Let Me Run In And Out Of Here Real Quick
Busy doing the social thing and catching up on messages and whatnot, so let me just throw the to-do list at you and head out:
Work – Mostly quiet day, though things picked up for me personally around 3 PM, what with a donor calling in to pay off their pledge after they had a bunch of payments denied on another card, and getting something the credit card people promised us THREE WEEKS ago, and reviewing it only to find more nonsense. *grumbles* Add in the usual “people love to fuckin’ ride my ass” commutes, and – yeah. This week isn’t looking quite as chill as the last, sad to say.
Beanbags – We did indeed get out, once I’d gotten home and changed and Mom had made pizza dough. And I actually ended up having a pretty damn good day, to make up for not winning once yesterday! Faltered in the last game though, allowing Mom to take a win – and today it was poor Dad’s turn not to win once, though he did always come second. Final scores were me W-W-3; Dad 2-2-2, Mom 3-3-W. *shrug* I’ll take it!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike today, as per usual, and back to the Oxventure with the next stream – “Gnome Alone!” Egbert is back, everybody! :D Though, interestingly, Dob is now out of the party, with Luke fully missing in action instead of simply having taken on the DM handle. Apparently he and Suzette have had some sort of mutual flash of inspiration and are cooking up something in her lab (while she continually asks him to stop playing “Igor” as he goes around hunched over with a mortar and pestle), and who knows when they shall emerge. (And it now occurs to me that – I’m pretty sure both Mike and Luke became fathers during 2020? So I’m wondering if Egbert’s kidnapping, and Dob now NPCing it with his sister, are related to that. . .)
*shrug* Well, anyway, the important thing in-universe was that Egbert had finally finished his long convalescence! Johnny set up a funny “everyone runs in to see Egbert in slow-motion in a golden-sunlight-tinted room” scene, and Prudence brought him an umbrella full of bees as a “get well” present, because Jane temporarily forgot the word “balloon.” XD Egbert was still appreciative of the gift, though, setting it aside as a secret Chekov’s gun. There was some banter, with Corazon getting Egbert to thank them for the rescue and goading him into trying to do a backflip once he got out of bed (Egbert ended up sort of power-slamming himself into the ground), then Egbert got all his kit back and headed outside to actually get some fresh air and whatnot!
To find a funeral pyre in the yard. With two familiar figures in front of it – Max, the “off-steed” paladin inspector (the guy who kicked off “Faire Trial” and Egbert needing to retake his paladin trials), and Captain Shattershield, Egbert’s old commander in the “Dragondor” paladin order (he’s the grumpy guy from “Out of Order” who wouldn’t listen to Egbert when he tried to warn him about the water being poisoned). Turns out Corazon, in true Corazon fashion, has been selling “RIP Egbert” shirts and still telling everyone he’s dead, and so Max and Shattershield had shown up to give Egbert the Dragondor funeral rights – cremation on a pyre, then the ashes scattered from a hot air balloon. As you might imagine, Egbert being alive made all of that – awkward. XD Though Egbert was actually quite touched that Shattershield had shown up at all, given that he and the Dragondor order had parted on such poor terms, and Shattershield admitted that, even if Egbert had done That Thing We Don’t Talk About, he still though well enough of him to come and give him the proper send-off. (Max, meanwhile, was just annoyed that he’d wasted twelve gold pieces on a t-shirt, though Corazon tried to convince him it was a collector’s item now – as he hastily started altering the others to say “Let ‘Er RIP Egbert” and tried to sell one of THOSE to Shattershield. XD)
So – what to do now that Egbert was still alive? How about a hot air balloon ride? :D Shattershield admitted that normally the balloon is reserved for funerary rites (supposed to be a dragonborn’s “last flight”), but given he already HAD it, there was no harm in taking it up. He sent Max to go get some picnic stuff while he lit the “brazier” (not the “brassiere,” as Johnny originally said and was promptly mocked for), and the others hung out, watching Egbert reunite with Seal Gaiman (who, naturally, was still trying to get away at every possible opportunity). Once the balloon was ready and the basket full of goodies, everyone filed in – though Corazon did pull Egbert aside briefly and ask if he was really okay with spending some time in such close quarters with Shattershield. Egbert assured him he was okay, reiterating that it actually meant a lot to him that Shattershield showed up to give him a proper funeral, and they all got on and set off!
And then Max made the mistake of asking about the umbrella. Prompting Prudence to explain that she’d only been able to find an umbrella in Suzette’s while looking for a balloon, so she’d filled that with bees instead, and then to claim that she was trying to make filling things with bees her “thing.” Which, of course, prompted Corazon to wonder out loud, hmm, why would she be thinking so much about bees lately, if only she’d properly joined in disguising herself as part of a certain rock band. . .yes, it all comes back to the damn Beeples with this lot now, and Prudence hates it (especially after Merilwen started making bee puns again). XD
Aside from that, the balloon ride started off well – yes, Seal Gaiman got into the picnic basket and ate most of the Scotch eggs, but that was probably a given. XD Egbert and Shattershield were still very awkward around each other, but they were doing well enough – and once again, What Egbert Did came up without really coming up, prompting Prudence to try and suggest a game of them all sharing dark secrets. That was shot down, though, as was Corazon taking out his guitar and trying to be the bard in Dob’s absence. (“Barred from being the bard,” as Merilwen put it. XD) They did get Egbert to say something nice about each of them in the reverse of them all saying nice things about him like at a normal funeral (Egbert apparently likes Corazon’s hat more than him, but he gave a decent compliment to Prudence, and a genuinely nice one to Merilwen), and picked out fun shapes in the clouds – dragons, paladins and their distant father figure mentors reconciling, a band of bee people, raccoons digging in the trash, a big stormy cloud coming their way against the wind that looks rather like the head of a drow sorceress –
Uh-oh. Looks like Liliana has tracked them down! I have left it on Corazon shaking the hell out of the basket in a desperate attempt to steer the balloon out of Cloudiana’s path. We shall see what happens and how painful it is tomorrow!
2. Continue writing “As Long As You Love Me”: Check – Alice and Victor have gotten their drinks, and Victor has told Alice about how he met Emily in this universe – trying to find his grandmother’s room in the hospital (poor woman was visiting and slipped on Nell’s overly-polished floors), he stumbled across Emily’s instead, and – upon hearing her story and feeling sorry for her – agreed to keep visiting. From there they developed a friendship, as they had some stuff in common – and Alice has twigged that Victor started developing some feelings for Emily. . . Which, yes, he did, but he wasn’t acting on them because he was with Victoria at the time. *serious nod* But soon enough, him rehearsing his speech to ask Victoria to prom in front of the wrong tree is gonna come back to bite him.
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – and yes, hallelujah, it was a quiet night tonight with just one upload, meaning I was able to catch up on my GrayStillPlays! In order, we had –
A) Teacher Simulator – Gray was educating young minds again, and we should all be afraid. XD This one had his teacher-in-a-superhero-outfit grade papers by doodling all over them (including writing “DEATH” over the Eiffel Tower and “Kill Me” in a speech balloon on a Pennywise drawing – yes, really, that was in the game), give As to the kids who did the worst on the school projects (like breaking their model car in half, or taking a bite out of their clay pot), sharpen her pencils until they were little more than nubs, catch cheaters and make them disappear into the classroom walls, and break up fights by spraying the participants with a fire extinguisher until they were too encased in foam to move. XD You know, typical Gray classroom chaos!
B) GTA V – It’s Alex and Danny time again! Specifically, they had a new form of pain for him – trick shot boards! For someone who spends all his time in the game doing parkour, this is a whole new level of hell. XD First board: Gray, trapped upon the constantly opening and closing iris of a thumbnail hole, must snipe his clone as said clone rides a conveyor belt from side to side some distance away. This takes multiple tries as Gray tries not to get shot himself by the clone (he’s been modded to die in a single hit) or fall off his little undulating platform, and it takes multiple shots to put the clone down. But, as he put it, “I do things until I win. I’m not good, I just don’t give up.” :p Second board: Gray must survive 13 seconds being shot at by Satan with a ROCKET LAUNCHER on a small platform with a target right behind him. How? By shooting the rockets out of the sky. This again takes multiple tries, but again, master of persistence Gray makes it in the end. Third board: Gray, with a literal target on his back, must dodge the rockets of MULTIPLE Satans as they spawn in, taking them out one by one. It also had three stages – Gray atop a reasonably big target, Gray atop a smaller target with Satans spawning ABOVE him, and The Boss Fight where he has to shoot one final Satan multiple times. This one had the added trickiness of not falling off the platform whenever he rolled out of the way of a rocket, but once he found the final boss’s weakness (shoot him every time he tries to get up), he finished it no problem.
Fourth board: Alex actually wasn’t sure if he wanted to include this one. XD Gray had to take a motorcycle, ramp it up and through a building, throw some C4 at a wall to break open the destructible spot, go through the tunnel and come out the other side, pull out his revolver and 360 no scope (aka spin around and shoot without aiming) one of his clones before landing on the platform to open up the rest of the path, murder ANOTHER clone standing in front of some windmills, make a big leap and throw some more C4 to open up a thumbnail hole, make ANOTHER big jump, leap off the bike, parachute his way through a tunnel with more Satans shooting rockets, kill his final clone to drop the final wall, then glide into the win. This one was ROUGH, if only because it was sheer luck if Gray made that “360% no scope” shot! On the plus side, though, he FINALLY landed in a body of water during one of his failed attempts (he always says he’s gonna land in the pond or the pool after dropping from a great height, only to miss and smack into something else), which made him very happy. And then the final win was on a pool and he smacked into the side instead. XD Damn, I have no idea how the boys are gonna top this one! Definitely eager to find out, though. . .
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – got the Victor Luvs Alice one done after writing and before GrayStillPlays: Chill Save posts for Wednesday, more Valicer silliness for Thursday, the masterpost of Nitewrighter’s Cindy for Friday! Not bad, not bad. . . And finished up Valice Multiverse this evening with two ask replies, nice. :)
So yeah, back on top of Subs, on top of queues, that's all good, time for bed. Night all!
Work – Mostly quiet day, though things picked up for me personally around 3 PM, what with a donor calling in to pay off their pledge after they had a bunch of payments denied on another card, and getting something the credit card people promised us THREE WEEKS ago, and reviewing it only to find more nonsense. *grumbles* Add in the usual “people love to fuckin’ ride my ass” commutes, and – yeah. This week isn’t looking quite as chill as the last, sad to say.
Beanbags – We did indeed get out, once I’d gotten home and changed and Mom had made pizza dough. And I actually ended up having a pretty damn good day, to make up for not winning once yesterday! Faltered in the last game though, allowing Mom to take a win – and today it was poor Dad’s turn not to win once, though he did always come second. Final scores were me W-W-3; Dad 2-2-2, Mom 3-3-W. *shrug* I’ll take it!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike today, as per usual, and back to the Oxventure with the next stream – “Gnome Alone!” Egbert is back, everybody! :D Though, interestingly, Dob is now out of the party, with Luke fully missing in action instead of simply having taken on the DM handle. Apparently he and Suzette have had some sort of mutual flash of inspiration and are cooking up something in her lab (while she continually asks him to stop playing “Igor” as he goes around hunched over with a mortar and pestle), and who knows when they shall emerge. (And it now occurs to me that – I’m pretty sure both Mike and Luke became fathers during 2020? So I’m wondering if Egbert’s kidnapping, and Dob now NPCing it with his sister, are related to that. . .)
*shrug* Well, anyway, the important thing in-universe was that Egbert had finally finished his long convalescence! Johnny set up a funny “everyone runs in to see Egbert in slow-motion in a golden-sunlight-tinted room” scene, and Prudence brought him an umbrella full of bees as a “get well” present, because Jane temporarily forgot the word “balloon.” XD Egbert was still appreciative of the gift, though, setting it aside as a secret Chekov’s gun. There was some banter, with Corazon getting Egbert to thank them for the rescue and goading him into trying to do a backflip once he got out of bed (Egbert ended up sort of power-slamming himself into the ground), then Egbert got all his kit back and headed outside to actually get some fresh air and whatnot!
To find a funeral pyre in the yard. With two familiar figures in front of it – Max, the “off-steed” paladin inspector (the guy who kicked off “Faire Trial” and Egbert needing to retake his paladin trials), and Captain Shattershield, Egbert’s old commander in the “Dragondor” paladin order (he’s the grumpy guy from “Out of Order” who wouldn’t listen to Egbert when he tried to warn him about the water being poisoned). Turns out Corazon, in true Corazon fashion, has been selling “RIP Egbert” shirts and still telling everyone he’s dead, and so Max and Shattershield had shown up to give Egbert the Dragondor funeral rights – cremation on a pyre, then the ashes scattered from a hot air balloon. As you might imagine, Egbert being alive made all of that – awkward. XD Though Egbert was actually quite touched that Shattershield had shown up at all, given that he and the Dragondor order had parted on such poor terms, and Shattershield admitted that, even if Egbert had done That Thing We Don’t Talk About, he still though well enough of him to come and give him the proper send-off. (Max, meanwhile, was just annoyed that he’d wasted twelve gold pieces on a t-shirt, though Corazon tried to convince him it was a collector’s item now – as he hastily started altering the others to say “Let ‘Er RIP Egbert” and tried to sell one of THOSE to Shattershield. XD)
So – what to do now that Egbert was still alive? How about a hot air balloon ride? :D Shattershield admitted that normally the balloon is reserved for funerary rites (supposed to be a dragonborn’s “last flight”), but given he already HAD it, there was no harm in taking it up. He sent Max to go get some picnic stuff while he lit the “brazier” (not the “brassiere,” as Johnny originally said and was promptly mocked for), and the others hung out, watching Egbert reunite with Seal Gaiman (who, naturally, was still trying to get away at every possible opportunity). Once the balloon was ready and the basket full of goodies, everyone filed in – though Corazon did pull Egbert aside briefly and ask if he was really okay with spending some time in such close quarters with Shattershield. Egbert assured him he was okay, reiterating that it actually meant a lot to him that Shattershield showed up to give him a proper funeral, and they all got on and set off!
And then Max made the mistake of asking about the umbrella. Prompting Prudence to explain that she’d only been able to find an umbrella in Suzette’s while looking for a balloon, so she’d filled that with bees instead, and then to claim that she was trying to make filling things with bees her “thing.” Which, of course, prompted Corazon to wonder out loud, hmm, why would she be thinking so much about bees lately, if only she’d properly joined in disguising herself as part of a certain rock band. . .yes, it all comes back to the damn Beeples with this lot now, and Prudence hates it (especially after Merilwen started making bee puns again). XD
Aside from that, the balloon ride started off well – yes, Seal Gaiman got into the picnic basket and ate most of the Scotch eggs, but that was probably a given. XD Egbert and Shattershield were still very awkward around each other, but they were doing well enough – and once again, What Egbert Did came up without really coming up, prompting Prudence to try and suggest a game of them all sharing dark secrets. That was shot down, though, as was Corazon taking out his guitar and trying to be the bard in Dob’s absence. (“Barred from being the bard,” as Merilwen put it. XD) They did get Egbert to say something nice about each of them in the reverse of them all saying nice things about him like at a normal funeral (Egbert apparently likes Corazon’s hat more than him, but he gave a decent compliment to Prudence, and a genuinely nice one to Merilwen), and picked out fun shapes in the clouds – dragons, paladins and their distant father figure mentors reconciling, a band of bee people, raccoons digging in the trash, a big stormy cloud coming their way against the wind that looks rather like the head of a drow sorceress –
Uh-oh. Looks like Liliana has tracked them down! I have left it on Corazon shaking the hell out of the basket in a desperate attempt to steer the balloon out of Cloudiana’s path. We shall see what happens and how painful it is tomorrow!
2. Continue writing “As Long As You Love Me”: Check – Alice and Victor have gotten their drinks, and Victor has told Alice about how he met Emily in this universe – trying to find his grandmother’s room in the hospital (poor woman was visiting and slipped on Nell’s overly-polished floors), he stumbled across Emily’s instead, and – upon hearing her story and feeling sorry for her – agreed to keep visiting. From there they developed a friendship, as they had some stuff in common – and Alice has twigged that Victor started developing some feelings for Emily. . . Which, yes, he did, but he wasn’t acting on them because he was with Victoria at the time. *serious nod* But soon enough, him rehearsing his speech to ask Victoria to prom in front of the wrong tree is gonna come back to bite him.
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – and yes, hallelujah, it was a quiet night tonight with just one upload, meaning I was able to catch up on my GrayStillPlays! In order, we had –
A) Teacher Simulator – Gray was educating young minds again, and we should all be afraid. XD This one had his teacher-in-a-superhero-outfit grade papers by doodling all over them (including writing “DEATH” over the Eiffel Tower and “Kill Me” in a speech balloon on a Pennywise drawing – yes, really, that was in the game), give As to the kids who did the worst on the school projects (like breaking their model car in half, or taking a bite out of their clay pot), sharpen her pencils until they were little more than nubs, catch cheaters and make them disappear into the classroom walls, and break up fights by spraying the participants with a fire extinguisher until they were too encased in foam to move. XD You know, typical Gray classroom chaos!
B) GTA V – It’s Alex and Danny time again! Specifically, they had a new form of pain for him – trick shot boards! For someone who spends all his time in the game doing parkour, this is a whole new level of hell. XD First board: Gray, trapped upon the constantly opening and closing iris of a thumbnail hole, must snipe his clone as said clone rides a conveyor belt from side to side some distance away. This takes multiple tries as Gray tries not to get shot himself by the clone (he’s been modded to die in a single hit) or fall off his little undulating platform, and it takes multiple shots to put the clone down. But, as he put it, “I do things until I win. I’m not good, I just don’t give up.” :p Second board: Gray must survive 13 seconds being shot at by Satan with a ROCKET LAUNCHER on a small platform with a target right behind him. How? By shooting the rockets out of the sky. This again takes multiple tries, but again, master of persistence Gray makes it in the end. Third board: Gray, with a literal target on his back, must dodge the rockets of MULTIPLE Satans as they spawn in, taking them out one by one. It also had three stages – Gray atop a reasonably big target, Gray atop a smaller target with Satans spawning ABOVE him, and The Boss Fight where he has to shoot one final Satan multiple times. This one had the added trickiness of not falling off the platform whenever he rolled out of the way of a rocket, but once he found the final boss’s weakness (shoot him every time he tries to get up), he finished it no problem.
Fourth board: Alex actually wasn’t sure if he wanted to include this one. XD Gray had to take a motorcycle, ramp it up and through a building, throw some C4 at a wall to break open the destructible spot, go through the tunnel and come out the other side, pull out his revolver and 360 no scope (aka spin around and shoot without aiming) one of his clones before landing on the platform to open up the rest of the path, murder ANOTHER clone standing in front of some windmills, make a big leap and throw some more C4 to open up a thumbnail hole, make ANOTHER big jump, leap off the bike, parachute his way through a tunnel with more Satans shooting rockets, kill his final clone to drop the final wall, then glide into the win. This one was ROUGH, if only because it was sheer luck if Gray made that “360% no scope” shot! On the plus side, though, he FINALLY landed in a body of water during one of his failed attempts (he always says he’s gonna land in the pond or the pool after dropping from a great height, only to miss and smack into something else), which made him very happy. And then the final win was on a pool and he smacked into the side instead. XD Damn, I have no idea how the boys are gonna top this one! Definitely eager to find out, though. . .
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – got the Victor Luvs Alice one done after writing and before GrayStillPlays: Chill Save posts for Wednesday, more Valicer silliness for Thursday, the masterpost of Nitewrighter’s Cindy for Friday! Not bad, not bad. . . And finished up Valice Multiverse this evening with two ask replies, nice. :)
So yeah, back on top of Subs, on top of queues, that's all good, time for bed. Night all!