Happy 40th Anniversary BTTF!
Jul. 3rd, 2025 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYes, it was 40 years today that the original Back To The Future was released in theaters! So naturally I had to make sure I got the 10:04 timestamp for this entry. :) I may not be much of a Backie anymore, but I am enough of one to want to acknowledge the anniversary still!
And now it is much later, and it is time for me to paste in the daily write-up and then head to bed:
Work – A very quiet day in the office to wrap up this short week – we didn’t get a single phone call or visitor or anything! Which meant I didn’t have much to do there, unfortunately – I deposited the checks from yesterday; I ran the usual morning reports; I went through the obituaries (all four of them); and – just to fill the time – I went through every instance of a particular common name on our system from those obituaries and updated them with birthdates and middle initials and whether they were active (or even alive) or not. Oh, and I looked up a bit of returned mail for my coworker after lunch and agreed with her that it was time to write the donor’s pledge off, as we’d already tried and failed to find a new address for him. *shrug* Nothing particularly exciting! Fortunately for my continued sanity, they did let us out early – I was out and on the road at 2 PM, yay. :) Even better, the traffic was really good, so I was home by 2:13 PM, double yay! :D Which meant, after washing my face and changing out of my work clothes and all that good stuff...
Superliminal – I had enough time this afternoon to go collectible-hunting in our favorite weird-ass puzzle game! Today I ran through “Blackout,” the horror-themed level (where everything is scary but nothing is actually trying to hurt you, because this is just a puzzle game that loves to fuck with you), which contained:
A) Another beautiful constellation room hidden within one of the filing cabinets in the reception area at the start – and yes, within the filing cabinet; you access it by walking into the shadowed side of the right-hand bank of three. The constellation this time was a cheese wheel (complete with a slice taken out of the side – probably for all those cheese ramps we were going up and down before) – proud to say it did not take me long to line up the stars to get it to form. :) I do like these rooms – they’re just so magical with all the stars around.
B) A blue pawn hidden atop the many boxes that make up the creepy box maze you have to navigate by the spooky red light of an exit sign you pull out of another part of the level – you have to turn around right when you get to the door out of the room and figure out a way to climb up to its secret little hidden notch at the top of the box wall. Which I found to be very fiddly, because – well. The video included with the guide I’m using to find all this stuff indicated that you needed to make your exit sign absolutely HUGE so you could use it as a ramp to climb up there. However, despite my best efforts, I could not get the exit sign big enough to climb up to the top, and half the time couldn’t even get it to fall the right way to FORM a ramp. It didn’t help that the few times that I did manage to climb up onto the first level of boxes (there were a couple of levels, with the pawn at the top of the second one), I ended up falling straight down back into the final bend of the maze because there was a gap I couldn’t see, on account of it being fucking dark up there! I actually thought the boxes didn’t have proper tops for a minute! Finally, though, I managed to climb up there and STAY up there, then thought to grab my sign to provide proper illumination so I could see where to walk. And then, after putting said sign on another box and resizing it so I could use it as an extra platform, I was finally able to climb up and grab the damn blue pawn. Sheesh! *shakehead* Some of these chess pieces, man…
C) Another blue pawn hiding behind a window in the storage room where you find the “IDEA” (rather than “IKEA”) generator – this space starts as a really dark and creepy hallway, but once you start the generator and turn the lights back on, you discover that it’s basically a giant pantry room for a pair of small kitchens, attached to the dining room where you find out all those red splatters you keep seeing everywhere were just red paint from a remodel. And this pantry room has windows, and through one of them (left-hand side if you’re facing the generator), you can see a blue pawn peeking in at you! The guide kept talking about using “wooden planks” to climb up and over the shelves to get at the window (I think they were referring to the planks holding up the fake entrance to the dining room, where the generator is actually situated?), but I just grabbed a can of lovely beans from one of the kitchens through its “serving window” and used it as a platform to vault the shelves and climb up onto the window sill, before poking my head through the window and grabbing that pawn. Was a little tricky to get the can just the right size to jump on, but nowhere NEAR as complicated as the damn exit sign ramp I was trying to make before!
D) And a blueprint lying on the floor of that same storage room, among the shelves on the opposite side (right-hand if you’re facing the generator) – again, I just grabbed myself another can of beans (I had to get a new one because I accidentally left my old one behind after getting the second blue pawn and returning to the central aisle) and hopped over the top of those shelves before making my way over to the blueprint and clicking on it to spawn the actual sketch (made by a “Washington ‘Licensed’ Dream Architect” XD). Now that one was easy-peasy, and I am THANKFUL.
Whew! Some tricky stuff to get in this one, but I managed to snag it all, yay. :) And, in keeping with my mission to tell you all the interesting little bits and bobs I’ve noticed while playing through this game again, here is today’s collection of Fun Facts:
I. I am pleased to report that the computer screen in the reception area of each level DOES update to reflect which chess pieces you’ve snagged in the previous levels, as the pink king and queen I got in “Cubism” were present on the screen when I checked! :D What a nice little touch – and a good way to keep track of your chess pieces. :)
II. The boomboxes that Dr. Glen Pierce talks to you through are made by “Loagiesonics” – not entirely sure what brand name that’s riffing on, but it’s an amusing name nonetheless. (I actually thought it was “Loogiesonics” at first – you know, like spitting? :P)
III. The Quest To Read All The Soda “Tag Lines” was successfully completed today with me ordering and then reading a can of Water Soda – and it turns out that the Water Soda has some good advice for us all: “Don’t be a fool – hydrate!” *nods* I will endeavor to drink more water this weekend, Water Soda.
IV. Speaking of soda, when I encountered the piled boxes of Diet Soda in the level proper (piled behind a doorway that means you initially only see the “Die” part of the name), I noticed that the boxes had the “Smooooooooth!” tagline that is on the cans, and not the “Made with REAL avocados!” tagline from the vending machine. I’m starting to think they came up with “real avocados” line early in production, put it on the vending machine, then decided to change it to “Smoooooooooth!” and just never bothered to update the machine because who was going to take the time to read all the buttons on there? *holds up hand* Me. I took the time. The “real avocados” line is funnier and you should have stuck with it. However, I will say that I did like that when you look at the Diet Soda boxes from the top, you still get the cans telling you to “die” through one of the little gaps for carrying the cases. XD Very appropriate for this level!
V. When you’re walking through the really dark “loading dock” hallway to the door that takes you into the actual level proper, if you go to the door directly opposite it (under the red light illuminating the door you need to enter) and look in its little window, you’ll see a distorted “reflection” of the door you need to go through. And I’ve put “reflection” in quotation marks because, looking at it, I think that “reflection” was actually supposed to look like a scene the dream creators painted either in the window or on a wall on the other side of the door – it had that same sort of “optical illusion” feel as some of the other “you thought it was real? PAINTING” moments I’ve seen in other parts of the game. Amusing!
VI. While most of the boxes in the level are either Diet Soda boxes or otherwise fairly generic cardboard boxes (though, judging by the imagery on one, I think it specifically was for wine glasses – certainly seemed to have SOMETHING fragile inside!), the boxes in the Creepy Box Maze are from RySAN Shipping, with “Rice Cakes and Assorted Candies” written on them. Oh, and the ones that you pass by while going into the big corridor in the second stack of boxes have a skull and crossbones on them with “Don’t Turn Around” written on them. Yeah, thanks game, this level wasn’t creepy enough? (Though I do say, I DID turn around, and I was rather disappointed to not find anything behind me. They should have put an oversized pawn or something behind you if you do turn around in that section.)
VII. The cans of beans you can get from the kitchens once you end the level are SURPRISINGLY well-detailed – they’re specifically Fieth’s Beans, and have a bunch of flowery copy on them about how they strive for “that squeal of joy you see in a child when they eat a delicious bean” and that “[w]e only pick the freshest, highest quality beans only picked from the fields of Spain” and that their beans are “[f]illed with delicious preservatives and saturated fats now and forever, despite the findings of all those health ‘studies.’” XD To be fair, they’re not kidding about that last bit – the nutritional information informs the player character that there’s 1,200 calories per serving (five wads), and that 1,175 of those calories are from fat. And that total fat is 201g, 574% of your Daily Value of fat. XD Here, I even have screenshots of a giant can of beans so you can see for yourself!
I love how much care the developers put into something many players might not even notice – it’s not immediately obvious you can pick these cans up, after all! XD
VIII. And finally, I did check for fire alarms I hadn’t pulled or fire extinguishers I hadn’t emptied during my travels through the level – and while I didn’t find any in the storage room (where I expected one to be hiding), I did find an alarm I hadn’t pulled next to the door leading to the exit elevator! So that’s been yanked, and I am one step closer to having pulled them all, yay. :P
And that is “Blackout” cleared! Genuinely – I checked in the level select screen, and I have gotten everything in it. :) Next time, we find the secrets in “Clone,” and I see what other fun stuff I can find in there! :)
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, pedaling my way through:
A) The entirety of “We played with the 2024 PHB | Character Creation Discussion | Oxventure Wyrdwood” by, well, Oxventure! A sponsored video where the Oxventure team talked about their experience creating characters with the 2024 Player’s Handbook for D&D 5E, and gave some more insight into why they created the characters they did! For example:
I. Mike wanted to do a character who was very connected to the titular Wyrdwood forest, but didn’t want to do a trad Ranger, so decided to combine the “Guide” background with the Barbarian class to create something more unique
II. Luke, by contrast, was all for creating a trad Ranger, as it was a nice simple class that he could use as a base for his luck-obsessed weirdo that was inspired by a book he was reading at the time (The Black-Tongued Thief, I believe he said – apparently there’s a character in it who has the power of knowing if they’re going to have a lucky day or not)
III. And Jane, Andy, and Ellen were all like “we just wanted to do someone very different from our original Oxventure characters.” XD (Okay, to be somewhat more specific: Jane decided to lean into the “healer” role she usually plays in multiplayer video games; Andy decided to lean into the “horror” side of the “folk horror” setting with his “one character possessing another” idea; and Ellen – actually, Ellen’s thing pretty much was just “opposite of Merilwen.” XD)
It was a nice look into how Lug, Happen, Willowfine, Robin/Morven, and Cressida all came to be! And yes, as you might imagine, they spent a decent amount of time praising the 2024 Player’s Handbook – highlighting the new and better backgrounds that let you mix-and-match concepts more (Mike brought up the idea of a half-orc Barbarian librarian – a barlibrarian if you will); the new fun stuff some characters get (apparently the “Sorcerous Burst” Morven cast in Episode 1 is the new Sorcerer equivalent of “Eldritch Blast,” meaning we’re probably going to see it a LOT from her); and the redesign of the character sheets to be generally more functional (they can see everything they need to know at a glance!) Good stuff overall – it’s nice to see how far they’ve come from the early days of the original Oxventure! :)
B) And about half of “Back to the Future (1985) - Back to the Future Scene | Movieclips” by, well, Moveclips! I would have watched the whole thing, but I had to end my workout a bit early because we had thunderstorms rolling into the area and I had to get my shower in before the lightning started. Ironically, the scene I was watching was the famous “race to the lightning” bit from the first movie. XD Don’t worry, though – I made sure to get to the point of the lightning strike and Marty getting sent back to the future before I headed upstairs. It’s the 40th anniversary, after all – I HAD to make sure to watch the most famous scene in all three movies!
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice managed to make it through more of Grout’s terrible maze today: finding her way out of the almost-the-same-as-the-starting-room room via the one unlocked door (wondering if Grout was following her invisibly and locking/unlocking doors to mess with her); using Obfuscate to sneak past a ghoul in a room that started out right-side up but then turned upside-down as you went down the stairs inside (she had to turn visible again to get through the door at the bottom, but she made it out before the ghoul really noticed her – though she overheard something worrying about there being “fucking mannequins” about…); navigating an upside-down hallway (complete with a little trough in the floor to represent the point of the upside-down roof); and then proceeding through a rather bland-looking room into a gorgeous blue marble room with plinths and statues and fancy golden images of mythological creatures all over the shop (Alice was like “...maybe Grout’s hiding from his creditors after having this built” XD). I left off with Cheshire warning her about getting too close to the strange, mystical beam of light hitting a big block of stone in the center of the room – he has a very good reason to warn her away from it, too, as Alice will see next time I work on this story...
3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – decided to get some of the videos out of my Watch Later with an onlyabidoang double feature:
A) “The Sims 4: 50 FASCINATING FACTS You Might Not Know!” – Abi going through a bunch of interesting stuff – including various Easter Eggs, references, and secret gameplay stuff – that he’s found in The Sims 4! Some of the best facts included:
I. Vegetarian werewolves, when directed to hunt for food, will come back with mushrooms instead of meat
II. If you use the SimRay from Get To Work’s Scientist career to transform objects with Cottage Living and/or Horse Ranch installed, there is a small chance that the object will turn into a chicken, rabbit, mini-goat, or mini-sheep, as they’re all technically classified as “objects” by the game (this also means you can resize them in Build/Buy if you want to make giant versions to terrorize your neighborhoods)
III. There’s a curse you can get from one of the Jungle Adventures idols that makes your Sim constantly hallucinate not only stacks of pancakes, but also the face of one Bob Pancakes from Willow Creek! You cure it by eating some pancakes, with the game explicitly telling you in a pop-up that “cannabilism” [sic] is not possible, so you can’t cure it by eating Bob (the only time that any mention of that comes up in the game anywhere! So figures they’d misspell it)
IV. The heart-shaped gemstone you can cut in Crystal Creations has a description that references one of the songs in the Steven Universe movie (allowing Abi to show off his beautiful singing voice again as he sang the lyrics)
V. And the list of South Asian names that NPCs can have in Tomorang in For Rent includes Abi’s own first name! He actually switched over to speaking his native Indonesian for that fact :D
Good stuff – I like when he points out fun facts like these! Proves there’s always something new to learn about the game. :)
B) “EVERY NEW FEATURE coming to Sims 4 Enchanted by Nature!” – Abi going over all the new stuff – such as the world of Innisgreen, the “Natural Living” and “Apothecary” skills, the living houseplants you have to care for, the “Luck” and “Balance” mechanics, the “Naturopath” career, the upgraded PlantSims, and of course the Fairy occult – coming with the latest pack, set to release next week! It was a very solid overview of what we knew about each new feature...and how some of them seemed a bit – lacking. Or like combinations of things we already have. For example, PlantSims ARE getting an upgrade, with some new powers and interactions...but they’re not becoming the permanent occult lifestate with a proper skill tree people want. And while the elixirs and cures you can craft with the Apothecary skill look interesting, Abi noted they did seem a bit like just another variation on the potions you can craft as a Spellcaster with Realm of Magic, or the concoctions you can brew up with the Herbalism skill with Outdoor Retreat. (Or, as I just thought now, the serums you can make as a Scientist in Get To Work!) Though, admittedly, I don’t know how much overlap there actually is between all of these… Bottom line, there’s some interesting stuff here (especially for Fairies, who have a really robust skill tree AND loads of fun CAS stuff), but Abi wasn’t shy about calling out the devs for apparently recycling ideas from older packs in a slightly new form. *shrug* I’m still on the fence – we’ll see if I tip one way or the other once the pack is out and we know more about it!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Um – half a substitute check, if that makes any sense. :p Let me explain –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here, I didn’t do anything actually queue-related (didn’t need to), but I did make sure to reblog a BTTF gifset made by “cineshemp” from one of the BTTF-obsessed people I follow to celebrate the 40th anniversary! Unfortunately, I got to it just after 10:04, but eh – I got the timestamp over here, and that’s what matters. :)
Valice Multiverse – And over there, I have one anon ask waiting in my inbox – someone complaining that the lyrics of the song “Colors Of The Wind” (from Disney’s Pocahontas) sounds like the sort of things a smelly hippie in a drum circle would tell people. I’m not sure how to answer it, if I want to answer it at all, so I’m gonna wait on it and decide tomorrow what I’m gonna do. *shrug*
And there we are! And I really need to get to bed. Tomorrow, plans include working on some of my Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) drafts; playing Fallout 4 and continuing the trek through the Mechanist's lair; updating the FO4 Playthrough Progression appropriately; getting in a workout (probably to the Fallout: London episode I missed last Sunday); and maybe getting something else out of the old Watch Later -- we'll see. Night all!
And now it is much later, and it is time for me to paste in the daily write-up and then head to bed:
Work – A very quiet day in the office to wrap up this short week – we didn’t get a single phone call or visitor or anything! Which meant I didn’t have much to do there, unfortunately – I deposited the checks from yesterday; I ran the usual morning reports; I went through the obituaries (all four of them); and – just to fill the time – I went through every instance of a particular common name on our system from those obituaries and updated them with birthdates and middle initials and whether they were active (or even alive) or not. Oh, and I looked up a bit of returned mail for my coworker after lunch and agreed with her that it was time to write the donor’s pledge off, as we’d already tried and failed to find a new address for him. *shrug* Nothing particularly exciting! Fortunately for my continued sanity, they did let us out early – I was out and on the road at 2 PM, yay. :) Even better, the traffic was really good, so I was home by 2:13 PM, double yay! :D Which meant, after washing my face and changing out of my work clothes and all that good stuff...
Superliminal – I had enough time this afternoon to go collectible-hunting in our favorite weird-ass puzzle game! Today I ran through “Blackout,” the horror-themed level (where everything is scary but nothing is actually trying to hurt you, because this is just a puzzle game that loves to fuck with you), which contained:
A) Another beautiful constellation room hidden within one of the filing cabinets in the reception area at the start – and yes, within the filing cabinet; you access it by walking into the shadowed side of the right-hand bank of three. The constellation this time was a cheese wheel (complete with a slice taken out of the side – probably for all those cheese ramps we were going up and down before) – proud to say it did not take me long to line up the stars to get it to form. :) I do like these rooms – they’re just so magical with all the stars around.
B) A blue pawn hidden atop the many boxes that make up the creepy box maze you have to navigate by the spooky red light of an exit sign you pull out of another part of the level – you have to turn around right when you get to the door out of the room and figure out a way to climb up to its secret little hidden notch at the top of the box wall. Which I found to be very fiddly, because – well. The video included with the guide I’m using to find all this stuff indicated that you needed to make your exit sign absolutely HUGE so you could use it as a ramp to climb up there. However, despite my best efforts, I could not get the exit sign big enough to climb up to the top, and half the time couldn’t even get it to fall the right way to FORM a ramp. It didn’t help that the few times that I did manage to climb up onto the first level of boxes (there were a couple of levels, with the pawn at the top of the second one), I ended up falling straight down back into the final bend of the maze because there was a gap I couldn’t see, on account of it being fucking dark up there! I actually thought the boxes didn’t have proper tops for a minute! Finally, though, I managed to climb up there and STAY up there, then thought to grab my sign to provide proper illumination so I could see where to walk. And then, after putting said sign on another box and resizing it so I could use it as an extra platform, I was finally able to climb up and grab the damn blue pawn. Sheesh! *shakehead* Some of these chess pieces, man…
C) Another blue pawn hiding behind a window in the storage room where you find the “IDEA” (rather than “IKEA”) generator – this space starts as a really dark and creepy hallway, but once you start the generator and turn the lights back on, you discover that it’s basically a giant pantry room for a pair of small kitchens, attached to the dining room where you find out all those red splatters you keep seeing everywhere were just red paint from a remodel. And this pantry room has windows, and through one of them (left-hand side if you’re facing the generator), you can see a blue pawn peeking in at you! The guide kept talking about using “wooden planks” to climb up and over the shelves to get at the window (I think they were referring to the planks holding up the fake entrance to the dining room, where the generator is actually situated?), but I just grabbed a can of lovely beans from one of the kitchens through its “serving window” and used it as a platform to vault the shelves and climb up onto the window sill, before poking my head through the window and grabbing that pawn. Was a little tricky to get the can just the right size to jump on, but nowhere NEAR as complicated as the damn exit sign ramp I was trying to make before!
D) And a blueprint lying on the floor of that same storage room, among the shelves on the opposite side (right-hand if you’re facing the generator) – again, I just grabbed myself another can of beans (I had to get a new one because I accidentally left my old one behind after getting the second blue pawn and returning to the central aisle) and hopped over the top of those shelves before making my way over to the blueprint and clicking on it to spawn the actual sketch (made by a “Washington ‘Licensed’ Dream Architect” XD). Now that one was easy-peasy, and I am THANKFUL.
Whew! Some tricky stuff to get in this one, but I managed to snag it all, yay. :) And, in keeping with my mission to tell you all the interesting little bits and bobs I’ve noticed while playing through this game again, here is today’s collection of Fun Facts:
I. I am pleased to report that the computer screen in the reception area of each level DOES update to reflect which chess pieces you’ve snagged in the previous levels, as the pink king and queen I got in “Cubism” were present on the screen when I checked! :D What a nice little touch – and a good way to keep track of your chess pieces. :)
II. The boomboxes that Dr. Glen Pierce talks to you through are made by “Loagiesonics” – not entirely sure what brand name that’s riffing on, but it’s an amusing name nonetheless. (I actually thought it was “Loogiesonics” at first – you know, like spitting? :P)
III. The Quest To Read All The Soda “Tag Lines” was successfully completed today with me ordering and then reading a can of Water Soda – and it turns out that the Water Soda has some good advice for us all: “Don’t be a fool – hydrate!” *nods* I will endeavor to drink more water this weekend, Water Soda.
IV. Speaking of soda, when I encountered the piled boxes of Diet Soda in the level proper (piled behind a doorway that means you initially only see the “Die” part of the name), I noticed that the boxes had the “Smooooooooth!” tagline that is on the cans, and not the “Made with REAL avocados!” tagline from the vending machine. I’m starting to think they came up with “real avocados” line early in production, put it on the vending machine, then decided to change it to “Smoooooooooth!” and just never bothered to update the machine because who was going to take the time to read all the buttons on there? *holds up hand* Me. I took the time. The “real avocados” line is funnier and you should have stuck with it. However, I will say that I did like that when you look at the Diet Soda boxes from the top, you still get the cans telling you to “die” through one of the little gaps for carrying the cases. XD Very appropriate for this level!
V. When you’re walking through the really dark “loading dock” hallway to the door that takes you into the actual level proper, if you go to the door directly opposite it (under the red light illuminating the door you need to enter) and look in its little window, you’ll see a distorted “reflection” of the door you need to go through. And I’ve put “reflection” in quotation marks because, looking at it, I think that “reflection” was actually supposed to look like a scene the dream creators painted either in the window or on a wall on the other side of the door – it had that same sort of “optical illusion” feel as some of the other “you thought it was real? PAINTING” moments I’ve seen in other parts of the game. Amusing!
VI. While most of the boxes in the level are either Diet Soda boxes or otherwise fairly generic cardboard boxes (though, judging by the imagery on one, I think it specifically was for wine glasses – certainly seemed to have SOMETHING fragile inside!), the boxes in the Creepy Box Maze are from RySAN Shipping, with “Rice Cakes and Assorted Candies” written on them. Oh, and the ones that you pass by while going into the big corridor in the second stack of boxes have a skull and crossbones on them with “Don’t Turn Around” written on them. Yeah, thanks game, this level wasn’t creepy enough? (Though I do say, I DID turn around, and I was rather disappointed to not find anything behind me. They should have put an oversized pawn or something behind you if you do turn around in that section.)
VII. The cans of beans you can get from the kitchens once you end the level are SURPRISINGLY well-detailed – they’re specifically Fieth’s Beans, and have a bunch of flowery copy on them about how they strive for “that squeal of joy you see in a child when they eat a delicious bean” and that “[w]e only pick the freshest, highest quality beans only picked from the fields of Spain” and that their beans are “[f]illed with delicious preservatives and saturated fats now and forever, despite the findings of all those health ‘studies.’” XD To be fair, they’re not kidding about that last bit – the nutritional information informs the player character that there’s 1,200 calories per serving (five wads), and that 1,175 of those calories are from fat. And that total fat is 201g, 574% of your Daily Value of fat. XD Here, I even have screenshots of a giant can of beans so you can see for yourself!
I love how much care the developers put into something many players might not even notice – it’s not immediately obvious you can pick these cans up, after all! XD
VIII. And finally, I did check for fire alarms I hadn’t pulled or fire extinguishers I hadn’t emptied during my travels through the level – and while I didn’t find any in the storage room (where I expected one to be hiding), I did find an alarm I hadn’t pulled next to the door leading to the exit elevator! So that’s been yanked, and I am one step closer to having pulled them all, yay. :P
And that is “Blackout” cleared! Genuinely – I checked in the level select screen, and I have gotten everything in it. :) Next time, we find the secrets in “Clone,” and I see what other fun stuff I can find in there! :)
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, pedaling my way through:
A) The entirety of “We played with the 2024 PHB | Character Creation Discussion | Oxventure Wyrdwood” by, well, Oxventure! A sponsored video where the Oxventure team talked about their experience creating characters with the 2024 Player’s Handbook for D&D 5E, and gave some more insight into why they created the characters they did! For example:
I. Mike wanted to do a character who was very connected to the titular Wyrdwood forest, but didn’t want to do a trad Ranger, so decided to combine the “Guide” background with the Barbarian class to create something more unique
II. Luke, by contrast, was all for creating a trad Ranger, as it was a nice simple class that he could use as a base for his luck-obsessed weirdo that was inspired by a book he was reading at the time (The Black-Tongued Thief, I believe he said – apparently there’s a character in it who has the power of knowing if they’re going to have a lucky day or not)
III. And Jane, Andy, and Ellen were all like “we just wanted to do someone very different from our original Oxventure characters.” XD (Okay, to be somewhat more specific: Jane decided to lean into the “healer” role she usually plays in multiplayer video games; Andy decided to lean into the “horror” side of the “folk horror” setting with his “one character possessing another” idea; and Ellen – actually, Ellen’s thing pretty much was just “opposite of Merilwen.” XD)
It was a nice look into how Lug, Happen, Willowfine, Robin/Morven, and Cressida all came to be! And yes, as you might imagine, they spent a decent amount of time praising the 2024 Player’s Handbook – highlighting the new and better backgrounds that let you mix-and-match concepts more (Mike brought up the idea of a half-orc Barbarian librarian – a barlibrarian if you will); the new fun stuff some characters get (apparently the “Sorcerous Burst” Morven cast in Episode 1 is the new Sorcerer equivalent of “Eldritch Blast,” meaning we’re probably going to see it a LOT from her); and the redesign of the character sheets to be generally more functional (they can see everything they need to know at a glance!) Good stuff overall – it’s nice to see how far they’ve come from the early days of the original Oxventure! :)
B) And about half of “Back to the Future (1985) - Back to the Future Scene | Movieclips” by, well, Moveclips! I would have watched the whole thing, but I had to end my workout a bit early because we had thunderstorms rolling into the area and I had to get my shower in before the lightning started. Ironically, the scene I was watching was the famous “race to the lightning” bit from the first movie. XD Don’t worry, though – I made sure to get to the point of the lightning strike and Marty getting sent back to the future before I headed upstairs. It’s the 40th anniversary, after all – I HAD to make sure to watch the most famous scene in all three movies!
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice managed to make it through more of Grout’s terrible maze today: finding her way out of the almost-the-same-as-the-starting-room room via the one unlocked door (wondering if Grout was following her invisibly and locking/unlocking doors to mess with her); using Obfuscate to sneak past a ghoul in a room that started out right-side up but then turned upside-down as you went down the stairs inside (she had to turn visible again to get through the door at the bottom, but she made it out before the ghoul really noticed her – though she overheard something worrying about there being “fucking mannequins” about…); navigating an upside-down hallway (complete with a little trough in the floor to represent the point of the upside-down roof); and then proceeding through a rather bland-looking room into a gorgeous blue marble room with plinths and statues and fancy golden images of mythological creatures all over the shop (Alice was like “...maybe Grout’s hiding from his creditors after having this built” XD). I left off with Cheshire warning her about getting too close to the strange, mystical beam of light hitting a big block of stone in the center of the room – he has a very good reason to warn her away from it, too, as Alice will see next time I work on this story...
3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – decided to get some of the videos out of my Watch Later with an onlyabidoang double feature:
A) “The Sims 4: 50 FASCINATING FACTS You Might Not Know!” – Abi going through a bunch of interesting stuff – including various Easter Eggs, references, and secret gameplay stuff – that he’s found in The Sims 4! Some of the best facts included:
I. Vegetarian werewolves, when directed to hunt for food, will come back with mushrooms instead of meat
II. If you use the SimRay from Get To Work’s Scientist career to transform objects with Cottage Living and/or Horse Ranch installed, there is a small chance that the object will turn into a chicken, rabbit, mini-goat, or mini-sheep, as they’re all technically classified as “objects” by the game (this also means you can resize them in Build/Buy if you want to make giant versions to terrorize your neighborhoods)
III. There’s a curse you can get from one of the Jungle Adventures idols that makes your Sim constantly hallucinate not only stacks of pancakes, but also the face of one Bob Pancakes from Willow Creek! You cure it by eating some pancakes, with the game explicitly telling you in a pop-up that “cannabilism” [sic] is not possible, so you can’t cure it by eating Bob (the only time that any mention of that comes up in the game anywhere! So figures they’d misspell it)
IV. The heart-shaped gemstone you can cut in Crystal Creations has a description that references one of the songs in the Steven Universe movie (allowing Abi to show off his beautiful singing voice again as he sang the lyrics)
V. And the list of South Asian names that NPCs can have in Tomorang in For Rent includes Abi’s own first name! He actually switched over to speaking his native Indonesian for that fact :D
Good stuff – I like when he points out fun facts like these! Proves there’s always something new to learn about the game. :)
B) “EVERY NEW FEATURE coming to Sims 4 Enchanted by Nature!” – Abi going over all the new stuff – such as the world of Innisgreen, the “Natural Living” and “Apothecary” skills, the living houseplants you have to care for, the “Luck” and “Balance” mechanics, the “Naturopath” career, the upgraded PlantSims, and of course the Fairy occult – coming with the latest pack, set to release next week! It was a very solid overview of what we knew about each new feature...and how some of them seemed a bit – lacking. Or like combinations of things we already have. For example, PlantSims ARE getting an upgrade, with some new powers and interactions...but they’re not becoming the permanent occult lifestate with a proper skill tree people want. And while the elixirs and cures you can craft with the Apothecary skill look interesting, Abi noted they did seem a bit like just another variation on the potions you can craft as a Spellcaster with Realm of Magic, or the concoctions you can brew up with the Herbalism skill with Outdoor Retreat. (Or, as I just thought now, the serums you can make as a Scientist in Get To Work!) Though, admittedly, I don’t know how much overlap there actually is between all of these… Bottom line, there’s some interesting stuff here (especially for Fairies, who have a really robust skill tree AND loads of fun CAS stuff), but Abi wasn’t shy about calling out the devs for apparently recycling ideas from older packs in a slightly new form. *shrug* I’m still on the fence – we’ll see if I tip one way or the other once the pack is out and we know more about it!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Um – half a substitute check, if that makes any sense. :p Let me explain –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here, I didn’t do anything actually queue-related (didn’t need to), but I did make sure to reblog a BTTF gifset made by “cineshemp” from one of the BTTF-obsessed people I follow to celebrate the 40th anniversary! Unfortunately, I got to it just after 10:04, but eh – I got the timestamp over here, and that’s what matters. :)
Valice Multiverse – And over there, I have one anon ask waiting in my inbox – someone complaining that the lyrics of the song “Colors Of The Wind” (from Disney’s Pocahontas) sounds like the sort of things a smelly hippie in a drum circle would tell people. I’m not sure how to answer it, if I want to answer it at all, so I’m gonna wait on it and decide tomorrow what I’m gonna do. *shrug*
And there we are! And I really need to get to bed. Tomorrow, plans include working on some of my Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) drafts; playing Fallout 4 and continuing the trek through the Mechanist's lair; updating the FO4 Playthrough Progression appropriately; getting in a workout (probably to the Fallout: London episode I missed last Sunday); and maybe getting something else out of the old Watch Later -- we'll see. Night all!
