Bleedy But Chill Saturday
Feb. 5th, 2022 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickIn multiple senses of the word "chill" -- cold day out there today, with Dad having to go out twice to scrape ice and salt our walkway and the driveway. Roads are a real mess, and it's just bleh out there. February, folks!
But yeah, bit of a slow, spacey day thanks to my period, and a stiff neck I suspect is at least partially down to the period (and partially down to the way I sleep -- I think I've been scrunching myself up too much). But I still did very well on my to-do list:
1. Write some more on "Learn to Love Again": Check – Alice has met Elder Gutknecht and Scraps, and been hugged by her parents, aawww. Victor got a hug from Lorina as well, and a bit of teasing from Alice about how he’ll give a truly grand gift without even thinking about it because it never occurs to him he could do less. XD (Victor is just like “but I knew I could do this and I knew how much you wanted to see your parents again” as if that doesn’t kind of prove Alice’s point.) Also getting in a touch of Bonejangles’s parents’ backstory so we can confirm again that June is his sister – up next is more chat about what these versions of the Liddells were up to in death, and then time for more magic exposition, yay! XD
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check, complete with a little bonus I couldn’t help checking out –
A) Started with the OXtra Show Of The Weekend – “Bloodborne PS1 Demake! Luke & Ellen vs 32-Bit Cleric Beast!” Yes, someone going by LWMedia has made a “demake” of Bloodborne called Bloodborne PSX, where everything looks and plays like it would if the game had been made in the PS1 late-90s/early-00s era! It’s fascinating the amount of effort they’ve put into it, complete with pixelated graphics, limited character creation (your character may have one of THREE whole heads!), fake “loading screens,” an inventory system straight out of early Resident Evil, and a fake draw distance straight out of Silent Hill. Also, the messengers are actually even more terrifying in this low-poly form, because their mouths look particularly skinless in this version. . . Luke, with Ellen cheering him on, had a good time wandering around the opening areas, taking on hunters, trolls, dogs, and finally the Cleric Beast, all the while commenting on how good it all looked and the nostalgia it gave them. And joking that all the enemies should have the face of Hagrid from that very first Harry Potter game. XD It looks like a fun ride if you can re-acclimate yourself to PS1-era controls! I’m not sure I’d have the patience, but it was good to watch Luke try it out! XD
B) Then it was over to the Subs for Call Me Kevin and Pokemon Legends: Arceus! This is the latest Pokemon game, and seems to involve – time travel, possibly? I’m not sure. All I know is that you’re a kid in a t-shirt who ends in a small, more old-timey-style town, and gets recruited to “Galaxy Team” to catch and study Pokemon in this new land. Kevin, as Ye Old Kevi, chose to interpret this as “throw away all my Pokeballs at the first opportunity; try everything I can to refuse to battle the guy at the gate with my Cyndaquill (and then get annoyed when he shows up with a Pokemon that’s literally an egg); waste even MORE Pokeballs trying to catch a Pokemon that wants to battle; get owned in combat by a guy with an incredibly stiff jacket; and then go out into the wilds to catch a Mr. Mime to be my character’s new father!” No, seriously on that last bit – Kevi went into a high-level area where the Snorlaxes have horrible laser vision to find a Mr. Mime, and immediately named him “Father.” Father proceeded to get pulverized by the Snorlax and then refuse to obey Kevin’s commands in future fights. Kevin seemed to consider this proper father behavior. XD I may not know the plot of this latest Pokegame, but I do know that I’m more than willing to watch more of this nonsense! XD
C) And finally we had GrayStillPlays and Dismounting Simulator – yes, it is now time for more stick torture! This one included such sticks as a few characters from Squid Game (specifically the killer doll, the jumpsuited minions, and the unfortunate players), Discount Spider-Man, and Discount Hulk for your bone-breaking pleasure. And did they provide ways to break bones – Gray was earning achievements left and right for flinging sticks down killer pits filled with swinging blades, various thrusters, steam vents, and crossbows shooting both a ridiculous number of ordinary arrows and a ridiculous number of explosive shuriken. There were quite a few times when “Rage Stick” was reduced to a mere green chunk of candy corn while Gray earned buckets of points from the remains of his limbs being mangled off-screen. But those boards – driving a disintegrating truck into rows of saw blades, zipping through a tunnel of arrows to be blasted with shuriken at the end – oh, they weren’t enough for Gray. His eye was on the prize, and the prize was his own custom-built level. Made of saw blades, shored up with green bouncy balls, filled with black holes and lasers. It was infinite points central, and it was GLORIOUS. XD Oh man. . .when Gray does one of these games, he does them RIGHT, let me tell you.
3. Play Sims 4 and get started with actually playing Smiler Always: Check, though it took more doing than originally anticipated! I had two false starts – first, I picked up some spiral eyes that function as “face make-up” in the game from NexusMods (Cryptiam’s Surreal Eyes Pack) and ran them through a batch fix with the most recent version of Sims4Studio (as the eyes are pre-the “sliders” makeup update and I wanted to make sure they worked – they’re not PERFECTLY opaque, but I still really like the effect!). Unfortunately, Sims4Studio also “fixed” one of the Wonderful Whims files, and the game told me the mod was “sad” when I first loaded in and that I needed to reinstall, which – well, I did! No problems after that with that, at least.
And then I went into CAS to update a few of Smiler’s outfits and then add the spiral eyes to their Dark Form – only to find I still had the Dark and Regular forms linked and it was applying the make-up to the Regular form too. And overwriting one of their Regular outfits. And then I accidentally deleted one of their Regular outfits. -.- Yeah, I ended up canceling out and trying again, this time making sure to UNLINK the two forms first. THAT worked out how I wanted, and after completing my outfit tweaks and then updating Smiler’s little Britchester house with some new paint, tile, and curtains, it was time to actually play through the day!
. . .Smiler, whom I specifically gave the Friend of the World aspiration to start with, never got a welcome wagon. I had to have the poor enby get an umbrella stand and brave the sun to get someone to talk to – and then the Sim, Lillie, proved to be a Gloomy, Greedy Sim who hates Fitness, meaning she and Smiler didn’t get along that well. At least she was good for practicing their Hallucination powers on! (Reminder, Smiler is a vampire – and as for the rest of their personality, they’re Gregarious, Erratic, Cheerful, a Music Lover, Innocent, and a Jester; they like yellow, purple, pop music, strange tunes, robotics, dancing, media production and – thanks to an early pop-up after getting energized from a dark mediation – fitness; they dislike gray and lullabies radio. And their attractiveness settings are designed so they’ll think Victor and Alice are cute XD) As for the rest of Smiler’s day –
I. They got an Odd Job to catch frogs from Mua Pel’am’s waterfall in Sulani, so once it was late enough, I sent them to do that for $90; they also met Nalani Mehi’ai, living in the shipwreck house, and hit it off with her; and did some beach clean-up and combing, which resulted in a scallop shell
II. They hit up Laurel’s Library and used the magic laptops available there (aka they kept pulling a portable computer out of nowhere) to browse the web – I had them look up vampire information for the XP and to complete a milestone. They also got some heavy metal out of a mineral rock, and played a bit of chess
III. They got a text from Vlad early on welcoming them as a vampire and sending over some plasma packs; I had them go over and visit him in Forgotten Hollow, making friends, receiving some vampire training, and becoming a Minor vampire! :D I haven’ t picked powers or weaknesses yet, but I’m leaning toward Command. . .
So yeah, busy first day on their lot! :) Though I looked at their calendar and was surprised to see no Egg Day? Thought I had that on the calendar. . .on the other hand, I AM considering switching to two-week seasons, so maybe that’s something to do next week, along with adding some new holidays. . .
4. Work on ship memes and Valicetines: Check! Good progress on both as well:
A) Ship Memes – Finished off the first “My Ship In Five Minutes” one that I was working on before, and got a start on the second! :D Took some tweaking and some hard thinks about some of the “check which half of the pairing is more this or more likely to do that” bits, but it’s done now, and will be ready to go on Thursday with my notes. :)
B) Valicetines – I have three Sims-related Valicetines all ready to go for the 14th! :D Funnily enough, this will make the second year in a row where the Valicetines are from a vacation my Victor and Alice took – last year it was Newcrest Adventures!Victor and Alice (and their children) going to Sulani; this year it’s my Chill Save!Victor and Alice’s delayed honeymoon to Selvadorada. There were two pictures I knew I wanted to use this year, and I stumbled upon a third while looking through my screenshots. :) So I’ve at least got my minimum sorted – we’ll see if I come up with any other good ideas before the big day!
Not too shabby at all, huh? :) Plus Mom made those s'mores cup cookies again, only at a bigger size this time, which was nice. And very sweet, which is what I want when I'm on my period. (Either sweet or meat, to be precise, but we had a good pizza for lunch too, so I'm happy.) Just glad we'll be over the hump on THAT after tomorrow too. . .
Anyway -- doing the "talking to friends" thing, so let's wrap up with Sunday to-dos:
1. Keep up with the FoD Playthrough Progression; Free Writing Day otherwise
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and Jon's latest F:NV "Utter Chaos" video
3. Play Fallout 4 and set up Starlight Drive-In as a settlement, then go over to Corvega to get Haylen's message for Danse's stuff
4. Work on tumblr drafts/queues
5. Get in a workout
All should be doable, I think! And yes, I want to get the early "meeting Danse" stuff out of the way now, like I did in my first attempt at a playthrough -- feels appropriate, even if Victor has noooo intention of joining the BOS. Not his scene. But I do like the idea of him helping Danse because he feels bad for him, only to realize "shit, this might be my fault" when the Prydwen shows up. XD But that's for tomorrow me to worry about -- night all!
But yeah, bit of a slow, spacey day thanks to my period, and a stiff neck I suspect is at least partially down to the period (and partially down to the way I sleep -- I think I've been scrunching myself up too much). But I still did very well on my to-do list:
1. Write some more on "Learn to Love Again": Check – Alice has met Elder Gutknecht and Scraps, and been hugged by her parents, aawww. Victor got a hug from Lorina as well, and a bit of teasing from Alice about how he’ll give a truly grand gift without even thinking about it because it never occurs to him he could do less. XD (Victor is just like “but I knew I could do this and I knew how much you wanted to see your parents again” as if that doesn’t kind of prove Alice’s point.) Also getting in a touch of Bonejangles’s parents’ backstory so we can confirm again that June is his sister – up next is more chat about what these versions of the Liddells were up to in death, and then time for more magic exposition, yay! XD
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check, complete with a little bonus I couldn’t help checking out –
A) Started with the OXtra Show Of The Weekend – “Bloodborne PS1 Demake! Luke & Ellen vs 32-Bit Cleric Beast!” Yes, someone going by LWMedia has made a “demake” of Bloodborne called Bloodborne PSX, where everything looks and plays like it would if the game had been made in the PS1 late-90s/early-00s era! It’s fascinating the amount of effort they’ve put into it, complete with pixelated graphics, limited character creation (your character may have one of THREE whole heads!), fake “loading screens,” an inventory system straight out of early Resident Evil, and a fake draw distance straight out of Silent Hill. Also, the messengers are actually even more terrifying in this low-poly form, because their mouths look particularly skinless in this version. . . Luke, with Ellen cheering him on, had a good time wandering around the opening areas, taking on hunters, trolls, dogs, and finally the Cleric Beast, all the while commenting on how good it all looked and the nostalgia it gave them. And joking that all the enemies should have the face of Hagrid from that very first Harry Potter game. XD It looks like a fun ride if you can re-acclimate yourself to PS1-era controls! I’m not sure I’d have the patience, but it was good to watch Luke try it out! XD
B) Then it was over to the Subs for Call Me Kevin and Pokemon Legends: Arceus! This is the latest Pokemon game, and seems to involve – time travel, possibly? I’m not sure. All I know is that you’re a kid in a t-shirt who ends in a small, more old-timey-style town, and gets recruited to “Galaxy Team” to catch and study Pokemon in this new land. Kevin, as Ye Old Kevi, chose to interpret this as “throw away all my Pokeballs at the first opportunity; try everything I can to refuse to battle the guy at the gate with my Cyndaquill (and then get annoyed when he shows up with a Pokemon that’s literally an egg); waste even MORE Pokeballs trying to catch a Pokemon that wants to battle; get owned in combat by a guy with an incredibly stiff jacket; and then go out into the wilds to catch a Mr. Mime to be my character’s new father!” No, seriously on that last bit – Kevi went into a high-level area where the Snorlaxes have horrible laser vision to find a Mr. Mime, and immediately named him “Father.” Father proceeded to get pulverized by the Snorlax and then refuse to obey Kevin’s commands in future fights. Kevin seemed to consider this proper father behavior. XD I may not know the plot of this latest Pokegame, but I do know that I’m more than willing to watch more of this nonsense! XD
C) And finally we had GrayStillPlays and Dismounting Simulator – yes, it is now time for more stick torture! This one included such sticks as a few characters from Squid Game (specifically the killer doll, the jumpsuited minions, and the unfortunate players), Discount Spider-Man, and Discount Hulk for your bone-breaking pleasure. And did they provide ways to break bones – Gray was earning achievements left and right for flinging sticks down killer pits filled with swinging blades, various thrusters, steam vents, and crossbows shooting both a ridiculous number of ordinary arrows and a ridiculous number of explosive shuriken. There were quite a few times when “Rage Stick” was reduced to a mere green chunk of candy corn while Gray earned buckets of points from the remains of his limbs being mangled off-screen. But those boards – driving a disintegrating truck into rows of saw blades, zipping through a tunnel of arrows to be blasted with shuriken at the end – oh, they weren’t enough for Gray. His eye was on the prize, and the prize was his own custom-built level. Made of saw blades, shored up with green bouncy balls, filled with black holes and lasers. It was infinite points central, and it was GLORIOUS. XD Oh man. . .when Gray does one of these games, he does them RIGHT, let me tell you.
3. Play Sims 4 and get started with actually playing Smiler Always: Check, though it took more doing than originally anticipated! I had two false starts – first, I picked up some spiral eyes that function as “face make-up” in the game from NexusMods (Cryptiam’s Surreal Eyes Pack) and ran them through a batch fix with the most recent version of Sims4Studio (as the eyes are pre-the “sliders” makeup update and I wanted to make sure they worked – they’re not PERFECTLY opaque, but I still really like the effect!). Unfortunately, Sims4Studio also “fixed” one of the Wonderful Whims files, and the game told me the mod was “sad” when I first loaded in and that I needed to reinstall, which – well, I did! No problems after that with that, at least.
And then I went into CAS to update a few of Smiler’s outfits and then add the spiral eyes to their Dark Form – only to find I still had the Dark and Regular forms linked and it was applying the make-up to the Regular form too. And overwriting one of their Regular outfits. And then I accidentally deleted one of their Regular outfits. -.- Yeah, I ended up canceling out and trying again, this time making sure to UNLINK the two forms first. THAT worked out how I wanted, and after completing my outfit tweaks and then updating Smiler’s little Britchester house with some new paint, tile, and curtains, it was time to actually play through the day!
. . .Smiler, whom I specifically gave the Friend of the World aspiration to start with, never got a welcome wagon. I had to have the poor enby get an umbrella stand and brave the sun to get someone to talk to – and then the Sim, Lillie, proved to be a Gloomy, Greedy Sim who hates Fitness, meaning she and Smiler didn’t get along that well. At least she was good for practicing their Hallucination powers on! (Reminder, Smiler is a vampire – and as for the rest of their personality, they’re Gregarious, Erratic, Cheerful, a Music Lover, Innocent, and a Jester; they like yellow, purple, pop music, strange tunes, robotics, dancing, media production and – thanks to an early pop-up after getting energized from a dark mediation – fitness; they dislike gray and lullabies radio. And their attractiveness settings are designed so they’ll think Victor and Alice are cute XD) As for the rest of Smiler’s day –
I. They got an Odd Job to catch frogs from Mua Pel’am’s waterfall in Sulani, so once it was late enough, I sent them to do that for $90; they also met Nalani Mehi’ai, living in the shipwreck house, and hit it off with her; and did some beach clean-up and combing, which resulted in a scallop shell
II. They hit up Laurel’s Library and used the magic laptops available there (aka they kept pulling a portable computer out of nowhere) to browse the web – I had them look up vampire information for the XP and to complete a milestone. They also got some heavy metal out of a mineral rock, and played a bit of chess
III. They got a text from Vlad early on welcoming them as a vampire and sending over some plasma packs; I had them go over and visit him in Forgotten Hollow, making friends, receiving some vampire training, and becoming a Minor vampire! :D I haven’ t picked powers or weaknesses yet, but I’m leaning toward Command. . .
So yeah, busy first day on their lot! :) Though I looked at their calendar and was surprised to see no Egg Day? Thought I had that on the calendar. . .on the other hand, I AM considering switching to two-week seasons, so maybe that’s something to do next week, along with adding some new holidays. . .
4. Work on ship memes and Valicetines: Check! Good progress on both as well:
A) Ship Memes – Finished off the first “My Ship In Five Minutes” one that I was working on before, and got a start on the second! :D Took some tweaking and some hard thinks about some of the “check which half of the pairing is more this or more likely to do that” bits, but it’s done now, and will be ready to go on Thursday with my notes. :)
B) Valicetines – I have three Sims-related Valicetines all ready to go for the 14th! :D Funnily enough, this will make the second year in a row where the Valicetines are from a vacation my Victor and Alice took – last year it was Newcrest Adventures!Victor and Alice (and their children) going to Sulani; this year it’s my Chill Save!Victor and Alice’s delayed honeymoon to Selvadorada. There were two pictures I knew I wanted to use this year, and I stumbled upon a third while looking through my screenshots. :) So I’ve at least got my minimum sorted – we’ll see if I come up with any other good ideas before the big day!
Not too shabby at all, huh? :) Plus Mom made those s'mores cup cookies again, only at a bigger size this time, which was nice. And very sweet, which is what I want when I'm on my period. (Either sweet or meat, to be precise, but we had a good pizza for lunch too, so I'm happy.) Just glad we'll be over the hump on THAT after tomorrow too. . .
Anyway -- doing the "talking to friends" thing, so let's wrap up with Sunday to-dos:
1. Keep up with the FoD Playthrough Progression; Free Writing Day otherwise
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and Jon's latest F:NV "Utter Chaos" video
3. Play Fallout 4 and set up Starlight Drive-In as a settlement, then go over to Corvega to get Haylen's message for Danse's stuff
4. Work on tumblr drafts/queues
5. Get in a workout
All should be doable, I think! And yes, I want to get the early "meeting Danse" stuff out of the way now, like I did in my first attempt at a playthrough -- feels appropriate, even if Victor has noooo intention of joining the BOS. Not his scene. But I do like the idea of him helping Danse because he feels bad for him, only to realize "shit, this might be my fault" when the Prydwen shows up. XD But that's for tomorrow me to worry about -- night all!
