Brain Stalled Out Wednesday

Yeah -- in an irritating twist, on the first day of my little mini-vacation, my brain just -- I won't say refused to work, I got some stuff done, but it took me WAY LONGER than expected to just get GOING on the day. I was just -- stuck, for unknown reasons. *facepalm* I'm blaming my period for at least part of it, but brain. Brain why.

Well, as stated, I did get SOME things done --

Tumblr: Well, thanks to the brain stall, I didn’t catch up on my Victor Luvs Alice dash OR tags – but I did, this evening, figure out something to put in the queue for tomorrow (a reblog of the official “schedule” for Polyship Week 2023 from the official blog), and I just finished a rough draft of an explanation of my Soulmates AU (which I have to have up before Polyship Week so I can refer to it for Days Four and Six) and a quick thought I had about the Smiler of the “Valicer of the Opera” AU that me and Stretch-Time kind of came up with a little while back (the reason why they wear the mask in this universe – they’re a brainwashing android on the run, and they can’t actually turn off the hypnotizing effect of their eyes). So yeah, at least THAT’S done, and will hopefully be ready for me to expand upon tomorrow morning properly!

Sims 4: My experience with The Sims 4 today can be summed up like this –

A) Updating all my current mods pre-lunch, in an attempt to deal with the brain stall and do something at least semi-productive – I’d tracked down all the ones that NEEDED updates and downloaded the relevant files last night, so it was just a matter of unzipping them into the version of the Mods folder currently sitting in my “Games Backup” folder.

B) Downloading some mods and custom content that I’ve wanted to try out for a while POST-lunch, still dealing with the brain stall (now in “I cannot force myself to ask my parents if they will buy High School Years and Growing Together for me instead of offering me $100 to use on Steam games because I will buy Sims expansion packs more often than a whole new game” flavor!) – namely some grocery consignment shelves from Srsly Sims (which, naturally, should be useful for the Van Liddelton Grocery store I’m making!); a bunch of mods from Lumpinou, including her Mood Pack Mod (and some custom moods for certain in-game moodlets), her LGBTQIA+ Mod (allowing Sims to have more defined gender and sexual identities), her Open Love Life mod (which allows for more nuanced polyamory), her Talents and Weaknesses mod (allows you to give Sims skills they’re good at and skills they’re bad at), and her Contextual Social Interactions mods (adds a few new interactions, like bragging about promotions and masterpieces); and the More CAS Columns mod from Weerbesu (allows you to expand the number of columns CAS has; I picked the 4 Columns version) and putting them in the Mods folder currently sitting in my “Games Backup” folder.

C) Getting frustrated with the brain stall and going “FINE – you don’t want to ask Mom and Dad about the new packs? THEN WE’RE JUST PLAYING THE BUILDING SAVE AGAIN,” booting up the game still in pure vanilla, taking a moment to look at the Gallery (another person downloaded my updated Slip 42, yay) – and then thinking, “actually, while I’m here, I know from the ‘Reginald speedruns magic’ episode of James’s High School Years LP which updated Magic Realm HQ lot he’s using – LilSimsie’s. Why not see if I can find her and download it?” So that’s what I did! Took a while to FIND, admittedly, because I’m not sure how the Gallery sorts things and I had no idea how many packs she used to make it (as it turns out, it’s pure Base Game/Realm of Magic), but I did locate it and stick it in my Library for later. Oh, and another cool-looking house she did, for a vampire/spellcaster couple, just because. :)

D) And, finally, returning to my building save and the Tranquil Circle spa lot! Which I actually had a pretty good, productive day on, I must say –

I. I updated the hand/foot massage chair room to be the one with the ocean/aquarium theme, mostly because it hit me today that, uh, if you’re getting a traditional back massage, YOU CAN’T SEE THE AQUARIUM. So why not put it in the room where you’re SITTING UP to receive your massage? So I flipped the chairs around to face the back wall and the aquarium, redid the lights, added a nice bamboo ceiling fan and some simple decorations (including some plants), and set up some end tables with the incense burners and the nail care clutter I wanted. Came out fairly nice!

II. As for the actual back massage room, I ended up deleting the original, rebuying the Styled Room for personal massages, adjusting it slightly (including giving it the nicer massage table), recoloring it to be pink and white all the way through (inspired by one of the swatches on the massage table), getting some of my clutter and decorations sorted (including adding in the plumbob ceiling fan and switching the lights because holy CRAP were the included ceiling lights WAY TOO YELLOW – I’ve ended up using them in the main lobby instead) – and then copying it three times so we had THREE private massage rooms! I’ve tweaked the color palette for the middle room (it is now the Brown-With-Occasional-Green Room), but I haven’t done the third room yet, nor finished off all my intended tweaks to the decorations and such. But still, it’s a good start!

III. I took a bit of time to turn all the hallways surrounding the center meditation garden into one big hollow square room so they’d have proper ceilings and such – that had been bugging me! I also put a glass roof over the meditation garden in case of rain – after playing around with some fancier designs, I eventually went for a plain glass pyramid, as I actually liked the look of that one best. It somehow feels really appropriately New-Agey. XD

IV. I put the sauna room next to the kitchen again (just on the other side of it since, you know, now the kitchen is nearer the front entrance), then built a big room next to that to fill in the space and be the general bathroom/shower area. I currently have three Discover University stalls in there and two shower cubicles with the Spa Day showers, along with sinks and a couple of lockers. I will definitely need to continue messing with it, but for now I have a basic floor plan!

V. I also filled in the gap on the other side of the reception area/lobby with an empty room of the right size to mirror the hand/foot massage room, and moved and resized the styled bathroom I’d bought to turn into a “mud bath” room so it fit against the third back massage room and was the right shape and size. I’m thinking the empty room will be a styling room, and will use the styling chair from Get Famous so it at least LOOKS like you can get makeovers in there (I ASSUME you can ask to be styled by another Sim? I’ve never used it before).

So yeah – not exactly what I INTENDED to get done with my Simming today, but I AM glad that I went back to the spa lot and got it a lot closer to done. Hopefully I’ve finally cracked the code on that and can just get it all sorted the next time I’m in a building mood!

Writing: The revisions for Valicer PolyShip Week have begun! Starting with the story for the Day Seven prompt “Metamours!” Now that I’ve decided that all the odd-numbered prompts are from the same road trip that the Modern AU version of Valicer is taking around England, I updated the story to reflect that, with Smiler thanking Alice for speaking up and saying she was willing to share Victor while they’re hanging out in their latest hotel suite along the way. It’s just a sweet little story about how glad Smiler is that she said early on that she was okay with them all getting together in a V relationship, because they don’t like to think about a world where they don’t have Victor and Alice in their lives – and Alice feels just the same. :) *happy giggling*

YouTube: Well, I didn’t get anything out of the Watch Later, but I DID keep up with GrayStillPlays – “Which Vehicle Can Push The Heaviest Object in GTA 5?” It’s not the one you might think! Yes, Gray had another torture board from Alex in GTA V today, with a “push the crate all the way to the end” challenge that saw him tackling the “5 Terrains Push” (getting the crate over a variety of terrains, including ice, grass, sand, and a rather narrow strip of thick wood), the “Speed Bumps Push” (getting the crate over a variety of speed bumps, including geometric platforms, giant popping balloons, a large tire, and a spinning tube with a cut-out in it), the “Geometry Dash Push” (getting the crate through various geometrically inclined pathways, making sure it was always in the correct position to actually make it through – for example, it had to be lying lengthwise to go up the ramps and over the obstacle at the end of the first path, but it had to be lying on the SHORT end – that is, taller than it was wide – to make it through the final pathway and its 90 degree turns), the “When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Pushing Push” (a series of challenges to push heavier and heavier rocks out of the way of the path – the first one had to fill in a gap in the road; the second one had to be knocked onto the back of a balancing bus to throw it and the teleporter it was attached to into the void; and the third one just had to be shoved out of the way with extreme prejudice – followed by a couple of ramps where Gray had to jump gaps with the crate; fortunately at least one had a teleporter at the bottom in case the crate made it but he didn’t – admittedly there was also one with a wind turbine in it, but that’s just business as usual), and finally the “Budlge Push” (Alex’s spelling, where Gray had to push the crate over various bulges – small ones to start, then increasingly steep ones – oh, and the penultimate one was covered in ice, forcing Gray to make the save of a LIFETIME to avoid wrecking his run) before making it to the win. Most of the cars that Gray tried couldn’t even make it past the first challenge (specifically, the hills in the grassy terrain), and Gray actually ended up having to tag-team cars (well, cars and a tank, whose turret could hit the crate like a damn baseball bat) and run back and forth on FOOT to get one that had enough speed and power to actually get the crate to the end. . .

Where it turns out Alex didn’t need him to do anything with the crate, it was just an April Fool’s joke. Gray’s angrish had to be heard to be believed. XD Alex, I would sleep with one eye open after this one.

Workout: Check – back on the bike tonight to finish off the Oxventure “Dine Harder!” Yes, I can now confirm that Bush “Hans Gruber” Ranger and his giantkin friend Carlos (the one who WASN’T waiting outside the bathroom for Egbert) were turned into human jam when the elevator crashed. Dob kindly Prestidigitated everyone clean while Merilwen saltily cured her own wounds (8 points healed) and some of Prudence’s (2 points healed, aka one scratch). XD Fortunately the lift operator was also okay (apparently he’d had worse) and not inclined to ask too many questions about why these randos wanted to go to the vault (Corazon’s fake chef hat doing the work here). They headed over to the big vault door, which happened to have a viewing window (a relic of a time where A. A. Tompkin had a stock taker in there that could quickly give him supply updates, and possibly used for tours these days), which they crowded around like hungry Velociraptors –

To see the chef himself attacking Egbert with a cleaver. Time to roll for initiative to see if they could help their friend! Unfortunately for every one involved, A. A. Tompkin got a nat 20 on his roll and thus was able to inflict an early cut on Egbert – nothing too serious, but Egbert could feel some of that 17 kilos of meat he’d eaten start to shift. Corazon was up next, and decided to try to listen to the combination lock on the door to see if he could figure out how to open it –

And got a crit 1. Cue him accidentally engaging a SECOND lock which required an actual key by pulling on the handle on the door wrong. Whoops. (To be fair, though, he COULD have gotten blasted by a hidden flamethrower, like Andy mentioned, so. . .) Fortunately, Prudence had a brilliant idea – she has the ability to Banish people, so she Banished Egbert to a harmless demiplane, giving them all a minute to come up with a way to get into the vault or fill it up with something from the outside so Egbert would return to this plane on the other side of the door! She won not only Inspiration for herself, but for EVERYBODY for that one (Johnny noting they hadn’t properly rewarded Dob for his excellent Ellis impersonation; Corazon for his strategy of pretending to be Tompkin; or Merilwen for actually having a brilliant plan in play for the Wall of Fire (Egbert had already gotten inspiration for a “Ye Oldeneye” pun earlier when Johnny was trying to describe the bathroom’s layout in terms of the one you saw in “Goldeneye”)).

With Egbert safely on another plane (and napping off the enormous amount of food he’d eaten), it was time for Dob to step up! And step up he did, shouting through the glass that he was a security inspector for the vault and it was time for the mandated 30-day password change! The annoyed Tompkin, distracted by trying to find the vanished Egbert, bought this and ended up writing his password on the viewing window in rich tomato paste, allowing Dob to put it in! That still left them with the second lock to deal with, though –

Well, left everyone except Merilwen, who turned into a fly, flew through the keyhole, and then turned back into an elf, putting up a hand next to some sausages and threatening to poison everything if Tompkin didn’t calm down. Tompkin, unfortunately, biffed his Wisdom/Perception roll to realize she was serious and instead attacked her, cutting her grass skirt down to mini levels and hitting her for 9 points of damage (good thing she healed herself previously!). Fortunately, Corazon was up next, and he MORE than made up for screwing up the first lock by nat 20ing the second, getting it open with no issue at all. He then decided to ride that nat 20 and use the door to knock the baffled Tompkin into some shelving –

And then Prudence, pissed off that their honeymoon had been ruined and only too happy to ruin Tompkin’s day, stepped inside and double-Agonizing-blasted him. It was then that Johnny had to admit that they’d never statted Tompkin up, because obviously the CHEF wasn’t supposed to be the final boss. XD But this is where they were now, and after Prudence hit the guy for 20 points of damage, Johnny declared that Tompkin exploded because that was narratively satisfying. Cthulhu was pleased and many many lunches were ruined. XD The gang promptly decided to steal anything that wasn’t too coated in viscera and go have a picnic on the beach – not in the least because they did not want to run into the other giantkin, Anthony, who had finally realized Egbert wasn’t coming back out of the bathroom and had found the remains of Bush and his brother Carlos. XD And so the adventure ended with the gang on the sand, washing off bits of chef from wheels of cheese and waiting for Bismuth to catch up with them with all their adventuring gear and actually tell them what was going on with the dragon up the mountain. XD AKA “Die Hard except John McClane kills Hans and company early in an elevator accident and then steals all the bonds himself.” XD This group, I swear. . .

That did leave me with a few extra minutes to fill, though, so I also watched another Petey Plays It video – “All Alien Powers And Abilities | The Sims 4 Guide!” A very short video about all the things aliens can do, from empathizing with people to pick up their moodlets, to erasing memories (a shitty interaction that wipes their relationship with the target Sim and should NOT be autonomous), to transmuting crystals and metals into other things and reviving dead alien creatures. It’s not a lot, but it’s something! Still doesn’t particularly make me want to play with an alien, though.

Not a total wash of a day, but still. I was hoping for a more productive start to the break. . .well, I still have five days to work with (even if I have to clean Saturday, and we might be going out for mini-golf on Sunday. . .), so hopefully I can make up some time tomorrow. Gotta focus on my tumblr posts, writing, and actual Simming tomorrow (maybe I can get over myself and ask my parents about the expansion packs). As it stands, though, in an attempt to fight off the other possible reason my brain stalled out -- tiredness -- I am making it a point to go to bed at a reasonable time tonight. Hopefully a little more sleep will help! Night all!