Last Half-Day Friday
Sep. 1st, 2023 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYes, with this Labor Day weekend, I have to go back to a schedule where every Friday that isn't a holiday or a day I take off is a full-length one. *grumbles* I love that little summertime perk, but it is TOUGH going back to true full weeks once it is over. Meh. Still, I feel like I made the most of this one --
Work – Quiet day, but fortunately not a drag – I did the GL, I updated the whiteboard calendar, I filled out a write-off form, I cleaned up pledge cards scans, I helped my coworkers look up some stuff, and I updated my various “here is how everything is going with these particular things” notes. *nods* And now I am out and home for three days, w000~ Hooray for long weekends!
Sims 4 – I was sure I wanted to play today (last half-day Friday and all, gotta take advantage of it), but I wasn’t fully sure what I wanted to do. Fortunately, after actually loading up the game, I decided it was a “fiddling around with builds” day and headed into my building save to do the following –
A) Putz around a little bit with my Gutknecht Bend VITD build! This is the version of my Gutknecht Bend build which is trashed and falling apart, as per its appearance in my “Valicer In The Dark AU.” Today’s goal was to make it look even more rundown and make it a little cheaper so, if I ever do do my VITD-themed challenge save, it MIGHT be affordable for my Valicer trio without me having to cheat. To that end, I deleted the dining table in the dining room (and scattered the chairs about, as per the description of the room in my actual “Home Sweet Lair” fic scene) and the selling table outside; painted the yard with the “Scratchy In Patches” terrain paint to suggest a lawn that had mostly died off; widened the fake “road” on the side of the lot by a tile so it was flush with the actual lot boundary; moved the debug walls and post-box thing over to the edge of the lot on the other side (as I decided I wanted that “yard space” to work with); took a few chunks out of the back patio with the sledgehammer tool (and then painted in the gaps with dirt); made the sewer basement area a little bit smaller (as that sewer pool is probably the most expensive bit of the lot); and added some more cracks and cobwebs around the shop. Here are some representative pictures showing what the downstairs is looking like now (as I didn’t do pretty much anything with the tower bit) –
B) Play around a little bit with Havisham House! This is one of the EA starter homes in Windenburg, where my Gutknecht Bend VITD build is currently living, and I gutted it during a previous building session because it looked awful. I decided I might as well have some fun redoing it a bit today, and proceeded to make the interior stairs to the second level smaller (as the doublewide stairs just looked too BIG for such a small house); make the upstairs walls shorter (because the medium-height walls were just too big to work with); repainted the interior with a nicer wall paint/plaster and make sure all the exterior wall pants matched; replaced the taller windows with wider ones in the same style (looks better on the walls both inside (not clipping the crown molding) and outside (didn’t look like they were too low to the ground) – AND they were cheaper to boot); added in a nice wooden trash bin outside; properly boxed in the area where the Sims team had stuck in a built-in wardrobe next to the KITCHEN for some reason and turned it into a small half-bath (toilet and sink) with Get Together tile floors and walls and Vampires fixtures (discovered also that you can apparently only access the slots to put items on the Vampires sink if you have the “moveobjects” cheat on O.o); and redid the kitchen area, this time using some different swatches for the Get Together tile floors and walls and the kitchen appliances and counters from Cottage Living (looks good and is decently cheap). Again, here are some representative pictures showing what I accomplished, with an emphasis on that downstairs bathroom and kitchen –
Maybe I didn’t do a HECK of a lot, but it was a nice chill time just having fun designing some rooms and making the Gutknecht Bend build look even more wrecked. XD Tomorrow, though, it’s back to the Chill Valicer Save and back to the store to see if I can finally fill up those shelves once and for all!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – last day on the bike this week, with the next episode of Addison’s “Dine Out Reloaded” side series – “We are going to build this house from scratch! Dine Out (Part 4)!” Which had a very exciting beginning, thanks to what happened in yesterday’s HSY Breanne episode – namely, Addison and Hilary are now officially engaged, thanks to Addison calling their sister about the ring they found in Hilary’s bag! :D And not only that, they have a new house to build up for themselves, as James took some suggestions from the comments and had Addison buy the $0 house that he’d previously built in Del Sol Valley (made mostly of debug items, on a lot that, thanks to a glitch, didn’t cost anything), with the intent of turning it into a REAL house as the series went on. So that’s gonna be cool! :) Anyway, here’s how Addison’s episode went –
A) Having gotten their free under-construction house set up on their lot, they headed back to the restaurant, updated the menu with a bigger variety of more difficult items (now that Agatha’s a lot more skilled at her job), and opened for business! They had a pretty good day – the staff were as usual doing excellent, but James ran into some glitches where some Sims would just get stuck as Addison tried to interact with them, and James had to reset them and basically lose any chance of them getting a good review. Which was pretty shitty when it happened with a critic who was going to give a FIVE STAR review. Meh. At least the restaurant still had a good day and turned a bit of profit! And we got to see the very amusing sight of two Agatha Crumplebottom clones (as that was a bit of a problem with Cottage Living back in the day, multiple Agathas and Agneses spawning) taking a table as behind them the Agatha working as a chef prepared their order. XD
B) After hours, James set up a little stage for Addison to use to entertain guests with their guitar (hoping to get more money from tips), then cleaned out the household inventory because unfortunately all the plant produce (and some of the plants) had ended up in there. And there’s no easy way to pull them out of household inventory. . . Yeah, I feel you when that happens, James – it’s a bitch and I hate it.
C) With that all taken care of, the next morning, Addison had Hilary over for some fancy breakfast, so they could enthuse about the wedding and start setting up their life together. Which meant Hilary officially moving into the household! :) Hilary is a Geek, Creative, and Romantic, and her aspiration was Renaissance Sim – though, uh, there was a worrying glitch where the first milestone of the aspiration had no goals in it. O.o Nerd Brain was similarly afflicted (mostly because I think those aspirations have the same exact first milestone when it comes to goals). Hopefully that doesn’t portend bad things for the save. . . James elected to leave it alone for the time being and had Addison and Hilary visit their under-construction “house,” where he spent some cash on building them one empty room on the side of the lot. XD I mean, it’s a start!
D) And with that taken care of, it was back to the restaurant to open for the evening, with Addison jumping in as chef again and Hilary taking care of welcoming customers, checking on tables, and managing the employees – Agatha is good enough she no longer needs training, but Keto on the waitstaff is still trying to catch up. But they’re all good employees, and Hilary was liberal with the praise – especially to Addison. XD James also DID try to have Addison play guitar for everyone, but they either faced the wrong way or refused to go on the actual little stage James built for them. *sigh* Sims, man – they be fiddly!
But yeah, the episode ended with the restaurant closing for the day, having turned another profit (despite Addison struggling a little bit with some dishes – and also, somehow, pouring nectar). Next episode in THIS subseries is a wedding (in the restaurant no less), but first we gotta see Breanne purchase her warehouse digs. . .and even before THAT, I’ve got some building videos of his in mind for Sunday’s workout (the actual construction of the warehouse and his design for a cemetery for his Sims). Good stuff!
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got another page on Chapter 6, with Alice preparing to set off for her night at the museum. She thought that she would be set for this mission with just her knife, pistol with a few spare rounds, and the maps Victor made her, but then Wonderland reminded her of something else she needed – namely, blood. Yes, she got in a couple of good feeds at Grout’s, but she cried a good portion of it out in the shower at the end of the last chapter. :( Alice’s first thought was that she could hopefully find some guy on the street who wanted a good “necking” –
But then Victor was like “uh, I’m right here – and we both know I’m not sick with that plague that was going around very very recently.” Which Alice had to admit, was a very good point in favor of her feeding on him and not anyone else! She’s confirmed that he knows what he’s in for (namely, that he’s likely to be fairly woozy afterward), and he’s cool, so tomorrow she goes in for the bite! Which – is going to be a LITTLE more awkward than either of them anticipate, for, uh, reasons. . . XD
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check plus – only one Subs video meant I could get in a bonus –
A) First up, from the Watch Later, an OXBox list – “7 Creepiest Secrets Ever Found in Horror Games!” Mike, Jane, and Andy taking us through those creepy things that you might not encounter in horror games if you’re not looking. From disturbing giant one-armed trailer monsters lurking in the files of P. T., to a phone call to 911 resulting in just a lot of random screaming and horrible noises in Cry of Fear, to the worst one of all – discovering that the reversed whispers you can hear from ghosts in Phantasmagoria are in fact lines of dialogue from Bee Movie. You know, that movie where Jerry Seinfeld played a bee. *pause* Yeah, okay, maybe some of the secrets aren’t THAT creepy. XD
B) And then, from the Subs, the latest GrayStillPlays – “I found 100 ways to become a mafia king,” aka Gray plays Murder Mafia! This is basically the same as another game he played a while back, where you have to assassinate a king, steal his kingdom, then continue down the near-endless hallway dodging other attempts on your life from a variety of randomly-spawned characters (though a few actually DO have your best interests in mind) by turning around and looking at them at just the right moment, only, well, mafia-themed. In this one, you murder the Don of a crime family, and must make it to the end while avoiding being shot, stabbed, arrested, trampled by a random marching band, turned into a Chihuahua by a disguised witch, or killed by the scenery (seriously, Gray’s first death was due to a loose gargoyle head falling on him). There’s a few people where turning around is actually a bad thing – you can accidentally send your fealty-swearing bro and your kiss-of-eternal-life-giving wife to the dungeon, and if you get haunted by the ghost of the old Don, looking at him gets you possessed – but for the most part, you want to send every to the pit of despair. Gray got most of the endings, from getting thrown in jail for life to dying of old age to having a party with his wife and bro only to get assassinated. Just another goofy one-button game for Gray to enjoy dying in!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, hooray –
Valice Multiverse – Nothing going on here tonight, in stark contrast to earlier in the week! I put a video of moths trying to use their eye spots on their lower wings to threaten/intimidate their owner that a friend shared and the other set of “Valicer In The Dark” Not-Incorrect Quotes into the queue to keep things moving. :) Have to try and add “Valicer In The Dark” as a proper AU for RP purposes this weekend!
Victor Luvs Alice – Threw that vine compilation that Marie made for the Valicer trio plus her OC Madeline into my queue over here for Song Saturday, like I said I would. :) I also made a start on getting the pictures ready for the Chill Valicer Save update this week (the big Harvestfest update that introduced the kittens) – I’m through the morning chores and the Grand Breakfast, with the gang on the verge of hitting Brindleton Bay to get the pets check-ups. Hopefully I can finish that without issue tomorrow and get some starter drafts done at least!
Not too bad at all! Really helped that I didn't have five million things to answer on the RP tumblr, though, I will admit. And now it's coming up on time for me to wrap up the social thing and head to bed. Tomorrow's goals -- catch up on a bunch of tumblr stuff and try to get all the starter drafts sorted for the Chill Valicer Save update; get the Valicer trio back to their store and do the final shelf-filling push; write some more "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland;" and keep up with the Subs. All doable for a non-cleaning Saturday, I would hope! Night all!
Work – Quiet day, but fortunately not a drag – I did the GL, I updated the whiteboard calendar, I filled out a write-off form, I cleaned up pledge cards scans, I helped my coworkers look up some stuff, and I updated my various “here is how everything is going with these particular things” notes. *nods* And now I am out and home for three days, w000~ Hooray for long weekends!
Sims 4 – I was sure I wanted to play today (last half-day Friday and all, gotta take advantage of it), but I wasn’t fully sure what I wanted to do. Fortunately, after actually loading up the game, I decided it was a “fiddling around with builds” day and headed into my building save to do the following –
A) Putz around a little bit with my Gutknecht Bend VITD build! This is the version of my Gutknecht Bend build which is trashed and falling apart, as per its appearance in my “Valicer In The Dark AU.” Today’s goal was to make it look even more rundown and make it a little cheaper so, if I ever do do my VITD-themed challenge save, it MIGHT be affordable for my Valicer trio without me having to cheat. To that end, I deleted the dining table in the dining room (and scattered the chairs about, as per the description of the room in my actual “Home Sweet Lair” fic scene) and the selling table outside; painted the yard with the “Scratchy In Patches” terrain paint to suggest a lawn that had mostly died off; widened the fake “road” on the side of the lot by a tile so it was flush with the actual lot boundary; moved the debug walls and post-box thing over to the edge of the lot on the other side (as I decided I wanted that “yard space” to work with); took a few chunks out of the back patio with the sledgehammer tool (and then painted in the gaps with dirt); made the sewer basement area a little bit smaller (as that sewer pool is probably the most expensive bit of the lot); and added some more cracks and cobwebs around the shop. Here are some representative pictures showing what the downstairs is looking like now (as I didn’t do pretty much anything with the tower bit) –
B) Play around a little bit with Havisham House! This is one of the EA starter homes in Windenburg, where my Gutknecht Bend VITD build is currently living, and I gutted it during a previous building session because it looked awful. I decided I might as well have some fun redoing it a bit today, and proceeded to make the interior stairs to the second level smaller (as the doublewide stairs just looked too BIG for such a small house); make the upstairs walls shorter (because the medium-height walls were just too big to work with); repainted the interior with a nicer wall paint/plaster and make sure all the exterior wall pants matched; replaced the taller windows with wider ones in the same style (looks better on the walls both inside (not clipping the crown molding) and outside (didn’t look like they were too low to the ground) – AND they were cheaper to boot); added in a nice wooden trash bin outside; properly boxed in the area where the Sims team had stuck in a built-in wardrobe next to the KITCHEN for some reason and turned it into a small half-bath (toilet and sink) with Get Together tile floors and walls and Vampires fixtures (discovered also that you can apparently only access the slots to put items on the Vampires sink if you have the “moveobjects” cheat on O.o); and redid the kitchen area, this time using some different swatches for the Get Together tile floors and walls and the kitchen appliances and counters from Cottage Living (looks good and is decently cheap). Again, here are some representative pictures showing what I accomplished, with an emphasis on that downstairs bathroom and kitchen –
Maybe I didn’t do a HECK of a lot, but it was a nice chill time just having fun designing some rooms and making the Gutknecht Bend build look even more wrecked. XD Tomorrow, though, it’s back to the Chill Valicer Save and back to the store to see if I can finally fill up those shelves once and for all!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – last day on the bike this week, with the next episode of Addison’s “Dine Out Reloaded” side series – “We are going to build this house from scratch! Dine Out (Part 4)!” Which had a very exciting beginning, thanks to what happened in yesterday’s HSY Breanne episode – namely, Addison and Hilary are now officially engaged, thanks to Addison calling their sister about the ring they found in Hilary’s bag! :D And not only that, they have a new house to build up for themselves, as James took some suggestions from the comments and had Addison buy the $0 house that he’d previously built in Del Sol Valley (made mostly of debug items, on a lot that, thanks to a glitch, didn’t cost anything), with the intent of turning it into a REAL house as the series went on. So that’s gonna be cool! :) Anyway, here’s how Addison’s episode went –
A) Having gotten their free under-construction house set up on their lot, they headed back to the restaurant, updated the menu with a bigger variety of more difficult items (now that Agatha’s a lot more skilled at her job), and opened for business! They had a pretty good day – the staff were as usual doing excellent, but James ran into some glitches where some Sims would just get stuck as Addison tried to interact with them, and James had to reset them and basically lose any chance of them getting a good review. Which was pretty shitty when it happened with a critic who was going to give a FIVE STAR review. Meh. At least the restaurant still had a good day and turned a bit of profit! And we got to see the very amusing sight of two Agatha Crumplebottom clones (as that was a bit of a problem with Cottage Living back in the day, multiple Agathas and Agneses spawning) taking a table as behind them the Agatha working as a chef prepared their order. XD
B) After hours, James set up a little stage for Addison to use to entertain guests with their guitar (hoping to get more money from tips), then cleaned out the household inventory because unfortunately all the plant produce (and some of the plants) had ended up in there. And there’s no easy way to pull them out of household inventory. . . Yeah, I feel you when that happens, James – it’s a bitch and I hate it.
C) With that all taken care of, the next morning, Addison had Hilary over for some fancy breakfast, so they could enthuse about the wedding and start setting up their life together. Which meant Hilary officially moving into the household! :) Hilary is a Geek, Creative, and Romantic, and her aspiration was Renaissance Sim – though, uh, there was a worrying glitch where the first milestone of the aspiration had no goals in it. O.o Nerd Brain was similarly afflicted (mostly because I think those aspirations have the same exact first milestone when it comes to goals). Hopefully that doesn’t portend bad things for the save. . . James elected to leave it alone for the time being and had Addison and Hilary visit their under-construction “house,” where he spent some cash on building them one empty room on the side of the lot. XD I mean, it’s a start!
D) And with that taken care of, it was back to the restaurant to open for the evening, with Addison jumping in as chef again and Hilary taking care of welcoming customers, checking on tables, and managing the employees – Agatha is good enough she no longer needs training, but Keto on the waitstaff is still trying to catch up. But they’re all good employees, and Hilary was liberal with the praise – especially to Addison. XD James also DID try to have Addison play guitar for everyone, but they either faced the wrong way or refused to go on the actual little stage James built for them. *sigh* Sims, man – they be fiddly!
But yeah, the episode ended with the restaurant closing for the day, having turned another profit (despite Addison struggling a little bit with some dishes – and also, somehow, pouring nectar). Next episode in THIS subseries is a wedding (in the restaurant no less), but first we gotta see Breanne purchase her warehouse digs. . .and even before THAT, I’ve got some building videos of his in mind for Sunday’s workout (the actual construction of the warehouse and his design for a cemetery for his Sims). Good stuff!
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got another page on Chapter 6, with Alice preparing to set off for her night at the museum. She thought that she would be set for this mission with just her knife, pistol with a few spare rounds, and the maps Victor made her, but then Wonderland reminded her of something else she needed – namely, blood. Yes, she got in a couple of good feeds at Grout’s, but she cried a good portion of it out in the shower at the end of the last chapter. :( Alice’s first thought was that she could hopefully find some guy on the street who wanted a good “necking” –
But then Victor was like “uh, I’m right here – and we both know I’m not sick with that plague that was going around very very recently.” Which Alice had to admit, was a very good point in favor of her feeding on him and not anyone else! She’s confirmed that he knows what he’s in for (namely, that he’s likely to be fairly woozy afterward), and he’s cool, so tomorrow she goes in for the bite! Which – is going to be a LITTLE more awkward than either of them anticipate, for, uh, reasons. . . XD
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check plus – only one Subs video meant I could get in a bonus –
A) First up, from the Watch Later, an OXBox list – “7 Creepiest Secrets Ever Found in Horror Games!” Mike, Jane, and Andy taking us through those creepy things that you might not encounter in horror games if you’re not looking. From disturbing giant one-armed trailer monsters lurking in the files of P. T., to a phone call to 911 resulting in just a lot of random screaming and horrible noises in Cry of Fear, to the worst one of all – discovering that the reversed whispers you can hear from ghosts in Phantasmagoria are in fact lines of dialogue from Bee Movie. You know, that movie where Jerry Seinfeld played a bee. *pause* Yeah, okay, maybe some of the secrets aren’t THAT creepy. XD
B) And then, from the Subs, the latest GrayStillPlays – “I found 100 ways to become a mafia king,” aka Gray plays Murder Mafia! This is basically the same as another game he played a while back, where you have to assassinate a king, steal his kingdom, then continue down the near-endless hallway dodging other attempts on your life from a variety of randomly-spawned characters (though a few actually DO have your best interests in mind) by turning around and looking at them at just the right moment, only, well, mafia-themed. In this one, you murder the Don of a crime family, and must make it to the end while avoiding being shot, stabbed, arrested, trampled by a random marching band, turned into a Chihuahua by a disguised witch, or killed by the scenery (seriously, Gray’s first death was due to a loose gargoyle head falling on him). There’s a few people where turning around is actually a bad thing – you can accidentally send your fealty-swearing bro and your kiss-of-eternal-life-giving wife to the dungeon, and if you get haunted by the ghost of the old Don, looking at him gets you possessed – but for the most part, you want to send every to the pit of despair. Gray got most of the endings, from getting thrown in jail for life to dying of old age to having a party with his wife and bro only to get assassinated. Just another goofy one-button game for Gray to enjoy dying in!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, hooray –
Valice Multiverse – Nothing going on here tonight, in stark contrast to earlier in the week! I put a video of moths trying to use their eye spots on their lower wings to threaten/intimidate their owner that a friend shared and the other set of “Valicer In The Dark” Not-Incorrect Quotes into the queue to keep things moving. :) Have to try and add “Valicer In The Dark” as a proper AU for RP purposes this weekend!
Victor Luvs Alice – Threw that vine compilation that Marie made for the Valicer trio plus her OC Madeline into my queue over here for Song Saturday, like I said I would. :) I also made a start on getting the pictures ready for the Chill Valicer Save update this week (the big Harvestfest update that introduced the kittens) – I’m through the morning chores and the Grand Breakfast, with the gang on the verge of hitting Brindleton Bay to get the pets check-ups. Hopefully I can finish that without issue tomorrow and get some starter drafts done at least!
Not too bad at all! Really helped that I didn't have five million things to answer on the RP tumblr, though, I will admit. And now it's coming up on time for me to wrap up the social thing and head to bed. Tomorrow's goals -- catch up on a bunch of tumblr stuff and try to get all the starter drafts sorted for the Chill Valicer Save update; get the Valicer trio back to their store and do the final shelf-filling push; write some more "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland;" and keep up with the Subs. All doable for a non-cleaning Saturday, I would hope! Night all!
