RikOz

My first attempt at a comic book cover. It got the book dimensions wrong, though. Source image: Result:

Clever!

Well, it's working now after I did a hard reset to my browser's default security/privacy settings.

Oops, I did it again! Yet another new 50 (#52). As you can see from her bio, this only took six years. Venus Lass (Fiery Blast/Electricity Manipulation blaster) Her colors were originally blue & red, but at some point after level 40 I decided to change the red to orange.

Another experiment! Got that map for the "Recover the Bands of Shu" mission from Harvey Maylor, a mission with only one objective. Entered the 1st elevator, cleared the floor. Nothing. Ran down to the 3rd elevator, cleared the floor. Nothing. Bands of Shu were found behind the 2nd elevator. So that's still the "winner".

So: I've been using the same VPN (Windscribe) forever, and never had any trouble with the Wiki until yesterday. I tried turning off the VPN, but still couldn't get in. I did recently install a new browser extension created by the makers of my VPN, which adds additional privacy features. I tried whitelisting the Wiki, to no avail, so I disabled the extension. Still couldn't get in. I use the Brave web browser. I've disabled Brave's security/privacy features and turned off my VPN and the aforementioned extension. Still can't get in. So I tried it with Chrome. The page threw up the Cloudflare page, which proceeded to "verify" me without even asking me to click a box. It would appear that the Cloudflare thing doesn't like something about Brave. EDIT: I found a security setting in Brave to "Use secure DNS", which was enabled. There is a popup menu to select a DNS, which was set by default to "OS default (when available)" (I'm on Windows 10, latest updates installed). I discovered, at the bottom of the menu, "Cloudflare (1.1.1.1)". I selected that option, and suddenly I could get into the Wiki. I tried again, and failed again with both the GoogleDNS and OpenDNS, so I switched back to the Cloudflare DNS and now that one doesn't work either. This is really puzzling.

So the Homecoming Wiki has started challenging me to prove I'm not a robot and ... it will not accept my answer. It just keeps throwing up the click box over and over. Turned off my VPN, still won't let me in. What's up with that?

Interesting--She's from Denmark, and her name is "Frossen", which is Danish for "Frozen"; her name and native country was not in the filename and I didn't type them in, but the AI still "randomly" put her in a snowy, European-looking scene. It must have guessed based on her color scheme.

A little fun with my wedding photo:

A few more using the same prompt as the previous post. I like the way the AI uses the costumes to guess at an appropriate background. This one almost looks like she's in First Ward: This one is extrapolated from an image that doesn't show her legs, hence the actual fingers, and the non-CoH boots. When I first tried this character with a full-body screenshot, Gemini seemed to think it was porn and wouldn't give me anything. I need to explain this guy a bit. His name is "Epic Gear". His bio indicates that he was a "elite raider" warrior from Azeroth (World of Warcraft) who, due to a botched portal summoned by some noob mage, ended up in Paragon City. "Epic" gear in WoW is identified by purple item name text, so I went with that for his costume color. The actual gears on his costume are there as a joke/pun. When he reached level 50, he got his "Legendary" weapon, which I colored orange to reflect the item name text color of legendary items in WoW. Another one that gave me "censorship" issues. This is "Triple-N", which stands for "Nearly Naked Ninja"; the game of course wouldn't let me use the word "naked" in a character name. So the first problem was that most of her costumes are, naturally, as minimal as possible, lots of bare skin. Gemini again thought it was porn, so wouldn't render them. So I tried with this costume, and on the first attempt it apparently decided that this was a "real person" (by which I assumed it meant a celebrity/person known to the general public), so refused to work with it. But I tried it a second time and now it worked.

Sounds kind of like the same thing as, when you exit an elevator, your character's power ground effects are waiting there for you to step into them.

A few more made with Google Gemini, using my own prompt: First ask me to upload an image and then create a photorealistic rendering of the characters in the picture, in a realistic style, in a real environment. It's not always exactly getting "photorealistic" on the faces, but I'll experiment some more.

With Everlasting down last night, I rolled a new character on Excelsior just so I could get some play time in. His costume is simple, but I like the result. I came up with the color scheme while fooling with various color combos to see what interesting effects I could get with the Spectrum face. I didn't intend to use that face, I just got distracted. Anyway, I just went with the last color combo I tried there. So here's ROFL Stomper (Energy/Psi Armor brute).

Way cool!

I rather like the way it picked out the buildings behind Venus Lass and included them on the box and screen: Original:

It seems to be the default sample prompt Google Gemini give so you can try it out. For mine, I got an e-mail inviting me to check it out, and it gave me a sample prompt that produced my Girl Mercury image: Here's Mother Sun, from the same prompt:

Tried out Google Gemini with a pic of my latest level 50, Girl Mercury:

Okay, I just got this map again for a mission in the Revenant Hero arc. I went straight to the bottom elevator first. The objective was, "Two computers to access". Which is an annoying way of stating it, because I counted one time and there are actually at least eight computers to "access", but only two of them have what you're looking for. Anyway, the bottom elevator led to three computers to click on, but all of them resulted in "The file is not on this computer". Moved up to the middle elevator, and on that floor I found both computers with the files I needed. So, again, mission resolved by the middle elevator, with the bottom elevator being useless. Still, more experimentation is needed. Like, go 1st and 3rd, and then next time go 3rd -> 1st.

Speaking of which, I sure wish they'd get around to fixing police stations and Portal Corp as safe places to log out. Every other day job location you can log out with a 0 timer, but those two locations always get the long waits.

I finally got around to doing the New Praetorians arc in Brickstown again. I ran it the first time a few years ago, on my "main" (Flaminatrix, fire/fire/flame blaster), right after she got Marchand as a contact, so around level 35. Holy crap, that was a freakin' challenge at that level, as a solo blaster, but I got through it. But I'd been nervous about trying it again, until yesterday, when I ran it again on my level 50, fully T4 incarnate, fully-IO'd dual blades/SR scrapper. It was much easier this time, even running it at +3 :D The reason I bring this up is that I made a mind-blowing discovery. The first time I did the arc, on my fire blaster, I was continually frustrated by my New Praetorians NPC allies constantly going down very early in the missions, leaving me to solo everything else. This time, after Pendragon went down for the first time, my other allies and I kept fighting, and once all of the enemies were down I had to tend to something out-of-game for a couple minutes. I got back to the game just in time to see Pendragon walking over and saying, "I still have some fight left in me." He was fully healed up. OMG. When those guys are defeated, they use Rest! If they go down I just have to wait a couple minutes and they're back up! My god, I unnecessarily soloed all that crap on my blaster the first time because I had no idea. The NPCs would go down and I'd leave them behind. Because I had no idea. I mean, I'm kinda proud of doing it solo and overcoming the challenge (I mean the only thing that saved me on the fight against the two giant robots was the fact that I'd chosen Bonfire for my first Epic Pool power--it kept those robots away from me so I could blast them at range), but it still would have been seriously less frustrating if I had only known. Nothing told me the NPC allies could do that. And now I wonder if this is true of some of the other helper NPCs that show up in missions. I mean, I've seen that Overdrive just despawns when she's defeated. But what about Grym, in that Hellions mission in the second part of the Shining Stars arc? Every time I've done that mission he's gotten defeated in the first fight, because he insists on standing in the fire. But if I waited around, would he have Rested and healed up? Anyway, my mind is blown.

Skyway City could use some work. Maybe it's just me, but most of my multitude of alts have seemed to get funneled from Kings Row to Steel Canyon, with Skyway ending up largely neglected.

LOL, that's more or less what I call it, too :D I had to ask one time what purpose that "Lab Equipment" serves aside from being something for blasters to inadvertently tab-target and waste attacks on. Was informed that getting caught in the explosion can result in a random buff or debuff. Yup, that's how I do it (always solo, though). Jump down to the bottom level and then work my way to the top.

Interesting question. I always take the elevators in the order I find them. Next time I get this map I'll try running down and using that bottom elevator first and see what happens. I always figured the spawn points were chosen when the map loads, but we'll see.

Heh. Not four pages, but there's one Indigo infodump, about six paragraphs long, that I've never been able to finish reading because Malta always ambushes me right in the middle of it. Though, to be fair, I don't think they were specifically intended to ambush me there. It's a general design problem with ambushes that spawn when you enter a zone. Those ambushes spawn near your entry point (in this particular case, usually the FF tram station), but seem to expect to to stay there long enough for them to run up on you. If you aren't aware of their presence and you immediately fly off after zoning in, they have to chase after you, which means that this particular ambush tends to finally catch up while you're talking to Indigo.