Hot & Annoying Monday

The "heat dome" has fully descended upon us now -- today was in the 90s, and it felt it during those brief moments when I was outside. Very glad that I could hide most of the day in the air conditioning, let me tell you! Especially since tomorrow is only supposed to get hotter... *grimace*

As for the "annoying" part, that refers mostly to my afternoon/evening, starting with coming home only to find Dad's truck in the middle of the driveway, preventing me from pulling in (I HATE when he does that -- fortunately I was able to find a place to pull into and call my parents to get him to move it), then moving onto supper being a bit late (for a good reason, admittedly -- Dad had to water the plants and naturally needed a shower afterward), then moving onto having to peel and cut my own carrots for lunch (which took longer than I would have liked as they needed a wash and a very good peel -- some of them were developing roots!), meaning I got on the computer later than I wanted, which threw off my hoped-for schedule for the evening, and -- yeah. Just -- not the greatest afternoon! *huffs* Hopefully tomorrow's will be better...in the meantime, here's the daily write-up:

Work – A decent-enough day, I suppose, though sprinkled with little annoyances – like, I got through the GL without any issues, but I had to contact our processor’s IT guy to resolve an issue where I couldn’t log into their scanning app; I got a call back from someone I contacted about a bad credit card gift (and was able to set up their pledge the way they wanted), but I also had to get our boss to poke our processors about some gifts that feel like they’ve been waiting a very long time; I kept busy with obituaries and other such roster maintenance for most of the day, but I also discovered a gift that had apparently been posted on the wrong account at the very end of the day helping my coworker look up something. Oh, and I thought the AC in the kitchen was broken, but fortunately it was just a case of the thermostat that controlled it had been shut off. So yeah – nothing horrible, but nothing amazing either. *shrug* We’ll see what Tuesday is like!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike and back with alien teens Radian Inu (Andy), Kae’l Crex (Jane), and Galaxa Spacemountain (Liv) for the final half of “A Whole New (old) World! | Teens in Space TTRPG | Episode 4!” The big old finale of this whole miniseries featured –

A) The teens and their new N-O-Alith (that’s closer to how Jasper pronounced it) friend successfully powering up the ship with the help of the dolphins and their big old cable – but as everything came back online, the group happened to look up and see a bunch of ACP ships pop through the “hole” left in space-time by the teens’ trip. Followed by a bunch of N-O-Alith ships appearing in the same space. Followed by two of the ships breaking off and coming up close to each other, presumably for some sort of diplomatic chat –

Followed by the ships beginning to fire on each other because the diplomatic chat did not go well. D: The teens were like “oh shit we gotta get out of here,” but there was a problem – their warp drive was out of fuel. And while their N-O-Alith buddy, Breezy (so called because the closest thing he had to a name was an image of a beautiful hillside caressed by a gentle breeze, and it was the nickname they came up for him based on that that he hated the least XD), had more fuel on his own ship – that ship happened to be in the war zone. Meaning that if they wanted it, they had to brave the fight going on between the N-O-Alith, the ACP, and oh yes, the leviathan with a laser cannon on its head that E.T.T.A. released into the fray to try and send these assholes fighting in Earth’s space packing. But as the alternative was remaining stuck on Earth, we moved on to…

B) The teens braving the war zone to get to Breezy’s ship and get the fuel they needed to warp out of there already! Things started off pretty solid, with Kae’l managing to cut a perfect hole in the hull of a wrecked N-O-Alith ship for them to sail through with the lasers (allowing everyone a look at the inside and a chance to figure out how N-O-Alith ships work – allowing Galaxa to do a tiny bit of hacking and screw up some of their weapon systems later), but some iffy dice rolls meant that poor Galaxa and V.I.N.N.I.E. spent a lot of time panicking instead of doing anything useful, while Radian’s attempts to pilot the ship were a chaotic mess at best. Which, actually, ended up helping them, as it made it incredibly hard for the N-O-Alith to hit them (at least, that’s what the dice said, as for some reason Jasper kept rolling REALLY low on his “Fight” rolls to target them despite Andy rolling pretty shittily on his “Flight” rolls to avoid getting shot XD). However, the constant hits on the shields, the constant use of the thrusters and automatic laser systems to try and get themselves out of trouble, and Radian at one point getting V.I.N.N.I.E. to repurpose the holodeck to fake them flying away to cover Breezy jumping over to his ship once they were close enough REALLY overstressed all the systems on the ship, and the N-O-Alith finally getting in one good hit ended up taking all the shields, lasers, and the holodeck down as the ship at last overheated (Radian was VERY upset to lose all of his holodeck settings XD). Fortunately, it was right around that time that Breezy returned with the fuel, leading to –

C) The teens doing a warp jump in hopes of getting back to the known universe and their home planet! Liv did the honor of rolling the die to see if they got home safely, with Jasper warning the group that they’d need a seventeen at minimum to succeed, and –

Got a four. Andy let her use Radian’s “Lucky” ability to reroll (with Jasper’s blessing), and THAT produced a nine, which, when boosted with everyone’s adversity tokens and whatnot –

Gave them a sixteen. Meaning that they got back to their home planet...but in the wrong universe. :O The kids immediately sensed something was wrong, but figured they should go down to look anyway, maybe seek out their alternate selves, and thus brought the ship down to land at one of the ACP landing sites. Where Dad Spacemountain came running up to meet them –

And greeted Galaxa with a delighted “you’re alive!” and began showering her with kisses while TV crews and news cameras descended. Turns out, in THIS universe the kids had gone off to try and end a war the ACP was having with the N-O-Alith (who were threatening to destroy everything, like the ACP had said they were going to do in the main universe), and the arrival of this ship was seen as them having returned in glory (and with an N-O-Alith prisoner/new ally). The teens and Breezy were like “Okay, we’ll roll with this for now, seems fine,” and the episode ended with them enjoying a big party held in their honor...only for a big old N-O-Alith warship to appear in the sky above them. O.O Yeah, uh, looks like if they ever do a second miniseries with these characters, they’ll have a VERY IMMEDIATE plot hook to latch onto! XD But for now the Space Teen adventures have ended, meaning I need to find something else to watch. And I have a particular oneshot of theirs in mind...

2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – today’s chunklet focused on Alice finding some goodies in one of Grout’s surgery rooms, with the help of the Queen of Hearts and her own nose. Specifically, she found a cold storage room that she could pick open, which contained five blood bags – three normal ones –

And two shockingly potent ones that smelled so good Alice had to exercise all of her self-control not to chomp into them immediately. She managed to resist, though – mostly because, according to the writing on the bags, the blood inside was from Grout himself, and she did NOT want to risk getting blood-bonded to the asshole. No matter HOW good his vitae smelled. The Queen was very grumpy about having to concede the logic. :P Alice is at least willing to take the blood WITH her, though, and I left things with her looking for a cooler. Tomorrow, she packs up her snacks, then continues on with her trip through the horrible mansion! Because this place is both huge and not done traumatizing her yet.

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – got to this a bit later than I wanted, but still soon enough to watch one of the remaining videos in my Watch Later: “The Sims 4: 20 ABANDONED FEATURES!” by onlyabidoang! A list of twenty things in The Sims 4 that he feels have been abandoned by the devs, including:

A) The list of achievements you can get in the game for maxing out certain skills, reaching the top of certain careers, and even doing things like wetting yourself on a lot with five toilets XD (this hasn’t seen an update since adding the “Polar Bear Plunge” achievement for the release of Seasons)

B) The Sim Stats panel, where you can see various stats about your Sim, like how many showers they’ve taken or how many times they’ve woohooed (which hasn’t added any new stats relevant to new packs – apart from, weirdly, Vampires)

C) The Lifestyles added in Snowy Escape, which serve as semi-permanent traits reflecting the way your Sims live their lives and come with various benefits and drawbacks (the system was never expanded with any new lifestyles or updates to old ones – and the ones that DO exist are often a bit poorly tuned. Like, if your Sim dares to have a close relationship with more than four people, even inside their own family, they are GOING to get “People Person”)

D) The “destination worlds” added with packs like Outdoor Retreat and Jungle Adventures, which are worlds specifically for vacationing in (these just stopped being made after Jungle Adventures – well, except for the Annoyance That Was Batuu – and officially went by the wayside once they introduced the update that allowed you to put vacation rental lots in residential worlds with Snowy Escape. Abi does not mind the new system at all, as it’s way more flexible and interesting, but thinks they could at least go back to Granite Falls and Selvadorada and make them properly residential at this point!)

E) And the whole idea of “Sims Sessions” as a periodic music festival event that popped up in the game every so often for your Sims to attend, rather than being behind-the-scenes videos of artists recording their songs in Simlish (this one makes me sad, because sending my Chill Save Victor and Alice Sims to Sims Sessions was a surprisingly fun play session! But since Smiler didn’t exist at the time, they didn’t get a chance to enjoy it, and – yeah. That really would have been their jam. :( )

Yeah – there have been a lot of new features added to this game that simply haven’t gotten the love that they deserved! And probably never will, because fixing or updating these features isn’t profitable for EA. Meeeh. When’s Paralives coming out again??

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: N/A – another Monday where I never got into the drafts section of Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), mostly because everything else took too long. :( Granted, I didn’t have anything in there that I specifically HAD to work on, but it still would have been nice! We’ll see how things go tomorrow.

*shrug* Not TOO bad, but yeah -- really wish I'd had more time for computer stuff instead of carrots! Ah well, lunch is important too... And now I have to hit the sheets. Night all! Stay cool!