Red Curse Has Officially Hit
May. 26th, 2023 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickIt started in full this morning, and I've been struggling against the moodiness and bad attention span all day. *sigh* Not exactly the best start to a long weekend, to be sure! Here's what I've managed to get done today --
Work – Pretty much the same as yesterday work-wise – mostly-quiet day with some irritating stuff at the very end. Had the world’s simplest GL, worked on obituaries, and then had a credit card call and someone wanting a pledge card (which they actually didn’t need) just as I was trying to take my afternoon break. *sigh* Not horrible, but not great when you’re on your period and stuff makes you very grumpy very easily. At least the ride home was mostly okay – highway was almost entirely clear, but the main drag was, well, a drag. The paradox of holiday weekends. . .
Oh, and no beanbags today, as my parents DID get the new boards, and thus the new, nicer version of the cornhole game is currently under construction. Mom’s hoping to have it ready by tomorrow afternoon – we shall see!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – a final night on the bike, finishing off the Oxventure One-Shot Wonder “Dragonlance: Shadow Of The Dragon Queen!” With the fishing competition over, it was time for everyone to lay out their catch. . .which put Strife in the rather awkward position of realizing that, even with Bennebog the Line-Breaker AND his tiny little extra eel, he was still a foot short of Rage’s pair of five-foot-long carps (Bennebog was eight feet, the eel one). He asked Corvus about their cheat fish, which Corvus pretended to know nothing about to avoid saying “I threw it away” – and then, after confirming Corvus was still in the form of a triton, demanded that he lay down with the rest of the catch. Corvus was like “we talked about this,” but when Strife was firm, instead demanded a boon – not part of the prize, but Strife’s magnificently goofy hat. Strife hesitated, but took the deal on the advice of Harold. Corvus thus lay down and attempted to look like Strife had caught him, with Strife boosting his attempts with Bardic Inspiration and him using every bonus he could think of to boost a poor roll up to eighteen. . .
NOT ENOUGH. Johnny was giggling through their apologies. XD The judges informed the “triton” that they couldn’t count him as part of the catch, and so Rage won! And for her prize –
ACCEPTED THE MAYOR’S CAT. The Mayor promptly ended up a blubbering mess. XD That being said, for catching Bennebog the Line-Breaker, Strife DID receive a very expensive fishing rod engraved with kingfishers. The problem was, he was too upset over the loss of his hat to Corvus to properly appreciate it. XD The Mayor got herself together long enough to say they were now behind schedule and it was time to head up to the ruin on the hill to reenact the battle against the forces of Ishtar, this year played by the mercenary forces of her good friend Ironsmile. Anyone who wanted to join the melee – played with things like broomsticks trapped in cloth – could leave their real weapons behind and join the parade; anyone who didn’t could be a judge (deciding who was the “most spirited” and the like) and get free drinks with little umbrellas. Harold said that if Strife wanted to join the battle, they’d better get Anitari and Rage on-side – fortunately, they were already eager to fight. Corvus and Celena decided they’d rather be judges and headed that way with the Mayor and Ironsmile. Oh, and there were happy endings to the cat and hat stories – Rage ended up giving the cat back to the Mayor as a bribe to get good scores for her and her friends (in exchange for the nice blue knit cap); Corvus traded the hat back to Strife in exchange for a favor to be cashed in at any time (“probably this same day,” he admitted, since, you know, one-shot). So that’s something, I suppose. XD
Anyway – the villagers, Strife, Rage, Anitari, and Harold all made their way to the top of the hill, cloth-wrapped broomsticks at the ready, as the mercenary forces of “Ishtar” stood at the bottom, ready for the signal to go. Once everything was good, the mercenary forces charged – and Johnny called for Wisdom/Insight checks from watching judges Celena and Corvus. Neither rolled well, but Johnny ruled that Corvus, having rolled higher, did still notice that the weapons looked rather, uh, real. Corvus, not thinking anything of it, just yelled at the mercenaries to try and hit his friends. XD One of the villagers came out to meet the force and start the battle proper –
And start it the poor bastard did, as it turns out the weapons of the mercenaries were in fact very real, and suddenly the poor villagers were fighting for the lives (to the point where they became difficult terrain). The four in the battle were promptly targeted by five mounted soldiers and surrounded, and battle began! The soldiers themselves were up first, and tried to throw a spear at Anitari – Harold jumped in with Protection and his shield. The soldiers THEN tried to throw a spear at Harold –
Cue ANITARI jumping in with Protection – not from himself, but from Small, the rather large mechanical saber-toothed cat. Everyone agreed the double deflect was very cool. XD The third and final spear went toward Strife, but it turned out he could take care of himself – a successful use of Hold Person on the soldier trying to throw it meant that said soldier was yanked off his horse. . .and then the guy behind him crashed into him, leaving two unmounted soldiers and two horses running off somewhere. And that wasn’t the end of the trouble for the mounted riders – Corvus, up next, used a combination of Hex and Eldritch Blast (in his case, represented by a flock of skeletal crows) to just straight-up slaughter one soldier, while Rage, entering her namesake battle mode, managed to force a horse to do a “stoppie,” slamming it with a forearm so that its back end kicked up and threw the rider over her head – she promptly stood on his back in triumph. And then Anitari hit the soldier who’d tried to spear him with a tiny fireball from a blow-dart –
And then sicced Small on the poor bastard, explicitly stating that the cat had transparent claws of pure force (APPARENTLY not the Star Wars kind, but who knows at this point?). Yeaaah. . . Not to mention, he followed that up with Tiny the (genuinely small) mechanical cat growing energy wings and flying around just trying to help and heal villagers as much as possible. Strife, for his part, ran and got himself one of the horses whose rider had been unseated, got a spear and tossed it to Harold (who caught it right-way-round, fortunately), and then used Cutting Words as a sort of bardic debuff on all the enemy combatants while directing all their attention onto Harold. And then firing off his hand-crossbow at the guy Rage had pinned – didn’t hit him (or Rage, fortunately), but he did nicely terrify the poor guy. Harold braced himself for violence, but first it was Celena’s turn –
Who finally actually did something other than drink wine and poorly catch eels, calling down the power of the crescent moon to use Colorspray on everyone BUT her four friends, blinding them all so they couldn’t see or do anything (though she did have to admit that she HAD blinded Strife’s horse). Johnny decided that this made it too easy for the gang to finish off the mercenaries if they so chose (though I don’t think anyone did – Harold certainly didn’t announce any stabbing plans, and Anitari was more focused on tag-teaming with Tiny to heal villagers), so instead they had the lieutenant of the mercenaries announce that, while these puny adventures may have won this battle, the war was just beginning – look above, at Death Knight Lord Soth!
Lord Soth promptly informed them it was the end of the adventure. XD Good times, and I think a decent “teaser” for the sponsored campaign! The guest stars, particularly Josh as Strife and Val as Corvus, were great. My one complaint is that Ellen in particular didn’t really DO anything – I wonder if she made her character based on how cool the new subclass was, and then realized too late she’d accidentally rolled up someone who wouldn’t really have come to a little fishing village like this if it wasn’t Mandated By Adventure. *shrug* I mean, I know Merilwen can fade a little into the background in Oxventure too, but she’s generally doing SOMETHING. Even if it’s just turning into a bear. *shrug* But all in all, a fun time! Next week, we have the Inappropriately Timed Holiday Specials for both main Oxventure and Blades In The Dark, broken up on Wednesday with some Smiler action in honor of my OC’s birthday and The Smiler’s official tenth anniversary. :)
2. Continue writing “The Joker And The Queen”: No check, unfortunately – what happened is, tonight was game night, and we ended up busting out BTTF Monopoly, and it ran a bit long – mostly because Mom and Dad were in a bit of a stalemate for a while (Dad had loads of cash and the two most expensive properties on the board, while Mom had not a lot of money but a number of good properties in key spots keeping her afloat), and Mom finally just said “You win” when she landed on Dad’s best space (with four plutonium rods, the game’s house equivalent) rather than keep the game going any longer. So I didn’t get on to do the write-ups until about 9 PM, and even THEN I had to have my ice cream first. . . Long story short, it was done to doing writing or watching GrayStillPlays, and Gray won. Period brain isn’t the best one to write with anyway. . .gonna see if I can get SOMETHING done before going to bed, though, even if it’s just a few lines on a potential Sims challenge or Valicer In The Dark stuff.
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – managed to keep up with GrayStillPlays and “When you hit the ground at lightspeed in Roblox,” aka Gray plays Broken Bones 4 in Roblox! I think he might have played something very similar to this at the beginning of one of his “smashing yourself to pieces” compilation videos, as it looked at least slightly familiar – it’s a game where you send your Robloxling careening down the side of a mountain into a lake at the bottom, trying to break as many bones, sprain as many joints, tear as many ligaments, and get as many concussions as possible to earn money. You then spend that money on upgrades to things like your running speed, your jumping height, various utilities you could use, and the cycle repeats. Gray, of course, decided to cut to the chase by using various gamepasses to give himself an unfair advantage (such as X2 Gravity paired with X5 Gravity so his character just got DRAGGED straight down to the bottom of the mountain) – and then found a gamepass that gave him infinite in-game money. Cue Gray slowly but surely maxing out EVERYTHING in the game, and creating a character that could run around so fast Gray could barely control him, jump so high he could basically leave the board, and do things like use fireworks to get even higher, flip time to repeat certain especially-good bone-break sections, and just straight up spring his limbs off his body and obliterate himself. By the end, he was breaking like millions of bones on the regular, had found a spot where he could get stuck forever and just wiggle his shattered limbs into eternity, had found a way to slide around infinitely on the ice around the ending pool for more broken bones and thus more points, and finally managed to rocket himself off the board entirely and fall into the void of space surrounding it. Just another good day in Roblox for Gray!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – Victor Luvs Alice is set for now, of course, and there was nothing happening on Valice Multiverse, so I just threw another set of Not-Incorrect Valicer Quotes (the ones with a musical theme) into the queue and called it a night. Trust me, with my brain the way it is, that’s the ideal outcome for tumblr!
Not too shabby, I suppose, though shame about the writing. . .on the other hand, I feel like getting more progress on "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland" is more important, so better to skip today than tomorrow! Now I have to go wrap up the social thing and indulge some TV Tropes nonsense. . .plans for tomorrow include hopefully getting caught up on tumblr tags at least; playing Sims 4 and getting the trio a cow; trying to clear some stuff out of the Watch Later; and working some more on "Londerland Bloodlines." Hopefully the period (and Merge Dragons) won't sabotage me too much! Night all!
Work – Pretty much the same as yesterday work-wise – mostly-quiet day with some irritating stuff at the very end. Had the world’s simplest GL, worked on obituaries, and then had a credit card call and someone wanting a pledge card (which they actually didn’t need) just as I was trying to take my afternoon break. *sigh* Not horrible, but not great when you’re on your period and stuff makes you very grumpy very easily. At least the ride home was mostly okay – highway was almost entirely clear, but the main drag was, well, a drag. The paradox of holiday weekends. . .
Oh, and no beanbags today, as my parents DID get the new boards, and thus the new, nicer version of the cornhole game is currently under construction. Mom’s hoping to have it ready by tomorrow afternoon – we shall see!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – a final night on the bike, finishing off the Oxventure One-Shot Wonder “Dragonlance: Shadow Of The Dragon Queen!” With the fishing competition over, it was time for everyone to lay out their catch. . .which put Strife in the rather awkward position of realizing that, even with Bennebog the Line-Breaker AND his tiny little extra eel, he was still a foot short of Rage’s pair of five-foot-long carps (Bennebog was eight feet, the eel one). He asked Corvus about their cheat fish, which Corvus pretended to know nothing about to avoid saying “I threw it away” – and then, after confirming Corvus was still in the form of a triton, demanded that he lay down with the rest of the catch. Corvus was like “we talked about this,” but when Strife was firm, instead demanded a boon – not part of the prize, but Strife’s magnificently goofy hat. Strife hesitated, but took the deal on the advice of Harold. Corvus thus lay down and attempted to look like Strife had caught him, with Strife boosting his attempts with Bardic Inspiration and him using every bonus he could think of to boost a poor roll up to eighteen. . .
NOT ENOUGH. Johnny was giggling through their apologies. XD The judges informed the “triton” that they couldn’t count him as part of the catch, and so Rage won! And for her prize –
ACCEPTED THE MAYOR’S CAT. The Mayor promptly ended up a blubbering mess. XD That being said, for catching Bennebog the Line-Breaker, Strife DID receive a very expensive fishing rod engraved with kingfishers. The problem was, he was too upset over the loss of his hat to Corvus to properly appreciate it. XD The Mayor got herself together long enough to say they were now behind schedule and it was time to head up to the ruin on the hill to reenact the battle against the forces of Ishtar, this year played by the mercenary forces of her good friend Ironsmile. Anyone who wanted to join the melee – played with things like broomsticks trapped in cloth – could leave their real weapons behind and join the parade; anyone who didn’t could be a judge (deciding who was the “most spirited” and the like) and get free drinks with little umbrellas. Harold said that if Strife wanted to join the battle, they’d better get Anitari and Rage on-side – fortunately, they were already eager to fight. Corvus and Celena decided they’d rather be judges and headed that way with the Mayor and Ironsmile. Oh, and there were happy endings to the cat and hat stories – Rage ended up giving the cat back to the Mayor as a bribe to get good scores for her and her friends (in exchange for the nice blue knit cap); Corvus traded the hat back to Strife in exchange for a favor to be cashed in at any time (“probably this same day,” he admitted, since, you know, one-shot). So that’s something, I suppose. XD
Anyway – the villagers, Strife, Rage, Anitari, and Harold all made their way to the top of the hill, cloth-wrapped broomsticks at the ready, as the mercenary forces of “Ishtar” stood at the bottom, ready for the signal to go. Once everything was good, the mercenary forces charged – and Johnny called for Wisdom/Insight checks from watching judges Celena and Corvus. Neither rolled well, but Johnny ruled that Corvus, having rolled higher, did still notice that the weapons looked rather, uh, real. Corvus, not thinking anything of it, just yelled at the mercenaries to try and hit his friends. XD One of the villagers came out to meet the force and start the battle proper –
And start it the poor bastard did, as it turns out the weapons of the mercenaries were in fact very real, and suddenly the poor villagers were fighting for the lives (to the point where they became difficult terrain). The four in the battle were promptly targeted by five mounted soldiers and surrounded, and battle began! The soldiers themselves were up first, and tried to throw a spear at Anitari – Harold jumped in with Protection and his shield. The soldiers THEN tried to throw a spear at Harold –
Cue ANITARI jumping in with Protection – not from himself, but from Small, the rather large mechanical saber-toothed cat. Everyone agreed the double deflect was very cool. XD The third and final spear went toward Strife, but it turned out he could take care of himself – a successful use of Hold Person on the soldier trying to throw it meant that said soldier was yanked off his horse. . .and then the guy behind him crashed into him, leaving two unmounted soldiers and two horses running off somewhere. And that wasn’t the end of the trouble for the mounted riders – Corvus, up next, used a combination of Hex and Eldritch Blast (in his case, represented by a flock of skeletal crows) to just straight-up slaughter one soldier, while Rage, entering her namesake battle mode, managed to force a horse to do a “stoppie,” slamming it with a forearm so that its back end kicked up and threw the rider over her head – she promptly stood on his back in triumph. And then Anitari hit the soldier who’d tried to spear him with a tiny fireball from a blow-dart –
And then sicced Small on the poor bastard, explicitly stating that the cat had transparent claws of pure force (APPARENTLY not the Star Wars kind, but who knows at this point?). Yeaaah. . . Not to mention, he followed that up with Tiny the (genuinely small) mechanical cat growing energy wings and flying around just trying to help and heal villagers as much as possible. Strife, for his part, ran and got himself one of the horses whose rider had been unseated, got a spear and tossed it to Harold (who caught it right-way-round, fortunately), and then used Cutting Words as a sort of bardic debuff on all the enemy combatants while directing all their attention onto Harold. And then firing off his hand-crossbow at the guy Rage had pinned – didn’t hit him (or Rage, fortunately), but he did nicely terrify the poor guy. Harold braced himself for violence, but first it was Celena’s turn –
Who finally actually did something other than drink wine and poorly catch eels, calling down the power of the crescent moon to use Colorspray on everyone BUT her four friends, blinding them all so they couldn’t see or do anything (though she did have to admit that she HAD blinded Strife’s horse). Johnny decided that this made it too easy for the gang to finish off the mercenaries if they so chose (though I don’t think anyone did – Harold certainly didn’t announce any stabbing plans, and Anitari was more focused on tag-teaming with Tiny to heal villagers), so instead they had the lieutenant of the mercenaries announce that, while these puny adventures may have won this battle, the war was just beginning – look above, at Death Knight Lord Soth!
Lord Soth promptly informed them it was the end of the adventure. XD Good times, and I think a decent “teaser” for the sponsored campaign! The guest stars, particularly Josh as Strife and Val as Corvus, were great. My one complaint is that Ellen in particular didn’t really DO anything – I wonder if she made her character based on how cool the new subclass was, and then realized too late she’d accidentally rolled up someone who wouldn’t really have come to a little fishing village like this if it wasn’t Mandated By Adventure. *shrug* I mean, I know Merilwen can fade a little into the background in Oxventure too, but she’s generally doing SOMETHING. Even if it’s just turning into a bear. *shrug* But all in all, a fun time! Next week, we have the Inappropriately Timed Holiday Specials for both main Oxventure and Blades In The Dark, broken up on Wednesday with some Smiler action in honor of my OC’s birthday and The Smiler’s official tenth anniversary. :)
2. Continue writing “The Joker And The Queen”: No check, unfortunately – what happened is, tonight was game night, and we ended up busting out BTTF Monopoly, and it ran a bit long – mostly because Mom and Dad were in a bit of a stalemate for a while (Dad had loads of cash and the two most expensive properties on the board, while Mom had not a lot of money but a number of good properties in key spots keeping her afloat), and Mom finally just said “You win” when she landed on Dad’s best space (with four plutonium rods, the game’s house equivalent) rather than keep the game going any longer. So I didn’t get on to do the write-ups until about 9 PM, and even THEN I had to have my ice cream first. . . Long story short, it was done to doing writing or watching GrayStillPlays, and Gray won. Period brain isn’t the best one to write with anyway. . .gonna see if I can get SOMETHING done before going to bed, though, even if it’s just a few lines on a potential Sims challenge or Valicer In The Dark stuff.
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – managed to keep up with GrayStillPlays and “When you hit the ground at lightspeed in Roblox,” aka Gray plays Broken Bones 4 in Roblox! I think he might have played something very similar to this at the beginning of one of his “smashing yourself to pieces” compilation videos, as it looked at least slightly familiar – it’s a game where you send your Robloxling careening down the side of a mountain into a lake at the bottom, trying to break as many bones, sprain as many joints, tear as many ligaments, and get as many concussions as possible to earn money. You then spend that money on upgrades to things like your running speed, your jumping height, various utilities you could use, and the cycle repeats. Gray, of course, decided to cut to the chase by using various gamepasses to give himself an unfair advantage (such as X2 Gravity paired with X5 Gravity so his character just got DRAGGED straight down to the bottom of the mountain) – and then found a gamepass that gave him infinite in-game money. Cue Gray slowly but surely maxing out EVERYTHING in the game, and creating a character that could run around so fast Gray could barely control him, jump so high he could basically leave the board, and do things like use fireworks to get even higher, flip time to repeat certain especially-good bone-break sections, and just straight up spring his limbs off his body and obliterate himself. By the end, he was breaking like millions of bones on the regular, had found a spot where he could get stuck forever and just wiggle his shattered limbs into eternity, had found a way to slide around infinitely on the ice around the ending pool for more broken bones and thus more points, and finally managed to rocket himself off the board entirely and fall into the void of space surrounding it. Just another good day in Roblox for Gray!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – Victor Luvs Alice is set for now, of course, and there was nothing happening on Valice Multiverse, so I just threw another set of Not-Incorrect Valicer Quotes (the ones with a musical theme) into the queue and called it a night. Trust me, with my brain the way it is, that’s the ideal outcome for tumblr!
Not too shabby, I suppose, though shame about the writing. . .on the other hand, I feel like getting more progress on "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland" is more important, so better to skip today than tomorrow! Now I have to go wrap up the social thing and indulge some TV Tropes nonsense. . .plans for tomorrow include hopefully getting caught up on tumblr tags at least; playing Sims 4 and getting the trio a cow; trying to clear some stuff out of the Watch Later; and working some more on "Londerland Bloodlines." Hopefully the period (and Merge Dragons) won't sabotage me too much! Night all!
