Reasonably Okay Wednesday
Feb. 18th, 2026 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickDad had the first of this week's chemo appointments today, and while he was stuck at the hospital for quite a while this time around (to the point where they got home after I did this afternoon), he was doing good when he and Mom got home, pottering around and actually eating a bunch (he hasn't made it through a full meal in a while). We'll see how he feels tomorrow, of course, but it's good to see him have a good day. :) We can only hope this round of chemo works as well as the last!
As for my day, it was -- all right:
Work – It was a little busier at work today, to my mild annoyance – a lot more phone calls when compared to yesterday, with a good number of them being people setting up pledges or doing one-time gifts via credit card. Though, of course, when I tried to contact the two people who had the Unspecified Error pop up before when we tried to set up their pledges by credit card, we still couldn’t do it. >( Fortunately both donors were understanding, but this is getting very frustrating – especially since we’re not sure what the linking factor between all the pledges and gifts getting the Unspecified Error IS. It is not nice to worry that every credit card gift you take could fail! >( Ugh, I wish they’d finally get back to me...
Apart from that, though, the day wasn’t too bad – I helped a couple of people avoid getting double-charged because they’d accidentally set up duplicate pledges, and did another QC file for the latest thank-yous to go out, and got through a couple more obituaries. The kind of work that helps you get through the day. Though I’m sorry to report my commute home was NOT as good as it was yesterday – largely because it was raining and all RI drivers lose their minds in the rain, meaning the highway was all backed up for a good portion of the trip. Bleeeh...on the other hand, still had it better than my parents, who had to straight-up cut through the city when coming home from Dad’s chemo appointment AND deal with some idiot who tried to essentially do a U-TURN in front of them (don’t know where the idiot was going, but it was nowhere fast). *shakehead* Hoping THAT’S better tomorrow, at least!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check (though it nearly wasn’t because Mom, upon getting home, nearly made supper early – fortunately I reminded of her of what time it was before she got too deep into bacon and pancakes) – another night on the bike, another half-hour spend pedaling through “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - Part 3 - Where We're Going, We Don't Need Legs!” Tonight’s chunklet covered:
A) Useless Steve failing to avoid being detected and shot by the Mr. Orderlies and Doctor Orderly MD PHD DDS in the Y-17 Medical Facility even with a Stealth Boy (apparently his base sneak is JUST THAT BAD) and finally resorting to Plan D – drugs! Just doing all the drugs and then smacking the shit out of everyone with the antenna. And while Steve did get very hurt (to the point of using up all but two of his stimpacks), he did finally murder all the robots, yay. Allowing him to collect all the goodies in the area:
I. A “Valence Radii-Accentuator” from the dead Doctor Orderly MD PHD DDS – a helmet that does take up both the hat and glasses slots, but provides +1 to Endurance and very slowly restores health over time. It also removes Steve’s hair due to a known-but-never-fixed bug, but Jon considered that a win because Steve’s haircut is deliberately the worst one in the game.
II. A free Stealth Boy, yay
III. Christine’s COS Recon armor (Christine being Veronica’s ex-girlfriend who was sent to hunt Father Elijah down in this area but instead got captured by him) – a decent set of medium armor that only provides +5 to Sneak, but has a DT of 19, meaning it protects Steve more than the Aural Stealth Suit. So good for those moments when he’s just trying to tank some shots!
IV. And the stuff he actually came there for – the Auto-Doc holotape that allowed him to wake up the doctor back in the Sink! Along with the one that allows the Auto-Doc to do cosmetic surgery, even though Steve didn’t plan to take advantage of it, and the one that allows him to install Implant C-13 (which provides +10% damage against cazadores), even if that one proved too expensive for Steve to get – might as well grab them, right?
Solid haul, even if it took a lot of blood and pain to claim it!
B) Useless Steve then leaving the facility, accidentally “YOLO-charging” a robobrain that was hanging out outside and managing to cripple an arm with his “booping stick,” then fleeing to the radar fence and making it back home to wake up the Auto-Doc and get healed from all his adventures (while Jon talked about all the other stuff the Auto-Doc can do if you have the stuff – like cosmetic surgery, haircuts, installing special implants (for a fuckton of money, as previously stated), and a one-time psychological evaluation to adjust your traits if you’re so inclined).
C) Useless Steve then fast traveling back over to X-8 and making his way over to the Northern Train Tunnel, which proved to be a mostly-quiet trip thanks to his decision to travel there via the elevated train lines (meaning most enemies couldn’t actually get to him – though one Lobotomite managed to get in his face for a bit, forcing him to use up most of his energy cell ammo for the Sonic Emitter killing the guy) – only for everything to start going wrong the minute he reached his destination:
I. First, he was jumped by some lobotomites right at the entrance to the tunnel, which he wasn’t expecting, leading to one death and him having to pull out the big guns (literally, in the form of Elijah’s Advanced LAER, which he has not been using as much as he thought) – fortunately, a combination of that and the Booping Stick killed them all, AND got Steve up to Level 9 (as expected, he dumped all his points into Melee Weapons, bringing that up to 15)
II. Then, after getting into the tunnel, securing the Light Switch 02 personality holotape, and murdering the turret inside, he went out intending to visit another location to get some more ammo for his guns (because even if Booping Stick is doing most of the work, Steve does still occasionally shoot things) – only for there to be a BUNCH of insta-murdering robo-scorpions waiting for him; cue poor Steve dying a LOT as he tried to get past them, and eventually fleeing on a broken leg
III. Then, after managing to give the robo-scorpions the slip, while trying to get to his next destination, he triggered a mine walking over a pipe “bridge” and broke his other leg, leaving himself with two crippled limbs (hence the title of the episode)
IV. Then, after finally managing to Skyrim his way down the cliffs to the Magnetohydraulics Complex in the canyon, he came close to drowning a couple of times (and actually drowned once off-screen) gathering up all the microfusion cells and energy cells he needed for his guns (because the facility is mostly-flooded and you have to go diving in order to get all the best stuff. Didn’t help Jon kept forcing Steve to keep swimming back into the main area instead of just surfacing in the little cave-like alcove where all the energy cells were!)
V. Then, after picking up admittedly quite a lot of ammo for both the Sonic Emitter and Elijah’s Advanced LAER, he was forced to go back outside again, where he was rapidly noticed by the robo-scorpions he was trying to avoid and couldn’t effectively run away from, and had to flee into the carnivorous plant area to get away from them! Fun!
Yeah, uh, it – it wasn’t a nice trip for old Steve. Fortunately, at this point the game decided he’d had enough and took pity on him by letting him fast travel back to base once he was far enough away from the robo-scorpions. Jon was BEYOND RELIEVED, as you might imagine. XD
D) Useless Steve then getting himself fixed up at the Sink’s Auto-Doc before doing two very important things:
I. Bringing Light Switch 02 back online – which involved flirting with her to get a free Meeting People magazine (for extra Speech whenever he needed it), learning about her beef with Light Switch 01 (who, according to 02, is an “ice queen” who thinks she’s better than everyone because she has a bigger processor), and installing the Mood Lights module so she could provide mood lighting for his bedroom, which conferred a lovely temporary 12-hour bonus of +2 Charisma, +5 Barter, and +5 Speech after his initial exposure, lovely! Meaning, so long as he’d been exposed to the lighting recently, Steve had Speech 29 under his belt – impressive.
II. And converting a bunch of his newly-acquired energy cells into overcharged energy cells (about three clips’ worth), which do more damage but eat through gun condition faster – which isn’t an issue with the Sonic Emitter, as all he has to do is pretend to swap out the sound file in the gun and he immediately gets a new fully-repaired Sonic Emitter from Blind Diode Johnson. And, thanks to all the ammo recycling and crafting he’s been doing, changing all those energy cells ALSO got him some free XP for fulling a crafting challenge – we do love the free XP.
E) And finally, Useless Steve heading back over to X-8 to grab Roxie and start the “retrieve the student files from the high school via any means necessary” test to try out his new ammo and actually move the plot along a bit – I left off with him and Roxie having taken down the first military cyberdog at the entrance and preparing to move into Dr. Borous Is Working Through Some Issues High. XD We’ll finish this off and start Episode 4 – which is pretty short – tomorrow!
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got a little over a page done tonight on Alice’s Sneaky Adventures In The Museum Basement, which was good. Tonight’s chunklet consisted of –
A) Alice, annoyed that she had to open a door and thus lose her invisibility temporarily, deciding to just get that over with right away and finding the door to Restoration Room C, then watching the camera at the end of the hall with her hand right over the handle so she could dart inside the moment it was turned away from her – fortunately, she got the timing perfect, and made it inside no problem
B) Alice squeezing into a little hidey-hole in the room and taking some time to puzzle out the riddle Cheshire gave her to figure out the code to the keypad door – didn’t take her too long to solve, fortunately (she’s a pretty smart cookie, after all), though Cheshire did have to remind her of a clue she’d forgotten once she’d eliminated all possibilities but four
C) Alice finding and claiming the Workshop Access keycard in the room once she’d solved the riddle, then slipping back outside again – which nearly went wrong when she pushed open the door and the camera in the hallway spotted the movement. Fortunately, she herself was still out of sight, and the camera kept panning after no other movement was detected, but it was a pretty near miss!
D) And Alice making her invisible way back through the hall up to the keypad door and waiting again for the camera to turn away before hastily standing up, punching in the keypad code, flinging open the door, making sure there wasn’t a guard behind it, throwing herself through, then sitting on the floor as the door shut behind her so she could turn herself invisible again. Once again, there was a near miss, with the camera spotting the motion near the door, but it didn’t see enough to raise an alarm, and so she was in the clear
*nods* Making some good progress here! But I also want to progress in my Valicer In The Dark series, so tomorrow we’ll be switching back to “The Van Dort Vacancy” for a couple of nights. Gotta start Chapter 4 so Victor can get his stuff out of his room already!
3. Watch something on FreeTube: No check tonight – I got to doing my write-ups a bit late, so I simply didn’t have the time. Hopefully tomorrow I can squeeze something in – Josh has another Fun With Shorts up that’s only about ten minutes, so...
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – just Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about tonight (though I actually forgot that fact for a moment and briefly checked up on Valice Multiverse too – do have a reblog over there, but that will have to wait until tomorrow). Got two more things into the queue this eve for the next couple of days:
A) Another post by shenanigansz of their Smiler OC, featuring a picture of said OC lounging in front of a window and a bunch of sketches featuring Smiler with their OC ideas for Galactica, Thirteen, Nemesis, Oblivion, and Wickerman for Thursday – I do enjoy their art, and I’m glad I went deep enough into “#the smiler” tag to find it! Getting past all the RP/ask blogs in there can be a little tricky these days…
B) And that art by platonbatonn of Emily, Victor, and Victoria all lying tangled up together on the floor, surrounded by and covered in what may be blood or Wine of Ages, for Friday – it’s good art and it was already in my drafts, so chucking it into the queue was nice and easy after wading through the Smiler stuff
So that’s good! Still gotta figure out Song Saturday, of course, but hopefully I’ll have time to get that done tomorrow.
Not too shabby, I suppose, but yeah, could have done without the credit card nonsense at work. We'll see if that's any better tomorrow, I guess...for now, I need to get to bed. Night all!
As for my day, it was -- all right:
Work – It was a little busier at work today, to my mild annoyance – a lot more phone calls when compared to yesterday, with a good number of them being people setting up pledges or doing one-time gifts via credit card. Though, of course, when I tried to contact the two people who had the Unspecified Error pop up before when we tried to set up their pledges by credit card, we still couldn’t do it. >( Fortunately both donors were understanding, but this is getting very frustrating – especially since we’re not sure what the linking factor between all the pledges and gifts getting the Unspecified Error IS. It is not nice to worry that every credit card gift you take could fail! >( Ugh, I wish they’d finally get back to me...
Apart from that, though, the day wasn’t too bad – I helped a couple of people avoid getting double-charged because they’d accidentally set up duplicate pledges, and did another QC file for the latest thank-yous to go out, and got through a couple more obituaries. The kind of work that helps you get through the day. Though I’m sorry to report my commute home was NOT as good as it was yesterday – largely because it was raining and all RI drivers lose their minds in the rain, meaning the highway was all backed up for a good portion of the trip. Bleeeh...on the other hand, still had it better than my parents, who had to straight-up cut through the city when coming home from Dad’s chemo appointment AND deal with some idiot who tried to essentially do a U-TURN in front of them (don’t know where the idiot was going, but it was nowhere fast). *shakehead* Hoping THAT’S better tomorrow, at least!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check (though it nearly wasn’t because Mom, upon getting home, nearly made supper early – fortunately I reminded of her of what time it was before she got too deep into bacon and pancakes) – another night on the bike, another half-hour spend pedaling through “Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues - Part 3 - Where We're Going, We Don't Need Legs!” Tonight’s chunklet covered:
A) Useless Steve failing to avoid being detected and shot by the Mr. Orderlies and Doctor Orderly MD PHD DDS in the Y-17 Medical Facility even with a Stealth Boy (apparently his base sneak is JUST THAT BAD) and finally resorting to Plan D – drugs! Just doing all the drugs and then smacking the shit out of everyone with the antenna. And while Steve did get very hurt (to the point of using up all but two of his stimpacks), he did finally murder all the robots, yay. Allowing him to collect all the goodies in the area:
I. A “Valence Radii-Accentuator” from the dead Doctor Orderly MD PHD DDS – a helmet that does take up both the hat and glasses slots, but provides +1 to Endurance and very slowly restores health over time. It also removes Steve’s hair due to a known-but-never-fixed bug, but Jon considered that a win because Steve’s haircut is deliberately the worst one in the game.
II. A free Stealth Boy, yay
III. Christine’s COS Recon armor (Christine being Veronica’s ex-girlfriend who was sent to hunt Father Elijah down in this area but instead got captured by him) – a decent set of medium armor that only provides +5 to Sneak, but has a DT of 19, meaning it protects Steve more than the Aural Stealth Suit. So good for those moments when he’s just trying to tank some shots!
IV. And the stuff he actually came there for – the Auto-Doc holotape that allowed him to wake up the doctor back in the Sink! Along with the one that allows the Auto-Doc to do cosmetic surgery, even though Steve didn’t plan to take advantage of it, and the one that allows him to install Implant C-13 (which provides +10% damage against cazadores), even if that one proved too expensive for Steve to get – might as well grab them, right?
Solid haul, even if it took a lot of blood and pain to claim it!
B) Useless Steve then leaving the facility, accidentally “YOLO-charging” a robobrain that was hanging out outside and managing to cripple an arm with his “booping stick,” then fleeing to the radar fence and making it back home to wake up the Auto-Doc and get healed from all his adventures (while Jon talked about all the other stuff the Auto-Doc can do if you have the stuff – like cosmetic surgery, haircuts, installing special implants (for a fuckton of money, as previously stated), and a one-time psychological evaluation to adjust your traits if you’re so inclined).
C) Useless Steve then fast traveling back over to X-8 and making his way over to the Northern Train Tunnel, which proved to be a mostly-quiet trip thanks to his decision to travel there via the elevated train lines (meaning most enemies couldn’t actually get to him – though one Lobotomite managed to get in his face for a bit, forcing him to use up most of his energy cell ammo for the Sonic Emitter killing the guy) – only for everything to start going wrong the minute he reached his destination:
I. First, he was jumped by some lobotomites right at the entrance to the tunnel, which he wasn’t expecting, leading to one death and him having to pull out the big guns (literally, in the form of Elijah’s Advanced LAER, which he has not been using as much as he thought) – fortunately, a combination of that and the Booping Stick killed them all, AND got Steve up to Level 9 (as expected, he dumped all his points into Melee Weapons, bringing that up to 15)
II. Then, after getting into the tunnel, securing the Light Switch 02 personality holotape, and murdering the turret inside, he went out intending to visit another location to get some more ammo for his guns (because even if Booping Stick is doing most of the work, Steve does still occasionally shoot things) – only for there to be a BUNCH of insta-murdering robo-scorpions waiting for him; cue poor Steve dying a LOT as he tried to get past them, and eventually fleeing on a broken leg
III. Then, after managing to give the robo-scorpions the slip, while trying to get to his next destination, he triggered a mine walking over a pipe “bridge” and broke his other leg, leaving himself with two crippled limbs (hence the title of the episode)
IV. Then, after finally managing to Skyrim his way down the cliffs to the Magnetohydraulics Complex in the canyon, he came close to drowning a couple of times (and actually drowned once off-screen) gathering up all the microfusion cells and energy cells he needed for his guns (because the facility is mostly-flooded and you have to go diving in order to get all the best stuff. Didn’t help Jon kept forcing Steve to keep swimming back into the main area instead of just surfacing in the little cave-like alcove where all the energy cells were!)
V. Then, after picking up admittedly quite a lot of ammo for both the Sonic Emitter and Elijah’s Advanced LAER, he was forced to go back outside again, where he was rapidly noticed by the robo-scorpions he was trying to avoid and couldn’t effectively run away from, and had to flee into the carnivorous plant area to get away from them! Fun!
Yeah, uh, it – it wasn’t a nice trip for old Steve. Fortunately, at this point the game decided he’d had enough and took pity on him by letting him fast travel back to base once he was far enough away from the robo-scorpions. Jon was BEYOND RELIEVED, as you might imagine. XD
D) Useless Steve then getting himself fixed up at the Sink’s Auto-Doc before doing two very important things:
I. Bringing Light Switch 02 back online – which involved flirting with her to get a free Meeting People magazine (for extra Speech whenever he needed it), learning about her beef with Light Switch 01 (who, according to 02, is an “ice queen” who thinks she’s better than everyone because she has a bigger processor), and installing the Mood Lights module so she could provide mood lighting for his bedroom, which conferred a lovely temporary 12-hour bonus of +2 Charisma, +5 Barter, and +5 Speech after his initial exposure, lovely! Meaning, so long as he’d been exposed to the lighting recently, Steve had Speech 29 under his belt – impressive.
II. And converting a bunch of his newly-acquired energy cells into overcharged energy cells (about three clips’ worth), which do more damage but eat through gun condition faster – which isn’t an issue with the Sonic Emitter, as all he has to do is pretend to swap out the sound file in the gun and he immediately gets a new fully-repaired Sonic Emitter from Blind Diode Johnson. And, thanks to all the ammo recycling and crafting he’s been doing, changing all those energy cells ALSO got him some free XP for fulling a crafting challenge – we do love the free XP.
E) And finally, Useless Steve heading back over to X-8 to grab Roxie and start the “retrieve the student files from the high school via any means necessary” test to try out his new ammo and actually move the plot along a bit – I left off with him and Roxie having taken down the first military cyberdog at the entrance and preparing to move into Dr. Borous Is Working Through Some Issues High. XD We’ll finish this off and start Episode 4 – which is pretty short – tomorrow!
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got a little over a page done tonight on Alice’s Sneaky Adventures In The Museum Basement, which was good. Tonight’s chunklet consisted of –
A) Alice, annoyed that she had to open a door and thus lose her invisibility temporarily, deciding to just get that over with right away and finding the door to Restoration Room C, then watching the camera at the end of the hall with her hand right over the handle so she could dart inside the moment it was turned away from her – fortunately, she got the timing perfect, and made it inside no problem
B) Alice squeezing into a little hidey-hole in the room and taking some time to puzzle out the riddle Cheshire gave her to figure out the code to the keypad door – didn’t take her too long to solve, fortunately (she’s a pretty smart cookie, after all), though Cheshire did have to remind her of a clue she’d forgotten once she’d eliminated all possibilities but four
C) Alice finding and claiming the Workshop Access keycard in the room once she’d solved the riddle, then slipping back outside again – which nearly went wrong when she pushed open the door and the camera in the hallway spotted the movement. Fortunately, she herself was still out of sight, and the camera kept panning after no other movement was detected, but it was a pretty near miss!
D) And Alice making her invisible way back through the hall up to the keypad door and waiting again for the camera to turn away before hastily standing up, punching in the keypad code, flinging open the door, making sure there wasn’t a guard behind it, throwing herself through, then sitting on the floor as the door shut behind her so she could turn herself invisible again. Once again, there was a near miss, with the camera spotting the motion near the door, but it didn’t see enough to raise an alarm, and so she was in the clear
*nods* Making some good progress here! But I also want to progress in my Valicer In The Dark series, so tomorrow we’ll be switching back to “The Van Dort Vacancy” for a couple of nights. Gotta start Chapter 4 so Victor can get his stuff out of his room already!
3. Watch something on FreeTube: No check tonight – I got to doing my write-ups a bit late, so I simply didn’t have the time. Hopefully tomorrow I can squeeze something in – Josh has another Fun With Shorts up that’s only about ten minutes, so...
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – just Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about tonight (though I actually forgot that fact for a moment and briefly checked up on Valice Multiverse too – do have a reblog over there, but that will have to wait until tomorrow). Got two more things into the queue this eve for the next couple of days:
A) Another post by shenanigansz of their Smiler OC, featuring a picture of said OC lounging in front of a window and a bunch of sketches featuring Smiler with their OC ideas for Galactica, Thirteen, Nemesis, Oblivion, and Wickerman for Thursday – I do enjoy their art, and I’m glad I went deep enough into “#the smiler” tag to find it! Getting past all the RP/ask blogs in there can be a little tricky these days…
B) And that art by platonbatonn of Emily, Victor, and Victoria all lying tangled up together on the floor, surrounded by and covered in what may be blood or Wine of Ages, for Friday – it’s good art and it was already in my drafts, so chucking it into the queue was nice and easy after wading through the Smiler stuff
So that’s good! Still gotta figure out Song Saturday, of course, but hopefully I’ll have time to get that done tomorrow.
Not too shabby, I suppose, but yeah, could have done without the credit card nonsense at work. We'll see if that's any better tomorrow, I guess...for now, I need to get to bed. Night all!
