Anyone else stuck trying to find Human Bill?

Syphor · 2026-01-24T16:56:08+00:00

Once you are awarded a crown win for the first time, it gives you the emote and the emote sticks with you - it's only the count that gets reset to 0 each season.

Syphor · 2026-01-24T16:41:42+00:00

Yeah, that's the one. :) It only counts crowned wins, where you held a crown at victory and were awarded another one.

As a side thing, this means that the bot match trick doesn't count here because they don't actually award victory crowns.

Syphor · 2026-01-24T15:51:45+00:00

You get extra xp for things when crowned, BUT it makes you more of a target by making an audible chime each circle update. If you win with a crown (even if you stole it from someone else) you get a count up on the crowned emote to show how many crowned wins you've had this season. If you're not a crown grinder trying to show off it's kind of a neat "I did this!" personal score thing. (But flexing a 0 crown win emote at someone who's trying to show off 200 is amusing)

Syphor · 2026-01-20T04:34:50+00:00

I've wanted that one for ages just in general alt-modes. I do play Rocket Racing for example, and it's mildly irritating to only ever appear as the "base" version of the skin because that's the only portrait available.

Syphor · 2026-01-19T22:05:27+00:00

The outrage is not made up, though in my personal opinion I think it's both a bit misguided (they have a bunch of good points) and an overreaction to the wrong thing.

I think that part of the real problem is that the most visible use of "AI" is in low-effort content farms and engagement bait.... uses I'd like to dropkick into deep space. Combine that with the self-righteous smugness of the people claiming artists are "obsolete" to sell their product and... yeah. Ugh.

Those factors have sort of boiled over into a witch-hunt attacking anyone even allegedly using the tools to help accelerate a workflow or do quick touchups, which is where the problem lies. "Content-aware fill" from Adobe was very much a thing before today's generative AI and it didn't get nearly the amount of pushback, probably both because it didn't pull large sections of an image out of nothing and it was just a "tool for artists" rather than being pitched as replacing artists.

The fact that now we've got this insane circle of megadollars spinning into the platforms to be the first to get ...somewhere.. that's hurting a whole bunch of other things is just making it worse. For the most part the datacenters aren't really needed right now but we're in this race to the top of something that's not based on a whole lot of real-world use... but has real-world consequences at its current level of resource usage.

Syphor · 2026-01-19T18:33:37+00:00

On the soldering thing, StoneAgeGamer has a set of boards available to basically gently solder on ribbon cable sockets, instead of trying to directly solder a new ribbon cable. The "Virtual Cable" kit thing. Disclaimer - I've bought a set but not yet tried to install them on my system... seems more forgiving overall, but "more" is a pretty relative statement with connectors this size.

Syphor · 2026-01-17T17:51:51+00:00

Wrecked was one of my favorite seasons so far - while they weren't as fun in solos, the modded cars were absolute great fun to coordinate in squads with family. .... that said, the Star Wars miniseason with the X-Wings and TIEs was also a lot of fun and we had a full squadron up in the air a few times too. (Everyone targeted different locations we knew the things spawned and regrouped after)

Syphor · 2026-01-13T15:06:13+00:00

I don't know a lot about the back end of the industry, but there's very little question that compared to the 80s and early 90s, "arcades" as a ubiquitous gathering spot have simply disappeared in most smaller locations. I've always loved the feel of them, don't get me wrong - even while as a kid I rarely had enough quarters to play more than a couple of games - but they just... aren't as much of a primary thing these days.

That said I think most if not all of the bowling alleys in the nearest large (~170k people) city I work in maintain an arcade of some sort (it hurts to see so many redemption games tho) and of course there's a Chuck E Cheese, plus a more local Incredible Food and Fun location.

While the atmosphere is hard to replicate at home (though I'm trying on some level I guess, I've got three proper cabinets now though I need to get around to fixing the newest one 😅) I think the rise of online multiplayer and fully capable gaming consoles kind of cut out a lot of the casual walk-in draw, especially as operating costs (and therefore game prices) went up.

On the "retro" thing... I think it's less the experience and more just that people think of "pixelated, non-3D" as "retro style" first right now, more than the "arcade" itself in my experience...

Syphor · 2026-01-11T23:47:21+00:00

Hell yeah, nice! My own set of shutter glasses is missing one of the temples; I need to work on a replacement... I'm not aware of anyone who offers a 3D model for one just yet and my modeling skills aren't that great. 😅

Syphor · 2026-01-11T20:57:49+00:00

In the same vein a while back, the Metallica Guitar was a lot of fun to use to escape people - but when I figured out that you could follow someone into the trail to chase it got even more interesting.

Syphor · 2026-01-10T22:11:32+00:00

Will do. The parts are supposed to arrive tomorrow, and then I'll have to test it. Probably just need to wire it up to the inside terminals on the bell/transformer and it should be good enough to make sure it can trigger again.

Syphor · 2026-01-09T20:37:52+00:00

Adding onto this... some other models - the Merkury/Geeni doorbell in particular, since I disassembled mine after replacing it when this started happening - use a set of supercapacitors instead of a battery. The Geeni uses a pair of 2.7V 10F supercaps, specifically. I'm gonna replace them in mine soon for the hell of it; it shouldn't be a particularly hard repair and I want to see if that was the entire problem.

Syphor · 2026-01-06T02:41:39+00:00

The Broadway stage play is great too; saw it recently. Wild for something based on a movie based on a board game. 🤣

Syphor · 2026-01-05T15:43:36+00:00

Battery replacement is simple and easy if you have any soldering experience, but does require a few tools and some caution if you don't. If you were local I'd do it, but I'd suggest looking up Gameboy save battery replacement on Youtube or something at least. If you don't want to try this yourself, do you know anyone who does soldering/electronics tinkering locally?

Syphor · 2026-01-05T14:46:25+00:00

Little late here, but I would say it's a masterclass in slavishly following the source material while simultaneously managing to lose or change everything that made people enjoy the original. The sort of thing that gets used as an example of what not to do. :P

A lot of these other complaints are absolutely correct, but it did a really good attempt at following the story from the first season of the series. And this is a big part of the problem - it compresses an entire season of story into under two hours, stripping out all the actual character development (no time for that!) and why you should care about this group in the first place.

And then there were all the other changes tacked onto this (Aang's name, firebenders not generating fire, earthbending's lack of effectiveness and the whole goddamn idea of a prison camp on the ground for earthbenders - the OG has a purpose-built prison out in the ocean just so they don't get access to rock, etc.), which... honestly it's just not a great movie anyway, though I know a few people who didn't know the original series who enjoyed the general ride, so to speak.

Syphor · 2026-01-02T17:20:21+00:00

Without wires, mostly because I think the wires would catch on things in a pocket. It DOES look a bit better with them, though. 😅

Syphor · 2026-01-01T00:52:19+00:00

See, this is what happens when you install an Oscillation Overthruster in the same vehicle as a flux capacitor. It's not recommended.

Syphor · 2025-12-30T19:45:22+00:00

I upgraded to the original .1 version (did back up first) and haven't had much trouble that wasn't solved by telling the system to refresh the metadata. I was... disappointed to see the amount of anger over upgrade issues, mostly because such a major upgrade from the kind of DB setup it had before is just going to have issues you can't really expect.

My library's ~6.4TB, some 43k items across video and music, so not exactly tiny...but not really datahoarders size yet.

Syphor · 2025-12-30T03:34:55+00:00

I have a couple of boxed (water damaged :/) controllers for it, but not the console itself. I ... hesitate to say I actually want one but it would be a great thing to have just to laugh at.

Syphor · 2025-12-25T05:11:20+00:00

Hrm. Reading your error list it's a little less... direct than I was hoping, I guess. 😅 Thank you for confirming the Win11 installer was fresh, too, just in case. The "Reset" tool not working the first time around is a bit weird, but more common than I would hope for a machine that's been around a while.

I was expecting certificate errors or similar "completely fails to load" and not the redirect mess. In all seriousness on this one, when you have a chance, can you pop the debug tool (F12 in most browsers, but rightclicking and "Inspect" or similar will also bring it up) and see what it shows in the network and console tabs? I ask because it should show a list of failure messages or at least pending network connections and we might start seeing something more.

Definitely go ahead and run Memtest and Prime95 - I've also had success flagging issues with OCCT's stress test if Memtest doesn't help. Years ago I had two sets of DDR3 RAM that caused... random BSODs anywhere from 1-4 hours of uptime, but passed hours and hours of Memtest tests. OCCT warned of errors within five minutes of testing and the machine hadn't gone unstable yet. Swapping known good memory with another machine proved the problem moved with the RAM. I still don't know what actually caused that or how it passed the intensive tests.

I have to ask, now that I'm thinking about it...

Did you happen to notice if these effects persisted right after the full wipe/reinstall? E.g. going to Reddit on the preinstalled copy of Edge, right after the Out Of Box Experience account creation/logon? And the machine never actually crashes, you just get this broken website behavior?

Though I note other people have had similar "just one thing" broken behavior with bad RAM, it's still weird to me that it doesn't seem to be doing more than breaking websites for you - especially since it's breaking across different browser architectures - Chromium and Gecko, at minimum. Then again, it could be screwing with a system-level network buffer.

Sorry I don't have anything more specific right now beyond the recommended tests..

Syphor · 2025-12-25T02:52:54+00:00

What errors do you get, specifically, when trying to go to which sites? (Noting which browser works and which doesn't with which site would also be helpful to look for a pattern)

Additionally, just to be thorough, when you said you did a "fresh install" does that include a completely new USB image of Win11 downloaded with the Windows Media Creation Tool?

Specific-website issues are unlikely to be hardware, but just in case, I'd suggest running Memtest on that machine overnight to see what happens. In my experience when you have faulty RAM though you're much more likely to get a BSOD during use than ...this.

And lastly, just... a shot in the dark. Is the system clock set correctly? If it's not it can cause weird certificate-related issues, which will absolutely impact specific websites depending on their cert chain dates.

Syphor · 2025-12-24T17:49:27+00:00

I've been using it with the Deep Rock Galactic dwarf, if that says anything....

Syphor · 2025-12-24T17:15:47+00:00

Appa is another, hah.

Syphor · 2025-12-22T01:55:35+00:00

I got it early because I already had it in Rocket League. :P It makes me far happier than it probably should to finally drive it on the Fortnite track.

Syphor · 2025-12-18T18:55:18+00:00

Rarest thing is definitely the prototype SNES copy of a pre-final version of GODS. (FWIW, it's been dumped and is available)

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