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Semi-Lazy Sunday
Mar. 7th, 2021 10:56 pmYou'll see what I mean from my to-do list -- three out of four, but the one I missed might not be the one you're expecting --
1. Watch the "3 Ways To Play," the Late Night Double Feature Linkara released earlier, the latest Call Me Kevin video, and Jon's latest FO4 YOLO episode: Check! Started later in the afternoon than I first intended, but I cleared out these four without issue –
A) Actually started with Late Night Double Feature, with “Manos Sequel Night!” Manos as in Manos: The Hands of Fate – yes, the MST3K episode. Turns out the actress who played the daughter, Debbie, has appeared in both a sequel – Manos Returns – and a prequel – Manos: The Rise of Torgo! Yes, people made BOTH. The first is a horror-comedy deliberately aping the poor production values of the first while expanding on some of the horror elements (it’s explicitly established that no one can die in the house, for one), and has “Debbie” reprising her role as the new leader of the cult now that the Master’s apparently decided he can’t be arsed running it anymore. The second is also a deliberately-bad horror-comedy, with “Debbie” now playing the role of Manos! It basically shows where the Master came from, then follows Torgo’s life as he is born, grows up, gets inducted into the cult, and ends up leading his own mother to her doom. Neither of them are great movies, but Clive (Lewis’s host role for this show) says that Manos Returns is a fun experience and brings up some interesting ideas, while Manos: The Rise of Torgo relies way too much on aping lines from the original and thus commits the cardinal sin of not being funny when it’s supposed to be a comedy. If you’re going to have a Manos movie night, stick with the original and the sequel and skip the prequel. :p
B) Then it was time for Hitman 3 “3 Ways To Play” from the OXBox crew! The 47s were in Argentina this time, attending a Providence party and eliminating the two people in the way of Diana getting to become the new Constant and quietly take down the group from the inside. First up was Tamara, a “Herald” and Diana’s constant companion because she’s a suspicious bitch. As usual, we had three distinct methods of play:
Andy promptly ditched the party to become one of the guards (he loves the belt), and found the perfect murder opportunity in a sabotaged wine press. He disguised himself as a fellow party member going with Diana and Tamara on a tour, then had to take a detour disguise as a field worker because the guy giving the tour wouldn’t leave until you gave him some grapes to try before harvesting. Once that was over with, he became the guy (Corvo Black, like the only person at the party who auto-recognizes 47) again, followed the ladies on the tour, had a very worrying moment when the winery owner got them ALL to stand in the press for a picture – then Diana distracted him by asking to see the picture long enough for Andy to press the button and juice Tamara. It was – pretty horrific. Even Andy was shocked, and he set the damn thing up.
Jane went into the party and wandered around the grounds, trying to find a good kill – and stumbled across a variety of garden lights next to hoses that could be sabotaged. Yup, time for some more fun electrocution kills! She went on a little adventure downstairs, disguising herself as a winery worker briefly to acquire a screwdriver before swapping back into her tuxedo, soaking up some story, and trying to figure out which easily-sabotaged light the pair were going to pass by (and when to turn on the water so that Tamara was the only one killed). It took a few tries and a lot of longing looks at Diana while listening to her talk about their relationship (Diana calling herself 47’s conscience), but eventually Tamara got close enough to a light and far away enough from Diana that Jane felt safe turning on the water and zapping her. She officially has an MO now!
Mike also went into the party, wondered how he was going to blow up Tamara when Diana was always right there beside her, got increasingly frustrated by Tamara refusing to just go off by herself, also got frustrated by Corvo Black being a noticer and threw him over a railing when he isolated himself, and eventually resorted to just flinging Tamara over what I think was the same railing when she and Diana were talking.
After coining away only ONE of the guards. To be fair, he tried to do both, but Tamara herself screwed it up by getting distracted as well. At any rate, she got murdered, Mike promptly ran to hide in the lavender bushes and change into a bodyguard outfit to stop himself getting shot at, then gleefully told everyone he hadn’t learned his lesson at all before going back to hide in the lavender bushes because all of the other bodyguards were noticers. XD And it looks like the upcoming second part will feature a wine bottle rampage! Ah, can’t beat a good wine bottle rampage. :)
C) This evening, started with Call Me Kevin, and more GTA V Chaos Mod! :D Today was the Paleto heist (apparently an FIB heist?), which involved Trevor and Michael robbing a bank while Franklin handled the getaway. Naturally, the Chaos Mod made this WAAAAY more complicated than it needed to be. XD Mostly through things like slowing down the game speed to ridiculous levels; having Michael fall asleep during a cutscene; spawning dump trucks everywhere; changing everyone’s clothes randomly; making a gravity field that killed Trevor and broke the cutscene at the very end of the set-up mission; loading Trevor’s minigun during the actual heist with cats; removing all the assets when Franklin had to pick the guys up; and doing a fake crash at the very end of the mission. Kevin had to restart certain sections a couple of times, and you could see it was starting to get pretty frustrating for the poor guy. XD Ah, your pain is our gain, Kevin – just remember that.
D) And then it was time for Jon’s Fallout 4 YOLO Playthrough! Today’s episode was all about Finalley finally making her way to the Glowing Sea! And along the way, we learned a few things, including:
I. The Hazmat Suit not only offers +1000 rad resistance, it also has a secret effect of 98% rad reduction, meaning – despite the fact it takes off all his armor and makes it so he’s going to take full damage from anything that hits him – Jon decided it was the better option for Finalley to use for the actual trip into the Sea, instead of power armor.
II. The Lonely Chapel and the nearby raider camp are actually linked areas, allowing you to access the same dungeon – in fact, technically the Lonely Chapel is the BACKDOOR into this dungeon, allowing you to skip straight to the final boss. I seriously thought they were separate areas! Also, Covert Ops Mag among Red Tourette’s stuff, so good work Jon.
III. Also, the Federal Ration Stockpile Raider Camp is totally in range of Oberland Station, meaning you can rain artillery death on it if you want, and Finalley wanted.
IV. Having the Brotherhood around is both blessing and curse – Jon can talk up how having the Knights drop in to kill monsters is extremely helpful all he likes, and I’m sure it is, but those circling vertibirds nearly got him in trouble with raiders and mutants twice. Not to mention their love for falling out of the sky and exploding. . .
V. A Staggering gun is very VERY useful against any enemy with melee weapons or unarmed creatures – Finalley managed to stunlock a Legendary Deathclaw with her Staggering Combat Rifle. Must remember for if and when I fire up the game myself again.
VI. Never go swimming if you can help it, because you WILL get a terrible disease when you can least afford it in Survival – Finalley went for a brief dip to cross a bridge that was half-open, and picked up Weakness. Which is +20% MORE damage from everything. On the edge of the GLOWING SEA. Jon was thrilled, as you might well guess. :p
Yeah, interesting journey south. But Finalley made it without actually taking any more hits – even got herself a level-up, which she used to boost her Luck and open up Four-Leaf Clover. We left her on the very edge of the Glowing Sea, looking out upon it and wondering how the hell she was going to handle it. Next week is probably going to be make or break for the run. I sincerely hope it’s make – I’m enjoying this LP and don’t want it to end too soon.
2. Play some Alice: Madness Returns and at least finish off Tundraful: Check! As I recalled, I was indeed pretty close to the end of Tundraful when I left off after the Radula room – it was just a matter of going through the final maze-like area to Mock Turtle’s ship, being sure to pick up all the secrets and goodies along the way. I’m already a good portion of the way into the Deluded Depths now – Alice has gone through her second major memory about the library fire, and wound her way past the wreckage of ships and Hatter’s Domain into Barrelbottom. Appropriately, I’ve left off halfway through there, after completing another Radula room (the first “time trial” one – basically distracted all the madcaps with a bunch of thrown Clockwork Bombs). Making good progress for this replay – up to 27% complete!
(Also, fun fact – I let off a depth charge right before the cutscene where the shark wrecks Turtle’s boat – turns out it’s entirely possible to blow up that shark before it actually bites you! Fortunately the explosion from the blast looks like it could totally throw the boat off course, so cutscene not totally ruined. XD)
3. Write something (it's a free day!): . . .does the to-do list itself count?
Okay, what happened here is simple – I’ve been in one of my “I just want to see Victor get brainwarped damn it” moods, so I ended up rereading most of my old fic snippets regarding that for most of the day, and never actually got around to writing anything new. I THOUGHT about it a lot, granted, but apart from a couple of quick edits on one snippet. . . *deep sigh* It’s just one day, I’m not going to worry about it. Let’s get all the brainfuzz out of the way TODAY so I can concentrate on my main projects for the rest of the week.
4. Get in a workout: Check! A bit later than my usual, but I got in my 25 minutes on the bike, and finished off Episode 61 of Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! Caught up with Grills just as he was leaving Far Harbor to return to Boston – and I just realized he never did the "Brain Dead" murder mystery quest! Damn it, this seals it – Grills is the WORST Fallout 4 character.
Anyway, Grills returned to the Commonwealth on his invisible-walls boat (Jon showing off how you can’t even jetpack off it) and delivered the bad news to the Nakanos – and lied about Kasumi being a synth because her trying to defend Acadia meant Grills thought she was as bad as one. Fortunately, this had immediate karmic consequences – namely, Grills didn’t get to dig up the “buried treasure” reward you can get if you bring Kasumi home safely. And after using the Institute teleport to make his way home, Grills discovered more bad news – not only had the low-level raiders around Hangman’s Alley regenerated while he was away, there was a Gunner attack on his home base! Fortunately most of the casualties were the Gunners – but he ALSO lost his shopkeep, the Vault-Tec Rep. Welp! Grills put him on a burning car for a “funeral pyre,” and later reassigned Sturges to the shop – though Sturges was very slow to get to work. Good, I like bad things happening to the Brotherhood asshole. :p
With that all sorted and the corpses of the Gunners looted, Grills took a moment to set up some armor racks for some of the new outfits he picked up – though he couldn’t actually put Erickson’s bear outfit on one! Which – makes sense, it’s SUPER MUTANT clothes, and the armor displays are human mannequins. Dunno where that will go now, then. . . He also officially retired his Lucky 10mm, and after some thought, replaced it with his Two-Shot Combat Rifle (December’s Child and the Enraging Automatic Combat Rifle, his other choices, just couldn’t match the damage output). He took a quick trip to Diamond City to get aluminum to complete the mods he wanted to add to the Two-Shot and give Ellie the bad news about the Nakanos, then let Nick know about his and DiMA’s relationship and DiMA’s death, being very rude about synths all the while. Nick wasn’t impressed. You’re just lucky you’re essential and thus can’t be killed by the player, Nick!
So yeah, that’s Episode 61 done. . .I technically started Episode 62, but I’m only a minute in, so nothing much has happened beyond Jon walking around base and complaining that the corpses of the Gunners haven’t been cleaned up. But I know that this episode is going to feature another massacre I probably won’t enjoy – you see, going all-in with the Brotherhood means you eventually have to eliminate the Railroad. . .
Additionally:
-->Just as a point of interest, today was kind of “leftovers day” for me – not only did we have the leftovers from yesterday for lunch and dinner (spinach pies and chicken pot pie respectively), I had the last slice of banana bread for breakfast, and the last two chocolate chocolate-and-peanut-butter-chip cookies out of the fridge for a snack this afternoon. Plus the remaining whipped cream Mom made yesterday on my ice cream. Just thought that was kinda funny. XD
-->Much quieter on the old Valice Multiverse side tonight -- one ask and that's it. Which is good, because I've got work tomorrow. At least it's an easy queue!
And now I just have to answer my DW comments and head to bed. Four day week this week, yay~ Hopefully it doesn't turn into a hell-week to justify me taking the time off. Night all!
1. Watch the "3 Ways To Play," the Late Night Double Feature Linkara released earlier, the latest Call Me Kevin video, and Jon's latest FO4 YOLO episode: Check! Started later in the afternoon than I first intended, but I cleared out these four without issue –
A) Actually started with Late Night Double Feature, with “Manos Sequel Night!” Manos as in Manos: The Hands of Fate – yes, the MST3K episode. Turns out the actress who played the daughter, Debbie, has appeared in both a sequel – Manos Returns – and a prequel – Manos: The Rise of Torgo! Yes, people made BOTH. The first is a horror-comedy deliberately aping the poor production values of the first while expanding on some of the horror elements (it’s explicitly established that no one can die in the house, for one), and has “Debbie” reprising her role as the new leader of the cult now that the Master’s apparently decided he can’t be arsed running it anymore. The second is also a deliberately-bad horror-comedy, with “Debbie” now playing the role of Manos! It basically shows where the Master came from, then follows Torgo’s life as he is born, grows up, gets inducted into the cult, and ends up leading his own mother to her doom. Neither of them are great movies, but Clive (Lewis’s host role for this show) says that Manos Returns is a fun experience and brings up some interesting ideas, while Manos: The Rise of Torgo relies way too much on aping lines from the original and thus commits the cardinal sin of not being funny when it’s supposed to be a comedy. If you’re going to have a Manos movie night, stick with the original and the sequel and skip the prequel. :p
B) Then it was time for Hitman 3 “3 Ways To Play” from the OXBox crew! The 47s were in Argentina this time, attending a Providence party and eliminating the two people in the way of Diana getting to become the new Constant and quietly take down the group from the inside. First up was Tamara, a “Herald” and Diana’s constant companion because she’s a suspicious bitch. As usual, we had three distinct methods of play:
Andy promptly ditched the party to become one of the guards (he loves the belt), and found the perfect murder opportunity in a sabotaged wine press. He disguised himself as a fellow party member going with Diana and Tamara on a tour, then had to take a detour disguise as a field worker because the guy giving the tour wouldn’t leave until you gave him some grapes to try before harvesting. Once that was over with, he became the guy (Corvo Black, like the only person at the party who auto-recognizes 47) again, followed the ladies on the tour, had a very worrying moment when the winery owner got them ALL to stand in the press for a picture – then Diana distracted him by asking to see the picture long enough for Andy to press the button and juice Tamara. It was – pretty horrific. Even Andy was shocked, and he set the damn thing up.
Jane went into the party and wandered around the grounds, trying to find a good kill – and stumbled across a variety of garden lights next to hoses that could be sabotaged. Yup, time for some more fun electrocution kills! She went on a little adventure downstairs, disguising herself as a winery worker briefly to acquire a screwdriver before swapping back into her tuxedo, soaking up some story, and trying to figure out which easily-sabotaged light the pair were going to pass by (and when to turn on the water so that Tamara was the only one killed). It took a few tries and a lot of longing looks at Diana while listening to her talk about their relationship (Diana calling herself 47’s conscience), but eventually Tamara got close enough to a light and far away enough from Diana that Jane felt safe turning on the water and zapping her. She officially has an MO now!
Mike also went into the party, wondered how he was going to blow up Tamara when Diana was always right there beside her, got increasingly frustrated by Tamara refusing to just go off by herself, also got frustrated by Corvo Black being a noticer and threw him over a railing when he isolated himself, and eventually resorted to just flinging Tamara over what I think was the same railing when she and Diana were talking.
After coining away only ONE of the guards. To be fair, he tried to do both, but Tamara herself screwed it up by getting distracted as well. At any rate, she got murdered, Mike promptly ran to hide in the lavender bushes and change into a bodyguard outfit to stop himself getting shot at, then gleefully told everyone he hadn’t learned his lesson at all before going back to hide in the lavender bushes because all of the other bodyguards were noticers. XD And it looks like the upcoming second part will feature a wine bottle rampage! Ah, can’t beat a good wine bottle rampage. :)
C) This evening, started with Call Me Kevin, and more GTA V Chaos Mod! :D Today was the Paleto heist (apparently an FIB heist?), which involved Trevor and Michael robbing a bank while Franklin handled the getaway. Naturally, the Chaos Mod made this WAAAAY more complicated than it needed to be. XD Mostly through things like slowing down the game speed to ridiculous levels; having Michael fall asleep during a cutscene; spawning dump trucks everywhere; changing everyone’s clothes randomly; making a gravity field that killed Trevor and broke the cutscene at the very end of the set-up mission; loading Trevor’s minigun during the actual heist with cats; removing all the assets when Franklin had to pick the guys up; and doing a fake crash at the very end of the mission. Kevin had to restart certain sections a couple of times, and you could see it was starting to get pretty frustrating for the poor guy. XD Ah, your pain is our gain, Kevin – just remember that.
D) And then it was time for Jon’s Fallout 4 YOLO Playthrough! Today’s episode was all about Finalley finally making her way to the Glowing Sea! And along the way, we learned a few things, including:
I. The Hazmat Suit not only offers +1000 rad resistance, it also has a secret effect of 98% rad reduction, meaning – despite the fact it takes off all his armor and makes it so he’s going to take full damage from anything that hits him – Jon decided it was the better option for Finalley to use for the actual trip into the Sea, instead of power armor.
II. The Lonely Chapel and the nearby raider camp are actually linked areas, allowing you to access the same dungeon – in fact, technically the Lonely Chapel is the BACKDOOR into this dungeon, allowing you to skip straight to the final boss. I seriously thought they were separate areas! Also, Covert Ops Mag among Red Tourette’s stuff, so good work Jon.
III. Also, the Federal Ration Stockpile Raider Camp is totally in range of Oberland Station, meaning you can rain artillery death on it if you want, and Finalley wanted.
IV. Having the Brotherhood around is both blessing and curse – Jon can talk up how having the Knights drop in to kill monsters is extremely helpful all he likes, and I’m sure it is, but those circling vertibirds nearly got him in trouble with raiders and mutants twice. Not to mention their love for falling out of the sky and exploding. . .
V. A Staggering gun is very VERY useful against any enemy with melee weapons or unarmed creatures – Finalley managed to stunlock a Legendary Deathclaw with her Staggering Combat Rifle. Must remember for if and when I fire up the game myself again.
VI. Never go swimming if you can help it, because you WILL get a terrible disease when you can least afford it in Survival – Finalley went for a brief dip to cross a bridge that was half-open, and picked up Weakness. Which is +20% MORE damage from everything. On the edge of the GLOWING SEA. Jon was thrilled, as you might well guess. :p
Yeah, interesting journey south. But Finalley made it without actually taking any more hits – even got herself a level-up, which she used to boost her Luck and open up Four-Leaf Clover. We left her on the very edge of the Glowing Sea, looking out upon it and wondering how the hell she was going to handle it. Next week is probably going to be make or break for the run. I sincerely hope it’s make – I’m enjoying this LP and don’t want it to end too soon.
2. Play some Alice: Madness Returns and at least finish off Tundraful: Check! As I recalled, I was indeed pretty close to the end of Tundraful when I left off after the Radula room – it was just a matter of going through the final maze-like area to Mock Turtle’s ship, being sure to pick up all the secrets and goodies along the way. I’m already a good portion of the way into the Deluded Depths now – Alice has gone through her second major memory about the library fire, and wound her way past the wreckage of ships and Hatter’s Domain into Barrelbottom. Appropriately, I’ve left off halfway through there, after completing another Radula room (the first “time trial” one – basically distracted all the madcaps with a bunch of thrown Clockwork Bombs). Making good progress for this replay – up to 27% complete!
(Also, fun fact – I let off a depth charge right before the cutscene where the shark wrecks Turtle’s boat – turns out it’s entirely possible to blow up that shark before it actually bites you! Fortunately the explosion from the blast looks like it could totally throw the boat off course, so cutscene not totally ruined. XD)
3. Write something (it's a free day!): . . .does the to-do list itself count?
Okay, what happened here is simple – I’ve been in one of my “I just want to see Victor get brainwarped damn it” moods, so I ended up rereading most of my old fic snippets regarding that for most of the day, and never actually got around to writing anything new. I THOUGHT about it a lot, granted, but apart from a couple of quick edits on one snippet. . . *deep sigh* It’s just one day, I’m not going to worry about it. Let’s get all the brainfuzz out of the way TODAY so I can concentrate on my main projects for the rest of the week.
4. Get in a workout: Check! A bit later than my usual, but I got in my 25 minutes on the bike, and finished off Episode 61 of Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! Caught up with Grills just as he was leaving Far Harbor to return to Boston – and I just realized he never did the "Brain Dead" murder mystery quest! Damn it, this seals it – Grills is the WORST Fallout 4 character.
Anyway, Grills returned to the Commonwealth on his invisible-walls boat (Jon showing off how you can’t even jetpack off it) and delivered the bad news to the Nakanos – and lied about Kasumi being a synth because her trying to defend Acadia meant Grills thought she was as bad as one. Fortunately, this had immediate karmic consequences – namely, Grills didn’t get to dig up the “buried treasure” reward you can get if you bring Kasumi home safely. And after using the Institute teleport to make his way home, Grills discovered more bad news – not only had the low-level raiders around Hangman’s Alley regenerated while he was away, there was a Gunner attack on his home base! Fortunately most of the casualties were the Gunners – but he ALSO lost his shopkeep, the Vault-Tec Rep. Welp! Grills put him on a burning car for a “funeral pyre,” and later reassigned Sturges to the shop – though Sturges was very slow to get to work. Good, I like bad things happening to the Brotherhood asshole. :p
With that all sorted and the corpses of the Gunners looted, Grills took a moment to set up some armor racks for some of the new outfits he picked up – though he couldn’t actually put Erickson’s bear outfit on one! Which – makes sense, it’s SUPER MUTANT clothes, and the armor displays are human mannequins. Dunno where that will go now, then. . . He also officially retired his Lucky 10mm, and after some thought, replaced it with his Two-Shot Combat Rifle (December’s Child and the Enraging Automatic Combat Rifle, his other choices, just couldn’t match the damage output). He took a quick trip to Diamond City to get aluminum to complete the mods he wanted to add to the Two-Shot and give Ellie the bad news about the Nakanos, then let Nick know about his and DiMA’s relationship and DiMA’s death, being very rude about synths all the while. Nick wasn’t impressed. You’re just lucky you’re essential and thus can’t be killed by the player, Nick!
So yeah, that’s Episode 61 done. . .I technically started Episode 62, but I’m only a minute in, so nothing much has happened beyond Jon walking around base and complaining that the corpses of the Gunners haven’t been cleaned up. But I know that this episode is going to feature another massacre I probably won’t enjoy – you see, going all-in with the Brotherhood means you eventually have to eliminate the Railroad. . .
Additionally:
-->Just as a point of interest, today was kind of “leftovers day” for me – not only did we have the leftovers from yesterday for lunch and dinner (spinach pies and chicken pot pie respectively), I had the last slice of banana bread for breakfast, and the last two chocolate chocolate-and-peanut-butter-chip cookies out of the fridge for a snack this afternoon. Plus the remaining whipped cream Mom made yesterday on my ice cream. Just thought that was kinda funny. XD
-->Much quieter on the old Valice Multiverse side tonight -- one ask and that's it. Which is good, because I've got work tomorrow. At least it's an easy queue!
And now I just have to answer my DW comments and head to bed. Four day week this week, yay~ Hopefully it doesn't turn into a hell-week to justify me taking the time off. Night all!
