Hotter Friday
Aug. 6th, 2021 11:15 pmYup, the hot and humid weather made its reappearance today -- was supposed to be in the 70s, but our little temperature thing recorded temps of 90 in direct sunlight on the porch, so. . .yeah. Got the AC on tonight, imagine I will have it on through tomorrow as Saturday was supposed to be HOTTER than today! Ah well. . .managed to have the windows open most of the day without any trouble! And this will be good for sleeping -- I had another touch of the old insomnia last night, hmph.
Fortunately, my brain hating me getting enough sleep did not stop me from having a nice productive Friday:
1. Edit some more on "Londerland Bloodlines": Check! Half before lunch, half after – Alice has officially met Therese, and while she finds her a bit of a snot (by the Queen’s admission, anyway), she’s willing to work with her just to get Tung out of hiding. Which means she’s going after a ghost in the Ocean House Hotel! We all remember that quest, right? :p I threw in a fun little reference to Linkara’s old Patreon-sponsored episode on the game with Therese talking about other avenues she’s perused to get rid of the ghost – a Brujah named Lewis who went in to confront the spirit, and came back screaming “I’M A GODDAMNED VAMPIRE!” over and over. XD Alice, fortunately, is going to be much better at keeping her wits about her. XD
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs: Very easy check today – amazing how much less stressful this is when I don’t have a bunch of stuff asking for my attention over in the Watch Later! It’s nice, it really is.
A) Started with the Plumbella upload of the day: “Each room is a different pack is STILL an awful challenge!” AKA she did that challenge where every room in the house is a randomly-chosen pack (using James Turner’s randomizer) after building a shell in – either Willow Creek or Newcrest, couldn’t quite tell. O.o But yeah, she got some bad ones today – Tiny Living came up for both the outside area and the kitchen, and had nothing for EITHER of them! Plumbella mitigated the damage for the outside area by restricting Tiny Living to the front courtyard (and later did some surprisingly nice things with Strangerville for the actual walls and plants and whatnot – she turned a broken-down car from the debug menu into a cute planter!), but forced herself to stick with it with the kitchen and just put in a sink, a table and chairs, and some decorative stuff that looked appropriate. Fortunately the rest of the build was better – Vintage Glamour for the living room, for a very fancy sitting area; Cats and Dogs for the bathroom, which was decent if very red; and Seasons for the bedroom, which had a green, festive theme because she shoved a fully-decorated Christmas tree in there. XD Also only the bathroom had flooring because Sims 4 hates adding new floors into the game for some reason. *shrug* It could have been a lot worse!
B) Then it was on to James Turner and another episode of the Cottage Living LP! Turns out the extra lot charges he was suffering with his bills was from a roof pattern on his new animal shed shell that has a bills surcharge for some reason. Changing the roof type got rid of the extra taxes completely. O.o Something to keep in mind when I roof! Most of the episode was actually spent trying to figure out how to best handle the bills, in fact, with James actually taking a few moments to go through each brother’s aspiration (they’re both sharing the “Country Caretaker” one from the pack – Trenton was earlier in the aspiration and thus just had to befriend llamas and fertilize crops, while Chaz had to sleep over in the Bramblewood to actually do some foraging there) and do things with them to get the points for them to purchase “Frugal” as a trait, which also took a decent chunk off their bills! That and getting rid of James’s shedsperiments – he’ll try again with that next time. :p
Other than that, the major items of note were James allowing them to actually keep some of their produce so they could do some real cooking (like Nightly Mushroom Stew, om nom); Hazel coming by a few times (she got the house key from Trenton on her first visit, and ended up repaying the kindness by giving the brothers a faux meat cube to cook with); and Summerfest happening (the brothers WERE able to celebrate with a Grand Meal of turkey – but thanks to James basically ignoring holidays now that they’re not the focus of an LP, that’s all they did). Oh, and adopting a dog! Yes, people were suggesting they get a farm dog, so James had Chaz (sad after trading away the elderly Lenny the Llama for simoleons) adopt Fae Fae the Australian Cattle Dog! She’s just a puppy now, but she’ll probably be aged up next episode. :) But yeah, rest of the episode was the usual tending the farm, trying to keep the chickens from revolting (the evil chickens are starting to object to their treatment on the island), selling their produce, and doing errands for the people in town. It’s a busy bee LP, and I don’t just say that because they have a beehive full of constantly-angry bees. XD
C) Then it was over to Call Me Kevin and Harvester! An old FMV game that – I believe is notorious for being horrible both in subject matter (it’s violent) and in general (it’s a baaaad game). Kevin’s only gotten through the very beginning, with poor Steve stumbling around the town of Harvest, trying to figure out what’s happening, why he’s engaged to be married, and being told he’s “always been such a kidder” every time he tries to tell anyone “look, I have amnesia, I can’t remember anything, please help me.” Kevin being Kevin, he promptly went to the local lodge to join the cult there. XD So far they’ve been having him do minor things like fill out an application (which Kevin obtained by giving the Postmaster a gas can from the police station’s evidence locker, obtained after he got the deputy to leave by giving him a girly mag – yeaaaah, it’s THAT kind of game), and scratch a dude’s car (which took three tries, as the first time, the car’s owner took him out with a tire iron; the second time, Steve took him out with a baseball bat and got the electric chair. Took try three for Kevin to get the item that will allow him to actually get to the car at NIGHT, when it’s not openly guarded). So far not THAT fucked up (if kind of uncomfortable with all the sexual talk and the deputy being smacked with a rolled-up magazine for, um, “alone time” on the clock), but I think it gets a lot worse as you go on, so. . .we’ll see what Kevin thinks of playing more! XD
D) Then this evening we had Fun With Shorts, this time showing the Mel-O-Toon “The Emperor’s Nightingale” – an adaptation of a Chinese folk tale about an emperor, obsessed with beauty, who gets himself a real nightingale as his court singer, eventually spurns it in favor of a mechanical version, then gets sick when the mechanical one breaks and is only saved when one of the staff convinces the real nightingale to come back and sing again for him. As Bluedog79 put it, “So the story is this: A rich guy get's mad because he doesn't have something he wanted. He get's what he wanted and then he's happy. The End. What a great story for the kids.” XD Still, it’s hardly the worst Mel-O-Toon we’ve seen, and Josh’s riffs were as usual quite good, so overall win. :P
E) And then we had GrayStillPlays and Universe Sandbox 2 again – where the developers have foolishly made an update that allows you to completely TURN OFF elements of physics. Like motion transfer between colliding objects. Or whether or not an object can pull others toward it or push others away. Gray naturally used these updated controls to create objects (like a grain-of-sand-sized moon, Mercury, Uranus, and Very Angry Pluto) to smash into the Earth and create epic explosions. But he wasn’t satisfied with just ONE Earth, oh no. We went from one, to five, to a dozen, to a HUNDRED, all in a nice neat row. Either being vaporized or being shoved into each other and smashing into dozens of fragments. Some, somehow, bigger than the things that were destroyed. As you might imagine, the episode ended with the game full-on crashing because Gray does nothing by halves. XD Delightful.
3. Either play more Bloodlines and clear out everything regarding the Clinic,or see about restarting Fallout 4: Check on the first – went to the Nexus, looked at the mods I’d downloaded for Fallout 4, thought for a while about how much I really wanted to go through them, figure out what to keep and what to toss, go through the mess of reinstalling the game to get a clean file, and – yeah, I played Bloodlines. That’s a janky piece of shit, but it’s one that WORKS with minimal effort from me. *grumbles*
Anyway, I did indeed clear out everything in the clinic – started downstairs with Vandal and the blood bank, went through the laundry into the morgue to get Crumb’s stuff and the Foxy Boxes keycard, then backtracked and saved Lily, and Dominated Vandal into forgetting the mess (and even bought a bag of blood from him, for emergencies). From there I went upstairs to the main building, saved Heather (and got $150 out of Dr. St. Martin – and I noticed the dialogue prompt indicated he should leave it in his OFFICE, so maybe that’s why it never appeared in Alice’s mailbox last time?), before looping around to the top floor to get the werewolf blood and Trip’s pills. That one took a few tries – I tried to be sneaky about it, but “Command” to make the guard oblivious (or dance) only works for so long, and the prescription storage has windows he can see you through if you’re not sufficiently sneaky. As I found out to my detriment. >( Fortunately you can Dominate him into giving you his keys, and then I was just very careful to make sure he was in a part of his patrol route where he wouldn’t see me while I was turning off security cameras and robbing the pill safe and the controlled substances cabinet! XD Left the clinic after that to hit Carson’s and officially learn that he checked out the tattoo parlor to find McGee, then swung by Trip to drop off his pills, complete that quest, get the bonus Finance dot, and sell a few things for cash. Dropped off the werewolf blood in Crystal’s mailbox, then went to the tattoo parlor to learn about Stanley Gimble. Detoured to the beach to meet up with the thin-bloods, complete E’s quest, give Lily back her stuff, check out the murder on the dock, and talk Copper into trying to accept his fate. Left it with Crystal by Gimble’s door – next time, boss fight! :D
4. Get in a workout: Check – took a walk on the treadmill today, and got through another episode of Jon’s Original FO4 Playthrough! Yeah, apparently Episode 7 was only 36 minutes long, which basically lines up perfectly with my average walking time on the treadmill! Today was all about the Brotherhood of Steel – Miss Jon went off with Paladin Danse to ArcJet Systems to get the deep range transmitter he needed for his team, learned about synths and the Institute, fought a few synths with him (when she wasn’t busy looting), and did the thing where you roast Danse with the rocket engine to help him with the synths attacking him. Good thing he has well-modded power armor! (Whether or not the fact that he’s a Gen 3 synth himself helped protect him is a matter of debate, though in the “Fallout of Darkness” universe, yes because he was in the Courser program before he decided to flee the Institute, and in that world Coursers have their blood converted to vampire vitae to make them kind of ghouls. . .) Danse did not hold that against her and offered her membership in the BOS when the mission was over – after confirming that this would come with nice toys, Past!Jon decided to say “yes” for the moment, figuring he could back out later.
And so Miss Jon got her first missions from Haylen and Rhys – retrieve some technology from one of the breweries (I didn’t see which one), and clear out the College Square subway station! As the latter was closer, Miss Jon did that first, taking out a bunch of ghouls with the help of Dogmeat and getting a nice heavy Hunting Rifle out of the bargain. She reported in to Rhys, got her XP, then decided to head back to Sanctuary to drop off some junk, do some gun modding, and get back on track with her mission. Because it is SO easy to get sidetracked in this game. XD Trust me, Past!Jon, Past!Me knows – it’s why I never got anywhere with the main quest. :p But yeah, having scrapped and updated a bunch of guns (and dosed Mama Murphy for more quest hints, because Past!Jon doesn’t know this will eventually kill her and probably wouldn’t care if he did), we ended the episode with Past!Jon declaring that next episode is a trip over to Oberland Station, and from there to Diamond City! We’ll see if that actually happens! XD (Damn, THIS is the sort of thing that makes me want to actually play again, I gotta admit. Maybe one day.)
5. Work on tumblr queues: Check! Only one thread reply over on Valice Multiverse – I went ahead and bulked it up with some FO4 and VTMB reblogs. And on Victor Luvs Alice, I stuck a “here’s the rough Pre-War backstory I came up with for Alice and especially Victor for Fallout Of Darkness, enjoy” post in the drafts, along with getting the pictures sorted out for the next Newcrest Adventures update! :) So yeah, got some good stuff in my drafts for later, and with my WL still clean, should have more chances to bulk it up further over the weekend.
Additionally:
-->Despite the heat, we did get out to do beanbags today! After multiple interruptions to try and keep the bugs away from me (for some reason I seem to be extra-delicious to them). Interesting scores today – I was 3-W-3-3-3, Dad was W-3-2-W-W, and Mom was 2-2-W-2-2. Basically, I lost every game except the one where I managed to pull out some halfway decent throws (I blame the heat, the bugs, and the loudness of the people next door having their lawn mowed throwing me off my game), while Mom came in second every game except the one she won. Wonder what the odds of that are? *shrug* At least we all won once!
-->That Venn diagram I made yesterday proved to be a bit of a hit, at least in terms of my blog -- 15 notes of people liking or reblogging it. XD Here's the post in question if you would like your own look.
So yeah, that's all very nice. :) And now I'm doing stuff with my tumblr friend Squid which may result in Friday Night Writing Thing (depending on how his brainmeats function), so let me wrap up here and get off for the night. With, of course, a Saturday to-do list:
1. Clean my room and do my monthly sheets-and-blankets laundry load
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs (maybe rewatch the AT4W VTMB episode if I have a moment?)
3. Write some more on "Learn To Love Again" and/or work on the Sims 4 challenges
4. Play Sims 4 -- either building save or Chill Save
5. Work on tumblr queues
Yeah, my vacation ends on a cleaning weekend -- but as I've had a week off before it, and I still get TWO days off after it thanks to Victory Day, I believe I shall survive. Night all!
Fortunately, my brain hating me getting enough sleep did not stop me from having a nice productive Friday:
1. Edit some more on "Londerland Bloodlines": Check! Half before lunch, half after – Alice has officially met Therese, and while she finds her a bit of a snot (by the Queen’s admission, anyway), she’s willing to work with her just to get Tung out of hiding. Which means she’s going after a ghost in the Ocean House Hotel! We all remember that quest, right? :p I threw in a fun little reference to Linkara’s old Patreon-sponsored episode on the game with Therese talking about other avenues she’s perused to get rid of the ghost – a Brujah named Lewis who went in to confront the spirit, and came back screaming “I’M A GODDAMNED VAMPIRE!” over and over. XD Alice, fortunately, is going to be much better at keeping her wits about her. XD
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs: Very easy check today – amazing how much less stressful this is when I don’t have a bunch of stuff asking for my attention over in the Watch Later! It’s nice, it really is.
A) Started with the Plumbella upload of the day: “Each room is a different pack is STILL an awful challenge!” AKA she did that challenge where every room in the house is a randomly-chosen pack (using James Turner’s randomizer) after building a shell in – either Willow Creek or Newcrest, couldn’t quite tell. O.o But yeah, she got some bad ones today – Tiny Living came up for both the outside area and the kitchen, and had nothing for EITHER of them! Plumbella mitigated the damage for the outside area by restricting Tiny Living to the front courtyard (and later did some surprisingly nice things with Strangerville for the actual walls and plants and whatnot – she turned a broken-down car from the debug menu into a cute planter!), but forced herself to stick with it with the kitchen and just put in a sink, a table and chairs, and some decorative stuff that looked appropriate. Fortunately the rest of the build was better – Vintage Glamour for the living room, for a very fancy sitting area; Cats and Dogs for the bathroom, which was decent if very red; and Seasons for the bedroom, which had a green, festive theme because she shoved a fully-decorated Christmas tree in there. XD Also only the bathroom had flooring because Sims 4 hates adding new floors into the game for some reason. *shrug* It could have been a lot worse!
B) Then it was on to James Turner and another episode of the Cottage Living LP! Turns out the extra lot charges he was suffering with his bills was from a roof pattern on his new animal shed shell that has a bills surcharge for some reason. Changing the roof type got rid of the extra taxes completely. O.o Something to keep in mind when I roof! Most of the episode was actually spent trying to figure out how to best handle the bills, in fact, with James actually taking a few moments to go through each brother’s aspiration (they’re both sharing the “Country Caretaker” one from the pack – Trenton was earlier in the aspiration and thus just had to befriend llamas and fertilize crops, while Chaz had to sleep over in the Bramblewood to actually do some foraging there) and do things with them to get the points for them to purchase “Frugal” as a trait, which also took a decent chunk off their bills! That and getting rid of James’s shedsperiments – he’ll try again with that next time. :p
Other than that, the major items of note were James allowing them to actually keep some of their produce so they could do some real cooking (like Nightly Mushroom Stew, om nom); Hazel coming by a few times (she got the house key from Trenton on her first visit, and ended up repaying the kindness by giving the brothers a faux meat cube to cook with); and Summerfest happening (the brothers WERE able to celebrate with a Grand Meal of turkey – but thanks to James basically ignoring holidays now that they’re not the focus of an LP, that’s all they did). Oh, and adopting a dog! Yes, people were suggesting they get a farm dog, so James had Chaz (sad after trading away the elderly Lenny the Llama for simoleons) adopt Fae Fae the Australian Cattle Dog! She’s just a puppy now, but she’ll probably be aged up next episode. :) But yeah, rest of the episode was the usual tending the farm, trying to keep the chickens from revolting (the evil chickens are starting to object to their treatment on the island), selling their produce, and doing errands for the people in town. It’s a busy bee LP, and I don’t just say that because they have a beehive full of constantly-angry bees. XD
C) Then it was over to Call Me Kevin and Harvester! An old FMV game that – I believe is notorious for being horrible both in subject matter (it’s violent) and in general (it’s a baaaad game). Kevin’s only gotten through the very beginning, with poor Steve stumbling around the town of Harvest, trying to figure out what’s happening, why he’s engaged to be married, and being told he’s “always been such a kidder” every time he tries to tell anyone “look, I have amnesia, I can’t remember anything, please help me.” Kevin being Kevin, he promptly went to the local lodge to join the cult there. XD So far they’ve been having him do minor things like fill out an application (which Kevin obtained by giving the Postmaster a gas can from the police station’s evidence locker, obtained after he got the deputy to leave by giving him a girly mag – yeaaaah, it’s THAT kind of game), and scratch a dude’s car (which took three tries, as the first time, the car’s owner took him out with a tire iron; the second time, Steve took him out with a baseball bat and got the electric chair. Took try three for Kevin to get the item that will allow him to actually get to the car at NIGHT, when it’s not openly guarded). So far not THAT fucked up (if kind of uncomfortable with all the sexual talk and the deputy being smacked with a rolled-up magazine for, um, “alone time” on the clock), but I think it gets a lot worse as you go on, so. . .we’ll see what Kevin thinks of playing more! XD
D) Then this evening we had Fun With Shorts, this time showing the Mel-O-Toon “The Emperor’s Nightingale” – an adaptation of a Chinese folk tale about an emperor, obsessed with beauty, who gets himself a real nightingale as his court singer, eventually spurns it in favor of a mechanical version, then gets sick when the mechanical one breaks and is only saved when one of the staff convinces the real nightingale to come back and sing again for him. As Bluedog79 put it, “So the story is this: A rich guy get's mad because he doesn't have something he wanted. He get's what he wanted and then he's happy. The End. What a great story for the kids.” XD Still, it’s hardly the worst Mel-O-Toon we’ve seen, and Josh’s riffs were as usual quite good, so overall win. :P
E) And then we had GrayStillPlays and Universe Sandbox 2 again – where the developers have foolishly made an update that allows you to completely TURN OFF elements of physics. Like motion transfer between colliding objects. Or whether or not an object can pull others toward it or push others away. Gray naturally used these updated controls to create objects (like a grain-of-sand-sized moon, Mercury, Uranus, and Very Angry Pluto) to smash into the Earth and create epic explosions. But he wasn’t satisfied with just ONE Earth, oh no. We went from one, to five, to a dozen, to a HUNDRED, all in a nice neat row. Either being vaporized or being shoved into each other and smashing into dozens of fragments. Some, somehow, bigger than the things that were destroyed. As you might imagine, the episode ended with the game full-on crashing because Gray does nothing by halves. XD Delightful.
3. Either play more Bloodlines and clear out everything regarding the Clinic,
Anyway, I did indeed clear out everything in the clinic – started downstairs with Vandal and the blood bank, went through the laundry into the morgue to get Crumb’s stuff and the Foxy Boxes keycard, then backtracked and saved Lily, and Dominated Vandal into forgetting the mess (and even bought a bag of blood from him, for emergencies). From there I went upstairs to the main building, saved Heather (and got $150 out of Dr. St. Martin – and I noticed the dialogue prompt indicated he should leave it in his OFFICE, so maybe that’s why it never appeared in Alice’s mailbox last time?), before looping around to the top floor to get the werewolf blood and Trip’s pills. That one took a few tries – I tried to be sneaky about it, but “Command” to make the guard oblivious (or dance) only works for so long, and the prescription storage has windows he can see you through if you’re not sufficiently sneaky. As I found out to my detriment. >( Fortunately you can Dominate him into giving you his keys, and then I was just very careful to make sure he was in a part of his patrol route where he wouldn’t see me while I was turning off security cameras and robbing the pill safe and the controlled substances cabinet! XD Left the clinic after that to hit Carson’s and officially learn that he checked out the tattoo parlor to find McGee, then swung by Trip to drop off his pills, complete that quest, get the bonus Finance dot, and sell a few things for cash. Dropped off the werewolf blood in Crystal’s mailbox, then went to the tattoo parlor to learn about Stanley Gimble. Detoured to the beach to meet up with the thin-bloods, complete E’s quest, give Lily back her stuff, check out the murder on the dock, and talk Copper into trying to accept his fate. Left it with Crystal by Gimble’s door – next time, boss fight! :D
4. Get in a workout: Check – took a walk on the treadmill today, and got through another episode of Jon’s Original FO4 Playthrough! Yeah, apparently Episode 7 was only 36 minutes long, which basically lines up perfectly with my average walking time on the treadmill! Today was all about the Brotherhood of Steel – Miss Jon went off with Paladin Danse to ArcJet Systems to get the deep range transmitter he needed for his team, learned about synths and the Institute, fought a few synths with him (when she wasn’t busy looting), and did the thing where you roast Danse with the rocket engine to help him with the synths attacking him. Good thing he has well-modded power armor! (Whether or not the fact that he’s a Gen 3 synth himself helped protect him is a matter of debate, though in the “Fallout of Darkness” universe, yes because he was in the Courser program before he decided to flee the Institute, and in that world Coursers have their blood converted to vampire vitae to make them kind of ghouls. . .) Danse did not hold that against her and offered her membership in the BOS when the mission was over – after confirming that this would come with nice toys, Past!Jon decided to say “yes” for the moment, figuring he could back out later.
And so Miss Jon got her first missions from Haylen and Rhys – retrieve some technology from one of the breweries (I didn’t see which one), and clear out the College Square subway station! As the latter was closer, Miss Jon did that first, taking out a bunch of ghouls with the help of Dogmeat and getting a nice heavy Hunting Rifle out of the bargain. She reported in to Rhys, got her XP, then decided to head back to Sanctuary to drop off some junk, do some gun modding, and get back on track with her mission. Because it is SO easy to get sidetracked in this game. XD Trust me, Past!Jon, Past!Me knows – it’s why I never got anywhere with the main quest. :p But yeah, having scrapped and updated a bunch of guns (and dosed Mama Murphy for more quest hints, because Past!Jon doesn’t know this will eventually kill her and probably wouldn’t care if he did), we ended the episode with Past!Jon declaring that next episode is a trip over to Oberland Station, and from there to Diamond City! We’ll see if that actually happens! XD (Damn, THIS is the sort of thing that makes me want to actually play again, I gotta admit. Maybe one day.)
5. Work on tumblr queues: Check! Only one thread reply over on Valice Multiverse – I went ahead and bulked it up with some FO4 and VTMB reblogs. And on Victor Luvs Alice, I stuck a “here’s the rough Pre-War backstory I came up with for Alice and especially Victor for Fallout Of Darkness, enjoy” post in the drafts, along with getting the pictures sorted out for the next Newcrest Adventures update! :) So yeah, got some good stuff in my drafts for later, and with my WL still clean, should have more chances to bulk it up further over the weekend.
Additionally:
-->Despite the heat, we did get out to do beanbags today! After multiple interruptions to try and keep the bugs away from me (for some reason I seem to be extra-delicious to them). Interesting scores today – I was 3-W-3-3-3, Dad was W-3-2-W-W, and Mom was 2-2-W-2-2. Basically, I lost every game except the one where I managed to pull out some halfway decent throws (I blame the heat, the bugs, and the loudness of the people next door having their lawn mowed throwing me off my game), while Mom came in second every game except the one she won. Wonder what the odds of that are? *shrug* At least we all won once!
-->That Venn diagram I made yesterday proved to be a bit of a hit, at least in terms of my blog -- 15 notes of people liking or reblogging it. XD Here's the post in question if you would like your own look.
So yeah, that's all very nice. :) And now I'm doing stuff with my tumblr friend Squid which may result in Friday Night Writing Thing (depending on how his brainmeats function), so let me wrap up here and get off for the night. With, of course, a Saturday to-do list:
1. Clean my room and do my monthly sheets-and-blankets laundry load
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs (maybe rewatch the AT4W VTMB episode if I have a moment?)
3. Write some more on "Learn To Love Again" and/or work on the Sims 4 challenges
4. Play Sims 4 -- either building save or Chill Save
5. Work on tumblr queues
Yeah, my vacation ends on a cleaning weekend -- but as I've had a week off before it, and I still get TWO days off after it thanks to Victory Day, I believe I shall survive. Night all!