Meh Tuesday
Jan. 23rd, 2024 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickWeather wasn't great -- chilly, and a bit rainy/snowy on my drive home -- and work wasn't exactly fun, but I got everything I needed to get done, done:
Work – “Meh” day, as stated – one of my coworkers was back, so I had someone to help with the phones and checks and stuff, but I ran into yet more credit card nonsense during the day, and spent a good portion of it stressed out over a QC file I couldn’t make reconcile (fortunately we were able to track down the problem by the end of the day). At least today there was no bullshit in the parking lot, and the traffic was just normal awful, not extra awful. *shrug* We’ll see what tomorrow brings – hopefully not a lot of slippery roads, as we’re supposed to get some wet snow overnight. . .
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure: Deadlands – “Dead Man’s Worth!” Which I should mention now is Part I of II. . . Anyway, having left the driver of the stage propped up in his jerky haze on his seat, with a note asking him to stick around, Garnet, Nate, and Delacey strolled into town to take the measure of the place, and confirm that the statue they could see was of Ben Bellows, their target (it was indeed). Andy informed them that the townsfolk did not look very happy, and commented that the fear level was about a four.
Johnny’s eyes bugged out, and they announced that they, Johnny, were scared. O.O Because apparently, a Fear Level of Four is a pretty big fucking deal in this game – this town has had so much bad shit happen in it that it’s attracted all sorts of bad supernatural attention, and now it is utterly steeped in misery. Or, as Nate put it to Delacy in-character, this place is a real shithole. XD With that in mind, Nate suggested that they somehow lure Bellows out of his home, instead of trying to murder him via pretending to be jerky salespeople. Delacy said that was the second or third smart thing Nate had said today – Nate was quite chuffed. XD Garnet suggested they stake out the town and watch the comings and goings from the manor house up on the rise, and thus the trio headed to the local saloon, the Jewel, to get a room facing the street. Delacy, in his usual “tough kid” manner, strode straight to the bar and announced they wanted one room for the three of them, and the bartender told them it would be a dollar, up-front –
Because, of course, they were here for the contest, weren’t they? Really the only reason out-of-towners come in. Garnet was promptly like, “Yes, yes we are” (despite Delacy’s confusion), while Nate took advantage of his doddering old man nature to get the guy to explain the contest to them by pretending he’d already forgotten what it was all about. As it turns out, so many people have come to Dead Man’s Worth to try and kill Ben Bellows that he’s made it into an official fucking contest – every so often, anyone who wants to murder him can come in and enter themselves in a quickdraw contest, going up against each other and Bellows (who fought as a regular contestant). The bartender himself was actually a contestant, long ago, looking for revenge against Bellows for killing all his buddies and stealing the gold they’d found – Bellows shot him about six or seven times, then gave him a choice – get shot six or seven more times, or run the saloon. The guy chose running the saloon, and said that he knew his place now. Garnet did a Notice roll to see if he was under some sort of supernatural compulsion – a success let her know that no, this guy was just so beaten down and broken living under Bellows, he’d come to believe he didn’t deserve any better. Not so much “creepy” as “extremely depressing.” :( However, the contest offered them an excellent and legitimate way to off Bellows, and so the gang took the room (which was thoroughly unremarkable, as per Andy, despite Luke and Johnny trying to get him to make it remarkable), with Delacy and Nate staying upstairs to watch the road and see if anything interesting happened and Garnet going back downstairs to see if she could get some intel via playing poker. She attracted the attention of a coughing man at the window of the bar in a red waistcoat, who came over and played a hand with her (with the bartender serving as dealer) – Garnet asked what his deal was, and as it turns out, this fellow (Slim, as we learned later), only had three months to live on account of a bad case of TB, so he thought it might be fun to go out against Bellows instead of coughing himself to death in a sanitarium. He asked Garnet what she thought her odds were – Garnet assured him that she and her friends came to win, only for Slim to point out that everyone in the cemetery over the way had come to win as well. Garnet had faith in her companions, though, and they played out the hand – which Garnet lost, even after spending a benny to reroll. Fortunately, they’d completely forgotten to talk about stakes, so Garnet quickly bowed out before the question of betting for actual money came up. XD
Meanwhile, upstairs, Delacy’s attempt to ask Nate more about getting people to do what he wanted without shooting them had derailed into Nate talking about how he lost a footrace with a coyote that had been taught to walk on its hind legs. XD Fortunately his attempt to ignore the story (and its lesson of “ask questions before you shoot” by concentrating hard on the street below bore fruit with a good notice roll, and he became aware of a lot of men in dark dusters and hats milling around, with one guy even on the roof of a nearby building, holding a repeater rifle. Delacy pointed them out to Nate, and the latter wondered if they might be Bellows’s bodyguards. . .
But then the announcement came from below that it was time to sign up for the contest. An eager Delacy raced down like it was Christmas morning to throw his metaphorical hat into the metaphorical ring – Garnet attempted to talk him down, since, you know, he’s only thirteen and she doesn’t particularly want to see him get shot to death, only to discover Nate entered himself while she wasn’t looking. XD Delacy was annoyed because the nearby chalkboard indicated this was a bracket elimination contest, and they might now have to face each other, but Nate made it clear that he wouldn’t hold it against Delacy if he had to shoot him. XD Delacy thus scrambled over to the bartender and got his name put in – Garnet was like “surely even BELLOWS wouldn’t shoot a kid,” but – despite the bartender’s personal trepidation about Delacy’s age – the thirteen-year-old was put in, and everyone cheered. XD
And then promptly STOPPED cheering as Bellows himself showed up, with practically an army of armed guards, and brought the mood RIGHT down by swanning around being a creepy, smug bastard. He entered his name with great ceremony, showed off the prize – a chest full of gold nuggets, worth several hundred dollars – then ordered the bartender to draw the names before heading off. The brackets were thus drawn – Garnet’s new coughing friend Slim against frontierswoman Hattie; Rosa, a woman in a smart black jacket, against Big Bill, a convict the Sheriff had dragged in earlier; Delacy against Rex, a fellow in a blinding white suit and hat with a lariat –
And Nate against fucking Bellows himself. Nate was extremely pleased by this. XD Garnet asked Nate if he had ANY experience with this kind of shooting, with Nate assuring her that he knew his way around a gun thanks to years of hunting (and refusing to understand that the two shooting skillsets were NOT the same), while Delacy (who’d been more concerned if Victoria would be mad if THEY weren’t specifically the ones to kill Bellows – Nate assured him that she probably only cared about getting proof of the guy’s death, and anyway he’d be shooting him soon, so moot point) decided to rile up the crowd for fun. XD I left it with Delacy asking the bartender when the contest would start – apparently 6 AM the next morning was the first round (Delacy, a farm boy, was disgusted, considering the day half-over by that point). We’ll see how said round goes, and how Nate and Delacy fare, tomorrow!
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice has concluded her visit with Strauss and (at his encouragement) is on her way to The Last Round to have a chat with Nines and his Anarchs! Though not after evaluating how trustworthy Strauss is (he’s not an IMMEDIATE risk, but Cheshire warned that his loyalties always lie with his chantry first and foremost) and noticing some unusual graffiti on a nearby house. . . No time to think about it, though – she has to chase a Rabbit to the loudest bar in L.A. XD (Seriously, how does anyone THINK inside The Last Round, it’s my least-favorite bar to visit in-game because of its music. . .)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – another GrayStillPlays-only day, with “I upgraded cavemen into gods,” aka Gray plays Age Of War! This is a browser game where you go up against the computer (playing various off-brand historical figures, such as “Brom the Basher” and “Zander The Great” and “Gongas Kang”), and have to destroy said off-brand historical figure’s base before they destroy yours. The main way to destroy the base is to send wave after wave of various guys against it, while the main way to defend your own base is to stack various turrets on it. It’s called Age of War because, as you go through each round with each opponent, you earn XP which you can use to level your forces through various historical ages – starting with cavemen wielding clubs and riding dinosaurs, through knights riding horses and wielding crossbows, to Renaissance men with fancy swords and hand-held cannons, to modern tanks and soldiers with knives, to finally super soldiers with laser guns. Gray’s initial strategy against the first few opponents was to just throw as many high-ranking guys of whatever era he’d progressed to at the problem until they finally overwhelmed the enemy forces (helped by whatever the era’s special power was – ranging from an erupting volcano, to a faith shield for his men, to a straight up orbital laser), but once he reached Gongas Kang, he had to change things up – mostly because that guy STARTS with knights while Gray was stuck with cavemen. That is when he learned the value of turrets for protecting his base, and for earning more money to unlock more and better turrets. XD By the end of the video, he had a variety of powerful ion cannons on his space base preventing anyone from getting anywhere near it, and was able to finally defeat Gongas by sending a super soldier over to his base to beat it to death with his gun. XD Game’s “hard mode” officially defeated, and another amusing video in the can! XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, hooray –
Victor Luvs Alice – Got my five-part Chill Valicer Save queued up for tomorrow, along with some A:MR fanart for Thursday and some CB fanart for Friday! Still gotta pick a Song Saturday, but we’ll figure that out upon the morrow.
Valice Multiverse – One anon ask with a conversation between two people studying for a test – one having brought notes, the other an accordion. XD I had my High School!Alice overhear and tell Smiler she’s glad they only play guitar, only for Smiler to admit they also noodle around on the drums. . . XD Hey, it’s something! Plus I found a link to Mimoto-Sims’s Patreon while browsing the “american mcgee’s alice” tag over there, and as it turns out, she extracted and converted Alice’s London dress from the game! I only have someone’s short-sleeved variant in my game currently, so I grabbed that right away. :) Now she’ll have her proper London fit!
So that was all good, at least! And now I have to go and get some more sleep because I have to do it all again tomorrow. Meh. Night all!
Work – “Meh” day, as stated – one of my coworkers was back, so I had someone to help with the phones and checks and stuff, but I ran into yet more credit card nonsense during the day, and spent a good portion of it stressed out over a QC file I couldn’t make reconcile (fortunately we were able to track down the problem by the end of the day). At least today there was no bullshit in the parking lot, and the traffic was just normal awful, not extra awful. *shrug* We’ll see what tomorrow brings – hopefully not a lot of slippery roads, as we’re supposed to get some wet snow overnight. . .
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure: Deadlands – “Dead Man’s Worth!” Which I should mention now is Part I of II. . . Anyway, having left the driver of the stage propped up in his jerky haze on his seat, with a note asking him to stick around, Garnet, Nate, and Delacey strolled into town to take the measure of the place, and confirm that the statue they could see was of Ben Bellows, their target (it was indeed). Andy informed them that the townsfolk did not look very happy, and commented that the fear level was about a four.
Johnny’s eyes bugged out, and they announced that they, Johnny, were scared. O.O Because apparently, a Fear Level of Four is a pretty big fucking deal in this game – this town has had so much bad shit happen in it that it’s attracted all sorts of bad supernatural attention, and now it is utterly steeped in misery. Or, as Nate put it to Delacy in-character, this place is a real shithole. XD With that in mind, Nate suggested that they somehow lure Bellows out of his home, instead of trying to murder him via pretending to be jerky salespeople. Delacy said that was the second or third smart thing Nate had said today – Nate was quite chuffed. XD Garnet suggested they stake out the town and watch the comings and goings from the manor house up on the rise, and thus the trio headed to the local saloon, the Jewel, to get a room facing the street. Delacy, in his usual “tough kid” manner, strode straight to the bar and announced they wanted one room for the three of them, and the bartender told them it would be a dollar, up-front –
Because, of course, they were here for the contest, weren’t they? Really the only reason out-of-towners come in. Garnet was promptly like, “Yes, yes we are” (despite Delacy’s confusion), while Nate took advantage of his doddering old man nature to get the guy to explain the contest to them by pretending he’d already forgotten what it was all about. As it turns out, so many people have come to Dead Man’s Worth to try and kill Ben Bellows that he’s made it into an official fucking contest – every so often, anyone who wants to murder him can come in and enter themselves in a quickdraw contest, going up against each other and Bellows (who fought as a regular contestant). The bartender himself was actually a contestant, long ago, looking for revenge against Bellows for killing all his buddies and stealing the gold they’d found – Bellows shot him about six or seven times, then gave him a choice – get shot six or seven more times, or run the saloon. The guy chose running the saloon, and said that he knew his place now. Garnet did a Notice roll to see if he was under some sort of supernatural compulsion – a success let her know that no, this guy was just so beaten down and broken living under Bellows, he’d come to believe he didn’t deserve any better. Not so much “creepy” as “extremely depressing.” :( However, the contest offered them an excellent and legitimate way to off Bellows, and so the gang took the room (which was thoroughly unremarkable, as per Andy, despite Luke and Johnny trying to get him to make it remarkable), with Delacy and Nate staying upstairs to watch the road and see if anything interesting happened and Garnet going back downstairs to see if she could get some intel via playing poker. She attracted the attention of a coughing man at the window of the bar in a red waistcoat, who came over and played a hand with her (with the bartender serving as dealer) – Garnet asked what his deal was, and as it turns out, this fellow (Slim, as we learned later), only had three months to live on account of a bad case of TB, so he thought it might be fun to go out against Bellows instead of coughing himself to death in a sanitarium. He asked Garnet what she thought her odds were – Garnet assured him that she and her friends came to win, only for Slim to point out that everyone in the cemetery over the way had come to win as well. Garnet had faith in her companions, though, and they played out the hand – which Garnet lost, even after spending a benny to reroll. Fortunately, they’d completely forgotten to talk about stakes, so Garnet quickly bowed out before the question of betting for actual money came up. XD
Meanwhile, upstairs, Delacy’s attempt to ask Nate more about getting people to do what he wanted without shooting them had derailed into Nate talking about how he lost a footrace with a coyote that had been taught to walk on its hind legs. XD Fortunately his attempt to ignore the story (and its lesson of “ask questions before you shoot” by concentrating hard on the street below bore fruit with a good notice roll, and he became aware of a lot of men in dark dusters and hats milling around, with one guy even on the roof of a nearby building, holding a repeater rifle. Delacy pointed them out to Nate, and the latter wondered if they might be Bellows’s bodyguards. . .
But then the announcement came from below that it was time to sign up for the contest. An eager Delacy raced down like it was Christmas morning to throw his metaphorical hat into the metaphorical ring – Garnet attempted to talk him down, since, you know, he’s only thirteen and she doesn’t particularly want to see him get shot to death, only to discover Nate entered himself while she wasn’t looking. XD Delacy was annoyed because the nearby chalkboard indicated this was a bracket elimination contest, and they might now have to face each other, but Nate made it clear that he wouldn’t hold it against Delacy if he had to shoot him. XD Delacy thus scrambled over to the bartender and got his name put in – Garnet was like “surely even BELLOWS wouldn’t shoot a kid,” but – despite the bartender’s personal trepidation about Delacy’s age – the thirteen-year-old was put in, and everyone cheered. XD
And then promptly STOPPED cheering as Bellows himself showed up, with practically an army of armed guards, and brought the mood RIGHT down by swanning around being a creepy, smug bastard. He entered his name with great ceremony, showed off the prize – a chest full of gold nuggets, worth several hundred dollars – then ordered the bartender to draw the names before heading off. The brackets were thus drawn – Garnet’s new coughing friend Slim against frontierswoman Hattie; Rosa, a woman in a smart black jacket, against Big Bill, a convict the Sheriff had dragged in earlier; Delacy against Rex, a fellow in a blinding white suit and hat with a lariat –
And Nate against fucking Bellows himself. Nate was extremely pleased by this. XD Garnet asked Nate if he had ANY experience with this kind of shooting, with Nate assuring her that he knew his way around a gun thanks to years of hunting (and refusing to understand that the two shooting skillsets were NOT the same), while Delacy (who’d been more concerned if Victoria would be mad if THEY weren’t specifically the ones to kill Bellows – Nate assured him that she probably only cared about getting proof of the guy’s death, and anyway he’d be shooting him soon, so moot point) decided to rile up the crowd for fun. XD I left it with Delacy asking the bartender when the contest would start – apparently 6 AM the next morning was the first round (Delacy, a farm boy, was disgusted, considering the day half-over by that point). We’ll see how said round goes, and how Nate and Delacy fare, tomorrow!
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice has concluded her visit with Strauss and (at his encouragement) is on her way to The Last Round to have a chat with Nines and his Anarchs! Though not after evaluating how trustworthy Strauss is (he’s not an IMMEDIATE risk, but Cheshire warned that his loyalties always lie with his chantry first and foremost) and noticing some unusual graffiti on a nearby house. . . No time to think about it, though – she has to chase a Rabbit to the loudest bar in L.A. XD (Seriously, how does anyone THINK inside The Last Round, it’s my least-favorite bar to visit in-game because of its music. . .)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – another GrayStillPlays-only day, with “I upgraded cavemen into gods,” aka Gray plays Age Of War! This is a browser game where you go up against the computer (playing various off-brand historical figures, such as “Brom the Basher” and “Zander The Great” and “Gongas Kang”), and have to destroy said off-brand historical figure’s base before they destroy yours. The main way to destroy the base is to send wave after wave of various guys against it, while the main way to defend your own base is to stack various turrets on it. It’s called Age of War because, as you go through each round with each opponent, you earn XP which you can use to level your forces through various historical ages – starting with cavemen wielding clubs and riding dinosaurs, through knights riding horses and wielding crossbows, to Renaissance men with fancy swords and hand-held cannons, to modern tanks and soldiers with knives, to finally super soldiers with laser guns. Gray’s initial strategy against the first few opponents was to just throw as many high-ranking guys of whatever era he’d progressed to at the problem until they finally overwhelmed the enemy forces (helped by whatever the era’s special power was – ranging from an erupting volcano, to a faith shield for his men, to a straight up orbital laser), but once he reached Gongas Kang, he had to change things up – mostly because that guy STARTS with knights while Gray was stuck with cavemen. That is when he learned the value of turrets for protecting his base, and for earning more money to unlock more and better turrets. XD By the end of the video, he had a variety of powerful ion cannons on his space base preventing anyone from getting anywhere near it, and was able to finally defeat Gongas by sending a super soldier over to his base to beat it to death with his gun. XD Game’s “hard mode” officially defeated, and another amusing video in the can! XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check, hooray –
Victor Luvs Alice – Got my five-part Chill Valicer Save queued up for tomorrow, along with some A:MR fanart for Thursday and some CB fanart for Friday! Still gotta pick a Song Saturday, but we’ll figure that out upon the morrow.
Valice Multiverse – One anon ask with a conversation between two people studying for a test – one having brought notes, the other an accordion. XD I had my High School!Alice overhear and tell Smiler she’s glad they only play guitar, only for Smiler to admit they also noodle around on the drums. . . XD Hey, it’s something! Plus I found a link to Mimoto-Sims’s Patreon while browsing the “american mcgee’s alice” tag over there, and as it turns out, she extracted and converted Alice’s London dress from the game! I only have someone’s short-sleeved variant in my game currently, so I grabbed that right away. :) Now she’ll have her proper London fit!
So that was all good, at least! And now I have to go and get some more sleep because I have to do it all again tomorrow. Meh. Night all!
