Busy Tuesday Evening
Mar. 24th, 2026 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYeah, time seems to have gotten away from me today, so let's dive right into the write-up, shall we?
Work – I must report that today was a pretty damn “meh” day at work. On the plus side:
-->The phone calls have finally calmed down, meaning we can actually get some work done without being interrupted every five minutes looking things up for people – I just had to update some parish relationships and call back a guy looking to update his recurring gift today
-->I was able to confirm to a guy who called yesterday that a gift had been posted today, which was nice
-->I got a very nice e-mail from a lady who I’d e-mailed about having both a pledge and recurring gift (people sometimes think they’re the same thing, which they are not, leading to them having two credit card charges when they try to “renew” their gift), thanking me for letting her know and choosing to keep the recurring gift
-->And I was able to start making a bit of progress toward clearing up some other issues, such as taking off the gifts that were actually meant for the newspaper office (which involves sending a memo to Fiscal so we can issue said office a check for the misattributed gifts)
On the minus side, however:
-->I also had to tell two people who’d called earlier looking for their gifts that no, said gifts had NOT shown up yet, I’m sorry (one guy is sending in a replacement, while the other woman is going to check with her parish and see if they still have it)
-->The credit card people never got back to us about the gift we had problems with yesterday, and when I tried to set it up again (before calling the guy back, as I didn’t want to waste his time if it went wrong), I got the same error, which is annoying
-->And I discovered that the damn issue of pledge payments not being posted if they’re charged on the same day the pledge is made is STILL PRESENT. Meaning I spent most of the day researching that to get a list of missed payments. >( And even worse? While checking all the credit card pledges our processors have posted recently, I found that the one payment that should have been excluded as a duplicate (a down payment on a pledge made in the same batch) was very nearly double-posted! Fortunately our database people caught that one before it actually happened, but – cripes, does it piss me off that the LEGIT ones are being suppressed while THAT one nearly slipped through!
So yes – very “meh.” *shakehead* We’ll see how things shake out tomorrow – I’ve got the check-in call with the credit card people in the afternoon, not that I expect anything to come of it...
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – and I chose to stick with Jon of Many A True Nerd for today’s session on the bike, as I’d seen something else I wanted to watch on his channel while bringing yesterday’s F:NV YOLO Remastered video. Accordingly, I spent my workout pedaling my way through roughly the first half of “Fallout: New Vegas - The Low XP Challenge!” A special one-off video Jon did six years ago to answer a very interesting question: What’s the lowest amount of XP one can earn playing New Vegas while still beating the game? His attempt to find out has so far featured –
A) The creation of Jo, the Perpetually Surprised Courier! A woman who has:
I. 10 Strength, 1 Perception, 10 Endurance, 1 Charisma, 10 Intelligence, 7 Agility, and 1 Luck as her SPECIAL stats (because passing skill checks is forbidden in this run – those give XP, after all – Jon decided the best thing to do was to set her up so she could both easily punch to death everything in her way, and easily take a hit or two)
II. Melee Weapons, Unarmed, and Barter as her tagged skills (because Jon wasn’t sure if she was going to handle her fights with melee weapons or unarmed ones, and because she was going to have to do a lot of buying and selling, so she might as well get better prices while doing so)
III. And Skilled (which immediately adds +5 to all skills but lowers experience gained by -10%) and Heavy Handed (which makes all melee and unarmed attacks do 20% more base damage at the cost of less critical hit damage) as her traits (because the first trait was essential to lowering the amount of XP she received during the game, and the second would just help keep her alive)
Easily one of Jon’s odder characters, to be sure – at least she got a somewhat normal name, I suppose. XD
B) Jo proceeding to rob Doc Mitchell’s house, then most of the rest of Goodsprings, blind before selling everything she could to Chet at the general store to get money to buy better weapons later on down the line...though she did make sure to pick up a shovel from him, as those are always useful! She also tossed all her slightly-overpowered pre-order-bonus stuff into one of the dumpsters in town because Jon felt her having those was a little unfair (this is why I’m glad that “Aqua Fria” mod I have spreads that stuff around the map so you have to find it first!).
C) Jo then heading down the road out of Goodsprings (being careful to not get near the Source, because that’s a discoverable location and she didn’t want the location XP for discovering it) until she hit the invisible “hey, you’re leaving the tutorial area, would you like to respec?” barrier – causing Jon to say “Yes” and “respec” her while choosing the exact same face, stats, tagged skills, and traits as before. Reason? Well, as it turns out, the Skilled trait is slightly bugged in that, if you redo your character and take it again, it immediately gives you another +5 to all your skills, while keeping the -10% experience loss the same. So if you can find a way to take it off and then put it back on again, it’s an easy way to boost all your skills up for free! And that’s exactly what Jon wanted to do here, as Jo was going to need all the help she could get! (Though, given the nature of the challenge, he briefly bemoaned the fact that he wouldn’t be getting a further -10% experience loss from taking the trait a second time :p)
D) Jo then traversing the Mojave Wasteland very carefully to avoid tagging any unnecessary locations – hugging cliffs and giving every sign of civilization as wide a berth as possible, with the exception of Hidden Valley as she needed to have “met” the Brotherhood at some point to get her chosen ending (Yes Man/Independent Vegas, as it was the quickest). This involved her basically mountain-goating her way along the side of a cliff to avoid a certain shack and the NPC inside it (who apparently could be triggered into action from quite a long ways away); having to weave around a bunch of bear traps along the path near the side of Black Mountain after avoiding the rockslide tumbling down it (because defusing them would also get her XP – at least she didn’t step in any!); and going into [DANGER] while coming down through the cliffs on the other side onto the plain by Camp McCarran – only to never see what the hell had taken such offense to her presence as it apparently couldn’t follow her up onto the rocks. XD On the plus side, she at least was able to loot a dead NCR Trooper along the way for some better armor – and, more importantly, a faction disguise…
E) Jo then heading to Camp McCarran and picking fights with the local Fiends menacing the place to get the NCR Troopers outside to fight them so she could then loot their bodies for goodies to sell! XD Which didn’t always work out in her favor – one Fiend glitched out during a fight and left behind a Plasma Gun when he finally disappeared into the void – which would have been great if it hadn’t been on zero condition and therefore worthless, and one Fiend managed to murder the NCR guy she was hiding behind and started shooting her instead – but at least with high Endurance she could take plenty of hits! ...helped that Jon was perfectly willing to play with the difficulty level too, as you can change that on the fly during the game. XD
F) Jo then heading inside Camp McCarran (bringing her total XP up to 27 from three locations discovered – the other two being Goodsprings and Hidden Valley, if you were curious) and hitting up Sgt. Contreras, the local supply guy, inside the concourse area to see what weapons he had and what she could sell to him! Because, well, when you’re doing the minimum number of quests and discovering the minimum number of locations possible, you’re not going to be earning any weapons as quest rewards or finding any at special locations. So she was entirely dependent on the shops at the locations she had to visit anyway to get her kit. Sadly, Contreras had nothing good on him, but she was at least able to sell a bunch of her collected shit to him and get all his caps! (Which, uh, was risky in itself because she also had to avoid completing the “You Run Barter Town” challenge, which meant she had to make sure that her combined buying and selling never brought her to the point of having traded 10,000 caps worth of goods. Because that would get her 100 XP, and that was NOT ALLOWED.)
G) Jon pausing the action for a moment to go “...did anyone else know there’s a Dr. Kemp back here in the concourse? Because I sure didn’t!” XD Yeah, apparently near the back of the concourse there’s an NPC called Dr. Kemp who just hangs out in the general area, who Jon had never met before because he’d always assumed all the medical people were in the medical tents outside. Just another example of Jon discovering something new about New Vegas every time he plays!
H) Jo then heading out to the medical tents and stealing/taking whatever she could (as some stuff is perfectly okay to pick up, for unknown reasons), then talking to Major Dhatri and pretending to take on his quest to hunt specific named Fiends for bounties – specifically, Driver Nephi – to get an NCR escort out of the camp! She didn’t have her squad for very long, admittedly – and had to break away from them at one point when they passed too close to a discoverable location – but they kept her safe from at least one Fiend. And stopped her having to gain unnecessary XP by dealing with them herself. :p
I) Jo then very carefully navigating the area by the camps of the three named Fiends, hugging the nearby cliff as much as she dared and taking a few rads from some scattered barrels to avoid some fire geckos, before heading to Red Rock Canyon to tag it (thus officially “meeting” the Great Khans) and then going to browse the secret armory in the basement of a ruined house nearby (which, thanks to a quirk in the game’s rules, had a much better chance of having rare and powerful items than most other shops) –
Only to be met with a problem – namely, the keepers of the secret armory wouldn’t trade with her. Because she didn’t have a good enough reputation with the Khans. And she couldn’t just try to get the goods out of the area they were hanging out in, or off their bodies, because they weren’t actually carrying their goods on them – anything in the basement was just set dressing. Jo attempted to solve this by sneaking some NCR armor into a Khan’s pocket, fast-traveling to prompt him to put it on, then stealing his own Khan armor to use as a disguise – but to no avail. The people there just refused to trade with her. :( Well, that stunk!
J) Jo thus traveling back to McCarran and stealing a unique weapon off someone named Little Buster, sleeping in one of the tents – the Cram Opener! A special bladed gauntlet that does almost as much damage as a power fist. So it would do for Jo’s purposes.
K) And Jo then using the NCR monorail to travel to The Strip, where she:
I. Went to the Ultra-Luxe, offloaded a few items onto the bartender, then said hi to Mortimer, thus officially meeting the faction he was a part of – I believe the White Glove Society
II. Went to Gomorrah and said hello to the receptionist there, thus officially meeting the Omertas
III. Went to The Tops and spotted Benny coming down the stairs...which officially completed the quest “They Went That-Away” and got her 900 XP, pushing her straight to Level 3
IV. Dumped all her newly acquired skill points for both levels into Unarmed, raising it up to 78, and picked Black Widow as her perk
V. Used her new Black Widow status to seduce Benny into going upstairs with her, enduring him referring to her boobs as “charlies,” then killing him in his sleep, thus taking care of him without earning any extra XP for it (as choosing the Black Widow dialogue option doesn’t count as a skill check, and neither does apparently strangling him in his sleep).
So yeah, things are going marvelously – by my count, she should have about 936 XP, which is HILARIOUSLY low for actually being in the Strip and completing Act 1 of the game. XD Tomorrow, Jo goes to meet Yes Man, her new partner in crime, and we’ll see how many more quests she has to do and locations she has to discover before being allowed to end the game! Taking bets now as to what level she’ll be at when she fights Lanius – I’m thinking maybe Level 8? We’ll see…
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got another page done on this tonight, covering –
A) Skelter recovering from Alice getting quite into his personal space while reminding everyone that LaCroix has Dominate (hence why she couldn’t try to warn Nines earlier) and that she wouldn’t have minded at ALL if Nines killed Grout, then asking a nearby vampire named Rob to verify if Alice was telling the truth or not, since he seemed to have a sixth sense about these things – cue a fictional vampire version of Rob Brydon from “Would I Lie To You?” confirming that Alice was telling the truth; a fictional vampire version of Lee Mack stating that even if she wasn’t, he wasn’t going to be the one to confront her; and a fictional vampire version of David Mitchell complaining that Lee never seems to find him scary when he gets mad. Causing Lee to inform David that that’s because he’s hilarious when he gets mad (which he is), and Rob to try and defuse the argument. And then David and Lee to start arguing about Lee’s claim that he can smell a dead fly across the room (a reference to a particularly ridiculous lie the showrunners gave Lee once in the “Quick Fire Lies” round). XD I know this is going to probably make a lot of people go “???” but fuck it, I love WILTY and I want to add the boys into my fic. I already put in the vampire version of Ed Sheeran from his “Bad Habits” music video!
B) Skelter telling Alice after all that that he’s willing to accept she might have been a patsy, but he’s watching her – Alice said that was fair, and confirmed with him that Nines got out of the city well ahead of the Blood Hunt (Skelter explaining they overheard some “Cammy fucks” discussing Nines murdering Grout and bundled him out of there). She was quite glad to hear that Nines wasn’t going to be immediately murdered, at least!
C) Damsel, still pissed off with Alice, telling her that she should consider herself really lucky that Nines got out in time, and asking what the hell she’d even done for them lately – cue Alice telling her about killing Pisha, startling our favorite bereted bitch out of her bad mood for a few seconds. XD Alice’s description of the Nagaraja’s death (stumbling into her own mystical fire and needing a couple of mercy shots to the head) made the entire bar shudder, and Skelter wondered how the hell Alice kept even finding this shit –
Cue Alice going “Rabbit keeps running off and forcing me to chase him.” XD I left off with Skelter suggesting she try “ignoring the fucking hallucinations for five minutes” and Damsel demanding any information she might have on LaCroix – tomorrow, we’ll pick up with Alice telling them all about her upcoming trip to Hollywood to find Gary!
3. Watch something on YouTube: Check – before diving into the Workout Video Write-Up above, I made sure to get in one YouTube Short that I saw in my Recommendeds and found intriguing: “The Great Old One Warlock's best reaction in Baldur's Gate 3” by DragonsDream! A little video showcasing how GOO Warlocks get some special dialogue when they come across a strange hole in the wall with disturbing tendrils coming out of it in what I believe is Moonrise Towers in Act 2! First, upon encountering the hole (which is actually a trap laid by the Absolute, the Big Bad of the game, hoping to grab the player character for a little chat should they be dumb enough to stick their hand in), a GOO Warlock will note that, whatever this thing is, it excites their patron. And when they stick their hand in the hole and feel something grab it, they can choose to “Invite the presence in. There’s always room for one more.” Leading to the Warlock being pulled into a strange void, surrounded by Elder Brain tentacles as the Artefact works overtime trying to keep them safe from the Absolute’s influence during the aforementioned chat –
And, in this particular video, to “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd playing as the eldritch vibes roll. XD It was very funny – I’m glad I took a few minutes to watch it! *quietly notes down another thing for Smiler to try once they’re at the correct part of the game...*
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Eh, check, but I didn’t get as much done here as I might have hoped thanks to the Workout Video Write-Up taking up so much of my time. But I did get one thing into the queue for tomorrow on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) (Valice Multiverse was, as usual, dead) – a video by davidolundell on TikTok, posted by the blog sometiktoksarevalid, of I presume David showing off a desk that was absolutely FULL of various interlocked secret compartments and drawers (claiming that his “future wife’s mother-in-law” – yes, that’s how he put it – asked him to keep something in it...that something being an epi-pen XD). With a comment by dduane about how her late husband Peter would have loved that desk, as he always wanted more secret compartments in stuff. XD It was a cool and fun video, and I just wanted to share it!
Whew! Yeah, that write-up definitely took longer than I wanted, as I definitely wanted to get more in the VLA(NS) queue today...but hopefully I can sort the rest of it out tomorrow. Gotta at least get Newt's gift fic post completed! For now, though, I have to head to bed -- night all!
Work – I must report that today was a pretty damn “meh” day at work. On the plus side:
-->The phone calls have finally calmed down, meaning we can actually get some work done without being interrupted every five minutes looking things up for people – I just had to update some parish relationships and call back a guy looking to update his recurring gift today
-->I was able to confirm to a guy who called yesterday that a gift had been posted today, which was nice
-->I got a very nice e-mail from a lady who I’d e-mailed about having both a pledge and recurring gift (people sometimes think they’re the same thing, which they are not, leading to them having two credit card charges when they try to “renew” their gift), thanking me for letting her know and choosing to keep the recurring gift
-->And I was able to start making a bit of progress toward clearing up some other issues, such as taking off the gifts that were actually meant for the newspaper office (which involves sending a memo to Fiscal so we can issue said office a check for the misattributed gifts)
On the minus side, however:
-->I also had to tell two people who’d called earlier looking for their gifts that no, said gifts had NOT shown up yet, I’m sorry (one guy is sending in a replacement, while the other woman is going to check with her parish and see if they still have it)
-->The credit card people never got back to us about the gift we had problems with yesterday, and when I tried to set it up again (before calling the guy back, as I didn’t want to waste his time if it went wrong), I got the same error, which is annoying
-->And I discovered that the damn issue of pledge payments not being posted if they’re charged on the same day the pledge is made is STILL PRESENT. Meaning I spent most of the day researching that to get a list of missed payments. >( And even worse? While checking all the credit card pledges our processors have posted recently, I found that the one payment that should have been excluded as a duplicate (a down payment on a pledge made in the same batch) was very nearly double-posted! Fortunately our database people caught that one before it actually happened, but – cripes, does it piss me off that the LEGIT ones are being suppressed while THAT one nearly slipped through!
So yes – very “meh.” *shakehead* We’ll see how things shake out tomorrow – I’ve got the check-in call with the credit card people in the afternoon, not that I expect anything to come of it...
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – and I chose to stick with Jon of Many A True Nerd for today’s session on the bike, as I’d seen something else I wanted to watch on his channel while bringing yesterday’s F:NV YOLO Remastered video. Accordingly, I spent my workout pedaling my way through roughly the first half of “Fallout: New Vegas - The Low XP Challenge!” A special one-off video Jon did six years ago to answer a very interesting question: What’s the lowest amount of XP one can earn playing New Vegas while still beating the game? His attempt to find out has so far featured –
A) The creation of Jo, the Perpetually Surprised Courier! A woman who has:
I. 10 Strength, 1 Perception, 10 Endurance, 1 Charisma, 10 Intelligence, 7 Agility, and 1 Luck as her SPECIAL stats (because passing skill checks is forbidden in this run – those give XP, after all – Jon decided the best thing to do was to set her up so she could both easily punch to death everything in her way, and easily take a hit or two)
II. Melee Weapons, Unarmed, and Barter as her tagged skills (because Jon wasn’t sure if she was going to handle her fights with melee weapons or unarmed ones, and because she was going to have to do a lot of buying and selling, so she might as well get better prices while doing so)
III. And Skilled (which immediately adds +5 to all skills but lowers experience gained by -10%) and Heavy Handed (which makes all melee and unarmed attacks do 20% more base damage at the cost of less critical hit damage) as her traits (because the first trait was essential to lowering the amount of XP she received during the game, and the second would just help keep her alive)
Easily one of Jon’s odder characters, to be sure – at least she got a somewhat normal name, I suppose. XD
B) Jo proceeding to rob Doc Mitchell’s house, then most of the rest of Goodsprings, blind before selling everything she could to Chet at the general store to get money to buy better weapons later on down the line...though she did make sure to pick up a shovel from him, as those are always useful! She also tossed all her slightly-overpowered pre-order-bonus stuff into one of the dumpsters in town because Jon felt her having those was a little unfair (this is why I’m glad that “Aqua Fria” mod I have spreads that stuff around the map so you have to find it first!).
C) Jo then heading down the road out of Goodsprings (being careful to not get near the Source, because that’s a discoverable location and she didn’t want the location XP for discovering it) until she hit the invisible “hey, you’re leaving the tutorial area, would you like to respec?” barrier – causing Jon to say “Yes” and “respec” her while choosing the exact same face, stats, tagged skills, and traits as before. Reason? Well, as it turns out, the Skilled trait is slightly bugged in that, if you redo your character and take it again, it immediately gives you another +5 to all your skills, while keeping the -10% experience loss the same. So if you can find a way to take it off and then put it back on again, it’s an easy way to boost all your skills up for free! And that’s exactly what Jon wanted to do here, as Jo was going to need all the help she could get! (Though, given the nature of the challenge, he briefly bemoaned the fact that he wouldn’t be getting a further -10% experience loss from taking the trait a second time :p)
D) Jo then traversing the Mojave Wasteland very carefully to avoid tagging any unnecessary locations – hugging cliffs and giving every sign of civilization as wide a berth as possible, with the exception of Hidden Valley as she needed to have “met” the Brotherhood at some point to get her chosen ending (Yes Man/Independent Vegas, as it was the quickest). This involved her basically mountain-goating her way along the side of a cliff to avoid a certain shack and the NPC inside it (who apparently could be triggered into action from quite a long ways away); having to weave around a bunch of bear traps along the path near the side of Black Mountain after avoiding the rockslide tumbling down it (because defusing them would also get her XP – at least she didn’t step in any!); and going into [DANGER] while coming down through the cliffs on the other side onto the plain by Camp McCarran – only to never see what the hell had taken such offense to her presence as it apparently couldn’t follow her up onto the rocks. XD On the plus side, she at least was able to loot a dead NCR Trooper along the way for some better armor – and, more importantly, a faction disguise…
E) Jo then heading to Camp McCarran and picking fights with the local Fiends menacing the place to get the NCR Troopers outside to fight them so she could then loot their bodies for goodies to sell! XD Which didn’t always work out in her favor – one Fiend glitched out during a fight and left behind a Plasma Gun when he finally disappeared into the void – which would have been great if it hadn’t been on zero condition and therefore worthless, and one Fiend managed to murder the NCR guy she was hiding behind and started shooting her instead – but at least with high Endurance she could take plenty of hits! ...helped that Jon was perfectly willing to play with the difficulty level too, as you can change that on the fly during the game. XD
F) Jo then heading inside Camp McCarran (bringing her total XP up to 27 from three locations discovered – the other two being Goodsprings and Hidden Valley, if you were curious) and hitting up Sgt. Contreras, the local supply guy, inside the concourse area to see what weapons he had and what she could sell to him! Because, well, when you’re doing the minimum number of quests and discovering the minimum number of locations possible, you’re not going to be earning any weapons as quest rewards or finding any at special locations. So she was entirely dependent on the shops at the locations she had to visit anyway to get her kit. Sadly, Contreras had nothing good on him, but she was at least able to sell a bunch of her collected shit to him and get all his caps! (Which, uh, was risky in itself because she also had to avoid completing the “You Run Barter Town” challenge, which meant she had to make sure that her combined buying and selling never brought her to the point of having traded 10,000 caps worth of goods. Because that would get her 100 XP, and that was NOT ALLOWED.)
G) Jon pausing the action for a moment to go “...did anyone else know there’s a Dr. Kemp back here in the concourse? Because I sure didn’t!” XD Yeah, apparently near the back of the concourse there’s an NPC called Dr. Kemp who just hangs out in the general area, who Jon had never met before because he’d always assumed all the medical people were in the medical tents outside. Just another example of Jon discovering something new about New Vegas every time he plays!
H) Jo then heading out to the medical tents and stealing/taking whatever she could (as some stuff is perfectly okay to pick up, for unknown reasons), then talking to Major Dhatri and pretending to take on his quest to hunt specific named Fiends for bounties – specifically, Driver Nephi – to get an NCR escort out of the camp! She didn’t have her squad for very long, admittedly – and had to break away from them at one point when they passed too close to a discoverable location – but they kept her safe from at least one Fiend. And stopped her having to gain unnecessary XP by dealing with them herself. :p
I) Jo then very carefully navigating the area by the camps of the three named Fiends, hugging the nearby cliff as much as she dared and taking a few rads from some scattered barrels to avoid some fire geckos, before heading to Red Rock Canyon to tag it (thus officially “meeting” the Great Khans) and then going to browse the secret armory in the basement of a ruined house nearby (which, thanks to a quirk in the game’s rules, had a much better chance of having rare and powerful items than most other shops) –
Only to be met with a problem – namely, the keepers of the secret armory wouldn’t trade with her. Because she didn’t have a good enough reputation with the Khans. And she couldn’t just try to get the goods out of the area they were hanging out in, or off their bodies, because they weren’t actually carrying their goods on them – anything in the basement was just set dressing. Jo attempted to solve this by sneaking some NCR armor into a Khan’s pocket, fast-traveling to prompt him to put it on, then stealing his own Khan armor to use as a disguise – but to no avail. The people there just refused to trade with her. :( Well, that stunk!
J) Jo thus traveling back to McCarran and stealing a unique weapon off someone named Little Buster, sleeping in one of the tents – the Cram Opener! A special bladed gauntlet that does almost as much damage as a power fist. So it would do for Jo’s purposes.
K) And Jo then using the NCR monorail to travel to The Strip, where she:
I. Went to the Ultra-Luxe, offloaded a few items onto the bartender, then said hi to Mortimer, thus officially meeting the faction he was a part of – I believe the White Glove Society
II. Went to Gomorrah and said hello to the receptionist there, thus officially meeting the Omertas
III. Went to The Tops and spotted Benny coming down the stairs...which officially completed the quest “They Went That-Away” and got her 900 XP, pushing her straight to Level 3
IV. Dumped all her newly acquired skill points for both levels into Unarmed, raising it up to 78, and picked Black Widow as her perk
V. Used her new Black Widow status to seduce Benny into going upstairs with her, enduring him referring to her boobs as “charlies,” then killing him in his sleep, thus taking care of him without earning any extra XP for it (as choosing the Black Widow dialogue option doesn’t count as a skill check, and neither does apparently strangling him in his sleep).
So yeah, things are going marvelously – by my count, she should have about 936 XP, which is HILARIOUSLY low for actually being in the Strip and completing Act 1 of the game. XD Tomorrow, Jo goes to meet Yes Man, her new partner in crime, and we’ll see how many more quests she has to do and locations she has to discover before being allowed to end the game! Taking bets now as to what level she’ll be at when she fights Lanius – I’m thinking maybe Level 8? We’ll see…
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got another page done on this tonight, covering –
A) Skelter recovering from Alice getting quite into his personal space while reminding everyone that LaCroix has Dominate (hence why she couldn’t try to warn Nines earlier) and that she wouldn’t have minded at ALL if Nines killed Grout, then asking a nearby vampire named Rob to verify if Alice was telling the truth or not, since he seemed to have a sixth sense about these things – cue a fictional vampire version of Rob Brydon from “Would I Lie To You?” confirming that Alice was telling the truth; a fictional vampire version of Lee Mack stating that even if she wasn’t, he wasn’t going to be the one to confront her; and a fictional vampire version of David Mitchell complaining that Lee never seems to find him scary when he gets mad. Causing Lee to inform David that that’s because he’s hilarious when he gets mad (which he is), and Rob to try and defuse the argument. And then David and Lee to start arguing about Lee’s claim that he can smell a dead fly across the room (a reference to a particularly ridiculous lie the showrunners gave Lee once in the “Quick Fire Lies” round). XD I know this is going to probably make a lot of people go “???” but fuck it, I love WILTY and I want to add the boys into my fic. I already put in the vampire version of Ed Sheeran from his “Bad Habits” music video!
B) Skelter telling Alice after all that that he’s willing to accept she might have been a patsy, but he’s watching her – Alice said that was fair, and confirmed with him that Nines got out of the city well ahead of the Blood Hunt (Skelter explaining they overheard some “Cammy fucks” discussing Nines murdering Grout and bundled him out of there). She was quite glad to hear that Nines wasn’t going to be immediately murdered, at least!
C) Damsel, still pissed off with Alice, telling her that she should consider herself really lucky that Nines got out in time, and asking what the hell she’d even done for them lately – cue Alice telling her about killing Pisha, startling our favorite bereted bitch out of her bad mood for a few seconds. XD Alice’s description of the Nagaraja’s death (stumbling into her own mystical fire and needing a couple of mercy shots to the head) made the entire bar shudder, and Skelter wondered how the hell Alice kept even finding this shit –
Cue Alice going “Rabbit keeps running off and forcing me to chase him.” XD I left off with Skelter suggesting she try “ignoring the fucking hallucinations for five minutes” and Damsel demanding any information she might have on LaCroix – tomorrow, we’ll pick up with Alice telling them all about her upcoming trip to Hollywood to find Gary!
3. Watch something on YouTube: Check – before diving into the Workout Video Write-Up above, I made sure to get in one YouTube Short that I saw in my Recommendeds and found intriguing: “The Great Old One Warlock's best reaction in Baldur's Gate 3” by DragonsDream! A little video showcasing how GOO Warlocks get some special dialogue when they come across a strange hole in the wall with disturbing tendrils coming out of it in what I believe is Moonrise Towers in Act 2! First, upon encountering the hole (which is actually a trap laid by the Absolute, the Big Bad of the game, hoping to grab the player character for a little chat should they be dumb enough to stick their hand in), a GOO Warlock will note that, whatever this thing is, it excites their patron. And when they stick their hand in the hole and feel something grab it, they can choose to “Invite the presence in. There’s always room for one more.” Leading to the Warlock being pulled into a strange void, surrounded by Elder Brain tentacles as the Artefact works overtime trying to keep them safe from the Absolute’s influence during the aforementioned chat –
And, in this particular video, to “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd playing as the eldritch vibes roll. XD It was very funny – I’m glad I took a few minutes to watch it! *quietly notes down another thing for Smiler to try once they’re at the correct part of the game...*
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Eh, check, but I didn’t get as much done here as I might have hoped thanks to the Workout Video Write-Up taking up so much of my time. But I did get one thing into the queue for tomorrow on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) (Valice Multiverse was, as usual, dead) – a video by davidolundell on TikTok, posted by the blog sometiktoksarevalid, of I presume David showing off a desk that was absolutely FULL of various interlocked secret compartments and drawers (claiming that his “future wife’s mother-in-law” – yes, that’s how he put it – asked him to keep something in it...that something being an epi-pen XD). With a comment by dduane about how her late husband Peter would have loved that desk, as he always wanted more secret compartments in stuff. XD It was a cool and fun video, and I just wanted to share it!
Whew! Yeah, that write-up definitely took longer than I wanted, as I definitely wanted to get more in the VLA(NS) queue today...but hopefully I can sort the rest of it out tomorrow. Gotta at least get Newt's gift fic post completed! For now, though, I have to head to bed -- night all!
