And Another Wednesday Passes
Dec. 28th, 2022 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickManaging to keep a grip on what day of the week it is, go me. :p But yeah, we've just passed the midpoint of the week, meaning the clock is definitely starting to run out on my vacation here. :( But I've still got five days, and I hope to make the most of them! Certainly got a decent amount done today, I feel --
Tumblr: Did the dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice and started drafting out a new post for the end of the year about my new Valice(r) Calendar before lunch! Finished up the main text of that after lunch (with plenty of looking at Wikipedia and my old journal entries to check dates), then did my final review and the tags after supper! And then decided I wanted that post to be for Friday, so I fixed up a different post about me talking about a post I’d seen recently that gave me real Valicer vibes (but which I felt awkward reblogging directly because it was about a show that I’d never even HEARD of before it showed up via a friend on my dash) and queued that up as my Thursday offering. XD Still need to decide on Song Saturday, and come up with New Year’s Writing Resolutions for Sunday, but I can get those sorted tomorrow, I think.
Superliminal: More “replaying the game with little bits of Developer Commentary scattered throughout the level” times! Picked up with the start of the “Cubism” level, and left off at the end of “Dollhouse,” right before the final three levels of the game. Along the way, I learned tidbits like how they nearly made everything in “Cubism’s” museum stage too complicated by trying to make it all make sense (and then remembering, “right, this is a puzzle game all about dreams and perspective tricks”); how “Cubism” in particular was all about the surprises regarding “what is a cube?” while keeping the puzzles simple; how the room at the end of “Blackout” is actually in sections so it can be lit in pieces and not kill player framerates; how the “Right Click To Return” sign in “Clone” is probably the least-read sign in the game (I suspect most players don’t realize you CAN return clones to their original object), but that the cloning mechanic is actually the one players, or at least playtesters, enjoyed the most (lots of smiles, anyway); how the fact that players can change their size freely in “Dollhouse” posed lots of level design and programming design challenges (like changing player collision and level geometry clipping – plus slowing down gravity so large objects always fall slowly because that’s easier on the player); and how the cat on the poster for the “Cardboard Lovers’ Association” in the ending elevator of “Dollhouse” is in fact one of the developer’s cats, Finn. XD I can also confirm that, even when you know what you’re doing (and aren’t glitching out the game by fucking with sizes too much), that one puzzle at the end of “Dollhouse” where you’re in the box and you have to shrink one portal door of the pair you’re trapped with and put it in the keyhole so you can squeeze your way out is still the most annoying puzzle in the game. *grumbles* But yeah, almost done with this Commentary replay – thinking I might actually finish this up on Saturday because this game goes quicker than either Sims 4 or Fallout 4, and in between cleaning my room and starting the New Year’s Eve movie marathon with my parents (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson action movies, if you’re wondering – San Andreas, Skyscraper, and Rampage) that day, it might be a good idea to do a shorter game in the little free time I’ll have!
Writing: Wrote some more on one of my Valicer AUs, who is surprised. :p Some more of the scene where a version of my Catch Us If You Can Victor (the dark Forgotten Vows AU where Alice and Victor end up vigilantes after Victor got shipped off to Rutledge post-Bumby instead of getting to have a quiet recovery with Alice, thanks to someone catching Alice killing Bumby and her needing to go on the run) got hypnotized via handshake induction from Smiler and ended up cuddled between them and Alice – Victor had a brief bad moment where, trying to figure out why he responded so joyfully to Alice calling him a “good boy,” his brain went back to Bumby and how he was treated under THAT asshole, but fortunately Alice and Smiler were able to bring him out of that. Now, though, Victor’s just realized he’s thought of Smiler as “his” Smiler, and. . .well, basically I suspect this scene ends with him waking up very confused about a few things he’s uncovered about himself. :p
YouTube: Kept up easily with the Subs today, and got another thing out of the Watch Later, so I’m happy. :) Let me give the skinny –
A) Started with a surprisingly short video from Call Me Kevin after I finished Superliminal – “I made my first video in 2009, in 2022 I almost quit.” Yeah, apparently that “I have to go to every other day for videos at the moment” post he made eight months ago was in response to him feeling burnt out and worrying about his mental health (not to mention his physical health, apparently he got sick/injured a LOT this year), and the sudden burst of free time made him do a lot of self-reflection and decide he needed to grow more as a person. So, much like Josh Way pivoting his channel to also include his art and his thoughts about video games and all that, Kevin’s gonna be doing more different content himself – like, tomorrow we’re getting a video of him teaching himself how to ride a skateboard in seven days! He’s hoping to just – get some more variety on the channel because, while he loves gaming and making gaming videos (and has been very pleased by the reactions of people to his new, longer videos on games), he doesn’t want it to be ALL he does. He also made sure to shout out all the people who have been giving him help and stopping him doing everything on his own so he’s too busy to think about things – girlfriend Anna who helps him organize, all his editors, the people who help him make thumbnails, all of that. It was short but sweet, and kind of makes you want to give him a hug, because it’s clear he’s awkward as hell and isn’t sure if he should share any of this. Fortunately the comments have all been very positive, so hopefully he’s getting the serotonins from that.
B) Then, after cookies, it was time for a bit of OXBoxtra:
I. “9 Times We Forged Precious Memories on Outside Xtra in 2022 - THANKS FOR THE PRESH MEMS” – Presh Mems time on OXtra! Luke and Ellen recounting a few favorite memories/clips from the year, from Ellen having sneakily beaten The Nameless King from Dark Souls 3 late one night and showing the clip to Luke under the guise of “this is the closest I’ve come to beating him” (and Luke’s delighted shock when it turns out she’d killed him); to Luke and Andy cracking up horribly over Luke’s “Games are back!” opener for the the list of new games for October 2022 – mostly because it was followed by them having to announce A Plague Tale: Requiem and its “rat physics,” which – yeah; to Ellen being initially freaked out, then deeply amused by a glitch in Stray where the cat’s head will rotate 360 degrees first one way, then the other if you have him sit in a particular position on the tram’s passenger seats; to one I actually saw – “Barry Sportington” giving commentary on Luke and Ellen doing Wii Bowling at a shopping center because they weren’t able to record their own dialogue for that particular “Show of the Weekend.” XD Good times with the OXBoxtra crew – AND it had some of their Blades In The Dark moments from this year, so now I know what to look forward to when it comes to THAT series!
II. “Game of the Year 2022: LUKE AND ELLEN DECIDE | Day 1” – GOTY time on OXBox and OXtra! It’s time for the gang to decide which games they loved best that came out in 2022. Luke and Ellen got to go first, and their decisions were not a surprise at all – Luke picked Elden Ring (known fanboy; his reasoning being is that it feels both like FROM Software really honed their craft when it came to combat, the world and NPC designs, all the little sidequests and such, and yet also loosened the player leash so you could make loads of totally overpowered builds not possible in their other games and really let loose whenever you want), and Ellen picked Stray (known fangirl; she admitted that she just absolutely adored the adorable cat and how well it’s crafted and how it’s a cute little puzzle game that you can play as a total pacifist (not that she doesn’t like combat, her runner-up was God of War: Ragnorak) and that she grew to truly love all the characters – including her little cat Jonesy, as named by the chat). *nods* Good stuff! I look forward to seeing what pops up tomorrow for Andy, Mike, and Jane!
C) And finally, this evening, it was back to the Subs for the latest from GrayStillPlays – “When you BLEND Reality,” aka Gray plays Blend It 3D! A mobile game from the Google Play store about being the owner/sole employee of a little beachside shack that serves both juice and coffee – and let me tell you, you can serve some odd “juices.” I mean, blending a couple of old Nokia cellphones with some ice cream for a robot MIGHT be understandable, I suppose. . .but giving supposedly ordinary people shakes made from corn mixed with apples and bananas? Just blending an entire chocolate bar to make a chocolate “shake?” Turning rotten fruit into a smoothie for a Frankenstein’s Monster? Serving a guy an ENTIRE BLENDED STRING OF SAUSAGES?? And don’t get me started about the Yeti who drinks toilet paper. . . Gray, as you might imagine, was equal parts horrified and delighted about all this weirdness, and gleefully tried to add his own – blending up moldy food for regular customers and making them vomit, trying to write “YEET” in his coffee art, and of course going a little TOO far into the blending and blending some fingers. XD Perfect combination of Gray and game tonight, I think!
Workout: Another night on the bike, another night with the Call Me Kevin “Rewind 2022” video! Today got me through the “Evil Kevin” section (featuring him trying to make the evilest person ever in Bitlife, being a jerk of a cat in Stray, and being a dickhead teenager in The Quarry among other things), leaving me at the beginning of the “Kevin Doesn’t Know How To Play Games” section (with him struggling his way through a Pokemon game – the generation I think before Scarlet/Violet? I admit, I’m not sure). About a quarter of the way through now, yay!
Not too shabby. . .and I've still got a few more days to play around with. Tomorrow, hoping to get a few more tumblr drafts sorted along with the rest of my Victor Luvs Alice queue; do some building in Sims 4 (finish off my "camper" lot, I think); and maybe try to do some more with my old "Blades in the Dark" Valicer stuff, haven't touched that in a while. We'll see how it all works out! Night all!
Tumblr: Did the dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice and started drafting out a new post for the end of the year about my new Valice(r) Calendar before lunch! Finished up the main text of that after lunch (with plenty of looking at Wikipedia and my old journal entries to check dates), then did my final review and the tags after supper! And then decided I wanted that post to be for Friday, so I fixed up a different post about me talking about a post I’d seen recently that gave me real Valicer vibes (but which I felt awkward reblogging directly because it was about a show that I’d never even HEARD of before it showed up via a friend on my dash) and queued that up as my Thursday offering. XD Still need to decide on Song Saturday, and come up with New Year’s Writing Resolutions for Sunday, but I can get those sorted tomorrow, I think.
Superliminal: More “replaying the game with little bits of Developer Commentary scattered throughout the level” times! Picked up with the start of the “Cubism” level, and left off at the end of “Dollhouse,” right before the final three levels of the game. Along the way, I learned tidbits like how they nearly made everything in “Cubism’s” museum stage too complicated by trying to make it all make sense (and then remembering, “right, this is a puzzle game all about dreams and perspective tricks”); how “Cubism” in particular was all about the surprises regarding “what is a cube?” while keeping the puzzles simple; how the room at the end of “Blackout” is actually in sections so it can be lit in pieces and not kill player framerates; how the “Right Click To Return” sign in “Clone” is probably the least-read sign in the game (I suspect most players don’t realize you CAN return clones to their original object), but that the cloning mechanic is actually the one players, or at least playtesters, enjoyed the most (lots of smiles, anyway); how the fact that players can change their size freely in “Dollhouse” posed lots of level design and programming design challenges (like changing player collision and level geometry clipping – plus slowing down gravity so large objects always fall slowly because that’s easier on the player); and how the cat on the poster for the “Cardboard Lovers’ Association” in the ending elevator of “Dollhouse” is in fact one of the developer’s cats, Finn. XD I can also confirm that, even when you know what you’re doing (and aren’t glitching out the game by fucking with sizes too much), that one puzzle at the end of “Dollhouse” where you’re in the box and you have to shrink one portal door of the pair you’re trapped with and put it in the keyhole so you can squeeze your way out is still the most annoying puzzle in the game. *grumbles* But yeah, almost done with this Commentary replay – thinking I might actually finish this up on Saturday because this game goes quicker than either Sims 4 or Fallout 4, and in between cleaning my room and starting the New Year’s Eve movie marathon with my parents (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson action movies, if you’re wondering – San Andreas, Skyscraper, and Rampage) that day, it might be a good idea to do a shorter game in the little free time I’ll have!
Writing: Wrote some more on one of my Valicer AUs, who is surprised. :p Some more of the scene where a version of my Catch Us If You Can Victor (the dark Forgotten Vows AU where Alice and Victor end up vigilantes after Victor got shipped off to Rutledge post-Bumby instead of getting to have a quiet recovery with Alice, thanks to someone catching Alice killing Bumby and her needing to go on the run) got hypnotized via handshake induction from Smiler and ended up cuddled between them and Alice – Victor had a brief bad moment where, trying to figure out why he responded so joyfully to Alice calling him a “good boy,” his brain went back to Bumby and how he was treated under THAT asshole, but fortunately Alice and Smiler were able to bring him out of that. Now, though, Victor’s just realized he’s thought of Smiler as “his” Smiler, and. . .well, basically I suspect this scene ends with him waking up very confused about a few things he’s uncovered about himself. :p
YouTube: Kept up easily with the Subs today, and got another thing out of the Watch Later, so I’m happy. :) Let me give the skinny –
A) Started with a surprisingly short video from Call Me Kevin after I finished Superliminal – “I made my first video in 2009, in 2022 I almost quit.” Yeah, apparently that “I have to go to every other day for videos at the moment” post he made eight months ago was in response to him feeling burnt out and worrying about his mental health (not to mention his physical health, apparently he got sick/injured a LOT this year), and the sudden burst of free time made him do a lot of self-reflection and decide he needed to grow more as a person. So, much like Josh Way pivoting his channel to also include his art and his thoughts about video games and all that, Kevin’s gonna be doing more different content himself – like, tomorrow we’re getting a video of him teaching himself how to ride a skateboard in seven days! He’s hoping to just – get some more variety on the channel because, while he loves gaming and making gaming videos (and has been very pleased by the reactions of people to his new, longer videos on games), he doesn’t want it to be ALL he does. He also made sure to shout out all the people who have been giving him help and stopping him doing everything on his own so he’s too busy to think about things – girlfriend Anna who helps him organize, all his editors, the people who help him make thumbnails, all of that. It was short but sweet, and kind of makes you want to give him a hug, because it’s clear he’s awkward as hell and isn’t sure if he should share any of this. Fortunately the comments have all been very positive, so hopefully he’s getting the serotonins from that.
B) Then, after cookies, it was time for a bit of OXBoxtra:
I. “9 Times We Forged Precious Memories on Outside Xtra in 2022 - THANKS FOR THE PRESH MEMS” – Presh Mems time on OXtra! Luke and Ellen recounting a few favorite memories/clips from the year, from Ellen having sneakily beaten The Nameless King from Dark Souls 3 late one night and showing the clip to Luke under the guise of “this is the closest I’ve come to beating him” (and Luke’s delighted shock when it turns out she’d killed him); to Luke and Andy cracking up horribly over Luke’s “Games are back!” opener for the the list of new games for October 2022 – mostly because it was followed by them having to announce A Plague Tale: Requiem and its “rat physics,” which – yeah; to Ellen being initially freaked out, then deeply amused by a glitch in Stray where the cat’s head will rotate 360 degrees first one way, then the other if you have him sit in a particular position on the tram’s passenger seats; to one I actually saw – “Barry Sportington” giving commentary on Luke and Ellen doing Wii Bowling at a shopping center because they weren’t able to record their own dialogue for that particular “Show of the Weekend.” XD Good times with the OXBoxtra crew – AND it had some of their Blades In The Dark moments from this year, so now I know what to look forward to when it comes to THAT series!
II. “Game of the Year 2022: LUKE AND ELLEN DECIDE | Day 1” – GOTY time on OXBox and OXtra! It’s time for the gang to decide which games they loved best that came out in 2022. Luke and Ellen got to go first, and their decisions were not a surprise at all – Luke picked Elden Ring (known fanboy; his reasoning being is that it feels both like FROM Software really honed their craft when it came to combat, the world and NPC designs, all the little sidequests and such, and yet also loosened the player leash so you could make loads of totally overpowered builds not possible in their other games and really let loose whenever you want), and Ellen picked Stray (known fangirl; she admitted that she just absolutely adored the adorable cat and how well it’s crafted and how it’s a cute little puzzle game that you can play as a total pacifist (not that she doesn’t like combat, her runner-up was God of War: Ragnorak) and that she grew to truly love all the characters – including her little cat Jonesy, as named by the chat). *nods* Good stuff! I look forward to seeing what pops up tomorrow for Andy, Mike, and Jane!
C) And finally, this evening, it was back to the Subs for the latest from GrayStillPlays – “When you BLEND Reality,” aka Gray plays Blend It 3D! A mobile game from the Google Play store about being the owner/sole employee of a little beachside shack that serves both juice and coffee – and let me tell you, you can serve some odd “juices.” I mean, blending a couple of old Nokia cellphones with some ice cream for a robot MIGHT be understandable, I suppose. . .but giving supposedly ordinary people shakes made from corn mixed with apples and bananas? Just blending an entire chocolate bar to make a chocolate “shake?” Turning rotten fruit into a smoothie for a Frankenstein’s Monster? Serving a guy an ENTIRE BLENDED STRING OF SAUSAGES?? And don’t get me started about the Yeti who drinks toilet paper. . . Gray, as you might imagine, was equal parts horrified and delighted about all this weirdness, and gleefully tried to add his own – blending up moldy food for regular customers and making them vomit, trying to write “YEET” in his coffee art, and of course going a little TOO far into the blending and blending some fingers. XD Perfect combination of Gray and game tonight, I think!
Workout: Another night on the bike, another night with the Call Me Kevin “Rewind 2022” video! Today got me through the “Evil Kevin” section (featuring him trying to make the evilest person ever in Bitlife, being a jerk of a cat in Stray, and being a dickhead teenager in The Quarry among other things), leaving me at the beginning of the “Kevin Doesn’t Know How To Play Games” section (with him struggling his way through a Pokemon game – the generation I think before Scarlet/Violet? I admit, I’m not sure). About a quarter of the way through now, yay!
Not too shabby. . .and I've still got a few more days to play around with. Tomorrow, hoping to get a few more tumblr drafts sorted along with the rest of my Victor Luvs Alice queue; do some building in Sims 4 (finish off my "camper" lot, I think); and maybe try to do some more with my old "Blades in the Dark" Valicer stuff, haven't touched that in a while. We'll see how it all works out! Night all!
