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crossover_chickAs evidenced by the fact that, despite a slow morning, a late lunch, and distractions from dogsitting (my aunt is out of the state and we're looking after her dog for the moment), I got the vast majority of my to-do list done --
1. Continue working on final edits on Chapter 3 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale Of Tears”: Check – did roughly another half-hour of that tonight, finishing up Alice going after the werewolf blood (by doing some very quick scrambling and sneaking around the guard to get everything unlocked and all cameras disabled). Of course, though, she isn’t done with the clinic yet – there’s someone else she has to meet. Tomorrow – Victor POV section! And probably a bit more besides. :D
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, OXBox Xmas Challenge, OXtra Xmas Challenge, and OX lists: Three-fourths check – thanks to getting WAAAY too involved with TV Tropes today (I was looking up Home Alone), I didn’t get to watching YouTube until late, so I was only able to do Subs and the Xmas Challenges. Still, provided an entertaining day –
A) Started with Day Six of the OXBox Xmas Challenge! It was Jane’s day, and she got the Life Is Strange: True Colors ELF Challenge – pretty simple, get a high score on the arcade machine in the main character’s apartment, and put the name ELF on the leaderboard. The arcade is “Mine Haunt,” and you control a little miner character who must avoid ghosts and random mine carts while picking up all the gold nuggets. And, hilariously, there’s a battery powerup, which allows you to scare away and even dispel the ghosts chasing you in their fixed patterns! Jane got three tries, and each try had four lives!
. . .It wasn’t enough, sadly. Jane did her best – learning the patterns, making the jumps, figuring out what worked and what didn’t – but a combination of getting trapped by ghosts at bad moments, not knowing what the cut-off was for “this jump is too high and your character will die upon hitting the ground” was, and some tricky platforming meant that by the time she’d used up her last life on her last go, her score was just about 24,000 – and she needed at least 31,000 to make the high score board. Ah well. . .so she and Andy are currently tied, meaning Mike has a chance to finally catch up tomorrow. . .
B) Then, this evening, it was time for Day One of the OXtra Xmas Challenge! Yes, it is time once again for Luke and Ellen to go head-to-head in a week of their own personal Christmas challenges to decide who THEIR Christmas champion is! And of courseProducer Jon Santa is here via Zoom call to assign the challenges. First up – Skyrim Fishing Face-Off! Luke and Ellen each had five minutes with their character Kippers, in Skyrim Anniversary Edition, to catch as much as they could (fish AND junk, it was decided) using the new fishing mechanic, then sell it to a local merchant in Whiterun. Whoever earned the most from their catch won! The whole thing ended up taking a half-hour in video form as Luke INSISTED on being murdery against the NPCs that annoyed him (one hanging around the docks trying to force him to start a side quest, then the merchant Belethor himself when Luke felt his haul was undervalued), but between all the bouts of rage against innocent quest-givers and the guards trying to enforce the “no murder” laws, we did get some final totals:
Luke – two salmon, two brook bass, one carp, one perch, two slaughterfish, two tongs and a flagon – 12 gold (turns out the one worth the most was the perch!)
Ellen – three longfish, two slaughterfish, one brook bass, one perch, one flagon, one tankard, one empty wine bottle, and ELVEN BOOTS – 39 gold (with the bulk of that coming from the boots, but a decent amount from the longfish and perch)
So Ellen took the first Christmas point, and Luke took out his rage on Belethor, killing him and then roasting him over a fire before vampirically feeding on the corpse. XD Oh boy – when the OXtra challenges start out this chaotically, you know they’re gonna be good. XD
C) Then it was over to the Subs for a longer-than-usual Call Me Kevin video – year 2 of his Stardew Valley Hermit Farmer challenge! Basically he’s allowed to leave his farm ONCE every year to buy supplies, and that’s it. He completed Year One over the course of a few episodes, but decided to do Year 2 as one longer video – aka, rare half-hour outing from Kevin! Year 2 was the year Hermit transitioned from being a logger to being a fisherman – Kevin spent SO much time doing SO much fishing, it wasn’t even funny (on his end, anyway – on ours, we got a lovely song as he did a montage!). Paid off, though – those fish sold for a lot! He also built tappers for some of his trees to get pine tar and maple syrup, a beehive to get honey, and continually went around gathering random berries and mushrooms from the cave farm, all of which provided a very decent passive income! On the minus side, though, he found himself with a COMPLETELY overgrown island, because it turns out not cutting down all those trees means they will grow out of control and completely block off chunks (including, appropriately, the path to town). Fortunately, he kept finding random boxes of cherry bombs to blow them up. . . By the time the beginning of Year 3 rolled around, Hermit had 60K from his passive income, and rushed into town to buy as many of his supplies as he could – a nice new fishing rod, some new seeds (including TONS of potatoes), a couple new fruit trees (hopefully he won’t accidentally destroy any of THESE), the ability to use forest magic and read mysterious text from the wizard, and a chicken coop! Though no chickens – the animal seller wouldn’t sell to him because technically the coop wasn’t built yet (and also, according to the comments, it might have been the wrong day). Ah well – he’s still doing pretty well, all things considered. Hoping he does a Year 3, so we can see what new activity Hermit shall turn to with single-minded determination! XD
D) And finally it was time for GrayStillPlays and City Smash – with hacks! Someone gave him the ability to mod the values in THAT game as well, and of course he took full advantage of the ability to give the cities some pretty epic natural disasters. Volcanoes vomiting out like ten thousand fireballs, all in a row. Hurricanes that hit with ludicrous amounts of force. Meteors that could vaporize entire cities upon landing. And, in the other direction, black holes that LOOKED cool but didn’t actually affect anything because Gray had set their damage to zero. There were many numbers to abuse, and Gray abused – not all, but enough. Gotta save some for the next episode! XD
3. Play Sims 4 and add in the Cute Romance mod to the Chill Save: Check! Got that mod and the XML Injector needed to make it work last night (along with the latest MC Command Center update this morning), tested the XML Injector to make sure it was working correctly, then slapped the mod in and played through Victor and Alice’s Saturday! Victor FINALLY completed the “water/weed ten plants” portion of the “Freelance Botanist” aspiration – mostly because I had him plant a chrysanthemum randomly outside his own house and water it. XD But then he sped through the next milestone as I had a ton of plants for him to evolve! So that was nice. He also finished and licensed his first song, and Alice finished her term paper and submitted it. :D But really, the big event of the day was me sending them out on a date to Honey Pop! Karaoke just in time for the Romance Festival. They managed to get a gold date despite never fulfilling the “have Deep Conversations” goal (I couldn’t find the interaction in the menu!), and the new romantic options are so cute. :D Your Sims can cuddle from behind, do a little twirly dip kiss, and even slow dance! It’s great. :D Definitely worth installing! And even better? The same duo behind the mod, thepancake1 and MizoreYukii, have other cool mods, including one that adds more personality trait slots to Sims! Definitely going to be checking THAT one out. . .
Oh, and bonus – got my pictures for my next Chill Save update (the “going to the Festival of Light” one) done this morning! The one productive thing I managed, apart from changing my sheets. XD
4. Get in a workout: Check – got back on the bike today, and back with the Oxventure “Heist Society!” Prudence ended up charming the HELL out of the bouncer guy, to the point where he not only ushered them in, he actually went off to prepare a red room of blood for Prudence at her request. XD Can’t argue with results, I suppose! Left alone in the grand entrance hall, the group started trying to come up with plans – er, well, after one of the staff told Corazon to stop filing bits off the gold statues in said entrance hall, and Dob and Corazon managed to confuse him into submission by demanding drinks despite the fact they were literally steps away from said drinks. XD Anyway, after surveying the scene, Dob and Corazon formed “Team Stealth” to head upstairs to the swankiest part of the party, while Merilwen and Prudence formed “Team Party” to head to the ballroom to listen to Giles Hawthorne give a speech to the assembled snobs of RutherGLEN (I’m sorry, I keep forgetting what all of these towns are called – except Tanner’s Folly just because that one’s funny), followed by Egbert, on a team of his own because everyone KNEW he was gonna cause some sort of weird scene. XD “Team Stealth” made it up to the upper levels by pretending to scoff at every painting they passed (sending a lot of lurking artists running out in tears), and – despite Corazon really wanting to go into Hawthorne’s private office – they ended up investigating the sound of a crying woman behind a door and stumbled across Amelia! The pair tried to convince her that her love (now named Horatio) had been framed, but she was having none of it, pointing out that the Captain of the Guard and the pawnbroker he supposedly sold the gem to testified against him. It looks like an open and shut case, but the boys aren’t so sure. . .
Meanwhile, “Team Party/Egbert” headed to the ballroom, where Egbert enjoyed some dancing before Hawthorne showed up and made a brief speech about how great it was that Horatio was going to be hanged on the morrow. Low Wisdom Egbert thought that maybe they’d been rumbled and darted outside, while Merilwen and Prudence decided to join the queue of people going to greet Hawthorne and managed to sufficiently charm him that he didn’t give them any grief about “punching above their station,” even talking about the supposed theft and Amelia’s refusal to join the party. I left it on Egbert being guided up to the “smoking room” – the only suitable place for a large dragon-man, especially one out of breath. XD I THINK I’ve seen how they prove Horatio was framed in one of their “best-of” compilations, but I don’t quite recall – looking forward to seeing how it all comes together, though!
So yeah -- not too bad, but it was definitely a result of cramming stuff into the afternoon hours. Gotta try and manage my time a little more effectively tomorrow! Let's set up THAT to-do list:
1. Continue working on final edits on Chapter 3 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale Of Tears”:
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, OXBox Xmas Challenge, OXtra Xmas Challenge, the OX Lists, and Jon's latest F:NV video
3. Play Bloodlines and redo the attack on the Sabbat so I have a chance of beating Andrei
4. Get in a workout
5. Keep up on tumblr queues
*wags finger at self* No reading tons of TV Tropes again tomorrow morning! You gotta hit the ground running, so to speak. I mean, it's not like it's the end of the world if I don't get to all the YouTube videos -- I'm coming up on a good stretch of time off -- but still. Like to keep on top of everything if I can! *nods* Speaking of which, should probably go check on my tumblrs and all that jazz. . .night all!
1. Continue working on final edits on Chapter 3 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale Of Tears”: Check – did roughly another half-hour of that tonight, finishing up Alice going after the werewolf blood (by doing some very quick scrambling and sneaking around the guard to get everything unlocked and all cameras disabled). Of course, though, she isn’t done with the clinic yet – there’s someone else she has to meet. Tomorrow – Victor POV section! And probably a bit more besides. :D
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, OXBox Xmas Challenge, OXtra Xmas Challenge, and OX lists: Three-fourths check – thanks to getting WAAAY too involved with TV Tropes today (I was looking up Home Alone), I didn’t get to watching YouTube until late, so I was only able to do Subs and the Xmas Challenges. Still, provided an entertaining day –
A) Started with Day Six of the OXBox Xmas Challenge! It was Jane’s day, and she got the Life Is Strange: True Colors ELF Challenge – pretty simple, get a high score on the arcade machine in the main character’s apartment, and put the name ELF on the leaderboard. The arcade is “Mine Haunt,” and you control a little miner character who must avoid ghosts and random mine carts while picking up all the gold nuggets. And, hilariously, there’s a battery powerup, which allows you to scare away and even dispel the ghosts chasing you in their fixed patterns! Jane got three tries, and each try had four lives!
. . .It wasn’t enough, sadly. Jane did her best – learning the patterns, making the jumps, figuring out what worked and what didn’t – but a combination of getting trapped by ghosts at bad moments, not knowing what the cut-off was for “this jump is too high and your character will die upon hitting the ground” was, and some tricky platforming meant that by the time she’d used up her last life on her last go, her score was just about 24,000 – and she needed at least 31,000 to make the high score board. Ah well. . .so she and Andy are currently tied, meaning Mike has a chance to finally catch up tomorrow. . .
B) Then, this evening, it was time for Day One of the OXtra Xmas Challenge! Yes, it is time once again for Luke and Ellen to go head-to-head in a week of their own personal Christmas challenges to decide who THEIR Christmas champion is! And of course
Luke – two salmon, two brook bass, one carp, one perch, two slaughterfish, two tongs and a flagon – 12 gold (turns out the one worth the most was the perch!)
Ellen – three longfish, two slaughterfish, one brook bass, one perch, one flagon, one tankard, one empty wine bottle, and ELVEN BOOTS – 39 gold (with the bulk of that coming from the boots, but a decent amount from the longfish and perch)
So Ellen took the first Christmas point, and Luke took out his rage on Belethor, killing him and then roasting him over a fire before vampirically feeding on the corpse. XD Oh boy – when the OXtra challenges start out this chaotically, you know they’re gonna be good. XD
C) Then it was over to the Subs for a longer-than-usual Call Me Kevin video – year 2 of his Stardew Valley Hermit Farmer challenge! Basically he’s allowed to leave his farm ONCE every year to buy supplies, and that’s it. He completed Year One over the course of a few episodes, but decided to do Year 2 as one longer video – aka, rare half-hour outing from Kevin! Year 2 was the year Hermit transitioned from being a logger to being a fisherman – Kevin spent SO much time doing SO much fishing, it wasn’t even funny (on his end, anyway – on ours, we got a lovely song as he did a montage!). Paid off, though – those fish sold for a lot! He also built tappers for some of his trees to get pine tar and maple syrup, a beehive to get honey, and continually went around gathering random berries and mushrooms from the cave farm, all of which provided a very decent passive income! On the minus side, though, he found himself with a COMPLETELY overgrown island, because it turns out not cutting down all those trees means they will grow out of control and completely block off chunks (including, appropriately, the path to town). Fortunately, he kept finding random boxes of cherry bombs to blow them up. . . By the time the beginning of Year 3 rolled around, Hermit had 60K from his passive income, and rushed into town to buy as many of his supplies as he could – a nice new fishing rod, some new seeds (including TONS of potatoes), a couple new fruit trees (hopefully he won’t accidentally destroy any of THESE), the ability to use forest magic and read mysterious text from the wizard, and a chicken coop! Though no chickens – the animal seller wouldn’t sell to him because technically the coop wasn’t built yet (and also, according to the comments, it might have been the wrong day). Ah well – he’s still doing pretty well, all things considered. Hoping he does a Year 3, so we can see what new activity Hermit shall turn to with single-minded determination! XD
D) And finally it was time for GrayStillPlays and City Smash – with hacks! Someone gave him the ability to mod the values in THAT game as well, and of course he took full advantage of the ability to give the cities some pretty epic natural disasters. Volcanoes vomiting out like ten thousand fireballs, all in a row. Hurricanes that hit with ludicrous amounts of force. Meteors that could vaporize entire cities upon landing. And, in the other direction, black holes that LOOKED cool but didn’t actually affect anything because Gray had set their damage to zero. There were many numbers to abuse, and Gray abused – not all, but enough. Gotta save some for the next episode! XD
3. Play Sims 4 and add in the Cute Romance mod to the Chill Save: Check! Got that mod and the XML Injector needed to make it work last night (along with the latest MC Command Center update this morning), tested the XML Injector to make sure it was working correctly, then slapped the mod in and played through Victor and Alice’s Saturday! Victor FINALLY completed the “water/weed ten plants” portion of the “Freelance Botanist” aspiration – mostly because I had him plant a chrysanthemum randomly outside his own house and water it. XD But then he sped through the next milestone as I had a ton of plants for him to evolve! So that was nice. He also finished and licensed his first song, and Alice finished her term paper and submitted it. :D But really, the big event of the day was me sending them out on a date to Honey Pop! Karaoke just in time for the Romance Festival. They managed to get a gold date despite never fulfilling the “have Deep Conversations” goal (I couldn’t find the interaction in the menu!), and the new romantic options are so cute. :D Your Sims can cuddle from behind, do a little twirly dip kiss, and even slow dance! It’s great. :D Definitely worth installing! And even better? The same duo behind the mod, thepancake1 and MizoreYukii, have other cool mods, including one that adds more personality trait slots to Sims! Definitely going to be checking THAT one out. . .
Oh, and bonus – got my pictures for my next Chill Save update (the “going to the Festival of Light” one) done this morning! The one productive thing I managed, apart from changing my sheets. XD
4. Get in a workout: Check – got back on the bike today, and back with the Oxventure “Heist Society!” Prudence ended up charming the HELL out of the bouncer guy, to the point where he not only ushered them in, he actually went off to prepare a red room of blood for Prudence at her request. XD Can’t argue with results, I suppose! Left alone in the grand entrance hall, the group started trying to come up with plans – er, well, after one of the staff told Corazon to stop filing bits off the gold statues in said entrance hall, and Dob and Corazon managed to confuse him into submission by demanding drinks despite the fact they were literally steps away from said drinks. XD Anyway, after surveying the scene, Dob and Corazon formed “Team Stealth” to head upstairs to the swankiest part of the party, while Merilwen and Prudence formed “Team Party” to head to the ballroom to listen to Giles Hawthorne give a speech to the assembled snobs of RutherGLEN (I’m sorry, I keep forgetting what all of these towns are called – except Tanner’s Folly just because that one’s funny), followed by Egbert, on a team of his own because everyone KNEW he was gonna cause some sort of weird scene. XD “Team Stealth” made it up to the upper levels by pretending to scoff at every painting they passed (sending a lot of lurking artists running out in tears), and – despite Corazon really wanting to go into Hawthorne’s private office – they ended up investigating the sound of a crying woman behind a door and stumbled across Amelia! The pair tried to convince her that her love (now named Horatio) had been framed, but she was having none of it, pointing out that the Captain of the Guard and the pawnbroker he supposedly sold the gem to testified against him. It looks like an open and shut case, but the boys aren’t so sure. . .
Meanwhile, “Team Party/Egbert” headed to the ballroom, where Egbert enjoyed some dancing before Hawthorne showed up and made a brief speech about how great it was that Horatio was going to be hanged on the morrow. Low Wisdom Egbert thought that maybe they’d been rumbled and darted outside, while Merilwen and Prudence decided to join the queue of people going to greet Hawthorne and managed to sufficiently charm him that he didn’t give them any grief about “punching above their station,” even talking about the supposed theft and Amelia’s refusal to join the party. I left it on Egbert being guided up to the “smoking room” – the only suitable place for a large dragon-man, especially one out of breath. XD I THINK I’ve seen how they prove Horatio was framed in one of their “best-of” compilations, but I don’t quite recall – looking forward to seeing how it all comes together, though!
So yeah -- not too bad, but it was definitely a result of cramming stuff into the afternoon hours. Gotta try and manage my time a little more effectively tomorrow! Let's set up THAT to-do list:
1. Continue working on final edits on Chapter 3 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale Of Tears”:
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, OXBox Xmas Challenge, OXtra Xmas Challenge, the OX Lists, and Jon's latest F:NV video
3. Play Bloodlines and redo the attack on the Sabbat so I have a chance of beating Andrei
4. Get in a workout
5. Keep up on tumblr queues
*wags finger at self* No reading tons of TV Tropes again tomorrow morning! You gotta hit the ground running, so to speak. I mean, it's not like it's the end of the world if I don't get to all the YouTube videos -- I'm coming up on a good stretch of time off -- but still. Like to keep on top of everything if I can! *nods* Speaking of which, should probably go check on my tumblrs and all that jazz. . .night all!
