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Late Thursday Update
Oct. 6th, 2022 11:53 pmMostly because it ended up being a bit of a day -- the to-do list should give you enough of the deets:
Work – Morning commute was back to the usual crawl; morning was spent largely dealing with some online giving page nonsense (somewhat distinct from the usual credit card nonsense, as it dealt with figuring out how people used the page and how they made logins on the site and all that); afternoon was documenting other credit card nonsense and doing some more duplicates; afternoon commute didn’t LOOK bad when I first left the building, but once I got onto the street, it turned into the usual slog – got home around 5:10 PM again. *sigh* One more day. . .
Beanbags – Nope – while today was actually pretty nice out (sunny and low 70s!), Mom was out with a friend this afternoon and came home too late to actually play. (And then she and Dad had to rush back out again because it turned out she’d dropped her wallet in the parking lot of the restaurant. . .got it back again safe and sound, fortunately.) We’ll see if it happens tomorrow!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike this evening, and onto the third episode in the Oxventure Orbpocalypse, “Escaped Crusaders!” Having gotten the cone thing they needed and inserted it into the orb (despite Corazon having earlier been like “we should probably wait until we’re out of the prison? In case it explodes?”), the orb produced another magical hologram of where the next cone-key-thing was – and THAT one was of deep interest to Corazon, because it showed a location he thought was mythical – the Court of the Thief Queen! He’s only ever heard stories of it, and figured there was no way it could be a real place. But no, apparently it does exist, deep in the heart of The Tangle, a massive dangerous jungle in Geth. And the cone just so happens to be in a room full of treasure. . . So yeah, Corazon is now totally Team Orb. XD
So yeah – now that their second location was set, the next step was clearly to get off the prison island of Alcataz! Dob, Prudence, Egbert, and Corazon all tromped their way up the stairs (Dob managing to talk Egbert into using some Cure Wounds on his scorched back), while Merilwen pulled herself up in the dumbwaiter. They eventually emerged onto the roof of the main tower, to find a single small airship flying about, using a spotlight to scan for any potential escapees. Dob began looking for something to signal it –
And managed to roll a crit 1. XD Johnny said that Dob found a “flare gun,” which Dob immediately fired in his excitement – and when he did, Johnny asked him to roll for a Dex attack. Which Dob scored a 21 on!
Meaning the airship they were hoping to steal promptly went down in flames on the nearby beach, thanks to Dob shooting a cannon at it. Dob immediately tried to play it off like this was all planned, and that “Phase 2” was salvaging the wreckage to make a better transport – nobody was buying it. XD Fortunately, an alternate means of transport showed up around then – a boat, crewed by three guards, patrolling the waters around the prison, and which naturally rushed to examine the wreckage of the airship. Questions began on how to get down from the tower to the beach so they could at least snag the boat – Prudence suggested that Corazon use Featherfall so they could jump off the tower and then use Egbert’s fire breath as a sort of propulsion system to get them over the anti-escape spikes and vines. Egbert was totally game, but Corazon said that, having already used Featherfall earlier, he probably needed a long rest before he could use it again, Dob. XD Fortunately Corazon had a cool alternate idea – zipline! Everyone tied up their 50 feet of hempen rope to make a super-long line that Merilwen then fired from her bow (having picked it up on their way out of the prison – Luke nearly ruined things by asking when they’d gotten their stuff back, but fortunately only after Merilwen shooting the line was canon; Johnny was also totally willing to accept them just picking it up on their long trek up the tower). And fortunately she rolled super well, lodging her arrow firmly into a cracked stone on the beach. They secured the rope on the other end (using an iron ring clearly used for airship tethering, Dob), and then everyone took turns going down the zipline! Corazon and Dob, first and last respectively, did great!
Egbert came down a bit too fast, nearly smacked into Corazon (who managed to do a cool rolling dive out of the way), and landed hard on his back; Prudence similarly flubbed her landing, doing a “dancer’s death drop” and landing badly on her knee; Merilwen just came in way too fast, and scraped her shins to hell on the sand. The dice are not kind today. XD But everyone was largely in one piece, and able to see the three guards examining the wreckage of the balloon. Everyone hid behind a large rock to make a plan, and Corazon – pointing out three of them still looked like guards (I thought you took off your uniforms? Eh, there’s a lot going on, and maybe they put them on again for the walk out), so they could pretend to claim the wreckage to distract the guards and steal the boat. Dob went “oh good, you’ve already figured out Phase 3,” so Corazon and Prudence went over to the wreckage and claimed to be from “Balloon Reclamation” (a subdivision of Logistics), explaining that someone must have been cleaning the cannon and caused it to go off. Corazon did his best to spin a good tale while Dob, Egbert, and Merilwen waited and tried to see if there was a good opportunity to go for the boat, but alas – a sixteen nearly convinced the guy they were real guards, but a follow-up six made him go “look, this is all too suspicious, you got here way too fast, something’s wrong.” Fortunately he didn’t want to go to the main prison to talk to anyone – no, what he wanted was a bribe. Which Prudence picked up on and pointed out to Corazon – accidentally using his real name.
Cue Prudence panic-Eldritch-Blasting two of the guards. XD She did quite well, though – not KILLING them, but certainly giving them a bad time, and severely injuring one of them by throwing them back against the boat. She promptly urged Corazon to start stabbing the remaining, rather understandably stunned guard – Corazon, trying for a slightly more peaceful resolution, tried to tie him up instead (with what? Don’t ask), but Johnny won the contested roll and had the guy try to go for his sword. So Corazon is now trying to knock him out with his rapier, since that’ll let him use all his Sneak Attack bonuses. Welp, they gave it a good go! As long as they get their hands on this boat. . .second half of the episode to wrap up the week tomorrow!
2. Continue writing “As Long As You Love Me”: Check – Victor just got a tip from a kid visiting their mom that the third floor has the world’s best vending machine, which he took as a sign from the universe to go up there and take a look. . .and he arrived just in time to catch a guard catching Alice trying to sneak out of her hospital room. And then bash him over the head with his duffel bag – which, I remind you, contains a not-exactly-light keyboard. XD We have hit the “Back On Track” snippet, and this thing FINALLY going full Valice right at the very end. Yay! :P
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Half check – the trend of “only having time to watch one video per night and it’s not the hour-long one” continues, with me instead watching Call Me Kevin’s most recent upload: “The Sims 3 is an amazing disaster!” We return to the life of Help Me the genie in this video, and all the trials and tribulations thereof. And trust me, there were plenty:
I. Upon discovering that leveling up in the Charisma skill in this game requires you to have friends (noooo!), Kevin had Help Me quit politics to instead become a Mime! This required him to go out and perform for tips, with Kevin choosing such places like the middle of the road, a gym, an outdoor pool during a thunderstorm, and the house of that couple whose marriage he wrecked! He earned no tips at any of these places, though he did eventually get a pity stipend at the couple’s house after he served them some of his magical super-hot curry, attempted to flirt and then struck out with the dad, and then peed himself there. XD
II. After treating his guy to an ice cream (which he promptly got brain freeze from), Kevin had him switch careers again to Ghost Hunter! To celebrate, he threw a party where he forced everyone to eat spoiled curry and desperately flirted with the only woman who even slightly liked him at this point in between throwing up. Weirdly enough, she was willing to kiss and spend the night with him, and he even picked up some fame from wooing her! (Mostly because she herself was a celebrity councilwoman.) Kevin decided they should become a couple and began wondering how to break her up with her current beau. . .
III. And then things got complicated when a SIMILAR-looking woman, Carmina, showed up on Help Me’s doorstep, and Kevin began getting them confused. XD He was only too happy to have Help Me flirt with both, though Carmina played very hard to get by flirting with him and then just running off into the poorly-rendered woods. And then Carolina essentially stood Help Me up when he tried to ask her on a date by never showing up at the spot he was waiting at (she was apparently in the area, but. . .) So he went out and busted some ghosts instead, before desperately calling and trying to get her to come over. . .
IV. And then it hit Kevin – a curry party worked once, surely it would work again! Especially if everyone arrived dressed in their most fashionable swimwear! And if he bought a weird bear statue for the occasion! Help Me invited over both his beaus and tried to flirt with them (fortunately one at a time) – Carmina just totally rejected his advances and popped out of existence before he could do anything about it, while Carolina also rejected him and got ensorcelled because she didn’t yeet herself from the lot in time. XD Kevin forced her to not only to flirt with Help Me, but also give him her car, which he promptly sold for nearly $20,000! To celebrate, Kevin bought a brick toy. XD He was almost to the point of getting them to have a baby, having just gotten her to break up with her other partner. . .
When the ensorcellment wore off, and Help Me proceeded to throw a fit, utterly destroy their relationship, and break up with her too. I’m glad to see Sims with, er, “erratic” traits have been the same for a while now.
V. Well, if he can’t HAVE a baby, he’ll MAKE a baby – Kevin ended the episode by sending Help Me into the future with the time portal to explore and maybe design his own baby with someone else’s genes! Not that he could find anyone willing to donate DNA. . .to be fair, everywhere Help went, robots seemed obsessed with taking pictures of him. I guess future SimBots are very susceptible to celebrity. :p But even if he didn’t make a baby this episode, we know it’s going to happen, simply because Help Me found his descendants! Who were even weirder-looking than him, and that’s saying something. XD Ah, Sims 3 – definitely not my favorite of the series, but Kevin definitely makes it fun. :p
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – easy one tonight with one ask reply in the Valice Multiverse queue. I’ll take it.
So yeah -- fairly stressful day, and I've been distracting myself reading tumblr stuff and catching up on reblogs. So now it's time to head to bed and see about getting through Friday. Hopefully it won't be too bad. . .night all!
Work – Morning commute was back to the usual crawl; morning was spent largely dealing with some online giving page nonsense (somewhat distinct from the usual credit card nonsense, as it dealt with figuring out how people used the page and how they made logins on the site and all that); afternoon was documenting other credit card nonsense and doing some more duplicates; afternoon commute didn’t LOOK bad when I first left the building, but once I got onto the street, it turned into the usual slog – got home around 5:10 PM again. *sigh* One more day. . .
Beanbags – Nope – while today was actually pretty nice out (sunny and low 70s!), Mom was out with a friend this afternoon and came home too late to actually play. (And then she and Dad had to rush back out again because it turned out she’d dropped her wallet in the parking lot of the restaurant. . .got it back again safe and sound, fortunately.) We’ll see if it happens tomorrow!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike this evening, and onto the third episode in the Oxventure Orbpocalypse, “Escaped Crusaders!” Having gotten the cone thing they needed and inserted it into the orb (despite Corazon having earlier been like “we should probably wait until we’re out of the prison? In case it explodes?”), the orb produced another magical hologram of where the next cone-key-thing was – and THAT one was of deep interest to Corazon, because it showed a location he thought was mythical – the Court of the Thief Queen! He’s only ever heard stories of it, and figured there was no way it could be a real place. But no, apparently it does exist, deep in the heart of The Tangle, a massive dangerous jungle in Geth. And the cone just so happens to be in a room full of treasure. . . So yeah, Corazon is now totally Team Orb. XD
So yeah – now that their second location was set, the next step was clearly to get off the prison island of Alcataz! Dob, Prudence, Egbert, and Corazon all tromped their way up the stairs (Dob managing to talk Egbert into using some Cure Wounds on his scorched back), while Merilwen pulled herself up in the dumbwaiter. They eventually emerged onto the roof of the main tower, to find a single small airship flying about, using a spotlight to scan for any potential escapees. Dob began looking for something to signal it –
And managed to roll a crit 1. XD Johnny said that Dob found a “flare gun,” which Dob immediately fired in his excitement – and when he did, Johnny asked him to roll for a Dex attack. Which Dob scored a 21 on!
Meaning the airship they were hoping to steal promptly went down in flames on the nearby beach, thanks to Dob shooting a cannon at it. Dob immediately tried to play it off like this was all planned, and that “Phase 2” was salvaging the wreckage to make a better transport – nobody was buying it. XD Fortunately, an alternate means of transport showed up around then – a boat, crewed by three guards, patrolling the waters around the prison, and which naturally rushed to examine the wreckage of the airship. Questions began on how to get down from the tower to the beach so they could at least snag the boat – Prudence suggested that Corazon use Featherfall so they could jump off the tower and then use Egbert’s fire breath as a sort of propulsion system to get them over the anti-escape spikes and vines. Egbert was totally game, but Corazon said that, having already used Featherfall earlier, he probably needed a long rest before he could use it again, Dob. XD Fortunately Corazon had a cool alternate idea – zipline! Everyone tied up their 50 feet of hempen rope to make a super-long line that Merilwen then fired from her bow (having picked it up on their way out of the prison – Luke nearly ruined things by asking when they’d gotten their stuff back, but fortunately only after Merilwen shooting the line was canon; Johnny was also totally willing to accept them just picking it up on their long trek up the tower). And fortunately she rolled super well, lodging her arrow firmly into a cracked stone on the beach. They secured the rope on the other end (using an iron ring clearly used for airship tethering, Dob), and then everyone took turns going down the zipline! Corazon and Dob, first and last respectively, did great!
Egbert came down a bit too fast, nearly smacked into Corazon (who managed to do a cool rolling dive out of the way), and landed hard on his back; Prudence similarly flubbed her landing, doing a “dancer’s death drop” and landing badly on her knee; Merilwen just came in way too fast, and scraped her shins to hell on the sand. The dice are not kind today. XD But everyone was largely in one piece, and able to see the three guards examining the wreckage of the balloon. Everyone hid behind a large rock to make a plan, and Corazon – pointing out three of them still looked like guards (I thought you took off your uniforms? Eh, there’s a lot going on, and maybe they put them on again for the walk out), so they could pretend to claim the wreckage to distract the guards and steal the boat. Dob went “oh good, you’ve already figured out Phase 3,” so Corazon and Prudence went over to the wreckage and claimed to be from “Balloon Reclamation” (a subdivision of Logistics), explaining that someone must have been cleaning the cannon and caused it to go off. Corazon did his best to spin a good tale while Dob, Egbert, and Merilwen waited and tried to see if there was a good opportunity to go for the boat, but alas – a sixteen nearly convinced the guy they were real guards, but a follow-up six made him go “look, this is all too suspicious, you got here way too fast, something’s wrong.” Fortunately he didn’t want to go to the main prison to talk to anyone – no, what he wanted was a bribe. Which Prudence picked up on and pointed out to Corazon – accidentally using his real name.
Cue Prudence panic-Eldritch-Blasting two of the guards. XD She did quite well, though – not KILLING them, but certainly giving them a bad time, and severely injuring one of them by throwing them back against the boat. She promptly urged Corazon to start stabbing the remaining, rather understandably stunned guard – Corazon, trying for a slightly more peaceful resolution, tried to tie him up instead (with what? Don’t ask), but Johnny won the contested roll and had the guy try to go for his sword. So Corazon is now trying to knock him out with his rapier, since that’ll let him use all his Sneak Attack bonuses. Welp, they gave it a good go! As long as they get their hands on this boat. . .second half of the episode to wrap up the week tomorrow!
2. Continue writing “As Long As You Love Me”: Check – Victor just got a tip from a kid visiting their mom that the third floor has the world’s best vending machine, which he took as a sign from the universe to go up there and take a look. . .and he arrived just in time to catch a guard catching Alice trying to sneak out of her hospital room. And then bash him over the head with his duffel bag – which, I remind you, contains a not-exactly-light keyboard. XD We have hit the “Back On Track” snippet, and this thing FINALLY going full Valice right at the very end. Yay! :P
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Half check – the trend of “only having time to watch one video per night and it’s not the hour-long one” continues, with me instead watching Call Me Kevin’s most recent upload: “The Sims 3 is an amazing disaster!” We return to the life of Help Me the genie in this video, and all the trials and tribulations thereof. And trust me, there were plenty:
I. Upon discovering that leveling up in the Charisma skill in this game requires you to have friends (noooo!), Kevin had Help Me quit politics to instead become a Mime! This required him to go out and perform for tips, with Kevin choosing such places like the middle of the road, a gym, an outdoor pool during a thunderstorm, and the house of that couple whose marriage he wrecked! He earned no tips at any of these places, though he did eventually get a pity stipend at the couple’s house after he served them some of his magical super-hot curry, attempted to flirt and then struck out with the dad, and then peed himself there. XD
II. After treating his guy to an ice cream (which he promptly got brain freeze from), Kevin had him switch careers again to Ghost Hunter! To celebrate, he threw a party where he forced everyone to eat spoiled curry and desperately flirted with the only woman who even slightly liked him at this point in between throwing up. Weirdly enough, she was willing to kiss and spend the night with him, and he even picked up some fame from wooing her! (Mostly because she herself was a celebrity councilwoman.) Kevin decided they should become a couple and began wondering how to break her up with her current beau. . .
III. And then things got complicated when a SIMILAR-looking woman, Carmina, showed up on Help Me’s doorstep, and Kevin began getting them confused. XD He was only too happy to have Help Me flirt with both, though Carmina played very hard to get by flirting with him and then just running off into the poorly-rendered woods. And then Carolina essentially stood Help Me up when he tried to ask her on a date by never showing up at the spot he was waiting at (she was apparently in the area, but. . .) So he went out and busted some ghosts instead, before desperately calling and trying to get her to come over. . .
IV. And then it hit Kevin – a curry party worked once, surely it would work again! Especially if everyone arrived dressed in their most fashionable swimwear! And if he bought a weird bear statue for the occasion! Help Me invited over both his beaus and tried to flirt with them (fortunately one at a time) – Carmina just totally rejected his advances and popped out of existence before he could do anything about it, while Carolina also rejected him and got ensorcelled because she didn’t yeet herself from the lot in time. XD Kevin forced her to not only to flirt with Help Me, but also give him her car, which he promptly sold for nearly $20,000! To celebrate, Kevin bought a brick toy. XD He was almost to the point of getting them to have a baby, having just gotten her to break up with her other partner. . .
When the ensorcellment wore off, and Help Me proceeded to throw a fit, utterly destroy their relationship, and break up with her too. I’m glad to see Sims with, er, “erratic” traits have been the same for a while now.
V. Well, if he can’t HAVE a baby, he’ll MAKE a baby – Kevin ended the episode by sending Help Me into the future with the time portal to explore and maybe design his own baby with someone else’s genes! Not that he could find anyone willing to donate DNA. . .to be fair, everywhere Help went, robots seemed obsessed with taking pictures of him. I guess future SimBots are very susceptible to celebrity. :p But even if he didn’t make a baby this episode, we know it’s going to happen, simply because Help Me found his descendants! Who were even weirder-looking than him, and that’s saying something. XD Ah, Sims 3 – definitely not my favorite of the series, but Kevin definitely makes it fun. :p
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – easy one tonight with one ask reply in the Valice Multiverse queue. I’ll take it.
So yeah -- fairly stressful day, and I've been distracting myself reading tumblr stuff and catching up on reblogs. So now it's time to head to bed and see about getting through Friday. Hopefully it won't be too bad. . .night all!
