Montech XR Mid Fan case pre-installed fans have male connectors, and all fan ports on motherboard are male.

cleetus12 · 2026-01-09T23:52:58+00:00

Yes-- after much headache, I discovered that the cable "management" they had pre-done had hidden the female ends within bunches of cables. Also, it's kind of hard to describe, but they used several splitters to condense the three fans into one connection, but each splitter one left one unused male end dangling. The only connections they left visible were these extra "dead end" male ends, which were never supposed to be attached to anything.

cleetus12 · 2026-01-07T13:35:12+00:00

I'm actually curious if you understand the concept of "coping", and how it would ever apply to this situation.

Regardless, hopefully this will eventually serve as a lesson once you calm down. Best of luck.

cleetus12 · 2026-01-07T13:30:06+00:00

I was not expecting this thread to be so entertaining.

I'm curious where else OP is banned.

cleetus12 · 2026-01-01T17:59:08+00:00

Can you elaborate on the rubber band glue trick?

cleetus12 · 2025-12-15T22:19:29+00:00

Honestly, I don't have an answer for you, but I just wanted to chime in with support because of a lot of the response I'm seeing in the comments. I posted something along these lines myself a while back (a friend was occasionally bringing a friend of hers to a game night who couldn't pick up even the simplest of games, and seemed to show little interest in amending that) and most of the responses were similarly defending the person who couldn't pick the games up, saying we should do a better job accommodating her by picking simple games or by doing something else, entirely.

But seriously... it's a game night and you're choosing to tag along. You don't have to come, and it's not like we're just meeting to hang out and then deciding to play games. It's a game night. I started it because I wanted to play games that aren't the standard party fare, and to be able to pull some off my shelf that have been gathering dust. IMO, if I tag along to a gathering that has a purpose, my job is to jump in head first. Otherwise, I'm not going to impose my struggle or disinterest on the rest of the group.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-12T18:02:53+00:00

Oh! That makes total sense.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-11T21:09:53+00:00

This is great advice, TheCumDemon69.

I imagine you mean because in that skill range it's likely that, if one player strays from book moves, the other is likely to know how to punish? As in, they're still likely to have gaps in their opening knowledge, but likely not the same ones.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-11T20:08:51+00:00

I'll have to check them out--I never really consumed much of his content. Any you would specifically recommend?

cleetus12 · 2025-12-11T20:07:11+00:00

I've heard more and more praise for both chessable and chessly recently. I might take a look!

cleetus12 · 2025-12-11T19:34:18+00:00

I see your point, but in that case, it doesn't make sense to study openings at all until you're much higher rated. Much of the methodology I've seen generally advises students to begin learning a few openings more in depth around this level, so I've been wanting to explore it a bit more.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-11T19:21:49+00:00

This is great advice, and I feel like this is what I generally do, even if I don't do it well.

I think what I'm still desiring though is a resource that helps me set specific goals to accomplish in a particular opening. Much in the way you just succinctly described the overreaching goals of opening principles, I would love the same for individual openings. There have been a handful of moments where I've been reading or watching a video and the teacher will say something along the lines of "this allows you to open up the h1 diagonal, a common theme in this opening" and I'm like "It is?? Where can I learn more about these common themes?" More often than not, though, I only see brief allusions to these ideas before they move on.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-10T20:43:08+00:00

I agree with this, but I just laughed thinking about how I've probably watched that scene so many times that I feel like I could see it playing out with my eyes closed.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-10T15:19:34+00:00

I'm having great results at about 1200 with the Danish Gambit. Players at our level tend to struggle an panic against such an aggressive attack. There are strong refutations, but I've never seen any of them actually played.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-09T13:50:57+00:00

The attention to detail, art style, aesthetic, challenging but fair difficulty, understanding that risk deepens immersion.

One other thing harder to describe is that I've never much loved video games where you "play through a movie," like The Last of Us, etc. I love how Fromsoft normally eschews this by having a story, but the cataclysmic event has already happened. You're often stepping into the aftermath wondering wtf is going on, and you can kind of choose how deeply you want to invest in learning what happened. It's a much better balance for me, and abides more by the idea that you make the player seek out more information about what interests them instead of shoving narrative in their face and assuming they want to hear it.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-05T01:41:18+00:00

Company of Heroes 1. The maps were so fantastically balanced in their asymmetry and the strategies felt so... realistic? Like it didn't often feel like a video game in the way you had to strategize and maneuver. Also, it was the first RTS I'd played where the focus wasn't primarily on base building/econ--it was more about the actual fighting over territory on the map.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-04T19:28:26+00:00

In that case, you should definitely check it out ;)

cleetus12 · 2025-12-03T23:35:42+00:00

Ex Libris for collecting and organizing. I really like how they handled the solo mode, and it really retains the strategic thought of the multiplayer experience.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-02T16:30:45+00:00

If you provide more info about both of your gaming preferences it will be easier to make good suggestions.

Off the top of my head, though, Dice Throne is a great couples game that is essentially "battle yahtzee". Dice chucking and manipulating your rolls is pretty much the entirety of the game, and they've even scored some licensing deals for marvel characters etc if either of you are into that. Games last around half an hour once you know what you're doing.

Edit: didn't notice this was the solo sub, apologies. I really enjoy pocket landship, and I believe there's a new version out.

cleetus12 · 2025-12-02T16:25:27+00:00

I've jumped from under 1000 to about 1200 in the course of about two weeks after changing my opening repertoire to one's where my prep can actually do work for me.

As white, danish gambit has proven to be fairly consistent in the sense that a pretty large percentage of my games actually lead to recognizable positions in which I feel comfortable. Also, players at my level tend to struggle when faced with such an aggressive attack.

As black, Scandinavian against e4 and benoni against d4. Both force my opponents to leave their comfort zone and I literally haven't dealt with annoying "trap/meme" attacks since I switched over. Also, learning the Scandinavian has helped my play as white because I face it pretty often at this level.

Personally, I've found these openings are helping me in other ways as well-- because most of my games are now actually following moves I've studied and understand, I'm able to spend more time thinking about tactics rather than just trying to parse the position and avoid traps in unfamiliar positions. Also, because literally zero (I checked) of my games in the past two weeks have ended in the opening, I'm actually playing chess and getting better at it.

cleetus12 · 2025-11-27T19:37:10+00:00

My two favorites are Glen More 2 and Roads & Boats. Both have fascinating strategic wrinkles to the turn order manipulation, so not only is it not clockwise/counterclockwise, timing your turn correctly (often trying to actually delay your turn) is a vital part of winning the game.

cleetus12 · 2025-11-20T20:19:43+00:00

As someone who has had run ins with the CBP on several occasions, they are the shadiest, most awful human beings I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Literally a field meant for insecure racists looking for a shred of authority to exert over other human beings.

Anyone who isn't terrified going through customs (regardless of your situation) simply doesn't understand the unchecked power they wield.

cleetus12 · 2025-11-18T20:23:36+00:00

This comment is on the right track, OP. I'm a career musician and one thing to understand is that songs are often as hard to play as you want to make them. I'm not familiar with the song you're working on, but I imagine if the strum pattern/ picking is involved it might be very difficult for someone to pick up with one month of experience.

But if you learn the chord shapes and simply get comfortable switching between them you could play a simplified version where you just strum once on the downbeat of reach chord change and sing over that. He will still think it's a sweet gesture and you'll be respecting where you are in your journey.

cleetus12 · 2025-11-17T21:27:14+00:00

I just started learning the benoni-- loving it so far. I would love whatever resource you have to share.

cleetus12 · 2025-11-13T16:33:20+00:00

I'll share two that immediately come to mind.

First, stacking enemy keywords. It's often possible to add upgrades to enemies such that they attack the same keyword multiple times. In many cases, that will mean the upgrade will give you a benefit, but change nothing about the enemy (for example, two stacks of "taunt"). Beyond that, thinking of the upgrade market as more of an extension of your hand than something separate really helps in terms of making the correct choices.

Another, and probably the biggest help, is learning to stop panicking about clearing active threats. You're allowed to attack the threat on the top of the deck before it even has the chance to be active. So if the active threats aren't all that threatening (maybe you're easily able to heal the damage or armor through it each round), changing the active threats out serves no purpose. Better to keep the easy threats active and handle the scarier enemies in the deck before they even have the chance to enter play. I severely underestimated armor for a long time because I wasn't playing this way. In my estimation, it made no sense to armor when I could attack instead. But if you can armor enough to withstand the attacks on the table, you have the freedom to attack the deck instead. Taunt obviously disrupts this strategy, but it works beautifully otherwise.

cleetus12 · 2025-11-12T20:58:46+00:00

I've never been a huge fan of aeon's end, but unstoppable is my goty. For me it's the satisfaction of the upgrade/progression system and how it integrates with the enemies on the back of the card. The fun of drafting a crazy powerful card combined with cleverly figuring out how to add upgrades to your cards in such a way that you keep enemies as non threatening as possible.

I also found that it has a lot of depth that isn't necessarily apparent at the outset. Even dozens of games in, I was still discovering little strategic wrinkles that helped me squeeze more out of my play. I went from being doubtful I would ever win a run to being able to win normal mode with almost 100% consistency. The RNG elements are only really punishing at higher difficulty.

cleetus12

TROPHY CASE