Staff Infection: FakeGhostPirate

Do you like cars? I like cars. Cars are good. Well, most cars are good. My name is Justin Sutton but on the interwebs I sometimes use an alias like FakeGhostPirate or Moetsukiru or Burnout. I’ve used a lot of names in the past 25+ years I’ve been on the internet, but at this point most people just call me Justin. I’m, like, a “car guy.” You know how PCs and PC gaming are totally awesome? Well cars can be awesome too! We even have our own version of eSports where you drop the “e” and just add the word “motor.” One of my favorite quotes of all time goes something like “The first car race happened shortly after the second car was made.” I’m not your typical American motorsport fan though, my poison is Formula 1, “the pinnacle of motorsport” as it is often called. If NASCAR is running on a 6700K and GTX 1080 then F1 is a 6950X with SLI Titans.

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I’ve liked cars ever since I realized that I was far more likely to own a car during my life than I was to own a WWII fighter plane (I love the Corsair and P51 particularly). Like many from Generation Y, when it comes to gaming I had my first true racing experience with Gran Turismo. I’ve been gaming since the late 80s when my parents gave me a Macintosh with a 5¼-inch floppy drive, then onto NES and Genesis, Playstation and Playstation 2, and all the while PC gaming as well (DOOM, Heretic/Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, the original Need for Speed, Warcraft 2, Descent, C&C Red Alert, UT, D2, and so on and so on).

These days I’m mostly exclusively a PC gamer. We own an Xbox One but it doesn’t get much use in this house. I play Heroes of the Storm sometimes, Diablo III sometimes, but mostly I’m playing racing games on my Thrustmaster TMX racing wheel (entry level, usually easy to find for under $200 in the US). Most recently I’ve gotten deep in Forza Horizon 3 which is far from a sim-racing game, but just good damn fun, especially on a wheel. I’ve also got Assetto Corsa, iRacing, rFactor 2, Automobilista, and F1 2016; some getting much more use than others.

In true KBMOD fashion let’s talk about my setup. I’m on a Haswell i5 with 16GB of RAM, GTX 970, a couple of SSDs in RAID 0, Rosewill Throne case, a box fan that I forget the name of that I bought in a rage when the stock fan broke, two 2TB HDDs, Logitech G510 keyboard (I know, I’m embarrassed too), Logitech G700 mouse (you will have to pry this mouse from my cold dead hands), Logitech G930 headset (seeing a pattern?), Logitech Z506 speakers (look, I have a problem, okay?), Blue Yeti Black Edition microphone with arm, two 24 inch monitors on either side of the 27 inch monitor in the middle, and the aforementioned Thrustmaster TMX racing wheel. I built it myself, it’s the third PC I’ve ever built, and I’m still planning to get a 4790K for it eventually. My chair is a Serta Microfiber (or Microfibre if you’re from across the pond) and is quite nice considering I use it like 12 hours a day. For this build I focused on the SSD RAID and also cable management, both of which were totally new to me at the time, and for the next build I’m looking to do water-cooling for the first time.

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Formerly, I’ve been a writer for iRacing News (where I mostly covered the UK&Ireland Skip Barber League) and also a contributor for the sim-racing section of Motorsport.com as well. I’m not a talented racing driver, I should probably mention that. My focus for the last four years or so has been on commentary. I’ve done commentary for lots of leagues, such as Apex Online Racing, Formula Sim-Racing, and various other YouTube channels in my time. My personal channel is BoxBoxBoxGaming where I upload content with my Finnish buddy Mikko (he’s the funny one), but my first priorities are with league commentary so sometimes the channel gets neglected when I get busy.

What I’m hoping to bring to KBMOD is a unique perspective of the PC gaming world, as somebody who is neck-deep in the culture and community of sim-racing and racing games in general. My time as a KBMOD fan started way back when I discovered AllShamNoWow and has blossomed from there. The people behind this place are incredible and I’m truly honored to share the same piece of the internet with all of them.

To further supplement this introduction I’ve gone ahead and published a YouTube video that I made about seven months ago. It was originally meant to be a channel trailer, or just a stroll down memory lane, but I never got around to publishing it. In the video you can see my/our transition from awkward content creator(s) in 2013 to slightly less awkward content creator(s)/commentator(s) in 2016. The best place to reach me is on Twitter (@FakeGhostPirate), where I spend far too much of my life, and if you have any requests/preferences for the type of content you’d like to see from me I’m open to suggestions.