All Right Tuesday
Feb. 20th, 2024 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickI mean, it was very cold today (bleh), and any workday cannot be perfect, but overall, I didn't have too much to complain about --
Work – Not as bad a Tuesday as I was fearing for my first day back after my long weekend! It’s February break for some of the schools, so traffic was better going in and coming home, and the day itself wasn’t too busy – mostly catching up on e-mails, doing some obits, following up with a few things in my exceptions, and doing a QC file. And taking a handful of credit card calls. One of my coworkers was in a mood, so that wasn’t great, and of course the credit card bullshit still hasn’t been resolved, but all in all – I’ve had worse first days back.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure: Deadlands, “More Wonders Than There Are In The Heavens, Part I!” Having managed to gain early access to Bison Billie’s tent, Edie and Delacy peeped inside to see the preparations for the show – people practicing lariat tricks, spinning guns, and wrangling horses. And standing amidst it all was the gigantic figure of Bison Billie himself –
Played by special guest star Jasper Cartwright! :D Delighted to see him again – Jasper and his friend Liv have starred in some of my favorite One Shot Wonders (notably the fucking amazing YASP episode), and I was thrilled when I saw that he was guest-starring in this one. :) He and Andy immediately began bouncing off each other beautifully, with Andy playing a variety of characters attempting and failing to impress Billie with their stunts – someone attempted to spin his gun on his finger, only for it to sail away, while someone else tried to get their knife out of their pocket to perform some five-finger fillet, only to cut themselves before they could even attempt the stabbing. Billie was nice about rejecting them, but you could see his patience was wearing a little thin. Poor Delacy was too shy to speak in the presence of his hero at first, so Edie took the lead, sidling up to Billie and noting that he looked like he needed some help. Billie admitted he did and introduced himself (Delacy squeaking out an “obliged” and then getting all bashful when Billie complimented his handshake), and Edie explained that they were in town for the fair and that Victoria had sent them to talk to him. Billie decided that this was a conversation best held in a more private area (especially as things weren’t getting any less chaotic in the main arena, someone yelling that poor Jed had gotten kicked in the head by a horse again) and hurried them away into a side tent, where he gave them some mysterious alcohol and asked about their business. Edie told him that their business was “finishing” business with Aunt Hildy – Billie was like, “no offense, but you two don’t look like the type to be doing this work,” but Edie assured him that she had her skills, and that Delacy in particular could shoot like no one she’d ever seen. Billie, intrigued, asked if that was so, and Delacy, remembering Billie himself had warned against false modesty, confirmed he was a good shot. Billie thus suggested a bit of “quid pro quo” – he was short a couple of acts, and his stablehands just didn’t have the talent to fill in. If they could help him out with his show tonight, he’d be happy to help them out with their “Aunt Hildy problem” – not in the least as he thought it was the same as HIS Aunt Hildy problem. He even knew of a good way into the fair after it closed for the night – through the Hall of Oddities! He’d backed his tent right up against that one, and even found a bunch of weird alcohol inside that he’d knicked and started selling to the crowd. XD Andy called for Vigor rolls for Delacy and Edie – Delacy, who’d already thrown up a ton of cotton candy in shock over being asked to perform in Billie’s show, was okay, but Edie ended up throwing up in her mouth a little over the fact that she’d drunk, uh, Wild Bill Hickok Hand preserving fluid. XD But they agreed to help out with the show, and started talking about where they could assist. Billie mentioned a train heist act, and Delacy immediately suggested they could help with that, explaining that he knew the steps already – one, stop the train; two, kill the Sasquatch. Billie was shocked –
Because how the hell did Delacy know that the show now incorporated a Sasquatch? Damn Jed, letting slip show secrets. . . XD Anyway, Edie began listing off her own talents – entertain, shoot, sing – and Delacy commented that she had a really good singing voice. Billie liked the idea of bringing some class to the show by having a singing section and decided to put her doing some tunes right before the big finale of the bison wrestling. Delacy, of course, would doing some shooting, and Billie decided that the most dramatic shot would be for Delacy to shoot an apple off his head. Though, of course, he wanted the kid to make a test shot first, because he didn’t want to do this trick just the once! XD Delacy was fine with that, and they headed back into the arena, where Billie put an apple on a pole about as high as he was and had Delacy shoot it –
And, because shooting is THE thing Delacy is good at, he nailed it with an excellent roll, hitting it without even looking at it. And reducing it to applesauce because he has custom explosive ammo. Billie was impressed (declaring that Delacy could shoot the pants off an ant – and then having to explain it’s just an expression when Delacy started looking for a panted ant) and perhaps a little bit scared. XD Fortunately Delacey assured him that he could change out the ammo for the actual shot, and it was agreed that he’d go on in the middle of the show, before Edie.
And with that, time was skipped forward to the actual show! The train heist was the first act, with a bunch of “rough riders” pretending to rob a toy train – it went pretty well, though one of the people who “died” during the show didn’t hit his old-timey “crash pad” of boxes and started moaning. Billie unwisely asked someone to shut him up, and IMMEDIATELY had to tell Delacy “I don’t mean like that!!” when he started pulling Rooster. XD But the rest of the act went off without a hitch. The show then moved onto Delacy’s apple-shooting – Billie introduced him as “Billie Jr.” (confusing Delacy, though he was willing to go along with when Billie asked him to), put the apple on his head, quietly asked Delacy not to miss, and went to stand in the arena. Delacy did some gun-spinning tricks to amuse the crowd, then, in time with the drumroll, did the shot –
And got a dirty twenty on his Shooting roll. AKA a success with four raises. So not only did he shoot the apple perfectly off Billie’s head with a regular bullet, he then managed to shoot the two halves flying through the air with his explosive bullets, turning them into apple fireworks. :D Billie was absolutely thrilled, and made sure everyone knew Delacy’s ACTUAL name after that. :) He also promptly offered Delacy a more permanent position, which Delacy immediately said “yes” to and told Edie he was leaving the group. Edie tried to protest that he needed to finish THIS job first, but Billie was like “sorry, he’s under contract” and got Delacy to sign on the dotted line before she could say anything more. Edie cattily informed Delacy, “Well, guess it’s up to me to tell NATE” – Delacy responded with a sulk and a “shouldn’t you be singing?” XD And yes, with the crowd appropriately warmed up, the show then passed over to Edie –
Prompting Ellen to admit that Edie does not have the Performance skill. XD Edie may be a saloon girl, but her role was generally to look attractive and get men to buy her drinks (with the bartender substituting sweet tea for whiskey) before splitting the take with the bartender. But she was more than willing to give it a go, and after spending a benny, managed to get a single success. She thus sang a bunch of delightfully raunchy saloon songs, getting the crowd to sing along – Billie immediately took advantage of the opportunity to peddle more of his stolen booze and get everyone good and drunk. XD Edie then scampered out of the limelight, and the show moved onto the big finale – the Bison-Tennial bison wrestling with Billie himself! Edie and Delacy wished him well (Edie unwisely using the theater term “break a leg,” which Billie didn’t take kindly too thanks to having, well, broken a leg in the past – Jasper had established right before then that Billie walked with a limp when he wasn’t on-stage), and he headed on out to wrestle the bison –
And, thanks to an excellent Performance roll, did beautifully, getting atop the bison and doing some cool spinning and twisting to show off for Delacy before getting the old girl on the ground. :) I left it with the crowd thoroughly entertained, and the Rex Randall Memorial Parade coming through in honor of that cowboy that Delacy shot in the throat. XD Next time, we should wrap up this particular half with the trio sneaking into the fair after-hours to see what they could do about Hildy!
2. Continue writing “Start At The Beginning. . .Sort Of”: Check – the actual “chase” bit of the chase sequence has more or less wrapped up, with Smiler taking out one pursuer with a spare syringe full of Joy Serum, and Victor accidentally leading Sergeant Tannen and his lackey straight into a feral specter who started feasting on the former. Now all that remains is for the trio to finish making their escape and officially call out Victor’s “ghost mind” ability, and I’ll be ready to wrap up this chapter! :) Making good progress on this story – I like it.
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – and managed to sneak in a small bonus video besides –
A) First up, a new release from the official The Sims channel – “The Sims 4 Crystal Creations Stuff Pack: Official Reveal Trailer!” Yes, they have revealed the next Stuff Pack, which shall appear at the end of this month, and it’s all about – well, look at the title. XD Specifically, it’s about making jewelry out of crystals, in a variety of cool designs – though you can also just cut crystals into pretty shapes (including a gnome shape if you are so inclined). And if you charge up your crystals and crystal-based jewelry in the moonlight, they might even develop cool powers your Sims can use, like a jet necklace allowing a Sim to summon the Grim Reaper! Add in a new plant type (the crystal tree) and some beautiful-looking build/buy and CAS assets (that look like they go great with Realm of Magic), and – yeah, THIS is a pack I’m interested in. My Chill Valicer Save Alice digs up her fair share of crystals as a werewolf – maybe she could get into jewelry-making to have something to do with them? Hmmm. . .
B) And second, from the Subs, we had the GrayStillPlays video of the night – “I went from weak to absolute giga chad in 15 minutes,” aka Gray plays Idle Biceps! This is one of those games where you click to make something happen – in this case, make a sad noodly arm lift a weight – and the more you make it happen, the more points you earn to dump into special multipliers – in this case, things like dumbbell weight, how many reps you can do per second, how good your technique is, and how good your grip on the dumbbell is. Each rep made the arm grow bigger and bigger as it filled up the “growth” meter on the top and each level of growth added more and more supplements to use to help speed up growth even further, starting with simple steaks and ending with straight-up steroids. XD And once you were happy with your level of growth, you could “ascend” and give up all your gains in exchange for points, which you could then funnel into more multipliers to make your next session go faster – and, if you had enough points, you could buy even more arms to lift weights and get you gains. Gray, of course, worked very hard to earn enough points to unlock all four arms offered by the game – by which I mean he went and hacked the game to give himself loads and loads of multipliers (at the cost of his arms staying noodly forever). And then, after playing legitimately again for a little bit, he hacked it again to give himself all the ascension points so he could maximize every multiplier he could find and get himself up to the point where the numbers got completely out of hand – the number of reps he was doing per second was measured in “Qi,” while the weight he was lifting was measured in “Godzi KG,” or “Godzilla units” as Gray put them. XD I do love how the units in these clicker games just get ENTIRELY out of hand once you play for a while and wrack up the bonuses – and how dedicated Gray is to finding all these bizarre units and trying to get them as high as possible. XD Good fun!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check –
Victor Luvs Alice – Got my six-part Chill Valicer Save update, some fanart of Nick Valentine, and Marie’s birthday fic in the queue for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday respectively! Now I just have to figure out Song Saturday. . .we can worry about that tomorrow, though, when I swap the queue speed back to one per day!
Valice Multiverse – Nothing happening over here, so I went through Victor Luvs Alice and found some Alice: Madness Returns and Corpse Bride fanart to stick in the queue. *shrug* Better than nothing!
*nods* Not too shabby, I think. At least I'm keeping up on everything important! And now it is time to head to bed and get some sleep, as I still have three days of this workweek to get through. Night all!
Work – Not as bad a Tuesday as I was fearing for my first day back after my long weekend! It’s February break for some of the schools, so traffic was better going in and coming home, and the day itself wasn’t too busy – mostly catching up on e-mails, doing some obits, following up with a few things in my exceptions, and doing a QC file. And taking a handful of credit card calls. One of my coworkers was in a mood, so that wasn’t great, and of course the credit card bullshit still hasn’t been resolved, but all in all – I’ve had worse first days back.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure: Deadlands, “More Wonders Than There Are In The Heavens, Part I!” Having managed to gain early access to Bison Billie’s tent, Edie and Delacy peeped inside to see the preparations for the show – people practicing lariat tricks, spinning guns, and wrangling horses. And standing amidst it all was the gigantic figure of Bison Billie himself –
Played by special guest star Jasper Cartwright! :D Delighted to see him again – Jasper and his friend Liv have starred in some of my favorite One Shot Wonders (notably the fucking amazing YASP episode), and I was thrilled when I saw that he was guest-starring in this one. :) He and Andy immediately began bouncing off each other beautifully, with Andy playing a variety of characters attempting and failing to impress Billie with their stunts – someone attempted to spin his gun on his finger, only for it to sail away, while someone else tried to get their knife out of their pocket to perform some five-finger fillet, only to cut themselves before they could even attempt the stabbing. Billie was nice about rejecting them, but you could see his patience was wearing a little thin. Poor Delacy was too shy to speak in the presence of his hero at first, so Edie took the lead, sidling up to Billie and noting that he looked like he needed some help. Billie admitted he did and introduced himself (Delacy squeaking out an “obliged” and then getting all bashful when Billie complimented his handshake), and Edie explained that they were in town for the fair and that Victoria had sent them to talk to him. Billie decided that this was a conversation best held in a more private area (especially as things weren’t getting any less chaotic in the main arena, someone yelling that poor Jed had gotten kicked in the head by a horse again) and hurried them away into a side tent, where he gave them some mysterious alcohol and asked about their business. Edie told him that their business was “finishing” business with Aunt Hildy – Billie was like, “no offense, but you two don’t look like the type to be doing this work,” but Edie assured him that she had her skills, and that Delacy in particular could shoot like no one she’d ever seen. Billie, intrigued, asked if that was so, and Delacy, remembering Billie himself had warned against false modesty, confirmed he was a good shot. Billie thus suggested a bit of “quid pro quo” – he was short a couple of acts, and his stablehands just didn’t have the talent to fill in. If they could help him out with his show tonight, he’d be happy to help them out with their “Aunt Hildy problem” – not in the least as he thought it was the same as HIS Aunt Hildy problem. He even knew of a good way into the fair after it closed for the night – through the Hall of Oddities! He’d backed his tent right up against that one, and even found a bunch of weird alcohol inside that he’d knicked and started selling to the crowd. XD Andy called for Vigor rolls for Delacy and Edie – Delacy, who’d already thrown up a ton of cotton candy in shock over being asked to perform in Billie’s show, was okay, but Edie ended up throwing up in her mouth a little over the fact that she’d drunk, uh, Wild Bill Hickok Hand preserving fluid. XD But they agreed to help out with the show, and started talking about where they could assist. Billie mentioned a train heist act, and Delacy immediately suggested they could help with that, explaining that he knew the steps already – one, stop the train; two, kill the Sasquatch. Billie was shocked –
Because how the hell did Delacy know that the show now incorporated a Sasquatch? Damn Jed, letting slip show secrets. . . XD Anyway, Edie began listing off her own talents – entertain, shoot, sing – and Delacy commented that she had a really good singing voice. Billie liked the idea of bringing some class to the show by having a singing section and decided to put her doing some tunes right before the big finale of the bison wrestling. Delacy, of course, would doing some shooting, and Billie decided that the most dramatic shot would be for Delacy to shoot an apple off his head. Though, of course, he wanted the kid to make a test shot first, because he didn’t want to do this trick just the once! XD Delacy was fine with that, and they headed back into the arena, where Billie put an apple on a pole about as high as he was and had Delacy shoot it –
And, because shooting is THE thing Delacy is good at, he nailed it with an excellent roll, hitting it without even looking at it. And reducing it to applesauce because he has custom explosive ammo. Billie was impressed (declaring that Delacy could shoot the pants off an ant – and then having to explain it’s just an expression when Delacy started looking for a panted ant) and perhaps a little bit scared. XD Fortunately Delacey assured him that he could change out the ammo for the actual shot, and it was agreed that he’d go on in the middle of the show, before Edie.
And with that, time was skipped forward to the actual show! The train heist was the first act, with a bunch of “rough riders” pretending to rob a toy train – it went pretty well, though one of the people who “died” during the show didn’t hit his old-timey “crash pad” of boxes and started moaning. Billie unwisely asked someone to shut him up, and IMMEDIATELY had to tell Delacy “I don’t mean like that!!” when he started pulling Rooster. XD But the rest of the act went off without a hitch. The show then moved onto Delacy’s apple-shooting – Billie introduced him as “Billie Jr.” (confusing Delacy, though he was willing to go along with when Billie asked him to), put the apple on his head, quietly asked Delacy not to miss, and went to stand in the arena. Delacy did some gun-spinning tricks to amuse the crowd, then, in time with the drumroll, did the shot –
And got a dirty twenty on his Shooting roll. AKA a success with four raises. So not only did he shoot the apple perfectly off Billie’s head with a regular bullet, he then managed to shoot the two halves flying through the air with his explosive bullets, turning them into apple fireworks. :D Billie was absolutely thrilled, and made sure everyone knew Delacy’s ACTUAL name after that. :) He also promptly offered Delacy a more permanent position, which Delacy immediately said “yes” to and told Edie he was leaving the group. Edie tried to protest that he needed to finish THIS job first, but Billie was like “sorry, he’s under contract” and got Delacy to sign on the dotted line before she could say anything more. Edie cattily informed Delacy, “Well, guess it’s up to me to tell NATE” – Delacy responded with a sulk and a “shouldn’t you be singing?” XD And yes, with the crowd appropriately warmed up, the show then passed over to Edie –
Prompting Ellen to admit that Edie does not have the Performance skill. XD Edie may be a saloon girl, but her role was generally to look attractive and get men to buy her drinks (with the bartender substituting sweet tea for whiskey) before splitting the take with the bartender. But she was more than willing to give it a go, and after spending a benny, managed to get a single success. She thus sang a bunch of delightfully raunchy saloon songs, getting the crowd to sing along – Billie immediately took advantage of the opportunity to peddle more of his stolen booze and get everyone good and drunk. XD Edie then scampered out of the limelight, and the show moved onto the big finale – the Bison-Tennial bison wrestling with Billie himself! Edie and Delacy wished him well (Edie unwisely using the theater term “break a leg,” which Billie didn’t take kindly too thanks to having, well, broken a leg in the past – Jasper had established right before then that Billie walked with a limp when he wasn’t on-stage), and he headed on out to wrestle the bison –
And, thanks to an excellent Performance roll, did beautifully, getting atop the bison and doing some cool spinning and twisting to show off for Delacy before getting the old girl on the ground. :) I left it with the crowd thoroughly entertained, and the Rex Randall Memorial Parade coming through in honor of that cowboy that Delacy shot in the throat. XD Next time, we should wrap up this particular half with the trio sneaking into the fair after-hours to see what they could do about Hildy!
2. Continue writing “Start At The Beginning. . .Sort Of”: Check – the actual “chase” bit of the chase sequence has more or less wrapped up, with Smiler taking out one pursuer with a spare syringe full of Joy Serum, and Victor accidentally leading Sergeant Tannen and his lackey straight into a feral specter who started feasting on the former. Now all that remains is for the trio to finish making their escape and officially call out Victor’s “ghost mind” ability, and I’ll be ready to wrap up this chapter! :) Making good progress on this story – I like it.
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – and managed to sneak in a small bonus video besides –
A) First up, a new release from the official The Sims channel – “The Sims 4 Crystal Creations Stuff Pack: Official Reveal Trailer!” Yes, they have revealed the next Stuff Pack, which shall appear at the end of this month, and it’s all about – well, look at the title. XD Specifically, it’s about making jewelry out of crystals, in a variety of cool designs – though you can also just cut crystals into pretty shapes (including a gnome shape if you are so inclined). And if you charge up your crystals and crystal-based jewelry in the moonlight, they might even develop cool powers your Sims can use, like a jet necklace allowing a Sim to summon the Grim Reaper! Add in a new plant type (the crystal tree) and some beautiful-looking build/buy and CAS assets (that look like they go great with Realm of Magic), and – yeah, THIS is a pack I’m interested in. My Chill Valicer Save Alice digs up her fair share of crystals as a werewolf – maybe she could get into jewelry-making to have something to do with them? Hmmm. . .
B) And second, from the Subs, we had the GrayStillPlays video of the night – “I went from weak to absolute giga chad in 15 minutes,” aka Gray plays Idle Biceps! This is one of those games where you click to make something happen – in this case, make a sad noodly arm lift a weight – and the more you make it happen, the more points you earn to dump into special multipliers – in this case, things like dumbbell weight, how many reps you can do per second, how good your technique is, and how good your grip on the dumbbell is. Each rep made the arm grow bigger and bigger as it filled up the “growth” meter on the top and each level of growth added more and more supplements to use to help speed up growth even further, starting with simple steaks and ending with straight-up steroids. XD And once you were happy with your level of growth, you could “ascend” and give up all your gains in exchange for points, which you could then funnel into more multipliers to make your next session go faster – and, if you had enough points, you could buy even more arms to lift weights and get you gains. Gray, of course, worked very hard to earn enough points to unlock all four arms offered by the game – by which I mean he went and hacked the game to give himself loads and loads of multipliers (at the cost of his arms staying noodly forever). And then, after playing legitimately again for a little bit, he hacked it again to give himself all the ascension points so he could maximize every multiplier he could find and get himself up to the point where the numbers got completely out of hand – the number of reps he was doing per second was measured in “Qi,” while the weight he was lifting was measured in “Godzi KG,” or “Godzilla units” as Gray put them. XD I do love how the units in these clicker games just get ENTIRELY out of hand once you play for a while and wrack up the bonuses – and how dedicated Gray is to finding all these bizarre units and trying to get them as high as possible. XD Good fun!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check –
Victor Luvs Alice – Got my six-part Chill Valicer Save update, some fanart of Nick Valentine, and Marie’s birthday fic in the queue for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday respectively! Now I just have to figure out Song Saturday. . .we can worry about that tomorrow, though, when I swap the queue speed back to one per day!
Valice Multiverse – Nothing happening over here, so I went through Victor Luvs Alice and found some Alice: Madness Returns and Corpse Bride fanart to stick in the queue. *shrug* Better than nothing!
*nods* Not too shabby, I think. At least I'm keeping up on everything important! And now it is time to head to bed and get some sleep, as I still have three days of this workweek to get through. Night all!
