Rainy Catch-Up Monday

Yeah, the weather was miserable today, but fortunately I didn't need to go anywhere -- hooray for a day off! Instead, I spent most of the day catching up on various things, as the write-up below will show:

Tumblr: Didn’t do much on tumblr today (I spent all of the time I would have normally spent working on tumblr drafts finishing off the write-up on Jon’s latest F:NV YOLO Remasted episode from yesterday – you can go to my previous entry to see the end now), but I did reblog one thing onto Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – my friend Nebby’s post linking the latest chapter of her “MediEvil Resurrection II” fic (finally completed after a seven-month hiatus)! After reading it and leaving a review, mind (which took up another good chunk of my afternoon). Gotta support my friends and their fic endeavors!

Writing: Since I wasn’t able to update the FO4 Playthrough Progression doc last night (apart from one paragraph), I instead updated it this afternoon, adapting the events of yesterday’s playsession to the world where Victor’s traveling around with both Ada and Alice. And there were a fair few changes between the game and the fiction this time around, including:

A) The spotlights in the main “battle arena” room not snapping on until Victor was already in the center of the room – I thought that would be more dramatic and make more sense than the Mechanist just turning them on as the door opened. (On a side note, I also had Alice question why the earth mover was in the room, because – yeah, why IS that down there?? Victor suggested they hoped to expand even further into the earth before the bombs dropped, which is as good an explanation as any I suppose)

B) Alice of course helping during the fight – specifically, battling the duelbot so it could live up to its name and actually duel someone! It definitely came off the worse in the fight, with Alice putting her famous Tal’Mehe’Ra blade through its power cell, but at least it got to fulfill its purpose

C) Victor staying in character when the Mechanist calls him a scourge post-fight-and-power-failure, telling her she was the scourge and demanding she come down and explain why she was casting him as the villain – Alice was the one who got the “we just want to talk” line that convinced the Mechanist to come down for the good of the Commonwealth

D) Conversely, Victor breaking character after the Mechanist unmasked in the final conversation much quicker – he tried to keep up with the persona briefly, but actually seeing Isabel’s face threw him off too much, and he ended up taking off his hat to “unmask” and speak as himself as well

E) Alice being the one to tell Isabel how her robots were misinterpreting orders to “save” people by killing them – and then to point out how it takes a sadistic mind to enslave human brains to her will when Isabel tried justify using the brains for her robot squads. Isabel retorted that it was breakthrough science and asked Alice if she was just supposed to let all those people die – cue Alice saying “YES LET THEM REST IN FUCKING PEACE” and asking if that’s not what SHE would have wanted after over 200 years in a jar...and Isabel crying in response as it truly hit her what an awful thing she’d done, and explaining more about her motivations (mainly, as per the Fallout wiki, that she grew up in a settlement plagued by raiders and super mutants, prompting her to want to make the Commonwealth a safer place for people like her family. I also had her be inspired to take on the Mechanist persona from hearing about the one you can find in the DC wasteland in Fallout 3 – thought it would be a nice nod to that game!)

F) Victor telling Isabel that he understands her intentions were good and that she should seek redemption as the Shroud, like in the game...but then asking Alice and Ada what they thought before they came to a final decision. Cue Alice saying that she was willing to let Isabel go, because while she’d done terrible things, her intentions WERE good, and her wanting to take responsibility counted for a lot –

And Ada having a proper conversation with the woman whose actions resulted in the death of her friends, asking how she couldn’t see the risks of using the robobrains and if she really didn’t know what they were doing. Fortunately, Isabel confirming she stupidly relied on the reports her bots gave her and tearfully saying that she’d become the very thing she hated and would have to live with that guilt forever touched something in Ada, and – having previously determined the woman’s remorse was genuine – she was willing to let her live too, as she was tired of the bloodshed

G) Ada lifting the security alert while Victor was having his VERY NECESSARY bathroom break, and telling Victor when he questioned the robobrains working in the command center that they were given different instructions, and that Isabel had agreed to gradually replace them with non-sapient robots going forward (this is when they all learned Isabel’s name, btw)

H) Isabel offering the Mechanist suit to Alice instead of Victor, as Victor was waaaay too tall for it – Alice was initially like “no thanks” until Victor pointed out she MIGHT be able to use it to walk around in the daylight (as she’d be completely covered). She’s still not THAT keen on putting it on, but she at least took the damn thing

I) And Victor waking up after his post-fight energy drop to find the ladies talking about maybe turning the facility into a robot-run food garden like Greygarden – meaning I now have an idea for what to do with the in-game settlement!

Whew! That was a looot of changes, huh? But I’m happy with them all, at least. :) And at least the next time I play, updating the Playthrough Progression should be easier and faster – much quicker to sum up a simple building episode than the end of a whole quest!

Workout: Another night on the bike, another night with everybody’s favorite board game movie, Clue! Tonight’s pedal session took me through the guests discovering the murder of the cook in the kitchen when she fell on poor Mr. Green; the disappearance of Mr. Boddy from the study, only to reappear, PROPERLY dead this time, in the bathroom, where Mrs. Peacock discovered him trying to powder her nose; the arrival of the stranded motorist and the poor guy being locked in the lounge; everyone splitting up into pairs to search the house and everyone getting paired up with the person least suited to them; the motorist getting murdered and Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet discovering his dead body after discovering the secret passage from the conservatory to the lounge; Yvette shooting out the locks on the lounge doors and accidentally nearly killing Colonel Mustard with a falling chandelier; the arrival of the cop looking for the stranded motorist, and HIM getting locked in the library; the cop getting a call on the library phone and getting the others to let him out by saying he’ll have them all arrested, then revealing the call was from J. Edgar Hoover (the movie’s set in 1954); the guests conspiring to make the cop think all the bodies are people just making out with partners/partying too hard; the cop getting locked back into the library and everyone going back to their searching; SOMEONE turning out the lights, and the cop, Yvette, and a singing telegram girl all getting murdered (to make sure every one of the classic weapons was used in a murder); and Wadsworth getting the lights on and everyone tromping around and taking in the new murders with a general air of resignation. I left off RIGHT before the iconic sequence where Tim Curry runs around like a madman and basically recreates the ENTIRE MOVIE up to that point – tomorrow, we SHOULD finish up with that and the three endings. Should be fun!

FreeTube/Invidious: Welp, FreeTube released an update fixing that [BAD_HTTP_STATUS: 403] bug that was preventing people from watching videos on it recently...but when I downloaded it today and tried watching a video, I got stuck in an infinite loading screen. *shakehead* So it was back to Invidious tonight for my evening entertainment, where I chose to watch the OXtra video “CAN YOU GUESS THE GAME FROM THE SCREENSHOT?” This featured Ellen, Jane, Mike, and Andy playing a round of Guess The Game, which is a browser-based game that gives you six tries to guess a video game from random screenshots. Each subsequent screenshot after the first also provides a little more information on the game – such as its metacritic score, the original platforms it was released on, and who made it. It will also let you know if you guess the wrong game, but the right franchise, so you can narrow down your guesses accordingly. The OX gang were reasonably good at guessing the games on offer – often needing more than one try, but usually getting it in the end. Notable moments included:

A) Andy managing to correctly guess Spec Ops: The Line on the third screenshot of someone’s burned back – Jane was like “I would have expected more sand” (turns out it was in the subsequent screenshots)

B) The gang initially thinking one game was Shadow of the Colossus from the first screenshot – but when they were informed “that’s wrong” and moved onto the second, Mike recognized a “ring totem” and correctly realized the game was in fact Sonic Frontiers (the other three were like WTF because no Sonic game should look like Shadow of the Colossus XD)

C) Mike seeing a screenshot of a city skybox and IMMEDIATELY correctly deducing it was Deus Ex (the 90s original) – everyone was very impressed)

D) On the flip side of that, Mike suggesting Nuclear Throne for an early pixel-art game that proved to be something else (Into The Breach) – and then not recognizing the ACTUAL Nuclear Throne when it showed up later (he said he was thrown off by one of the screenshots featuring a medieval-looking brazier)

E) And me managing to guess one game before the OX gang did – a shot of an apartment building that immediately had me think “Oh, that’s probably Silent Hill 4: The Room, I know that takes place in somebody’s apartment!” The OX gang initially thought it was a shot of a building from the Silent Hill 2 remake, but guessed right on the second shot of a rusty horrible-looking kitchen. (I also recognized a shot of Fallout 4 at the very end, but only after one of them said it looked like that game, causing me to be like “wait, yeah, I think that is the Commonwealth…”)

Fun times! :) These sorts of games are always pretty neat – I hope they do another video on it! (Well, okay, a third video on it, as apparently they’d already done one video on this site, sans Mike – perhaps tomorrow I will catch up with the original? We will see...)

So yeah -- hopefully now I am all caught up and ready to go back into the workweek! And now I should really go to bed, as once again I have stayed up too late. *shakehead* Night all!