Late Snowy Update
Feb. 25th, 2022 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYeah, in the middle of a conversation, so wasn't able to get here earlier. At least the time stamp will show Friday!
Anyway, been a pretty good day. I don't know how much snow we ended up getting, but it was pretty messy out there (and worse with the plows clumsily either plowing over the end of our driveway or backing into it, annoying my dad), and I'm glad I didn't have to drive in it. And now it's all gonna freeze overnight, yaaay. . . But I just stayed in and chilled out, and got most of my to-dos sorted:
1. Do my taxes: Check – managed to get that done this morning, with only a little bit of the usual grumpiness that comes with dealing with my tax program. Everything’s filed and sorted – paid $83 bucks, but should be getting a decent-sized refund this year, so yeah, I’ll take it.
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and see about an OXBoxtra Marathon: Check! Got all four OX lists out of my Watch Later, and all three videos out of my Subs –
A) Started with that OXBoxtra Marathon, because the list videos have been building up in the old WL –
I. “7 Easter Eggs So Dark You’ll Need a Flashlight: Chapter Two” – OXBox takes us through more creepy Easter Eggs in games! From an entire murdered athletics team in Red Dead Redemption 2 (killed by a serial killer you fortunately take care of in a different mission), to Pennywise leaving his trademark balloons around the environs of Far Cry 5, to PayDay having you run a mission in Mercy Hospital at the start of the infections that will result in Left 4 Dead – and then having you spot a Witch sobbing in a room, who WILL scream at you if you startle her, these games prefer to paint their Easter Eggs black. And jumpscarey. Though nothing is weirder than Hitman III getting you to summon a talking hippo to give you hints on how to kill someone in a wine press in a later level. O.o
II. “7 Deleted Bosses You’ll Never Get to Fight” – OXtra takes us through the boss fights that shall never be, because they were deleted from the final product. Well, except sometimes you can find and fight what code is in there if you can find the right glyph for a bonus dungeon or know the right console command – looking at you, Great Old Beast from Bloodborne and Gojira Gecko from Fallout: New Vegas! But other boss fights are truly gone, like the Illusive Man fight from Mass Effect 3 and the Demonic Bat from Cuphead. And, of course, The March Hare and the Dormouse from Alice: Madness Returns, because apparently they had ONE PERSON on enemy AI and he ran out of time to do things. Yeah, if you know the history of the game, you know it is absurdly appropriate for this list, what with the bosses cut out – though, admittedly, I’ve never missed them. It DOES feel thematically right for the Dollmaker to be the only real boss, and – well. I don’t want any repeats of the Duchess or, worse, JABBERWOCK fights.
III. “7 Dying Light 2 Easter Eggs That Will Parkour All Over Your Brain” – OXBox, specifically Andy, takes us through some more Easter Egg fun specifically in the game Dying Light 2! I might not have bothered with this one if Marty McFly and his hoverboard hadn’t been on the title card, and indeed, the first item on the list is a hoverboard you can get by listening to a broadcast from two characters about one “Dr. Emmett” and then chasing the board down to a parked car and stealing it from the trunk. Unfortunately it’s only used for a specific parkour challenge and is kind of terrible. :( Fortunately there are much better Easter Eggs in the game, including lawyer-friendly “cameos” from some Resident Evil favorites – Leon and Chris Redfield, the latter having unfortunately been zombified; a recreation of the first classic DOOM level if you grab some rubber ducks and wire up a pentagram; and – gotten within the DOOM Easter Egg – your own version of the Force Choke to use on your many zombie foes! Awesome. :D
IV. “7 Ludicrously Overpowered Cheat Modes That Gave You Godlike Power” – the full crew of OXBox take us through cheat modes that are the absolute best if you want ALL THE POWER. From the explosive punches of GTA V (best paired with invincibility and moon gravity), to unlocking a tank to blow up your opponents in racing game TOCA Touring Car Championship, to the debug mode in the classic Sonic the Hedgehog letting you muck with the game however you like (turning Sonic into enemies and letting you spawn them wherever, screwing with the level design, and just flying through the level as a random TV), these cheats will let you wield the power of a god! Or you could just “motherlode” your way through Sims 4 and instead wield the power of capitalism. Your choice. XD
B) Then, after supper, it was time for this week’s Fun With Shorts – “Oddities of Nature!” A short “wildlife documentary” covering animals that use mimicry and camouflage, from leaf insects to rock frogs to color-changing cuttlefish. It was your standard reasonably terrible wildlife short from the past, in which a mantis is fed a grasshopper and a poor frog is poked to within an inch of its life with a pencil. Josh had some pretty good riffs at least! And at least it didn’t feature any screaming bear cubs like that one MST3K short. . .
C) Then it was over to Call Me Kevin, playing new game Sifu – about a young martial arts student looking to avenge his family’s murder with kung-fu! Except in Kevin’s game, this student is Shaggy. You know – from Scooby-Doo. Yes, someone has made a mod for this and it makes the game hilarious. XD Well, that and poor Kevin’s struggles to learn how the game even works – it’s a pretty tricky game, since you don’t always see enemies coming for you, or how they’re going to attack you. It’s very easy to be taken off guard and beaten to death! And when you get killed, you can use the power of your protective charm to rise – but each time you do, you get older and older, skipping more and more of your life. . .ending at a maximum fighting age of 78 years. I know this because Kevin died so often on his way to the first boss fight that he got a game over at that age. XD Poor guy, he was trying so hard to get around people and block their attacks and use his special moves! Fortunately he found some shortcuts on his next go-round, and was able to get past the mooks and through the boss fight by the ripe old age of 52. Kevin promptly decided Shaggy was retiring and putting revenge behind him. XD Yeah, that seems fair.
D) And finally we had GrayStillPlays playing Cities: Skylines again, this time using his USA map to cut the United States in half. Specifically, he made a pair of giant plateaus running straight up to California, then flooded the channel in-between (and California, since it was the outlet for all that water). He then started shoving as many people as humanly possible onto the map, with the goal of reaching 30K – before unleashing HELL in the form of every natural disaster he could get his hands on. The goal? To find out the safest place to live in during an apocalypse! XD Anyway, as per usual, everything was powered by five million wind turbines (again, if Gray has to suffer them in GTA V, so do the virtual birds in his cities), and he just went for as much density as possible. The traffic jams stretched for MILES. XD He had an early hiccup with a random tsunami as he was hovering around the 28K mark for population (causing a mass exodus to the northern half of the map, represented by a ton of people running along the sidewalks because you ain’t getting ANYWHERE in a car), but eventually he got to 30K and his computer crying at him for it to end. So he obliged. Meteor strikes, tornadoes (combining into a super-mega-tornado, no less), tsunamis, flooding (caused by opening up the interior channel), massive lightning storms – he threw it ALL at the cities to kill as many people as possible. It took quite a while – the people who live in Hell are tough, after all – but finally Gray had his single survivor (for like five seconds before they died). So – place to live in the end of days? New Mexico, apparently! Congrats, NM, enjoy your Gray trophy. XD
3. Play Unpacking and work through the final level for more stickers: Check – I have officially completed the game again, having unpacked the entire ending house. And once again, the much-too-adorable ending song made me tear up. :) I DID end up having to look up how to get those final four stickers I was missing, though! A couple I probably should have realized on my own – “Solve A Puzzle” refers to the Rubix Cube you have in the first couple of levels (you right-click on it a couple of times, much like setting the clocks in the game), while “Hat on Head” refers to putting the girlfriend’s baseball cap on her monster head. XD The other two, though, I wasn’t going to get without help – “Tidy Whities” refers to the BOYFRIEND’S underwear and socks – you have to put them all neatly into their own drawer to get that one. And “Brew Some Coffee” involves getting EVERY bit of kit the boyfriend might use in his kitchen to brew up his super-fancy espresso out onto the counter. Including multiple kettles and grinders, plus two mugs. Yeah, the site I found on my iPad listing all the stickers said this was the hardest one of all. XD But I have a complete set now, and thus I have basically finished Unpacking. Nice. :)
4. Continue editing Chapter 5 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale Of Tears”: Check – Alice has gotten a snack for the night – Mark Bremerkamp again, still peeing behind the dumpsters but at least using hand sanitizer now – and has met Tung. And been rather taken aback by his looks, because Mercurio saying his clan gets hit by the ugly stick doesn’t really prepare you for meeting a vampire whose face is mainly boils. XD She’s doing her best not to stare, though – and at least Tung is understanding, given she’s a newbie. Just a few more pages to finish off this chapter, then we go into Chapter 6! Maybe I’ll be able to get Chapter 5 up in March after all?
5. Get in a workout: No check – I meant to, but the OXBoxtra marathon ended up running over too late for me to get down there. Ah well – maybe tomorrow, though I don’t usually work out on cleaning Saturdays. . .first time for everything? :p
Additionally:
-->I actually got all of my Smiler pictures for their next Chill Save update done last night! So those are ready to go whenever I need them, yay. I also went on the Incorrect Quotes Generator I’ve visited before for silly times and did some quotes for the Victor/Alice/Smiler thruple, just for funsies. XD So yeah, actually sort of staying ahead on tumblr drafts, look at me.
Not bad, huh? Very glad to have my taxes out of the way, and glad they didn't take longer than about an hour, yay. And now it's time to set up the to-do list for tomorrow:
1. Clean my room and do the monthly laundry
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and clean out the Watch Later
3. Play Sims 4 -- either more Smiler Always or some building
4. Write some more on "Learn To Love Again"
5. Get in a workout (if possible)
Leaving that last one optional because, again, don't usually do it on cleaning days, so. . .we'll see! And yeah, Sims 4 might be building just because I'm unsure of mod statuses following the "behind the scenes fixes" patch from Wednesday. Might work some more on my deconstructed Unpacking house, or maybe try making my version of the lot for my "Worst Lot In The World" challenge -- I do need to start getting going on my challenge save!
Right now, though, I need a glass of water and to finish catching up on anything I might have missed during my chat -- night all!
Anyway, been a pretty good day. I don't know how much snow we ended up getting, but it was pretty messy out there (and worse with the plows clumsily either plowing over the end of our driveway or backing into it, annoying my dad), and I'm glad I didn't have to drive in it. And now it's all gonna freeze overnight, yaaay. . . But I just stayed in and chilled out, and got most of my to-dos sorted:
1. Do my taxes: Check – managed to get that done this morning, with only a little bit of the usual grumpiness that comes with dealing with my tax program. Everything’s filed and sorted – paid $83 bucks, but should be getting a decent-sized refund this year, so yeah, I’ll take it.
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and see about an OXBoxtra Marathon: Check! Got all four OX lists out of my Watch Later, and all three videos out of my Subs –
A) Started with that OXBoxtra Marathon, because the list videos have been building up in the old WL –
I. “7 Easter Eggs So Dark You’ll Need a Flashlight: Chapter Two” – OXBox takes us through more creepy Easter Eggs in games! From an entire murdered athletics team in Red Dead Redemption 2 (killed by a serial killer you fortunately take care of in a different mission), to Pennywise leaving his trademark balloons around the environs of Far Cry 5, to PayDay having you run a mission in Mercy Hospital at the start of the infections that will result in Left 4 Dead – and then having you spot a Witch sobbing in a room, who WILL scream at you if you startle her, these games prefer to paint their Easter Eggs black. And jumpscarey. Though nothing is weirder than Hitman III getting you to summon a talking hippo to give you hints on how to kill someone in a wine press in a later level. O.o
II. “7 Deleted Bosses You’ll Never Get to Fight” – OXtra takes us through the boss fights that shall never be, because they were deleted from the final product. Well, except sometimes you can find and fight what code is in there if you can find the right glyph for a bonus dungeon or know the right console command – looking at you, Great Old Beast from Bloodborne and Gojira Gecko from Fallout: New Vegas! But other boss fights are truly gone, like the Illusive Man fight from Mass Effect 3 and the Demonic Bat from Cuphead. And, of course, The March Hare and the Dormouse from Alice: Madness Returns, because apparently they had ONE PERSON on enemy AI and he ran out of time to do things. Yeah, if you know the history of the game, you know it is absurdly appropriate for this list, what with the bosses cut out – though, admittedly, I’ve never missed them. It DOES feel thematically right for the Dollmaker to be the only real boss, and – well. I don’t want any repeats of the Duchess or, worse, JABBERWOCK fights.
III. “7 Dying Light 2 Easter Eggs That Will Parkour All Over Your Brain” – OXBox, specifically Andy, takes us through some more Easter Egg fun specifically in the game Dying Light 2! I might not have bothered with this one if Marty McFly and his hoverboard hadn’t been on the title card, and indeed, the first item on the list is a hoverboard you can get by listening to a broadcast from two characters about one “Dr. Emmett” and then chasing the board down to a parked car and stealing it from the trunk. Unfortunately it’s only used for a specific parkour challenge and is kind of terrible. :( Fortunately there are much better Easter Eggs in the game, including lawyer-friendly “cameos” from some Resident Evil favorites – Leon and Chris Redfield, the latter having unfortunately been zombified; a recreation of the first classic DOOM level if you grab some rubber ducks and wire up a pentagram; and – gotten within the DOOM Easter Egg – your own version of the Force Choke to use on your many zombie foes! Awesome. :D
IV. “7 Ludicrously Overpowered Cheat Modes That Gave You Godlike Power” – the full crew of OXBox take us through cheat modes that are the absolute best if you want ALL THE POWER. From the explosive punches of GTA V (best paired with invincibility and moon gravity), to unlocking a tank to blow up your opponents in racing game TOCA Touring Car Championship, to the debug mode in the classic Sonic the Hedgehog letting you muck with the game however you like (turning Sonic into enemies and letting you spawn them wherever, screwing with the level design, and just flying through the level as a random TV), these cheats will let you wield the power of a god! Or you could just “motherlode” your way through Sims 4 and instead wield the power of capitalism. Your choice. XD
B) Then, after supper, it was time for this week’s Fun With Shorts – “Oddities of Nature!” A short “wildlife documentary” covering animals that use mimicry and camouflage, from leaf insects to rock frogs to color-changing cuttlefish. It was your standard reasonably terrible wildlife short from the past, in which a mantis is fed a grasshopper and a poor frog is poked to within an inch of its life with a pencil. Josh had some pretty good riffs at least! And at least it didn’t feature any screaming bear cubs like that one MST3K short. . .
C) Then it was over to Call Me Kevin, playing new game Sifu – about a young martial arts student looking to avenge his family’s murder with kung-fu! Except in Kevin’s game, this student is Shaggy. You know – from Scooby-Doo. Yes, someone has made a mod for this and it makes the game hilarious. XD Well, that and poor Kevin’s struggles to learn how the game even works – it’s a pretty tricky game, since you don’t always see enemies coming for you, or how they’re going to attack you. It’s very easy to be taken off guard and beaten to death! And when you get killed, you can use the power of your protective charm to rise – but each time you do, you get older and older, skipping more and more of your life. . .ending at a maximum fighting age of 78 years. I know this because Kevin died so often on his way to the first boss fight that he got a game over at that age. XD Poor guy, he was trying so hard to get around people and block their attacks and use his special moves! Fortunately he found some shortcuts on his next go-round, and was able to get past the mooks and through the boss fight by the ripe old age of 52. Kevin promptly decided Shaggy was retiring and putting revenge behind him. XD Yeah, that seems fair.
D) And finally we had GrayStillPlays playing Cities: Skylines again, this time using his USA map to cut the United States in half. Specifically, he made a pair of giant plateaus running straight up to California, then flooded the channel in-between (and California, since it was the outlet for all that water). He then started shoving as many people as humanly possible onto the map, with the goal of reaching 30K – before unleashing HELL in the form of every natural disaster he could get his hands on. The goal? To find out the safest place to live in during an apocalypse! XD Anyway, as per usual, everything was powered by five million wind turbines (again, if Gray has to suffer them in GTA V, so do the virtual birds in his cities), and he just went for as much density as possible. The traffic jams stretched for MILES. XD He had an early hiccup with a random tsunami as he was hovering around the 28K mark for population (causing a mass exodus to the northern half of the map, represented by a ton of people running along the sidewalks because you ain’t getting ANYWHERE in a car), but eventually he got to 30K and his computer crying at him for it to end. So he obliged. Meteor strikes, tornadoes (combining into a super-mega-tornado, no less), tsunamis, flooding (caused by opening up the interior channel), massive lightning storms – he threw it ALL at the cities to kill as many people as possible. It took quite a while – the people who live in Hell are tough, after all – but finally Gray had his single survivor (for like five seconds before they died). So – place to live in the end of days? New Mexico, apparently! Congrats, NM, enjoy your Gray trophy. XD
3. Play Unpacking and work through the final level for more stickers: Check – I have officially completed the game again, having unpacked the entire ending house. And once again, the much-too-adorable ending song made me tear up. :) I DID end up having to look up how to get those final four stickers I was missing, though! A couple I probably should have realized on my own – “Solve A Puzzle” refers to the Rubix Cube you have in the first couple of levels (you right-click on it a couple of times, much like setting the clocks in the game), while “Hat on Head” refers to putting the girlfriend’s baseball cap on her monster head. XD The other two, though, I wasn’t going to get without help – “Tidy Whities” refers to the BOYFRIEND’S underwear and socks – you have to put them all neatly into their own drawer to get that one. And “Brew Some Coffee” involves getting EVERY bit of kit the boyfriend might use in his kitchen to brew up his super-fancy espresso out onto the counter. Including multiple kettles and grinders, plus two mugs. Yeah, the site I found on my iPad listing all the stickers said this was the hardest one of all. XD But I have a complete set now, and thus I have basically finished Unpacking. Nice. :)
4. Continue editing Chapter 5 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale Of Tears”: Check – Alice has gotten a snack for the night – Mark Bremerkamp again, still peeing behind the dumpsters but at least using hand sanitizer now – and has met Tung. And been rather taken aback by his looks, because Mercurio saying his clan gets hit by the ugly stick doesn’t really prepare you for meeting a vampire whose face is mainly boils. XD She’s doing her best not to stare, though – and at least Tung is understanding, given she’s a newbie. Just a few more pages to finish off this chapter, then we go into Chapter 6! Maybe I’ll be able to get Chapter 5 up in March after all?
5. Get in a workout: No check – I meant to, but the OXBoxtra marathon ended up running over too late for me to get down there. Ah well – maybe tomorrow, though I don’t usually work out on cleaning Saturdays. . .first time for everything? :p
Additionally:
-->I actually got all of my Smiler pictures for their next Chill Save update done last night! So those are ready to go whenever I need them, yay. I also went on the Incorrect Quotes Generator I’ve visited before for silly times and did some quotes for the Victor/Alice/Smiler thruple, just for funsies. XD So yeah, actually sort of staying ahead on tumblr drafts, look at me.
Not bad, huh? Very glad to have my taxes out of the way, and glad they didn't take longer than about an hour, yay. And now it's time to set up the to-do list for tomorrow:
1. Clean my room and do the monthly laundry
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and clean out the Watch Later
3. Play Sims 4 -- either more Smiler Always or some building
4. Write some more on "Learn To Love Again"
5. Get in a workout (if possible)
Leaving that last one optional because, again, don't usually do it on cleaning days, so. . .we'll see! And yeah, Sims 4 might be building just because I'm unsure of mod statuses following the "behind the scenes fixes" patch from Wednesday. Might work some more on my deconstructed Unpacking house, or maybe try making my version of the lot for my "Worst Lot In The World" challenge -- I do need to start getting going on my challenge save!
Right now, though, I need a glass of water and to finish catching up on anything I might have missed during my chat -- night all!
