Happy Easter!

Not that me and mine did much to celebrate -- what with nowhere to go and nothing to really do (not even beanbags -- too cold today! Plus it rained briefly at one point), we just hung out at home and treated it like a regular Sunday. Closest I came was watching that video on "Easter Eggs" and putting some colorful spring-themed sprinkles on my ice cream tonight. *shrug* What can you do?

. . .well, the things on the to-do list, for starters:

1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – got that sorted right after playing and giving you the write-up below! It’s taken just under a month of in-game time, but Victor has made it to Diamond City! And he’s already feeling more favorably toward the local news reporter than he is toward the mayor, given what a blowhard McDonough is coming off as. . .on the other hand, he’s also gotten a pretty good demonstration of what Institute paranoia can do to people, having seen a man get killed for holding his own brother at gunpoint, declaring that said brother is a synth (over the brother’s objections). Still, he’s willing to give one Piper Wright an article in the morning. . .and eventually take her on as a companion. :) Plot progression ahoy!

2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, "Show of the Weekend" by OXtra, and Jon's F:NV "Utter Chaos" video: Check – pretty easy to do, given there was only Gray in the Subs today –

A) Started with “Show of the Weekend” by OXtra – “How Many Videogame Easter Eggs Do You Know?” Ellen quizzed Luke on video game Easter Eggs that were previously mentioned in some of the OXBox and OXtra list videos, with the prize for correct answers being chocolate eggs! Luke had to admit he pretty much never watches the shows after they’re made. XD He did decently well, though, correctly identifying things like “there’s a message from Frank West of Dead Rising in a Left 4 Dead DLC” (a joke on the fact that Frank wouldn’t do as well against the fast zombies of the latter game), “there’s a mysterious key on the back of a Da Vinci painting in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which we think is a Da Vinci Code reference” (though he couldn’t get the name of the painting for the bonus egg – “Vitruvian Man,” for the curious, just called “Academic Painting” in the game), and “there’s a Dark Souls bonfire in a house in Fallout 4 that, if you interact with it, produces stimpacks” (because bonfires heal you in the former and stimpacks in the latter – though I couldn’t stop myself from noting in my comment that the house in question is specifically in Nuka-World). And James, cameraman and editor, got an egg for answering a question Luke missed – apparently in one level in Hitman: Absolution, where you take a guy out to dig his own grave in the desert, if you kill all the vultures, an ice cream truck comes barreling across the map and hits the guy. XD Video games, I swear. . .Also, the video ended with Luke telling the story of how he threw a toy Tony The Tiger he got from his cereal or something onto the roof and how his mother wouldn’t let him get it down. XD No, you don’t get the context for why that came up, go watch the video. XD

B) Then it was over to the Subs for GrayStillPlays and more Happy Wheels! We had some interesting boards today, starting with Bottle Flip Heaven (with four wins, including the Rainbow Rectum and Maximum Penetratus); then an assault by squares (with two separate paths – the upper one, which involved biking along trying to avoid being decapitated or crushed or sent tumbling off off the spinning squares; and the lower one, which was a crawl through many more dangerous crushing and spinning squares); then a day at work with Segway Nixon (again with multiple endings – like if you go backwards you get the “fired” ending, if you defeat the boss cutting your paycheck, you get the “normal but less money” ending, etc.); then a chain swing that pretends to have two endings but in reality only has one (fortunately Gray is so good at getting secret endings he got the actual ending via careful wall-falling before realizing it WAS the actual ending); and finally the return of Dylan Snider with an adventure through a “Day of the Dead” board (featuring sacrificed eyes, skeleton keys, crushing sugar skulls, tricky platforming, the Devil’s spinning trident challenges, and a quiz at the end including the question how you spell Dylan’s first and last names (as I’m not the only one who has put a “y” in “Snider”)). XD Excellent stuff from our chaotic little community over there!

C) And finally, another episode of Jon’s F:NV “Utter Chaos” series! The penultimate episode, in fact, in which Jon cleared up a few big “here’s a fight kicking off” sidequests before trying to figure out a way to save President Kimball of the NCR. Step One – discover to his shock that a group of NCR people he met way back near the beginning who were going to help him assassinate this one raider have shown up just outside Novac, and are trying to get into the test site over there, leading most of them except one – Major Polati, in a stripper outfit and a steampunk top hat – to die horribly to remixed enemies, including a giant bear. Jon managed to save the Major and started doing some jobs for him to kick off a fight at Nelson between the NCR and the Legion. This involved gathering some supplies for a quartermaster and fending off a Legion ambush (despite laying some bottlecap mines early on, the first time Jon got exploded thanks to the enemies getting good guns – fortunately the enemies are spawned when you open the box, so they got rerolled on the second attempt and Jon was able to take them out much easier); carefully planning his route and teleporting places so that the Major stayed alive instead of dying to random terrible enemies along the way (Polati had very low health in his Steampunk Stripper get-up); blowing up all the Legion in Cottonwood Cove while SOMEHOW not killing the prisoners there (he ended up releasing them, which is a good act to counteract all the awfulness he’s been doing just to get endings) to get to the door to the medical tent; performing surgery on a guy half-sunk into his mattress and another who was just invisible; before finally being sent to Nelson with a guy in a suit with a minigun, and two shrunken people with melee weapons who rapidly died. Fortunately the guy with the minigun did good work, and Jon backing him up with explosives lead to the deaths of almost all the Legionnaires in the area, and the rescue of the three prisoners off their crucifixes. Mind you, Jon MAY have aggroed one of them trying to kill another guy, and was set on fire by one last guy with a flaming sword without realizing until one of the people he was meant to meet pulled a gun on “him,” but he got everyone out and got the XP!

And then realized he couldn’t fully complete the mission because he couldn’t find the final Leader guy in Nelson. Because he’s in a closed loop softlock location. (The comments later reminded him that it was the very first softlock he found, in fact, when he was accidentally sent off to meet this guy by a Legionnaire and discovered his tent with one exit lead into a room with one exit, meaning he had to reload and avoid anyone talking to him.) Whoops. Well, he did most of it, so that was what mattered.

Step Two – go back to the very beginning of the game again and do the battle between the Powder Gangers and the town of Goodsprings! This involved finding and talking to Trudy (in a dangerous-looking Legionnaire suit) after she told Joe Cobb (shrunk and thus not looking particularly intimidating today) to piss off about wanting to find Ringo (I think Ringo owes him money or something, I don’t know the quests in this game very well). Jon was ORIGINALLY going to do this on the side of those in Goodsprings, but after running around half the map trying to find Ringo – and discovering that there was a whole exterior location he hadn’t properly explored – he ran into a problem. Because Ringo was hiding out behind a door – that only worked one way. That is, it technically led to the Goodsprings gas station, but you couldn’t actually OPEN the door to go into the gas station – you could only go back into the exterior location through that door if you teleported into the actual gas station. The door didn’t exist from the other side. And Jon discovered that teleporting into the room didn’t set off the cue for Ringo to talk to you and organize a town defense. There was no way to start the quest on Goodsprings’ side.

But there was on the Powder Gangers’ side, so Jon switched over to supporting the shrunken Joe Cobb! This also came with a variety of challenges – namely, only two Goodsprings citizens, one old lady and her dog-turned-roboscorpion, were in the town itself, and Jon had to track down the others to shoot them (ending with Easy Pete hanging out at the end of the dock in Cottonwood Cove), and then the Powder Gangers tried to get to the saloon, only to end up living in an NCR greenhouse – but another quest completed, job done, yay.

Step Three – time to try and save President Kimball! Jon traveled to Hoover Dam to try and explain the situation – a sniper on one tower, a bomb on a vertibird, and he can’t technically access either location thanks to randomized doors –

But the instant he pulled out a gun to use as a sort of makeshift laser pointer, the NCR immediately turned hostile, considering him a punk.

It took a few tries, including arriving dressed in a NCR outfit he stripped off Sunny Smiles’s corpse, for him to realize what was going on – the NCR either Shunned him (when he was dressed as NCR) or Punked him (when he was himself) whenever he pulled out a gun. I cottoned on that this was the reason why a little earlier than he did, but wasn’t sure what about going around armed was bad until the comments pointed out that you have to get permission to use your weapons in Hoover Dam while this quest is active, because – well, it’s a quest about the president being assassinated. People are jumpy. But that linked up straight to issue two about this whole mess – the NPC that Jon was supposed to talk to would not actually give him his mission, including authorizing his guns. He was stuck in a “saying goodbye” loop. And nothing Jon could do to reset him worked. So he just tried to force the mission to start via console commands –

Nothing. President Kimball never spawned, the voice line that he needed to set things off was never said, and even trying to use console commands to finish the quest didn’t work. All that effort with the NCR – and Jon can’t do their second-to-last mission to get to the final climatic battle of Hoover Dam. Well, shit.

Or, should I say, “Well, Yes-Man,” because THAT particular ending – going independent with Yes-Man’s uploaded consciousness – is still viable. Mostly because, while he suggests protecting the president too, you can just refuse if the NCR hate you enough (which they do). So, next week, Jon has to do some recalculating as he moves into the final episode and takes on the battle of Hoover Dam – namely, he was EXPECTING to have like half the people fighting LIKE him, and now. . .but then again, he does both have an NCR disguise and a Legionnaire one from the slaughter of Goodsprings. . .hmmm. . .We’ll just have to see how that goes next week!

3. Play Fallout 4 and get Victor to Diamond City already: Check, check, check! :D Got Victor and Preston up bright and early on 11/21/2287 by the veggie stand where they’d camped the night before – Victor picked the lock into the backroom to find a chem bench (though he couldn't make anything good on it), then cooked up a bunch of his meat and veg on the stove before he and Preston continued on. They passed through a wrecked neighborhood where a Mr. Gutsy apparently killed a scavver and a feral ghoul – fortunately, he and his Protectron buddy were not immediately hostile to Victor and Preston, so they were able to loot the bodies and get past without getting pulled into another fight. Reaching the outskirts of Boston, I heard a LOT of gunfire, so Victor and Preston started sneaking through the side streets –

At least, until a passing trader recognized Preston and expressed his appreciation for the Minutemen, giving Preston a little something (I presume bottlecaps). I figured, while he was there, we might as well browse his wares – and lo and behold, he had duct tape AND vegetable starch! Plus a used oil can and three lanterns – I relieved him of one of those and the other stuff, selling him some antibiotics in return. I then checked out a bathtub nearby, with a skeleton clutching a bottlecap mine within –

And then heard violence behind me, and saw the trader being attacked by a raider. Victor killed the raider and then walked with the trader through a flooded underpass until they reached his little hidden home. Along the way, he SOMEHOW found Hangman’s Alley, which I guess was close enough to the trader’s place to count. O.o
Anyway, got through the flooded road, to find a trio of raiders on the other side – including a Legendary! Preston and Victor took them out with just a little trouble, and I looted an Incendiary Studded Leather Chestpiece from the Legendary (sets those who attack you with melee weapons on fire). This put poor Victor overweight, so I went over to a nearby diner and used the portable workbench to scrap down his junk (less the port-a-potty) and reduce his weight that way.

And then I got curious about where the hell Hangman’s Alley was in relation to the flooded road and started back down it. Only to run into some Super Mutants coming the other way. Victor was able to molotov one, and I was able to switch over to his sniper rifle in time to take care of another farther down the road. There was also a raider that got blown up when a car damaged in the fight exploded (fortunately with Victor and Preston already at a safe distance). Looted the corpses, then continued backtracking to a locked door with some corpses hanging outside of it – yup, that was the back entrance into Hangman’s Alley! Took out one raider with a sniper shot, but then the others spotted me, and my attempt to run in there with my shotgun. . .yeah. Cue one dead Victor. Whoops.

Fortunately, I’d saved right after getting the legendary chest piece – redid the scrapping, then just continued onward toward Diamond City. Spotted a guard, which let me know I was on the right track – and then another raider started taking potshots at Victor and Preston from a nearby storefront. Victor shot him in the butt, then – hearing some buddies nearby – followed their voices to the raised patio on the other side. Managed to disarm a tripwire trap, then started shooting –

And died again because damn fast-firing weapons! I’d had the foresight to save RIGHT before disarming the trap this time, and Preston was able to kill one raider for me – I killed the other, healed myself up, grabbed what loot I could actually carry, remembered I wanted to be in my vault suit when I met Piper for her nickname to make sense and swapped back to that, then started down the nearby side street –

Which put us right at the stadium, yay! :D And WITHOUT having to deal with those super mutants you usually run into. Preston and Victor looped around to the official entrance, and there was Piper, arguing with Danny. We let that conversation play out, Piper pretended Victor was a trader to get them both in, McDonough and Piper started arguing about her paper, and Victor happily supported the free press. He told them about his missing boy, with McDonough assuring him that he was sure that someone inside could help and Piper going “the guards can’t help??” They went inside, but Victor lingered for a moment to apologize to Danny (didn’t pass the Charisma check though) and – well, to take a poop. Nothing like getting the “you have to go to the bathroom” message in the middle of a cutscene! XD Well, this is why I have the port-a-potty. . .

Once THAT was all done, and Victor was in his nice hat, it was into Diamond City itself shortly after 1 PM in-game time! Victor talked to Nat outside Publick Occurrences about the paper and the Institute kidnappings (taking a copy of “The Synthetic Truth”), then told her about his missing kid – and just because, I gave the Charisma check of asking if she knew anybody who could help a shot.

Passed! Probably because of Victor’s nice hat. XD So she told him about Nick Valentine, w00! Plus the XP bonus from passing the check pushed Victor over the threshold to Level 17! Thought about what I wanted for a while, but ultimately went for another point in Charisma because I’ve GOT to raise it to 6 eventually just for the supply lines from “Local Leader.” Anyway, with that sorted, Victor went down into the marketplace, took a moment to read the paper, then started wandering around the various shops. First stop though was the bounty board, where I picked up “Evie’s Call For Help,” the custom bounty that helps you progress my mod-added quest “Music Lessons” – that bounty can glitch out, so I wanted to make sure I got it first thing! From there it was over to Arturo to talk weapons and armor. Or, rather, to sell him the vast majority of my old weapon mods, the Legendary armor I’d picked up (none of it had an effect I wanted), unused ammo, and a couple of guns I wasn’t using, and to buy a better metal helmet and metal chest piece (the latter of which came with pockets!). Went over to the nearby armor workbench and got both of those up to Polished, the best level, then went back to Arturo to sell my old raider chest piece and pick up a Lightweight Combat Armor left leg (and a right leg by accident). From there it was over to Myrna, where after a hostile conversation, I traded the accidental right leg purchase for some duct tape. Then I went around and found McDonough’s little stage by the (expanded by mods) farm to watch his speech, then visited the mod-added laundry just for funsies.

And then I came out, went back to the middle of town, and saw a guy named Kyle holding his brother Riley at gunpoint because he thought he was a synth duplicate, with Diamond City eventually shooting Kyle, leaving Riley fairly shellshocked. O.o Wasn’t sure if that would trigger after entering a mod-added building, but apparently so! After that, Victor was utterly exhausted, so he and Preston camped out in front of Piper’s office at 10 PM. Have left it with them having just woken up at 6 AM – plan to do Piper’s interview, then visit a few more shops before visiting Nick’s and learn that he’s gone missing. Only took us about an in-game month to get this far! XD

4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check – got my write-up of the potential “As Long As You Love Me” sequel, featuring the Alton Coasters as other holistics/people with powers, done around lunch (as in, started before lunch, finished after lunch) for Victor Luvs Alice. It was a long post, but now it's done, yay!

5. Get in a workout: No check – I’m too easily distracted by random stuff on the weekends! (Like my “Fallout of Darkness” playthrough progression write-up, and thoughts on my Holistic!AU.) Gotta get back into the habit of getting down there on Sundays. . .but this one’s Easter, so I’ll cut myself a break.

Not too shabby, not too shabby. . .and now I have a little late-night time to myself, w00. Though I'm gonna try not to go to bed too late -- stayed up WAY late last night and kinda regret it. Plus I have to get used to going to bed earlier again, because I got work on Tuesday. . .but I still have tomorrow off, so let's whip up one last day-off to-do list:

1. Free Writing Day -- try to write something!

2. Keep up with YouTube Subs

3. Play Sims 4 and get through Fall Sunday with Smiler Always

4. Work on tumblr drafts (specifically the Wednesday Chill Save Update)

5. Get in a workout

*nods* Should be manageable. Night all!