Fallout Frustrations Sunday
Jan. 4th, 2026 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickAs will be made apparent in my write-up below -- though I will say that at least the frustrations have a happy ending, so far:
Tumblr: We were back to nothing happening over on Valice Multiverse – but that’s okay, because I got plenty done on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) before lunch –
A) First, I posted my pick for my Song Sunday (if still tagged “#song saturday” for consistency) “it’s around New Year’s so let’s have some Poets Of The Fall” song – “Children Of The Elder God!” Which is one of the songs they did for the original Alan Wake game as the fictional band “Old Gods of Asgard,” features in a really cool action sequence in said game where you have to fight off shadow monsters on a big old stage with a dragon animatronic and the very bright stage lights, and is generally just extremely kick-ass. :D I figured we could use something uplifting that encourages us to fight back against all our enemies at the beginning of 2026! (Not to mention, I was shocked to go through my “#poets of the fall” tag and discover that I’d apparently never posted it before, so I had to right THAT wrong! It’s genuinely one of my favorite songs of theirs!)
B) Then, I did my “Fic Resolutions For 2026” post – said resolutions consisting of:
I. Finish “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” and start “Londerland Bloodlines: Hollywood’s Deluded Depths”
II. Finish “The Van Dort Vacancy” and start “They Would Have Done It For An Ottoman”
III. Get more of my fics on tumblr (plus the Secundus drabbles) posted to Archive Of Our Own
The first two goals should be pretty easy to accomplish – I’m most of the way through editing the final chapter of “Downtown Queensland,” and while I’m only two chapters into edits on “The Van Dort Vacancy” that story is a lot shorter and thus should go faster – while the third...well, it’s just a matter of figuring out how I want to post all those prompt fics and whatnot. Especially the ones that need some more explanation for what’s going on, or that I see as small chunks of a larger Hypothetical Full Story, as I said in the tags of the post. *shakehead* We’ll see what happens as the year goes on!
C) And then I reblogged a couple of posts from castielsprostate with links to organizations you can donate to if you want to help the victims of the recent Venezuelan bombings (because the world remains an absolutely awful place to live) – here’s the posts with the links for your own perusal, if you are interested.
A pretty productive morning, all things considered! I will take it.
Fallout: New Vegas: Well – after much stress, annoyance, and worry, I am pleased to report that, for the moment, Fallout: New Vegas lives! Took me most of the afternoon to finish setting everything up, though...let me give you a run-down of what happened:
A) I picked up after lunch where I left off yesterday – namely, with the issue that the Modding Linked guide I was using to set up my Wabbajack install of Mod Organizer 2 and the Viva New Vegas modlist was telling me that I had to exclude the entire “Installation Folder” (where all the files and MO2 itself lived) from my antivirus...but McAfee wouldn’t allow me to exclude an entire folder, just individual files. Presented with this conundrum afresh, l ended up spending about an hour and a half (at LEAST) researching the issue – googling both the main MO2 page on NexusMods and other modlist sites had similar “here’s how you install the list with MO2 and Wabbajack” guides to see what they said about the issue (it often boiled down to “disable your antivirus and rely on Windows Security,” which – not sure I wanted to do); invisibly wandering the Modding Linked Discord to see what those behind the guide had to say about it (usually “fuck McAfee” – which is probably fair – and “just use Windows Defender” – which, not so much); and looking up whatever Reddit posts I could find on the subject that might be able to help me (which were few and far between, to my annoyance). I then took a break to chill, clear my head, and browse tumblr for a while so I could digest all I’d learned…
And then, inspired by the one Reddit post I found where someone actually using McAfee replied to someone else talking about how a virus scan had fucked up MO2 and mentioned excluding some specific files to make sure everything worked correctly, I went “okay, let’s try this” and simply excluded every file related to MO2 within the folder they were telling me to exclude. With special care taken to get the ones mentioned in the Reddit post, of course. I’m hoping this will be sufficient to keep McAfee from throwing itself at my game and trying to eat it in a haze of “oh, it’s making changes, it must be malware” – we’ll see what happens going forward, I suppose!
B) With that taken care of, it was time to continue on through the guide! I thus completed the “Root Mods” section (copying everything from the “requires manual installation” folder to the “Root” folder of the game before running the included patcher app) and the “BSA Decompressor” section (running the BSA Decompressor app to decompress all the .bsa files to improve performance and fix some sound issues in the vanilla game), before moving onto the “Mod Organizer 2 Setup” section. As per the instructions, I launched the Mod Organizer 2 app from the installation folder and said “yes” when the “register?” pop-up popped up (twice) –
And then it asked me if I was interested in completing the tutorial. Since I was new to MO2 and all. “Sure,” I thought, and agreed to check it out –
Aaand MO2 proceeded to glitch out, with the tutorial just refusing to work after it gave me the prompt to click on the “help” button, followed shortly thereafter by the whole program just shutting down entirely. Startled and a little concerned, I reopened it and tried the tutorial again – only for the same thing to happen. Now frustrated, I reopened it again and this time chose to skip the tutorial –
Aaand the program opened correctly! *shakehead* Figures... Resigning myself to not being able to do the tutorial, I instead looked at the app, familiarizing myself with all the different panes and looking through the list of mods in the right-hand one…
And discovering that three of them were marked with a little “caution” sign, which – when I hovered over it – indicated that those mods were “missing info” and had to be re-retrieved. After reading the included instructions in the mouse-over, I right-clicked on one of the “caution” mods and tired having it “query info” to find what it needed…
Only for the mod in question to get stuck “fetching info” endlessly, from what I could see. And while trying to figure out if this was a known issue and what I could do about it, I happened to look in the left-hand pane, which had the actual mod load order for everything – and that indicated that the mod “fetching info” wasn’t even active. Leading me to wonder if I’d totally screwed everything up right at the last second. *heavy sigh* Gotta say, I really did not have a lot of faith in my choices regarding how to mod New Vegas in that moment…
C) Anyway – after waiting for a while to see if the mod would finish “fetching info” (it did not), confirming that it did not seem to be active (maybe it was just included because another active mod built upon it?), and confirming through some more research and another lurk in the Modding Links discord that it should be okay for me to continue with the guide even with the mod endlessly checking for info, I went ahead and used MO2 to open the New Vegas launcher to make sure I was using the Ultra preset and that the resolution matched that of my monitor (which I had to double-check in my settings, just to be sure I picked the right one), then started the game itself to make sure all the Utilities had installed. Which, fortunately, they had, according to the pop-up that presented itself a few seconds after I hit the main menu screen –
But, to my horror and fury, when I tried to click on it, I discovered that the game was apparently not detecting my mouse. Extremely irritated by this point, I used “Enter” to get out of the pop-up, and the arrow keys to navigate the menu so I could quit out and disable the “check Utilities” mod as per the guide. I then reopened the game to see what the hell was going on –
And then, upon arriving at the main menu again, had a thought: “Wait a minute – is it expecting me to use my controller?” I thus picked up said controller and started using that –
And sure enough, I was able to navigate just fine through all the menus and such. Well, mostly fine – the left stick controls for moving through menu options is a little sensitive. But it functioned, so after poking around through the settings and seeing what was what (and eventually discovering via looking at various tweaks and what they did that “oh, wait – the mouse DOES work, it just doesn’t work in the menu screen itself – rude”), I decided to run with it –
D) And so began my initial foray into Fallout: New Vegas itself! Which consisted of:
I. Watching the opening cinematic, with the NCR and various other people walking the streets of New Vegas itself; a sniper on the New Vegas sign taking out a raider hiding behind a car on the road leading into the strip, and – much further away from the lights of the city – a certain asshole named Benny standing with some Great Khans over an unconscious courier (face covered with a hat, because obviously this is supposed to be your player character) while some other Khans nearby dug a grave… It was actually REALLY well done, I was quite impressed. :)
II. Watching the second opening cinematic, starting with some narration about the situation at the start of the game – how the New California Republic was lured to the Mojave by their scouts telling them of the city untouched by the warheads, and the great bulk of Hoover Dam; how Caesar’s Legion marched on the Dam from the east with their troops made of conquered tribes, and how the NCR just barely held them off; and how, throughout their battles, the New Vegas Strip remained open for business, under the watchful gaze of one Mr. House – before explaining that the player character was a courier, contracted by the Mojave Express to deliver a package to the Strip...only for the “simple” job to go extremely wrong. Cue the Courier waking up bound before the Khans and Benny, and the player getting to watch in first person as Benny told them that they’d made their last delivery and that, while they might think they’d run into a streak of super bad luck, “the truth is – the game was rigged from the start” before shooting them in the head. Again, excellent stuff –
Though I suspect that it would have been better if I’d known to turn the background music down before the cinematic started playing. It didn’t quite drown out all the voices, but it came pretty damn close sometimes! *facepalm* Gotta love 15-year-old games where they didn’t know how to properly balance the sound levels of the music versus the sound levels of the NPCs… (And yes, F:NV is 15 years old – came out in 2010.)
III. Watching as my player character woke up under the loving care of Doc Mitchell of Goodsprings, and starting character creation! And, because I am me, I decided that my Courier was also going to be Victor Van Dort. XD What, you guys know what I’m like – both with video games AND with AUs! Admittedly, getting my Courier to look anything like Victor was a bit of a trick – though I will have to say, character creation in this game is more involved than I first thought! There’s all sorts of sliders to adjust general face shape, forehead height, brow shape, nose shape, how far apart the eyes are, how shallow or puffy the cheeks were...everything to make someone who at least vaguely resembled my favorite Victorian noodle was in the “Reflectron” Doc Mitchell handed him. XD After choosing my initial preset, fiddling around with a variety of sliders, and figuring out which hair looked the least worst, I eventually landed on this:
...again, game made in 2010, there’s only so much I could do. He’s got the right vibes, I’d say! And I’m pretty sure there’s an option to mess with your appearance again right before you leave Goodsprings, so if I want to tweak him before leaving Tutorial Town, I should be able to. (Because I did admittedly look up hair mods for the game after quitting for the day. XD)
IV. And – after a quick walk to the Vit-O-Matic to learn the movement controls – entering the menu, adjusting the sound, and using the Mod Configuration Menu to tweak a few mod settings (namely, making sure Victor could hit the vanilla game cap of 50 levels instead of the Agua Fria mod’s cap of 35), before realizing “okay, I really can’t spend any more time in here,” saving, and closing. Because while I would have liked to fully finish Victor’s character creation – choosing his SPECIAL stats, figuring out his tagged skills, choosing his traits – I knew that summing it all up afterward would just take too much time. Shame, but that’s the way it goes!
And there we have it – the start of my F:NV adventures! I fully intend to return to the Mojave this Saturday if I can and finish up choosing Victor’s stats and everything – hopefully everything continues to run smoothly and I won’t run into any major problems! I got really lucky with my Fallout 4 install being pretty stable, after all...fingers crossed!
Writing: I got to it late, but I did write a little bit more on my latest self-indulgent scene of “Smiler’s present for the Moorgate Confrontation and that screws up everything even more for Bumby,” including:
A) Poor Victor getting a headache as he hugged Smiler, and nearly slipping back into Thirteen-mode – fortunately Alice and Smiler were able to keep him out of it
B) Smiler saying Alice’s name, and Victor finally recognizing her and trying to apologize for not finding her and for falling to Bumby’s predations :(
C) Bumby telling Victor that the headache was punishment for not obeying and trying to order him to kill Alice again – only for Victor to punch him, just like in the original “Forgetting You;” Alice squealed with glee, and Smiler cackled and pointed out it was three-against-one
D) Bumby nearly reasserting control over Victor by threatening him with the dark – only for Smiler to step in and use their old trigger on Victor, causing him to slip into a trance where he didn’t respond to anyone else – Alice noted he didn’t look quite as blank as he had before, but it was still creepy
E) And Bumby asking what the hell Smiler did to Victor, and Smiler coldly asking if Bumby didn’t recognize a post-hypnotic suggestion when he saw one, with Alice saying he probably didn’t, as he was a bad psychiatrist; a furious Bumby lunged at her, intending to kill her himself, but she got out of his way and told Smiler (ready to join the fight) to get Victor out of there and see if they could undo whatever Bumby did to him – her view shifting to Wonderland and the Dollmaker boss fight as she declared she could handle the bastard
*nods* Not bad! Very rough, to be sure, but self-indulgent fic’s allowed to be. Back to “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” tomorrow, though – I have to finish off that damn Chapter 6 sooner rather than later!
Workout: Hopped back on the bike tonight – but I did not watch the next episode of Jon of Many A True Nerd’s F:NV YOLO Remastered series! Why? Well, because there straight up wasn’t one – Jon and his girlfriend Claire both got sick around New Year’s, and while Jon managed to put up a couple of videos this week (a pre-recorded episode of his new Baldur’s Gate III Let’s Play and a one-off video about a weird skating game), he apparently wasn’t feeling up to YOLO antics this Sunday. I mean, fair enough – I don’t think I would be either if I was suffering from a nasty cold! So instead I watched:
A) A bit of the livestream Jon and Claire did instead of F:NV YOLO Remastered: “Fallout 3: Jon & Claire Are Still Sick So We're Speedrunning Fallout Live Special!” AKA how I found out about the change of plans. XD Specifically, Jon attempted to do a glitchless speedrun Fallout 3 – I popped in while Jon was running around the Project Purity site, trying to clear out all the remaining super mutants (and their horrific centaur abominations) so his Lone Wanderer’s dad could attempt to turn the giant water purifier on (this does not go well, just FYI). For once, Jon was actually salty about the lack of quest markers in a Fallout quest (as per Claire, normally he bitches that there’s too many), as it forced him to go running all over the shop hunting down the remaining mutants. Which does not do good things for your time in a speedrun! I left around the time he finally got the last one – looks like the final time of the livestream in full was about 2 hours and 22 minutes, meaning it’s likely Jon did the whole game in roughly 2 hours (with the extra time for intros and outros). Which I personally think isn’t bad for getting through an entire Fallout game! Likely isn’t a world record or anything, but still – respectable. Especially for someone playing with a really nasty cold. Still, hoping he’s better enough next week to YOLO it up!
B) And the first twenty-five or so minutes of “KIDS ON BIKES – A Twixtmas Disappearance | Oxventure Holiday Special” by Oxventure! Their most recent one-shot, I decided to watch this one before going back to catch up on everything else on the channel simply because, as per the title, it was a holiday special! And I’d rather watch one of those now, when Christmas was a mere week-and-a-half ago, then sometime around Easter, or even at the beginning of summer (as it will probably take me a while to get through all the remaining Oxventure videos). Ellen was the lovely GM; Mike, Andy, and Jane the players; and the system Kids On Bikes, an RPG about kids (on bikes, naturally) investigating weird occurrences around their towns. If I remember correctly, it’s made by the same people who made Teens In Space, and uses the same sort of dice-rolling system (you choose a type of die to represent your stat in something – for example, Mike has a ten-sided die for the “Brainy” stat – and you roll that die in an attempt to meet or beat a target number when faced with a challenge. Roll the highest number, and your die “explodes” and you can roll again. If you roll under the target number, you can spend “adversity tokens” to improve your result – or gain them for later for choosing to simply fail the roll.) The OXBoxers were playing a trio of thirteen-year-olds (Mike: “Ignore the harrowed face,” Andy: “Ignore the salt-and-pepper beard” XD) – Mike the shy and mysterious transfer student Keegan, Andy the mystery-obsessed Corey, and Jane Corey’s conspiracy-theory-obsessed twin sister Tori – living in the seaside town of Milton-on-Keys, a former Victorian resort town that has seen MUCH better days, and the first part of their session involved:
I. Tori and Corey arriving at Milton-on-Keys’s model village with their dog, a Yorkshire terrier called Clive Barker (Ellen approved) on Boxing Day (hence why it’s a Twixtmas disappearance – this all takes place during that weird liminal time between Christmas and New Year’s, where you feel like anything could happen, but nothing does), prepared to meet the fellow kids who responded to the ad in Tori’s conspiracy theory zine so they could hang out and find mysteries to solve and conspiracies to bring to light – Tori assured Corey that tens of people read her zine, so they were sure to get someone XD
II. Keegan showing up and shyly asking if this is where the meet-up was, and Corey and Tori initially welcoming him before Corey went, “hang on, you’ve got to give the password” – Keegan admitted he hadn’t seen a password in the ad, and Corey was like “how could you not put in a password?” to Tori. (Tori, meanwhile, was more concerned if Keegan was a real teen or not. XD) Corey thus had Keegan guess the password – Keegan tried “Mystery,” and Corey was like “oh God, he’s right.” XD To be fair, that’s what I would have guessed too!
III. Keegan asking Corey and Tori the name of the group – Corey immediately went “Mystery Club” while Tori went “Conspiracy Crew.” After a bit of discussion, they compromised and went with “Mystery Conspiracy Club Crew,” or MCCC for short. (Somewhere, the creator of MC Command Center for Sims 4 sneezed and didn’t know why. XD)
IV. Keegan telling Corey and Tori a little about himself – namely, that his parents are marine biologists obsessed with their work, who move around a lot to study whatever marine animal they’re so obsessed with (Keegan doesn’t know). Tori promptly declared that “fish are government drones” while Corey attempted to get her to chill out a little XD
V.Corey and Tori informing Keegan they were twins (doing the creepy synchronized smile), and Keegan asking if they had any special twin powers – Tori promptly said “telepathy” and went on about how she yaps in her head all day to Corey while he ignores her, while Corey insisted that wasn’t real and they were just normal kids. Poor Keegan seemed very confused by it all!
VI. The group talking about mysteries they could try to solve or conspiracies they could try to unearth now that they were all together – Corey, after hearing Keegan’s description of his home life and how he wasn’t sure if his parents loved him or their work more (and going “sounds like the latter, buddy”), suggested that they find the definitive answer to that question, only for Keegan to say he wasn’t sure he wanted to know; Tori, meanwhile, asked Keegan if he’d watched the Queen’s speech, which morphed into a discussion of how she thought the Queen was an insectoid alien (Keegan admitting that her article in her zine had convinced him that insect aliens walked among them, while Corey insisted that the reason the Queen had looked like she had mandibles during the speech was because they owned a shitty 90s TV set whose quality was equivalent to that of 240 peas XD)
VII. Corey and Tori realizing that, wait a minute, they already had a mystery to solve – the third card-carrying member of their group had never shown up for the meet-up! Said kid was supposed to be called “Christopher Williams,” but – thanks to Andy blurting out a name first when Ellen started to describe their tardy mate – he became “Rollo Fiarucci.” XD Andy eventually magnanimously said that “Rollo” was Corey’s nickname for Christopher, and it was later decided that his family was the Williams-Fiarucci family, with his mom being Williams and his dad Fiarucci. *nods* Teamwork!
VIII. Corey deciding Rollo must have been abducted (as normally he’s a very punctual kid) and comparing the whole situation to a mystery novel he read in his favorite series, where a clue was hidden in a creamer jug shaped like a cow; cue the very first roll of the game being Ellen deciding whether or not he spotted a cow-shaped creamer in a bric-a-brac shop when the group pedaled out to find their missing buddy (he did not) XD
IX. The group heading over to Rollo’s house (which was down the most over-decorated street in the village, as every town has one) and discovering a cop car outside, and a cop talking to Rollo’s mum! Everyone promptly slowed down to hear what was being said – Corey and Tori passed the roll and managed to pick up that, apparently, Rollo had gone missing after leaving the house to pick up the paper that morning, while Keegan failed it and proved more interested in concentrating on his bike riding and impressing his new friends. And then Rollo’s mum spotted them and waved, and he fell over trying to wave back. XD Awww, poor Keegan...
X. The kids being summoned into the conversation by Rollo’s anxious mother, confirming that they hadn’t seen Rollo – then coming up with their own bizarre theories as to what had happened: Tori was convinced that Rollo had been abducted by aliens (asking if they’d seen any lights in the sky that WEREN’T Christmas lights), while Corey suggested that maybe Santa had kidnapped him to be a helper – Keegan pointed out that Santa wouldn’t imprison a kid, but Corey insisted it was a busy time of year for him, and maybe he just hadn’t brought Rollo back yet. And then Tori stepped in with “Santa isn’t real, he’s a government drone.” Mrs. Williams-Fiarucci and the cop were very nonplussed by these weird children XD
XI. The kids promising to solve the mystery (with the cop giving them his card so they could contact him or the station if they saw anything) and heading out on their bikes, doing wheelies for dramatic effect – only for Tori and Corey to see a strange black shape dart across the road ahead of them. Tori smartly grabbed Barker’s collar (as the dog was riding in the milk crate on the front of her bike) so he wouldn’t try to go after it, while Corey wondered “what shape was Rollo?” XD Tori pointed out Rollo would be boy-shaped, which the shape they just saw most certainly hadn’t been, and Corey commented on how this reminded him of another entry in his favorite book series, “The Case of the Boy-Shaped Boy.” Which led to an argument between him and Tori when she was like “what” and it was revealed she was just letting the books he kept lending her pile up in her room. XD Once again, excellent sibling dynamics at play in Oxventure!
Fun stuff so far, as you can see – I already love these bizarre siblings and their shy new friend. :) I left off with the twins asking Keegan if he’d seen the shape (no, he’d missed it thanks to another failed roll), then, noticing how sad he seemed, asking if he was all right (yes, he was enjoying this) and what he got for Christmas (a tube of Rolos candy...that he found in the house because his parents were busy working – the twins were rightfully upset by this). We’ll see where this conversation goes, and if the kids can find the mysterious shape, tomorrow!
So yeah -- getting that modlist to work was a pain in the ass, but it seems that I WILL have my Courier Victor, and that makes me happy. But for now, I really have to get to bed, as I do have work tomorrow. *sigh* Hopefully it won't be too terrible...we shall see. Night all!
Tumblr: We were back to nothing happening over on Valice Multiverse – but that’s okay, because I got plenty done on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) before lunch –
A) First, I posted my pick for my Song Sunday (if still tagged “#song saturday” for consistency) “it’s around New Year’s so let’s have some Poets Of The Fall” song – “Children Of The Elder God!” Which is one of the songs they did for the original Alan Wake game as the fictional band “Old Gods of Asgard,” features in a really cool action sequence in said game where you have to fight off shadow monsters on a big old stage with a dragon animatronic and the very bright stage lights, and is generally just extremely kick-ass. :D I figured we could use something uplifting that encourages us to fight back against all our enemies at the beginning of 2026! (Not to mention, I was shocked to go through my “#poets of the fall” tag and discover that I’d apparently never posted it before, so I had to right THAT wrong! It’s genuinely one of my favorite songs of theirs!)
B) Then, I did my “Fic Resolutions For 2026” post – said resolutions consisting of:
I. Finish “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” and start “Londerland Bloodlines: Hollywood’s Deluded Depths”
II. Finish “The Van Dort Vacancy” and start “They Would Have Done It For An Ottoman”
III. Get more of my fics on tumblr (plus the Secundus drabbles) posted to Archive Of Our Own
The first two goals should be pretty easy to accomplish – I’m most of the way through editing the final chapter of “Downtown Queensland,” and while I’m only two chapters into edits on “The Van Dort Vacancy” that story is a lot shorter and thus should go faster – while the third...well, it’s just a matter of figuring out how I want to post all those prompt fics and whatnot. Especially the ones that need some more explanation for what’s going on, or that I see as small chunks of a larger Hypothetical Full Story, as I said in the tags of the post. *shakehead* We’ll see what happens as the year goes on!
C) And then I reblogged a couple of posts from castielsprostate with links to organizations you can donate to if you want to help the victims of the recent Venezuelan bombings (because the world remains an absolutely awful place to live) – here’s the posts with the links for your own perusal, if you are interested.
A pretty productive morning, all things considered! I will take it.
Fallout: New Vegas: Well – after much stress, annoyance, and worry, I am pleased to report that, for the moment, Fallout: New Vegas lives! Took me most of the afternoon to finish setting everything up, though...let me give you a run-down of what happened:
A) I picked up after lunch where I left off yesterday – namely, with the issue that the Modding Linked guide I was using to set up my Wabbajack install of Mod Organizer 2 and the Viva New Vegas modlist was telling me that I had to exclude the entire “Installation Folder” (where all the files and MO2 itself lived) from my antivirus...but McAfee wouldn’t allow me to exclude an entire folder, just individual files. Presented with this conundrum afresh, l ended up spending about an hour and a half (at LEAST) researching the issue – googling both the main MO2 page on NexusMods and other modlist sites had similar “here’s how you install the list with MO2 and Wabbajack” guides to see what they said about the issue (it often boiled down to “disable your antivirus and rely on Windows Security,” which – not sure I wanted to do); invisibly wandering the Modding Linked Discord to see what those behind the guide had to say about it (usually “fuck McAfee” – which is probably fair – and “just use Windows Defender” – which, not so much); and looking up whatever Reddit posts I could find on the subject that might be able to help me (which were few and far between, to my annoyance). I then took a break to chill, clear my head, and browse tumblr for a while so I could digest all I’d learned…
And then, inspired by the one Reddit post I found where someone actually using McAfee replied to someone else talking about how a virus scan had fucked up MO2 and mentioned excluding some specific files to make sure everything worked correctly, I went “okay, let’s try this” and simply excluded every file related to MO2 within the folder they were telling me to exclude. With special care taken to get the ones mentioned in the Reddit post, of course. I’m hoping this will be sufficient to keep McAfee from throwing itself at my game and trying to eat it in a haze of “oh, it’s making changes, it must be malware” – we’ll see what happens going forward, I suppose!
B) With that taken care of, it was time to continue on through the guide! I thus completed the “Root Mods” section (copying everything from the “requires manual installation” folder to the “Root” folder of the game before running the included patcher app) and the “BSA Decompressor” section (running the BSA Decompressor app to decompress all the .bsa files to improve performance and fix some sound issues in the vanilla game), before moving onto the “Mod Organizer 2 Setup” section. As per the instructions, I launched the Mod Organizer 2 app from the installation folder and said “yes” when the “register?” pop-up popped up (twice) –
And then it asked me if I was interested in completing the tutorial. Since I was new to MO2 and all. “Sure,” I thought, and agreed to check it out –
Aaand MO2 proceeded to glitch out, with the tutorial just refusing to work after it gave me the prompt to click on the “help” button, followed shortly thereafter by the whole program just shutting down entirely. Startled and a little concerned, I reopened it and tried the tutorial again – only for the same thing to happen. Now frustrated, I reopened it again and this time chose to skip the tutorial –
Aaand the program opened correctly! *shakehead* Figures... Resigning myself to not being able to do the tutorial, I instead looked at the app, familiarizing myself with all the different panes and looking through the list of mods in the right-hand one…
And discovering that three of them were marked with a little “caution” sign, which – when I hovered over it – indicated that those mods were “missing info” and had to be re-retrieved. After reading the included instructions in the mouse-over, I right-clicked on one of the “caution” mods and tired having it “query info” to find what it needed…
Only for the mod in question to get stuck “fetching info” endlessly, from what I could see. And while trying to figure out if this was a known issue and what I could do about it, I happened to look in the left-hand pane, which had the actual mod load order for everything – and that indicated that the mod “fetching info” wasn’t even active. Leading me to wonder if I’d totally screwed everything up right at the last second. *heavy sigh* Gotta say, I really did not have a lot of faith in my choices regarding how to mod New Vegas in that moment…
C) Anyway – after waiting for a while to see if the mod would finish “fetching info” (it did not), confirming that it did not seem to be active (maybe it was just included because another active mod built upon it?), and confirming through some more research and another lurk in the Modding Links discord that it should be okay for me to continue with the guide even with the mod endlessly checking for info, I went ahead and used MO2 to open the New Vegas launcher to make sure I was using the Ultra preset and that the resolution matched that of my monitor (which I had to double-check in my settings, just to be sure I picked the right one), then started the game itself to make sure all the Utilities had installed. Which, fortunately, they had, according to the pop-up that presented itself a few seconds after I hit the main menu screen –
But, to my horror and fury, when I tried to click on it, I discovered that the game was apparently not detecting my mouse. Extremely irritated by this point, I used “Enter” to get out of the pop-up, and the arrow keys to navigate the menu so I could quit out and disable the “check Utilities” mod as per the guide. I then reopened the game to see what the hell was going on –
And then, upon arriving at the main menu again, had a thought: “Wait a minute – is it expecting me to use my controller?” I thus picked up said controller and started using that –
And sure enough, I was able to navigate just fine through all the menus and such. Well, mostly fine – the left stick controls for moving through menu options is a little sensitive. But it functioned, so after poking around through the settings and seeing what was what (and eventually discovering via looking at various tweaks and what they did that “oh, wait – the mouse DOES work, it just doesn’t work in the menu screen itself – rude”), I decided to run with it –
D) And so began my initial foray into Fallout: New Vegas itself! Which consisted of:
I. Watching the opening cinematic, with the NCR and various other people walking the streets of New Vegas itself; a sniper on the New Vegas sign taking out a raider hiding behind a car on the road leading into the strip, and – much further away from the lights of the city – a certain asshole named Benny standing with some Great Khans over an unconscious courier (face covered with a hat, because obviously this is supposed to be your player character) while some other Khans nearby dug a grave… It was actually REALLY well done, I was quite impressed. :)
II. Watching the second opening cinematic, starting with some narration about the situation at the start of the game – how the New California Republic was lured to the Mojave by their scouts telling them of the city untouched by the warheads, and the great bulk of Hoover Dam; how Caesar’s Legion marched on the Dam from the east with their troops made of conquered tribes, and how the NCR just barely held them off; and how, throughout their battles, the New Vegas Strip remained open for business, under the watchful gaze of one Mr. House – before explaining that the player character was a courier, contracted by the Mojave Express to deliver a package to the Strip...only for the “simple” job to go extremely wrong. Cue the Courier waking up bound before the Khans and Benny, and the player getting to watch in first person as Benny told them that they’d made their last delivery and that, while they might think they’d run into a streak of super bad luck, “the truth is – the game was rigged from the start” before shooting them in the head. Again, excellent stuff –
Though I suspect that it would have been better if I’d known to turn the background music down before the cinematic started playing. It didn’t quite drown out all the voices, but it came pretty damn close sometimes! *facepalm* Gotta love 15-year-old games where they didn’t know how to properly balance the sound levels of the music versus the sound levels of the NPCs… (And yes, F:NV is 15 years old – came out in 2010.)
III. Watching as my player character woke up under the loving care of Doc Mitchell of Goodsprings, and starting character creation! And, because I am me, I decided that my Courier was also going to be Victor Van Dort. XD What, you guys know what I’m like – both with video games AND with AUs! Admittedly, getting my Courier to look anything like Victor was a bit of a trick – though I will have to say, character creation in this game is more involved than I first thought! There’s all sorts of sliders to adjust general face shape, forehead height, brow shape, nose shape, how far apart the eyes are, how shallow or puffy the cheeks were...everything to make someone who at least vaguely resembled my favorite Victorian noodle was in the “Reflectron” Doc Mitchell handed him. XD After choosing my initial preset, fiddling around with a variety of sliders, and figuring out which hair looked the least worst, I eventually landed on this:
...again, game made in 2010, there’s only so much I could do. He’s got the right vibes, I’d say! And I’m pretty sure there’s an option to mess with your appearance again right before you leave Goodsprings, so if I want to tweak him before leaving Tutorial Town, I should be able to. (Because I did admittedly look up hair mods for the game after quitting for the day. XD)
IV. And – after a quick walk to the Vit-O-Matic to learn the movement controls – entering the menu, adjusting the sound, and using the Mod Configuration Menu to tweak a few mod settings (namely, making sure Victor could hit the vanilla game cap of 50 levels instead of the Agua Fria mod’s cap of 35), before realizing “okay, I really can’t spend any more time in here,” saving, and closing. Because while I would have liked to fully finish Victor’s character creation – choosing his SPECIAL stats, figuring out his tagged skills, choosing his traits – I knew that summing it all up afterward would just take too much time. Shame, but that’s the way it goes!
And there we have it – the start of my F:NV adventures! I fully intend to return to the Mojave this Saturday if I can and finish up choosing Victor’s stats and everything – hopefully everything continues to run smoothly and I won’t run into any major problems! I got really lucky with my Fallout 4 install being pretty stable, after all...fingers crossed!
Writing: I got to it late, but I did write a little bit more on my latest self-indulgent scene of “Smiler’s present for the Moorgate Confrontation and that screws up everything even more for Bumby,” including:
A) Poor Victor getting a headache as he hugged Smiler, and nearly slipping back into Thirteen-mode – fortunately Alice and Smiler were able to keep him out of it
B) Smiler saying Alice’s name, and Victor finally recognizing her and trying to apologize for not finding her and for falling to Bumby’s predations :(
C) Bumby telling Victor that the headache was punishment for not obeying and trying to order him to kill Alice again – only for Victor to punch him, just like in the original “Forgetting You;” Alice squealed with glee, and Smiler cackled and pointed out it was three-against-one
D) Bumby nearly reasserting control over Victor by threatening him with the dark – only for Smiler to step in and use their old trigger on Victor, causing him to slip into a trance where he didn’t respond to anyone else – Alice noted he didn’t look quite as blank as he had before, but it was still creepy
E) And Bumby asking what the hell Smiler did to Victor, and Smiler coldly asking if Bumby didn’t recognize a post-hypnotic suggestion when he saw one, with Alice saying he probably didn’t, as he was a bad psychiatrist; a furious Bumby lunged at her, intending to kill her himself, but she got out of his way and told Smiler (ready to join the fight) to get Victor out of there and see if they could undo whatever Bumby did to him – her view shifting to Wonderland and the Dollmaker boss fight as she declared she could handle the bastard
*nods* Not bad! Very rough, to be sure, but self-indulgent fic’s allowed to be. Back to “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” tomorrow, though – I have to finish off that damn Chapter 6 sooner rather than later!
Workout: Hopped back on the bike tonight – but I did not watch the next episode of Jon of Many A True Nerd’s F:NV YOLO Remastered series! Why? Well, because there straight up wasn’t one – Jon and his girlfriend Claire both got sick around New Year’s, and while Jon managed to put up a couple of videos this week (a pre-recorded episode of his new Baldur’s Gate III Let’s Play and a one-off video about a weird skating game), he apparently wasn’t feeling up to YOLO antics this Sunday. I mean, fair enough – I don’t think I would be either if I was suffering from a nasty cold! So instead I watched:
A) A bit of the livestream Jon and Claire did instead of F:NV YOLO Remastered: “Fallout 3: Jon & Claire Are Still Sick So We're Speedrunning Fallout Live Special!” AKA how I found out about the change of plans. XD Specifically, Jon attempted to do a glitchless speedrun Fallout 3 – I popped in while Jon was running around the Project Purity site, trying to clear out all the remaining super mutants (and their horrific centaur abominations) so his Lone Wanderer’s dad could attempt to turn the giant water purifier on (this does not go well, just FYI). For once, Jon was actually salty about the lack of quest markers in a Fallout quest (as per Claire, normally he bitches that there’s too many), as it forced him to go running all over the shop hunting down the remaining mutants. Which does not do good things for your time in a speedrun! I left around the time he finally got the last one – looks like the final time of the livestream in full was about 2 hours and 22 minutes, meaning it’s likely Jon did the whole game in roughly 2 hours (with the extra time for intros and outros). Which I personally think isn’t bad for getting through an entire Fallout game! Likely isn’t a world record or anything, but still – respectable. Especially for someone playing with a really nasty cold. Still, hoping he’s better enough next week to YOLO it up!
B) And the first twenty-five or so minutes of “KIDS ON BIKES – A Twixtmas Disappearance | Oxventure Holiday Special” by Oxventure! Their most recent one-shot, I decided to watch this one before going back to catch up on everything else on the channel simply because, as per the title, it was a holiday special! And I’d rather watch one of those now, when Christmas was a mere week-and-a-half ago, then sometime around Easter, or even at the beginning of summer (as it will probably take me a while to get through all the remaining Oxventure videos). Ellen was the lovely GM; Mike, Andy, and Jane the players; and the system Kids On Bikes, an RPG about kids (on bikes, naturally) investigating weird occurrences around their towns. If I remember correctly, it’s made by the same people who made Teens In Space, and uses the same sort of dice-rolling system (you choose a type of die to represent your stat in something – for example, Mike has a ten-sided die for the “Brainy” stat – and you roll that die in an attempt to meet or beat a target number when faced with a challenge. Roll the highest number, and your die “explodes” and you can roll again. If you roll under the target number, you can spend “adversity tokens” to improve your result – or gain them for later for choosing to simply fail the roll.) The OXBoxers were playing a trio of thirteen-year-olds (Mike: “Ignore the harrowed face,” Andy: “Ignore the salt-and-pepper beard” XD) – Mike the shy and mysterious transfer student Keegan, Andy the mystery-obsessed Corey, and Jane Corey’s conspiracy-theory-obsessed twin sister Tori – living in the seaside town of Milton-on-Keys, a former Victorian resort town that has seen MUCH better days, and the first part of their session involved:
I. Tori and Corey arriving at Milton-on-Keys’s model village with their dog, a Yorkshire terrier called Clive Barker (Ellen approved) on Boxing Day (hence why it’s a Twixtmas disappearance – this all takes place during that weird liminal time between Christmas and New Year’s, where you feel like anything could happen, but nothing does), prepared to meet the fellow kids who responded to the ad in Tori’s conspiracy theory zine so they could hang out and find mysteries to solve and conspiracies to bring to light – Tori assured Corey that tens of people read her zine, so they were sure to get someone XD
II. Keegan showing up and shyly asking if this is where the meet-up was, and Corey and Tori initially welcoming him before Corey went, “hang on, you’ve got to give the password” – Keegan admitted he hadn’t seen a password in the ad, and Corey was like “how could you not put in a password?” to Tori. (Tori, meanwhile, was more concerned if Keegan was a real teen or not. XD) Corey thus had Keegan guess the password – Keegan tried “Mystery,” and Corey was like “oh God, he’s right.” XD To be fair, that’s what I would have guessed too!
III. Keegan asking Corey and Tori the name of the group – Corey immediately went “Mystery Club” while Tori went “Conspiracy Crew.” After a bit of discussion, they compromised and went with “Mystery Conspiracy Club Crew,” or MCCC for short. (Somewhere, the creator of MC Command Center for Sims 4 sneezed and didn’t know why. XD)
IV. Keegan telling Corey and Tori a little about himself – namely, that his parents are marine biologists obsessed with their work, who move around a lot to study whatever marine animal they’re so obsessed with (Keegan doesn’t know). Tori promptly declared that “fish are government drones” while Corey attempted to get her to chill out a little XD
V.Corey and Tori informing Keegan they were twins (doing the creepy synchronized smile), and Keegan asking if they had any special twin powers – Tori promptly said “telepathy” and went on about how she yaps in her head all day to Corey while he ignores her, while Corey insisted that wasn’t real and they were just normal kids. Poor Keegan seemed very confused by it all!
VI. The group talking about mysteries they could try to solve or conspiracies they could try to unearth now that they were all together – Corey, after hearing Keegan’s description of his home life and how he wasn’t sure if his parents loved him or their work more (and going “sounds like the latter, buddy”), suggested that they find the definitive answer to that question, only for Keegan to say he wasn’t sure he wanted to know; Tori, meanwhile, asked Keegan if he’d watched the Queen’s speech, which morphed into a discussion of how she thought the Queen was an insectoid alien (Keegan admitting that her article in her zine had convinced him that insect aliens walked among them, while Corey insisted that the reason the Queen had looked like she had mandibles during the speech was because they owned a shitty 90s TV set whose quality was equivalent to that of 240 peas XD)
VII. Corey and Tori realizing that, wait a minute, they already had a mystery to solve – the third card-carrying member of their group had never shown up for the meet-up! Said kid was supposed to be called “Christopher Williams,” but – thanks to Andy blurting out a name first when Ellen started to describe their tardy mate – he became “Rollo Fiarucci.” XD Andy eventually magnanimously said that “Rollo” was Corey’s nickname for Christopher, and it was later decided that his family was the Williams-Fiarucci family, with his mom being Williams and his dad Fiarucci. *nods* Teamwork!
VIII. Corey deciding Rollo must have been abducted (as normally he’s a very punctual kid) and comparing the whole situation to a mystery novel he read in his favorite series, where a clue was hidden in a creamer jug shaped like a cow; cue the very first roll of the game being Ellen deciding whether or not he spotted a cow-shaped creamer in a bric-a-brac shop when the group pedaled out to find their missing buddy (he did not) XD
IX. The group heading over to Rollo’s house (which was down the most over-decorated street in the village, as every town has one) and discovering a cop car outside, and a cop talking to Rollo’s mum! Everyone promptly slowed down to hear what was being said – Corey and Tori passed the roll and managed to pick up that, apparently, Rollo had gone missing after leaving the house to pick up the paper that morning, while Keegan failed it and proved more interested in concentrating on his bike riding and impressing his new friends. And then Rollo’s mum spotted them and waved, and he fell over trying to wave back. XD Awww, poor Keegan...
X. The kids being summoned into the conversation by Rollo’s anxious mother, confirming that they hadn’t seen Rollo – then coming up with their own bizarre theories as to what had happened: Tori was convinced that Rollo had been abducted by aliens (asking if they’d seen any lights in the sky that WEREN’T Christmas lights), while Corey suggested that maybe Santa had kidnapped him to be a helper – Keegan pointed out that Santa wouldn’t imprison a kid, but Corey insisted it was a busy time of year for him, and maybe he just hadn’t brought Rollo back yet. And then Tori stepped in with “Santa isn’t real, he’s a government drone.” Mrs. Williams-Fiarucci and the cop were very nonplussed by these weird children XD
XI. The kids promising to solve the mystery (with the cop giving them his card so they could contact him or the station if they saw anything) and heading out on their bikes, doing wheelies for dramatic effect – only for Tori and Corey to see a strange black shape dart across the road ahead of them. Tori smartly grabbed Barker’s collar (as the dog was riding in the milk crate on the front of her bike) so he wouldn’t try to go after it, while Corey wondered “what shape was Rollo?” XD Tori pointed out Rollo would be boy-shaped, which the shape they just saw most certainly hadn’t been, and Corey commented on how this reminded him of another entry in his favorite book series, “The Case of the Boy-Shaped Boy.” Which led to an argument between him and Tori when she was like “what” and it was revealed she was just letting the books he kept lending her pile up in her room. XD Once again, excellent sibling dynamics at play in Oxventure!
Fun stuff so far, as you can see – I already love these bizarre siblings and their shy new friend. :) I left off with the twins asking Keegan if he’d seen the shape (no, he’d missed it thanks to another failed roll), then, noticing how sad he seemed, asking if he was all right (yes, he was enjoying this) and what he got for Christmas (a tube of Rolos candy...that he found in the house because his parents were busy working – the twins were rightfully upset by this). We’ll see where this conversation goes, and if the kids can find the mysterious shape, tomorrow!
So yeah -- getting that modlist to work was a pain in the ass, but it seems that I WILL have my Courier Victor, and that makes me happy. But for now, I really have to get to bed, as I do have work tomorrow. *sigh* Hopefully it won't be too terrible...we shall see. Night all!
