Less Than Relaxing Sunday
Mar. 20th, 2022 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickAt least to start -- we recently got a Ring doorbell system, and the set up was one of those things that is an utter pain in the ass. From getting the app properly installed on our phones, to figuring out how to wire it into the doorbell (which also stopped me from getting on my computer for a good hour because the breaker the bell was connected to is also the one that my room is on -- I couldn't even get properly dressed for a while because I had no light), to discovering that the motion sensor is so sensitive it was chiming EVERY TIME A CAR DROVE BY OUR HOUSE. . . Ugh. Not a good morning in the slightest.
That being said, I DID complete my to-do list this afternoon -- possibly because, thanks to the distraction of the doorbell, we never did do anything in Sims 4 with Mom's kitchen plans --
1. Keep up on the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – not a heck of a lot to note down this time (as you will see below, today was largely “clean up a settlement and make it fit for human habitation”), but I’ve got down Victor and Preston’s work to make Sunshine Tidings a nice place to live. Plus, because one of the settlers that showed up thanks to the recruitment beacon was a ghoul, I was able to put in Victor’s first meeting with a non-feral ghoul, which gave me an excuse to have her recognize his name from the before times and Victor have to give her and Preston his “engineer in the military” backstory, nice. :) So a good bit of fanficcy stuff there!
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and Jon's F:NV "Utter Chaos" video: Check, plus some bonuses!
A) Started with a quick look at a Smiler vid – what appears to be a virtual reality reconstruction of the ride! So that’s pretty cool, honestly. Even if I can never ride the ride in person, at least I can experience it vicariously through videos such as these. :)
B) Then I moved onto a recent upload from onlyabidoang – his notes on the March 15 2022 patch which introduced the Neighborhood Stories system in full! Good simple overview of how the system works, what can happen, and how you adjust it. There was also a note on the upcoming tattoos, just because the Sims team had already provided previews of them. Abi’s good at this sort of simple informative video, and I always appreciate his uploads. :)
C) And from there it was onto the latest Plumbella upload – starting an LP of The Sims 2 – on the PSP! Yes, the PlayStation Portable had a Sims 2 game, and it was all about Strangetown and the mysteries therein! Naturally, it didn’t play QUITE like the PC version – this one has a story and everything! A story that involves your player character Sim breaking down outside of Strangetown and leaving your car with a very grouchy mechanic (who teaches you the “Social Game” mechanic where you have to match the other person’s speech bubbles) before going to wait in the nearby curio shop (and get a personality test to discover your Aspiration and personality zodiac sign) – only to discover later that not only your car, but the entire shop is gone! And then you get a call from a mysterious “Dr. Newlow” who offers to hire you as an assistant if you can get a ride into town and a place to stay. Your ride comes from a local cop who will give you a lift if you get him donuts from the curio shop owner (turns out they’re in the bathroom trash), and your home from Bella Goth, who is running away after an alien abduction and gives you Espirtu Estate in exchange for all your money. Fortunately the cop will give you some cash – that he took from criminals and crime scenes. Also there’s a sanity mechanic and it’s handled about as well as anything about sanity in the early 2000s, as Jesse noted. She had fun, though – she unabashedly flirted with Bella and made sure to collect all the little “hints about the occult” scattered around (which are pretty dark at times! Like the best way to a man’s heart being through a major vein). She’s currently left it at having moved into the estate and learning from the maid weird shit is afoot – I guess next time we find out just how freaking haunted the place is! (Seriously – Espirtu Estate. House is haunted.)
D) And then it was onto the Subs for the only video there today – GrayStillPlays and more Happy Wheels! Started with a bottle flip with epic yeets, doom music, and death by harpoon (also a spinning “calm down” platform that Gray got completely by accident and was very pleased by); Nixon taking a very deadly Segway ride (featuring coin grabs where you had to be VERY fast to avoid death by harpoon or death by sais and people cannon; or another course where you could be tricked into a faux spikefall before VERY carefully going down the world’s steepest staircase to the win); Gray tormenting some stick figures who very much don’t want to fight in a “stick figure fight” demo; Gray having to bike through an incredibly spiky “blood tears” board to get the coin (protected by a bloody laughing face and a double sai – though, really, Gray trying to figure out alternate paths was much more deadly); Pogo Guy hopping through a very deadly obstacle course (with multiple paths through the mines, laser harpoons, and wrecking balls – though as Gray discovered, trying to cheese it by just hopping on the ceiling might put you down an invisible pit); a don’t-move board where you watch a Nixon’s heart go on a journey before being plopped into a hobo; and finally a trip to Dylan Snyder’s Vermont, where Bike Dad the Chad had to avoid being smashed by Thomas the Tank engine, crushed by the falling half-and-half iced teas, getting stabbed in the head as he pedaled slowly over the rocky sidewalk, axed by the ax windmills, and finally run over by the Karen with a plow truck who’d been tormenting him all level before watching as she yeeted herself into a pond (unless you’re Gray, in which case maybe you kill her too early and break the board XD). All of these boards are so ridiculous and I love them. :p
E) Then, of course, this evening we had Jon’s latest F:NV “Utter Chaos” video! Where Jon decided that perhaps the trick to completing Dead Money was to explore Old World Blues. XD To be fair, the idea was that he hadn’t explored everywhere in OWB yet, because previously he wasn’t the grenade sniper god. So it was a good place to look for the door to the restaurant he needed in the Sierra Madre!
In typical “Utter Chaos” fashion, what he found instead were radscorpions that could shoot lasers, a door to a mine with a bloatfly that wouldn’t die until it was properly activated and a random deathclaw, a train tunnel to Nellis, and an invisible “trauma harness” that could only just push him around. After marking every door he could find, he left via the Goodsprings exit and went to buy all the grenades from the grenade shop, just because he could.
From there it was time to do some Brotherhood of Steel stuff, as Jon was trying not to blow them up unless he absolutely had to. And because he was starting to run out of doors and places to look for doors, he decided to go ahead and turn on the quest markers. Which was good, as it led him to a mining shack and a mine that he’d COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN EXISTED. Which led him, via the house of a dude named Orion whom Jon killed because he’d already failed his quest (and who proved to be pretty tough for someone in a sweater vest) to the top floor of REPCONN, where was able to pick up the final thing he needed for the first BOS sub-quest! From there he went to check on some Brotherhood scouts to get their reports – two were dressed. . .let’s say they weren’t in uniform; the third was appropriately attired, but set up near a mother deathclaw – and then the Legion assassins showed up. It is REALLY a good thing Jon’s getting so good with explosives!
And so that brought us to the final BOS subquest, finding parts for something-or-other – Jon already had two of the three things needed, but hadn’t yet located the third. But he knew where to go for it – Vault 22, a vault that had a lovely elevator to all of its floors. An elevator that was NOT randomized, and – with some creative use of drugs and outfits – could be repaired and allow Jon access to all the levels!
One of the levels was filled with hardened sentry bots and his attempts to explode them knocked a keycard he needed out of existence. Whoops. At least he got a good shooting gallery when he found his way into the caves? Not to mention a bunch more doors to explore. . .but none of the ones he needed. Shame. So it appears next time the hunt is still on, as Jon prepares to once again use one DLC to solve a different DLC, and head back into the earlier parts of Lonesome Road to check out the doors there. Should be interesting – though I’m still wondering if any of the game is actually “finishable,” given the last time Jon tried to complete a campaign, the whole thing just broke. . .
3. Play Fallout 4 and get Sunshine Tidings set up before starting toward Diamond City: Check, though the “starting toward Diamond City” part didn’t really happen – look, I was very invested in getting the settlement done right! Which meant hacking Goodfeels’s terminal to check on his backstory. XD More seriously, I scrapped all the old beds and gave everyone the nicer Vault-Tec ones; lugged away as many of the corpses as I possibly could (for some reason, I couldn’t move the Legendary Radroach – might be for the best, those things are CREEPY when you pick them up); set up a water pump and a little farm with corn, tatos, melons, gourds, mutfruit, razorgrain, and carrots; moved the cooking station inside the “mess hall;” scrapped down as much crap as I possibly could; and set up a couple of toilets and a shower and sink in some relatively private areas. Oh, and set up the actual recruitment beacon (with a windmill generator – I’m trying to favor those for “immersion” because what the hell do the gas generators run on??) to attract some settlers – got two already, a ghoul woman and an unknown. I still need to set up defenses, but I’m low on oil for turrets, so I might have to wait for another settler to arrive and assign them guard duty. I also want to clear out Victor’s inventory some more the next time I play – he’s carrying around WAY too much crap right now, and so is Preston. Time to scrap down some guns and armor and whatnot, I think!
4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check – got the pictures sorted for Smiler Always’s next Chill Save update on Valice Multiverse and then did some quick drafts of the posts while my parents were away at Job Lot after lunch getting boxes (for book storage; a lot of the older ones are falling apart). And then, this evening, I was able to go back to those initial drafts and finish up the text and tags, w00. Meaning, given what I currently have in my drafts, I’m all set for a Smiler/Valicer-themed week this week! :D Also found a couple of more generic shipping things to reblog later, so that’s all good. Plus a cool FO4 Slog settlement (all-ghoul settlement built around an old swimming pool) picture for Valice Multiverse’s queue, yay. Keeping busy!
5. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back to the Oxventure – well, kind of; the next video in the big giant playlist was actually the “13 Best D&D Moments: Oxventure’s Critical Hits of 2019” list video. Which I remember enjoying the first time I watched it, so I decided to give it another go, this time with context! XD Features such lovely things as the skeleton army building an orphanage with orphan mortar; Dob being reunited with his sister Suzette (and losing two pints of blood in her search for a cure on rabies); Egbert asking “what’s chess?” in response to a drunk rich dude trying to describe how the villain of “Heist Society” hid the Emerald Tear via chess metaphors; and later in that same show, Dob and Merilwen’s “bear down” protocol, which involved Dob throwing Cat!Merilwen at the villain, only for her to turn into a bear when she hit him. XD Good times, good times!
So yeah, that's all good at least. Still would have preferred a quieter morning to enjoy my parfait in peace, but what are you gonna do. Right now, I just have to hit the sheets -- first of three full weeks of work I have to get through before my next major bit of time off starts tomorrow! Bleeeh. . .well, hopefully it won't be too stressful. We'll see. Night all!
That being said, I DID complete my to-do list this afternoon -- possibly because, thanks to the distraction of the doorbell, we never did do anything in Sims 4 with Mom's kitchen plans --
1. Keep up on the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – not a heck of a lot to note down this time (as you will see below, today was largely “clean up a settlement and make it fit for human habitation”), but I’ve got down Victor and Preston’s work to make Sunshine Tidings a nice place to live. Plus, because one of the settlers that showed up thanks to the recruitment beacon was a ghoul, I was able to put in Victor’s first meeting with a non-feral ghoul, which gave me an excuse to have her recognize his name from the before times and Victor have to give her and Preston his “engineer in the military” backstory, nice. :) So a good bit of fanficcy stuff there!
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and Jon's F:NV "Utter Chaos" video: Check, plus some bonuses!
A) Started with a quick look at a Smiler vid – what appears to be a virtual reality reconstruction of the ride! So that’s pretty cool, honestly. Even if I can never ride the ride in person, at least I can experience it vicariously through videos such as these. :)
B) Then I moved onto a recent upload from onlyabidoang – his notes on the March 15 2022 patch which introduced the Neighborhood Stories system in full! Good simple overview of how the system works, what can happen, and how you adjust it. There was also a note on the upcoming tattoos, just because the Sims team had already provided previews of them. Abi’s good at this sort of simple informative video, and I always appreciate his uploads. :)
C) And from there it was onto the latest Plumbella upload – starting an LP of The Sims 2 – on the PSP! Yes, the PlayStation Portable had a Sims 2 game, and it was all about Strangetown and the mysteries therein! Naturally, it didn’t play QUITE like the PC version – this one has a story and everything! A story that involves your player character Sim breaking down outside of Strangetown and leaving your car with a very grouchy mechanic (who teaches you the “Social Game” mechanic where you have to match the other person’s speech bubbles) before going to wait in the nearby curio shop (and get a personality test to discover your Aspiration and personality zodiac sign) – only to discover later that not only your car, but the entire shop is gone! And then you get a call from a mysterious “Dr. Newlow” who offers to hire you as an assistant if you can get a ride into town and a place to stay. Your ride comes from a local cop who will give you a lift if you get him donuts from the curio shop owner (turns out they’re in the bathroom trash), and your home from Bella Goth, who is running away after an alien abduction and gives you Espirtu Estate in exchange for all your money. Fortunately the cop will give you some cash – that he took from criminals and crime scenes. Also there’s a sanity mechanic and it’s handled about as well as anything about sanity in the early 2000s, as Jesse noted. She had fun, though – she unabashedly flirted with Bella and made sure to collect all the little “hints about the occult” scattered around (which are pretty dark at times! Like the best way to a man’s heart being through a major vein). She’s currently left it at having moved into the estate and learning from the maid weird shit is afoot – I guess next time we find out just how freaking haunted the place is! (Seriously – Espirtu Estate. House is haunted.)
D) And then it was onto the Subs for the only video there today – GrayStillPlays and more Happy Wheels! Started with a bottle flip with epic yeets, doom music, and death by harpoon (also a spinning “calm down” platform that Gray got completely by accident and was very pleased by); Nixon taking a very deadly Segway ride (featuring coin grabs where you had to be VERY fast to avoid death by harpoon or death by sais and people cannon; or another course where you could be tricked into a faux spikefall before VERY carefully going down the world’s steepest staircase to the win); Gray tormenting some stick figures who very much don’t want to fight in a “stick figure fight” demo; Gray having to bike through an incredibly spiky “blood tears” board to get the coin (protected by a bloody laughing face and a double sai – though, really, Gray trying to figure out alternate paths was much more deadly); Pogo Guy hopping through a very deadly obstacle course (with multiple paths through the mines, laser harpoons, and wrecking balls – though as Gray discovered, trying to cheese it by just hopping on the ceiling might put you down an invisible pit); a don’t-move board where you watch a Nixon’s heart go on a journey before being plopped into a hobo; and finally a trip to Dylan Snyder’s Vermont, where Bike Dad the Chad had to avoid being smashed by Thomas the Tank engine, crushed by the falling half-and-half iced teas, getting stabbed in the head as he pedaled slowly over the rocky sidewalk, axed by the ax windmills, and finally run over by the Karen with a plow truck who’d been tormenting him all level before watching as she yeeted herself into a pond (unless you’re Gray, in which case maybe you kill her too early and break the board XD). All of these boards are so ridiculous and I love them. :p
E) Then, of course, this evening we had Jon’s latest F:NV “Utter Chaos” video! Where Jon decided that perhaps the trick to completing Dead Money was to explore Old World Blues. XD To be fair, the idea was that he hadn’t explored everywhere in OWB yet, because previously he wasn’t the grenade sniper god. So it was a good place to look for the door to the restaurant he needed in the Sierra Madre!
In typical “Utter Chaos” fashion, what he found instead were radscorpions that could shoot lasers, a door to a mine with a bloatfly that wouldn’t die until it was properly activated and a random deathclaw, a train tunnel to Nellis, and an invisible “trauma harness” that could only just push him around. After marking every door he could find, he left via the Goodsprings exit and went to buy all the grenades from the grenade shop, just because he could.
From there it was time to do some Brotherhood of Steel stuff, as Jon was trying not to blow them up unless he absolutely had to. And because he was starting to run out of doors and places to look for doors, he decided to go ahead and turn on the quest markers. Which was good, as it led him to a mining shack and a mine that he’d COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN EXISTED. Which led him, via the house of a dude named Orion whom Jon killed because he’d already failed his quest (and who proved to be pretty tough for someone in a sweater vest) to the top floor of REPCONN, where was able to pick up the final thing he needed for the first BOS sub-quest! From there he went to check on some Brotherhood scouts to get their reports – two were dressed. . .let’s say they weren’t in uniform; the third was appropriately attired, but set up near a mother deathclaw – and then the Legion assassins showed up. It is REALLY a good thing Jon’s getting so good with explosives!
And so that brought us to the final BOS subquest, finding parts for something-or-other – Jon already had two of the three things needed, but hadn’t yet located the third. But he knew where to go for it – Vault 22, a vault that had a lovely elevator to all of its floors. An elevator that was NOT randomized, and – with some creative use of drugs and outfits – could be repaired and allow Jon access to all the levels!
One of the levels was filled with hardened sentry bots and his attempts to explode them knocked a keycard he needed out of existence. Whoops. At least he got a good shooting gallery when he found his way into the caves? Not to mention a bunch more doors to explore. . .but none of the ones he needed. Shame. So it appears next time the hunt is still on, as Jon prepares to once again use one DLC to solve a different DLC, and head back into the earlier parts of Lonesome Road to check out the doors there. Should be interesting – though I’m still wondering if any of the game is actually “finishable,” given the last time Jon tried to complete a campaign, the whole thing just broke. . .
3. Play Fallout 4 and get Sunshine Tidings set up before starting toward Diamond City: Check, though the “starting toward Diamond City” part didn’t really happen – look, I was very invested in getting the settlement done right! Which meant hacking Goodfeels’s terminal to check on his backstory. XD More seriously, I scrapped all the old beds and gave everyone the nicer Vault-Tec ones; lugged away as many of the corpses as I possibly could (for some reason, I couldn’t move the Legendary Radroach – might be for the best, those things are CREEPY when you pick them up); set up a water pump and a little farm with corn, tatos, melons, gourds, mutfruit, razorgrain, and carrots; moved the cooking station inside the “mess hall;” scrapped down as much crap as I possibly could; and set up a couple of toilets and a shower and sink in some relatively private areas. Oh, and set up the actual recruitment beacon (with a windmill generator – I’m trying to favor those for “immersion” because what the hell do the gas generators run on??) to attract some settlers – got two already, a ghoul woman and an unknown. I still need to set up defenses, but I’m low on oil for turrets, so I might have to wait for another settler to arrive and assign them guard duty. I also want to clear out Victor’s inventory some more the next time I play – he’s carrying around WAY too much crap right now, and so is Preston. Time to scrap down some guns and armor and whatnot, I think!
4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check – got the pictures sorted for Smiler Always’s next Chill Save update on Valice Multiverse and then did some quick drafts of the posts while my parents were away at Job Lot after lunch getting boxes (for book storage; a lot of the older ones are falling apart). And then, this evening, I was able to go back to those initial drafts and finish up the text and tags, w00. Meaning, given what I currently have in my drafts, I’m all set for a Smiler/Valicer-themed week this week! :D Also found a couple of more generic shipping things to reblog later, so that’s all good. Plus a cool FO4 Slog settlement (all-ghoul settlement built around an old swimming pool) picture for Valice Multiverse’s queue, yay. Keeping busy!
5. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back to the Oxventure – well, kind of; the next video in the big giant playlist was actually the “13 Best D&D Moments: Oxventure’s Critical Hits of 2019” list video. Which I remember enjoying the first time I watched it, so I decided to give it another go, this time with context! XD Features such lovely things as the skeleton army building an orphanage with orphan mortar; Dob being reunited with his sister Suzette (and losing two pints of blood in her search for a cure on rabies); Egbert asking “what’s chess?” in response to a drunk rich dude trying to describe how the villain of “Heist Society” hid the Emerald Tear via chess metaphors; and later in that same show, Dob and Merilwen’s “bear down” protocol, which involved Dob throwing Cat!Merilwen at the villain, only for her to turn into a bear when she hit him. XD Good times, good times!
So yeah, that's all good at least. Still would have preferred a quieter morning to enjoy my parfait in peace, but what are you gonna do. Right now, I just have to hit the sheets -- first of three full weeks of work I have to get through before my next major bit of time off starts tomorrow! Bleeeh. . .well, hopefully it won't be too stressful. We'll see. Night all!
