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Snow Squall Tuesday
Apr. 8th, 2025 11:49 pmYes, we actually had some fucking SNOW today -- mixed in with rain, granted, and nothing that stuck, but still -- for a few minutes around 11:30 this morning, we had a lot of big wet flakes coming down! O.o And then it all went away and it got sunny out for the rest of the day. *shakehead* New England weather, people -- you seriously never know what you're going to get. (Besides wind -- lately, you can always count on lots and lots of wind.)
Anyway -- here's how my day went beyond looking out the window and being shocked to see snow:
Work – An okay day at work – I spent most of it working through the exceptions we got back from our processors, going through the notes and figuring out what to do with all of them. Wrote off a pledge, contacted someone about a failed credit card, changed one lady’s parish because the wrong one appeared on her pledge billing and set her up on automatic payments – that sort of stuff. Also took a couple of credit card calls (one of which required me to make an entirely new profile for the caller) and did a bit of roster maintenance. *shrug* Nothing particularly special! We’ll see how tomorrow goes!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike tonight, and back with the second half of “Semaj really sucks in The Sims 2 Rags to Riches - Part 5” by James Turner! (Plus a rewatch of the Alice: Madness Returns release trailer to fill out the last couple of minutes.) The back half of the episode saw James trying to help Iled and Semaj juggle both parenthood and business ownership, and having limited success:
A) On the parenthood side, Iled did a FANTASTIC job of raising toddler Reswob, using the power of Smart Milk to smash out potty-training, walking, and a nursery rhyme in basically one day! (All while pregnant with her next kid, mind! Though, admittedly, the snapdragons all over the shop probably helped with that. XD) Semaj also gave him a little love near the end of the episode (after James noticed that Reswob barely even knew his father), and by fulfilling his wants to be talked to and played with, he and Iled were able to guarantee that he grew up well, with platinum aspiration. He is now a cute little kid with bear foot slippers. :) And as for the new baby, he was born right before Reswob aged up, and was christened “Noulg” – aka “Gluon” backwards! Rather sweet of James to add his friend’s name in that way, actually. Even if it was partially because he couldn’t name the kid after his other dog, Frannie. :p
B) On the STORE side, however – well, Semaj insisted on serving customers in his leopard-print undies, showing off his spaghetti gut, so… XD A little more seriously, James had some issues with customers claiming that Semaj had asked them to spend the night, but then wouldn’t let them sleep, despite the fact that James had done no such thing (the comments suggest that it’s because of the “poison” snapdragons he’s trying to sell dropping everyone’s needs); a customer passing out at the back, right by those poison snapdragons (yeah, seems like you should maybe junk the green-mist ones, buddy?); and everyone hating the outside of the store because of all the cockroach corpses yet to be cleaned up (Semaj eventually resorted to turning on his personal cleanbot to help with disposal...which ended up breaking and starting to sneeze trash everywhere, so it had to be hastily turned off XD). He also couldn’t get the business up above rank five because he kept gaining and losing stars that kept him bouncing between that and rank four (mostly because Semaj got the Gold Sales badge, but kept failing to properly Dazzle people to buy stuff afterward). So, to help with the chaos, he hired some employees! A dude to play cashier (don’t remember his name) and a lady, Gina, to help do sales. They both do good work (with Gina in particular earning Sales badges pretty fast), though James has a problem with getting the cashier to actually go home at the end of the day – for some reason he seems to end up trapped behind his counter a lot! Plus there’s no staff room, so when Semaj told Gina to take a break, she ended up going upstairs to sleep in his and Iled’s bed. XD But at least Semaj doesn’t have to do everything by himself while Iled does the “Super Mum” thing!
So yeah – pretty busy second half! But the episode ended with the happy family getting ready to sit down to cake with their newly-aged-up son, and James making plans to try and either transition the store to selling stuff out of the catalog (as crafting all their own items is a bit tricky these days) or maybe hiring an employee to craft for them. And maybe going on vacation again to see if he could learn the secrets of teleportation and a way to keep their energy need up for longer. Of course, all of that is dependent on the save file not breaking, and James was getting a LOT of “bad object” errors in this one… I guess we’ll see what happens if a Part 6 ever shows up!
2. Continue working on “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – finished off Alice’s time at the Last Round tonight, with her accepting Damsel’s offer to spy on LaCroix for the Anarchs, and telling the trio about her upcoming trip to Grout’s to see why he wasn’t talking to any of the other primogen as a “freebie.” Which worried Nines, as he remembered Grout as someone who loved logic and reason (despite being a Malkavian), and wasn’t always shy about pointing out the bullshit – so for him to go missing...he didn’t like it. At all. Alice promised to let him know what went down when she visited him, then headed out, grumbling to Wonderland about how Damsel and Skelter piss her off, and how the Camarilla pays better...but also how she hates LaCroix and is only too willing to sell him out to Nines. Basically, she’s not really keen on either side right now, and Caterpillar has kind of counseled that she should keep it that way. XD Tomorrow, we should be able to wrap up this latest chapter with Alice heading home to Skyeline and meeting up with Victor, yay!
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Substitution Check – it was another Tuesday without anything in my Subs, so instead I checked out the following –
A) First, before getting into my writing, I watched another one of James’s shorts because I’d seen the thumbnail and was curious: “This is how The Sims 4 aged my child into a teen!” Which consisted of James’s shocked and baffled reaction to the game aging up Sandalwood Bigwallet from a beautiful little child with a giant mop of brown curly hair into an old man teenager with horrible neon face make-up and a pitch black werewolf form. XD Like, we all know The Sims 4 makes bad decisions, that’s how townie fashion comes into being, but – why. XD
B) And second, after my writing and my dessert, I watched yet more of CaFae Latte by C. M. Alongi – “CaFae Latte Season 37 - TikTok Compilation” to be exact! This video was all about Ghost Hunter John and King Herla of the Wild Hunt sort of teaming up to deal with a badly-haunted house inhabited by the spirit of a vengeful witch, Eliza, who fancied herself “Queen of Minnesota” material and all the people she’d murdered to start forming a ghost army. And by “sort of teaming up,” I mean “King Herla showed up to just brute force all the ghosts into cages with his Wild Hunt, only for John to make him stay outside with a walkie-talkie while he interviewed the current owner, then Eliza herself, to make him understand that only ONE ghost needed to be shoved in a cage.” Featured such things as Herla’s own Fae lieutenant listening to Herla rant about John’s pride and going “oh sure, he’s the proud one” under his breath; John managing to get Eliza to reveal her evil plan without ever tipping his hand about his recorder pen transmitting it all to Herla (despite having to get very specific about where they were standing at the end); Herla smashing through a window to get Eliza because it was “faster and more dramatic,” then complaining about the glass in his hair; the reveal that the current owner, Mr. Benson, had actually died himself ages ago, when John tried to apologize to him about the smashed window and found himself looking at a skeleton; and John calling Herla out on using his grief over the loss of his world and family to be an asshole...by revealing he too lost his entire family ten years ago (drunk driver killed his wife, four-year-old-daughter, and infant son while they were driving to his in-laws’ house). And that, while it still hurt, he had managed to heal from it. Yeah, some heavy stuff at the end there, but it was handled well, and it might lead to Herla getting some actual therapy to deal with his issues. We will see when we next encounter them!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – I am very pleased to say that, through judicious use of getting stuff out of my drafts already and reblogging old posts, I set up my queue for the rest of the week over here tonight! We have:
A) A reblog of a OT3 prompt I found back near the end of last year about a matchmaker who falls in love with the people they’re matchmaking, with one being really tall, one being average height, and one small for Wednesday! As I noted in my tags, this is basically an ideal Valicer AU situation, with Smiler being the average matchmaker trying to get tall Victor and small Alice together, only to realize, whoops, fell in love with Victor myself. XD Good stuff!
B) A reblog of a jokey paragraph of “description” for a character that is pretty much entirely tautological and gives no useful information for Thursday – “He was as tall as he was tall, and his eyes were the color they were,” to quote the first line. XD I first stuck this in my drafts when I was just thinking about updating Chapter Two of “Start At The Beginning...Sort Of” to include a proper description of Smiler, with my tags reflecting my worries that my attempt to actually say what they look like would end up like this – meaning that, now that I’ve actually started working on said description, I had to update the tags accordingly before sticking it in the queue. Not much, but I wanted to make sure they accurately reflected my current writing situation!
C) A reblog of a screenshot of a tweet about how EVERYTHING can be an AU for your favorite ship if you’re deranged enough for Friday – look me in the eye and tell me that this post is not the Most Me post you have ever heard of. XD You’re talking to someone who covered ten different Valicer (and larger polycules) AUs over the course of Multiamory March. I had to reblog this.
D) And a reblog of my old Song Saturday post for the song “Beautiful Soul” by Jesse McCartney for Saturday! Went on a trawl of some of my older Song Saturday stuff again, found this, and decided I liked it enough to give it another showing. :) Ended up going “I should link this to my Valicer Soulmate AU” in the tags and deciding that the AU’s fanfic title name is “You And Your Beautiful Souls” now. *facepalm* One day I will either find the willpower not to name all these AUs, or the time to write them all properly. (Probably the former, but I’m not holding my breath.)
Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had two things for the queue tonight:
A) Another reblog on the “Forgotten Vows Alice meets Richard Lewis” thread with The Coven Wars – Richard was surprised to hear that Alice too hallucinates, and Alice, realizing he was a Kindred spirit, told him about how she sees Wonderland sometimes! And is followed around by the residents giving commentary. XD We’ll see how he reacts to that later!
B) And an anon ask from a “GI Robot” about killing Nazis together – Londerland Bloodlines!Alice took him up on that offer, though she said she’d like to know where he came from afterward. I felt like she was the best suited for taking out those jackbooted fuckfaces, given she can literally kill people with her mind. >D
Not bad -- very productive evening on tumblr, that's for sure! I like it when I get the queue for the week done early. :) But now I really have to head to bed before I once again stay up too freaking late. And before it gets too cold, as we're getting wind chill temps down in the TEENS tonight. Bleh. >( Night all!
Anyway -- here's how my day went beyond looking out the window and being shocked to see snow:
Work – An okay day at work – I spent most of it working through the exceptions we got back from our processors, going through the notes and figuring out what to do with all of them. Wrote off a pledge, contacted someone about a failed credit card, changed one lady’s parish because the wrong one appeared on her pledge billing and set her up on automatic payments – that sort of stuff. Also took a couple of credit card calls (one of which required me to make an entirely new profile for the caller) and did a bit of roster maintenance. *shrug* Nothing particularly special! We’ll see how tomorrow goes!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike tonight, and back with the second half of “Semaj really sucks in The Sims 2 Rags to Riches - Part 5” by James Turner! (Plus a rewatch of the Alice: Madness Returns release trailer to fill out the last couple of minutes.) The back half of the episode saw James trying to help Iled and Semaj juggle both parenthood and business ownership, and having limited success:
A) On the parenthood side, Iled did a FANTASTIC job of raising toddler Reswob, using the power of Smart Milk to smash out potty-training, walking, and a nursery rhyme in basically one day! (All while pregnant with her next kid, mind! Though, admittedly, the snapdragons all over the shop probably helped with that. XD) Semaj also gave him a little love near the end of the episode (after James noticed that Reswob barely even knew his father), and by fulfilling his wants to be talked to and played with, he and Iled were able to guarantee that he grew up well, with platinum aspiration. He is now a cute little kid with bear foot slippers. :) And as for the new baby, he was born right before Reswob aged up, and was christened “Noulg” – aka “Gluon” backwards! Rather sweet of James to add his friend’s name in that way, actually. Even if it was partially because he couldn’t name the kid after his other dog, Frannie. :p
B) On the STORE side, however – well, Semaj insisted on serving customers in his leopard-print undies, showing off his spaghetti gut, so… XD A little more seriously, James had some issues with customers claiming that Semaj had asked them to spend the night, but then wouldn’t let them sleep, despite the fact that James had done no such thing (the comments suggest that it’s because of the “poison” snapdragons he’s trying to sell dropping everyone’s needs); a customer passing out at the back, right by those poison snapdragons (yeah, seems like you should maybe junk the green-mist ones, buddy?); and everyone hating the outside of the store because of all the cockroach corpses yet to be cleaned up (Semaj eventually resorted to turning on his personal cleanbot to help with disposal...which ended up breaking and starting to sneeze trash everywhere, so it had to be hastily turned off XD). He also couldn’t get the business up above rank five because he kept gaining and losing stars that kept him bouncing between that and rank four (mostly because Semaj got the Gold Sales badge, but kept failing to properly Dazzle people to buy stuff afterward). So, to help with the chaos, he hired some employees! A dude to play cashier (don’t remember his name) and a lady, Gina, to help do sales. They both do good work (with Gina in particular earning Sales badges pretty fast), though James has a problem with getting the cashier to actually go home at the end of the day – for some reason he seems to end up trapped behind his counter a lot! Plus there’s no staff room, so when Semaj told Gina to take a break, she ended up going upstairs to sleep in his and Iled’s bed. XD But at least Semaj doesn’t have to do everything by himself while Iled does the “Super Mum” thing!
So yeah – pretty busy second half! But the episode ended with the happy family getting ready to sit down to cake with their newly-aged-up son, and James making plans to try and either transition the store to selling stuff out of the catalog (as crafting all their own items is a bit tricky these days) or maybe hiring an employee to craft for them. And maybe going on vacation again to see if he could learn the secrets of teleportation and a way to keep their energy need up for longer. Of course, all of that is dependent on the save file not breaking, and James was getting a LOT of “bad object” errors in this one… I guess we’ll see what happens if a Part 6 ever shows up!
2. Continue working on “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – finished off Alice’s time at the Last Round tonight, with her accepting Damsel’s offer to spy on LaCroix for the Anarchs, and telling the trio about her upcoming trip to Grout’s to see why he wasn’t talking to any of the other primogen as a “freebie.” Which worried Nines, as he remembered Grout as someone who loved logic and reason (despite being a Malkavian), and wasn’t always shy about pointing out the bullshit – so for him to go missing...he didn’t like it. At all. Alice promised to let him know what went down when she visited him, then headed out, grumbling to Wonderland about how Damsel and Skelter piss her off, and how the Camarilla pays better...but also how she hates LaCroix and is only too willing to sell him out to Nines. Basically, she’s not really keen on either side right now, and Caterpillar has kind of counseled that she should keep it that way. XD Tomorrow, we should be able to wrap up this latest chapter with Alice heading home to Skyeline and meeting up with Victor, yay!
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Substitution Check – it was another Tuesday without anything in my Subs, so instead I checked out the following –
A) First, before getting into my writing, I watched another one of James’s shorts because I’d seen the thumbnail and was curious: “This is how The Sims 4 aged my child into a teen!” Which consisted of James’s shocked and baffled reaction to the game aging up Sandalwood Bigwallet from a beautiful little child with a giant mop of brown curly hair into an old man teenager with horrible neon face make-up and a pitch black werewolf form. XD Like, we all know The Sims 4 makes bad decisions, that’s how townie fashion comes into being, but – why. XD
B) And second, after my writing and my dessert, I watched yet more of CaFae Latte by C. M. Alongi – “CaFae Latte Season 37 - TikTok Compilation” to be exact! This video was all about Ghost Hunter John and King Herla of the Wild Hunt sort of teaming up to deal with a badly-haunted house inhabited by the spirit of a vengeful witch, Eliza, who fancied herself “Queen of Minnesota” material and all the people she’d murdered to start forming a ghost army. And by “sort of teaming up,” I mean “King Herla showed up to just brute force all the ghosts into cages with his Wild Hunt, only for John to make him stay outside with a walkie-talkie while he interviewed the current owner, then Eliza herself, to make him understand that only ONE ghost needed to be shoved in a cage.” Featured such things as Herla’s own Fae lieutenant listening to Herla rant about John’s pride and going “oh sure, he’s the proud one” under his breath; John managing to get Eliza to reveal her evil plan without ever tipping his hand about his recorder pen transmitting it all to Herla (despite having to get very specific about where they were standing at the end); Herla smashing through a window to get Eliza because it was “faster and more dramatic,” then complaining about the glass in his hair; the reveal that the current owner, Mr. Benson, had actually died himself ages ago, when John tried to apologize to him about the smashed window and found himself looking at a skeleton; and John calling Herla out on using his grief over the loss of his world and family to be an asshole...by revealing he too lost his entire family ten years ago (drunk driver killed his wife, four-year-old-daughter, and infant son while they were driving to his in-laws’ house). And that, while it still hurt, he had managed to heal from it. Yeah, some heavy stuff at the end there, but it was handled well, and it might lead to Herla getting some actual therapy to deal with his issues. We will see when we next encounter them!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – I am very pleased to say that, through judicious use of getting stuff out of my drafts already and reblogging old posts, I set up my queue for the rest of the week over here tonight! We have:
A) A reblog of a OT3 prompt I found back near the end of last year about a matchmaker who falls in love with the people they’re matchmaking, with one being really tall, one being average height, and one small for Wednesday! As I noted in my tags, this is basically an ideal Valicer AU situation, with Smiler being the average matchmaker trying to get tall Victor and small Alice together, only to realize, whoops, fell in love with Victor myself. XD Good stuff!
B) A reblog of a jokey paragraph of “description” for a character that is pretty much entirely tautological and gives no useful information for Thursday – “He was as tall as he was tall, and his eyes were the color they were,” to quote the first line. XD I first stuck this in my drafts when I was just thinking about updating Chapter Two of “Start At The Beginning...Sort Of” to include a proper description of Smiler, with my tags reflecting my worries that my attempt to actually say what they look like would end up like this – meaning that, now that I’ve actually started working on said description, I had to update the tags accordingly before sticking it in the queue. Not much, but I wanted to make sure they accurately reflected my current writing situation!
C) A reblog of a screenshot of a tweet about how EVERYTHING can be an AU for your favorite ship if you’re deranged enough for Friday – look me in the eye and tell me that this post is not the Most Me post you have ever heard of. XD You’re talking to someone who covered ten different Valicer (and larger polycules) AUs over the course of Multiamory March. I had to reblog this.
D) And a reblog of my old Song Saturday post for the song “Beautiful Soul” by Jesse McCartney for Saturday! Went on a trawl of some of my older Song Saturday stuff again, found this, and decided I liked it enough to give it another showing. :) Ended up going “I should link this to my Valicer Soulmate AU” in the tags and deciding that the AU’s fanfic title name is “You And Your Beautiful Souls” now. *facepalm* One day I will either find the willpower not to name all these AUs, or the time to write them all properly. (Probably the former, but I’m not holding my breath.)
Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had two things for the queue tonight:
A) Another reblog on the “Forgotten Vows Alice meets Richard Lewis” thread with The Coven Wars – Richard was surprised to hear that Alice too hallucinates, and Alice, realizing he was a Kindred spirit, told him about how she sees Wonderland sometimes! And is followed around by the residents giving commentary. XD We’ll see how he reacts to that later!
B) And an anon ask from a “GI Robot” about killing Nazis together – Londerland Bloodlines!Alice took him up on that offer, though she said she’d like to know where he came from afterward. I felt like she was the best suited for taking out those jackbooted fuckfaces, given she can literally kill people with her mind. >D
Not bad -- very productive evening on tumblr, that's for sure! I like it when I get the queue for the week done early. :) But now I really have to head to bed before I once again stay up too freaking late. And before it gets too cold, as we're getting wind chill temps down in the TEENS tonight. Bleh. >( Night all!
