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Very Snowy Sunday
Feb. 13th, 2022 11:30 pmYes, yesterday we hit record highs of 63F -- today it topped out about 34F and snowed pretty much the ENTIRE DAY. A possible two to four inches out there, though the roads fortunately are still pretty good thanks to previous salting and whatnot. Even better, I don't need to drive out in it tomorrow. XD But yeah, winter has come back with a vengeance, and I'm not sure I approve.
Fortunately, it was a much better day than yesterday, if only because I didn't have to waste any time on that damn phone. And because it was The Big Football Day and thus both lunch and dinner were snacky things (veggies and homemade crackers with dip, crabmeat-stuffed puffs, and panko-crusted chicken tenders, om nom) that I could nibble on to my heart's content. Plus cupcakes, though the top fell off of mine (fortunately onto a napkin, frosting-side up!). And I got a lot more done on my to-do list, even with an early fall down the TV Tropes hole:
1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – wrote that up after completing the below sum-up for you guys, as per usual. Checking past entries, I can now confirm that the random super mutants wandering down the road to Cambridge’s College Square and getting into a fight with the feral ghouls there (seriously, see item three, this happened in-game) is Victor’s first “encounter” with super mutants in general! (Not that he actually FOUGHT them this time around – I let the ferals do that. Plenty of time to get into scraps with them later!) And yes, I did make it clear that, in-universe, his setting off the engine in ArcJet on Danse was an accident – poor guy nearly has a panic attack over the whole mess, and who can blame him? But at least Danse was okay. Thanks to his power armor. >.> <.< (Well, okay, I’m sure the power armor HELPED, but yeah, if you know Danse’s full story, you know the real reason he probably survived. . .) Good times, as always!
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, the two non-Sims videos in the Watch Later, and Jon's F:NV "Utter Chaos" episode: Check – did indeed get everything I want to get watched, watched today, yay –
A) Started after FO4, below, with the latest Late Night Double Feature from Linkara – “Wax Wonders Night,” featuring House of Wax and Nightmare In Wax! One is a classic of the genre starring Vincent Price and using a paddle ball-wielding carnival barker to do some cool early 3-D effects stuff; the other is a terrible movie with a soundtrack that sounds like it too was dipped in wax, staring Cameron Mitchell, an actor with many and varied credits who most of us probably know from MST3K (he’s Commander Santa from Space Mutiny, from the Sci-Fi Channel era). Clive was effuse in his praise toward the first (noting that anything with Vincent Price is elevated by Vincent Price) and equally effuse with his disdain toward the second (complaining it was padded to hell and has a completely awful ending). Short, sweet, and not too scary or gory – nice.
B) Then it was on to a new OXBox list – “7 Side Quests You Should NEVER Finish: Commenter Edition!” Yes, the comments are in, and there’s yet more side quests that one should never finish to keep their game experience pleasant. From learning the hard way that completing “Birds Of A Feather” for the Van Graffs in Fallout: New Vegas will lead to companion Cass getting disintegrated right before you (for a measly 350 caps too); to finding the fashion designer you were helping design a fun new suit with in “Make Space Suit, Won’t Travel” dead at the end of the quest in The Outer Worlds; to having an awesomely powerful, potentially-soul-eating sword either taken away from you, or become a rather heavy weapon when before it was a weightless quest item in “Clavicus Vile’s Shrine” in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion; to – HEY, WHAT IS “WHEN FREEDOM CALLS” FROM FALLOUT 4 DOING ON HERE?! *grumbles repeatedly about how she LIKES the Minutemen stuff, damn it. . .*
C) Then, after supper, moved over to the Subs for Call Me Kevin and another GTA V mod – one that spawns an enemy every time his character gets injured. Like, every time. Just falling on his face hard enough will spawn one, and it VERY RAPIDLY gets out of hand. Kevin attempted to do a few heists, but – well. The only reason he got as far as he did in the Paleto Job is because he had a minigun to take out the initial guards – the actual heist itself? A total CLUSTERFUCK, with random people, dogs, and even CHICKENS WITH GUNS spawning in to keep Kevin from crossing a street and making his way through a meat factory. Not only did Kevin keep dying to the growing crowd of enemies, but the game kept crashing because it wasn’t built to handle the number of NPCs he was spawning. The jewelry job ended up going better because the enemies spawned ended up spawning on the back of his bike and falling right off, and the plane job similarly had the enemies spawning OUTSIDE THE PLANE and instantly falling to their deaths – but in both of those instances, Kevin ended up crashing a plot-important vehicle. Really, the only mission that was truly safe for him to complete? Buying masks at the mask store. XD Oh dear, even the Chaos Mod had the occasional GOOD outcome. . .
D) Then it was onto GrayStillPlays and yes, more Happy Wheels! Started with “Bottle Flip Pink,” which had things like angry rocket-powered strawberries and ninja swords skewering your head if you missed the unlocked win right next to it (on the plus side, Gray managed the Bullseye area on his very first throw), then went through a board where you had to escape TWO meteors (and then get lightly BOUNCED onto the win, which was arguably the hardest part for poor Gray, who generally had waaay too much speed and just flew over the bouncer), a very speedy rainbow harpoon run (Gray had to get ALL the speed to get past that one), a surprisingly leisurely trip to see the “Insane Anaconda 2” (the flippy-floppy snake actually curled up in such a way that it didn’t even come close to Gray – Gray actually did the board again to show what SHOULD have happened), a “you need luck to beat this” board with harpoons and head-severing shapes (Gray sacrificed Tom to win instead of sending him to daycare, as he does), a “Road of Death Arena” where Bike Dad and Son had to face off against a number of characters carrying cleavers, swords, spears, and other sharp pointy things (most of which ended up in Gray’s wiener, naturally – also he found that you had to kill EVERYONE to get the win, and that includes the big old group at the end), an “impossible” harpoon board that he did pretty much by sheer luck (lost his arms, but the majority of the harpoons missed him, and he was able to get the dad to just fall off his bike onto the win), a visit to see Gray’s Mech (not at all dangerous unless you don’t back up when the arm falls on you – Gray found this one mostly confusing), a bottle/toilet run that Gray did before even got a chance to explain it (all the speed and he had all the win), and a trip to the zoo that consisted of a brief look at some lions before Gray had to speed away on the Nixon Segway to avoid a killer beach ball (going through a construction area before getting to Dylan Synder’s trademark win strung with eyes). A weird but deeply amusing set today!
E) And finally, as usual for a Sunday, it was time for Jon’s Fallout: New Vegas “Utter Chaos” video! Today was Jon’s attempt to go exploring the East corner of the map that he’s been avoiding, but now no longer needs to fear so much because he has ALL the grenades. His wanderings resulted in the following:
I. An attempt to contact the Brotherhood of Steel in the area with companion Veronica (now Dr. Veronica) that went a bit pear-shaped because he took the peaceful way in with the companion who works for them (or at least used to work for them, I forget Veronica’s exact situation). He was expecting to be teleported to the elders, but instead fell afoul of randomized doors and had to figure out a way into each level. He DOES at least have the Brotherhood as a known faction now, and if he’s forced to do the Yes Man route, he can safely say they can be ignored, but he still hopes to eventually find his way to the elders. (Though, Jon, perhaps you should be GRATEFUL for the lack of teleporting, because the last time it happened, you got soft-locked.)
II. Robbing a Novac settler’s house because he thought it was an abandoned house elsewhere, killing the settler, and getting a Vilified karma rating with Novac. That’ll be fun later!
III. Multiple “Jon Got Distracted” trips into Old World Blues because he keeps finding doors into Big MT. He’s fired some artillery at a fake town, and is certain that does something but isn’t sure what; explored the area between two of the towers, checking out doors and being very, VERY anxious about the lack of enemies (though going through one cave seems to have tripped a trigger – though not very much); and found his way to a model town with a few more doors to explore, though none of them seemed to go exactly where he wanted.
IV. Attempted to get ED-E because a viewer spotted that he had a door into the eyebot’s location; unfortunately it’s the back door, and Jon can’t do the building backwards. Shame!
V. STUMBLED ACROSS THE GREAT KHAN LONGHOUSE, THE PLACE HE WAS LOOKING FOR FOR THE NCR QUESTS, ENTIRELY BY ACCIDENT. It was just a random door he was checking and he was absolutely STUNNED. Of course, that brought up the other problem of him needing to find Regis, a plot-important character if you want to make peace, but – well, he’d wandered off from where Jon had last seen him, and Jon couldn’t track him down again. So, for the first time in all the times he’d played New Vegas, Jon ended up nuking and/or explosively shooting them all. Along with the Legion spy among their ranks, but the Legion was only somewhat pissed off about that – Jon can still do missions for them. And, hilariously, despite all the murder, right after Jon went and turned in the quest to the NCR Colonel, Cassandra – his reputation with whatever remained of the Great Khans went UP! To “Merciful Thug,” meaning they still hate him mostly, but – he was BAFFLED. XD This game is so broken. . .
Anyway – good plot progress, good exploration today! And Jon has a new mission for next time – well, two new missions, one from the game and one from himself. Personally, he wants to go to the Central Sewers, which is the biggest sewer system in the game, and explore that for doors and ladders. The NCR, meanwhile, has set him to spy on the Omertas and stop their clandestine meetings.
The Omertas run that casino where everyone tried to kill him once, and he had to run out and leave all his guns and such behind for a good long while before he could sneak back in and get them back by going out the front.
Revenge is gonna be sweet. XD Something to look forward to!
3. Play Fallout 4 and do Danse's introductory missions: Check! Picked up with Victor and Preston following the radio signal to Cambridge – only to notice someone rather, ah, BULKY on the road directly ahead of them. Victor and Preston promptly dropped into a crouch as I tried to assess the situation, hearing a quite a lot of gunfire –
And then there was a big old explosion, and a feral got dropped basically at Victor’s feet. O.O After a bit more observation, I realized what had happened is that a bunch of super mutants, including a suicider, had stumbled into Cambridge’s College Square, and the feral ghouls there, and now the two groups were taking each other out. HANDY! Victor and Preston crept along in their wake, looting pretty much everything from the corpses and taking out a few ferals themselves when the need arose. After some careful checking for more super mutants, they found their way to the police station, and helped Danse take care of the last few ferals tormenting them, then Victor did some more looting before chatting with Danse. Danse was surprised to learn Victor was a vault dweller, but commended him on his good work and asked for his help in getting the Deep Range Transmitter from ArcJet. Victor said yes, but the late hour and exhaustion meant that I had him and Preston camp out outside the station and get a good night’s sleep before actually starting the mission. (I would have gone inside straight away and used any beds in there, but my camp always counts as a clean owned bed, so I knew I’d get the maximum amount of sleep there and benefit from the temporary "Well-Rested" perk.)
Went inside the next in-game day, did some looting and some hacking (and oh yes, I made sure to thank Jon from Many A True Nerd tonight – discovering the “cheat codes” in the gobbledygook surrounding the password choices makes things so much easier when hacking), then talked to Danse and set out for ArcJet around 8:14 AM in-game time! Took care of some raiders around a dead caravan, some bloatflies, some dogs, and, most notably, a settler being menaced by raiders along the way – turns out the settler was a recruitable one, so Victor sent her over to Starlight Drive-In to populate the place a bit more. :) Hit ArcJet after a few hours in-game time, learned about the Institute and synths from Danse’s perspective, found our way to the room with the locked door – Victor did some more hacking as he could take on Advanced terminals now, and we opened the doors to fight the synths –
And, uh, Victor died simply because there were so many of them and I didn’t heal him in time. Whoops. Fortunately I’d saved right at the beginning of ArcJet, so I just replayed that bit, and this time, set a bottlecap mine that Victor had picked up on the stairs to blow up a bunch of synths before opening the door. This worked a lot better, though I did have to stimpack poor Preston, who got caught in the blast. The gang continued through the facility (Victor having to emergency stimpack himself a couple of times during the next synth ambush), and finally entered the engine core, where Danse stayed behind with the rocket engine while Victor and Preston went to get the power on. Found the Junk Jet back there, but didn’t take it (I need my junk to build and modify stuff with!), hacked the terminal to get the power on –
And then hit the button to activate the rocket engine and take out the synths because why not? XD Danse was fine, after all – though Victor did sound appropriately horrified when asking if he was okay (I mean, Victor does activate the rocket, but it’s an accident in-verse – he slaps the button while slamming his hands on the console and can’t stop the countdown nor get Danse to safety). They took the elevator up to the final room, where they killed the last few synths and got the Deep Range Transmitter, then headed back to the surface –
Into a freaking rad storm. Mr. Power Armor naturally ran right out into it, but Victor and Preston hung out in the back bunker for a while, Victor scrapping junk until the rads turned into rain and he could talk to Danse and end the quest. Got Righteous Authority, but refused to join the Brotherhood of Steel, and I saved with my nice shiny Level 13 and second rank of Gun Nut in hand. :D I’ll probably have them overnight in ArcJet, then maybe swing back to Starlight to build a few more things before working down to Diamond City to get the plot going again. Also need to upgrade guns – very important. *serious nod*
4. Get the Valicetines ready to fire and finish up another ship meme: Check – finished up ritelli_draws’s ship meme (the “My Ship’s Dynamic Summary” meme) around suppertime, then just put the Valicetines into the queue and the Dynamic Summary into the drafts with a bit of starter text! So I’m good to go on both those fronts. :)
5. Get in a workout: No check – I said that I was quietly considering this one optional, and good thing, as I got to some of my YouTube late and ended up just – not feeling it. I’ll get back on the horse (or bike, or treadmill) tomorrow!
Not too shabby! Always nice when you can fully relax and enjoy yourself on a day off, that's for certain. And now to set up the Valicetine's Day to-dos!
1. Either write some more on "Learn To Love Again" or do a free writing Valice thing
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and watch those two darn Sims videos in the Watch Later
3. Play Sims 4 and get Smiler their skills to get into Foxbury, and maybe see about introducing them to Victor and Alice
4. Work on getting the Victor Luvs Alice tumblr drafts sorted for the rest of the week
5. Get in a workout
Hopefully those are all doable with no misadventure! *nods* As it stands, I'm finding my parents a Valentine's Day e-card, then just chilling until I head to bed. Ahh, lovely day off. . . Night all!
Fortunately, it was a much better day than yesterday, if only because I didn't have to waste any time on that damn phone. And because it was The Big Football Day and thus both lunch and dinner were snacky things (veggies and homemade crackers with dip, crabmeat-stuffed puffs, and panko-crusted chicken tenders, om nom) that I could nibble on to my heart's content. Plus cupcakes, though the top fell off of mine (fortunately onto a napkin, frosting-side up!). And I got a lot more done on my to-do list, even with an early fall down the TV Tropes hole:
1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – wrote that up after completing the below sum-up for you guys, as per usual. Checking past entries, I can now confirm that the random super mutants wandering down the road to Cambridge’s College Square and getting into a fight with the feral ghouls there (seriously, see item three, this happened in-game) is Victor’s first “encounter” with super mutants in general! (Not that he actually FOUGHT them this time around – I let the ferals do that. Plenty of time to get into scraps with them later!) And yes, I did make it clear that, in-universe, his setting off the engine in ArcJet on Danse was an accident – poor guy nearly has a panic attack over the whole mess, and who can blame him? But at least Danse was okay. Thanks to his power armor. >.> <.< (Well, okay, I’m sure the power armor HELPED, but yeah, if you know Danse’s full story, you know the real reason he probably survived. . .) Good times, as always!
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, the two non-Sims videos in the Watch Later, and Jon's F:NV "Utter Chaos" episode: Check – did indeed get everything I want to get watched, watched today, yay –
A) Started after FO4, below, with the latest Late Night Double Feature from Linkara – “Wax Wonders Night,” featuring House of Wax and Nightmare In Wax! One is a classic of the genre starring Vincent Price and using a paddle ball-wielding carnival barker to do some cool early 3-D effects stuff; the other is a terrible movie with a soundtrack that sounds like it too was dipped in wax, staring Cameron Mitchell, an actor with many and varied credits who most of us probably know from MST3K (he’s Commander Santa from Space Mutiny, from the Sci-Fi Channel era). Clive was effuse in his praise toward the first (noting that anything with Vincent Price is elevated by Vincent Price) and equally effuse with his disdain toward the second (complaining it was padded to hell and has a completely awful ending). Short, sweet, and not too scary or gory – nice.
B) Then it was on to a new OXBox list – “7 Side Quests You Should NEVER Finish: Commenter Edition!” Yes, the comments are in, and there’s yet more side quests that one should never finish to keep their game experience pleasant. From learning the hard way that completing “Birds Of A Feather” for the Van Graffs in Fallout: New Vegas will lead to companion Cass getting disintegrated right before you (for a measly 350 caps too); to finding the fashion designer you were helping design a fun new suit with in “Make Space Suit, Won’t Travel” dead at the end of the quest in The Outer Worlds; to having an awesomely powerful, potentially-soul-eating sword either taken away from you, or become a rather heavy weapon when before it was a weightless quest item in “Clavicus Vile’s Shrine” in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion; to – HEY, WHAT IS “WHEN FREEDOM CALLS” FROM FALLOUT 4 DOING ON HERE?! *grumbles repeatedly about how she LIKES the Minutemen stuff, damn it. . .*
C) Then, after supper, moved over to the Subs for Call Me Kevin and another GTA V mod – one that spawns an enemy every time his character gets injured. Like, every time. Just falling on his face hard enough will spawn one, and it VERY RAPIDLY gets out of hand. Kevin attempted to do a few heists, but – well. The only reason he got as far as he did in the Paleto Job is because he had a minigun to take out the initial guards – the actual heist itself? A total CLUSTERFUCK, with random people, dogs, and even CHICKENS WITH GUNS spawning in to keep Kevin from crossing a street and making his way through a meat factory. Not only did Kevin keep dying to the growing crowd of enemies, but the game kept crashing because it wasn’t built to handle the number of NPCs he was spawning. The jewelry job ended up going better because the enemies spawned ended up spawning on the back of his bike and falling right off, and the plane job similarly had the enemies spawning OUTSIDE THE PLANE and instantly falling to their deaths – but in both of those instances, Kevin ended up crashing a plot-important vehicle. Really, the only mission that was truly safe for him to complete? Buying masks at the mask store. XD Oh dear, even the Chaos Mod had the occasional GOOD outcome. . .
D) Then it was onto GrayStillPlays and yes, more Happy Wheels! Started with “Bottle Flip Pink,” which had things like angry rocket-powered strawberries and ninja swords skewering your head if you missed the unlocked win right next to it (on the plus side, Gray managed the Bullseye area on his very first throw), then went through a board where you had to escape TWO meteors (and then get lightly BOUNCED onto the win, which was arguably the hardest part for poor Gray, who generally had waaay too much speed and just flew over the bouncer), a very speedy rainbow harpoon run (Gray had to get ALL the speed to get past that one), a surprisingly leisurely trip to see the “Insane Anaconda 2” (the flippy-floppy snake actually curled up in such a way that it didn’t even come close to Gray – Gray actually did the board again to show what SHOULD have happened), a “you need luck to beat this” board with harpoons and head-severing shapes (Gray sacrificed Tom to win instead of sending him to daycare, as he does), a “Road of Death Arena” where Bike Dad and Son had to face off against a number of characters carrying cleavers, swords, spears, and other sharp pointy things (most of which ended up in Gray’s wiener, naturally – also he found that you had to kill EVERYONE to get the win, and that includes the big old group at the end), an “impossible” harpoon board that he did pretty much by sheer luck (lost his arms, but the majority of the harpoons missed him, and he was able to get the dad to just fall off his bike onto the win), a visit to see Gray’s Mech (not at all dangerous unless you don’t back up when the arm falls on you – Gray found this one mostly confusing), a bottle/toilet run that Gray did before even got a chance to explain it (all the speed and he had all the win), and a trip to the zoo that consisted of a brief look at some lions before Gray had to speed away on the Nixon Segway to avoid a killer beach ball (going through a construction area before getting to Dylan Synder’s trademark win strung with eyes). A weird but deeply amusing set today!
E) And finally, as usual for a Sunday, it was time for Jon’s Fallout: New Vegas “Utter Chaos” video! Today was Jon’s attempt to go exploring the East corner of the map that he’s been avoiding, but now no longer needs to fear so much because he has ALL the grenades. His wanderings resulted in the following:
I. An attempt to contact the Brotherhood of Steel in the area with companion Veronica (now Dr. Veronica) that went a bit pear-shaped because he took the peaceful way in with the companion who works for them (or at least used to work for them, I forget Veronica’s exact situation). He was expecting to be teleported to the elders, but instead fell afoul of randomized doors and had to figure out a way into each level. He DOES at least have the Brotherhood as a known faction now, and if he’s forced to do the Yes Man route, he can safely say they can be ignored, but he still hopes to eventually find his way to the elders. (Though, Jon, perhaps you should be GRATEFUL for the lack of teleporting, because the last time it happened, you got soft-locked.)
II. Robbing a Novac settler’s house because he thought it was an abandoned house elsewhere, killing the settler, and getting a Vilified karma rating with Novac. That’ll be fun later!
III. Multiple “Jon Got Distracted” trips into Old World Blues because he keeps finding doors into Big MT. He’s fired some artillery at a fake town, and is certain that does something but isn’t sure what; explored the area between two of the towers, checking out doors and being very, VERY anxious about the lack of enemies (though going through one cave seems to have tripped a trigger – though not very much); and found his way to a model town with a few more doors to explore, though none of them seemed to go exactly where he wanted.
IV. Attempted to get ED-E because a viewer spotted that he had a door into the eyebot’s location; unfortunately it’s the back door, and Jon can’t do the building backwards. Shame!
V. STUMBLED ACROSS THE GREAT KHAN LONGHOUSE, THE PLACE HE WAS LOOKING FOR FOR THE NCR QUESTS, ENTIRELY BY ACCIDENT. It was just a random door he was checking and he was absolutely STUNNED. Of course, that brought up the other problem of him needing to find Regis, a plot-important character if you want to make peace, but – well, he’d wandered off from where Jon had last seen him, and Jon couldn’t track him down again. So, for the first time in all the times he’d played New Vegas, Jon ended up nuking and/or explosively shooting them all. Along with the Legion spy among their ranks, but the Legion was only somewhat pissed off about that – Jon can still do missions for them. And, hilariously, despite all the murder, right after Jon went and turned in the quest to the NCR Colonel, Cassandra – his reputation with whatever remained of the Great Khans went UP! To “Merciful Thug,” meaning they still hate him mostly, but – he was BAFFLED. XD This game is so broken. . .
Anyway – good plot progress, good exploration today! And Jon has a new mission for next time – well, two new missions, one from the game and one from himself. Personally, he wants to go to the Central Sewers, which is the biggest sewer system in the game, and explore that for doors and ladders. The NCR, meanwhile, has set him to spy on the Omertas and stop their clandestine meetings.
The Omertas run that casino where everyone tried to kill him once, and he had to run out and leave all his guns and such behind for a good long while before he could sneak back in and get them back by going out the front.
Revenge is gonna be sweet. XD Something to look forward to!
3. Play Fallout 4 and do Danse's introductory missions: Check! Picked up with Victor and Preston following the radio signal to Cambridge – only to notice someone rather, ah, BULKY on the road directly ahead of them. Victor and Preston promptly dropped into a crouch as I tried to assess the situation, hearing a quite a lot of gunfire –
And then there was a big old explosion, and a feral got dropped basically at Victor’s feet. O.O After a bit more observation, I realized what had happened is that a bunch of super mutants, including a suicider, had stumbled into Cambridge’s College Square, and the feral ghouls there, and now the two groups were taking each other out. HANDY! Victor and Preston crept along in their wake, looting pretty much everything from the corpses and taking out a few ferals themselves when the need arose. After some careful checking for more super mutants, they found their way to the police station, and helped Danse take care of the last few ferals tormenting them, then Victor did some more looting before chatting with Danse. Danse was surprised to learn Victor was a vault dweller, but commended him on his good work and asked for his help in getting the Deep Range Transmitter from ArcJet. Victor said yes, but the late hour and exhaustion meant that I had him and Preston camp out outside the station and get a good night’s sleep before actually starting the mission. (I would have gone inside straight away and used any beds in there, but my camp always counts as a clean owned bed, so I knew I’d get the maximum amount of sleep there and benefit from the temporary "Well-Rested" perk.)
Went inside the next in-game day, did some looting and some hacking (and oh yes, I made sure to thank Jon from Many A True Nerd tonight – discovering the “cheat codes” in the gobbledygook surrounding the password choices makes things so much easier when hacking), then talked to Danse and set out for ArcJet around 8:14 AM in-game time! Took care of some raiders around a dead caravan, some bloatflies, some dogs, and, most notably, a settler being menaced by raiders along the way – turns out the settler was a recruitable one, so Victor sent her over to Starlight Drive-In to populate the place a bit more. :) Hit ArcJet after a few hours in-game time, learned about the Institute and synths from Danse’s perspective, found our way to the room with the locked door – Victor did some more hacking as he could take on Advanced terminals now, and we opened the doors to fight the synths –
And, uh, Victor died simply because there were so many of them and I didn’t heal him in time. Whoops. Fortunately I’d saved right at the beginning of ArcJet, so I just replayed that bit, and this time, set a bottlecap mine that Victor had picked up on the stairs to blow up a bunch of synths before opening the door. This worked a lot better, though I did have to stimpack poor Preston, who got caught in the blast. The gang continued through the facility (Victor having to emergency stimpack himself a couple of times during the next synth ambush), and finally entered the engine core, where Danse stayed behind with the rocket engine while Victor and Preston went to get the power on. Found the Junk Jet back there, but didn’t take it (I need my junk to build and modify stuff with!), hacked the terminal to get the power on –
And then hit the button to activate the rocket engine and take out the synths because why not? XD Danse was fine, after all – though Victor did sound appropriately horrified when asking if he was okay (I mean, Victor does activate the rocket, but it’s an accident in-verse – he slaps the button while slamming his hands on the console and can’t stop the countdown nor get Danse to safety). They took the elevator up to the final room, where they killed the last few synths and got the Deep Range Transmitter, then headed back to the surface –
Into a freaking rad storm. Mr. Power Armor naturally ran right out into it, but Victor and Preston hung out in the back bunker for a while, Victor scrapping junk until the rads turned into rain and he could talk to Danse and end the quest. Got Righteous Authority, but refused to join the Brotherhood of Steel, and I saved with my nice shiny Level 13 and second rank of Gun Nut in hand. :D I’ll probably have them overnight in ArcJet, then maybe swing back to Starlight to build a few more things before working down to Diamond City to get the plot going again. Also need to upgrade guns – very important. *serious nod*
4. Get the Valicetines ready to fire and finish up another ship meme: Check – finished up ritelli_draws’s ship meme (the “My Ship’s Dynamic Summary” meme) around suppertime, then just put the Valicetines into the queue and the Dynamic Summary into the drafts with a bit of starter text! So I’m good to go on both those fronts. :)
5. Get in a workout: No check – I said that I was quietly considering this one optional, and good thing, as I got to some of my YouTube late and ended up just – not feeling it. I’ll get back on the horse (or bike, or treadmill) tomorrow!
Not too shabby! Always nice when you can fully relax and enjoy yourself on a day off, that's for certain. And now to set up the Valicetine's Day to-dos!
1. Either write some more on "Learn To Love Again" or do a free writing Valice thing
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and watch those two darn Sims videos in the Watch Later
3. Play Sims 4 and get Smiler their skills to get into Foxbury, and maybe see about introducing them to Victor and Alice
4. Work on getting the Victor Luvs Alice tumblr drafts sorted for the rest of the week
5. Get in a workout
Hopefully those are all doable with no misadventure! *nods* As it stands, I'm finding my parents a Valentine's Day e-card, then just chilling until I head to bed. Ahh, lovely day off. . . Night all!
