Surprsingly Not A Shitty Thursday
Apr. 9th, 2026 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickIt didn't start out great -- I only JUST missed being clobbered by my collection of BTTF cards (which are displayed on a shelf above my bed) when I woke up this morning (the binder they're in fell on my pillow RIGHT after I got up), and my commute in was a slow-going nightmare thanks to an accident. But after that things calmed down rather a lot, and in fact most of my day was pretty decent. Not perfect, but certainly better than I thought it was going to go! As the write-up should prove:
Work – As stated above, I thought it was going to be a pretty shitty day at work thanks to my miserable morning commute, but it actually ended up being quite chill and quiet:
A) I spent the morning (once I got in) doing the morning reports and going through a QC file for the next pledge billing to go out (making sure all the numbers were correct and checking a few people who had a bad address or a “Do Not Mail” status to see if they should get something)
B) And I spent the afternoon sending out a bunch of e-mails to people saying “hey, we were unable to process your credit card gift for [X] reason, please call us if you would still like to set it up for automatic payments” (got one call back so far to set up a lady’s pledge), doing a bit of roster maintenance, and upping a guy’s pledge now that he’s sent in the check portion of said pledge (he always sends in one chunk by check and sets up the rest on a credit card, so in order to make sure the credit card portion goes on correctly, the pledge has to be put on as lower when he first calls in)
Yeah – really not that much to it! Which I honestly appreciated, given how wound up and grumpy I was when I first came in. Just gotta get through Friday now – hopefully it isn’t a total disaster!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, back with “HITMANNIVERSARY! Hitman 10th Anniversary Stream | The BEST Maps and Our NEVER-BEFORE-TRIED Missions” by OXBox! Today’s just-over-a-half-hour continued the trio’s trip through the Deadly Sins, and featured –
A) Mike completing the final level of “The Envy Contention!” A process that involved:
I. Mike executing a perfect sniper shot on the final target in the level, after having been foiled by rocks and foliage previously, and everyone being very happy for him
II. Mike getting to murder his hated High Fashion Rival as a treat (as the Omniscient Voice who controlled the level admitted he had no more use for him now) and sniping off the faux-47 as he stood in the house where the first two targets had been hanging out, looking confused and sad
III. Mike then nearly blowing everything by heading over TO said house to grab the High Fashion hoodie off his rival’s corpse, because he was petty. Jane and Andy were like “fair.” XD Unfortunately, as he wasn’t allowed in the front gate in his current guard disguise, he had to go the long way around to the back of the house (shimmying along various ledges and punching out a guard who found him suspicious), meaning by the time he got there, the body had already been bagged up by the local security and taken into the basement. And a quick sneak down there confirmed he couldn’t loot the outfit out of the body bag. :( Granted, he’d already earned it on his account after Andy completed the first mission, but he really wanted to strip it off his rival’s corpse, damn it!
IV. Mike finally returning to the chairs at the start of the level to exit, and getting his rating – “Sniper, 0 Stars.” He was quite annoyed about that, though Andy couldn’t help but point out that he had killed a random maid while trying to murder his targets, and that couldn’t have helped matters. Fortunately, Mike got an even better reward than Hitman stars after – his turn to wear the “Noticer” headband. XD
B) And the gang starting the final Seven Deadly Sins mission – “The Wrath Termination!” A curious mission set in the Dartmoor mansion where 47 was tasked by the Omniscient Voice of the level with keeping his own unconscious body (tucked safely away at the very top of the house) safe from the “Inhibitors” coming to destroy him. Based on the context, I believe this is supposed to be a dream he’s having shortly before waking up in the final level of Hitman III, and symbolizes him fighting off the sedatives and other drugs that the main bad guy organization, Providence, pumped him full of after capturing him –
But in practice it’s a “defend the base from waves of enemies” mission, with 47 given a short window of time to collect useful items (such as knives and machetes) and set traps (such as loosening the valves on the gas tanks his subconscious had kindly set around the mansion, or puncturing barrels to create electrified puddles on the ground with the help of generators) before the Inhibitors and their guards tried to storm the place and reach his unconscious form. 47 wasn’t allowed any guns in this level, and enemies dropped neither weapons nor disguises once they were downed (just the occasional tool, like a rusty crowbar) – but non-target kills were not an issue, as the game wanted 47 to kill as many people as possible in this one. This was thus declared a very “Mike” mission. XD. However, the round-robin order of Andy, Jane, Mike was preserved when it came to trying it – here’s how everyone did:
I. Andy got off to a bit of a poor start – first, by getting stuck on a body bag in the second room of the level while collecting sharp items to use against his enemies, and second, by then electrocuting himself by setting up one of those “electrified/flaming oil puddle” traps in the wrong order (basically, he turned on the generator, THEN punctured the oil barrel at the other end of the sparking wire – to be fair, he’d stepped away for a moment trying to figure out how to get the first wave of enemies to begin, then came back and decided to puncture the barrel forgetting Mike had urged him to turn on the barrel). XD He managed to do a little bit better on the reload, finding plenty of useful items and even locating the first member of the first wave lurking outside the mansion as he descended to the ground floor (everyone joked that this was “Steve,” the unlucky bastard who’d been chosen to be the first wave all on his lonesome, with his compatriots explaining that the name referred to them waving at him as he went in XD) – but despite defeating the first wave with some excellent machete work and a screwdriver flung into some unlucky guard’s head, he ended up going down during the second, gunned down by some of the guards after taking down the first Inhibitor. Shame.
II. Jane thought she had learned from Andy’s mistakes, taking his advice to be more of a “trap master” than he had been – but as it turned out, she was even less prepared to take on this mode than he was. First, she managed to accidentally jumpscare herself during the “prep” phase at the start by running into a mirror in the bathroom thinking it was a doorway. XD Then, she nearly blew herself up by turning on a generator BEFORE loosening the valves on the nearby gas canister – fortunately, Andy and Mike were able to tell her that she’d gotten it the wrong way round and prevented tragedy. And finally, despite getting an accidental perfect chandelier drop on the Inhibitors and their guards as they charged in through the front door (after hearing from Mike and Andy repeatedly about how hard it was to get the timing right on those), her attempt at blowing another up went sadly awry (merely knocking him over instead of killing him), and she too went down in a hail of gunfire trying to murder him with a machete. Shame.
III. And Mike, having learned from the others (and enjoying that this was a mission that encouraged him to let loose), did pretty damn well during the first wave – he set up a bunch of traps as he wandered the mansion in the “prep” phase (along with dropping a propane canister into the front room to maybe use later), and while he was unable to release the chandelier on the incoming enemies at the right time (dropping it just a few seconds too early), he was able to shove one guard over a railing, blow up one of the Inhibitors with a gas trap, slice up the two guards with him, and finally take out the second Inhibitor and his guard with a thrown machete and screwdriver respectively. :) Classic Mike stuff! He then retrieved all his stuff, picked up a rusty nail (aka a one-use lockpick) and a rusty crowbar (aka a one-use – crowbar) from his enemies (the latter with some help from Andy, as he had trouble finding the right spot to actually get the prompt), and headed back up to the starting area to get some goodies that were previously inaccessible – namely, a fancy knife and a flash grenade shaped like a bear from a display case (picked open with the rusty nail), and a couple of fuses from a storage box (popped open with the rusty crowbar). So now he has those to play with – even if nobody is quite sure yet what the hell the fuses are for…
And so I left off with Mike preparing to face Wave Two and maybe see if those fuses can be used as electric grenades or something! We’ll finish this off tomorrow – hopefully Mike can succeed here! Be a shame if he failed at a level that everyone said was custom-built for him. XD
2. Continue final edits on Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check, though I once again didn’t get as far as I might have liked – I stopped at the very beginning of page 21. I plead having reword a few sentences and remove a LOT of extraneous “Alices” from my paragraphs. (Seriously, why do I keep overusing her name like that in this fic…) Still, I managed to get through –
A) Alice meeting Pisha and learning her whole deal (namely, that she’s a vampire who must also eat flesh as well as drink blood), her reason for being in the city (looking for occult artifacts...and she let Alice know as well she was willing to trade them for others of similar value should someone want to fetch them for her), and how the hell “Mr. Haunted LA” even got away from her when she demanded Alice go find him and send him back down (scrambled up and out the shortcut between her morgue lair and the front lobby before she could catch him). Alice wasn’t particularly impressed with the “mantis,” but reluctantly agreed to go find her prey simply because he was a Masquerade risk (even if she very much did not want to send him back to Pisha to get eaten)
B) Alice taking the shortcut back to the hospital lobby, and discovering Mr. Haunted LA’s dropped business card there with Hatter’s help...before promptly bitching about how ridiculously convenient her universe is, because she recognize the name on the card – Simon Milligan – as being the same as the name as the guy who lived on the first floor of her apartment building. XD She also noted that this didn’t say much about Simon’s survival prospects, as the OTHER three people she went looking for in Skyeline were all dead now, but Caterpillar assured her this quest had other potential endings
C) Alice, on Wonderland’s advice, going to visit Strauss in his Chantry and telling him about Pisha – he confirmed for her that, yes, there was a bloodline of vampires who had to eat flesh as well as drink blood (thanks to the necromantic ritual that created them screwing something up somewhere in the transformation process), but no, Pisha really didn’t have to kill an ENTIRE camera crew in one night – and that it sounded like she’d done so without getting the permission of the prince, which was even worse. Cue a phone call to LaCroix, and Alice being told that she had his permission to do whatever it took to wrap up the situation quietly and without further fuss
D) And Alice taking the opportunity to ask Strauss about what happened when she fed on Victor earlier, and why she felt so perky now, and learning about the new phenomenon of Resonance – basically, how strong emotions “flavor” blood to assist with particular disciplines. Strauss confirmed that Alice was under the influence of Sanguine Resonance, which wasn’t the IDEAL mood for her particular set of Disciplines (Obfuscate preferred Melancholy blood, while Auspex preferred Phlegmatic – he wasn’t entirely sure on Dementation, as they hadn’t had a chance to properly study that one) but should still provide a small boost, and offered to compensate her for any data she could provide “from the field,” as it were. Alice was only too happy to agree, given his previous excellent payout
*nods* I’ll take that. Anyway, I left off with her leaving the Chantry and heading back to Skyeline to deal with Milligan...tomorrow, hopefully we’ll get through that and the Pisha boss fight! Would be nice...
3. Watch something on YouTube: No check – the frustration continues since I saw the OXBox list that got uploaded today in my Recommendeds, and it looks like an interesting one. Hmph. Maybe I can block out some time on Saturday to watch that and the latest Fun With Shorts...
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – there was nothing happening over on Valice Multiverse, but I did get my Song Saturday post sorted for Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – a reblog of the lyric video for “Higher Power” by Coldplay! Because it’s a fun, upbeat song that makes me think of my OT3 dancing and enjoying life together. :) Nothing better than that, right? Plus it’s one that I haven’t featured for a while, so that’s good too.
*nods* Not too shabby, I suppose. And now it is time for me to head to bed and prepare to do it all again tomorrow, with extra Monopoly (Game Night, you see). Hopefully it'll be a good one -- night all!
Work – As stated above, I thought it was going to be a pretty shitty day at work thanks to my miserable morning commute, but it actually ended up being quite chill and quiet:
A) I spent the morning (once I got in) doing the morning reports and going through a QC file for the next pledge billing to go out (making sure all the numbers were correct and checking a few people who had a bad address or a “Do Not Mail” status to see if they should get something)
B) And I spent the afternoon sending out a bunch of e-mails to people saying “hey, we were unable to process your credit card gift for [X] reason, please call us if you would still like to set it up for automatic payments” (got one call back so far to set up a lady’s pledge), doing a bit of roster maintenance, and upping a guy’s pledge now that he’s sent in the check portion of said pledge (he always sends in one chunk by check and sets up the rest on a credit card, so in order to make sure the credit card portion goes on correctly, the pledge has to be put on as lower when he first calls in)
Yeah – really not that much to it! Which I honestly appreciated, given how wound up and grumpy I was when I first came in. Just gotta get through Friday now – hopefully it isn’t a total disaster!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, back with “HITMANNIVERSARY! Hitman 10th Anniversary Stream | The BEST Maps and Our NEVER-BEFORE-TRIED Missions” by OXBox! Today’s just-over-a-half-hour continued the trio’s trip through the Deadly Sins, and featured –
A) Mike completing the final level of “The Envy Contention!” A process that involved:
I. Mike executing a perfect sniper shot on the final target in the level, after having been foiled by rocks and foliage previously, and everyone being very happy for him
II. Mike getting to murder his hated High Fashion Rival as a treat (as the Omniscient Voice who controlled the level admitted he had no more use for him now) and sniping off the faux-47 as he stood in the house where the first two targets had been hanging out, looking confused and sad
III. Mike then nearly blowing everything by heading over TO said house to grab the High Fashion hoodie off his rival’s corpse, because he was petty. Jane and Andy were like “fair.” XD Unfortunately, as he wasn’t allowed in the front gate in his current guard disguise, he had to go the long way around to the back of the house (shimmying along various ledges and punching out a guard who found him suspicious), meaning by the time he got there, the body had already been bagged up by the local security and taken into the basement. And a quick sneak down there confirmed he couldn’t loot the outfit out of the body bag. :( Granted, he’d already earned it on his account after Andy completed the first mission, but he really wanted to strip it off his rival’s corpse, damn it!
IV. Mike finally returning to the chairs at the start of the level to exit, and getting his rating – “Sniper, 0 Stars.” He was quite annoyed about that, though Andy couldn’t help but point out that he had killed a random maid while trying to murder his targets, and that couldn’t have helped matters. Fortunately, Mike got an even better reward than Hitman stars after – his turn to wear the “Noticer” headband. XD
B) And the gang starting the final Seven Deadly Sins mission – “The Wrath Termination!” A curious mission set in the Dartmoor mansion where 47 was tasked by the Omniscient Voice of the level with keeping his own unconscious body (tucked safely away at the very top of the house) safe from the “Inhibitors” coming to destroy him. Based on the context, I believe this is supposed to be a dream he’s having shortly before waking up in the final level of Hitman III, and symbolizes him fighting off the sedatives and other drugs that the main bad guy organization, Providence, pumped him full of after capturing him –
But in practice it’s a “defend the base from waves of enemies” mission, with 47 given a short window of time to collect useful items (such as knives and machetes) and set traps (such as loosening the valves on the gas tanks his subconscious had kindly set around the mansion, or puncturing barrels to create electrified puddles on the ground with the help of generators) before the Inhibitors and their guards tried to storm the place and reach his unconscious form. 47 wasn’t allowed any guns in this level, and enemies dropped neither weapons nor disguises once they were downed (just the occasional tool, like a rusty crowbar) – but non-target kills were not an issue, as the game wanted 47 to kill as many people as possible in this one. This was thus declared a very “Mike” mission. XD. However, the round-robin order of Andy, Jane, Mike was preserved when it came to trying it – here’s how everyone did:
I. Andy got off to a bit of a poor start – first, by getting stuck on a body bag in the second room of the level while collecting sharp items to use against his enemies, and second, by then electrocuting himself by setting up one of those “electrified/flaming oil puddle” traps in the wrong order (basically, he turned on the generator, THEN punctured the oil barrel at the other end of the sparking wire – to be fair, he’d stepped away for a moment trying to figure out how to get the first wave of enemies to begin, then came back and decided to puncture the barrel forgetting Mike had urged him to turn on the barrel). XD He managed to do a little bit better on the reload, finding plenty of useful items and even locating the first member of the first wave lurking outside the mansion as he descended to the ground floor (everyone joked that this was “Steve,” the unlucky bastard who’d been chosen to be the first wave all on his lonesome, with his compatriots explaining that the name referred to them waving at him as he went in XD) – but despite defeating the first wave with some excellent machete work and a screwdriver flung into some unlucky guard’s head, he ended up going down during the second, gunned down by some of the guards after taking down the first Inhibitor. Shame.
II. Jane thought she had learned from Andy’s mistakes, taking his advice to be more of a “trap master” than he had been – but as it turned out, she was even less prepared to take on this mode than he was. First, she managed to accidentally jumpscare herself during the “prep” phase at the start by running into a mirror in the bathroom thinking it was a doorway. XD Then, she nearly blew herself up by turning on a generator BEFORE loosening the valves on the nearby gas canister – fortunately, Andy and Mike were able to tell her that she’d gotten it the wrong way round and prevented tragedy. And finally, despite getting an accidental perfect chandelier drop on the Inhibitors and their guards as they charged in through the front door (after hearing from Mike and Andy repeatedly about how hard it was to get the timing right on those), her attempt at blowing another up went sadly awry (merely knocking him over instead of killing him), and she too went down in a hail of gunfire trying to murder him with a machete. Shame.
III. And Mike, having learned from the others (and enjoying that this was a mission that encouraged him to let loose), did pretty damn well during the first wave – he set up a bunch of traps as he wandered the mansion in the “prep” phase (along with dropping a propane canister into the front room to maybe use later), and while he was unable to release the chandelier on the incoming enemies at the right time (dropping it just a few seconds too early), he was able to shove one guard over a railing, blow up one of the Inhibitors with a gas trap, slice up the two guards with him, and finally take out the second Inhibitor and his guard with a thrown machete and screwdriver respectively. :) Classic Mike stuff! He then retrieved all his stuff, picked up a rusty nail (aka a one-use lockpick) and a rusty crowbar (aka a one-use – crowbar) from his enemies (the latter with some help from Andy, as he had trouble finding the right spot to actually get the prompt), and headed back up to the starting area to get some goodies that were previously inaccessible – namely, a fancy knife and a flash grenade shaped like a bear from a display case (picked open with the rusty nail), and a couple of fuses from a storage box (popped open with the rusty crowbar). So now he has those to play with – even if nobody is quite sure yet what the hell the fuses are for…
And so I left off with Mike preparing to face Wave Two and maybe see if those fuses can be used as electric grenades or something! We’ll finish this off tomorrow – hopefully Mike can succeed here! Be a shame if he failed at a level that everyone said was custom-built for him. XD
2. Continue final edits on Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check, though I once again didn’t get as far as I might have liked – I stopped at the very beginning of page 21. I plead having reword a few sentences and remove a LOT of extraneous “Alices” from my paragraphs. (Seriously, why do I keep overusing her name like that in this fic…) Still, I managed to get through –
A) Alice meeting Pisha and learning her whole deal (namely, that she’s a vampire who must also eat flesh as well as drink blood), her reason for being in the city (looking for occult artifacts...and she let Alice know as well she was willing to trade them for others of similar value should someone want to fetch them for her), and how the hell “Mr. Haunted LA” even got away from her when she demanded Alice go find him and send him back down (scrambled up and out the shortcut between her morgue lair and the front lobby before she could catch him). Alice wasn’t particularly impressed with the “mantis,” but reluctantly agreed to go find her prey simply because he was a Masquerade risk (even if she very much did not want to send him back to Pisha to get eaten)
B) Alice taking the shortcut back to the hospital lobby, and discovering Mr. Haunted LA’s dropped business card there with Hatter’s help...before promptly bitching about how ridiculously convenient her universe is, because she recognize the name on the card – Simon Milligan – as being the same as the name as the guy who lived on the first floor of her apartment building. XD She also noted that this didn’t say much about Simon’s survival prospects, as the OTHER three people she went looking for in Skyeline were all dead now, but Caterpillar assured her this quest had other potential endings
C) Alice, on Wonderland’s advice, going to visit Strauss in his Chantry and telling him about Pisha – he confirmed for her that, yes, there was a bloodline of vampires who had to eat flesh as well as drink blood (thanks to the necromantic ritual that created them screwing something up somewhere in the transformation process), but no, Pisha really didn’t have to kill an ENTIRE camera crew in one night – and that it sounded like she’d done so without getting the permission of the prince, which was even worse. Cue a phone call to LaCroix, and Alice being told that she had his permission to do whatever it took to wrap up the situation quietly and without further fuss
D) And Alice taking the opportunity to ask Strauss about what happened when she fed on Victor earlier, and why she felt so perky now, and learning about the new phenomenon of Resonance – basically, how strong emotions “flavor” blood to assist with particular disciplines. Strauss confirmed that Alice was under the influence of Sanguine Resonance, which wasn’t the IDEAL mood for her particular set of Disciplines (Obfuscate preferred Melancholy blood, while Auspex preferred Phlegmatic – he wasn’t entirely sure on Dementation, as they hadn’t had a chance to properly study that one) but should still provide a small boost, and offered to compensate her for any data she could provide “from the field,” as it were. Alice was only too happy to agree, given his previous excellent payout
*nods* I’ll take that. Anyway, I left off with her leaving the Chantry and heading back to Skyeline to deal with Milligan...tomorrow, hopefully we’ll get through that and the Pisha boss fight! Would be nice...
3. Watch something on YouTube: No check – the frustration continues since I saw the OXBox list that got uploaded today in my Recommendeds, and it looks like an interesting one. Hmph. Maybe I can block out some time on Saturday to watch that and the latest Fun With Shorts...
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – there was nothing happening over on Valice Multiverse, but I did get my Song Saturday post sorted for Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – a reblog of the lyric video for “Higher Power” by Coldplay! Because it’s a fun, upbeat song that makes me think of my OT3 dancing and enjoying life together. :) Nothing better than that, right? Plus it’s one that I haven’t featured for a while, so that’s good too.
*nods* Not too shabby, I suppose. And now it is time for me to head to bed and prepare to do it all again tomorrow, with extra Monopoly (Game Night, you see). Hopefully it'll be a good one -- night all!
