Weather All Wrong Tuesday
Jun. 17th, 2025 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickIt was SUPPOSED to be sunny and in the mid 70s today, but when I woke up and took the fan out of my window, I was startled to see it was raining! (And very glad that none of the rain had come in THROUGH said fan in my window). Turns out the forecast had changed on a dime overnight, with the day now said to be rainy and anywhere from 70 to 79 degrees. "Well, okay," I figured, "I'll wear long pants and a t-shirt. That should be fine, right?"
WRONG -- it stayed in the mid-60s all day, and I ended up being quite chilly in our cold building! I resorted to putting my windbreaker on in the afternoon -- it didn't provide MUCH warmth, being very thin, but it at least covered my arms! *sigh* And now tomorrow is SUPPOSED to be warmer and more humid, with passing showers and a chance of a downpour...we'll see if THAT comes to pass, or if it too is a lie!
Apart from the weather being an ass, though, I can't say I had too bad a day:
Work – A fairly quiet day at work, with a few busy bits – I did the usual morning reports; I updated a few more credit cards on people’s pledges and changed one guy’s parish; I did a security training thing (because we have to do those yearly); and I put on some Easter collection gifts! Nothing particularly exciting, but at least it all helped the day go by! Hopefully Wednesday is more of the same!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, pedaling my way through the second half of “Party Time! | Teens in Space TTRPG | Episode 3!” I picked up with alien teens Radian Inu (Andy), Kae’l Crex (Jane), and Galaxa Spacemountain (Liv) preparing to escape quite a lot of space pirates by using the secret illegal special warp drive Galaxa’s dad hid on his spaceship, which led to the following –
A) The teens getting physically (but not mentally, fortunately) deaged into four-year-olds for 85 minutes thanks to the space-time weirdness that results from using any sort of warp technology – and, when they popped out the other side of the warp, immediately crashing into a planet! Radian and Galaxa managed to brace in time, but poor tiny Kae’l was thrown out of the ship and ended up in a crater of her own making on the planet’s surface. Fortunately for her, the air was breathable, and Galaxa was able to fix her up in the ship’s medbay (complete with fun band-aids)
B) The ship’s power going out as a result of the crash – fortunately their AI friend V.I.N.N.I.E. had just enough power to sustain himself and continue talking to them (after Radian literally punched something back into place in the wall XD), but the kids were going to have to find some sort of power source if they wanted to repair the ship and ever get off this planet
C) The kids thus venturing out into the frozen wastes beyond the ship to try and find power, discovering that they were on a planet utterly scoured of life – mostly because, at some point in the past, the sun had become a black hole. O.o I am reminded of that GrayStillPlays video where he surrounded Earth with black holes now...or maybe the one where he played as a black hole eating gradually bigger and bigger stuff and slurped down the entire universe in the end. That black hole was much cuter, at least. :p Anyway, they checked out the remains of a nearby town, but didn’t find much that was useful – some paper fliers with text in an utterly unknown language on them; a map that Kae’l was pretty sure she could use to navigate; and some sparking wires that Radian thought briefly developed a weird eyeball to stare at him (he then remembered that he’d had some STRONG drinks back at the party XD)
D) The kids then heading down some nearby steps into a weird subterranean area, because they had to get out of the cold before they froze – though some very worrying growling noises coming from the bottom of the steps made them advance with weapons drawn and shouts of “We don’t want to hurt you! Unless you want to hurt us, in which case, we’re very well armed!” XD Fortunately, what they actually found at the bottom (after a few minutes of terror) was a holographic artificial intelligence named E.T.R.A. – the Earth Terraforming and Reclamation AI! Because yes, these alien teens had indeed landed on a long-abandoned Earth – where did you think they were going to go? XD Anyway, E.T.R.A. was very happy to see new people, and after a bit of awkwardness (including her just suddenly APPEARING between the jumpy Radian and Kae’l to ask what they were hiding from), explained to the kids that she was an AI designed to help save what she could of the Earth when the sun turned into a black hole. Specifically, she was tasked with hollowing out the interior of the Earth and turning it into a big terrarium with the core as a new sun so that those humans who’d been frozen and left behind could repopulate and rebuild in their new hollow Earth! Except...well. The humans who had been left were all the asshole rich billionaires (plus Lady Gaga and Michelle Obama), and E.T.R.A. hadn’t felt much like thawing THEM out – after all, they were horrible dicks! So instead she’d created the terrarium and filled it with a bunch of earth creatures, including some she’d spliced together to resemble creatures from fairy tales. She cheerfully showed the kids her work, leading them past the still-frozen billionaires and into her beautiful hollow-earth world, where a pigeon promptly pooped on Radian –
And the angry rumbles and growls they’d heard earlier repeated themselves. Prompting E.T.R.A. to comment that they’d woken “it” up – and then revealing that her favorite creature from human “fairy tales” was THE LEVIATHAN. Uh-oh. So, uh, yeah – next episode, the teens are gonna have to find a way to deal with THAT thing! And Liv’s going to have to deal with the fury of her fellow players, because apparently she’s the one who mentioned this thing during character creation (I’m not sure what the context was because the character creation video is a members-only video), thus inspiring Jasper. XD At least she got a good “Liv-iathan” joke out of it? XD
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice made it across the front entrance and through the stairwell room into the newly-opened section of the house today, finding the tape with Grout talking about how he’s starting to hear voices telling him strange and fearful information about other vampires in the process. She promptly asked the Wonderlanders if they’d been advising anyone else when they weren’t bothering her. XD Fortunately, Cheshire recognized she was genuinely concerned about sharing any similarities with Grout behind the joke, and reassured her that they were cut from cloths so different you couldn’t even purchase them in the same store. Which is very sweet, in a Wonderlandish way. XD Anyway, that was followed by Hatter trying to puzzle out why Grout was leaving the tape recorders everywhere (Carpenter was certain the man had the heart of a showman, while Alice was pretty sure he was just following the dictates of the mysterious voices), and Alice saying that if Grout had hoped hearing his personal musings would make any visitors to his horrible mansion feel more kindly inclined to him – well, he had another thing coming. XD I left off with her preparing to move on into the deeper sections of the house – tomorrow, she gets to see the first of Grout’s medical labs! She shall not approve. :P
3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: I was feeling more in a Baldur’s Gate III mood tonight than a CaFae Latte one, so I went back over to Proxy Gate Tactician’s channel to watch “Baldur's Gate 3 - 10 of the Most Secret Encounters You Probably MISSED!” A short video detailing a bunch of NPCs and enemies that players are unlikely to encounter – plus one that a lot more people know about, but which is just a little harder to find than you might think (remember to do your mushroom platforming in the Underdark should you want to find BOOOOAL and his flock of fishy followers!). Entries on the list included:
A) The alternate enemies you can fight in the Stormshore Tarbanacle (a collection of shrines to various deities; Gale has to go there to meet up with his ex Mystra, Goddess of Magic) should you loot the chests in the basement and anger the gods – normally you get cursed to have to fight an enemy deva (looks like a type of angel), but if your character is the cleric of a storm god, they’ll fight djinn instead – and if they’re the cleric of an evil god, they’ll fight cambions!
B) The zombie forms of Minthara and Dror Ragzlin (two enemies from the goblin camp in Act I), who only appear if you defeat the goblins in Act I, then suddenly switch sides and help one of the three big bads Ketheric Thorm and his underling Balthazar with their plans in Act II – they show up as Balthazar’s bodyguards in the mind flayer colony when the pair ultimately betray you and trap you down there to steal the artifact keeping you safe
C) The shadow creatures the Necromancy of Thay book spawns should you choose to destroy it with radiant damage instead of read it – they’re not very powerful, and they don’t make up for losing the benefits of the book (+1 to Wisdom saving throws and ability checks, and eventually the ability to summon your own zombie minions in Act III), so Proxy does NOT recommend finding these three enemies in your game
D) And Honk, brother of Henk, the half-orc owner of the Singing Lute Tavern in Act III, who only shows up if you for some reason kill Henk, then take a romanced Karlach on a date to the tavern – Henk’s supposed to be your (rather bad) waiter, but if he’s dead, Honk takes his place. The pair are basically identical except for different haircuts and a different speaking voice, meaning Proxy considers poor Honk to be the laziest back-up character Larian implemented in the game – but is still impressed he exists at all. Larian – they WILL have a back-up character for your shenanigans!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check, I’m happy to say –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Welp, I really wanted to post them this week, so I buckled down this evening and got the “Polyheart OT3 House Is Done” post and the “BTTF Characters” addition to the “Mega Gender/Sexuality Headcanon Post” DONE and in the queue! w00! :D They’ll be going up Wednesday and Thursday respectively, as I’d hoped. :) I also threw in a reblog of a post about how “love is stored in the fictional couple i’ve gotten overly invested in” for Friday, with tags indicating that it’s often a larger polycule that the love is stored in for me. :) I just gotta figure out my Song Saturday and get Nebby’s birthday fic sorted for Sunday, and the queue will be set!
Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had one anon ask for the queue, telling me about how they’d just learned that British people apparently call macaroni and cheese just “macaroni cheese.” Which – yeah, that’s accurate, as per Wikipedia. O.o As a result, my thoroughly English Cuddlepile!Alice pointed out that the dish came from England, and accused the Americans of adding an entirely unnecessary ampersand. XD Sorry, Alice, but I think it flows better as “mac AND cheese.” And damn it, now I’m hungry. :P
Whew! Pretty productive there -- and I'm very glad I put in the time to finish those posts. :) Would have been sad if I'd had to delay them a week! But with that, I must hit the sheets -- still got a day of work to go here! Night all!
WRONG -- it stayed in the mid-60s all day, and I ended up being quite chilly in our cold building! I resorted to putting my windbreaker on in the afternoon -- it didn't provide MUCH warmth, being very thin, but it at least covered my arms! *sigh* And now tomorrow is SUPPOSED to be warmer and more humid, with passing showers and a chance of a downpour...we'll see if THAT comes to pass, or if it too is a lie!
Apart from the weather being an ass, though, I can't say I had too bad a day:
Work – A fairly quiet day at work, with a few busy bits – I did the usual morning reports; I updated a few more credit cards on people’s pledges and changed one guy’s parish; I did a security training thing (because we have to do those yearly); and I put on some Easter collection gifts! Nothing particularly exciting, but at least it all helped the day go by! Hopefully Wednesday is more of the same!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, pedaling my way through the second half of “Party Time! | Teens in Space TTRPG | Episode 3!” I picked up with alien teens Radian Inu (Andy), Kae’l Crex (Jane), and Galaxa Spacemountain (Liv) preparing to escape quite a lot of space pirates by using the secret illegal special warp drive Galaxa’s dad hid on his spaceship, which led to the following –
A) The teens getting physically (but not mentally, fortunately) deaged into four-year-olds for 85 minutes thanks to the space-time weirdness that results from using any sort of warp technology – and, when they popped out the other side of the warp, immediately crashing into a planet! Radian and Galaxa managed to brace in time, but poor tiny Kae’l was thrown out of the ship and ended up in a crater of her own making on the planet’s surface. Fortunately for her, the air was breathable, and Galaxa was able to fix her up in the ship’s medbay (complete with fun band-aids)
B) The ship’s power going out as a result of the crash – fortunately their AI friend V.I.N.N.I.E. had just enough power to sustain himself and continue talking to them (after Radian literally punched something back into place in the wall XD), but the kids were going to have to find some sort of power source if they wanted to repair the ship and ever get off this planet
C) The kids thus venturing out into the frozen wastes beyond the ship to try and find power, discovering that they were on a planet utterly scoured of life – mostly because, at some point in the past, the sun had become a black hole. O.o I am reminded of that GrayStillPlays video where he surrounded Earth with black holes now...or maybe the one where he played as a black hole eating gradually bigger and bigger stuff and slurped down the entire universe in the end. That black hole was much cuter, at least. :p Anyway, they checked out the remains of a nearby town, but didn’t find much that was useful – some paper fliers with text in an utterly unknown language on them; a map that Kae’l was pretty sure she could use to navigate; and some sparking wires that Radian thought briefly developed a weird eyeball to stare at him (he then remembered that he’d had some STRONG drinks back at the party XD)
D) The kids then heading down some nearby steps into a weird subterranean area, because they had to get out of the cold before they froze – though some very worrying growling noises coming from the bottom of the steps made them advance with weapons drawn and shouts of “We don’t want to hurt you! Unless you want to hurt us, in which case, we’re very well armed!” XD Fortunately, what they actually found at the bottom (after a few minutes of terror) was a holographic artificial intelligence named E.T.R.A. – the Earth Terraforming and Reclamation AI! Because yes, these alien teens had indeed landed on a long-abandoned Earth – where did you think they were going to go? XD Anyway, E.T.R.A. was very happy to see new people, and after a bit of awkwardness (including her just suddenly APPEARING between the jumpy Radian and Kae’l to ask what they were hiding from), explained to the kids that she was an AI designed to help save what she could of the Earth when the sun turned into a black hole. Specifically, she was tasked with hollowing out the interior of the Earth and turning it into a big terrarium with the core as a new sun so that those humans who’d been frozen and left behind could repopulate and rebuild in their new hollow Earth! Except...well. The humans who had been left were all the asshole rich billionaires (plus Lady Gaga and Michelle Obama), and E.T.R.A. hadn’t felt much like thawing THEM out – after all, they were horrible dicks! So instead she’d created the terrarium and filled it with a bunch of earth creatures, including some she’d spliced together to resemble creatures from fairy tales. She cheerfully showed the kids her work, leading them past the still-frozen billionaires and into her beautiful hollow-earth world, where a pigeon promptly pooped on Radian –
And the angry rumbles and growls they’d heard earlier repeated themselves. Prompting E.T.R.A. to comment that they’d woken “it” up – and then revealing that her favorite creature from human “fairy tales” was THE LEVIATHAN. Uh-oh. So, uh, yeah – next episode, the teens are gonna have to find a way to deal with THAT thing! And Liv’s going to have to deal with the fury of her fellow players, because apparently she’s the one who mentioned this thing during character creation (I’m not sure what the context was because the character creation video is a members-only video), thus inspiring Jasper. XD At least she got a good “Liv-iathan” joke out of it? XD
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice made it across the front entrance and through the stairwell room into the newly-opened section of the house today, finding the tape with Grout talking about how he’s starting to hear voices telling him strange and fearful information about other vampires in the process. She promptly asked the Wonderlanders if they’d been advising anyone else when they weren’t bothering her. XD Fortunately, Cheshire recognized she was genuinely concerned about sharing any similarities with Grout behind the joke, and reassured her that they were cut from cloths so different you couldn’t even purchase them in the same store. Which is very sweet, in a Wonderlandish way. XD Anyway, that was followed by Hatter trying to puzzle out why Grout was leaving the tape recorders everywhere (Carpenter was certain the man had the heart of a showman, while Alice was pretty sure he was just following the dictates of the mysterious voices), and Alice saying that if Grout had hoped hearing his personal musings would make any visitors to his horrible mansion feel more kindly inclined to him – well, he had another thing coming. XD I left off with her preparing to move on into the deeper sections of the house – tomorrow, she gets to see the first of Grout’s medical labs! She shall not approve. :P
3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: I was feeling more in a Baldur’s Gate III mood tonight than a CaFae Latte one, so I went back over to Proxy Gate Tactician’s channel to watch “Baldur's Gate 3 - 10 of the Most Secret Encounters You Probably MISSED!” A short video detailing a bunch of NPCs and enemies that players are unlikely to encounter – plus one that a lot more people know about, but which is just a little harder to find than you might think (remember to do your mushroom platforming in the Underdark should you want to find BOOOOAL and his flock of fishy followers!). Entries on the list included:
A) The alternate enemies you can fight in the Stormshore Tarbanacle (a collection of shrines to various deities; Gale has to go there to meet up with his ex Mystra, Goddess of Magic) should you loot the chests in the basement and anger the gods – normally you get cursed to have to fight an enemy deva (looks like a type of angel), but if your character is the cleric of a storm god, they’ll fight djinn instead – and if they’re the cleric of an evil god, they’ll fight cambions!
B) The zombie forms of Minthara and Dror Ragzlin (two enemies from the goblin camp in Act I), who only appear if you defeat the goblins in Act I, then suddenly switch sides and help one of the three big bads Ketheric Thorm and his underling Balthazar with their plans in Act II – they show up as Balthazar’s bodyguards in the mind flayer colony when the pair ultimately betray you and trap you down there to steal the artifact keeping you safe
C) The shadow creatures the Necromancy of Thay book spawns should you choose to destroy it with radiant damage instead of read it – they’re not very powerful, and they don’t make up for losing the benefits of the book (+1 to Wisdom saving throws and ability checks, and eventually the ability to summon your own zombie minions in Act III), so Proxy does NOT recommend finding these three enemies in your game
D) And Honk, brother of Henk, the half-orc owner of the Singing Lute Tavern in Act III, who only shows up if you for some reason kill Henk, then take a romanced Karlach on a date to the tavern – Henk’s supposed to be your (rather bad) waiter, but if he’s dead, Honk takes his place. The pair are basically identical except for different haircuts and a different speaking voice, meaning Proxy considers poor Honk to be the laziest back-up character Larian implemented in the game – but is still impressed he exists at all. Larian – they WILL have a back-up character for your shenanigans!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check, I’m happy to say –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Welp, I really wanted to post them this week, so I buckled down this evening and got the “Polyheart OT3 House Is Done” post and the “BTTF Characters” addition to the “Mega Gender/Sexuality Headcanon Post” DONE and in the queue! w00! :D They’ll be going up Wednesday and Thursday respectively, as I’d hoped. :) I also threw in a reblog of a post about how “love is stored in the fictional couple i’ve gotten overly invested in” for Friday, with tags indicating that it’s often a larger polycule that the love is stored in for me. :) I just gotta figure out my Song Saturday and get Nebby’s birthday fic sorted for Sunday, and the queue will be set!
Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had one anon ask for the queue, telling me about how they’d just learned that British people apparently call macaroni and cheese just “macaroni cheese.” Which – yeah, that’s accurate, as per Wikipedia. O.o As a result, my thoroughly English Cuddlepile!Alice pointed out that the dish came from England, and accused the Americans of adding an entirely unnecessary ampersand. XD Sorry, Alice, but I think it flows better as “mac AND cheese.” And damn it, now I’m hungry. :P
Whew! Pretty productive there -- and I'm very glad I put in the time to finish those posts. :) Would have been sad if I'd had to delay them a week! But with that, I must hit the sheets -- still got a day of work to go here! Night all!
