Ael

Yeah, it's been quite the day, and I can already tell I'm going to be staying up a bit later than I should to complete this write-up, so let's get straight to it --

Cape Cod Mini-Golf Trip: So, today was the day of the great trip to Cape Cod to play a few rounds at two of the mini-golf places up there (Skull Island, which has one course, and Pirate’s Cove, which has two – the “Captain’s Course” and the “Blackbeard Course” – we did both), have lunch, and get some ice cream! How did that go? Well, I would say it was a fun afternoon of mini-golfing –

Sandwiched in between TWO HORRIFIC CAR RIDES. Because holy HELL did we have a shit time getting up to Cape Cod and back! Between a multi-car accident (on the other side of the road; we were caught in the looky-loo traffic) and MULTIPLE instances of road construction and just plain heavy traffic, what my parents had said was supposed to be an hour trip up to the Cape took almost THREE FUCKING HOURS. And it would have been an even worse trip if we hadn’t managed to find a rest stop with a bathroom along the way, because let me tell you, Dad and I were getting fit to burst sitting in all that traffic. *facepalm* The trip home wasn’t quite SO bad – taking maybe about two hours? – but we still got caught in some truly miserable traffic at one point, taking like forty-five minutes at LEAST to move a mile or so. *sigh* Just – ugh. AND we had trouble finding a place to eat after completing the Skull Island course, because the restaurant that Mom found first proved to be ULTRA busy, and then, while trying to find another place, she accidentally managed to turn down the brightness on her (already dying) phone, meaning she couldn’t see the damn map to direct us any place else. Fortunately we found a place across the street from Pirate’s Cove, but for someone who was EXTREMELY HUNGRY after having had smoothie glop for breakfast because it was hot and humid, it was pretty fucking frustrating to have to wait THAT LONG to get some food! *grimace*

However – lest my above bitching make you think I didn’t have a good time, let me list what WAS fun about the trip:

A) We saw some fun sand sculptures along the way in front of various places, like the rest stop (which had some aliens visiting the cape) and a bank (which had a dolphin with some coins)

B) Skull Island was a decent mini-golf course, with plenty of fun stuff to look at as we went through (though I suspect I would have liked it better if we’d played there AFTER we ate)

C) Lunch, once we got it, actually proved to be really good – the place we went to was called D.C. Porcelli’s Pizzeria And More, and while it was definitely a “sports bar” kinda place (with darts and a pool table and arcade games and, yes, a bar with screens showing a baseball game), the food was quite tasty! Mom got a turkey club, Dad a meatball sub, and me a chicken parm sub, and all were very filling. And the fries were great – “Jersey Shore” style, meaning they had an extra coating and were deliciously crispy. Reminded me a bit of the ones we had back at Dunn’s Corners pizza, when that was a thing. Just what I needed after being hungry for so long!

D) Pirate’s Cove’s two mini-golf courses were quite fun – and the “Captain’s Course” was very kind to me, as I managed to score FIVE HOLES-IN-ONE. I’m not even kidding. I had the absolute BEST luck on that course, making shots I never expected (or even tried!) to get. My parents did decently too – we actually ALL got a hole-in-one on one particular hole, which was very cool. :D Very proud of myself there – that’s probably the best round of mini-golf any of us have EVER played!

E) Lest you think I utterly crushed my parents, though, I did not – we actually all ended up winning a game, with Dad taking the original Skull Island course, and Mom edging out Dad and me in the “Blackbeard’s Course” at Pirate’s Cove. So that was nice!

F) And we had decent ice cream at Cape Cod Creamery to celebrate our wins before braving the road home – not great ice cream (Mom’s coffee ice cream had grounds in it, apparently; Dad wasn’t able to get his wanted cherry vanilla in his hot fudge sundae; and my hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream with brownie chunks didn’t have as many bits of brownie as I would have liked), but decent enough. I couldn’t complain about how chocolately my sundae was, anyway.

So yeah – nice day out, but horrific trip up and back. Makes me VERY glad I have nowhere to go this weekend!

Writing: Despite the long day out, I did find the time to continue writing “The Van Dort Vacancy,” with poor Victor (having just been forced to go and mingle in the main ballroom by this mother) overhearing his parents talk about the story he just told them...and his mother go “what ghost would marry our Victor” in such a derisive tone that it just – hit him straight in the heart. :( And then made him absolutely FURIOUS as he realized that his parents had never truly cared about HIM, and the people who DID (who’d know him for FOUR DAYS and still treated him better than his mother and father) had been forced to go around to the SERVANTS’ ENTRANCE for looking too poor, and that he didn’t WANT to stay in this horrible gilded prison anymore, he wanted to be with Alice and Smiler and damn the consequences! Leading to him storming off while thinking about how he could get up to his room and what he wanted to pack –

Only to bump into someone because, well, not paying attention to where he’s going. XD I left it off with Victor apologizing to the guy – tomorrow, Barnaby “The Butcher” Fortescue III finally gets a speaking role in one of my fics! And let me tell you, I’m absolutely thrilled about it. :D

YouTube: I continued my trip through the C. M. Alongi CaFae Latte backlog tonight with “CaFae Latte Season 65 - TikTok Compilation!” And let me tell you, this episode was EPIC, featuring –

A) A quick meta-short at the beginning with C. M. pitching the Kickstarter of her candle supplier, Wares By Fiend, in-character by Bob promoting in the store – and assuring JC that all the candles are ethically sourced and made when they expressed some worries about them giving money to an unethical big corporation. Hopefully it gave Wares By Fiend a nice boost at the end of their Kickstarter!

( Okay, This Gets Long, So... )

...and I also did some stuff on tumblr, but completing the entry with that is gonna take too long, so I'm gonna call it here for now and edit this sometime tomorrow (hopefully in the morning but we'll see) with what I did over on Valice Multiverse (short version -- responded to a reply and stuck three asks in the queue). As it is, I need to hit the sack, as I do have work tomorrow -- my coworker and supervisor took the day off, so HOPEFULLY it will be a quiet day in the office. We shall see. Night all!

6/20, 7:46 AM: Okay, had just enough time to finish this off this morning -- here's the missing tumblr stuff I did yesterday --

Tumblr: Well, I wasn’t able to get anything done on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), sadly – finishing up my Song Saturday post and getting Nebby’s birthday post sorted will have to wait until tomorrow – but I did get some stuff done on Valice Multiverse (as of course the day where I was out and about for most of it was the day where it was actually busy over there):

A) First, I responded to Satirical Demon’s reply on the “Fact Core: Presidential Seal is actually a sea lion” post – I’d mentioned in the tags I vaguely knew that Aperture Science had done some government work in the backstory (as per Victor saying so in the main reply), and Satirical let me know that, as per his research, Aperture and Black Mesa (their rival science firm from the Half-Life series) were competing for government contracts in the 50s with different kinds of portal tech – Aperture with its famous portal guns, Black Mesa with the interdimensional/extraterrestrial stuff which led to them meeting the Xen and the Resonance Cascade that kicks off the original Half-Life. I replied that I didn’t know much about the Black Mesa/Half-Life thing, but as I was pretty sure that the Resonance Cascade led to Earth being taken over by aliens...yeah, probably the US government in that verse regretted funding EITHER company. XD

B) And second, I answered three anon asks and stuck them in my queue:

I. A follow-up to the “Brits call mac & cheese ‘macaroni cheese’” ask where, in response to Cuddlepile!Alice saying “well, England invented the dish, so it’s you Americans who are adding that ‘and’ unnecessarily,” the anon asked how she’d feel if we started calling fish & chips “fish chips” – Alice was unruffled, saying the anon could do as they liked, but pointing out that removing the “and” in this case might make people think that they were talking about a form of fish sticks, or fried fish medallions if we went with the American version of “chip” (aka like a potato chip). Whereas if you call mac & cheese “macaroni cheese,” people should at least picture the same dish. XD Don’t think you’re winning this one, anon!

II. An anon giving dating advice – mainly, that any relationship meant to annoy your parents should be kept very casual, as such a reason for getting together wasn’t viable for sustaining something long term. Naturally, I had my Cuddlepile!Victor respond that it was a good thing that “pissing off his parents” was just a fun bonus of his relationships with Smiler, Alice, Emily, Victoria, Preston, and Piper (and Christopher and Richard, as his metamours)! XD He truly loves them, but ticking off Nell in the process of loving them IS fun.

III. And an anon asking “If Kuei-jin are Kindred of the East then does that make Kindred Kuei-jin of the West?” I had my Londerland Bloodlines!Alice let the anon know that “kuei-jin” are actually pretty much a separate set of supernaturals and resent the comparison to Kindred, as Ming Xiao told her in their first meetings. And that while Ming Xiao turned out to be PERSONALLY a bitch in league with LaCroix, she would allow that reducing the kuei-jin to just “Kindred of the East” was – not great. Granted, she’d allow a kuei-jin to call Kindred “kuei-jin of the west,” as they deserve it for their nonsense, but – still. *grimace* Yeah, apparently that book is one of the more racist ones in the Classic WOD line, so – gotta be careful when talking about stuff like that!

*nods* And THERE we go. I have to get ready for work -- talk to you later!

It was SUPPOSED to be sunny and in the mid 70s today, but when I woke up and took the fan out of my window, I was startled to see it was raining! (And very glad that none of the rain had come in THROUGH said fan in my window). Turns out the forecast had changed on a dime overnight, with the day now said to be rainy and anywhere from 70 to 79 degrees. "Well, okay," I figured, "I'll wear long pants and a t-shirt. That should be fine, right?"

WRONG -- it stayed in the mid-60s all day, and I ended up being quite chilly in our cold building! I resorted to putting my windbreaker on in the afternoon -- it didn't provide MUCH warmth, being very thin, but it at least covered my arms! *sigh* And now tomorrow is SUPPOSED to be warmer and more humid, with passing showers and a chance of a downpour...we'll see if THAT comes to pass, or if it too is a lie!

Apart from the weather being an ass, though, I can't say I had too bad a day:

Work – A fairly quiet day at work, with a few busy bits – I did the usual morning reports; I updated a few more credit cards on people’s pledges and changed one guy’s parish; I did a security training thing (because we have to do those yearly); and I put on some Easter collection gifts! Nothing particularly exciting, but at least it all helped the day go by! Hopefully Wednesday is more of the same!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, pedaling my way through the second half of “Party Time! | Teens in Space TTRPG | Episode 3!” I picked up with alien teens Radian Inu (Andy), Kae’l Crex (Jane), and Galaxa Spacemountain (Liv) preparing to escape quite a lot of space pirates by using the secret illegal special warp drive Galaxa’s dad hid on his spaceship, which led to the following –

A) The teens getting physically (but not mentally, fortunately) deaged into four-year-olds for 85 minutes thanks to the space-time weirdness that results from using any sort of warp technology – and, when they popped out the other side of the warp, immediately crashing into a planet! Radian and Galaxa managed to brace in time, but poor tiny Kae’l was thrown out of the ship and ended up in a crater of her own making on the planet’s surface. Fortunately for her, the air was breathable, and Galaxa was able to fix her up in the ship’s medbay (complete with fun band-aids)

B) The ship’s power going out as a result of the crash – fortunately their AI friend V.I.N.N.I.E. had just enough power to sustain himself and continue talking to them (after Radian literally punched something back into place in the wall XD), but the kids were going to have to find some sort of power source if they wanted to repair the ship and ever get off this planet

C) The kids thus venturing out into the frozen wastes beyond the ship to try and find power, discovering that they were on a planet utterly scoured of life – mostly because, at some point in the past, the sun had become a black hole. O.o I am reminded of that GrayStillPlays video where he surrounded Earth with black holes now...or maybe the one where he played as a black hole eating gradually bigger and bigger stuff and slurped down the entire universe in the end. That black hole was much cuter, at least. :p Anyway, they checked out the remains of a nearby town, but didn’t find much that was useful – some paper fliers with text in an utterly unknown language on them; a map that Kae’l was pretty sure she could use to navigate; and some sparking wires that Radian thought briefly developed a weird eyeball to stare at him (he then remembered that he’d had some STRONG drinks back at the party XD)

D) The kids then heading down some nearby steps into a weird subterranean area, because they had to get out of the cold before they froze – though some very worrying growling noises coming from the bottom of the steps made them advance with weapons drawn and shouts of “We don’t want to hurt you! Unless you want to hurt us, in which case, we’re very well armed!” XD Fortunately, what they actually found at the bottom (after a few minutes of terror) was a holographic artificial intelligence named E.T.R.A. – the Earth Terraforming and Reclamation AI! Because yes, these alien teens had indeed landed on a long-abandoned Earth – where did you think they were going to go? XD Anyway, E.T.R.A. was very happy to see new people, and after a bit of awkwardness (including her just suddenly APPEARING between the jumpy Radian and Kae’l to ask what they were hiding from), explained to the kids that she was an AI designed to help save what she could of the Earth when the sun turned into a black hole. Specifically, she was tasked with hollowing out the interior of the Earth and turning it into a big terrarium with the core as a new sun so that those humans who’d been frozen and left behind could repopulate and rebuild in their new hollow Earth! Except...well. The humans who had been left were all the asshole rich billionaires (plus Lady Gaga and Michelle Obama), and E.T.R.A. hadn’t felt much like thawing THEM out – after all, they were horrible dicks! So instead she’d created the terrarium and filled it with a bunch of earth creatures, including some she’d spliced together to resemble creatures from fairy tales. She cheerfully showed the kids her work, leading them past the still-frozen billionaires and into her beautiful hollow-earth world, where a pigeon promptly pooped on Radian –

And the angry rumbles and growls they’d heard earlier repeated themselves. Prompting E.T.R.A. to comment that they’d woken “it” up – and then revealing that her favorite creature from human “fairy tales” was THE LEVIATHAN. Uh-oh. So, uh, yeah – next episode, the teens are gonna have to find a way to deal with THAT thing! And Liv’s going to have to deal with the fury of her fellow players, because apparently she’s the one who mentioned this thing during character creation (I’m not sure what the context was because the character creation video is a members-only video), thus inspiring Jasper. XD At least she got a good “Liv-iathan” joke out of it? XD

2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice made it across the front entrance and through the stairwell room into the newly-opened section of the house today, finding the tape with Grout talking about how he’s starting to hear voices telling him strange and fearful information about other vampires in the process. She promptly asked the Wonderlanders if they’d been advising anyone else when they weren’t bothering her. XD Fortunately, Cheshire recognized she was genuinely concerned about sharing any similarities with Grout behind the joke, and reassured her that they were cut from cloths so different you couldn’t even purchase them in the same store. Which is very sweet, in a Wonderlandish way. XD Anyway, that was followed by Hatter trying to puzzle out why Grout was leaving the tape recorders everywhere (Carpenter was certain the man had the heart of a showman, while Alice was pretty sure he was just following the dictates of the mysterious voices), and Alice saying that if Grout had hoped hearing his personal musings would make any visitors to his horrible mansion feel more kindly inclined to him – well, he had another thing coming. XD I left off with her preparing to move on into the deeper sections of the house – tomorrow, she gets to see the first of Grout’s medical labs! She shall not approve. :P

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: I was feeling more in a Baldur’s Gate III mood tonight than a CaFae Latte one, so I went back over to Proxy Gate Tactician’s channel to watch “Baldur's Gate 3 - 10 of the Most Secret Encounters You Probably MISSED!” A short video detailing a bunch of NPCs and enemies that players are unlikely to encounter – plus one that a lot more people know about, but which is just a little harder to find than you might think (remember to do your mushroom platforming in the Underdark should you want to find BOOOOAL and his flock of fishy followers!). Entries on the list included:

A) The alternate enemies you can fight in the Stormshore Tarbanacle (a collection of shrines to various deities; Gale has to go there to meet up with his ex Mystra, Goddess of Magic) should you loot the chests in the basement and anger the gods – normally you get cursed to have to fight an enemy deva (looks like a type of angel), but if your character is the cleric of a storm god, they’ll fight djinn instead – and if they’re the cleric of an evil god, they’ll fight cambions!

B) The zombie forms of Minthara and Dror Ragzlin (two enemies from the goblin camp in Act I), who only appear if you defeat the goblins in Act I, then suddenly switch sides and help one of the three big bads Ketheric Thorm and his underling Balthazar with their plans in Act II – they show up as Balthazar’s bodyguards in the mind flayer colony when the pair ultimately betray you and trap you down there to steal the artifact keeping you safe

C) The shadow creatures the Necromancy of Thay book spawns should you choose to destroy it with radiant damage instead of read it – they’re not very powerful, and they don’t make up for losing the benefits of the book (+1 to Wisdom saving throws and ability checks, and eventually the ability to summon your own zombie minions in Act III), so Proxy does NOT recommend finding these three enemies in your game

D) And Honk, brother of Henk, the half-orc owner of the Singing Lute Tavern in Act III, who only shows up if you for some reason kill Henk, then take a romanced Karlach on a date to the tavern – Henk’s supposed to be your (rather bad) waiter, but if he’s dead, Honk takes his place. The pair are basically identical except for different haircuts and a different speaking voice, meaning Proxy considers poor Honk to be the laziest back-up character Larian implemented in the game – but is still impressed he exists at all. Larian – they WILL have a back-up character for your shenanigans!

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check, I’m happy to say –

Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Welp, I really wanted to post them this week, so I buckled down this evening and got the “Polyheart OT3 House Is Done” post and the “BTTF Characters” addition to the “Mega Gender/Sexuality Headcanon Post” DONE and in the queue! w00! :D They’ll be going up Wednesday and Thursday respectively, as I’d hoped. :) I also threw in a reblog of a post about how “love is stored in the fictional couple i’ve gotten overly invested in” for Friday, with tags indicating that it’s often a larger polycule that the love is stored in for me. :) I just gotta figure out my Song Saturday and get Nebby’s birthday fic sorted for Sunday, and the queue will be set!

Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had one anon ask for the queue, telling me about how they’d just learned that British people apparently call macaroni and cheese just “macaroni cheese.” Which – yeah, that’s accurate, as per Wikipedia. O.o As a result, my thoroughly English Cuddlepile!Alice pointed out that the dish came from England, and accused the Americans of adding an entirely unnecessary ampersand. XD Sorry, Alice, but I think it flows better as “mac AND cheese.” And damn it, now I’m hungry. :P

Whew! Pretty productive there -- and I'm very glad I put in the time to finish those posts. :) Would have been sad if I'd had to delay them a week! But with that, I must hit the sheets -- still got a day of work to go here! Night all!

I got to bed later than I should have, and I woke up earlier than I should have -- a couple of times, in fact, as I was sucking down water last night and really needed to pee. The first time wasn't an issue -- I used the bathroom then went back to sleep -- but the SECOND time, I became aware of some water in my ear and got distracted trying to get it out. Which, for some reason, caused my NOSE to run at one point, and at that point I saw it was around 9 AM and I was like "fuck it, I'll get up." Thinking I'd be okay and that maybe I could turn the time to something more productive --

Nope. I ended up feeling groggy and out of it pretty much ALL FREAKING DAY. I ended up skipping my workout because I was so tired! I didn't really feel like I woke up properly until I took my shower, right before supper! Which, as you might guess, is a bit of a problem, because, you know, I SHOULD be feeling tired the closer I get to bedtime, not more awake! Ugh...at least I got a nice chocolate chip pancake for breakfast, because Mom made blueberry pancakes for Dad for Father's Day and had leftover batter. And Dad liked the Father's Day card I got him. And I got chocolate cream pie for dessert because, again, Mom wanted to do something nice for Dad. And I got the following done, even despite being tired:

Tumblr: Not an ideal day over here on the tumbls, but I did get stuff done –

Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Despite my exhaustion, I was able to make some progress on both “Pride-related” posts sitting in my drafts over here pre-lunch:

A) I got the main text sorted on the “Polyheart OT3 House Is Done” post, describing the updates I made both inside and out – though I feel like I’m going to want to go over it again and make sure it’s all up to snuff on a day when I’m feeling more awake

B) And I started adding the BTTF characters (Doc, Marty, Clara, and Jennifer) to the “Mega List of Gender And Sexuality Headcanons” post I made before – though so far all I’ve gotten done is their gender identities (they’re all cis people, so that was easy). I THINK I know what I want to say for all of them, but I need a moment to turn all these headcanons around in my head more, make sure they’re truly what I feel is right for them all

*shrug* Not as much progress as I was hoping, but – it’s something!

Valice Multiverse – And tonight, I had two anon asks to stick in the queue over here:

A) One sending me the very first question on the list of “LBGTQ Asks” I reblogged a little earlier: “Is your Muse LGBTQ?” I answered that OOC, with the short answer being “yes, mostly!” and the long answer going into detail about Alice, Victor, and Smiler, as they’re my primary three on the blog these days – as a refresher, Alice is a cis woman, demipanromantic (no gender preference, but needs an emotional bond), and gray-asexual (mostly uninterested in sex but a few very specific things get the motor running); Victor is a cis man, biromantic, and bisexual (he can be attracted to multiple genders, though he leans a bit toward women partners thanks to his repressed and rigid upbringing); and Smiler is nonbinary, panromantic, and pansexual (their gender is firmly “other,” and they have no explicit gender preferences – they just like what they like). We’ll see if anybody asks me any of the other questions and makes me think a little bit more about what I want to say! XD

B) And one playing Fact Core and saying that the Presidential Seal has ear flaps, so it’s really a sea lion. XD I had Aperture Wage Slave!Victor respond admitting he couldn’t just dismiss that as one of Fact Core’s obviously nonsense “facts” because, well, he knew Aperture had done work with the US Government, and he wouldn’t put it past Cave Johnson to give the President a seal. Or a sea lion thinking it was a seal. XD Haven’t had one of these asks in a while – was fun to answer one again. :)

Superliminal: Yes, Superliminal! Everyone’s favorite weird and slightly-fucked-up perspective puzzle game was my game of choice for today, and here are the reasons why:

I. I’ve been feeling rather uninspired when it comes to my usual Sunday game, Fallout 4 – I do want to finish up the whole Mechanist quest line and get going on all the other quests I have waiting in the wings (including, you know, the MAIN quest), but I just haven’t had much motivation to do so. I think the problem is a combination of “I really want to play these OTHER games” (see below) and “it takes soooo freaking long to play the game, write up a summary of what I did in the game, update the FO4 Playthrough Progression with the fanfic version of what happened in the game, then write up a summary of how THAT differs from my previous summary.” Which wouldn’t be SO much of a problem if I didn’t do it on Sundays, where not only do I have to go to bed at a decent time (theoretically – we know what I’m like) but I have a rather long video that I can only watch late at night that I ALSO need to summarize. (Well – I don’t NEED to, but I think we can all agree at this point that I’m GOING to whether any of us like it or not. ...actually, you know what, tell me if you like it or not, maybe if people are like “why are you doing this,” I can finally get my brain to be a little less of a bastard about it.) I’m thinking that a potential solution, at least for the summer, would be to bring back “Fallout Fridays” once my half-day Fridays start up in July (because, while I’d still have Game Night and, depending on the weather, beanbags to deal with, I’d also have no long videos to watch and the ability to stay up later to get everything done as necessary), but that sure as hell didn’t help my lack of motivation today, so – yeah. No Fallout 4 today!

II. While I do very much want to dive into both my “Teen Valicer” Sims 4 save file AND my “This Is It The Big One The One I’ve Been Waiting For All My Life” hopefully-FULL playthrough of Baldur’s Gate III with my Tav!Smiler, both of THOSE are still in the “planning/preparation” stage of things. Specifically:

a. For the “Teen Valicer” save file, I still need to figure out everybody’s traits, what aspirations I definitely want them to complete, what degrees they’ll be getting in university, what jobs they’ll be getting as adults, where I want them to live after university, if they’ll be getting pets, if they’ll be having kids, etc, etc

b. For the “Final Tav!Smiler” playthrough, I still need to figure out what Smiler’s starting skill proficiencies should be, what their background should be, what spells I think they should specialize in as a Bardlock, etc, etc

c. And for both, I have to figure out what mods I’m using – and in BG3’s case, if I’m using the external fan-made mod manager or the internal official one. Oh, and of course, there’s still the whole “Smiler’s yellow eyes don’t glow anymore and that bugs me” issue in Sims 4 too. Gotta figure out how to fix THAT before anything else.

Yeah, it’s a lot to tackle, and I never seem to have much time to think about any of it! *grumbles* So yeah, both those games were off the table too today.

III. As for “why Superliminal in particular?” – it’s a game I haven’t played for roughly two and a half years (last time I played it was 12/31/2022); it’s a game I remember enjoying, even if parts of it were fairly obtuse; and – most importantly – it’s a game with a bunch of collectibles in it that I’ve never gotten! And I do like to get as close to 100%-ing a game as I can if it’s one I like…

So yeah – new plan is, whenever I’m feeling like I can’t get into any of my “core three” games for whatever reason, I’ll hop into Superliminal and work on getting collectibles! With the help of a guide, because I’d have NO idea where to look otherwise. XD Accordingly, I played through the first level of the game today, retrieving the hidden blue chess piece and blueprint available there! Both of which proved a little tricky:

A) The blue chess piece was available in the room where you have to shrink down a giant cube into a tiny one to open the door to the next chamber – the guide I was using told me it was “on the ledge,” and that I should go through the hidden doorway behind the giant cube, get a soda from the soda machine in the backstage area, make it as big as possible, and then use it and the cube to reach the ledge and retrieve the chess piece – though the author mentioned that you could also use one of the planks nailed up over the doorway to make a ramp if you wanted. I thus grabbed my soda, my planks, and my cube, and began trying to build a pathway up onto what I thought was “the ledge” – a duct above the soda machine. And then, when that proved to be the incorrect spot, up to what LOOKED like a ledge atop the doorway into the backstage area. Which also proved to be incorrect. It wasn’t until, confused as to what the hell I was supposed to do because I simply couldn’t get anywhere building these terrible structures, I watched the video the guide had provided about how to reach the chess piece that I realized –

“The ledge” was in the puzzle room itself. Specifically, it was a ledge atop the little paneled walls in the right-hand corner closest to the exit door. *facepalm* Guide writer, you could have been a LITTLE more specific about what ledge you meant! Anyway, after seeing that, I easily used one of the chunks of wood to make a ramp up to the chess piece I sought so I could grab it. *shakehead* Lot of wasted effort for a collectible that should have been very easy to snag!

B) The blueprint, meanwhile, was in an even trickier location – a “hidden” room at the very end of the level! “Hidden” being in quotation marks because – well. When you come to the end of the first level of Superliminal, you have to knock down the panels that make up the testing room around you with a piece of cheese to access the backstage area, as the proper “exit” door to the room is all bricked up (it makes – SOME sense in context). You then go around the backstage area until you find a corridor with what looks like a room full of blue sky and clouds at the end – this is the room with the blueprint. However, when you try to approach this room, you discover that the patch of deep shadow stretching across the room at about the halfway mark hides a gap, which you fall down until you land in a bed, triggering the next level to start. So the room that you need to access isn’t exactly hidden, it’s more that you can’t get to it in normal gameplay. The guide told me that the trick to getting across the gap was to use your wedge of cheese to create either a ramp so you could jump over the gap, or a bridge to walk over it. I didn’t trust my jumping skills, so I tried to make the cheese big enough to make a bridge –

And let me tell you, that shit’s nearly impossible. It’s VERY hard to get the cheese into the exact right position where it’s big enough to stretch across the entire gap without falling in! I lost my cheese down the gap more than once and had to restart from the nearest checkpoint (which fortunately was at the very beginning of the corridor) to try again. And yes, I did try jumping once – and I was right to distrust my jump, as I fell down the gap and accidentally triggered the second level to load. Forcing me to go to the level select, return to the first level, and do it all over again. >( Fortunately, given this is the tutorial level and I HAVE played this game a few times, once in Challenge Mode, it didn’t take long to get back to where I was and resume my “please make a bridge cheese” adventures. So, how did I finally get across the gap?

Well, by managing to glitch myself into the increasingly giant-cheese and accidentally launch myself briefly out of the top of the level before landing on the other side of the gap! I was like “...you know what, if Bethesda physics-ing myself across is what works…” XD Anyway, with that sorted, I headed into the room, went around the blue-sky-and-clouds backdrop, and found the blueprint taped up behind it. To my puzzlement, it was blank when I first found it – but when I clicked on it, suddenly a rough sketch of the layout of the first level appeared! Neat. :) With that finally collected, I exited the room and hopped down the gap of my own volition, to start level two properly instead of by accident. I then proceeded to spend a bit of time wandering the initial halls, attempting to throw away a soda can “unsuccessfully” to get an achievement (yes, there is an achievement for failing to throw away trash properly in this game, though as you can probably guess I’m not sure how you get it) and reading the text on it (I went for a can of “Baking Soda” just for funsies, and was deeply amused to see the tagline on the can was “what have we done?!” XD) –

Before realizing “uh, okay, the game is actually making me feel a little bit motion-sick” and saving and exiting! Yeah, unfortunately the game is VERY sensitive to the mouse, so it’s easy to get a bit of a “dicky tummy,” so to speak, after playing for too long. Have to remember to see if I can adjust that – and if I can’t, to make sure I don’t play for more than an hour at a time. *nods* Still, it was fun, and I’m glad I was able to get those two collectibles! Next time, we’ll see what I can get in Level 2!

Writing: Well, as I didn’t play Fallout 4 today, I couldn’t update the FO4 Playthrough Progression doc, meaning I had to find another writing project to work on today! Fortunately for me, I already knew what I could do with my writing time – get the second draft of Nebby’s gift fic done! Because her birthday just so happens to be next Sunday, the 22nd, and I figured if I got the fic sorted today, I could just chuck it into the end of my queue when I set it up later this week. So that’s what I did. :) The second and final draft of “Victor, Alice, and Smiler in the ‘Freakshow’ chapter of Nebby’s fic ‘MediEvil II Resurrection” ended up being about half-a-page longer than the first as I rearranged some things, gave some dialogue to different characters (for example, Alice was the one who explained the sword-laden “Pincushion” freak’s whole deal to Victor in the original rough draft; in the edited version, it’s Smiler), and generally cleaned up a bunch of awkward phrasing and unclear sections, but the general gist remained the same – Alice (as a knife-thrower at the carnival), Smiler (as an alchemist who did regular shows on the midway), and Victor (as a guest who lingered after closing time) hiding from all the dangerous magical bullshit going on and spying on main character Dan as he fought the zombified Pincushion. And Alice intervening with her knife-throwing skills when it looked like Dan was going to lose. Because she’s awesome like that. :P I’m pretty happy with the end product – just hope Nebby is too! (Don’t worry, Gigs – your story is coming up next!)

YouTube: I may not have played my own Fallout game this Sunday, but I still made sure to watch Jon play his, getting through “Fallout: London - Part 47 - Black & Blue” this evening! The continuing adventures of Aria and Mad Jack as they worked to bring about Gaunt’s plans of revenge against Black and his lieutenants John Lockheed, Enforcer Sinclair, and Pieter the Fence – well, kind of. Here’s how things actually went down –

A) First, Aria spoke to “Chill” Winston, “Bullettooth” Anthony, and Johnny “Shrapnel” about how to take down Lockheed, Sinclair, and Pieter in turn:

I. Winston informed her that he’d gotten Lockheed’s mistress, Meg, to turn on him by using her addiction to chems against her – and that he wanted her to go to Meg’s apartment, secure the place, and then wait for him to show up and kill the fucker slowly. Gaunt was like “what? No, this is a dangerous job, I don’t want you anywhere near there” but Winston furiously protested that Lockheed had killed his entire family and he wanted his fury, damn it. Leaving Gaunt to put his foot down and tell Winston he’d stay behind if he didn’t want to meet his dead wife again, and Jon to go “...I did not expect that from the guy called ‘Chill,’ getting really worried this entire gang is bad news, not just Gaunt”

II. Anthony told Aria that Sinclair was based in a metalworks factory up north, using slaves to make things (what wasn’t specified), and that he’d gotten one of the workers, Lexi, to turn against her – just enough to let Aria into the factory, anyway. He said that she probably wouldn’t meet too much security, though he warned her that Sinclair had some sort of “big dog” (I immediately went “she’s got a pet womble, doesn’t she,” which was echoed by Jon later), and that if she wanted the best chance of taking her down, she needed to get the drop on her. He then told her to burn the body in one of the furnaces after she killed her –

Causing Gaunt to protest “hang on, I want all these bodies on display. To send a message, remember?” Anthony retorted that Sinclair was a monster and the last thing he wanted was her to be martyred – he wanted her forgotten and erased. Gaunt was unmoved, though, and Aria realized at this point that once again she was being given an opportunity to undermine Gaunt by doing what his lieutenants wanted instead of following his orders! Which she was VERY happy about, as she really didn’t like him and wanted control of the gang already, damn it XD

III. And Johnny let her know that Pieter did a lot of work with the Gentry these days, meeting them in his own private back room in a private club called the Aeneid, and that he’d managed to get her at least temporary admission...so long as she didn’t bring any weapons in with her. Gaunt was like “how the fuck is she going to kill him without weapons?” –

And Johnny admitted that he didn’t want her to kill Pieter at all, just scare him off and steal his ledger so he’d have to retire. Turns out they were mates back in the day, and while he knows Pieter is the enemy, he just – he knows the guy isn’t a killer. Gaunt was like “you weak little shit” and told Aria to get in there however she needed to, murder whoever she needed to, and bring him back that ledger soaked in blood. *raises an eyebrow* Dramatic much, Gaunt? I don’t think that’ll endear you to Aria any further...

B) Second, Aria went around London in her Vagabond cap (completely missing that she had a matching set of clothes to go with it – to be fair, I didn’t realize there was an outfit either, I think Jon cut receiving it out of an earlier episode) fulfilling her various missions –

I. She found Lockheed on the Isle of Dogs in the Brass Nail, the brothel Meg worked out of, as promised – she gave him Gaunt’s regards when he demanded to know who she was, and he immediately started panicking and begging to cut a deal. Winston then showed up, openly defying Gaunt’s orders and demanding his revenge for his family –

And Aria was like “uh, I’m sorry, Winston, but I’m not about the cold-blooded torture, at least not today. Could you please just go so I can put this guy down quietly?” Winston, as you might expect, was furious, calling her “a boot-licking little shit,” but did indeed back down, and Aria took Lockheed out with a single headshot from Scaramanga, her golden gun. As you might imagine, the comments had a lot to say about Aria suddenly being against a guy maybe torturing someone else to get revenge for his murdered family when she’s happily committed full-scale acts of terrorism for Angel – not to mention SLAUGHTERED THE ENTIRETY OF CAMELOT (though, admittedly, that one wasn’t fully her fault, as the game wouldn’t let her kill Arthur in a quieter place thanks to competing quests nonsense). Just, it seems an odd time to have a moral twinge, Aria. Especially after Mad Jack’s Murder Revenge Quest last week!

II. She found Sinclair over at London Smelters & Co, next to Canning Town and just over the water from the Millennium Dome – as promised, Lexi was waiting outside for her, and let her into the factory through some nearby doors before running for it –

Aaand almost the minute Aria stepped into the stairwell, we realized why she was so eager to get away – turns out she’d led Aria straight into a trap. Sinclair quickly revealed she knew Aria was there and said she was now a rat in a maze, and proceeded to throw not just a bunch of goons at her, but also her dog Willie. Who was not, as Jon and I speculated, a tame Womble, but a giant glowing corgi! Jon approved. XD However, Aria was well-prepared to deal with all this, and with her lovely guns and a bit of Hero, she managed to kill all the goons and Willie and make her way to Sinclair, stabbing the woman to death with the super-fast knife she looted off Merlin’s corpse as Sinclair tried to beat her to death with a sledgehammer. Aria then dragged her body off to the nearby furnace and, after a little trouble, dropped it into the lava to appease Anthony. Because if she couldn’t get Winston on her side when it came time to depose Gaunt, she at least wanted him and Johnny to back her up!

III. And she found Pieter at The Aeneid in Westminster, as promised. She proceeded to swipe her way in with her new membership card, no problem; easily bribe the lady at the front desk with 200 tickets so she didn’t have to turn in her weapons (it just made things easier for John so he didn’t have to rebind all his hot keys); pick open a locked door and discover a birthday party in the making (Jon was delighted); then make her way to Pieter’s room to tell him to hand over his ledger and get out of town, or Johnny would be very sad to learn of the death of an old friend. Pieter said he supposed he should be grateful to have the choice and admitted he felt bad about what he did to Johnny, handed over his ledger without a fuss, then told the two Gentry ghouls he was dealing with, Bill and Ben, to go fuck themselves before heading out into retirement. XD To Aria’s surprise, though, the ghouls then asked what she wanted –

And the game gave her an option to turn them into customers for the Vagabonds instead! Presumably hiring them to steal things and kill people they wanted killing. The pair were initially like “why should we side with you little gang,” but fortunately for Aria, she was Respectable thanks to an earlier quest, and said if they signed up with her gang, she’d make sure they dealt only with her, not the riff-raff. This was acceptable to them, and Aria happily went on her way, pleased to have gotten not only the ledger, but also some new “friends” for the gang. :)

C) Third, Aria returned to the Vagabond’s headquarters to let Gaunt know she’d finished all her missions – Gaunt thanked her, then called in Blind Nelson to tell him what the word on the street was. Nelson informed him that Lockheed had been discovered murdered in the Brass Nail, with a man in Vagabond clothes having been seen lurking nearby earlier (Gaunt was pleased, but said that he wasn’t sure how anyone could have mistaken Aria for a man – revealing that, hilariously, Blind Nelson hadn’t realized Aria was a woman XD), but that while Sinclair’s factory was full of bodies, hers wasn’t one of them, and people were assuming her slaves had finally revolted and dumped her in a furnace, and that Pieter had been seen leaving the city with a good chunk of Syndicate cash, still very much alive. Gaunt was quite sour, as you might expect, and gave Aria the business about it all. Though he was glad to hear from Nelson that his true target, Black, would definitely know that it was the Vagabonds who had pulled all that off. Nelson warned him that Black would regroup and try to annihilate the Vagabonds, but Gaunt waved him off, and dismissed both him and Aria, saying he needed time to think. Jon thus assumed that Aria now had to go find something else to do before Gaunt called her back in –

Only for the game to tell him, “Hey, have Aria go talk to Yvette.” Who, when Aria said hello, delivered a note to her from Nelson, before talking about how she felt a metaphorical storm on the wind and was going to check the perimeter for trouble. Aria read the note, which directed her up to Nelson’s room to contact him on a hidden radio. She thus found it and tuned him in, and he told her that he knew Black was getting ready to flee the city via biplane, and thus he needed her to come to Canning Town and intercept Black’s personal subway train before he could get away –

Alone. Aria was instantly suspicious and asked why Gaunt, who very much wanted to kill Black himself, wasn’t involved – Nelson claimed he didn’t want Gaunt to get hurt, as she knew how he got whenever Black’s name was mentioned. Aria conceded the point, but was still suspicious of a set-up and headed downstairs to tell Gaunt about the message. He was furious and demanded to know the details –

And then Yvette burst in to reveal that the perimeter guards had seen lots of Syndicate enforcers coming their way! Gaunt realized it was his job to rally the troops and beat back the invaders, and reluctantly told Aria to go ahead and get Black, giving her some bullets to do the job – Aria was still like “I feel like this is a trap” but headed out. Making sure to kill plenty of the Syndicate Enforcers outside first, of course.

D) Fourth, Aria headed to the Docklands Light Rail Station in Canning Town, where she shot her way past all the Syndicate Dogs and Mercenaries and Enforcers in her way before hopping on the train, which promptly set off. Aria then proceeded to fight her way up to the front of the train, taking down all and sundry with her Instigating Shotgun –

And found Blind Nelson waiting for her. Turns out that this whole thing was indeed a trap – but perhaps not quite the one she’d expected. Nelson explained to her that he’d been an informer for the Syndicate for years, ever since Gaunt’s father Gabriel died, and that he’d used the position to do his best to keep the gang small because that helped keep them alive. However, from the moment Aria had shown up, she’d thrown that fragile equilibrium completely out of whack. So he’d tricked her onto the train to deliver an offer from Black – switch sides and join with the Syndicate, or die slowly with the rest of the Vagabonds. Aria was like “there must be another way – most of the gang is tired all the endless fighting, can’t we have a ceasefire instead? Just stick to our own territories and not bother each other?” Blind Nelson said that he didn’t know how Black would take it, but they could at least present the idea to him –

And so they headed up to see Black, in his office at the top of One Canada Square in Canary Wharf! Black greeted them like a proper supervillain, standing over them on a balcony high above, and gave a big long villain speech about how this place was a temple to money, a place where people lost their souls in the pursuit of value, and how he had taken the lesson that money can be used to own people’s very souls to heart (citing the fact that he paid Nelson to be a traitor, and watched the guilt eat away at him and make him more and more of a puppet). He knew he could never buy off Gaunt, though, and he was pretty sure he couldn’t just buy off Aria (Aria confirmed this by saying she just did what she pleased whenever it pleased her, which – yeah, does pretty much sum up the LP) – but he was willing to extend her a job offer as one of his Syndicate, as he wanted someone like her on HIS side. Aria promptly responded with her counter-proposition regarding the ceasefire, pointing out that wiping the Vagabonds would cost Black dearly even if he won, and that this stupid war was draining both sides while their enemies, the Gentry, profited. Wouldn’t it be better if they stopped fighting, drew firm boundaries, and worked to improve their own stations instead of all this nonsense? Black admitted that she made some good points, and he would be willing to entertain this idea –

But that Gaunt never would. Which meant, if there was going to be any chance for peace, Aria would have to take out Gaunt and take over the Vagabonds. Aria was like “I have been wanting to do that for a WHILE, good sir.” So yes, next week, having gotten Black to agree to an end to hostilities if she takes over the gang, Aria will be heading back to the Vagabonds to confront Gaunt and see who she can sway to her side! She’s pretty certain she’s got Anthony and Johnny’s support – we’ll see about Winston, I suppose! Ooh, this is gonna be tense...

Okay, I stayed up to finish this, which I'm not sure was the right call, but I was so stressed out the last time I had to finish one of these the following morning that -- yeah, it's probably a six-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other situation. *sigh* I'm not going to worry about it -- I'm just going to go to bed. Night all!

Yeah, I ended up wound up again today from a bunch of little annoyances (like people tailgating me on my commute home, that was not fun), meaning I wasn't in the best mood for a lot of it. Which I suppose is appropriate for Friday the 13th, but still. Meh. But even with that, I managed to get through the day and accomplish stuff:

Work – A slightly-busy Friday to cap off the workweek – I did the GL (which took most of the morning thanks to a bunch of credit card stuff having been uploaded Thursday); I did the couple of exceptions that came through and weren’t checks or matching gift stuff; I put on a couple of checks for the director (both unusual cases); I took a few credit card calls; and I took a quick peek at the failed credit cards of the week. All pretty typical Friday stuff, and it did all make the day go by. *nods* Still glad to be out for another couple of days, though!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – last night on the bike, pedaling my way through:

A) The end of “Now This is Space Racing! | Teens in Space TTRPG | Episode 2” by Oxventure! We wrapped this particular episode up with alien teens Radian Inu (Andy), Kae’l Crex (Jane), and Galaxa Spacemountain (Liv) participating in the big race to win tickets to the Ultimate Party happening on the planet Rez T-75 with their new buddy Memples (not Meeples like I may have said before, that was me having a brain fart)! As each speeder required a pilot (to actually drive the speeder) and a gunner (to fend off all the other competitors), they divided up into two teams of two to double their chances of winning – Radian with Memples (with Radian as the pilot and Memples as gunner), and Kae’l and Galaxa (with Galaxa as pilot and Kae’l as gunner – mostly because neither girl was great at flying, but Kae’l had an edge in the “fighting people off” department thanks to her power armor and her giant black laser blade) – then hopped about the rustiest, most crap speeders in the race and took off! How did things go? Well –

I. Radian and Memples made a great start, escaping the crush easily and soaring into a good position at 15th place; Kae’l and Galaxa, meanwhile, got caught in the crush thanks to the speeder stalling a bit (bad rolls were bad) and only just barely managed to get into 39th place without being utterly destroyed by another speeder, oof

II. Fortunately, by being sneaky (thanks to one of Galaxa’s talents) and spending a whole lot of adversity tokens to buff up a bad roll, Kae’l and Galaxa were able to weave through the crowd and get out of the crush on their next turn, moving up to 29th place – and then Kae’l managed to use her laser blade to disable a speeder, send it careening into a rock wall, and start an avalanche, VASTLY reducing the competition. While terrifying poor Galaxa. XD Radian and Memples, meanwhile, surged ahead to 10th on a decent roll...and then Memples pulled out a rocket launcher and utterly OBLITERATED the two people in front of them on a fantastic Fight roll, moving them up to 8th! As you might imagine, Radian was a bit “holy SHIT you’re scary” after that happened!

III. The next roll saw Galaxa (VERY motivated by the avalanche behind them) manage to get in the zone and kick the speeder into high gear, getting them all the way into 12th place; Radian and Memples, meanwhile, got all the way up to 3rd with Radian’s piloting skills – and with the tickets to the party within reach, Radian fell to Memples’s bloodlust and encouraged him to take out 1st and 2nd with a rocket, which Memples happily did. Seeing this, the girls decided to help thin the herd even further so their friends had the best shot at winning –

AND CHUCKED ONE OF THE PLASMA GRENADES GALAXA HAD STOLEN OFF THAT SMUGGLER. Utterly obliterating everyone between them and Radian and Memples, and bringing them into second! And infuriating everyone who’d survived, as you might imagine. XD Man, these kids went from “this guy accidentally killed himself in front of us and it was really traumatizing” to “WE WILL DESTROY ALL TO GET TO THIS DAMN PARTY” rather fast, didn’t they? XD

IV. And finally, with some good rolls, both teams were able to avoid all the blaster lasers and rocket fire and whatnot coming from behind them and zip over the finish line neck-and-neck, with Radian and Memples JUST taking the win! :D Galaxa attempted to spin to a nearby camera and do the promised promo for Storacle as she followed them over, but a bad roll meant that she forgot she had to keep both hands on the speeder controls and ended up plowing it, and her and Kae’l, into the sand. XD Fortunately Radian took care of the promo for them, so that fish lady will NOT be coming for their hides, yay~

And with that, the quartet scored their tickets to the party! :D Next week, we’ll continue on with this mini-series and see how that goes! I’m assuming chaotically, with this group. XD

B) The entirety of “Resident Evil 9 LORE EXPLAINED | Who is Grace Ashcroft? When is it Set? | Resident Evil Requiem” by OXBox! Which was roughly seven minutes of Andy answering the titular questions and speculating a bit more on what was revealed in the recent trailer and what it could mean. Specifically:

I. He let us know that Grace Ashcroft is the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft, reporter and one of the player characters of the multiplayer title Resident Evil: Outbreak, and the only canonical survivor of that game (which makes it a little sad that she’s now a murder victim and her daughter has trauma over it :( )

II. Given that Alyssa was canonically alive in 2016 (as per a newspaper article written by her about the Baker family’s shenanigans in Resident Evil VII) and the trailer specified that she’d died eight years before the events of RE9, the game could be set in 2024 at the earliest – though Andy was banking on it being set in 2026, the year it’s due to release

III. Looking at the ruins of the bombed Raccoon City (complete with giant ashy crater) made Andy think that either one, this city was never cleaned up or demolished after the big bomb for some reason (what is this, a Bethesda Fallout game?), or two, we might be exploring the ruins shortly AFTER the bomb in some sort of flashback sequence, which would be cool

IV. He’s pretty certain that at least one of the series’ mainstay protagonists should be showing up in some capacity, saying that if you really stretched your ears, you could maybe guess that a couple of the voices in the trailer belonged to Leon, Jill, and Chris. Personally, given that Chris showed up in both RE7 and RE8, I think it’s about time Leon got an airing in a RE game that wasn’t a REmake. And we DID get a pretty close look at the old Raccoon City Police Department building, which was the place he was going in RE2...

V. And he thinks that, based on what we saw in the trailer, we might be getting a new, unique villain (as the guy heavily hinted to be a villain didn’t look like a Wesker, or the ancient founder of Umbrella) – though if the game does NOT feature another fun alphabet virus to turn people into zombies, he will very much eat his hat XD

So yeah – it wasn’t much, but it at least helped explain who Grace was a little better and provided some fun speculation as to what might be coming up in the new game. :) I’m looking forward to seeing what pops up next regarding this latest entry in the series – I may not play these things directly, but I do enjoy watching others tackle the Residents Evil! OXBox in particularly does fun LPs, and I’m sure this one will be no exception. :)

2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – tonight, Alice listened to Grout’s latest recording (where he talked about how silly his fellow vampires were, commenting in particular on their ridiculously-flowery language...until he realized he was doing it too – Alice was most amused) and solved the upstairs candle puzzle with the help of another note and a few explorative pulls, opening up a secret passage downstairs! Only for Cheshire to point out that she could have skipped the whole thing if she’d just noticed the secret “book” lever in the nearby bookcase that did the exact same thing. XD Alice was like “well, being able to do candle puzzles is a very important skill in this house, so I won’t beat myself up about it.” :p Tomorrow, she ventures into the secret passage to see what’s inside! (Lots of deadly electricity, if you’re curious.)

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check, but only just – between beanbags (below) and Game Night (BTTF Yahtzee – Dad won two games while Mom and I each won one, with me edging Dad out in my game by a mere POINT) eating up most of my regular computer time this afternoon/evening, I got to summing up the workout videos and doing my regular writing very late. Meaning I had barely any time at all to watch any YouTube stuff. :( But I wanted to watch SOMETHING –

So I turned to Proxy Gate Tactician and raided the earliest videos on his channel for “Baldur's Gate 3: Cheesing To Defeat the Tutorial Boss Fight On Tactician Mode (Patched Method)!” Four minutes of Proxy explaining how he found a way to cheese the tutorial “boss” fight against the devils on the Nautiloid shortly after the game came out of Early Access. For reference, when you reach the helm of the Nautiloid, you’re confronted with a mind flayer fighting a devil who tells you to get to the weird nerves at the front of the ship and connect them so you all can get out of Avernus already. And while the devil he’s fighting IS technically an enemy you can battle, you are strongly discouraged from doing so by the following:

I. He’s level 8 with almost 200 HP and resistances to pretty much EVERYTHING, especially anything a puny level 1 character can throw at him

II. He will summon some other devil buddies to help him a few turns into the fight, who are a little less powerful than him but still a LOT for a level 1 character to take on

III. You’re on a time limit of 15 turns to reach the nerves and trigger the “escaping Avernus” cutscene – take too long and the ship just straight-up crashes, killing EVERYONE on board

So yeah, almost never worth the fight. But Proxy was very curious if beating him and all his minions was even possible, and what loot you got off the bodies if you did. So he experimented, and experimented, and experimented some more –

And after ten hours of failure (including one very near-miss where, thanks to him taking a bit too long and the timer disappearing, the ship crashed just as he had whittled the final cambion down to 13 health), he finally struck upon a winning strategy – Abusing The “Mage Hand” Cantrip! Specifically, abusing the fact that, at the time he recorded, “Mage Hand” could only be cast once per short rest – but if you short rested with a Mage Hand active, you could cast the cantrip again and get a second Mage Hand. And there’s little “heal” stations all over the Nautiloid that function very much like a character taking a short rest… Cue Proxy:

I. Faking a multiplayer game on his computer to get himself three player characters and buff his party up to six with his three PCs, Us, Lae’zel, and Shadowheart

II. Getting everyone buffed up as much as possible with “Bless” and Bardic Inspirations and whatnot before the fight kicked off

II. Having Shadowheart Command the leader devil, Zhalk, to drop his weapon – this doesn’t have much of a chance of working, but Proxy got lucky – and Lae’zel loot the blade so he couldn’t get it back

III. Directing most of the party to work on killing Commander Zhalk...while one of his PCs snuck off and started summoning an ARMY of Mage Hands near one of the heal stations

IV. Getting the Mage Hands into the fight where, despite being the world’s crappiest fighters (with terrible accuracy and damage), they DID help him kill all the devils in time. Sure, poor Lae’zel got nearly killed by the mind flayer when it briefly went hostile during the fight after Zhalk went down, and sure one of the other PCs had to sacrifice herself to blow up a cambion with all the explosive jars and such she’d collected wandering the ship, and SURE, Proxy wrapped up the fight at the absolute LAST MINUTE, nearly risking another ship crash, but he DID succeed! And his reward?

A couple of tridents, a handful of scrolls and potions, the Everburn Blade (which isn’t THAT good, as he’s revealed in other videos), some special arrows, and enough XP to immediately take the team up to level 2 (which was the REAL useful reward). Proxy was proud of himself for managing it, but warned everyone “do NOT do this, it isn’t worth the stress.” XD Not that it matters, because apparently the same day he released the video, Larian patched that “summon infinite Mage Hands” exploit anyway. Proxy jokingly griped that Larian needed to stop using him for QA in his pinned comment explaining this. :P (Hey, at least they’re DOING QA, which is more than I think I can say for EA these days...)

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – there was nothing for me to do on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) tonight (or, at least, nothing I had time to do), but over on Valice Multiverse I had a surprise reply from TheCovenWars on our “Richard’s missing and Seth goes to Alice and Victor for help” thread from back in May! Apparently life got nutty for them and they could only get back to it now. Anyway, Seth told Victor and Alice that he and Richard had been wandering around the village when he disappeared, and he only took his eyes off the kid for a second, and I queued up a reply where Alice declared that they needed to head into the village then to see if anyone had seen him, asking if they’d been near the square or farther afield, and Victor assured him that the villagers here were nice and would help them look. We’ll see tomorrow if we’re back to more regular activity on this or not!

Other: As stated above, we did get in a round of beanbags when I got home from work today – and while I did poorly in the first two games, a switch flipped in the third and I suddenly did REALLY well while my poor parents absolutely sucked ass. Dunno what triggered THAT, but I’m happy to have at least won one game! Final scores were me 3-3-W; Dad W-W-2; Mom 2-2-3. We’ll see if things even out a little more the next time we play!

Yeah, thinking I should have said "no" to beanbags so I could have gotten in more computer time...well, too late to speculate about that now. I have to get to bed before it gets too late. Plans for tomorrow include working some more on "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland;" if not actually PLAYING Sims 4, then figuring out what I want to do in the new "Teen Valicer Save" I want to start and putting that down in black-and-white; and watching at least a few of the videos currently cluttering up my Watch Later. We'll see what I manage to get done -- night all!

Yeah, I'm sad to say that I spent most of the day in a grumpy, wound-up mood -- I blame having a dream about the world's worst road trip where I was arguing with my Mom about something right before I woke up. And anticipating all the stuff we'll be doing tomorrow and mentally preparing myself for it. Basically I haven't felt like I could relax most of the day, and that did not do good things for the old mental state. *sigh* But I got through it, and even managed to accomplish some stuff:

Work – Very quiet day at work again – there was one call in the morning from a lady updating her credit card on her pledge, and then I spent the rest of the day working on the latest obituaries (and doing a little bit of extra roster maintenance that cropped up as a result), helping get rid of some old fliers and such we didn’t need anymore, and doing a bunch of reversals. *shrug* This has been a very unexciting week, I must say! At least tomorrow will be more interesting, given I’m running around going to the hairdresser and the dentist and mini-golf instead of to work...

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night pedaling my way through the adventures of Radian Inu (Andy), Kae’l Crex (Jane), and Galaxa Spacemountain (Liv) as they had adventures as Teens In Space! Today saw me get through:

A) The last eight-odd minutes of “Dad's Gonna be So Mad! | Teens in Space TTRPG | Episode 1!” Kae’l managed to fire some perfect warning shots to warn the guards chasing them off (and embarrass Dad Spacemountain even more), and the trio were able to make it into space and to a “null gate” (essentially a man-made wormhole to other places in known space, you know the drill) – which, fortunately for them, was manned by Kae’l’s cousin! Who, after some initial confusion about what the hell was going on, decided that his cousin stealing a luxury line spaceship was really cool and helped them out with a random jump to the very hot planet of Rez T-75! Which led into…

B) The first half-hour or so of “Now This is Space Racing! | Teens in Space TTRPG | Episode 2!” Featuring our intrepid trio of runaway teens –

I. Finding ways to pass the time they spent actually traveling through space-time to the other side of the null gate – Radian spent a good hour in the holodeck “learning about ancient civilizations” (though he had no proof as the browser history had been mysteriously wiped XD); Kae’l and Galaxa took a look down at the mysterious Restricted area in the lower deck, only to find that V.I.N.N.I.E. had laser cannons at his disposal to stop them going in (a fact that surprised even V.I.N.N.I.E.) – they were unable to charm the AI into going against his programming, but Galaxa had an inkling she could try to reprogram him a bit, if she was very careful about it (it helped that V.I.N.N.I.E. himself was keen on trying to figure out what was behind the door); Galaxa assuming a new tree-person form, complete with falling cherry blossoms (that turned into goo once they got far enough away from her); and everyone going up onto the Observation deck to look at space-time fragmenting beautifully around them – Radian and Kae’l were both overwhelmed by the wonder and majesty of it all, while poor Galaxa was like “emotions? Lock those down like Dad said” and had to pretend she was overwhelmed. She didn’t do a good job of it XD

II. Coming out of the space-time slipstream – only to find that, thanks to null gates being imperfect technology, they’d suffered some interesting side effects from their trip. Specifically, their feet had switched with their hands. XD Fortunately, as per the dice rolls Jasper made everybody do to figure out what the side effects would be, it was an impermanent situation that would only last an hour. Unfortunately, it made it impossible for anyone to hold on when V.I.N.N.I.E. took them down to investigate Rez T-75 and everybody got rather banged up from the bumpy reentry. XD To be fair, though, they could have suffered much WORSE swaps, as Radian and Galaxa noted, so…

III. Deciding, as implied above, to go ahead and take a look at the planet they’d jumped to, because why the hell not, they should get to explore a little while they’re on the run from the space cops! XD V.I.N.N.I.E. gave them the stats on the planet – it’s a very hot desert planet, covered in beautiful blue sand, with all the water underground, meaning most of the lifeforms live beneath the surface (as you would) – and took them down into the atmosphere, and after spotting and assessing a few landing sites, Radian was all for landing in the cave that seemed to lead directly to the underground area where all the locals lived. The ladies were on board with this, as was V.I.N.N.I.E. – though everyone was less on-board with V.I.N.N.I.E.’s suggestion to go in guns blazing. XD Kae’l was like “we will put that on the ‘maybe’ pile” and managed to convince him to go in cloaked instead. I left off with the gang preparing to sneakily land and head out (in special environment suits, of course – hot planet is hot) – we’ll see what happens to them on old Rez T-75 tomorrow!

2. Continue writing “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Check – tonight saw Victor attempt to explain more about what happened to him, in particular how he finally got away from Emily and out of the ghost field, but Nell was rather distracted by the reveal that Victor ended up in Silkshore (aka the “red lantern district”) and quickly became convinced that her son had done the local equivalent of sowing his wild oats (I’m still trying to come up with a Duskwall-appropriate phrase). Victor tried to say it wasn’t like that, but he didn’t help his case by admitting Alice and Smiler had taken him to the Mangled Mermaid. ^^; At any rate, Nell eventually told him that if he wanted to make things right, he could go and mingle at the party, try and chat up a new noble girl, and Victor reluctantly entered the ballroom to do just that (or try to, anyway). I left off with him slumped against the door, bemoaning how the day couldn’t get any worse...yeah, you can probably guess a certain “what ghost would marry our Victor” moment is imminent. :p That’s for next week, though – tomorrow, it’s back to “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” for that Alice to continue experiencing a new form of hell!

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check, with an actual Subs video and a bonus –

A) First up, from Josh Way, we had “YouTube Doesn’t Understand (or Care) What Riffing Is!” A short update video from Josh letting us know that YouTube has Officially Demonetized his channel (which, incidentally, he’s had pretty much since YouTube LAUNCHED), because, apparently, they think he’s not adding enough “entertainment value” to “other people’s content” with his riffs on public domain educational shorts. Like, seriously. Josh attempted to appeal, but YouTube was firm, and has set impossibly high goals for him to achieve if he wants to appeal again (such as getting ten fucking million YouTube Shorts views in ninety days – Josh doesn’t even DO YouTube Shorts!). So yeah – no more YouTube revenue for Josh. He doesn’t plan to abandon the channel – mostly because he’s enjoying making “Fun With Shorts” again; he already has two more written and ready to go once he finds the time to record – but he is going to be looking for a potential new home for his content (such as Twitch, if he can get back into his account). *shakehead* What a shame… I’m sorry for you, Josh! Twenty years of loyal uploading and this is what you get. :(

B) And second up, as I didn’t have enough time to watch the CaFae Latte video in my Watch Later, I instead went with another short video from Proxy Gate Tactician – “10 Instant Death Cutscenes in Baldur's Gate 3 (Acts 1 and 2 Only)!” As per the title, Proxy showing off all the ways your character, or even your entire party, can die or be defeated in Acts 1 and 2 if you make the wrong decisions (or get unlucky on a die roll, in some cases). Basically, if you don’t want to find yourself either getting an early game over or having to revive a character back at camp:

I. Don’t let the injured mind flayer in the wreckage of the Nautiloid suck all your brains out (obvious)

II. Don’t put on any of the Whispering Masks in Auntie Ethel’s horrible basement (she WILL mind control you through them)

III. Don’t let Lae’zel kill you (and herself) when you start showing signs of turning into a mind flayer (even if you have other party members to revive you, you’ll lose Lae’zel as they’ll have to fight her, and apparently she can’t be revived after they kill her)

IV. Don’t let Astarion drink as much blood from you as he wants, as he WILL essentially suck you dry (though admittedly, you can be revived the next day, and it can result in some amusing dialogue as Astarion tries to downplay murdering you XD)

V. If Gale dies, don’t ignore the warnings of his specially-created projection that he has to be revived in two days (because otherwise that Netherese orb in his chest is going to go off pretty fucking explosively)

VI. Don’t jump down that chasm underneath the blighted village into the Underdark without casting Feather Fall (or Fly, if you have that spell, as per one of his myth-busting videos)

VII. Don’t goad Philomeen into blowing up the barrel of runepowder she has when you confront her, because she is NOT bluffing when she threatens that (and you will go very much boom)

VIII. Don’t mouth off to Vlaakith, “God-Queen” of the githyanki (she’s actually a very powerful magical lich, but nobody mention that in her presence), as she is more than happy to use the spell Wish to insta-kill you (but NOT to insta-kill Orpheus inside the artifact. Interesting)

IX. Don’t steal the Blood of Lathander mace from the monastery the githyanki are using as a base, lest you arm the sunlight-powered super-laser outside – or, if you do, make sure to either find a way to disarm it or fucking RUN as fast as you can in the four turns you get before it goes off (or, if you can’t save everybody, make sure Astarion gets left behind because he has some pretty fucking hilarious dialogue if he dies to that thing and you revive him afterward)

X. And if the Dream Visitor/Emperor warns you that taking a certain course of action would remove the protection he gives you from the Absolute (such as trying to go back to the Mountain Pass of Act 1 once you’ve entered Act 2), FOR FUCK’S SAKE DON’T DO IT UNLESS YOU WANT TO BECOME A MIND FLAYER

So now you know! And knowing is half the battle. (The other half is getting lucky on the initiative die roll. :P)

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – just Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about tonight, and I finished off my queue over there with a reblog of my old Song Saturday featuring “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr! Because I had to do that one after queuing up the Ghostbusters Mega AU for Thursday. XD (As for the song parody I had in mind – I don’t have enough of it done, and it would take too long to try and wrangle into shape. I’ll have to save it for another time, when inspiration strikes again!)

Other: We did play beanbags when I got home from work, and it was one of those days where Dad absolutely smoked Mom and me, winning all three games while Mom and I traded second place back and forth. Final scores were me 2-3-2; Dad W-W-W; and Mom 3-2-3. *shakehead* I dunno why I’m so freaking off lately with my throwing...though I suppose I should just be grateful I did that little bit better than Mom. We’ll see what happens the next time we play!

So at least that was all okay. And now I have to go to bed, as I can't stay up late -- my appointment at Fantastic Sam's is at 9 AM, so I have to get up normal time. :( And then I have my dentist appointment at 11:45 AM, and then Mom wants to do mini-golf in the afternoon, as per the above...we'll see how it all pans out. Night all!

It, uh, hasn't been quite as nice as Alice and Smiler's birthdays (I mean, for starters, I had to work, plus there was an -- INCIDENT with the toilet when I got home -- I won't go into it, you don't want details), but I am making a distinct effort to try and concentrate on some of the better things that happened today. Such as reading a bunch of Corpse Bride fanfics on my lunch break (a couple of Victor/Victoria/Emily poly fics, and a couple chapters from "In A World Of My Own," the Forgotten Vows Verse "Victor and Alice exploring Victor's Otherland" story I wrote ages ago)! Or having a nice dish of Cookies & Cream ice cream with lots of cookie bits and chocolate sauce! Or listening to some really nice CB-inspired ambience as I caught up on webcomics and such! Or -- and this is the big one --

Getting my new mouse! Yes, it was waiting for me on my desk when I got home today, and I am pleased to report that so far it's working very well! It moves REALLY smoothly over my desk, and oh man, is it SO NICE to be able to click on something and not worry that the mouse is going to think that I double- or triple-clicked! I'm still getting used to the scroll wheel (though it is pleasantly clicky), and I don't think I can make the glowy bits glow any other color than green unless I download some software from the Logitech site, but I am pleased with its performance as of this moment. May it last for at least a BIT longer than the Alienware mouses I had before!

Anyway -- let's do the write-up of the day, and at a DECENT hour for a change:

Work – An okay day to start the week, I’d say – I spent the morning doing the GL and clearing out some exceptions (had to send a check back to a guy because he put two different amounts on it), then the rest of the day was spent working on a QC file for the next thank you to go out, with a couple of breaks to take phone calls (clearing up some issues we had with a parish check, and establishing which of two different pledge amounts a couple wanted (as they’d each sent in a pledge because they go to church different days)). Oh, and learning the new online time card system from the lady in charge of such in the Fiscal department. Nothing particularly exciting, other than having to fight with the printer a bit this morning, but nothing particularly horrible either. *shrug* I’ll take it!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, and another night with Oxventure, as I started “Dad's Gonna be So Mad! | Teens in Space TTRPG | Episode 1!” This is a short miniseries of Jane and Andy playing the Teens In Space RPG with Jasper and Liv of Three Black Halflings! I’m always thrilled to see them come on the channel – they’re such fun people. :) Anyway, the conceit of Teens In Space is that you are, well, teens in space, traveling around on your own spaceship and having teen-media-appropriate adventures across the known galaxy, with the dice rolls working roughly how they do in Deadlands – you get dice with more sides for the stuff that you’re better at, and if you roll the highest result, the die “explodes” and you get to roll it again. The conceit of this particular mini-series of Teens In Space is that Andy, Jane, and Liv are the three alien teenagers Radian Inu (who is basically a giant bipedal Shibu Inu in a denim jacket), Kae’l Crex (a blue three-fingered alien girl with a steely stare and no actual bones), and Galaxa Spacemountain (a purplish girl with tentacles for hair, big eyes, and the ability to melt into goo), who – after a dedication ceremony at their school for the newest luxury-model spaceship, the Galaxa (named after teen Galaxa, as one of the people behind its creation was her father) – decide to sneak over to the drydock where it’s being held and have a snoop around inside. This will of course inevitably lead to them straight-up stealing it and going on fantastic space adventures, but we haven’t gotten to that part yet. XD What we covered in this first half-hour was instead the following:

A) A history lesson on the setting – specifically how this super-advanced race 300 years ago came up with teleporter technology and went around sharing it with all the “lesser” races, only to be nonplussed by the “lesser” races fighting for their favor and leaving, warning said races not to venture out beyond “known” space or try to figure out the teleporter tech on their own, or they’ll come back and “delete” all “unworthy” races – the teens were all very bored as they already knew all this stuff from school

B) The discovery that, in this world, there’s a special enzyme that can be added to punch that automatically makes any alcohol in it evaporate if it detects it’s being poured into underaged mouths; it was later established by Andy that some kids still try to get drunk off the vapor as it comes off the punch

C) The teens, bored at the afterparty, deciding to go and check out the ship because, after all, it’s named after Galaxa, it’s practically hers – spurred on by a friend of theirs showing up and revealing that his brother had been chosen to pilot the ship (upsetting Radian, who considered himself the best pilot in all the simulations) AND he knew where the keys were as a result. Galaxa was able to handily charm the location out of him (in a safe in Galaxa’s dad’s office), while Kae’l’s steely stare made sure that their friend didn’t want to come along with them for the ride (and scored her his wallet as a bonus)

D) Galaxa becoming somehow convinced the ship was actually a late birthday present from her dad and going and hugging him – and then becoming immediately disillusioned when a reporter asked Dad Spacemountain why he’d named the ship Galaxa, and it turned out that he’d actually called his very first spaceship the Galaxa, meaning that his daughter had been named after his ship, and things had just come around full circle with this latest space liner

E) The gang having a run-in with the janitor while on their way to Dad Spacemountain’s office, and managing to get him to leave them alone after he obliquely threatened Radian by pointing out that that was creepy, and openly asking if he was responsible for disappearing kids in the past; the janitor was quite freaked out by these accusations and quickly headed off, with Jasper noting that he was probably going to seek gainful employment elsewhere XD

F) After failing to cut open the lock with a laser (Kae’l) and break the door down (Radian), Galaxa turning into her goo form to slither under Dad Spacemountain’s office door and open it from the other side – Kae’l and Radian were both VERY shocked by this, because Galaxa hadn’t ever done it in front of them, though fortunately Kae’l was able to keep Radian from making any incriminating noises

G) Galaxa stealing all the money, the little phaser, and the two “smart watch” spaceship keys from her dad’s safe after seeing a big old picture of him with his spaceship, with his family tiny in the background XD

H) And the kids having to hastily hide when they heard Dad Spacemountain approaching the office with a reporter for a photo op – Galaxa went into goo form; Kae’l folded herself up so she could fit in the safe (with a little help from Radian), and Radian elected to hop out the window and stand on the ledge, pressing himself up tight against the wall to stay out of site. We’ll see tomorrow if Andy’s roll was enough to make that plan happen, or if poor Radian is potentially going to go splat three stories down before the first episode’s over. XD

2. Continue writing “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Check – and yes, we’re starting with the Valicer In The Dark stuff this week, as I wanted to work on the story that’s from Victor’s POV on his birthday. Which I feel is understandable! Anyway, today we got through Victor trying to bring Alice and Smiler into the house with him to meet his parents (mingling with their guests in the main ballroom, as per Barry) and hopefully give them a reward (they protested a bit – Smiler more than Alice, admittedly – but Victor assured them he really wanted to give them something for helping him) –

Only for Barry to be like “uh, no, they’re clearly from the lower classes and will poor up the place, they need to wait at the servants’ entrance.” Victor was quite peeved and tried to argue the point, but Alice and Smiler were both like “no, Victor, it’s okay, this is an unnecessary argument, we’ll go wait there.” Which Victor was still annoyed about, but he recognized that they were probably right and that it was easier not to argue about it (and that putting his mother and Alice in the same room was likely to be a recipe for disaster), and so let them go. I left off with Victor preparing to head inside while Alice and Smiler were brought around to the servants’ entrance by Barry – tomorrow, we meet the local versions of Nell and William Van Dort, and discover just how dickish they really are! (Spoilers: very!)

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – got in both videos that I really wanted to watch today, hooray –

A) First up, for my Mandated Watching Of Victor Van Dort-Related Content For His Birthday, we had “Victor Van Dort scenepack 🖤” by ☽skyler-vogel☾! Seven minutes of various short clips of Victor from throughout Corpse Bride. Featuring classic moments as him playing the piano in the Everglots’ front foyer; the candle refusing to light in the disastrous rehearsal; his attempts to flee Emily both in the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead; him getting caught with Victoria by Emily; him making up with Emily via piano duet; him choosing to marry Emily when he thought Victoria had married another; and the fork-vs-sword fight with Barkis. Good stuff, though I do wish a couple of moments had been allowed to play out for longer. The cuts between moments were a little jerky at times. *shrug* Ah well, it was still fun to watch.

B) And second up, we had more C. M. Alongi with “CaFae Latte Season 60 - TikTok Compilation!” This season featured the resolution of the “John going into the woods to try and figure out what’s happening to all those missing hikers and campers...only for his walkie-talkie to mysteriously go out” cliffhanger from the previous season, and included:

I. Nicole telling Herla back at the Stoughton Street Coven headquarters that he had to get to the nearby forest by sundown, otherwise there would be death, and Herla thus getting his horse, dogs, and bow ready because he’s not dumb enough to ignore the visions of a witch

II. A bloodied John running through the woods and encountering the ghost of one of the missing people, Jessica Valentine, who led him to the stream and our friend the riddle-and-cat-toy-loving sphynx; it was then revealed that the reason the ghost-detecting charm wasn’t doing John any good before was because the people who were killing all the campers were two very human serial killers, with a device on them that jams walkie-talkie and cell phone signals (though, fortunately, they weren’t straight-up cannibals, as Jessica clarified when the sphynx misunderstood her commenting that they like to “play with their food” – only a small mercy, though, that!)

III. The sphynx and Jessica doing their best to help John escape the killers so he could follow the stream back to civilization – the sphynx distracting one of the brothers, Brady, and clawing out one of his eyes, while Jessica did her best to stop George – unfortunately, he had an anti-ghost charm bracelet meaning she couldn’t do shit to him, AND he proved callous enough to not want to help his brother, so – yeah. Not good!

IV. George catching up with John, and getting ready to start whacking him up with his axe – only to get an arrow through the wrist from Herla, aka our beloved grumpy cavalry (Jessica was VERY happy to see that)

V. And John and Herla talking to the cops afterward to explain what happened – and it being revealed that Herla not only carried John (who’d collapsed right after the danger had passed, both from exhaustion and a concussion) out of the woods in a bridal carry, he’d started tending his wounds before the EMTs arrived and had refused to leave his side. Actions that had convinced the cop they were talking to that they were a couple. XD Herla was quite annoyed by this, and bemoaned the fact that back in his day, men were allowed to be human, while John tried to get him off using words like “sodomites” to describe gay people. XD At any rate, they’re at least closer to being friends (even if Herla refuses to admit it), and the season ended with John delighted that he got to ride Herla’s flying horsey (because, you know, can’t drive with a concussion)

Lovely stuff, as always! I didn’t THINK Chris would kill off John, but it’s nice to see for sure that he’s gonna be okay. And yes, there were plenty of comments declaring that people would LOVE to see Herla and John get together. XD Me, I’d be happy with them as a couple or just grumpy besties – they’ve got a good dynamic either way! :)

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Substitute check – just had Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about today, and of course the main thing I wanted to get done over there was the plushy celebration picture! Because I couldn’t do them for Alice Dolly and Smileon and not for Victor Plush! Fortunately, I already had an idea in mind, so I was able to set up and take the picture right before my workout, then make the post tonight, while I was writing up the Teens In Space stuff – behold poor Victor Plush having a bit of a hard time riding Us, while Alice Dolly, Smileon, and Dougie offer assistance and moral support. XD To be fair, Victor’s long legs probably make riding the big old intellect devourer a bit more difficult than it is for Alice Dolly or Smileon! :p I’m just glad it came together so well and so quickly – I had the basic poses set up in an instant, and just had to tweak them slightly so Alice’s face was in frame and Smileon was facing the right way before snapping the pics. :) And now those are all set for another year, yay~

*nods* Not bad. And now I am going to get off and get some sleep, as I am VERY tired. As you might expect given how late I got to bed last night. *shakehead* Gotta do something about Sundays...night all!

Welp, the rain finally showed up to wash some of the humidity away -- and by "showed up," I mean "Dad gave me a couple minutes' warning to get the fan out of my window, and then the sky FUCKING OPENED." O.O Like, it rained so fucking hard so fucking fast that the road outside promptly started looking like a shallow river with all the water running down it. Mom's estimate is that we got like three inches in ten minutes, and -- fuck it, I'm prepared to believe that. O.o It did eventually calm down, and I'm glad it DID rain because it is now much drier and cooler than it's been the past couple of nights, but STILL. That was -- something. O.o Very glad I didn't have to go out on it!

As for my day -- it was typical in some respects, a little unusual in others:

Cleaning: Pretty typical Cleaning Saturday, as I feel I say every time – I got started around 10:35 AM; finished the dusting and the Swiffering right before lunch around 1 PM; then finished off with a thorough vacuuming after lunch, finishing everything off around 1:45 PM! *shrug* Nothing particularly special, though I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with washing my blankets or anything – obviously I changed my sheets, but those just went in the communal hamper to be washed with all the other stuff tomorrow. And I got to relisten to an excellent Oxventure Presents: Blades In The Dark episode, “Into The Deathlands” – featuring the gang stealing a train locomotive by setting up a fake crash out in the titular deathlands! Key highlights been the return of everyone’s favorite murder-children, the Gutcutters, to help with the score; Zillah accidentally getting put to sleep with slumber essence (while they were trying to deal with a rail-riding hobo on the same train they were trying to steal), then smacking Edvard straight out of his shoes with a sleep punch while he was attempting to rouse her with smelling salts; Barnaby refusing to wear goggles for traveling in the harsh gritty winds atop the train because they didn’t go with his ensemble, getting essentially blinded...and then, with the help of a lucky dice roll, managing to argue that he can actually see better in the smoky cabin with his sand-blasted corneas and successfully knocking the stoker over the head with an old whiskey bottle; and the gang having to deal with some deathlands scavengers before they could get the locomotive back to Volisport – who, thanks to the voice Luke ended up choosing for them, I now headcanon as the skeletons from the hammer in the Original Oxventure, having turned to scavenging after the gang finally passed on and magic was forcibly sucked out of the world (don’t ask how they’re okay, the skeletons have always been OP). XD Excellent stuff – very sad I only have three episodes left to go! Though I suppose I can always listen to other Oxventure stuff once I’m done...

Writing: As I was feeling a bit uninspired when it came to video games (like, I wanted to start working on my new Sims 4 save file, but I couldn’t figure out where the heck I wanted to begin), I decided after I finished my cleaning and did the usual rounds online this afternoon to instead just dive straight into another page on “The Van Dort Vacancy!” Having seen yesterday that the his parents seemed to having a party, Victor brought Alice and Smiler up to the front door with him today, hoping to find the Van Dorts’ butler, Barry, there to explain what was going on. Fortunately, Barry was indeed there (instructing a footman on the proper care of Lord Goth’s luggage), and was also only too happy to start giving Victor the “where the hell have you been” speech when he saw him. Victor introduced him to Alice and Smiler (Smiler doing their usual “I’m going to blast happiness and cheer directly in your face and there’s nothing you can do about it” routine XD), and the trio proceeded to learn the following facts from him:

I. That the Van Dorts were having a big old multi-meal party to make up for the wedding not happening on the 30th

II. That while the Van Dorts HAD looked for Victor the Names before the wedding, they hadn’t actually done much searching for him since, too busy trying to fix their own reputations

III. And that hampering the search further, their driver, Mayhew, had died – Victor was horrified, though not surprised to learn it was the cough that had done him in, and somewhat comforted by hearing that his corpse had been picked right up by the Spirit Wardens (no ghost Mayhews for him to worry about!)

So yeah – so far, the Van Dorts are NOT acquitting themselves well when it comes to looking like they actually care about their son! And things are soon to get worse, as Victor’s going to ask to speak to them the next time I work on this story – and learn that he can’t take his friends along with…

Baldur’s Gate III – The Planning: Yup – since I was feeling uninspired when it came to actually playing a game, I figured that I should spend this afternoon trying to get some work done on planning out what my Tav!Smiler should be like (what abilities they should prioritize, what skills they should have proficiency in, what spells they should have, etc) for my eventual restart of BG3. And I’m pleased to report that I actually made some halfway-decent progress! Specifically, I –

A) Went through all the skills available in the game and checked what they actually did and where checks involving them were likely to come up to figure out which ones Smiler should have proficiency in (and thus get bonuses to those checks) – I already knew that they needed proficiency in Persuasion, but looking at what’s on offer, Arcana, Investigation, Nature, Insight, Medicine, Deception, and Performance all feel like good candidates for proficiency as well. (Which puts me in a bit of a pickle when it comes to Smiler’s background, as “Guild Artisan” gives Persuasion and Insight proficiency, but looking at the inspiration triggers, I’m still leaning toward “Entertainer” as more generally Smiler…)

B) And, after doing that, I went back and look at their ability scores and went “...yeah, I need to swap the Dexterity and Wisdom scores, Smiler should definitely have higher Wisdom than Dexterity given the skills I want to specialize in. And I should probably drop Charisma just a TINY bit so I can boost Wisdom up to an even number and get some better modifiers – Cha 16 and Cha 17 give the same modifier, after all!” So yeah, looks like Smiler’s ability scores are gonna be Strength 10, Dexterity 10, Constitution 12, Intelligence 14, Wisdom 14, and Charisma 16 whenever I get back into the character creator!

Not too shabby – considering the last time I tried this I rather stalled out because I was focusing too much on my mod issues, I was very pleased to actually get something done over here. Maybe next time I can figure out some spell stuff! And that damn background issue...

YouTube: Cleared the three videos waiting for me in the Watch Later, which was nice –

A) First up, we had the OXBox list video of the week: “7 Hardest Optional Bosses for Elite Players Only: Commenter Edition!” Jane, Mike, and Andy talking about more horrible ultra-hard optional bosses, as per the comments on their last video on the subject! Are you a Dark Souls III player looking for even more punishment? Shove the giant dragon Darkeater Midir into a pit, then jump down there to give him and his horrible black mouth laser a try! Looking to suffer in Soulcaliber 3’s story mode? Follow a certain path and you can fight Night Terror as the final boss, and learn what it’s like not only to get your shit wrecked, but be unable to win via “Ring Out” because your opponent can, you know, fly! Want to see how weird and hard Super Mario RPG can get? Track down Culex, the one Final Fantasy-esque boss in the game, and be prepared to suffer at the hands of this shirtless 2D monstrosity! Basically, if you think you’re hard enough, you can find an optional boss ready to destroy you in this list. The rest of us will be over here maintaining normal blood pressures, thanks. :P

B) Then, it was over to Petey Plays It for “101 Sims 4 Tips, Tricks And Secrets From 7,000+ Hours Played!” Yes, apparently Petey has played 7,777 hours (and 35 minutes) of The Sims 4, and feeling this made him something an expert on the game, decided he had to share a whole bunch of various tips and tricks with us. Granted, most of these were tips and tricks he’d shared in other videos – such as the Discover University soccer ball and the City Living basketball hoop being the ultimate tools to have your Sims gain fitness, lose weight, and become ripped; honey from the bee box in Seasons granting a moodlet that makes Sims temporarily immune to temperature effects; and how you can buy a special low-maintenance crow with a golden perch from the ghost salesman Waylon in Life & Death – but there were a few new things too! For example, I didn’t know that the “Breeze Through Homework” interaction on homework for children was unlocked by having level 3 in all the child skills (I thought it was related to their grade in school) – nor that it actually made them complete their homework faster (also thought that it was just a textual change). And if you get them up to level 7 in all the child skills, they’ll get the “Dominate Homework” interaction and complete it even FASTER! I also didn’t know that a human Sim who happened to have inherited one of the magical bloodlines from a Spellcaster parent, after asking a Sage to turn them into a spellcaster, wouldn’t have to go through the mote-finding “quest” most Sims have to do – the Sage will just turn them right away because they already have a hidden magical nature! And while I knew that the solar panel roof from Eco Lifestyle gave Sims power, I didn’t know that the living grass roof from that pack actually provided water! So yeah, that was neat. :) Plus there’s a hexagonal wood flooring from that pack that apparently reduces your bills, which I will definitely have to think about using in my next save file for my Teen Valicer trio...maybe in a house renovation? :P Anyway, good stuff as always – and here’s to the next 7,000 hours, Petey!

C) And finally, we visited C. M. Alongi for the next CaFae Latte video I had to catch up on: “CaFae Latte Season 59 - TikTok Compilation!” This season featured:

I. Bob catching two teenagers vandalizing the store (smashing pumpkins and painting random pentagrams and whatnot on the wall), giving them the choice of coming to the cafe at 5 AM to clean up the damage or going to the police, and then taking a bit of their hair to curse them both to be bright pink as insurance to make sure they actually showed up to fix things

II. One of the kids, Logan, showing up the next morning at the appointed time (with his very-grumpy father) and cleaning everything up, which earned him a free coffee, a free scone for breakfast, his skin going back to normal color, and some life advice from Jennifer Charles (namely, get better friends and talk to someone about the anger issues) – and the other, Alex, showing up just before school with his pissed-off mother to bitch about the curse; the mother bitched out Bob for cursing her “baby boy” in the following video, but Bob held firm, saying that his actions had consequences and she’d given him his choice of outs from said curse. And when the mother threatened to sue, revealing that she’d already gotten documentation of all the damage and that she knew the curse caused no actual harm to the kid (other than being kinda humiliating), so no lawyer would take their case. The pair eventually stormed out to talk to a lawyer anyway, and JC was like “I’m usually NOT a fan of blaming the parent for the kid’s behavior, buuuut…”

III. JC bringing Rethu (who’d been out for a few days due to a Jewish holiday, Sakkot) up to speed on what happened with the pranksters (turns out Alex and his mother finally went to the police after Alex’s dad said “we’re rich, we can afford a good lawyer to make sure this doesn’t affect his record too badly,” as per the Drek gossip line – looks like he’ll probably only have to pay a fine, and he did get un-pinked for confessing to the police), and Rethu telling them about the holiday and how there’s some shit going down in the woods with missing hikers, and how they think it’s a ghost – only for the pair to be interrupted by a customer angry that neither of them had come over to refill their drink, instead “unprofessionally” talking about their personal lives. JC and Rethu set them straight on how things worked (namely, that this is a CAFE, not a restaurant, and that they’re allowed to chat to pass the time), causing the customer to declare they’d just lost their business and flounce out. JC was like “you promise?” XD

IV. And Herla showing up with a unicorn corpse at the Stoughton Street Witch coven, to turn it into various charms to reward his lieutenants for their good and loyal service (the coven gets some small fees, a hoof, and the teeth out of the trade), only for Ghost Hunter John to show up a little bit later to buy a ghost-detecting charm from Nicole for his latest job – tracking down whatever’s been spiriting away those unfortunate campers and hikers. The plan was that he’d go out on initial recon, figure out what the problem was, then report back to his HQ –

But when we cut to him actually out in the woods, he didn’t find any evidence of paranormal activity. His keychain charm wasn’t even glowing. But then his cellphone lost signal, and…yeah, that’s where Chris left things. O.o Oh cripes, I am like – 99% certain she wouldn’t actually kill John, but that is still a hell of a cliffhanger! I am REALLY hoping that Herla will have a big damn heroes moment so they can have a heartfelt bitchy friends moment afterward. They have earned it.

Tumblr: Didn’t do MUCH on the tumblrs, but I accomplished some stuff – to the point where doing something on one blog helped me with the other –

Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Didn’t do any draft stuff, as is usual for a Cleaning Saturday, but I did straight-up reblog two things:

A) A truly awesome video of a steampunk carousel, complete with flying machines and boats and mechanical animals that moved around! :D It was so freaking cool and made me think of Secundus and how they’d DEFINITELY have that somewhere in the city – maybe some sort of event building or park? So yeah, had to put that on the blog!

B) And a photo post featuring two screencapped tweets about the “fell first/fell harder” trope and how it’s not about one of the characters loving the other more – instead, it’s about one character slowly falling and getting used to pining over the second one, sure it’ll never lead to anything...and the second character just being hit by their feelings like a truck one day and deciding they HAVE to be with their beloved. XD Which, when I looked at it, made me realize that dynamic could describe Victor/Alice AND Victor/Smiler very well, so – yeah. Reblogged it, tagged it both “#valice” and “#valicer,” and explained the “Victor falls first but never wants to act on his feelings because he’s sure the others won’t feel the same way/Alice and Smiler fall harder and are just clobbered by their feelings” dynamic in said tags. XD It’s just fun!

Valice Multiverse – And then, since there was nothing happening over here, I went ahead and reblogged the steampunk carousel post off Victor Luvs Alice into this account’s drafts! Because Secundus IS one of my verses over here, and it felt appropriate to feature it on both. :) Hooray!

*nods* Fairly productive overall -- I fully expected to want to play Sims and do some save file stuff, but that just wasn't in the cards today. *shrug* Maybe I need to plan that out a little more too before diving into it...or maybe my brain's like "let's not start anything until the 'weather effects indoors' bug is fixed." XD At any rate, I was happy to make some progress on figuring out Tav!Smiler! One step closer to actually properly playing the game again...

Anyway -- I have to get to bed, as I have once again stayed up too late. Tomorrow, goals include working on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) drafts (gotta get the one for second Polyheart OT3 House update started so I can properly show off the exterior!); either working more on the Tav!Smiler stuff and writing up the first draft of Nebby's gift OR playing Fallout 4, making more progress toward the Mechanist, and updating the FO4 Playthrough Progression doc appropriately; getting in a workout; and keeping up with Jon of Many A True Nerd. Again, hopefully all achievable goals, but we shall see! Personally, I'm just hoping the humidity is okay...night all!