Paperworky Wednesday

Well, sort of -- the paperwork itself was all done, we just needed someone to check it. Which was the point of our appointment at the library today -- to have our passport paperwork looked over, approved, and sent out! Fortunately this proved to be a relatively painless process, with the lady who looked everything over being very nice and very thorough. So now all our paperwork is on its way, and now we just have to wait for the actual passports to arrive! Which will probably take a while, because current events are current. *sigh* But at least we did our bit! And paid our money, which was nearly $500. *wince* Shit be expensive, yo.

Anyway -- here's what I accomplished today apart from that trip to the library:

Tumblr: Only Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about today – though I didn’t do as much over here as you might think, as I dedicated the hour before lunch to answering Moose’s messages instead of working on any of my drafts. But I DID get my Song Saturday post for this week done and in the queue right before we left to get our passport stuff sorted – trawled the deep reaches of the “#song saturday” tag and settled on a reblog of Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Always Forever!” Because, for some reason, I’d never actually reblogged it before, and after listening to it again I decided I still enjoyed it. :) Plus, it’s a very simple, very generic love song, so it’s easy to adapt to both my OTP and my OT3. :D So yeah, at least I’m set with the queue over here!

Writing: Continued final edits on Chapter 4 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” today, before my workout – got Alice into Brotherhood headquarters; introduced her to Jennifer, the scared kid trapped in there, and had her vow to save her; had her fight her way through all the zombies in the upper levels before dropping through a hole in the floor into the hall leading to the temple; and had her confront Bishop Vick, who told her his sob story about an unwanted Embrace only to get “you should have just stepped into the sun, you asshole” in return. XD And that all got me up to page 22 of 36 – tomorrow, we’ll focus on getting through the boss fight, Alice getting Jennifer to the CDC post-fight, and maybe her reporting to Strauss. *nods* And then, hopefully, we can finish things off on Friday and get everything posted! Fingers crossed!

Workout: Hopped back on the bike this evening before supper and pedaled my way through:

A) The end of “Trying to get rich from nectar in The Sims 1 (Part 2)” by James Turner! The final chunklet of his second (and so far, final) The Sims episode featured the following:

I. Old Semaj staying on the nectar grind, occasionally popping to Magic Town to stock up on sugar and slowly but surely working on increasing his cooking skill – by the end of the episode, he’d gotten up to level 7, and the bottles were selling for $350 a pop, nice. :) Which helped fund the purchase of a nicer bookcase, some better chairs, and a cool VR headset so he could get his fun up really fast. It’s nice to have money, isn’t it Semaj? :p

II. Old Semaj also staying on the “romancing Iled” grind, inviting her over to his house twice and then out on a date to Downtown once. These all went reasonably well – the first visit to his house didn’t go great, but the second visit saw them both enjoying the chess table, and sharing their first “passionate” kiss (complete with epic musical stings). Though Iled was still not down for “fiery” kisses, those were a bit much. XD The downtown date was pretty nice as well, with Semaj getting Iled a diamond ring before taking her out the local diner for a two-course meal. While badly overdressed, as James had put him in his formalwear before he went. XD But yeah, by the end of all these dates, they were at 100/100 relationship, with both of them having full-on red love hearts for each other! Which led to –

III. Old Semaj inviting Iled over one more time at the very end of the episode – to propose! :D Yes, with their relationship so high, and him FINALLY able to keep his needs in decent shape, Old Semaj decided it was time to pop the question, brought his beloved around, and whipped out the ring!

...She said no! FOUR TIMES! O.O Yeah, uh, James forgot to take into account the fact that ILED needed to be in a good mood as well for the proposal to work, and thus was rejected for (in order) not talking to her enough; not feeding her; not having fun with her; and not letting her sit down and be comfortable. Bella Goth showing up randomly in the middle of the visit with a box of chocolates for Old Semaj probably didn’t help matters either. XD So the episode ended with Old Semaj still alone, with nobody but his scarecrow in the nectar-making room for company. Awww. Bit of a depressing note to end this “LP” on, but James hasn’t returned to it since starting his Sims 2 and The Sims 4: Businesses & Hobbies LPs, so – yeah. Old Semaj just may be stuck like that. Shame.

B) The beginning of “Our family chaos is growing in The Sims 2 Rags to Riches - Part 6,” also by James Turner! Yeah, speaking of the Sims 2 LP, James actually uploaded this latest episode on that just the other day, so I figured I’d watch it to round out the week! :D Just got through the first ten minutes today, which saw James quickly renovate the parents’ office space into a kid’s room for their older son Reswob (Semaj and Iled weren’t really using it anyway); start building the beginnings of a playground next to the house so Reswob had a place to go play (and since their lot is supposed to be largely a “commercial” space anyway – he plans to add a nasty alleyway between the main house and the playground once he has the cash XD); and send Iled to open the store (without their employees for some reason) while Semaj took care of baby Noulg and worked on his Mechanical skill so he could build the family a Servo. :) So far, so promising – and I saw from the thumbnail that the family will also be getting a dog soon too! So that’ll be fun. Hopefully said dog will show up in the next chunklet tomorrow!

YouTube: Well, I ended up getting to this later than expected, so I wasn’t able to get through as much as I’d hoped to, but I still got in three videos instead of two, so that was nice –

A) First up, my bonus video of the day – “This E-Rated Kids Game Still Haunts Me in Adulthood” by Outside Xtra! Featuring Ellen talking about Heart Of Darkness, a late-90s PS1 “cinematic platformer” about a kid who needs to save his beloved dog Whisky from shadow monsters after a total eclipse – which has AMAZINGLY VIOLENT DEATH ANIMATIONS for a KIDS’ GAME in the 90s. Like, seriously, the animations include the kid getting SWALLOWED ALIVE multiple times, the kid being TORN UP by a shadow monster, the kid being SWARMED AND EATEN by shadow fish in a pond, the kid being SMASHED FLAT by pillars, the kid having his BACK BROKEN by a horrible giant shadow mosquito...all on screen! All on screen for a 12-year-old Ellen to see and be traumatized by! D: Like, okay, there’s almost never visible blood on-screen for any of these deaths, but they are still SHOCKINGLY violent for a “rated E for Everyone” game! Ellen can only think that the people doing the ratings only saw a no-death run, saw that it had a kid protagonist, and went “oh sure, game for children, a children’s game.” Meanwhile, she kept having nightmares wondering how the poor kid died when he was eaten alive by the shadows. D: Anyway, she just wanted to share her pain now that she’s part of a gaming content YouTube channel, especially after finding more people who had been traumatized looking up the game on the interwebs and finding such things as “death compilations” with comments full of horror. Like, thanks, Ellen. I certainly needed to see that tonight. XD (Seriously, though, who let this happen?!)

B) Then it was over to the Subs for the latest from Josh Way – “Fun With Shorts: Mission Third Planet: Creatures of the Land!” The first seven-or-so minutes of a short about an alien named Alex (yes, really) and his robot companion getting stranded on Earth during a scientific expedition due to a meteor storm and deciding to just keep going with their mission to classify animals because, well, might be the last ones alive and they’re stuck in an educational short, so why not? :p This first chunk saw them focusing on frogs (for amphibians) and gators (for reptiles), with Josh mocking the terrible spaceship, the terrible alien costumes, the ridiculous attempt to teach children biology, and the general goofiness of the short all the way. Along with the usual more topical riffs, like “Republicans from space” when Alex started wondering about how animals reproduced. XD Ridiculous but amusing, as always!

C) And finally, we had the GrayStillPlays video of the day – “Cars vs sharpest ramps in GTA 5!” A point-based torture board, with Gray having to take cars ranging from the trike and the lawnmower, to the dump truck and the Liberator monster truck, down increasingly-steep ramps with various painful challenges! Whoever conquered the most ramps got to be the winner. What were the challenges, and who prevailed? Well, in order, we had:

I. A 30-degree ramp with increasingly large gaps and increasingly-small strips of ramp, plus walls for Gray to dodge as he went down before ending in a thumbnail hole right before the checkpoint! This one claimed a lot of cars, but eventually the banana yellow “Baja Blast” vehicle, as Gray called it, managed to do the run and claim a point!

II. A 40-degree ramp that actually started out as a straight road, then slowly tilted downward as Gray drove along it, through a bunch of floating packing peanuts that Gray had to dodge! The trick with this one was that it was timed in two ways – not only did Gray have to make it to the bottom of the ramp and onto the stationary curved bit before the ramp went past it, he ALSO had to get there in time to launch himself off said curved bit and onto the ending chunk of road in less than 36 seconds, otherwise a wall came up and stopped him from completing the challenge. The cool thing about this one was that pretty much every car ended up floating over the ramp while it dropped due to weird physics fuckery, which Gray liked very much. Granted, it also caused most of them to wipe out, but still. XD The winner ended up being the open-wheel F1 racer, who got a point thanks to having the most downforce and just enough acceleration to get down the ramp and over the jump fast enough.

III. A 60-degree ramp where Gray had to race three other scripted cars down the ramp and up and off the jump, because the only way to the next challenge was to overtake the pink car in the lead and leap into the teleporter attached to the front of it. This one required just pure speed so you could get to the lead car before actually making the jump at the end, because – as Gray found out – once you two were flying through the air, there was no way you were going to land in the teleporter. It took him a few tries, but in the end he found a carbon-fiber sports car with a kick-ass spoiler and a need for speed, which got a point when it nearly ran the pink car off the road entirely in its quest for the teleporter. XD

IV. And finally, a 90-degree “ramp” where Gray had to survive a straight drop downward on a road absolutely COVERED in increasing numbers of yeeters, before hitting the ramp at the bottom to sail through the win. And, as you might expect, the winner here, and thus the ultimate winner overall, was the F1 racer, because its incredible downforce meant that it just stuck to the road in a way neither the Baja Blast or the carbon-fiber sports car could. I mean, granted, that did not make it immune to the yeeters, but it did give it a better chance, and after many tries to learn the pattern, it finally succeeded. *nod* Good stuff – and I said in my comment that I’d love to see more “physics fuckery” challenges after seeing the ramp that made all the cars essentially fly for a minute. Seems like an excellent way to torture Gray for our amusement! :P

Other: As per the “Tumblr” section above, spent the time before lunch getting all of Moose’s messages sorted again, hooray! Only took me nine days. *shakehead* One of these days we’ll get back to answering each other sooner, Moose!

*nods* Yeah, I was hoping to accomplish a bit more, but I will definitely take that -- allowed me to catch up on a few things, at least! And now I have to go to bed because I have one last day of work tomorrow before a four-day weekend. :p Hopefully it won't be a bad one -- night all!