Decent Enough Short Friday
Jul. 12th, 2024 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickHad some annoying moments, but overall I think it was a very successful half-day off --
Work – Slightly annoying day – I got through the GL and cleaning up the failed credit card payments all right, but as I was trying to have my lunch, a bunch of questions came in regarding the auditor reports our database people were running, and then the exceptions from our processors, and I ended up rather annoyed by everything and everyone for a time. But I got through it, and was rewarded by being able to leave at 1:30 PM, yay. *whew* Hooray for the weekend! Even if it is a cleaning weekend, meh.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – final night on the bike this week, and final night with “I completed the Every Occult Challenge! - Part 8” by James Turner! :D Picked up with the gang excavating dig piles at the temple in Selvadorada, looking for that Balampalsoh (cat-head) relic top that they needed to make Semaj a skeleton and complete the challenge! And while their trip to the temple didn’t help them get what they needed (though Vlad WAS able to work his way through all the traps and claim the treasures within, including a super-expensive frog), nor did having Vlad work through some of the “artifact-shaped dirt clumps” they’d collected (though they did pick up some nice artifacts), exploring the OTHER jungle spaces available to them did! After tearing open a few more gates, Nalani finally got the needed relic top in one of the side areas near the river! Vlad fused them together at James’s command, and James sent the gang home to get the party started (and to get away from all the broken shit in their rental home’s bathroom, which had prompted both the Night Wraith and Lou to pick up the “Neat” trait from mopping up all the puddles XD)! Vlad refined a diamond to fit into the front slot, then everything was given to Semaj so he could try activating the relic…
And even though Semaj was still in Plant-Sim mode when he tried it, the transformation took, and he became a skeleton! A PLANT-SIM skeleton, no less, as he kept getting the Plant-Sim effects, like leaves growing on him. XD Delighted, James decided that the best way to send off the series was to have Semaj and Nalani renew their vows. (He was also going to do a wheel challenge, but the wheel let him down by picking the same challenges one too many times, so he scrapped it.) He tried to put together a specific wedding event, but was stymied by first, Semaj having exactly ONE romantic interaction available to him as a skeleton (cuddling up by the bonfire with Nalani, which was indeed cute), and then by the late hour –
And then he decided, “You know what? I am going to use the power of the T.O.O.L. mod to make a makeshift wedding venue on top of the Howling Point in Moonwood Mill and do a more informal vow renewal with everyone there.” And so that is exactly what he did. :) I mean, it wasn’t PERFECT – getting everything up there took some doing, and getting everyONE up there took even MORE doing – and because everyone’s needs-boosting earrings were either drained or accidentally left behind in Selvadorada, Bailey only got partway through the ceremony before transportalating back home to use the toilet. XD (And this was with free will OFF, mind! Teach James to put his trust in that option.) But it was still a lovely little vow renewal, and the episode and series ended on a sweet note with Nalani and Skelemaj having their official first dance. :) Good stuff! I love when he does fun little challenge mini-series like this...which is good, because he’s got two more that I need to catch up on. XD
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice has brought Victor up to speed on the death cult; Victor has brought Alice up to speed on the fact that he too knows the mysterious cabbie that always shows up when she needs a ride (turns out he was the one who dropped him off around Venture Tower when she emerged); and the pair of them are preparing to head back to Santa Monica to get all their stuff so they can move into Alice’s new apartment together. Meaning Chapter 2 is OFFICIALLY DONE! *blows noisemaker* Meaning that, starting next Monday (I have a gift fic to write tomorrow), we can start the final editing process and get this chapter up! Yay!
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Took a little longer than I hoped, but I DID watch everything I wanted to watch today, yay –
A) First up, the OXBoxtra Marathon (well, I SAY that – thanks to me having to help my parents install new antivirus on their computers, my workout, and game night, the third video got watched a lot later than the other two):
I. “HITMAN CONOR MCGREGOR! 3 Ways to Play Elusive Target The Disruptor” – The latest Hitman video from our favorite OXBoxers, this one showed the trio taking on the newest “Elusive Target” mission, which saw them having to stop an idiotic billionaire CEO, Tim Quinn, from getting himself killed in an MMA fight with billionaire mega-fighter The Disruptor (who is apparently based on real MMA fighter Conor McGregor to the point of having his exact face, voice, and tattoos). How did our intrepid trio fare? Well:
Mike showed up in The Disruptor cosplay at the harbor, wielding an Irish-themed kettle bell because he’d bought the DLC (Andy cracked up over the kettle bell); found the octagon where the fight was being held and was incredulous about the fact that the fight was ALREADY STARTING when they arrived, wondering if it was in McGregor’s contract that he got to kill McQuinn with one punch to the head; completely ignored a Mission Story opportunity by talking about that possibility with Jane and Andy; refused to look at the match when Jane wanted to see what was happening in favor of getting a better disguise (Jane promising the viewers SHE’D show McQuinn possibly getting his head punched off); faffed about in the crypt getting a guard costume so he could move around more freely; managed to find and ring the bell that ended the round looking for a good spot to snipe The Disruptor, making both participants leave the ring and opening up the opportunity to kill The Disruptor somewhere quieter; squandered that opportunity by trying to get a proper “secret society” robe – only to get spotted knocking out a guard who’d come to investigate his coin; managed to book it back to his old guard costume to change and avoid the heat – but in the process lost track of the target, who Diana warned was already fleeing; and by the time he got down to the docks (since he thought that was the only way anyone could leave the island), The Disruptor had already escaped, causing the mission to fail. :( Well, we all knew it was going to go a bit Mike...
Jane showed up in Mr. Worldwide cosplay (aka the Scarlet Suit from the Deadly Sins stuff) at the Chapel tower starting location she’d unlocked, after wondering if she could somehow complete this mission non-lethally (Andy and Mike were rightfully incredulous); discovered that she was actually in the perfect position to kill The Disruptor before he even entered the ring (her starting location was a tower overlooking the fight, and she had an ideal view of him posturing at the top of the stairs leading down to the octagon); managed to pull off the snipe, drop her gun, and simply start walking down the tower to the exit as the guards ran past her, looking for the killer...and then made the mistake of going straight for the corpse to see if she could steal his coat; ended up getting noticed by EVERYONE and, in her panic, got stuck on the scenery before she could get away; and ended her run in a hail of gunfire from the guards as she attempted to get back to the docks. How long did all this take? Roughly three minutes from planning to fail. XD Oh Jane.
Andy showed up in the Eyes Wide Shut cosplay at the harbor, as the game suggested (Mike was like “no planning??”); went over to the octagon and actually listened to the Mission Story where he learned that the competitors could invoke the “Right of Second” to make someone else fight their competition for them; took a moment to steal an initiate outfit (in a much cleaner way than Mike did) and then rang the bell to stop the round; tailed Tim Quinn and his coach back to their “training room” (the island’s security suite, it looked like) as best he could (learning in the process that Tim’s coach is not only former ICA, but CLAIMING TO BE 47, RUDE); used a fuse box to lure Tim out so he could knock him out and steal his shorts (Tim’s coach came with him, so he was able to knock that fraud out too, nice); returned to the octagon and invoked the Right Of Second as “Mr. Doe” to get the chance to fight The Disruptor –
And then basically just punched him to death. Everyone was appropriately horrified. XD But yes, Andy was the only one to actually finish the mission, and he didn’t even have to escape – letting the ringmaster count out the dead McGregor and then being declared the winner counted as “finding an exit.” XD He got “Shadow ICA Assassin” for that lovely performance – but, shockingly, only four stars! Because, apparently, someone found a body. XD And THEN, right after they’d wrapped things up, a cutscene played showing McGregor being revived in the Hokkaido hospital...I guess our MMA fighter wanted more bang for his buck! (Or said “hey, Sean Bean’s character got revived for a second go, I want that too!” XD Wouldn’t it be funny if those two ended up in the same map together...)
II. “7 Stupidest Game Overs We Should Have Seen Coming” – Andy and Mike talking about game overs made from stupid decisions that we really should have guessed would cause a game over. Decide to self-destruct on YorHA’s spaceship The Bunker in Nier: Automata? Congrats on getting ending U, where you cause everything to blow up in a beautiful explosion! Decide to change out of your spacesuit while wandering around outside the spaceship during your playthrough of Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta? Hope you like seeing your character’s head explode as Bethesda believes in explosive decompression! Decide you haven’t had enough punishment in Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s normal mode and decide to start a new game in Hardcore Mode? Guess what – the game is going to kill you multiple times before you can even start the game (you just get a text box stating how you died early, from trying to save a friend from a frozen lake to not surviving childbirth). And then even when you DO survive, the game makes you pick two negative “perks” to take with you throughout the rest of your journey. ...Maybe the stupid decision here is installing Kingdom Come: Deliverance in the first place. O.o
III. “Top 7 Longest Cutscenes in Gaming History” – Ellen and Andy doing a countdown of – well, see the title. XD And trust me, these suckers were long – the shortest one, the ending cutscene of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, clocked in at twenty-three minutes. The longest? The post-credits cutscene of Metal Gear Solid 4, which is FEATURE FILM LENGTH. Admittedly a SHORT feature film – it’s seventy-one minutes in total – but it’s still almost as long as my beloved Corpse Bride! I am suddenly extremely glad that my two primary games right now, Sims 4 and Fallout 4, pretty much don’t do cutscenes. I don’t think I could take it. O.o
B) And after all that, we had GrayStillPlays and “Earth but every minute the rotation slows,” aka Gray conducts more horrible experiments in Universe Sandbox 2! As you might expect from the title, this was Gray slowly but surely slowing down the rotational period of the earth (making each day longer and longer) and seeing what happened. The smallest increases (like up to 1.01 day rotations, or 1.10 day rotations, or even 1.50 day rotations) didn’t result in THAT much of a change to the planet (though they did reduce life likelihood by a surprising amount – Gray was like “seriously, it’s already down into the 70s?!”), but as the days got longer and longer – well, things didn’t get THAT weird, but you did get more extremes in the temperatures, and the clouds started moving faster and faster, which was neat to watch. It wasn’t until Gray slowed the Earth’s rotation down to almost just one rotation per year that things got REALLY interesting – basically, at that point, the planet just had one giant “sunspot” worth of heat moving over its surface, with ice slowly freezing over every land left in the dark. Things actually got a tiny bit more normal once he started making the days even longer (at the very least, the heat map was no longer a giant map of cold with a big blob of hot moving across it), but the minute Gray, bored with just increasing the length of a day into the thousands (it was like 64,008 days per day by the end), decided to also fuck with the orbital period (how long it takes the Earth to go around the sun), everything froze over. Like, complete snowball earth. XD So today we learned that, while life REALLY doesn’t like the days getting longer, it takes the rotation speed nearly matching up with the orbital speed to truly make fuckery happen, and that if you fuck with the orbital speed, the REAL fuckery happens. I look forward to a video where Gray changes the length of the year on a whim. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – I didn’t actually HAVE to do anything here (I’m good with my Victor Luvs Alice queue for the moment, and Valice Multiverse remains dead), but I ended up looking through my VLA drafts, realizing “oh yeah, I need to add my ideas for ‘prequel’ stories to my Valicer In The Dark ‘scores and story ideas’ post” – and then just spontaneously finishing that up because I was on a roll, apparently. *shrug* Well, maybe that can go up next Thursday then!
Yeah, not bad at all. But now I have to head to bed, as I am VERY tired indeed -- and tomorrow's a Cleaning Saturday, so I don't want to sleep in too late. (Though at least I don't have to worry about washing my blankets as well this week!) Other things I hope to accomplish tomorrow include hitting Sims 4 and doing some Tiny Town planning stuff (I'm thinking of downloading an empty save someone made so I can see where I'd want to put the lots I have in my library); watching Petey Plays It's latest Super Sim episode and the latest GrayStillPlays; writing that gift fic I mentioned having to do above; and doing tumblr drafting stuff if I can. We'll see what happens and what I get accomplished! Night all!
Work – Slightly annoying day – I got through the GL and cleaning up the failed credit card payments all right, but as I was trying to have my lunch, a bunch of questions came in regarding the auditor reports our database people were running, and then the exceptions from our processors, and I ended up rather annoyed by everything and everyone for a time. But I got through it, and was rewarded by being able to leave at 1:30 PM, yay. *whew* Hooray for the weekend! Even if it is a cleaning weekend, meh.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – final night on the bike this week, and final night with “I completed the Every Occult Challenge! - Part 8” by James Turner! :D Picked up with the gang excavating dig piles at the temple in Selvadorada, looking for that Balampalsoh (cat-head) relic top that they needed to make Semaj a skeleton and complete the challenge! And while their trip to the temple didn’t help them get what they needed (though Vlad WAS able to work his way through all the traps and claim the treasures within, including a super-expensive frog), nor did having Vlad work through some of the “artifact-shaped dirt clumps” they’d collected (though they did pick up some nice artifacts), exploring the OTHER jungle spaces available to them did! After tearing open a few more gates, Nalani finally got the needed relic top in one of the side areas near the river! Vlad fused them together at James’s command, and James sent the gang home to get the party started (and to get away from all the broken shit in their rental home’s bathroom, which had prompted both the Night Wraith and Lou to pick up the “Neat” trait from mopping up all the puddles XD)! Vlad refined a diamond to fit into the front slot, then everything was given to Semaj so he could try activating the relic…
And even though Semaj was still in Plant-Sim mode when he tried it, the transformation took, and he became a skeleton! A PLANT-SIM skeleton, no less, as he kept getting the Plant-Sim effects, like leaves growing on him. XD Delighted, James decided that the best way to send off the series was to have Semaj and Nalani renew their vows. (He was also going to do a wheel challenge, but the wheel let him down by picking the same challenges one too many times, so he scrapped it.) He tried to put together a specific wedding event, but was stymied by first, Semaj having exactly ONE romantic interaction available to him as a skeleton (cuddling up by the bonfire with Nalani, which was indeed cute), and then by the late hour –
And then he decided, “You know what? I am going to use the power of the T.O.O.L. mod to make a makeshift wedding venue on top of the Howling Point in Moonwood Mill and do a more informal vow renewal with everyone there.” And so that is exactly what he did. :) I mean, it wasn’t PERFECT – getting everything up there took some doing, and getting everyONE up there took even MORE doing – and because everyone’s needs-boosting earrings were either drained or accidentally left behind in Selvadorada, Bailey only got partway through the ceremony before transportalating back home to use the toilet. XD (And this was with free will OFF, mind! Teach James to put his trust in that option.) But it was still a lovely little vow renewal, and the episode and series ended on a sweet note with Nalani and Skelemaj having their official first dance. :) Good stuff! I love when he does fun little challenge mini-series like this...which is good, because he’s got two more that I need to catch up on. XD
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice has brought Victor up to speed on the death cult; Victor has brought Alice up to speed on the fact that he too knows the mysterious cabbie that always shows up when she needs a ride (turns out he was the one who dropped him off around Venture Tower when she emerged); and the pair of them are preparing to head back to Santa Monica to get all their stuff so they can move into Alice’s new apartment together. Meaning Chapter 2 is OFFICIALLY DONE! *blows noisemaker* Meaning that, starting next Monday (I have a gift fic to write tomorrow), we can start the final editing process and get this chapter up! Yay!
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Took a little longer than I hoped, but I DID watch everything I wanted to watch today, yay –
A) First up, the OXBoxtra Marathon (well, I SAY that – thanks to me having to help my parents install new antivirus on their computers, my workout, and game night, the third video got watched a lot later than the other two):
I. “HITMAN CONOR MCGREGOR! 3 Ways to Play Elusive Target The Disruptor” – The latest Hitman video from our favorite OXBoxers, this one showed the trio taking on the newest “Elusive Target” mission, which saw them having to stop an idiotic billionaire CEO, Tim Quinn, from getting himself killed in an MMA fight with billionaire mega-fighter The Disruptor (who is apparently based on real MMA fighter Conor McGregor to the point of having his exact face, voice, and tattoos). How did our intrepid trio fare? Well:
Mike showed up in The Disruptor cosplay at the harbor, wielding an Irish-themed kettle bell because he’d bought the DLC (Andy cracked up over the kettle bell); found the octagon where the fight was being held and was incredulous about the fact that the fight was ALREADY STARTING when they arrived, wondering if it was in McGregor’s contract that he got to kill McQuinn with one punch to the head; completely ignored a Mission Story opportunity by talking about that possibility with Jane and Andy; refused to look at the match when Jane wanted to see what was happening in favor of getting a better disguise (Jane promising the viewers SHE’D show McQuinn possibly getting his head punched off); faffed about in the crypt getting a guard costume so he could move around more freely; managed to find and ring the bell that ended the round looking for a good spot to snipe The Disruptor, making both participants leave the ring and opening up the opportunity to kill The Disruptor somewhere quieter; squandered that opportunity by trying to get a proper “secret society” robe – only to get spotted knocking out a guard who’d come to investigate his coin; managed to book it back to his old guard costume to change and avoid the heat – but in the process lost track of the target, who Diana warned was already fleeing; and by the time he got down to the docks (since he thought that was the only way anyone could leave the island), The Disruptor had already escaped, causing the mission to fail. :( Well, we all knew it was going to go a bit Mike...
Jane showed up in Mr. Worldwide cosplay (aka the Scarlet Suit from the Deadly Sins stuff) at the Chapel tower starting location she’d unlocked, after wondering if she could somehow complete this mission non-lethally (Andy and Mike were rightfully incredulous); discovered that she was actually in the perfect position to kill The Disruptor before he even entered the ring (her starting location was a tower overlooking the fight, and she had an ideal view of him posturing at the top of the stairs leading down to the octagon); managed to pull off the snipe, drop her gun, and simply start walking down the tower to the exit as the guards ran past her, looking for the killer...and then made the mistake of going straight for the corpse to see if she could steal his coat; ended up getting noticed by EVERYONE and, in her panic, got stuck on the scenery before she could get away; and ended her run in a hail of gunfire from the guards as she attempted to get back to the docks. How long did all this take? Roughly three minutes from planning to fail. XD Oh Jane.
Andy showed up in the Eyes Wide Shut cosplay at the harbor, as the game suggested (Mike was like “no planning??”); went over to the octagon and actually listened to the Mission Story where he learned that the competitors could invoke the “Right of Second” to make someone else fight their competition for them; took a moment to steal an initiate outfit (in a much cleaner way than Mike did) and then rang the bell to stop the round; tailed Tim Quinn and his coach back to their “training room” (the island’s security suite, it looked like) as best he could (learning in the process that Tim’s coach is not only former ICA, but CLAIMING TO BE 47, RUDE); used a fuse box to lure Tim out so he could knock him out and steal his shorts (Tim’s coach came with him, so he was able to knock that fraud out too, nice); returned to the octagon and invoked the Right Of Second as “Mr. Doe” to get the chance to fight The Disruptor –
And then basically just punched him to death. Everyone was appropriately horrified. XD But yes, Andy was the only one to actually finish the mission, and he didn’t even have to escape – letting the ringmaster count out the dead McGregor and then being declared the winner counted as “finding an exit.” XD He got “Shadow ICA Assassin” for that lovely performance – but, shockingly, only four stars! Because, apparently, someone found a body. XD And THEN, right after they’d wrapped things up, a cutscene played showing McGregor being revived in the Hokkaido hospital...I guess our MMA fighter wanted more bang for his buck! (Or said “hey, Sean Bean’s character got revived for a second go, I want that too!” XD Wouldn’t it be funny if those two ended up in the same map together...)
II. “7 Stupidest Game Overs We Should Have Seen Coming” – Andy and Mike talking about game overs made from stupid decisions that we really should have guessed would cause a game over. Decide to self-destruct on YorHA’s spaceship The Bunker in Nier: Automata? Congrats on getting ending U, where you cause everything to blow up in a beautiful explosion! Decide to change out of your spacesuit while wandering around outside the spaceship during your playthrough of Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta? Hope you like seeing your character’s head explode as Bethesda believes in explosive decompression! Decide you haven’t had enough punishment in Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s normal mode and decide to start a new game in Hardcore Mode? Guess what – the game is going to kill you multiple times before you can even start the game (you just get a text box stating how you died early, from trying to save a friend from a frozen lake to not surviving childbirth). And then even when you DO survive, the game makes you pick two negative “perks” to take with you throughout the rest of your journey. ...Maybe the stupid decision here is installing Kingdom Come: Deliverance in the first place. O.o
III. “Top 7 Longest Cutscenes in Gaming History” – Ellen and Andy doing a countdown of – well, see the title. XD And trust me, these suckers were long – the shortest one, the ending cutscene of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, clocked in at twenty-three minutes. The longest? The post-credits cutscene of Metal Gear Solid 4, which is FEATURE FILM LENGTH. Admittedly a SHORT feature film – it’s seventy-one minutes in total – but it’s still almost as long as my beloved Corpse Bride! I am suddenly extremely glad that my two primary games right now, Sims 4 and Fallout 4, pretty much don’t do cutscenes. I don’t think I could take it. O.o
B) And after all that, we had GrayStillPlays and “Earth but every minute the rotation slows,” aka Gray conducts more horrible experiments in Universe Sandbox 2! As you might expect from the title, this was Gray slowly but surely slowing down the rotational period of the earth (making each day longer and longer) and seeing what happened. The smallest increases (like up to 1.01 day rotations, or 1.10 day rotations, or even 1.50 day rotations) didn’t result in THAT much of a change to the planet (though they did reduce life likelihood by a surprising amount – Gray was like “seriously, it’s already down into the 70s?!”), but as the days got longer and longer – well, things didn’t get THAT weird, but you did get more extremes in the temperatures, and the clouds started moving faster and faster, which was neat to watch. It wasn’t until Gray slowed the Earth’s rotation down to almost just one rotation per year that things got REALLY interesting – basically, at that point, the planet just had one giant “sunspot” worth of heat moving over its surface, with ice slowly freezing over every land left in the dark. Things actually got a tiny bit more normal once he started making the days even longer (at the very least, the heat map was no longer a giant map of cold with a big blob of hot moving across it), but the minute Gray, bored with just increasing the length of a day into the thousands (it was like 64,008 days per day by the end), decided to also fuck with the orbital period (how long it takes the Earth to go around the sun), everything froze over. Like, complete snowball earth. XD So today we learned that, while life REALLY doesn’t like the days getting longer, it takes the rotation speed nearly matching up with the orbital speed to truly make fuckery happen, and that if you fuck with the orbital speed, the REAL fuckery happens. I look forward to a video where Gray changes the length of the year on a whim. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – I didn’t actually HAVE to do anything here (I’m good with my Victor Luvs Alice queue for the moment, and Valice Multiverse remains dead), but I ended up looking through my VLA drafts, realizing “oh yeah, I need to add my ideas for ‘prequel’ stories to my Valicer In The Dark ‘scores and story ideas’ post” – and then just spontaneously finishing that up because I was on a roll, apparently. *shrug* Well, maybe that can go up next Thursday then!
Yeah, not bad at all. But now I have to head to bed, as I am VERY tired indeed -- and tomorrow's a Cleaning Saturday, so I don't want to sleep in too late. (Though at least I don't have to worry about washing my blankets as well this week!) Other things I hope to accomplish tomorrow include hitting Sims 4 and doing some Tiny Town planning stuff (I'm thinking of downloading an empty save someone made so I can see where I'd want to put the lots I have in my library); watching Petey Plays It's latest Super Sim episode and the latest GrayStillPlays; writing that gift fic I mentioned having to do above; and doing tumblr drafting stuff if I can. We'll see what happens and what I get accomplished! Night all!
