Mostly Complete Sunday
Jan. 15th, 2023 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThe answering of messages has gotten away from me again, annoyingly -- might try to get that done before I got to bed, but I've been going to sleep WAY late for the past two days, so -- might instead go for a morning update. Sorry Moose! :( I did at least get everything ELSE I was trying to get done, done --
Tumblr: Did the Victor Luvs Alice dash-and-tags catch-up before lunch, then did some quick drafts of this week’s Chill Save update (the accidental Valicer date and the adoption of the pets) with pictures and starter text after lunch! Not much else to say here, as there’s not anything going on with Valice Multiverse at the moment. Gonna have to finish that stuff up tomorrow too!
Fallout 4: I SOMEWHAT accomplished my goal of getting to the Castle – after a few missteps, I’m at least going in the right direction and on the right bit of landmass. XD Let me tell you all about it –
A) Picked up right after the USS Constitution flying itself into another building and Victor getting his level-up – with THAT sorted, it was time to pick his way through the Royal Arms apartments and grab some junk, get Nick, and then head back down to street level to start planning the route to the Castle! Though not without investigating the general area of the Weatherby Savings and Loan first, specifically the back beach area for goodies. Found a little bit of loot, but not much. Also found that poor Lookout the Mr. Handy had been left behind by the others at the location! :( Hopefully he can make his way over to the ship at a later date. . . Anyway, ended up crossing the river at its shallowest point beside the bridge and picking up a bit of junk from the nearby beaches before hopping onto the bridge itself by a side staircase. . .
B) And then realized that I was going the wrong way again, heading toward County Crossing and Finch Farm instead of toward the Castle. While I was debating whether or not I wanted to drop in on the settlements, I heard some screaming, and found a random farmer being attacked by mongrels – Victor tried to help with his Rapid 10mm, but the farmer died before he and Nick could kill all the dogs. Shame. :( Bodies were looted, and I turned Victor around to go in the RIGHT direction back over the bridge. Just for funsies, though, after going over the bridge, I had him take a hard right to examine the backs of the shops by the waterfront (including a “BBQ Buffet”) – not too much there except a fishing rod and some bottles, but it was nice to go a different way. I continued looping around the scenic way, and found a little mini-bay with a walkway forming a U around it – and a bunch of mines. Victor managed to disarm two – the third went off before he could, but he managed to get far enough away to avoid breaking an arm, at least. Though I did stimpack him and drink some health tea and some milk, just in case. The mined area proved to be the back of the old scavenger’s hideout, in fact, once I’d looped back around by the Savings And Loan – might have to go in and check the place out properly now that its former occupants are very dead!
C) First things first, though – reaching the RIGHT bridge! Some rain rolled in as Victor and Nick headed down the road to the bridge that would take them back in the direction of Goodneighbor (which is the way I needed to go) – which ended up just providing a very dramatic backdrop to their fight against the three raiders who were on said bridge, two regulars and a nasty Veteran who took QUITE a few shots from Victor’s 10mm to put down. Should have switched to the Two-Shot earlier, I think. . .still, he died eventually. Victor took what he wanted from the corpses and continued on. . .
D) But as he did, I noticed a building on my compass that was like JUST on the verge of being tagged. After popping onto the waterfront to the right of the bridge briefly, I found a sign down an alley saying “private property, no trespassing” and went to investigate. Turned out Victor was up against the side of Cabot House! So now I know where that is, nice. :) Didn’t try to go in – Victor hasn’t even met Edward Deegan yet – but it’s good information to have for later. Instead, Victor and Nick headed straight down the main road, into Haymarket Mall, then hung a left toward one of the old skyscrapers – which, upon looking up, I realized was the new resting place of the USS Constitution. Now, the USS Constitution can be refound for some XP and a final chat with Ironsides after it launches, so I figured there was no harm in going up and saying hello!
E) First, though, had to scope out the building itself, which seemed to be some sort of liquor/duty-free store on one side (with a couple of mongrels inside who’d just killed a raider) and a diner on the other. Victor picked up some bottles for later filling on the liquor store side (though I did have to do some more inventory management with Nick as a result), and found a terminal on the other that he was able to hack on the second try (it was Advanced, and didn’t randomize enough “garbage code” for me to eliminate enough duds on the first go). This just opened the safe behind Victor – after confirming he couldn’t just pick it open (Expert lock), he popped it with the terminal and got the goodies inside. Might as well, right? Especially since we’re heading for the Castle, which becomes a settlement after its cleared – need junk to dump into the workbench for beds and generators and all that! I also had him take a moment with his portable workbench to scrap a bunch of the weapons he’d picked up for parts, and take a look at the Staggering Laser Rifle he’d picked up – not sure exactly what I want to do with it yet, but I did attach the Maximized Capacitor mod I had laying around from upgrading Righteous Authority to its “killer sniper” mode. Better damage never bad!
F) And then it was up to the top via a pair of elevators, to refind the Constitution and chat with Ironsides! He was very pleased with his launch (Victor told him it was really something) and said that, even if they hadn’t reached their main goal, he was just glad of the progress. Victor told him he was happy to help, and received an Honorary Lieutenant’s status (along with the hat of office) and full access to the captain’s quarters (as Ironsides can’t use them, being unable to fit downstairs – I still think you can’t actually take anything inside, though). I had Victor and Nick admire the view for a moment (this was at sunset in-game, and it was really pretty), took a screenshot, and then had the boys take their leave and head back to ground level to make some more progress before it got too late.
G) As it turned out, the skyscraper was right by another location I know well at this point – Fanueil Hall! Which now has a strange glitched super mutant t-posing in one of the stone fences behind it. O.o I tried shooting him, but there wasn’t even any blood – I don’t think he was really “there.” Anyway, Victor attempted to make it down the flooded street to the left, but had to turn back after encountering a LOT of radiation (and a black bloatfly, which he took down from a safe distance). Instead, I had the boys cut around the Hall and creep under the collapsed overpass where a bus crashed and a woman tried to defend her groceries from thieves (taking all that I could), which led them to Postal Square. There was a Gunner wandering around, but she didn’t seem interested in making a fuss, so Victor and Nick just crept by her – though I did have Victor take a moment to milk the brahmin grazing in the middle of the square. :P Around to the right and over some debris took them back to Water St Apartments, and from there to a safe-looking parking garage. As it was getting late, I tried to have Victor pitch the tent and get some sleep. . .
H) Only to be told he couldn’t sleep while enemies were nearby! I hadn’t seen any red dots, but since the game wouldn’t let him sleep, I had him press on. Fortunately, going straight on through the garage and down another street piled high with debris got him and Nick to ANOTHER, safer parking garage not far from the Combat Zone. And so Victor was allowed to finally pitch his tent and get some sleep around 10 PM in-game.
I) I had him get up at 5 AM the next morning to keep things moving and had him and Nick cut through the parking garage into the little dumpster plaza beyond. I took a moment to reorient myself with the Pip-Boy, then had Victor unlock a gate nearby and go up an alley by the side of Mass Bay Medical Center and the Metro center right next to it –
Which proved to be Gunner-controlled. And these ones were a LOT less chill about Victor and Nick just passing through. Victor took out two Gunners, a spotlight, and a turret, then a third Gunner coming up the road once he’d had some nice healing food. Thanks Righteous Authority! Fortunately, from there they were able to get down a side street between the two and out before any other Gunners spotted them, and over to the crossover they needed by a broken-down elevated highway and – as per Victor’s map discovery – Hester’s Consumer Robotics! Complete with patrolling Protectron friend! Victor tipped his hat and went on his way, into the fog, emerging by the wreckage of a neighborhood by the water. There was a raider on the road, so Victor and Nick went to sneak around him –
J) When I heard the telltale voice of a super mutant behind them. Victor and Nick quickly hid nearby, and the raider and the super mutants started going after each other, with a couple of dogs named Ruby and Shug coming in to wreck up some of the mutants. Victor and Nick got in a few shots too – there was a mutant on the beach they were hiding by, and they finished off the last super mutant that killed Ruby – but mainly it was just them watching the random encounters get pissed off at each other. It’s so useful when your enemies murder each other! :p
K) Of course, all that excitement meant Victor needed a poop break – and how convenient, there was a Wicked Shipping trailer that he could use his port-a-potty behind. XD Marked with a Railroad chalk sign, no less – as I’d picked up the keys for these trucks a bit back, I had Victor unlock it once he’d done his business, and get some ammo, a bottlecap mine, and a couple of Stealth Boys. Nice. :D
And then, just up the road, I found myself at the South Boston Military Checkpoint! I had Victor go inside the little command camper to steal a desk fan and read through all the log entries and suchlike on the terminal, then figured that was as good a place as any to stop for the day. Especially since something was exploding nearby in the same direction I had to go. XD Problem for next Sunday Vicky. XD But yeah, should reach the Castle next weekend and take on another Mirelurk Queen! With lots and lots of explosives this time to make things nice and easy. . .
Writing: Did the usual FO4 Playthrough Progression write-up right after doing the above write-up! In the fanfic universe, though, I decided that Victor’s detour up to the USS Constitution was to specifically return Lookout to the crew, so the poor Mr. Handy wouldn’t be stuck just patrolling by the Weatherby Savings and Loan forever. He also marked Cabot House on his Pip-Boy map in response to Alice giving him a message from Wonderland to do so – gotta love that Malkavian intuition! :p Other than that, though, pretty much everything above happened the same way, from going the wrong way and not being able to save that one farmer, to working their way through two Gunner camps (one peaceful, one not so much), to finding the Railroad-cache Wicked Shipping truck by the South Boston Military Checkpoint (not that Victor realized that’s what it was at the time). Good progress for the trio, I think!
YouTube: Got all the ones I wanted to watch watched, hooray! Good to have that one video finally out of my Watch Later, let me tell you. . .
A) Started this afternoon with the Subs video from GrayStillPlays – “When you hit the roof at light speed!” AKA Gray plays mobile game Hit The Roof, where you are a muscular guy tasked with jumping off a diving board set onto a tall building and plowing your way head-first through the building beside it, coring your way down to the bottom floor and smashing everything in your path. You start with relatively small 25-floor buildings and gradually work your way up to 100 floors of pain, destruction, and bouncing bits of furniture (ranging from studio cameras, to Christmas trees, to mysterious pickup trucks, to pool and foozball tables). Along the way, you can upgrade your speed, your jump, your helmet toughness, and how much money you earn from destroying buildings in the stupidest way possible. Oh, and you can unlock new hats too, from football helmets to baseball caps to cheeseburgers. :p Gray had a lot of fun perfecting the timing on his jumps and boosts to cause as much devastation as possible as he plowed down to the bottom. Good times!
B) Then, this evening, I finally got to watch the OXtra video I’ve been missing – “garfield.wmv!” AKA the gang (well, Mike, Luke, Ellen, and Andy – Jane got to just observe due to being busy drinking from her Cthulhu mug) playing Garfield Lasagna Party, a Mario Party rip-off that is – well, let’s just say most of the humor in the video came from the gang complaining MIGHTILY about the game. XD The main complaints being that the dice-rolling and moving around the board is actually pretty dull, and the minigames (running from dogs, copying poses, eating loads of food, trying to follow a line on the wall, etc) have horrible controls and take WAAAY too long – most of them are a minute instead of the usual 30 seconds. Which feels a LOT longer when you’re doing a button masher. . . Oh, and all of the characters look weird and upsetting in bad 3D CGI. Arlene was compared to a portion of the male anatomy a couple of times. XD Anyway, Luke (who vocally confessed to paying 35 pounds for the game MULTIPLE TIMES) did manage to win in the end by somehow being the best at playing this game. Which is not an achievement I think he will be touting much. XD Last game of the channel for 2022, folks! I’m hoping 2023 brings them bigger and better things. And maybe a different awful multiplayer game for them to bitch about at the end of December. XD
C) And finally, going VERY late today so it’s a good thing I have tomorrow off, we had Jon and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 12 - The Ship of Secrets!” AKA, Jon sends Wanda to Rivet City to cause Drama and show off how broken karma can get. Highlights from the episode included:
I. Showing off how the holotapes in “The Replicated Man” quest (where you have to hunt down an “android” – because they weren’t called synths yet – who’d escaped from the Commonwealth to the Capital Wasteland, and either turn him into the Institute agent hanging around Rivet City, or let the poor guy go free because he’s gotten a new life for himself as security) change depending on what order you get them in and where you get them – basically, the first tape you pick up is always an introduction to the idea of androids and this particular guy, but what it says depends on whether you got it from a doctor’s office, a mechanist’s office, a certain woman’s bunker in Megaton (proving she’s a Railroad member), or from Sister’s room in Rivet City. Same with the third tape, which mentions the various equipment needed to give the synth a new face and new memories, but the wording and in what order everything is mentioned depends on whether you get it from a doctor, a slaver, a technician, or a Railroad member. The second and fourth tapes are always from the synth himself, a former Courser who now regrets his life and wants to go rogue, and details his attempts to get help and the reason he wants new memories so badly (because, as a former agent of the Institute, he feels like he knows too much). Which tape you get is dynamically generated as you pick up the unlabeled holotapes and in what order. It’s pretty neat that they put in all this effort to record so many different variations on the tape, and made it so what you heard depended on where you got it! As a side note, you can also figure out who in the Capital Wasteland are Railroad members (other than Victoria Waters, who openly tries to chase you down to give you a fake android part to give to Zimmer to convince him the synth is dead) – hint, a good tell is that they’re ALSO very sympathetic to ghouls (or one themselves – turns out Tulip in Underworld is a member in good standing!).
II. Showing off how many people are horny for each other in Rivet City. Seagraves, a technician on the ship, is into Vera, the local gossip; the owner of the chem store in the marketplace spends a LOT of time around this one guy named Bannon (despite being married, but – well. It’s VERY easy to kill off her husband, let me tell you – and I will in a bit); and of course there’s that whole THING between Angela and Diego. If you’re unaware, there’s a mini-quest in the game where you can talk to this one woman who works at the restaurant, Angela, who has a thing for a dude, Diego – only Diego’s studying to become a priest under the local holy man, Father Clifford (at the Saint Monica Chapel on the boat). She really wants to be with him, though – to the point of saying that if she could just get her hands on some ant pheromones, she KNOWS he would be unable to resist her. If you go talk to Diego, he will kind of confirm that he’s into her, but he’s chosen the Church over her “temptation” and that’s that. Now, there are a couple of ways to resolve this quest, including telling him that you’ll tell Father Clifford he’s still hanging out with her as a friend (which makes him break off the friendship entirely to focus on the priesthood) or lie to Father Clifford and say Diego and Angela have already been fornicating (which gets Diego excommunicated, so he just goes ahead and proposes to Angela because why not at this point) – but the one that the game considers the BEST is actually GETTING THE DAMN ANT PHEROMONES AND LETTING ANGELA BASICALLY CHEMICALLY SEDUCE DIEGO INTO GIVING UP THE PRIESTHOOD AND MARRYING HER. Because that’s the only one that actually ends with a WEDDING that you can attend, and thus the only one that gives you positive Karma. What the hell, Fallout 3.
III. Showing off how weird the karma system in this game can get, in fact. It’s not just getting positive karma for arranging a wedding where the groom was half-drugged into proposing! You can also get a load of bad karma just for giving the chem dealer’s chem-addicted husband loads of Psycho when he asks for it just by talking to him ten times. (This kills him, by the way, no matter how much you give him – his wife considers it something of a blessing, though.) By contrast, give a thousand caps to the church, and all that evil debt will be wiped out. (In fact, Jon believes he has figured out the exact value of a human life in Fallout 3, and it is 100 caps – murder is -100 karma, you get one point of karma per cap donated to the church, and so 100 caps to the church clears that particular sin. Handy for “I am dedicated to being neutral” Wanda!) And, right before attending the pheromone wedding, Jon showed how you can bully a child by being rude to them (after talking with their mother to get the real nasty stuff unlocked) and then speech check them into running away with their best friend, before going out and retrieving them from the location just around the corner from the ship where they end up sitting and crying. Bringing them home nets you good karma, despite the fact YOU’RE THE ONE WHO CAUSED THEM BOTH TO RUN AWAY IN THE FIRST PLACE. (Granted, Wanda got her OWN form of karma for pulling that – as it turned out, she’d gone a little TOO good thanks to her church donations, and had to fight off some Talon Company mercenaries before she could get to the kids. On the plus side, free armor!) Oh, and you can randomly talk some guy out of committing suicide by giving him a new lease on life by being a mentor to Ted. Who is Ted? Good question! XD (He’s some dude who’s a bit of a shiftless sort wandering around the ship, but it doesn’t matter if your character has met him or not – if you’ve got the speech, you can offer him up as a reason for Mister Lopez to live.)
IV. Showing off the best ways to complete the quests “The Replicated Man” and “Wasteland Survival Guide” for the best rewards by braving a flooded horror show full of mirelurks and a bunch of terrible traps at “The Broken Bow” of the ship so you can talk to one Horace Pinkerton! He’ll give you the true history of Rivet City (he and his fellow scientists cleared it out for its lab, and the traders ended up just sort of joining them; he’s bitterly living in the broken-off section because his teammates ended up abandoning him to work with Dr. Li on “Project Purity” and he got booted off the council) and the minutes of the first meeting to back it up, AND he will confirm he did the facial reconstruction and memory replacement on the synth (having stolen the memory chip from Vault 112, where Braun is running his horrible “Tranquility Lane” simulation and has James trapped as a dog) and tell you who they now are – Harkness, one of the security guards. So, how did this play into getting the best rewards, at least for his character?
i. Replicated Man – Well, by having Wanda trigger Harkness’s memories of his past as a courser by using – well, it’s not really a RECALL code as it RESTORES memories (the code in Fallout 4 wipes the synth and allows them to be reprogrammed), but it’s some sort of special code for the chip in his brain. She told him she’d get Zimmer off his back and thus got his VERY nice plasma gun; then went to Zimmer and outed him as the missing synth to get a combat module implant and thus a special perk that heavily boosts her crit chances in VATS. And the used those new crit chances to easily murder Zimmer and his courser minion. XD Both rewards for both ways of resolving the quest, and Harkness gets to live a happy life as a Rivet City security guard. :)
ii. Wasteland Survival Guide – By having Wanda bring back the notes and snidely tell Moira that an old coot had given them to her. This locked in Wanda having a) done all the optional objectives and b) been a sarcastic little bitch about it, meaning that Moira’s completed version of the Wasteland Survival Guide was the best it could be (even listing Wanda as the main author) and the most sarcastic it could be! Meaning she got the best version of the perk associated with completing the Guide, which gave her good poison and rad resistance, and ANOTHER boost to her crit chances. Jon now feels that, between her super-high luck, her various perk bonuses, and the fact that she uses a LOT of guns that ALSO give crit chance bonuses, basically every other shot should be a crit these days. Not bad at ALL.
V. Showing off Fallout 3 being a Bethesda game, as we had some big bugs this time around – from the chem shop owner just REFUSING to acknowledge her husband’s death, to Father Clifton levitating during the wedding of Angela and Diego, to whole parts of the level despawning while Wanda was swimming around opening doors in the Broken Bow. Because it wouldn’t be Bethesda if it wasn’t at least a little crap! *shakehead*
So yeah, that was today’s offering! :) Next week, though, Jon promises some adventures and secrets out in the Wasteland itself! That should be fun. :) Just hope I can get to it earlier in the evening this time. . .time management, you WILL be a thing again! *shakes fist*
Workout: Got in a bit of time on the bike today, and solved one of my video-watching conundrums – mainly by realizing, if I was willing to watch Call Me Kevin’s “Rewind 2022” video in chunks while working out because it was mostly compilation stuff, why can’t I do the same with GrayStillPlay’s Solar Smash compilation? So that is what I have done with “I found 100 ways to destroy the earth!” Watched the first half-hour today, including the Obligatory New Content Bit at the beginning – apparently now you can give your custom planets textures from photos, and Gray did his with the face of Cartoon Dog (a creepypasta cryptid being that resembles a rubber hose 1930s cartoon character; apparently a relative of the more powerful and more well known Cartoon CAT in that area of the internet) before throwing moons at it to give it new eyes and giving it Lasik surgery from the other side. Rest of it was Gray’s attempts to make Donut Earth and Gray having fun with his Hax from Outlast (playing with the laser sword and the various god-like entities). More classic Gray lunacy tomorrow!
So yes, things have been achieved! And hopefully I'll be able to achieve even more tomorrow. Namely, getting caught up on those messages, getting my "Chill Save" update on Victor Luvs Alice fully sorted, keeping up on YouTube Subs and my workout, and doing whatever it is I'm doing with Sims 4. If anything, but again, since the Big Infants Patch seems to be looming. . .we'll see. For now, night all!
Tumblr: Did the Victor Luvs Alice dash-and-tags catch-up before lunch, then did some quick drafts of this week’s Chill Save update (the accidental Valicer date and the adoption of the pets) with pictures and starter text after lunch! Not much else to say here, as there’s not anything going on with Valice Multiverse at the moment. Gonna have to finish that stuff up tomorrow too!
Fallout 4: I SOMEWHAT accomplished my goal of getting to the Castle – after a few missteps, I’m at least going in the right direction and on the right bit of landmass. XD Let me tell you all about it –
A) Picked up right after the USS Constitution flying itself into another building and Victor getting his level-up – with THAT sorted, it was time to pick his way through the Royal Arms apartments and grab some junk, get Nick, and then head back down to street level to start planning the route to the Castle! Though not without investigating the general area of the Weatherby Savings and Loan first, specifically the back beach area for goodies. Found a little bit of loot, but not much. Also found that poor Lookout the Mr. Handy had been left behind by the others at the location! :( Hopefully he can make his way over to the ship at a later date. . . Anyway, ended up crossing the river at its shallowest point beside the bridge and picking up a bit of junk from the nearby beaches before hopping onto the bridge itself by a side staircase. . .
B) And then realized that I was going the wrong way again, heading toward County Crossing and Finch Farm instead of toward the Castle. While I was debating whether or not I wanted to drop in on the settlements, I heard some screaming, and found a random farmer being attacked by mongrels – Victor tried to help with his Rapid 10mm, but the farmer died before he and Nick could kill all the dogs. Shame. :( Bodies were looted, and I turned Victor around to go in the RIGHT direction back over the bridge. Just for funsies, though, after going over the bridge, I had him take a hard right to examine the backs of the shops by the waterfront (including a “BBQ Buffet”) – not too much there except a fishing rod and some bottles, but it was nice to go a different way. I continued looping around the scenic way, and found a little mini-bay with a walkway forming a U around it – and a bunch of mines. Victor managed to disarm two – the third went off before he could, but he managed to get far enough away to avoid breaking an arm, at least. Though I did stimpack him and drink some health tea and some milk, just in case. The mined area proved to be the back of the old scavenger’s hideout, in fact, once I’d looped back around by the Savings And Loan – might have to go in and check the place out properly now that its former occupants are very dead!
C) First things first, though – reaching the RIGHT bridge! Some rain rolled in as Victor and Nick headed down the road to the bridge that would take them back in the direction of Goodneighbor (which is the way I needed to go) – which ended up just providing a very dramatic backdrop to their fight against the three raiders who were on said bridge, two regulars and a nasty Veteran who took QUITE a few shots from Victor’s 10mm to put down. Should have switched to the Two-Shot earlier, I think. . .still, he died eventually. Victor took what he wanted from the corpses and continued on. . .
D) But as he did, I noticed a building on my compass that was like JUST on the verge of being tagged. After popping onto the waterfront to the right of the bridge briefly, I found a sign down an alley saying “private property, no trespassing” and went to investigate. Turned out Victor was up against the side of Cabot House! So now I know where that is, nice. :) Didn’t try to go in – Victor hasn’t even met Edward Deegan yet – but it’s good information to have for later. Instead, Victor and Nick headed straight down the main road, into Haymarket Mall, then hung a left toward one of the old skyscrapers – which, upon looking up, I realized was the new resting place of the USS Constitution. Now, the USS Constitution can be refound for some XP and a final chat with Ironsides after it launches, so I figured there was no harm in going up and saying hello!
E) First, though, had to scope out the building itself, which seemed to be some sort of liquor/duty-free store on one side (with a couple of mongrels inside who’d just killed a raider) and a diner on the other. Victor picked up some bottles for later filling on the liquor store side (though I did have to do some more inventory management with Nick as a result), and found a terminal on the other that he was able to hack on the second try (it was Advanced, and didn’t randomize enough “garbage code” for me to eliminate enough duds on the first go). This just opened the safe behind Victor – after confirming he couldn’t just pick it open (Expert lock), he popped it with the terminal and got the goodies inside. Might as well, right? Especially since we’re heading for the Castle, which becomes a settlement after its cleared – need junk to dump into the workbench for beds and generators and all that! I also had him take a moment with his portable workbench to scrap a bunch of the weapons he’d picked up for parts, and take a look at the Staggering Laser Rifle he’d picked up – not sure exactly what I want to do with it yet, but I did attach the Maximized Capacitor mod I had laying around from upgrading Righteous Authority to its “killer sniper” mode. Better damage never bad!
F) And then it was up to the top via a pair of elevators, to refind the Constitution and chat with Ironsides! He was very pleased with his launch (Victor told him it was really something) and said that, even if they hadn’t reached their main goal, he was just glad of the progress. Victor told him he was happy to help, and received an Honorary Lieutenant’s status (along with the hat of office) and full access to the captain’s quarters (as Ironsides can’t use them, being unable to fit downstairs – I still think you can’t actually take anything inside, though). I had Victor and Nick admire the view for a moment (this was at sunset in-game, and it was really pretty), took a screenshot, and then had the boys take their leave and head back to ground level to make some more progress before it got too late.
G) As it turned out, the skyscraper was right by another location I know well at this point – Fanueil Hall! Which now has a strange glitched super mutant t-posing in one of the stone fences behind it. O.o I tried shooting him, but there wasn’t even any blood – I don’t think he was really “there.” Anyway, Victor attempted to make it down the flooded street to the left, but had to turn back after encountering a LOT of radiation (and a black bloatfly, which he took down from a safe distance). Instead, I had the boys cut around the Hall and creep under the collapsed overpass where a bus crashed and a woman tried to defend her groceries from thieves (taking all that I could), which led them to Postal Square. There was a Gunner wandering around, but she didn’t seem interested in making a fuss, so Victor and Nick just crept by her – though I did have Victor take a moment to milk the brahmin grazing in the middle of the square. :P Around to the right and over some debris took them back to Water St Apartments, and from there to a safe-looking parking garage. As it was getting late, I tried to have Victor pitch the tent and get some sleep. . .
H) Only to be told he couldn’t sleep while enemies were nearby! I hadn’t seen any red dots, but since the game wouldn’t let him sleep, I had him press on. Fortunately, going straight on through the garage and down another street piled high with debris got him and Nick to ANOTHER, safer parking garage not far from the Combat Zone. And so Victor was allowed to finally pitch his tent and get some sleep around 10 PM in-game.
I) I had him get up at 5 AM the next morning to keep things moving and had him and Nick cut through the parking garage into the little dumpster plaza beyond. I took a moment to reorient myself with the Pip-Boy, then had Victor unlock a gate nearby and go up an alley by the side of Mass Bay Medical Center and the Metro center right next to it –
Which proved to be Gunner-controlled. And these ones were a LOT less chill about Victor and Nick just passing through. Victor took out two Gunners, a spotlight, and a turret, then a third Gunner coming up the road once he’d had some nice healing food. Thanks Righteous Authority! Fortunately, from there they were able to get down a side street between the two and out before any other Gunners spotted them, and over to the crossover they needed by a broken-down elevated highway and – as per Victor’s map discovery – Hester’s Consumer Robotics! Complete with patrolling Protectron friend! Victor tipped his hat and went on his way, into the fog, emerging by the wreckage of a neighborhood by the water. There was a raider on the road, so Victor and Nick went to sneak around him –
J) When I heard the telltale voice of a super mutant behind them. Victor and Nick quickly hid nearby, and the raider and the super mutants started going after each other, with a couple of dogs named Ruby and Shug coming in to wreck up some of the mutants. Victor and Nick got in a few shots too – there was a mutant on the beach they were hiding by, and they finished off the last super mutant that killed Ruby – but mainly it was just them watching the random encounters get pissed off at each other. It’s so useful when your enemies murder each other! :p
K) Of course, all that excitement meant Victor needed a poop break – and how convenient, there was a Wicked Shipping trailer that he could use his port-a-potty behind. XD Marked with a Railroad chalk sign, no less – as I’d picked up the keys for these trucks a bit back, I had Victor unlock it once he’d done his business, and get some ammo, a bottlecap mine, and a couple of Stealth Boys. Nice. :D
And then, just up the road, I found myself at the South Boston Military Checkpoint! I had Victor go inside the little command camper to steal a desk fan and read through all the log entries and suchlike on the terminal, then figured that was as good a place as any to stop for the day. Especially since something was exploding nearby in the same direction I had to go. XD Problem for next Sunday Vicky. XD But yeah, should reach the Castle next weekend and take on another Mirelurk Queen! With lots and lots of explosives this time to make things nice and easy. . .
Writing: Did the usual FO4 Playthrough Progression write-up right after doing the above write-up! In the fanfic universe, though, I decided that Victor’s detour up to the USS Constitution was to specifically return Lookout to the crew, so the poor Mr. Handy wouldn’t be stuck just patrolling by the Weatherby Savings and Loan forever. He also marked Cabot House on his Pip-Boy map in response to Alice giving him a message from Wonderland to do so – gotta love that Malkavian intuition! :p Other than that, though, pretty much everything above happened the same way, from going the wrong way and not being able to save that one farmer, to working their way through two Gunner camps (one peaceful, one not so much), to finding the Railroad-cache Wicked Shipping truck by the South Boston Military Checkpoint (not that Victor realized that’s what it was at the time). Good progress for the trio, I think!
YouTube: Got all the ones I wanted to watch watched, hooray! Good to have that one video finally out of my Watch Later, let me tell you. . .
A) Started this afternoon with the Subs video from GrayStillPlays – “When you hit the roof at light speed!” AKA Gray plays mobile game Hit The Roof, where you are a muscular guy tasked with jumping off a diving board set onto a tall building and plowing your way head-first through the building beside it, coring your way down to the bottom floor and smashing everything in your path. You start with relatively small 25-floor buildings and gradually work your way up to 100 floors of pain, destruction, and bouncing bits of furniture (ranging from studio cameras, to Christmas trees, to mysterious pickup trucks, to pool and foozball tables). Along the way, you can upgrade your speed, your jump, your helmet toughness, and how much money you earn from destroying buildings in the stupidest way possible. Oh, and you can unlock new hats too, from football helmets to baseball caps to cheeseburgers. :p Gray had a lot of fun perfecting the timing on his jumps and boosts to cause as much devastation as possible as he plowed down to the bottom. Good times!
B) Then, this evening, I finally got to watch the OXtra video I’ve been missing – “garfield.wmv!” AKA the gang (well, Mike, Luke, Ellen, and Andy – Jane got to just observe due to being busy drinking from her Cthulhu mug) playing Garfield Lasagna Party, a Mario Party rip-off that is – well, let’s just say most of the humor in the video came from the gang complaining MIGHTILY about the game. XD The main complaints being that the dice-rolling and moving around the board is actually pretty dull, and the minigames (running from dogs, copying poses, eating loads of food, trying to follow a line on the wall, etc) have horrible controls and take WAAAY too long – most of them are a minute instead of the usual 30 seconds. Which feels a LOT longer when you’re doing a button masher. . . Oh, and all of the characters look weird and upsetting in bad 3D CGI. Arlene was compared to a portion of the male anatomy a couple of times. XD Anyway, Luke (who vocally confessed to paying 35 pounds for the game MULTIPLE TIMES) did manage to win in the end by somehow being the best at playing this game. Which is not an achievement I think he will be touting much. XD Last game of the channel for 2022, folks! I’m hoping 2023 brings them bigger and better things. And maybe a different awful multiplayer game for them to bitch about at the end of December. XD
C) And finally, going VERY late today so it’s a good thing I have tomorrow off, we had Jon and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 12 - The Ship of Secrets!” AKA, Jon sends Wanda to Rivet City to cause Drama and show off how broken karma can get. Highlights from the episode included:
I. Showing off how the holotapes in “The Replicated Man” quest (where you have to hunt down an “android” – because they weren’t called synths yet – who’d escaped from the Commonwealth to the Capital Wasteland, and either turn him into the Institute agent hanging around Rivet City, or let the poor guy go free because he’s gotten a new life for himself as security) change depending on what order you get them in and where you get them – basically, the first tape you pick up is always an introduction to the idea of androids and this particular guy, but what it says depends on whether you got it from a doctor’s office, a mechanist’s office, a certain woman’s bunker in Megaton (proving she’s a Railroad member), or from Sister’s room in Rivet City. Same with the third tape, which mentions the various equipment needed to give the synth a new face and new memories, but the wording and in what order everything is mentioned depends on whether you get it from a doctor, a slaver, a technician, or a Railroad member. The second and fourth tapes are always from the synth himself, a former Courser who now regrets his life and wants to go rogue, and details his attempts to get help and the reason he wants new memories so badly (because, as a former agent of the Institute, he feels like he knows too much). Which tape you get is dynamically generated as you pick up the unlabeled holotapes and in what order. It’s pretty neat that they put in all this effort to record so many different variations on the tape, and made it so what you heard depended on where you got it! As a side note, you can also figure out who in the Capital Wasteland are Railroad members (other than Victoria Waters, who openly tries to chase you down to give you a fake android part to give to Zimmer to convince him the synth is dead) – hint, a good tell is that they’re ALSO very sympathetic to ghouls (or one themselves – turns out Tulip in Underworld is a member in good standing!).
II. Showing off how many people are horny for each other in Rivet City. Seagraves, a technician on the ship, is into Vera, the local gossip; the owner of the chem store in the marketplace spends a LOT of time around this one guy named Bannon (despite being married, but – well. It’s VERY easy to kill off her husband, let me tell you – and I will in a bit); and of course there’s that whole THING between Angela and Diego. If you’re unaware, there’s a mini-quest in the game where you can talk to this one woman who works at the restaurant, Angela, who has a thing for a dude, Diego – only Diego’s studying to become a priest under the local holy man, Father Clifford (at the Saint Monica Chapel on the boat). She really wants to be with him, though – to the point of saying that if she could just get her hands on some ant pheromones, she KNOWS he would be unable to resist her. If you go talk to Diego, he will kind of confirm that he’s into her, but he’s chosen the Church over her “temptation” and that’s that. Now, there are a couple of ways to resolve this quest, including telling him that you’ll tell Father Clifford he’s still hanging out with her as a friend (which makes him break off the friendship entirely to focus on the priesthood) or lie to Father Clifford and say Diego and Angela have already been fornicating (which gets Diego excommunicated, so he just goes ahead and proposes to Angela because why not at this point) – but the one that the game considers the BEST is actually GETTING THE DAMN ANT PHEROMONES AND LETTING ANGELA BASICALLY CHEMICALLY SEDUCE DIEGO INTO GIVING UP THE PRIESTHOOD AND MARRYING HER. Because that’s the only one that actually ends with a WEDDING that you can attend, and thus the only one that gives you positive Karma. What the hell, Fallout 3.
III. Showing off how weird the karma system in this game can get, in fact. It’s not just getting positive karma for arranging a wedding where the groom was half-drugged into proposing! You can also get a load of bad karma just for giving the chem dealer’s chem-addicted husband loads of Psycho when he asks for it just by talking to him ten times. (This kills him, by the way, no matter how much you give him – his wife considers it something of a blessing, though.) By contrast, give a thousand caps to the church, and all that evil debt will be wiped out. (In fact, Jon believes he has figured out the exact value of a human life in Fallout 3, and it is 100 caps – murder is -100 karma, you get one point of karma per cap donated to the church, and so 100 caps to the church clears that particular sin. Handy for “I am dedicated to being neutral” Wanda!) And, right before attending the pheromone wedding, Jon showed how you can bully a child by being rude to them (after talking with their mother to get the real nasty stuff unlocked) and then speech check them into running away with their best friend, before going out and retrieving them from the location just around the corner from the ship where they end up sitting and crying. Bringing them home nets you good karma, despite the fact YOU’RE THE ONE WHO CAUSED THEM BOTH TO RUN AWAY IN THE FIRST PLACE. (Granted, Wanda got her OWN form of karma for pulling that – as it turned out, she’d gone a little TOO good thanks to her church donations, and had to fight off some Talon Company mercenaries before she could get to the kids. On the plus side, free armor!) Oh, and you can randomly talk some guy out of committing suicide by giving him a new lease on life by being a mentor to Ted. Who is Ted? Good question! XD (He’s some dude who’s a bit of a shiftless sort wandering around the ship, but it doesn’t matter if your character has met him or not – if you’ve got the speech, you can offer him up as a reason for Mister Lopez to live.)
IV. Showing off the best ways to complete the quests “The Replicated Man” and “Wasteland Survival Guide” for the best rewards by braving a flooded horror show full of mirelurks and a bunch of terrible traps at “The Broken Bow” of the ship so you can talk to one Horace Pinkerton! He’ll give you the true history of Rivet City (he and his fellow scientists cleared it out for its lab, and the traders ended up just sort of joining them; he’s bitterly living in the broken-off section because his teammates ended up abandoning him to work with Dr. Li on “Project Purity” and he got booted off the council) and the minutes of the first meeting to back it up, AND he will confirm he did the facial reconstruction and memory replacement on the synth (having stolen the memory chip from Vault 112, where Braun is running his horrible “Tranquility Lane” simulation and has James trapped as a dog) and tell you who they now are – Harkness, one of the security guards. So, how did this play into getting the best rewards, at least for his character?
i. Replicated Man – Well, by having Wanda trigger Harkness’s memories of his past as a courser by using – well, it’s not really a RECALL code as it RESTORES memories (the code in Fallout 4 wipes the synth and allows them to be reprogrammed), but it’s some sort of special code for the chip in his brain. She told him she’d get Zimmer off his back and thus got his VERY nice plasma gun; then went to Zimmer and outed him as the missing synth to get a combat module implant and thus a special perk that heavily boosts her crit chances in VATS. And the used those new crit chances to easily murder Zimmer and his courser minion. XD Both rewards for both ways of resolving the quest, and Harkness gets to live a happy life as a Rivet City security guard. :)
ii. Wasteland Survival Guide – By having Wanda bring back the notes and snidely tell Moira that an old coot had given them to her. This locked in Wanda having a) done all the optional objectives and b) been a sarcastic little bitch about it, meaning that Moira’s completed version of the Wasteland Survival Guide was the best it could be (even listing Wanda as the main author) and the most sarcastic it could be! Meaning she got the best version of the perk associated with completing the Guide, which gave her good poison and rad resistance, and ANOTHER boost to her crit chances. Jon now feels that, between her super-high luck, her various perk bonuses, and the fact that she uses a LOT of guns that ALSO give crit chance bonuses, basically every other shot should be a crit these days. Not bad at ALL.
V. Showing off Fallout 3 being a Bethesda game, as we had some big bugs this time around – from the chem shop owner just REFUSING to acknowledge her husband’s death, to Father Clifton levitating during the wedding of Angela and Diego, to whole parts of the level despawning while Wanda was swimming around opening doors in the Broken Bow. Because it wouldn’t be Bethesda if it wasn’t at least a little crap! *shakehead*
So yeah, that was today’s offering! :) Next week, though, Jon promises some adventures and secrets out in the Wasteland itself! That should be fun. :) Just hope I can get to it earlier in the evening this time. . .time management, you WILL be a thing again! *shakes fist*
Workout: Got in a bit of time on the bike today, and solved one of my video-watching conundrums – mainly by realizing, if I was willing to watch Call Me Kevin’s “Rewind 2022” video in chunks while working out because it was mostly compilation stuff, why can’t I do the same with GrayStillPlay’s Solar Smash compilation? So that is what I have done with “I found 100 ways to destroy the earth!” Watched the first half-hour today, including the Obligatory New Content Bit at the beginning – apparently now you can give your custom planets textures from photos, and Gray did his with the face of Cartoon Dog (a creepypasta cryptid being that resembles a rubber hose 1930s cartoon character; apparently a relative of the more powerful and more well known Cartoon CAT in that area of the internet) before throwing moons at it to give it new eyes and giving it Lasik surgery from the other side. Rest of it was Gray’s attempts to make Donut Earth and Gray having fun with his Hax from Outlast (playing with the laser sword and the various god-like entities). More classic Gray lunacy tomorrow!
So yes, things have been achieved! And hopefully I'll be able to achieve even more tomorrow. Namely, getting caught up on those messages, getting my "Chill Save" update on Victor Luvs Alice fully sorted, keeping up on YouTube Subs and my workout, and doing whatever it is I'm doing with Sims 4. If anything, but again, since the Big Infants Patch seems to be looming. . .we'll see. For now, night all!
