Last Day Of Freedom
Mar. 15th, 2021 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickAnd I'm already getting the "I do NOT want to go back to work" vibes. :( Not helped by the fact we're slowly but surely coming up on that time of the month for me. . .I'll have to make sure I have a pad in my bag, just in case. But for what it's worth, I had a pretty nice Monday off. The weather outside was frightful -- -3F with the wind chill at one point! -- but I did well on the old to-do list:
1. Keep up on YouTube Subscriptions: Check – very easy to do, given I only had two videos in it. Plenty of time for bonus content, though –
A) With nothing in the Watch Later, I was dependent on the Recommended at first for “Bonus YouTube Content” TM – and it delivered by providing a video from Anna Rudolf, aka Call Me Kevin’s girlfriend! I actually ended up watching two from her:
I. Anna and Kevin played chess on Chess.com together, with one person declaring which kind of piece to move and the other actually making the move. It was actually pretty good – Anna, being a chess champion, was obviously better-suited to being the “brains” of the operation, but she had nothing but praise for how far Kevin’s come in figuring out the game. Highlights included Kevin doing silly “songs” about chess in-between matches (once via the medium of spinning around in his chair and holding his pick), and Kevin panicking whenever Anna said “sure” in response to one of his moves, because apparently he’s learned that’s what she says when she’s trying to be diplomatic about him having made a not-so-great move. XD They’re honestly really cute together too, I love it. :)
II. Anna and Kevin played Among Us together with friends, and Kevin, as the impostor, vented right in front of Anna at the beginning of the game. Now, you’d think that what happened was either a) the quickest “impostor!” ever, or b) Anna playing “third impostor” and not reporting it because he’s her boyfriend.
The actual answer is c) Anna agonized over reporting it, and when she eventually did, Kevin managed to convince her that his idiocy was a glitch. Which she was willing to believe because she’d experienced glitches in the game before. Hilariously, she then ended up getting suspicious of her friend Jay, who kept following her around – and Kevin used that in a “big brain” play by killing someone in front of Jay (after they got his fellow impostor) and then reporting and claiming Jay killed the person. And since they were the only three left, well. . . Jay being sus in Anna’s eyes ended up handing Kevin the win. XD Oh man. . . The best part was Kevin confessing that he totally vented and Anna cracking up over her own gullibility. XD Good times.
B) Then, after Sims, I stumbled across OXBox’s latest video – “7 Weirdest Driving Games That Defy Explanation!” Naturally, this one was hosted by Mike. XD Entries included Environ-Bear 3000 (a game about a bear driving a car with one paw, loading up on fish and berries before the start of winter in five minutes); Drive Girls (part driving game, part third-person hack-and-slash with lovely scantily-dressed ladies who transform into cars in between battling monsters); Multi Level 4 Car Parking Simulator (a mobile game all about parking your car in various parking spaces – and if you want more, get the sequel about pulling up to gas station pumps right); and everyone’s favorite classic, Big Rigs Over The Road Racing (the completely broken game about racing big rig trucks – apparently they figured out that the fastest you can go in reverse is twenty times the speed of light, at which point you hit every checkpoint on the map simultaneously and auto-win). Good, strange stuff!
C) Evening brought me to Call Me Kevin and the alpha version of The Emperor’s Own, a game about an alternate version of the early-19th-century Russian Empire. (Kevin apparently thought it was a total conversion mod of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but the comments insist it’s its own thing.) Here, you are young Alex, with the Russian military, going out to investigate sightings of werewolves and witches in the countryside with two friends. Kevin, of course, played his Alex as a credulous, murderous fool, who happily declared a man who had clearly been ripped apart by something a suicide and demanded that everyone involved in the whole mess be slaughtered. Though, to be fair, the villagers were VERY eager to attack him and his buddies almost the moment they arrived. . . Also, the whole thing was actually the result of some weird wolf death cult started by a former Colonel hooking everyone on magic mushrooms. If this is just the first level, the full game should be something else once it comes out. XD
D) Then it was over to GrayStillPlays and more GTA V stunt races! Today’s offering was a super long board with super long tubes and super-long wall rides! Basically it was a test of endurance – can you make it through all the obstacles in this tube? Can you keep going up and up and up this wall ride? Do you have the STAMINA to spit in the face of failure again and again as you do transfer after transfer after transfer? And the answer is – YES, BABY! Gray whined about it a lot, as is his wont, but he also completed the ride, as is ALSO his wont! w0000! :D He’s still alive, baby, he’s still alive!
E) And, since I had a little extra time, I went over to The Epic Nate and watched a pair of videos about strange and interesting things existing outside the map in Fallout 4 and its DLCs – both boundary breaks and inaccessible cells. From a fully-explorable, lootable island just off the coast of the Island in Far Harbor normally behind an invisible wall, to an unfinished dungeon with raiders by the Shamrock Taphouse, to developer testing room “Claraland” with all sorts of fun little tableaus, to two TV reporters hanging out in a variation of the Sole Survivor’s house, to a personal fallout shelter never implemented, to the famous QA Smoke room (aka the “God Room” as it contains literally everything in the game), FO4 has a LOT going on behind the black for the players! Interesting stuff. :)
2. Play some Sims 4 (Chill Save, see if I can get up to Victor and Alice's wedding): Check, though I didn’t quite make it to this Victor and Alice getting married. I did get through Love Day with them, though! After getting all of their classes out of the way, they went on a nice date to the Municipal Muses museum in Willow Creek (where this Victor and Alice live), which included a visit to the actual museum, rollerskating in the nearby pop-up rink, and having some free barbecue courtesy of this one guy who would not stop cooking. XD Saturday was a much quieter day, as I had them focus mainly on their classwork – Alice has finished fixing the presentation she has to do and done the first draft of her term paper, while Victor has done the first draft of both his term papers and gotten started on his own presentation. They keep pretty busy with this college stuff! I made it to Sunday morning, and chose to spend the last of my time in the game fixing up Magnolia Blossom Park with a new wedding area (complete with a glass roof over the wedding arch because it WAS raining when I left the pair), and then popping back into their house to set up specific wedding outfits for them. :) So next time I play the Chill Save (which should be over Easter weekend, since that’s my next long weekend), I should be able to dive into their wedding straightaway! :)
Oh, and additionally, I ended up buying Paranormal Stuff right beforehand, though I didn’t yet use any of the stuff in the pack – I remembered having a LITTLE left over from an old Amazon gift card, so I used that to knock the price down to seven bucks. Now that’s ready to go whenever I need it. :)
3. Start Chapter 4 of "In A World Of His Own": Check! Did it before lunch (which was a bit on the late side today thanks to Mom washing all the cushion covers on the couch and going out to the library to return some stuff). Victor and Alice are strolling along the path, enjoying the various little bits of musicality and talking about – well, talking about the possibility of green power, basically. What can I say, I can imagine them as solar-punk enthusiasts in a modern setting. XD Of course, the real trick of this chapter is to keep up the theme from the rest of them – mainly, the “at least Victor gets wet” business. While all of the other main chapters feature a body of water (a river in both The Living Dead Forest and The Butterfly Jungle, a magical ocean in The Magic Tower, and a watercolor pond with matching rain in Sketchbook World), and the epilogue in Alice’s Queensland is in – well, Queensland, which is naturally BLOODY – Orchestralia’s action takes place largely inside of a building, with a brief stroll through the fields beforehand. Hmmm – use a bit of rain to get them to run inside the Conservatory faster? They don’t have to get very wet, just wet. . .
4. Get in a workout: Check – hopped on the treadmill today for two miles and about forty minutes of Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! Caught up with Grills as he finished off the last of the turrets in the initial room and made his way through the rest of the Gauntlet. Turns out a high-level character with Sneak 3 and power armor with a jetpack does pretty well in this hellhole! I mean, it helps that he’s played it before too (and figured out something I wasn’t able to when I first tried it – namely, where the key to unlock the door out of the radiation room is), but – well, the room full of traps didn’t even go off because Grills is too stealthy to trigger anything on the floor these days, and he was able to shoot through the boards to the top level and just fly his way up there. And then, in a different maze area, he was again able to just fly over a few of the obstacles. Really, the only difficulty he encountered was the Mirelurk room (where he accidentally triggered a trap on a door while fighting the Mirelurks) and the gas room (where he accidentally triggered more explosives before entering a room full of toxic gas that slowly drains your health – and ended up dying when a Radroach (admittedly a Legendary one) got in a few hits). And even then, he got through without issue on the second try, making notes all the while for how he plans to handle this DLC in YOLO. XD Hell, he even found a great way to cheese things after discovering a secret area above the teacup ride room (infested with giant ants, yay) – turns out if you jetpack up to the balcony area and look out the window, you can see the enemies that will be taking potshots at you in the next area, another maze with “audience participation.” And if you have some good sniping weapons, like Grills. . .let’s just say he left a pile of bodies in his wake and got through that section pretty much perfectly.
After that, all that remained was to kill Colter! And even that Grills was able to do pretty easily – using the squirt gun to disable his “electric shield,” then his Two-Shot Advanced .44 to blow out his brains. Gage declared Grills the new Overboss, and Grills strode confidently out into his new kingdom, Jon praising the look of the place all the while (and laughing over the pile of corpses stacked up outside the boundaries of the maze – looks like Jon certainly thinned out the ranks there!). Jon, however, also declared that he wasn’t doing a “proper” Nuka-World run this time, as he’d already done that (I presume with Bacon in “No Guns”). No, his goal was to do experiments! Namely, seeing how much cheesing of the DLC you could do with a jetpack. He paid lip service to Gage’s ambitions at the end of episode 63, then started episode 64 by ignoring all the gang leaders and marching straight over to the Galactic Zone to see if he could avoid going through a dangerous ride by jetpacking up onto the scenery, then getting through the back door.
He totally could! He was able to collect the park medallion, the Nuka-Girl costume (which apparently allows you to breathe underwater – snazzy for an outfit meant to go on an animatronic), and some other goodies, and then grab a few “star cores” to insert into the mainframe and start shutting down dangerous robots. I’m looking forward to seeing what else Grills manages to sequence-break with his power armor! And the name of the episode is “Open Season,” so I assume that, at the very least, he’s not siding with the raiders. . .
Additionally:
-->More productivity regarding tumblr queues this week -- I got the text for this week's Newcrest Adventures posts sorted, and finished up the "Fallout of Darkness" shitpost post! So I'm set for Wednesday and Thursday on Victor Luvs Alice -- and, naturally, I figure I can throw up a progress report for "In A World Of His Own" on Friday. So feeling good about life there! Nice to have one less thing to worry about this upcoming week. . .
And now I should probably answer my final DW comment and head to bed. Back to the grind tomorrow. . .ugh, I hope it isn't a hell day. I already know I'm going to be completely stressed out just from having to go back to work, I don't need it to be extra-bad on top of that. At least I already know when my next long weekend is. . .come on, April! In the meantime, good night!
1. Keep up on YouTube Subscriptions: Check – very easy to do, given I only had two videos in it. Plenty of time for bonus content, though –
A) With nothing in the Watch Later, I was dependent on the Recommended at first for “Bonus YouTube Content” TM – and it delivered by providing a video from Anna Rudolf, aka Call Me Kevin’s girlfriend! I actually ended up watching two from her:
I. Anna and Kevin played chess on Chess.com together, with one person declaring which kind of piece to move and the other actually making the move. It was actually pretty good – Anna, being a chess champion, was obviously better-suited to being the “brains” of the operation, but she had nothing but praise for how far Kevin’s come in figuring out the game. Highlights included Kevin doing silly “songs” about chess in-between matches (once via the medium of spinning around in his chair and holding his pick), and Kevin panicking whenever Anna said “sure” in response to one of his moves, because apparently he’s learned that’s what she says when she’s trying to be diplomatic about him having made a not-so-great move. XD They’re honestly really cute together too, I love it. :)
II. Anna and Kevin played Among Us together with friends, and Kevin, as the impostor, vented right in front of Anna at the beginning of the game. Now, you’d think that what happened was either a) the quickest “impostor!” ever, or b) Anna playing “third impostor” and not reporting it because he’s her boyfriend.
The actual answer is c) Anna agonized over reporting it, and when she eventually did, Kevin managed to convince her that his idiocy was a glitch. Which she was willing to believe because she’d experienced glitches in the game before. Hilariously, she then ended up getting suspicious of her friend Jay, who kept following her around – and Kevin used that in a “big brain” play by killing someone in front of Jay (after they got his fellow impostor) and then reporting and claiming Jay killed the person. And since they were the only three left, well. . . Jay being sus in Anna’s eyes ended up handing Kevin the win. XD Oh man. . . The best part was Kevin confessing that he totally vented and Anna cracking up over her own gullibility. XD Good times.
B) Then, after Sims, I stumbled across OXBox’s latest video – “7 Weirdest Driving Games That Defy Explanation!” Naturally, this one was hosted by Mike. XD Entries included Environ-Bear 3000 (a game about a bear driving a car with one paw, loading up on fish and berries before the start of winter in five minutes); Drive Girls (part driving game, part third-person hack-and-slash with lovely scantily-dressed ladies who transform into cars in between battling monsters); Multi Level 4 Car Parking Simulator (a mobile game all about parking your car in various parking spaces – and if you want more, get the sequel about pulling up to gas station pumps right); and everyone’s favorite classic, Big Rigs Over The Road Racing (the completely broken game about racing big rig trucks – apparently they figured out that the fastest you can go in reverse is twenty times the speed of light, at which point you hit every checkpoint on the map simultaneously and auto-win). Good, strange stuff!
C) Evening brought me to Call Me Kevin and the alpha version of The Emperor’s Own, a game about an alternate version of the early-19th-century Russian Empire. (Kevin apparently thought it was a total conversion mod of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but the comments insist it’s its own thing.) Here, you are young Alex, with the Russian military, going out to investigate sightings of werewolves and witches in the countryside with two friends. Kevin, of course, played his Alex as a credulous, murderous fool, who happily declared a man who had clearly been ripped apart by something a suicide and demanded that everyone involved in the whole mess be slaughtered. Though, to be fair, the villagers were VERY eager to attack him and his buddies almost the moment they arrived. . . Also, the whole thing was actually the result of some weird wolf death cult started by a former Colonel hooking everyone on magic mushrooms. If this is just the first level, the full game should be something else once it comes out. XD
D) Then it was over to GrayStillPlays and more GTA V stunt races! Today’s offering was a super long board with super long tubes and super-long wall rides! Basically it was a test of endurance – can you make it through all the obstacles in this tube? Can you keep going up and up and up this wall ride? Do you have the STAMINA to spit in the face of failure again and again as you do transfer after transfer after transfer? And the answer is – YES, BABY! Gray whined about it a lot, as is his wont, but he also completed the ride, as is ALSO his wont! w0000! :D He’s still alive, baby, he’s still alive!
E) And, since I had a little extra time, I went over to The Epic Nate and watched a pair of videos about strange and interesting things existing outside the map in Fallout 4 and its DLCs – both boundary breaks and inaccessible cells. From a fully-explorable, lootable island just off the coast of the Island in Far Harbor normally behind an invisible wall, to an unfinished dungeon with raiders by the Shamrock Taphouse, to developer testing room “Claraland” with all sorts of fun little tableaus, to two TV reporters hanging out in a variation of the Sole Survivor’s house, to a personal fallout shelter never implemented, to the famous QA Smoke room (aka the “God Room” as it contains literally everything in the game), FO4 has a LOT going on behind the black for the players! Interesting stuff. :)
2. Play some Sims 4 (Chill Save, see if I can get up to Victor and Alice's wedding): Check, though I didn’t quite make it to this Victor and Alice getting married. I did get through Love Day with them, though! After getting all of their classes out of the way, they went on a nice date to the Municipal Muses museum in Willow Creek (where this Victor and Alice live), which included a visit to the actual museum, rollerskating in the nearby pop-up rink, and having some free barbecue courtesy of this one guy who would not stop cooking. XD Saturday was a much quieter day, as I had them focus mainly on their classwork – Alice has finished fixing the presentation she has to do and done the first draft of her term paper, while Victor has done the first draft of both his term papers and gotten started on his own presentation. They keep pretty busy with this college stuff! I made it to Sunday morning, and chose to spend the last of my time in the game fixing up Magnolia Blossom Park with a new wedding area (complete with a glass roof over the wedding arch because it WAS raining when I left the pair), and then popping back into their house to set up specific wedding outfits for them. :) So next time I play the Chill Save (which should be over Easter weekend, since that’s my next long weekend), I should be able to dive into their wedding straightaway! :)
Oh, and additionally, I ended up buying Paranormal Stuff right beforehand, though I didn’t yet use any of the stuff in the pack – I remembered having a LITTLE left over from an old Amazon gift card, so I used that to knock the price down to seven bucks. Now that’s ready to go whenever I need it. :)
3. Start Chapter 4 of "In A World Of His Own": Check! Did it before lunch (which was a bit on the late side today thanks to Mom washing all the cushion covers on the couch and going out to the library to return some stuff). Victor and Alice are strolling along the path, enjoying the various little bits of musicality and talking about – well, talking about the possibility of green power, basically. What can I say, I can imagine them as solar-punk enthusiasts in a modern setting. XD Of course, the real trick of this chapter is to keep up the theme from the rest of them – mainly, the “at least Victor gets wet” business. While all of the other main chapters feature a body of water (a river in both The Living Dead Forest and The Butterfly Jungle, a magical ocean in The Magic Tower, and a watercolor pond with matching rain in Sketchbook World), and the epilogue in Alice’s Queensland is in – well, Queensland, which is naturally BLOODY – Orchestralia’s action takes place largely inside of a building, with a brief stroll through the fields beforehand. Hmmm – use a bit of rain to get them to run inside the Conservatory faster? They don’t have to get very wet, just wet. . .
4. Get in a workout: Check – hopped on the treadmill today for two miles and about forty minutes of Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! Caught up with Grills as he finished off the last of the turrets in the initial room and made his way through the rest of the Gauntlet. Turns out a high-level character with Sneak 3 and power armor with a jetpack does pretty well in this hellhole! I mean, it helps that he’s played it before too (and figured out something I wasn’t able to when I first tried it – namely, where the key to unlock the door out of the radiation room is), but – well, the room full of traps didn’t even go off because Grills is too stealthy to trigger anything on the floor these days, and he was able to shoot through the boards to the top level and just fly his way up there. And then, in a different maze area, he was again able to just fly over a few of the obstacles. Really, the only difficulty he encountered was the Mirelurk room (where he accidentally triggered a trap on a door while fighting the Mirelurks) and the gas room (where he accidentally triggered more explosives before entering a room full of toxic gas that slowly drains your health – and ended up dying when a Radroach (admittedly a Legendary one) got in a few hits). And even then, he got through without issue on the second try, making notes all the while for how he plans to handle this DLC in YOLO. XD Hell, he even found a great way to cheese things after discovering a secret area above the teacup ride room (infested with giant ants, yay) – turns out if you jetpack up to the balcony area and look out the window, you can see the enemies that will be taking potshots at you in the next area, another maze with “audience participation.” And if you have some good sniping weapons, like Grills. . .let’s just say he left a pile of bodies in his wake and got through that section pretty much perfectly.
After that, all that remained was to kill Colter! And even that Grills was able to do pretty easily – using the squirt gun to disable his “electric shield,” then his Two-Shot Advanced .44 to blow out his brains. Gage declared Grills the new Overboss, and Grills strode confidently out into his new kingdom, Jon praising the look of the place all the while (and laughing over the pile of corpses stacked up outside the boundaries of the maze – looks like Jon certainly thinned out the ranks there!). Jon, however, also declared that he wasn’t doing a “proper” Nuka-World run this time, as he’d already done that (I presume with Bacon in “No Guns”). No, his goal was to do experiments! Namely, seeing how much cheesing of the DLC you could do with a jetpack. He paid lip service to Gage’s ambitions at the end of episode 63, then started episode 64 by ignoring all the gang leaders and marching straight over to the Galactic Zone to see if he could avoid going through a dangerous ride by jetpacking up onto the scenery, then getting through the back door.
He totally could! He was able to collect the park medallion, the Nuka-Girl costume (which apparently allows you to breathe underwater – snazzy for an outfit meant to go on an animatronic), and some other goodies, and then grab a few “star cores” to insert into the mainframe and start shutting down dangerous robots. I’m looking forward to seeing what else Grills manages to sequence-break with his power armor! And the name of the episode is “Open Season,” so I assume that, at the very least, he’s not siding with the raiders. . .
Additionally:
-->More productivity regarding tumblr queues this week -- I got the text for this week's Newcrest Adventures posts sorted, and finished up the "Fallout of Darkness" shitpost post! So I'm set for Wednesday and Thursday on Victor Luvs Alice -- and, naturally, I figure I can throw up a progress report for "In A World Of His Own" on Friday. So feeling good about life there! Nice to have one less thing to worry about this upcoming week. . .
And now I should probably answer my final DW comment and head to bed. Back to the grind tomorrow. . .ugh, I hope it isn't a hell day. I already know I'm going to be completely stressed out just from having to go back to work, I don't need it to be extra-bad on top of that. At least I already know when my next long weekend is. . .come on, April! In the meantime, good night!
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Date: 2021-03-16 11:08 pm (UTC)If you want to watch it, I'll email over my login. Something this good must be shared.
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