Less-Than-Productive Friday
Jan. 9th, 2026 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickPartly because I had a good chunk of my evening taken up by Game Night (a round of LIFE -- which I ended up winning thanks to a few lucky salary swaps and gaining a ton of LIFE tiles -- followed by three rounds of Sorry Revenge -- I won the first two, and Dad the third), and partly because Dad's side was playing up again, and -- yeah. Worrying about that is not conducive to getting much done! *sigh* But I managed to get a couple of things accomplished, as per the below write-up:
Work – I am pleased to report that, fortunately, the end of the work week was quieter than the day before – yes, we still had some credit card calls, but they weren’t coming in on top of each other, and my coworker actually took a few, so there was less pressure on me to keep on top of them. (Though, admittedly, since she does them so infrequently, I kind of had to double-check her work, but still.) The main activities of my day other than the calls were:
A) Doing the GL, which was pretty short and thus completed quickly
B) Talking to my supervisor about soft-credited gifts not showing up on one lady’s billing statement, and e-mailing our database people about it
C) Talking a few phone calls and receiving a few e-mails about the overpayments (most people were fine with moving them to the current appeal)
D) Working on that spreadsheet of new parishioners from one of the parishes
Nothing particularly exciting! Day may have dragged a little in spots, but I will always prefer “bored” to “stressed.” And besides, the quiet allowed me to catch up on all the calendar puzzle pages I hadn’t been able to do. :P We’ll see what things are like when I go back on Monday!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – my final night on the bike this week saw me head over to Proxy Gate Tactician’s channel to pedal my way through another one of his ridiculous challenge videos: “Can You Beat Baldur's Gate 3 Using A Companion Cube?” (Which I admit, I ended up rewatching after Game Night because I’d had some problems concentrating/keeping up with his explanations while on the bike (damn PMS brain) and thus didn’t actually finish it during my workout. Bit embarrassing, that, but it was a very fun video, so I didn’t mind watching it again.) Now, you may be thinking that what he meant by that title is that he had to somehow use a crate that he decided to lug around to beat the game, as I initially assumed. After all – it’s not like he could actually get the Portal Companion Cube into the game, right?
WRONG! Because modders exist, and specifically mod creator Skirbie exists, and more importantly, mod creator Skirbie takes frankly ridiculous requests from YouTubers. XD Cue Proxy commissioning Skirbie to create for him a custom Companion Cube summon that weighs 80 pounds, does nothing, and is completely indestructible (except to falling into bottomless pits). He then picked up the magical equivalent of a portal gun (aka a modded version of the Arcane Gate spell available to Level 1 players and jazzed up with the appropriate orange and blue Portal glows), created a goofy-looking gnome named Wheatley to haul the affectionately-nicknamed “Cubert” around (little surprised he didn’t create a Chell, but maybe he couldn’t find a good face for her), and set out to beat the game using only the power of portals and the Improvised Melee Weapon action to swing Cubert into his enemies! Did he succeed?
Yes – but barely. Because as it turns out, Improvised Melee Weapon is one of the WORST combat actions in the game – its damage is a flat base 2D4 and does not scale with the strength of the character; its damage is not improved by the Tavern Brawler feat (at least under the custom difficulty setting with Honor Mode elements Proxy was using? There was some discussion about that in the comments); its damage can be buffed if you play as a Swarmkeeper Ranger, as theirs are the only subclass reactions that can be triggered while using an Improvised Melee Weapon (allowing you to set your swarm on the enemy for an extra D6 worth of pain) – but the reactions are also BUGGY and pop up THREE windows every time, meaning you have to find and click on the right one not to waste the reaction; and strangely enough, pretty much all of the items that do add some sort of bonus to these attacks never seem to mention it in their tooltips (though the comments figured that nonsense out – it’s because the Improvised Melee Weapon attack is technically a Throw attack, just with shitty range; thus, anything that boosts Throw attacks also boosts it). Oh, and it deals bludgeoning damage, and most enemies – certainly most of those in Act 2 – are resistant to that. Proxy ended up spending over 100 hours on this challenge run, which included:
A) Proxy discovering that most of the companions could NOT actually pick up Cubert when first encountered – which makes sense for Gale and Wyll, the men of BG3 have shit Strength stats, but I would have guessed Shadowheart would have been able to manage it! Fortunately respeccing everyone into Fighters helped with that
B) Proxy nearly dying on the Nautiloid – aka the tutorial level – because Shadowheart couldn’t pick up Cubert to join the fight and Lae’zel kept setting herself on fire picking up Cubert when it got set on fire; fortunately the Portal Gun saved his run by letting him port Cubert to the transponder where it could connect the nerves (how? Don’t ask)
C) Proxy expecting to bypass the initial goblin fight at the gate of the Grove with his portals...only for Zevlor to use them to descend into the fray; he proved to be so good at goblin murder that Proxy switched tactics and followed him around casting the portal spell to help him commit all his murders easier
D) Proxy’s tactic for winning most fights to be to bludgeon one person to death, use portals to escape for a while, then come back and repeat, meaning all fights took an ABSURDLY long time, even when he found the scant few ways to buff Cubert’s damage and leveled up enough to finally get multi-attack
E) Proxy’s team being unable to handle the boat ride into Grymforge – the duergar who attack you proved able to tank the damage and smash Proxy’s attempts at protective barrel walls – so Proxy proceeded into the Shadow-Cursed Lands via the mountain pass, then headed into Grymforge via the elevator in the back instead to kill duergar and do science (will Grym, the giant robot in the actual forge, go through portals? No. Can you imprison a lava elemental with Grym so they fight each other? Yes, but it will take a loooong time)
F) Proxy using portals to cheese two of Shar’s trials without any problems...only to run into some pretty significant problems in the one where the party members have to fight their own clones, because not only are the clones resistant to bludgeoning damage, party members also get a strength debuff if they hit any enemy that isn’t their own clone, and the debuff was hefty enough to stop party members from being able to pick up the cube! Wyll eventually won the day with Cubert and 7 HP, but it was a looong slog to get there
G) Proxy going on multiple murdering sprees throughout the video despite being limited to the objectively-worst form of combat in the game because he was desperate to get more XP, slaughtering the druids in Act 1 (AFTER saving the tieflings, fortunately) and the Harpers in Act 2 (largely by taking advantage of their willingness to run into the Shadow Curse to get his characters for their evil deeds)
H) Proxy, expecting a miserably long first phase boss fight with Ketheric Thorm involving kiting him off his rooftop and into the lands around to chip away at him with the cube, being absolutely astonished when he managed to lure Ketheric into a portal off the roof – and instantly won the first phase of his boss fight, with Ketheric retreating to his true battle arena; after consulting with another YouTuber, SlimK, who knows all the secrets of the game, he discovered this was because the devs put in a secret “instant-win” condition for the freak edge case of Ketheric falling off the roof (that’s what it says in the code and everything!). So that was a nice break for him!
I) ...Proxy then having to build box towers, open up some portals, and exploit the fact that the Improvised Melee Weapon attack has no vertical limit to its range to smash Ketheric, and subsequently the Avatar of Myrkul, over the head with Cubert over and over and OVER again until both died and Cubert was able to claim the first Netherstone
J) Proxy using a fun “item duplication” glitch (caused by giving the party member destined to be kidnapped by Orin – in this case Halsin – your best equipment (making sure it’s equipped), then encountering the disguised Orin in the sewers and interrupting her conversation with you by looking at the artifact or casting Silence or whatnot – for some reason this duplicates everything she’s wearing in her disguise) to make copies of all of his best equipment for this run...then having to figure out how to actually, you know, kill Orin to GET those copies. As you might imagine, direct combat did not work, but accidental glitches did – turns out there’s a way to glitch through the door into Orin’s boss fight room which stops her transforming out of her disguise. Then all Wheatley had to do was knock her out with non-lethal blows, and the cutscene of her death played, allowing him to collect her Netherstone and all his duplicated goodies!
K) Proxy setting up a box tower to knock Gortash off of when it came to his boss fight, and managing to successfully lure him out there and onto the top of the tower via portals...only for Wyll to somehow critically miss an attack with Cubert that he had a 99% chance of making WITH ADVANTAGE. *facepalm* The dice be really cruel sometimes. He DID manage to knock Gortash off shortly thereafter, but yeeps.
L) Proxy using portals to get past the gauntlet to the main boss without much issue...only to find himself COMPLETELY stuck as he tried to complete Phase 1 of the boss fight, as there were just too many enemies, some of which were only too willing to constantly stun his party. He eventually decided that he could use a Potion of Invisibility on his group if he used Cubert to smash it open, but man.
K) Proxy then SUFFERING during Phase 2 of the boss fight against the Will Of The Netherbrain itself, because every time he tried throwing Cubert at one of the few spots where the brain could be bludgeoned, it would fall into the pit and be lost. Cue Proxy pretending to give up, then revealing that he found the ONE spot on the platform nearest the brain where Cubert would land on a mere pixel of floor and thus not be lost after much trial-and-error testing, and using that (plus as many bonuses as he could bring to bear) to finally kill the brain
M) And Proxy ending the video with Cubert choosing to dominate the brain, killing the Emperor and making all fall before it in worship before having them build a giant cube XD
Good, fun stuff as always! I may struggle with watching Proxy’s videos sometimes due to fast talking and going “wait what the fuck are you up to now,” but it’s worth. He’s a good player and very fun!
2. Write something: No check – though I also wasn’t sure what I was going to work on tonight, as per the list item, so… Still, hopefully I can figure out something to noodle with tomorrow before trying to get back to a proper “three days of ‘Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland’ and three days of ‘The Van Dort Vacancy’” schedule again!
3. Watch something on FreeTube: ...well, as stated above, I ended up rewatching the video I (mostly) watched for my workout, so – check? Kind of? We’ll call it a half-check as it was a rewatch. At least I didn’t have anything else waiting!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – while there was, as usual, nothing happening on Valice Multiverse, I actually added a couple of posts to my drafts to reblog later on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) this morning before work:
A) A post by sarakipin featuring some of her very pretty medieval fantasy artwork – I especially loved the picture of a hunter and their hounds above a bunny burrow...that happened to have a dragon sleeping in the main chamber at the bottom XD Someone’s about to get a nasty surprise…
B) And a post by upright-fool featuring the comic “Rings” by ND Stevenson, animator on She-Ra: Princess of Power among other things, which was about how he and his husband have changed over the course of their marriage – largely by transitioning from women to a transmasc nonbinary person and a trans man; ND had completed his transition by the time of the comic, and his hubby Lee was starting his – and how they’ve changed their rings to match (reforging each other’s bands to fit their new hands while keeping the same stones they love), and how, no matter how in flux they are, how ND knows that it will always be them for each other. :) It was just very sweet and I wanted to save it for later!
So yeah – glad I got that done this morning, because I don’t think I would have had the time tonight!
Yeah, definitely not my most productive night -- but what can you do? Especially with burgeoning PMS brain...anyway, I really need to get to bed. Tomorrow's plans include posting Moose's gift fic and answering her messages; returning to the Mojave to finish making Courier!Victor in Fallout: New Vegas; doing some form of writing (even if it's just making a "master doc" for my F:NV stuff); and keeping up with the latest from CaFae Latte. *nods* We'll see how all that goes - night all!
Work – I am pleased to report that, fortunately, the end of the work week was quieter than the day before – yes, we still had some credit card calls, but they weren’t coming in on top of each other, and my coworker actually took a few, so there was less pressure on me to keep on top of them. (Though, admittedly, since she does them so infrequently, I kind of had to double-check her work, but still.) The main activities of my day other than the calls were:
A) Doing the GL, which was pretty short and thus completed quickly
B) Talking to my supervisor about soft-credited gifts not showing up on one lady’s billing statement, and e-mailing our database people about it
C) Talking a few phone calls and receiving a few e-mails about the overpayments (most people were fine with moving them to the current appeal)
D) Working on that spreadsheet of new parishioners from one of the parishes
Nothing particularly exciting! Day may have dragged a little in spots, but I will always prefer “bored” to “stressed.” And besides, the quiet allowed me to catch up on all the calendar puzzle pages I hadn’t been able to do. :P We’ll see what things are like when I go back on Monday!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – my final night on the bike this week saw me head over to Proxy Gate Tactician’s channel to pedal my way through another one of his ridiculous challenge videos: “Can You Beat Baldur's Gate 3 Using A Companion Cube?” (Which I admit, I ended up rewatching after Game Night because I’d had some problems concentrating/keeping up with his explanations while on the bike (damn PMS brain) and thus didn’t actually finish it during my workout. Bit embarrassing, that, but it was a very fun video, so I didn’t mind watching it again.) Now, you may be thinking that what he meant by that title is that he had to somehow use a crate that he decided to lug around to beat the game, as I initially assumed. After all – it’s not like he could actually get the Portal Companion Cube into the game, right?
WRONG! Because modders exist, and specifically mod creator Skirbie exists, and more importantly, mod creator Skirbie takes frankly ridiculous requests from YouTubers. XD Cue Proxy commissioning Skirbie to create for him a custom Companion Cube summon that weighs 80 pounds, does nothing, and is completely indestructible (except to falling into bottomless pits). He then picked up the magical equivalent of a portal gun (aka a modded version of the Arcane Gate spell available to Level 1 players and jazzed up with the appropriate orange and blue Portal glows), created a goofy-looking gnome named Wheatley to haul the affectionately-nicknamed “Cubert” around (little surprised he didn’t create a Chell, but maybe he couldn’t find a good face for her), and set out to beat the game using only the power of portals and the Improvised Melee Weapon action to swing Cubert into his enemies! Did he succeed?
Yes – but barely. Because as it turns out, Improvised Melee Weapon is one of the WORST combat actions in the game – its damage is a flat base 2D4 and does not scale with the strength of the character; its damage is not improved by the Tavern Brawler feat (at least under the custom difficulty setting with Honor Mode elements Proxy was using? There was some discussion about that in the comments); its damage can be buffed if you play as a Swarmkeeper Ranger, as theirs are the only subclass reactions that can be triggered while using an Improvised Melee Weapon (allowing you to set your swarm on the enemy for an extra D6 worth of pain) – but the reactions are also BUGGY and pop up THREE windows every time, meaning you have to find and click on the right one not to waste the reaction; and strangely enough, pretty much all of the items that do add some sort of bonus to these attacks never seem to mention it in their tooltips (though the comments figured that nonsense out – it’s because the Improvised Melee Weapon attack is technically a Throw attack, just with shitty range; thus, anything that boosts Throw attacks also boosts it). Oh, and it deals bludgeoning damage, and most enemies – certainly most of those in Act 2 – are resistant to that. Proxy ended up spending over 100 hours on this challenge run, which included:
A) Proxy discovering that most of the companions could NOT actually pick up Cubert when first encountered – which makes sense for Gale and Wyll, the men of BG3 have shit Strength stats, but I would have guessed Shadowheart would have been able to manage it! Fortunately respeccing everyone into Fighters helped with that
B) Proxy nearly dying on the Nautiloid – aka the tutorial level – because Shadowheart couldn’t pick up Cubert to join the fight and Lae’zel kept setting herself on fire picking up Cubert when it got set on fire; fortunately the Portal Gun saved his run by letting him port Cubert to the transponder where it could connect the nerves (how? Don’t ask)
C) Proxy expecting to bypass the initial goblin fight at the gate of the Grove with his portals...only for Zevlor to use them to descend into the fray; he proved to be so good at goblin murder that Proxy switched tactics and followed him around casting the portal spell to help him commit all his murders easier
D) Proxy’s tactic for winning most fights to be to bludgeon one person to death, use portals to escape for a while, then come back and repeat, meaning all fights took an ABSURDLY long time, even when he found the scant few ways to buff Cubert’s damage and leveled up enough to finally get multi-attack
E) Proxy’s team being unable to handle the boat ride into Grymforge – the duergar who attack you proved able to tank the damage and smash Proxy’s attempts at protective barrel walls – so Proxy proceeded into the Shadow-Cursed Lands via the mountain pass, then headed into Grymforge via the elevator in the back instead to kill duergar and do science (will Grym, the giant robot in the actual forge, go through portals? No. Can you imprison a lava elemental with Grym so they fight each other? Yes, but it will take a loooong time)
F) Proxy using portals to cheese two of Shar’s trials without any problems...only to run into some pretty significant problems in the one where the party members have to fight their own clones, because not only are the clones resistant to bludgeoning damage, party members also get a strength debuff if they hit any enemy that isn’t their own clone, and the debuff was hefty enough to stop party members from being able to pick up the cube! Wyll eventually won the day with Cubert and 7 HP, but it was a looong slog to get there
G) Proxy going on multiple murdering sprees throughout the video despite being limited to the objectively-worst form of combat in the game because he was desperate to get more XP, slaughtering the druids in Act 1 (AFTER saving the tieflings, fortunately) and the Harpers in Act 2 (largely by taking advantage of their willingness to run into the Shadow Curse to get his characters for their evil deeds)
H) Proxy, expecting a miserably long first phase boss fight with Ketheric Thorm involving kiting him off his rooftop and into the lands around to chip away at him with the cube, being absolutely astonished when he managed to lure Ketheric into a portal off the roof – and instantly won the first phase of his boss fight, with Ketheric retreating to his true battle arena; after consulting with another YouTuber, SlimK, who knows all the secrets of the game, he discovered this was because the devs put in a secret “instant-win” condition for the freak edge case of Ketheric falling off the roof (that’s what it says in the code and everything!). So that was a nice break for him!
I) ...Proxy then having to build box towers, open up some portals, and exploit the fact that the Improvised Melee Weapon attack has no vertical limit to its range to smash Ketheric, and subsequently the Avatar of Myrkul, over the head with Cubert over and over and OVER again until both died and Cubert was able to claim the first Netherstone
J) Proxy using a fun “item duplication” glitch (caused by giving the party member destined to be kidnapped by Orin – in this case Halsin – your best equipment (making sure it’s equipped), then encountering the disguised Orin in the sewers and interrupting her conversation with you by looking at the artifact or casting Silence or whatnot – for some reason this duplicates everything she’s wearing in her disguise) to make copies of all of his best equipment for this run...then having to figure out how to actually, you know, kill Orin to GET those copies. As you might imagine, direct combat did not work, but accidental glitches did – turns out there’s a way to glitch through the door into Orin’s boss fight room which stops her transforming out of her disguise. Then all Wheatley had to do was knock her out with non-lethal blows, and the cutscene of her death played, allowing him to collect her Netherstone and all his duplicated goodies!
K) Proxy setting up a box tower to knock Gortash off of when it came to his boss fight, and managing to successfully lure him out there and onto the top of the tower via portals...only for Wyll to somehow critically miss an attack with Cubert that he had a 99% chance of making WITH ADVANTAGE. *facepalm* The dice be really cruel sometimes. He DID manage to knock Gortash off shortly thereafter, but yeeps.
L) Proxy using portals to get past the gauntlet to the main boss without much issue...only to find himself COMPLETELY stuck as he tried to complete Phase 1 of the boss fight, as there were just too many enemies, some of which were only too willing to constantly stun his party. He eventually decided that he could use a Potion of Invisibility on his group if he used Cubert to smash it open, but man.
K) Proxy then SUFFERING during Phase 2 of the boss fight against the Will Of The Netherbrain itself, because every time he tried throwing Cubert at one of the few spots where the brain could be bludgeoned, it would fall into the pit and be lost. Cue Proxy pretending to give up, then revealing that he found the ONE spot on the platform nearest the brain where Cubert would land on a mere pixel of floor and thus not be lost after much trial-and-error testing, and using that (plus as many bonuses as he could bring to bear) to finally kill the brain
M) And Proxy ending the video with Cubert choosing to dominate the brain, killing the Emperor and making all fall before it in worship before having them build a giant cube XD
Good, fun stuff as always! I may struggle with watching Proxy’s videos sometimes due to fast talking and going “wait what the fuck are you up to now,” but it’s worth. He’s a good player and very fun!
2. Write something: No check – though I also wasn’t sure what I was going to work on tonight, as per the list item, so… Still, hopefully I can figure out something to noodle with tomorrow before trying to get back to a proper “three days of ‘Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland’ and three days of ‘The Van Dort Vacancy’” schedule again!
3. Watch something on FreeTube: ...well, as stated above, I ended up rewatching the video I (mostly) watched for my workout, so – check? Kind of? We’ll call it a half-check as it was a rewatch. At least I didn’t have anything else waiting!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – while there was, as usual, nothing happening on Valice Multiverse, I actually added a couple of posts to my drafts to reblog later on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) this morning before work:
A) A post by sarakipin featuring some of her very pretty medieval fantasy artwork – I especially loved the picture of a hunter and their hounds above a bunny burrow...that happened to have a dragon sleeping in the main chamber at the bottom XD Someone’s about to get a nasty surprise…
B) And a post by upright-fool featuring the comic “Rings” by ND Stevenson, animator on She-Ra: Princess of Power among other things, which was about how he and his husband have changed over the course of their marriage – largely by transitioning from women to a transmasc nonbinary person and a trans man; ND had completed his transition by the time of the comic, and his hubby Lee was starting his – and how they’ve changed their rings to match (reforging each other’s bands to fit their new hands while keeping the same stones they love), and how, no matter how in flux they are, how ND knows that it will always be them for each other. :) It was just very sweet and I wanted to save it for later!
So yeah – glad I got that done this morning, because I don’t think I would have had the time tonight!
Yeah, definitely not my most productive night -- but what can you do? Especially with burgeoning PMS brain...anyway, I really need to get to bed. Tomorrow's plans include posting Moose's gift fic and answering her messages; returning to the Mojave to finish making Courier!Victor in Fallout: New Vegas; doing some form of writing (even if it's just making a "master doc" for my F:NV stuff); and keeping up with the latest from CaFae Latte. *nods* We'll see how all that goes - night all!
