Busy Chilly Saturday

A December nip was in the air today -- fortunately I didn't get much of a chance to give it much mind, as I was kept very busy by the following:

Cleaning: Did quite well on this – got up shortly before 10 AM; had my breakfast, brushed my teeth, all of that; started cleaning around 10:50 AM, and finished up with dusting, Swiffering, and vacuuming right before lunch at 1:10 PM! (Which is good, as lunch ran a little long today with Taskmaster.) My sheets and bathrobe went into the wash around 11:50 AM, and came out of the dryer around 3:30 PM (admittedly because I forgot about them for a bit while doing pictures for the next Chill Save update, below). So that’s all set until New Year’s, because I’ve decided I’m not cleaning Christmas Eve. Given how undusty everything was today, I think I can skip an extra week around Christmas!

Tumblr: Didn’t get a chance to do a whole lot with this most of the day, but I had a few asks and thread replies on Valice Multiverse this evening, and I just finished up getting the rough drafts of all the posts in this week’s Chill Save update (pictures and a bit of starter text) sorted. So I’m at least ahead of the game there!

Sims 4: Okay, my intention had actually been to do some playing, but because I got on a bit late thanks to my usual “first getting on the computer” routine (checking all my usual sites and whatnot), then helping Mom get some packages inside (including the gifts we ordered for my coworkers, ball bird feeders), then taking a moment to get all the pictures for the next Chill Save update sorted while waiting to see how long Call Me Kevin’s video would be today (50 pictures for the update, 35 minutes for the video), I decided to just go with some more building and FINISH OFF THE HOUSE. Which I pretty much succeeded in doing – at the very least, it is now as finished as it’s gonna get! But I did at least accomplish the following:

A) Upgraded all the bathrooms as I noticed some of the fixtures were actually labeled as “uncomfortable” and – well, they needed an upgrade. The downstairs bathroom now has a nicer Tiny Living toilet, pedestal sink, and mirror set (plus that painting from Alice); the upstairs ones have the same toilet, better shower (Victor and Alice) and tub (Smiler), and counter sinks with soap trays, toothbrush cups, and medicine cabinet mirrors. :) Yes, this means Victor needs to redo some of his upgrades to the shower, but that’s good for his handiness. :p

B) Tweaked the kitchen a little – I moved one of the fish prints to the stairs and sold the other one; rearranged the botanical prints so they were on opposite walls (the pear is now above the fruit bowl); added the aprons they put into the game in some past “base game” update; and updated the sink in there too.

C) Opened up Alice’s latest time capsule to get the librarian MySim – after buying another little house-shelf for her, I decided that actually, she’d fit better on the mantle of the fireplace in the living room. So I swapped her out with the Hoppy MySim (the one in the frog outfit) – then decided that Hoppy should be in Smiler’s room and moved him in there in his new house shelf so he’d be over Smiler’s pet Hypnofrog. :p This necessitated moving a few things around in Smiler’s room – they now have a couple of shelves over the far side of their desk, one with their Island Living treasures, one with their space rock from their GeekCon adventure! Also gave them the Newcrest snowglobe, while Victor and Alice got the City one (which actually fit perfectly into a little compartment on their Ivybell desk).

D) I also have Victor and Alice open up the fossil rocks in their inventories – Alice had a duplicate handprint which I sold, but Victor got a cool raptor claw. I ended up putting all the fossil rocks on the suitcase shelves from Cepzid (hence why the space rock went into Smiler’s room) and putting those on the wall near Victor and Alice’s room.

E) And I moved all but the least expensive frogs out of Smiler’s inventory and into the shelves in the barn, because that means the cheap frogs can be bred for easy plasma packs. Though the first duplicates will probably go into the shelves to fill them out. :p

F) Moved around some of the pet stuff – there’s no pet bed downstairs anymore, but I added a cat tree upstairs, so the pets will have plenty of places to sleep. :) I also moved the Dragon Dragonfly out of the insect collection and into Victor and Alice’s room, as that is also meant to be a “pet” (like Smiler’s Hypnofrog).

G) Added lots more lights around the place, as I noticed some spots were actually fairly dark. This led to some annoyance in the greenhouse, as the best lights to light up the middle were a couple of hanging lights – but as the greenhouse obviously has no CEILING, they’re kind of just floating in midair. Which USED to not annoy me, but then I got into James Turner’s stuff, and that annoys HIM, so. . . I eventually gritted my teeth and lived with it after trying a few things with moveobjects, but meeh.

H) Penned up the chickens! Ended up using the Strangerville picket fence and matching gate, and had Smiler lock it for all chickens. They should still have room to roam, but I wanted to keep them in one place. (Also, most of the chickens are now elders, which is a bit concerning – but hmm, does my setting aging off override the setting where I let farm animals age? I guess we’ll find out!)

I) Finished off the séance room! This took some fiddling – I grabbed Victor’s spare broom and all the familiar orbs he’d collected to display in there – the latter ended up going into the Realm of Magic curio cabinet, which felt appropriate. I also grabbed all of Alice’s collected crystals and tried to find some good shelves for them – the big ones are currently on one of the shelves the egg collection used to be on, while the smaller ones are on top of the Paranormal Stuff shelf, with the bizarre idol they got in the bottom slot (once I made sure it wasn’t clipping). In order to give the room more reason to exist, I also put in a rocking chair in one corner, and a meditation stool in another. *shrug* Fills out the room a bit. Oh, and I put in a cool bat wing ceiling fan I got from a Simblrween download (Crypt O’Club, as per my actual CC file), just for funsies.

And that’s where I called it done, after adding a couple last decorations. So yeah, update after this one for the Chill Save is gonna be “hey, look how I updated the house.” XD But it’s nice to have it looking the way I want it to! And I know exactly what I’m gonna do the next time I actually play. . .now that I have all that pet stuff, it’s time to start adopting! :D

Writing: Got another page on “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” – Alice has talked her way past Dima, Boris’s personal guard, and into Boris’s office to tell Boris that Venus is not happy with her current “payment plan.” And that no, she is not a prostitute Venus hired to fuck him in her place. XD Boris is annoyed, but after Alice pointed out she got up here without alerting the guards, he’s curious if he can get her to do something for him instead. Time to scam the Russian mafioso out of a thousand bucks! XD

YouTube: I keep getting in my own way when it comes to watching AT4W! Though admittedly, I HAD to clean my room, and I’m glad I got those pictures sorted for the Chill Save update. . .but I do wish I’d spent less time worrying about the lights in the greenhouse on the Valicer farm so I could have at least attempted the first one! Still, I’m keeping up with Subs, and I did get in a different bonus video –

A) Started with a surprise video from OXBox – “XMAS CHALLENGE DAY 1! FIFA 22 Giant vs Giant Challenge | Tournament of Champions 2022!” Yeah, it appears that instead of doing their traditional two tournaments of Andy, Mike, and Jane in twelve separate challenges and Ellen and Luke in seven one-on-one challenges, the gang has combined forces to do fifteen days of one-on-one challenges between the five of them in a “Tournament of Champions!” (Because they HAVE all won the Christmas Crowns multiple times.) With “Papa Xmas” (I presume, as usual, Producer Jon in a Santa suit) joining them on the couch to read out the challenges and choose who will be going up against who! Today’s challenge was, as stated, “FIFA 22 Giant vs Giant Challenge” – rather than the traditional “Giant-Killing Challenge” of getting a crap player-controlled team to beat a good AI-controlled team (usually given to Jane), today Santa decided that it was Luke vs Andy in a head-to-head match with TWO decent teams! Whoever won got the point. Andy went with the Wolves because they had a cool name, and Luke went with Leeds United because he has a lot of family who supports them. The pair squared off, and –

Well, uh, Andy kind of steamrolled poor Luke. XD To be fair, judging by his reaction when he was picked for the challenge and when Andy was picked as his opponent, Luke was kind of expecting that. He basically had a lot of trouble passing the ball to the guy he actually WANTED to pass to (his constant refrain was “pass to the guy I’m THINKING of!”), while Andy kept stealing the ball away from him. With two goals and one penalty where Luke just absolutely failed to save a fairly easy shot, he won handily, three to nil. Ooof. *pats Luke* So first Xmas point goes to Andy – tomorrow, we see who is playing what for the next one!

B) Then it was over to the Subs for Call Me Kevin – “This mod makes you a cop in GTA V!” Yes, having done quite a bit with the Chaos Mod in that game over the years, he decided it was time to bring a bit of order with the Police Mod instead! He created his guy, Mr. Cop, with a flat-top haircut and a full set of American flag facepaint, and set out to stop crime and protect Los Santos!

This – went as well as you imagine it might have. XD Namely, Mr. Cop was much more likely to kill suspects than actually arrest them. Highlights from his career in law enforcement included trying to kill a guy who he’d pulled over for a traffic violation via train (only for the dude to just be gently knocked to the side and Mr. Cop to almost die); stealing a fire truck after calling in some back-up and using the water cannon to try and subdue some suspects; attempting to get a haircut and a tattoo in the middle of escorting two different suspects (one had to be his friend as his punishment; one had to wait in the car while he bled out because Mr. Cop shot him to make him stop running); chasing down a manslaughter suspect and getting her cuffed in the middle of a tunnel – then doing SOMETHING (possibly accidentally kicking her) that completely destroyed her physics, turning her into a perpetual motion spinning machine in the middle of his car; glitching out so badly after he reset that he ended up in Michael’s house and got trapped in there because, obviously, Mr. Cop didn’t have the key; calling in every type of unit in the game to help deal with a mountain lion running loose – and then repeating that trick AT THE TRAIN LINE so multiple people would get squished; promoting himself to FIB status and investigating a bomb threat that proved to be a guy wandering around with C-4 – Mr. Cop ended up just blowing him up with his own stuff; and ending the episode at the pier riding a roller-coaster in first person, completely ignoring all the calls coming in over his radio. XD And that’s not even touching upon the “dream sequence” where Kevin tried out this mod WITH the Chaos Mod. . .I mean, how are you supposed to get anything done when Doomsday is raging outside and Griefer Jesus is spawning inside your car? At least in the main timeline Mr. Cop finally took Jesus down and "sent him off to Alaska" (aka had him picked up by the snow-covered police car). Oh, Kevin, I don’t know where you find these mods. . . XD

C) And finally, we had GrayStillPlays and “Ending crime by ending humanity in GTA 5” – aka, Gray doing his own cop-related antics in GTA V! Though instead of the Police Mod, he had Alex-created challenge courses from hell. This one was in two parts – first, Gray had to complete his target-practice training by shooting increasingly-small and increasingly-fast-moving targets from atop a platform, dodging the “distractions” glider coming for his ass on the regular and a random angry sheriff with a nightstick. . .and not getting all the targets in time meant getting condemned to being the “taser dummy” in the cage of painful electricity, so Gray had some freaking motivation to get this right. XD And then, after finally passing his training, he got to be a cop on the “floating highway through downtown” beat, patrolling with his new partner Rachel! He had to take Rachel across the floating highway, stopping crime by shooting bad guys and making sure that a) he completed the course in time to beat the wall that came up at the end and b) he completed the course with Rachel still alive as she had to get home to her kids after her shift. Complicating matters was that Gray was very much invulnerable, so the bad guys always targeted Rachel; the bike they were patrolling on had a top speed of 30 mph; there was at least one wind turbine and one fake road; the bad guys always spawned in a few seconds before Gray reached them (ranging from simple muggers, to evil clowns, to dudes with rocket launchers); and Gray was, of course, an absolutely abysmal shot. XD It took him like fifty million tries, but eventually he made it and got through the course with Rachel – maybe not UNHARMED, but still alive. XD His relief at seeing a win circle has never been greater, I don’t think. XD

Not EXACTLY how I planned for my day to go, but I'm glad I got the Valicer house as finished as it's gonna get at the moment, and that I kept up on my Subs and the first day of OXmas, and that I've gotten a head start on those drafts (a five-post update is a long one, after all!). Still, I'm gonna have to take a good hard look at how I handle my free time, now that OXmas is in play and I need to keep up on that as well as Subs. Gotta clear out this AT4W FAST, is what I'm saying! So yeah, tomorrow, plan is to watch those, next OXmas, Gray, and Jon; play a bit of Fallout 4 and see if I can get Victor and Nick back to Diamond City; and get as much of my next Chill Save update drafted as possible. All around hanging Christmas decorations and getting my coworkers gifts ready for whenever our gift exchange is. *whew* Busy weekend! Hopefully I can manage. . .night all!