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A Not Great Monday
Nov. 25th, 2024 11:52 pmI mean, Mondays are never particularly good unless they're a holiday, but -- meh. This one was definitely not great by most standards, particularly mine --
Work – A rather “eh” day – my commute in was slow thanks to an accident on the highway (looked like someone went into the concrete barrier between the two sides, ouch); one of my coworkers was out, so I had to pick up her usual workload as well as my own – which was mostly okay, but getting the checks in the mail on the system proved to be a bit of a pain; we got a new printer, only to immediately run into teething problems trying to get it to, you know, print things (I couldn’t print my batches at the end of the day as it was asking for paper, and I couldn’t figure out where it wanted it); and I got out a little later than I wanted. Just – kind of a day full of petty annoyances. Ugh. At least I only have two more to go!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Meeting one of our last Sims! Tiny Town challenge! - Part 9” by James Turner! Scarlet’s adventures into cute green gardening continued this chunklet, with a variety of ups and downs –
A) She got her “starter” house with all the basics – James was originally going to build her a true circle house with curved walls, but then thought better of it (curved walls apparently be glitchy yo) and made it a cute little cottagecore octagon instead. Though he ran into some real problems with removing the fake grass floor he painted her lot in to designate it as her apartment (pre-actual-house) and trying to roof the damn house, because the game kept giving him the same error that he got when his entire world got corrupted earlier. And even doing the whole “get the tenants out of there, change the lot back to a regular residential, save it as such, disable For Rent, save the lot so it has no For Rent stuff in it, then re-enable the pack and set all the apartments back up for everybody” thing didn’t fix it! Fortunately, James found a work-around through going into Build/Buy mode in a very specific way that let him see ALL of the lots on the property, not just Scarlet’s (as the problem seemed to be related to the fact that the other units were hidden when he tried to go into Build/Buy normally), but still. This series is turning into a treatise on why you shouldn’t buy that pack! *sigh* But he got it working, and by the end of the chunklet Scarlet had a working house with a kitchen, bed, couch, cute penguin TV, and bathroom. Oh, and her own bin. All the basics! :p
B) She celebrated Harvestfest, but despite appeasing two out of three gnomes, she only walked away with one seed packet of summer seeds. Real shame – usually those things litter packets all over the place! You can’t walk for seed packets! But on the other hand, she got to keep the gnomes, and they ended up making nice lawn decorations, so that that was all right. :)
C) She made enough money from her various harvests to donate about $2,500 to the community center vault, but James forced her to give up her cool bizarre fruit plant. Possibly because it only produced one fruit worth $2 a pop, possibly because he feared a return to StrangerVille nonsense should someone eat one of the damn things. XD I guess seeing the creepy plant probably WOULD spark some unpleasant memories in Krystoff and Pablo… On the plus side, James eventually remembered to bring the rest of the plants inside her fence, and even used terrain paint to make a nice garden path for her through her lot. :) So at least things are looking a LITTLE neater around the place.
D) She finally advanced enough in her aspiration that she could use the Tiny Town club to get her siblings to help with the gardening, but she had to spend a lot of time this chunklet stopping it from thunderstorming constantly on the lot. ...those two things don’t really have anything to do with each other, but I wanted to keep up the “good thing, but bad thing” pattern. XD At least James got some cool shots of the weather machine beam coming out behind the spire of the clock tower! :D
So yeah – plenty of good things, but some real bad things too. Which is how life just works in general, honestly. :p Anyway, I left it with James getting ready to wrap up his time with Scarlet – and then it’s onto the next episode, where it looks like we’re returning to a previous Sim to make some more money and continue improving their house...
2. Start working on Christmas gift fics: Yes, it’s before Thanksgiving, but I really wanted to get a jump on starting these because I have ten of them to write and I want to give myself enough time to actually write them! As for how I did...one-third check, let’s say – I didn’t start any stories, but I at least got VERY thorough write-ups from two of my tumblr friends, Marie and Weird Kev, about what they wanted out of theirs. So I can start one of those tomorrow and hopefully keep collecting ideas as they come! Speaking of which – Moose, Gigs, if you have any ideas for what you want, just let me know!
Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that, while I didn’t do any writing, I DID start on a project I really wanted to do – set up a proper Duskwall calendar using tables so I can better understand how it all works and figure out what dates certain scores should be set on ands suchlike! I currently have one standard “month” table right now with the names of all the days and the date of the monthly “Moontide” holiday on it – just have to copy that six times, add the names of the months themselves, and start adding holidays and notes about when certain things happen in my stories! Should help with planning shit out. (I’m hoping to do something similar with Duskwall’s bizarre clock, though that will probably take some more doing.)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Two-thirds check, as I caught up with two of the three videos in here I had to watch –
A) First up, that Josh Way video I kept not getting to over the weekend – “Wicked Movie Review!” Yes, Josh went to see the movie version of everyone’s favorite musical about the Wicked Witch Of The West, and...he didn’t like it. He took some time at the beginning of the review to tell all the fans “it’s well done, the spectacle is spectacular, the actors are great, the leads in particular are amazing and it’s great that they got people who could sing,” but also admitted that he was utterly unfamiliar with the source material, which did not help him get into the film. He found the whole thing a bit too convoluted – and the way he talked about it, he’s not a fan of “deconstructing fairy tales” anyway. Add in that he didn’t feel like the big blockbuster moments in the movie fit with the stuff that was taken from the musical, and he didn’t like that this was a “stealth Part One” (because yes, it is, this THREE-HOUR movie is only the first half of the musical apparently), and – yeah. This movie was Not For Him. *shrug* It happens sometimes! (She says, as if she’s a fan of Wicked – I’ve never seen it either! And wasn’t planning to! XD)
B) And second up, I skipped over Gray’s Sunday video for today’s GTA V offering – “GTA 5 but sizes are random!” Mostly because I felt it was easier to watch the one longer video today and try to catch up with the shorter Sunday video tomorrow, when he should release another shorter video. *nods* Anyway, this was a Torture Board where Gray had to find the right vehicle to get past four challenges all featuring objects at random sizes – most of which were trying to kill him. XD We had –
I. Find the Yacht – Gray had to find and punch a tiny yacht hidden on a large multicolored board full of various size-changing objects (including multiple LEGOs, a Christmas tree, a Reginald on a Minecraft block, and a whirling boomerang) to remove the wall blocking his progress to the next section, without getting smashed to pieces by the various size-changing objects. Gray found this rather difficult, as you might imagine – though near the end he finally figured out he could get out of the car, climb onto the object the yacht was hidden on (a LEGO block, natch), and just punch it instead of trying to climb his car up there to hit it down that way. It’s the little things!
II. Packing Peanuts But They Get Bigger And Bigger – Gray had to first jump into, then out of, a large container full of mounds of packing peanuts (well, packing peanuts texture) with a large gap on either side; then make it up a hill covered in slow-down sticks through a never-ending rockslide of medium-sized packing peanuts; then finally leap an ENORMOUS gap and avoid the rain of grossly over-sized packing peanuts right near the end. And these packing peanuts were NOT fooling around – if the ones in the landslide hit you, it was almost CERTAINLY game over. Gray learned that the hard way.
III. Stay Big Dang It – Gray had to go around and around a circular course covered in size-changing traffic cones, doing his best to overtake a car that randomly flipped from normal-sized to absolutely tiny and back again. Specifically, he had to get into the circle at the front of the car and stay there for five seconds to get teleported over to the final area. As the game did not count being in the circle whenever the car went tiny, the amount of time that the car stayed big during any transformation was unknown, and if Gray hit the car the wrong way, his car just got YEETED, this was an EXTREMELY painful challenge for him. All came down to luck, this one! And not getting flung off the board.
IV. One Penny Board: Coin Flip – Gray had 40 seconds to go around a big circle “kicking” soccer balls of various sizes – some pretty huge, others very tiny – to remove walls from the path to the win, all while avoiding a giant penny spinning around the area looking to murder him with malice aforethought. Getting hit by that wasn’t quite as dangerous as getting hit by a packing peanut or the Incredible Shrinking Car, but it still fucked Gray up a little, and more importantly lost him time, so – avoiding it was a key part of his plan!
So, which car made it to the end? Well, the dump truck got knocked on its roof and failed at the first hurdle, while the Bandito was the first to find the yacht and make it to the packing peanuts –
And then it and almost every other car Gray tried died to the packing peanuts avalanche in the middle of that challenge. Power Wheels Quad? Destroyed. Cloth-top convertible? Mangled. Trophy Truck? Got SO close and then was slammed back down every single time. It eventually came down to the super car and the Liberator monster truck as the only cars left –
And fortunately for Gray, picking the super car was the right choice, as it managed to get past all the other challenges. Not prettily, mind – while it had the least amount of trouble with the packing peanuts, it suffered a lot in the last two challenges, losing large chunks of itself to that damn penny in particular. But it got through everything and made it to the end, and that’s what matters!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: ...no check, unfortunately – I was too busy getting everything else done, including taking all those notes for the gift fics. *sigh* Maybe tomorrow I can get something done.
Yeah, I'm not happy about not getting any actual writing done, nor anything on the tumblr queue. I'm really hoping tomorrow is better in those two regards. As it stands, I've gotta hit the sheets -- night all!
Work – A rather “eh” day – my commute in was slow thanks to an accident on the highway (looked like someone went into the concrete barrier between the two sides, ouch); one of my coworkers was out, so I had to pick up her usual workload as well as my own – which was mostly okay, but getting the checks in the mail on the system proved to be a bit of a pain; we got a new printer, only to immediately run into teething problems trying to get it to, you know, print things (I couldn’t print my batches at the end of the day as it was asking for paper, and I couldn’t figure out where it wanted it); and I got out a little later than I wanted. Just – kind of a day full of petty annoyances. Ugh. At least I only have two more to go!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Meeting one of our last Sims! Tiny Town challenge! - Part 9” by James Turner! Scarlet’s adventures into cute green gardening continued this chunklet, with a variety of ups and downs –
A) She got her “starter” house with all the basics – James was originally going to build her a true circle house with curved walls, but then thought better of it (curved walls apparently be glitchy yo) and made it a cute little cottagecore octagon instead. Though he ran into some real problems with removing the fake grass floor he painted her lot in to designate it as her apartment (pre-actual-house) and trying to roof the damn house, because the game kept giving him the same error that he got when his entire world got corrupted earlier. And even doing the whole “get the tenants out of there, change the lot back to a regular residential, save it as such, disable For Rent, save the lot so it has no For Rent stuff in it, then re-enable the pack and set all the apartments back up for everybody” thing didn’t fix it! Fortunately, James found a work-around through going into Build/Buy mode in a very specific way that let him see ALL of the lots on the property, not just Scarlet’s (as the problem seemed to be related to the fact that the other units were hidden when he tried to go into Build/Buy normally), but still. This series is turning into a treatise on why you shouldn’t buy that pack! *sigh* But he got it working, and by the end of the chunklet Scarlet had a working house with a kitchen, bed, couch, cute penguin TV, and bathroom. Oh, and her own bin. All the basics! :p
B) She celebrated Harvestfest, but despite appeasing two out of three gnomes, she only walked away with one seed packet of summer seeds. Real shame – usually those things litter packets all over the place! You can’t walk for seed packets! But on the other hand, she got to keep the gnomes, and they ended up making nice lawn decorations, so that that was all right. :)
C) She made enough money from her various harvests to donate about $2,500 to the community center vault, but James forced her to give up her cool bizarre fruit plant. Possibly because it only produced one fruit worth $2 a pop, possibly because he feared a return to StrangerVille nonsense should someone eat one of the damn things. XD I guess seeing the creepy plant probably WOULD spark some unpleasant memories in Krystoff and Pablo… On the plus side, James eventually remembered to bring the rest of the plants inside her fence, and even used terrain paint to make a nice garden path for her through her lot. :) So at least things are looking a LITTLE neater around the place.
D) She finally advanced enough in her aspiration that she could use the Tiny Town club to get her siblings to help with the gardening, but she had to spend a lot of time this chunklet stopping it from thunderstorming constantly on the lot. ...those two things don’t really have anything to do with each other, but I wanted to keep up the “good thing, but bad thing” pattern. XD At least James got some cool shots of the weather machine beam coming out behind the spire of the clock tower! :D
So yeah – plenty of good things, but some real bad things too. Which is how life just works in general, honestly. :p Anyway, I left it with James getting ready to wrap up his time with Scarlet – and then it’s onto the next episode, where it looks like we’re returning to a previous Sim to make some more money and continue improving their house...
2. Start working on Christmas gift fics: Yes, it’s before Thanksgiving, but I really wanted to get a jump on starting these because I have ten of them to write and I want to give myself enough time to actually write them! As for how I did...one-third check, let’s say – I didn’t start any stories, but I at least got VERY thorough write-ups from two of my tumblr friends, Marie and Weird Kev, about what they wanted out of theirs. So I can start one of those tomorrow and hopefully keep collecting ideas as they come! Speaking of which – Moose, Gigs, if you have any ideas for what you want, just let me know!
Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that, while I didn’t do any writing, I DID start on a project I really wanted to do – set up a proper Duskwall calendar using tables so I can better understand how it all works and figure out what dates certain scores should be set on ands suchlike! I currently have one standard “month” table right now with the names of all the days and the date of the monthly “Moontide” holiday on it – just have to copy that six times, add the names of the months themselves, and start adding holidays and notes about when certain things happen in my stories! Should help with planning shit out. (I’m hoping to do something similar with Duskwall’s bizarre clock, though that will probably take some more doing.)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Two-thirds check, as I caught up with two of the three videos in here I had to watch –
A) First up, that Josh Way video I kept not getting to over the weekend – “Wicked Movie Review!” Yes, Josh went to see the movie version of everyone’s favorite musical about the Wicked Witch Of The West, and...he didn’t like it. He took some time at the beginning of the review to tell all the fans “it’s well done, the spectacle is spectacular, the actors are great, the leads in particular are amazing and it’s great that they got people who could sing,” but also admitted that he was utterly unfamiliar with the source material, which did not help him get into the film. He found the whole thing a bit too convoluted – and the way he talked about it, he’s not a fan of “deconstructing fairy tales” anyway. Add in that he didn’t feel like the big blockbuster moments in the movie fit with the stuff that was taken from the musical, and he didn’t like that this was a “stealth Part One” (because yes, it is, this THREE-HOUR movie is only the first half of the musical apparently), and – yeah. This movie was Not For Him. *shrug* It happens sometimes! (She says, as if she’s a fan of Wicked – I’ve never seen it either! And wasn’t planning to! XD)
B) And second up, I skipped over Gray’s Sunday video for today’s GTA V offering – “GTA 5 but sizes are random!” Mostly because I felt it was easier to watch the one longer video today and try to catch up with the shorter Sunday video tomorrow, when he should release another shorter video. *nods* Anyway, this was a Torture Board where Gray had to find the right vehicle to get past four challenges all featuring objects at random sizes – most of which were trying to kill him. XD We had –
I. Find the Yacht – Gray had to find and punch a tiny yacht hidden on a large multicolored board full of various size-changing objects (including multiple LEGOs, a Christmas tree, a Reginald on a Minecraft block, and a whirling boomerang) to remove the wall blocking his progress to the next section, without getting smashed to pieces by the various size-changing objects. Gray found this rather difficult, as you might imagine – though near the end he finally figured out he could get out of the car, climb onto the object the yacht was hidden on (a LEGO block, natch), and just punch it instead of trying to climb his car up there to hit it down that way. It’s the little things!
II. Packing Peanuts But They Get Bigger And Bigger – Gray had to first jump into, then out of, a large container full of mounds of packing peanuts (well, packing peanuts texture) with a large gap on either side; then make it up a hill covered in slow-down sticks through a never-ending rockslide of medium-sized packing peanuts; then finally leap an ENORMOUS gap and avoid the rain of grossly over-sized packing peanuts right near the end. And these packing peanuts were NOT fooling around – if the ones in the landslide hit you, it was almost CERTAINLY game over. Gray learned that the hard way.
III. Stay Big Dang It – Gray had to go around and around a circular course covered in size-changing traffic cones, doing his best to overtake a car that randomly flipped from normal-sized to absolutely tiny and back again. Specifically, he had to get into the circle at the front of the car and stay there for five seconds to get teleported over to the final area. As the game did not count being in the circle whenever the car went tiny, the amount of time that the car stayed big during any transformation was unknown, and if Gray hit the car the wrong way, his car just got YEETED, this was an EXTREMELY painful challenge for him. All came down to luck, this one! And not getting flung off the board.
IV. One Penny Board: Coin Flip – Gray had 40 seconds to go around a big circle “kicking” soccer balls of various sizes – some pretty huge, others very tiny – to remove walls from the path to the win, all while avoiding a giant penny spinning around the area looking to murder him with malice aforethought. Getting hit by that wasn’t quite as dangerous as getting hit by a packing peanut or the Incredible Shrinking Car, but it still fucked Gray up a little, and more importantly lost him time, so – avoiding it was a key part of his plan!
So, which car made it to the end? Well, the dump truck got knocked on its roof and failed at the first hurdle, while the Bandito was the first to find the yacht and make it to the packing peanuts –
And then it and almost every other car Gray tried died to the packing peanuts avalanche in the middle of that challenge. Power Wheels Quad? Destroyed. Cloth-top convertible? Mangled. Trophy Truck? Got SO close and then was slammed back down every single time. It eventually came down to the super car and the Liberator monster truck as the only cars left –
And fortunately for Gray, picking the super car was the right choice, as it managed to get past all the other challenges. Not prettily, mind – while it had the least amount of trouble with the packing peanuts, it suffered a lot in the last two challenges, losing large chunks of itself to that damn penny in particular. But it got through everything and made it to the end, and that’s what matters!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: ...no check, unfortunately – I was too busy getting everything else done, including taking all those notes for the gift fics. *sigh* Maybe tomorrow I can get something done.
Yeah, I'm not happy about not getting any actual writing done, nor anything on the tumblr queue. I'm really hoping tomorrow is better in those two regards. As it stands, I've gotta hit the sheets -- night all!
