanted and saved for) would keep away a lot of part time, PC and console gamers, as well as resellers. Boy, was I wrong. I don’t know how many people who actually got one, ended up using it, its always hard to tell. But within minutes of the lottery style sale reservations going out, ebay already had hundreds. And seriously Valve, you “misjudged demand” for this thing? I hate resellers so much. I mostly hate that people have to do that just to get by in life, but that’s another thing altogether. It also drives me nuts that no one can just have nice things. Want to go to a show for a somewhat famous band you like? If you’re not running a bot, better be prepard to pay 30-1000% extra for each ticket! And the best part? The sites that sell the tickets are DOING IT THEMSELVES!

So, to bring it back to Latte Larry’s, I started thinking about building my own Steam Machine (With black jack, and hookers!). Since spite is such a great motivator, I started planning. Small Form Factor (SFF) PC, with decent AMD GPU and CPU, on a small board. I had never built an ITX board or PC before, so I started getting excited. I have been wanting to try Linux as a main OS (you know, the constant enshittification of Windows), and when I found out Valve made SteamOS available to the public, I knew it was time. I really really like my Steam Deck. It’s a great piece of hardward and since I work from my desk all day at home, sometimes when I want to game, I don’t really want to do it there! The Deck was a great purchase and exceeded my expectations, especially for XBox360 era games, who can play for hours. The newer games do tend to chew through the battery (90-120m), but I heard that got better with OLED deck?

Anyways, if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably thinking “jesus christ, this reads like a recipe where the person tells their life story first”, and reader, you’re not wrong! I just want to set the right context, and provide some laughs along the way. Ok, (I swear) we are nearing the end to this Part 1 of the Spite Build Saga, but to those not the in the know, home PCs are made up of several critical components. In particular, I’m going to be talking about a gaming PC, so a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) will always be part of the discussion. Just know for a normal PC, most mother boards come with “integrated” graphics processing, which is more than enough if you just use the PC for web, office, youtube, etc.

Next

• Part II - The Buildening