Busy Friday Night
Aug. 30th, 2024 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickGot a few different things on the go right at the moment, but hopefully I can get the to-do list up here at a decent time (not that you'll notice since I never change the timestamps :p) --
Work – Last Summer Half-Friday of the year, and it was a fairly quiet one, all told. My coworker with the personal stuff was still out, and my other coworker was busy with her own stuff, so I just did my thing – completed the GL; ran the usual morning reports; did some roster maintenance; called this one lady with a credit card issue and got that resolved; had my lunch; and put on the checks for the day. *shrug* Nothing particularly exciting! And the commutes both in and out were nice and smooth, so I got home in great time. :) And now I have a three-day weekend, yaaay~ I will take it!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – last night on the bike for this week, working (out) my way through –
A) The end of “I have bested the Every Life Stage Challenge! - Part 5” by James Turner! We finished off this episode of the series with three key events:
I. Semaj using the money he earned from his latest acting gig to expand the living room and buy a pipe organ so he could get the pipe organ skill he needed, then making breadsticks and brownies to get two points in the Baking skill and clear out the last of his skill-related goals! w00!
II. Semaj cruising for new DNA donors over at the rec center and the Salty Paws Saloon with Pablo, Sunny, and Vivienne (Krystoff was at school) – after a few false starts trying to find someone who meets The Criteria (black hair and brown clothes), he eventually gave up and headed home (without his travel cribs, incidentally – those got left at the rec center!), and while everyone was getting their needs fixed up by the Plumbite, James made the executive decision that “orange is close enough” (which does make sense, as he already bent the “brown clothes” rule so Semaj could have a kid with Nalani, and she wears orange). And the one Sim Semaj met that wore orange was one Dominic Fyres! So Semaj invited him around, befriended him, and got him to agree to have a science baby with him. They ended up having a girl, which the randomizer named Scarlett. :)
III. Semaj and all his kids aged up! Semaj made a coconut cake for everyone to use, and over the course of the early morning hours, Krystoff became a teenager (with a face full of piercings and weird sunglasses – James insisted on taking all those out and giving him a better haircut XD); Pablo became a child (who looked adorably dorky, just like his older brother had); Sunny and Vivienne became toddlers; and Camilo became an infant! And Semaj became an adult, because he too had completed a task that would cause him to age up. So now the household has every age stage except Young Adult and Elder.
*nods* So yeah – a pretty calm episode for Semaj, but things are getting interesting around here as the household gets larger and larger – not in the least because Semaj just does NOT make a lot of money from his acting career. Mostly because he’s always more involved with trying to bother his children rather than improving his skills for his acting gigs. XD But given that Camilo now needs a room of his own (to represent his love of purple Luxe-style items and Wellness), he’d better figure out some good ways to make more cashola fast...we’ll see what happens in the next episode!
B) The entirety of “5 Lovestruck Objects You Need To Start Using | The Sims 4 Guide” by Petey Plays It! Another one of his lists of objects that stand out in a particular Sims DLC, I think it’s VERY TELLING that this expansion pack only gets five when normally he does ten per EP. *squints hard at Lovestruck* That being said, the ones he picked were winners – the “Who’s Up Party Games” box (which you can put on any table you want to play a couple of fun mixer games); the costume trunk (which allows you to put on costumes to get moodlets and cause chaos by forcing other Sims around you to change); the vibrating heart bed (I mean, it is a classic); the “Keep It Clean” venue closet (a supply cupboard for Sims to woohoo in – which, honestly, is actually a good add for community lots); and the various “romantic blankets” that come with the pack (which you can use for watching the sky, eating some food, or having a roll in the hay). Plus he did highlight some honorable mentions to help fill things out, including a compact bar, a fun and colorful backsplash tiles item, the magic ring you can get from helping the sad bear in Cuidad Enamorada, the sweetheart boxes of treats you can share with loved ones, and the axolotl collection. *nods* Not exactly enough to convince me to buy the pack, but at least we know it comes with SOME good items. :p
2. Continue editing “Start At The Beginning...Sort Of”: Check plus – I got almost two full pages done on this today! :D Elder Gutknecht’s explained why he’s being so welcoming to the three (basically, he’s a former teacher who became a bit of a hermit once he got old, and then ended up hiding his house from everyone via magic after an asshole gang started wrecking his shit after he became a ghost – he’s just straight-up lonely after spending so much time with just his ravens, and the trio ended up wandering in during the brief period between ward refreshes when the house became visible again), and the trio have explained what happened to even bring them into the house (the whole “we were falsely accused of murdering a Spirit Warden” thing). I’ve left off with Smiler explaining that Alice was ABOUT to tell them what her employer was up to when Victor came through the wall – and having a sudden revelation about what she was probably going to say… I’m currently within a couple of pages of the end now – we’ll see how much of this I can get through tomorrow!
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check plus, with me keeping up with the Subs AND emptying out my Watch Later (well, after I finished my workout above) –
A) First up, we had the OXBoxtra lists of the week –
I. “7 Disappointing Games with Great Sequels” – Mike and Ellen talking about those games that weren’t anything to write home about themselves, but which were followed by amazing sequels. From the classic one that we all know (Street Fighter, a fiddly, hard-to-control fighting game, laying the groundwork for Street Fighter II, the legend which defined the genre), to modern missteps being corrected (Resident Evil 6, an action-filled entry in the mainline series that wasn’t exactly beloved, being followed by Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a sharp turn BACK into survival horror that was pretty damn beloved), to “what the fuck is Red Dead Redemption doing on this list, do you WANT Andy to yell at – oooooh, there was another game before that one, gotcha…” (yes, the first game in the series was actually Red Dead Revolver, about a bounty hunter named Red – passable but nothing to write home about, and definitely nothing compared to its open-world follow-up), we should be glad these games exist just because, if they didn’t, those sequels wouldn’t be around. And nobody wants that!
II. “7 Games That Respected Your Time and We Thank Them” – Andy and Mike talking about the ways games can actually respect your time as a busy human being (instead of someone who apparently has endless free time to play video games), with examples from all sorts of different games. Can’t spare the time to backtrack all the way out of a dungeon? The patented Skyrim door at the end has got you covered as long as you pull the lever! Worried about how long it’ll take you to beat this multi-stage boss fight? God of War (the “Kratos fights Norse Mythology” one) will kindly provide you a checkpoint so you can start over at the beginning of the phase that’s giving you trouble, not the very beginning. Need to make stuff but don’t have the time or patience to create every item individually? Terraria is like “hey, you can do batch creation of items if you want, so long as you have the resources!” And we all appreciate them for this. :) Though as I said in my comment on the video, the best way a video game can respect your time is to allow MANUAL SAVING AND QUITTING WHENEVER. Fuck checkpoint systems – as a grown-up who sometimes must do grown-up things, I NEED that manual save. Hopefully it will get its due in any follow-up videos!
B) And second, after game night (Trivial Pursuit – after an early lead, I ended up bested by Mom, while poor Dad struggled to get any pie pieces at all), we had GrayStillPlays and “This disturbing game gets creepier every minute,” aka Gray plays the Roblox game Fashion Diva! And Clean’s Runway, and [UPGRADES] Daycare! All by CleanMeanBeans, who apparently decided he wanted to make some complicated horror stuff spread across these three games. Gray was alerted to the games’ existence by Yeet And Destroy, a fan who told him that he had to play the Fashion Diva game – which looked like a normal goofy “dress up according to the theme and then get rated by the audience” game until Gray noticed how bizarre the chat was and started asking about the bots everyone was apparently seeing – only to find himself in a bizarre dark world with a creepy figure hanging around directing him to the Clean’s Runway game. Where he found a notice asking for children who wanted to be stars hanging up between some of the racks of stuff you can put on. Which eventually lead him to find the [UPGRADES] Daycare game, which was a game about being a child in a horrible facility where you are being experimented on and you have to try and fight the scientists while they try to round up and burn the “bad noodles.” And then he eventually went back to the original game, got into the dark mirror world of Clean’s Runway, completed a creepy quiz where he confirmed he was a child with no one to look after him, and ended up becoming a bot in the audience of Fashion Diva. It was all – mostly confusing, but Gray quite enjoyed how CMB tied all three of the games together in this ludicrous fashion. And being his usual goofy self fumbling around and trying to find secrets. XD And people are already recommending other Roblox horror games he can try out in the comments, so we’ll see if he tries any of those out in the future...
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check –
Victor Luvs Alice – Well, the queue was already done, but this evening, I actually got an ask on my “ask me about my Valicer AUs” post from Satirical, who wanted to hear about the Severance AU (because he was unfamiliar with the series) and the “BITD Smiler in ‘Beneath A Broken Sky’ AU” (because BABS is his Valice fic). So I got to ramble on about both of those for a bit tonight. :) That makes me feel a little better about things.
Valice Multiverse – Two things from Toonsisters for the queue – a reblogged follow-up to Cuddlepile!Victor asking her about the Van Dort golden toilet and her claims that it was used in a crime ring, and her going “you’ll have to find out for yourself ^_^” (Victor was immediately like “maybe we should get out of here while she’s busy ranting”), and Toonsisters sharing some more fanart in an ask (a piece of Victor wielding a weapon and power from the video game Genshin Impact – I SWEAR I have seen it on tumblr before, but I don’t quite remember WHERE. Tracked down the devART link, at least! Anyway, Cuddlepile!Victor was impressed, even if he doesn’t believe for a moment he’d ever be that smooth with a sword). So that’s nice!
Other: Well, I’d hoped to get through more, but between answering the big ask on VLA and juggling some other stuff, I only managed to get through half of Moose’s messages. Will be doing the other half tomorrow morning sometime!
*whew* Okay, I am done with things for the night, as it's after 1 AM here and I am TIRED. So it is time to head to bed. Tomorrow is a nice non-cleaning Saturday -- goals for tomorrow include getting the pictures done for the next Chill Valicer Save update on tumblr (I unfortunately didn't get to them tonight, so good thing it's a long weekend); finishing up the replies to Moose's messages here; play some more Sims 4 and get back to the Chill Valicer Save for Harvestfest if I can; work some more on "Start At The Beginning...Sort Of;" and do my best to keep up with Gray and Jon for the Saturday Two on YouTube. Hopefully these are all achievable goals...night all!
Work – Last Summer Half-Friday of the year, and it was a fairly quiet one, all told. My coworker with the personal stuff was still out, and my other coworker was busy with her own stuff, so I just did my thing – completed the GL; ran the usual morning reports; did some roster maintenance; called this one lady with a credit card issue and got that resolved; had my lunch; and put on the checks for the day. *shrug* Nothing particularly exciting! And the commutes both in and out were nice and smooth, so I got home in great time. :) And now I have a three-day weekend, yaaay~ I will take it!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – last night on the bike for this week, working (out) my way through –
A) The end of “I have bested the Every Life Stage Challenge! - Part 5” by James Turner! We finished off this episode of the series with three key events:
I. Semaj using the money he earned from his latest acting gig to expand the living room and buy a pipe organ so he could get the pipe organ skill he needed, then making breadsticks and brownies to get two points in the Baking skill and clear out the last of his skill-related goals! w00!
II. Semaj cruising for new DNA donors over at the rec center and the Salty Paws Saloon with Pablo, Sunny, and Vivienne (Krystoff was at school) – after a few false starts trying to find someone who meets The Criteria (black hair and brown clothes), he eventually gave up and headed home (without his travel cribs, incidentally – those got left at the rec center!), and while everyone was getting their needs fixed up by the Plumbite, James made the executive decision that “orange is close enough” (which does make sense, as he already bent the “brown clothes” rule so Semaj could have a kid with Nalani, and she wears orange). And the one Sim Semaj met that wore orange was one Dominic Fyres! So Semaj invited him around, befriended him, and got him to agree to have a science baby with him. They ended up having a girl, which the randomizer named Scarlett. :)
III. Semaj and all his kids aged up! Semaj made a coconut cake for everyone to use, and over the course of the early morning hours, Krystoff became a teenager (with a face full of piercings and weird sunglasses – James insisted on taking all those out and giving him a better haircut XD); Pablo became a child (who looked adorably dorky, just like his older brother had); Sunny and Vivienne became toddlers; and Camilo became an infant! And Semaj became an adult, because he too had completed a task that would cause him to age up. So now the household has every age stage except Young Adult and Elder.
*nods* So yeah – a pretty calm episode for Semaj, but things are getting interesting around here as the household gets larger and larger – not in the least because Semaj just does NOT make a lot of money from his acting career. Mostly because he’s always more involved with trying to bother his children rather than improving his skills for his acting gigs. XD But given that Camilo now needs a room of his own (to represent his love of purple Luxe-style items and Wellness), he’d better figure out some good ways to make more cashola fast...we’ll see what happens in the next episode!
B) The entirety of “5 Lovestruck Objects You Need To Start Using | The Sims 4 Guide” by Petey Plays It! Another one of his lists of objects that stand out in a particular Sims DLC, I think it’s VERY TELLING that this expansion pack only gets five when normally he does ten per EP. *squints hard at Lovestruck* That being said, the ones he picked were winners – the “Who’s Up Party Games” box (which you can put on any table you want to play a couple of fun mixer games); the costume trunk (which allows you to put on costumes to get moodlets and cause chaos by forcing other Sims around you to change); the vibrating heart bed (I mean, it is a classic); the “Keep It Clean” venue closet (a supply cupboard for Sims to woohoo in – which, honestly, is actually a good add for community lots); and the various “romantic blankets” that come with the pack (which you can use for watching the sky, eating some food, or having a roll in the hay). Plus he did highlight some honorable mentions to help fill things out, including a compact bar, a fun and colorful backsplash tiles item, the magic ring you can get from helping the sad bear in Cuidad Enamorada, the sweetheart boxes of treats you can share with loved ones, and the axolotl collection. *nods* Not exactly enough to convince me to buy the pack, but at least we know it comes with SOME good items. :p
2. Continue editing “Start At The Beginning...Sort Of”: Check plus – I got almost two full pages done on this today! :D Elder Gutknecht’s explained why he’s being so welcoming to the three (basically, he’s a former teacher who became a bit of a hermit once he got old, and then ended up hiding his house from everyone via magic after an asshole gang started wrecking his shit after he became a ghost – he’s just straight-up lonely after spending so much time with just his ravens, and the trio ended up wandering in during the brief period between ward refreshes when the house became visible again), and the trio have explained what happened to even bring them into the house (the whole “we were falsely accused of murdering a Spirit Warden” thing). I’ve left off with Smiler explaining that Alice was ABOUT to tell them what her employer was up to when Victor came through the wall – and having a sudden revelation about what she was probably going to say… I’m currently within a couple of pages of the end now – we’ll see how much of this I can get through tomorrow!
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check plus, with me keeping up with the Subs AND emptying out my Watch Later (well, after I finished my workout above) –
A) First up, we had the OXBoxtra lists of the week –
I. “7 Disappointing Games with Great Sequels” – Mike and Ellen talking about those games that weren’t anything to write home about themselves, but which were followed by amazing sequels. From the classic one that we all know (Street Fighter, a fiddly, hard-to-control fighting game, laying the groundwork for Street Fighter II, the legend which defined the genre), to modern missteps being corrected (Resident Evil 6, an action-filled entry in the mainline series that wasn’t exactly beloved, being followed by Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a sharp turn BACK into survival horror that was pretty damn beloved), to “what the fuck is Red Dead Redemption doing on this list, do you WANT Andy to yell at – oooooh, there was another game before that one, gotcha…” (yes, the first game in the series was actually Red Dead Revolver, about a bounty hunter named Red – passable but nothing to write home about, and definitely nothing compared to its open-world follow-up), we should be glad these games exist just because, if they didn’t, those sequels wouldn’t be around. And nobody wants that!
II. “7 Games That Respected Your Time and We Thank Them” – Andy and Mike talking about the ways games can actually respect your time as a busy human being (instead of someone who apparently has endless free time to play video games), with examples from all sorts of different games. Can’t spare the time to backtrack all the way out of a dungeon? The patented Skyrim door at the end has got you covered as long as you pull the lever! Worried about how long it’ll take you to beat this multi-stage boss fight? God of War (the “Kratos fights Norse Mythology” one) will kindly provide you a checkpoint so you can start over at the beginning of the phase that’s giving you trouble, not the very beginning. Need to make stuff but don’t have the time or patience to create every item individually? Terraria is like “hey, you can do batch creation of items if you want, so long as you have the resources!” And we all appreciate them for this. :) Though as I said in my comment on the video, the best way a video game can respect your time is to allow MANUAL SAVING AND QUITTING WHENEVER. Fuck checkpoint systems – as a grown-up who sometimes must do grown-up things, I NEED that manual save. Hopefully it will get its due in any follow-up videos!
B) And second, after game night (Trivial Pursuit – after an early lead, I ended up bested by Mom, while poor Dad struggled to get any pie pieces at all), we had GrayStillPlays and “This disturbing game gets creepier every minute,” aka Gray plays the Roblox game Fashion Diva! And Clean’s Runway, and [UPGRADES] Daycare! All by CleanMeanBeans, who apparently decided he wanted to make some complicated horror stuff spread across these three games. Gray was alerted to the games’ existence by Yeet And Destroy, a fan who told him that he had to play the Fashion Diva game – which looked like a normal goofy “dress up according to the theme and then get rated by the audience” game until Gray noticed how bizarre the chat was and started asking about the bots everyone was apparently seeing – only to find himself in a bizarre dark world with a creepy figure hanging around directing him to the Clean’s Runway game. Where he found a notice asking for children who wanted to be stars hanging up between some of the racks of stuff you can put on. Which eventually lead him to find the [UPGRADES] Daycare game, which was a game about being a child in a horrible facility where you are being experimented on and you have to try and fight the scientists while they try to round up and burn the “bad noodles.” And then he eventually went back to the original game, got into the dark mirror world of Clean’s Runway, completed a creepy quiz where he confirmed he was a child with no one to look after him, and ended up becoming a bot in the audience of Fashion Diva. It was all – mostly confusing, but Gray quite enjoyed how CMB tied all three of the games together in this ludicrous fashion. And being his usual goofy self fumbling around and trying to find secrets. XD And people are already recommending other Roblox horror games he can try out in the comments, so we’ll see if he tries any of those out in the future...
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check –
Victor Luvs Alice – Well, the queue was already done, but this evening, I actually got an ask on my “ask me about my Valicer AUs” post from Satirical, who wanted to hear about the Severance AU (because he was unfamiliar with the series) and the “BITD Smiler in ‘Beneath A Broken Sky’ AU” (because BABS is his Valice fic). So I got to ramble on about both of those for a bit tonight. :) That makes me feel a little better about things.
Valice Multiverse – Two things from Toonsisters for the queue – a reblogged follow-up to Cuddlepile!Victor asking her about the Van Dort golden toilet and her claims that it was used in a crime ring, and her going “you’ll have to find out for yourself ^_^” (Victor was immediately like “maybe we should get out of here while she’s busy ranting”), and Toonsisters sharing some more fanart in an ask (a piece of Victor wielding a weapon and power from the video game Genshin Impact – I SWEAR I have seen it on tumblr before, but I don’t quite remember WHERE. Tracked down the devART link, at least! Anyway, Cuddlepile!Victor was impressed, even if he doesn’t believe for a moment he’d ever be that smooth with a sword). So that’s nice!
Other: Well, I’d hoped to get through more, but between answering the big ask on VLA and juggling some other stuff, I only managed to get through half of Moose’s messages. Will be doing the other half tomorrow morning sometime!
*whew* Okay, I am done with things for the night, as it's after 1 AM here and I am TIRED. So it is time to head to bed. Tomorrow is a nice non-cleaning Saturday -- goals for tomorrow include getting the pictures done for the next Chill Valicer Save update on tumblr (I unfortunately didn't get to them tonight, so good thing it's a long weekend); finishing up the replies to Moose's messages here; play some more Sims 4 and get back to the Chill Valicer Save for Harvestfest if I can; work some more on "Start At The Beginning...Sort Of;" and do my best to keep up with Gray and Jon for the Saturday Two on YouTube. Hopefully these are all achievable goals...night all!
