収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

So I was playing in a Flashpoint match, which I kind of think of as “5CP” because it’s 2CP but five points instead of two (plus some other changes that make it work better), and basically, you fight over as many as five contested points on a map in random order and first to capture and hold three points wins.

We were winning pretty handily and had just nailed down the second point when I flew off as D.va and got to… I forget which point, doesn’t matter, maybe ruins… and started defending. We won the first team fight, but right as enemy team was coming back I noticed that the possession counter hadn’t started ticking up. And then we won the second team fight and the possession counter still kept not ticking up. And we were winning the third team fight and I’m like nobody else is on this goddamn point, why the hell isn’t the possession counter still at 0-0, why isn’t it ticking up?! when I realised

OH MY GOD WE’RE DEFENDING THE WRONG FUCKING POINT

and flew off to the right one, which was, you see, just past the one I’d been defending in the same direction as I’d come from, because I’d followed the point marker to the third point, but stopped one point too early – these are big maps, so that can happen. So I when I landed and started to fight everyone on both teams apparently just kind of assumed from the way I was playing that I knew what the hell I was doing and took my word for it until I suddenly took off screaming GROUP GROUP GROUP via emits and OH MY GOD in text chat.

We fought over the wrong goddamn point for… I don’t know. Almost five minutes.

We still won. I mean, they hadn’t noticed either. But it’s still the funniest (and dumbest!) moment I’ve had in Overwatch in ages xD

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

So Tripwire Interactive's president strongly endorsed Texas's anti-abortion/$10,000 bounty on women this weekend.

Here's how to block his entire company and all its games on Steam. Even if you've never had any plans to buy anything from them, if you have a Steam account, please do this anyway. Thanks.

how to never see a tripwire game on steam again:
1. navigate to https://t.co/SDk4OANgZ2
2. click that little gear
3. click "ignore this creator" https://t.co/0pgrCDT9Rx pic.twitter.com/Eo6qvhB7IV

— it's nouv! (@nnoouuvv) September 5, 2021

chonkyboi is my gaming PC, and since I built it, it's been pretty solid, but there've been a couple of small issues, mostly related to noise, and last night, I finally did did something about it.

I typed it into Discord while I was doing it, too, so...

---

ha ha HAAAAAAAAAAA I FIXED THE VBUS PIN

fuck the USB 3.0 header I mean it

i've been single-3.0 front-panel port since i built this thing

which wasn't rly a deal? because i don't use front ports much, not even for the controller

but it's bugged me and now it's fixed

[later]

the little fan that they have cooling the cpu power chips has been fucking loud 5eva

this is an X299 board so the power regulation chipset runs hot even for intel, right? so this mb came with this little bansidhe of a fan on its heatsink, it's been the nosiest thing in the case

i figured out that i can bring it down (RPM-wise) a lot because a fan that's embedded in the CPU block of my AIO water cooling is (by design!) pointed right at the same heat sink (so we have double-fan-coverage)

so i turned the bansidhe down to a quiet RPM and it's still completely fine

right now i'm doing overwatch play and monitoring PWM temperatures and it's staying at/below CPU which is what I wanted

[later]

i also changed airflow around a bit, i was doing negative pressure but too much and getting airflow fouling

so that's quieter too

and one of the fans was making a tic noise on startup sometime and it's good i found and fixed that because it was one of my GPU's onboard fans

(I have a little card brace (to prevent GPU sag)? it had slipped a little and was occasionally touching a fan on startup. now it won't.)

now i've got one more fan that i want to see if i can move from fixed speed to variable and get that quietened down too

this is a mesh case so it won't ever be silent (and it's never been like actually loud) but the closer i can get the happier I'll be ^_^

i used PCs in the 90s, those things were like fucking jet engines

when I rebuilt my old 1998 rig i replaced all the standard original fans with modern quiet fans and it's silent now but before that when i started it back up with the original fans it was like HI I GUESS I WORK AT BOEING NOW lol

[later]

HOLY SHIT I

okay i knew there was an RPM-controllable header on this thing but i didn't think i had the cabling to reach it and i wasn't 100% sure it would work

GUESS WHO HAD CABLE MANAGED THE CASE FAN TOO WELL

(i'd hid it under an SSD cover!)

it's so quiet now

I slowed the bansidhe fan down a bit more and the PWM temp is running a couple of degrees warmer but only a couple (38C peak vs. 36C peak) and I'm fine with that.

and it's so quiet

happy dance happy dance

[later]

huh it's finally showing me CPU temperature on the motherboard, I wonder what

(it's been showing this 9b I think and i never found out...)

oh FUCK ME that's hilarious

9b is "USB Reset" indicating a USB problem IT WAS TRYING TO TELL ME

(i mean to be fair i knew but it also knew and was saying stuff)

aAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

holy fuck you scratch the surface and it's TIME TO GO MINING

So this VR rig I got used a little while ago, to use it I've had to plug all the parts into a couple of different power strips every time because I've never finished setting it up right. That kind of sucks and is a barrier to use and all that so last night I decided to be all LET'S FIX THIS!

And while I'm setting it up with foot switches and stuff that's when I find that the UPS for my gaming rig is actually only backing up one (1) external soundbox, and the rest of the kit is just on power filters.

(The UPS is also really for another machine that uses that external soundbox - both the external soundbox and that CPU were supposed to be on it.)

And I then find out that while it's beefy enough for the other machine, it is NOT beefy enough for my gaming rig so I'm like "whelp I've got kind of a spare - one I can use anyway" and swap that in
and that involves digging a lot of stuff out of closets but that's okay.

So I plug the replacement UPS into the (heavy duty, 13A, three-prong) extension cord and the replacement UPS starts making new noises, ones I've never heard before and I'm like "uh, this is bad" and I'm thinking maybe it's just charging capacitors since it's been out of service for a while and that's... okay enough...

But then I see that it's not getting power despite being plugged in. It's running on battery except occasionally (I determine) it's not? And sometimes it's getting 120V and sometimes it's getting 0V and sometimes it's getting small random numbers of volts under 25?

So I'm like "I plugged this in and then put the connection back behind these boxes in the closet, did it come partially unplugged somehow?" and I retrieve the cord (which is for the record completely unstressed and was completely unstressed before, this is not a bendy cord issue)

...and it's making noises.

extension cords should

never

make noises

So I grab the end of it and see that depending upon how I put stress on the connection it makes different noises (and yes, it was completely plugged in) so I'm OKAY TURNING OFF THE UPS NOW and unplug it and I think, okay, this is probably the socket end of the extension cord gone bad but I can't rule out the plug end, let's go make sure nothing's wrong with that (which is easy, it's a short cord, it's just behind shit) and I move all the stuff in the way and I get to it and it's plugged in fine and stable

but

the outlet-mount power filter/line splitter it's plugged into is wobbly? And that's new? (And it has also been under no meaningful stress?)

So I unscrew the filter from the outlet and take off the outlet plate and discover yep it's the outlet and oh shit it was never screwed down properly by the electrician which is insane because it had been perfectly stable when I set all this up which is when I realise that's only because of the sprayed-on wall texture that's been holding it down.

So anyway I fix all of that

(that's like three levels removed from the original task at this point)

and put the plate back on and put the adaptor/splitter/filter/surge protector back on and plug the UPS into that and it behaves normally and if I put the extension cord back in series it's definitely the extension cord socket gone bad. It's really clear when you aren't bent over under shelves in a closet.

Anyway, that's what happens when you try to plug a VR helmet interface box's power plug into a footswitch.

i just want to say that if you pick the gamertag "staceysdad," get curbstomped, and then come in to match chat and start bitching about how the game is bullshit, then you deserve whatever song fragment i might just, you know, make up on the spot.

i'm in one of the horrible "yeah, all my skills turned off" periods, wherein i'm basically broken. but tonight so were the pc servers, so i'm very glad i played on pc despite my current status.

please enjoy this series of lolserver captures:

lolserver 1: respawning me with the enemy team. surprise!

lolserver 2: a magnificent 2 on 0 victory at horizon lunar colony.

lolserver 3: the play of the game from lolserver 2, pulled out separately because it is objectively the best POTG evar

I haven't been playing a whole lot of Tracer lately, so I've gone back to her, trying to get my skills back together, and after a rather dumb early death, I fell back in and had a rather good game.

This was POTG, but without the "Hello there!" at the beginning, and I wanted to add that in because I could.

The real attraction is the Junkrat shot, of course.

[gfycat] [unedited]

This game was one of those where enemy team just kind of... spent a lot of time not confronting me? Which was absolutely their mistake. I mean, we're talking about a fairly supreme unforced error there, in particular one run after they took the first checkpoint (their only really successful push) and I was just mowing them down from a high point they mostly didn't approach.

And even when they did, it's like, they'd chase me, I'd flee momentarily, they'd not follow, and I'd come right back and kill them. Particularly this Genji, who... still seems to have issues with object permanence? Somebody didn't get enough games of peek-a-boo as a kid, I guess.