βlack Knight

Mod at http://acthfm.tumblr.com long ago. Can be found on Mastodon https://social.linux.pizza/@blackknight95857669 Can also be found on Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/blackknight95857669 I will mostly post music, but may occasionally post longer form reviews of whatever game I'm playing and maybe even life updates, if the mood strikes me. I'm just an aging disabled GenX dude livin in an RV with some cats and my partner who thinks I'm awesome. I think she's crazy. We have fun.

[kidmograph]

CONTROL

3D/No GenAI

[itsfullofstars]

THE CHALLENGER DISASTER WAS 40 YEARS AGO TODAY

January 28, 1986

I was home sick from school, watching the Challenger liftoff alone in my living room while my mom made me oatmeal.

I'll never forget that moment.

40 years and it still hurts.

[caffeineandnicotinefeverdream-d]

I play video games to distract myself from the horrors

[thevaultofretroscifi]

David Lynch (1946-2025) on the set of Dune

[catgirlfingies]

Reblog if think trans people are neato

[blackknight95857669]

Fuck PayPal

After 14 years, I closed my PayPal account yesterday. Here’s why:

I received a security alert email that specifically stated PayPal had "blocked some unusual activity" on one of my linked credit cards. .. Odd. The email said "go to the PayPal app where we can help you with what to do next". I have never installed any financial app nor will I ever. It turns out PayPal insists you use the app to view/take action on these security issues, it’s even in their FAQ.

I checked my CC statement and no odd transactions. Logged into PP's website and used the “AI Chat Asst” to force contact with a human to try and figure out what was going on. It took 24 hours to get a response, which seems a long time for a company with almost 30,000 employees.

In the ensuing "chat" through the Message Center, which felt more like emails, the first thing the help agent said was a scripted mess about changing PW and adding 2FA. Next I was told “well there’s many reasons this email could happen, new address detected, new device used, etc. YOUR CARD IS NOW ON GOOD SHAPE AND YOUR ACCOUNT IS NOW ON GOOD STANDING. (sic)"

I continually asked to be told what exactly the activity was because it was linked to a credit card and I wanted to know if I should contact the bank. Eventually I was told "there is no activity on your account on June 17 that could support the email you receive (sic), the activity has been block (sic) already since it is not showing on your account."

… wait, WHAT? I got an email from PP but there’s “no record” of what triggered the email? WTF.

I decided to contact my bank but before I could, at this point 36 hours later, the bank contacted ME with a text/email alert about suspicious charges on my credit card. Within a half hour, the issue was resolved and I have a new credit card on the way.

PayPal could have just told me “something’s up with your CC, contact the bank”. Instead, they chose enshittification with an app, AI chat “assistance”, and off sourced humans. So I am done with them.

[xteacupx]

Hey guys, just putting out a PSA because now that's THREE people I know of who've got these identical messages on Discord last night alone.

If a friend messages you apologising because someone "with a similar username to you" tried to deceive them so they reported your account as hacked, and sends an image of a discord email, your friend is the one who has been hacked.

It's hard to read in the screenshot (sorry!) but it looks like the "advice" is something like "file a friend request with our CORPORATE HEAD OF SECURITY to open your case. You have 12 hours to do so or we might suspend your account."

I've been told that if you do contact that user, they try to get you to "prove" you own the account by making a "100% refundable transaction" to them. Which is so scummy.

Scammers catch people out by imposing a time limit and dramatic consequences of not acting fast enough. In that moment of panic, you might not figure out it's suspicious, especially when the email looks so real (it will have your screen-name in it to make it seem legit, but the request code will likely be identical to the one in this post, #40557035) and you're worried about both an impersonator AND losing your account.

If you get sent the above message, try to let your friend know through other ways (socials, etc) that they've been hacked. If you are ever worried, your best bet is to check Discord's website and ask for help through their support page, which has a section for hacked accounts.

[blackknight95857669]

"Finished" PC Build

Backstory: Starting 2023 I was still running a cobbled together mess of a PC, the heart of which was a Dell Studio XPS desktop from 2010. Yes, THIRTEEN YEARS old. I got 2 of them from a gaming company in 2012 for the price of a tank of gas, thanks to knowing someone working there that had been tasked with E-wasting all the Windows PCs. Company was switching to iOS dev.

Anyway, at its heart was the Dell Mobo, which featured a 1st Gen i5-920. By this point, the OG GPU was long gone and I had "upgraded" with a 1050TI. 16gigs of DDR3 RAM. This basic as hell setup had served me admirably for a decade, for a couple reasons.

I run Linux.

I have never been a HEAVY PC GAMER. Sure, I have gamed on PC since I first got one in 2005 (yeah, kinda late to the game, considering I was almost 30, lol), but I mostly used my PC for World of Warcraft, other similar MMOs, and what are now called Indie games on Steam. I've had consoles from like 6yrs old, and I tend to prefer them as they are the cheap option for gaming. I appreciate what a modern PC can do (esp lately with RT etc) but like, more often than not PC gaming can be as much of a chore as it can be fun.

Now, starting around March 2023, that old PC began having strange errors with the RAM, which would cause Firefox to crash tabs/completely, among other things. Eventually it broke my Linux Mint OS badly enough it just stopped allowing me to login. Finally figured out the HDD I had was failing and got an SSD. Installed Garuda on it and pretty quickly realized I had Mobo issues as the RAM was still reporting less DIMMs than it had, half the time.

At this point, a friend that was aware of the issues offered to mail me an i5-6400, to build a "new" system around. Naturally I accepted and bought a Fractal Meshify 2, some new DDR4 RAM, DeepCool Gammax, and a used MSI Krait Gaming Mobo. Stuck the new parts in the new case, and moved over storage/GPU from old PC. Booted and updated the OS, then launched WoW. Still getting 10fps in Valdrakken. Shit. Guess I need to upgrade this GPU.

So I bought an RX 6800. Stuck it in the case and booted. Updated the OS, which brought the Mesa drivers on board. Launched WoW again. 10fps again. What the fuck. Thought maybe swapping from Nvidia to AMD might have left over some driver mess, so I fresh installed Garuda and got all set up. Logged WoW Main again. STILL 10fps. WTF. Took my Main to SW, stood in front of the bank, then logged an alt with NO UI. Holy shit, there's a 35fps difference between them. My UI was broken, lol. Spent a day fixing that. Now I get 20fps in Valdrakken, but 55ish everywhere else. This is good.. but... What if I upgraded the core to something current gen, say AM5?

Finally we arrive at the part the title of this post suggested, building the "new" PC. I went to Newegg and picked out a Ryzen 5 7600X, MSI Mag B650 Tomahawk WIFI Mobo, G.SKILL FlareX5 32g RAM kit, and a TFORCE 2TB M.2 SSD. I also got a "free" 1TB Sata SSD with the CPU, it was also a TFORCE. The following are the pics of the "build" process. There will also be an aside for a complication. ProTip: be real fucking sure everything you want to put into a PC is absolutely compatible. Some things say they are when they aren't. You'll see what I mean.

Here's the parts laid out and ready to be installed.

This Mobo has a ton of IO.

The iFixit "Pro Tech" toolkit. I got it on sale for I wanna say 80 bucks a few months ago, as of today it's listed for $75, and I think it's definitely worth the money.

Here we see the 3 M.2 slots. 2 of them have included heat sinks. Nice.

ProTip: Remember to peel the fucking plastic off these thermal pads, cause they don't really work with it on there.

Like a glove.

ProTip: it's real damn important to make sure you put the RAM in the proper dual channel config on an AMD system. On this motherboard there is a little diagram pointing out that the slots the sticks are in clearly say "first" on them, which is a nice touch. If you look closely, you can barely make out the very fuzzy diagram printed just above the heat sink bracket on the right hand side of the CPU.

Storage in place with the little "carder heat sink" strip in place. This SSD came with its own heat sink but I'm going to use the one that came with the board.

Like so.

And here's the board, ready to go into the case for further assembly.. however, it was at this point that i realized that the EVGA 650w PSU I had didn't have two 8pin(4x4) CPU cables. I got it open box, no manuals etc, and could have sworn it had 2 cables but I was wrong. Makes sense, really, 650 watts would be cutting it too close with this build. Bummer.

Ok, well I can at least move over my DeepCool Gammax heat sink. I looked at the listing from when I bought it and it says "AM5 compatible". I watched a vid that said "hey as long as your cooler doesn't use a back plate, it should work with AM5"

LIES, BOTH OF THEM. I tried to get the DeepCool on there but the brackets didn't quite line up, and then even if I could kinda fudge it a little to make that work, the screws were threaded differently. Fuck. So at this point, in the middle of a somewhat heavy storm, I had to make a run to Best Buy and hope the store really did have the things the website said it did. Thankfully, it did (and I guess yay for living in a decent area or something? cause I've heard stories about BBs having like 3 PSUs from one brand, so "my" store having 19 from 6 brands is luxury, it seems. I miss Fry's). Picked up an EVGA GT 850w 80+ Gold with auto Eco Mode and a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Halo, which was extremely lucky as it was the only one in the store.

That out of the way, the build can continue.

Coming along nicely. Sorry about the quality of some of these pics btw, I'm getting old so the eyes ain't what they were plus I had been dealing with this for several hours by now so I was also cranky and kinda rushing through the pics part. They looked good on the phone, less so once I moved them to the PC, heh.

Oh thank fuck, it posts. Ignore the slightly dirty desk, I been busy damn it.

That's looking clean as fuck. Yeah that old USB IO thing is old and kinda looks stupid but like, never can have enough ports, right?

I really do like this Fractal Meshify 2 case. It's laid out super well and is a breeze to build in. I mean just look at that cable routing, yo. And I was kinda rushing and not really being that finicky about it lol.

And it's home. Yeah, yeah, I know I need to clean up the cable situation on the left, there. I'll get to it. Also yes, there's some rust on that standing desk pole. I got it for free and it had been sitting outside. I've meant to clean that up but just haven't gotten to it, heh. Living in an RV as a not small dude (6ft1 240lbs or so) makes doing things like this just kinda suck, honestly. Add another person to the mix and yeah things can get tight. A 28ftx8ft box to live in just ain't the best time in the world, lol. We make do, though.

Finally, I figure I can give one nod to the RGB fans, so here you go. The Halo's fan in all its glory. I have since installed OpenRGB and managed, even on Linux, to gain access to the RGB controller and set the brightness to minimum.

I have run some benchmarks with Phoronix. I guess at least one person who might read this may be interested, especially Linux fans? So here's links to those:

GLmark2

Unigine Valley

Blender - this is an all tests, best of 3 run. Took a couple hours, which meant it was a great stress test for the CPU. I had no problems, which is impressive as the CPU sat at what I understand to be the throttle point temp of 95C. Yeah. I'm going to be looking into a better cooling solution or at least add another fan to the heat sink and see if that helps.

There's also 3 tests from when I was running the i5-6400 with the RX 6800.... if you wanna see what happens to a GPU when you severely bottleneck it, lol. If anyone actually reading this is interested you can just click "System Logs" on any of the links above, then "Show System Information" which will take you to a list of all benchmarks I've done so far.

Well, I guess that's it. Hope this was interesting and/or amusing to whoever reads this. Thanks for taking the time.

Edit*******

Oh and by the way, I launched WoW again after I finished, despite it being late and I was sore and tired. But I just had to see. I am now unable to get less than 35-40fps in Valdrakken, and I'm averaging nearly 100 anywhere else. I actually saw 130fps a few times. I'm not sure I've ever seen that high a number even when I flew as high as is allowed and looked straight up, lol.

In other words: yes, it was worth it. Especially if I can manage to baby this thing well enough it lasts me at least a few years before I "have" to think about upgrading it. Again.

[kaylasartwork]

Trans timeline for no reason at all. Totally not to do with what's going on currently.

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[disast3rtransp0rt]

As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

Are you okay?

That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.

Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?

This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.

Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.

Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?

If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.

I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

TLDR: It's much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren't expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don't get angry, get spitefully polite! :)

[jojo-oliver]

[ID in alt text] 16/25+ of my LGBTQIA+ boots series! transgender flag themed 🏳️‍⚧️ stickers or prints of this series here

[humanoidhistory]

November 20, 1969: Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean holds a sample container filled with lunar soil. Pete Conrad, who took this image, can be seen in Bean’s helmet visor.

[humanoidhistory]

''I didn't make a decision to pursue astronomy. Rather, it just grabbed me, and I had no thought of escaping.''

—Carl Sagan, born on this day in 1934

[tokyostreetphoto]

Dark Angel, Ginza 銀座

[vintagegeekculture]

Someone deeply influential in a subterranean way to comic book culture passed without comment this week: female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, who was 70. Even if you've never heard of her, I guarantee you've seen her image, or a takeoff of one of her images.

If she seems familiar in some way, there's a reason.

You see, every single artist in the world has it drilled into them that an art swipe (tracing from figure studies or other artists) is unethical, but here’s the thing:

Every single working comic artist does it!

Is it really cheating if everyone does it? Artists love to mock Rob Liefeld for his art swaps, but it is possible to do the same if you dig into the art catalogue of nearly any comic artist, even today. Nowhere else can I find a better example of the old quote that "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue."

In any case, there’s no better figure at the center of this than Lisa Lyon, who in the 1980s, was a female bodybuilder who was the center of an enormously influential series of sophisticated physique study photographs by superstar photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It sounds almost quaint to remember now, but Mapplethorpe was so influential that he was the first photographer to be called to congress for obscenity in the 1980s, based on his male nudes and study of the gay BDSM scene, in a moral panic that sounds extremely familiar. He was also the first photographer to get a video game, the Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe on CD-I, which was essentially just an image gallery set to muzak, famously reviewed by a completely baffled Angry Video Game Nerd and his sidekick.

Mapplethorpe’s favorite subject was Lisa Lyon, and his photographs were so widespread that they were essentially traced and used for art swipes over and over by comic artists that need a study of a muscular female physique.

So at different points, photograph swipes of Lisa Lyon were the model used for Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, tons of fighting game characters....it's impossible to list all the times a Lisa Lyon photograph was swiped. We may never find them all. Most importantly of all, she was not only swiped but was the physical inspiration for the appearance of Elektra.

Frank Miller always had a foot in the fine art world, and like his mentor, Philip Jose Farmer, was also interested in the theme of how violence is often a substitute for sexuality in the lives of adventure characters. Miller was always fascinated by BDSM (which to me, explains a lot of 300), and explicitly said in many interviews he based Elektra physically on Lisa Lyon and was a great fan of Mapplethorpe.

[blackknight95857669]

A Place in Space

Pay what you want for this debut LP from Killed By Crows.

[blackknight95857669]

Arcade Paradise Review

Arcade Paradise (Multiplatform, played on Series X via Game Pass)

TL;DR: This is a great game that brings on some heavy nostalgia for arcades, especially in the '90s. I quite enjoyed my time working through the story, and intend to keep it on my console till it leaves Game Pass so I can go in and get a fresh hit now and then.

Lit by glowing neon tubes and the many CRT screens on the game cabinets, luring in players to dump their quarters into the Insert Coin slots, arcades conjure up different types of nostalgia for different generations. Arcade Paradise is set in the late 90s, just as home game consoles and PCs came into their own and started their inevitable march to domination of the gaming market.

You assume the role of Ashley, a recent college dropout whose father owns a laundromat he tasks you with running in order to "teach you good business sense", or something. In the back of the building there's a small arcade. In this semi-Life/Work sim, you start out by doing laundry loads left by people, thus earning the money that keeps the business rolling. The arcade games are a small side income, mostly neglected. Ashley gets the bright idea to expand the offerings in the "arcade", and slowly (with the help of your sister who works for the city) you also begin to expand the space the arcade takes up in the building. You're doing this under your father's nose, which leads to predictable issues.

The story in Arcade Paradise is fairly decent, albeit mostly told through answering machine messages, emails, and online chats. The meat of this game though, once you get the arcade expanded a bit, is the plethora of "mini" games the arcade provides. As someone old enough to recall the original game boom in the 80s (foggily anyway, as I was born in '76), it's pretty cool to see games like Shuttlecocks (Pong clone) or Communists From Mars (Missile Command clone). But I really remember The Return of the Arcade in the 90s. Which is well represented here with games like Cyber Dance (DDR clone) or Knuckles and Knees (Streets of Rage clone). These aren't just single level knock offs, either. There are some pretty deep experiences in these games. Knuckles and Knees even goes super meta, featuring an arcade in the first level that you can enter.. and play the games in!

I also really enjoyed how they game-ified the chores. Getting "high scores" for cleaning the toilet or tossing the garbage into the dumpster (in the form of higher cash rewards) was amusing and a fun mechanic. The upgrades purchased with the money earned completing the "To-Do" list goals were nice quality of life bonuses. Speaking of QoL, I also appreciated the accessibility options such as changing "hold <button> to perform <action>" to "toggle <button> to perform <action>".

The soundtrack provided mostly by the jukebox (once you buy it) is also excellent, featuring some really good newer music that definitely would have fit in perfectly had it been released in the 90s. I was also struck by the ambient sound while standing in the arcade, as the various bleeps and bloops are obviously from actual arcade games I would hear while standing in actual arcades .. let's just say back then so I don't have to count how many years ago that was again.

I absolutely recommend this game to anyone with a Game Pass sub. At $20 dollars on most platforms (ProTip, at the time this posted it's currently on sale for $13 on GoG) it's certainly worth the price of admission. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, and I'm going to leave it installed on my console till it exits Game Pass so I can keep going back in and getting a fresh hit of nostalgia from time to time.