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A Simmy Saturday
Oct. 2nd, 2021 11:41 pmYes, from a vampire theme to a Sims one today -- makes sense, given I also played Sims 4 myself! Also a productive day, which I was pleased with -- here, let me show you:
1. Clean my room and do the monthly laundry: Check – started the room clean just before 11 AM, finished around 2:15 PM with a lunch break near the end. Laundry naturally took longer (most of the day), but it always does. Just had to work around my mother doing all sorts of cleaning and adjusting and grouting in the bathroom (meaning I didn’t get a shower today – good thing I wasn’t planning on working out anyway!). All done for another two weeks, at least!
2. Watch the OXBox video and Plumbella's latest, and keep up with YouTube Subs: Check! Got it all done today, w000 –
A) Started with Call Me Kevin (by accident – double-click issue strikes again) and the latest episode of The Sims 2! Where he promptly dumped all the karma he might have built up from trying to play Fallout 4 and Skyrim as a pacifist by trying to make a FREE-RANGE BABY FOOD FARM. Remember, he’s got the LOLWTFBBQ mod – and his grand plan for getting visitors to come to his pay-to-hang-out lot? Adopt a baby, clone that baby via cheats, and then just cook babies for everyone to lure them in with food. Sounds like an excellent evil plan, right?
. . .Cloning’s fucked in this game, and Kevin ended up with dozens of babies, some of which were randomly floating in the air, and others which were ATTACHED TO HIS CHARACTER. An attempt to get rid of them accidentally deleted Sim!Kevin, no less, so Kevin was forced to let his SimSelf go around living his life with a bunch of babies floating around him and through him (one got lodged in his forehead at one point). With all the babies crying and screaming because they were hungry and stinky. Trying to set them on fire didn’t work (babies be invincible, yo), and when the social worker came to finally start taking them away (one by freaking one), Kevin ended up killing her via death by flies. And then another one showed up, and the game started full-on breaking, so he just had to do a full-on exit out and reload. Which wiped the babies from existence, mysteriously but fortunately (Kevin thinks it was because it was in the middle of the social worker getting them). And saved Vidcund, who had been resurrected for more torture and just died AGAIN shortly before Kevin exited out. Lesson learned – if you want to start a baby food farm, JUST ADOPT BABIES ONE BY ONE.
B) From there we moved onto Plumbella, for another “Entire History Of” – though this video was specifically entitled “A deep dive into the failings of The Sims 4.” This was an in-depth discussion of the history of The Sims 4’s release – namely, how it released without a lot of stuff people had come to take for granted from its predecessors, like toddlers, pools, basements, and – specific to Sims 3 – an open world and Create-A-Style. Basically Sims 4 was such a hot mess before and at launch you had player petitions (that made the news! Well, the gaming news) to have features added back in, even if it meant delaying the release date. Plumbella DID acknowledge that the game did have some good features at launch – Build/Buy has always been user-friendly, for example – and to their credit, they have not generally CHARGED to add back in these features – they’ve always been free patch updates. But she’s of the opinion that the bad launch, coming on the heels of SimCity (2013)’s disastrous launch, really crippled the game, and that they definitely should have delayed it. And if there’s a Sims 5 coming, she hopes they’ve learned from the mistakes of the past. Which – one can hope, but given that the new releases, while good in concept, are also buggy as hell in execution. . . I dunno. I’ve gotten Sims 4 into a state where I enjoy it, and maybe that’s the best you can hope for.
C) Then, after supper, we had James Turner and the latest episode of the Cottage Living LP! As usual, things are VERY busy – Hazel had her second child, a girl named Nina (after a breed of cow, in keeping with the theme of her older brother’s name – she is also blue like her brother, and James is seriously considering changing both their skin tones because they’re not actually aliens); Trenton, after many zappings and many hours creating parts, was finally able to craft his first gardening robot; and Chaz bought his third chicken coop (with James making the oft-neglected greenhouse smaller to accommodate it) and stocked it with regular chickens to get regular eggs for cooking purposes, and had a very successful Easter at the store, selling tons of eggs (and one book) and getting the “Serious Shopper” perk! And then he sold his excess to Kim after haggling with her so much she broke down and gave him the discount. XD And the kids are doing well too – Hazel and Trenton are actually paying some attention to Angus, doing flash cards and potty training and whatnot. The farm is not QUITE a well-oiled machine – there’s always a lot to take care of, even with the help of the birds, the rabbits, the gardening bot, an actual gardener, and Patchy – but everyone’s actually in a decent mood more often than not, and James is having a lot of fun managing the chaos. :) Basically, this is what Sims 4 looks like at its best, and I’m glad.
D) Then it was over to the Watch Later to watch my OXBox video – “7 Times You Totally Showed That Jerk from the Start of the Game | Part 2!” A sequel to a video from three years ago about getting revenge on some bully from the start of the game by showing off just how cool you’ve become thanks to being the protagonist. :p Featuring Benny from Fallout: New Vegas (who shoots the Courier in the head at the beginning of the game, and can be killed once you reach New Vegas in a delightful variety of ways – and if you’re a girl, you have the option of the stupidest voice-over “sex scene” in the world courtesy of Chandler Bing himself XD); Valen Dreth from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (a fellow prisoner with race-and-gender-specific taunts for your prisoner at the very start of the game – he’s the target of a Dark Brotherhood contract later on); and Vile from Mega Man X (an evil robot who serves as a boss fight Zero has to save Mega Man from at the start of the game – you fight him without his extra mech suit nearer the end, and can one-shot him if you’ve picked up a Hadouken from Ryo), among others. As Andy says, it’s one of the great joys of video games.
E) And finally it was back to the Subs to watch GrayStillPlays take on more GTA V! We’re back to classic “evil parkour boards” today, with Gray doing a course that involves swapping through multiple cars to take on multiple challenges. I mean, the TUTORIAL has you driving a big old boxy truck along steep inclines and around sharp curves – the actual board has stuff like rocketing down a “funnel” of inconveniently-spaced rainbow platforms in the box truck; taking on his old nemesis, long and tricky wall rides, in a shiny pink sports car (both the “go straight up and pray” and the “yay sudden transfers!” variety); using the sports car to travel between ramps on MOVING ! SIGNS (yeah, that was – painful); using a ATV-type vehicle to traverse a giant hill of multicolored tightrope pain; and using a rocket-powered sports car to leap from ramp to tube, from tube to platform, from platform to wall ride, and from wall ride back to tube. It was a board of many, MANY near misses, and much general agony from Gray. Perfect GTA V board, in other words! XD
3. Play Sims 4 and do some more house building: Check – Got on after cleaning and a quick look at what was happening online and went back to my house build. It’s slowly coming along – I added a bit more clutter to the kitchen and bathroom (and figured out how to use moveobjects to get the little soap dispenser to actually sit at the proper spot next to the sink, so it didn’t look like it was too far away), then more or less finished the living room with some new curtains, a coffee table, some bookcases and a record player, and a little “crafting corner” with the knitting and cross-stitch baskets, rocking chair, and associated clutter. Actually rather proud of it! Also got some wallpaper and flooring in the entrance hall, and left with a start made on the “study nook” in the front (desk, chess table, another bookcase). Coming together at a snail’s pace, but it’s coming! I think deciding that my aesthetic for the house is largely a combination of Vampires, Realm of Magic, Cottage Living, Nifty Knitting, and Paranormal helps.
4. Free Writing Day -- either do more tumblr queue stuff, or a scene from a future installment of "Londerland Bloodlines" that's on my mind: Check – I did indeed do that scene I was thinking of, or at least a rough draft of it. It’s in fact the death of Chastity the vampire hunter stripper, inspired by the fact that I learned during my Alice playthrough that it’s possible to kill her with no trouble at all if you hit her with Vision of Death before the boss fight. Though things are a little more complicated in the fic. . .namely because Chastity mistook VICTOR (posing as a customer to lure Chastity away from anyone else in the peep show) for a vampire and threatened him, and Alice (having followed them invisibly to take care of her away from prying eyes) got so angry that she used Vision of Death just on INSTINCT. This is actually a running thing with Alice – she’s got a natural talent for Dementation, and a lot of it comes very easily to her. As you might imagine, she does NOT appreciate this – the last bit of my writing was her talking to VV and being very shaken over the fact that she just killed a woman with her worst fear (granted, for the crime of trying to kill the man she’s just realized she’s in love with, but still). Poor Alice – I put her through a LOT in this story.
(And on the queue side, I did actually get my pictures ready for the next Newcrest Adventures update – another 25, meaning another three posts, one half-sized. Seems to be a theme with this lot now!)
Additionally:
-->Another nice day, so again we did beanbags – and Dad was definitely champion today, with a final score of W-W-3-3-W. I got 2-3-W-W-2, while Mom got 3-2-2-2-3. Not really her day, sadly. We’ll see if we do beanbags tomorrow so she can have another chance to catch up – we haven’t been playing on Sundays because of football, but as far as I can tell, there’s only ONE game Dad really wants to see tomorrow, and it’s the night game. . .
So yeah, got everything done on my to-do list that I wanted to get done, yay. And I'm currently having a very busy night juggling multiple conversations/RP stuff, so let me quickly set up tomorrow's to-dos:
1. Write some more on "Learn To Love Again"
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs and Jon's FO4 YOLO episode
3. Play more Bloodlines and get through to the Nosferatu's haven
4. Get in a workout
5. Work on tumblr queues
Usual Sunday stuff! Hopefully it all goes well. . .night all!
1. Clean my room and do the monthly laundry: Check – started the room clean just before 11 AM, finished around 2:15 PM with a lunch break near the end. Laundry naturally took longer (most of the day), but it always does. Just had to work around my mother doing all sorts of cleaning and adjusting and grouting in the bathroom (meaning I didn’t get a shower today – good thing I wasn’t planning on working out anyway!). All done for another two weeks, at least!
2. Watch the OXBox video and Plumbella's latest, and keep up with YouTube Subs: Check! Got it all done today, w000 –
A) Started with Call Me Kevin (by accident – double-click issue strikes again) and the latest episode of The Sims 2! Where he promptly dumped all the karma he might have built up from trying to play Fallout 4 and Skyrim as a pacifist by trying to make a FREE-RANGE BABY FOOD FARM. Remember, he’s got the LOLWTFBBQ mod – and his grand plan for getting visitors to come to his pay-to-hang-out lot? Adopt a baby, clone that baby via cheats, and then just cook babies for everyone to lure them in with food. Sounds like an excellent evil plan, right?
. . .Cloning’s fucked in this game, and Kevin ended up with dozens of babies, some of which were randomly floating in the air, and others which were ATTACHED TO HIS CHARACTER. An attempt to get rid of them accidentally deleted Sim!Kevin, no less, so Kevin was forced to let his SimSelf go around living his life with a bunch of babies floating around him and through him (one got lodged in his forehead at one point). With all the babies crying and screaming because they were hungry and stinky. Trying to set them on fire didn’t work (babies be invincible, yo), and when the social worker came to finally start taking them away (one by freaking one), Kevin ended up killing her via death by flies. And then another one showed up, and the game started full-on breaking, so he just had to do a full-on exit out and reload. Which wiped the babies from existence, mysteriously but fortunately (Kevin thinks it was because it was in the middle of the social worker getting them). And saved Vidcund, who had been resurrected for more torture and just died AGAIN shortly before Kevin exited out. Lesson learned – if you want to start a baby food farm, JUST ADOPT BABIES ONE BY ONE.
B) From there we moved onto Plumbella, for another “Entire History Of” – though this video was specifically entitled “A deep dive into the failings of The Sims 4.” This was an in-depth discussion of the history of The Sims 4’s release – namely, how it released without a lot of stuff people had come to take for granted from its predecessors, like toddlers, pools, basements, and – specific to Sims 3 – an open world and Create-A-Style. Basically Sims 4 was such a hot mess before and at launch you had player petitions (that made the news! Well, the gaming news) to have features added back in, even if it meant delaying the release date. Plumbella DID acknowledge that the game did have some good features at launch – Build/Buy has always been user-friendly, for example – and to their credit, they have not generally CHARGED to add back in these features – they’ve always been free patch updates. But she’s of the opinion that the bad launch, coming on the heels of SimCity (2013)’s disastrous launch, really crippled the game, and that they definitely should have delayed it. And if there’s a Sims 5 coming, she hopes they’ve learned from the mistakes of the past. Which – one can hope, but given that the new releases, while good in concept, are also buggy as hell in execution. . . I dunno. I’ve gotten Sims 4 into a state where I enjoy it, and maybe that’s the best you can hope for.
C) Then, after supper, we had James Turner and the latest episode of the Cottage Living LP! As usual, things are VERY busy – Hazel had her second child, a girl named Nina (after a breed of cow, in keeping with the theme of her older brother’s name – she is also blue like her brother, and James is seriously considering changing both their skin tones because they’re not actually aliens); Trenton, after many zappings and many hours creating parts, was finally able to craft his first gardening robot; and Chaz bought his third chicken coop (with James making the oft-neglected greenhouse smaller to accommodate it) and stocked it with regular chickens to get regular eggs for cooking purposes, and had a very successful Easter at the store, selling tons of eggs (and one book) and getting the “Serious Shopper” perk! And then he sold his excess to Kim after haggling with her so much she broke down and gave him the discount. XD And the kids are doing well too – Hazel and Trenton are actually paying some attention to Angus, doing flash cards and potty training and whatnot. The farm is not QUITE a well-oiled machine – there’s always a lot to take care of, even with the help of the birds, the rabbits, the gardening bot, an actual gardener, and Patchy – but everyone’s actually in a decent mood more often than not, and James is having a lot of fun managing the chaos. :) Basically, this is what Sims 4 looks like at its best, and I’m glad.
D) Then it was over to the Watch Later to watch my OXBox video – “7 Times You Totally Showed That Jerk from the Start of the Game | Part 2!” A sequel to a video from three years ago about getting revenge on some bully from the start of the game by showing off just how cool you’ve become thanks to being the protagonist. :p Featuring Benny from Fallout: New Vegas (who shoots the Courier in the head at the beginning of the game, and can be killed once you reach New Vegas in a delightful variety of ways – and if you’re a girl, you have the option of the stupidest voice-over “sex scene” in the world courtesy of Chandler Bing himself XD); Valen Dreth from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (a fellow prisoner with race-and-gender-specific taunts for your prisoner at the very start of the game – he’s the target of a Dark Brotherhood contract later on); and Vile from Mega Man X (an evil robot who serves as a boss fight Zero has to save Mega Man from at the start of the game – you fight him without his extra mech suit nearer the end, and can one-shot him if you’ve picked up a Hadouken from Ryo), among others. As Andy says, it’s one of the great joys of video games.
E) And finally it was back to the Subs to watch GrayStillPlays take on more GTA V! We’re back to classic “evil parkour boards” today, with Gray doing a course that involves swapping through multiple cars to take on multiple challenges. I mean, the TUTORIAL has you driving a big old boxy truck along steep inclines and around sharp curves – the actual board has stuff like rocketing down a “funnel” of inconveniently-spaced rainbow platforms in the box truck; taking on his old nemesis, long and tricky wall rides, in a shiny pink sports car (both the “go straight up and pray” and the “yay sudden transfers!” variety); using the sports car to travel between ramps on MOVING ! SIGNS (yeah, that was – painful); using a ATV-type vehicle to traverse a giant hill of multicolored tightrope pain; and using a rocket-powered sports car to leap from ramp to tube, from tube to platform, from platform to wall ride, and from wall ride back to tube. It was a board of many, MANY near misses, and much general agony from Gray. Perfect GTA V board, in other words! XD
3. Play Sims 4 and do some more house building: Check – Got on after cleaning and a quick look at what was happening online and went back to my house build. It’s slowly coming along – I added a bit more clutter to the kitchen and bathroom (and figured out how to use moveobjects to get the little soap dispenser to actually sit at the proper spot next to the sink, so it didn’t look like it was too far away), then more or less finished the living room with some new curtains, a coffee table, some bookcases and a record player, and a little “crafting corner” with the knitting and cross-stitch baskets, rocking chair, and associated clutter. Actually rather proud of it! Also got some wallpaper and flooring in the entrance hall, and left with a start made on the “study nook” in the front (desk, chess table, another bookcase). Coming together at a snail’s pace, but it’s coming! I think deciding that my aesthetic for the house is largely a combination of Vampires, Realm of Magic, Cottage Living, Nifty Knitting, and Paranormal helps.
4. Free Writing Day -- either do more tumblr queue stuff, or a scene from a future installment of "Londerland Bloodlines" that's on my mind: Check – I did indeed do that scene I was thinking of, or at least a rough draft of it. It’s in fact the death of Chastity the vampire hunter stripper, inspired by the fact that I learned during my Alice playthrough that it’s possible to kill her with no trouble at all if you hit her with Vision of Death before the boss fight. Though things are a little more complicated in the fic. . .namely because Chastity mistook VICTOR (posing as a customer to lure Chastity away from anyone else in the peep show) for a vampire and threatened him, and Alice (having followed them invisibly to take care of her away from prying eyes) got so angry that she used Vision of Death just on INSTINCT. This is actually a running thing with Alice – she’s got a natural talent for Dementation, and a lot of it comes very easily to her. As you might imagine, she does NOT appreciate this – the last bit of my writing was her talking to VV and being very shaken over the fact that she just killed a woman with her worst fear (granted, for the crime of trying to kill the man she’s just realized she’s in love with, but still). Poor Alice – I put her through a LOT in this story.
(And on the queue side, I did actually get my pictures ready for the next Newcrest Adventures update – another 25, meaning another three posts, one half-sized. Seems to be a theme with this lot now!)
Additionally:
-->Another nice day, so again we did beanbags – and Dad was definitely champion today, with a final score of W-W-3-3-W. I got 2-3-W-W-2, while Mom got 3-2-2-2-3. Not really her day, sadly. We’ll see if we do beanbags tomorrow so she can have another chance to catch up – we haven’t been playing on Sundays because of football, but as far as I can tell, there’s only ONE game Dad really wants to see tomorrow, and it’s the night game. . .
So yeah, got everything done on my to-do list that I wanted to get done, yay. And I'm currently having a very busy night juggling multiple conversations/RP stuff, so let me quickly set up tomorrow's to-dos:
1. Write some more on "Learn To Love Again"
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs and Jon's FO4 YOLO episode
3. Play more Bloodlines and get through to the Nosferatu's haven
4. Get in a workout
5. Work on tumblr queues
Usual Sunday stuff! Hopefully it all goes well. . .night all!
