Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) Tournament!

 

Click here for more information!

Connect to the BBS Directly with this link

Brainscan (1994) Full Movie!

 

Let's watch some Brainscan together!

This classic movie from 1994 stars Edward Furlong in his first outing after Terminator 2. Awesome villain standout "The Trickster" steals the show. Has a good mix of horror, teen movie and some twists. +1 for random A List talent that pops in and out.  

Hypercard Stacks - Macintosh Mainstay and Homebrew Oddity

Who wouldn't want a black and white pixelated Samantha Fox? (Link)

    Time and time again I have expressed my love for early 80's and 90's Macintosh gaming and computers. The classic beige boxes and tiny screens fascinated me, and rules the roost both at home and school when I was but a wee lad. For more on my experience with Macs, read here and here, oh and here and here as well. Of course now-a-days you can emulate a classic Mac in a browser window, download all the files you need in seconds automatically; This is the future after all. 

Welcome! Look at all this cool shit you can do in the 80's.

      What is Hypercard you ask? It's one of the very first hypermedia systems that gained any kind of traction before the adoption of the World Wide Web. Links, audio, video, and text- all presented as an easy to use development kit free of charge to the lucky people who bought an early Macintosh or Apple IIGS. Think of Hypercard as a primitive Microsoft Powerpoint, but with a more simple front end and without any kind of database engine. You could essentially code something without the knowledge of coding, redirect and link different media types, and add controls, links and text in the "Stack". A Stack is terminology for a bunch of documents, individual documents are called 'Cards'. Basically it's just how the documents and data are stored, and how you link to them. Compare this to how Powerpoint has slides and how they link and interact. Using this subsystem, Hypercard users could make presentations, educational software, or even games. What is a good example of a game with Hypercard you ask?

Ahhhh Myst. The game that changed everything. Including making people buy 1x speed tray loading CD drives.

          Yes. This primitive black and white program with limited programming abilities, was just a bunch of Hypercard stacks linked together to play animation or show pictures and audio at predetermined times, was used to create this groundbreaking game that we know and love. Myst is a game that was revolutionary for it's day, had industry leading graphics and cutting edge gameplay that changed the way people thought how game should be designed and played. Unfortunately, for every one game like Myst, there was 100000 Hypercard games uploaded to Keyword: Download on AOL that defied logic and sense. Let's look at a couple shining examples below. I'll provide links to all the games, all you have to do is click the green power button on the screen, it will load the rom into the Macintosh Emulator automatically, and all you have to do is open the disk on the virtual desktop to launch the program. Let's get started.

I've been approved to post on r/cannibalism

 

     I don't remember asking to join the group, however, it does sound like something I would do when I'm drunk. This mystical subreddit is private and invite only, by application. What can someone see on this subreddit? Behold:

I guess if you want to be eaten, you are labeled as a pig. 

Correction: A long pig.

I'm so conflicted. The comments are equally disturbing.

Good god fuck.

I'm done for the day. With life.

I couldn't help but ask an innocent question. 

Intel i7 10700k - Upgrade and initial thoughts

This chip runs a little hot. Here is my take on it, and my struggles with it so far.

     In a previous blogpost, I wrote about the i7 8700k, overclocking and temps, and what I used specifically to keep it maintained and under control. Well, throw that all out the window, because recently I've upgraded.. to the 10700k. My wife was getting a new PC, and I found a deal on the motherboard and CPU, and we had another case sitting around. My 8700k and RTX 2070 went to my son for his gaming computer, and mine was a fresh build with my aging RTX 2080.

Observations

Right away I noticed in this older Ibuypower case, which was a little smaller than my old one, had a MUCH larger corsair AIO cooler in it, which was a large improvement over my last bog-standard corsair cooler. Even though my old cooler on the 8700k was smaller, it got the job done, and allowed a small overclock for a number of years without issue. 

After moving over the 32gb of ram, video card and CPU in to the new case, I hooked everything up and turned it on. Right away I noticed the PC was thermal throttling.. within 3-4 minutes the computer crashed and rebooted. I checked everything and all the fans were spinning, pump is pumping.. nothing out of the ordinary. I remounted the cooler and reapplied the thermal paste to no avail. I added an exhaust cooler to the top of the case where there was mounting holes for it, which decreased the temps only slightly. I did an RPM test on the fans and discovered one of the fans on the AIO was only just turning ever so slightly, and was bad. I replaced it with one I had laying around, and we were off to the races. 

Initial Temps After Repair

With everything running normally I was sitting at 34-37c at idle, and the video card at 37c. When playing Overwatch the CPU would sit heat up to around 80-87c easily and peak a little higher than that here and there. The video card would get to around 75-85c and come back to 67c in between rounds. To be honest I was not happy with these temps at all. I'm use to much lower operating temps with the 8700k when I'm gaming or in load situations without an overclock. I know the 10700k can boost to 5.3ghz, but I have it on a balanced power plan, and don't really need it. I tweaked and added a custom fan curve to stop anything from going too far over 80c to save the CPU. The current configuration was struggling and ramping the fans and pump up to 100% during gaming and testing constantly, so I decided something had to be done.

Changes

I ordered 3 case fans from Amazon. 2 for top exhaust, and 1 to replace the rear fan that seemed pretty slow. I also ordered a slot GPU cooler as this case has side mount brackets so I can aim the cooler right at the GPU. The GPU is so large, it touches the fan mounts on the other side of the case for the AIO cooler. The fans were cheap, but I've ordered them before and they worked great for long periods and could be controlled by the motherboard.

Temps After

CPU idles at 30-34c now with the added fans. I had the dust covers off for added airflow, and have since put them back on. At full load in Overwatch with chrome tabs open and such, the peak temps hovered around 70-75c. I saw the occasional spike up to the mid-80's, but it was quickly handled by the fan curve and brought back down again.. and very quietly. This is the first time I've noticed adding fans quieted down the case as a whole, with the temps being managed better, the fans that are in the system don't have to peak so high in to the noisy range anymore. The GPU idle temps are around 29-35c. Under load in Overwatch the GPU peaks at 67c, so I opened a Valheim server on another monitor, and it still would not go over 67c. It looks like the heating issues are solved. I removed the custom fan curve for this test, but left the ceiling for the temps at 80c, so if it ever went higher, it would react with a 6-8v fan boost in the exhaust fans. 

Conclusion

So far I really like the CPU. After I got the temp issues ironed out, it has proved in the last week or so to be a decent improvement from the 8700k. I noticed in games, my FPS has leveled out, especially in e-sports titles where I would bounce around from 220-240, now it's pegged at 240 in any situation. I was very happy with the 8700k when I moved on from it and would still be using it had I not found this deal. I do not use the PC for rendering or editing, but I'm sure I would see a substantial increase in performance there. In gaming I'm only noticing about an 8% difference in most situations, with some leveling out of the 1% lows.

Update! 4/21/22

I had one more fan from the box of fans I ordered, and found a spot to mount it facing the radiator. There is now a shit-ton of fans in this case. I don't hear a change in the noise level at all. Idle temps are now 26-30c, 32c with some Chrome tabs and discord open. This is a pretty big improvement over the previous resting temps that would bounce around in the low 40's just with some Chrome tabs open. I did a stress test, and saw the spikes in to the high 90's were leveled out, and never got close to thermal throttling. I started up Overwatch with some Chrome tabs and discord open and some other stuff, and the system stayed in the low to mid 70's like before, and still spiked very rarely in to the mid-80's for a millisecond until the fan curve to catch up. I'm seeing that the extra fan just smoothed out the spikes and everything is just running a little cooler now. I think I'm at a point where I'm not going to touch it for a while!

Update! 4/22/22

Had some chrome tabs open and was watching a youtube video, and popped open Cyberpunk 77. CPU temps bounced in the high 80's and touched high 90's and once in a while a few cores peaked at 100c for just a second. Had to quit the game. Ordering a new CPU cooler now as that is obviously the issue. Everything else in the case is way cooler than it should be and functioning properly. More to come. 

Update 4/24/22

New cooler came in this afternoon when I was taking a nap. I ordered the Coolermaster ML240 Mirror, and it was a staggering $50 off for some reason on amazon. On eBay and amazon the cooler retails for 129.99. I found one on amazon for 78.99, which I knew was a risk, but pulled the trigger. It came sealed in the box, everything looked good on the outside. Inside, was ML280 140mm fan and radiator edition. Strange that the much larger radiator and fan combo was cheaper, but maybe it's because it is a very unconventional size. I had no mounting holes and all outlets and intakes were 120mm. I decided I wanted the larger cooler and the savings and grabbed my drill. Made holes for venting the larger area through the front, and made new mounting holes for the cooler. One huge issue, the new fans touch the RTX 2080. I considered modifying the graphics card, but that would take away from the value when I sell it to get a new one. I used a GPU sag bracket against a piece of the case and slowly turned it until the fan did not touch my the very smallest amount, bending the case such a small amount no one would know I had done it. 

Tests: Resting idle temps are unchanged at 26-30c. Stress test did only spiked one core at 70c briefly. Cyberpunk 77 hovered around 55-60c and never moved. I have yet to see any spikes like I observed with the old pump and cooler. This oversized radiator and fans are really doing their job, and I'm glad I decided to keep them. Last note: when removing the old pump and radiator, it sounded like something was loose in there.

Update 5/1/22

The case was just bad. If I had anything else open and ran Cyberpunk, Overwatch.. and had my Valheim server open, it got dangerously close to thermal throttling. There was so many fans in this case I had no idea what to do except move to a larger case with a better design. The 3 fans on the old case in the front were trash Ibuypower specials, hooked up to a daisy chain 5w power supply not attached to the motherboard fan connectors, so were at a static slow speed. The rear fan was the exact same. The whole case was designed for 120mm fans, but the holes that everything was lined up for looked like 80mm. I decided to just get another case and start over. I had a super tower case that a previous build was in that never gave me any issues at all, this one with MUCH better ventilation, tons of space for large fans, and I could mount the radiator at the top as opposed to on the side. I had zero issues moving everything over and getting it setup, which took around an hour. Final thermals with two games running at the same time and under stress testing never got above 65C. Perfect. Idle temps super low under 30c, zero spikes or slow building like the old case. Replaced all garbage fans. There is a two inch gap at the top of the case, which I covered with a screen. You can see the pics of the case in it's final form here. I flipped the fans around so it would exhaust out of the top of the case, completing the loop. Huge fucking difference, everything just works. I was worried I hurt the processor, and my wife had run it to thermal throttle for around a year, so was happy when everything came together. 

3 Years Later 5/9/25

I can't believe I'm on the same system 3 years later! I was reading this post after tweaking some fan settings after adding another fan, and thought I would write a quick update. I'm sitting here watching CPUID HWMonitor while I'm writing this and idle is pegged at 33c, GPU also 33c. Recent changes: I added another fan on the end of the video card, zip tied to the video card support bracket blowing towards the back of the case in the last few days. I found out the port fan blowing up into the video card had the fans on it installed backwards just last year, so took that apart, put it back together and found a PMW controller to plug it into, which I paired to the video card sensor in FANCONTROL. The video card is coming up on it's 7th year of life, as I bought it on release day all those years ago, and I repasted it yet again, but was still getting hot. The fans still work, port fan now going in the right direction and now another small fan blowing over the fins have brought it back down to it's original spec temps. I can hear a slight difference in fan noise as my janky fans ramp up in games, but it performs perfectly. I tested it VS my sons 4060ti and it almost keeps up with it, just using a ton more power and making a ton of fan noise. It's time for an upgrade, and this setup will be moved over to the other side of the office to replace my wife's aging gaming PC, which is my old 8700k with a 3060ti, which will be retired to the garage or to a friends house so their kid can have a budget gaming PC. I rebuilt it a year ago- new case, new AIO and fans, and it's been running really well with zero issues. My wife once in a while says it's slow when loading steam on boot, but I think that's to be expected. What's the new upgrade you ask? I'm currently specing out an AMD build, Ryzen 7 9800x3d with a rtx 5070ti. I never thought I would leave intel, but these X3d series chips have been kicking Intels ass on the reg. Look for that post in September 2025!

Podcast of the Month - Doubled Feature

    Ways to tune in- Spotify - Anchor FM - Apple Podcasts - Listen Notes - Podchaser

You should listen to this podcast, it's made by people I know, and it's funny and informative.

Description from their Spotify landing page: 

"Twin Films (noun) Films with the same, or very similar, plot produced or released at the same time by two different film studios. Doubled Feature is a movie podcast dedicated to exploring and documenting this strange phenomenon. Host's Dan and Max discuss the film's plots, casts, and any striking similarities there in. We aren't here to tell you which one is better, though one often is, we are just here to share a love for film and maybe have a few laughs along the way.

Dune 1992 (DOS) Was way ahead of it's time.

 

Play Dune for DOS in your browser here. Works with no bullshit!

     Dune for DOS holds a special place in my gamers heart. It's one of the very first DOS games I was introduced to, being a tried and true Macintosh user. It has DOS demo-scene quality graphics and sound, animations, and awesome call backs to the movie. It has lots of relatability and paved the way for games like Warcraft, Command and Conquer and more. The fully voiced cut scenes, changes in gameplay types and modes were way ahead of their time.

World of Longplays Video

Screen shots from the game I grabbed below:

Amazing Screw-On Head (Full Pilot Episode)

 

It's criminal that this show never got picked up. 

Diablo 2 Resurrected - It's unplayable

I spent 3.25 minutes adding text with a lens flare in photoshop to this snipped image of my battle.net screen, because that's 2.7 minutes more than the developers put in to this game to run. 

     My wife surprised me by buying this game for me as a gift knowing that I love the original so much, and we played it when we just young whippersnappers after we got married in 2004. I did want to play and it told her as much, so I was pretty excited when it was time to play. Yes, I have seen the memes on reddit, and heard from a few friends it had issues, but typically I did not have some of the same issues, being that I use pretty good hardware and know what I'm doing. 

     Diablo 2 Resurrected crashes, does not start, has performance issues, and it generally sucks. I started it up, made a character and right away it looked exactly as I remembered, except some updated visuals and resolution. I have played many iterations and fan-made upgrades of this game, so I'm not sure I was going to be impressed, but either way, I looked at this like a good time dump, and something I could play besides Overwatch for a few weeks and catch up to some of my friends. Well, I'm sorry to say guys, i was wrong. 

    Every 15 minutes the game just quits to the desktop. There is no error screen or anything that prompts this, it just acts like I was done playing and quits back to the battle.net prompt. I looked online and saw a few errors and such, tons of people dealing with the same thing. Potential fixes like changing the permission to Administrator, disabling certain features, disabling overlays, underclocking and removing overclocks.. I've tried them all. I'm using the newest firmware and software driver updates on everything I own. I have installed this game on two other computers and get the same result. I've tried every variation of different settings in the video and sound options. 

     I requested the refund and it was denied. I have requested an appeal to their denial and attached the graphic I made in photoshop above. More to come!

Update: 1/16/22 - They denied my refund for the second time, so I wrote them back and told them I would charge back the purchase on the Discover card I used, and show them that the crashes are not part of the programmed game experience. I also mentioned that if they are calling one-two hours of play time over four days a significant amount of playtime 10-15 minutes at a time, they need to check the logs a little better. I also asked them to check those logs, or show me a way to find them. Their response is below with the feedback for of the closed ticket that they sent me:

     They have denied the appeal for a third time, and now they are no longer willing to help me find a way to play the game, even thought I have sent them all the information they require. I wanted to document everything, so I started a twitch stream to document the crash. It crashed on opening the game, and again when I was playing after a few minutes. I sent them the response and youtube video below:

Last update of the night 1/16/22  6:29PM - I posted the thread above to reddit to see if anyone had any ideas of how to help. Of course it's Reddit, so 97% of the comments are trash saying I'm using a potato PC, I don't know how to trouble shoot PC's, to even someone recommending me taking the CMOS battery and ram out of the computer to reformat and disable XMP. The guy called me out for being rude in my reply, but if anyone listens to his IT advice, there could be a bigger problem. Imagine taking your PC apart not knowing what to do because random dude on reddit said so to fix my $40 game, and accidentally fuck something up. Jesus.

     The two people genuinely interested to see what happened are the real bros and asked some good questions which gave me pause for thought. Overall, the posts were downvoted in to non existence and left me bullied in the very forums I like to frequent. Thanks for the help guys!

     Meanwhile, blizzard replied to their own closed ticket request with a specialist asking me to disable my wallpaper background and close all background processes. That's exactly what I have been doing. My wallpaper engine is set to close when games open as it is, but I killed it anyways, killed everything including razer apps and such, and it still happened. Another dead end. See attached for the latest crash I sent to blizzard:

Update 9:51pm - An example of the people on Reddit:

     I've listed a few sources in my original post of all the widespread issues that plague this game and cause it to crash. This dude says.. hey listen man, you are poor, just get upgrade or stop your bitching. My specs are posted in the original post and 10+ times in the thread for people that asked. I linked to my blog where I review mid-high end PC parts, monitors, and other setups that I own that rival the one I'm currently using. People just want to talk shit to hear themselves talk. I can almost imagine the response, saying something like.. "Yeah right, you don't have that computer." or something similar. No apologies on Reddit! 

Who thought of a PC as a multimedia device? (Demoscene)

 

    Spoiler alert: It was the PC/Amiga/C64 Demo Scene guys.

    Have you ever heard of the Demo Scene? I'll give you the "Major Version". Basically, technologically curious people (hackers) would get together, create original music and rendered animation in to a video collage that seemed like it was way beyond the capabilities of the PC's of the time. They would create and code new software, MIDI and MOD trackers, custom UI graphical engines, all from the base assembly code. If they liked something from another platform or program, they would hack all those components together in their own amalgamation of what they would need to get the job done. Some of the best well known sound editing software today is based on their ideas of the time. See below for a few great examples of the Demo Scene from the artists from Future Crew:

     Before the demo scene was even considered a thing, hackers were looking in to ways at pushing the limits of their home computers. Game developers and Software Engineers took notice of these kids in their bedrooms creating the unthinkable, and hired from these small groups of guys, creating some of the founding programs considered essential to software engineering: Futuremark, ID, Remedy, Bugbear Entertainment, Bitboys, Epic Megagames.. the list goes on. Innovations we take for granted today, like full motion video, 60 FPS rendering, and sound samples in music and games, were not implemented at the time and changed the way we think about PC as multimedia engines in our day-to-day lives.

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Quick post today! Lots going on. Happy New Year!

Employment, Housing, Beer, and other things.

 

Picture of me taken by my wife at a keg tapping of Hop Silo 16 beer by Tampa Bay Brewing Company last night at Craft Street.

     Very recently I moved yet again to another spot in Florida, this time leaving my job of 5 years with an Anheuser Busch distributor. They sold their brands and distribution in Florida to other beer distributors, which left me empty and losing faith in the business that brought me up in this state.. Beer. Low on energy to do this all over again, I knew I had to change things up.

     As outlined in some other posts from long ago, I've worked in Distribution for almost 20 years in one way or another. Sales, marketing, events, administration, operations, finance, and national accounts most recently. I've managed brands and developed programs for breweries for the last 11 years of that 20. I had the urge to work with the people that have always been great to me and been the most fun to work with; the local guys, the ones who made really good beer and fought the good fight in the market to do different and interesting things. I wanted to make the change over to the Supplier side of the industry for the first time since I worked for Molson/Coors in 2010.

     You have to have a job right? I applied for any and everything to get an idea of what people would be interested in as far as employment. I don't know if you have been looking lately, but there are a ton of jobs out there. I started in distribution and started applying for supplier and local level positions right out of the gate before the other 190 employees being laid off would get there first. I secured some decent references and worked in for a week straight, at one point keep a spreadsheet of all my applications and interview processes. I had two and a half months to make something happen.

     Offers started coming in first from distributors from people that know me or I have worked with in the past, which kind of surprised me at first. The company that sold offered me a transfer out of state, and the new regime that took over offered me a position as well. I was waiting for one company in particular to call me back, so I told everyone else to hold the line, as I have severance coming and they would need to wait. Eventually that call did come, and my dream job in the supplier world presented itself. A local legend in the industry, someone known to make things happen, take risks, and well known to be very good to his employees reached out to me and I couldn't say YES fast enough. I said goodbye to the severance, moved to Tampa and started my new job the very next week. 

    The rest is history! I'm settled in my new place, already love the people I work for and with, and made some friends with some really talented people in the industry. I've already started my book blog back up and made my first post, and there I've outlined the timeline of my 5 moves in 4 years. 

Cheers!

"You can't install Windows 11? Who cares!" - Microsoft, probably

 

This is everyone's level of frustration with Microsoft at the moment.

     The above screen shot I took today, when just going through my computer and catching up some updates. I did not want to update to Windows 11, but When I saw the popup prompting me to download Windows PC Health, I was a little worried. Is my PC too old? When googling for PC Health Check, some Windows insider program and some garbage clickbait links showed up, nothing you could click on to get this program needed to see if I pass the fabled Windows 11 test. Spoiler: It's in the Windows Update Tab, or you can just click this. Already I'm more annoyed than when my wife asks me to get her something when she is physically closer at least 13 times a day.

Circled in yellow, TPM 2.0 is some mystery bullshit no one cares about.

     I'll admit, it's been a while since I just went thought and cleaned things up and installed some new drivers, and did the required Windows Updates. In a future post I'll go over some of the personal stuff that lead up to that, and why I've been so lazy with it. For example, I updated my RTX 2080 video card drivers today, and I was 20 versions behind. Oops! I did turn on the GPU Hardware Scheduling (HAGS) for the first time, but I haven't played anything to see the difference. Anyways, I followed their instructions, downloaded the PC Health Check, and low and behold, I actually do have the system requirements to download and install Windows 11. Hmmmm. 

The game is afoot Windows!

     I figured since I have all the other requirements as outlined on my manufacturers website, It must be this TPM 2.0 garbage that is holding me back. What is TPM do you ask? It stands for Trusted Platform Module, and it's really just a security protocol that Windows 11 and some hardware requires. Do you really need it? No. Some older mother boards made you buy an external module that plugs on to your board to handle the security it provides. There is no actual standard of what it's called, what it actually does, and how it's enabled. It's so badly described, that even Microsoft's own website describing it, does not  even try. They mention it could be called by all these different things, and when you click the external links, they go to unhelpful click-fucks that just make you go back to the way in which you started. On it's own site to guide you how to fix this issue, they don't actually tell you how to fix the issue. "Vague idea" is more accurate.

Literally their page is full of spelling errors and misinformation. I just can't.

     I'm going to try to end this on a good note, but I can't. The problem is still there, I have TPM 2.0 enabled by default, and in the security settings in my BIOS it's enabled. Windows simultaneously says I can and cannot install Windows 11, and their own company hates that we are asking. Of course, my mind goes to the hacking part of it, of someway you can bypass the TPM check that is not needed anyways.

Of course you can bypass it. Silly me.