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crossover_chickAfter a false alarm when I first got up, the damn things showed up this morning, probably on the ride in to work -- I say this because, for the first time in a while, I didn't catch it in time to prevent some damage to my underwear. >( Very annoying when that happens! Fortunately I was able to cover it with the pad's wing and wash it out when I got home, but -- still. I don't like it when that happens. My period's annoying enough without potentially ruining my clothes in the bargain. Hmph. At least it's here now and thus should be mostly over by the time Valentine's Day rolls around on Saturday...
As for the rest of my day:
Work – Well, it was a long and hard battle, but our IT guys did manage to restore our access to the shared drive by lunchtime, and get our printers working by the end of the day. So hopefully tomorrow will be a normal day when it comes to work activities! As it was, today’s activities included:
A) Working a bit more on the obituaries, though it was admittedly hard to concentrate given my recently-arrived period
B) Taking a couple of credit card calls from people – one gift nearly didn’t go through, but fortunately actually charged when I retried it
C) Catching up on the usual morning reports when access to the shared drive was restored
D) Talking to my contact at the credit card company and telling her about some of the woes we’ve been having (including various errors and missing payments) – I don’t expect anything to come of it, but I’ve done my part
E) And researching more of the missing payments just to get an idea of what we’re dealing with
...you know, I didn’t feel particularly productive today because of my period, but that’s actually a decent amount of stuff I got done. I like it. *nods* We’ll see how tomorrow goes!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – got back on the bike tonight, pedaling my way to about the halfway point of “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - The Level 1 Naked Useless Survival Run!” Today’s chunklet featured:
A) Useless Steve waking up in The Sink after the intro slides, sporting a terrible patient’s gown to go with his terrible haircut, and looting whatever he could find around the place (which included a surprising amount of Sunset Sarsaparilla, some mad scientist scrubs – yes, genuinely what they were called – and a bunch of mentats, which should come in VERY handy) while Jon explained why he thought Steve actually might have a chance of completing the DLC! Namely, because “Old World Blues” is both designed for fairly experienced Couriers (Level 15+) bringing in their own weapons, AND the third DLC to come out, the weapons it offers to the player have to be pretty darn powerful to be worth their while. He fully expected Steve to die and die often, of course – Steve is useless and the enemies powerful – but once Steve got his hands on some proper weaponry, the odds would be evened a bit. A tiny, tiny bit. XD
B) Useless Steve then going to meet the Think Tank group – Dr. Klein, Dr. Dala, Dr. 8, Dr. 0, and Dr. Borous – to learn what the hell had happened to him and how he could get home! Which was my most thorough look at how this DLC actually starts to date (mostly because in stuff like F:NV YOLO Remastered, Jon tends to just cut the opening conversation entirely for the sake of time, as it’s VERY long), and included such things as:
I. An explanation for why you can’t just shoot the Think Tanks right away – there’s a pacification field over their main laboratory, meaning your character is incapable of drawing a weapon against them (until the finale, where you can fight them if you must)
II. Some dialogue that was equal parts hilarious and disturbing, such as Dr. Dala describing Steve as the “skinvelope” that held the brain they sent the signal to, and then comparing him to a “big hairless teddy bear;” Dr. Klein having apparently forgotten what “toes” are since sticking his brain in a floating robot tank, and accusing Steve of having “penises wriggling on his feet” – Steve then failed a Science check to gesture at them and gave them the finger, causing Klein to disgustedly note “the penis on its hand is achieving erection;” and Dr. Mobius, the “big bad” of the DLC, interrupting with a transmission from his “dome-shaped...dome” in the Forbidden Zone – “A zone...that is, yes...forbidden to you” – and declaring that he was sending out his robo-scorpions and soon all Science would be his before cheerfully saying “That’s all. Goodbye.” XD Oh gods, I can’t wait to see the entire conversation when I finally get there in my own game!
III. A quick sum-up of the surgery performed on Steve – basically, they yeeted his brain and replaced it with Tesla coils (apparently his brain is still SOMEHOW controlling him through said coils, but don’t ask how, this is the DLC of “handwaving the bizarre science”), then replaced his heart and spine as well when his body started failing due to, you know, a lack of brain (as per Dala, they “began to cry for direction using your nerves as telegraph wires,” which is a really nice turn of phrase, it must be said – and then she made creepy by telling the organs to “go to sleep in your tanks. Dala loves you.” XD). This did come with some benefits, though – specifically, the perks “Brainless” (head cannot be crippled, +25% resistance to chem addiction, +1 DT), “Heartless” (cannot be poisoned, +25% to the effectiveness of all healing items, and robots have -50% chance to score a critical hit), and “Spineless” (torso cannot be crippled, +1 to Strength, +1 to Damage Threshold). Basically, the Think Tank did Steve a favor by replacing most of his internals with SCIENCE!
IV. And the Think Tank giving Steve his mission – recover the schematics for three technologies around the Big MT, along with the technologies themselves if at all possible (“You have a new spine. Use it,” as per Klein) – and a bunch of XP for completing the opening quest, pushing Steve into Level 2! He increased his Sneak to 10 and his Energy Weapons to 11, and took the Ladykiller Perk (which allows him to get extra dialogue options with female NPCs and do more damage to them in combat – I guess this combined with the Confirmed Bachelor perk he took in the main series means Steve is canonically bisexual? :P) to help out with a quest shortly.
C) Useless Steve then robbing the Think Tank’s main lab for as much useful shit as possible (including ammo, drugs, Dr. Klein’s very useful glasses – +1 DT, +5 Repair, and +1 Intelligence – a Stealth Boy (nice!), replacement sexy pajamas from Dr. Dala’s room, and a desperado hat to give him more Perception and cover his terrible haircut) before setting about getting as much XP as he could from them before even setting out to do their tasks! Because all of the doctors have little mini-quests you can do if you wish – and not only are they good sources of XP, they also make the characters like you if you do them correctly. And Steve definitely wanted these guys to like him, given he was likely to have no chance against them in a straight-up fight when it came time to wrap up the DLC. So, in order to get some levels and some “friendship points,” so to speak, Steve:
I. Pestered Dr. Klein with questions, causing him to give Steve the mini-quest to go talk to the other brains – then asked him about the “passive” sensation he was experiencing, causing Klein to explain that it was a side effect of the “cerebral scrubbing” they’d put him though and that it prevented him from being aggressive or telling anyone outside the facility about Big MT. Which was a security precaution they’d put in place after their last batch of visitors caused some chaos around the place (including crashing one of this trains), starting another mini-quest to find out about the visitors
II. Chatted with Dr. 0 about the visitors who came before him, and learned that one of them escaped the facility in record time, found the bomb collars in one of the research centers and tinkered with them until he found the right frequency to set them off, destroyed all the robots sent to stop him, then hacked into the mainframe, frying poor Dr. 8’s vocal processor and taking control of the trains. He crashed a bunch as a distraction, then used one to punch a hole in the force field around the Big MT and escape –
To the Sierra Madre, because – while the Think Tank doesn’t confirm this – that particular asshole was Father Elijah, who needed the bomb collars to force people to do his bidding in “Dead Money.” That completed the quest to find out about the visitors, but Steve asked about the others just out of curiosity, and Dr. 0 told him one was a woman who managed to escape the Y-17 facility before being lobotomized (Christine, one of your companions in “Dead Money”), and the other a mystery man who had a chat with Klein before being released. Starting ANOTHER mini quest to learn more about THAT guy!
III. Returned to Dr. Klein to ask him about the guy who he had the chat with, and Dr. Klein discovering he – couldn’t quite recall what they’d spoken about. History, maybe? He knew their chat had been interrupted twice, once by the train crash, and once by – something else – but his data banks refused to pull up the relevant information. Though he did recall they’d forgotten to brain scrub the visitor, meaning he might have left with knowledge he shouldn’t have...Dr. Klein dismissed it as unimportant, though, saying he rarely made mistakes, so probability favored him not having made one that time. :p (Which Steve might not agree with if he was doing “Lonesome Road,” because that visitor was Ulysses, and Jon has always wondered if what Ulysses asked the Think Tank included how to get access to the nuclear weapons still in The Divide…) Anyway, that finished that mini-quest, bumping Steve up to Level 3 and allowing him to improve his Science and Energy Weapons skills both to 13. Yay!
IV. Swung by the Sink’s central intelligence unit to see what it had for sale – then realized “wait, I never actually finished the quest to talk to the other brains” and returned to the main lab to say hi to Dr. Borous (who he couldn’t do anything with just yet), Dr. 8 (who he couldn’t communicate with yet because he had neither the Science nor the Perception to decipher the guy’s scrambled-hacking-code “voice”) –
And Dr. Dala. Who continued to be absolutely weird about Steve having a human body, asking him to speak for her so she could record it for later and admiring the way his lips and tongue and what not moved (even if she compared his tongue to a fish, or a particularly dexterous slug, moving about in his mouth). And HER mini-quest Steve could do immediately thanks to having the Lady Killer perk, which allowed him to immediately suss out that she was rather turned on by him having a proper fleshy body. She tried to deny it, but Steve did some stuff like cough and yawn and rub his own face (all of which Jon urged people NOT to do because he recorded this during The Plague Years), and she could not stop herself from staring, admitting that he’d “sufficiently percolated” her. He assured her that it was all right to look, and she admitted maybe there was value in what he said, commenting that she did enjoy breathing long ago. Steve thus promised to come and breathe for her sometimes –
Causing her to get very excited and state that he’d have to space out his visits lest her gel run over. And then radar-scan him and, well, essentially have an orgasm. XD It was very fucking weird, but it netted Steve some microfusion cells, I guess? And more XP, XP is nice.
And yeah, that’s about where I left off. Tomorrow, we’ll see what else Steve gets up to in Big MT besides being a breathy fleshy “gigolo” of sorts for Dala. XD
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines”: Check – another night, another page of edits on this, covering:
A) Hatter asking Alice since when did she care about not cutting down everyone and everything in her path (prompted by her mental comment about how she’d like to avoid hurting any of the guards if she could from the end of yesterday’s session), and Alice retorting since she started dealing with corpses that don’t always dissolve into dust (the “always” being added because the vampires Alice has killed do dissolve like so) and people who can’t be brought back to life with just a thought, before reminding him and the others that the only reason she seems so bloodthirsty to THEM is because most of them tried to murder her at one point or another. Carpenter attempted to claim he hadn’t, but Alice immediately pointed out that what he’d done was simply farm out the job to the drowned sailors, which hadn’t worked out for him. And that he should be grateful that he did try to protect her from the Infernal Train when it rampaged through his theater, and was willing to change his diet when she brought him back, because otherwise...well, she didn’t specify, but it was pretty clear. :P
B) Alice then putting the kibosh on that conversation so she could figure out her next move – namely, finding the door to the basement, since she now had the key and it was still the most likely place to find the sarcophagus. Fortunately, puzzling out its most likely location wasn’t difficult – she knew it wasn’t in the security area thanks to her little trip through the events, and given the Wonderlanders had all encouraged her to go upstairs and snatch Stanley’s “Office” keys, well… Unfortunately, though, the universe wasn’t quite convenient enough to put the office door on the same side of the main hall as her – instead, it was on the opposite wall, as demonstrated by Rabbit hopping, skipping, and jumping over there. Alice pointed out to him that she couldn’t get over there as easily, then told him to park his furry butt by the correct door, leading to...
C) Alice carefully sneaking around the perimeter of the main hall, avoiding the guards while preparing to activate Obfuscate at a moment’s notice. Fortunately, thanks to a shift change and the guard who was supposed to be at the front entrance being missing in action (Alice wondered if it was the guy who came into the bathroom while she was trying to sneak out, noting it would be very interesting if that near miss had actually been excellent timing), she was able to get across to the Office door no problem (Rabbit even praised her for only being three minutes late instead of four).
D) And Alice opening the door to find a little L-shaped hallway beyond it (much like the one she went through at the start, only with awards and plaques hung up instead of posters) with two doors of its own in it. Alice slipped inside, noted the dirty floor and the need for this place to get some proper janitors, considered a job as a cleaner once all the bullshit was said and done (the Queen of Hearts complained that Alice had said she might be interested in bounty hunting before, but Alice pointed out that she needed something to pay the bills before she got her license, and probably between hunts), then appropriately opened the first door at the corner of the L to find some mops and brooms. :p
And there we have it! I left off right before Alice entered the actual office area itself – tomorrow, she goes in there to see what she can find! Which does include someone’s forgotten pills, but also includes a door...
3. Watch something on FreeTube: Check – as it turns out, OXtra ended up forgoing a list video this week, opting instead to talk about an upcoming game Ellen was eager to promote in “Pokémon Pokopia is a Dystopian Nightmare and I Love It!” Apparently back in January, Ellen was invited to Nintendo headquarters to preview some of the games coming out on the Switch in 2026, and Pokémon Pokopia was the one she ended up the most excited about. Mostly because it’s a cutesy, cozy game that is best described as “Animal Crossing mixed with Minecraft in the Pokémon universe” –
That has, as its plot, “You are a Ditto imitating its human trainer after all the humans mysteriously disappeared and their buildings fell to ruin, and now it’s up to you to take your trainer’s old Pokédex and help out all your struggling fellow Pokémon by building them nice habitats.” Yes, like any good Pokémon game, Pokémon Pokopia has some disturbing bones under all the cutesy meat, and those bones appear to be “congrats, you’re cleaning up the place after an apocalypse and learning just how helpless a lot of Pokémon are without their trainers.” And Ellen loves it as she loves some creepy vibes in her cozy games. XD Apart from the hints at the dystopian setting, though, the game does look very cute – I mean, it’s CLEARLY a reskin of an Animal Crossing game with Charmanders and Bulbasaurs and a slight bit of Minecraft aesthetic to the landscape, it has no choice but to be cute. And Ellen found the gameplay loop of “fixing up habitats for Pokémon, enticing them to move in, learning special moves from them, and using those moves to fix up more and better habitats” to be pleasantly engaging, so it seems like a solid title there too. I guess we’ll see if anyone agrees with her when the game releases in March – at any rate, I expect to see some of Ellen’s post-human Pokémon utopia on the channel once it’s on shelves and in Switch 2s! Should be very fun.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – mostly. I only had Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about tonight, and I finally came up with a couple of new Not-Incorrect Quote scenes to append to my old Valentine’s Day set – but due to having to scramble to finish all the rest of my write-ups, I was only able to get one done.
...and again, I will have to completely finish this tomorrow, because it is far too late and I HAVE to go to bed. I really have to reign in the level of detail I put into some of these write-ups...night all!
As for the rest of my day:
Work – Well, it was a long and hard battle, but our IT guys did manage to restore our access to the shared drive by lunchtime, and get our printers working by the end of the day. So hopefully tomorrow will be a normal day when it comes to work activities! As it was, today’s activities included:
A) Working a bit more on the obituaries, though it was admittedly hard to concentrate given my recently-arrived period
B) Taking a couple of credit card calls from people – one gift nearly didn’t go through, but fortunately actually charged when I retried it
C) Catching up on the usual morning reports when access to the shared drive was restored
D) Talking to my contact at the credit card company and telling her about some of the woes we’ve been having (including various errors and missing payments) – I don’t expect anything to come of it, but I’ve done my part
E) And researching more of the missing payments just to get an idea of what we’re dealing with
...you know, I didn’t feel particularly productive today because of my period, but that’s actually a decent amount of stuff I got done. I like it. *nods* We’ll see how tomorrow goes!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – got back on the bike tonight, pedaling my way to about the halfway point of “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - The Level 1 Naked Useless Survival Run!” Today’s chunklet featured:
A) Useless Steve waking up in The Sink after the intro slides, sporting a terrible patient’s gown to go with his terrible haircut, and looting whatever he could find around the place (which included a surprising amount of Sunset Sarsaparilla, some mad scientist scrubs – yes, genuinely what they were called – and a bunch of mentats, which should come in VERY handy) while Jon explained why he thought Steve actually might have a chance of completing the DLC! Namely, because “Old World Blues” is both designed for fairly experienced Couriers (Level 15+) bringing in their own weapons, AND the third DLC to come out, the weapons it offers to the player have to be pretty darn powerful to be worth their while. He fully expected Steve to die and die often, of course – Steve is useless and the enemies powerful – but once Steve got his hands on some proper weaponry, the odds would be evened a bit. A tiny, tiny bit. XD
B) Useless Steve then going to meet the Think Tank group – Dr. Klein, Dr. Dala, Dr. 8, Dr. 0, and Dr. Borous – to learn what the hell had happened to him and how he could get home! Which was my most thorough look at how this DLC actually starts to date (mostly because in stuff like F:NV YOLO Remastered, Jon tends to just cut the opening conversation entirely for the sake of time, as it’s VERY long), and included such things as:
I. An explanation for why you can’t just shoot the Think Tanks right away – there’s a pacification field over their main laboratory, meaning your character is incapable of drawing a weapon against them (until the finale, where you can fight them if you must)
II. Some dialogue that was equal parts hilarious and disturbing, such as Dr. Dala describing Steve as the “skinvelope” that held the brain they sent the signal to, and then comparing him to a “big hairless teddy bear;” Dr. Klein having apparently forgotten what “toes” are since sticking his brain in a floating robot tank, and accusing Steve of having “penises wriggling on his feet” – Steve then failed a Science check to gesture at them and gave them the finger, causing Klein to disgustedly note “the penis on its hand is achieving erection;” and Dr. Mobius, the “big bad” of the DLC, interrupting with a transmission from his “dome-shaped...dome” in the Forbidden Zone – “A zone...that is, yes...forbidden to you” – and declaring that he was sending out his robo-scorpions and soon all Science would be his before cheerfully saying “That’s all. Goodbye.” XD Oh gods, I can’t wait to see the entire conversation when I finally get there in my own game!
III. A quick sum-up of the surgery performed on Steve – basically, they yeeted his brain and replaced it with Tesla coils (apparently his brain is still SOMEHOW controlling him through said coils, but don’t ask how, this is the DLC of “handwaving the bizarre science”), then replaced his heart and spine as well when his body started failing due to, you know, a lack of brain (as per Dala, they “began to cry for direction using your nerves as telegraph wires,” which is a really nice turn of phrase, it must be said – and then she made creepy by telling the organs to “go to sleep in your tanks. Dala loves you.” XD). This did come with some benefits, though – specifically, the perks “Brainless” (head cannot be crippled, +25% resistance to chem addiction, +1 DT), “Heartless” (cannot be poisoned, +25% to the effectiveness of all healing items, and robots have -50% chance to score a critical hit), and “Spineless” (torso cannot be crippled, +1 to Strength, +1 to Damage Threshold). Basically, the Think Tank did Steve a favor by replacing most of his internals with SCIENCE!
IV. And the Think Tank giving Steve his mission – recover the schematics for three technologies around the Big MT, along with the technologies themselves if at all possible (“You have a new spine. Use it,” as per Klein) – and a bunch of XP for completing the opening quest, pushing Steve into Level 2! He increased his Sneak to 10 and his Energy Weapons to 11, and took the Ladykiller Perk (which allows him to get extra dialogue options with female NPCs and do more damage to them in combat – I guess this combined with the Confirmed Bachelor perk he took in the main series means Steve is canonically bisexual? :P) to help out with a quest shortly.
C) Useless Steve then robbing the Think Tank’s main lab for as much useful shit as possible (including ammo, drugs, Dr. Klein’s very useful glasses – +1 DT, +5 Repair, and +1 Intelligence – a Stealth Boy (nice!), replacement sexy pajamas from Dr. Dala’s room, and a desperado hat to give him more Perception and cover his terrible haircut) before setting about getting as much XP as he could from them before even setting out to do their tasks! Because all of the doctors have little mini-quests you can do if you wish – and not only are they good sources of XP, they also make the characters like you if you do them correctly. And Steve definitely wanted these guys to like him, given he was likely to have no chance against them in a straight-up fight when it came time to wrap up the DLC. So, in order to get some levels and some “friendship points,” so to speak, Steve:
I. Pestered Dr. Klein with questions, causing him to give Steve the mini-quest to go talk to the other brains – then asked him about the “passive” sensation he was experiencing, causing Klein to explain that it was a side effect of the “cerebral scrubbing” they’d put him though and that it prevented him from being aggressive or telling anyone outside the facility about Big MT. Which was a security precaution they’d put in place after their last batch of visitors caused some chaos around the place (including crashing one of this trains), starting another mini-quest to find out about the visitors
II. Chatted with Dr. 0 about the visitors who came before him, and learned that one of them escaped the facility in record time, found the bomb collars in one of the research centers and tinkered with them until he found the right frequency to set them off, destroyed all the robots sent to stop him, then hacked into the mainframe, frying poor Dr. 8’s vocal processor and taking control of the trains. He crashed a bunch as a distraction, then used one to punch a hole in the force field around the Big MT and escape –
To the Sierra Madre, because – while the Think Tank doesn’t confirm this – that particular asshole was Father Elijah, who needed the bomb collars to force people to do his bidding in “Dead Money.” That completed the quest to find out about the visitors, but Steve asked about the others just out of curiosity, and Dr. 0 told him one was a woman who managed to escape the Y-17 facility before being lobotomized (Christine, one of your companions in “Dead Money”), and the other a mystery man who had a chat with Klein before being released. Starting ANOTHER mini quest to learn more about THAT guy!
III. Returned to Dr. Klein to ask him about the guy who he had the chat with, and Dr. Klein discovering he – couldn’t quite recall what they’d spoken about. History, maybe? He knew their chat had been interrupted twice, once by the train crash, and once by – something else – but his data banks refused to pull up the relevant information. Though he did recall they’d forgotten to brain scrub the visitor, meaning he might have left with knowledge he shouldn’t have...Dr. Klein dismissed it as unimportant, though, saying he rarely made mistakes, so probability favored him not having made one that time. :p (Which Steve might not agree with if he was doing “Lonesome Road,” because that visitor was Ulysses, and Jon has always wondered if what Ulysses asked the Think Tank included how to get access to the nuclear weapons still in The Divide…) Anyway, that finished that mini-quest, bumping Steve up to Level 3 and allowing him to improve his Science and Energy Weapons skills both to 13. Yay!
IV. Swung by the Sink’s central intelligence unit to see what it had for sale – then realized “wait, I never actually finished the quest to talk to the other brains” and returned to the main lab to say hi to Dr. Borous (who he couldn’t do anything with just yet), Dr. 8 (who he couldn’t communicate with yet because he had neither the Science nor the Perception to decipher the guy’s scrambled-hacking-code “voice”) –
And Dr. Dala. Who continued to be absolutely weird about Steve having a human body, asking him to speak for her so she could record it for later and admiring the way his lips and tongue and what not moved (even if she compared his tongue to a fish, or a particularly dexterous slug, moving about in his mouth). And HER mini-quest Steve could do immediately thanks to having the Lady Killer perk, which allowed him to immediately suss out that she was rather turned on by him having a proper fleshy body. She tried to deny it, but Steve did some stuff like cough and yawn and rub his own face (all of which Jon urged people NOT to do because he recorded this during The Plague Years), and she could not stop herself from staring, admitting that he’d “sufficiently percolated” her. He assured her that it was all right to look, and she admitted maybe there was value in what he said, commenting that she did enjoy breathing long ago. Steve thus promised to come and breathe for her sometimes –
Causing her to get very excited and state that he’d have to space out his visits lest her gel run over. And then radar-scan him and, well, essentially have an orgasm. XD It was very fucking weird, but it netted Steve some microfusion cells, I guess? And more XP, XP is nice.
And yeah, that’s about where I left off. Tomorrow, we’ll see what else Steve gets up to in Big MT besides being a breathy fleshy “gigolo” of sorts for Dala. XD
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines”: Check – another night, another page of edits on this, covering:
A) Hatter asking Alice since when did she care about not cutting down everyone and everything in her path (prompted by her mental comment about how she’d like to avoid hurting any of the guards if she could from the end of yesterday’s session), and Alice retorting since she started dealing with corpses that don’t always dissolve into dust (the “always” being added because the vampires Alice has killed do dissolve like so) and people who can’t be brought back to life with just a thought, before reminding him and the others that the only reason she seems so bloodthirsty to THEM is because most of them tried to murder her at one point or another. Carpenter attempted to claim he hadn’t, but Alice immediately pointed out that what he’d done was simply farm out the job to the drowned sailors, which hadn’t worked out for him. And that he should be grateful that he did try to protect her from the Infernal Train when it rampaged through his theater, and was willing to change his diet when she brought him back, because otherwise...well, she didn’t specify, but it was pretty clear. :P
B) Alice then putting the kibosh on that conversation so she could figure out her next move – namely, finding the door to the basement, since she now had the key and it was still the most likely place to find the sarcophagus. Fortunately, puzzling out its most likely location wasn’t difficult – she knew it wasn’t in the security area thanks to her little trip through the events, and given the Wonderlanders had all encouraged her to go upstairs and snatch Stanley’s “Office” keys, well… Unfortunately, though, the universe wasn’t quite convenient enough to put the office door on the same side of the main hall as her – instead, it was on the opposite wall, as demonstrated by Rabbit hopping, skipping, and jumping over there. Alice pointed out to him that she couldn’t get over there as easily, then told him to park his furry butt by the correct door, leading to...
C) Alice carefully sneaking around the perimeter of the main hall, avoiding the guards while preparing to activate Obfuscate at a moment’s notice. Fortunately, thanks to a shift change and the guard who was supposed to be at the front entrance being missing in action (Alice wondered if it was the guy who came into the bathroom while she was trying to sneak out, noting it would be very interesting if that near miss had actually been excellent timing), she was able to get across to the Office door no problem (Rabbit even praised her for only being three minutes late instead of four).
D) And Alice opening the door to find a little L-shaped hallway beyond it (much like the one she went through at the start, only with awards and plaques hung up instead of posters) with two doors of its own in it. Alice slipped inside, noted the dirty floor and the need for this place to get some proper janitors, considered a job as a cleaner once all the bullshit was said and done (the Queen of Hearts complained that Alice had said she might be interested in bounty hunting before, but Alice pointed out that she needed something to pay the bills before she got her license, and probably between hunts), then appropriately opened the first door at the corner of the L to find some mops and brooms. :p
And there we have it! I left off right before Alice entered the actual office area itself – tomorrow, she goes in there to see what she can find! Which does include someone’s forgotten pills, but also includes a door...
3. Watch something on FreeTube: Check – as it turns out, OXtra ended up forgoing a list video this week, opting instead to talk about an upcoming game Ellen was eager to promote in “Pokémon Pokopia is a Dystopian Nightmare and I Love It!” Apparently back in January, Ellen was invited to Nintendo headquarters to preview some of the games coming out on the Switch in 2026, and Pokémon Pokopia was the one she ended up the most excited about. Mostly because it’s a cutesy, cozy game that is best described as “Animal Crossing mixed with Minecraft in the Pokémon universe” –
That has, as its plot, “You are a Ditto imitating its human trainer after all the humans mysteriously disappeared and their buildings fell to ruin, and now it’s up to you to take your trainer’s old Pokédex and help out all your struggling fellow Pokémon by building them nice habitats.” Yes, like any good Pokémon game, Pokémon Pokopia has some disturbing bones under all the cutesy meat, and those bones appear to be “congrats, you’re cleaning up the place after an apocalypse and learning just how helpless a lot of Pokémon are without their trainers.” And Ellen loves it as she loves some creepy vibes in her cozy games. XD Apart from the hints at the dystopian setting, though, the game does look very cute – I mean, it’s CLEARLY a reskin of an Animal Crossing game with Charmanders and Bulbasaurs and a slight bit of Minecraft aesthetic to the landscape, it has no choice but to be cute. And Ellen found the gameplay loop of “fixing up habitats for Pokémon, enticing them to move in, learning special moves from them, and using those moves to fix up more and better habitats” to be pleasantly engaging, so it seems like a solid title there too. I guess we’ll see if anyone agrees with her when the game releases in March – at any rate, I expect to see some of Ellen’s post-human Pokémon utopia on the channel once it’s on shelves and in Switch 2s! Should be very fun.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – mostly. I only had Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about tonight, and I finally came up with a couple of new Not-Incorrect Quote scenes to append to my old Valentine’s Day set – but due to having to scramble to finish all the rest of my write-ups, I was only able to get one done.
...and again, I will have to completely finish this tomorrow, because it is far too late and I HAVE to go to bed. I really have to reign in the level of detail I put into some of these write-ups...night all!
