What's everyone up to these days

Black Knight Society
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curious how everyone’s doing these days, where everyone’s at, etc.

me personally, i’ve been living in NYC for the past ten years now (over in queens), currently working over at a startup for payroll automation as an SRE. lived in london for like a year somewhere in there, met my current girlfriend over there, then somehow convinced her to move back to NYC

not sure what else to say. it’s been great living here in NYC for the most part, albeit tough with rents being where they’re at (not like it’s much better in seattle tbh)

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hey! the past ten years ive split between austin and denver w/ this company i founded w/ friends https://nexus.gg i left back in november and took a three month sabbatical to decompress

just found something new and relocating to seattle sometime later this year? :crossed_fingers: still figuring out the timing

this past weekend i was looking for something on an old drive, randomly found the SMF backup, and decided to restore it to a discourse instance! it was surprisingly easy w/ an agent helping

i hope more folks show up and everyone is doing well!

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HOLY MOLY… what has it been… at least 16+ years, right?! Getting old. lol!
Also live in Queens (Fresh Meadows). We bought a house in 2000. Maybe some of you attended the MLAN parties in the early 2000s?

It’s been so long, I can’t remember! Lots of clans… we went from Windows 2000/XP to Windows 11! hah.

I left a job in 2003… started my own comp. consulting thing. It’s more like part-time… or so my social security statements remind me! D’oh!

Musician… want more? www.utopiawinds.com
Not hip stuff, but …I do have a degree in classical clarinet, so…!

Zillions of things have happened. Lost a LOT of people…some friends, most of my family members, same w/my wife. Celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary last Sept. Freaky!

Pandemic is a whole, separate nightmare. Did some things.. didn’t get horribly sick… never fully “recovered” from the isolation.

It’s time to plant flowers and the veggie garden, redo our deck, roof of the garage, stain the furniture, and we need new windows - real one… they’re like 25 years old!

Got a new kitchen and bath…that was… life-altering!

Got two kitties… our beloved Howard - beautiful black cat - passed in 2011, I think…? We were cat-less for more than 14 years, then found this little guy living in a pile of rubble about 10 blocks from our house. HAD to rescue him… and so it began. Last June, got him a sister..another rescued kitty. Introductions have been slow… they’re a huge part of our lives.

Went on first vacation in 6 years - Canada… Quebec. Pretty awesome! Getting our kitty a “friend” was key. All snow up there… and then…hah…tons of snow here at the same time! Ooof! Coldest winter in a decade, and still… 2nd warmest Winter on record. smh.

”FUN” times.

Nice to know you all still exist!! :folded_hands:

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oh god, COVID was such a fucking trip. i still remember my last ever commute into the city and everyone being real jumpy when someone would cough or sneeze, using elbows instead of dapping people up when greeting people, then just complete silence outside of constant ambulances (i live over in ridgewood, but moved apartments a few times - the place i lived in before was like maybe fifteen blocks away from the bushwick general hospital, so… that was a thing.) still feels like we as a society have just not recovered from it completely

never been to fresh meadows myself, closest i’ve been i think was kissena park, which is a fucking beautiful park i gotta say

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I got the email to renew my account here late last night, glad I wasn’t the only one! I can’t exactly say time flies but dang we are all old lol.. I’m 41 now.

This community was a huge part of my teenage years, I discovered Q2JB when I was about 13 years old. We had some great times.. I remember playing Q3A JB:PoW in high school and I think we were still playing up until around 2003’sh. I just know by the time Quake 4 came out most of us went our own ways and started playing different games.

I worked in IT for years but the last decade or so I’ve been coaching and officiating youth & amateur ice hockey. Just local stuff, I never knew the refs got paid so well otherwise I would have started sooner lol. Right now it’s nice but I’ll need to find something else I can do, it’s a very odd “job” but I’ve met some great people. Also a little lucky I played with a few of the guys that assign the games lol, it’s definitely not for everyone though.

My father retired last summer and I am currently helping my parents move about 35+ years worth of stuff from my childhood home in North NJ to South NJ. South Jersey will be nice for them, 5 acres at the fraction of what it costs to live up here. Heck I might build a bungalow down there for myself if I’m allowed. But I have to stay up in this area for work.

Going to be a rough summer for me with all the driving back and forth, I just want to get their belongings down there.

I’m still playing computer games though that will never change, I’m glad I built my fancy AM4 system and it plays everything well. I don’t know if anything will ever be as much as the Q2/Q3 days though.. We had it good!

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Holy shiiiiiiiiit! I occasionally did a google search for BKP over the years. This is great.

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Merc is an SRE. Makes sense :grin:. Me too, but now I manage a team of 13 SREs. Life in Canada is good. Married, 2 kids (boys 10 and 13), 2 dogs, coaching hockey every weekend. That’s it. That’s my life. Servo, you were in high school playing hockey back then. I’m 51 now, boy does time fly.

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That’s awesome Bungle.. My weekends at the rinks probably aren’t as fun as yours. Reffing 10u/12u levels might be tougher then reffing the 16u/18u and older players lol. Some of these parents are just insane! :joy:

I remember being younger then everyone here, but I think Merc and a couple guys were about my age. Everyone here was always awesome. I still thank the Q2JB community for helping me get into upgrading and building my PCs, pretty sure half of us had the same or similar computer builds lol.

I was thinking about Q3JB:PoW the other day when I downloaded that new RTX mod for Q3A.. It’s actually pretty sweet but it’s relatively beefy. I’m running a 5700x3d, (2x16)32gb ddr4-3200, ASUS TUF 5070oc 12GB.

I just got the 5070 back in November, I got worried prices were going to go up on GPUs like RAM, SSDs, and everything else. Guess I’m glad I spent the $600 because I saw the price of the same card go up to about $750’sh.

Hope everyone has their computer systems updated and where they need them to be.. As much as I’d love to build an AM5 system I can’t justify spending $500 on 16GB of DDR5 RAM lol. Curious to what everyone is running nowadays.

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had no idea there’s an RTX remix thing for Q3A - might have to check that out. i still remember trying to play the Q3A alpha way back in the day with i think a voodoo 2, just could not deal with it at all

my current rig, which, thankfully, was built before AI companies decided to buy up all the RAM, is this:

  • AMD ryzen 9800x3d (with an AIO water cooler)
  • RTX 5080
  • 64 GB DDR5
  • fractal design meshify 2 XL (i’ve got a ton of hard drives, so needed a case to fit them all in)
  • a couple of NVME SSDs

it’s been more than solid tbh. granted, most of the stuff i play at the moment barely even scratch the surface of its performance ceiling (things like deadlock, league of legends: TFT, dragon quest games, EU5, etc), but i’ll be set for a long while. uh, at least until nvidia starts shoving DLSS 5 in our faces which apparently was running on 2x RTX 5090s

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Ohh man you’ve got that top of the line setup compared to me lol. My one buddy always busts my chops for not having the latest and bestest stuff. He’s got a 9800x3d/5080/32GB and idk what else. I just know he likes to play those big open world survival games like Arc in 4K.

We are definitely living in some interesting times with the RAM shortage, AI silliness, and whatever else contributes to these bogus prices we have to deal with.

Q3A RTX mod is neat but I think it only supports a few maps right now. I was thinking about how amazing it would look with one of Scrotch or Neotic’s maps.. Those guys were on another level!

Q3A was beautiful, the Team Reaction and BKP mappers were just incredible. I can’t remember everyone off the top of my head but we were very lucky to have so many skilled players in the community.

Here’s the link to the article about the mod New NVIDIA RTX Remix Advanced Particle VFX Previewed In Quake III Arena RTX Demo

And here’s the link for the Q3A RTX mod.. Super easy to install just like the old days. Just needs you to copy and paste the Q3A .pk3 files (maps) into the folder of the downloaded unzipped mod.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-remix-advanced-particle-vfx/

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Yep.. shit, I’m still a bit unnerved when someone’s visibly sick and the train is packed. The elbow no-touch crap was weird to me, esp. given the thing was in the air, so.. We were actually wiping everything down for a few months, until it became clear the vector was breathing. Pff. Opened my eyes to how the society is divided, how folks WANT to believe the thing isn’t dangerous because they don’t LIKE being quarantined, even if my own neighborhood lost over 80 people - JUST Fresh Meadows! There were hundreds stored in refrigerated trucks in Elmhurst… like playing DOOM or some shit! NOT fun.

Fresh Meadows is… too quiet for me, yet folks are drag racing all over. It’s kinda annoying. Religious freakish folk abound…multiple religions, and we’re the “weirdos” for decorating for ANY holiday - I kid you not! We ignore that, and put up a HUGE Halloween thing every year, and even the ultra-Orthos drop by! haha! Going on 26 years of being THE house in the neighborhood. But I’m gettin’ too old for this stuff. It’s exhausting!

Kissena Park’s awesome! I think it was renovated a few years ago. Too far for us to go often, but Cunningham is near us. The NY Phil puts on concerts in the Summer, and there’s this 8-mile-long Vanderbilt Motorway - now a hilly, in-the-woods, re-paved road - that was the first U.S. high-speed roadway! I think it originally cost, in the 1920s… like 25 BUCK to drive on it - for the super-rich ONLY! haha! The Northern and Southern State Parkways supplanted it. D’oh.

I’ve been in NYC 39 years… just about - came here in 1987 - and have never been able to live in Manhattan. It’s SO damned expensive! Queens is YUGE, right?! If you’re near Kissena, you’re near all the nice food, too! heh!

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wow… my last rig .. I built in I think… 2020 or 2021! It’s OLD now. Lol! My first Core i9. But all I’m still playin’ is Doom III - yeah, I know - Doom IV, and one of the CODs.. smh… now I get dizzy when I run first-person shooters! Bought a WII - had to - back in 2020 or 2021.. wow, the years are blurry… and got Zelda… and again, I know… Animal Crossings. hahah! Instantly addicted.. STILL playin’ them. Although after finishing both the last two Zeldas, I only do it just to roam around the rendered worlds. Just incredible stuff. Weird… I don’t get dizzy in Zelda… but COD STILL messes me up. I miss it, too. Did that Quake online web version when it came out… holy… kept going until the dizziness faded! I wonder if non-players get dizzy the first time? Or do I have middle-ear issues? smh.

I CANNOT justify spending like… $1,500 on a video card. Maybe ‘cause my barely over HD games aren’t worth it? Music takes up too much time, too. Hand issues, tensor/flexor muscle problems, neck… gawd. Is there like a “gamer disease” syndrome out there, or something?! Got the Aeron chair and everything. Just too much.

The QIII demo looks pretty cool! Heh…reminds me of map admins changing the effects… like zero grav!

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Remember GARR’s solution for QIII Arena? Cartoon Quake! lol! All settings reduced to 3D lines!

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Picmip baby! :rofl:

My buddy who moved to NJ from Sweden in middle school was one of those super skilled European TDM players, I remember forcing him to play Jailbreak with us a bunch of times. Think he used the alias GoldenBoy or Nilrak, Karl backwards hehe. He invited a few of his TDM buddies like Gunmetal, just remember he was a bit older then us and lived in NYC.

I remember I was at his house one weekend and I brought my .cfg over on like a CD-R or whatever media I could lol. Still have spindles of CD-Rs in the basement here.

I just remember him telling me my .cfg was garbage, he gave me his and it looked something like this below lol.

q3apicmip001
q3apicmip0011680×1050 208 KB

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lol! Garr’s was even less-detailed… just 3-D blocks… like triangles and squares. It was insane! But he had an awesome frame rate, and could run circles around everyone!

Oh yeah..I still have CD + and - Rs, and DVDs. The era’s almost over… wow! Crap, I still have 8-track tapes…lol! A couple, anyway! I need to convert my VHS stuff before it disintegrates!

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lol! cool! All I remember, is never finding what I wanted, or settling for something I didn’t want, and debating buying a rewinder so I don’t ruin my VHS’s motor. lol

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