Freedom Friday (Now Not On A Tuesday)
Mar. 12th, 2021 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickHad a weird moment where I woke up early for no reason I could see (other than being a touch cold because I'd kicked the covers off), but I managed to get back to sleep with minimal fuss and get up around 10. That was nice. Pretty nice day overall, honestly -- good weather, no work stress, and I made decent progress on my to-do list --
1. Catch up on the OXBox/OXtra videos in my Watch Later and keep up on YouTube subscriptions: Check! For once, managed to get ALL of the OXBox and OXtra videos in one sweep, plus all of the videos in my Subs! So that was nice.
A) Started with the OXBox and OXtra –
I. “Oh No, We Painted Model Pokemon and They Look Awful” – Luke, Ellen, and Producer Jon paint model Pokemon from a UK Pokemon magazine! And, as you might guess from the title, it does not go well. XD Ellen’s Pikachu and Luke’s Charmander both came out looking rather murderous thanks to their red mouths – Luke said the Pikachu looked like it should be making a noise akin to Slenderman, while he admitted his own Charmander made him think of the Joker (before teeth) and Dr. Finklestien (after teeth). Jon’s Togepi came out really nicely, by comparison, though his bum got smudged – but it should be noted that Jon had the least painting to do, as Togepi is partly in a white eggshell. XD They had fun, though, even if poor Luke’s hands got covered in paint thanks to how thickly he was slathering it on Charmander’s undercarriage. XD
II. “The 7 Tallest Things We Couldn't Resist Jumping Off in Videogames” – quick video about favorite tall things to leap off of in video games. From Wayne Tower in the Arkham games; to low-orbit frigates in No Man’s Sky; to the Prydwen in Door Kickers: Action Squad! . . .What, didn’t you hear they renamed Fallout 4? XD Poor Andy, he’s gonna be taking shit for that title bar mistake for a while. . .
III. “7 Games That Begged You to Stop Playing Them” – times when video games either said “time to take a break, gamer!” in the middle, or “you’re done already? Well, good, but have you considered going outside?” at the end. From Cuphead’s barber pole barbershop quartet singing at you what you could do if you took a break, to Flower offering achievements for waiting ten minutes between levels, and a week between playtimes, to Earthbound having the protagonist’s dad call him up every two hours of extended playtime to suggest a break (though you could tell him no way, the fate of the world was at stake). Though of course the topper is Stanley Parable’s “Go Outside” achievement, where you have to play the game once, then wait five years to play it again. (As I said in my comment on the video, for someone who took three years to play a game she bought once (I purchased Fallout 4 in the same Steam sale where I got all of the BioShock games and played those first), maybe that’s achievable.)
IV. “Hitman 3 Mendoza! 3 Ways to Play! CHANDELIER TRAP! WOODCHIPPER! DIANA?! (Part 2 of 2)” – yes, it was time to watch the second half of the “in Argentina, eliminating the people in the way of Diana taking over Providence to dismantle it from the inside” mission! :D Last time the gang took care of Tamara Vidal, the Herald, in a variety of ways – now it’s time to take out the other candidate for Constant, Don Archibald Yates! But who picked what out of that list of ways to kill him in the title?
Andy picked up at the end of the wine tour (still horrified by the fact that he crushed Tamara so THOROUGHLY), only to be dismissed as Corvo as Yates came out of a secret tunnel to fetch Diana for a secret meeting. Ever the master of disguise, he snuck into the wine cellar and took on the identity of the sommelier, Mr. Flowers, before proceeding up to the secret meeting and presenting the most expensive bottle of wine in the world. Unfortunately, said meeting was a vote on “should we kill Diana and make it look like an accident so Yates can become Constant?” and all the other members voted yes. Diana was dragged off by one of Yates’s guards, forcing Andy to sneakily obtain a new mercenary outfit to follow her up. After taking out the other guards around Yates’s office, Diana told 47 to just sit and wait – she’d provide him an opportunity. 47 did so, and Yates came up to gloat before having her murdered –
And Diana STABBED HIM WITH A LETTER OPENER. Andy rushed to knock out the other guard, then Diana allowed 47 to finish Don off before telling him to meet her on the dance floor, to tango their way out of the level. Andy was very pleased to find 47’s most classic suit in Don’s office and went down to meet her in style. Five stars, Silent Assassin. (And just about 47 minutes to complete the level!)
Jane headed from the garden party into the staff area, where she disguised herself first as a waiter, then as a security person. She stumbled around for a bit, looking for ways into the villa itself to attack Don (and trying desperately to avoid noticers as she made her way through all the secret tunnels and the wine cellars), but eventually managed to make it up above ground and into the villa itself. She choked out a mercenary for a fresh disguise, then headed inside to find Don rehearsing a speech. She followed him upstairs as he made a phone call to Edwards, the current Constant, and noticed a very handy chandelier nearby. She lured him over with a coin, shot down the chandelier – boom, accident kill! Her other MO! XD She remained a mercenary, stumbling around a bit more looking for the exit until she found that it was Diana on the dance floor – who didn’t seem put out at dancing with a guard, at least. Three stars, Clean ICA Agent.
Mike managed to sneak around all the security that were now noticers and started looking for ways into the villa, stumbling into the same secret tunnels and wine cellars that Jane did. The moment he discovered Mr. Flowers’s cellar and the wine behind the laser grid, though, he knew he had to have it to whack over his target’s head. XD Not knowing the passcode, he set off the alarm to see if the security would do anything – when they didn’t, he just set off the alarm again and stole it, taking some other bottles of wine for good measure. He fumbled his way around the level, deleting some tapes here, stealing a mercenary outfit and dumping guards over a rail there, before finally finding his way to the villa and its gardens –
And its woodchipper. A Mike plan was hatched, and he hung around the convenient fields of lavender until his target was in a good position. As usual, things didn’t go QUITE according to plan – Mike ended up having to knock out a LOT of people with wine bottles when he was accidentally spotted clocking his target with the super-expensive bottle of wine – but the rampage was worth it, and he got Don into the chipper. XD He then started looking for the exit, realized it was Diana, and risked exposure to meet her on the dance floor in the white tux he’d originally shown up in. One star, Trapmaster – though surely that should be Jane? *shrug* Oh, and he got bonus XP for collecting all the various wine types in the level. XD
B) Then, this evening, we went onto a new video from James Turner, promoting and playing Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition! SEGA sponsored him to give the new updated version on consoles a go, so he dove right in and showed us how he builds hospitals – one room at a time! No, seriously, he basically builds rooms as he needs them – starting with reception, then a general practitioners, then a diagnosis room, then a pharmacy. . . The layout is not always the most intuitive, but it seemed to work out okay for the patients. And things started getting a little more logical once he got himself a second building so he could separate diagnostic work and treatment work. Unfortunately, his treatment methods weren’t the best – right off the bat, we had a couple of people die from bad pills in the pharmacy. XD Dude had to hire a ghost hunter for a janitor to clear out the resultant spooks! On the plus side, he successfully cured a bunch of people from a couple of challenges – a Pandemic (people with pans on their heads) and a sort of generalized “Ward” illness. And he won a couple of awards, mostly showing that his hospital was a good place to work. Fun little video – I think I’ve mainly seen this game and others like it played to cause maximum pain for people (*looks over at Gray*), so it is nice to see someone trying to play it like it’s meant to be played. XD
C) Next was the latest Fun With Shorts – “Spinal Column Structure and Function in Man.” . . .It’s an Encyclopedia Britannica short, what do you want. We got a lot of information on the various forms of the vertebrae in the spine, some unsettling X-Ray pictures, the narrator calling the spine the “axis” of the body a lot, some basic “drink milk and sleep enough and it’ll improve your posture!” nonsense, and Josh making a lot of cracks about that asshole Ted Cruz. Solid eight minutes!
D) Onto the latest Call Me Kevin, which was Kevin deciding to Google himself, after what I assume was an incident on a stream where he googled himself and found himself listed as a musical artist, with clips of him being used in a song on Spotify. O.o Most of the video was taken up with him fact-checking his own Wiki page, and cracking up over the fact that his Sim-self (who was in a Sims video for like four seconds) had his own section and was listed as dead. He even tweeted out the picture to see how people would react. XD There was also a look back at him being a Disney Princess (aka dealing with a butterfly that got into his room while recording), a trip to his IMBD page (yup, he has one! He was surprised too), and the usual silliness about him and RTGame being the same person – which started with Kevin lip-syncing to RTGame’s voice, and ended with Kevin going on “Akinator” and trying to get it to guess him – and getting RTGame. Immediately followed by him showing the clip where RT went on there a few years ago and got Kevin. XD Good times~ And it ended with Kevin admitting that he was too frightened to go on Wattpad and read fanfiction about himself, which is – probably for the best.
E) And then it was time for GrayStillPlays and the return of Descenders! He played this a while back – it’s one of the games where people make him impossible boards, and the conceit is that it’s essentially Wipe Out (or Fall Guys) on a mountain bike. Gray’s course of choice today was a terrible thing of long jumps, fans, and lots of things that spin in such a way as to kill the mountain bikers trying to conquer them. Hell, the very start of the course had shaky platforms that took Gray a few tries to get over! Though the worst bits were clearly trying to bounce across a trio of three slowly spinning balls; trying to make it through spinning discs with holes in each level so you could drop down to the next stretch of course; trying to loop-de-loop through two rapidly-spinning cylinders; and then needing to bike OVER the cylinders, going against the spin. Prime suffering in this episode – I hope he does more of this game!
2. Play some more Alice: Madness Returns (maybe try to get to the next Radula Room?): Check! And I indeed made it to the next Radula Room, exiting Barrelbottom (after getting all the teeth) and going through Dreary Lane Theater, the Octopus’s area (Octopus’s Garden? If it’s not called that, it should be), and Choral Coral with the Bottle Fish. The rhythm game with the music was easier than I remember it being. . .not that I’m really complaining. Left off just before entering the Oyster’s seaweedy beds, since that’s where the third Radula room is located. Up to 29% completion – four more snouts, four more memories, one more Radula room, and three more bottles to find in this level!
3. Organize my various hypnofic AUs into their own document for ease-of-finding: Check – I haven’t actually fully completed this, but I got all of the snippets that were in the “Forgotten Vows Verse” document out and sorted, so I think that’s enough to count this “done!” And I’ve learned a bit about how headers and such work in Writer. Navigational things are happening and I like it. :)
4. Get in a workout: No check today – the OXBox/OXtra stuff took longer than I thought, as did writing up summaries for the to-do list, so I ended up skipping. I have decided not to worry about it, given this whole long weekend is about relaxing.
Additionally:
-->As implied previously, we’ve had a brief streak of warm weather the past couple of days – and as I was home today, we decided to pull out the old cornhole/beanbag game and play a few rounds! Mom hit a winning streak with the first three games, but I managed to pull out a win with some good throws in the fourth, and Dad came back to win the fifth. :) So that was a lot of fun – nice to get a bit of fresh air and sunshine in the backyard too.
-->And queuing on the Valice Multiverse tonight was both easy and difficult -- easy because I had no asks or threads to take care of; difficult because that meant I had to find fandom stuff to reblog. Fortunately I found some good fanart and gif sets to stick in there, so I'm covered for tomorrow's daylight hours over there.
Okay, and now I have the Friday Night Writing Thing to get to, so let me answer my final DW comment and get on that. Oh, and set up the Saturday to-do list:
1. Clean my room
2. Watch the two Plumbella videos in my Watch Later, plus keep up on YouTube Subs
3. Play some Sims 4 (thinking Spookfest in Newcrest Adventures)
4. Continue the HypnoSnippets Organization Project
Since the first item is likely to take up most of the day, I think that's reasonable. Night all!
1. Catch up on the OXBox/OXtra videos in my Watch Later and keep up on YouTube subscriptions: Check! For once, managed to get ALL of the OXBox and OXtra videos in one sweep, plus all of the videos in my Subs! So that was nice.
A) Started with the OXBox and OXtra –
I. “Oh No, We Painted Model Pokemon and They Look Awful” – Luke, Ellen, and Producer Jon paint model Pokemon from a UK Pokemon magazine! And, as you might guess from the title, it does not go well. XD Ellen’s Pikachu and Luke’s Charmander both came out looking rather murderous thanks to their red mouths – Luke said the Pikachu looked like it should be making a noise akin to Slenderman, while he admitted his own Charmander made him think of the Joker (before teeth) and Dr. Finklestien (after teeth). Jon’s Togepi came out really nicely, by comparison, though his bum got smudged – but it should be noted that Jon had the least painting to do, as Togepi is partly in a white eggshell. XD They had fun, though, even if poor Luke’s hands got covered in paint thanks to how thickly he was slathering it on Charmander’s undercarriage. XD
II. “The 7 Tallest Things We Couldn't Resist Jumping Off in Videogames” – quick video about favorite tall things to leap off of in video games. From Wayne Tower in the Arkham games; to low-orbit frigates in No Man’s Sky; to the Prydwen in Door Kickers: Action Squad! . . .What, didn’t you hear they renamed Fallout 4? XD Poor Andy, he’s gonna be taking shit for that title bar mistake for a while. . .
III. “7 Games That Begged You to Stop Playing Them” – times when video games either said “time to take a break, gamer!” in the middle, or “you’re done already? Well, good, but have you considered going outside?” at the end. From Cuphead’s barber pole barbershop quartet singing at you what you could do if you took a break, to Flower offering achievements for waiting ten minutes between levels, and a week between playtimes, to Earthbound having the protagonist’s dad call him up every two hours of extended playtime to suggest a break (though you could tell him no way, the fate of the world was at stake). Though of course the topper is Stanley Parable’s “Go Outside” achievement, where you have to play the game once, then wait five years to play it again. (As I said in my comment on the video, for someone who took three years to play a game she bought once (I purchased Fallout 4 in the same Steam sale where I got all of the BioShock games and played those first), maybe that’s achievable.)
IV. “Hitman 3 Mendoza! 3 Ways to Play! CHANDELIER TRAP! WOODCHIPPER! DIANA?! (Part 2 of 2)” – yes, it was time to watch the second half of the “in Argentina, eliminating the people in the way of Diana taking over Providence to dismantle it from the inside” mission! :D Last time the gang took care of Tamara Vidal, the Herald, in a variety of ways – now it’s time to take out the other candidate for Constant, Don Archibald Yates! But who picked what out of that list of ways to kill him in the title?
Andy picked up at the end of the wine tour (still horrified by the fact that he crushed Tamara so THOROUGHLY), only to be dismissed as Corvo as Yates came out of a secret tunnel to fetch Diana for a secret meeting. Ever the master of disguise, he snuck into the wine cellar and took on the identity of the sommelier, Mr. Flowers, before proceeding up to the secret meeting and presenting the most expensive bottle of wine in the world. Unfortunately, said meeting was a vote on “should we kill Diana and make it look like an accident so Yates can become Constant?” and all the other members voted yes. Diana was dragged off by one of Yates’s guards, forcing Andy to sneakily obtain a new mercenary outfit to follow her up. After taking out the other guards around Yates’s office, Diana told 47 to just sit and wait – she’d provide him an opportunity. 47 did so, and Yates came up to gloat before having her murdered –
And Diana STABBED HIM WITH A LETTER OPENER. Andy rushed to knock out the other guard, then Diana allowed 47 to finish Don off before telling him to meet her on the dance floor, to tango their way out of the level. Andy was very pleased to find 47’s most classic suit in Don’s office and went down to meet her in style. Five stars, Silent Assassin. (And just about 47 minutes to complete the level!)
Jane headed from the garden party into the staff area, where she disguised herself first as a waiter, then as a security person. She stumbled around for a bit, looking for ways into the villa itself to attack Don (and trying desperately to avoid noticers as she made her way through all the secret tunnels and the wine cellars), but eventually managed to make it up above ground and into the villa itself. She choked out a mercenary for a fresh disguise, then headed inside to find Don rehearsing a speech. She followed him upstairs as he made a phone call to Edwards, the current Constant, and noticed a very handy chandelier nearby. She lured him over with a coin, shot down the chandelier – boom, accident kill! Her other MO! XD She remained a mercenary, stumbling around a bit more looking for the exit until she found that it was Diana on the dance floor – who didn’t seem put out at dancing with a guard, at least. Three stars, Clean ICA Agent.
Mike managed to sneak around all the security that were now noticers and started looking for ways into the villa, stumbling into the same secret tunnels and wine cellars that Jane did. The moment he discovered Mr. Flowers’s cellar and the wine behind the laser grid, though, he knew he had to have it to whack over his target’s head. XD Not knowing the passcode, he set off the alarm to see if the security would do anything – when they didn’t, he just set off the alarm again and stole it, taking some other bottles of wine for good measure. He fumbled his way around the level, deleting some tapes here, stealing a mercenary outfit and dumping guards over a rail there, before finally finding his way to the villa and its gardens –
And its woodchipper. A Mike plan was hatched, and he hung around the convenient fields of lavender until his target was in a good position. As usual, things didn’t go QUITE according to plan – Mike ended up having to knock out a LOT of people with wine bottles when he was accidentally spotted clocking his target with the super-expensive bottle of wine – but the rampage was worth it, and he got Don into the chipper. XD He then started looking for the exit, realized it was Diana, and risked exposure to meet her on the dance floor in the white tux he’d originally shown up in. One star, Trapmaster – though surely that should be Jane? *shrug* Oh, and he got bonus XP for collecting all the various wine types in the level. XD
B) Then, this evening, we went onto a new video from James Turner, promoting and playing Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition! SEGA sponsored him to give the new updated version on consoles a go, so he dove right in and showed us how he builds hospitals – one room at a time! No, seriously, he basically builds rooms as he needs them – starting with reception, then a general practitioners, then a diagnosis room, then a pharmacy. . . The layout is not always the most intuitive, but it seemed to work out okay for the patients. And things started getting a little more logical once he got himself a second building so he could separate diagnostic work and treatment work. Unfortunately, his treatment methods weren’t the best – right off the bat, we had a couple of people die from bad pills in the pharmacy. XD Dude had to hire a ghost hunter for a janitor to clear out the resultant spooks! On the plus side, he successfully cured a bunch of people from a couple of challenges – a Pandemic (people with pans on their heads) and a sort of generalized “Ward” illness. And he won a couple of awards, mostly showing that his hospital was a good place to work. Fun little video – I think I’ve mainly seen this game and others like it played to cause maximum pain for people (*looks over at Gray*), so it is nice to see someone trying to play it like it’s meant to be played. XD
C) Next was the latest Fun With Shorts – “Spinal Column Structure and Function in Man.” . . .It’s an Encyclopedia Britannica short, what do you want. We got a lot of information on the various forms of the vertebrae in the spine, some unsettling X-Ray pictures, the narrator calling the spine the “axis” of the body a lot, some basic “drink milk and sleep enough and it’ll improve your posture!” nonsense, and Josh making a lot of cracks about that asshole Ted Cruz. Solid eight minutes!
D) Onto the latest Call Me Kevin, which was Kevin deciding to Google himself, after what I assume was an incident on a stream where he googled himself and found himself listed as a musical artist, with clips of him being used in a song on Spotify. O.o Most of the video was taken up with him fact-checking his own Wiki page, and cracking up over the fact that his Sim-self (who was in a Sims video for like four seconds) had his own section and was listed as dead. He even tweeted out the picture to see how people would react. XD There was also a look back at him being a Disney Princess (aka dealing with a butterfly that got into his room while recording), a trip to his IMBD page (yup, he has one! He was surprised too), and the usual silliness about him and RTGame being the same person – which started with Kevin lip-syncing to RTGame’s voice, and ended with Kevin going on “Akinator” and trying to get it to guess him – and getting RTGame. Immediately followed by him showing the clip where RT went on there a few years ago and got Kevin. XD Good times~ And it ended with Kevin admitting that he was too frightened to go on Wattpad and read fanfiction about himself, which is – probably for the best.
E) And then it was time for GrayStillPlays and the return of Descenders! He played this a while back – it’s one of the games where people make him impossible boards, and the conceit is that it’s essentially Wipe Out (or Fall Guys) on a mountain bike. Gray’s course of choice today was a terrible thing of long jumps, fans, and lots of things that spin in such a way as to kill the mountain bikers trying to conquer them. Hell, the very start of the course had shaky platforms that took Gray a few tries to get over! Though the worst bits were clearly trying to bounce across a trio of three slowly spinning balls; trying to make it through spinning discs with holes in each level so you could drop down to the next stretch of course; trying to loop-de-loop through two rapidly-spinning cylinders; and then needing to bike OVER the cylinders, going against the spin. Prime suffering in this episode – I hope he does more of this game!
2. Play some more Alice: Madness Returns (maybe try to get to the next Radula Room?): Check! And I indeed made it to the next Radula Room, exiting Barrelbottom (after getting all the teeth) and going through Dreary Lane Theater, the Octopus’s area (Octopus’s Garden? If it’s not called that, it should be), and Choral Coral with the Bottle Fish. The rhythm game with the music was easier than I remember it being. . .not that I’m really complaining. Left off just before entering the Oyster’s seaweedy beds, since that’s where the third Radula room is located. Up to 29% completion – four more snouts, four more memories, one more Radula room, and three more bottles to find in this level!
3. Organize my various hypnofic AUs into their own document for ease-of-finding: Check – I haven’t actually fully completed this, but I got all of the snippets that were in the “Forgotten Vows Verse” document out and sorted, so I think that’s enough to count this “done!” And I’ve learned a bit about how headers and such work in Writer. Navigational things are happening and I like it. :)
4. Get in a workout: No check today – the OXBox/OXtra stuff took longer than I thought, as did writing up summaries for the to-do list, so I ended up skipping. I have decided not to worry about it, given this whole long weekend is about relaxing.
Additionally:
-->As implied previously, we’ve had a brief streak of warm weather the past couple of days – and as I was home today, we decided to pull out the old cornhole/beanbag game and play a few rounds! Mom hit a winning streak with the first three games, but I managed to pull out a win with some good throws in the fourth, and Dad came back to win the fifth. :) So that was a lot of fun – nice to get a bit of fresh air and sunshine in the backyard too.
-->And queuing on the Valice Multiverse tonight was both easy and difficult -- easy because I had no asks or threads to take care of; difficult because that meant I had to find fandom stuff to reblog. Fortunately I found some good fanart and gif sets to stick in there, so I'm covered for tomorrow's daylight hours over there.
Okay, and now I have the Friday Night Writing Thing to get to, so let me answer my final DW comment and get on that. Oh, and set up the Saturday to-do list:
1. Clean my room
2. Watch the two Plumbella videos in my Watch Later, plus keep up on YouTube Subs
3. Play some Sims 4 (thinking Spookfest in Newcrest Adventures)
4. Continue the HypnoSnippets Organization Project
Since the first item is likely to take up most of the day, I think that's reasonable. Night all!
