About:
Hi I’m Flynn. I’ve been pc gaming since the apple 2e and grew up hanging out at arcades in the 80’s. After 22 years as a peace officer I was forced to retire due to health issues. I then worked in the tech industry for bit, rising to the executive level before fully retiring this year. Now I’m just a full time gamer.
Gaming Experience:
I’ve been playing FPS and flight sims games since they were invented. The Wing Commander series was one of my favorites and the reason I’ve kept an eye on Star Citizen. My preferred Star Citizen game play is in a combat, security, escort roll. Either in the cock-pit or boots on the ground. The majority of my fleet and vehicles are combat orientated.
Real Life Tactical Training:
My 22 years in law enforcement involved not only basic but advanced tactical training. I served in various capacities on various teams. Immediately following the 911 attacks I worked as a private security contractor while I was still an active police officer. My part-time career as a security contractor was cut short due to the creation of homeland security and I am still under a strict NDA not to talk about it. It doesn’t prohibit me from mentioning it or passing on the training I received.
Location:
Forgot to add that I live in Northern Illinois about 60 miles from Chicago but I was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. So I’m in Central time.
Play Time:
Times I am usually on-line. Being retired I have all day during the week to game unless I have something to do around the house or need to run an errand. That being said my evenings and weekends are reserved for family, but I can make the occasional exception if I clear it with the wife first.
PC Hardware:
My PC hardware is always kept at the most current high end level for maximum performance. I use the highest level GPU’s from both Nvidia and Radeon. It just depends which one I can get the best deal on at the time. The most FPS for the dollar. That means the fastest cpu, gpu, ram, and drives on the market.
Network:
I also play on fiber giving me an edge when it comes to latency. My latency rarely goes over 2ms. Having experience in networks and pc building I know how to tweak everything to get the most performance out of my equipment. I only use enterprise level equipment and have a cable line and LTE as a back up to my fiber line with automatic fail over enable. This gives me a total bandwidth of 2.5gb down and 1.2 up. My IT rack in the basement looks like something you would find in a server farm, and performs just as well.
RIGS:
I have 4 main rigs all with the current hardware and each has a dedicated role. One of them has a HOTAS set up Logitech X56 PRO. One is for media creation, streaming, editing my go pro video, and gaming. One is a compact Rig for LAN parties which I attend with friends once a year in Atlanta. The other is my VR rig built for the Steam Index. I build around redundancy so that if one rig has a problem I can quickly switch to the other. I have other rigs that are made of older parts that I let my son and his friends use to play whatever games they are into. Right now everything’s kind of torn apart while I do what I call a “hardware shuffle”. I have new hardware to install and shuffle the old hardware down to the older rigs. In total I have 9 gaming rigs, when they are all up an running. Basically my own mini-lan center.
LAN parties:
I have hosted LAN parties with up to 30 people and have dedicated network equipment for that purpose. It’s tuned to provide low latency and equal bandwidth to each user. It’s a portable rack with dedicated network equipment and even a server for running game servers. It’s portable in case I ever exceed the number of people I can fit in my basement. I would love to host this group some day.
Content Creation:
I can’t post any direct links but I was the host of a pc gaming podcast for 12 years. While I can’t post it’s name or links here, I’m sure if you look, you’ll find it. We once had the chance to interview one of the developers of Star Citizen when it was in the initials funding stage but made the mistake of passing on the opportunity because they wouldn’t let us interview Chris himself. I know that seems foolish but we had interviewed really big names by that time and thought we had more pull than we did.
Now I sometimes stream. That’s about it. Most of my content creation involves editing go-pro video of my family vacations. That being said, I’m always willing to help out the community by acting as producer and production manager for any community based content creation project and publishing.
Family and Personal Life:
I’ve been married for 22 years but my wife and I have been together for 25 years. She is a few years younger than I am. We have 2 kids, daughter in college and a son in Highschool. My two favorite kids are my German Shephard “Lucifer” and Husky “Freya”. During the summer we spend allot of time using our camper and head out west to Wyoming and Montana for a couple weeks. In the mountains we’d be completely off grid if not for our Garmin Sat-Coms and Starlink. Although I don’t really game much when off grid.
Social Media
I’ve been on and off with social media over the years. I’m currently off of all social media for the foreseeable future
If you’ve read this far please feel free to send me a friend request in game or on Discord. I’m looking forward to making new friends here.
