Middling Saturday

A combination of the lousy weather, PMS, and some annoyance with my parents (they were having their own drama with Amazon, and then Mom chose to clean the bathroom right when I was getting ready to brush my teeth) means it wasn't the greatest of Saturdays, I have to say. On the plus side, though, I did get a good chunk of stuff done --

Tumblr: Unfortunately, getting up a bit later than I anticipated, making my smoothie, and the aforementioned delay in brushing my teeth (leading to a delay in changing my sheets) meant that I didn’t do any catching up on Victor Luvs Alice this morning. I DID, however, make sure to get all my pictures for the next Chill Valicer save update sorted after playing Sims 4, below – AND I took some time after YouTube to get them all in the drafts with some starter text! 65 pictures, so seven posts altogether. You know, the usual these days. :p But yeah, at least got a good start on that! Hopefully tomorrow morning I can make more progress on dash and tags. As for Valice Multiverse, just the one ask reply so far – we’ll see how the night goes.

Sims 4: Well, I didn’t actually update my mods today – mostly because I had a think about what I wanted to do today, and went “okay, my main goal is to get a basic shell for the grocery store that I’m making for the Valicer trio done, right? Even if I did update all my mods and such, today is gonna be another building day – so why don’t I just hop into my building save, do the shell THERE, then save it to my Library so I can plop it down in the Valicer save once I’m on break and update it there?”

And so that is what I did! Though it took a bit of fiddling, that’s for damn sure. I started out with a really big box to make like your classic big chain grocery store (I’m sure you know the kind, with big sliding doors on either end and lots of big windows in front), but then I started having some real problems trying to figure out the layout and whatnot (especially since I needed both a back room for doing some on-lot crafting as necessary, plus a bathroom). Like, I sort of knew I wanted to do florist stuff in front of the front windows, and then fresh produce, and a bakery section in the back, but it just wasn’t coming together the way I wanted. So I popped onto the Gallery for a bit of inspiration, and what I saw there convinced me that my main problem was that I’d gone too large. So I scrapped most of the build, then started over by building the basic bathroom and the kitchen for food prep and juice fizzing FIRST, then putting them together and building the rest of the box around them. (Though I kept the “sliding door – big front windows – sliding door” facade, as I did like that look.) It’s a lot smaller now, and a lot closer to what I want – here, have some pictures:



If it all looks really basic for now, that’s intentional – the place isn’t really going to come together until I get the Valicer trio to buy it and come down with some items so I can see what fits where and what exactly they’re gonna be selling (I already plan on fresh produce and eggs, flower arrangements, juice, and prepared meals, as is probably obvious by the kitchen). But it’s got the basic vibes I want down! Oh, and if you’re wondering where it is, I built it on the Old Salt House lot in San MyShuno – I figured there was no point in having the grocery in Henford-On-Bagley, as most people there are farmers and already either grow their own stuff or get it from Kim! San MyShuno, by contrast, is a city, so farm-fresh produce and related items would be more appreciated there. :) Or at least that’s my logic – maybe Smiler just wanted an excuse to visit the karaoke bar nearby more often in-universe. XD

Writing: Got another prompt done for my Valicer Polyship Week prompts – a list of what the crew from my Valicer In The Dark AU, The Three Pillars, looks like to various people and factions in the city! I was going to use this for the “Identity Porn” prompt of Day Six, but after thinking about it a bit, I decided it didn’t exactly fit the whole “living as different personas” vibe of that prompt and instead moved it to Day Eight’s “Free Day,” fitting it to the “Outsider POV” prompt borrowed from Day Three. That just leaves Day Six, which is a hard one as none of the prompts are jumping out at me. . . I might just have to go with “Drabble” and focus on writing 100 words! Been a while since I did that, that’s for sure. (Though they are accepting multiples-of-100 fics for that prompt too. . .)

YouTube: Kept up with Gray and knocked a couple of things out of my Watch Later, nice. (Granted, I did also ADD an hour-and-a-half-long video to said WL (part one of Linkara’s Sandman retrospective), but that’s for my long Easter break.)

A) First up some OXBox lists –

I. “Resident Evil 4: 7 Things That Are Better in the Remake” – Andy taking us on an admittedly-bit-spoilery tour of some of the better changes and tweaks in the REmake of the fan favorite RE4! A few of the less-spoilery ones – Leon can now move and shoot at the same time (yes, a standard of modern gaming, but he couldn’t in the original); Leon no longer has to worry about quick time events (meaning that famous knife fight he has is more dynamic – though hopefully you’ve got the parry mechanic down by then!); and – in New Game Plus, at least – Leon can actually end the initial village fight early by using a sniper rifle or similar to ring the church bell (you could never do this in the original game – the bell-ringing that ended the original fight was scripted, I guess. But at least now you’ve got the option once you get through the game once!). Oh, and the Merchant may have a different, less fun voice, but he also pays better for used guns, so – yeah, fair trade, I guess. :p

II. “7 Surprise Shortcut Endings for Lazy Players: Commenter Edition” – Jane, Andy, and Mike listing more endings that you can get really quickly if you’re in a hurry! Only have an hour to play The Witch’s House? Just leave the game running without moving your player character at all, and the roses blocking your path out of the area will vanish! (Because the person controlling them has died off-screen, tragically. More would be a spoiler!) Want out of the original Clock Tower game as fast as possible? Grab the car keys as soon as you find them and force Jennifer to bust her way out of the garage! (However, expect some karma for abandoning your friends. . .) Can’t be arsed to do the main quest of Golden Sun? You can just refuse the whole thing after completing the tutorial dungeon! (Sure, the text boxes say the world is now doomed, but you have Fast and Furious movies to watch!) Sure, maybe none of these are truly SATISFYING endings, but they ARE endings – isn’t that enough? :p

B) And then it was over to the Subs for today’s GrayStillPlays – “Giant & Tiny Cars vs Broken Bridge in GTA 5!” Another Alex Torture board, this one featuring a variety of awful busted bridges (as in, each had a gap for Gray to jump) and a variety of cars, ranging from the huge (the dump truck and the Liberator monster truck, for example) to the tiny (an RC monster truck and the go-kart). Gray’s mission was to find the car that could get across all of the awful bridges – the “Shipping Bridge” (a bridge styled to look like it was on a work site, complete with shipping containers falling into the gap – for the smaller cars, there was also a shipping container suspended within it with a ramp for them to use to make it to the other side); the “Under A Ton Bridge” (a bridge made of breakaway platforms, so heavier cars would destroy it simply by driving over it, with the gap caused by a plane crash – the plane’s tail gave Gray some real problems); the “Intersaction Bridge” (one of the game’s ACTUAL train bridges crossing the Alex-made road – Alex set up a guy there connected to a barrier, and Gray had to wait for the guy to be shoved aside by an oncoming train into the tunnel to remove the barrier. HOWEVER, he then only had about 8 seconds to find a way to jump the train before the first chunk of platforms on the OTHER side of the bridge moved away, rendering the leap impossible – basically he had to hope there was a good gap in the train cars he could use!); the “Treacherous Rainbow Road” bridge (a bridge made up of various-colored platforms – except all the pink ones were fake, so Gray had to dodge them; also there were TWO gaps, with water spouts in them to knock him off course); the “Wavy Ramp” bridge (a bridge made up of large hills like waves, again with two gaps to leap – if you didn’t have enough stick, you were going off into the landscape); the “WWII Bridge” (another bridge made up of destructible wood, with large gaps in the floor and a brick wall that you had to shoot through – Gray got himself stuck in the partially bricked-up gap right before it once – and a final leap at the end); and finally, after a much-beloved checkpoint, the “Volcano Bridge” (a bridge that had a giant gap right above a homemade volcano – Alex didn’t even test this one, and it was up to Gray to figure out that you had to let yourself be hit by the volcano’s spray to even HOPE of getting enough height to make it across to the other side and the win)! Gray alternated between the biggest and smallest cars to see which ones worked the best – and, rather appropriately, the only car to make it to the end was one of the ones in the exact middle, a fancy branded car that I suspect was a race car due to the spoiler and all the logos. Nothing else had the speed, the light build, the agility, and the ability to be hit by volcano rocks and still stick the landing. XD Ahhh, delightful torture indeed. . .

So yeah -- didn't get to EVERYTHING I wanted to get to, but I got most of it sorted! I can't complain, I suppose. :p And for tomorrow. . .well, I gotta finish exploring University Point in Fallout 4 and then write about it; keep up with Gray and Jon for the usual Sunday Shenanigans; try to get at least a few of the Chill Valicer Save posts fully drafted out; and get in a workout. Again, hopefully all achievable! But we shall see. . .night all!