![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
As Usual The Time Gets Away From Me
Aug. 17th, 2022 11:33 pmYes, okay, I'm actually updating a little EARLIER today, sure, but trust me, I still didn't get everything I wanted to get done, done. And it's pretty much entirely the fault of YouTube tonight --
Work – More “quietly busy” time, with catching up on roster maintenance stuff, looking things up for people, and getting annoyed at nothing being done with the credit card nonsense. Pretty typical day for this week, in other words! *shrug* As long as the time goes by without me getting too stressed out!
Beanbags – It turned out to be a nice day instead of a rainy one (though, given we’re in a pretty nasty drought, we wanted the rainy day), so we went out and played. . .and ended up getting the exact same scores as yesterday – me W-2-2; Dad 2-W-W; Mom 3-3-3. It just took longer because Mom and I kept tying on the last game. XD Ah well, we’ll see how things progress as we get closer to the weekend!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with the Oxventure Stream “Chart of Darkness!” After desperately trying to explain himself to the others, Dob was allowed to cast his Major Illusion of the group being attacked by the mechanical shark in an attempt to break the boar’s mechanical brain. He did not succeed in this aim –
But, thanks to another roll Johnny made and biffed, he did succeed in fooling WALLY, who came in to deactivate the boar (yanking out the gold teeth and giving them back to Corazon) and apologize about two turning on at once. XD Corazon promptly said it was fine, they’d just take out the shark instead and pretended to defeat it, while Dob busied himself maintaining the illusion just long enough to make that believable and untied Merilwen. XD Wally apologized again and gave them a coupon for ten percent off in the mid-escape-room-cafe, which pleased everyone. General consensus is now that Merilwen was correct – Wally just doesn’t understand that escape rooms aren’t supposed to kill the people trying to escape from them. Corazon, honestly, is enjoying the extra sense of danger. XD
So yes, with the statues “defeated,” it was onto the refreshment break! In a cafe full of muffins, coffee, cheap stew, and the lot. Everyone happily chowed down (Egbert having one of everything) except Merilwen, who insisted on rolling Wis/Per to check that nothing here was bad, kinda biffed it, and became convinced that everything was poisoned. XD But everyone else had a fine time, and once they were all full up (and Corazon had convinced Dob to pour some stew in his pockets for the road), they were just about ready to head out into the next room –
When the cafe lady asked “is that your monkey?” And sure enough, sitting on one of the table eating muffin crumbs was a monkey! Everyone was a little puzzled as to where the monkey had come from, though Dob – in typical fashion – was only too happy to name it Matilda and try to adopt it. XD Merilwen asked Corazon if any of his old shipmates had monkeys – Corazon said that monkeys had come and gone all the time on the Joyful Damnation, and while he knew Jack Crackson had had a specific monkey named Penelope, this clearly wasn’t the same one (Penelope was in fact already getting on in years when Jack adopted her, so it was likely she had already “reached her monkey reward”). Merilwen tried to use Speak With Animals on it, but the monkey proved to just be an amiable sort who apparently lived in the area and found the cafe a convenient place to eat muffins and chill. The cafe lady was insistent that it wasn’t hers and that management wasn’t responsible for lost property and didn’t care who took it, so the gang decided to adopt it, at least for the time being, and see if Matilda would be useful in the next room!
Short answer: probably! Mostly because, having blown the budget on poison gas and animated mechanical statues, Wally had gone simple with this room – most of it was a giant spike pit, with a plinth containing the map scroll they needed emerging out of it, and a frayed rope leading from the entrance to the plinth. Dob was like “well, good thing we’ve got this monkey” –
And then Merilwen was like, “Actually, didn’t we just find out Egbert can teleport?” XD Egbert was like “oh yeah!” and after confirming from Johnny that the plinth wasn’t more than thirty feet away (and confirming that he could Misty Step any distance UP TO thirty feet, meaning he wouldn’t teleport over there and overshoot the plinth by ten feet), went ahead and did that. Dob had his own twenty-five minute flashback sequence of all the times Egbert being able to teleport could have helped them in their adventures, while Corazon and Panniers just bitched about it and Egbert waved at everyone, oblivious. XD Of course, given this was a second-level spell, the question then became whether or not Egbert could use it to get BACK – fortunately, as Egbert really doesn’t use a lot of magic and has really only just discovered second-level spells, after a perusal of his character sheet, it was confirmed he still had a spell slot to get back to everyone. Which he did.
Cue a Dex save as Matilda leapt onto his arm and tried to wrench the map from his hand. Fortunately, Egbert rolled well and got a dirty twenty with his modifiers, so he was able to keep a good firm grip on it. Matilda, realizing she’d been made, instantly tried to escape back through the cafe and the previous escape rooms – Dob gave chase, but a middling roll put him screeching across the floor JUST short. However, Corazon was on the case, and as Matilda fled into the statue room, he used Mage Hand to slot the two gold teeth Wally had given back to him into the snake’s mouth and then close the door, setting it on Matilda. Cue the others arguing about what had happened and what was going on with Matilda and how they had to NON-FATALLY capture the monkey, while the cafe lady looked on, unimpressed and Johnny made some rolls with some interesting facial expressions. XD A couple of minutes later, the doors opened again. . .
And there was nothing left of Matilda except some classic toy monkey cymbals laying on the floor. Desperate, Dob resorted to Speak With Dead (figuring if Matilda’s spirit communicated in monkey noises, he could hold hands with Merilwen to get her help with Speak With Animals – Johnny joked that the rules were groaning) – Johnny allowed this and said that the cymbals floated up, ready to bang on command. Dob used one of the five questions allowed him to establish a yes-no code, then asked if Matilda had been sent to stop them – yes (with a confirmation of “wait, was that yes or no?” from Egbert eating up another question). They narrowed it down – was Matilda sent specifically from one of Corazon’s old crewmates? Another yes. This is when everyone remembered Panniers was there and started asking him about who in the crew could have done this (since they’d already ruled out Wally and Panniers himself) – Panniers was like “well, Jack Crackson could have gotten another monkey, he liked them,” and Dob asked if Matilda was Jack’s monkey.
BANG! That’s a yes! However, nobody could figure out the WHY – Corazon was especially confused because, well, even if his old crewmates still hold a grudge regarding what happened, surely they’d want him to BREAK the curse? (Panniers even admitted that trying to kill Corazon was getting a bit boring, and he’d mainly done it last time because Corazon’s dad had paid him.) It was a mystery –
But a mystery that could soon be solved, as Wally congratulated them on their victory, then asked that whoever had parked the big old pirate ship on the beach in front of the “Explorium Emporium” (I KNEW it was something like that) please move it. As the Oxventurers had WALKED to Wally’s, they knew it wasn’t theirs – next time, they rush out to see whose it is and what they want to wrap up this particular Oxventure!
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Victor’s gotten through most of the meat of the new version of Corpse Bride now for Alice. Namely, that in this reality, Victoria was forced onto a date with Barkis, only to end up kidnapped; Emily recognized the name, which led to them getting Elder Gutknecht’s help in figuring out where Victoria was and if the two Barkises were indeed the same man (they were); and Victor and Emily leading a small party of the dead Upstairs to mount a rescue. Still managed to work in Victor and Barkis’s sword-and-fork fight, at least! XD But yeah, the tale is starting to wrap up with the police showing up to arrest Barkis and being – understandably a bit freaked out about the walking corpses everywhere. XD But we’re not quite done yet. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Okay, this is technically a half check, because I only watched one of the two videos in my Subs, but I’m giving myself a whole one because that video was OVER AN HOUR LONG. Yup, Call Me Kevin was at it again with “Did Chamber Of Secrets PS2 age well?” and a full replay of the game! Which you think would take more than an hour, except they have really screwed up how the plot goes in this game. Like, worse than how the movies did Prisoner of Azkaban, and I was VERY sour when I saw that particular movie about how they’d done the plot. As Kevin put it, they cut out SO MUCH of the plot in favor of various minigames where you throw imps into cages, jump around dangerous platforms, and fight magically animated statues all to learn one spell, that Harry and Tom Riddle basically have to summarize the entire book to each other at the end. I mean, Gilderoy Lockhart shows up twice. TWICE! Look, I know he’s not exactly IMPORTANT to the final confrontation, but he was a significant subplot in the books! *shakehead* Anyway, Kevin managed to muddle his way through it – getting through all his most dangerous classes with their horrible platforming; getting caught constantly by the prefects during all the “sneaking out at night” sections and losing so many house points they were getting beaten by Hufflepuff; retrieving people’s lost items for wizarding cards; getting a distinction in the first flying minigame and then flying into the ground and the scenery constantly thereafter; throwing EVERY Quidditch game after his first practice match; and as usual making fun of all the NPCs’ tendency to go to bed at 9 AM. When he wasn’t making fun of their incredibly stiff facial expressions – these character models all had the DEADEST of eyes. Like, the upper half of Hagrid’s face never moved at ALL. Snape was arguably the best-animated one – possibly because he was animated by Dreamworks. Dude looked SHOCKINGLY like Lord Farquaad. O.o But yeah, despite his usual fumbling, Kevin brute-forced his way through the game via spamming spells and running and hiding too quickly for the stealth minigames to properly punish him, and made it through another Harry Potter game! Good for you, Kevin, but could you do these things closer to the weekend? XD
And then, just because it was still going on when the video ended and I’d finished some of my other little bits of catching up – I briefly popped into Jon’s Birthday Livestream of a Fallout 4 No-Kill run. I don’t normally do this – I find the “chat” part of Livestreams distracting, and I like having videos I can just pause at will – but it’s his BIRTHDAY, and I had to leave him a quick birthday message. I’ve really enjoyed his Fallout content over the couple of years I’ve been watching it, and – yeah. Could spare a few minutes to wish him the best and watch him finishing up Corvega (via unleashing murderous Protectron apparently) so he could build the teleporter with the Minutemen to get into the Institute. :)
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – added the latest of the Wyrd Sister Podcasts, “The Shepherd’s Crown,” to post on Saturday on Victor Luvs Alice. Weird to think that’s almost over with. . .been a fun ride, though!
Ugh, yeah, probably should have saved the hour-long video for later, but I so wanted to just get it watched and out of the way. . .I mean, it was FUN, don't get me wrong, but given how late my writing goes. . . I swear I used to have more time at night. I don't know what's happened.
But for now, I do need to head to bed, and sharpish. At least we're past the halfway point of the week! And hopefully tomorrow will be better with catching up with messages and whatnot. . . At least I managed to leave another review for Moose! Night all!
Work – More “quietly busy” time, with catching up on roster maintenance stuff, looking things up for people, and getting annoyed at nothing being done with the credit card nonsense. Pretty typical day for this week, in other words! *shrug* As long as the time goes by without me getting too stressed out!
Beanbags – It turned out to be a nice day instead of a rainy one (though, given we’re in a pretty nasty drought, we wanted the rainy day), so we went out and played. . .and ended up getting the exact same scores as yesterday – me W-2-2; Dad 2-W-W; Mom 3-3-3. It just took longer because Mom and I kept tying on the last game. XD Ah well, we’ll see how things progress as we get closer to the weekend!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with the Oxventure Stream “Chart of Darkness!” After desperately trying to explain himself to the others, Dob was allowed to cast his Major Illusion of the group being attacked by the mechanical shark in an attempt to break the boar’s mechanical brain. He did not succeed in this aim –
But, thanks to another roll Johnny made and biffed, he did succeed in fooling WALLY, who came in to deactivate the boar (yanking out the gold teeth and giving them back to Corazon) and apologize about two turning on at once. XD Corazon promptly said it was fine, they’d just take out the shark instead and pretended to defeat it, while Dob busied himself maintaining the illusion just long enough to make that believable and untied Merilwen. XD Wally apologized again and gave them a coupon for ten percent off in the mid-escape-room-cafe, which pleased everyone. General consensus is now that Merilwen was correct – Wally just doesn’t understand that escape rooms aren’t supposed to kill the people trying to escape from them. Corazon, honestly, is enjoying the extra sense of danger. XD
So yes, with the statues “defeated,” it was onto the refreshment break! In a cafe full of muffins, coffee, cheap stew, and the lot. Everyone happily chowed down (Egbert having one of everything) except Merilwen, who insisted on rolling Wis/Per to check that nothing here was bad, kinda biffed it, and became convinced that everything was poisoned. XD But everyone else had a fine time, and once they were all full up (and Corazon had convinced Dob to pour some stew in his pockets for the road), they were just about ready to head out into the next room –
When the cafe lady asked “is that your monkey?” And sure enough, sitting on one of the table eating muffin crumbs was a monkey! Everyone was a little puzzled as to where the monkey had come from, though Dob – in typical fashion – was only too happy to name it Matilda and try to adopt it. XD Merilwen asked Corazon if any of his old shipmates had monkeys – Corazon said that monkeys had come and gone all the time on the Joyful Damnation, and while he knew Jack Crackson had had a specific monkey named Penelope, this clearly wasn’t the same one (Penelope was in fact already getting on in years when Jack adopted her, so it was likely she had already “reached her monkey reward”). Merilwen tried to use Speak With Animals on it, but the monkey proved to just be an amiable sort who apparently lived in the area and found the cafe a convenient place to eat muffins and chill. The cafe lady was insistent that it wasn’t hers and that management wasn’t responsible for lost property and didn’t care who took it, so the gang decided to adopt it, at least for the time being, and see if Matilda would be useful in the next room!
Short answer: probably! Mostly because, having blown the budget on poison gas and animated mechanical statues, Wally had gone simple with this room – most of it was a giant spike pit, with a plinth containing the map scroll they needed emerging out of it, and a frayed rope leading from the entrance to the plinth. Dob was like “well, good thing we’ve got this monkey” –
And then Merilwen was like, “Actually, didn’t we just find out Egbert can teleport?” XD Egbert was like “oh yeah!” and after confirming from Johnny that the plinth wasn’t more than thirty feet away (and confirming that he could Misty Step any distance UP TO thirty feet, meaning he wouldn’t teleport over there and overshoot the plinth by ten feet), went ahead and did that. Dob had his own twenty-five minute flashback sequence of all the times Egbert being able to teleport could have helped them in their adventures, while Corazon and Panniers just bitched about it and Egbert waved at everyone, oblivious. XD Of course, given this was a second-level spell, the question then became whether or not Egbert could use it to get BACK – fortunately, as Egbert really doesn’t use a lot of magic and has really only just discovered second-level spells, after a perusal of his character sheet, it was confirmed he still had a spell slot to get back to everyone. Which he did.
Cue a Dex save as Matilda leapt onto his arm and tried to wrench the map from his hand. Fortunately, Egbert rolled well and got a dirty twenty with his modifiers, so he was able to keep a good firm grip on it. Matilda, realizing she’d been made, instantly tried to escape back through the cafe and the previous escape rooms – Dob gave chase, but a middling roll put him screeching across the floor JUST short. However, Corazon was on the case, and as Matilda fled into the statue room, he used Mage Hand to slot the two gold teeth Wally had given back to him into the snake’s mouth and then close the door, setting it on Matilda. Cue the others arguing about what had happened and what was going on with Matilda and how they had to NON-FATALLY capture the monkey, while the cafe lady looked on, unimpressed and Johnny made some rolls with some interesting facial expressions. XD A couple of minutes later, the doors opened again. . .
And there was nothing left of Matilda except some classic toy monkey cymbals laying on the floor. Desperate, Dob resorted to Speak With Dead (figuring if Matilda’s spirit communicated in monkey noises, he could hold hands with Merilwen to get her help with Speak With Animals – Johnny joked that the rules were groaning) – Johnny allowed this and said that the cymbals floated up, ready to bang on command. Dob used one of the five questions allowed him to establish a yes-no code, then asked if Matilda had been sent to stop them – yes (with a confirmation of “wait, was that yes or no?” from Egbert eating up another question). They narrowed it down – was Matilda sent specifically from one of Corazon’s old crewmates? Another yes. This is when everyone remembered Panniers was there and started asking him about who in the crew could have done this (since they’d already ruled out Wally and Panniers himself) – Panniers was like “well, Jack Crackson could have gotten another monkey, he liked them,” and Dob asked if Matilda was Jack’s monkey.
BANG! That’s a yes! However, nobody could figure out the WHY – Corazon was especially confused because, well, even if his old crewmates still hold a grudge regarding what happened, surely they’d want him to BREAK the curse? (Panniers even admitted that trying to kill Corazon was getting a bit boring, and he’d mainly done it last time because Corazon’s dad had paid him.) It was a mystery –
But a mystery that could soon be solved, as Wally congratulated them on their victory, then asked that whoever had parked the big old pirate ship on the beach in front of the “Explorium Emporium” (I KNEW it was something like that) please move it. As the Oxventurers had WALKED to Wally’s, they knew it wasn’t theirs – next time, they rush out to see whose it is and what they want to wrap up this particular Oxventure!
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Victor’s gotten through most of the meat of the new version of Corpse Bride now for Alice. Namely, that in this reality, Victoria was forced onto a date with Barkis, only to end up kidnapped; Emily recognized the name, which led to them getting Elder Gutknecht’s help in figuring out where Victoria was and if the two Barkises were indeed the same man (they were); and Victor and Emily leading a small party of the dead Upstairs to mount a rescue. Still managed to work in Victor and Barkis’s sword-and-fork fight, at least! XD But yeah, the tale is starting to wrap up with the police showing up to arrest Barkis and being – understandably a bit freaked out about the walking corpses everywhere. XD But we’re not quite done yet. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Okay, this is technically a half check, because I only watched one of the two videos in my Subs, but I’m giving myself a whole one because that video was OVER AN HOUR LONG. Yup, Call Me Kevin was at it again with “Did Chamber Of Secrets PS2 age well?” and a full replay of the game! Which you think would take more than an hour, except they have really screwed up how the plot goes in this game. Like, worse than how the movies did Prisoner of Azkaban, and I was VERY sour when I saw that particular movie about how they’d done the plot. As Kevin put it, they cut out SO MUCH of the plot in favor of various minigames where you throw imps into cages, jump around dangerous platforms, and fight magically animated statues all to learn one spell, that Harry and Tom Riddle basically have to summarize the entire book to each other at the end. I mean, Gilderoy Lockhart shows up twice. TWICE! Look, I know he’s not exactly IMPORTANT to the final confrontation, but he was a significant subplot in the books! *shakehead* Anyway, Kevin managed to muddle his way through it – getting through all his most dangerous classes with their horrible platforming; getting caught constantly by the prefects during all the “sneaking out at night” sections and losing so many house points they were getting beaten by Hufflepuff; retrieving people’s lost items for wizarding cards; getting a distinction in the first flying minigame and then flying into the ground and the scenery constantly thereafter; throwing EVERY Quidditch game after his first practice match; and as usual making fun of all the NPCs’ tendency to go to bed at 9 AM. When he wasn’t making fun of their incredibly stiff facial expressions – these character models all had the DEADEST of eyes. Like, the upper half of Hagrid’s face never moved at ALL. Snape was arguably the best-animated one – possibly because he was animated by Dreamworks. Dude looked SHOCKINGLY like Lord Farquaad. O.o But yeah, despite his usual fumbling, Kevin brute-forced his way through the game via spamming spells and running and hiding too quickly for the stealth minigames to properly punish him, and made it through another Harry Potter game! Good for you, Kevin, but could you do these things closer to the weekend? XD
And then, just because it was still going on when the video ended and I’d finished some of my other little bits of catching up – I briefly popped into Jon’s Birthday Livestream of a Fallout 4 No-Kill run. I don’t normally do this – I find the “chat” part of Livestreams distracting, and I like having videos I can just pause at will – but it’s his BIRTHDAY, and I had to leave him a quick birthday message. I’ve really enjoyed his Fallout content over the couple of years I’ve been watching it, and – yeah. Could spare a few minutes to wish him the best and watch him finishing up Corvega (via unleashing murderous Protectron apparently) so he could build the teleporter with the Minutemen to get into the Institute. :)
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – added the latest of the Wyrd Sister Podcasts, “The Shepherd’s Crown,” to post on Saturday on Victor Luvs Alice. Weird to think that’s almost over with. . .been a fun ride, though!
Ugh, yeah, probably should have saved the hour-long video for later, but I so wanted to just get it watched and out of the way. . .I mean, it was FUN, don't get me wrong, but given how late my writing goes. . . I swear I used to have more time at night. I don't know what's happened.
But for now, I do need to head to bed, and sharpish. At least we're past the halfway point of the week! And hopefully tomorrow will be better with catching up with messages and whatnot. . . At least I managed to leave another review for Moose! Night all!
