This has been fun!

I put together my gaming computer and got everything up and running the way I like it over the last week. It’s been a satisfying experience – planning it all out, assembling it, and working out the little kinks. (I got a few taken care of; I’ll see how many more I hit.) The result is a computer that has been able to handle everything I’ve thrown at it so far in good form!
This contraption is running off an Intel Core i5-2500K processor, which seems plenty fast enough to eat up some games while also not costing me $1000, like the higher-end Core i7’s do. I have it in an Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 motherboard, which offers not only compatibility with all the other hardware but also sufficient expansion capabilities for me to upgrade a few times over the coming years. There are two 4 GB sticks of 1600 MHz RAM in there from G.Skill, and room for two more DIMMs up to 8 GB each. I sprang for a Sapphire Radeon 7950, which is a GTX 580 competitor that’s only about a month into its product life, giving me plenty of usable time on this graphics card (and the option to pair it up with a second one when we hit the end of the Radeon product cycle). That graphics card also has some nifty power-saving features to keep from hogging all the electricity in my apartment all the time. I put Windows on a 64 GB solid-state hard drive, and have two 7200 rpm, terabyte-sized hard disks in a mirrored RAID configuration for data. It’s all running from a Cooler Master Silent 700 W power supply in an Antec Three Hundred Illusion case. (I am fantastically happy with this case/power/cooling situation, by the way.)
Now I can run around feeling like I’m inside a Lord of the Rings movie.

Hi,
I am kelly and I am a painter and I realy amazed by cathedral galaxy map you had done.
I realy want to know more about “Cathedral galaxy” map and need nformation to understand it.
I don’t know about galaxies or space as my major is art but I love to know about this map.
I couldn’t find any information to help me understand it.
So I appreciate you give me some clues or any web or link to understand it .
Kind regards
Kelly
Ah, you mean this?
I assume you’re asking about how I put together the artwork for that map, right? Well, there are certainly many ways to do something like that and I’d easily believe that mine wasn’t the best. What I did was create the shapes of all the territories as 3D models in Google Sketchup, to give them the 3D effect. I put a mostly-desaturated image of a real galaxy (M81, I think…) on a flat plane cutting through the middle of those 3D shapes, and tilted my camera. The rest was added later using GIMP (open-source Photoshop).
There is a lot of cool artwork, and inspiration for artwork, in telescopic imagery like this. Look online for galleries of images from the Hubble Telescope, Spitzer telescope, Cassini probe, or Mars Reconnaissance Observer!