Busier Than Anticipated Wednesday
Apr. 20th, 2022 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickI mean, I anticipated some busy-ness, especially at work, but the afternoon has definitely had more to it than expected, particularly in the realms of YouTube:
Work – As stated, busy day again, mostly because I was up there by myself (coworker had to tend to a pet). Though, fortunately, again not overwhemingly busy – phones were mostly quiet, and there weren’t a lot of checks in the mail to put on. Lot of reversals, though, and the GL took longer than I wanted because I was trying to do two things at once and both ended up late. *sigh* Ah well – I got most of the important stuff done, and that’s what’s important.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back to the Oxventure Stream “Hunter Pressure!” As it turns out, while majority did rule on sneaking upstairs to kill those who wished to hunt the Oxventurers in their sleep, it took quite a lot of argument! Mostly because – as Dob himself pointed out – everyone seemed weirdly reluctant to do it if Dob wasn’t on board. Or, at least, they were very determined to get Dob on board. (Admittedly, Egbert and Robin weren’t crazy about the plan either, but were trying to be pragmatic about things – Merilwen, on the other hand, was all about the revenge and making these people suffer, which eventually got her a Prudence hug.) After talking about possible other plans – like just ruining all their gear before running, or using the classic grease-and-spikes Meat Grinder trap as a fallback, Dob finally encouraged the others to just go up there and start killin’, and he and Robin would stay back in the foyer and talk traps. This was met with general approval, and Corazon, Prudence, Merilwen, and Egbert headed upstairs (with – varying levels of stealth: Egbert got a nat 20 and was darkness and shadow; Prudence got a 7 and was humming to herself all the way up) while Dob and Robin hung back and looked at their surroundings. Dob was briefly concerned by a statue of Rodrigo that was very lifelike, but Johnny assured him it was genuinely just a statue. After running through a few ideas (Robin defaulting to pub-owner tricks like giving people bad drinks, Dob trying to talk him into pretending to be a statue and stabbing people), they ended up with Robin having gotten a rope over a precariously-balanced harp on the mezzanine level, ready to yank it down on pursuers, and Dob up on the chandelier, ready to cut it down on pursuers.
Meanwhile, the rest of the gang made it upstairs, where Prudence’s humming got the attention of an annoyed Orbo, who yelled in their general direction to keep it down, he’s trying to sleep. After some debate about which door to try first (the ornate double doors obviously being Rodrigo’s quarters and thus a good target; Merilwen, however, wanted him to SEE this all crumble beneath him – cue the Prudence hug), Egbert ended up using the last of his super stealth to check out Orbo’s room, which was just AWASH in beer and wine bottles and whatnot. Orbo himself, fortunately, had gone back to sleep, so Egbert tried to sneak in to tie him to the bed if nothing else –
Nat 1. Egbert stepped on a bottle, legs went out from under him, and he landed with a crash that definitely woke up the sleeping Goliath. He tried desperately to claim he was room service with a Scotch Egg, but another Nat 1 meant that he was very shortly to be on the business end of Orbo’s war hammer. Johnny had everyone roll for initiative, and, hilariously, Dob – still out in the foyer, mind – got the best result. Having heard the crash and deduced his friends were in trouble, he proceeded to swing the chandelier backwards, launch himself off it as it swung back forward, swan dive into Orbo’s room, tuck and roll, then COME UP AND USE HIS MOMENTUM TO BARREL INTO HIM AND KNOCK HIM OUT THE WINDOW. A combination of a good roll on Luke’s part and a bad one on Johnny’s, plus Orbo not having a high armor class, meant that this SUCCEEDED and resulted in Orbo not only falling out the window, but THROUGH THE TRAPDOOR COURTYARD, resulting a rather wet noise as he met the dungeon floor. Dob just glared at everyone as this happened. XD And then they tried to pretend that they were going for a more peaceful resolution, and Dob just barely restrained himself from throwing himself out the window for Robin’s sake.
Of course, this ruckus did not go unnoticed, as the other residents of the house began to stir. Merilwen desperately tried to imitate Orbo’s voice (who was getting steadily more Slavic as time went on) and claim he’d just had a bad dream – a 16 on a Charisma roll meant that she successfully fooled Ashlin and Furio, but Rodrigo and Neve beat her and started investigating. Some panicked discussion about what they wanted to do about the situation followed – Merilwen was all for just Poison Spraying everyone in the face, but Corazon wanted something a bit sneakier and to set up a trap via her filling a bucket with Poison Spray so they could all hide around the room and, as Dob put it, kill everyone with magic. XD They eventually settled on Corazon’s plan as the best, but then Ellen noted a problem – Poison Spray is actually a bit misnamed, in that it’s a cloud of gas, not a spray of liquid. Johnny offered Merilwen a devil’s bargain – namely, they put a bucket full of “liquid” in the room and said that she could “carbonate” it with her Poison Spray if she wished. Merilwen immediately went for it –
Yeah, uh, Orbo needed a piss during the night, and that was the bucket. XD To be fair, an acidic bucket of wee is actually WORSE than just a bucket of acid, I feel. . .anyway, the trap was set, and everyone hid – except Egbert, who ended up freezing in place to pretend to be taxidermy. XD Rodrigo and Neve came in (after Corazon tried, badly, to convince them he was Orbo), and I left it with them having both failed their saving throws when it came to the acid wee bucket, and Johnny calculating damage. Luke asked if this was what they’d had in mind when they made these NPCs – Johnny said no, but they’d expected them to be treated badly. XD
2. Keep editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale of Tears”: Check – gotten through Tung explaining the Camarilla, the Anarchs, and a bit of the war with the Kuei-Jin to Alice, then dropping her off just beneath the broken-down old house that serves as the entrance to the warehouse level. Time for Alice to get sneaky as she prepares to make a big boom! :D And in purely numerical terms, I’m on page 8 of 21, so good progress. :)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – three in, three out today –
A) Started with James Turner and “I tried to buy every community lot in The Sims 4 (mod),” testing out Carl’s new early access Real Estate Mod! It allows you to buy community lots (using the Vet Clinic system, as James found out while fiddling), purchase a variety of upgrades for them to improve their star rating, and get income via rent. Even comes with a custom three-level aspiration! James TRIED to do this as a pseudo-Rags-To-Riches (starting in a cheap apartment while he looked for good properties), but quickly learned that you need a lot of capital to BUY a building in the first place. Hence most of Semaj’s time was spent either trying to fish up good stuff or painting at first. XD Took him over an in-game week to get enough to buy the Hare & Hedgehog cafe in Windenburg – he kept up this method of making paintings via the sketch pad and selling them on the street to get Hare Park and Discotheque Europa – but after snagging all of those, fully upgrading the Hare & Hedgehog, and seeing what he got for rent, he started blatantly cheating so he could buy loads more properties and see how much he could earn. It’s actually a pretty busy life, being a real estate mogul – stuff is constantly breaking at your lots, requiring you to go fix them personally or hire a repair service (and sometimes stuff glitches out, like at his own Snowy Escape lounge), and of course you have to manage your money so you can upgrade your lots – the price goes up the bigger it is! James even ended up placing a super-detailed university lot in Brindleton Bay to purchase just for funsies, because it was over a million and he wanted to see how much he got in rent. XD And he admittedly got a healthy amount – just over $111,000, I believe, from that lot alone! The others had more realistic payouts (Discotheque was only about 10 grand), but he was pleased nonetheless. Mostly because it seems a good way to spend money for Sims who are already rich and can’t do much else with the cash. In fact, he’s already thinking Hazel, Chaz, and Trenton from Cottage Living could make good use of this. . .
B) Then it was over to Call Me Kevin for “What it's like to start GTA V Online in 2022?” AKA, he purchased a fresh copy of GTA Online to make himself a brand new character and see how long it took him to get his own place! Said character ended up being a creepy knockoff of the Joker, and the answer was “long.” Mostly because the tutorial lasts quite a while – having you do a simple drug handoff, telling you to go get new clothes, stuff like that – and then it just drops you into the deep end of all the various missions and stuff you can do. Never once mentioning that it doesn’t matter how much you have in your bank account, it’s all about your character level when it comes to whether or not you can get an office and apartment of your own. XD Granted, Kevin doing things like holding up a store to afford a forehead tattoo that says “sleepy,” killing loads of NPCs with a hatchet, accidentally dying while hiding from the cops by falling off a billboard, getting a Joker SUV in green and purple with neon underlights, utterly wrecking that SUV by taking a variety of painful shortcuts off high bridges, completely failing a team mission to steal some shit from inside an airplane hanger because he for some reason couldn’t get inside the airplane itself to get the cars (and then got killed by the police when he tried to run interference there), and taking a moment to have a musical montage about how he feels like an NPC didn’t help matters. But it was all very funny. XD We’ll see if Knockoff Joker sticks around!
C) And finally we had GrayStillPlays for “When cartoons become a living nightmare” – aka, more Happy Wheels! We started with an Easter-themed bottle flip (containing both the Killer Bunny and the Bunny On Drugs – both were the same murderous rabbit); a “don’t move” harpoon swing board across the rainbow of pain; a Death Race with Bike Dad and Son, smashing up and flying over their opponents while trying to avoid the various deaths (like smashy glass or collapsing scenery – Nixon gave it his all, but in the end he couldn’t keep up with them); a course for Segway Nixon which required speed, agility, and advanced crawling techniques (lest you explode upon exiting the cannon or going up the boost-covered hillsides); and a very involved board from one “betrayusgaming,” involving Segway Nixon starring as Patrick Star looking for Spongebob after he goes missing – and discovering such horrors as a zombie demon Spongebob, various smaller demon Spongebobs, and some painful traps (poor Gray had to go through this level SO MANY TIMES as Nixon kept falling to pieces/being killed by random shit on his quest to save the real Spongebob and get out of the house). That last one was the majority of the video, and it was truly epic – props!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – tried to get an early start on this one by finding a song to reblog for Song Saturday from my tag before my workout, but it was right AFTER my workout that I realized that – since my Thursday write-up for the “As Long As You Love Me” sequel features “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” at an important moment in the plot – I should probably put that song up for Song Saturday. So I switched it after YouTube. XD And I still have my original choice – the Electric String Quartet’s take on “Rock Me Amadeus” – in the drafts, so I think I’ve taken care of two Saturdays at once on Victor Luvs Alice! :) Not bad, not bad. . .
And hence why I have another slightly late update tonight. XD Ah well, at least I was productive. And tomorrow is likely to be the exact opposite of today when it comes to YouTube, given the upload schedules of my subs, so we'll see what I get done then! In the meantime, night all!
Work – As stated, busy day again, mostly because I was up there by myself (coworker had to tend to a pet). Though, fortunately, again not overwhemingly busy – phones were mostly quiet, and there weren’t a lot of checks in the mail to put on. Lot of reversals, though, and the GL took longer than I wanted because I was trying to do two things at once and both ended up late. *sigh* Ah well – I got most of the important stuff done, and that’s what’s important.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back to the Oxventure Stream “Hunter Pressure!” As it turns out, while majority did rule on sneaking upstairs to kill those who wished to hunt the Oxventurers in their sleep, it took quite a lot of argument! Mostly because – as Dob himself pointed out – everyone seemed weirdly reluctant to do it if Dob wasn’t on board. Or, at least, they were very determined to get Dob on board. (Admittedly, Egbert and Robin weren’t crazy about the plan either, but were trying to be pragmatic about things – Merilwen, on the other hand, was all about the revenge and making these people suffer, which eventually got her a Prudence hug.) After talking about possible other plans – like just ruining all their gear before running, or using the classic grease-and-spikes Meat Grinder trap as a fallback, Dob finally encouraged the others to just go up there and start killin’, and he and Robin would stay back in the foyer and talk traps. This was met with general approval, and Corazon, Prudence, Merilwen, and Egbert headed upstairs (with – varying levels of stealth: Egbert got a nat 20 and was darkness and shadow; Prudence got a 7 and was humming to herself all the way up) while Dob and Robin hung back and looked at their surroundings. Dob was briefly concerned by a statue of Rodrigo that was very lifelike, but Johnny assured him it was genuinely just a statue. After running through a few ideas (Robin defaulting to pub-owner tricks like giving people bad drinks, Dob trying to talk him into pretending to be a statue and stabbing people), they ended up with Robin having gotten a rope over a precariously-balanced harp on the mezzanine level, ready to yank it down on pursuers, and Dob up on the chandelier, ready to cut it down on pursuers.
Meanwhile, the rest of the gang made it upstairs, where Prudence’s humming got the attention of an annoyed Orbo, who yelled in their general direction to keep it down, he’s trying to sleep. After some debate about which door to try first (the ornate double doors obviously being Rodrigo’s quarters and thus a good target; Merilwen, however, wanted him to SEE this all crumble beneath him – cue the Prudence hug), Egbert ended up using the last of his super stealth to check out Orbo’s room, which was just AWASH in beer and wine bottles and whatnot. Orbo himself, fortunately, had gone back to sleep, so Egbert tried to sneak in to tie him to the bed if nothing else –
Nat 1. Egbert stepped on a bottle, legs went out from under him, and he landed with a crash that definitely woke up the sleeping Goliath. He tried desperately to claim he was room service with a Scotch Egg, but another Nat 1 meant that he was very shortly to be on the business end of Orbo’s war hammer. Johnny had everyone roll for initiative, and, hilariously, Dob – still out in the foyer, mind – got the best result. Having heard the crash and deduced his friends were in trouble, he proceeded to swing the chandelier backwards, launch himself off it as it swung back forward, swan dive into Orbo’s room, tuck and roll, then COME UP AND USE HIS MOMENTUM TO BARREL INTO HIM AND KNOCK HIM OUT THE WINDOW. A combination of a good roll on Luke’s part and a bad one on Johnny’s, plus Orbo not having a high armor class, meant that this SUCCEEDED and resulted in Orbo not only falling out the window, but THROUGH THE TRAPDOOR COURTYARD, resulting a rather wet noise as he met the dungeon floor. Dob just glared at everyone as this happened. XD And then they tried to pretend that they were going for a more peaceful resolution, and Dob just barely restrained himself from throwing himself out the window for Robin’s sake.
Of course, this ruckus did not go unnoticed, as the other residents of the house began to stir. Merilwen desperately tried to imitate Orbo’s voice (who was getting steadily more Slavic as time went on) and claim he’d just had a bad dream – a 16 on a Charisma roll meant that she successfully fooled Ashlin and Furio, but Rodrigo and Neve beat her and started investigating. Some panicked discussion about what they wanted to do about the situation followed – Merilwen was all for just Poison Spraying everyone in the face, but Corazon wanted something a bit sneakier and to set up a trap via her filling a bucket with Poison Spray so they could all hide around the room and, as Dob put it, kill everyone with magic. XD They eventually settled on Corazon’s plan as the best, but then Ellen noted a problem – Poison Spray is actually a bit misnamed, in that it’s a cloud of gas, not a spray of liquid. Johnny offered Merilwen a devil’s bargain – namely, they put a bucket full of “liquid” in the room and said that she could “carbonate” it with her Poison Spray if she wished. Merilwen immediately went for it –
Yeah, uh, Orbo needed a piss during the night, and that was the bucket. XD To be fair, an acidic bucket of wee is actually WORSE than just a bucket of acid, I feel. . .anyway, the trap was set, and everyone hid – except Egbert, who ended up freezing in place to pretend to be taxidermy. XD Rodrigo and Neve came in (after Corazon tried, badly, to convince them he was Orbo), and I left it with them having both failed their saving throws when it came to the acid wee bucket, and Johnny calculating damage. Luke asked if this was what they’d had in mind when they made these NPCs – Johnny said no, but they’d expected them to be treated badly. XD
2. Keep editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale of Tears”: Check – gotten through Tung explaining the Camarilla, the Anarchs, and a bit of the war with the Kuei-Jin to Alice, then dropping her off just beneath the broken-down old house that serves as the entrance to the warehouse level. Time for Alice to get sneaky as she prepares to make a big boom! :D And in purely numerical terms, I’m on page 8 of 21, so good progress. :)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – three in, three out today –
A) Started with James Turner and “I tried to buy every community lot in The Sims 4 (mod),” testing out Carl’s new early access Real Estate Mod! It allows you to buy community lots (using the Vet Clinic system, as James found out while fiddling), purchase a variety of upgrades for them to improve their star rating, and get income via rent. Even comes with a custom three-level aspiration! James TRIED to do this as a pseudo-Rags-To-Riches (starting in a cheap apartment while he looked for good properties), but quickly learned that you need a lot of capital to BUY a building in the first place. Hence most of Semaj’s time was spent either trying to fish up good stuff or painting at first. XD Took him over an in-game week to get enough to buy the Hare & Hedgehog cafe in Windenburg – he kept up this method of making paintings via the sketch pad and selling them on the street to get Hare Park and Discotheque Europa – but after snagging all of those, fully upgrading the Hare & Hedgehog, and seeing what he got for rent, he started blatantly cheating so he could buy loads more properties and see how much he could earn. It’s actually a pretty busy life, being a real estate mogul – stuff is constantly breaking at your lots, requiring you to go fix them personally or hire a repair service (and sometimes stuff glitches out, like at his own Snowy Escape lounge), and of course you have to manage your money so you can upgrade your lots – the price goes up the bigger it is! James even ended up placing a super-detailed university lot in Brindleton Bay to purchase just for funsies, because it was over a million and he wanted to see how much he got in rent. XD And he admittedly got a healthy amount – just over $111,000, I believe, from that lot alone! The others had more realistic payouts (Discotheque was only about 10 grand), but he was pleased nonetheless. Mostly because it seems a good way to spend money for Sims who are already rich and can’t do much else with the cash. In fact, he’s already thinking Hazel, Chaz, and Trenton from Cottage Living could make good use of this. . .
B) Then it was over to Call Me Kevin for “What it's like to start GTA V Online in 2022?” AKA, he purchased a fresh copy of GTA Online to make himself a brand new character and see how long it took him to get his own place! Said character ended up being a creepy knockoff of the Joker, and the answer was “long.” Mostly because the tutorial lasts quite a while – having you do a simple drug handoff, telling you to go get new clothes, stuff like that – and then it just drops you into the deep end of all the various missions and stuff you can do. Never once mentioning that it doesn’t matter how much you have in your bank account, it’s all about your character level when it comes to whether or not you can get an office and apartment of your own. XD Granted, Kevin doing things like holding up a store to afford a forehead tattoo that says “sleepy,” killing loads of NPCs with a hatchet, accidentally dying while hiding from the cops by falling off a billboard, getting a Joker SUV in green and purple with neon underlights, utterly wrecking that SUV by taking a variety of painful shortcuts off high bridges, completely failing a team mission to steal some shit from inside an airplane hanger because he for some reason couldn’t get inside the airplane itself to get the cars (and then got killed by the police when he tried to run interference there), and taking a moment to have a musical montage about how he feels like an NPC didn’t help matters. But it was all very funny. XD We’ll see if Knockoff Joker sticks around!
C) And finally we had GrayStillPlays for “When cartoons become a living nightmare” – aka, more Happy Wheels! We started with an Easter-themed bottle flip (containing both the Killer Bunny and the Bunny On Drugs – both were the same murderous rabbit); a “don’t move” harpoon swing board across the rainbow of pain; a Death Race with Bike Dad and Son, smashing up and flying over their opponents while trying to avoid the various deaths (like smashy glass or collapsing scenery – Nixon gave it his all, but in the end he couldn’t keep up with them); a course for Segway Nixon which required speed, agility, and advanced crawling techniques (lest you explode upon exiting the cannon or going up the boost-covered hillsides); and a very involved board from one “betrayusgaming,” involving Segway Nixon starring as Patrick Star looking for Spongebob after he goes missing – and discovering such horrors as a zombie demon Spongebob, various smaller demon Spongebobs, and some painful traps (poor Gray had to go through this level SO MANY TIMES as Nixon kept falling to pieces/being killed by random shit on his quest to save the real Spongebob and get out of the house). That last one was the majority of the video, and it was truly epic – props!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – tried to get an early start on this one by finding a song to reblog for Song Saturday from my tag before my workout, but it was right AFTER my workout that I realized that – since my Thursday write-up for the “As Long As You Love Me” sequel features “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” at an important moment in the plot – I should probably put that song up for Song Saturday. So I switched it after YouTube. XD And I still have my original choice – the Electric String Quartet’s take on “Rock Me Amadeus” – in the drafts, so I think I’ve taken care of two Saturdays at once on Victor Luvs Alice! :) Not bad, not bad. . .
And hence why I have another slightly late update tonight. XD Ah well, at least I was productive. And tomorrow is likely to be the exact opposite of today when it comes to YouTube, given the upload schedules of my subs, so we'll see what I get done then! In the meantime, night all!
