Very Late Update
But a calmer one than yesterday, despite kitchen drama (part of our sink broke and now it isn't properly connected to the drain) and whatnot -- perhaps because I'm coming off the worst of my period, perhaps because I didn't feel quite as squeezed during my evening routine. *shrug* But here's the to-dos so I can scurry off to bed:
Work – Another mostly-quiet day, though with more phone calls (including one for our new temp which I totally misinterpreted when she tried to explain it to me – fortunately, once my coworker came out of the bathroom, she was able to figure out what was actually going on) and some more spreadsheets for me to ponder. Oh, and more leaf blowers – my coworker and I had to yell a conversation at one point about someone’s check because they were blowing leaves out of the square outside. Still, could have been worse, so – can’t complain too much!
Beanbags – Back out in the backyard again as we had another nice day – but oh man, how the mighty have fallen in my case. I went from winning every game yesterday to winning none today, damn. Mom by contrast had a very good day, though not as good as I did yesterday – Dad managed to sneak in a win at the end. Final scores were me 3-2-3; Dad 2-3-W; Mom W-W-2. Hopefully I can get good again next time we play (depending on weather – we’re expecting some rain, but who knows what day anymore).
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and onto the next Oxventure Stream, the “usual two hours or so long” “Snow Mercy!” Though this one is also a bit special as it was done for D&D Celebration – not entirely sure what that is, guessing some kind of virtual con for fans of D&D. XD Anyway, picked up with the gang still on that damn mountain, having gotten extremely lost thanks to a blizzard blowing in. Egbert and Merilwen-as-Bearilwen were offering warmth to the others as Dob climbed a tree (with his usual acrobatic grace, because god forbid he roll anything else but Dex/Acrobatics XD) to try and get SOME sense of the surrounding area. He didn’t see much, but he did spot a strange hunched shape coming towards them and messaged Merilwen (who took a moment to remember she could think in words and not grunts) to maybe make it look like she was attacking the others as a vicious bear to ward off a potential enemy.
The timing on this was immaculate, as Corazon was just pulling out his banjo for some very loud sea shanties. XD Merilwen swatted that away and pinned Corazon and Prudence, managing with some careful bear expressions to convey that she was pretending to maul them for reasons. However, the mauling, rather than scaring off the strange figure, ended up bringing them running – turned out to be some sort of mountain man, with a barrel on his back, oiled furs on his body, and some nice jerky in his hand, which Merilwen allowed herself to be tempted by. XD Corazon, upon determining this person was just a normal human and not some sort of giant or other obvious threat, congratulated the stranger on “passing their test” (with Merilwen turning back into an elf to prove she was no threat). The stranger introduced himself as Dale Icewind (if you are a D&D fan who like the Drizzt novels, this should get a chuckle, I think), and proved to be a very-out-of-place surfer dude (Johnny eventually apologized for the accent twenty minutes in XD). He gave the group some cups of hot chocolate out of his enchanted barrel to warm them up (Dob executing a perfect leap out of the tree and kicking his cup gracefully into the air so he could just swallow his in one gulp), then asked what they were doing out here with no warm clothes or anything. The gang admitted they were lost and not dressed for the weather, and Dale offered to bring them back to Frostmaiden, where he lived, so they could, you know, not freeze to death. Everyone was for this plan, and Dale started leading them back, talking about what a nice, welcoming place Frostmaiden was –
Well. Unless you were a kobold. Everyone immediately latched onto that, confused, and it came out that there’s a dragon on top the mountain (just sleeping, as Prudence confirmed later), and of course dragons attract kobold populations. The kobolds ended up coming into town asking to do odd jobs in exchange for food and clothes, and ended up forming their own little community in the town. . .but lately they’re on edge, talking about disappearances and such, and they seem to think the townspeople are to blame. Doesn’t help that some of the townsfolk are genuinely giant jerks to them, really. . .the team was intrigued and concerned by this turn of events –
But first, drinks! The gang headed straight into the tavern and, while Dale asked for a refill on his hot chocolate, badgered the bartender, Dana, for mulled wine. She scolded them for their lack of manners, but seemed to change her tune when Dob asked for ten gold’s worth of mulled wine – and then she spotted Egbert and proved to be a kobold racist. Egbert was able to vouch with 98% certainty he was not a kobold (he checked earlier, and his -1 Wisdom on the roll meant he wasn’t 100% sure), and even got some mini marshmallows out of her. Which he put in his mulled wine. Causing them to swell up and become big old marsmallow wine gummies, basically. XD The others thoroughly enjoyed this new treat, with Dob naming it “Marsh-Merlot” (in contrast to Corazon’s “Drunk Flumphies”) and the others starting to talk branding. They also asked Dale if the kobolds had anywhere to drink, and Dale had to admit they did not. This ended up sparking an idea, and they emptied a whole thing of marshmallows into the mulled wine barrel Dob’s money had bought them, and Dale took it and them over to the little kobold market, run from under the town bridge! The kobolds were naturally rather suspicious of the outsiders, but Egbert decided to purchase some trousers from the kobold selling retailored clothing – the kobold, after determining Egbert was just one being and not a bunch of kobolds in a suit, got him to buy some nice red pants instead of the tacky gold ones he was going for. Egbert tried to pay by bartering with some of the Marsh-Merlots, but the kobold wasn’t biting – literally. XD But they are still open to barter, which I suspect is how we’re going to get to our main quest. . .
2. Continue writing “As Long As You Love Me”: Check – I have decided that, in this world, Victor was practicing asking Victoria to prom in the park before meeting up with her, and happened to stumble across the perfect wording in front of a tree Emily was behind, leading her to assume it was a surprise. And then Victor, feeling bad, went to ask Victoria if it was okay if he took Emily to the prom, only for her to follow and get angry he was talking to another woman. Fortunately this Victor is a bit better at communication than canon!Victor and explained what was going on, and Victoria suggested they all go stag so they could just hang out together, no obligations on anybody. Which was working out for them just fine until Victoria disappeared while visiting the ladies’ room. . .time to take down a Barkis, I think!
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Three-fifths check – Gray, Kevin, and James all uploaded today, but I decided to prioritize Kevin and Gray today, in the hopes that tomorrow is a Gray-only day and THEN I can start properly catching up with James’s Werewolves LP. Just down to the first two episodes of that in my Subs, yay! But in the meantime –
A) Started with Call Me Kevin and “Making a base to survive 100 days in a Minecraft Zombie Apocalypse!” Yes, the Zombie Apocalypse Minecraft mod is back, and also upsetting Kevin’s computer regularly as he tries to upgrade his base to survive the hordes. Seriously, the amount of crashing every time he tried to slaughter zombies via electric fence. . . Anyway, theme of this episode was “setting up a trap amusement park!” XD Basically Kevin wanted to up his defenses with some good traps, and finding an old mineshaft full of rails and redstone beneath his house inspired him to start with a cute little powered minecart ride! Not exactly deadly, but it was amusing. At least until he unleashed the lava and destroyed part of it. XD He rebuilt it, though, and started working on new traps. Like a big old lava faucet, to rain fiery death down upon the zombies who cluster under it trying to get to him! The aforementioned electric fences which kept crashing his game, and proved less useful than he would have liked thanks to his house being surrounded by rails and thus on a bit of a hill! And a giant lava pit under his home, with a pressure plate and a piston to get the zombies to shove in more of their own brethren! Along the way, he unfortunately lost all his chickens (three cooked to death after an unexplained fire incident while he was downstairs gathering rails, redstone, and iron, and the third ran into the lava the moment he unlocked the way in), but ended up replacing them with underground sheep. Because nobody ever says no to mutton, right? XD He also managed to die to an un-Kevin-proofed lava fall – but on the plus side, he’s also personally killed 94 Zombies, and never been killed by one in return, so that’s something, right? Plus he has a floating chair for when he wants to FEEL LIKE A GOD halfway up a tree. XD I’m quite looking forward to where this mini-series takes us! (From what it sounds like, into more lava pits.)
B) And then it was time to catch up on my GrayStillPlays:
I. “I made people's lives unreasonably difficult” – aka, Gray plays DOP 4, one of those terrible drawing games where Gray’s horrible art skills are put to the test. XD Or, rather, not put to the test, as this particular drawing game would accept ANYTHING Gray shoved at it. Draw the world’s shittiest shark attacking a surfer’s feet? Yeah, that’ll be a surfboard. Put a human skull in an espresso machine? Sure, that can be a coffee cup. Finish a woman’s wedding dress with a can of Bud Light? No problem, we’ll accept that as a skirt. Smack a softball into a toucan’s face? Good enough to be the beak! Draw a tiny dinosaur on the ground, trying to eat a child’s foot, miles away from the tree branch she is supposedly hanging from? Yup, that’s a swing! It’s rare that a game actually just ALLOWS his nonsense instead of trying to punish him for it – makes for a nice change. XD
II. “I had to choose who dies first” – aka, Gray plays Physics Who Dies Stickman, otherwise known as “Google Translate asks you to guess who dies first in a variety of ridiculous puzzle rooms.” And trust me, they are ridiculous – like, there’s a claw machine dropping a soccer ball, that’s going to hit a wheel, that’s going to knock over some dominoes, which is going to send a car topped with a spinning saw blade into a guy, but in the MEANTIME, that same soccer ball is going to bounce down an incline and hit a boxing glove that’s going to send a DIFFERENT guy into orbit – how the heck are you going to figure out who’s going to die first in THAT case! The easiest one was the tutorial mission, featuring two dudes on either end of a row of dominoes, with one end shorter and thus quicker to kill when it falls over, and THEN Gray just picked the wrong dude out of spite. XD He did manage to correctly predict a few when he took a moment to look the nonsense over properly, but I don’t think he ever did better than half correct. Good thing we’re not here to see him guess right – we’re here to watch stickmen get killed in absolutely baffling ways. And this game MORE than provided. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check! I’ve got my four Wednesday posts and one Thursday post in the queue on Victor Luvs Alice (still deciding on Friday and Saturday), and an ask reply and a friend’s video they made describing their favorite part of the Forgotten Vows Verse in the queue for Valice Multiverse. :) So THAT’S all good!
*nods* Making progress! Now I just have to get through the rest of this week. . .we'll see how that all goes! Night all!
Work – Another mostly-quiet day, though with more phone calls (including one for our new temp which I totally misinterpreted when she tried to explain it to me – fortunately, once my coworker came out of the bathroom, she was able to figure out what was actually going on) and some more spreadsheets for me to ponder. Oh, and more leaf blowers – my coworker and I had to yell a conversation at one point about someone’s check because they were blowing leaves out of the square outside. Still, could have been worse, so – can’t complain too much!
Beanbags – Back out in the backyard again as we had another nice day – but oh man, how the mighty have fallen in my case. I went from winning every game yesterday to winning none today, damn. Mom by contrast had a very good day, though not as good as I did yesterday – Dad managed to sneak in a win at the end. Final scores were me 3-2-3; Dad 2-3-W; Mom W-W-2. Hopefully I can get good again next time we play (depending on weather – we’re expecting some rain, but who knows what day anymore).
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and onto the next Oxventure Stream, the “usual two hours or so long” “Snow Mercy!” Though this one is also a bit special as it was done for D&D Celebration – not entirely sure what that is, guessing some kind of virtual con for fans of D&D. XD Anyway, picked up with the gang still on that damn mountain, having gotten extremely lost thanks to a blizzard blowing in. Egbert and Merilwen-as-Bearilwen were offering warmth to the others as Dob climbed a tree (with his usual acrobatic grace, because god forbid he roll anything else but Dex/Acrobatics XD) to try and get SOME sense of the surrounding area. He didn’t see much, but he did spot a strange hunched shape coming towards them and messaged Merilwen (who took a moment to remember she could think in words and not grunts) to maybe make it look like she was attacking the others as a vicious bear to ward off a potential enemy.
The timing on this was immaculate, as Corazon was just pulling out his banjo for some very loud sea shanties. XD Merilwen swatted that away and pinned Corazon and Prudence, managing with some careful bear expressions to convey that she was pretending to maul them for reasons. However, the mauling, rather than scaring off the strange figure, ended up bringing them running – turned out to be some sort of mountain man, with a barrel on his back, oiled furs on his body, and some nice jerky in his hand, which Merilwen allowed herself to be tempted by. XD Corazon, upon determining this person was just a normal human and not some sort of giant or other obvious threat, congratulated the stranger on “passing their test” (with Merilwen turning back into an elf to prove she was no threat). The stranger introduced himself as Dale Icewind (if you are a D&D fan who like the Drizzt novels, this should get a chuckle, I think), and proved to be a very-out-of-place surfer dude (Johnny eventually apologized for the accent twenty minutes in XD). He gave the group some cups of hot chocolate out of his enchanted barrel to warm them up (Dob executing a perfect leap out of the tree and kicking his cup gracefully into the air so he could just swallow his in one gulp), then asked what they were doing out here with no warm clothes or anything. The gang admitted they were lost and not dressed for the weather, and Dale offered to bring them back to Frostmaiden, where he lived, so they could, you know, not freeze to death. Everyone was for this plan, and Dale started leading them back, talking about what a nice, welcoming place Frostmaiden was –
Well. Unless you were a kobold. Everyone immediately latched onto that, confused, and it came out that there’s a dragon on top the mountain (just sleeping, as Prudence confirmed later), and of course dragons attract kobold populations. The kobolds ended up coming into town asking to do odd jobs in exchange for food and clothes, and ended up forming their own little community in the town. . .but lately they’re on edge, talking about disappearances and such, and they seem to think the townspeople are to blame. Doesn’t help that some of the townsfolk are genuinely giant jerks to them, really. . .the team was intrigued and concerned by this turn of events –
But first, drinks! The gang headed straight into the tavern and, while Dale asked for a refill on his hot chocolate, badgered the bartender, Dana, for mulled wine. She scolded them for their lack of manners, but seemed to change her tune when Dob asked for ten gold’s worth of mulled wine – and then she spotted Egbert and proved to be a kobold racist. Egbert was able to vouch with 98% certainty he was not a kobold (he checked earlier, and his -1 Wisdom on the roll meant he wasn’t 100% sure), and even got some mini marshmallows out of her. Which he put in his mulled wine. Causing them to swell up and become big old marsmallow wine gummies, basically. XD The others thoroughly enjoyed this new treat, with Dob naming it “Marsh-Merlot” (in contrast to Corazon’s “Drunk Flumphies”) and the others starting to talk branding. They also asked Dale if the kobolds had anywhere to drink, and Dale had to admit they did not. This ended up sparking an idea, and they emptied a whole thing of marshmallows into the mulled wine barrel Dob’s money had bought them, and Dale took it and them over to the little kobold market, run from under the town bridge! The kobolds were naturally rather suspicious of the outsiders, but Egbert decided to purchase some trousers from the kobold selling retailored clothing – the kobold, after determining Egbert was just one being and not a bunch of kobolds in a suit, got him to buy some nice red pants instead of the tacky gold ones he was going for. Egbert tried to pay by bartering with some of the Marsh-Merlots, but the kobold wasn’t biting – literally. XD But they are still open to barter, which I suspect is how we’re going to get to our main quest. . .
2. Continue writing “As Long As You Love Me”: Check – I have decided that, in this world, Victor was practicing asking Victoria to prom in the park before meeting up with her, and happened to stumble across the perfect wording in front of a tree Emily was behind, leading her to assume it was a surprise. And then Victor, feeling bad, went to ask Victoria if it was okay if he took Emily to the prom, only for her to follow and get angry he was talking to another woman. Fortunately this Victor is a bit better at communication than canon!Victor and explained what was going on, and Victoria suggested they all go stag so they could just hang out together, no obligations on anybody. Which was working out for them just fine until Victoria disappeared while visiting the ladies’ room. . .time to take down a Barkis, I think!
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Three-fifths check – Gray, Kevin, and James all uploaded today, but I decided to prioritize Kevin and Gray today, in the hopes that tomorrow is a Gray-only day and THEN I can start properly catching up with James’s Werewolves LP. Just down to the first two episodes of that in my Subs, yay! But in the meantime –
A) Started with Call Me Kevin and “Making a base to survive 100 days in a Minecraft Zombie Apocalypse!” Yes, the Zombie Apocalypse Minecraft mod is back, and also upsetting Kevin’s computer regularly as he tries to upgrade his base to survive the hordes. Seriously, the amount of crashing every time he tried to slaughter zombies via electric fence. . . Anyway, theme of this episode was “setting up a trap amusement park!” XD Basically Kevin wanted to up his defenses with some good traps, and finding an old mineshaft full of rails and redstone beneath his house inspired him to start with a cute little powered minecart ride! Not exactly deadly, but it was amusing. At least until he unleashed the lava and destroyed part of it. XD He rebuilt it, though, and started working on new traps. Like a big old lava faucet, to rain fiery death down upon the zombies who cluster under it trying to get to him! The aforementioned electric fences which kept crashing his game, and proved less useful than he would have liked thanks to his house being surrounded by rails and thus on a bit of a hill! And a giant lava pit under his home, with a pressure plate and a piston to get the zombies to shove in more of their own brethren! Along the way, he unfortunately lost all his chickens (three cooked to death after an unexplained fire incident while he was downstairs gathering rails, redstone, and iron, and the third ran into the lava the moment he unlocked the way in), but ended up replacing them with underground sheep. Because nobody ever says no to mutton, right? XD He also managed to die to an un-Kevin-proofed lava fall – but on the plus side, he’s also personally killed 94 Zombies, and never been killed by one in return, so that’s something, right? Plus he has a floating chair for when he wants to FEEL LIKE A GOD halfway up a tree. XD I’m quite looking forward to where this mini-series takes us! (From what it sounds like, into more lava pits.)
B) And then it was time to catch up on my GrayStillPlays:
I. “I made people's lives unreasonably difficult” – aka, Gray plays DOP 4, one of those terrible drawing games where Gray’s horrible art skills are put to the test. XD Or, rather, not put to the test, as this particular drawing game would accept ANYTHING Gray shoved at it. Draw the world’s shittiest shark attacking a surfer’s feet? Yeah, that’ll be a surfboard. Put a human skull in an espresso machine? Sure, that can be a coffee cup. Finish a woman’s wedding dress with a can of Bud Light? No problem, we’ll accept that as a skirt. Smack a softball into a toucan’s face? Good enough to be the beak! Draw a tiny dinosaur on the ground, trying to eat a child’s foot, miles away from the tree branch she is supposedly hanging from? Yup, that’s a swing! It’s rare that a game actually just ALLOWS his nonsense instead of trying to punish him for it – makes for a nice change. XD
II. “I had to choose who dies first” – aka, Gray plays Physics Who Dies Stickman, otherwise known as “Google Translate asks you to guess who dies first in a variety of ridiculous puzzle rooms.” And trust me, they are ridiculous – like, there’s a claw machine dropping a soccer ball, that’s going to hit a wheel, that’s going to knock over some dominoes, which is going to send a car topped with a spinning saw blade into a guy, but in the MEANTIME, that same soccer ball is going to bounce down an incline and hit a boxing glove that’s going to send a DIFFERENT guy into orbit – how the heck are you going to figure out who’s going to die first in THAT case! The easiest one was the tutorial mission, featuring two dudes on either end of a row of dominoes, with one end shorter and thus quicker to kill when it falls over, and THEN Gray just picked the wrong dude out of spite. XD He did manage to correctly predict a few when he took a moment to look the nonsense over properly, but I don’t think he ever did better than half correct. Good thing we’re not here to see him guess right – we’re here to watch stickmen get killed in absolutely baffling ways. And this game MORE than provided. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check! I’ve got my four Wednesday posts and one Thursday post in the queue on Victor Luvs Alice (still deciding on Friday and Saturday), and an ask reply and a friend’s video they made describing their favorite part of the Forgotten Vows Verse in the queue for Valice Multiverse. :) So THAT’S all good!
*nods* Making progress! Now I just have to get through the rest of this week. . .we'll see how that all goes! Night all!