![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Decent Sunday
Mar. 22nd, 2026 11:48 pmThe weather was miserable, granted -- starting out cloudy but kinda warm, then getting colder and rainier as the day went on -- and there were a few annoying moments here and there, but I got to have a big bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, chocolate granola, and banana slices for breakfast, my parents got calzones from our favorite calzone place for lunch (spinach & pepperoni and chicken parm), AND we had chicken pesto pizza for supper, so food-wise it was great. XD And there's plenty of leftovers I can take for lunch over the next couple of days, which is even better. :D You guys have no idea how much I've missed calzones and pizza and the like -- we've been avoiding them because Dad couldn't eat them. He's still having some trouble with his dentures, mind, but he's got a dentist appointment tomorrow, so HOPEFULLY something can be done then. Fingers crossed!
As for my goals for the day, I did pretty well on those too:
Tumblr: Once again there was nothing going on over on Valice Multiverse – but over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), I did indeed spend the morning going through my tracked tags and looking for more stuff to add to my drafts for later queues! And I’m happy to say that I was able to snag a good number of posts, including:
A) A Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines gifset by claudiawolf, depicting scenes from the Ocean House Hotel level like the White Dress Woman ghost, the one I named Dorothy in “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale Of Tears,” running from her murderous husband down a hallway, and one of the paintings on the upstairs balcony shaking in a worrying way – it’s a good level and I thought the gifs were quite well done
B) A VTMB photoset by gamerism depicting locations in the Chinatown map area, including Kamikaze Zen (the computer place you have to infiltrate to do the “setting up the Nosferatu Schreknet hubs” mission), The White Cloud (where the creepy guy who sends you to do things like get a dead criminal’s eyes and be a “bad luck farmer” in the local spa works), and the noodle shop (where you can meet Yukie and help her avenge her dead mentor by fighting a wereshark) – the pictures were really pretty, edited to make the colors really POP
C) A photo post by twisted-cat2476 showing off her latest acquisition: a The Smiler pin with the iconic swirly-eyed smiley face and “CORRECTED” hanging down from underneath the logo – I like Smiler merch myself, and it’s a very cool pin :D
D) An Alice: Madness Returns photoset by cbcks depicting the cutscene where Alice falls down the rabbit hole after confronting Pris Witless, tumbling about through the normal Wonderland debris before seeing the new added Ruin-themed mechanical stuff at the bottom and changing into her Wonderland form as she enters the Vale of Tears – it was a nice photoset with some good shots, depicting a very cool moment from the game in the kind of detail you don’t often see on tumblr
E) A photo post by edellis showing off their fanart of A:MR Alice in her Queensland dress, featuring two variants of a portrait of her looking off to the side (one with a simple frame background, one with a Queen of Hearts cards background) sandwiching a picture of her standing in the card castle that serves as the entrance to the level once you leave Cardbridge – it was some very nice fanart, and I found the way they did the cards in the background of the middle one to be very impressive – they looked just like the ones from the game!
F) A photo post by vorpalbae showing off some A:MR fanart they found on max.wise.art’s Instagram, featuring his take on what a Polly Pocket playset based on A:MR might look like: a compact with teeth lining the rim; tiny Alice and Cheshire figurines; a bottom section that mostly resembled the Vale of Tears with a bit of Queensland mixed in in the form of a hedge maze (with a cake at the end), and Ruin pouring in from the side; and a top section with rooms depicting some of the realms Alice travels through in the game (Hatter’s Domain, Deluded Depths, Dollhouse, Rutledge Hallucination, and Dollhouse Basement) – it was very cool and very well done
G) A short Corpse Bride video by rjvill, showing a few clips of the film like Victor and Emily looking at the butterfly in the forest, Emily giving Victor his ring back, and Emily dissolving into butterflies at the church doors, set to some pretty background music – the quality on the video was not the greatest, but I still liked it, and the music rjvill chose was pretty
H) And a text post by callagoo simply stating “anyone else think the corpse bride should have ended with victor and victoria and emily as a poly couple” in pink – I mean, the Corpse Bride trio were basically my first OT3, so, yeah :P
*nods* A good haul! Should help get me through a couple of queues, at least. :p
Writing: I spent the time after lunch revising my tumblr friend Newt’s birthday gift fic (the Valicer In The Dark/Dead Boys Detectives crossover where my crime trio has to tell the titular detectives, Charles and Edwin, that they’re stuck in a place where ghosts must be destroyed as there is no afterlife) as I said I would last night – main things I did were:
A) Start the whole thing off by finding some clips of Charles and Edwin (mostly ones showing them acting like an old married couple) from Dead Boy Detectives on YouTube and watching them through to make sure I had their voices right for the fic (very important, that)
B) Cut out the whole bit specifying how the Spirit Wardens in this world kill ghosts (by boiling them in electroplasm) – while I liked the part where Edwin automatically corrected “electroplasm” to “ectoplasm,” only to be told “no, it’s electroplasm because it’s electric – are ghosts not electric where you’re from?” it just slowed things down and fucked with the pacing
C) And adjusted some of the dialogue – Smiler’s now the one who explains how most ghosts in their world aren’t as sane as Charles and Edwin are (mostly because poor Victor was getting tongue-tied trying to do it), while Victor is the one who initially tells the boys there is no afterlife (Alice dropped the bombshell in the first draft). Gotta fit the right words to the right person!
Couple that with some general rephrasing and cleaning up, and I think this fic is good to go. :) Hopefully Newt likes it when it goes up on Thursday!
Portal 2: Spent a half-hour in the bowels of Aperture Science this afternoon, getting through three whole test chambers today! Mostly because the first two were pretty simple, granted, but still. XD In order, we had –
Chamber 16: The big screens around the elevator advertised various custom paint jobs you could get for the infamous turrets (both solid colors and patterns like plaid and forest camo – the latter of which is actually the color of the “blind box” turret figurine I got to go with my Chell figure and Wheatley light-up keychain years and years ago), and indeed this chamber featured them heavily – to the point of having a turret tucked away behind a grate in the wall in the tiny entrance “hall,” ready to shoot you as you passed by. *rolls eyes* Fortunately it was easily defeated by running and jumping past its laser sight as fast as possible. The test chamber itself was divided into three distinct areas:
I. The starting area, which consisted of a big red floor button, and a laser emitter on the ceiling, pointed at a portal-able bit of floor nearby – the laser emitter turned on when you stood on the button, and could be portaled to wherever you needed it to be
II. A side area to the right, separated from the main area by a big glass partition, that had three turrets lined up in a row in it, ready to shoot you should you try to come around the side of the partition, all guarding a Weighted Storage Cube and a Laser Redirection Cube behind them – unfortunately for them, they were facing some portal-able chunks of wall…
III. And another room next to the starting area, cut off from the other two areas with glass walls, featuring a bunch of turrets guarding the laser receiver and the exit door, which did not have seem to have any immediately-visible entrances
Figuring out how to handle the first part of the test was easy, as you might imagine – once I figured out that the button turned on the laser emitter (and killed the camera GLaDOS had set up in the room), all I had to do was put a portal on the bit of floor beneath the emitter and another on the wall in front of the turrets in the side area with the cubes, then stand on the button and watch as the laser first set the turrets on fire, then blew them up as they overheated. :D The second part was a bit more complicated, though – you see, when I initially stood on the button myself to kill the turrets, I assumed that it also opened up an entrance to the room with the emitter in that side area with the cubes. But when I took the Weighted Storage Cube over to said button and used it to give myself a permanent laser (after briefly moving one of my portals so I could walk down the hall safely), I discovered this wasn’t the case – all of the glass panels stayed in place. Which was a relief in one sense, as all the turrets were facing me when I looked at them through the panel – but was also a puzzle in another, because how was I supposed to solve the puzzle and escape if I couldn’t get into that room?
...And then I remembered “that panel is glass – and lasers are light.” Sure enough, once I brought the laser back down near the floor, I was able to use the Redirection Cube to redirect it right through the glass panel, killing the turrets on the other side and powering the receiver. Which opened up a couple of blue glass panels on the side wall next to me and allowed me to access the room and the now-open exit door! Allowing me to head out and to the next test chamber...all while GLaDOS hummed “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” in a vaguely-menacing way…
( Further Portal Shenanigans Below )
Workout: Well, Jon once again uploaded the latest F:NV YOLO Remastered episode too late for me to watch it while on the bike (in fact, he uploaded it right as my workout ended) – so instead I pedaled my way through a different, older Fallout: New Vegas video he did around the time that The Outer Worlds (another RPG made by the creators of New Vegas, Obsidian Entertainment) came out: “Fallout: New Vegas - The Gun Runners' Arsenal Challenges!” This was a one-shot video talking about the special challenges that the Gun Runners’ Arsenal DLC added to the game for people to complete for loads of XP, because Jon had never really covered them before and was always keen to make more videos talking about just how flipping good New Vegas is and how much content it has. :p The specific challenges he covered in the video were –
A) “Vault 13’s Revenge” – kill 15 super mutants using a weapon that you might have been able to find in one of the first two Fallout games, like a 5.56mm pistol, plasma grenades, or a power fist! Because the title refers to the vault from which the very first Fallout protagonist came from, which was threatened by super mutants in that game. Jon said that this was one of the easier challenges, and proceeded to prove it by acquiring That Gun (a unique 5.56mm pistol specifically named after a type of pistol in the original games that players would call “that gun”) and slaughtering the friendly super mutants of Jacobstown. Which – completed the challenge, but also left him feeling very ashamed. *nods* As he should be – Marcus deserved better!
( This got long, who is surprised )
YouTube: Well, as usual, summing up my workout video took up most of my evening – but I was determined to watch something, so I went ahead and checked out a couple of Shorts that I’d noticed lurking in my Recommendeds that I found intriguing –
A) “When Oghma’s Cleric Meets a God #baldursgate3” by SuNStereO – a short showing off a unique interaction that a Cleric of Oghma (god of knowledge) can have with Milil, the minor god of music that serves as the entertainment at the epilogue party. Basically, Milil starts the party off pretty sad because he considers himself “washed up” after being banished to the Fugue Plane by trickster god Cyric – however, a cleric of Oghma can cheer him up by telling him “It’s an honor to meet the Wise One’s closest godly ally.” He promptly goes “damn straight it’s an honor,” notes he sensed a “whiff of the wise” about the cleric, and asks what he can do for a fellow “Oghmanyte.” XD Just another fun little extra in a game full of fun little extras depending on your class!
B) “They didn't say “cut" and it led to one of the best jokes of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” by Featurama – a short talking about how one of the funniest moments in the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves film came about! Basically, when the paladin Xenk parts ways with the main characters (having helped them acquire the artifact they need to perform a big old heist on their former friend), he turns around and walks away in a straight line down the beach they’re all hanging out on. His actor, Regé-Jean Page, was only supposed to keep walking until one of the directors said “cut”...but as you might have guessed by the title, neither director said “cut” because they wanted to see what would happen, particularly when Regé-Jean ended up encountering a big old rock in his path. Regé-Jean’s decision to march right up it and hop over it rather than go around (coupled with lead Chris Pine’s commentary) proved so funny to them that they knew they had to include in the final product. Given it seems to be a pretty iconic moment I’ve seen a lot on tumblr and the like, I believe this was the correct decision. XD
So yeah -- pretty productive day, overall! And now it is time for me to head to bed so I can get to work tomorrow and face whatever bullshit is waiting for me. *grimace* Night all!
As for my goals for the day, I did pretty well on those too:
Tumblr: Once again there was nothing going on over on Valice Multiverse – but over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), I did indeed spend the morning going through my tracked tags and looking for more stuff to add to my drafts for later queues! And I’m happy to say that I was able to snag a good number of posts, including:
A) A Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines gifset by claudiawolf, depicting scenes from the Ocean House Hotel level like the White Dress Woman ghost, the one I named Dorothy in “Londerland Bloodlines: Santa Monica’s Vale Of Tears,” running from her murderous husband down a hallway, and one of the paintings on the upstairs balcony shaking in a worrying way – it’s a good level and I thought the gifs were quite well done
B) A VTMB photoset by gamerism depicting locations in the Chinatown map area, including Kamikaze Zen (the computer place you have to infiltrate to do the “setting up the Nosferatu Schreknet hubs” mission), The White Cloud (where the creepy guy who sends you to do things like get a dead criminal’s eyes and be a “bad luck farmer” in the local spa works), and the noodle shop (where you can meet Yukie and help her avenge her dead mentor by fighting a wereshark) – the pictures were really pretty, edited to make the colors really POP
C) A photo post by twisted-cat2476 showing off her latest acquisition: a The Smiler pin with the iconic swirly-eyed smiley face and “CORRECTED” hanging down from underneath the logo – I like Smiler merch myself, and it’s a very cool pin :D
D) An Alice: Madness Returns photoset by cbcks depicting the cutscene where Alice falls down the rabbit hole after confronting Pris Witless, tumbling about through the normal Wonderland debris before seeing the new added Ruin-themed mechanical stuff at the bottom and changing into her Wonderland form as she enters the Vale of Tears – it was a nice photoset with some good shots, depicting a very cool moment from the game in the kind of detail you don’t often see on tumblr
E) A photo post by edellis showing off their fanart of A:MR Alice in her Queensland dress, featuring two variants of a portrait of her looking off to the side (one with a simple frame background, one with a Queen of Hearts cards background) sandwiching a picture of her standing in the card castle that serves as the entrance to the level once you leave Cardbridge – it was some very nice fanart, and I found the way they did the cards in the background of the middle one to be very impressive – they looked just like the ones from the game!
F) A photo post by vorpalbae showing off some A:MR fanart they found on max.wise.art’s Instagram, featuring his take on what a Polly Pocket playset based on A:MR might look like: a compact with teeth lining the rim; tiny Alice and Cheshire figurines; a bottom section that mostly resembled the Vale of Tears with a bit of Queensland mixed in in the form of a hedge maze (with a cake at the end), and Ruin pouring in from the side; and a top section with rooms depicting some of the realms Alice travels through in the game (Hatter’s Domain, Deluded Depths, Dollhouse, Rutledge Hallucination, and Dollhouse Basement) – it was very cool and very well done
G) A short Corpse Bride video by rjvill, showing a few clips of the film like Victor and Emily looking at the butterfly in the forest, Emily giving Victor his ring back, and Emily dissolving into butterflies at the church doors, set to some pretty background music – the quality on the video was not the greatest, but I still liked it, and the music rjvill chose was pretty
H) And a text post by callagoo simply stating “anyone else think the corpse bride should have ended with victor and victoria and emily as a poly couple” in pink – I mean, the Corpse Bride trio were basically my first OT3, so, yeah :P
*nods* A good haul! Should help get me through a couple of queues, at least. :p
Writing: I spent the time after lunch revising my tumblr friend Newt’s birthday gift fic (the Valicer In The Dark/Dead Boys Detectives crossover where my crime trio has to tell the titular detectives, Charles and Edwin, that they’re stuck in a place where ghosts must be destroyed as there is no afterlife) as I said I would last night – main things I did were:
A) Start the whole thing off by finding some clips of Charles and Edwin (mostly ones showing them acting like an old married couple) from Dead Boy Detectives on YouTube and watching them through to make sure I had their voices right for the fic (very important, that)
B) Cut out the whole bit specifying how the Spirit Wardens in this world kill ghosts (by boiling them in electroplasm) – while I liked the part where Edwin automatically corrected “electroplasm” to “ectoplasm,” only to be told “no, it’s electroplasm because it’s electric – are ghosts not electric where you’re from?” it just slowed things down and fucked with the pacing
C) And adjusted some of the dialogue – Smiler’s now the one who explains how most ghosts in their world aren’t as sane as Charles and Edwin are (mostly because poor Victor was getting tongue-tied trying to do it), while Victor is the one who initially tells the boys there is no afterlife (Alice dropped the bombshell in the first draft). Gotta fit the right words to the right person!
Couple that with some general rephrasing and cleaning up, and I think this fic is good to go. :) Hopefully Newt likes it when it goes up on Thursday!
Portal 2: Spent a half-hour in the bowels of Aperture Science this afternoon, getting through three whole test chambers today! Mostly because the first two were pretty simple, granted, but still. XD In order, we had –
Chamber 16: The big screens around the elevator advertised various custom paint jobs you could get for the infamous turrets (both solid colors and patterns like plaid and forest camo – the latter of which is actually the color of the “blind box” turret figurine I got to go with my Chell figure and Wheatley light-up keychain years and years ago), and indeed this chamber featured them heavily – to the point of having a turret tucked away behind a grate in the wall in the tiny entrance “hall,” ready to shoot you as you passed by. *rolls eyes* Fortunately it was easily defeated by running and jumping past its laser sight as fast as possible. The test chamber itself was divided into three distinct areas:
I. The starting area, which consisted of a big red floor button, and a laser emitter on the ceiling, pointed at a portal-able bit of floor nearby – the laser emitter turned on when you stood on the button, and could be portaled to wherever you needed it to be
II. A side area to the right, separated from the main area by a big glass partition, that had three turrets lined up in a row in it, ready to shoot you should you try to come around the side of the partition, all guarding a Weighted Storage Cube and a Laser Redirection Cube behind them – unfortunately for them, they were facing some portal-able chunks of wall…
III. And another room next to the starting area, cut off from the other two areas with glass walls, featuring a bunch of turrets guarding the laser receiver and the exit door, which did not have seem to have any immediately-visible entrances
Figuring out how to handle the first part of the test was easy, as you might imagine – once I figured out that the button turned on the laser emitter (and killed the camera GLaDOS had set up in the room), all I had to do was put a portal on the bit of floor beneath the emitter and another on the wall in front of the turrets in the side area with the cubes, then stand on the button and watch as the laser first set the turrets on fire, then blew them up as they overheated. :D The second part was a bit more complicated, though – you see, when I initially stood on the button myself to kill the turrets, I assumed that it also opened up an entrance to the room with the emitter in that side area with the cubes. But when I took the Weighted Storage Cube over to said button and used it to give myself a permanent laser (after briefly moving one of my portals so I could walk down the hall safely), I discovered this wasn’t the case – all of the glass panels stayed in place. Which was a relief in one sense, as all the turrets were facing me when I looked at them through the panel – but was also a puzzle in another, because how was I supposed to solve the puzzle and escape if I couldn’t get into that room?
...And then I remembered “that panel is glass – and lasers are light.” Sure enough, once I brought the laser back down near the floor, I was able to use the Redirection Cube to redirect it right through the glass panel, killing the turrets on the other side and powering the receiver. Which opened up a couple of blue glass panels on the side wall next to me and allowed me to access the room and the now-open exit door! Allowing me to head out and to the next test chamber...all while GLaDOS hummed “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” in a vaguely-menacing way…
( Further Portal Shenanigans Below )
Workout: Well, Jon once again uploaded the latest F:NV YOLO Remastered episode too late for me to watch it while on the bike (in fact, he uploaded it right as my workout ended) – so instead I pedaled my way through a different, older Fallout: New Vegas video he did around the time that The Outer Worlds (another RPG made by the creators of New Vegas, Obsidian Entertainment) came out: “Fallout: New Vegas - The Gun Runners' Arsenal Challenges!” This was a one-shot video talking about the special challenges that the Gun Runners’ Arsenal DLC added to the game for people to complete for loads of XP, because Jon had never really covered them before and was always keen to make more videos talking about just how flipping good New Vegas is and how much content it has. :p The specific challenges he covered in the video were –
A) “Vault 13’s Revenge” – kill 15 super mutants using a weapon that you might have been able to find in one of the first two Fallout games, like a 5.56mm pistol, plasma grenades, or a power fist! Because the title refers to the vault from which the very first Fallout protagonist came from, which was threatened by super mutants in that game. Jon said that this was one of the easier challenges, and proceeded to prove it by acquiring That Gun (a unique 5.56mm pistol specifically named after a type of pistol in the original games that players would call “that gun”) and slaughtering the friendly super mutants of Jacobstown. Which – completed the challenge, but also left him feeling very ashamed. *nods* As he should be – Marcus deserved better!
( This got long, who is surprised )
YouTube: Well, as usual, summing up my workout video took up most of my evening – but I was determined to watch something, so I went ahead and checked out a couple of Shorts that I’d noticed lurking in my Recommendeds that I found intriguing –
A) “When Oghma’s Cleric Meets a God #baldursgate3” by SuNStereO – a short showing off a unique interaction that a Cleric of Oghma (god of knowledge) can have with Milil, the minor god of music that serves as the entertainment at the epilogue party. Basically, Milil starts the party off pretty sad because he considers himself “washed up” after being banished to the Fugue Plane by trickster god Cyric – however, a cleric of Oghma can cheer him up by telling him “It’s an honor to meet the Wise One’s closest godly ally.” He promptly goes “damn straight it’s an honor,” notes he sensed a “whiff of the wise” about the cleric, and asks what he can do for a fellow “Oghmanyte.” XD Just another fun little extra in a game full of fun little extras depending on your class!
B) “They didn't say “cut" and it led to one of the best jokes of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” by Featurama – a short talking about how one of the funniest moments in the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves film came about! Basically, when the paladin Xenk parts ways with the main characters (having helped them acquire the artifact they need to perform a big old heist on their former friend), he turns around and walks away in a straight line down the beach they’re all hanging out on. His actor, Regé-Jean Page, was only supposed to keep walking until one of the directors said “cut”...but as you might have guessed by the title, neither director said “cut” because they wanted to see what would happen, particularly when Regé-Jean ended up encountering a big old rock in his path. Regé-Jean’s decision to march right up it and hop over it rather than go around (coupled with lead Chris Pine’s commentary) proved so funny to them that they knew they had to include in the final product. Given it seems to be a pretty iconic moment I’ve seen a lot on tumblr and the like, I believe this was the correct decision. XD
So yeah -- pretty productive day, overall! And now it is time for me to head to bed so I can get to work tomorrow and face whatever bullshit is waiting for me. *grimace* Night all!
