Last Sunday Before Back To The Grind
Jan. 3rd, 2021 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickLast day of freedom before I have to readjust back to my work schedule. So, how'd I do on the old to-do list I set up?
1. Make muffins for breakfast now that I'm going back to work on Monday: Check! Made them this evening, after supper. They came out very nicely, and I’m now covered for twelve workdays. Om nom.
2. Catch up with Call Me Kevin tomorrow on YouTube: Check! In order, we had:
1. Yesterday’s offering, Kevin’s annual episode of Fable: The Lost Chapters! And the lost knowledge, with Kevin struggling to remember how you open your inventory and getting the map stuck on the screen and whatnot. XD This is what happens when you only play a game once a year! His extremely evil Jim Pickens managed to accomplish a few things, though – getting a new hero title (Arseface) and a new back tattoo; rescuing an archaeologist from the undead (mostly by running past them and letting NPC guards do the work – he attempted to do so naked, but had to give that up after dying and getting revived multiple times); getting a set of armor for a skeleton to open a way further down into the underworld – and then abandoning that quest, giving himself a makeover to be more attractive (including a Fu Manchu mustache), and getting married. Multiple times. To women who were often already married to someone else. XD Good year’s work! Sure, Picken's mom is still in prison, but that can wait until 2022. . .
2. And today’s offering, Rust! Which – uh, I think is a co-op survival game? That’s what it looks like, anyway. . . Kevin plopped himself into a map as your average rando sleeping by a lighthouse, aaaand got killed. Repeatedly. Like, a lot. (Okay, maybe it’s a PvP game. . .) Kevin eventually gave up on being repeatedly murdered and tried a different server – where he got stuck inside a car, learned that no one was interested in making friends, and died to a chicken. Fortunately, third server was the charm – sort of. First person he met hit him with a rock, but let him stumble away alive, and he survived long enough after that to explore a mine, get loads of good loot, and start making a house and a furnace! And then some asshole with a gun and proper armor killed him. And then killed him again because reasons (and apparently because he forgot to loot him the first time). Kevin fortunately didn’t lose his house, and was eventually able to gather enough resources to complete the roof, make a campfire and a new furnace, and even a nice sturdy door! Poor guy is super dehydrated from all this, but at least he has a good base now! And we know there are friendly people on the server! Problem is, none of them know HE’S friendly, given his mike was apparently off through this whole episode. XD But Kevin in the comments said he fixed that for the next video, so yay! :D
3. Play Fallout 4 and figure out why I'm crashing when I try to get into Concord: Check – but in a very frustrating way. The steps I went through to check this off are thus:
1. Open up Steam and Vortex, disable all my most recent mods/downloads (excepting the CWSS update I downloaded today), restart from my “clean save” in Vault 111, speedrun down to Concord. No crash, I was able to go in and trigger the raiders attacking Preston.
2. Start re-enabling mods, starting with an update to a mod that was previously loaded in. Use the autosave that the game created when I first reached the Commonwealth. Reach Concord, experience game crash.
3. Repeat Step #2 with a couple of different mods four times.
4. Have thought with the mod that creates a new “Overboss” terminal after Nuka World is cleared out and lets you recruit new settlers and gives parks to different factions – should I really be trusting this auto-save? There's memes about not doing so in the fandom. . .
5. Load a slightly-earlier save from before I actually got on the elevator to leave the vault, make my own hard save, go down to Concord. Game – does not crash.
6. Put back in the Vault-Tec Overhaul Redux update, try again from that save. Game does not crash – I can even fight the riders and finish the “Out of Time” quest.
7. Have nasty thought, reenable ALL mods, use that save to speedrun into Concord.
Game does not crash. Game lets me fight raiders and complete “Out of Time.” Game even helpfully creates a Garbage Squirrel from my latest mod that I can fight and kill, no problem.
8. Realize with some irritation it’s my save, not my mods.
9. Wonder where the fuck I restart from – I obviously have earlier saves, but I don’t know where they corrupted?
9a. Also wonder if this is the sort of thing that “canary save file monitor” mod would have helped with.
So yeah – it appears the issue is with the save I made right before heading down to Concord. I’m gonna have to experiment next weekend, see where I can restart from that won’t lead to a crash. (Half-tempted just to take it from the vault again. . .cripes, I’m gonna play the opening tutorial so often I’m going to have it MEMORIZED.)
4. Write something: Check, if only because I didn’t specify writing on a story – worked some more on my updates to The Valice Multiverse and the verses available to play in. Think I’ve nailed down the “template” I want to use for writing up all these verse descriptions, and I’ve gotten the two hardest, The Forgotten Vows Verse and The Secundus Verse, out of the way. Now I just have to fit the remaining ones – Catch Us If You Can, Londerland Bloodlines, Cuddlepile, The Inevitable High School AU, Aperture Wage Slave, Fallout of Darkness, The Technicolor Phase, and Somewhere In New York – into those slots, and actually get them up on the blog. That’s getting finished next weekend, definitely. But at least I’ve made a start.
5. Get in a workout: Check! Got on the treadmill today, and got a little farther along in Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I caught back up with Grills taking on the raiders outside of Poseidon Energy – his Martyr gear ended up kicking in, but he managed to take down all the raiders and their dog. And then it was into the basement of the place to clear out the mirelurks, the robots, and the last raiders (led by Cutty) before finally getting the Endurance bobblehead. He considered a level up, then decided to save it as all the good stuff unlocks at level 50, and he was at that moment level 49. So instead he teleported home and made a few upgrades to his living area – a new mannequin to display his Atom Cats gear, and a new weapon board to put up a few of his legendaries and uniques that he doesn’t really use anymore (such as “Kellogg’s Dead,” Kellogg’s special pistol). This finished off episode 35, and I went straight into episode 36, which Jon said was for doing stuff around the Boston area. Such as heading over to Cambridge Polymer Labs and becoming a temporary “employee” (as per Molly the Mr. Handy) to do the quest there. (Grills became a salesman, getting a new suit and whatnot – Jon was intrigued by this, as a previous playthrough had him get a scientist job, and he thinks his higher Charisma with Grills may have affected the outcome.) He killed the ghouls, finished off the experimental coating for the power armor, and took his bonus from Molly before heading out to Trinity Tower to finally rescue Rex and Strong! Which was easier than he expected – instead of spawning in the super-tough Super Mutants he was expecting for his level, the game stuck with the basics – and didn’t even spawn in anybody on the first couple of floors, which was weird! But anyway – he successfully rescued the pair, picked up the Melee Bobblehead, and sent Strong to join the others at Hangman’s Alley. From there he went to Goodneighbor to see what was up with Cedric – left him having wrangled the information that yes, Cedric was sent there by Bill to hire someone to take out “Roger,” only for Cedric to decide “screw it, I’ll just stay here” because this whole enterprise is more than he bargained for. He is willing to warn Grills that Bill might be willing to go pretty far to get rid of Roger, though. . .
6. Watch Jon's latest Fallout 4 YOLO episode: And check! Today was a day all about laying the groundwork for Finalley’s future successes in the wasteland. And checking out Preston’s sweet moves on the pommel horse. XD Anyway, to sum up Finalley’s latest adventures in the Commonwealth:
1. Ran into Cricket the guns and ammo vendor outside Diamond City – picked up some much-needed ammo and a surprisingly nice laser sniper rifle she had on her
2. Did gear upgrades at Diamond City (though he had to run around getting more leather to make his new armor pocketed) and basically set himself up so it looks like Finalley has a robot arm XD
3. Grabbed the Fat Man off the settler who snagged it to go against the raiders last episode, put that and his old combat rifle in a locker on a roof the settlers can’t access, along with the power armor (also discovered that Finalley had no fusion cells for her nifty new gun at base, because Jon may have left them at the Castle last time)
4. Traversed the Wasteland setting up artillery at a few key points (Oberland Station, Taffington Boathouse, and Tenpines Bluff – and, in a moment of perfect comedic timing, a Super Mutant Suicider blew himself up right next to Starlight Drive-In just as Jon was saying it was perfectly quiet and safe there XD)
5. Used the artillery at Tenpines to slaughter the raiders (including Boomer, the guy in power armor with a Fat Man) at Outpost Zimonja, and set up the settlement for both the Railroad and the Minutemen
6. Picked a ton of hubflowers on his adventures
7. Turned in his quests for the Minutemen and the Railroad (and was deeply relieved to find the latter didn’t try to send him to DLC Land for the first “Jackpot” mission, so he has a chance of getting his beloved ballistic weave)
8. Went back to Diamond City to explain his three-part plan for dealing with problems in this run. One – if it is outside and within range of artillery, shell it from orbit. Two – if it is inside and/or out of range of artillery, use lots and lots of Psychojet to kill it with guns (and he promptly took two level-ups of Chem Resistant to make sure he never got addicted). Three – if it can be reasoned with via speech checks, make lots and lots of Grape Mentats (which happen to use hubflowers) to pair with his Charisma-raising gear to help him pass them. His base Charisma is three; with his Charisma-raising clothing, it’s seven. Add the Grape Mentats, and it goes up to twelve, which SHOULD get him past even red speech checks, the hardest kind.
So yeah – Finalley is well on her way to becoming the biggest badass in the Commonwealth, and I am here for it. :D Really looking forward to what he has planned for next week!
Not bad at all! :D And I even found the time for some additional YouTubery:
A) An old speedrun of Untitled Goose Game – from the first honk to the beginning of the end credits, the game was completed in roughly eight and a half minutes! Mostly because of the runner finding the ability to glitch straight to the pub via the river that runs through the town and some careful easing of the goose up the bridge. . .and then more glitching through a locked gate meant that none of the villagers could opposed the goose once it got to the bell. XD Best part is, this run was apparently beaten really quickly as people found new and even quicker glitches! Apparently the latest record for beating it is – *checks the leaderboard on the official Speedrun website* Holy crap, two minutes and eight seconds! By this person going by Vitek. . .
B) Yeah, I had to find their Goose speedrun too. XD This runner has MASTERED the glitch that lets the goose clip through gates and walls, and climb up things via quickly putting down and picking up items. The most amusing part is, this is the world where the goose did the least damage – it didn’t even need to tear down the castle model to get its beautiful golden bell! Any% glitches-allowed speedruns are the “good end” for the village! XD (Also, learned something about the pub – that gap by the gate I was just using to hide from the couple who own it? Yeah, turns out that’s a tunnel into the back area. *facepalm* And here’s me waiting for the delivery person to keep opening the gate! Next time. . .)
So that was fun. :) I'm just finishing up the last bits I need to take care of before bed now -- namely some tumblr comments, Valice Multiverse queue, and my DW comment of the night. Hoping I don't have too much trouble trying to get to sleep, now that I have to go to bed earlier again. (Then again, I've been having trouble getting to sleep for the past couple of nights anyway. . .mind's been racing.) Oh, tomorrow's likely to be LOADS of fun after two weeks off. Meeeh. At least keeping busy should make the day go by fast. . .and I do have a pretty close three-day weekend to look forward to with MLK Jr Day. Of course, THEN I have to plan taking time off because then I don't have any actual holidays until the long Easter weekend at the beginning of April. . .
Getting ahead of myself here. Gotta go and take care of my DW comment and wrap up for the night. Sleep tight, all! Wish me luck tomorrow!
1. Make muffins for breakfast now that I'm going back to work on Monday: Check! Made them this evening, after supper. They came out very nicely, and I’m now covered for twelve workdays. Om nom.
2. Catch up with Call Me Kevin tomorrow on YouTube: Check! In order, we had:
1. Yesterday’s offering, Kevin’s annual episode of Fable: The Lost Chapters! And the lost knowledge, with Kevin struggling to remember how you open your inventory and getting the map stuck on the screen and whatnot. XD This is what happens when you only play a game once a year! His extremely evil Jim Pickens managed to accomplish a few things, though – getting a new hero title (Arseface) and a new back tattoo; rescuing an archaeologist from the undead (mostly by running past them and letting NPC guards do the work – he attempted to do so naked, but had to give that up after dying and getting revived multiple times); getting a set of armor for a skeleton to open a way further down into the underworld – and then abandoning that quest, giving himself a makeover to be more attractive (including a Fu Manchu mustache), and getting married. Multiple times. To women who were often already married to someone else. XD Good year’s work! Sure, Picken's mom is still in prison, but that can wait until 2022. . .
2. And today’s offering, Rust! Which – uh, I think is a co-op survival game? That’s what it looks like, anyway. . . Kevin plopped himself into a map as your average rando sleeping by a lighthouse, aaaand got killed. Repeatedly. Like, a lot. (Okay, maybe it’s a PvP game. . .) Kevin eventually gave up on being repeatedly murdered and tried a different server – where he got stuck inside a car, learned that no one was interested in making friends, and died to a chicken. Fortunately, third server was the charm – sort of. First person he met hit him with a rock, but let him stumble away alive, and he survived long enough after that to explore a mine, get loads of good loot, and start making a house and a furnace! And then some asshole with a gun and proper armor killed him. And then killed him again because reasons (and apparently because he forgot to loot him the first time). Kevin fortunately didn’t lose his house, and was eventually able to gather enough resources to complete the roof, make a campfire and a new furnace, and even a nice sturdy door! Poor guy is super dehydrated from all this, but at least he has a good base now! And we know there are friendly people on the server! Problem is, none of them know HE’S friendly, given his mike was apparently off through this whole episode. XD But Kevin in the comments said he fixed that for the next video, so yay! :D
3. Play Fallout 4 and figure out why I'm crashing when I try to get into Concord: Check – but in a very frustrating way. The steps I went through to check this off are thus:
1. Open up Steam and Vortex, disable all my most recent mods/downloads (excepting the CWSS update I downloaded today), restart from my “clean save” in Vault 111, speedrun down to Concord. No crash, I was able to go in and trigger the raiders attacking Preston.
2. Start re-enabling mods, starting with an update to a mod that was previously loaded in. Use the autosave that the game created when I first reached the Commonwealth. Reach Concord, experience game crash.
3. Repeat Step #2 with a couple of different mods four times.
4. Have thought with the mod that creates a new “Overboss” terminal after Nuka World is cleared out and lets you recruit new settlers and gives parks to different factions – should I really be trusting this auto-save? There's memes about not doing so in the fandom. . .
5. Load a slightly-earlier save from before I actually got on the elevator to leave the vault, make my own hard save, go down to Concord. Game – does not crash.
6. Put back in the Vault-Tec Overhaul Redux update, try again from that save. Game does not crash – I can even fight the riders and finish the “Out of Time” quest.
7. Have nasty thought, reenable ALL mods, use that save to speedrun into Concord.
Game does not crash. Game lets me fight raiders and complete “Out of Time.” Game even helpfully creates a Garbage Squirrel from my latest mod that I can fight and kill, no problem.
8. Realize with some irritation it’s my save, not my mods.
9. Wonder where the fuck I restart from – I obviously have earlier saves, but I don’t know where they corrupted?
9a. Also wonder if this is the sort of thing that “canary save file monitor” mod would have helped with.
So yeah – it appears the issue is with the save I made right before heading down to Concord. I’m gonna have to experiment next weekend, see where I can restart from that won’t lead to a crash. (Half-tempted just to take it from the vault again. . .cripes, I’m gonna play the opening tutorial so often I’m going to have it MEMORIZED.)
4. Write something: Check, if only because I didn’t specify writing on a story – worked some more on my updates to The Valice Multiverse and the verses available to play in. Think I’ve nailed down the “template” I want to use for writing up all these verse descriptions, and I’ve gotten the two hardest, The Forgotten Vows Verse and The Secundus Verse, out of the way. Now I just have to fit the remaining ones – Catch Us If You Can, Londerland Bloodlines, Cuddlepile, The Inevitable High School AU, Aperture Wage Slave, Fallout of Darkness, The Technicolor Phase, and Somewhere In New York – into those slots, and actually get them up on the blog. That’s getting finished next weekend, definitely. But at least I’ve made a start.
5. Get in a workout: Check! Got on the treadmill today, and got a little farther along in Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I caught back up with Grills taking on the raiders outside of Poseidon Energy – his Martyr gear ended up kicking in, but he managed to take down all the raiders and their dog. And then it was into the basement of the place to clear out the mirelurks, the robots, and the last raiders (led by Cutty) before finally getting the Endurance bobblehead. He considered a level up, then decided to save it as all the good stuff unlocks at level 50, and he was at that moment level 49. So instead he teleported home and made a few upgrades to his living area – a new mannequin to display his Atom Cats gear, and a new weapon board to put up a few of his legendaries and uniques that he doesn’t really use anymore (such as “Kellogg’s Dead,” Kellogg’s special pistol). This finished off episode 35, and I went straight into episode 36, which Jon said was for doing stuff around the Boston area. Such as heading over to Cambridge Polymer Labs and becoming a temporary “employee” (as per Molly the Mr. Handy) to do the quest there. (Grills became a salesman, getting a new suit and whatnot – Jon was intrigued by this, as a previous playthrough had him get a scientist job, and he thinks his higher Charisma with Grills may have affected the outcome.) He killed the ghouls, finished off the experimental coating for the power armor, and took his bonus from Molly before heading out to Trinity Tower to finally rescue Rex and Strong! Which was easier than he expected – instead of spawning in the super-tough Super Mutants he was expecting for his level, the game stuck with the basics – and didn’t even spawn in anybody on the first couple of floors, which was weird! But anyway – he successfully rescued the pair, picked up the Melee Bobblehead, and sent Strong to join the others at Hangman’s Alley. From there he went to Goodneighbor to see what was up with Cedric – left him having wrangled the information that yes, Cedric was sent there by Bill to hire someone to take out “Roger,” only for Cedric to decide “screw it, I’ll just stay here” because this whole enterprise is more than he bargained for. He is willing to warn Grills that Bill might be willing to go pretty far to get rid of Roger, though. . .
6. Watch Jon's latest Fallout 4 YOLO episode: And check! Today was a day all about laying the groundwork for Finalley’s future successes in the wasteland. And checking out Preston’s sweet moves on the pommel horse. XD Anyway, to sum up Finalley’s latest adventures in the Commonwealth:
1. Ran into Cricket the guns and ammo vendor outside Diamond City – picked up some much-needed ammo and a surprisingly nice laser sniper rifle she had on her
2. Did gear upgrades at Diamond City (though he had to run around getting more leather to make his new armor pocketed) and basically set himself up so it looks like Finalley has a robot arm XD
3. Grabbed the Fat Man off the settler who snagged it to go against the raiders last episode, put that and his old combat rifle in a locker on a roof the settlers can’t access, along with the power armor (also discovered that Finalley had no fusion cells for her nifty new gun at base, because Jon may have left them at the Castle last time)
4. Traversed the Wasteland setting up artillery at a few key points (Oberland Station, Taffington Boathouse, and Tenpines Bluff – and, in a moment of perfect comedic timing, a Super Mutant Suicider blew himself up right next to Starlight Drive-In just as Jon was saying it was perfectly quiet and safe there XD)
5. Used the artillery at Tenpines to slaughter the raiders (including Boomer, the guy in power armor with a Fat Man) at Outpost Zimonja, and set up the settlement for both the Railroad and the Minutemen
6. Picked a ton of hubflowers on his adventures
7. Turned in his quests for the Minutemen and the Railroad (and was deeply relieved to find the latter didn’t try to send him to DLC Land for the first “Jackpot” mission, so he has a chance of getting his beloved ballistic weave)
8. Went back to Diamond City to explain his three-part plan for dealing with problems in this run. One – if it is outside and within range of artillery, shell it from orbit. Two – if it is inside and/or out of range of artillery, use lots and lots of Psychojet to kill it with guns (and he promptly took two level-ups of Chem Resistant to make sure he never got addicted). Three – if it can be reasoned with via speech checks, make lots and lots of Grape Mentats (which happen to use hubflowers) to pair with his Charisma-raising gear to help him pass them. His base Charisma is three; with his Charisma-raising clothing, it’s seven. Add the Grape Mentats, and it goes up to twelve, which SHOULD get him past even red speech checks, the hardest kind.
So yeah – Finalley is well on her way to becoming the biggest badass in the Commonwealth, and I am here for it. :D Really looking forward to what he has planned for next week!
Not bad at all! :D And I even found the time for some additional YouTubery:
A) An old speedrun of Untitled Goose Game – from the first honk to the beginning of the end credits, the game was completed in roughly eight and a half minutes! Mostly because of the runner finding the ability to glitch straight to the pub via the river that runs through the town and some careful easing of the goose up the bridge. . .and then more glitching through a locked gate meant that none of the villagers could opposed the goose once it got to the bell. XD Best part is, this run was apparently beaten really quickly as people found new and even quicker glitches! Apparently the latest record for beating it is – *checks the leaderboard on the official Speedrun website* Holy crap, two minutes and eight seconds! By this person going by Vitek. . .
B) Yeah, I had to find their Goose speedrun too. XD This runner has MASTERED the glitch that lets the goose clip through gates and walls, and climb up things via quickly putting down and picking up items. The most amusing part is, this is the world where the goose did the least damage – it didn’t even need to tear down the castle model to get its beautiful golden bell! Any% glitches-allowed speedruns are the “good end” for the village! XD (Also, learned something about the pub – that gap by the gate I was just using to hide from the couple who own it? Yeah, turns out that’s a tunnel into the back area. *facepalm* And here’s me waiting for the delivery person to keep opening the gate! Next time. . .)
So that was fun. :) I'm just finishing up the last bits I need to take care of before bed now -- namely some tumblr comments, Valice Multiverse queue, and my DW comment of the night. Hoping I don't have too much trouble trying to get to sleep, now that I have to go to bed earlier again. (Then again, I've been having trouble getting to sleep for the past couple of nights anyway. . .mind's been racing.) Oh, tomorrow's likely to be LOADS of fun after two weeks off. Meeeh. At least keeping busy should make the day go by fast. . .and I do have a pretty close three-day weekend to look forward to with MLK Jr Day. Of course, THEN I have to plan taking time off because then I don't have any actual holidays until the long Easter weekend at the beginning of April. . .
Getting ahead of myself here. Gotta go and take care of my DW comment and wrap up for the night. Sleep tight, all! Wish me luck tomorrow!
