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Chill And Productive Thursday
May. 13th, 2021 11:20 pmYeah, I am pretty happy with how this day off has turned out! :) Got up around 9:30ish, had myself a nice bowl of cereal, chocolate granola, and banana slices with milk, then got started on my to-do list for the day:
1. Post Chapter 2 of "In A World Of His Own": Check! Got that done this evening – here is a link for your approval! This is the “Butterfly Jungle” chapter, aka “I dump a bunch of my Secundus ideas in the Forgotten Vows Verse cause I can.” XD Hopefully you find it enjoyable!
2. Watch the Plumbella and OXBox/OXtra lists in my Watch Later and keep up on YouTube Subs: Check! Easier than expected, in fact, thanks to having only one video in the Subs (Call Me Kevin took another Thursday off this week) –
A) Started with Plumbella and this video: “Playing The Sims 4 on Extreme Expert level is a form of torture!” This is like her previous “expert” challenges (household of 8 Sims of varying ages, played on three times speed for one week of in-game time – it gets chaotic FAST), but the “extreme” comes in the form of “oh, and I can only control the TODDLER.” Strangely enough, though, the beginning of the challenge – with two parents, two teenagers, three children, and one toddler (BLOO passport – apparently this is how Boris Johnson pronounces the color “blue”) – actually went pretty well! The Sims took care of themselves (mostly – potty accidents were definitely a thing), and being in control of the toddler meant that Plumbella could always keep an eye on his needs. So, after some musing, Plumbella switched to ULTIMATE Expert mode – and deaged everyone BUT the mom and dad (Lindsay Cole and Draco Malfoy – she likes Harry Potter, okay) into toddlers as to cause more problems. However, even THEN there were no major disasters – they lost one child (Boris) due to neglect (admittedly trying to keep everyone fed was a bit of an issue), and got threatened with losing another (Tesco Mealdeal – SHE ASKED FOR SHIT SIM NAMES ON HER DISCORD) due to bad grades, but everyone made it to the end of the week alive, semi-well, and not even singed from the incredibly brief fire that happened near the end of the episode. Plumbella considered this all very lackluster, complaining that apparently children are smarter than adults in these games. She plans to try again, though, with Sims 3 and Sims 2. We’re all expecting the latter to be – a trip. XD
B) Then it was into my Subs for James Turner and his own Sims 4 challenge – build a house for a random number of Sims in twenty minutes. The randomizer gave him the lovely seven sims, and James groaned and set to work! XD He actually didn’t come out with something too bad in the end, though – yes, the outside is very sad, with off-pink siding and gray bricks and no landscaping, but the inside has everything seven sims could need, including a surprisingly nice kitchen. Bunk beds were of course heavily used, and he also near the end of the challenge randomly decided one of the sims was going to be a toddler and had to rush to get a toddler bed and some toddler stuff (with literal SECONDS to go choosing the final wallpaper). It’s hardly an IDEAL house, but if your Sim family is the kind where the parents will put the kids in shared bedrooms so they can have a master suite with bathroom AND walk-in wardrobe on either side, it’ll probably do. XD
C) And then, this evening (post gaming, workout, and posting my chapter), it was time for my OXBox and OXtra lists to finish out the night! We had:
I. OXBox, “7 Guilt-Free Hitman Kills Where Someone Else Did It For You” – kills from the “World of Assassination” trilogy where 47 only had to set up a few domino pieces and then wait for the rest of the world to knock them over. From quietly helping Emma poison Alexa in the Dartmoor murder mystery level, to getting Jordan Cross and his scumbag lawyer Morgan arguing until Cross shoves Morgan off a balcony in Bangkok, to doing something similar with Yates and his wife (whose diplomatic career he ruined) in Argentina, there’s lots of ways to get someone else to kill your target for you and still get paid. (Hell, maybe THAT should have been the gimmick of the “Greed” level for the Seven Deadly Sins DLC. . .)
II. OXtra, “7 Weirdest Things You Had a Boss Fight Against” – ever wanted to fight a paranormal entity operating from inside a fridge (for Control)? How about a hole punch (quite dangerous when you’re a Paper Mario)? Two separate house-turned-robot-wrecking-machines (a hell house from Final Fantasy VII Remake, and some tentacled corporate soda headquarters from Sunset Overdrive)? No? Well, don’t play the mentioned games then. :P Seriously, how do people come UP with some of these. . .
III. OXBox, “7 Most Cursed Weapons That Weren’t Worth the Hassle” – a variety of cursed weapons (okay, mostly swords) that can force you to kill people who trust you to fully power up its health-restoring powers (the Ebony Blade, Skyrim), force you to slay at least one wicked soul per day, lest you lose a year of your life in repayment for that day (Kusanagi, The Darkness 2 co-op DLC Vendettas), or rip all your skin off and turn you into a hulking nightmare knight carrying a sword partially made of flesh (Soul Edge, the Soul Edge and Soul Caliber games). The worst one, though? The Bane, from Borderlands 2, a gun with the curse – of being really super annoying as it narrates in the most ear-grating voice imaginable everything it does. Including every time you fire it. No curse like torturing the player as well as the player character!
3. Play Sims 4 and work more on what I'm now calling the "Ice Cream Conery" (the ice cream parlor place shaped like a cake cone that I'm making): Check, though it nearly wasn’t – I opened Origin a little after three to discover that the first of the May patches had dropped TODAY. -.- I really wish they would give us better warning. . .naturally I found myself going back and forth a bit about actually playing, since my mods and CC would be disabled, and I’d want to double-check at least MC Command Center before re-enabling them. . .but eventually I convinced myself that I was going into a save that I just use for building, and since the Ice Cream Conery is going on the Gallery, I’m not going to be using CC for it anyway, so I should be okay.
. . .I did end up saving what I did in a new “Building Save Numero Dos” save file, admittedly, but. . . XD Anyway, not TOO much progress – I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the stairs, and if I wanted to keep the floor in the second level (which is totally blocked off by curvy pieces on the outside walls, meaning there’s no chance of putting windows in it – but I can’t make the stairs go THROUGH the empty floor if I remove it, it seems, so no dice), but eventually I got them in a configuration I’m happy with, and started setting up the top level. So far we have part of the kitchen and a pretty decent bathroom. Lots of light and dark browns in this build – I’m still working out what I want the style to be. I might need to take a look at actual ice cream parlors online at some point, it’s been a while since I was in one. Though I did find a really cool new wall tile that was added with Snowy Escape that features adorable pictures! A mountain landscape or kitties in a river, depending on the swatch. Apparently they’re meant for the onsen bathhouse, but I used them as feature walls, since they were so fun. :D Can we have more wall patterns like that please?
4. Get in a workout: Check! Another round on the bike, another round with “Nuka-World Level One Survival!” I caught up with Minnie as she fled the terrifying flying ant swarm and went back to hunting Gatorclaws while high as a kite on Psychobuff. She and Cito did good work in tracking down the remaining few – one in the reptile house, a couple by the river, one fighting a bear in the cave in the bear enclosure (Minnie got slightly mauled by the OTHER bear who lived in there, because Jon had forgotten it existed – whoops), and a trio outside the main bounds of the park, which Minnie was able to cheese slightly by slashing them with her knife and then running back into the bounds of the park – turns out that while she and Cito could go out to confront the Gatorclaws, the Gatorclaws could not follow them back into the park itself. Hey, when you’re not even level twenty yet, you take all the advantages you can get in a fight!
With the last Gatorclaw defeated, there was only one other thing to do before Minnie could assign a gang to the park – deal with Cito himself. It’s a medium speech check to convince Cito to share Safari Adventure with one of the gangs (as opposed to attacking and killing him, or convincing him and his ghoulrilla family to move on), and Jon wasn’t certain Minnie would make it – but happily, she did, and Cito was only too glad to allow one of Minnie’s new gangs to come in. He even handed over a shiny thing he’d found as a present – Cito’s Shiny Slugger, an aluminum spiked rocket baseball bat that refills action points on every critical hit. Not ideal for Minnie’s build (she doesn’t have the Luck for quickly building crits), but Jon was not going to turn down a free weapon, especially when he could mix and match with the trusty yellow rocket bat.
And so Minnie’s time in the Safari Adventure park ended with her handing the park over to – The Operators! Yes, I know it seems an obvious choice for the Pack, but Jon was thinking solely in terms of who he didn’t want to fight by the end of the DLC’s campaign, and the Operators? They’re the only gang with guns – the other two are more melee-focused. So Jon wants them on MINNIE’S side, not their own. This, of course, left only one land to go – the dreaded “World of Refreshment.” Jon decided he MIGHT poke his head into that next episode, but that doing a few side quests to get Minnie’s levels up a bit more (she’s currently level 19, having just taken “Aquagirl” to get rid of rads while swimming) and get the adrenaline pumping MIGHT be a better idea.
And, indeed, Episode 13 opened with Minnie heading back into the Galactic Zone, having combined her two rocket bats into a truly terrifying slugger and on the hunt for five spacesuits! Because, yes, the Hubologists are next! She was able to find most of the suits without issue, though one did require getting quite a few rads to snatch up. Ah well – Minnie can fix that by going to the doctor and spending her caps. Which just makes her stronger, so good deal!
5. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check! I actually started this one before going to bed, by getting the next set of pictures for Eric’s next Newcrest Adventures update sorted, then this morning I spent a good chunk of time doing an “opening lines” meme a tumblr friend tagged me on (20 opening lines of my last 20 fics; I ended up doing 21 because for some reason “Losing You” appears before “Triskaidekaphobia” in the “last updated” sort on AO3), a post on a headcanon I have on why the Commonwealth still looks so dead in Fallout 4 (namely, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Fallout verse in general has even WORSE climate change than we have), and drafts of Eric’s two posts for this upcoming Wednesday. And of course I finished up tonight by putting Chapter 2 of “In A World Of His Own,” a reblog of an old Song Saturday (I happened to listen to the song featured within it this morning and figured “why not?”), and the birthday present to my tumblr friend Squid in the Victor Luvs Alice queue, and one ask and one cute piece of fanfic I found about Preston on Valice Multiverse. So yeah, definitely all set there for a bit!
Additionally:
-->We did indeed play the beanbag game, though not until the late afternoon (my parents were busy putting in new plants in our back yard and building planter boxes for my mom’s peppers and cherry tomatoes) – Mom was the winner of the day, winning the first and third games, with Dad winning the second. I had a terrible day with 3-2-3 – ONE really nice throw to get that second, but I never really got the magic tosses I needed. Ah well.
Aaand now I'm running a bit late, so I gotta wrap up, answer my DW comment and hit the sheets. For my one day of work tomorrow. XD I probably should have taken tomorrow off. . .ah well, it should be busy enough for us to get through quickly. And I think I would rather have more short weeks than one longer weekend. . . We'll see what happens tomorrow. For now, good night!
1. Post Chapter 2 of "In A World Of His Own": Check! Got that done this evening – here is a link for your approval! This is the “Butterfly Jungle” chapter, aka “I dump a bunch of my Secundus ideas in the Forgotten Vows Verse cause I can.” XD Hopefully you find it enjoyable!
2. Watch the Plumbella and OXBox/OXtra lists in my Watch Later and keep up on YouTube Subs: Check! Easier than expected, in fact, thanks to having only one video in the Subs (Call Me Kevin took another Thursday off this week) –
A) Started with Plumbella and this video: “Playing The Sims 4 on Extreme Expert level is a form of torture!” This is like her previous “expert” challenges (household of 8 Sims of varying ages, played on three times speed for one week of in-game time – it gets chaotic FAST), but the “extreme” comes in the form of “oh, and I can only control the TODDLER.” Strangely enough, though, the beginning of the challenge – with two parents, two teenagers, three children, and one toddler (BLOO passport – apparently this is how Boris Johnson pronounces the color “blue”) – actually went pretty well! The Sims took care of themselves (mostly – potty accidents were definitely a thing), and being in control of the toddler meant that Plumbella could always keep an eye on his needs. So, after some musing, Plumbella switched to ULTIMATE Expert mode – and deaged everyone BUT the mom and dad (Lindsay Cole and Draco Malfoy – she likes Harry Potter, okay) into toddlers as to cause more problems. However, even THEN there were no major disasters – they lost one child (Boris) due to neglect (admittedly trying to keep everyone fed was a bit of an issue), and got threatened with losing another (Tesco Mealdeal – SHE ASKED FOR SHIT SIM NAMES ON HER DISCORD) due to bad grades, but everyone made it to the end of the week alive, semi-well, and not even singed from the incredibly brief fire that happened near the end of the episode. Plumbella considered this all very lackluster, complaining that apparently children are smarter than adults in these games. She plans to try again, though, with Sims 3 and Sims 2. We’re all expecting the latter to be – a trip. XD
B) Then it was into my Subs for James Turner and his own Sims 4 challenge – build a house for a random number of Sims in twenty minutes. The randomizer gave him the lovely seven sims, and James groaned and set to work! XD He actually didn’t come out with something too bad in the end, though – yes, the outside is very sad, with off-pink siding and gray bricks and no landscaping, but the inside has everything seven sims could need, including a surprisingly nice kitchen. Bunk beds were of course heavily used, and he also near the end of the challenge randomly decided one of the sims was going to be a toddler and had to rush to get a toddler bed and some toddler stuff (with literal SECONDS to go choosing the final wallpaper). It’s hardly an IDEAL house, but if your Sim family is the kind where the parents will put the kids in shared bedrooms so they can have a master suite with bathroom AND walk-in wardrobe on either side, it’ll probably do. XD
C) And then, this evening (post gaming, workout, and posting my chapter), it was time for my OXBox and OXtra lists to finish out the night! We had:
I. OXBox, “7 Guilt-Free Hitman Kills Where Someone Else Did It For You” – kills from the “World of Assassination” trilogy where 47 only had to set up a few domino pieces and then wait for the rest of the world to knock them over. From quietly helping Emma poison Alexa in the Dartmoor murder mystery level, to getting Jordan Cross and his scumbag lawyer Morgan arguing until Cross shoves Morgan off a balcony in Bangkok, to doing something similar with Yates and his wife (whose diplomatic career he ruined) in Argentina, there’s lots of ways to get someone else to kill your target for you and still get paid. (Hell, maybe THAT should have been the gimmick of the “Greed” level for the Seven Deadly Sins DLC. . .)
II. OXtra, “7 Weirdest Things You Had a Boss Fight Against” – ever wanted to fight a paranormal entity operating from inside a fridge (for Control)? How about a hole punch (quite dangerous when you’re a Paper Mario)? Two separate house-turned-robot-wrecking-machines (a hell house from Final Fantasy VII Remake, and some tentacled corporate soda headquarters from Sunset Overdrive)? No? Well, don’t play the mentioned games then. :P Seriously, how do people come UP with some of these. . .
III. OXBox, “7 Most Cursed Weapons That Weren’t Worth the Hassle” – a variety of cursed weapons (okay, mostly swords) that can force you to kill people who trust you to fully power up its health-restoring powers (the Ebony Blade, Skyrim), force you to slay at least one wicked soul per day, lest you lose a year of your life in repayment for that day (Kusanagi, The Darkness 2 co-op DLC Vendettas), or rip all your skin off and turn you into a hulking nightmare knight carrying a sword partially made of flesh (Soul Edge, the Soul Edge and Soul Caliber games). The worst one, though? The Bane, from Borderlands 2, a gun with the curse – of being really super annoying as it narrates in the most ear-grating voice imaginable everything it does. Including every time you fire it. No curse like torturing the player as well as the player character!
3. Play Sims 4 and work more on what I'm now calling the "Ice Cream Conery" (the ice cream parlor place shaped like a cake cone that I'm making): Check, though it nearly wasn’t – I opened Origin a little after three to discover that the first of the May patches had dropped TODAY. -.- I really wish they would give us better warning. . .naturally I found myself going back and forth a bit about actually playing, since my mods and CC would be disabled, and I’d want to double-check at least MC Command Center before re-enabling them. . .but eventually I convinced myself that I was going into a save that I just use for building, and since the Ice Cream Conery is going on the Gallery, I’m not going to be using CC for it anyway, so I should be okay.
. . .I did end up saving what I did in a new “Building Save Numero Dos” save file, admittedly, but. . . XD Anyway, not TOO much progress – I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the stairs, and if I wanted to keep the floor in the second level (which is totally blocked off by curvy pieces on the outside walls, meaning there’s no chance of putting windows in it – but I can’t make the stairs go THROUGH the empty floor if I remove it, it seems, so no dice), but eventually I got them in a configuration I’m happy with, and started setting up the top level. So far we have part of the kitchen and a pretty decent bathroom. Lots of light and dark browns in this build – I’m still working out what I want the style to be. I might need to take a look at actual ice cream parlors online at some point, it’s been a while since I was in one. Though I did find a really cool new wall tile that was added with Snowy Escape that features adorable pictures! A mountain landscape or kitties in a river, depending on the swatch. Apparently they’re meant for the onsen bathhouse, but I used them as feature walls, since they were so fun. :D Can we have more wall patterns like that please?
4. Get in a workout: Check! Another round on the bike, another round with “Nuka-World Level One Survival!” I caught up with Minnie as she fled the terrifying flying ant swarm and went back to hunting Gatorclaws while high as a kite on Psychobuff. She and Cito did good work in tracking down the remaining few – one in the reptile house, a couple by the river, one fighting a bear in the cave in the bear enclosure (Minnie got slightly mauled by the OTHER bear who lived in there, because Jon had forgotten it existed – whoops), and a trio outside the main bounds of the park, which Minnie was able to cheese slightly by slashing them with her knife and then running back into the bounds of the park – turns out that while she and Cito could go out to confront the Gatorclaws, the Gatorclaws could not follow them back into the park itself. Hey, when you’re not even level twenty yet, you take all the advantages you can get in a fight!
With the last Gatorclaw defeated, there was only one other thing to do before Minnie could assign a gang to the park – deal with Cito himself. It’s a medium speech check to convince Cito to share Safari Adventure with one of the gangs (as opposed to attacking and killing him, or convincing him and his ghoulrilla family to move on), and Jon wasn’t certain Minnie would make it – but happily, she did, and Cito was only too glad to allow one of Minnie’s new gangs to come in. He even handed over a shiny thing he’d found as a present – Cito’s Shiny Slugger, an aluminum spiked rocket baseball bat that refills action points on every critical hit. Not ideal for Minnie’s build (she doesn’t have the Luck for quickly building crits), but Jon was not going to turn down a free weapon, especially when he could mix and match with the trusty yellow rocket bat.
And so Minnie’s time in the Safari Adventure park ended with her handing the park over to – The Operators! Yes, I know it seems an obvious choice for the Pack, but Jon was thinking solely in terms of who he didn’t want to fight by the end of the DLC’s campaign, and the Operators? They’re the only gang with guns – the other two are more melee-focused. So Jon wants them on MINNIE’S side, not their own. This, of course, left only one land to go – the dreaded “World of Refreshment.” Jon decided he MIGHT poke his head into that next episode, but that doing a few side quests to get Minnie’s levels up a bit more (she’s currently level 19, having just taken “Aquagirl” to get rid of rads while swimming) and get the adrenaline pumping MIGHT be a better idea.
And, indeed, Episode 13 opened with Minnie heading back into the Galactic Zone, having combined her two rocket bats into a truly terrifying slugger and on the hunt for five spacesuits! Because, yes, the Hubologists are next! She was able to find most of the suits without issue, though one did require getting quite a few rads to snatch up. Ah well – Minnie can fix that by going to the doctor and spending her caps. Which just makes her stronger, so good deal!
5. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check! I actually started this one before going to bed, by getting the next set of pictures for Eric’s next Newcrest Adventures update sorted, then this morning I spent a good chunk of time doing an “opening lines” meme a tumblr friend tagged me on (20 opening lines of my last 20 fics; I ended up doing 21 because for some reason “Losing You” appears before “Triskaidekaphobia” in the “last updated” sort on AO3), a post on a headcanon I have on why the Commonwealth still looks so dead in Fallout 4 (namely, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Fallout verse in general has even WORSE climate change than we have), and drafts of Eric’s two posts for this upcoming Wednesday. And of course I finished up tonight by putting Chapter 2 of “In A World Of His Own,” a reblog of an old Song Saturday (I happened to listen to the song featured within it this morning and figured “why not?”), and the birthday present to my tumblr friend Squid in the Victor Luvs Alice queue, and one ask and one cute piece of fanfic I found about Preston on Valice Multiverse. So yeah, definitely all set there for a bit!
Additionally:
-->We did indeed play the beanbag game, though not until the late afternoon (my parents were busy putting in new plants in our back yard and building planter boxes for my mom’s peppers and cherry tomatoes) – Mom was the winner of the day, winning the first and third games, with Dad winning the second. I had a terrible day with 3-2-3 – ONE really nice throw to get that second, but I never really got the magic tosses I needed. Ah well.
Aaand now I'm running a bit late, so I gotta wrap up, answer my DW comment and hit the sheets. For my one day of work tomorrow. XD I probably should have taken tomorrow off. . .ah well, it should be busy enough for us to get through quickly. And I think I would rather have more short weeks than one longer weekend. . . We'll see what happens tomorrow. For now, good night!
