Chillier Tuesday
May. 9th, 2023 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickTemperatures only in the mid-60s today, and with a steady breeze, it felt colder, brr. Tomorrow's supposed to be more summery, though, which is nice. And I had a fairly productive day all things considered --
Work – Quiet but somewhat annoying day at work – one of my coworkers was out, and the other busy with a label project, so they weren’t bugging me, and we didn’t have a heck of a lot of phone calls – BUT the printer went bad midway through the GL thanks to a faulty toner cartridge, so I had to wait until that was fixed in the afternoon to finish that. At least I had a QC spreadsheet to keep me busy. . .but yeah, that plus some idiocy on the rides up and back meant that I was a touch grumpy. But it wasn’t the worst day by any stretch, and at least I don’t have to go in tomorrow!
We also played beanbags this afternoon, despite it being a little chilly – I had a slow start with a good finish, Dad had a good start with a crash at the end, and Mom improved a little bit from previous attempts! Final scores were me 3-2-W; Dad W-W-3; Mom 2-3-2. *shrug* Not too shabby!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, finishing off Oxventure: Legacy of Dragons – “Ready Lair One” and starting “Corpse and Robbers!” Giovanni ended up liking the lair that Prudence had designed, with the hot orange water pools and all of that, though he immediately clocked that the architecture wasn’t genuine dwarven. Corazon JUST managed to bullshit that this Theme Park version was better because it brought new voices to the table when it came to the art. XD Giovanni agreed and said he’d move in, tasking them with getting his hoard while he got comfortable, did a little rearranging, and started scent-marking. Corazon, Prudence, and Egbert left in a hurry after hearing THAT! XD
In fact, they left just in time to see Dob and Merilwen pull up with all the gold! Corazon was BRIEFLY like “you know, Giovanni asked us to get him his OWN hoard, we could probably keep this,” but a good Wisdom/Insight roll (he was knocking out the twenties this session, damn) had him realize “oh, wait, bigger lair means bigger hoard, and if he has to make it himself, he will do all the killing he so likes to do.” So the Oxventurers’ treasure was put in as a “down payment” as they retrieved the original hoard – Dob ALSO attempted to offload Flannery onto Giovanni as a gift, but Gio wasn’t having him. And also couldn’t kill him, despite his best efforts. Dob interpreted this to mean Flannery was some eldritch creature and said that him keeping the dragon occupied was a good thing, but the others were like “no, we’ve downgraded to imprisoning and torturing the dragon now” and Corazon let Flannery out. Ah well, Dob tried. :p
So the episode ended with the group telling Shattershield about the order’s new tenant and prompting a “thank you” out of him (Shattershield complaining they never give him a CHANCE to be polite first), and asking how he was doing. And that prompted him to comment that Paladin Harris, who’d he sent to examine Mistmire and make a report of the damage, hadn’t yet reported back yet. . .
And start next episode! XD The group were immediately like “Not Harris!” and began making up features because Johnny had foolishly not actually described the paladin – poor Harris ended up with an arm that was like five feet longer than the other. XD They offered to go look for him, which Shattershield appreciated, and Egbert used Locate Object to locate the weird sling that Harris uses for his arm (the spell apparently functions much like using a dowsing rod – Egbert IMMEDIATELY warned Merilwen not to call it “tree-ps” XD). The gang followed it down through the city, running into Richard (the gaunt petitioner all for leaving Mistmire) again as the citizenry looked at some of the ruins. Dob and Corazon immediately began playing up the fact that Mistmire had a new dragon and started mocking Richard and shoving him around – they got good enough performance rolls to win over the crowd at first, but then Dob rolled a critical one and the crowd turned on him for being too cruel, forcing Corazon (who’d rolled decently) to haul him away. With that sidetrack sorted, the gang followed the vibrating twig down into a storeroom with wine and barrels and a big old crack in the wall, where they found Harris curled up on the ground, arm wrapped around himself, supposedly sleeping. Corazon tried to shake him awake, but got no response, so Prudence used Detect Magic on the guy to see if he’d been magically drugged –
Nope, dude was just dead. Turns out his throat had been slit, and he’d actually been lying in a pool of his own blood (mingled with spilled wine). Dob used Speak With Dead to question him (after wrapping his arm around his throat to try and seal the wound, then wasting a question asking how he communicated, telepathically or by actually using his lungs – Johnny’s answer as Harris was, uh, unclear XD), and got from him that he’d been killed by a “jackal” (Corazon, with ANOTHER nat twenty, could not recall any assassins going by that name; Merilwen theorized that maybe it related to Jacques Darkfall, with someone taking up his mantle, prompting Corazon to do a cool pose in Darkfall’s boots XD) and that he’d died about sixteen hours ago. The group scanned the room for more clues – Egbert, who rolled poorly, got distracted by the spilled wine; Corazon, finally getting a bad roll, was only able to confirm “yup, dead guy;” Prudence was able to determine that there were no signs of a struggle – Harris had died where he lay – and Merilwen and Dob found the murder weapon – Harris’s own knife! Which Merilwen said suggested a more opportunistic attack. (Dob also determined that no, no one had come in through the crack by sticking his head through it. XD) They also found Harris’s unfinished report, which indicated that the damage to Mistmire, though bad in spots, was not so horrible that it needed to be abandoned. The group immediately decided Harris had probably been murdered to keep that information from coming out (Richard shooting up to “prime suspect”), though none of them could figure out why he’d apparently stopped mid-sentence for a nap. Egbert urged them to report this to Shattershield, and so they hurried back to the keep –
Where they found Shattershield asleep on the job! After waking him and discussing whether to give him syrup of ipecac or such, Prudence Detected Magic on his glass and found it was nothing but boring old water. Apparently Shattershield was just tired. The group relayed their findings about Harris (Shattershield being briefly more horrified by Harris sleeping on the job than him being killed – the others pointed out the hypocrisy, and he quickly explained he was off-duty) and explained their worries about someone trying to make Mistmire look more run-down and dangerous to live in than it really is, citing Richard, again, as the prime suspect. Shattershield was of course all for investigating, so after a quick look at the well to make sure that was all right (yup, all ordinary water), Corazon attempted to find Richard by sneaky means so they could observe what he was doing while alone. A poor roll meant he couldn’t figure out where he was, though, so Merilwen turned to Locate Creature to find “the scrawny guy.” And I left it on Johnny saying that Richard was REALLY zipping around for such a gaunt and fragile gentleman. Hmmmm. . .
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice has gotten a very begrudging, incredulous “thank you” from Damsel and a more sincere one from Nines for her work in taking out the Brotherhood of the Ninth Circle. She’s also confirmed to Skelter that Patty has “disappeared” from Los Angeles, agreed to spy on LaCroix for the Anarchs (because while she’s not particularly fond of them, she likes LaCroix a whole lot less), and told them about her upcoming trip to Grout’s, which Nines is quite interested in. Which, uh, will be biting him in the ass at the end of the next chapter, that’s for certain. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – nice and simple two-in, two-out, yay –
A) First up, the latest from Josh Way – “Fun With Shorts: Out of This World (Part 2)!” The second half of the short about a mother in what I presume to be the 60s who goes to visit the World’s Fair and gets sucked into a dream about futuristic kitchens. And somewhat xenophobic ones, as the short’s idea of making this a “World’s Fair” was to have the woman get dressed up in slightly racist ways to represent Indian, Chinese, and – well, I’m not sure what the last one was supposed to be, but I suspect African. There was a lot of talk about how good the fridge space was, how convenient the laundry was, and how easy-to-clean the second oven was. Josh was brutal in talking about how “hobbies and careers exist, you know” and mocking the short for entirely running out of things to say in the last “foreign kitchen.” Good, ridiculous stuff! XD
B) And second up, the latest from GrayStillPlays – “The new iPhone ruined my life,” aka Gray plays Happy Wheels! Maps from this episode included the customary overly-complicated bottle flip (Gray managed not only to perfectly flip two bottles into “how did you get up here” and “amazing” at the same time, he also managed to flip a bottle onto HIMSELF); a surprisingly-tricky rope swing (mostly because his leg kept getting caught in one of the ropes thanks to being fired onto it by a cannon – he only succeeded when the damn things got ripped off midway through the board); a longer-than-he-expected bottle run (where you had to keep your front wheel JUST off the bottles to win); a tour of “Happy Beach” (where everyone was building sandcastles, having ice cream and beer, and fishing for hobos – at least until Gray ran them over on his bike while trying to get to the hot dog party); a race by Dylan Snider where Gray as the hobo piloting the “Murder Mystery Machine” had to win against a pickup truck, a flotation device, and a repurposed nuke (if he didn’t, the board just never completed); a short but SHOCKINGLY difficult jet run (possibly because it WAS so short, meaning Gray didn’t have much hope of NOT being smashed against the far wall); a glass break with watermelons, chairs, and bottles (and a secret ending where you had to defeat Florida Man); and a really amazingly detailed trip through an Apple store, where you had to platform over and around the various products (featuring two mini-maps inside an iPhone and a TV/Mac combo respectively! It was honestly quite impressive). All good stuff, and showcasing the best of the Happy Wheels board creation community!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, on both my tumblrs –
Victor Luvs Alice – Finished the text-and-tags on my last Chill Valicer Save update post (the one where they went to the grocery store to start filling it up), did a few edits on the previous posts, then queued them all up, along with a couple of fanart reblogs for Corpse Bride and Alice: Madness Returns – keeping it simple this week so I can build up some more drafts of my own content for the future!
Valice Multiverse – Three ask replies for the queue, nothing too difficult. Related, if you’re not a fan of Christmas outside of December, you may not want to go to the Philippines if this one ask I received is accurate.
And that's that! And now I am off to bed, as I'm making an effort to wake up, if not at normal work time, then not that much later because of the running around we have to do. Morning will be dedicated to clothes-shopping (need new bras, tops, skirts, pants, dresses, the works) and picking up any other stuff we need; afternoon is covered by the car inspection, though I hope that won't take TOO long and will allow me to get in SOME Sims time. Or at least some bonus YouTube time. . .we can but hope. So yeah, night all!
Work – Quiet but somewhat annoying day at work – one of my coworkers was out, and the other busy with a label project, so they weren’t bugging me, and we didn’t have a heck of a lot of phone calls – BUT the printer went bad midway through the GL thanks to a faulty toner cartridge, so I had to wait until that was fixed in the afternoon to finish that. At least I had a QC spreadsheet to keep me busy. . .but yeah, that plus some idiocy on the rides up and back meant that I was a touch grumpy. But it wasn’t the worst day by any stretch, and at least I don’t have to go in tomorrow!
We also played beanbags this afternoon, despite it being a little chilly – I had a slow start with a good finish, Dad had a good start with a crash at the end, and Mom improved a little bit from previous attempts! Final scores were me 3-2-W; Dad W-W-3; Mom 2-3-2. *shrug* Not too shabby!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, finishing off Oxventure: Legacy of Dragons – “Ready Lair One” and starting “Corpse and Robbers!” Giovanni ended up liking the lair that Prudence had designed, with the hot orange water pools and all of that, though he immediately clocked that the architecture wasn’t genuine dwarven. Corazon JUST managed to bullshit that this Theme Park version was better because it brought new voices to the table when it came to the art. XD Giovanni agreed and said he’d move in, tasking them with getting his hoard while he got comfortable, did a little rearranging, and started scent-marking. Corazon, Prudence, and Egbert left in a hurry after hearing THAT! XD
In fact, they left just in time to see Dob and Merilwen pull up with all the gold! Corazon was BRIEFLY like “you know, Giovanni asked us to get him his OWN hoard, we could probably keep this,” but a good Wisdom/Insight roll (he was knocking out the twenties this session, damn) had him realize “oh, wait, bigger lair means bigger hoard, and if he has to make it himself, he will do all the killing he so likes to do.” So the Oxventurers’ treasure was put in as a “down payment” as they retrieved the original hoard – Dob ALSO attempted to offload Flannery onto Giovanni as a gift, but Gio wasn’t having him. And also couldn’t kill him, despite his best efforts. Dob interpreted this to mean Flannery was some eldritch creature and said that him keeping the dragon occupied was a good thing, but the others were like “no, we’ve downgraded to imprisoning and torturing the dragon now” and Corazon let Flannery out. Ah well, Dob tried. :p
So the episode ended with the group telling Shattershield about the order’s new tenant and prompting a “thank you” out of him (Shattershield complaining they never give him a CHANCE to be polite first), and asking how he was doing. And that prompted him to comment that Paladin Harris, who’d he sent to examine Mistmire and make a report of the damage, hadn’t yet reported back yet. . .
And start next episode! XD The group were immediately like “Not Harris!” and began making up features because Johnny had foolishly not actually described the paladin – poor Harris ended up with an arm that was like five feet longer than the other. XD They offered to go look for him, which Shattershield appreciated, and Egbert used Locate Object to locate the weird sling that Harris uses for his arm (the spell apparently functions much like using a dowsing rod – Egbert IMMEDIATELY warned Merilwen not to call it “tree-ps” XD). The gang followed it down through the city, running into Richard (the gaunt petitioner all for leaving Mistmire) again as the citizenry looked at some of the ruins. Dob and Corazon immediately began playing up the fact that Mistmire had a new dragon and started mocking Richard and shoving him around – they got good enough performance rolls to win over the crowd at first, but then Dob rolled a critical one and the crowd turned on him for being too cruel, forcing Corazon (who’d rolled decently) to haul him away. With that sidetrack sorted, the gang followed the vibrating twig down into a storeroom with wine and barrels and a big old crack in the wall, where they found Harris curled up on the ground, arm wrapped around himself, supposedly sleeping. Corazon tried to shake him awake, but got no response, so Prudence used Detect Magic on the guy to see if he’d been magically drugged –
Nope, dude was just dead. Turns out his throat had been slit, and he’d actually been lying in a pool of his own blood (mingled with spilled wine). Dob used Speak With Dead to question him (after wrapping his arm around his throat to try and seal the wound, then wasting a question asking how he communicated, telepathically or by actually using his lungs – Johnny’s answer as Harris was, uh, unclear XD), and got from him that he’d been killed by a “jackal” (Corazon, with ANOTHER nat twenty, could not recall any assassins going by that name; Merilwen theorized that maybe it related to Jacques Darkfall, with someone taking up his mantle, prompting Corazon to do a cool pose in Darkfall’s boots XD) and that he’d died about sixteen hours ago. The group scanned the room for more clues – Egbert, who rolled poorly, got distracted by the spilled wine; Corazon, finally getting a bad roll, was only able to confirm “yup, dead guy;” Prudence was able to determine that there were no signs of a struggle – Harris had died where he lay – and Merilwen and Dob found the murder weapon – Harris’s own knife! Which Merilwen said suggested a more opportunistic attack. (Dob also determined that no, no one had come in through the crack by sticking his head through it. XD) They also found Harris’s unfinished report, which indicated that the damage to Mistmire, though bad in spots, was not so horrible that it needed to be abandoned. The group immediately decided Harris had probably been murdered to keep that information from coming out (Richard shooting up to “prime suspect”), though none of them could figure out why he’d apparently stopped mid-sentence for a nap. Egbert urged them to report this to Shattershield, and so they hurried back to the keep –
Where they found Shattershield asleep on the job! After waking him and discussing whether to give him syrup of ipecac or such, Prudence Detected Magic on his glass and found it was nothing but boring old water. Apparently Shattershield was just tired. The group relayed their findings about Harris (Shattershield being briefly more horrified by Harris sleeping on the job than him being killed – the others pointed out the hypocrisy, and he quickly explained he was off-duty) and explained their worries about someone trying to make Mistmire look more run-down and dangerous to live in than it really is, citing Richard, again, as the prime suspect. Shattershield was of course all for investigating, so after a quick look at the well to make sure that was all right (yup, all ordinary water), Corazon attempted to find Richard by sneaky means so they could observe what he was doing while alone. A poor roll meant he couldn’t figure out where he was, though, so Merilwen turned to Locate Creature to find “the scrawny guy.” And I left it on Johnny saying that Richard was REALLY zipping around for such a gaunt and fragile gentleman. Hmmmm. . .
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice has gotten a very begrudging, incredulous “thank you” from Damsel and a more sincere one from Nines for her work in taking out the Brotherhood of the Ninth Circle. She’s also confirmed to Skelter that Patty has “disappeared” from Los Angeles, agreed to spy on LaCroix for the Anarchs (because while she’s not particularly fond of them, she likes LaCroix a whole lot less), and told them about her upcoming trip to Grout’s, which Nines is quite interested in. Which, uh, will be biting him in the ass at the end of the next chapter, that’s for certain. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – nice and simple two-in, two-out, yay –
A) First up, the latest from Josh Way – “Fun With Shorts: Out of This World (Part 2)!” The second half of the short about a mother in what I presume to be the 60s who goes to visit the World’s Fair and gets sucked into a dream about futuristic kitchens. And somewhat xenophobic ones, as the short’s idea of making this a “World’s Fair” was to have the woman get dressed up in slightly racist ways to represent Indian, Chinese, and – well, I’m not sure what the last one was supposed to be, but I suspect African. There was a lot of talk about how good the fridge space was, how convenient the laundry was, and how easy-to-clean the second oven was. Josh was brutal in talking about how “hobbies and careers exist, you know” and mocking the short for entirely running out of things to say in the last “foreign kitchen.” Good, ridiculous stuff! XD
B) And second up, the latest from GrayStillPlays – “The new iPhone ruined my life,” aka Gray plays Happy Wheels! Maps from this episode included the customary overly-complicated bottle flip (Gray managed not only to perfectly flip two bottles into “how did you get up here” and “amazing” at the same time, he also managed to flip a bottle onto HIMSELF); a surprisingly-tricky rope swing (mostly because his leg kept getting caught in one of the ropes thanks to being fired onto it by a cannon – he only succeeded when the damn things got ripped off midway through the board); a longer-than-he-expected bottle run (where you had to keep your front wheel JUST off the bottles to win); a tour of “Happy Beach” (where everyone was building sandcastles, having ice cream and beer, and fishing for hobos – at least until Gray ran them over on his bike while trying to get to the hot dog party); a race by Dylan Snider where Gray as the hobo piloting the “Murder Mystery Machine” had to win against a pickup truck, a flotation device, and a repurposed nuke (if he didn’t, the board just never completed); a short but SHOCKINGLY difficult jet run (possibly because it WAS so short, meaning Gray didn’t have much hope of NOT being smashed against the far wall); a glass break with watermelons, chairs, and bottles (and a secret ending where you had to defeat Florida Man); and a really amazingly detailed trip through an Apple store, where you had to platform over and around the various products (featuring two mini-maps inside an iPhone and a TV/Mac combo respectively! It was honestly quite impressive). All good stuff, and showcasing the best of the Happy Wheels board creation community!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, on both my tumblrs –
Victor Luvs Alice – Finished the text-and-tags on my last Chill Valicer Save update post (the one where they went to the grocery store to start filling it up), did a few edits on the previous posts, then queued them all up, along with a couple of fanart reblogs for Corpse Bride and Alice: Madness Returns – keeping it simple this week so I can build up some more drafts of my own content for the future!
Valice Multiverse – Three ask replies for the queue, nothing too difficult. Related, if you’re not a fan of Christmas outside of December, you may not want to go to the Philippines if this one ask I received is accurate.
And that's that! And now I am off to bed, as I'm making an effort to wake up, if not at normal work time, then not that much later because of the running around we have to do. Morning will be dedicated to clothes-shopping (need new bras, tops, skirts, pants, dresses, the works) and picking up any other stuff we need; afternoon is covered by the car inspection, though I hope that won't take TOO long and will allow me to get in SOME Sims time. Or at least some bonus YouTube time. . .we can but hope. So yeah, night all!
