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A Pretty Chill Friday
Nov. 26th, 2021 11:09 pmBoth in terms of doing stuff and in terms of temperature -- only made it to the high 40s today, and we've got wind whipping up a chill making it feel like it's in the teens overnight. . .definitely need my good blanket now! But I just hung out, catching up on tumblr stuff and having a pretty good, relaxed time with my to-dos --
1. Edit some more on “Londerland Bloodlines”: Check – back in Chapter 4, at least for the time being, and starting The Adventures of Alice and Mercurio, Detectives! XD After a brief moment where Alice is slightly stunned to learn that Mercurio covered up her killing most of Dennis and his goons by subjecting the one guy she left alive, Al, to an overdose and framing him for the carnage. She’s trying not to give Mercurio any reasons to doubt her as an ally, but as she said, this is NOT the life she would have chosen for herself if she’d had a choice. *pats her* Ah well. . .at least now she’ll have some back-up as she makes her way through the Gimble nonsense!
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs, watch the OXBox list in WL, see about another OXventure: Check with a substitution – I didn’t have the time to watch the next OXventure in the list, but I did get in another, shorter OXBox video! And as I’m actually out of stuff in the WL and still have two days off, I think I’ll get to the next OXventure yet. :D In the meantime –
A) Started with the good old OXBox:
I. “7 Weirdest Easter Eggs That Take Serious Explaining” – games with some Easter Eggs that can make you go “huh??” For example, Psychonauts 2 having a joke animation of a pregnant Raz giving birth to some sort of psychic pig thing made by Pendleton Ward you can watch if you throw a pen at the word Ward in a particular brain space. Or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare referencing the infamous early COVID toilet paper shortage by making you shoot teddy bears in a supermarket map to open a delivery truck containing “The Last Roll” (admittedly, it is made of gold). Or Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla having a surprise cameo from Keith of The Prodigy (a UK band) as an NPC post his death, and a mini-quest involving smacking a bishop giving him a hard time about his music. Though that one is only confusing if you’re not a fan of the band, and perhaps more weirdly touching if you are and miss Keith. Or hell, even if you just think it’s very nice of them to let what is obviously one of the developers’ favorite singers live on, like me. :)
II. “WRONG CONTROLLER CHALLENGE | Playing Dark Souls, Sonic and Hot Wheels with a Guitar Hero Controller” – Andy, Mike, and Jane all take turns playing – well, look at the title. XD Also, this is a video sponsored by DURACELL, of all people. They wanted the gang to promote their new batteries, and apparently this was the challenge they set them. The idea was they’d all take a turn at each of the three games, and award points (3, 2, 1) based on the following criteria:
Hot Wheels – Best lap time of the three laps of the “Basement” circuit
Sonic The Hedgehog – Fewest number of attempts to do “Green Hill Zone Act 1”
Dark Souls 3 – Longest survival time against the first boss
Mike, being the “racing game” guy, did the best in Hot Wheels – a few mistakes, but nothing he couldn’t recover from. Andy had moves, but not the speed, while poor Jane had neither the speed nor the moves (she accidentally jumped onto an earlier part of the track at one point, forcing her to add half-a-lap in the middle of her go!). In Sonic, though, Andy managed to speedrun the entire course and do it all in ONE GO – Mike needed two, and Jane ended up giving up after three because she couldn’t make a jump to keep herself out of the spiky lower area – and that’s impossible to get past with the crappy “jump” control on the guitar controller (it’s jerking the neck up, and it’s FIDDLY). And in Dark Souls 3, everyone gave it their best go (hell, they each even tried to kill the boss at least once), but Andy proved to be the winner by simply refusing to lock onto the boss and then just running away for two minutes and forty-eight seconds before being smashed. And Jane managed to eek ahead into second place this time with an “infinite rolls” strategy on her last attempt, which put her at a minute thirty-one, four seconds ahead of Mike’s best go. So Andy won the day, with Mike coming in second and poor Jane last. Very weird little challenge (especially as sponsored content for the new Duracell batteries), but a lot of fun nonetheless! :)
B) Then, after supper, we moved into the Subs to watch Call Me Kevin play Let’s Build A Zoo, a zoo-building game that actually has moral choices in it! Like, say, you can agree to help a lost dog be found. . .or you can dress it up as a lion and shove it into one of your habitats. XD Kevin obviously went as evil as possible and created Cruelty Land, a zoo that is very up-front about how it treats its animals. After getting a load of rabbits from other zoos around the world, and that poor lost dog, Kevin began expanding into things like researching meat processing plants, electricity siphoners, sewage renewal plants, and trash burners! Yes, these are all things you can really get in the game, and they push you toward the evil side of the spectrum. You can also be contacted by a black market animal dealer to buy and sell (Kevin offloaded SO many starving rabbits onto him), make more “scam-imals” (like painting a goose to look like a peafowl – which seems absurdly dangerous because geese MEAN), get the help of a mad scientist to make robot animals with taxidermy skin over the top (yes), agree to feed a MOB HIT TO A PIG (and that is REALISTIC folks, pigs are OMNIVORES and WILL eat corpses), and even unlock genetic engineering to make terrifying hybrids (like combining geese and rabbits). As long as you keep the ticket prices low so the protesters can pay to come in, you’ll be making money hand over fist! XD Seriously, this game is wacky and I want more. XD
C) Then it was onto GrayStillPlays and the delightful horror that is Episode! Today we had Flak Horris of Floridopolous (like Zak Morris, only he’s constantly getting beaten up) on a dating game show, where he had to ask women hidden behind curtains questions, pick two over two rounds, then watch them fight for his love! This being Episode, he was allowed to ask things like if they’d seen a gynecologist recently, and they answered things like “murder” to “how do you handle being angry?” XD He ended up with Blair – a goth who openly said a demon told her to sign up for the show – and Emily – a criminal who confessed to murder and would get a reduced sentence if she won the date. Emily actually won the ending fight, but Gray couldn’t resist picking literal demon-summoner and necromancer Blair to smooch with. XD Though I kind of wish he’d chosen Grant, the host – he and Flak had a good thing going on. XD
3. Play Bloodlines and do the final Chinatown sidequest and move onto the Giovanni mansion: Check! Made some excellent progress too – Crystal bounced back and forth between Ji Wan Ja and Lu Fang for a bit, then convinced them to reconcile for six experience points and a Humanity gain – more than enough for me to boost her Scholarship to max and get her Persuasion up to 9 (and get use of the Braided Tailsman she picked up in Kamikaze Zen)! With that sorted, she went off to the Giovanni Mansion. Her attempt at getting Maria’s invitation off her didn’t go particularly well (chose the wrong dialogue options, and she told Crystal to piss off) – fortunately, her husband was easily persuaded to get her out of there because of how drunk she was, giving her the opportunity to pick up the invitation and head inside. She went around Mina, Adam, and Chris to get their dirty secrets, and ended up spilling the boys’ to Mina for $200. Then it was over to Nadia to charm her into letting her into the crypts (and pick up the Voce Del Morte for Pisha), then time to fight some zombies and pick up the Salocept, aka the late-game XP booster. :D Took me a couple of tries to get through the lower crypts (took a wrong turn and accidentally jammed a door that had a bunch of zombies behind it), but I managed it – and then it took me another couple of tries to get past the Chang Brothers. Because, you know, they hit hard, and there’s an angry ghost upstairs making things worse. On the plus side, I found the only other time Blood Shield has been actually useful, soooo. . .
Anyway, got past them, grabbed their weapons, then took the sarcophagus back to LaCroix, where Crystal asked him about the potential alliance between him and Ming-Xiao (he denied the hell out of it, of course), and they found the sarcophagus couldn’t be opened. Beckett pointed Crystal in the direction of the missing professor, and I struggled MIGHTILY against picking the flirty option while asking him about himself. XD Fortunately, I picked right and chose how Crystal never wants to fall to the Beast – because THAT is the option that opens up “oh hey, Beckett can teach you a bonus Discipline.” :D And that, my dear friends, means my Tremere character now has FORTITUDE. When she had 17 XP to spend too – promptly dumped two points into that for any future boss fights! :D And, having swung by Pisha’s to drop off the Voce Del Morte, she also now has the Key of Alamut, which increases her soak even more. Now I don’t have to worry if anything gets past her Blood Boil abilities. XD Currently holed up in her Chantry haven, I plan to see if Strauss has any new fun dialogue options before starting the endgame stuff. My only worry is what’s going to happen to Heather. . .she hasn’t had any new dialogue options in quite a while. . . O.o
4. Get in a workout: Check – got back on the bike today, and watched another episode of The Spiffing Brit! This one was from 2020 and involved the classic Evil Genius game, with Spiff showing off a fun exploit – namely, how to get loads of minions and loads of money without ever technically leaving the tutorial. You see, you can do a lot of stuff from the “main” portion of the game while in the tutorial – build your base, build a front for your base, send minions out into the world to steal and plot and do missions – but as long as you never actually complete the last tutorial mission (abducting a vacationing maid for some reason – I ASSUME she’s secretly spying on you), the game will never send any secret agents to your base, meaning you don’t have to worry about defending it and yourself from the James Bonds of the game. Combine that with the fact that, to get loads of minions to send out and get money for you, all you need is a room with one bed and tons of “barracks” lockers, and you can basically get yourself a ton of cash without anyone actually retaliating against your evil deeds. :D And while he was doing that, he also informed us that we should be kinder when naming animals and that specifically we should be nice to the “fat sand rat,” which he’d recently learned about. XD Bit of a strange video, but it’s always fun to see him slip past a game’s defenses and get it to do things it wasn’t meant to.
Not too shabby, right? And my Valice Multiverse queue is all set too -- two ask replies, nothing too complicated. :) Nice to have a day like this! However, tomorrow shall be a little more complicated:
1. Clean my room and do the monthly Big Laundry Pile
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, watch the next Oxventure
3. Play Sims 4 and do some more with the Chill Save
4. Free Writing Day -- maybe some more "Fallout of Darkness" snippets
5. Get in a workout
Yes, it is time again for the cleaning and the washing. *shrug* Gotta be done -- and honestly, it's probably better for it to be done on a weekend when I have the extra time off. Still, hoping it doesn't take up too much of my Saturday! Fingers crossed, everybody -- night all!
1. Edit some more on “Londerland Bloodlines”: Check – back in Chapter 4, at least for the time being, and starting The Adventures of Alice and Mercurio, Detectives! XD After a brief moment where Alice is slightly stunned to learn that Mercurio covered up her killing most of Dennis and his goons by subjecting the one guy she left alive, Al, to an overdose and framing him for the carnage. She’s trying not to give Mercurio any reasons to doubt her as an ally, but as she said, this is NOT the life she would have chosen for herself if she’d had a choice. *pats her* Ah well. . .at least now she’ll have some back-up as she makes her way through the Gimble nonsense!
2. Keep up on YouTube Subs, watch the OXBox list in WL, see about another OXventure: Check with a substitution – I didn’t have the time to watch the next OXventure in the list, but I did get in another, shorter OXBox video! And as I’m actually out of stuff in the WL and still have two days off, I think I’ll get to the next OXventure yet. :D In the meantime –
A) Started with the good old OXBox:
I. “7 Weirdest Easter Eggs That Take Serious Explaining” – games with some Easter Eggs that can make you go “huh??” For example, Psychonauts 2 having a joke animation of a pregnant Raz giving birth to some sort of psychic pig thing made by Pendleton Ward you can watch if you throw a pen at the word Ward in a particular brain space. Or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare referencing the infamous early COVID toilet paper shortage by making you shoot teddy bears in a supermarket map to open a delivery truck containing “The Last Roll” (admittedly, it is made of gold). Or Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla having a surprise cameo from Keith of The Prodigy (a UK band) as an NPC post his death, and a mini-quest involving smacking a bishop giving him a hard time about his music. Though that one is only confusing if you’re not a fan of the band, and perhaps more weirdly touching if you are and miss Keith. Or hell, even if you just think it’s very nice of them to let what is obviously one of the developers’ favorite singers live on, like me. :)
II. “WRONG CONTROLLER CHALLENGE | Playing Dark Souls, Sonic and Hot Wheels with a Guitar Hero Controller” – Andy, Mike, and Jane all take turns playing – well, look at the title. XD Also, this is a video sponsored by DURACELL, of all people. They wanted the gang to promote their new batteries, and apparently this was the challenge they set them. The idea was they’d all take a turn at each of the three games, and award points (3, 2, 1) based on the following criteria:
Hot Wheels – Best lap time of the three laps of the “Basement” circuit
Sonic The Hedgehog – Fewest number of attempts to do “Green Hill Zone Act 1”
Dark Souls 3 – Longest survival time against the first boss
Mike, being the “racing game” guy, did the best in Hot Wheels – a few mistakes, but nothing he couldn’t recover from. Andy had moves, but not the speed, while poor Jane had neither the speed nor the moves (she accidentally jumped onto an earlier part of the track at one point, forcing her to add half-a-lap in the middle of her go!). In Sonic, though, Andy managed to speedrun the entire course and do it all in ONE GO – Mike needed two, and Jane ended up giving up after three because she couldn’t make a jump to keep herself out of the spiky lower area – and that’s impossible to get past with the crappy “jump” control on the guitar controller (it’s jerking the neck up, and it’s FIDDLY). And in Dark Souls 3, everyone gave it their best go (hell, they each even tried to kill the boss at least once), but Andy proved to be the winner by simply refusing to lock onto the boss and then just running away for two minutes and forty-eight seconds before being smashed. And Jane managed to eek ahead into second place this time with an “infinite rolls” strategy on her last attempt, which put her at a minute thirty-one, four seconds ahead of Mike’s best go. So Andy won the day, with Mike coming in second and poor Jane last. Very weird little challenge (especially as sponsored content for the new Duracell batteries), but a lot of fun nonetheless! :)
B) Then, after supper, we moved into the Subs to watch Call Me Kevin play Let’s Build A Zoo, a zoo-building game that actually has moral choices in it! Like, say, you can agree to help a lost dog be found. . .or you can dress it up as a lion and shove it into one of your habitats. XD Kevin obviously went as evil as possible and created Cruelty Land, a zoo that is very up-front about how it treats its animals. After getting a load of rabbits from other zoos around the world, and that poor lost dog, Kevin began expanding into things like researching meat processing plants, electricity siphoners, sewage renewal plants, and trash burners! Yes, these are all things you can really get in the game, and they push you toward the evil side of the spectrum. You can also be contacted by a black market animal dealer to buy and sell (Kevin offloaded SO many starving rabbits onto him), make more “scam-imals” (like painting a goose to look like a peafowl – which seems absurdly dangerous because geese MEAN), get the help of a mad scientist to make robot animals with taxidermy skin over the top (yes), agree to feed a MOB HIT TO A PIG (and that is REALISTIC folks, pigs are OMNIVORES and WILL eat corpses), and even unlock genetic engineering to make terrifying hybrids (like combining geese and rabbits). As long as you keep the ticket prices low so the protesters can pay to come in, you’ll be making money hand over fist! XD Seriously, this game is wacky and I want more. XD
C) Then it was onto GrayStillPlays and the delightful horror that is Episode! Today we had Flak Horris of Floridopolous (like Zak Morris, only he’s constantly getting beaten up) on a dating game show, where he had to ask women hidden behind curtains questions, pick two over two rounds, then watch them fight for his love! This being Episode, he was allowed to ask things like if they’d seen a gynecologist recently, and they answered things like “murder” to “how do you handle being angry?” XD He ended up with Blair – a goth who openly said a demon told her to sign up for the show – and Emily – a criminal who confessed to murder and would get a reduced sentence if she won the date. Emily actually won the ending fight, but Gray couldn’t resist picking literal demon-summoner and necromancer Blair to smooch with. XD Though I kind of wish he’d chosen Grant, the host – he and Flak had a good thing going on. XD
3. Play Bloodlines and do the final Chinatown sidequest and move onto the Giovanni mansion: Check! Made some excellent progress too – Crystal bounced back and forth between Ji Wan Ja and Lu Fang for a bit, then convinced them to reconcile for six experience points and a Humanity gain – more than enough for me to boost her Scholarship to max and get her Persuasion up to 9 (and get use of the Braided Tailsman she picked up in Kamikaze Zen)! With that sorted, she went off to the Giovanni Mansion. Her attempt at getting Maria’s invitation off her didn’t go particularly well (chose the wrong dialogue options, and she told Crystal to piss off) – fortunately, her husband was easily persuaded to get her out of there because of how drunk she was, giving her the opportunity to pick up the invitation and head inside. She went around Mina, Adam, and Chris to get their dirty secrets, and ended up spilling the boys’ to Mina for $200. Then it was over to Nadia to charm her into letting her into the crypts (and pick up the Voce Del Morte for Pisha), then time to fight some zombies and pick up the Salocept, aka the late-game XP booster. :D Took me a couple of tries to get through the lower crypts (took a wrong turn and accidentally jammed a door that had a bunch of zombies behind it), but I managed it – and then it took me another couple of tries to get past the Chang Brothers. Because, you know, they hit hard, and there’s an angry ghost upstairs making things worse. On the plus side, I found the only other time Blood Shield has been actually useful, soooo. . .
Anyway, got past them, grabbed their weapons, then took the sarcophagus back to LaCroix, where Crystal asked him about the potential alliance between him and Ming-Xiao (he denied the hell out of it, of course), and they found the sarcophagus couldn’t be opened. Beckett pointed Crystal in the direction of the missing professor, and I struggled MIGHTILY against picking the flirty option while asking him about himself. XD Fortunately, I picked right and chose how Crystal never wants to fall to the Beast – because THAT is the option that opens up “oh hey, Beckett can teach you a bonus Discipline.” :D And that, my dear friends, means my Tremere character now has FORTITUDE. When she had 17 XP to spend too – promptly dumped two points into that for any future boss fights! :D And, having swung by Pisha’s to drop off the Voce Del Morte, she also now has the Key of Alamut, which increases her soak even more. Now I don’t have to worry if anything gets past her Blood Boil abilities. XD Currently holed up in her Chantry haven, I plan to see if Strauss has any new fun dialogue options before starting the endgame stuff. My only worry is what’s going to happen to Heather. . .she hasn’t had any new dialogue options in quite a while. . . O.o
4. Get in a workout: Check – got back on the bike today, and watched another episode of The Spiffing Brit! This one was from 2020 and involved the classic Evil Genius game, with Spiff showing off a fun exploit – namely, how to get loads of minions and loads of money without ever technically leaving the tutorial. You see, you can do a lot of stuff from the “main” portion of the game while in the tutorial – build your base, build a front for your base, send minions out into the world to steal and plot and do missions – but as long as you never actually complete the last tutorial mission (abducting a vacationing maid for some reason – I ASSUME she’s secretly spying on you), the game will never send any secret agents to your base, meaning you don’t have to worry about defending it and yourself from the James Bonds of the game. Combine that with the fact that, to get loads of minions to send out and get money for you, all you need is a room with one bed and tons of “barracks” lockers, and you can basically get yourself a ton of cash without anyone actually retaliating against your evil deeds. :D And while he was doing that, he also informed us that we should be kinder when naming animals and that specifically we should be nice to the “fat sand rat,” which he’d recently learned about. XD Bit of a strange video, but it’s always fun to see him slip past a game’s defenses and get it to do things it wasn’t meant to.
Not too shabby, right? And my Valice Multiverse queue is all set too -- two ask replies, nothing too complicated. :) Nice to have a day like this! However, tomorrow shall be a little more complicated:
1. Clean my room and do the monthly Big Laundry Pile
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, watch the next Oxventure
3. Play Sims 4 and do some more with the Chill Save
4. Free Writing Day -- maybe some more "Fallout of Darkness" snippets
5. Get in a workout
Yes, it is time again for the cleaning and the washing. *shrug* Gotta be done -- and honestly, it's probably better for it to be done on a weekend when I have the extra time off. Still, hoping it doesn't take up too much of my Saturday! Fingers crossed, everybody -- night all!
