Reasonably Nice Friday
Apr. 2nd, 2021 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThough a chilly one -- not entirely sure it ever hit 50F! Bleh. . .then again, we've had SNOW in April in the past (most notably one April Fool's Day when I was still in middle school), so I shouldn't be complaining too much. Still, I had hot chocolate for dessert tonight, and doing that in April feels like the cold is starting to drag on. Meeeh.
Still, it was a pretty productive day, all things considered --
1. Watch the two OXBox/OXtra list videos in my Watch Later, along with keeping up on YouTube Subs: Check! Got everything I wanted to watch, watched, yay~
A) Started with the OXBox/OXtra stuff, after playing my A:MR – we had –
I. “7 Time-Sucks that Should be Illegal in Games” – those things in video games that we consider time wasting and the definition of not fun. Included are slow-as-balls NPCs (both in the “why can’t my follower keep up with me” and “why must I follow this leisurely strolling asshole at this precise fucking distance” flavors), unskippable openings (featuring THREE Bethesda games, including the infamous Skyrim opening – well, it’s infamously memey if you’re on tumblr), and the tyranny of bad checkpoints (mostly in the sense of having to redo terrible boss battles from the beginning, but you know me – I don’t like when I can’t save when I like. It’s one of my few complaints about A:MR). I’d be pretty happy if all of these went the way of the dodo, yeah!
II. “7 April Fools' Jokes that Came True” – games and DLC who were either a) originally an April Fool’s joke that, due to positive audience reaction, ended up becoming real (the Pandaren race joining World of Warcraft ten years after they debuted as an April Fool’s joke in Warcraft 3; the latest Yakuza game getting turn-based combat after everyone loved the joke trailer for it) or b) were always real and their announcement being released on April Fool’s was just a bit of marketing fun (Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon as a currently-out, currently well-enjoyed example; Conan Chop Chop as an example still in production). A lot of people in the comments of this one seem to think that video game companies are using this as a way to judge audience reaction to new things – if it’s not very well liked, it was just a joke; if it is, it’ll be real. *shrug* Worse ways to go about market research?
B) Then this evening we had James Turner doing more Sims quizzes! Started off with a really easy one from Twinfinite, stating trivia pretty much everyone knows, then moved onto a much harder, much older quiz about The Sims 2. Don’t ask him what the names for the various aspiration levels for each age group are, he does not know. XD Then the video finished out with a couple of Buzzfeed quizzes – another general trivia quiz (James got one wrong, about how many players Sims 4 has), and one where you rank your Sims traits to determine the zodiac sign of your soulmate! James got Taurus – and promptly retook the quiz because his actual girlfriend, Deli, is an Aries. XD Whoops. XD
C) Then it was onto Call Me Kevin, who is back in Among Us! There is a new map – the airship from Henry Stickmin! – so Kevin decided to make some new friends! This proved harder than expected, unfortunately – one, because the new map is HUGE, so it’s very easy to get lost, and two, people just weren’t friendly this time around. Hell, Kevin won his very first game because both impostors chose to disconnect rather than keep playing right at the start. After a bit of fumbling around in a couple of lobbies, though, he eventually found a partner in crime – mute! Mute was clearly a bit puzzled by Kevin’s antics – especially when he drew impostor and then accidentally got him killed by bringing him to the other impostor – but by the time of the third game, they’d become close enough that mute was helping Kevin hunt down the others, and Kevin repaid the favor by helping mute track down the next impostor in the next game. Yay friendship! :D
D) Then it was time for GrayStillPlays and more Happy Wheels! We started off with a “100% impossible” pogo jump challenge with no less than three ways to win, if you could get past the mega-harpoons, mines, and spikes. Gray did indeed, but it took him a while to get to the third way to win without completely exploding into a shower of gore. XD Then there was the Accelerator – three loops in a ring of extremely fast boosts that just want you to turn into tenderized meat (took him a while, but he managed all three loops with just one arm); the Harpoon parkour – getting down to the win area on harpoons lodged in Santa’s rectum (less time for this one, though it took him a bit to learn how to grab the ropes); the Avalanche – outrun the board essentially falling apart on you (Gray used speed to essentially LEVITATE over it all); the Spinny Thing – stay on this very lopsided shape while the game pelts you with crap (Gray abandoned the bike in favor of clinging on with his hands and tensing his biceps), the Pogo Glass Break – smash increasingly-higher glass walls with the pogo stick (once he learned the pattern he was fine); and a bottle run with some surprises, like harpoons and mines (Gray JUST lived long enough to beat it). Good day in this game! XD
E) Then to round things out, the latest Fun With Shorts – “Developing Self-Reliance!” Classic Coronet silliness about a faux-teenager learning the steps to becoming self-reliant, which in this case means wearing a tie to go to the movies with his friends because he might meet one friend’s parents, and figuring out what electives he wants to take next year. And then developing the confidence to suggest old tennis courts be repurposed as parking spaces. :p You know how it is with these shorts.
2. Write some more on "In A World Of His Own": Check! Finished off Chapter 4 today, as I had hoped I would – Victor trying to figure out what the Paino represented as an issue he’s struggling with, and officially naming the Awful Orphica. Another chapter in the can, yay. . .now I just have to decide if I’m moving straight on to Sketchbook World on Monday, or going back over this to see what, if anything, needs to be cut. We’ll see!
3. Play Alice: Madness Returns and get past at least the second Sacred Scroll: Check, though like yesterday, it nearly wasn’t. You know how OneDrive opened up the other day and started syncing files without my permission, making copies of some of the key files in my Sims folders?
Yeah, it pulled the same shit with Alice – which I only found out about when I opened up the game. . .and was prompted to make a new profile.
Cue me doing a looot of swearing and closing out the game to see what the fuck I could do. Fortunately, I came across the solution pretty quickly. What had happened was, OneDrive had renamed a bunch of files, adding an extra “extension” for my desktop in the file names, while it was doing its “syncing” bullshit. I decided to try and take that “extension” out, delete anything newer than 3/31 (when I last played) and restart the game, telling it to use the data on my computer instead of anything in the cloud. It started up, I crossed my fingers. . .
Success! My old profile appeared, my progress was saved, and I started breathing again. So glad I uninstalled that bullshit now. . .though it does make me realize what was going on with Sims 4 the other day – since I was removing the renamed files, it was forced to use the newer ones, which made it act like I’d reinstalled it or something. At least in that case it didn’t actually affect my saves! *shakehead* And now it can’t happen again, hooray.
Anyway, when I actually got into the game, I made some really good progress – not only did I get past the second Sacred Scroll, I in fact finished the entire chapter! I know people have said in the past that one of A:MR’s problems is that levels are just a tiny bit too long and overstay their welcome, but they actually go pretty quickly if you know what you’re doing. And I do, for the most part, thanks to having replayed this a LOT back in the day. XD Got past the Jade Cave with all the fire, the next sliding block puzzle, a number of difficult fights (one of which needed Hysteria), and a bunch of platforming, and made it to Caterpillar and the start of Chapter 4! :D Got all the collectibles in the level too – except maybe one peach in a Sacred Scroll, but I’m not sure and those don’t actually count, so. . . Actually, speaking of the Scrolls, I really appreciate those a lot more now – the paper Alice is really intricately done! You can see just how her various little paper bits move when you make her jump or spin or run. Nice work, Spicy Horse! So yeah, starting Chapter 4 on Sunday. . .oooh! And that means I’ll be playing my favorite level to close out the A:MR part of my weekend. :D
4. Get in a workout: Check – another round on the bike finished off Episode 72 of Jon's Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I caught back up with Grills as he stopped by Quinlan’s office to drop off some technical documents and check up on P.A.M., now hanging around the Prydwen! She – promptly informed him of a Courser threatening Railroad assets. Jon was very confused, but decided that, since Coursers are a threat to Brotherhood security as well, perhaps she hadn’t been fully reprogrammed to remove that bit. (Either that or the update made her see the Brotherhood as the Railroad?)
With that over with, Grills left the Prydwen by jumping off it in his power armor to go report to Proctor Ingram. . .and then had to take a vertibird back up to the Prydwen when it became apparent she wasn’t in the Boston Airport. She told him about the beryllium agitator that they need to properly power Liberty Prime, and that they could get one from Mass Fusion! Which is exactly where the Institute wanted Grills to go for their reactor problems. . .yup, agreeing to go with Ingram to retrieve it promptly made him enemies with the Institute, and – promptly gave him a quest to go back there. A quest called “Banished From The Institute.” Cue more confusion from Jon, as apparently he didn’t get this back when he was playing Bacon and siding with the Railroad. His rationale this time was that maybe since he’d done more quests for them, the Institute wanted to formally banish him, complete with a dressing down from Father? (Checking the wiki reveals – yeah, looks like he’s more or less right. You relay in, get a speech from Father, then have to leave again.) Lots of weird stuff happening this episode, it seems!
At any rate, Grills made his choice, and he and Ingram flew over to Mass Fusion to retrieve the agitator! There were some synths on the roof waiting for them, which Grills tried VERY ineffectually to take out with the minigun in the vertibird – it wasn’t until the darn thing let them jump out that he was able to ACTUALLY get his murder on. They cleared out the roof and proceeded into the executive suite, where Grills found the keycard they needed to access the elevators. Ingram suggested they head down the elevator just below them to get to the sub-level where the agitator was –
Grills, being played by someone with more knowledge of this whole mess, vetoed that in favor of jumping off the roof. Because Jon has done the elevator ride down and knows it’s a mess of having to kill synths – but if you have power armor, like these two do, you can safely leap off the roof, scare yourself by walking into some sandbags, go in the front door of the main building, take out the mere two synths hanging out in the lobby, and go straight to the second elevator that ACTUALLY takes you to the agitator! Better yet, Jon already knew some tricks for circumventing the security – using a Master-locked terminal to trigger a sentry bot’s door early and thus kill it before it could become a problem, then do the same with an Advanced terminal in charge of some Assaultrons. With the majority of their robot enemies out of the way, Grills did a bunch of Rad-X and got the agitator from its VERY radioactive room, then he and Ingram took care of the last of the security (one Assaultron still alive and some turrets on the ceiling), before going back to the lobby and helping the BOS forces there wipe out the last of the synths. We ended with Grills hanging out by the front door, getting ready to briefly pop back into the Institute, then take it down with Liberty Prime and the Brotherhood. Just the big finale to go now, folks! It has been a hell of a ride. . .
5. Keep up on the Valice Multiverse queue: Check – couple of asks to queue up, no big deal. *nods*
6. Answer my two FF.net PMs: Check! Did that between lunch and firing up A:MR – I didn’t want to let them languish any further! Really gotta get back into the habit of answering those closer to when they actually arrive in my inbox, now that I’ve got my reminder e-mails back. . .
So yay, everything checked off -- even if one of the items made me rage, however briefly. I'm just glad I thought of "if I re-rename the files" for A:MR. . .but you can be damn sure I'm making some thorough back-ups tonight!
Right now, though, I have another comment to answer, and the Friday Night Writing Thing to prepare for, so let's pop up the next to-do list for Actual Saturday and get going:
1. Watch the final part of "Marvel Meets The Eye" from Linkara and keep up on YouTube Subs
2. Write some more on "Londerland Bloodlines"
3. Play Sims 4 and do the Valice Wedding in the Chill Save
4. Keep up on various comments and messages
That last is just a catch-all for FF.net PMs and whatnot, since tomorrow is Active RP Night and also Day Off Working Out. Should be fine! And now I'm off to handle my thingamabobs -- night all!
Still, it was a pretty productive day, all things considered --
1. Watch the two OXBox/OXtra list videos in my Watch Later, along with keeping up on YouTube Subs: Check! Got everything I wanted to watch, watched, yay~
A) Started with the OXBox/OXtra stuff, after playing my A:MR – we had –
I. “7 Time-Sucks that Should be Illegal in Games” – those things in video games that we consider time wasting and the definition of not fun. Included are slow-as-balls NPCs (both in the “why can’t my follower keep up with me” and “why must I follow this leisurely strolling asshole at this precise fucking distance” flavors), unskippable openings (featuring THREE Bethesda games, including the infamous Skyrim opening – well, it’s infamously memey if you’re on tumblr), and the tyranny of bad checkpoints (mostly in the sense of having to redo terrible boss battles from the beginning, but you know me – I don’t like when I can’t save when I like. It’s one of my few complaints about A:MR). I’d be pretty happy if all of these went the way of the dodo, yeah!
II. “7 April Fools' Jokes that Came True” – games and DLC who were either a) originally an April Fool’s joke that, due to positive audience reaction, ended up becoming real (the Pandaren race joining World of Warcraft ten years after they debuted as an April Fool’s joke in Warcraft 3; the latest Yakuza game getting turn-based combat after everyone loved the joke trailer for it) or b) were always real and their announcement being released on April Fool’s was just a bit of marketing fun (Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon as a currently-out, currently well-enjoyed example; Conan Chop Chop as an example still in production). A lot of people in the comments of this one seem to think that video game companies are using this as a way to judge audience reaction to new things – if it’s not very well liked, it was just a joke; if it is, it’ll be real. *shrug* Worse ways to go about market research?
B) Then this evening we had James Turner doing more Sims quizzes! Started off with a really easy one from Twinfinite, stating trivia pretty much everyone knows, then moved onto a much harder, much older quiz about The Sims 2. Don’t ask him what the names for the various aspiration levels for each age group are, he does not know. XD Then the video finished out with a couple of Buzzfeed quizzes – another general trivia quiz (James got one wrong, about how many players Sims 4 has), and one where you rank your Sims traits to determine the zodiac sign of your soulmate! James got Taurus – and promptly retook the quiz because his actual girlfriend, Deli, is an Aries. XD Whoops. XD
C) Then it was onto Call Me Kevin, who is back in Among Us! There is a new map – the airship from Henry Stickmin! – so Kevin decided to make some new friends! This proved harder than expected, unfortunately – one, because the new map is HUGE, so it’s very easy to get lost, and two, people just weren’t friendly this time around. Hell, Kevin won his very first game because both impostors chose to disconnect rather than keep playing right at the start. After a bit of fumbling around in a couple of lobbies, though, he eventually found a partner in crime – mute! Mute was clearly a bit puzzled by Kevin’s antics – especially when he drew impostor and then accidentally got him killed by bringing him to the other impostor – but by the time of the third game, they’d become close enough that mute was helping Kevin hunt down the others, and Kevin repaid the favor by helping mute track down the next impostor in the next game. Yay friendship! :D
D) Then it was time for GrayStillPlays and more Happy Wheels! We started off with a “100% impossible” pogo jump challenge with no less than three ways to win, if you could get past the mega-harpoons, mines, and spikes. Gray did indeed, but it took him a while to get to the third way to win without completely exploding into a shower of gore. XD Then there was the Accelerator – three loops in a ring of extremely fast boosts that just want you to turn into tenderized meat (took him a while, but he managed all three loops with just one arm); the Harpoon parkour – getting down to the win area on harpoons lodged in Santa’s rectum (less time for this one, though it took him a bit to learn how to grab the ropes); the Avalanche – outrun the board essentially falling apart on you (Gray used speed to essentially LEVITATE over it all); the Spinny Thing – stay on this very lopsided shape while the game pelts you with crap (Gray abandoned the bike in favor of clinging on with his hands and tensing his biceps), the Pogo Glass Break – smash increasingly-higher glass walls with the pogo stick (once he learned the pattern he was fine); and a bottle run with some surprises, like harpoons and mines (Gray JUST lived long enough to beat it). Good day in this game! XD
E) Then to round things out, the latest Fun With Shorts – “Developing Self-Reliance!” Classic Coronet silliness about a faux-teenager learning the steps to becoming self-reliant, which in this case means wearing a tie to go to the movies with his friends because he might meet one friend’s parents, and figuring out what electives he wants to take next year. And then developing the confidence to suggest old tennis courts be repurposed as parking spaces. :p You know how it is with these shorts.
2. Write some more on "In A World Of His Own": Check! Finished off Chapter 4 today, as I had hoped I would – Victor trying to figure out what the Paino represented as an issue he’s struggling with, and officially naming the Awful Orphica. Another chapter in the can, yay. . .now I just have to decide if I’m moving straight on to Sketchbook World on Monday, or going back over this to see what, if anything, needs to be cut. We’ll see!
3. Play Alice: Madness Returns and get past at least the second Sacred Scroll: Check, though like yesterday, it nearly wasn’t. You know how OneDrive opened up the other day and started syncing files without my permission, making copies of some of the key files in my Sims folders?
Yeah, it pulled the same shit with Alice – which I only found out about when I opened up the game. . .and was prompted to make a new profile.
Cue me doing a looot of swearing and closing out the game to see what the fuck I could do. Fortunately, I came across the solution pretty quickly. What had happened was, OneDrive had renamed a bunch of files, adding an extra “extension” for my desktop in the file names, while it was doing its “syncing” bullshit. I decided to try and take that “extension” out, delete anything newer than 3/31 (when I last played) and restart the game, telling it to use the data on my computer instead of anything in the cloud. It started up, I crossed my fingers. . .
Success! My old profile appeared, my progress was saved, and I started breathing again. So glad I uninstalled that bullshit now. . .though it does make me realize what was going on with Sims 4 the other day – since I was removing the renamed files, it was forced to use the newer ones, which made it act like I’d reinstalled it or something. At least in that case it didn’t actually affect my saves! *shakehead* And now it can’t happen again, hooray.
Anyway, when I actually got into the game, I made some really good progress – not only did I get past the second Sacred Scroll, I in fact finished the entire chapter! I know people have said in the past that one of A:MR’s problems is that levels are just a tiny bit too long and overstay their welcome, but they actually go pretty quickly if you know what you’re doing. And I do, for the most part, thanks to having replayed this a LOT back in the day. XD Got past the Jade Cave with all the fire, the next sliding block puzzle, a number of difficult fights (one of which needed Hysteria), and a bunch of platforming, and made it to Caterpillar and the start of Chapter 4! :D Got all the collectibles in the level too – except maybe one peach in a Sacred Scroll, but I’m not sure and those don’t actually count, so. . . Actually, speaking of the Scrolls, I really appreciate those a lot more now – the paper Alice is really intricately done! You can see just how her various little paper bits move when you make her jump or spin or run. Nice work, Spicy Horse! So yeah, starting Chapter 4 on Sunday. . .oooh! And that means I’ll be playing my favorite level to close out the A:MR part of my weekend. :D
4. Get in a workout: Check – another round on the bike finished off Episode 72 of Jon's Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I caught back up with Grills as he stopped by Quinlan’s office to drop off some technical documents and check up on P.A.M., now hanging around the Prydwen! She – promptly informed him of a Courser threatening Railroad assets. Jon was very confused, but decided that, since Coursers are a threat to Brotherhood security as well, perhaps she hadn’t been fully reprogrammed to remove that bit. (Either that or the update made her see the Brotherhood as the Railroad?)
With that over with, Grills left the Prydwen by jumping off it in his power armor to go report to Proctor Ingram. . .and then had to take a vertibird back up to the Prydwen when it became apparent she wasn’t in the Boston Airport. She told him about the beryllium agitator that they need to properly power Liberty Prime, and that they could get one from Mass Fusion! Which is exactly where the Institute wanted Grills to go for their reactor problems. . .yup, agreeing to go with Ingram to retrieve it promptly made him enemies with the Institute, and – promptly gave him a quest to go back there. A quest called “Banished From The Institute.” Cue more confusion from Jon, as apparently he didn’t get this back when he was playing Bacon and siding with the Railroad. His rationale this time was that maybe since he’d done more quests for them, the Institute wanted to formally banish him, complete with a dressing down from Father? (Checking the wiki reveals – yeah, looks like he’s more or less right. You relay in, get a speech from Father, then have to leave again.) Lots of weird stuff happening this episode, it seems!
At any rate, Grills made his choice, and he and Ingram flew over to Mass Fusion to retrieve the agitator! There were some synths on the roof waiting for them, which Grills tried VERY ineffectually to take out with the minigun in the vertibird – it wasn’t until the darn thing let them jump out that he was able to ACTUALLY get his murder on. They cleared out the roof and proceeded into the executive suite, where Grills found the keycard they needed to access the elevators. Ingram suggested they head down the elevator just below them to get to the sub-level where the agitator was –
Grills, being played by someone with more knowledge of this whole mess, vetoed that in favor of jumping off the roof. Because Jon has done the elevator ride down and knows it’s a mess of having to kill synths – but if you have power armor, like these two do, you can safely leap off the roof, scare yourself by walking into some sandbags, go in the front door of the main building, take out the mere two synths hanging out in the lobby, and go straight to the second elevator that ACTUALLY takes you to the agitator! Better yet, Jon already knew some tricks for circumventing the security – using a Master-locked terminal to trigger a sentry bot’s door early and thus kill it before it could become a problem, then do the same with an Advanced terminal in charge of some Assaultrons. With the majority of their robot enemies out of the way, Grills did a bunch of Rad-X and got the agitator from its VERY radioactive room, then he and Ingram took care of the last of the security (one Assaultron still alive and some turrets on the ceiling), before going back to the lobby and helping the BOS forces there wipe out the last of the synths. We ended with Grills hanging out by the front door, getting ready to briefly pop back into the Institute, then take it down with Liberty Prime and the Brotherhood. Just the big finale to go now, folks! It has been a hell of a ride. . .
5. Keep up on the Valice Multiverse queue: Check – couple of asks to queue up, no big deal. *nods*
6. Answer my two FF.net PMs: Check! Did that between lunch and firing up A:MR – I didn’t want to let them languish any further! Really gotta get back into the habit of answering those closer to when they actually arrive in my inbox, now that I’ve got my reminder e-mails back. . .
So yay, everything checked off -- even if one of the items made me rage, however briefly. I'm just glad I thought of "if I re-rename the files" for A:MR. . .but you can be damn sure I'm making some thorough back-ups tonight!
Right now, though, I have another comment to answer, and the Friday Night Writing Thing to prepare for, so let's pop up the next to-do list for Actual Saturday and get going:
1. Watch the final part of "Marvel Meets The Eye" from Linkara and keep up on YouTube Subs
2. Write some more on "Londerland Bloodlines"
3. Play Sims 4 and do the Valice Wedding in the Chill Save
4. Keep up on various comments and messages
That last is just a catch-all for FF.net PMs and whatnot, since tomorrow is Active RP Night and also Day Off Working Out. Should be fine! And now I'm off to handle my thingamabobs -- night all!
