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Where Does The Time Go??
Jun. 13th, 2022 11:44 pmI get out an hour early and I'm updating late again! Though I know what the culprit behind this lateness is, and I think when you read my to-do list, you will as well:
Work – The actual workday was pretty quiet – we have a new temp to help with some of the roster maintenance tasks and such, so that’s good! Spent most of my day doing duplicates and obits and the like, along with clearing out most of another bundle of exceptions. The real pain in the ass was my commute – people riding my ass, not staying in their lanes, and – well, since I left early because of a graduation today, the parking lot was full of grads and their families trying to get in while I was trying to get out and it was – just such a frustrating experience. *grumbles* But I still made it home in decent time, at least.
Beanbags – Hot but sunny, so we did indeed venture out – but unfortunately, I just couldn’t get it together today. Final scores were me 2-2-3; Dad W-3-W; Mom 3-W-2. Well, at least Mom won a game – hopefully tomorrow I can do better!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – actually did a treadmill workout today (which I slightly regret, as it was a) exhausting and b) gave me a bit of a blister on my toe) to finish off the Sims 4: Werewolves Livestream! The presenters were getting a little too twee and “ooh-hoo, look at us pretending not to know about shit we put in the game” by the end for me, but it was nice to see the bar build (James Turner doing the work in making these builds look good), and to see how a first transformation goes (classic rampage before waking up naked in a strange spot – in this case, on top of the local mountain). And there was a quick skim through some of the werewolf CAS options, and the build/buy items too. It looks like a genuinely interesting pack – again, I am not getting it until it’s been vetted by the community and proved to be playable upon release, but if it is, then I think I’ll happily add it to my game. I actually already have ideas for how Chill Save Alice could become a werewolf version of Cheshire. . .
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – I immediately decided I wanted to spend at least part of my free hour getting this done early, and get it done early I did! Alice has met up with LaCroix, praised Mercurio to the skies, and has been validated in her earlier assumption that LaCroix was going to send her to investigate the Elizabeth Dane cargo ship. XD I left it with LaCroix telling her about the Ankaran Sarcophagus on board – Alice is curious as to what that even is, but he’s not going to be able to give her much detail (though it’s more than you get from him in the actual game). And after that, it’ll be back to Santa Monica to get that mission done! Damn, this is a long opening chapter. . .but then they’re ALL long in this series.
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Three-fourths check – my hopes of getting through them all was shattered by a video over an hour long waiting for me there. I still managed to get through three, but I remain a day behind on Gray –
A) Started with the reason it was good that I got an extra hour off today to get all my writing done early – James Turner wrapping up his Cottage Living Let’s Play with Hazel and Trenton’s wedding and the finished vault! AKA the video that was an hour and eight minutes BEFORE I had to take breaks to go to the bathroom and get ice cream and stuff like that. As you might imagine, a fair bit happened, so let’s just hit the highlights:
The Wedding: Took up most of the first half of the video, with James turning Chaz’s old barn home into an outdoor wedding venue for Hazel and Trenton to get married at! Hazel then went around asking Sims to be various special roles – even getting (via the power of picture-taking) Agnes Crumplebottom to agree to officiate. XD James also made sure she actually knew Trenton’s family (Brodie, Isaiah, and Candle) so she could invite them to the wedding, then tried to plan the wedding event –
From the phone. Because he never remembers that doing it from the PHONE is “start the event instantly,” and doing it from the CALENDAR is “plan it for later.” And then, on TOP of that, he ended up with a strange “lot won’t load” bug, meaning that – even though everyone was on the lot for the not-wedding – he couldn’t actually play any of them. Fortunately he was able to fix it by restarting, loading up the 3 Brothers, and going to play BRODIE to load the lot (since he was already there), getting him access to the main family. And, as a plus, it glitched out the event so it didn’t start. James promptly went to the CALENDAR, removed “New Skill Day” from the following Sunday, and redid the event to start at 10 in the morning. And when that rolled around –
Event worked! Mostly. Yeah, not everybody was sitting down or facing the right direction, and yeah, Hazel and Trenton kept bonking heads whenever they did a spousal kiss, and yeah, James was panicking over Sims eating the wedding cake early the entire time (to the point where he bought FOUR when he initially purchased it from the stall in Tartosa so he’d have plenty of extras – and to be fair, when Hazel and Trenton removed the topper and cut the cake, the guests SWARMED the thing), but they actually were married successfully by Agnes, and they were able to tick off everything on the list. Which is better than you usually get with a My Wedding Stories wedding. Whew!
The Vault – And with THAT out of the way, it was time to focus on getting money to finish up the basement vault (notably, the golden bathroom) and items to display within it! Hazel did a whole lot of stealing around Newcrest, Windenburg, and Del Sol Valley, picking up a variety of items like the Brindleton Bay model (which James had to add to the Plumbob Pictures museum because he replaced the lighthouse in Brindleton Bay where it normally resides), some new paintings, a golden bowl of fruit, and even one of the Von Haunt informational plaques. XD But the actual MONEY to redo the vault ended up coming from Chaz’s final pumpkin harvest, which got them $25K – just enough to finish off the gaudy bathroom (gold everything, even the curtains), and clean up all the display rooms so they had more distinct themes (like one room was the “pedestal room” for stuff that fit on pedestals, one was the “map room” for the Brindleton Bay model, etc). Yeah, he ended up just putting the electronics she stole wherever they fit (pretending one computer was a “check-in desk” for example), but it all ended up looking very nice!
The Aging: And the other main item of note is a whole bunch of aging up during this episode – Trenton became an Adult after his wedding; both Fae Fae and Hagrid aged up into elders, with Fae Fae actually DYING on the final in-game day; and Chaz ended the series by becoming an elder! Having earned one hell of a retirement, I can tell you that. This has been a hell of a chaotic series – and I’m looking forward to having the nonsense continue once James sets up Angus and Nina for werewolf adventures! :D Should be fun.
B) Then it was over to Call Me Kevin for his latest: “Can you beat LA Noire using an 8 Ball?” Yes, Kevin has decided to play L.A. Noire again – but he left all of his most important decisions up to that master of fortune-telling, the Magic 8 Ball. As you might imagine, this did not work in his favor. XD The case this time was trying to track down the masterminds behind a car theft ring, with Cole questioning a few Grand Theft Auto (2013) suspects, a lady who sold some of the cars, the owner of a car dealership, the manager of the place that printed the sales slips, and the guy in charge of the warehouse/chop shop where all the stolen cars ended up – but thanks to Kevin having to do whatever the Magic 8 Ball said, most of the time he was happily believing bald-faced lies and disputing solid truths with whatever he had on hand. XD The only times Kevin actually seemed to do well was when the 8 Ball gave him those “answer unclear, ask again later” messages, which allowed him to at least pick “Doubt” and get the person he was interrogating to cough up the necessary info. Couple that with losing his cop car by SOMEHOW driving it up a super-steep hill and getting it stuck on a fence, then stealing one of the dealership’s cars for sale, running over MULTIPLE pedestrians, and just generally being shit at his job, and is it any wonder he got the worst rank on a case that he’s ever gotten in this game? His supervisor wouldn’t even give him another case until he did something to prove his worth to the force – and then, when he tried to apprehend a burglary suspect, he ended up getting punched off some scaffolding and dying. Life lesson there – if you become a detective, do NOT trust all your decisions to the Magic 8 Ball! Try one of those foldy paper fortune tellers instead. XD
C) And then it was back to the previous day’s GrayStillPlays for more Happy Wheels! Last night was apparently the night of deceptively hard boards – we started with a bottle flip that not only had ledges that only revealed themselves once you started flipping, but also a whole ball fall minigame underneath it to unlock (Gray won as a torso, but he still won); an admittedly-simple cannon-blast through some coins (that Gray still managed to fuck up on the first go, getting himself crushed instead); a pogo fight where the last obstacle was an extra-tall wall laden with hidden harpoons (Gray had to bounce VERY carefully to get over without getting stabbed so hard he exploded); “Rope Swing Blue,” which had ropes placed JUST close enough that grabbing them at the right moment and swinging over to the spike-lined win was a major timing challenge (and that’s not even bringing the blueberry Dorito in the middle into things); Bike Dad and Tom Hardy taking on a glass bridge – which was constructed like a sagging rope bridge, meaning it was EXTREMELY easy to accidentally shatter it as you tried to get off it on the other end (abandoning the bike and crawling to the end was the only way Gray could get the win); a 100% impossible board where pretty much every way to win was surrounded by both endless amounts of pain (aka harpoons) and invisible walls (except one of those invisible walls had a gap, and once Gray found that gap. . .took him ages, but he managed to wiggle through to the win!); and a “core freezedown” board where Segway Nixon had to escape the facility and its corridors of mines, crossbows, and steep ramps that required him to still have his legs before the entire place froze from an overcooled core (Gray lost his legs a lot before finally managing to keep them long enough to get up the hill so he could drag himself to the end). The HW crew bringing their A game today! Well, yesterday. . .we’ll see if I can catch up on the rest of his stuff tomorrow!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: N/A, and I’m glad of it tonight, given I ended up chewing through my extra free time with no mercy. Though it does annoy me, as there’s one “fairy tale AU” draft I’ve been meaning to work on for weeks now. . .I will have to make that a priority this weekend, I think.
*huffs* I mean, I understand James wanted to wrap up the previous LP before starting the new one, but -- damn, if I hadn't gotten out an hour early and thus gotten a chance to complete my writing an hour early. . . Well, there should be a couple of quieter upload days this week that'll let me catch up a bit. In the meantime, I gotta get to bed -- night all!
Work – The actual workday was pretty quiet – we have a new temp to help with some of the roster maintenance tasks and such, so that’s good! Spent most of my day doing duplicates and obits and the like, along with clearing out most of another bundle of exceptions. The real pain in the ass was my commute – people riding my ass, not staying in their lanes, and – well, since I left early because of a graduation today, the parking lot was full of grads and their families trying to get in while I was trying to get out and it was – just such a frustrating experience. *grumbles* But I still made it home in decent time, at least.
Beanbags – Hot but sunny, so we did indeed venture out – but unfortunately, I just couldn’t get it together today. Final scores were me 2-2-3; Dad W-3-W; Mom 3-W-2. Well, at least Mom won a game – hopefully tomorrow I can do better!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – actually did a treadmill workout today (which I slightly regret, as it was a) exhausting and b) gave me a bit of a blister on my toe) to finish off the Sims 4: Werewolves Livestream! The presenters were getting a little too twee and “ooh-hoo, look at us pretending not to know about shit we put in the game” by the end for me, but it was nice to see the bar build (James Turner doing the work in making these builds look good), and to see how a first transformation goes (classic rampage before waking up naked in a strange spot – in this case, on top of the local mountain). And there was a quick skim through some of the werewolf CAS options, and the build/buy items too. It looks like a genuinely interesting pack – again, I am not getting it until it’s been vetted by the community and proved to be playable upon release, but if it is, then I think I’ll happily add it to my game. I actually already have ideas for how Chill Save Alice could become a werewolf version of Cheshire. . .
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – I immediately decided I wanted to spend at least part of my free hour getting this done early, and get it done early I did! Alice has met up with LaCroix, praised Mercurio to the skies, and has been validated in her earlier assumption that LaCroix was going to send her to investigate the Elizabeth Dane cargo ship. XD I left it with LaCroix telling her about the Ankaran Sarcophagus on board – Alice is curious as to what that even is, but he’s not going to be able to give her much detail (though it’s more than you get from him in the actual game). And after that, it’ll be back to Santa Monica to get that mission done! Damn, this is a long opening chapter. . .but then they’re ALL long in this series.
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Three-fourths check – my hopes of getting through them all was shattered by a video over an hour long waiting for me there. I still managed to get through three, but I remain a day behind on Gray –
A) Started with the reason it was good that I got an extra hour off today to get all my writing done early – James Turner wrapping up his Cottage Living Let’s Play with Hazel and Trenton’s wedding and the finished vault! AKA the video that was an hour and eight minutes BEFORE I had to take breaks to go to the bathroom and get ice cream and stuff like that. As you might imagine, a fair bit happened, so let’s just hit the highlights:
The Wedding: Took up most of the first half of the video, with James turning Chaz’s old barn home into an outdoor wedding venue for Hazel and Trenton to get married at! Hazel then went around asking Sims to be various special roles – even getting (via the power of picture-taking) Agnes Crumplebottom to agree to officiate. XD James also made sure she actually knew Trenton’s family (Brodie, Isaiah, and Candle) so she could invite them to the wedding, then tried to plan the wedding event –
From the phone. Because he never remembers that doing it from the PHONE is “start the event instantly,” and doing it from the CALENDAR is “plan it for later.” And then, on TOP of that, he ended up with a strange “lot won’t load” bug, meaning that – even though everyone was on the lot for the not-wedding – he couldn’t actually play any of them. Fortunately he was able to fix it by restarting, loading up the 3 Brothers, and going to play BRODIE to load the lot (since he was already there), getting him access to the main family. And, as a plus, it glitched out the event so it didn’t start. James promptly went to the CALENDAR, removed “New Skill Day” from the following Sunday, and redid the event to start at 10 in the morning. And when that rolled around –
Event worked! Mostly. Yeah, not everybody was sitting down or facing the right direction, and yeah, Hazel and Trenton kept bonking heads whenever they did a spousal kiss, and yeah, James was panicking over Sims eating the wedding cake early the entire time (to the point where he bought FOUR when he initially purchased it from the stall in Tartosa so he’d have plenty of extras – and to be fair, when Hazel and Trenton removed the topper and cut the cake, the guests SWARMED the thing), but they actually were married successfully by Agnes, and they were able to tick off everything on the list. Which is better than you usually get with a My Wedding Stories wedding. Whew!
The Vault – And with THAT out of the way, it was time to focus on getting money to finish up the basement vault (notably, the golden bathroom) and items to display within it! Hazel did a whole lot of stealing around Newcrest, Windenburg, and Del Sol Valley, picking up a variety of items like the Brindleton Bay model (which James had to add to the Plumbob Pictures museum because he replaced the lighthouse in Brindleton Bay where it normally resides), some new paintings, a golden bowl of fruit, and even one of the Von Haunt informational plaques. XD But the actual MONEY to redo the vault ended up coming from Chaz’s final pumpkin harvest, which got them $25K – just enough to finish off the gaudy bathroom (gold everything, even the curtains), and clean up all the display rooms so they had more distinct themes (like one room was the “pedestal room” for stuff that fit on pedestals, one was the “map room” for the Brindleton Bay model, etc). Yeah, he ended up just putting the electronics she stole wherever they fit (pretending one computer was a “check-in desk” for example), but it all ended up looking very nice!
The Aging: And the other main item of note is a whole bunch of aging up during this episode – Trenton became an Adult after his wedding; both Fae Fae and Hagrid aged up into elders, with Fae Fae actually DYING on the final in-game day; and Chaz ended the series by becoming an elder! Having earned one hell of a retirement, I can tell you that. This has been a hell of a chaotic series – and I’m looking forward to having the nonsense continue once James sets up Angus and Nina for werewolf adventures! :D Should be fun.
B) Then it was over to Call Me Kevin for his latest: “Can you beat LA Noire using an 8 Ball?” Yes, Kevin has decided to play L.A. Noire again – but he left all of his most important decisions up to that master of fortune-telling, the Magic 8 Ball. As you might imagine, this did not work in his favor. XD The case this time was trying to track down the masterminds behind a car theft ring, with Cole questioning a few Grand Theft Auto (2013) suspects, a lady who sold some of the cars, the owner of a car dealership, the manager of the place that printed the sales slips, and the guy in charge of the warehouse/chop shop where all the stolen cars ended up – but thanks to Kevin having to do whatever the Magic 8 Ball said, most of the time he was happily believing bald-faced lies and disputing solid truths with whatever he had on hand. XD The only times Kevin actually seemed to do well was when the 8 Ball gave him those “answer unclear, ask again later” messages, which allowed him to at least pick “Doubt” and get the person he was interrogating to cough up the necessary info. Couple that with losing his cop car by SOMEHOW driving it up a super-steep hill and getting it stuck on a fence, then stealing one of the dealership’s cars for sale, running over MULTIPLE pedestrians, and just generally being shit at his job, and is it any wonder he got the worst rank on a case that he’s ever gotten in this game? His supervisor wouldn’t even give him another case until he did something to prove his worth to the force – and then, when he tried to apprehend a burglary suspect, he ended up getting punched off some scaffolding and dying. Life lesson there – if you become a detective, do NOT trust all your decisions to the Magic 8 Ball! Try one of those foldy paper fortune tellers instead. XD
C) And then it was back to the previous day’s GrayStillPlays for more Happy Wheels! Last night was apparently the night of deceptively hard boards – we started with a bottle flip that not only had ledges that only revealed themselves once you started flipping, but also a whole ball fall minigame underneath it to unlock (Gray won as a torso, but he still won); an admittedly-simple cannon-blast through some coins (that Gray still managed to fuck up on the first go, getting himself crushed instead); a pogo fight where the last obstacle was an extra-tall wall laden with hidden harpoons (Gray had to bounce VERY carefully to get over without getting stabbed so hard he exploded); “Rope Swing Blue,” which had ropes placed JUST close enough that grabbing them at the right moment and swinging over to the spike-lined win was a major timing challenge (and that’s not even bringing the blueberry Dorito in the middle into things); Bike Dad and Tom Hardy taking on a glass bridge – which was constructed like a sagging rope bridge, meaning it was EXTREMELY easy to accidentally shatter it as you tried to get off it on the other end (abandoning the bike and crawling to the end was the only way Gray could get the win); a 100% impossible board where pretty much every way to win was surrounded by both endless amounts of pain (aka harpoons) and invisible walls (except one of those invisible walls had a gap, and once Gray found that gap. . .took him ages, but he managed to wiggle through to the win!); and a “core freezedown” board where Segway Nixon had to escape the facility and its corridors of mines, crossbows, and steep ramps that required him to still have his legs before the entire place froze from an overcooled core (Gray lost his legs a lot before finally managing to keep them long enough to get up the hill so he could drag himself to the end). The HW crew bringing their A game today! Well, yesterday. . .we’ll see if I can catch up on the rest of his stuff tomorrow!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: N/A, and I’m glad of it tonight, given I ended up chewing through my extra free time with no mercy. Though it does annoy me, as there’s one “fairy tale AU” draft I’ve been meaning to work on for weeks now. . .I will have to make that a priority this weekend, I think.
*huffs* I mean, I understand James wanted to wrap up the previous LP before starting the new one, but -- damn, if I hadn't gotten out an hour early and thus gotten a chance to complete my writing an hour early. . . Well, there should be a couple of quieter upload days this week that'll let me catch up a bit. In the meantime, I gotta get to bed -- night all!
