Vampirey Start To October
Oct. 1st, 2021 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickWhich, frankly, makes a lot of sense, because I looked up the calendar for October 2004 earlier out of curiosity -- and it matches this year's. Precisely. BUT -- even more than that?
This October ALSO matches with the one in 2077 in Fallout 4. The bombs are explicitly said to drop on the morning of Saturday, October 23rd -- and this year has that exact date.
As you might imagine, this has affected my plans for the month. Namely:
A. The week of October 21st and 23rd, I'm going to switch from Oxventures to something related to VTMB and something related to Fallout for those dates during my workouts
B. I am going to try one more time to get Fallout 4 to work on the 23rd (mostly by taking out most of my mods)
C. Gigs, you get your wish -- I'll post the very first chapter of "Londerland Bloodlines" by October 21st (please note that it WILL go up "as is" without a major revision check right beforehand, though! And I will be soliciting more opinions on the length of the chapter)
So yeah -- combine that with me hoping to get a vault suit this year for me to dress up as a Sole Survivor for Halloween, and it's going to be a bloody, radioactive spoopy season for me. :p Gonna make the most of it!
Anyway, like I said, we started off kind of vampirey today -- I wore my "Fang-Tastic" shirt and got the following accomplished --
1. Edit some more on "Londerland Bloodlines": Check – Alice has escaped Jeannette, and – after an off-screen break to dump her stuff back at her haven – is now out and about, taking care of some sidequests. With Rabbit showing her a slightly more efficient route for handling them, as the diner where she can learn something about Lily is on-route to Kilpatrick’s Bail Bonds (where she was headed to look up Virgil Crumb). So she’s in there, about to ask the counter woman if she’s seen Lily. . .and wondering a little why another vampire’s hanging around in there. . .
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, listen to the latest Wyrd Sisters Podcast, and watch the latest OXBox list video: Two-thirds check – thanks to starting with something else this morning and doing other things this afternoon/evening, I never got around to the OXBox video. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow! Fortunately it’s only the one list video. . .
A) Started with morning with a set of three videos, actually – one of the songs I listened to this morning while making my bed was one I first heard as part of the “Vampair” series by Daria Cohen, and I thought, “You know, I wonder if anything more has happened with that?” after listening. So I looked it up, and it turns out the “Season One” playlist was completed when I wasn’t paying attention! So I watched the last few videos in that:
I. A speedpaint of Missi and Duke to a cover of Chicago’s “Funny Honey” – initially them getting along for a bit while Duke plays piano, only to transition to actually trying to kill each other, as per usual. XD
II. The final official episode of the series – and yes, as many of us guessed after Duke poked Missi’s eye out and Missi cut his thumb off in “The Showdown,” it was Voltaire and Amanda Palmer’s duet “Stuck With You!” After the usual antics, it seems they’ve finally lived in the same place long enough to actually, you know, decide “okay you’re not SO bad.” XD
III. And a recap AMV made by a fan, showing just how far the series has come from the original “The Night” to the current “Stuck With You” (with a lot of focus on contrasting “The Night’s” dance scenes with “The Showdown’s”) – good stuff all around!
B) Then, this evening, we started by listening to the Wyrd Sisters Podcast for Monstrous Regiment, the book where it’s an all-girl army regiment pretending to be boys. And which is only an hour, despite the fact that I could have SWORN it was an hour and a half when I first saw it upload. . . *shrug* Anyway, listened to and enjoyed it – solid summary of the story (including some bits I’d forgotten about, such as the fact there’s a troll and an Igorina hiding their true genders in the group along with the humans and the vampire), and a good discussion of how there was some shockingly great representation here, especially with Lofty and Tonker being basically an out lesbian couple (though the fact that they’re also traumatized to the point of mental illness got some side-eye – though they also mentioned that the narrative is careful to say that the trauma was wrong and bad, but it has nothing to do with their relationship, which is good and a good thing for them), and Jackrum being allowed to continue his life as, essentially, a trans man. Plus the moment where Polly was reunited with her coded-autistic brother being a tear-jerker, and both Manning and Liz flying the flag of putting Polly in a polycule with Shufti and Maladicta (the latter of whom is basically her usual squeeze when it comes to shipping). The most “gender” of the Discworld novels to be sure, and kinda makes me want to reread it. :)
C) Then it was over to today’s Call Me Kevin episode – he’s done playing Fallout 4 as a pacifist, now it’s time to take on Skyrim as a pacifist! Again, with the definition of “I can’t kill personally, but I’m perfectly okay with getting OTHERS to kill for me. . .” After creating his character Scared, Kevin managed to escape the dragon and enter Whiterun looking for work. . .and for some reason decided to take on a bounty requiring him to kill a bandit chief. This took – quite a while. First, Scared tried to get the bandit chief to chase him out of their little hidey-hole into the wilds, to find something to kill him – but the bandit chief refused to leave his retreat. Then Scared tried to kite a guard from a nearby fortress to follow him INTO the retreat to kill the chief – the guard refused to come in, and Scared just died a couple of times for his trouble. Then Scared traveled to Rivendell and got himself an elf with a bow as a companion (by giving a girl the elf liked a fake letter from her suitor to make him dump him – Scared is only against VIOLENCE, not lying) to follow him to the retreat and kill the bandit chief for him – this ALMOST worked, but then Scared accidentally punched his already-on-the-ropes companion and, uh, accidentally killed him. (Because they’re not essential in THIS game.) Forcing him to retreat YET AGAIN. THEN Scared discovered a mercenary he could hire in Whiterun, but didn’t have the coin – and when he tried considering just marrying someone at random to mooch off of, he didn’t have the coin for THAT either. Cue Scared now going around stealing as much crap as possible to pawn, and even returning to the (admittedly much emptier, thanks to the dead elf companion) retreat to steal a bunch of stuff there to sell. Even found a treasure map, which gave him a load of stuff to pawn. He finally got all the money he needed to hire the mercenary by robbing one of the merchants, took her over to the retreat, and got her to kill the chief! And then he got the “Amulet of Mara” he needed to marry someone and – well, went ahead and married his mercenary. So now he can just let her do all the violence and mooch off her success! Much better ending than Dad got, trapped perpetually in a store by a Deathclaw and all.
D) And finally we had GrayStillPlays and Brain Game, another awful mobile “puzzle” game where you had to erase certain items to solve a puzzle (like uncovering the snake for Adam and Eve, or uncovering a girl’s chastity belt to foil a knockoff Leonidas from 300), or draw something in to complete a picture (like giving a tightrope walker a pole to stay balanced – yes, you can probably guess what Gray drew – or drawing a sun to warm up a cold woman and make her expose her breasts); or run a magnifying glass over something to find hidden items (like the throwing star a ninja had in her hair, or the candy some other woman had shoved in her bra); or occasionally just click on things to make something happen (like cleaning a window in one swipe to reveal a startled lady behind it, or stripping all the various layers off another woman). It was the usual “we want to ogle big-breasted women in a variety of situations” nonsense that Gray is so good at finding and mocking, basically. XD Nothing more, nothing less!
3. Play more Bloodlines and take on Andrei: Check – after quickly swinging by the Last Round to talk to Jack (nothing on Andrei yet, but I WAS able to bring up Bach and the Society of Leopold), and the chantry to talk to Strauss (no new dialogue), Crystal made her way into 609 King’s Way! Her new Shin Ginto (taken from Chastity) served her well against the monsters in there, as did picking up the Mummywrap Fetish for faster healing. She DID have to do the boss fight with Andrei twice, though – the first time, she went in with a bit too little blood and spent too much of her time trying to fight his little monsters instead of him. After Final Death, I made she sure had enough blood, activated Blood Shield (another rare moment where it’s useful!), and then started using a lot of Blood Purge near him as it stuns the recipient and made him an easy target for her sledgehammer and sword. Killed him and promptly sunk some XP into melee combat and strength, as – well, Crystal’s been relying a little too heavily on her blood magic and needs some actual physical combat skills. XD
After that, of course, it was into the sewers! Everybody’s favorite section, yay. . . Crystal filled up on the rats scurrying around down there, picked up the flavor text clipboard from the worker (aka the masc!Malkavian model reuse), killed a bunch of the headhunters or whatever their official name are, found the old office with the ledger detailing the Nosferatu playing tricks on sewer workers in the 70s, and then found the locked “free ammo” room –
Which I discovered, at least in this version of the patch, makes the game crash, so after two attempts, I left it alone and continued onward. Crystal killed a few more monsters, then – to my delight – found the shortcut room and headed into the deeper sewers past the expected boss fights and whatnot. Filled up on some more rats (after brushing too close to a fire barrel, mea culpa), then made me realize WHY we were relying too heavily on her blood magic by Blood Boiling one of the big monsters. Seriously, NOTHING seems capable of standing up to Blood Boil apart from the actual bosses. Tremere are shockingly overpowered and I kinda love it. XD
4. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back with the very first Oxventure! (Which does not seem to have a fancy/punny name like the ones to come, aw.) Having caught up with the merry band investigating the house of a woman whose husband has disappeared, they were able to find a bottle of a mysterious elixir on the floor near the man’s clothes, and between Dob finding that and Merilwen (sorry, spelt her name wrong the first time) speaking to a chicken that Corazon kicked for pecking him (she was most displeased), they have determined that said elixir is turning people into animals! The man’s wife said that she’d seen the stuff being flogged in the market, so off to the market they went to find the stall, with Merilwen coming up with a clever plan to pretend to be a sick customer, pretend to drink some of the stuff in public, and then turn into her wildcat form to make the stall owner confess what was happening without anyone getting hurt. Everyone was on board with this, the plan was enacted, Prudence turned on the intimidation once the seller was rattled, and (after weeing a bit), he told them that the stuff was being manufactured in a crypt about a half-day’s ride out of town. The gang let him run off, destroyed his wares, then hired a horse and rode over there, with Dob disguising himself as the merchant to get past the gate-guard. And, unfortunately, a trend has started with poor Dob – rolling poorly on rolls for stuff he, as a half-orc bard, should be able to do easily – such as knock over the cart of elixir (he failed miserably on that and ended up flinging himself into the puddle of wee the seller left behind – fortunately he knows Prestidigitation and was able to clean himself up), or talk his way past the gate-guard after slipping up and saying let “us” in (again failed at trying to convince the guy he meant his horse; fortunately he was able to pull it back by admitting he had the son-turned-rat of the rich man and saying he needed to know how to get him turned back so they didn’t get trouble pulled down on them – required an extra bribe, but got them in!). If it makes you feel better, Dob, the thieving pirate initially completely fluffed an attempt to steal five gold pieces from the woman’s house – though he was later able to pickpocket them extremely easily thanks to a twenty sooo. . . XD Also, the elixir is apparently the product of one “M. Channail,” meaning good old Mike is with them in spirit, at least. XD
5. Work on tumblr queues: Check – got the Wyrd Sisters Podcast into my queue on Victor Luvs Alice for Song Saturday, plus did a quick draft of another post I’ve been meaning to make for later on. And on Valice Multiverse – well, no asks or thread replies, but somebody tagged me in a meme about what songs you’ve been enjoying lately, so I did that and put it in the queue. *shrug* It’s something!
Additionally:
-->Naturally, as it was a very nice day, we had a game of beanbags – five rounds, since it was one of my days off. No big dramatic twelves today, sadly – I got 2-2-3-W-W (with both of my wins being narrow Dad-got-one-point-less affairs, but still!); Dad got W-3-W-2-2, and Mom got 3-W-2-3-3, which at least means she won one! In fact, we all won at least once, which is great. :) Though Dad and I are tied for who did best, so we’ll have to settle that over the weekend. :p
Not bad, not bad at all. :p And I'm doing some light RP stuff with a friend in tumblr messages, plus I've got the Friday Night Writing Thing with my other tumblr friend, so let me quickly do my to-do list for Saturday and wrap things up here:
1. Clean my room and do the monthly laundry
2. Watch the OXBox video and Plumbella's latest, and keep up with YouTube Subs
3. Play Sims 4 and do some more house building
4. Free Writing Day -- either do more tumblr queue stuff, or a scene from a future installment of "Londerland Bloodlines" that's on my mind
Since Item 1 will take most of the day, and Item 4 covers tumblr queue stuff, I think we'll leave it there. Happy start of Spoopy Season, everyone! Night all!
This October ALSO matches with the one in 2077 in Fallout 4. The bombs are explicitly said to drop on the morning of Saturday, October 23rd -- and this year has that exact date.
As you might imagine, this has affected my plans for the month. Namely:
A. The week of October 21st and 23rd, I'm going to switch from Oxventures to something related to VTMB and something related to Fallout for those dates during my workouts
B. I am going to try one more time to get Fallout 4 to work on the 23rd (mostly by taking out most of my mods)
C. Gigs, you get your wish -- I'll post the very first chapter of "Londerland Bloodlines" by October 21st (please note that it WILL go up "as is" without a major revision check right beforehand, though! And I will be soliciting more opinions on the length of the chapter)
So yeah -- combine that with me hoping to get a vault suit this year for me to dress up as a Sole Survivor for Halloween, and it's going to be a bloody, radioactive spoopy season for me. :p Gonna make the most of it!
Anyway, like I said, we started off kind of vampirey today -- I wore my "Fang-Tastic" shirt and got the following accomplished --
1. Edit some more on "Londerland Bloodlines": Check – Alice has escaped Jeannette, and – after an off-screen break to dump her stuff back at her haven – is now out and about, taking care of some sidequests. With Rabbit showing her a slightly more efficient route for handling them, as the diner where she can learn something about Lily is on-route to Kilpatrick’s Bail Bonds (where she was headed to look up Virgil Crumb). So she’s in there, about to ask the counter woman if she’s seen Lily. . .and wondering a little why another vampire’s hanging around in there. . .
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, listen to the latest Wyrd Sisters Podcast, and watch the latest OXBox list video: Two-thirds check – thanks to starting with something else this morning and doing other things this afternoon/evening, I never got around to the OXBox video. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow! Fortunately it’s only the one list video. . .
A) Started with morning with a set of three videos, actually – one of the songs I listened to this morning while making my bed was one I first heard as part of the “Vampair” series by Daria Cohen, and I thought, “You know, I wonder if anything more has happened with that?” after listening. So I looked it up, and it turns out the “Season One” playlist was completed when I wasn’t paying attention! So I watched the last few videos in that:
I. A speedpaint of Missi and Duke to a cover of Chicago’s “Funny Honey” – initially them getting along for a bit while Duke plays piano, only to transition to actually trying to kill each other, as per usual. XD
II. The final official episode of the series – and yes, as many of us guessed after Duke poked Missi’s eye out and Missi cut his thumb off in “The Showdown,” it was Voltaire and Amanda Palmer’s duet “Stuck With You!” After the usual antics, it seems they’ve finally lived in the same place long enough to actually, you know, decide “okay you’re not SO bad.” XD
III. And a recap AMV made by a fan, showing just how far the series has come from the original “The Night” to the current “Stuck With You” (with a lot of focus on contrasting “The Night’s” dance scenes with “The Showdown’s”) – good stuff all around!
B) Then, this evening, we started by listening to the Wyrd Sisters Podcast for Monstrous Regiment, the book where it’s an all-girl army regiment pretending to be boys. And which is only an hour, despite the fact that I could have SWORN it was an hour and a half when I first saw it upload. . . *shrug* Anyway, listened to and enjoyed it – solid summary of the story (including some bits I’d forgotten about, such as the fact there’s a troll and an Igorina hiding their true genders in the group along with the humans and the vampire), and a good discussion of how there was some shockingly great representation here, especially with Lofty and Tonker being basically an out lesbian couple (though the fact that they’re also traumatized to the point of mental illness got some side-eye – though they also mentioned that the narrative is careful to say that the trauma was wrong and bad, but it has nothing to do with their relationship, which is good and a good thing for them), and Jackrum being allowed to continue his life as, essentially, a trans man. Plus the moment where Polly was reunited with her coded-autistic brother being a tear-jerker, and both Manning and Liz flying the flag of putting Polly in a polycule with Shufti and Maladicta (the latter of whom is basically her usual squeeze when it comes to shipping). The most “gender” of the Discworld novels to be sure, and kinda makes me want to reread it. :)
C) Then it was over to today’s Call Me Kevin episode – he’s done playing Fallout 4 as a pacifist, now it’s time to take on Skyrim as a pacifist! Again, with the definition of “I can’t kill personally, but I’m perfectly okay with getting OTHERS to kill for me. . .” After creating his character Scared, Kevin managed to escape the dragon and enter Whiterun looking for work. . .and for some reason decided to take on a bounty requiring him to kill a bandit chief. This took – quite a while. First, Scared tried to get the bandit chief to chase him out of their little hidey-hole into the wilds, to find something to kill him – but the bandit chief refused to leave his retreat. Then Scared tried to kite a guard from a nearby fortress to follow him INTO the retreat to kill the chief – the guard refused to come in, and Scared just died a couple of times for his trouble. Then Scared traveled to Rivendell and got himself an elf with a bow as a companion (by giving a girl the elf liked a fake letter from her suitor to make him dump him – Scared is only against VIOLENCE, not lying) to follow him to the retreat and kill the bandit chief for him – this ALMOST worked, but then Scared accidentally punched his already-on-the-ropes companion and, uh, accidentally killed him. (Because they’re not essential in THIS game.) Forcing him to retreat YET AGAIN. THEN Scared discovered a mercenary he could hire in Whiterun, but didn’t have the coin – and when he tried considering just marrying someone at random to mooch off of, he didn’t have the coin for THAT either. Cue Scared now going around stealing as much crap as possible to pawn, and even returning to the (admittedly much emptier, thanks to the dead elf companion) retreat to steal a bunch of stuff there to sell. Even found a treasure map, which gave him a load of stuff to pawn. He finally got all the money he needed to hire the mercenary by robbing one of the merchants, took her over to the retreat, and got her to kill the chief! And then he got the “Amulet of Mara” he needed to marry someone and – well, went ahead and married his mercenary. So now he can just let her do all the violence and mooch off her success! Much better ending than Dad got, trapped perpetually in a store by a Deathclaw and all.
D) And finally we had GrayStillPlays and Brain Game, another awful mobile “puzzle” game where you had to erase certain items to solve a puzzle (like uncovering the snake for Adam and Eve, or uncovering a girl’s chastity belt to foil a knockoff Leonidas from 300), or draw something in to complete a picture (like giving a tightrope walker a pole to stay balanced – yes, you can probably guess what Gray drew – or drawing a sun to warm up a cold woman and make her expose her breasts); or run a magnifying glass over something to find hidden items (like the throwing star a ninja had in her hair, or the candy some other woman had shoved in her bra); or occasionally just click on things to make something happen (like cleaning a window in one swipe to reveal a startled lady behind it, or stripping all the various layers off another woman). It was the usual “we want to ogle big-breasted women in a variety of situations” nonsense that Gray is so good at finding and mocking, basically. XD Nothing more, nothing less!
3. Play more Bloodlines and take on Andrei: Check – after quickly swinging by the Last Round to talk to Jack (nothing on Andrei yet, but I WAS able to bring up Bach and the Society of Leopold), and the chantry to talk to Strauss (no new dialogue), Crystal made her way into 609 King’s Way! Her new Shin Ginto (taken from Chastity) served her well against the monsters in there, as did picking up the Mummywrap Fetish for faster healing. She DID have to do the boss fight with Andrei twice, though – the first time, she went in with a bit too little blood and spent too much of her time trying to fight his little monsters instead of him. After Final Death, I made she sure had enough blood, activated Blood Shield (another rare moment where it’s useful!), and then started using a lot of Blood Purge near him as it stuns the recipient and made him an easy target for her sledgehammer and sword. Killed him and promptly sunk some XP into melee combat and strength, as – well, Crystal’s been relying a little too heavily on her blood magic and needs some actual physical combat skills. XD
After that, of course, it was into the sewers! Everybody’s favorite section, yay. . . Crystal filled up on the rats scurrying around down there, picked up the flavor text clipboard from the worker (aka the masc!Malkavian model reuse), killed a bunch of the headhunters or whatever their official name are, found the old office with the ledger detailing the Nosferatu playing tricks on sewer workers in the 70s, and then found the locked “free ammo” room –
Which I discovered, at least in this version of the patch, makes the game crash, so after two attempts, I left it alone and continued onward. Crystal killed a few more monsters, then – to my delight – found the shortcut room and headed into the deeper sewers past the expected boss fights and whatnot. Filled up on some more rats (after brushing too close to a fire barrel, mea culpa), then made me realize WHY we were relying too heavily on her blood magic by Blood Boiling one of the big monsters. Seriously, NOTHING seems capable of standing up to Blood Boil apart from the actual bosses. Tremere are shockingly overpowered and I kinda love it. XD
4. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back with the very first Oxventure! (Which does not seem to have a fancy/punny name like the ones to come, aw.) Having caught up with the merry band investigating the house of a woman whose husband has disappeared, they were able to find a bottle of a mysterious elixir on the floor near the man’s clothes, and between Dob finding that and Merilwen (sorry, spelt her name wrong the first time) speaking to a chicken that Corazon kicked for pecking him (she was most displeased), they have determined that said elixir is turning people into animals! The man’s wife said that she’d seen the stuff being flogged in the market, so off to the market they went to find the stall, with Merilwen coming up with a clever plan to pretend to be a sick customer, pretend to drink some of the stuff in public, and then turn into her wildcat form to make the stall owner confess what was happening without anyone getting hurt. Everyone was on board with this, the plan was enacted, Prudence turned on the intimidation once the seller was rattled, and (after weeing a bit), he told them that the stuff was being manufactured in a crypt about a half-day’s ride out of town. The gang let him run off, destroyed his wares, then hired a horse and rode over there, with Dob disguising himself as the merchant to get past the gate-guard. And, unfortunately, a trend has started with poor Dob – rolling poorly on rolls for stuff he, as a half-orc bard, should be able to do easily – such as knock over the cart of elixir (he failed miserably on that and ended up flinging himself into the puddle of wee the seller left behind – fortunately he knows Prestidigitation and was able to clean himself up), or talk his way past the gate-guard after slipping up and saying let “us” in (again failed at trying to convince the guy he meant his horse; fortunately he was able to pull it back by admitting he had the son-turned-rat of the rich man and saying he needed to know how to get him turned back so they didn’t get trouble pulled down on them – required an extra bribe, but got them in!). If it makes you feel better, Dob, the thieving pirate initially completely fluffed an attempt to steal five gold pieces from the woman’s house – though he was later able to pickpocket them extremely easily thanks to a twenty sooo. . . XD Also, the elixir is apparently the product of one “M. Channail,” meaning good old Mike is with them in spirit, at least. XD
5. Work on tumblr queues: Check – got the Wyrd Sisters Podcast into my queue on Victor Luvs Alice for Song Saturday, plus did a quick draft of another post I’ve been meaning to make for later on. And on Valice Multiverse – well, no asks or thread replies, but somebody tagged me in a meme about what songs you’ve been enjoying lately, so I did that and put it in the queue. *shrug* It’s something!
Additionally:
-->Naturally, as it was a very nice day, we had a game of beanbags – five rounds, since it was one of my days off. No big dramatic twelves today, sadly – I got 2-2-3-W-W (with both of my wins being narrow Dad-got-one-point-less affairs, but still!); Dad got W-3-W-2-2, and Mom got 3-W-2-3-3, which at least means she won one! In fact, we all won at least once, which is great. :) Though Dad and I are tied for who did best, so we’ll have to settle that over the weekend. :p
Not bad, not bad at all. :p And I'm doing some light RP stuff with a friend in tumblr messages, plus I've got the Friday Night Writing Thing with my other tumblr friend, so let me quickly do my to-do list for Saturday and wrap things up here:
1. Clean my room and do the monthly laundry
2. Watch the OXBox video and Plumbella's latest, and keep up with YouTube Subs
3. Play Sims 4 and do some more house building
4. Free Writing Day -- either do more tumblr queue stuff, or a scene from a future installment of "Londerland Bloodlines" that's on my mind
Since Item 1 will take most of the day, and Item 4 covers tumblr queue stuff, I think we'll leave it there. Happy start of Spoopy Season, everyone! Night all!
