Tired Thursday

Well, it is right now, anyway -- dunno why, it didn't feel like a particularly long day...but then again, getting enough sleep is something I struggle with on the regular, so maybe this is just me dealing with that again. Either way, it's a good reason to get this entry done as quick as I can so I can get to bed --

Work – Another fairly “meh” day at work – mostly because one of the credit card people got back to me this morning (well, late last night, but I saw it this morning) about some of the missing payments, talking about how his logs showed pledges AND payments coming over from our database and how he could put on the payments manually but it would be much better if we could fix the underlying problem… I somehow resisted the urge to tear him a new asshole and instead just showed him as many batches and screenshots as I could find proving that the damn payments were NOT in our batches, I don’t care what his logs say, under the guise of “I just want us to be on the same page.” >( I really fucking hate the credit card company, I swear... Rest of the day was all right, though – I took a couple of credit card calls, helped my coworker figure out some stuff (or at least tried to – there’s one guy who wants to split his credit card pledge in thirds, so that’ll be fun), and did some obituaries. Nothing exciting, but I’m just fine with that. We’ll see what tomorrow brings!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with the Adventures Of Useless Steve, Science Edition, as I pedaled my way through:

A) The end of “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - Part 3 - Where We're Going, We Don't Need Legs!” The last twenty-odd minutes of which featured Useless Steve braving the X-8 high school infiltration test with Roxie! And included:

I. Roxie running off to fight a turret and then growl at a forcefield she couldn’t get through while Steve used the power of Dr. Klein’s clothes to hack his first-ever terminal and get the turrets willing to shoot ANYONE, not just him...followed by him forgetting to put his armor back on because Jon NEVER remembers to change his characters’ clothes BACK after swapping them for something (see P. D. Shoot remastered sneaking to the Follower’s safehouse in her NIGHTIE)

II. Steve trying to lure some military cyberdogs over to Roxie to get her help in fighting them...only to get knocked down by their enthusiastic lunges, then find Roxie far too obsessed with whatever was on the other side of the forcefield to actually help with fighting the other doggos until the very end, where she ended up promptly dying distracting one of them (Jon at least gave her a “well done Roxie” for it)

III. Steve, due to a lack of health-restoring items on his person, resorting to drinking the heavily-irradiated water fountain water to restore his HP (feels like the sort of thing he would do)

IV. Steve handling the dogs and lobotomite in and around the library with the power of mines, the Sonic Emitter, and cramming himself into one corner where the dogs couldn’t get him (well, MOSTLY couldn’t get him – he died once because a dog managed to chomp him despite technically not being able to reach him). Oh, and some Nuka-Cola Quartz, which in this game makes your vision blue to represent temporary night vision. Nuka-Cola is some powerful stuff!

V. Steve attempting to set up a Most Clever Trap for the dogs on the second floor by scrambling the turret in the middle of the main room so it would shoot anybody (instead of just him), temporarily deactivating said turret, heading around into the next hallway to annoy the two dogs waiting there, and finally using his ability to jump over the fences surrounding the bits of the room that have a force field “floor” to get back to the terminal quickly and turn the turret back on so it would shoot the dogs...only for the two dogs’ AI to break, leaving them stuck at the end of the hallway never actually doing anything to Steve. He ended up anticlimatically shooting them to death with the Sonic Emitter (even using the crap “bulk” energy cells to do it with). Fallout: New Vegas – sometimes, it just breaks!

VI. Steve cleverly collecting the second and third student records he needed to download off the terminals in the high school out of order in order to be out of the way of the two dogs the game spawns at the test’s exit door when you get all three, even leaving a mine at the spawn point and the turret on in his wake to attack them...only to realize that he forgot to shut the upstairs door, meaning the dogs could run past everything in their quest to attack them. Fortunately, through the power of reloading, he was able to try again and finally get that “lure the dogs toward me and let the turret murder them” trap to work! With the extra fun of standing at the entrance to the main second-floor room and repeatedly shutting the door in a dog’s face as it tried to get at him XD

VII. Steve completing the test and heading back to the main room – only to encounter a LOT more lobotomites armed with plasma grenades and axes (both proton and regular) than he originally anticipated, along with the Protectrons he had. Fortunately the X-2 Antenna was up to the job of booping everyone to death, but Steve had to do a lot of accidental parrying and running ahead around corners to survive the onslaught!

VIII. And Steve ending things by doing some more splicing – first trying to combine a lobotomite and a dog, which just ended up in a dead dog and some chunks of lobotomite (but also gave him a level-up to Level 10 from the XP granted from doing unethical experiments – Melee Weapons went up to 25, Energy Weapons went up to 26, and he took the “Finesse” perk for better critical chance), then combining another robot and dog to create a new Roxie to help him with the upcoming fight against Dr. Borous’s giant cyberdog Gabe. Because Roxie is a good dog and an even better distraction. XD

B) And the beginning of “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - Part 4 - Dog Eat Dog!” The first sixteen minutes of which featured –

I. Useless Steve and Roxie 2.0 taking on the X-8 Residential Test and Dr. Borous’s giant monster cyberdog Gabe, looking for the holotape recording of Gabe’s bark for the Sonic Emitter! Which mostly consisted of Roxie running up to Gabe and distracting him as best she could (though poor thing, she was TINY compared to him) while Steve ran and jumped all over the place searching through all of Gabe’s little dig piles to figure out where he buried the holotape. *shrug* It worked!

II. Useless Steve then taking on the roboscorpions that Dr. Mobius sent against him, Roxie, and Gabe when he found the holotape, which were naturally handled via wild application of Electro Booping Stick (aka the X-2 Antenna). Steve tried to keep Gabe alive during this fight, because you can get some special dialogue from Dr. Borous if you do, but sadly he just was not fast enough with the Electro Booping stick, and by the end of the fight, Steve was the only one left standing. *sigh* Well, at least it gave him plenty of time to search all the remaining dig piles (and corpses) for goodies!

III. Useless Steve then returning to the starting area and managing to kill FOUR robo-scorpions via the “dance around them swinging the Electro Booping stick” method without ANY of them landing a hit! Which was frankly extremely impressive! The fifth one, waiting up the stairs in another room, DID manage to land a couple of blasts on him, but that was mostly because Steve decided to use VATS for the double melee damage over doing the dance, and apparently VATS does not provide a lot of defense against getting hit in this particular game. Good to know!

IV. Useless Steve then making Roxie 3.0 and going back into the high school infiltration test to do the advanced version! Why? To get the upgrade to the Sonic Emitter that let it take down force fields, of course! Which was a very important upgrade to get! Roxie 3.0 proved to be a bit tougher than her predecessors, helping take down a military cyberdog without getting hurt at all, but her insistence on trying to take on a robot that was partially clipping through a door led to her rather swift death. On the plus side, she still managed to be a good distraction for Steve, and he was able to kill some of the new “hall monitor” turrets and work his way around some of the robots and dogs in his way via the amazing method of either “not opening doors” or “closing doors in their faces.” He even got to pull off his “set the turret on the enemies in the hallway just beyond the main room on the second floor” trap a second time! Not without some weird glitches, mind – one of the cyberdogs managed to follow him THROUGH the fences when he tried jumping over them (though, to be fair, they were fences with VERY big gaps in them, more than wide enough to admit a dog, so it kind of made sense), and another managed to knock him halfway across a hallway even after the closed the door on it. So, uh, yeah. That made sense. XD

And that is where I left it, with Steve waiting for the turret to kill the final cyberdog so he could finish the Advanced High School Infiltration test and get on with things. We’ll finish this episode off tomorrow – then, next week, we’ll watch the Grand Finale of The Adventures Of Useless Steve, Science edition! Looking forward to it. :)

2. Start editing Chapter 4 of “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Check – though, annoyingly, tonight’s edit session was something of a fight, as I wasn’t quite happy with many of my edits. There was a lot of poking at word choices and trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to phrase something and whatnot, and it made for a bit of a rough experience. But I got through it in the end, covering:

A) Victor, Alice, and Smiler arriving at Victor’s room, with Alice noting that it had been rather a hike to get there, and Smiler saying that it seemed like an easy house to get lost in; cue Victor confirming that by telling them a story about how he got lost in the mansion on move-in day as a child (having decided to go exploring with Scraps while his parents supervised the people placing the furniture – he got turned around near the back of the house and was eventually discovered panicking in the servants’ quarters) – Alice responded that she was very glad she’d never had to move house as a child, then told a Wonderlander that getting chuckled into Littlemore, then Rutledge, did not count

B) Victor apologizing for the long walk, admitting he’s gone between the kitchens and his room so often he’s used to it now – Smiler assured him that it was fine, it only made sense he’d be used to it, and Victor agreed before admitting he’d still love to live in a smaller place (thinking of how many cups of tea went cold before he got them back to his room); Alice reminded him that if all went well tonight, he would

C) Alice noting with interest Victor’s plain blue door and admitting she thought Nell wouldn’t have stood for that, as it didn’t go with her wallpaper – Victor confessed she had initially kicked up a fuss, but William eventually convinced her it would be fine as guests wouldn’t be coming to see his bedroom, in one of the few fights they’d had that he’d won. Alice noted that they’d learned in the kitchen Nell was very much someone used to having her own way, and Victor grumbled that she was impossible to keep happy and that’s why they had such a high turnover of servants – though he imagined most of them were eager to leave by the end

D) And Victor finally entering his room at Alice’s urging and having a brief “stepped back in time” moment as he looked around at the place, which was exactly how he’d left it before the rehearsal – before spotting his forgotten wallet and spiritbane charm on his desk and immediately marching over to stuff them in his pockets. Because he isn’t forgetting THEM again. XD

Not bad, though I hope tomorrow’s editing session is smoother!

3. Watch something on FreeTube: Check – had enough time tonight to slip in Josh Way’s latest – “Fun With Shorts: How To Conduct a Meeting Part 2!” The second half of a short on how to effectively conduct a meeting from the 70s, featuring stuff like Discount Rick Moranis attempting to adjourn the meeting early when he didn’t get his way on changing a motion – only to be shamed out of it by the narrator; a lady getting a little too into seconding things and seconding someone’s nomination to the regional coordinator position; and the narrator forcing everyone to review things because this is an educational short, damn it. XD As usual, the rather silly short was made better by Josh’s zingers, including noting that a lot of women probably say “shame on you, Palmer” to Discount Rick Moranis; commenting that many fraud possibilities were also available to figure out who won an election when you couldn’t be sure of one person getting a majority; and complaining about a certain clip of a guy starting a motion to set aside money to pay delegate expenses for an upcoming conference being shown a liiiittle too often (“Show it 14 more times, movie, I dare you”). Just a nice bit of fun at the end of the day!

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Mostly check and check –

Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here, I did decide on a Song Saturday – a reblog of my post about “Bangarang” by Skrillex (and Sirah) and how it makes me think of Alice, Victor, and Smiler teaming up to fight off a bunch of Bumby’s Ruins! Because I was rereading some of my old Smiler Otherland stuff on my lunch break, saw the post, and was like “yeah, you know what, I still like that, let’s go.” I didn’t QUITE finish the tags tonight, but it IS in the queue, and I’ll have some time tomorrow to complete those.

Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had one thread reply from thecovenwars on our VITD “lost confused girl” thread – though the reblog had the girl admitting she wasn’t sure if she was lost. Smiler was like “You’re not sure? Why’s that?” – we’ll see what the girl has to say later!

And there we are, and now I have to go to bed because I still have one day of work left this week. Hopefully it'll be okay -- night all!