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To-Do List Again Not Quite Complete
Dec. 7th, 2020 11:00 pmFor various reasons -- let's go through each item together, shall we?
Play Sims 4: Didn't happen, because -- well, it went like this, roughly. We'd just had lunch, so I decided to play my game before watching my videos so I'd have plenty of time to micromanage my Sims as I always do. So I booted up Origin, waited for it to open, prepared to hit my game library to open Sims 4 --
And suddenly noticed the game was downloading something.
Cue me abruptly recalling there was supposed to be a patch in December and racing back online to discover the Gurus dropped the "skintones update" patch early. *facepalm* My own fault for keeping the settings on auto-update, but I'm used to this happening midweek, when I'm NOT home and don't expect to play until the weekend, when my mods will hopefully have updated! (Also I was half under the impression you couldn't play without patching, but apparently if you take Origin offline AND disable automatic patches. . .too late now, though.) Arrrgh. . .and one of the people whose mods I use says they're probably not going to update their own game to the new patch right away, and I have no idea about Deaderpool and MC Command Center (someone said this might not be updated until 2021!) . . .or my rather massive amount of CC. . . I'll check tomorrow for more updates, but I might be off Sims for a while. Good thing that I took a couple of shots of my movie theater update for this week's Wednesday post!
. . .so instead of Sims 4, I played more Fallout 4. Which, if I'm honest, is the game I really want to play these days, sooo -- can't even be that mad? (I'm feeling a bit burnt out on Sims 4, and my OTP randomly fighting in the game does not help. . .) Anyway, picked up with Victor and Dogmeat chilling in the Red Rocket -- had Victor scrap a bunch of stuff, move the crafting benches into the garage (minus the cooking spit, though I did replace the campfire under it with one that was actually lit), then turned the back office into a bedroom for him and Dogmeat. After a good night's sleep, it was into Concord to kill some bloodbugs, pick up some loot from one of the houses (including a red bandanna that was promptly given to Dogmeat), then kill the raiders threatening Preston and clear out the Museum of Freedom! Managed to do that without getting totally wrecked, met up with Preston and gang, PASSED THE SPEECH CHECK WITH MAMA MURPHY to learn more about the Deathclaw (may I remind you Victor is a Charisma 2 build and is currently just in his Vault 111 suit so no bonuses there), picked up the Perception bobblehead, JUST managed to hack the terminal for the security door to get the fusion core, then brought that up to the power armor. I've saved with Victor getting ready to get himself a minigun and take on some raiders and a Deathclaw. :D I'm having a lot of fun restarting my run and doing it this way! I'm particularly looking forward to branching out from these early tutorial quests and into the bigger, badder world. Gonna properly use my camping gear and everything. :D
Watch the Sims-related videos in my Watch Later: This I did -- if I can't play Sims, I can at least watch them! We covered the following:
A) Again, started off with an off-the-list video from my recommendeds – this one from XUrbanSimsX about the LGBT mod! You can assign your Sims’ sexuality/gender presentation (or have them wonder about it in-game, which I assume lets you give them the opportunity to figure it out themselves), have them be activists, in or out of the closet, have protests and galas to drum up support for the cause. . .it’s very thorough! There’s even a special aspiration you can choose for helping promote LGBT rights! Homophobia and transphobia can also be a thing, but that’s an optional file – if you’d prefer an open and accepting world, you can have that too. It looks pretty awesome and well-done. :D
B) Actually in my Watch Later, we started off with some videos from good old Carl’s Sim Guides:
1. A summary of the Livestream of Snowy Escape (again, some of these videos have been in my WL for a while), showing that Carl was. . .semi-impressed? He praised the world for looking beautiful, but seemed iffy on the actual gameplay. Mainly noting all the ways that it was like other packs we’ve had before (namely Jungle Adventure for some of the more adventurous stuff). He doesn’t seem to think it has a lot of replayability, anyway. More reasons to get this during a sale and/or in a bundle, I guess. . . (And I’m glad to see someone else who doesn’t seem to like the new Sim Profile popups! Yes, fine, the tooltips for Sims in the relationship panels were getting huge, but I kind of LIKED ‘hover over it and get all the info you need?’ Meeeh. . .)
2. Slipped out of the WL for his actual pack review of Snowy Escape – which revealed that, apparently, the Game Changers don’t get their early packs for free! It’s just discounted ($27, according to Carl). That’s interesting. . . Anyway, his thoughts on the pack: pretty much the same as his thoughts on the livestream, just more in-depth and sarcastic. XD He likes some of the new stuff, but thinks things like skiing, snowboarding, and going on mountain excursions is likely to get repetitive fast, and he’s not sure there’s enough variety in the Lifestyles to give them the depth they, and thus Sims, need. Hmmmm. . .yeah, think this will be a “on-sale” pack for sure. (Especially with me having learned that Sentiments are much more easily manipulated than one might think too. . .)
3. And then, back in the WL, a video basically informing EA what they need to do to make a good “Sims 5” – can be summed up as “You guys did great with building this time around! Bring back the gameplay from Sims 2 and Sims 3 and don’t have stuff like pools added in after the base game comes out.” XD Not a particularly NEW sentiment – a lot of people I’ve seen complaining about Sims 4’s gameplay happily gush about the two previous installments as ways to do it right. (I never played Sims 3 because of my never-ending loathing for the aesthetic, but the skills journal Carl highlighted looks like a great gameplay addition!) So yeah – at least his featured cute little plumbob moths he made for the opener? XD
C) Then, time to catch up on the Plumbella video I missed while doing my marathon on Saturday – accidentally building a one-tile house! . . .wat. Okay, what actually happened is she decided to do the absolute SMALLEST house she could possibly do. After some faffing about with the platform tool and trying to get a door to work properly with it, she eventually settled on a four-tile box flat box (she was going to have the bed up on the platform, but eventually concluded it wasn’t really necessary). She downloaded a one-tile bathroom from the Gallery because she couldn’t get the right level of squish on her own, then managed to fit in a bed, an all-in-one TV center above that, a mini-fridge, and a bookshelf above THAT. And somewhere in all of that, the game only registered one tile as having been used, meaning her house is in fact too SMALL to count as a tiny house for Tiny Living! O.o She made it work and look pretty nice in the end, though – some roof pieces on the ground created a fun roof line and a tilted window, and she used a pointed window to fit in the corner of the mini-fridge that was sticking through the wall (since you can’t do this without “moveobjects on”). Even made a little garden with roof decorations for a fence! XD I am duly impressed.
Catch up on Kevin and Gray in the subscriptions: Half done -- I watched these tonight, and ended up focusing on Call Me Kevin. Caught up on the three following vids:
1. I Am Your President – Kevin becomes president! Frankly, I am glad, even if his decision-making process involves hiring people with nice hair and selling Taiwan nukes so we can launch them at each other to shoot out of the sky (to show how good our anti-missile tech is). He spent most of his time getting angry at people for e-mailing him about random stuff, stating how much he liked polar bears, starring in a Super Bowl add that he didn’t even watch, and setting up a plan for global domination! Poor guy didn’t get a second term (admittedly, due to health issues, it wasn’t a good idea), but he did get a happy ending according to the game (along with the possibility of reconciling with his ex-wife), so. . . Admittedly, this all came after three attempts to secure being his party’s candidate thanks to some bad speech checks, but hey. XD
2. Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes – Kevin teams up with his friend Will to defuse virtual bombs, in a game where one person has the bomb, and the other person has the manual to defuse it! This was done on stream, with the rule that, if a bomb other than the training level bomb went off, the stream IMMEDIATELY ENDED. They ran into some trouble with the training bomb (with Will steadfastly refusing to believe Kevin had no white wires and essentially reading him the entire manual – btw, did you know Will is an electrician?), but managed to get their groove back and successfully defused bombs for roughly an hour, passing back and forth who had the bomb and who had the manual. XD It was very satisfying, up until the fourth level of bomb, where suddenly the boys were confronted with having to guess words and navigate mazes, and – yeah. Things went explodey, stream and video ended. Fun while it lasted! XD
3. More People Playground – Kevin’s back to his GrayStillPlays torturing ways! Today featured Jeff and Crabmeat, and their father Power Tools (Kevin is – not good at names), in a variety of situations. Like having a bunch of cars flung at them down a steep slope! Being crushed by pistons! Riding the bus to school with a monster bus driver who takes the bus to terminal velocity! And having all their blood smashed out of their bodies as Kevin tries to find a way to fill a blood machine. Seriously, if Gray doesn’t know about this game, SOMEONE NEEDS TO TELL HIM.
So yeah, that was satisfying. XD And I have some EXCELLENT Gray content to look forward to tomorrow!
Write a gift fic: Done! Took me a minute to figure out what I wanted to do, but I have another one in the bag, yay~
Get in a workout: Done! I was gonna do the treadmill, but I lingered a little late with the Fallout 4 and did a slightly longer, harder bike ride instead. And back on the bike means more time with Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I restarted episode 25 today – more time with the Automatron DLC! Jon finished building his tech lab (and then had to remove a bit of the roof to actually use the robot workbench), attached the relay beacon to Ada, and got the location of the next Robobrain – which had in fact spawned right next to the location where one has to fight the THIRD Robobrain. How curious. . .anyway, after somehow accidentally vanishing Ada by trying to improve her in the workbench, Grills picked up his improved power armor and Paladin Danse and had a vertibird take them over to Sunshine Tidings. Reason being? Sunshine is reasonably close to where the Robobrain spawned, and Jon wanted to see if he could put an artillery piece in there and have Danse man it to shell the hell out of the bots. After putting Danse on big guns duty, Grills proceeded down to the area in question, where the Robobrain and its compatriots were hanging out. He tagged them with his recon scope, did a bit of sneaking to get close, then unleashed hell with an artillery smoke grenade. Out of the four robots in the area, the strike ended up killing three of them, with Grills managing to finish the fourth off when it came for him. So yeah, good work there! And then Grills decided “while I’m here, might as well clear out as much as I can of the Relay base where the third one spawns!” and took out some more junkbots before calling in another artillery strike to smash up some of the Rust Devils there. Left him having slaughtered the lot and taking a break to head out on a trip to refill his ammunition supplies! Ah, I do love me some good FO4 content. :)
Other: And in other things that happened today. . .
-->Going to bed a little earlier WAS a good idea -- didn't wake up feeling tired, managed to get dressed before noon! (Not MUCH before noon, but it still happened.) I think my ideal bedtime for non-work days is between 12:30 and 1:30, honestly -- given I always seem to wake up around 8:30 to 9:00 anyway. . .
-->Had to have the garage door people around because the damn garage door broke today! Everything was properly socially distanced and masked, but hmph. Do not approve.
-->Got an early Christmas present from Dad for the family (though mostly for Mom) -- puzzles! We now have two new ones all our own, a "reading room" puzzle and a "classic movie posters" puzzle. So we have some stuff to help keep us entertained now without borrowing stuff from the library! And apparently there's a third coming soon. . .
And that's about it for now, really. . . Got one more day of freedom tomorrow, so time to make the most of it! Including answering comments and maybe getting a couple of early tumblr posts sorted before bed. . . Tomorrow, to-do list: Listen to my two "Wyrd Sister Podcast" episodes; catch up on GrayStillPlays; another workout; another gift fic; probably some more Fallout 4. Think this is doable. :) Night all!
Play Sims 4: Didn't happen, because -- well, it went like this, roughly. We'd just had lunch, so I decided to play my game before watching my videos so I'd have plenty of time to micromanage my Sims as I always do. So I booted up Origin, waited for it to open, prepared to hit my game library to open Sims 4 --
And suddenly noticed the game was downloading something.
Cue me abruptly recalling there was supposed to be a patch in December and racing back online to discover the Gurus dropped the "skintones update" patch early. *facepalm* My own fault for keeping the settings on auto-update, but I'm used to this happening midweek, when I'm NOT home and don't expect to play until the weekend, when my mods will hopefully have updated! (Also I was half under the impression you couldn't play without patching, but apparently if you take Origin offline AND disable automatic patches. . .too late now, though.) Arrrgh. . .and one of the people whose mods I use says they're probably not going to update their own game to the new patch right away, and I have no idea about Deaderpool and MC Command Center (someone said this might not be updated until 2021!) . . .or my rather massive amount of CC. . . I'll check tomorrow for more updates, but I might be off Sims for a while. Good thing that I took a couple of shots of my movie theater update for this week's Wednesday post!
. . .so instead of Sims 4, I played more Fallout 4. Which, if I'm honest, is the game I really want to play these days, sooo -- can't even be that mad? (I'm feeling a bit burnt out on Sims 4, and my OTP randomly fighting in the game does not help. . .) Anyway, picked up with Victor and Dogmeat chilling in the Red Rocket -- had Victor scrap a bunch of stuff, move the crafting benches into the garage (minus the cooking spit, though I did replace the campfire under it with one that was actually lit), then turned the back office into a bedroom for him and Dogmeat. After a good night's sleep, it was into Concord to kill some bloodbugs, pick up some loot from one of the houses (including a red bandanna that was promptly given to Dogmeat), then kill the raiders threatening Preston and clear out the Museum of Freedom! Managed to do that without getting totally wrecked, met up with Preston and gang, PASSED THE SPEECH CHECK WITH MAMA MURPHY to learn more about the Deathclaw (may I remind you Victor is a Charisma 2 build and is currently just in his Vault 111 suit so no bonuses there), picked up the Perception bobblehead, JUST managed to hack the terminal for the security door to get the fusion core, then brought that up to the power armor. I've saved with Victor getting ready to get himself a minigun and take on some raiders and a Deathclaw. :D I'm having a lot of fun restarting my run and doing it this way! I'm particularly looking forward to branching out from these early tutorial quests and into the bigger, badder world. Gonna properly use my camping gear and everything. :D
Watch the Sims-related videos in my Watch Later: This I did -- if I can't play Sims, I can at least watch them! We covered the following:
A) Again, started off with an off-the-list video from my recommendeds – this one from XUrbanSimsX about the LGBT mod! You can assign your Sims’ sexuality/gender presentation (or have them wonder about it in-game, which I assume lets you give them the opportunity to figure it out themselves), have them be activists, in or out of the closet, have protests and galas to drum up support for the cause. . .it’s very thorough! There’s even a special aspiration you can choose for helping promote LGBT rights! Homophobia and transphobia can also be a thing, but that’s an optional file – if you’d prefer an open and accepting world, you can have that too. It looks pretty awesome and well-done. :D
B) Actually in my Watch Later, we started off with some videos from good old Carl’s Sim Guides:
1. A summary of the Livestream of Snowy Escape (again, some of these videos have been in my WL for a while), showing that Carl was. . .semi-impressed? He praised the world for looking beautiful, but seemed iffy on the actual gameplay. Mainly noting all the ways that it was like other packs we’ve had before (namely Jungle Adventure for some of the more adventurous stuff). He doesn’t seem to think it has a lot of replayability, anyway. More reasons to get this during a sale and/or in a bundle, I guess. . . (And I’m glad to see someone else who doesn’t seem to like the new Sim Profile popups! Yes, fine, the tooltips for Sims in the relationship panels were getting huge, but I kind of LIKED ‘hover over it and get all the info you need?’ Meeeh. . .)
2. Slipped out of the WL for his actual pack review of Snowy Escape – which revealed that, apparently, the Game Changers don’t get their early packs for free! It’s just discounted ($27, according to Carl). That’s interesting. . . Anyway, his thoughts on the pack: pretty much the same as his thoughts on the livestream, just more in-depth and sarcastic. XD He likes some of the new stuff, but thinks things like skiing, snowboarding, and going on mountain excursions is likely to get repetitive fast, and he’s not sure there’s enough variety in the Lifestyles to give them the depth they, and thus Sims, need. Hmmmm. . .yeah, think this will be a “on-sale” pack for sure. (Especially with me having learned that Sentiments are much more easily manipulated than one might think too. . .)
3. And then, back in the WL, a video basically informing EA what they need to do to make a good “Sims 5” – can be summed up as “You guys did great with building this time around! Bring back the gameplay from Sims 2 and Sims 3 and don’t have stuff like pools added in after the base game comes out.” XD Not a particularly NEW sentiment – a lot of people I’ve seen complaining about Sims 4’s gameplay happily gush about the two previous installments as ways to do it right. (I never played Sims 3 because of my never-ending loathing for the aesthetic, but the skills journal Carl highlighted looks like a great gameplay addition!) So yeah – at least his featured cute little plumbob moths he made for the opener? XD
C) Then, time to catch up on the Plumbella video I missed while doing my marathon on Saturday – accidentally building a one-tile house! . . .wat. Okay, what actually happened is she decided to do the absolute SMALLEST house she could possibly do. After some faffing about with the platform tool and trying to get a door to work properly with it, she eventually settled on a four-tile box flat box (she was going to have the bed up on the platform, but eventually concluded it wasn’t really necessary). She downloaded a one-tile bathroom from the Gallery because she couldn’t get the right level of squish on her own, then managed to fit in a bed, an all-in-one TV center above that, a mini-fridge, and a bookshelf above THAT. And somewhere in all of that, the game only registered one tile as having been used, meaning her house is in fact too SMALL to count as a tiny house for Tiny Living! O.o She made it work and look pretty nice in the end, though – some roof pieces on the ground created a fun roof line and a tilted window, and she used a pointed window to fit in the corner of the mini-fridge that was sticking through the wall (since you can’t do this without “moveobjects on”). Even made a little garden with roof decorations for a fence! XD I am duly impressed.
Catch up on Kevin and Gray in the subscriptions: Half done -- I watched these tonight, and ended up focusing on Call Me Kevin. Caught up on the three following vids:
1. I Am Your President – Kevin becomes president! Frankly, I am glad, even if his decision-making process involves hiring people with nice hair and selling Taiwan nukes so we can launch them at each other to shoot out of the sky (to show how good our anti-missile tech is). He spent most of his time getting angry at people for e-mailing him about random stuff, stating how much he liked polar bears, starring in a Super Bowl add that he didn’t even watch, and setting up a plan for global domination! Poor guy didn’t get a second term (admittedly, due to health issues, it wasn’t a good idea), but he did get a happy ending according to the game (along with the possibility of reconciling with his ex-wife), so. . . Admittedly, this all came after three attempts to secure being his party’s candidate thanks to some bad speech checks, but hey. XD
2. Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes – Kevin teams up with his friend Will to defuse virtual bombs, in a game where one person has the bomb, and the other person has the manual to defuse it! This was done on stream, with the rule that, if a bomb other than the training level bomb went off, the stream IMMEDIATELY ENDED. They ran into some trouble with the training bomb (with Will steadfastly refusing to believe Kevin had no white wires and essentially reading him the entire manual – btw, did you know Will is an electrician?), but managed to get their groove back and successfully defused bombs for roughly an hour, passing back and forth who had the bomb and who had the manual. XD It was very satisfying, up until the fourth level of bomb, where suddenly the boys were confronted with having to guess words and navigate mazes, and – yeah. Things went explodey, stream and video ended. Fun while it lasted! XD
3. More People Playground – Kevin’s back to his GrayStillPlays torturing ways! Today featured Jeff and Crabmeat, and their father Power Tools (Kevin is – not good at names), in a variety of situations. Like having a bunch of cars flung at them down a steep slope! Being crushed by pistons! Riding the bus to school with a monster bus driver who takes the bus to terminal velocity! And having all their blood smashed out of their bodies as Kevin tries to find a way to fill a blood machine. Seriously, if Gray doesn’t know about this game, SOMEONE NEEDS TO TELL HIM.
So yeah, that was satisfying. XD And I have some EXCELLENT Gray content to look forward to tomorrow!
Write a gift fic: Done! Took me a minute to figure out what I wanted to do, but I have another one in the bag, yay~
Get in a workout: Done! I was gonna do the treadmill, but I lingered a little late with the Fallout 4 and did a slightly longer, harder bike ride instead. And back on the bike means more time with Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! I restarted episode 25 today – more time with the Automatron DLC! Jon finished building his tech lab (and then had to remove a bit of the roof to actually use the robot workbench), attached the relay beacon to Ada, and got the location of the next Robobrain – which had in fact spawned right next to the location where one has to fight the THIRD Robobrain. How curious. . .anyway, after somehow accidentally vanishing Ada by trying to improve her in the workbench, Grills picked up his improved power armor and Paladin Danse and had a vertibird take them over to Sunshine Tidings. Reason being? Sunshine is reasonably close to where the Robobrain spawned, and Jon wanted to see if he could put an artillery piece in there and have Danse man it to shell the hell out of the bots. After putting Danse on big guns duty, Grills proceeded down to the area in question, where the Robobrain and its compatriots were hanging out. He tagged them with his recon scope, did a bit of sneaking to get close, then unleashed hell with an artillery smoke grenade. Out of the four robots in the area, the strike ended up killing three of them, with Grills managing to finish the fourth off when it came for him. So yeah, good work there! And then Grills decided “while I’m here, might as well clear out as much as I can of the Relay base where the third one spawns!” and took out some more junkbots before calling in another artillery strike to smash up some of the Rust Devils there. Left him having slaughtered the lot and taking a break to head out on a trip to refill his ammunition supplies! Ah, I do love me some good FO4 content. :)
Other: And in other things that happened today. . .
-->Going to bed a little earlier WAS a good idea -- didn't wake up feeling tired, managed to get dressed before noon! (Not MUCH before noon, but it still happened.) I think my ideal bedtime for non-work days is between 12:30 and 1:30, honestly -- given I always seem to wake up around 8:30 to 9:00 anyway. . .
-->Had to have the garage door people around because the damn garage door broke today! Everything was properly socially distanced and masked, but hmph. Do not approve.
-->Got an early Christmas present from Dad for the family (though mostly for Mom) -- puzzles! We now have two new ones all our own, a "reading room" puzzle and a "classic movie posters" puzzle. So we have some stuff to help keep us entertained now without borrowing stuff from the library! And apparently there's a third coming soon. . .
And that's about it for now, really. . . Got one more day of freedom tomorrow, so time to make the most of it! Including answering comments and maybe getting a couple of early tumblr posts sorted before bed. . . Tomorrow, to-do list: Listen to my two "Wyrd Sister Podcast" episodes; catch up on GrayStillPlays; another workout; another gift fic; probably some more Fallout 4. Think this is doable. :) Night all!
