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Busy Tuesday
Sep. 20th, 2022 11:43 pmMaybe not so much at work itself, but the evening was certainly full of stuff:
Work – Another pretty quiet day – took care of the usual reports, helped stuff envelopes for another mailing, e-mailed the credit card company about the last of the outstanding credit card nonsense for the moment (ugh, be so glad to have this stuff DONE), and cleared up a write-off and a few obits. Plus had lunch at a decent time. :p So yeah, not too bad!
Beanbags – No again – hilariously, while it was sunny for MOST of the day, just before it was time to go home it clouded up again and started sprinkling. And even though it stopped sprinkling a little while after I got home, my parents had gotten involved in a landscape-painting show they like, soo. . .we’ll probably just head out tomorrow if the weather’s good!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back to the Oxventure “Crawl Me Maybe!” Bob’s literal interpretation of “dungeon crawl” lasted rather longer than anyone expected, until he looked behind him and saw Dob, Merilwen, Corazon, and Prudence walking behind him patiently. Dob quickly said that Bob had passed his first test and could advance to “dungeon walking.” XD This speeded things up a bit, and the gang were able to catch up with Egbert, who’d found a big old chamber made of gray diamond! :D
. . .Egbert had crit 1’ed an Int/Investigation roll and was just in a big stone room. XD Corazon was like “Egbert, I know diamonds are technically a stone. . .” XD Anyway, there wasn’t much to the room except for a pair of big old statues holding weapons. Bob, naturally, was fully prepared to just go up and poke at them, but Corazon stopped him and said that oftentimes these big stone statues come to life and you have to fight them. Bob was like “how does that even work” and everyone replied “it just does.” The gang checked the room – was the floor a big old chessboard, courtesy of Dob? No – it DID look a bit like a backgammon board, but that was just natural color variations in the stone. (Also, in response to another question, there were no bits of mining equipment or buckets or anything left behind, to stop people getting confused with their lateral thinking.) Were there pressure plates or traps about, as per Corazon? Nope, not a thing. Were the statues magical, asked Prudence?
HELLA FUCKIN’ MAGICAL. Prudence promptly confirmed to the others that the statues WOULD come to life if they were poked. Bob remained confused and asked what even the point of the statues were – like, why would you do such an incredible feat of magic and then just put it down here? Merilwen suggested that a lot of ancient peoples just didn’t have a lot to do and this is how they filled the time. XD Meanwhile, Egbert went looking at the one door out of the room –
Unlocked. Everyone was a bit surprised at that, and admitted to Bob that as dungeon rooms go, this was actually a pretty poor example of the danger involved, in that they could just leave. Bob was like “none of this really makes sense,” but he also didn’t want to fight the statues when they offered to set them off, so they instead proceeded onward. Bob wanted to go first, but Prudence insisted that Egbert go with him just in case.
And a good thing too, because – in an unexpectedly GOOD roll on a Wis/Perception check, Egbert went into the next room (a big old hallway with a treasure chest and a door at the end) and went “Oh yeah, pressure plates out the wazoo, traps galore in this place.” He successfully stopped Bob from just striding ahead and getting himself killed, and Corazon demonstrated the kind of traps they were dealing with by flinging a stone at one plate and sending an axe swinging across the room. Bob was shocked and again deeply confused as to why this was even a thing – surely if you wanted to protect some treasure, you’d just lock it up NORMALLY? He even set off an arrow trap with his own thrown rock and then proceeded to get annoyed at the wonderful engineering and how it was being used to solely to maim, pointing out that it would make a good system for moving water into houses. Everyone began debating a bit WHY things were set up this way, with Merilwen defending her “ancient people were just bored” theory and Prudence positing that this could just be the work of a very elaborate serial killer. Corazon objected on the grounds that the killer couldn’t SEE everyone getting slaughtered, but Prudence pointed out that they didn’t KNOW they weren’t being watched. Cue Dob deciding to look for any watchers, and finding a niche in the wall with a skeleton inside – that was chained to the wall by their neck, suggesting they were a prisoner being forced to watch OTHERS brave the gauntlet. The Saw franchise jokes promptly commenced. XD
Well – even if they didn’t know the WHY of the dungeon, the gang could see there was treasure on the other side, with Corazon using his Mage Hand spell to pop it open and confirm there were bags of gold and silver inside. Dob, unfortunately, got it in his head to start showboating and told Bob that he’d show him how these things usually worked out, and began to acrobatically dance across the floor, trying to avoid all the plates. He rolled really poorly on both thinking this was a good idea AND his actual acrobatics (a rare thing for Dob!), but managed to roll well enough to just avoid a spear trap and a spiked log trap. . .
But then his dice came up short, and right near the end, as he turned to wave to Bob proudly, he took an arrow to the ribs for nine points of damage. Cue him limping over to the treasure chest and sitting on it, poor sod. :( Corazon and Merilwen decided that the best way to get across was to swing – Corazon with his grappling hook, Merilwen by firing an arrow tied to all her hempen rope into the ceiling. Dirty twenties got both hook and arrow solidly into the rock, and they were able to swing across. Bob, meanwhile, studied the floor and got a good roll on identifying all the pressure plates – and then crit 1’ed and tripped and fell onto one. Fortunately, Johnny ALSO rolled a one on the damage, so the trap he set off hadn’t been oiled properly or something, and the axe blade just lightly tapped his ankle. Merilwen managed to scoop him up and bring him to the other side before he could do any more damage to himself. XD Egbert, having seen all this nonsense play out, figured it was probably safe enough to actually just walk across the floor, following Dob’s path (yeah, don’t get your teleport out or anything XD) and actually made it through fine; Prudence, meanwhile, confirmed there were no ceiling traps and just Spider Climbed her way across. Bob was like “Cripes, this is all old hat to you, isn’t it? Why do you even still do it?” And the group –
Didn’t really answer, instead choosing to focus on Dob having been shot with an arrow. XD To be fair, that was the more important issue at the time. Egbert decided he could be bothered to Cure Wounds (everyone cracked up at how annoyed Egbert/Mike was at having to use magic), though a not-great roll meant that he basically just healed the flesh around the arrowhead, meaning it was stuck all the firmer in Dob. Corazon kindly cut the shaft off so it wouldn’t get poked on things. XD They raided the treasure chest, Corazon making a bandoleer of all the sacks of money, then checked out the door –
Which was locked, this time! Corazon promptly went in with his thieves’ tools and started picking. A middling roll meant that he did succeed in opening the door. . .
He just also opened up a spike pit trap under himself. Fortunately he promptly cast Featherfall on himself to slow his descent, and Merilwen tossed in her anchored rope so he could climb back out. Dob ended up doing the splits to allow Bob to cross the pit safely, then used Merilwen’s rope to get up again – Merilwen tossed Bob the other end and told him to keep it anchored. I left it with the others working out how to get across the pit safely while Bob started telling them that there was a surprisingly lovely bioluminescent tree in the other room – everyone was like “DON’T TOUCH IT.” XD That ended the first episode – I’m eager to see where the next one takes us! (Oh, and bonus information I couldn’t fit in elsewhere – Corazon, in an effort to impress Bob, used Disguise Self to make himself look like a cat in the pressure plate room. An affronted Merilwen was like “it can’t be used like THAT, can it?” and Johnny assured her that Corazon looked like one of the CGI horrors from the CATS movie, to general mirth. XD Fortunately he changed back to himself before picking the lock.)
(Oh, and I also found out what was going on with YouTube suddenly “forgetting” where I was while I was watching “High Moon” – turns out the gang have been moving and reuploading videos onto a brand new Oxventure YouTube channel! So the version I was watching probably got deleted when they moved it onto there. *shrug* Hey, at least now I know!)
2. Continue writing “As Long As You Love Me”: Check – I have wrapped up the rewrite of the “Breaking News” snippet, with Victor having asked for a sign from the universe that going after Alice is right – and getting a commercial with the Backstreet Boys singing “As Long As You Love Me” on the TV. XD That plus Nell coming in and being, well, Nell has solidified his resolve, and he just went upstairs to call Victoria so she (and Emily) can meet him tomorrow and he can give them the news. Next time, I think it’s straight into the “Are You Ready For It” snippet, with Victor shocking them with his decision to become the tag-along to a serial killer. XD
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – simple two-in, two-out today –
A) First up from the Subs, Call Me Kevin and “He's watching me” – aka, Kevin plays The Closing Shift! This is a somewhat-janky horror game about being a young woman working the closing shift at a coffee shop, only to be slowly but surely menaced more and more often by a stalker. It’s an interesting combination of coffee shop simulator (you do genuinely have to deal with customers and make their orders; they even provide the right recipes on a handy cheat whiteboard in the back) and psychological horror, as the girl grows more and more creeped out as the stalker gets bolder and bolder, from taking pictures of her outside the shop to actually coming in and apparently SLEEPING IN THE WALLS to get closer to her. *shudder* Pretty effective for a game where most of the people look like photographs pasted onto mannequins and people regularly phase through the walls and T-pose whenever they get into their cars. :p Kevin, for his part, threw away a LOT of incorrectly-made coffees and complained mightily whenever the game threw a scare at him. Like a lady spooking him by coming out of nowhere in the parking lot with her stroller. XD Fortunately it wasn’t too jump-scarey, and it was surprisingly enjoyable watching Kevin learn how to make all the different coffee orders and try to figure out what to do about the stalker. And apparently he’s in the mood for more horror games after this and The Mortuary Assistant, so – we’ll see what pops up!
B) And second up, we had as a palate cleanser from GrayStillPlays – “When you launch a BILLIONAIRE pet penguin into space,” aka Learn To Fly 3! In this one, the penguins have moved from just trying to fly in general to specifically setting up a space program. And it was Gray’s job to launch them, starting with a penguin using a spring and a balloon, and going all the way up to a proper space shuttle launched out of a nuclear reactor, with its own little reactor stages pushing it farther and farther up. Also the penguin became a pink potato because the game made the mistake of letting Gray customize his character. XD And apparently just reaching space isn’t really the end goal of this game – a lot of commenters were saying you can fuck up the Moon if you’re going fast enough when you leave the atmosphere once and for all. So hopefully we may get a sequel to this video in the future! I mean, Gray certainly seemed to have a lot of fun making his potato fly ever higher and bump more and more planes, helicopters, random birds, and space debris out of his path. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check! Got an early start on this – after answering Ace’s FF.net PM (yay!), I set up the Wednesday Chill Save update in my Victor Luvs Alice queue right before my workout! Then, after supper and YouTube, I got all of my Valice Multiverse stuff sorted – five ask replies, and three videos shared with me with my regular RP partner (the one who plays Madeline, her Valice daughter OC). Whew! And then it was back to Victor Luvs Alice to start on my potential Thursday post – somebody whose been doing some Valice fanart asked if I had a prompt list for Inktober, so I figured I might as well give it a go. *shrug* Got a few starting prompts in, will try to fill in the rest tomorrow!
Yeah, lot of tumblr queuing, lot of stuff to answer, but I got to most of it! So that makes me happy. :) And now it's time to get ready for bed and hope I sleep well -- last night actually proved to be pretty good, and I've gotten the room nice and cool for tonight with my fan, so that's good. Night all!
Work – Another pretty quiet day – took care of the usual reports, helped stuff envelopes for another mailing, e-mailed the credit card company about the last of the outstanding credit card nonsense for the moment (ugh, be so glad to have this stuff DONE), and cleared up a write-off and a few obits. Plus had lunch at a decent time. :p So yeah, not too bad!
Beanbags – No again – hilariously, while it was sunny for MOST of the day, just before it was time to go home it clouded up again and started sprinkling. And even though it stopped sprinkling a little while after I got home, my parents had gotten involved in a landscape-painting show they like, soo. . .we’ll probably just head out tomorrow if the weather’s good!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back to the Oxventure “Crawl Me Maybe!” Bob’s literal interpretation of “dungeon crawl” lasted rather longer than anyone expected, until he looked behind him and saw Dob, Merilwen, Corazon, and Prudence walking behind him patiently. Dob quickly said that Bob had passed his first test and could advance to “dungeon walking.” XD This speeded things up a bit, and the gang were able to catch up with Egbert, who’d found a big old chamber made of gray diamond! :D
. . .Egbert had crit 1’ed an Int/Investigation roll and was just in a big stone room. XD Corazon was like “Egbert, I know diamonds are technically a stone. . .” XD Anyway, there wasn’t much to the room except for a pair of big old statues holding weapons. Bob, naturally, was fully prepared to just go up and poke at them, but Corazon stopped him and said that oftentimes these big stone statues come to life and you have to fight them. Bob was like “how does that even work” and everyone replied “it just does.” The gang checked the room – was the floor a big old chessboard, courtesy of Dob? No – it DID look a bit like a backgammon board, but that was just natural color variations in the stone. (Also, in response to another question, there were no bits of mining equipment or buckets or anything left behind, to stop people getting confused with their lateral thinking.) Were there pressure plates or traps about, as per Corazon? Nope, not a thing. Were the statues magical, asked Prudence?
HELLA FUCKIN’ MAGICAL. Prudence promptly confirmed to the others that the statues WOULD come to life if they were poked. Bob remained confused and asked what even the point of the statues were – like, why would you do such an incredible feat of magic and then just put it down here? Merilwen suggested that a lot of ancient peoples just didn’t have a lot to do and this is how they filled the time. XD Meanwhile, Egbert went looking at the one door out of the room –
Unlocked. Everyone was a bit surprised at that, and admitted to Bob that as dungeon rooms go, this was actually a pretty poor example of the danger involved, in that they could just leave. Bob was like “none of this really makes sense,” but he also didn’t want to fight the statues when they offered to set them off, so they instead proceeded onward. Bob wanted to go first, but Prudence insisted that Egbert go with him just in case.
And a good thing too, because – in an unexpectedly GOOD roll on a Wis/Perception check, Egbert went into the next room (a big old hallway with a treasure chest and a door at the end) and went “Oh yeah, pressure plates out the wazoo, traps galore in this place.” He successfully stopped Bob from just striding ahead and getting himself killed, and Corazon demonstrated the kind of traps they were dealing with by flinging a stone at one plate and sending an axe swinging across the room. Bob was shocked and again deeply confused as to why this was even a thing – surely if you wanted to protect some treasure, you’d just lock it up NORMALLY? He even set off an arrow trap with his own thrown rock and then proceeded to get annoyed at the wonderful engineering and how it was being used to solely to maim, pointing out that it would make a good system for moving water into houses. Everyone began debating a bit WHY things were set up this way, with Merilwen defending her “ancient people were just bored” theory and Prudence positing that this could just be the work of a very elaborate serial killer. Corazon objected on the grounds that the killer couldn’t SEE everyone getting slaughtered, but Prudence pointed out that they didn’t KNOW they weren’t being watched. Cue Dob deciding to look for any watchers, and finding a niche in the wall with a skeleton inside – that was chained to the wall by their neck, suggesting they were a prisoner being forced to watch OTHERS brave the gauntlet. The Saw franchise jokes promptly commenced. XD
Well – even if they didn’t know the WHY of the dungeon, the gang could see there was treasure on the other side, with Corazon using his Mage Hand spell to pop it open and confirm there were bags of gold and silver inside. Dob, unfortunately, got it in his head to start showboating and told Bob that he’d show him how these things usually worked out, and began to acrobatically dance across the floor, trying to avoid all the plates. He rolled really poorly on both thinking this was a good idea AND his actual acrobatics (a rare thing for Dob!), but managed to roll well enough to just avoid a spear trap and a spiked log trap. . .
But then his dice came up short, and right near the end, as he turned to wave to Bob proudly, he took an arrow to the ribs for nine points of damage. Cue him limping over to the treasure chest and sitting on it, poor sod. :( Corazon and Merilwen decided that the best way to get across was to swing – Corazon with his grappling hook, Merilwen by firing an arrow tied to all her hempen rope into the ceiling. Dirty twenties got both hook and arrow solidly into the rock, and they were able to swing across. Bob, meanwhile, studied the floor and got a good roll on identifying all the pressure plates – and then crit 1’ed and tripped and fell onto one. Fortunately, Johnny ALSO rolled a one on the damage, so the trap he set off hadn’t been oiled properly or something, and the axe blade just lightly tapped his ankle. Merilwen managed to scoop him up and bring him to the other side before he could do any more damage to himself. XD Egbert, having seen all this nonsense play out, figured it was probably safe enough to actually just walk across the floor, following Dob’s path (yeah, don’t get your teleport out or anything XD) and actually made it through fine; Prudence, meanwhile, confirmed there were no ceiling traps and just Spider Climbed her way across. Bob was like “Cripes, this is all old hat to you, isn’t it? Why do you even still do it?” And the group –
Didn’t really answer, instead choosing to focus on Dob having been shot with an arrow. XD To be fair, that was the more important issue at the time. Egbert decided he could be bothered to Cure Wounds (everyone cracked up at how annoyed Egbert/Mike was at having to use magic), though a not-great roll meant that he basically just healed the flesh around the arrowhead, meaning it was stuck all the firmer in Dob. Corazon kindly cut the shaft off so it wouldn’t get poked on things. XD They raided the treasure chest, Corazon making a bandoleer of all the sacks of money, then checked out the door –
Which was locked, this time! Corazon promptly went in with his thieves’ tools and started picking. A middling roll meant that he did succeed in opening the door. . .
He just also opened up a spike pit trap under himself. Fortunately he promptly cast Featherfall on himself to slow his descent, and Merilwen tossed in her anchored rope so he could climb back out. Dob ended up doing the splits to allow Bob to cross the pit safely, then used Merilwen’s rope to get up again – Merilwen tossed Bob the other end and told him to keep it anchored. I left it with the others working out how to get across the pit safely while Bob started telling them that there was a surprisingly lovely bioluminescent tree in the other room – everyone was like “DON’T TOUCH IT.” XD That ended the first episode – I’m eager to see where the next one takes us! (Oh, and bonus information I couldn’t fit in elsewhere – Corazon, in an effort to impress Bob, used Disguise Self to make himself look like a cat in the pressure plate room. An affronted Merilwen was like “it can’t be used like THAT, can it?” and Johnny assured her that Corazon looked like one of the CGI horrors from the CATS movie, to general mirth. XD Fortunately he changed back to himself before picking the lock.)
(Oh, and I also found out what was going on with YouTube suddenly “forgetting” where I was while I was watching “High Moon” – turns out the gang have been moving and reuploading videos onto a brand new Oxventure YouTube channel! So the version I was watching probably got deleted when they moved it onto there. *shrug* Hey, at least now I know!)
2. Continue writing “As Long As You Love Me”: Check – I have wrapped up the rewrite of the “Breaking News” snippet, with Victor having asked for a sign from the universe that going after Alice is right – and getting a commercial with the Backstreet Boys singing “As Long As You Love Me” on the TV. XD That plus Nell coming in and being, well, Nell has solidified his resolve, and he just went upstairs to call Victoria so she (and Emily) can meet him tomorrow and he can give them the news. Next time, I think it’s straight into the “Are You Ready For It” snippet, with Victor shocking them with his decision to become the tag-along to a serial killer. XD
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – simple two-in, two-out today –
A) First up from the Subs, Call Me Kevin and “He's watching me” – aka, Kevin plays The Closing Shift! This is a somewhat-janky horror game about being a young woman working the closing shift at a coffee shop, only to be slowly but surely menaced more and more often by a stalker. It’s an interesting combination of coffee shop simulator (you do genuinely have to deal with customers and make their orders; they even provide the right recipes on a handy cheat whiteboard in the back) and psychological horror, as the girl grows more and more creeped out as the stalker gets bolder and bolder, from taking pictures of her outside the shop to actually coming in and apparently SLEEPING IN THE WALLS to get closer to her. *shudder* Pretty effective for a game where most of the people look like photographs pasted onto mannequins and people regularly phase through the walls and T-pose whenever they get into their cars. :p Kevin, for his part, threw away a LOT of incorrectly-made coffees and complained mightily whenever the game threw a scare at him. Like a lady spooking him by coming out of nowhere in the parking lot with her stroller. XD Fortunately it wasn’t too jump-scarey, and it was surprisingly enjoyable watching Kevin learn how to make all the different coffee orders and try to figure out what to do about the stalker. And apparently he’s in the mood for more horror games after this and The Mortuary Assistant, so – we’ll see what pops up!
B) And second up, we had as a palate cleanser from GrayStillPlays – “When you launch a BILLIONAIRE pet penguin into space,” aka Learn To Fly 3! In this one, the penguins have moved from just trying to fly in general to specifically setting up a space program. And it was Gray’s job to launch them, starting with a penguin using a spring and a balloon, and going all the way up to a proper space shuttle launched out of a nuclear reactor, with its own little reactor stages pushing it farther and farther up. Also the penguin became a pink potato because the game made the mistake of letting Gray customize his character. XD And apparently just reaching space isn’t really the end goal of this game – a lot of commenters were saying you can fuck up the Moon if you’re going fast enough when you leave the atmosphere once and for all. So hopefully we may get a sequel to this video in the future! I mean, Gray certainly seemed to have a lot of fun making his potato fly ever higher and bump more and more planes, helicopters, random birds, and space debris out of his path. XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check! Got an early start on this – after answering Ace’s FF.net PM (yay!), I set up the Wednesday Chill Save update in my Victor Luvs Alice queue right before my workout! Then, after supper and YouTube, I got all of my Valice Multiverse stuff sorted – five ask replies, and three videos shared with me with my regular RP partner (the one who plays Madeline, her Valice daughter OC). Whew! And then it was back to Victor Luvs Alice to start on my potential Thursday post – somebody whose been doing some Valice fanart asked if I had a prompt list for Inktober, so I figured I might as well give it a go. *shrug* Got a few starting prompts in, will try to fill in the rest tomorrow!
Yeah, lot of tumblr queuing, lot of stuff to answer, but I got to most of it! So that makes me happy. :) And now it's time to get ready for bed and hope I sleep well -- last night actually proved to be pretty good, and I've gotten the room nice and cool for tonight with my fan, so that's good. Night all!
