A collection of fun facts not long enough to make an entire post

Some of these are short, some are long, none of them should actually matter to you—but they all are interesting and weird enough when together to make a full blog post. Most of these are just interesting bugs or things that were never patched out in consoles or games.

Minecraft go map, 3DS go crash

This one is fairly well known already, but one of the quickest ways to crash a 3DS and make it force restart is by clicking something once. To prepare, go to a stronghold, and put your bed there. Specifically, put it in the library if possible. If a library didn't generate, redo these steps over and over into one does. Then, after you placed your bed, set it as your respawn point, and save.

Now, you are ready. Reopen Minecraft for New 3DS, open the world, and spam click every chest as fast as possible. You see, Minecraft for New 3DS makes great use of the lower screen. It uses it for inventory management and maps (that you just so happen to get and keep for free without additional inventory space being used)—but this is its downfall, where the error stems. Anyways, there is a high chance that in one of those chests there is a map. Even though the actual map you use isn't an item in the game, Mojang never remembered to remove the possibility of a map generating inside chests in strongholds for this version. Anyways, if you click the map in any chest (or try to use it), kaboom. Successfully crashed your console.

Minecraft for New 3DS never implemented proper error handling for missing item assets and code because they didn't know it would be a problem. It came with available mods on its proprietary addon store, but these were hardcoded into the game, especially if you downloaded Minecraft for New 3DS with DLC.

Anyways, it is one of the coolest but most interesting ways to crash Minecraft New 3DS Edition with a good bit of backstory behind it.

Mii sleep paralysis??

In Tomadachi Life, Miis normally sleep around the same time you would—sometimes going to bed as early as 6 PM (or 18:00) and usually wake up when the sun comes up, whether or not you have the game open. When they go to bed, it is very obvious they go to bed. Their little window on on the screen showing all apartments will have the curtains shut, and when tapping on their apartment, you can usually see them sleeping and sometimes enter if they are dreaming.

However, your Miis will occasionally get sleep paralysis (as a bug, not a feature). Their eyes will remain open even though the game tells you they are in a sleeping state and none of their animations (e.x. tossing and turning) will properly play, resulting in something resembling sleep paralysis for that Mii. It’ll usually fix itself when you go to some other Mii’s apartment and then back to the original Mii’s apartment, ending the sleep paralysis.

Wii time travel everything kaboom

There was an interesting issue with the Wii that was never patched in its lifetime. It was a calendar overflow glitch, involving setting the date to something like 2099. In doing this, the glitch would occur.

This glitch would essentially softlock you in certain parts of the OS or break features. For example, by doing this, trying to do anything on the Wii Message Board would make it infinitely hang while it was “attempting to fetch” mail or whatever. This may or may not have also caused glitches in time-dependent games like Animal Crossing: City Folk, but I’m not entirely sure because I do not have a copy of that Animal Crossing game to test with.

This glitch was never patched out and remains in the latest version, 4.3, as something you can do. If this bricks your Wii and you can’t change the time settings back, don’t blame me.

Miiverse change? it also go kaboom

There was a weird bug with Miiverse (Nintendo’s proprietary social media on the Wii U and 3DS) where changing your profile picture would sometimes cause Miiverse to crash when you opened it. This bug was exclusive to Wii U, as far as I’m aware.

Rebooting wouldn’t fix this either—it was a bug that was semi-permanent. Once you did it, it would stay forever unless you took measures against it. I have absolutely no idea why it is that way. It might have something to do with a conflict between the cache and the data on the server which causes Miiverse to crash? I don’t really know.

Anyways, the only measure you could take against this bug that was likely extremely problematic is straight up wiping your profile from the console. That’s it. You might’ve been able to redownload games after from the eShop but all of your hard earned save data would be gone, just to fix a bug with Miiverse. Was it really worth it?

Streetpass sucks at counting

Streetpass on the 3DS is known to only allow you to streetpass 10 people at a time, which you would then have to greet in app or if you paid for some other thing in the Streetpass Plaza you could send them to a line with a capacity of 100 people total just to streetpass the next 10.

Why does this cap even exist? Well, it’s pretty simple. Out of the already miniscule RAM available on the 3DS (256 megabytes on old 3DS models or 512 megabytes on new 3DS models), Streetpass got even less of it reserved for all of its operations. This ended up with 10 being the optimal number to work with between storing temporary streetpasses, storing your StreetPass profile, and constantly searching for 3DSes to streetpass.

It might’ve been a little hard to notice then if you were in a rural area and really hard to notice nowadays because of how few and far people who actually still use StreetPass are now, but back then it was really easy to notice when you were at a StreetPass Relay spot, because it would not only hit that 10 limit but it would hit it FAST.

mini fact: new leaf villager go poof but no say… why?

There was a chance in Animal Crossing: New Leaf that if you time-jumped a lot to get exclusive items or benefits and didn’t interact with 1 villager in specific, they would leave without even saying a goodbye to you and the others. Just.. gone. So if you play Animal Crossing, maybe stop time jumping if you do and start interacting with your villagers a little more.

Conclusion

That’s it. Not much else to say. I gave some fun facts. If you want more fun facts like this, then don’t forget to tune into the CheeseBlog soon for another post. Cya!

Some software that got worse over time

There’s tons of software that used to actually work as a service or product but now are just.. sucky. Basically, I’m going to be going over some prime examples of those software and OSes in this blog post.

Windows

Windows just really isn’t good now. You already know what I think about Windows 7 if you read my previous blog post, but I can argue that Windows XP and even Vista after driver updates were similar in usability to 7, once everything is fully updated and you’ve got the service packs for both OSes.

Windows 8, the OS that came right after Windows 7 in 2012, was quite the mess and we all know it. Windows 8.1 tried to fix up some of the major issues of 8 but by then the grave was already dug. Windows 10 wasn’t necessarily that terrible but it still had tons of bloat such as Candy Crush Saga, TikTok, and.. Edge. Windows 11 deserves almost all the hate it gets nowadays, with it nearly doubling the bloat, shoving tons of more ads in your face, and adding artificial barriers like a TPM 2.0 requirement just to (officially) install it.

Discord

Discord is still okay, but it has definitely faced some enshittification. Nitro, an overly expensive subscription service just to get slightly more than the bare minimum, is shoved in your face daily. It’s also faced a lot of UI changes that I wouldn’t necessarily label as bad but not good, either.

The Electron (boo!) app on Desktop is also insanely buggy and slow on older hardware, like what I use, which is why I prefer clients like Aerochat instead that were built from the ground up. The mobile app is slightly better with these kinds of things, but still.

Skype

Didn’t this get shut down? Whatever. When it still existed, it faced a major redesign or two that really messed things up. It used to just look like your average calling and chatting app on desktop that basically everyone used before Discord, but Microsoft decided to shoot themselves in the foot and redesign the entire UI, making it look like some sort of ripoff business version of itself.

Later in this thing’s life, Microsoft really just wanted to kill this thing without actually killing it. Classic Microsoft. Eventually they made Microsoft Teams as a replacement (who even uses that?) while it was still alive but basically on life support, and then they killed it. Imagine that you’re a king and then you see your replacement also take the spot as king, and now you’re gonna get executed at a later date. That’s essentially what happened.

Everyone uses Discord instead of Microsoft Teams, now, so really executing it on the spot was just plain pointless…

Hotmail/Outlook/Windows Live Mail

What even happened here? The naming scheme basically had an identity crisis. Anyways, I can fill you in on what happened here.

At first, Outlook was called Hotmail, and it didn’t have a thing to do with Microsoft. I can’t really tell you what it was like to use it because I wasn’t born in the 90s. Anyways, sometime in the later 90s, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for some large sum of money. It was still called Hotmail, just with the Microsoft name slapped on and some changes.

Later, it decided to walk on the fence between being called Outlook and being called Windows Live Mail. There are references to Outlook as far back as Windows 98 (in Outlook Express), but also references to Windows Live Mail in Vista, 7, and the free Windows Live Essentials pack back in 2012 and 2009. For now, I’m gonna refer to it as WLM for 2006-2012, and Outlook for any time past that.

The introduction of WLM was when Microsoft really started changing things, making a whole new client and making major branding changes. The last version of WLM, WLM2012, was my personal favorite but most feature-filled version of WLM. It would integrate with your Windows Live (now yucky Microsoft) account optionally and also any of your email accounts to, well, email. There wasn’t really anything bad about it; it looked clean, had a ton of features, and most things tying to accounts or always-online were optional, asides from adding your email account. The newest version still works to this day, with workarounds, of course.

Outlook, though, was really the downfall of this emailing service/product. It began to have forced Microsoft accounts to even use it, and it was an earlier sign of everything becoming always-online and requiring accounts. They then, of course, killed off the last good Outlook email client officially for Windows 10 and 11 earlier in 2024, that is unless you PAY for the email client to get a slightly better one that still really sucks. The newer email clients are just Electron and a cluttered web page interface that you could literally just go to on your typical web browser if you wanted to. At this point, in 2025, it is one of the worse mainstream email client/providers to use. just use Gmail or Yahoo as an email provider and Thunderbird, or yet again, Gmail as a client if you want to not do any complicated workarounds like you need to do to use WLM2012 as a client.

Conclusion

A lot of software and OSes, especially when free, just.. suck, unless they’re open source. Not to sound like some nostalgic nerd, but sometimes old is genuinely gold, depending on where you go. And also, not to sound like an ending sequence I use in almost every blog post, but tune in to the CheeseBlog for more cool tech stuff and insights on modern software. Cya!