Hasty Sunday Update

Look, I had to answer Moose first so I didn't keep her waiting all weekend, and I had rather a lot going on with YouTube and Fallout today. So here is your to-do list:

1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – after my playthrough, below, I wrote up the version of adventures that Victor, Alice, and Piper had. They’re pretty much the same as what happened in my playthrough – killed the raiders threatening Pickman after said raiders noticed them; picked up his “gift” (aka his bleedy stealthy knife) from the safe; made their way back to County Crossing (getting jumpscared by a radscorpion along the way) and fixed up the place a bit while attracting some more settlers; slept through the afternoon; then finished up the County Crossing upgrades before making their way over to Poseidon Energy Turbine #18-F, killing all the bugs at the front entrance in preparation for getting the transmitter they need – with the major exception that Pickman (whom I left alive in my playthrough because I’m trying to keep Victor outright murdering people to a minimum, and Pickman was classed as a friendly) died in this version of reality. Victor didn’t shoot him, though – Alice ate him. XD Victor was struggling with shooting an unarmed man, you see, while Alice was like “he drains blood for paintings, I drain blood to eat, it’s close enough, nom.” XD Sometimes it’s useful to have a vampire not-yet-girlfriend who has been getting slowly hungrier with every gore-drenched painting you pass! XD Anyway, they’re preparing for the assault on the turbine now, same as me – hope it goes well for all of us!

2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, Jon's F:BOS playthrough, and more AT4W if possible: Check! Managed to get through the lot, yay –

A) Started with the next AT4W from the Watch Later after FO4 times – “Star Wars Infinities: A New Hope!” This is a “what-if” miniseries centered around the question “what if Luke wasn’t able to blow up the Death Star at the end of that movie?” Not because he doesn’t make the shot, though – instead the torpedoes are faulty and only do more minor damage. Leia and the other rebels on the Yaavin base are captured (I presume, we only ever see Leia and C3PO in custody) and Yaavin is blown up; Luke and Han are forced to dart into a meteor field to escape (after Luke, enraged at seeing what he thinks is Leia and the others being exploded, goes ham on some of the TIE fighters attacking them and has to be told by Ben’s force ghost not to give in to the desire for revenge) and end up going to Dagobah so Luke can train with Yoda; Leia is corrupted to the Dark Side and becomes Vader’s apprentice; after a five-year time skip, Han – seeing Leia becoming a senator for the Empire – goes to pick up the now-fully-trained Luke to fight the Empire, and Luke is given the news about Vader and Leia being his family; Yoda decides he’s coming with them to visit the Empire’s capital and its greatest weapon, the now-renamed “Justice Star” – and then the final issue sees Luke having to battle LEIA in a climatic lightsaber duel on Coruscant, managing to get through to her, Vader learning the truth of their parentage and stopping the Emperor when Palpy busts out the Force Lightning so they can escape –

And Yoda using his Force powers and R2-D2’s general awesomeness TAKES OVER THE FUCKING DEATH STAR, BLOWS UP THE IMPERIAL FLEET, AND SMASHES THE ACTUAL SPACESHIP INTO THE PLANET RIGHT ON TOP OF FUCKING PALPATINE. This naturally leads to a happy ending in which freedom has triumphed, Leia has been shockingly forgiven and allowed to become a chancellor in the new government, and Luke is a full and happy Jedi. Yeah, Linkara was like “this comic is a thoughtful look at a change in the timeline for the first three issues, absolutely bonkers for the last, and I will make as many jokes about Yoda Majora’s Masking the Death Star into Palpatine as I possibly can because WOW.” XD A great miniseries if you like What Ifs and Yoda getting off his ass for once. XD

B) Then, this evening, we started with the video from Call Me Kevin I missed yesterday – “I ruined the new Bitlife Business update!” Yes, BitLife recently updated with the ability to run businesses by creating products and managing production and what not, and Kevin’s latest character, Businessman Ltd., wanted in on that action! His first attempt at joining the business train didn’t exactly go well, though – after a rather sad childhood (during which his mother met and married a man named Perry O’Reilly, which hilariously is Kevin’s actual last name), he joined the army straight of high school to earn some cash to try and buy a food truck. . .only for everything to go topsy-turvy when his stepfather hid his sunglasses and Businessman chose to attack him. Perry attacked back; Businessman was arrested; and he couldn’t beat the charge and spent a year in jail, which led to him being kicked out of the army. Kevin tried to find him a decent job with a criminal record – starting as a “pornography historian” and moving to “portapotty pumper” – and attempted to make him happy by letting him pet a racoon. . .only for the damn thing to bite and kill him at age 28.

Well – we have to try THAT again, don’t we? Fortunately, things went a lot better for Businessman the second time around, thanks to his mother marrying a different man (an O’Donnell this time); him choosing to go to university to study finance; and him making the brilliant decision to start marrying rich old women to use their cash for capital. (Which worked out the first time – elderly lady died in a tornado – but not the other – elderly lady divorced him and took so much money his bank account was in the red). XD His career path proceeded to be very up and very down – he attempted to get in on the ground floor of the shoe business (Foot Fetish R Us), but failed to make a profit and got liquidized; then he tried out food trucks selling “daddy’s special sauce” chicken parm – that worked out decently for a while, but Kevin’s tendency to just constantly try to max production as he bought more trucks led to that one also shutting down; then he went for the medical marijuana business – and did AMAZINGLY, as for once his strategy of “just constantly make more” worked out in his FAVOR. He ended up finally just selling the business to a doctor for roughly 5.5 million. And then he tried to get into the adult toys industry, immediately went for edible underwear, maxed production, and bankrupted the company again. XD Fortunately, at this point he was well known enough that other companies were starting to offer HIM jobs as their CEO – and he didn’t even run them all into the ground! The first one he did (I actually forget which one it was) – in the first year no less – but the car company actually did well for a few years under his leadership, and the coffee company that he literally did nothing for kept him on long enough to earn a few million. (He also had his own coffee company for a while, started solely because he’d become famous from all this wheeling and dealing, which did well enough that he was able to later sell it to a movie director for three million.) Hilariously, though, what ended up netting him the most money was GAMBLING – not blackjack, he actually lost everything on that at one point, but then he was dragged to the race track by some friends, managed to bet on the right horse, and won ten million. XD So yeah. He eventually died in his 70s, having run multiple companies either into the ground or into the arms of other people; having been married once and divorced once; having outlived his friend Dick Handy; and having outlived his enemy Juan after sleeping with the guy’s wife and later having him murdered. XD BitLife is getting pretty wild these days.

C) Then it was over to GrayStillPlays and his latest – “When you hit a target at 781,727,731 mph,” aka Gray Plays Stunt Man! This is a game where you must ensure that the stunt person filming the action scene of a movie is sent flying far enough across the particular scene that they’re in to hit the bullseye on the other end, breaking as many bones along the way to earn more and more money to upgrade – Gray wasn’t sure, they were just represented with things like a clapper board and popcorn. But upgrading them meant your person flew farther, broke more bones, and possibly murdered more extras! Scenes included your standard asshole being kicked down some public stairs by his wife; King Kong flinging a woman over what appeared to be the Florida skyline and onto the beach; a ninja being kicked off a construction site (Gray deliberately failed this one until he’d killed the extras on the crane in front of them); a version of Titanic where Jack yeets Rose off the bow of the ship (Gray TRIED to get her eaten by a shark, but no luck); and a scene which I guess was supposed to be a pivotal moment in the latest season of Stranger Things but to Gray and I looked like some rando in a windbreak Sparta-kicking Discount Purple Cthulhu across lava and through a bunch of grandfather clocks. :p Gray, of course, took his bone breaking very seriously, and ruined many many lives. As he should in the pursuit of our entertainment.

D) And finally we had the latest episode of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel from Jon! Today Cain visited the ghoul city of Los (unknown, as apparently this city does NOT conveniently map to any city starting with “Los” in Texas, sadly) looking for his Brotherhood brethren, and ended up having to gun or sledgehammer down much of his ghoul brethren instead. Jon was annoyed, because he’d hoped playing as a ghoul might have meant going in unmolested, but nope, sadly not. He did make a few friends on the bridge into the city – cultured merchant Heironymous (who also ran gladitorial matches that Jon tried a couple of times before realizing he wasn’t getting much cash from his bouts) and returning fan favorite Harold, the ghoul (or possibly mutant?) who had a tree growing out of him in the first Fallout games, and had turned fully into a tree by the time of Fallout 3, poor guy. Here he was just hanging out, looking for help with lost body parts, which Jon was happy to fetch (even if he was pretty certain he ended up with the wrong eye in the end).

Besides this, though, most of the episode was Jon running around Los, shooting or beating or exploding enemies as necessary (he found the homemade bomb in its original form rather irritating, but the moment he took the perk to set it up as a mine, it got much more useful), encountering creepy things like a faux-Satanic shrine in front of a giant Vault Boy statue (all I could think was “if you could mod something like this into Fallout 4, it would probably be a cool creepy quest thing”) and saving human prisoners from holding pens and ghouls firing laser weapons, before finally coming to the torture chamber and discovering the paladins he was looking for – including Rhombus, another face returning from the first game, who apparently absolutely HAD to live in that game or the Brotherhood became “The Steel Plague” and ushered in a millenium of darkness.

Guess who got a “heroic sacrifice” in this game! Not right away – he had time to be racist about ghouls (somewhat understandable given he was chained to the wall and tortured by the leader of a ghoul cult. . .though I should observe that said leader, Blake, seemed rather more super-mutantish than ghoul. . .) and get pissy about a ghoul being in the Brotherhood (less understandable as Cain was SAVING YOUR ASS, buddy), watch as Cain fought Blake the cult leader for the key to his chains (Jon STRONGLY regretted not saving up his points to actually activate Cain’s ghoul ability to heal with radiation, since the arena was STREWN with rad puddles), and lead Cain on a rather annoying escort mission through the streets of the city (fighting off more ghoul mercenaries and dogs and such – fortunately, despite having a health bar, he couldn’t actually die at this point) before finally getting blown up by a ghoul suicide bomber as he finally found the keycard to the “secret vault” he’d stashed away. Now it’s up to Cain to figure out what’s going on in there and take down the new – or, rather, old, since almost everything that isn’t raiders in dominatrix gear is being stolen from the original Fallout – mutant army before it can do whatever the hell it’s planning on doing!

. . .Yeah, Jon’s not particularly impressed with the story either. He liked seeing Harold, at least, and he appreciated the ability to call out Rhombus on some of his anti-ghoul attitudes, but he feels like most of this game is a different top-down run-and-gunner with just a splash of Fallout paint – like, the people who made it were aware of the basic lore and stuff, but didn’t really put any thought into how it all went together (like making giant ghoul enemies when that’s not a thing). He also doesn’t like how grindy the combat is, and how it encourages just hanging back and doing nothing in a desperate attempt to get your health to regenerate. . .but damn it, he likes the guns. XD He is actually enjoying playing with his loadout and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Current two favorites are the combat shotgun (decent damage, fires FAST) and the incendiary mortar (does LOADS of explodey fire damage, just has a penchant for friendly fire – aka setting YOU on fire – too). It is nice to see him enjoying BITS of the game, at least – we’ll see if having a decent weapon selection to play with saves it at all in his eyes by the end!

3. Play Fallout 4 and finish Pickman's Gallery: Check – check plus, in fact, as I was able to do more than just finish Pickman’s! Mostly because, well, I was a lot closer to the end of Pickman’s Gallery than I first thought. Let me tell you how it went down –

-->Picked up with Victor and Piper having just had a nap/cuddle at the little raider rest spot I stopped at to end last week’s session – I had Victor trade out his Alien Blaster for his Two-Shot Combat Rifle (because a) the Two-Shot is way better; b) I actually have more ammo for the Two-Shot; c) looking at the FO4 tag on tumblr recently reminded me I’m going to be doing the Cabot quest line at some point, and I feel it would be appropriate to save some alien blaster shots for that nonsense given alien bullshit is at the center of the Cabot’s whole thing), then he and Piper continued on, down the tunnel, around a corner, along another tunnel following a pipe –

-->And then I heard Slab telling Pickman they’d got him now. Yup, turns out we’d just hit the final area, with Pickman facing off against three raiders, one of which was the aforementioned Slab. The fight between Pickman and the raiders began, and I watched for a moment, dropping down into the fight for a better look at what was going on –

-->And then the raiders noticed me and Piper, and we had to kill them. Piper took out the two underlings with her cool laser gun, while Victor managed to score the killing blow on Slab. That just left Pickman. . .

-->Who was in green. Meaning he was friendly. Meaning killing him would be murder.

I – didn’t exactly want to murder someone right in front of Piper. Pickman thanked Victor for the assist – Victor wasn’t exactly pleased with Pickman’s thanks, pointing out he could kill him easily as well, but Pickman said that they were really working toward the same goal, and Victor killed the raiders without a second thought, so he was still going to give Victor a present. He presented him with a key and told him what painting to look behind, starting the mini-quest “Pickman’s Gift” to pick up the stuff. I debated shooting him anyway, but a quick look online didn’t clarify if Piper would hate it or not. . .and as it turns out, she doesn’t actually OBJECT to you getting Pickman’s knife from that safe, so – left him alive. Maybe I’ll return later alone and finish him off, or let Hancock do the honors. But yeah, my fear of majorly upsetting a companion means he gets to live – for now.

-->On the plus side, got some good loot from the cellar, including a new Astoundingly Awesome Tales magazine that upped poison resistance by +5. :)

-->Going out the doorway to the right and up the nearby ladder put Victor and Piper in an abandoned wreck of a building in the North End – hopping out of the wreckage and making for the road revealed that they were by the Old North Church again. Victor and Piper then proceeded to do a simple loop around the way they’d come back to Pickman’s, where Victor found the painting, opened the safe, and grabbed Pickman’s Knife (I think it has the “wounding” effect, which, useful), his thank-you note (“Thanks, Killer” – wince), some ammo, and some caps. (There was also a .44 pistol in there, which I already had, and a bit of raider armor, which I didn’t need.)

-->This all lead to “Victor is now at capacity when he’s under the effects of carryweight-boosting food, need to solve this while also getting back to County Crossing as fast as possible.” After a little back and forth, I had Victor dump off a few extra items at the dumpster outside of Pickman’s, and also grabbed a few things off Piper that I knew neither she nor Victor needed (like a sledgehammer). With the inventories a bit rearranged, Victor and Piper then proceeded back along the waterfront and over the bridge, past the USS Constitution, then over the NEXT bridge closest to County Crossing, near the remains of two houses where we’d previously seen some radstags –

-->And which now contained a radscorpion which POPPED OUT OF THE GROUND RIGHT IN FRONT OF VICTOR AND SCARED ME NEARLY HALF TO DEATH. Fortunately Victor’s Two-Shot plus Piper’s Fiery laser rifle took care of it pretty quickly, but damn. Thanks, buddy! *sigh*

-->Fortunately from there it was a quick, easy trip to County Crossing (listening to Atomic Radio all the while because I don’t use the radio enough in my game), where Victor reported on his and Piper’s success at clearing out the super mutants, getting 100 caps and the settlers there to join the Minutemen! I promptly got to the workbench and started building – planting some extra crops like corn, tatos, and razorgrain to go with the mutfruit plantation they already had; building a recruitment beacon and a windmill to power it to summon in some extra settlers to help farm (ended up getting two – one’s on farming duty, the other got put on scavenging duty); building the usual outhouse set-up and a bathtub beside it; and then (after dropping the port-a-potty in the original settler’s shack to keep it safe) dropping all of my junk, and then all of PIPER’S junk, into the workbench to help make a whole bunch of turrets for defenses. It was around this time that Victor ended up downright exhausted, so I had him pitch his and Piper’s tent and take a seven-hour snooze from 3 PM to 10 PM. He did some cooking when he woke up, then traded out the water pump already in the settlement for a more-efficient water purifier (as the settlement was just at the edge of a trashy lake, and Victor never has concrete to build the damn pumps) with another windmill generator to power it. And after setting up that and an acoustic guitar on the foundation of a house that remains in the settlement. . .

-->I decided, might as well start heading toward the Poseidon radar transmitter thing I needed for the USS Constitution! So Victor and Piper left County Crossing at 2:15 AM on 12/16/2287, looping around the National Guard Training Yard on the quest to wherever that transmitter was. Another radscorpion popped up as they crossed the remains of the road, but THIS time, it was far away enough that Victor was able to get a proper bead on it and one-shot it with his Two-Shot rifle. :D Nice!

-->They proceeded onward, on the way hitting Relay Tower 0MC-810 (Victor took a moment to raise the dishes and raid the little settlement the guy who had been charge of it had set up) and Irish Pride Industries Shipyard (didn’t go very far in – which is good, because I saw while passing it that the damn place had bloodbugs). A little further along from that, they finally reached their target – Poseidon Energy Turbine #18-F! I recall this place from Jon’s LPs, and I believe it is full of mirelurks! Fun.

-->It is also, however, full of radroaches! At least, that’s what Victor and Piper immediately encountered upon arrival in the front office. Victor easily picked them off with the Two-Shot, including a Legendary. Carrying a Poisoner’s Rolling Pin. XD Oh man, I can already hear Jon’s rage at this incredibly stupid legendary weapon in my head. . .anyway, with them taken care of, Victor and Piper continued poking around the front office for loot –

-->And were promptly attacked by the damn BLOATFLIES also living there. With Victor missing every shot on the first one he targeted the first time he entered VATS! What the hell? Fortunately Piper’s fiery gun helped a lot, and the two were eventually taken down. . .but that and realizing that it was already about 3:30 PM in the real world helped me decide that yeah, enough Fallout 4 for today. XD Next week, we tackle the turbine and make our way back to the USS Constitution!

4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check – did the dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice this morning, then worked a little more on that post I have for my supplementary Alton Towers coasters OCs (aka Smiler’s friend group in AUs) – finished up the section on Rita, and got the ones on Gayle (Air/Galactica), Robert (Wickerman), and Nemesis sorted, with some basic information for each – just gotta finish filling in the details on those three and I’m good! And one ask reply for Valice Multiverse tonight, so that’s all right then.

5. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike tonight, to return to one of my other workout mainstays at the moment – the next episode of James Turner’s High School Years Rags To Riches! I didn’t QUITE finish the episode, but I got most of the way through – here are the highlights so far:

-->James had taken the advice of his commenters and was now having Reginald wear his outfits and hype them to other people in an attempt to drive their hype up on Trendi. This met with – mixed results, thanks to his Socially Awkward nature. His boyfriend Sidney (with whom he has shared some very passionate kisses as of late, but who also he upset by already talking about marriage) was pretty good for generating hype, as was his mother Column, but others were – less eager to promote the outfits, and NOBODY wanted to hype the Batuu one. XD It did result in a few sales, but James is still working on it.

-->James finally got Reginald up to an A student by sending him alone to high school for a day, meaning he is now being pestered constantly by calls from random Sims asking if he wants to graduate early. XD The whole POINT of the LP is to play through High School Years in FULL, guys! And then go on to university and whatnot, as James is doing a full generational thing with Reginald to even out the family tree a little bit. . . But yeah, finally achieved his “A” grade, w00.

-->He also took down a bully at school the very next day! Yeah, for some reason, when he went to class on Tuesday and started catching up with Sidney and Molly, some random Sim named “Ava” came up and started yelling at EVERYBODY – Reginald, Sidney, Molly, the teachers. . .just everybody. Reginald decided this could not stand and – after attending his first class of the day – found her and started insulting and throwing shade, leading them to fight. Reginald won, leaving Ava dazed and hopefully rethinking her life choices. XD He also had a mood swing right after that left him enraged and stomping around the place, but he still managed to complete the day with good scores. Go Reginald!

-->With the money from his Trendi sales and his job, Reginald earned himself a proper little kitchen AND a computer, because James wanted to do some of the entrepreneurial stuff he’d unlocked by leveling the skill, and for that you need a computer! Granted, given his funds allowed him to buy a computer but NOT a desk and chair, he had to get creative in setting everything up – that is, use an island counter and a bar stool so Reginald could use the computer from one side and chop up food from the other. *shrug* I mean, that’s one way to make the most of limited space!

-->He wasn’t doing so great in his barista job, however – a glitch in the system stopped him from getting a raise when he’d technically earned one, and James kept forgetting to clear his fear of a dead-end job by having him “regain passion” before work – and then when he DID remember, for whatever reason the fear-clearing want didn’t show up (possibly because he was in a Trendi outfit – he just kept putting that damn Batuu look on randomly). By the point where I stopped, he’d actually quit the barista career to become a Simfluencer, since that made the most use of the entrepreneurial actions James had unlocked. We’ll see how that goes!

So yeah, that’s about it – tomorrow, last few minutes of the current episode, then it’s on to more “Oxventure Presents: Blades In The Dark!”

So yeah, pretty busy day, but in a good way. And now I must head to bed in preparation for a full work week this week. Meh. Night all!