Last Half Friday Of The Year
Sep. 2nd, 2022 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickWell, last Official Summer Half-Friday -- I'm sure to get a few more early releases once the holidays start rolling around (they always seem to let us out a bit early the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, for example), but this is the last summer long weekend hurrah. Always sad to see it go -- those extra few hours on a Friday are so nice. :( Still, feel like I managed to make the most of this one:
Work – An EXTREMELY quiet day – while the GL did take up most of the short shift, that’s mostly because one of the damn printers malfunctioned (faulty magenta toner), meaning I had to wait for it to be fixed before I could print some of my stuff. The rest of the day I wiled away with reviewing old credit card nonsense. Meh. Glad to be out for a three-day weekend!
Beanbags – Yup – went out this afternoon around 5 for three rounds. Sadly, though, the streak of all of us winning once has passed – while we all threw well enough for some close, high-scoring games, Mom was never able to get past me or Dad. Final scores were me W-2-2; Dad 2-W-W; Mom 3-3-3. Ah well, there’s always tomorrow!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, and another episode of James Turner’s High School Years LP, the Early Access Episodes! The LAST of those episodes, in fact, as he said at the end that the next time you’d see Reginald, he’d be back in James’s regular save and James would be merging him properly into the Bigwallet family tree once more in his teenage form. As for his current state of affairs, though – ups and downs:
A) He got promoted all the way to the top of the part-time “Barista” career (Latte Artiste), and managed to sell some outfits on Trendi for major cash (including to Sims who don’t technically exist in this world, like Lilith Vatore) – but a weird bug after he attended Career Day at Copperdale High meant that almost all of his inventory, apart from a few pictures he took with Sidney, was wiped out for no apparent reason, including an outfit he was trying to sell. James was most irritated, as that meant Reginald no longer had his homework OR his bike, and actually ended up cheating in $100 so he could rebuy the latter. He was also able to buy a shower for his home field, which is nice – no more having to run to school for that! Now he just needs to settle the food situation. . .
B) He tried very hard to get all his tasks done for school each day and do well on his exams – but his tendency to go eat in the principal’s office hindered his progress (not to mention the usual stupidity of Sims wandering around to use sinks in totally different bathrooms across the school – James said that when he rebuilds the high school, he is DEFINITELY making a smaller version), and his exams were interrupted by his new friend Michaela (Mikayla? I’m not sure how it’s spelled) coming in, insisting on asking him if they could be best friends and showing him photos. XD Though he did still do well. . .but at the same time, he has NOT budged from a C grade. James was quite frustrated by this turn of events, and I don’t blame him. It’s not a good look when your Early Access promoters can’t get the pack to work properly, EA!
C) His attempts to find someone to go to prom with him, even just as friends, all crashed and burned (Cassandra Goth already had a date, and he blew his attempt to make a new friend at Career Day). . .until Football Day, where he finally made his new friend Michaela up there through the power of selfies. XD Look, whatever works at this point. She’s agreed to go with him as buddies, so at least he’s set for a date for Saturday!
D) And he had a great group performance at the Cheer Day celebration, getting a whole bunch of people to perform with him and earning a score of 81 and another Fitness skill point in the bargain. . .but the damn thing just ended without any winners being announced, because buggy game is buggy. *rolls eyes* I mean, we already know it only had SIX quality control testers. . . It’s stuff like this that make me think that, even if I do make myself a “long haul” save with Victor, Alice, Smiler, and maybe even Victoria and Emily as kids, I’m probably gonna stick with base-game rabbit hole school and just get a mod that lets me do prom as a special party. Seems like the better option!
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – I have wrapped up Alice’s recitation of what led her to L.A., and her current circumstances (though I think I repeated some stuff earlier in the chapter. . .one of the issues of them being so long. At least this is just the first draft!), and so we are moving out of exposition land with Victor and Alice each admitting that they’d like a friend here in L.A., and they may as well try each other. :) Next up, we finally get back to the quests with Alice remembering a certain Anarch ghoul also lives in this building. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – got all the videos uploaded today, plus one bonus!
A) Started early with the latest Call Me Kevin video – “The Mortuary Assistant is the Creepiest Game Ever!” Why start early with this one? Well, because my tumblr friend Squid watched a playthrough of this game from ANOTHER YouTuber, and I have been warned it can be rather scary and kinda gory! So I figured I’d watch it in the daylight. I’m no stranger to taking on horror games on YouTube (remember, my first love on the Tube was Helloween4545), but – yeah. Don’t need the nightmares if I can avoid them! Though fortunately this game is less jumpscare-heavy than I initially thought, and Kevin apparently didn’t see a couple of the freakier demons Squid told me about – he got mostly just the shadowy guy with the red eyes. It is VERY tense, though – you’re playing as a young woman, Rebecca, who has a traumatic past that has invited a demon to try and possess her. Her boss, Raymond, recognized the signs when he invited her to her internship at his mortuary, and called her in for a surprise late-night visit to learn which corpse the demon is currently hiding out in, its name, and how to destroy it. The problem is, the demon likes to cause various hallucinations and whatnot to make Rebecca’s time trying to destroy it harder, like Shadow Man, scenes from Rebecca’s past, and getting buried alive at one point. Poor Kevin was genuinely freaked out about it – which he reacted to by getting mad at Raymond. XD Which, to be fair, the guy could have told her about the dangers a whole lot earlier. . . Anyway, he did his best to figure out the demon’s name (via special flash papers that would reveal sigils in the area), which house it belonged to (which was revealed via a nightmare trip to the basement), and which body needed to be destroyed (along with actually doing his assistant’s job in preparing the bodies for embalming and suchlike, which is arguably worse than the jumpscares, ugh), but thanks to his copy of the game glitching out, he was unable to put the mark bearing the demon’s name on the corpse and got the “Rebecca gets possessed ending.” At least he got to watch Raymond get folded up into a little ball? XD
B) Then, after beanbags and before heading for my workout, I slipped in the latest Fun With Shorts – the previously Patreon Exclusive “Animal Cunning!” Which was a short in the vein of “Catching Trouble” from MST3K, in that it showed basically rather horrible animal cruelty under the guise of entertainment and education. I mean, the damn short STARTED with feeding a young deer cigarettes and just went downhill from here with insisting raccoons make good pets, tormenting sloths and anteaters for our amusement, and causing an iguana to lose its tail before letting us watch another one get eaten by a mountain lion. Fun! *strained smile* Josh said in the riff it was the worst thing he’d ever watched for FWS at the time, and I’m not surprised.
C) Then, this evening, we snuck in another video from James Turner – “Can you take 8 teens to high school?” Another early access video in which he aged down Mortimer and Bella Goth, Bob and Eliza Pancakes, Nancy Landgraab, Johnny Zest, Katrina Caliente, and Eric Lewis to teens, put them on the empty lot in Copperdale by the pier, built them atorture chamber perfectly functional round house with separate shower block, and then tried to see if he could wrangle them to do well in school!
Answer – not really! As you might imagine, trying to keep track of eight Sims is rough at the BEST of times (I mean, I can struggle with a mere THREE sometimes), and trying to coordinate eight teenagers to have a good educational experience? James tried, but getting through all the tasks in your average school day is TOUGH when you have so many to look after. Basically his mistake was trying to get all of them to learn about their new school from the principal – thanks to a locked staff room door, a lot of them were late trying to get to her to say hello, and in the end I think only two of them, Johnny and Eric, managed to complete the interaction. And then only two of them attended their first class (it WAS three, but then Bob just walked out after pranking the whiteboard). The rest of them hung out in the teacher’s lounge until Bella and Nancy got detention for not being in class. Things got a little better after lunch, where James was able to corral everyone in the cafeteria to eat, be friendly with people, and study for exams, and everyone attended class two of the day, but it was rough going, and James was only too happy to leave things at just one video. I don’t blame him!
D) And finally, we returned to the Subs for today’s GrayStillPlays video – “I found a 1000+ G force waterslide in GTA 5!” Yes, it is still “Alex and his proteges torture Gray in GTA V times” it seems – this time with waterslides! Well, half with waterslides, half with obstacle courses featuring the IDEA of waterslides. XD Gray first had to make it down three different twisty-turny waterslides (being rendered almost incoherent with laughter on the first one after being hit by a whale), starting at 0 Gs, then going up to 100 Gs, and then going up to 1000 Gs, meaning each one got faster and faster until finally he was spinning helplessly through the air like a badminton birdie. A birdie that then had to land on a moving “!” sign no less. XD And after THAT, it was time for the obstacle course in the car – first going up through a series of spinning disks, most with platforms designed to smack Gray into submission (representing your average wait for a popular waterslide and how it sucks the life out of you), then going down a steep ramp with all sorts of random obstacles, from LSD tunnels to wind turbine blades to teleporters to take you back to the beginning, all of which are popping in and out of existence randomly (representing the slide itself and how it is both terrifying and amazing), THEN working his way through the cut-out purple tubes of sadness, doing wall ride jumps across gaps and trying to avoid the turbine in the middle of one (representing Gray’s diminishing will to live), then finally make it down ANOTHER ramp, this one with occasional disappearing platforms and obstacles ranging from surfboard spikes to billboard leg spikes to billboard leg spikes going around in a double carousel with boosts before launching himself onto another ramp far below to boost himself into the target cylinder with the win – protected by, yes, another wind turbine (representing how Alex is evil because if you fall through the second disappearing green section you can actually fall onto the last ramp and try to hit the win at your leisure). Definitely one of Alex’s best torture boards for Gray, hands down, no notes. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – easy one tonight, just a single ask reply over on The Valice Multiverse, yay.
5. Play Superliminal Challenge Mode: Check – it is finished, in fact! I have completed both “Labyrinth” and “Whitespace” and the challenges within – and once again, didn’t even have to look anything up. :) Admittedly, “Labyrinth” only has two puzzles in it that require you to click something, and I was able to spot the OBVIOUS trap one (the room where, if you try to move the wrong chess piece, it turns into paint on the wall), while “Whitespace” had three, and only one gave me any real difficulty (I thought the chess board one where you have to place pieces on the various spaces in order to make them real was going to be tough with a mere three clicks, but as it turns out, all you have to do there is make sure the pieces are on the BORDERS between two spaces, and it’ll make both real; no, the problem one was the one where you have to put a block through the door to make it real and then get the cheese on the other side to make a ramp up to the door – you’re only allowed two clicks, so you HAVE to put the block through the doorway before activating the challenge, and getting the cheese just the right size and angle to jump through the doorway can be tricksy!). So that was all good. I have now pretty much officially completed the game twice, go me. :) Still need to do the developer commentary version, but we’ll save that for when I have a lot more free time again (probably over the holidays).
Not bad, not bad at all. But I am now very busy on the whole "catching up" and "writing with a friend" things, so I must be off sooner rather than later. Here's the to-dos for tomorrow:
1. Clean my room
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs (specifically clear out that final Wyrd Sisters Podcast)
3. Play Sims 4 and have Smiler do some more college stuff, see about werewolfing Alice, and actually experience a haunted night at the house
4. Work on the Blades in the Dark Valicer thing
Yeah, the BitD AU stuff has been on my mind a LOT lately, so I'm giving myself the long holiday weekend to poke at it. I mean, if I'm due my period any day now like I suspect, I'm not going to be much good on my "official" WIPs anyway, so. . . Might as well go for the easier stuff, right? *nods* In the meantime, night all!
Work – An EXTREMELY quiet day – while the GL did take up most of the short shift, that’s mostly because one of the damn printers malfunctioned (faulty magenta toner), meaning I had to wait for it to be fixed before I could print some of my stuff. The rest of the day I wiled away with reviewing old credit card nonsense. Meh. Glad to be out for a three-day weekend!
Beanbags – Yup – went out this afternoon around 5 for three rounds. Sadly, though, the streak of all of us winning once has passed – while we all threw well enough for some close, high-scoring games, Mom was never able to get past me or Dad. Final scores were me W-2-2; Dad 2-W-W; Mom 3-3-3. Ah well, there’s always tomorrow!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, and another episode of James Turner’s High School Years LP, the Early Access Episodes! The LAST of those episodes, in fact, as he said at the end that the next time you’d see Reginald, he’d be back in James’s regular save and James would be merging him properly into the Bigwallet family tree once more in his teenage form. As for his current state of affairs, though – ups and downs:
A) He got promoted all the way to the top of the part-time “Barista” career (Latte Artiste), and managed to sell some outfits on Trendi for major cash (including to Sims who don’t technically exist in this world, like Lilith Vatore) – but a weird bug after he attended Career Day at Copperdale High meant that almost all of his inventory, apart from a few pictures he took with Sidney, was wiped out for no apparent reason, including an outfit he was trying to sell. James was most irritated, as that meant Reginald no longer had his homework OR his bike, and actually ended up cheating in $100 so he could rebuy the latter. He was also able to buy a shower for his home field, which is nice – no more having to run to school for that! Now he just needs to settle the food situation. . .
B) He tried very hard to get all his tasks done for school each day and do well on his exams – but his tendency to go eat in the principal’s office hindered his progress (not to mention the usual stupidity of Sims wandering around to use sinks in totally different bathrooms across the school – James said that when he rebuilds the high school, he is DEFINITELY making a smaller version), and his exams were interrupted by his new friend Michaela (Mikayla? I’m not sure how it’s spelled) coming in, insisting on asking him if they could be best friends and showing him photos. XD Though he did still do well. . .but at the same time, he has NOT budged from a C grade. James was quite frustrated by this turn of events, and I don’t blame him. It’s not a good look when your Early Access promoters can’t get the pack to work properly, EA!
C) His attempts to find someone to go to prom with him, even just as friends, all crashed and burned (Cassandra Goth already had a date, and he blew his attempt to make a new friend at Career Day). . .until Football Day, where he finally made his new friend Michaela up there through the power of selfies. XD Look, whatever works at this point. She’s agreed to go with him as buddies, so at least he’s set for a date for Saturday!
D) And he had a great group performance at the Cheer Day celebration, getting a whole bunch of people to perform with him and earning a score of 81 and another Fitness skill point in the bargain. . .but the damn thing just ended without any winners being announced, because buggy game is buggy. *rolls eyes* I mean, we already know it only had SIX quality control testers. . . It’s stuff like this that make me think that, even if I do make myself a “long haul” save with Victor, Alice, Smiler, and maybe even Victoria and Emily as kids, I’m probably gonna stick with base-game rabbit hole school and just get a mod that lets me do prom as a special party. Seems like the better option!
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – I have wrapped up Alice’s recitation of what led her to L.A., and her current circumstances (though I think I repeated some stuff earlier in the chapter. . .one of the issues of them being so long. At least this is just the first draft!), and so we are moving out of exposition land with Victor and Alice each admitting that they’d like a friend here in L.A., and they may as well try each other. :) Next up, we finally get back to the quests with Alice remembering a certain Anarch ghoul also lives in this building. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – got all the videos uploaded today, plus one bonus!
A) Started early with the latest Call Me Kevin video – “The Mortuary Assistant is the Creepiest Game Ever!” Why start early with this one? Well, because my tumblr friend Squid watched a playthrough of this game from ANOTHER YouTuber, and I have been warned it can be rather scary and kinda gory! So I figured I’d watch it in the daylight. I’m no stranger to taking on horror games on YouTube (remember, my first love on the Tube was Helloween4545), but – yeah. Don’t need the nightmares if I can avoid them! Though fortunately this game is less jumpscare-heavy than I initially thought, and Kevin apparently didn’t see a couple of the freakier demons Squid told me about – he got mostly just the shadowy guy with the red eyes. It is VERY tense, though – you’re playing as a young woman, Rebecca, who has a traumatic past that has invited a demon to try and possess her. Her boss, Raymond, recognized the signs when he invited her to her internship at his mortuary, and called her in for a surprise late-night visit to learn which corpse the demon is currently hiding out in, its name, and how to destroy it. The problem is, the demon likes to cause various hallucinations and whatnot to make Rebecca’s time trying to destroy it harder, like Shadow Man, scenes from Rebecca’s past, and getting buried alive at one point. Poor Kevin was genuinely freaked out about it – which he reacted to by getting mad at Raymond. XD Which, to be fair, the guy could have told her about the dangers a whole lot earlier. . . Anyway, he did his best to figure out the demon’s name (via special flash papers that would reveal sigils in the area), which house it belonged to (which was revealed via a nightmare trip to the basement), and which body needed to be destroyed (along with actually doing his assistant’s job in preparing the bodies for embalming and suchlike, which is arguably worse than the jumpscares, ugh), but thanks to his copy of the game glitching out, he was unable to put the mark bearing the demon’s name on the corpse and got the “Rebecca gets possessed ending.” At least he got to watch Raymond get folded up into a little ball? XD
B) Then, after beanbags and before heading for my workout, I slipped in the latest Fun With Shorts – the previously Patreon Exclusive “Animal Cunning!” Which was a short in the vein of “Catching Trouble” from MST3K, in that it showed basically rather horrible animal cruelty under the guise of entertainment and education. I mean, the damn short STARTED with feeding a young deer cigarettes and just went downhill from here with insisting raccoons make good pets, tormenting sloths and anteaters for our amusement, and causing an iguana to lose its tail before letting us watch another one get eaten by a mountain lion. Fun! *strained smile* Josh said in the riff it was the worst thing he’d ever watched for FWS at the time, and I’m not surprised.
C) Then, this evening, we snuck in another video from James Turner – “Can you take 8 teens to high school?” Another early access video in which he aged down Mortimer and Bella Goth, Bob and Eliza Pancakes, Nancy Landgraab, Johnny Zest, Katrina Caliente, and Eric Lewis to teens, put them on the empty lot in Copperdale by the pier, built them a
Answer – not really! As you might imagine, trying to keep track of eight Sims is rough at the BEST of times (I mean, I can struggle with a mere THREE sometimes), and trying to coordinate eight teenagers to have a good educational experience? James tried, but getting through all the tasks in your average school day is TOUGH when you have so many to look after. Basically his mistake was trying to get all of them to learn about their new school from the principal – thanks to a locked staff room door, a lot of them were late trying to get to her to say hello, and in the end I think only two of them, Johnny and Eric, managed to complete the interaction. And then only two of them attended their first class (it WAS three, but then Bob just walked out after pranking the whiteboard). The rest of them hung out in the teacher’s lounge until Bella and Nancy got detention for not being in class. Things got a little better after lunch, where James was able to corral everyone in the cafeteria to eat, be friendly with people, and study for exams, and everyone attended class two of the day, but it was rough going, and James was only too happy to leave things at just one video. I don’t blame him!
D) And finally, we returned to the Subs for today’s GrayStillPlays video – “I found a 1000+ G force waterslide in GTA 5!” Yes, it is still “Alex and his proteges torture Gray in GTA V times” it seems – this time with waterslides! Well, half with waterslides, half with obstacle courses featuring the IDEA of waterslides. XD Gray first had to make it down three different twisty-turny waterslides (being rendered almost incoherent with laughter on the first one after being hit by a whale), starting at 0 Gs, then going up to 100 Gs, and then going up to 1000 Gs, meaning each one got faster and faster until finally he was spinning helplessly through the air like a badminton birdie. A birdie that then had to land on a moving “!” sign no less. XD And after THAT, it was time for the obstacle course in the car – first going up through a series of spinning disks, most with platforms designed to smack Gray into submission (representing your average wait for a popular waterslide and how it sucks the life out of you), then going down a steep ramp with all sorts of random obstacles, from LSD tunnels to wind turbine blades to teleporters to take you back to the beginning, all of which are popping in and out of existence randomly (representing the slide itself and how it is both terrifying and amazing), THEN working his way through the cut-out purple tubes of sadness, doing wall ride jumps across gaps and trying to avoid the turbine in the middle of one (representing Gray’s diminishing will to live), then finally make it down ANOTHER ramp, this one with occasional disappearing platforms and obstacles ranging from surfboard spikes to billboard leg spikes to billboard leg spikes going around in a double carousel with boosts before launching himself onto another ramp far below to boost himself into the target cylinder with the win – protected by, yes, another wind turbine (representing how Alex is evil because if you fall through the second disappearing green section you can actually fall onto the last ramp and try to hit the win at your leisure). Definitely one of Alex’s best torture boards for Gray, hands down, no notes. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – easy one tonight, just a single ask reply over on The Valice Multiverse, yay.
5. Play Superliminal Challenge Mode: Check – it is finished, in fact! I have completed both “Labyrinth” and “Whitespace” and the challenges within – and once again, didn’t even have to look anything up. :) Admittedly, “Labyrinth” only has two puzzles in it that require you to click something, and I was able to spot the OBVIOUS trap one (the room where, if you try to move the wrong chess piece, it turns into paint on the wall), while “Whitespace” had three, and only one gave me any real difficulty (I thought the chess board one where you have to place pieces on the various spaces in order to make them real was going to be tough with a mere three clicks, but as it turns out, all you have to do there is make sure the pieces are on the BORDERS between two spaces, and it’ll make both real; no, the problem one was the one where you have to put a block through the door to make it real and then get the cheese on the other side to make a ramp up to the door – you’re only allowed two clicks, so you HAVE to put the block through the doorway before activating the challenge, and getting the cheese just the right size and angle to jump through the doorway can be tricksy!). So that was all good. I have now pretty much officially completed the game twice, go me. :) Still need to do the developer commentary version, but we’ll save that for when I have a lot more free time again (probably over the holidays).
Not bad, not bad at all. But I am now very busy on the whole "catching up" and "writing with a friend" things, so I must be off sooner rather than later. Here's the to-dos for tomorrow:
1. Clean my room
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs (specifically clear out that final Wyrd Sisters Podcast)
3. Play Sims 4 and have Smiler do some more college stuff, see about werewolfing Alice, and actually experience a haunted night at the house
4. Work on the Blades in the Dark Valicer thing
Yeah, the BitD AU stuff has been on my mind a LOT lately, so I'm giving myself the long holiday weekend to poke at it. I mean, if I'm due my period any day now like I suspect, I'm not going to be much good on my "official" WIPs anyway, so. . . Might as well go for the easier stuff, right? *nods* In the meantime, night all!
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Date: 2022-09-03 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-04 03:37 am (UTC)