Sometimes the text outputted in my CLI briefly uses a strange character set for a word or two making the text rather impossible to read. And I get a similarly related effect in any ncurses interfaces such as SBopkg where the borders of the text boxes seem to be overflowing with these unusual characters.
I've attached some pictures so you can see just how I mean.

I realize that using TERM=xterm before I run something like sbopkg can temporarily resolve this issue for the session that its active, but I'd like to find a permanent fix. For what it's worth, this problem only started around the time I upgraded from 14.2 to current.

And I'm curious; how does changing the TERM variable from linux to something like xterm fix it?

edit: apparently the images are too large to upload. I'll see if I can upload to a 3rd party image hosting site.

TERM=linux is for linux console/framebuffer. When using a terminal from a graphical DE, usually it will set TERM to a suitable value.

Terminfo database may lack the proper record for your terminal if the terminal you're using is uncommon and not installed on the host (e.g. when logging in over SSH). OTOH, most graphical terminals are compatible to Xterm, so setting TERM=xterm works in many such cases.

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https://imgur.com/a/kE58i3W Sorry it took so long for me to put the images up. Anyway, this is what the effects look like.

Well, these look like UTF-8 characters in a non-Unicode locale. What does echo $LANG show on your system? Also, have a look at https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:localization

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What burning is experiencing is fixed by editing /etc/lilo.conf

In the append line change en_US.YTF-8 to en_US

From what I can see there is no down side to doing this.

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Looking at /etc/lilo.conf ; the append line read as " vt.default_utf8=0" .
Changing it to " vt.default en_US" and restarting the system has had no effect and the problem still persists.

echo $LANG outputs en_US.UTF-8

That should have been "vt.default_utf8=1". And then you have to run lilo.

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What I ended up doing was use pkgtool to run liloconfig and in so doing it wrote new lilo.conf. Here is what I found:

Notice append=" "? Well that was a surprise! Oh, problem is now solved and I have no clue how it got changed on me in the first place

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Oh, was the append " " the cause of the problem? or was it what solved it?

As in it being set to 1 should've been causing the problem? Or I should have set it to 1 in order to solve it? And my bad, I thought lilo ran on startup.

By now you should have tried it to see what happened and you would know it solved the problem

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Sorry, I've been rather busy lately so haven't had much time to do it until now. I changed it to append " " like in your example and I reran LILO and upon rebooting the system, the problem's been solved!
Thanks for your help

That means you are using UTF-8 and not the old 8-bit character set. (It's set in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh)
Your kernel command line originally included vt.default_utf8=0, switching off the utf8 mode of the ttys. vt.default_utf8=1 would have switched the utf8 mode on, but it's the default value, so you don't have to add it.
That just appends a space character to the kernel command line. OK!

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An unexpected result is that my penguins now have re-appeared when rebooting

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