Okay Saturday
Sep. 16th, 2023 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThe weather never got too bad (though it was FREAKING windy for most of the day), and I accomplished pretty much everything on my to-do list, but there were some bad moments (mostly related to me trying to upload pictures places and my mouse's stupid double-clicking bug making things difficult, plus a weird moment at dinner where Dad nearly choked on his water) that kept it from being truly "good." Meh. *shakes head* But as stated, I got everything I wanted to get done, done, so. . .
Tumblr: I had a pretty good day on Victor Luvs Alice today – caught up on the dash this morning, then finished cleaning up my Chill Valicer Save pictures for the next update (only 60 this week!) and got all those posts started in the drafts. Then, just now, I went through all my tracked tags over there so I’d be all caught up on those! So that’s good. :)
As for Valice Multiverse – really nothing happening on there at the moment. Back to quiet Saturdays, it seems. I’ll find something to reblog before I go to bed, I’m sure.
Sims 4: I was still in “building mode” this weekend, with my focus today being on doing some more with my “Community Conservatory” community space lot! Spent about an hour and a half in the game working on the conservatory in both its “empty, kinda wrecked” community space form, and it’s “nice refurbished garden” community garden form –
Community Space – Having been reminded by the game when I set up the other forms of this lot that Sims need bathrooms, I quickly made a little outhouse in the right-hand front corner with a toilet and sink inside for visitors to use! The Spooky Stuff wooden walls and floors paired with the mossy roof pattern from Werewolves made it look appropriately aged, and I used the sink and toilet from Vampires inside because, short of having a Sim BUILD a wooden toilet for it, that’s the most appropriately old-timey toilet we have. Came out pretty well, and I saved the room to my Library for later use. :) I spent the rest of my time on this version of the lot making it look kind of old and decrepit – painting the grass outside to look old and scraggly, adding in a worn dirt path to the door (THAT took more time than I want to admit! Matching the dirt color to the one around the nearby road was a bit tough), dirtying up the buildings a bit, that sort of thing. The outhouse ended up getting a bunch of scratches and various water stains, along with a couple of cobwebs, while the main conservatory building got cobwebs, cracks in the floors – AND cracks in the walls, positioned in such a way as to look like the windows were cracked! Discovered something interesting about this too – while you need “moveobjects” on to place the Vampires cracks on walls covered by windows, the cracks that came with Jungle Adventures and Werewolves place over windows no problem (though, admittedly, the only one from the Werewolves set that looks right is the punch-style damage). But I got them placed, and was able to get more or less the look I wanted – though I worry some of the cracks are too faint now. Ah well, I can always fiddle a bit more with this. . .be VERY useful if they just had “cracked” window designs in general, though! Meh. Here’s a general view of what the “grungy” version of the lot looks like – you might be able to see some of the cracks I placed in the windows!
Community Garden – I plopped down my pre-saved outhouse room here to fulfill the bathroom requirements, then got to work trying to figure out the layout of the space and what I wanted to put in it! (And also resetting the lot traits, because you can actually have DIFFERENT lot traits for each separate version of the lot! Holy cow! O.O But my intention is for this place to be mainly a garden, so I kept the “Great Soil” and “Natural Light” traits I assigned to it before. Maybe each different version of the lot can have a third different trait?) I ended up putting all the square floor planters – you know the type – in the main octagonal room, kind of framing the various archways into the entrance hall and the two wings. The left wing ended up full of vertical planters, while the right wing ended up being the home of a bunch of insect farms. I also stuck a bee box in the middle of the regular planters – hey, if we’re gonna have the other insect farms, we might as well have a beehive, right? Once I had the layout, I started look into decorations and lighting – it’s a bit hard to get that sorted when your main building is almost all windows, but I found some wall lights that had the right vibe (same ones I used in the “sewer” in my Gutknecht Bend VITD update) and put them up all around where I could find some space, and I focused mainly on decorations that sat on the ground – a cute little flower cart, a whole repotting bench, the bathtub succulents from StrangerVille, that sort of thing. I DO have the wall-mounted pitchfork and such currently up on one of the diagonal walls, but I’m think I’m gonna have to move it, as it IS right on a window, and – yeah. Just looks a LITTLE bit weird. I also threw a couple woven rugs into the front entrance and the outhouse to make them look a bit nicer (outhouse also got some pictures for a little color), painted the roof of the front entrance with a brick pattern so it wasn’t plain yellowy stone, put in a proper stone path to the door, and added a bunch of flowers to the outside (was going to add a tree, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted one or not – it felt more likely that Sims would plant flowers around the building!). It’s not exactly DONE, but it’s in a pretty good place right now! :) Behold the fruits of my various labors –
Nice, right? Still needs some tweaking, but I can do that later – I mean, we DO have another patch coming up fast thanks to the new Home Chef Hustle Stuff Pack coming out at the end of the month, soooo. . . Do intend to do some actual PLAYING next weekend, though – want to see what, if anything, I can achieve with the Chill Valicer Save store, and maybe get through Winterfest while I’m at it.
Writing: Got another page done on “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” – Alice followed the scream she heard going down into the basement to its source (a tricky business that involved her falling onto some cabinets and then crawling around under the floor to get around a blocked hallway), only to arrive too late to save the screamer from being splatted. :( She was naturally not very happy about this. She’s also not happy about the fact that Cheshire has warned her NOT to immediately try to kill the culprit now that she’s found them – a strange woman hanging out in what seems to be the hospital’s morgue – but he’s got a point in that “destruction pairs better with permission.” Basically, while she COULD kill the woman now, it’s better to get LaCroix’s permission to do it first. Fortunately for her, said woman is Pisha, and she’s much more interested in talking than fighting, at least for now. . .we’ll see how Alice responds to what she has to say next time!
YouTube: Despite another night of slowdown, I was able to watch today’s GrayStillPlays this evening – “Cars vs 1000 Speedbumps in GTA 5!” Another Alex Torture board, focusing on unusual speedbumps this time around! We had Landscaping Speedbumps (two bumps made of rebar, one of barrels, one of piles of old bricks); Waste Speedbumps (alternating old tires, busted-up concrete, sand piles, and more busted-up concrete); Balls Speedbumps (a double line of bouncy soccer balls followed by a single line of same – they didn’t shoot out from under Gray but they definitely moved enough to be noticeable); Growing Grinder Speedbumps (a long stretch of weird round grinder-like bumps that slowly but surely grew in size), Speening Speedbumps (a set of spinning speedbumps made of those yellow-and-black caution platforms, ranging from a single slow-spinning platform to a full-speed sideways blender at the end); the Slowdown Speedbump On Drugs (a giant speedbump made up of a bunch of mini-walls covered in stop sticks, so Gray couldn’t just ramp them); and the Just Your Regular, Middle-Of-The-Road Stalking Speedbump (a large speedbump that followed Gray and constantly tried to get in front of him so he always had the speedbump underneath him). Oh, and to just twist the knife, the entire course was TIMED – Gray had to complete it in a minute and thirty, otherwise he had no hope of reaching the win. Gray tried a lot of cars – the bumper car got farther than he expected but couldn’t get past the last of the landscaping speedbumps; the “2 AMEND” camo car with roof-mounted weapons fell victim to its own mortar shots when Gray tried to use them to clear the balls; the motorcycle did well but was felled by the spinning bumps; the RC car nearly cheated the board but then hit the final spinning bump and got POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL (aka it glitched out so bad you could just see the tires vibrating in the road); and the firetruck-turned-branded-bus, Dragur, and Sherp all made it to the stop-sticks-speedbump but just couldn’t climb it without speed. So, of course, you know what Gray had to turn to.
The WASTELANDER, baby! As Gray noted, this thing is like a cheat vehicle when it comes to bumpy terrain, and this was no different, getting over pretty much all of the bumps no problem – even the absurdly tall stop-sticks bump was no issue. The only one that caused Gray any grief was the final stalking speedbump as it did its best to throw him off the side and slow him down, and once he figured out how to get over it and outrun it juuuust enough so that all it could do was occasionally smack his back tires? Yeah, he got the win. *pumps* Wastelander supremacy, baby. :D
So yeah, productive day if nothing else -- AND I made myself another candidate for an OT3 Valicer icon out of some screenshots from the "family reunion" Chill Valicer save "episode." XD So hopefully I can pick one and actually upload it so I have a full set again. I want to show my Valicer love over here, damn it. As it stands, though, I"m doing the social thing, so I shall be off. Tomorrow is Fallout Friday, so the plan is to play Fallout 4 and at least get Victor and Ada to the Library to start clearing it out (Victor may even break out the flare gun to summon some Minutemen!); update the Playthrough Progression appropriately; get as much done on the Chill Valicer Save update for this week as I can; and keep up with GrayStillPlays and Jon of Many A True Nerd (more Mayor Bob, yay!). Hopefully this is all doable -- keep your fingers crossed! Night all!
Tumblr: I had a pretty good day on Victor Luvs Alice today – caught up on the dash this morning, then finished cleaning up my Chill Valicer Save pictures for the next update (only 60 this week!) and got all those posts started in the drafts. Then, just now, I went through all my tracked tags over there so I’d be all caught up on those! So that’s good. :)
As for Valice Multiverse – really nothing happening on there at the moment. Back to quiet Saturdays, it seems. I’ll find something to reblog before I go to bed, I’m sure.
Sims 4: I was still in “building mode” this weekend, with my focus today being on doing some more with my “Community Conservatory” community space lot! Spent about an hour and a half in the game working on the conservatory in both its “empty, kinda wrecked” community space form, and it’s “nice refurbished garden” community garden form –
Community Space – Having been reminded by the game when I set up the other forms of this lot that Sims need bathrooms, I quickly made a little outhouse in the right-hand front corner with a toilet and sink inside for visitors to use! The Spooky Stuff wooden walls and floors paired with the mossy roof pattern from Werewolves made it look appropriately aged, and I used the sink and toilet from Vampires inside because, short of having a Sim BUILD a wooden toilet for it, that’s the most appropriately old-timey toilet we have. Came out pretty well, and I saved the room to my Library for later use. :) I spent the rest of my time on this version of the lot making it look kind of old and decrepit – painting the grass outside to look old and scraggly, adding in a worn dirt path to the door (THAT took more time than I want to admit! Matching the dirt color to the one around the nearby road was a bit tough), dirtying up the buildings a bit, that sort of thing. The outhouse ended up getting a bunch of scratches and various water stains, along with a couple of cobwebs, while the main conservatory building got cobwebs, cracks in the floors – AND cracks in the walls, positioned in such a way as to look like the windows were cracked! Discovered something interesting about this too – while you need “moveobjects” on to place the Vampires cracks on walls covered by windows, the cracks that came with Jungle Adventures and Werewolves place over windows no problem (though, admittedly, the only one from the Werewolves set that looks right is the punch-style damage). But I got them placed, and was able to get more or less the look I wanted – though I worry some of the cracks are too faint now. Ah well, I can always fiddle a bit more with this. . .be VERY useful if they just had “cracked” window designs in general, though! Meh. Here’s a general view of what the “grungy” version of the lot looks like – you might be able to see some of the cracks I placed in the windows!
Community Garden – I plopped down my pre-saved outhouse room here to fulfill the bathroom requirements, then got to work trying to figure out the layout of the space and what I wanted to put in it! (And also resetting the lot traits, because you can actually have DIFFERENT lot traits for each separate version of the lot! Holy cow! O.O But my intention is for this place to be mainly a garden, so I kept the “Great Soil” and “Natural Light” traits I assigned to it before. Maybe each different version of the lot can have a third different trait?) I ended up putting all the square floor planters – you know the type – in the main octagonal room, kind of framing the various archways into the entrance hall and the two wings. The left wing ended up full of vertical planters, while the right wing ended up being the home of a bunch of insect farms. I also stuck a bee box in the middle of the regular planters – hey, if we’re gonna have the other insect farms, we might as well have a beehive, right? Once I had the layout, I started look into decorations and lighting – it’s a bit hard to get that sorted when your main building is almost all windows, but I found some wall lights that had the right vibe (same ones I used in the “sewer” in my Gutknecht Bend VITD update) and put them up all around where I could find some space, and I focused mainly on decorations that sat on the ground – a cute little flower cart, a whole repotting bench, the bathtub succulents from StrangerVille, that sort of thing. I DO have the wall-mounted pitchfork and such currently up on one of the diagonal walls, but I’m think I’m gonna have to move it, as it IS right on a window, and – yeah. Just looks a LITTLE bit weird. I also threw a couple woven rugs into the front entrance and the outhouse to make them look a bit nicer (outhouse also got some pictures for a little color), painted the roof of the front entrance with a brick pattern so it wasn’t plain yellowy stone, put in a proper stone path to the door, and added a bunch of flowers to the outside (was going to add a tree, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted one or not – it felt more likely that Sims would plant flowers around the building!). It’s not exactly DONE, but it’s in a pretty good place right now! :) Behold the fruits of my various labors –
Nice, right? Still needs some tweaking, but I can do that later – I mean, we DO have another patch coming up fast thanks to the new Home Chef Hustle Stuff Pack coming out at the end of the month, soooo. . . Do intend to do some actual PLAYING next weekend, though – want to see what, if anything, I can achieve with the Chill Valicer Save store, and maybe get through Winterfest while I’m at it.
Writing: Got another page done on “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” – Alice followed the scream she heard going down into the basement to its source (a tricky business that involved her falling onto some cabinets and then crawling around under the floor to get around a blocked hallway), only to arrive too late to save the screamer from being splatted. :( She was naturally not very happy about this. She’s also not happy about the fact that Cheshire has warned her NOT to immediately try to kill the culprit now that she’s found them – a strange woman hanging out in what seems to be the hospital’s morgue – but he’s got a point in that “destruction pairs better with permission.” Basically, while she COULD kill the woman now, it’s better to get LaCroix’s permission to do it first. Fortunately for her, said woman is Pisha, and she’s much more interested in talking than fighting, at least for now. . .we’ll see how Alice responds to what she has to say next time!
YouTube: Despite another night of slowdown, I was able to watch today’s GrayStillPlays this evening – “Cars vs 1000 Speedbumps in GTA 5!” Another Alex Torture board, focusing on unusual speedbumps this time around! We had Landscaping Speedbumps (two bumps made of rebar, one of barrels, one of piles of old bricks); Waste Speedbumps (alternating old tires, busted-up concrete, sand piles, and more busted-up concrete); Balls Speedbumps (a double line of bouncy soccer balls followed by a single line of same – they didn’t shoot out from under Gray but they definitely moved enough to be noticeable); Growing Grinder Speedbumps (a long stretch of weird round grinder-like bumps that slowly but surely grew in size), Speening Speedbumps (a set of spinning speedbumps made of those yellow-and-black caution platforms, ranging from a single slow-spinning platform to a full-speed sideways blender at the end); the Slowdown Speedbump On Drugs (a giant speedbump made up of a bunch of mini-walls covered in stop sticks, so Gray couldn’t just ramp them); and the Just Your Regular, Middle-Of-The-Road Stalking Speedbump (a large speedbump that followed Gray and constantly tried to get in front of him so he always had the speedbump underneath him). Oh, and to just twist the knife, the entire course was TIMED – Gray had to complete it in a minute and thirty, otherwise he had no hope of reaching the win. Gray tried a lot of cars – the bumper car got farther than he expected but couldn’t get past the last of the landscaping speedbumps; the “2 AMEND” camo car with roof-mounted weapons fell victim to its own mortar shots when Gray tried to use them to clear the balls; the motorcycle did well but was felled by the spinning bumps; the RC car nearly cheated the board but then hit the final spinning bump and got POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL (aka it glitched out so bad you could just see the tires vibrating in the road); and the firetruck-turned-branded-bus, Dragur, and Sherp all made it to the stop-sticks-speedbump but just couldn’t climb it without speed. So, of course, you know what Gray had to turn to.
The WASTELANDER, baby! As Gray noted, this thing is like a cheat vehicle when it comes to bumpy terrain, and this was no different, getting over pretty much all of the bumps no problem – even the absurdly tall stop-sticks bump was no issue. The only one that caused Gray any grief was the final stalking speedbump as it did its best to throw him off the side and slow him down, and once he figured out how to get over it and outrun it juuuust enough so that all it could do was occasionally smack his back tires? Yeah, he got the win. *pumps* Wastelander supremacy, baby. :D
So yeah, productive day if nothing else -- AND I made myself another candidate for an OT3 Valicer icon out of some screenshots from the "family reunion" Chill Valicer save "episode." XD So hopefully I can pick one and actually upload it so I have a full set again. I want to show my Valicer love over here, damn it. As it stands, though, I"m doing the social thing, so I shall be off. Tomorrow is Fallout Friday, so the plan is to play Fallout 4 and at least get Victor and Ada to the Library to start clearing it out (Victor may even break out the flare gun to summon some Minutemen!); update the Playthrough Progression appropriately; get as much done on the Chill Valicer Save update for this week as I can; and keep up with GrayStillPlays and Jon of Many A True Nerd (more Mayor Bob, yay!). Hopefully this is all doable -- keep your fingers crossed! Night all!
