No Plan Saturday
Dec. 6th, 2025 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYeah, uh, turns out that when you don't have a specific plan for what video game you want to play on your day off, your brain just might go, "right, we're just gonna reread our old fanfics for pretty much the entire day." Specifically, I reread a good chunk of the Forgotten Vows Verse, revisiting some favorite moments -- like Victor's fight against the wall in "Remembering You," and Victor and Alice both visiting Wonderland and taking on Silent Burtonsville in "Fixing You." Good stuff still. :) Also reread a bit of "A Murder Shared Is A Murder Thirded" for the Valicer In The Dark take on fucking over Bumby, because I adore VITD with all my heart and love seeing Bumby get his. :D Despite this, though, I did get a few things done:
Cleaning: Took up a good chunk of my day, as usual – though not as much as it could have, given I didn’t have to do my monthly laundry today, and Mom excused me from drying the dishes after lunch. Basically, I started dusting at 10:50 AM (having gotten up late thanks to staying up so late yesterday); finished dusting right before lunch at around 1:10 PM; then did the Swiffering and the vacuuming between 1:45 PM and 2:10 PM. *shrug* Pretty typical, honestly! But at least it’s done for another couple of weeks.
Writing: Despite this being a day where I spent most of my time rereading my own fanfic, I did get some actual writing done too – specifically, I edited my tumblr friend Nebby’s Christmas gift fic! She requested the trio of Kift, Dan, and Kiya from her MediEvil Resurrection II fanfic having their first Christmas together, with all of them sharing their various traditions with each other – accordingly, I wrote a story with Kift introducing Dan and Kiya to the concept of the Christmas tree, and telling them about Christmas geese and turkeys and plum puddings; Dan telling Kift and Kiya about the Yule logs he and his used to burn when he was alive, along with the feasts they used to have (with plenty of pumpkin dishes, of course); and Kiya telling Dan and Kift about the winter solstice celebrations she and hers used to have in honor of the sun god Ra when she was alive, featuring offerings and dances and feasts with breads sculpted into the shapes of animals and people. Oh, and Winston cheekily introducing Dan and Kiya to the concept of mistletoe. XD This one needed less bulking up than the first two, but I did have to poke at it for a little while to get all the dialogue and descriptions just right – a few things felt off here and there, and needed some extra tweaking to get just right. But I got there in the end, and managed to check another story off my list. :) Three out of ten totally done!
FreeTube/Invidious: Watched two things via the old FreeTube app tonight –
A) “The Entire Plot of HEART OF IRON Through TikTok Sounds” by C. M. Alongi! A video whose title completely confused me until I actually started watching it and realized, “Ooooooh – it’s like when people label the actors in those memey videos from Vine and TikTok and whatnot on Tumblr with the names of favorite characters and pretend they’re doing whatever’s happening in the sketch in question, only C. M. is actually acting things out in-character and lip-syncing to the audio!” ...which I HOPE explains what the video was all about, because otherwise I’m in trouble. XD Look, you understand if you’re on Tumblr! Anyway, I won’t list ALL the sketches C. M. did/lip-synced to (because there were a lot, and TECHNICALLY there were spoilers for the book in them, though I suspect you only recognize those spoilers upon reading the actual book), but my favorites were:
I. JC letting everyone know “I now identify as a threat; my pronouns are ‘try me’”
II. JC asking if they could “holler” at Nicole...and then getting tongue-tied when Nicole said “yeah,” with her repeatedly asking “cat got your tongue?” until she cracked up laughing
III. Bob asking the villain of the book, Red Wolf, why he thought any of his evil plot was a good idea, and him going – well, text said “probably because I’m a Fae supremacist with a huge grudge” while the audio said “probably because I’m a sociopath with a long history of violence,” but I feel both work. XD Either way, he was like “How do you keep forgetting that” while Bob’s expression was like “fair”
IV. JC telling Nicole “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people,” and Nicole, as the ride-or-die girlfriend, going “Whose car we gonna take” XD (I like this one especially as I can picture it in a “VITD Alice asking Victor and Smiler to help her with Bumby” context)
V. Bob, currently in Red Wolf’s clutches, informing him that she was choosing kindness – which meant that she was free to explore other options, and would jump the kindness ship with TERRIFYING ease
VI. And Nicole reciting the bit from The Emperor’s New Groove where Kronk finally recognizes one of the people from the restaurant they just stopped at as the peasant (Pacha) who accidentally kidnapped llama!Kuzco at the start of the film, and if they find him they find Kuczo, with the caption “when the witch’s visions finally start making sense” XD
Good stuff! And kind of makes me hope that C. M. has a tumblr, because the people over there would eat this shit up. XD
B) And “Can You Beat Baldur's Gate 3 Without Talking To Others?” by Proxy Gate Tactician! Because I do love his ridiculous challenge runs in that game. XD This entry saw him playing the world’s most socially-awkward Shadowheart (accompanied by a number of summons and the often dead-or-wildshaped Lae’zel), who was absolutely forbidden from talking to other people. She could talk to herself, sure (because, well, there was no way around that – the game has a LOT of voice lines that your character automatically spits out whenever you click on them or send them to explore); she was allowed to use spells that had verbal incantations (because that wasn’t talking to someone, that was sending a spell their way); and if she was trapped in a dialogue with someone, she could let them monologue at her while picking only the nonverbal reactions (aka anything marked in italics) – but she was not allowed to say actual words to anyone, nor was Lae’zel ever allowed to say words to her that might spark a conversation. (And if you’re wondering, “hey, wait a second – how the fuck did Shadowheart even recruit Lae’zel in the first place, then?” – she didn’t, really. Proxy’s method of skipping Lae’zel’s very first dialogue by starting combat with the imps via Minor Illusion right before the cutscene triggered, combined with forcing Lae’zel to jump to her death immediately afterward, resulted in Lae’zel glitching out and staying in Shadowheart’s party when Act One started, instead of leaving to get caught by the tieflings. Granted, she was very much DEAD at the time, but her portrait was still on the side as a selectable character, and Shadowheart was able to revive her later, so – yeah. Free companion!) Her goal: to somehow finish the game despite this restriction cutting her off from stuff like traders, respecs, and pretty much every quest that wasn’t the main one. Did she succeed?
...No. Oh, Proxy tried his fucking best, let me tell you, coming up with all sorts of tricks to avoid dialogue in this game, including:
I. Straight up hitting the “Attack” button that so often rests beside the dialogue box when you’re in conversation with someone, before Shadowheart could be made to say anything
II. Having Shadowheart (and later Lae’zel) take a level in Druid to get Wildshape and thus avoid conversations by running around as a cat or a spider (also to get access to some handy spells so she could take on a lot of threats by herself, since Lae’zel spent so much time dead)
III. If Lae’zel or Shadowheart got locked in a conversation with no handy nonverbal response and no way to attack on their own, switching control to the other one (or to a summon they had out) and using the spare/summon to either initiate combat with the speaker, or straight-up kill whoever was locked in conversation to get them out of it
IV. Avoiding long resting after clearing out the goblin camp at the end of Act One to avoid the Dream Visitor or the Emperor visiting Shadowheart in her sleep (because even dream conversations were forbidden)
V. When forced to long rest during the game, finding new and interesting ways to break the cutscenes foisted on Shadowheart (such as having Shadowheart fiddle with her artifact to totally skip a cutscene where she was meant to meet Raphael and chat with him, or set a Spectator monster on Lae’zel just as she was going to sleep before the githyanki ambush at the end of Act II, forcing Lae’zel to stay up and thus stopping her from getting sucked into the cutscene so she could kill Shadowheart to keep her from having to engage in conversation)
VI. And just straight-up playing as Shadowheart, because not only does she have access to the artifact that can be fiddled with to break cutscenes immediately, she’s also the only one who can avoid having a conversation with Aylin when she meets her in the Shadowfell, as she has the option to just immediately slay her with the Spear of Night
And those got him through pretty much everything straight through to the end of Act II – the goblin hordes, the Underdark, Grymforge, the Shadow-Cursed Lands, Last Light Inn, and Ketheric’s multiple boss battles. But, unfortunately, when he saved the Emperor from the githyanki trying to kill him in the Astral Prism, the Emperor insisted on speaking with Shadowheart afterward – and, as per some experimenting he did on a separate save file – there was no way NOT to talk to him without softlocking the game, as he only opens your exit portal AFTER you speak to him. Meh! Proxy, annoyed, instead figured out the exact combination of responses that would let Shadowheart say the absolute least she could to him (31 words), then carried on because he never likes to leave a run unfinished, even the failed ones. He managed to get through the rest of the game without Shadowheart any more words to anyone – there was a close call with the Emperor AGAIN near the end of the game, but he got around it by having Lae’zel kill Shadowheart, then force Scratch to fight her in owlbear form with an insanity potion to glitch out some cutscenes (Lae’zel, amusingly, left immediately afterward, fed up with all these shenanigans, and took Scratch with her – Proxy was like “fair” XD) – and ended things with Shadowheart getting revenge on the Emperor for forcing her to fail her challenge by killing him and taking over the Netherbrain herself. Which, honestly, given her main source of XP in this run was just straight-up murdering loads of people (or kiting them toward locations where they and the locals would try to murder each other), AND how much time she spent killing/deliberately antagonizing Lae’zel, felt appropriate. XD Always a shame when one of these runs fails, but even the failed ones are a fun watch, so it’s not too bad. And I like that Proxy always tries to get to the end no matter what – now there’s a man who won’t quit on you!
Tumblr: My fanficcing ways kept me from doing anything on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), but I did make an effort to answer an anon ask I got on Valice Multiverse before the end of the day: “Life is like a party. And the undead are guests who’ve overstayed their welcome.” I WAS going to answer this with my Londerland Bloodlines Malkavian!Alice, perhaps with a pithy quip about how she didn’t PLAN to overstay her welcome, she was forced into it by a party crasher –
But then I had a thought about my Forgotten Vows Victor answering it with “in my experience, it’s DEATH that’s a party” and decided to go with that as an unexpected and more interesting option. (Besides, I spent most of the day reading his fanfic – felt only appropriate.) Thus, I had FV!Victor tell the anon that, in his experience, DEATH was the party, and the living were surprisingly welcome to join in (perhaps because it was known everyone would get an “invitation” sooner or later), followed by FV!Alice saying that she was pretty sure the anon didn’t mean his properly-dead friends, but rather creatures like vampires –
Followed by her going, essentially, “...actually, wait, are those real? I don’t think we ever asked anyone,” and Victor deciding to contact Jeremiah Fixxler and see what he said. Because no, I don’t think I ever did establish if vampires are a thing in that verse. O.o I suppose they COULD be – maybe they’re created by spells instead of bites – but yeah. Just never was important to that pair! (Which is understandable, they had plenty of other shit to go through.)
Aaaand it is now waaaay too late and I REALLY have to go to bed already. XD Seriously, what is it with me and staying up so late these days...anyway, I do have a plan for tomorrow, and it includes doing some form of drafting on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler); playing Portal and finding that final radio; working on another gift fic; and watching the latest episode of Jon's F:NV YOLO Remastered run. Hopefully I am awake for enough of tomorrow to accomplish all these things! Night all!
Cleaning: Took up a good chunk of my day, as usual – though not as much as it could have, given I didn’t have to do my monthly laundry today, and Mom excused me from drying the dishes after lunch. Basically, I started dusting at 10:50 AM (having gotten up late thanks to staying up so late yesterday); finished dusting right before lunch at around 1:10 PM; then did the Swiffering and the vacuuming between 1:45 PM and 2:10 PM. *shrug* Pretty typical, honestly! But at least it’s done for another couple of weeks.
Writing: Despite this being a day where I spent most of my time rereading my own fanfic, I did get some actual writing done too – specifically, I edited my tumblr friend Nebby’s Christmas gift fic! She requested the trio of Kift, Dan, and Kiya from her MediEvil Resurrection II fanfic having their first Christmas together, with all of them sharing their various traditions with each other – accordingly, I wrote a story with Kift introducing Dan and Kiya to the concept of the Christmas tree, and telling them about Christmas geese and turkeys and plum puddings; Dan telling Kift and Kiya about the Yule logs he and his used to burn when he was alive, along with the feasts they used to have (with plenty of pumpkin dishes, of course); and Kiya telling Dan and Kift about the winter solstice celebrations she and hers used to have in honor of the sun god Ra when she was alive, featuring offerings and dances and feasts with breads sculpted into the shapes of animals and people. Oh, and Winston cheekily introducing Dan and Kiya to the concept of mistletoe. XD This one needed less bulking up than the first two, but I did have to poke at it for a little while to get all the dialogue and descriptions just right – a few things felt off here and there, and needed some extra tweaking to get just right. But I got there in the end, and managed to check another story off my list. :) Three out of ten totally done!
FreeTube/Invidious: Watched two things via the old FreeTube app tonight –
A) “The Entire Plot of HEART OF IRON Through TikTok Sounds” by C. M. Alongi! A video whose title completely confused me until I actually started watching it and realized, “Ooooooh – it’s like when people label the actors in those memey videos from Vine and TikTok and whatnot on Tumblr with the names of favorite characters and pretend they’re doing whatever’s happening in the sketch in question, only C. M. is actually acting things out in-character and lip-syncing to the audio!” ...which I HOPE explains what the video was all about, because otherwise I’m in trouble. XD Look, you understand if you’re on Tumblr! Anyway, I won’t list ALL the sketches C. M. did/lip-synced to (because there were a lot, and TECHNICALLY there were spoilers for the book in them, though I suspect you only recognize those spoilers upon reading the actual book), but my favorites were:
I. JC letting everyone know “I now identify as a threat; my pronouns are ‘try me’”
II. JC asking if they could “holler” at Nicole...and then getting tongue-tied when Nicole said “yeah,” with her repeatedly asking “cat got your tongue?” until she cracked up laughing
III. Bob asking the villain of the book, Red Wolf, why he thought any of his evil plot was a good idea, and him going – well, text said “probably because I’m a Fae supremacist with a huge grudge” while the audio said “probably because I’m a sociopath with a long history of violence,” but I feel both work. XD Either way, he was like “How do you keep forgetting that” while Bob’s expression was like “fair”
IV. JC telling Nicole “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people,” and Nicole, as the ride-or-die girlfriend, going “Whose car we gonna take” XD (I like this one especially as I can picture it in a “VITD Alice asking Victor and Smiler to help her with Bumby” context)
V. Bob, currently in Red Wolf’s clutches, informing him that she was choosing kindness – which meant that she was free to explore other options, and would jump the kindness ship with TERRIFYING ease
VI. And Nicole reciting the bit from The Emperor’s New Groove where Kronk finally recognizes one of the people from the restaurant they just stopped at as the peasant (Pacha) who accidentally kidnapped llama!Kuzco at the start of the film, and if they find him they find Kuczo, with the caption “when the witch’s visions finally start making sense” XD
Good stuff! And kind of makes me hope that C. M. has a tumblr, because the people over there would eat this shit up. XD
B) And “Can You Beat Baldur's Gate 3 Without Talking To Others?” by Proxy Gate Tactician! Because I do love his ridiculous challenge runs in that game. XD This entry saw him playing the world’s most socially-awkward Shadowheart (accompanied by a number of summons and the often dead-or-wildshaped Lae’zel), who was absolutely forbidden from talking to other people. She could talk to herself, sure (because, well, there was no way around that – the game has a LOT of voice lines that your character automatically spits out whenever you click on them or send them to explore); she was allowed to use spells that had verbal incantations (because that wasn’t talking to someone, that was sending a spell their way); and if she was trapped in a dialogue with someone, she could let them monologue at her while picking only the nonverbal reactions (aka anything marked in italics) – but she was not allowed to say actual words to anyone, nor was Lae’zel ever allowed to say words to her that might spark a conversation. (And if you’re wondering, “hey, wait a second – how the fuck did Shadowheart even recruit Lae’zel in the first place, then?” – she didn’t, really. Proxy’s method of skipping Lae’zel’s very first dialogue by starting combat with the imps via Minor Illusion right before the cutscene triggered, combined with forcing Lae’zel to jump to her death immediately afterward, resulted in Lae’zel glitching out and staying in Shadowheart’s party when Act One started, instead of leaving to get caught by the tieflings. Granted, she was very much DEAD at the time, but her portrait was still on the side as a selectable character, and Shadowheart was able to revive her later, so – yeah. Free companion!) Her goal: to somehow finish the game despite this restriction cutting her off from stuff like traders, respecs, and pretty much every quest that wasn’t the main one. Did she succeed?
...No. Oh, Proxy tried his fucking best, let me tell you, coming up with all sorts of tricks to avoid dialogue in this game, including:
I. Straight up hitting the “Attack” button that so often rests beside the dialogue box when you’re in conversation with someone, before Shadowheart could be made to say anything
II. Having Shadowheart (and later Lae’zel) take a level in Druid to get Wildshape and thus avoid conversations by running around as a cat or a spider (also to get access to some handy spells so she could take on a lot of threats by herself, since Lae’zel spent so much time dead)
III. If Lae’zel or Shadowheart got locked in a conversation with no handy nonverbal response and no way to attack on their own, switching control to the other one (or to a summon they had out) and using the spare/summon to either initiate combat with the speaker, or straight-up kill whoever was locked in conversation to get them out of it
IV. Avoiding long resting after clearing out the goblin camp at the end of Act One to avoid the Dream Visitor or the Emperor visiting Shadowheart in her sleep (because even dream conversations were forbidden)
V. When forced to long rest during the game, finding new and interesting ways to break the cutscenes foisted on Shadowheart (such as having Shadowheart fiddle with her artifact to totally skip a cutscene where she was meant to meet Raphael and chat with him, or set a Spectator monster on Lae’zel just as she was going to sleep before the githyanki ambush at the end of Act II, forcing Lae’zel to stay up and thus stopping her from getting sucked into the cutscene so she could kill Shadowheart to keep her from having to engage in conversation)
VI. And just straight-up playing as Shadowheart, because not only does she have access to the artifact that can be fiddled with to break cutscenes immediately, she’s also the only one who can avoid having a conversation with Aylin when she meets her in the Shadowfell, as she has the option to just immediately slay her with the Spear of Night
And those got him through pretty much everything straight through to the end of Act II – the goblin hordes, the Underdark, Grymforge, the Shadow-Cursed Lands, Last Light Inn, and Ketheric’s multiple boss battles. But, unfortunately, when he saved the Emperor from the githyanki trying to kill him in the Astral Prism, the Emperor insisted on speaking with Shadowheart afterward – and, as per some experimenting he did on a separate save file – there was no way NOT to talk to him without softlocking the game, as he only opens your exit portal AFTER you speak to him. Meh! Proxy, annoyed, instead figured out the exact combination of responses that would let Shadowheart say the absolute least she could to him (31 words), then carried on because he never likes to leave a run unfinished, even the failed ones. He managed to get through the rest of the game without Shadowheart any more words to anyone – there was a close call with the Emperor AGAIN near the end of the game, but he got around it by having Lae’zel kill Shadowheart, then force Scratch to fight her in owlbear form with an insanity potion to glitch out some cutscenes (Lae’zel, amusingly, left immediately afterward, fed up with all these shenanigans, and took Scratch with her – Proxy was like “fair” XD) – and ended things with Shadowheart getting revenge on the Emperor for forcing her to fail her challenge by killing him and taking over the Netherbrain herself. Which, honestly, given her main source of XP in this run was just straight-up murdering loads of people (or kiting them toward locations where they and the locals would try to murder each other), AND how much time she spent killing/deliberately antagonizing Lae’zel, felt appropriate. XD Always a shame when one of these runs fails, but even the failed ones are a fun watch, so it’s not too bad. And I like that Proxy always tries to get to the end no matter what – now there’s a man who won’t quit on you!
Tumblr: My fanficcing ways kept me from doing anything on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), but I did make an effort to answer an anon ask I got on Valice Multiverse before the end of the day: “Life is like a party. And the undead are guests who’ve overstayed their welcome.” I WAS going to answer this with my Londerland Bloodlines Malkavian!Alice, perhaps with a pithy quip about how she didn’t PLAN to overstay her welcome, she was forced into it by a party crasher –
But then I had a thought about my Forgotten Vows Victor answering it with “in my experience, it’s DEATH that’s a party” and decided to go with that as an unexpected and more interesting option. (Besides, I spent most of the day reading his fanfic – felt only appropriate.) Thus, I had FV!Victor tell the anon that, in his experience, DEATH was the party, and the living were surprisingly welcome to join in (perhaps because it was known everyone would get an “invitation” sooner or later), followed by FV!Alice saying that she was pretty sure the anon didn’t mean his properly-dead friends, but rather creatures like vampires –
Followed by her going, essentially, “...actually, wait, are those real? I don’t think we ever asked anyone,” and Victor deciding to contact Jeremiah Fixxler and see what he said. Because no, I don’t think I ever did establish if vampires are a thing in that verse. O.o I suppose they COULD be – maybe they’re created by spells instead of bites – but yeah. Just never was important to that pair! (Which is understandable, they had plenty of other shit to go through.)
Aaaand it is now waaaay too late and I REALLY have to go to bed already. XD Seriously, what is it with me and staying up so late these days...anyway, I do have a plan for tomorrow, and it includes doing some form of drafting on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler); playing Portal and finding that final radio; working on another gift fic; and watching the latest episode of Jon's F:NV YOLO Remastered run. Hopefully I am awake for enough of tomorrow to accomplish all these things! Night all!
no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-10 12:57 pm (UTC)