Usual Busy Sunday Night
May. 21st, 2023 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThough I did have a very nice, rather productive Sunday, as the record shall show --
Tumblr: Didn’t get as much done on here as I would have liked (thanks to a slow start this morning thanks to Merge Dragons – see below in “Other”), but I did get a few key things done –
Victor Luvs Alice – Got the NINE POSTS for this week’s Chill Valicer Save update (Love Day ended up being EIGHTY-FIVE pictures overall, you see) into the drafts with pictures and starter text before lunch, then managed to get the full text-and-tags for the first two posts done between beanbags and my workout. I started the third while I was working on summarizing Jon’s latest “Tale of Two Wastelands” video (also below), but wasn’t able to get more than like a paragraph in – I’ll have to buckle down and make some serious progress tomorrow!
Valice Multiverse – Not much happening here, but my friend Brynlee Marie has promised some thread replies in the near future, and I got one ask about how Richard Nixon said that if rap was around back when he was younger, he would have tried to pursue a career as a rapper, late this evening for the queue over there. (Also, that is apparently 100% a true fact. I am as baffled as you are.)
Fallout 4: Had a short but productive day out in the Commonwealth today –
A) Started back at Nordhagen Beach, where I decided to do one last look through Ada’s inventory to see what she was carrying and if I wanted to give any of it to the local settlers. My attempt to give the lady (Carleen in the Playthrough Progression) some of the spare Bolstering leather armor Victor was trucking around just ended up stripping her naked (because for some reason you can’t put armor pieces over a lot of outfits), but I was able to give her a combat shotgun and a few shells. That should hopefully make up a bit for the fact that I wasn’t able to build as many turrets as I wanted! I also stopped by the chem bench to make a pack of Rad-Away and a robot repair kit (just in case Ada needed it). Always be prepared! And crafting, because that’s how you get lots of little bits of XP. XD
B) Anyway – with all that sorted, it was back on the road for Victor and Ada! After checking out all of Victor’s current quests, I made the decision that it WAS smartest to go and check out the General Atomics Factory for Ada first, as that’s on the same side of the map – it’s down nearby the Castle – and then work my way back across to Sanctuary so I can finally get to plot-relevant stuff again. However, since I wasn’t probably going to get anywhere near the factory today, I figured that Victor and Ada could clear out Easy City Downs first. I had them thus proceed over the bridge and over by the Downs, with Victor climbing up a nearby chunk of elevated highway for a better look at the racetrack and its racing robots (for screenshot purposes :p). With that sorted, I had him and Ada loop around to the front of the building –
C) Where a raider happened to spot Victor trying to sneak up close, and so the murder games begun! Fortunately, all of these raiders and Triggermen happen to be pretty low level, so Victor’s Two-Shot Combat Rifle was able to take pretty much all of them out in one shot. :D After killing a few guys at the entrance, Victor and Ada made it into the “front office” of the clubhouse, then out and across where Victor used the Mighty Sniper to take out a turret on the far side of the tracks. The pair then crossed the racetrack itself (with Victor waiting for the robots to pass, while I worried that Ada was firing on them for no good reason – please, Ada, one of them is an ASSAULTRON) and into the raider shanty town in the middle, working their way through and shooting all the raiders while “Eager Ernie” panicked a bit about the fact that all his customers and employees were getting shot up. Sorry, dude, but you and yours started hostilities first! All you had to do was not shoot on sight!
D) Anyway, it didn’t take long for Victor to clear most of the raiders in the center, and the heat died down as Ernie couldn’t get a bead on him and Ada. This allowed me some time to loot corpses and buildings and do some exploring! Along with a lot of raider armor, spare guns and ammo, and useful junk, Victor also found a “repair shop” homemade terminal (the kind with the annoying circular screen that is a little hard to read) that, when cracked, revealed itself to have controls for the robots and turrets! I wasn’t sure what the robot controls did, though (I certainly wasn’t going to make them any more hostile!), and it turned out the only turret it was connected to was the one Victor had already blown up with the Mighty Sniper, so I ended up leaving both options alone. Instead, I had Victor and Ada backtrack back to the front office, mindful of the fact that Eager Ernie was apparently just above them, to do some raiding –
E) And find another terminal! This one the “clubhouse terminal,” which again had controls for the robots when cracked. This time, I decided to try stopping the race just to see what would happen (after quickly making a save) – turns out “stopping the race” just shuts them all down entirely. Good! No more accidentally upsetting the robots then. :D I then directed Victor to loot all the cash registers, before creeping across the parking lot to the other building I’d noticed. Popped the door to find a sort of lounge and canteen area, with a sleeping raider and a Triggerman on duty. Killed them both pretty easily with the Two-Shot (though I let the raider at least start waking up first, to make it a tiny bit fairer), then went through that and raided it for food and booze. Found a tripwire on the other side, which was easily disarmed (also disarmed a lot of can chimes just going around the place – Victor has so many tin cans now) – and exited out the other door to find a bus parked in the parking lot over there. Checked that out – two locked suitcases, neither with anything Victor really wanted in them – but hey, gotta love the XP!
F) With that sorted, it was back into the Downs itself to explore and grab more loot. After raiding all the bodies and all the buildings at “ground level” (giving Ada a bunch more stuff to truck around in the process – it’s a good thing she’s the only companion that doesn’t complain about you picking up everything that isn’t nailed down!), Victor and Ada went up a ladder onto the catwalks above, wandering around until they found the way over to Eager Eddie’s office (where he broadcasts the results of the races) on the second level. Eddie was NOT prepared for them, and while he tried to get off a few shots with his submachine gun, Victor was easily able to take him out with a couple of shots from the Two-Shot. Fair amount of bottle caps and ammo in his place, but the real win was finding a copy of Tumblers Today, the lockpicking magazine – sometimes that sweet spot is hard to find!
G) With all enemies that I could find cleared out, and the day wearing on, I figured now was a good time for Victor and Ada to make camp in the shanty town. I had Victor do some more exploring, and find a workshed with a bunch of tools, a deactivated Protectron (I didn’t bother waking it up), and a weapons workbench which Victor used to scrap down some of the guns he’d picked up. He then found an armor workbench in the little village to scrap down some of the armor he’d picked up as well, and used the cooking pot to cook up a few more dishes (including more mirelurk meat) before setting up his tent by the central fire and turning in around 9 PM.
H) Up bright and early at 5:15 AM the next morning, I had Victor do one last circuit of the place looking for enemies and loot, checking both top and bottom – got some more ammo and a bunch of bottle caps out of a guard/viewing tower I hadn’t visited before. :) With that sorted, I figured it was time for Ada and Victor to be off, and had them head straight through the playground past East Boston Prep –
And then went – “You know what, I don’t know when I’ll be back this way, and I’m reasonably close to a level-up – let me just stick my head in and see what’s inside.” And so I did just that –
I) And was presented with a dead settler on the other side of a crumbling wall. Yup, raider base. I took the useful loot off the corpse and started doing a slow-and-careful explore of the bottom floor (plus a quick peek up one set of stairs – nothing up there but a skeleton, though, and there was no way to go higher that I could see). I could hear a lot of raider “barks” (talking about how they could hear someone, but figured they were jumping at shadows, stuff like that), but never saw any raiders – all the red little pips on the compass whenever I slipped into [CAUTION] indicated they were in fact above me. Only enemies that gave Victor and Ada any trouble were a couple of radroaches. I ended the playsession with Victor and Ada holed up in an office that looked like it had been converted to a tailor’s – there was an ironing board inside with a tuxedo folded up on it, along with a measuring stick, a fancy hat, and a pompadour wig. O.o I feel like there’s a story here – was somebody in this gang getting ready for a hot date?
So yeah – not a HECK of a lot happened, but it’s nice to have the Downs cleared! No more needing to sneak around when I head back to Nordhagen Beach. . .and I’m in a good position to clear out this particular raider base and get some more XP and maybe even a level up next week! Because the closer I get to level 41, the closer I’ll be to getting all the crafting perks I want and being able to max out my guns and armor. . .fingers crossed!
Writing: Another Sunday with Fallout 4, another Sunday with the FO4 Playthrough Progression! Today’s chunk was pretty much identical to what happened above, with Victor and company leaving Nordhagen Beach to clear out Easy City Downs, then deciding to head inside East Boston Prep, only to discover a raider base – I just had Victor confirm with Carleen at Nordhagen that it was purely assholes at the Downs (Carleen telling him the raiders have kidnapped at least ONE person to run with the robots, and then shot them when they couldn’t keep up) to help justify his assault (and even then he was trying to SNEAK in, and he didn’t shoot anyone who fled), and talk briefly to Ernie about why he didn’t try running a “legitimate” racetrack (Ernie’s response being that settlers never have any money and that the raiders make it fun). Also threw in a reference to the Combat Zone, as the two places has semi-similar clientele, and Victor’s got to go back there at some point to pick up Cait anyway. But yeah, other than that, pretty much the same as the above, just “plus Alice.” We will see where their adventures in East Boston Prep take them next week!
YouTube: Kept up with my usual Sunday two –
A) Started with the Subs and GrayStillPlays – “When you split the universe in half,” aka Gray plays Tap Tap Breaking! This is a mobile game where you are in charge of an anime dude with only one goal in life – to break EVERYTHING. The game starts you out on normal stuff, like wooden chopsticks and lumber, with the occasional gold bar to earn money – but it’s not long before stuff starts getting out of control. Namely, you progress through normal Earth materials, like wood, tile, and various metal alloys, to various chunks of space rock, Non-Copyright-Infringing Weapons (like a “Sword of the Elven” or a straight-up crowbar – I assume the creators like Half-Life), Totally Copyright-Infringing Dragonballs (no guesses what animes they like), monoliths, the very asteroid you’re standing on, planets, stars, and BLACK HOLES. And you get more and more and MORE ridiculous amounts of money as you go along, going from earning like 100 per broken chopstick to like A TRILLION for the space stuff. Gray was absolutely DELIGHTED by how bonkers all the numbers got, especially when it came to challenging the “Breaking Kings” (having to break four objects from each category in a certain amount of time). It got to the point where he was using an autoclicker just to purchase his UPGRADES because he had so much freaking cash. AND it’s worth noting that I don’t think he completed the game, because there was an entire THIRD category called “God Things” that I’m not sure he touched. . .so maybe the karate-chopping anime boy with the constantly-regenerating hand that can cause like twenty billion damage per strike will be making another appearance on the channel. We’ll see. XD
B) And then it was onto Jon of Many A True Nerd and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 30 - The Rest Is History!” An episode largely centered around Wanda diving into the National Archives to meet a new friend and retrieve an important document. However, there was a bit more to it than that, with Jon doing his usual “hey, you might have never seen this” tour of the Wasteland. Here’s what he covered today –
I. First, starting in Falls Church (having just helped out the Brotherhood from last week), Jon took us on a little tour of LOB Enterprises, a company that for some reason is full of sentry bots, REQUIRED all of its employees to carry low-grade military weaponry and know how to use their desks as barricades against the Feds (but don’t write the warning e-mail in ALL CAPS, HR looks down on that), and had a plan for the nuclear apocalypse that involved swearing all of the employees in as citizens of their own sovereign nation. Reason being? While this was an American company, they were secretly working with the Chinese, developing weapons for them. Like the Zhu-Rong 418 10mm pistol, a gun that does a tiny bit of burning damage with each shot. Not a great gun by any stretch of the imagination – the damage is a pittance, especially at Wanda’s level – but it’s nice to have, and it’s an interesting story in a dungeon that is otherwise all about running around punching sentry bots in the back with The Shocker.
II. Then it was back to Rivet City to talk to museum curator Abraham Washington and pick up the quest that Jon has been ignoring for a while now – “Stealing Independence,” where AW asks you to get the Declaration Of Independence out of the National Archives to complete his collection of important historical documents framed on his museum wall! Though, with enough speech, you can get him to admit that you’re not the first relic hunter he’s sent on this mission – the previous young woman, Sydney, has yet to come back. . .but surely giving your life in the pursuit of history isn’t a big deal, isn’t it? Think of the Second Judgmental Congress! Paul Revere singing the National Anthem battle hymn! The Declaration being served to the King of England via plane and kicking off the Evolutionary War! . . .yeah, AW has a bit of a skewed understanding of history thanks to living in the post-apocalyptic ruins. XD He tries, bless him.
III. Onward to the National Archives, where – after killing a few Super Mutants outside – Wanda ran into AW’s previous relic hunter, Sydney! Turns out she’s been having a bit of a time with the Super Mutants, and talking to her triggers two waves of them to start coming at you. If you’re low level, then it’ll just be the basic boys –
If you’re Jon’s level, and playing with Broken Steel, you’ve got Masters and Overlords. One of which might have a missile launcher. Yeah, despite laying a bunch of bottle cap mines about, it took two tries for Jon to get both Wanda and Sydney through the barrage. Because Sydney is NOT essential, and unless you DESPERATELY want her slightly-better-than-usual SMG right away, you want to keep her alive. Reason being, if you both survive the assault, she’ll recognize you as a fellow relic hunter after the Declaration and suggest teaming up! Now, you CAN say no to this, but the end result is Sydney deciding “okay, in that case, you’re my competition,” leaving the Archives, and turning into a special encounter in the Wasteland, where she and her girlfriend can randomly show up at some point to try and murder you. Which is definitely not as fun as teaming up with her, as you can get some special interactions that way. . .plus, she has access to the cargo elevator in the main rotunda, which allows you to skip a decent part of the dungeon.
IV. First things first, though – Jon was there not only to get the Declaration, but also show off a couple of things people might miss! First being a pair of terminals right outside the rotunda, which most people might not pay any attention to, because, well, super mutants, teaming up with Sydney, etc. But if you DO pay attention to them, you’ll find that one of them is the National Archive’s Guess And Win quiz – a series of eight questions on American history! Get them all right, and you can print off a prize voucher, redeemable at the other terminal for a pack of either Grape, Berry, or Orange Mentats! Which is the ONLY place you can find them in the game, incidentally – they may be common in the Commonwealth, to the point where you can craft them yourself, but in DC? Nonexistent except for this one terminal. The quiz isn’t too hard if you’re American, but for the very British Jon. . .well, it’s a good thing you can retry each question as much as you like. (Though he really didn’t do too badly, and I wouldn’t have been able to get the number of delegates who signed the Declaration first try either). If you don’t want to do the quiz, or if you’ve already done it but want more flavored Mentats, you can also take the door to the right and head upstairs to the head curator’s office – crack his safe and there’s six more vouchers inside, meaning you can get a maximum of seven flavored Mentats. (Jon recommends Grape flavor, as anything that boosts Charisma will help with the game’s speech checks massively.) There’s also a note on his terminal confirming that, yes, the reason for that whole game is a sponsorship from Med-Tek, who decided to use the National Archives as a secret public laboratory to test their new fruit-flavored Mentats. The dude was not happy, as you might expect. XD Fallout US, everyone!
V. The other thing in the National Archives that someone might miss? Through the door to the left of the main rotunda is a couple of ruined rooms, at the end of which is a bathroom. Which has a toilet that you can drink from, if you don’t mind the rads –
And you don’t mind getting electrocuted. Yes, for some reason, there is a booby-trapped toilet in that bathroom, complete with a skeleton over it suggesting some dude already got zapped and didn’t survive. It’s not too hard to disarm the trap if you have enough Repair to disable the microfusion cells the wires are hooked up to at the top of the tank – but it’s just WEIRD. Raises more questions than it answers, as Jon said!
VI. Anyway, with those little side trips over, Wanda and Sydney took the cargo elevator down into the depths of the archives, on the hunt for that Declaration! Only to be set upon by an army of robots (largely Sentry Bots – Jon is now The Shocker power fist’s biggest fan, given how easily it takes them out if you continually run in circles around them) apparently commanded (as per the messages on the speakers) by one Button Gwinnett, second signer of the Declaration of Independence and fervent patriot. Why the hell does the security system apparently have messages recorded by someone pretending to Button Gwinnett? We’ll get to that. Jon helped Sydney get past all the robots (bypassing those he could with Wanda’s high Lockpicking and Science skills to get through broken doors), and made sure to take two side paths through locked doors into rooms with turrets (behind fancy barriers that you could still easily shoot them through) and safes to raid – one with the Bill of Rights, one with the Magna Carta (which Jon noted was really more BRITISH history, but snagged it anyway). Jon also managed to blow Wanda up once trying to take out a sentry bot from afar with a pulse grenade, forgetting those also do extra damage to POWER ARMOR – aka, the very thing Wanda is now wearing. Whoops. XD Jon was very sour about his own idiocy. XD
VII. Anyway, Wanda and Sydney eventually both reached the end of the line, where they confronted the final layer of security – Button Gwinnett himself! How is this possible, you ask?
“Button Gwinnett” is a Protectron in a powdered wig. XD Yeah, I think Bethesda might have a thing for robots in silly hats doing patriotic stuff – at least Captain Ironsides in FO4 knows he’s a robot in the modern post-apocalyptic wasteland, even if he thinks he has the authority to start up the Congressional Army and try to launch his boat to retaliate against China! Anyway, there’s a number of ways to deal with Buttontron – you can just straight-up fight him and his remaining robots; if you have the “Robotics Expert” perk, you can just straight-up shut him down; you can convince him that you’re here to make a forgery of the Declaration of Independence to throw the “Redcoats” off the scent (AW will apparently pay you the same for the forgery, as he won’t be able to tell its not real) –
Or there is Wanda’s method, which was to pass a speech check with the help of Grape Mentats to convince Buttontron she was Thomas Jefferson, the author of the damn thing, here to liberate it. XD And then, because she’d been a little too good lately and Jon needed the loss of karma to push her back to neutral territory, she told Buttontron that she was bringing it back to the King of England (causing him no small bit of mental anguish), and told him that he was a disgrace and she was kicking him out of the Continental Congress (which caused him to snarkily tell Jefferson to give Sally his best – Sally being the slave Jefferson had some kids with – before shutting down all his robots and self-destructing). Brutal, but it got the job done, and the girls were able to retrieve the Declaration with no further fuss. (If you’re curious, one of the other options is to claim that Abraham Washington is the new president, which I am kind of curious about what goes down if you say that. . . [checks the wiki] Okay, apparently you just get the same speech options in the end no matter what, so it can’t be that interesting.)
VIII. Anyway, documents in hand, the pair prepared to head back to AW – but before that, Jon made a point of Wanda asking Sydney about herself. Specifically, how she got into the relic-hunting business (she randomly found a note on a body about an important historical document, which turned out to get the Constitution, and got it for AW – when he paid her enough to get properly drunk and laid for the first time in a while, she decided “this is the job for me”), and about her special gun (turns out she tinkers with guns as a hobby – her dad made ammunition for a living, so it’s kind of a family trade). Wanda tried to push her about her father, but Sydney demurred, saying she didn’t trust Wanda enough to share THAT information yet. . .
IX. So NOW it was time to head back to AW, sell him the extra documents (75 caps for the Magna Carta and 100 for the Bill of Rights – Jon felt like Wanda was getting ripped off), and present the Declaration of Independence from both her AND Sydney! A delighted AW promised to give her her promised bounty personally and gave Wanda her promised reward, including some spare schematics for the Railway Rifle (improving them). Wanda went and admired the newly-framed documents in the collection on the wall, pleased in her work. . .
X. Then tracked down Sydney to ask where she was going (turns out she hangs out in Underworld, the ghoul city, between jobs) and once again about her dad. Sydney finally opened up, saying that she and her dad had a close relationship when she was little (he called her “little moonbeam”), but he disappeared when she was fourteen. She was understandably bitter about being left at such a young age to fend for herself in the DC ruins. . .
But apparently, Jon knows how to get her a bit of closure regarding her father’s disappearance. And it involves tracking down Riley of Riley’s Rangers to finally do THAT quest. And that has set up our episode for next week! :D I am intrigued and excited, though I suspect this is another case of “Dad didn’t mean to abandon you, he just got murdered out in the Wasteland. . .”
Workout: Back on the bike again for this week, with the following two videos –
A) “FALLOUT But EVERYTHING Is Legendary And Overpowered - A Perfectly Balanced Fallout 4 Mod” by The Spiffing Brit! Yes, in order to fit his latest FO4 video into my day, I chose to watch it with my workout! This was Spiff’s take on the “Legendary Roulette” mod (where most enemies are upgraded to their Legendary counterparts, meaning almost all encounters are extremely hard BUT there is a WEALTH of legendary items for the taking if you manage to come out on top), with him deciding to play as the “GigaChad.” GigaChad was a beast of a man (who honestly looked vaguely like Paladin Danse – same haircut and facial hair, I believe), who – upon beating the Legendary Radroaches of Vault 111 and earning his Pip-Boy – had all of his stats set at 100, his level set at 100, and his health set at 1,000 thanks to the power of console commands (though Spiff commented there was a “legit” way to do this by making use of duplication glitches on the “You’re SPECIAL!” book found in Sanctuary and using debuffs to temporarily lower your stats before adding another point so you could break the usually-strict “10 max” barrier on your SPECIAL, but it would take forever, so, console commands). Now, having 100 in all stats definitely made things easier, but having only 1,000 health definitely made things HARDER, and his level being 100 kind of just balanced things by making him super powerful but also making any enemies that scaled with his level also super powerful. He then proceeded into the wasteland, skirting Sanctuary and the Red Rocket to proceed straight into Concord and rescue Preston Garvey’s group from the Legendary Raiders they were facing (not an easy feat, given he did not have great weapons beyond an Explosive pipe gun and a Staggering 10mm), before ripping the minigun straight off the vertibird atop the Museum of Freedom (no power armor required – if your strength is high enough, you CAN just do that) and taking out the Deathclaw that emerged mid-fight with the remaining raiders (a process that involved GigaChad desperately running down an alley and trying to take out the Deathclaw’s leg so it couldn’t move as fast). He then headed through Lexington, felling through MUCH effort a Super Mutant Behemoth wandering around the area of the Corvega plant (much Staggering 10mm ammo was used), before proceeding over the bridge and the USS Riptide, taking out the raiders there and getting himself the wonderful Assassin’s Super Sledge, which does 50% extra damage against humans and thus is pretty damn good. He then made it to Diamond City, where he resupplied (aka bought some shotgun ammo as he really wanted an Explosive or Wounding combat shotgun, as those are the best Legendaries in the game) before turning his attentions to the area he REALLY wanted to visit – the Glowing Sea. One trip through a Super Mutant camp (complete with Suiciders and Warlords) and the exterior of Vault 95 (complete with Gunners and Assaultron) later, he got tired of waiting for the gun he wanted to spawn naturally and used console commands to change a Resilient combat shotgun he’d picked up to a Wounding one, before proceeding into the Glowing Sea and taking out a couple of big old radscorpions, all the Children of Atom living in the crater, and the Legendary Mythic Deathclaw by the old reactor (which actually ran away from him for most of the fight, forcing him to track it down), thus “winning” the game. It was an amusing video, to be sure (especially Spiff’s fight against the Behemoth), but I much preferred Jon’s “Legendary Roulette” miniseries, as he didn’t actually cheat his way through anything, and watching him struggle and learn how to turn the altered game to his advantage (again, with Wounding weapons) was a lot more fun. Ah well, it was good to watch with my bike ride!
B) “Houses VS. Apartments VS. Penthouses In The Sims 4 | Guide” by Petey Plays It! His most recent video, this went over the essential differences between regular old houses/lots, apartments, and penthouse lots. As someone who doesn’t really play with apartments or penthouses, I actually learned a few things from this video – such as the fact that apartments don’t have lot taxes, just the weekly fixed rent, and you have to put down a deposit when you move in (which makes sense), and that penthouses are essentially just regular old house lots on top of apartment blocks – I thought they were special kinds of fancier apartments, with the same restrictions, but nope. The only things they share with apartments is being in apartment buildings, being accessed by elevators, and having the special apartment mailbox and trash chute. A penthouse otherwise is built pretty much exactly like a house! (Though, thinking back, I now recall that James built Max Power a custom penthouse when he was living in San Myshuno for a time – but that was a while ago, and I don’t think it ever properly clicked that he’d done that from scratch – I thought he’d just altered an existing lot.) Cool stuff – I like Petey, he’s a good source of little tidbits of information. :)
Other:
-->Got through all my Merge Dragons playing of the day this morning – thanks to my optimized points grinding, I was actually able to get a bit MORE than I usually get from these events (all three dragon eggs for the new dragon, a nest of the previous special event dragon eggs, and a couple of dragon trees instead of just one). My camp is once again looking an utter mess, but I’m almost up to the dragon power to clear out a new area, w00~
-->I also FINALLY managed to get the picture I wanted as my phone’s wallpaper on said phone! Involved me having to type in the EXACT SPECIFIC URL of the tumblr post where it was into Safari to get it, but I managed, and now I have one of my favorite shots of Victor, Alice, and Smiler from my Chill Valicer Save celebrating New Year’s (specifically, it’s a shot of Victor and Smiler kissing while Alice looks on with a big grin – OT3 feels!) as my phone wallpaper. About freaking time.
-->Answered my friend Ace’s latest FF.net PM, w00! Keeping on top of messages best I can. :) I promise I’ll get to you tomorrow, Moose!
-->We played beanbags this afternoon, and in sharp contrast to Friday, I was on fire today! Just utterly obliterated my parents in the first three games. XD Poor Dad didn’t get it fully together until the last game, while Mom got the second-to-last with some good throws. Final scores were me W-W-W-2-2; Dad 2-2-3-3-W; Mom 3-3-2-W-3. I am glad that everyone won once, but it is nice to be the champ. :D
Whew -- not bad! I mean, yes, really wish I'd gotten more done when it comes to the MASSIVE Chill Valicer Save update this week, but -- I'll manage. In the meantime, time to hit the sheets now that I've cooled the room down with my big-ass fan. Another week of work beckons -- night all!
Tumblr: Didn’t get as much done on here as I would have liked (thanks to a slow start this morning thanks to Merge Dragons – see below in “Other”), but I did get a few key things done –
Victor Luvs Alice – Got the NINE POSTS for this week’s Chill Valicer Save update (Love Day ended up being EIGHTY-FIVE pictures overall, you see) into the drafts with pictures and starter text before lunch, then managed to get the full text-and-tags for the first two posts done between beanbags and my workout. I started the third while I was working on summarizing Jon’s latest “Tale of Two Wastelands” video (also below), but wasn’t able to get more than like a paragraph in – I’ll have to buckle down and make some serious progress tomorrow!
Valice Multiverse – Not much happening here, but my friend Brynlee Marie has promised some thread replies in the near future, and I got one ask about how Richard Nixon said that if rap was around back when he was younger, he would have tried to pursue a career as a rapper, late this evening for the queue over there. (Also, that is apparently 100% a true fact. I am as baffled as you are.)
Fallout 4: Had a short but productive day out in the Commonwealth today –
A) Started back at Nordhagen Beach, where I decided to do one last look through Ada’s inventory to see what she was carrying and if I wanted to give any of it to the local settlers. My attempt to give the lady (Carleen in the Playthrough Progression) some of the spare Bolstering leather armor Victor was trucking around just ended up stripping her naked (because for some reason you can’t put armor pieces over a lot of outfits), but I was able to give her a combat shotgun and a few shells. That should hopefully make up a bit for the fact that I wasn’t able to build as many turrets as I wanted! I also stopped by the chem bench to make a pack of Rad-Away and a robot repair kit (just in case Ada needed it). Always be prepared! And crafting, because that’s how you get lots of little bits of XP. XD
B) Anyway – with all that sorted, it was back on the road for Victor and Ada! After checking out all of Victor’s current quests, I made the decision that it WAS smartest to go and check out the General Atomics Factory for Ada first, as that’s on the same side of the map – it’s down nearby the Castle – and then work my way back across to Sanctuary so I can finally get to plot-relevant stuff again. However, since I wasn’t probably going to get anywhere near the factory today, I figured that Victor and Ada could clear out Easy City Downs first. I had them thus proceed over the bridge and over by the Downs, with Victor climbing up a nearby chunk of elevated highway for a better look at the racetrack and its racing robots (for screenshot purposes :p). With that sorted, I had him and Ada loop around to the front of the building –
C) Where a raider happened to spot Victor trying to sneak up close, and so the murder games begun! Fortunately, all of these raiders and Triggermen happen to be pretty low level, so Victor’s Two-Shot Combat Rifle was able to take pretty much all of them out in one shot. :D After killing a few guys at the entrance, Victor and Ada made it into the “front office” of the clubhouse, then out and across where Victor used the Mighty Sniper to take out a turret on the far side of the tracks. The pair then crossed the racetrack itself (with Victor waiting for the robots to pass, while I worried that Ada was firing on them for no good reason – please, Ada, one of them is an ASSAULTRON) and into the raider shanty town in the middle, working their way through and shooting all the raiders while “Eager Ernie” panicked a bit about the fact that all his customers and employees were getting shot up. Sorry, dude, but you and yours started hostilities first! All you had to do was not shoot on sight!
D) Anyway, it didn’t take long for Victor to clear most of the raiders in the center, and the heat died down as Ernie couldn’t get a bead on him and Ada. This allowed me some time to loot corpses and buildings and do some exploring! Along with a lot of raider armor, spare guns and ammo, and useful junk, Victor also found a “repair shop” homemade terminal (the kind with the annoying circular screen that is a little hard to read) that, when cracked, revealed itself to have controls for the robots and turrets! I wasn’t sure what the robot controls did, though (I certainly wasn’t going to make them any more hostile!), and it turned out the only turret it was connected to was the one Victor had already blown up with the Mighty Sniper, so I ended up leaving both options alone. Instead, I had Victor and Ada backtrack back to the front office, mindful of the fact that Eager Ernie was apparently just above them, to do some raiding –
E) And find another terminal! This one the “clubhouse terminal,” which again had controls for the robots when cracked. This time, I decided to try stopping the race just to see what would happen (after quickly making a save) – turns out “stopping the race” just shuts them all down entirely. Good! No more accidentally upsetting the robots then. :D I then directed Victor to loot all the cash registers, before creeping across the parking lot to the other building I’d noticed. Popped the door to find a sort of lounge and canteen area, with a sleeping raider and a Triggerman on duty. Killed them both pretty easily with the Two-Shot (though I let the raider at least start waking up first, to make it a tiny bit fairer), then went through that and raided it for food and booze. Found a tripwire on the other side, which was easily disarmed (also disarmed a lot of can chimes just going around the place – Victor has so many tin cans now) – and exited out the other door to find a bus parked in the parking lot over there. Checked that out – two locked suitcases, neither with anything Victor really wanted in them – but hey, gotta love the XP!
F) With that sorted, it was back into the Downs itself to explore and grab more loot. After raiding all the bodies and all the buildings at “ground level” (giving Ada a bunch more stuff to truck around in the process – it’s a good thing she’s the only companion that doesn’t complain about you picking up everything that isn’t nailed down!), Victor and Ada went up a ladder onto the catwalks above, wandering around until they found the way over to Eager Eddie’s office (where he broadcasts the results of the races) on the second level. Eddie was NOT prepared for them, and while he tried to get off a few shots with his submachine gun, Victor was easily able to take him out with a couple of shots from the Two-Shot. Fair amount of bottle caps and ammo in his place, but the real win was finding a copy of Tumblers Today, the lockpicking magazine – sometimes that sweet spot is hard to find!
G) With all enemies that I could find cleared out, and the day wearing on, I figured now was a good time for Victor and Ada to make camp in the shanty town. I had Victor do some more exploring, and find a workshed with a bunch of tools, a deactivated Protectron (I didn’t bother waking it up), and a weapons workbench which Victor used to scrap down some of the guns he’d picked up. He then found an armor workbench in the little village to scrap down some of the armor he’d picked up as well, and used the cooking pot to cook up a few more dishes (including more mirelurk meat) before setting up his tent by the central fire and turning in around 9 PM.
H) Up bright and early at 5:15 AM the next morning, I had Victor do one last circuit of the place looking for enemies and loot, checking both top and bottom – got some more ammo and a bunch of bottle caps out of a guard/viewing tower I hadn’t visited before. :) With that sorted, I figured it was time for Ada and Victor to be off, and had them head straight through the playground past East Boston Prep –
And then went – “You know what, I don’t know when I’ll be back this way, and I’m reasonably close to a level-up – let me just stick my head in and see what’s inside.” And so I did just that –
I) And was presented with a dead settler on the other side of a crumbling wall. Yup, raider base. I took the useful loot off the corpse and started doing a slow-and-careful explore of the bottom floor (plus a quick peek up one set of stairs – nothing up there but a skeleton, though, and there was no way to go higher that I could see). I could hear a lot of raider “barks” (talking about how they could hear someone, but figured they were jumping at shadows, stuff like that), but never saw any raiders – all the red little pips on the compass whenever I slipped into [CAUTION] indicated they were in fact above me. Only enemies that gave Victor and Ada any trouble were a couple of radroaches. I ended the playsession with Victor and Ada holed up in an office that looked like it had been converted to a tailor’s – there was an ironing board inside with a tuxedo folded up on it, along with a measuring stick, a fancy hat, and a pompadour wig. O.o I feel like there’s a story here – was somebody in this gang getting ready for a hot date?
So yeah – not a HECK of a lot happened, but it’s nice to have the Downs cleared! No more needing to sneak around when I head back to Nordhagen Beach. . .and I’m in a good position to clear out this particular raider base and get some more XP and maybe even a level up next week! Because the closer I get to level 41, the closer I’ll be to getting all the crafting perks I want and being able to max out my guns and armor. . .fingers crossed!
Writing: Another Sunday with Fallout 4, another Sunday with the FO4 Playthrough Progression! Today’s chunk was pretty much identical to what happened above, with Victor and company leaving Nordhagen Beach to clear out Easy City Downs, then deciding to head inside East Boston Prep, only to discover a raider base – I just had Victor confirm with Carleen at Nordhagen that it was purely assholes at the Downs (Carleen telling him the raiders have kidnapped at least ONE person to run with the robots, and then shot them when they couldn’t keep up) to help justify his assault (and even then he was trying to SNEAK in, and he didn’t shoot anyone who fled), and talk briefly to Ernie about why he didn’t try running a “legitimate” racetrack (Ernie’s response being that settlers never have any money and that the raiders make it fun). Also threw in a reference to the Combat Zone, as the two places has semi-similar clientele, and Victor’s got to go back there at some point to pick up Cait anyway. But yeah, other than that, pretty much the same as the above, just “plus Alice.” We will see where their adventures in East Boston Prep take them next week!
YouTube: Kept up with my usual Sunday two –
A) Started with the Subs and GrayStillPlays – “When you split the universe in half,” aka Gray plays Tap Tap Breaking! This is a mobile game where you are in charge of an anime dude with only one goal in life – to break EVERYTHING. The game starts you out on normal stuff, like wooden chopsticks and lumber, with the occasional gold bar to earn money – but it’s not long before stuff starts getting out of control. Namely, you progress through normal Earth materials, like wood, tile, and various metal alloys, to various chunks of space rock, Non-Copyright-Infringing Weapons (like a “Sword of the Elven” or a straight-up crowbar – I assume the creators like Half-Life), Totally Copyright-Infringing Dragonballs (no guesses what animes they like), monoliths, the very asteroid you’re standing on, planets, stars, and BLACK HOLES. And you get more and more and MORE ridiculous amounts of money as you go along, going from earning like 100 per broken chopstick to like A TRILLION for the space stuff. Gray was absolutely DELIGHTED by how bonkers all the numbers got, especially when it came to challenging the “Breaking Kings” (having to break four objects from each category in a certain amount of time). It got to the point where he was using an autoclicker just to purchase his UPGRADES because he had so much freaking cash. AND it’s worth noting that I don’t think he completed the game, because there was an entire THIRD category called “God Things” that I’m not sure he touched. . .so maybe the karate-chopping anime boy with the constantly-regenerating hand that can cause like twenty billion damage per strike will be making another appearance on the channel. We’ll see. XD
B) And then it was onto Jon of Many A True Nerd and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 30 - The Rest Is History!” An episode largely centered around Wanda diving into the National Archives to meet a new friend and retrieve an important document. However, there was a bit more to it than that, with Jon doing his usual “hey, you might have never seen this” tour of the Wasteland. Here’s what he covered today –
I. First, starting in Falls Church (having just helped out the Brotherhood from last week), Jon took us on a little tour of LOB Enterprises, a company that for some reason is full of sentry bots, REQUIRED all of its employees to carry low-grade military weaponry and know how to use their desks as barricades against the Feds (but don’t write the warning e-mail in ALL CAPS, HR looks down on that), and had a plan for the nuclear apocalypse that involved swearing all of the employees in as citizens of their own sovereign nation. Reason being? While this was an American company, they were secretly working with the Chinese, developing weapons for them. Like the Zhu-Rong 418 10mm pistol, a gun that does a tiny bit of burning damage with each shot. Not a great gun by any stretch of the imagination – the damage is a pittance, especially at Wanda’s level – but it’s nice to have, and it’s an interesting story in a dungeon that is otherwise all about running around punching sentry bots in the back with The Shocker.
II. Then it was back to Rivet City to talk to museum curator Abraham Washington and pick up the quest that Jon has been ignoring for a while now – “Stealing Independence,” where AW asks you to get the Declaration Of Independence out of the National Archives to complete his collection of important historical documents framed on his museum wall! Though, with enough speech, you can get him to admit that you’re not the first relic hunter he’s sent on this mission – the previous young woman, Sydney, has yet to come back. . .but surely giving your life in the pursuit of history isn’t a big deal, isn’t it? Think of the Second Judgmental Congress! Paul Revere singing the National Anthem battle hymn! The Declaration being served to the King of England via plane and kicking off the Evolutionary War! . . .yeah, AW has a bit of a skewed understanding of history thanks to living in the post-apocalyptic ruins. XD He tries, bless him.
III. Onward to the National Archives, where – after killing a few Super Mutants outside – Wanda ran into AW’s previous relic hunter, Sydney! Turns out she’s been having a bit of a time with the Super Mutants, and talking to her triggers two waves of them to start coming at you. If you’re low level, then it’ll just be the basic boys –
If you’re Jon’s level, and playing with Broken Steel, you’ve got Masters and Overlords. One of which might have a missile launcher. Yeah, despite laying a bunch of bottle cap mines about, it took two tries for Jon to get both Wanda and Sydney through the barrage. Because Sydney is NOT essential, and unless you DESPERATELY want her slightly-better-than-usual SMG right away, you want to keep her alive. Reason being, if you both survive the assault, she’ll recognize you as a fellow relic hunter after the Declaration and suggest teaming up! Now, you CAN say no to this, but the end result is Sydney deciding “okay, in that case, you’re my competition,” leaving the Archives, and turning into a special encounter in the Wasteland, where she and her girlfriend can randomly show up at some point to try and murder you. Which is definitely not as fun as teaming up with her, as you can get some special interactions that way. . .plus, she has access to the cargo elevator in the main rotunda, which allows you to skip a decent part of the dungeon.
IV. First things first, though – Jon was there not only to get the Declaration, but also show off a couple of things people might miss! First being a pair of terminals right outside the rotunda, which most people might not pay any attention to, because, well, super mutants, teaming up with Sydney, etc. But if you DO pay attention to them, you’ll find that one of them is the National Archive’s Guess And Win quiz – a series of eight questions on American history! Get them all right, and you can print off a prize voucher, redeemable at the other terminal for a pack of either Grape, Berry, or Orange Mentats! Which is the ONLY place you can find them in the game, incidentally – they may be common in the Commonwealth, to the point where you can craft them yourself, but in DC? Nonexistent except for this one terminal. The quiz isn’t too hard if you’re American, but for the very British Jon. . .well, it’s a good thing you can retry each question as much as you like. (Though he really didn’t do too badly, and I wouldn’t have been able to get the number of delegates who signed the Declaration first try either). If you don’t want to do the quiz, or if you’ve already done it but want more flavored Mentats, you can also take the door to the right and head upstairs to the head curator’s office – crack his safe and there’s six more vouchers inside, meaning you can get a maximum of seven flavored Mentats. (Jon recommends Grape flavor, as anything that boosts Charisma will help with the game’s speech checks massively.) There’s also a note on his terminal confirming that, yes, the reason for that whole game is a sponsorship from Med-Tek, who decided to use the National Archives as a secret public laboratory to test their new fruit-flavored Mentats. The dude was not happy, as you might expect. XD Fallout US, everyone!
V. The other thing in the National Archives that someone might miss? Through the door to the left of the main rotunda is a couple of ruined rooms, at the end of which is a bathroom. Which has a toilet that you can drink from, if you don’t mind the rads –
And you don’t mind getting electrocuted. Yes, for some reason, there is a booby-trapped toilet in that bathroom, complete with a skeleton over it suggesting some dude already got zapped and didn’t survive. It’s not too hard to disarm the trap if you have enough Repair to disable the microfusion cells the wires are hooked up to at the top of the tank – but it’s just WEIRD. Raises more questions than it answers, as Jon said!
VI. Anyway, with those little side trips over, Wanda and Sydney took the cargo elevator down into the depths of the archives, on the hunt for that Declaration! Only to be set upon by an army of robots (largely Sentry Bots – Jon is now The Shocker power fist’s biggest fan, given how easily it takes them out if you continually run in circles around them) apparently commanded (as per the messages on the speakers) by one Button Gwinnett, second signer of the Declaration of Independence and fervent patriot. Why the hell does the security system apparently have messages recorded by someone pretending to Button Gwinnett? We’ll get to that. Jon helped Sydney get past all the robots (bypassing those he could with Wanda’s high Lockpicking and Science skills to get through broken doors), and made sure to take two side paths through locked doors into rooms with turrets (behind fancy barriers that you could still easily shoot them through) and safes to raid – one with the Bill of Rights, one with the Magna Carta (which Jon noted was really more BRITISH history, but snagged it anyway). Jon also managed to blow Wanda up once trying to take out a sentry bot from afar with a pulse grenade, forgetting those also do extra damage to POWER ARMOR – aka, the very thing Wanda is now wearing. Whoops. XD Jon was very sour about his own idiocy. XD
VII. Anyway, Wanda and Sydney eventually both reached the end of the line, where they confronted the final layer of security – Button Gwinnett himself! How is this possible, you ask?
“Button Gwinnett” is a Protectron in a powdered wig. XD Yeah, I think Bethesda might have a thing for robots in silly hats doing patriotic stuff – at least Captain Ironsides in FO4 knows he’s a robot in the modern post-apocalyptic wasteland, even if he thinks he has the authority to start up the Congressional Army and try to launch his boat to retaliate against China! Anyway, there’s a number of ways to deal with Buttontron – you can just straight-up fight him and his remaining robots; if you have the “Robotics Expert” perk, you can just straight-up shut him down; you can convince him that you’re here to make a forgery of the Declaration of Independence to throw the “Redcoats” off the scent (AW will apparently pay you the same for the forgery, as he won’t be able to tell its not real) –
Or there is Wanda’s method, which was to pass a speech check with the help of Grape Mentats to convince Buttontron she was Thomas Jefferson, the author of the damn thing, here to liberate it. XD And then, because she’d been a little too good lately and Jon needed the loss of karma to push her back to neutral territory, she told Buttontron that she was bringing it back to the King of England (causing him no small bit of mental anguish), and told him that he was a disgrace and she was kicking him out of the Continental Congress (which caused him to snarkily tell Jefferson to give Sally his best – Sally being the slave Jefferson had some kids with – before shutting down all his robots and self-destructing). Brutal, but it got the job done, and the girls were able to retrieve the Declaration with no further fuss. (If you’re curious, one of the other options is to claim that Abraham Washington is the new president, which I am kind of curious about what goes down if you say that. . . [checks the wiki] Okay, apparently you just get the same speech options in the end no matter what, so it can’t be that interesting.)
VIII. Anyway, documents in hand, the pair prepared to head back to AW – but before that, Jon made a point of Wanda asking Sydney about herself. Specifically, how she got into the relic-hunting business (she randomly found a note on a body about an important historical document, which turned out to get the Constitution, and got it for AW – when he paid her enough to get properly drunk and laid for the first time in a while, she decided “this is the job for me”), and about her special gun (turns out she tinkers with guns as a hobby – her dad made ammunition for a living, so it’s kind of a family trade). Wanda tried to push her about her father, but Sydney demurred, saying she didn’t trust Wanda enough to share THAT information yet. . .
IX. So NOW it was time to head back to AW, sell him the extra documents (75 caps for the Magna Carta and 100 for the Bill of Rights – Jon felt like Wanda was getting ripped off), and present the Declaration of Independence from both her AND Sydney! A delighted AW promised to give her her promised bounty personally and gave Wanda her promised reward, including some spare schematics for the Railway Rifle (improving them). Wanda went and admired the newly-framed documents in the collection on the wall, pleased in her work. . .
X. Then tracked down Sydney to ask where she was going (turns out she hangs out in Underworld, the ghoul city, between jobs) and once again about her dad. Sydney finally opened up, saying that she and her dad had a close relationship when she was little (he called her “little moonbeam”), but he disappeared when she was fourteen. She was understandably bitter about being left at such a young age to fend for herself in the DC ruins. . .
But apparently, Jon knows how to get her a bit of closure regarding her father’s disappearance. And it involves tracking down Riley of Riley’s Rangers to finally do THAT quest. And that has set up our episode for next week! :D I am intrigued and excited, though I suspect this is another case of “Dad didn’t mean to abandon you, he just got murdered out in the Wasteland. . .”
Workout: Back on the bike again for this week, with the following two videos –
A) “FALLOUT But EVERYTHING Is Legendary And Overpowered - A Perfectly Balanced Fallout 4 Mod” by The Spiffing Brit! Yes, in order to fit his latest FO4 video into my day, I chose to watch it with my workout! This was Spiff’s take on the “Legendary Roulette” mod (where most enemies are upgraded to their Legendary counterparts, meaning almost all encounters are extremely hard BUT there is a WEALTH of legendary items for the taking if you manage to come out on top), with him deciding to play as the “GigaChad.” GigaChad was a beast of a man (who honestly looked vaguely like Paladin Danse – same haircut and facial hair, I believe), who – upon beating the Legendary Radroaches of Vault 111 and earning his Pip-Boy – had all of his stats set at 100, his level set at 100, and his health set at 1,000 thanks to the power of console commands (though Spiff commented there was a “legit” way to do this by making use of duplication glitches on the “You’re SPECIAL!” book found in Sanctuary and using debuffs to temporarily lower your stats before adding another point so you could break the usually-strict “10 max” barrier on your SPECIAL, but it would take forever, so, console commands). Now, having 100 in all stats definitely made things easier, but having only 1,000 health definitely made things HARDER, and his level being 100 kind of just balanced things by making him super powerful but also making any enemies that scaled with his level also super powerful. He then proceeded into the wasteland, skirting Sanctuary and the Red Rocket to proceed straight into Concord and rescue Preston Garvey’s group from the Legendary Raiders they were facing (not an easy feat, given he did not have great weapons beyond an Explosive pipe gun and a Staggering 10mm), before ripping the minigun straight off the vertibird atop the Museum of Freedom (no power armor required – if your strength is high enough, you CAN just do that) and taking out the Deathclaw that emerged mid-fight with the remaining raiders (a process that involved GigaChad desperately running down an alley and trying to take out the Deathclaw’s leg so it couldn’t move as fast). He then headed through Lexington, felling through MUCH effort a Super Mutant Behemoth wandering around the area of the Corvega plant (much Staggering 10mm ammo was used), before proceeding over the bridge and the USS Riptide, taking out the raiders there and getting himself the wonderful Assassin’s Super Sledge, which does 50% extra damage against humans and thus is pretty damn good. He then made it to Diamond City, where he resupplied (aka bought some shotgun ammo as he really wanted an Explosive or Wounding combat shotgun, as those are the best Legendaries in the game) before turning his attentions to the area he REALLY wanted to visit – the Glowing Sea. One trip through a Super Mutant camp (complete with Suiciders and Warlords) and the exterior of Vault 95 (complete with Gunners and Assaultron) later, he got tired of waiting for the gun he wanted to spawn naturally and used console commands to change a Resilient combat shotgun he’d picked up to a Wounding one, before proceeding into the Glowing Sea and taking out a couple of big old radscorpions, all the Children of Atom living in the crater, and the Legendary Mythic Deathclaw by the old reactor (which actually ran away from him for most of the fight, forcing him to track it down), thus “winning” the game. It was an amusing video, to be sure (especially Spiff’s fight against the Behemoth), but I much preferred Jon’s “Legendary Roulette” miniseries, as he didn’t actually cheat his way through anything, and watching him struggle and learn how to turn the altered game to his advantage (again, with Wounding weapons) was a lot more fun. Ah well, it was good to watch with my bike ride!
B) “Houses VS. Apartments VS. Penthouses In The Sims 4 | Guide” by Petey Plays It! His most recent video, this went over the essential differences between regular old houses/lots, apartments, and penthouse lots. As someone who doesn’t really play with apartments or penthouses, I actually learned a few things from this video – such as the fact that apartments don’t have lot taxes, just the weekly fixed rent, and you have to put down a deposit when you move in (which makes sense), and that penthouses are essentially just regular old house lots on top of apartment blocks – I thought they were special kinds of fancier apartments, with the same restrictions, but nope. The only things they share with apartments is being in apartment buildings, being accessed by elevators, and having the special apartment mailbox and trash chute. A penthouse otherwise is built pretty much exactly like a house! (Though, thinking back, I now recall that James built Max Power a custom penthouse when he was living in San Myshuno for a time – but that was a while ago, and I don’t think it ever properly clicked that he’d done that from scratch – I thought he’d just altered an existing lot.) Cool stuff – I like Petey, he’s a good source of little tidbits of information. :)
Other:
-->Got through all my Merge Dragons playing of the day this morning – thanks to my optimized points grinding, I was actually able to get a bit MORE than I usually get from these events (all three dragon eggs for the new dragon, a nest of the previous special event dragon eggs, and a couple of dragon trees instead of just one). My camp is once again looking an utter mess, but I’m almost up to the dragon power to clear out a new area, w00~
-->I also FINALLY managed to get the picture I wanted as my phone’s wallpaper on said phone! Involved me having to type in the EXACT SPECIFIC URL of the tumblr post where it was into Safari to get it, but I managed, and now I have one of my favorite shots of Victor, Alice, and Smiler from my Chill Valicer Save celebrating New Year’s (specifically, it’s a shot of Victor and Smiler kissing while Alice looks on with a big grin – OT3 feels!) as my phone wallpaper. About freaking time.
-->Answered my friend Ace’s latest FF.net PM, w00! Keeping on top of messages best I can. :) I promise I’ll get to you tomorrow, Moose!
-->We played beanbags this afternoon, and in sharp contrast to Friday, I was on fire today! Just utterly obliterated my parents in the first three games. XD Poor Dad didn’t get it fully together until the last game, while Mom got the second-to-last with some good throws. Final scores were me W-W-W-2-2; Dad 2-2-3-3-W; Mom 3-3-2-W-3. I am glad that everyone won once, but it is nice to be the champ. :D
Whew -- not bad! I mean, yes, really wish I'd gotten more done when it comes to the MASSIVE Chill Valicer Save update this week, but -- I'll manage. In the meantime, time to hit the sheets now that I've cooled the room down with my big-ass fan. Another week of work beckons -- night all!
