Busy Kinda Hot Friday
Jul. 28th, 2023 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickWas supposed to be a scorcher, but it didn't EXACTLY pan out that way -- while it was definitely HUMID, I think some of the heat got lost because it ended up being cloudier today than expected. Though that was only around 1:30 PM, when I left work -- it definitely got sunnier after that, so maybe it got hotter after that too. At any rate, we did keep the AC on and stayed inside for the afternoon, so it was definitely hot ENOUGH. *shrug* Summer in RI for you!
At any rate, I did keep busy enough through the day --
Work – Quiet Friday – now that we’re mostly past the “catching up on processing” period (except for the credit card people uploading some stuff, but there’s not much I can do about that), there’s little to do now except cleaning up duplicates and deceased, which is what I did for most of the day after the GL. *shrug* At least I got to go home early and thus didn’t have to try and drag that out for another few hours! Though it does make me wonder how long next week’s gonna feel. . .
Sims 4 – Was in the mood for more building today (plus I didn’t feel like trying to track down updates on all my various mods just yet), so I went back to my current project in the old Building Save – renovating my old “Gutknecht Bend” build to be more the crappy “this place has been abandoned for years” house that my “Valicer In The Dark” trio first stumbled across when they ran from the Bluecoats and were looking for place to stay! Because I am still sort of half-determined to do a challenge save based on that AU one day. . .here’s what I accomplished today –
A) First things first, I remembered that one of the “necessary starting items” for this build was a selling table for traveling salesperson Smiler to use! So I plopped the Jungle Adventures Selvadoradan one on the lot right away. :) I also ended up deleting the robotics lab for now, because the lot’s “Off The Grid,” and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t work without power. . .I’ll probably bring it back once I figure out where to put it, but getting it powered so Smiler can USE it will be one of the gang’s first priorities!
B) After that, I decided to try saving the lot to my personal Library again – and THIS time it let me do so without mentioning that I’d technically already saved the lot! Hooray! With the wrecked version in my Library, I promptly headed over to Windenburg, where I checked out the Munch’s lot and the blank “Summer Home” lot, both of which were the right size for the house. Both were decent and rather pleasantly secluded, but I felt that the Summer Home lot had a bit more of the vibe I was going for – the Munch lot is actually near a river, and I never pictured the Gutknecht Bend house near the water. So onto the Summer Home lot the house went for further renovation!
C) Cue me spending some time looking both on my phone and in my Corpse Bride: An Invitation To The Wedding art book for some more reference photos of Gutknecht’s tower from the outside, and not getting anywhere. *grumbles* Ah well, just had to work with what I had. . .but what I had wasn’t quite gelling with me. Mostly because I’d been having some trouble getting the tower and its glass dome roof just how I wanted it – particularly the roof, which didn’t want to center (probably because it was a circular roof, and the tower itself an octagonal-type shape).
D) So I decided to just rebuild the tower entirely! Did a much bigger octagon (three grid spaces on each side) after getting one of the little octagon rooms for reference, copied that and stacked it on itself, did a proper octagonal roof atop it, curving it into a rough dome, deleted the old tower sections after getting all the items I wanted to keep out of the top (cauldron, bookshelf, séance table), deleted the roof on the rectangular portion of the house, and then shoved the new tower into the side. I then lined up the intersecting walls a bit better (so the house didn’t connect up with the tower in the middle of the diagonal bits), and removed the interior walls on the bottom-most octagonal room to get rid of some weird angles and open up the space a bit more.
E) And then, since the tower was bigger, I decided the rectangle should be bigger too! So I widened it by two tiles on each side of the centered tower and stretched all the rooms. My Sims shall actually have room to roam in this house! :p I also put the right-angle roof back on that bit, making sure it went the right way and intersected the tower at the right angle – not too high, not too low.
F) With that done, I moved the stairs back into the tower, finding that I could get one set up against the far left wall, then another set up against the front wall on the second story, which created as close to a spiral staircase as you can get without mods in Sims 4 AND left more of both the second and third story rooms open for actual use! Nice! I couldn’t figure out what I could actually DO with the second-story room in the old build. . .with that sorted, I replaced the stairs with a cheaper variant that still looked right, and put some nice fencing that matched the balustrades around the gaps in the floors. I then put some broken Werewolves window frames into the third story room all along the outer walls, and put the bookcase, cauldron, and séance table up there, since that’s supposed to be the “magic” area. I then removed some more interior walls on the bottom floor and repainted everything to be the same stone blocks as the outside. . .
G) And then found myself a bit stuck, because I wasn’t sure about my floor plan again. It’s tough figuring out where stuff should GO in this house – the shape makes it rather weird! I toyed around with making the second story of the tower the bedroom, but I’m not sure I’m gonna go with that, as I think the bedroom needs a fireplace (I soft-established that in one of my fics, where the trio were huddled up in a blanket for warmth on a chilly day – I always pictured that as happening in the bedroom) and putting chimneys on this house is gonna be weird enough as it is. :p I’m also starting to wonder if any bathroom area should go near the sewer entrance. . .and if I need to MOVE said sewer entrance, as currently it’s a bit close to the back of the house? And I WOULD like some sort of courtyard area out there? Maybe? I dunno, I’m still working it out. *shrug* So, as it was getting on toward 4 PM anyway and I had other stuff I wanted to do this afternoon, I decided to leave it there (after getting the archway for the “back door” into place) and quit for the day –
Though not before finding the “top-down view” button under camera controls so I could draw a rough sketch of the exterior walls of the bottom floor (along with where the stairs and front and back doors are). Because maybe I can figure out how I want the house to look if I actually draw it out myself, instead of in the game. I’m already thinking that the second story of the tower should probably be Smiler’s lab space, while the top is the library/magic area (so that would be more Victor’s area), so it’s just a matter of figuring out the ground floor. Hmmm. . . I’ll get it sorted eventually! Not like I don’t have time to do it (and will have even more time when I get my vacation week after next).
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back to GrayStillPlay’s compilation video “Testing 100 Vehicles in GTA 5!” I got through Alex’s original “Potholes” board (I THOUGHT the Wastelander had won this one, but it actually got stuck in one of the geometry potholes, poor thing), and I want to say I’m MOST of the way through the original “Crate-Dragging” board (the one where Alex recreated the train derailment that spilled all those chemicals in Ohio). Nice to see some of the older boards again and see how far we’ve come – and to re-experience old trolls too. Because the end of the “Crate-Dragging” board had a big one. XD But we’ll see THAT on Sunday!
2. Continue writing Valicer In The Dark stuff: Check – took the opportunity of being between scenes to edit the beginning of my “Accused” fanfic snippet for VitD, cleaning up a few things, correcting a few mistakes (I had the half-melted mask they found on Barkis’s body as silver before, but after consulting the book again, it turns out Spirit Wardens wear bronze masks), and generally just tweaking it to be a better version of itself. :) I do love working in this universe, especially with the inspiration of the second season of Oxventure Presents Blades In The Dark to power me on. :)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – got both my Subs video and an extra, despite YouTube being a little bitch tonight and forcing me to wait for it to load a couple of times –
A) First up, another old list video from OXBox – “7 Misleading Trailers That Were Nothing Like the Final Game!” Mike, Jane, and Andy taking us through those game trailers that were nothing like their final product. From the obviously-lying “this game is filled with action and adventure and pretty models, not resource collection and microtransactions and vaguely attractive pixels” of the Game Of War: Fire Age trailers, to the “we contracted our trailer for your run-of-the-mill zombie survival horror game to a separate studio and they made a gorgeous short film guaranteed to make you cry, whoops” of Dead Island, to “that gameplay trailer was a complete fabrication because the game was still in pre-production and had a different name until yesterday, but we THINK we can make the game as cool as this looks!” of Anthem, game trailers are sometimes very, very bad at their jobs. And they don’t even feature Keanu Reeves! Shame.
B) And second up, from GrayStillPlays – “I grew the biggest spiral in the world,” aka Gray plays Spiral Roll! This is I believe a mobile game where you play as a scraping implement (you start out as a chisel and can spend your hard-earned coins to become things like fancier chisels, lightsabers, lollipops, and chainsaws) and you scrape various chunks of wood (or cacti, or gold bars) to create spirals! These spirals bounce ahead of you to do things like smash potential dangers (like saws and spikes and walls), drop into various multiplier baskets, grab coins, and generally just destroy the ecosystem, and each level ends with you trying to scrape up a red carpet and get the max entry on the various strong-man machines at the end (ranging from telling you you’re “okay” to “GOD” or indicating how far you’ve flung the spiral or just displaying random numbers, because the numbers in this game mean NOTHING – you bounce spirals of multicolored wood off grids of emojis, why are you looking for sense here). The goal is to figure out when to go for little spirals to bounce into baskets and such, and when to go for BIG spirals and smash through things and get all the multipliers. Gray had rather a lot of fun scraping down his wood and gold straight down to the river they were floating in, and it was rather satisfying to watch. Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’, keep those spirals rollin’~
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – have caught up on all five owed posts (two asks, three thread replies) from Brynlee Marie and put them in the Valice Multiverse queue for tomorrow, hooray. (Still not liking the dash, but I’m not sure how best to fix it now – been playing around with XKit Rewritten a bit, will see what comes of that.) Also sent an ask with a prompt she wanted to do – trying to touch on all bases! So I should be getting back into the groove here now. I hope.
Not too shabby -- plus I got a nice head start on this weekend's Merge Dragons event and managed to win a couple of games of Scrabble Slam at game night, nice. :P And now it is time to wrap things up for the night, as tomorrow IS a cleaning Saturday, bleh. Also a stormy one, so I dunno how much I'll actually be able to get done. . . Must-dos are definitely getting the pictures sorted for the next Chill Valicer Save update on Victor Luvs Alice; keeping up with GrayStillPlays on YouTube; and writing on "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland." Hopeful to-dos are watching more Watch Later videos and doing some more Sims 4 building, or at least updating all my mods. We'll see what happens -- night all!
At any rate, I did keep busy enough through the day --
Work – Quiet Friday – now that we’re mostly past the “catching up on processing” period (except for the credit card people uploading some stuff, but there’s not much I can do about that), there’s little to do now except cleaning up duplicates and deceased, which is what I did for most of the day after the GL. *shrug* At least I got to go home early and thus didn’t have to try and drag that out for another few hours! Though it does make me wonder how long next week’s gonna feel. . .
Sims 4 – Was in the mood for more building today (plus I didn’t feel like trying to track down updates on all my various mods just yet), so I went back to my current project in the old Building Save – renovating my old “Gutknecht Bend” build to be more the crappy “this place has been abandoned for years” house that my “Valicer In The Dark” trio first stumbled across when they ran from the Bluecoats and were looking for place to stay! Because I am still sort of half-determined to do a challenge save based on that AU one day. . .here’s what I accomplished today –
A) First things first, I remembered that one of the “necessary starting items” for this build was a selling table for traveling salesperson Smiler to use! So I plopped the Jungle Adventures Selvadoradan one on the lot right away. :) I also ended up deleting the robotics lab for now, because the lot’s “Off The Grid,” and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t work without power. . .I’ll probably bring it back once I figure out where to put it, but getting it powered so Smiler can USE it will be one of the gang’s first priorities!
B) After that, I decided to try saving the lot to my personal Library again – and THIS time it let me do so without mentioning that I’d technically already saved the lot! Hooray! With the wrecked version in my Library, I promptly headed over to Windenburg, where I checked out the Munch’s lot and the blank “Summer Home” lot, both of which were the right size for the house. Both were decent and rather pleasantly secluded, but I felt that the Summer Home lot had a bit more of the vibe I was going for – the Munch lot is actually near a river, and I never pictured the Gutknecht Bend house near the water. So onto the Summer Home lot the house went for further renovation!
C) Cue me spending some time looking both on my phone and in my Corpse Bride: An Invitation To The Wedding art book for some more reference photos of Gutknecht’s tower from the outside, and not getting anywhere. *grumbles* Ah well, just had to work with what I had. . .but what I had wasn’t quite gelling with me. Mostly because I’d been having some trouble getting the tower and its glass dome roof just how I wanted it – particularly the roof, which didn’t want to center (probably because it was a circular roof, and the tower itself an octagonal-type shape).
D) So I decided to just rebuild the tower entirely! Did a much bigger octagon (three grid spaces on each side) after getting one of the little octagon rooms for reference, copied that and stacked it on itself, did a proper octagonal roof atop it, curving it into a rough dome, deleted the old tower sections after getting all the items I wanted to keep out of the top (cauldron, bookshelf, séance table), deleted the roof on the rectangular portion of the house, and then shoved the new tower into the side. I then lined up the intersecting walls a bit better (so the house didn’t connect up with the tower in the middle of the diagonal bits), and removed the interior walls on the bottom-most octagonal room to get rid of some weird angles and open up the space a bit more.
E) And then, since the tower was bigger, I decided the rectangle should be bigger too! So I widened it by two tiles on each side of the centered tower and stretched all the rooms. My Sims shall actually have room to roam in this house! :p I also put the right-angle roof back on that bit, making sure it went the right way and intersected the tower at the right angle – not too high, not too low.
F) With that done, I moved the stairs back into the tower, finding that I could get one set up against the far left wall, then another set up against the front wall on the second story, which created as close to a spiral staircase as you can get without mods in Sims 4 AND left more of both the second and third story rooms open for actual use! Nice! I couldn’t figure out what I could actually DO with the second-story room in the old build. . .with that sorted, I replaced the stairs with a cheaper variant that still looked right, and put some nice fencing that matched the balustrades around the gaps in the floors. I then put some broken Werewolves window frames into the third story room all along the outer walls, and put the bookcase, cauldron, and séance table up there, since that’s supposed to be the “magic” area. I then removed some more interior walls on the bottom floor and repainted everything to be the same stone blocks as the outside. . .
G) And then found myself a bit stuck, because I wasn’t sure about my floor plan again. It’s tough figuring out where stuff should GO in this house – the shape makes it rather weird! I toyed around with making the second story of the tower the bedroom, but I’m not sure I’m gonna go with that, as I think the bedroom needs a fireplace (I soft-established that in one of my fics, where the trio were huddled up in a blanket for warmth on a chilly day – I always pictured that as happening in the bedroom) and putting chimneys on this house is gonna be weird enough as it is. :p I’m also starting to wonder if any bathroom area should go near the sewer entrance. . .and if I need to MOVE said sewer entrance, as currently it’s a bit close to the back of the house? And I WOULD like some sort of courtyard area out there? Maybe? I dunno, I’m still working it out. *shrug* So, as it was getting on toward 4 PM anyway and I had other stuff I wanted to do this afternoon, I decided to leave it there (after getting the archway for the “back door” into place) and quit for the day –
Though not before finding the “top-down view” button under camera controls so I could draw a rough sketch of the exterior walls of the bottom floor (along with where the stairs and front and back doors are). Because maybe I can figure out how I want the house to look if I actually draw it out myself, instead of in the game. I’m already thinking that the second story of the tower should probably be Smiler’s lab space, while the top is the library/magic area (so that would be more Victor’s area), so it’s just a matter of figuring out the ground floor. Hmmm. . . I’ll get it sorted eventually! Not like I don’t have time to do it (and will have even more time when I get my vacation week after next).
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back to GrayStillPlay’s compilation video “Testing 100 Vehicles in GTA 5!” I got through Alex’s original “Potholes” board (I THOUGHT the Wastelander had won this one, but it actually got stuck in one of the geometry potholes, poor thing), and I want to say I’m MOST of the way through the original “Crate-Dragging” board (the one where Alex recreated the train derailment that spilled all those chemicals in Ohio). Nice to see some of the older boards again and see how far we’ve come – and to re-experience old trolls too. Because the end of the “Crate-Dragging” board had a big one. XD But we’ll see THAT on Sunday!
2. Continue writing Valicer In The Dark stuff: Check – took the opportunity of being between scenes to edit the beginning of my “Accused” fanfic snippet for VitD, cleaning up a few things, correcting a few mistakes (I had the half-melted mask they found on Barkis’s body as silver before, but after consulting the book again, it turns out Spirit Wardens wear bronze masks), and generally just tweaking it to be a better version of itself. :) I do love working in this universe, especially with the inspiration of the second season of Oxventure Presents Blades In The Dark to power me on. :)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – got both my Subs video and an extra, despite YouTube being a little bitch tonight and forcing me to wait for it to load a couple of times –
A) First up, another old list video from OXBox – “7 Misleading Trailers That Were Nothing Like the Final Game!” Mike, Jane, and Andy taking us through those game trailers that were nothing like their final product. From the obviously-lying “this game is filled with action and adventure and pretty models, not resource collection and microtransactions and vaguely attractive pixels” of the Game Of War: Fire Age trailers, to the “we contracted our trailer for your run-of-the-mill zombie survival horror game to a separate studio and they made a gorgeous short film guaranteed to make you cry, whoops” of Dead Island, to “that gameplay trailer was a complete fabrication because the game was still in pre-production and had a different name until yesterday, but we THINK we can make the game as cool as this looks!” of Anthem, game trailers are sometimes very, very bad at their jobs. And they don’t even feature Keanu Reeves! Shame.
B) And second up, from GrayStillPlays – “I grew the biggest spiral in the world,” aka Gray plays Spiral Roll! This is I believe a mobile game where you play as a scraping implement (you start out as a chisel and can spend your hard-earned coins to become things like fancier chisels, lightsabers, lollipops, and chainsaws) and you scrape various chunks of wood (or cacti, or gold bars) to create spirals! These spirals bounce ahead of you to do things like smash potential dangers (like saws and spikes and walls), drop into various multiplier baskets, grab coins, and generally just destroy the ecosystem, and each level ends with you trying to scrape up a red carpet and get the max entry on the various strong-man machines at the end (ranging from telling you you’re “okay” to “GOD” or indicating how far you’ve flung the spiral or just displaying random numbers, because the numbers in this game mean NOTHING – you bounce spirals of multicolored wood off grids of emojis, why are you looking for sense here). The goal is to figure out when to go for little spirals to bounce into baskets and such, and when to go for BIG spirals and smash through things and get all the multipliers. Gray had rather a lot of fun scraping down his wood and gold straight down to the river they were floating in, and it was rather satisfying to watch. Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’, keep those spirals rollin’~
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – have caught up on all five owed posts (two asks, three thread replies) from Brynlee Marie and put them in the Valice Multiverse queue for tomorrow, hooray. (Still not liking the dash, but I’m not sure how best to fix it now – been playing around with XKit Rewritten a bit, will see what comes of that.) Also sent an ask with a prompt she wanted to do – trying to touch on all bases! So I should be getting back into the groove here now. I hope.
Not too shabby -- plus I got a nice head start on this weekend's Merge Dragons event and managed to win a couple of games of Scrabble Slam at game night, nice. :P And now it is time to wrap things up for the night, as tomorrow IS a cleaning Saturday, bleh. Also a stormy one, so I dunno how much I'll actually be able to get done. . . Must-dos are definitely getting the pictures sorted for the next Chill Valicer Save update on Victor Luvs Alice; keeping up with GrayStillPlays on YouTube; and writing on "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland." Hopeful to-dos are watching more Watch Later videos and doing some more Sims 4 building, or at least updating all my mods. We'll see what happens -- night all!
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Date: 2023-07-29 06:27 pm (UTC)Her name is Rayne Flora and the Sim is Rahn Cher lol.
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