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Chilly Sunday
Mar. 14th, 2021 11:16 pmMade even more so by a) wind and b) the fact that I somehow squirted myself with fruit juice while trying to get the freshness seal off my fruit this morning and thus had to put my bathrobe in the wash. Currently wrapped up in my big purple blanket to keep a bit warmer tonight -- brrr. I may throw a load in the wash tomorrow just to get my bathrobe back sooner! Guess this means I don't have to wash it at the end of the month, at least. . .
But yeah, day didn't start out so great -- apart from that, I actually woke up around the new 7:15 AM because I REALLY had to pee, then it took me a while to actually get back to sleep. Finally got up around 10:30, still kinda groggy. Gonna make an effort to try to get to bed a little earlier tonight, make sure I'm not completely exhausted in the days ahead. I will say it's kinda worth it for the shift in daylight -- while morning darkness is a little depressing, I'm more appreciative of more light in the evening.
Fortunately, after those initial setbacks, things started going a bit better, at least to-do list wise:
1. Keep up on YouTube Subscriptions and Jon's latest FO4 YOLO episode: Checkaroonie! Having nothing waiting in the Watch Later means more time for stuff that might pop up in the Subs, after all –
A) Started with James Turner and the latest episode of “3 Brothers” – and oooh boy, is the game getting buggy! The Bust the Dust Kit is now not functioning at ALL – that is, the house isn’t even getting dusty; James kept getting some absolutely HORRIFIC framerate drops (he actually brought up the FPS on his recording software – seven frames per second at one point!); and when he tried to get Brodie to go to lifestyle coaching to remove the “People Person” lifestyle (that was fading away because James’s Sims rarely have friends, meaning Brodie was CONSTANTLY TENSE from wanting to make friends and unable to do his job), it didn’t actually go away (though a combination of time and getting the “Carefree” trait meant that it stopped affecting him eventually, hooray). On the plus side, despite terrible needs, Candle remains an A student; Isaiah has successfully maxed out his Vampire Lore skill and thus has the ability to make a cure for his vampirism (once he gets both enough money AND all the ingredients); and Brodie, despite being tense for ages, did manage to successfully complete two Investigator gigs (a medium one and a hard one). And the one he failed was honestly not so much the fault of him being tense as the fault of James being distracted by the household’s puppies. XD It was downright adorable. So the family is continuing to limp along! Or penguin-walk along, as the brothers’ attempt at a hike proved. XD Might want to take off “vampirically run here” for everything before trying another, James!
B) Then it was onto Call Me Kevin and another episode of The Forest! Today’s episode involved going down a couple of scary caves to find a chainsaw and a modern bow. Along the way, Kevin had many, many scraps with the local cannibal mutants, from the standard “skin color is a bit blue for some reason” humanoids to “why so many legs WHY SO MANY LEGS” spider-people. If it wasn’t for Kevin, I’d actually find this game quite horrifying, methinks. As it IS Kevin. . . XD He somehow managed to stumble his way through, slaying the mutants with his tooth ax and modern bow, once he found it. He also picked up lots of cave meds, cave snacks, and a cave restraining order. O.o I – think that probably has something to do with the story? Got me. . . At any rate, he survived the experience – even got to kill a crocodile with his new bow! And now that he can cut down lots and lots of trees with his new chainsaw, he’s planning on building a tree house next episode. You love to see it. :D
C) Then, this evening, we had GrayStillPlays and another round of Solar Smash! Maybe he’s allowing himself to torture games instead of be tortured by them on weekends. XD And today’s episode was all about a secret that he found out about the game – turns out you can actually pilot some of the world-destroyer thingamajigs manually! The prime example is the space fighter jet, which he used for all sorts of interesting purposes – trying to blow up the Sun (only if you have something else set as the destroyer at the same time, meaning firing the guns will fire that thing as well); trying to fly INTO the Sun (unfortunately no, there’s an invisible wall); trying to shoot down various other world-destroyers (most of your shots just go through them (or they go through you, like with Space Punch Man), but I think you can kill one of the laser things, and you can definitely shoot the moon); trying to fly into Cthulhu (can’t get to his dimension, but you can glitch him into leaving his tentacles behind); and trying to blow up a thousand bombs stuffed into a hole in the Earth (causes some TERRIFYING frame drop, but the actual destruction is fairly meh). He also discovered that shaving the Earth down to a disk and then resetting the planet will give you a LEGITIMATE flat Earth to play with. He promptly used the jets to punch a hole in it, then blew up the Sun to make pizza. XD Fun times!
D) Then, of course, it’s Sunday, so it’s time for Jon’s Fallout 4 YOLO Playthrough! Today’s episode was under an hour, which concerned me – but then, fortunately, it just turned out to be “Jon nearly gave himself a heart attack navigating through the Glowing Sea, so he’s cutting this particular episode short.” XD Even better, he actually had a plan WORK for a change – he hit all three areas that he wanted to (the abandoned shack with the military installation under it – containing some synths and a Covert Ops mag, meaning he’s got all but one now; the actual Crater of Atom; and Virgil’s cave); managed to avoid almost all fights except a dust-up with a swarm of Stingwings (had to burn his crits but he got through without any damage – and, remember, in the Glowing Sea, he had a no-damage-reduction Hazmat suit on, and Weakness, meaning he would have taken +20% damage on top of everything) and the one required Deathclaw (managed to go around it and take it out with two sniper shots); and got out of there via vertibird without radscorpions following him to the ends of the earth (or, rather to Cambridge Police Station, where he hiked back to home base, killing a few raiders along the way). Very tense, but Finalley has met Virgil, learned a bit more about the Institute, and received her goal!
KILL A COURSER. Or, rather, shut down a Courser, as I am 100% certain that Jon is about to head back to Sanctuary on a very brief visit to get Mama Murphy drugged up and hit that Courser with his recall code. No, what Jon’s worried about is the rest of the building – Greentech Genetics. Which is a big firefight with lots of very dangerous Gunners. And even though Finalley can wear her armor (maybe even her power armor) for that fight – yeah. Still. Jon’s got some prep to do if he wants to survive this – we’ll see how it goes next Sunday! If, you know, he doesn’t get distracted by something else on the way. XD
2. Play Alice: Madness Returns and see about finishing the Deluded Depths chapter: Check – I would have played just to the next Radula Room, but – that’s literally just before the end of the chapter, so. . . Woke up all the oysters, completed the hilariously easy block puzzle, fiddled my way through the fights with the Drowned Sailors in that stupid graveyard section – then broke my streak of only killing Alice through missed jumps via dying to the Colossal Ruin. To be fair, that feels like an appropriate time to die in combat. And I should be fucking commended for not dying during last Radula Room – it was a “kill or be killed” room, and THOSE involve two waves of hard enemies – in this case, Eyepots and Menacing Ruin. I got through the first wave okay, but got knocked about hard by the second wave – fortunately, Hysteria (on my last quarter-rose of health!) managed to kill off most of the Eyepots, and I just kept my distance and kept hitting the remaining enemies with my now-fully-upgraded Pepper Grinder. (Yeah, if you play this, upgrade that first – there are plenty of “fire on the switch while fighting the clock” puzzles, and you’ll want to have it firing as fast as possible as quickly as you can!) Annoyingly, though, I have missed a snout! Got EVERYTHING else in the level, at least, but – grr. Now, I could go back into the chapter, but that’ll reset my progress to that checkpoint, and I don’t know where it is, so. . . Probably better to wait until the end of the game and then get anything I missed!
3. Write something now that I've done all my organizing: Check! Something else I’ve been meaning to do this weekend – I have another tumblr friend’s birthday coming up, so I wanted to get the rough draft of a birthday fic done for him! He’s really into the “Destiel” ship from Supernatural at the moment – buuut, as I have very little experience with the show, I decided to do a crossover with the other thing he really loves, the TV version of Dirk Gently, and do a fic of Dirk and Todd talking about one of his favorite characters, Dean Winchester. Currently just a dialogue-only short, but I think it’s fairly amusing and should get the job done. At least get a laugh out of him.
4. Get in a workout: Check! After a two-day break, got back on the bike and back to Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! Caught up with Grills as he finished up Vault 81 and “Hole In The Wall” – not without difficulty, as he’d raced ahead of Preston and Curie and had to wait for them to catch up, then get Curie to head over to Hangman’s Alley with the rest of the companions. But he handed over Austin’s cure, got a “Preston loved that,” and a free room in the vault, yay.
What he didn’t get was enough approval from Preston to get any affinity conversations, so he decided to forgo, at least for the moment, picking up his perk (which he said he considered one of the top-tier perks, second mainly to Deacon’s (bet you’re regretting killing the Railroad now, huh?)), and instead swapped companions to Nick Valentine so Nick could hack Olivette’s terminal and Jon could see her side of the story. Turns out her grand plan was simply “sabotage the phone lines the morning the bombs dropped to stop the scientists getting in,” but two of them (Flint and Collins) actually lived nearby and just came in with the residents, while the third – Burrow – was so keen he stopped in just to see if they were doing a prep drill. So she ended up letting them seal themselves into the secret vault, sabotaged the dispensers, and eventually cut off communication. She actually felt bad about it, just because she was a very moral person. Jon was quite pleased with the backstory and was very glad he came there, even if it didn’t give him Preston perkness. He also took a moment to do the "Dependency" quest to get Bobby DeLuca off the Jet, and recruited Tina for his settlement, because he hadn't done any of those things either. He finished off episode 63 saying that it was likely he was going to send Grills to start clearing up the main story missions next time. . .
And then episode 64 started with him going, “Hey, everyone, we’re going to NUKA-WORLD!” Apparently he remembered that DLC existed between parts and decided he might as well handle it before he got any more levels up and it got any harder. XD Popped on his Power Armor, made sure all his companions were sequestered at Hangman’s Alley, made sure he had his good guns, then took a vertibird over to Sunshine Tidings, working his way over to the transit center from there. The Gunners currently occupying the place didn’t give him much grief – he was only really worried about the Assaultron and their boss, and the former turned out to be really low level, so. . . He headed inside, met Harvey –
Aaaand shot him in the head. Prompting a surprise message from Gage essentially saying, “Well, damn. Okay then, maybe you just want to do raidery things instead of being tricked into a death trap – how about you come down here and run the death trap anyway, and we’ll see what happens?” XD Grills was only too happy to do so, and I left things with him starting to make his way through the Gauntlet. Laser turrets remain one of Jon’s worst nightmares, but I don’t think they’ll really give Grills much trouble.
Additionally:
-->. . .so last night I got bored after running out of things to look at over on icemunmunn’s blogspot (they do a lot of custom objects and foods), and had a sudden burst of productivity regarding my latest set of Newcrest Adventures pictures.
Namely, I managed to get all the pictures sorted, and the initial draft posts into my, er, drafts. O.o Okay, seems like when you allow me to finally exhaust all avenues of entertainment for myself, I can and will actually get shit done. :p
-->Truth in action -- I've already taken care of any queuing on Valice Multiverse (one ask again, and I'd already spotted an Alice thing I wanted to reblog earlier on my main account, sooo), so I'm writing up a "shitposts" draft featuring silly conversations I've thought of for "Fallout of Darkness" in my drafts for Victor Luvs Alice. At least I should be well-covered for posts for the next couple of days?
Anyway -- time to answer my remaining DW comment, then finish up the tags on that draft post before finding something to keep myself occupied before bedtime. One more day of freedom left. . .let's cover the to-do list for it:
1. Keep up on YouTube Subscriptions
2. Play some Sims 4 (Chill Save, see if I can get up to Victor and Alice's wedding)
3. Start Chapter 4 of "In A World Of His Own"
4. Get in a workout
Yeah, I think that's good. Night all!
But yeah, day didn't start out so great -- apart from that, I actually woke up around the new 7:15 AM because I REALLY had to pee, then it took me a while to actually get back to sleep. Finally got up around 10:30, still kinda groggy. Gonna make an effort to try to get to bed a little earlier tonight, make sure I'm not completely exhausted in the days ahead. I will say it's kinda worth it for the shift in daylight -- while morning darkness is a little depressing, I'm more appreciative of more light in the evening.
Fortunately, after those initial setbacks, things started going a bit better, at least to-do list wise:
1. Keep up on YouTube Subscriptions and Jon's latest FO4 YOLO episode: Checkaroonie! Having nothing waiting in the Watch Later means more time for stuff that might pop up in the Subs, after all –
A) Started with James Turner and the latest episode of “3 Brothers” – and oooh boy, is the game getting buggy! The Bust the Dust Kit is now not functioning at ALL – that is, the house isn’t even getting dusty; James kept getting some absolutely HORRIFIC framerate drops (he actually brought up the FPS on his recording software – seven frames per second at one point!); and when he tried to get Brodie to go to lifestyle coaching to remove the “People Person” lifestyle (that was fading away because James’s Sims rarely have friends, meaning Brodie was CONSTANTLY TENSE from wanting to make friends and unable to do his job), it didn’t actually go away (though a combination of time and getting the “Carefree” trait meant that it stopped affecting him eventually, hooray). On the plus side, despite terrible needs, Candle remains an A student; Isaiah has successfully maxed out his Vampire Lore skill and thus has the ability to make a cure for his vampirism (once he gets both enough money AND all the ingredients); and Brodie, despite being tense for ages, did manage to successfully complete two Investigator gigs (a medium one and a hard one). And the one he failed was honestly not so much the fault of him being tense as the fault of James being distracted by the household’s puppies. XD It was downright adorable. So the family is continuing to limp along! Or penguin-walk along, as the brothers’ attempt at a hike proved. XD Might want to take off “vampirically run here” for everything before trying another, James!
B) Then it was onto Call Me Kevin and another episode of The Forest! Today’s episode involved going down a couple of scary caves to find a chainsaw and a modern bow. Along the way, Kevin had many, many scraps with the local cannibal mutants, from the standard “skin color is a bit blue for some reason” humanoids to “why so many legs WHY SO MANY LEGS” spider-people. If it wasn’t for Kevin, I’d actually find this game quite horrifying, methinks. As it IS Kevin. . . XD He somehow managed to stumble his way through, slaying the mutants with his tooth ax and modern bow, once he found it. He also picked up lots of cave meds, cave snacks, and a cave restraining order. O.o I – think that probably has something to do with the story? Got me. . . At any rate, he survived the experience – even got to kill a crocodile with his new bow! And now that he can cut down lots and lots of trees with his new chainsaw, he’s planning on building a tree house next episode. You love to see it. :D
C) Then, this evening, we had GrayStillPlays and another round of Solar Smash! Maybe he’s allowing himself to torture games instead of be tortured by them on weekends. XD And today’s episode was all about a secret that he found out about the game – turns out you can actually pilot some of the world-destroyer thingamajigs manually! The prime example is the space fighter jet, which he used for all sorts of interesting purposes – trying to blow up the Sun (only if you have something else set as the destroyer at the same time, meaning firing the guns will fire that thing as well); trying to fly INTO the Sun (unfortunately no, there’s an invisible wall); trying to shoot down various other world-destroyers (most of your shots just go through them (or they go through you, like with Space Punch Man), but I think you can kill one of the laser things, and you can definitely shoot the moon); trying to fly into Cthulhu (can’t get to his dimension, but you can glitch him into leaving his tentacles behind); and trying to blow up a thousand bombs stuffed into a hole in the Earth (causes some TERRIFYING frame drop, but the actual destruction is fairly meh). He also discovered that shaving the Earth down to a disk and then resetting the planet will give you a LEGITIMATE flat Earth to play with. He promptly used the jets to punch a hole in it, then blew up the Sun to make pizza. XD Fun times!
D) Then, of course, it’s Sunday, so it’s time for Jon’s Fallout 4 YOLO Playthrough! Today’s episode was under an hour, which concerned me – but then, fortunately, it just turned out to be “Jon nearly gave himself a heart attack navigating through the Glowing Sea, so he’s cutting this particular episode short.” XD Even better, he actually had a plan WORK for a change – he hit all three areas that he wanted to (the abandoned shack with the military installation under it – containing some synths and a Covert Ops mag, meaning he’s got all but one now; the actual Crater of Atom; and Virgil’s cave); managed to avoid almost all fights except a dust-up with a swarm of Stingwings (had to burn his crits but he got through without any damage – and, remember, in the Glowing Sea, he had a no-damage-reduction Hazmat suit on, and Weakness, meaning he would have taken +20% damage on top of everything) and the one required Deathclaw (managed to go around it and take it out with two sniper shots); and got out of there via vertibird without radscorpions following him to the ends of the earth (or, rather to Cambridge Police Station, where he hiked back to home base, killing a few raiders along the way). Very tense, but Finalley has met Virgil, learned a bit more about the Institute, and received her goal!
KILL A COURSER. Or, rather, shut down a Courser, as I am 100% certain that Jon is about to head back to Sanctuary on a very brief visit to get Mama Murphy drugged up and hit that Courser with his recall code. No, what Jon’s worried about is the rest of the building – Greentech Genetics. Which is a big firefight with lots of very dangerous Gunners. And even though Finalley can wear her armor (maybe even her power armor) for that fight – yeah. Still. Jon’s got some prep to do if he wants to survive this – we’ll see how it goes next Sunday! If, you know, he doesn’t get distracted by something else on the way. XD
2. Play Alice: Madness Returns and see about finishing the Deluded Depths chapter: Check – I would have played just to the next Radula Room, but – that’s literally just before the end of the chapter, so. . . Woke up all the oysters, completed the hilariously easy block puzzle, fiddled my way through the fights with the Drowned Sailors in that stupid graveyard section – then broke my streak of only killing Alice through missed jumps via dying to the Colossal Ruin. To be fair, that feels like an appropriate time to die in combat. And I should be fucking commended for not dying during last Radula Room – it was a “kill or be killed” room, and THOSE involve two waves of hard enemies – in this case, Eyepots and Menacing Ruin. I got through the first wave okay, but got knocked about hard by the second wave – fortunately, Hysteria (on my last quarter-rose of health!) managed to kill off most of the Eyepots, and I just kept my distance and kept hitting the remaining enemies with my now-fully-upgraded Pepper Grinder. (Yeah, if you play this, upgrade that first – there are plenty of “fire on the switch while fighting the clock” puzzles, and you’ll want to have it firing as fast as possible as quickly as you can!) Annoyingly, though, I have missed a snout! Got EVERYTHING else in the level, at least, but – grr. Now, I could go back into the chapter, but that’ll reset my progress to that checkpoint, and I don’t know where it is, so. . . Probably better to wait until the end of the game and then get anything I missed!
3. Write something now that I've done all my organizing: Check! Something else I’ve been meaning to do this weekend – I have another tumblr friend’s birthday coming up, so I wanted to get the rough draft of a birthday fic done for him! He’s really into the “Destiel” ship from Supernatural at the moment – buuut, as I have very little experience with the show, I decided to do a crossover with the other thing he really loves, the TV version of Dirk Gently, and do a fic of Dirk and Todd talking about one of his favorite characters, Dean Winchester. Currently just a dialogue-only short, but I think it’s fairly amusing and should get the job done. At least get a laugh out of him.
4. Get in a workout: Check! After a two-day break, got back on the bike and back to Jon’s Fallout 4 Survival Playthrough! Caught up with Grills as he finished up Vault 81 and “Hole In The Wall” – not without difficulty, as he’d raced ahead of Preston and Curie and had to wait for them to catch up, then get Curie to head over to Hangman’s Alley with the rest of the companions. But he handed over Austin’s cure, got a “Preston loved that,” and a free room in the vault, yay.
What he didn’t get was enough approval from Preston to get any affinity conversations, so he decided to forgo, at least for the moment, picking up his perk (which he said he considered one of the top-tier perks, second mainly to Deacon’s (bet you’re regretting killing the Railroad now, huh?)), and instead swapped companions to Nick Valentine so Nick could hack Olivette’s terminal and Jon could see her side of the story. Turns out her grand plan was simply “sabotage the phone lines the morning the bombs dropped to stop the scientists getting in,” but two of them (Flint and Collins) actually lived nearby and just came in with the residents, while the third – Burrow – was so keen he stopped in just to see if they were doing a prep drill. So she ended up letting them seal themselves into the secret vault, sabotaged the dispensers, and eventually cut off communication. She actually felt bad about it, just because she was a very moral person. Jon was quite pleased with the backstory and was very glad he came there, even if it didn’t give him Preston perkness. He also took a moment to do the "Dependency" quest to get Bobby DeLuca off the Jet, and recruited Tina for his settlement, because he hadn't done any of those things either. He finished off episode 63 saying that it was likely he was going to send Grills to start clearing up the main story missions next time. . .
And then episode 64 started with him going, “Hey, everyone, we’re going to NUKA-WORLD!” Apparently he remembered that DLC existed between parts and decided he might as well handle it before he got any more levels up and it got any harder. XD Popped on his Power Armor, made sure all his companions were sequestered at Hangman’s Alley, made sure he had his good guns, then took a vertibird over to Sunshine Tidings, working his way over to the transit center from there. The Gunners currently occupying the place didn’t give him much grief – he was only really worried about the Assaultron and their boss, and the former turned out to be really low level, so. . . He headed inside, met Harvey –
Aaaand shot him in the head. Prompting a surprise message from Gage essentially saying, “Well, damn. Okay then, maybe you just want to do raidery things instead of being tricked into a death trap – how about you come down here and run the death trap anyway, and we’ll see what happens?” XD Grills was only too happy to do so, and I left things with him starting to make his way through the Gauntlet. Laser turrets remain one of Jon’s worst nightmares, but I don’t think they’ll really give Grills much trouble.
Additionally:
-->. . .so last night I got bored after running out of things to look at over on icemunmunn’s blogspot (they do a lot of custom objects and foods), and had a sudden burst of productivity regarding my latest set of Newcrest Adventures pictures.
Namely, I managed to get all the pictures sorted, and the initial draft posts into my, er, drafts. O.o Okay, seems like when you allow me to finally exhaust all avenues of entertainment for myself, I can and will actually get shit done. :p
-->Truth in action -- I've already taken care of any queuing on Valice Multiverse (one ask again, and I'd already spotted an Alice thing I wanted to reblog earlier on my main account, sooo), so I'm writing up a "shitposts" draft featuring silly conversations I've thought of for "Fallout of Darkness" in my drafts for Victor Luvs Alice. At least I should be well-covered for posts for the next couple of days?
Anyway -- time to answer my remaining DW comment, then finish up the tags on that draft post before finding something to keep myself occupied before bedtime. One more day of freedom left. . .let's cover the to-do list for it:
1. Keep up on YouTube Subscriptions
2. Play some Sims 4 (Chill Save, see if I can get up to Victor and Alice's wedding)
3. Start Chapter 4 of "In A World Of His Own"
4. Get in a workout
Yeah, I think that's good. Night all!
