People Who Like Me

As in, there was nothing that really set me off today like there was yesterday, but I was REALLY tired at times. I blame my period slowly but surely coming to an end and screwing up my hormones again. Plus my shitty sleep schedule. :P But yeah -- a calmer day overall today, mood-wise, which I appreciated. And I did get a lot done:

Work – A busy-but-in-a-quiet-way Tuesday – meaning that while I had a lot to do, it wasn’t overwhelming, and I didn’t have to deal with loads of phone calls or anything on top of it (just one lady updating her card on her pledge, and another letting me know that she would be updating her card on her ongoing gift once she got the new one). Basically, the morning was spent talking to our database people, getting a new report set up to catch gifts going to the wrong Appeal year (as, since we’re now past the end of our fiscal year, we can only take in pledge payments for the 2025 Appeal – all new gifts have to be posted as early gifts to the 2026 Appeal) and getting a bunch of gifts that were posted under the wrong Appeal year by our credit card people moved; then the afternoon was spent finishing off that mega-batch of gifts that came back to us from our processors in the exceptions because they added two Capital Campaign gifts into the Appeal stuff (can’t be done – those are two separate bank accounts, and we have to do a memo to Fiscal to move the money into the correct bank account now because the check covering it all was only made out to the Appeal). Like I said, it was a lot! But I got it all done, and now it is hopefully out of my hair, whew. We’ll see what tomorrow brings!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Oxventure D&D: Wyrdwood | Chapter 3: Howls In The Night!” When we left off yesterday, the gang was facing off against two horrible wolf-like creatures with human heads and loads of needle-fine teeth, who had panicked the mules pulling the wagon they were riding on and were threatening the fellow who’d given them the ride in the first place, Yoffie, and his young son Michael! Fortunately, Happen had already scored some good shots on the monsters (“gabble-ratchets,” apparently, according to Johnny) – here’s what’s happened in today’s chunk –

A) The gang continuing the fight against the gabble-ratchets! In order, we had –

I. Robin grabbing the reins from Yoffie’s terrified daughter Lily (who’d been driving before the horrors kicked off) and managing to get some control over the wagon so it wasn’t going so hell-for-leather

II. Willowfine hopping off the back of the wagon to help out Lug, casting Sanctuary on Michael (so he couldn’t be attacked by anything) and Guiding Bolt at the monsters...except she rolled a crit 1 on firing the bolt, and the dice decreed she hit Lug instead for a nasty chunk of damage. XD Poor Lug, it’s always him!

III. The gabble-ratchets, as if to underscore the previous point, successfully attacking Lug and tearing up his arm (though fortunately he managed to resist being knocked prone) while whiffing the attack against Willowfine (one of them leapt OVER her instead of INTO her). As you might imagine, Happen was just LOVING Lug’s lack of luck. XD

IV. Cressida successfully using Phantasmal Force against one of the gabble-ratchets, creating a spectral imp only it could see to torment it with psychic damage – then promptly using Misty Step to teleport behind a big rock to hide XD

V. Lug activating his passive-aggressive rage and managing to crack the skull of the gabble-ratchet tormenting him with his big old hammer, causing it to limp away back the way it came

VI. Happen VERY coolly rapid-firing two arrows into the other gabble-ratchet and killing it, causing it to dissolve away and fly off as a strange cloud toward the west

VII. And Robin, proving he can be badass too, successfully forcing the mules to turn around and run over the other gabble-ratchet, killing it as well! :) Nice to see Robin can contribute to these sorts of situations despite being literally Just A Commoner

B) The gang having an argument about whether or not they should follow the strange clouds the gabble-ratchets turned into west (Happen thinking it was their duty, while Cressida was like “there is already a team going west, those are THEIR problem now”), only for Yoffie to declare that he wasn’t going ANYWHERE near those things with his children, and Lily to point out it was starting to get dark (in a very scared “I don’t want to be out here in the dark” way). The gang eventually decided that their first responsibility was to help shield the nice people who gave them a ride (with Lug assuring them that everything should be fine – having gotten a critical 1 on his Wisdom/Insight roll XD), and thus made camp on the road, with Lug rather laboriously turning the wagon over to serve as shelter for Yoffie and the kids/a makeshift yurt for the “only ever been glamping” Cressida. XD However, while he was doing this, Cressida – the ONLY one to make the Perception check – noticed that the axle looked kind of weird. Segmented, in fact, like a – spine. And were those wheel spokes femurs?! Yeah, uh, cue the reveal that the entire wagon was in fact made out of BONES –

And cue Lug being “oh SHIT,” because he knew that wagons made out of bones were generally used by “dullahans” around these parts – headless horsemen who hunt down those who have wronged them with their packs of gabble-ratchets. And using a dullahan’s wagon without his permission (never mind that the family just found it abandoned in the mud) would probably count as wronging him. And indeed, just as Lug realized this, there was the sound of hoofbeats coming fast up the road, leading to –

C) The gang having to flee an angry dullahan and his pack of gabble-ratchets! After a tiny bit of initial confusion, Happen said they should make for the woods and that he’d scout them a path (forests are his favored terrain, after all) – for even if the Wyrdwood wasn’t exactly welcoming, it would be better than dealing with the dullahan! Everyone agreed with that logic, and they all headed back for the forest at a sprint, Lug carrying Lily and Michael under his arms. The run to the woods was pretty fraught, with Willowfine stumbling at one point thanks to a bad roll and needing to be helped up by Robin (who actually rolled REALLY well to keep ahead of the monsters – Robin getting all the lucky rolls today); Cressida rolling a crit 1, falling over, and promptly casting Invisibility to keep herself safe (as Johnny put it, a point of debt well-spent); Happen coming across some very “you’re not welcome” brambles in his way at the edge of the wood and having to tear through them with the help of his sprites to create a tunnel of sorts for the others to get through (he got a 10 on the special Cadence die to do this, thus proving it DOES have other numbers on it XD); and Lug just BARELY getting through the tunnel ahead of a gabble-ratchet snapping at his foot (aka one of the monsters finally MISSED an attack on him). But the majority of the team, Yoffie, and the kids all made it safely through the brambles and into a clearing –

And then the dullahan whipped back his dogs, got off his horse, and started forcing his way through the brambles himself. Uh-oh. I left off with Happen asking Lug if there was anything they could do to get the Wyrdwood at least temporarily on their side in the next ten seconds – tomorrow, we’ll wrap this up and see how they escape the dullahan’s wrath before starting Episode 4!

2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – I returned to Alice’s Adventures In Grout’s Mansion today, and FINALLY got her out of the damn maze – a process which featured:

A) Alice reading about how Grout faked his death via car crash from the newspaper article he keeps on the subject in the weird little chapel – she was very briefly tempted to shove him in a burning car for real to punish him for his sins, but then decided that no, she had too many bad memories of her house fire to wish such a death on anyone

B) Alice finding her way up the stairs to another hidden lever, which opened a wall onto a room back in the main house – she had to grab a Darkened Looking Glass (aka activate Obfuscate) almost immediately though to avoid being spotted by the ghoul patrolling the area

C) And Alice taking care of the ghoul by shoving him into one of the pits in the floor (which I think is how you get into the room if you take the NON-creepy-maze path through the house to this point) before preparing to listen to Grout’s penultimate recording to see just how paranoid he’d truly gotten. (Answer shall be: Very.)

*nods* Good times! Well, for me at least – not so much for Alice. :P Anyway, tomorrow she listens to the latest tape, then starts working her way up to Grout’s bedroom at last! Though she has a few more unpleasant surprises to encounter along the way...

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – I am happy to say that I got to watch a video that I’ve been wanting to watch for a while tonight: “Can You Beat Baldur's Gate 3 As The Unluckiest Man In The World?” by Proxy Gate Tactician! Another one of Proxy’s beloved challenge runs, this one featured Viel Gluck, a githyanki cleric of Vlaakith, who was the unluckiest man in the world thanks to a mod Proxy asked some modders to create for him (to their total confusion) that forced every roll in the game – be it for initiative, speech checks, damage, or otherwise – to be a critical 1. His mission? To get to the end of the game and end the threat of the Netherbrain in his beloved goddess-queen’s name! Did he succeed?

Yes – by taking the mostly-evil path through the game! Mostly evil because he did free the Nightsong instead of killing her for a change – though, hilariously, in this playthrough he ended up killing Shadowheart instead because she tried to knife Lae’zel in her sleep (a scripted event that happens once you learn she’s carrying a githyanki artifact) and Viel obviously had no ability to talk her down. But yeah, Viel’s path through the three acts of BG3 saw him –

A) Miss out on recruiting most of the companions, only ending up with Lae’zel, Astarion, and – after she finally got over her githyanki racism – Shadowheart...and then of course Shadowheart tried to murder Lae’zel, got murdered herself, and got replaced with a hireling githyanki cleric

B) Decide to raid the grove with the goblins after his inability to talk anyone out of anything led to him seeing the most barbaric side of everyone in the Emerald Grove (and get poisoned by healer Nettie!); this went great right up until Minthara tried to knife him in his sleep post the grove raid party, forcing Viel and his friends to kill her and her companions (very slowly, thanks to their low damage)

C) Visit the githyanki creche, get his stats permanently reduced by the “claims to be able to cure you of imminent mindflayer but really just tries to kill you” chair, and try to kill the Dream Visitor (aka the person KEEPING THEM SAFE FROM TURNING INTO A MIND FLAYER) in the artifact for Vlaakith – only to get betrayed after failing to do so and have to kill his way out. Fortunately Lae’zel reassured him that this must all be a test by their God-Queen, and he was able to get his revenge on the creche as a whole by stealing the Blood of Lathander mace and causing the sun laser outside to blow the place up (well, he got ASTARION to steal it and then left him to die, but same difference. He resurrected the guy later!)

D) Enter the Shadow-Cursed Lands and find his way to Last Light Inn, where True Soul Marcus vouched for him to Jaheira before trying to persuade Viel to help him betray the Harpers and capture Isobel. Viel instead betrayed him first, and after a long hard fight, brought him down

E) Infiltrate Moonrise Towers, skip most of Shar’s Gauntlet, successfully kill Balthazar, free the Nightsong, and let her do most of the work of killing Ketheric (to be fair, Viel and company literally COULDN’T do anything to him thanks to their extremely low damage being negated by his armor)

F) Enter the artifact AGAIN to defend their Dream Visitor from another raiding party of githyanki monks – only to discover she was in truth a mind flayer; despite this he agreed cautiously to a temporary truce because, well, the mind flayer (the Emperor, to give him his proper name) was keeping them all from turning into mind flayers – though he refused to become partial or fully-ithillid himself

G) Listen to Vlaakith task his beloved Lae’zel with killing Orpheus in exchange for ascension and becoming her chosen, and then congratulate his girl on being given such an important mission

H) Make a deal with Raphael the devil upon reaching Baldur’s Gate to give him the Crown of Karsus (a VERY powerful magical artifact that the Netherbrain uses to inflict its will upon people) in exchange for the Orphic Hammer to free Orpheus for fun murder times

I) Kill Cazador for Astarion with the power of Spike Growth and Daylight (seriously, Spike Growth traps saved this team’s ass so many times...that and can-never-miss Magic Missile), then watch as Astarion decided to hijack the ritual Cazador was going to use to ascend for himself, becoming a powerful Vampire Ascendant – who still couldn’t sneak around to save his life because of the mod XD

J) Acquire Orin and Gortash’s Netherstones (necessary to beat the big final boss) in some TRULY painful boss fights; say “truce over” to the Emperor once he saved them from getting their ass kicked by the Netherbrain after they attempted and failed to dominate it, causing him to fuck off to join the enemy; release Orpheus and get him to turn himself into a mind flayer so HE could use the Netherstones to dominate it, happily agreeing to kill him afterward because they were planning to do that anyway; and cheesing the final boss fights with invisibility, potions of speed, and SOOO many Magic Missiles in a desperate attempt to do enough damage to the brain in three turns to get it to die

K) And finally, celebrate his victory by flying off with Lae’zel to see Vlaakith in the Astral Plane and revel in her glory as Lae’zel accepted her place as Chosen – an act that could not have any negative consequences whatsoever!

...just so you know, if you choose this path for Lae’zel, she gets essentially eaten by Vlaakith because that’s what she does to her “Chosen” to extend her own unnaturally long life. And since Viel was right there with Lae’zel...yeah, suffice to say that Proxy didn’t get to play the epilogue party in this run. XD But hey, he beat the game, and that’s all that matters! And it does feel kind of appropriate that Viel would end his playthrough like that – after all, unluckiest man in the world. :P

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – there was nothing going on over on Valice Multiverse, so I didn’t have to worry about that one, and on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler)? Well, I decided to go ahead and reblog some fic that I’d enjoyed in the past, because I didn’t really have anything else to put in there! And so I added this fic to my queue for Wednesday. It’s a really nice story, about how most people really just need someone who will listen to their woes, and how even if you feel fundamentally broken inside, you can still be important and loved. :) Certainly deserves a place on my blog!

Other: Another decent weather day meant another round of beanbags – and I’m happy to report that I actually managed to pull out a win today! Just the one, but that’s still way better than yesterday! Dad still dominated the game overall, though, while Mom stayed a solid second throughout. Final scores were me 3-W-3; Dad W-3-W; Mom 2-2-2. We should be able to get in one more game this week before the humidity starts really picking up – hopefully we can each win one before having to retreat into the AC again!

Aaand this just became another night where I stayed up too late finishing this. *facepalm* I'd better get to bed before the tiredness really gets me -- night all!

I mean, the weather was pretty shit (hot and humid, with the constant THREAT of thunderstorms but no actual thundering -- bit of rain, though), and I still had to deal with my period, but I got pretty much all I wanted to get done, done --

Tumblr: Okay, admittedly here I wasn’t very productive – there was nothing happening on Valice Multiverse today, and I didn’t have much time to spend on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) after spending most of the morning answering Moose’s messages (see below). I did spend the final half-hour or so before lunch going through my tracked tags on VLA(NS) looking for stuff to stick in my drafts for later – unfortunately, it was kind of lean pickings today. The only two things I found that I liked enough to save in the drafts were:

A) Some art by “velbsy” of their Smiler OC Miser with a friend’s Smiler/FNAF OC Marmaliser (yes, that’s right – the design of the OC is inspired both by the ride and by one of the robots in one of the later iterations of the FNAF franchise, I believe), shaking hands while holding bombs behind their backs because that’s what they thought the vibes would be if they ever met – what can I say, I just really liked the “Looney Tunes” vibes of it all. XD

B) And a photoset by “prettydeaddoll” of the classic menu screens from the original American McGee’s Alice, featuring Alice in the asylum staring at a guttering candle with her bunny doll on her lap as the main menu screen (complete with bloody bandages wrapped around her wrists :( ); the “Bandersnatch Opticus” screen for managing your saves (which made them all look like old timey camera snapshots, and had a trio of lights labeled “L,” “S,” and “D” for “Load,” “Save,” and “Delete” – it was 2000); a phrenology-type picture of a head for choosing your game options (complete with a reflected Alice watching your mouse on the other side of the screen); and the infamous “Running Away, Are We?” quit screen with the image of a particularly creepy Mad Hatter – I was just hit by the nostalgia and had to add it to the drafts.

*shrug* Better than nothing, I suppose… Hopefully the next time I check my tracked tags, I’ll find more interesting stuff!

Superliminal: Finished off “Whitespace” today, getting the final batch of collectibles from the final proper level of the game (as, again, “Retrospective” is basically a glorified cutscene). Our final set of goodies included:

A) A blue pawn chess piece, which is hidden within the rows of Water Sodas behind the bar in the Jungle Bistro! What’s the Jungle Bistro? It’s the very noisy jungle-themed restaurant next to SomnaSculpt in the real world – you can see a crude version of it in the model of the strip mall where SomnaSculpt is located in the room where you wake up in the “Diagnostic Framework” dream at the start of the level. How the heck do you get into it, given that it’s in the real world and you’re still in a dream? Well, you don’t go into the real one, obviously –

You go into the model one. Because in the model of the strip mall, you can, and must, pick up the model of SomnaSculpt’s building and resize it so you can go through the front door and find that it contains the very space you’re in within itself, including, well, itself – how you advance the level is by trying to take the model through the door that leads out of the model and essentially causing a paradox that breaks the dream and brings you into the titular Whitespace. BUT, before doing that, you can ALSO use the connection between the model and the “real” space to resize yourself by making the model SomnaSculpt small again, then walking through the door that leads out of the model, which lets you now walk out of the tiny SomnaSculpt building and explore the model of the strip mall! ...I genuinely don’t think I can make it any clearer than that, because this is a weird game and a weird level. XD Anyway, the other two buildings in the model strip mall (“Trophy Tony’s” and “Rysan Medical Supply And Shipping” – oh hey again, Rysan!) only have loading bay doors in the back, but the Jungle Bistro has an entrance in the back that allows you to enter the place and have a look around! And, of course, get behind the bar and find the blue pawn tucked into the back row of the Water Sodas on the shelf back there. XD I’ll talk about this place more in the Interesting Things section, but that is wild.

B) A blue rook chess piece, which is hidden in an even WEIRDER place – inside the dispenser slot on the Dream Soda machine in the reception area of the Diagnostic Framework dream! In this case, you have to make the model even smaller, tuck it in there, then go through the door opposite the vending machine so you can exit the model inside the slot and find the blue rook hanging upside-down from the top of the slot, above your head. *shakehead* Wow – good thing this one doesn’t actually dispense sodas, or you’d find yourself having some real trouble getting in there!

C) A blueprint which is on the roof of the reception area you find in Whitespace right after the radio where Dr. Pierce tells you about his dream, much like the blueprint you find on the roof of your little suite room in the parking lot at the end of “Labyrinth.” Once again, the easiest way up there is to find a way to jump onto the electrical box on the side, which will then let you jump onto the roof. One of the easier ones to get, especially since you just practiced getting one like this last level!

D) Another blueprint, which is directly behind the doorway where you exit the darkness beyond the filing cabinet room into the white corridor with the black “carpet” – if you squeeze your way past the windows on either side and go around the doorway, you’ll see that it’s in one of those fake wall bits, and the blueprint is right between the frames holding it up.

E) The final blueprint of the game, which is simply tucked behind one of the hills in the snowy valley full of crumbling snow chess pieces and giant water coolers (again, weird game) – you just go right upon entering the valley and work your way up and around the hill to get it!

F) The final constellation room of the game, which is also in the snowy valley on the right, just further along (technically past the doorway you’re meant to go through to get to the next puzzle) and down, next to a frozen river running along the side of the valley – the constellation in there is the “keyboard” constellation, to commemorate those couple of keyboards we found along the way and banged out a few tunes on. :P

G) And the final pink pawn of the game, which is – okay. What you have to do is find a way to climb up onto the big snowy ledge that runs along the right side of the snowy valley, ideally near where the final blueprint is because that’s closest to where you want to be. My guide recommended grabbing the chess pieces from the next room through the doorway and resizing them to be climbable – perhaps there are other methods, I dunno, that’s what I used. Once you’re up there, you’ll see that there’s a half-dot of pink paint on the back of the big water cooler that sits above the entrance to the valley. You then want to follow the ledge around until you find another ledge coming off it that’s a slight drop down. Dropping onto this ledge and turning around, you’ll find an image of a mostly-complete pink pawn that’s missing the very top of its head. And then, just like all the way back in “Optical,” you have to find the right spot on the ledge to stand so that the pink pawn and the pink half-dot on the water cooler line up and make the completed chess piece for you to collect! (Though, interestingly, in this case, after you collect the piece, the paint stays on the snow and the water cooler – back in “Optical,” once you got the item, the paint that was helping make it up disappeared off the objects it was painted on. *shrug* Dunno why it’s different here!)

Hooray! So that’s all the blueprints, chess pieces, and constellations in Superliminal got! And how did the game reward me for my collecting ways? With the following:

( Because this is once again getting long )

And that is Superliminal – ALMOST done. For I have to replay “Optical” to find the fire extinguisher(s) I’m missing to get the achievement for emptying all of those (and a couple other achievements possible in that level), and “Labyrinth” to find the fire alarm(s) I’m missing to get the achievement for pulling all of those. But we’re almost there – by next Sunday, I should have every achievement it’s possible for me (someone who doesn’t want to play the multiplayer mode) to get! Yay!

Workout/YouTube: Yes, we’re combining these two categories again today, because – in what shall now become the new normal for Sundays – I watched most of Jon of Many A True Nerd’s latest Fallout: New Vegas video with my workout, and finished off the last twenty-odd minutes after supper. Reason? I’m trying to break the awful habit of staying up too ridiculously late on Sundays to sum up his videos after watching them with my dessert, and turning them into mostly-workout videos that I watch earlier seemed to be the best solution to the problem! I will announce at the end of this entry if it actually worked or not. :p Keep your fingers crossed!

Anyway – today Jon of Many A True Nerd video was “Fallout New Vegas: You Only Live Once Remastered - Part 2 - Knife To Meet You!” The continuing adventures of his courier P. D. Shooter, who has chosen to use guns if and only if she is absolutely FORCED to (aka a quest will not progress otherwise), and otherwise shall be conducting all her violence via baseball bats and golf clubs. XD Today’s itinerary included:

A) Taking a quick trip north from Goodsprings up the edge of the map (because enemies don’t usually spawn near the edges of the actual play area, and she wanted to avoid the local cazadors, horrible killer mega-bugs that would fuck her up RIGHT quick) to find and rob the grave of the mysterious Chance! Why? Because he was buried with his special combat knife – which was in excellent condition, had great damage, and could be swung VERY quickly. Meaning it paired very well with her 9 Iron golf club, which, thanks to her high melee skills, could knock down enemies and leave them prone at her feet for rather a long time – certainly more than enough time to murder them with a very good knife! So yes, with the trio of the Baseball Bat, the 9 Iron, and Chance’s Knife in her possession, P. D. is now prepared for whatever trouble comes her way on her adventures!

B) Breaking into Goodspring’s saloon and robbing the place of all its alcohol (avoiding Ringo the trader all the while, as he was hanging around playing bartender for some reason), then drinking it all in one massive bender to complete an achievement in the game (use 25 addictive “chems”) and get the “Day Tripper” perk (because F:NV will assign you perks for completing certain goals, which is cool). “Day Tripper” is a perk that lengthens the amount of time any chem affects the player character by either 25% or 33% (Jon couldn’t remember which) – and, much like “Logan’s Loophole,” it basically counts ANY consumable as a chem. Including – dah dah daaaah – Stealth Boys! Meaning that, for the price of getting incredibly drunk the night before she left Goodsprings, P. D. picked up a perk that meant any Stealth Boy she used would last FIVE REAL-TIME MINUTES (and that’s if she didn’t go into any menus while using it, because those of course freeze game time). Now THAT is a deal!

C) Visiting the shack of one Barton Thorn, a dude who apparently tries to get the player slaughtered by geckos by claiming his girlfriend’s been cornered by them nearby (I can only trust Jon’s word that this is indeed a trap, but given Jon has played a loooot of F:NV, I think that’s a safe bet); pretending to take on the rescue mission; then sneaking up on him and smashing him over the head with a Sneak Attack Grand Slam, killing him instantly so she could steal all his stuff. Good way to show off the power of the baseball bat when it comes to sneak attack criticals!

D) Traveling down the road to Primm (after a quick stop at the Jean Sky Diving shack to loot goodies to sell later – though she avoided the Sunset Sarsaparilla star cap in there because Jon didn’t want to be jumpscared by one of the NPCs tied to the quest involving those), doing her best to avoid the scripted nonsense the game places in the way of new player characters! She ALMOST succeeded too, only falling afoul of two gecko hunters that spotted her post-harassing a radroach. Fortunately, neither managed to land a hit on her, and she was able to take them out with the power of the 9 Iron/Chance’s Knife combo, despite Jon’s panicking on his side of the screen. XD I mean, good way to show off the power of those two when it comes to a head-to-head melee fight! Even if Jon would have preferred not having to show it off at all!

E) Raiding the NCR camp near Primm for goodies (including a nice set of NCR armor to really beef up the old “Damage Threshold” when necessary), then sneaking into Primm itself to complete the sidequest “My Kind of Town” to get some XP and level up her skills to keep pace with the checks she’d need to pass! This involved:

I. Getting into Primm via the giant gap in the side of it that Jon apparently never noticed before, having always snuck in by using a car to climb over the fence at the front (XD – this is why we make all these “-1 Perception” jokes, Jon!)

II. Waiting until nightfall, popping a Stealth Boy, and then carefully killing the two escaped convicts hanging around in the plaza between the Vikki & Vance Casino and the Bison Steven Hotel (the guy with a gun went down to a Sneak Attack Grand Slam, while the guy with the tire iron got the 9 Iron and Chance’s Knife combo – neither got a hit on her, nice)

III. Sneaking into the Bison Steven Hotel and carefully winding her way through the guards while still invisible, killing one isolated guy, before making her way to the kitchen and freeing the town’s trapped Deputy Beagle, allowing him to run off like a coward because trying to convince him to stay and fight (or tell her about the guy who shot her, as Benny apparently passed through here) would cause problems she didn’t want (namely, starting a big fight with the escaped convicts that could get her quest giver killed)

IV. Heading back the way she came once Beagle was free; sneakily killing the convict who wanders into the hotel’s gift shop to loot said shop’s goodies – before realizing she couldn’t find the skill book she was after, panicking, and getting out of dodge (“it was just a barter book anyway!” said Jon XD); taking a moment to pop open one final door by cracking the terminal it was attached to and raiding the fridge in there for more sweet sweet booze; and finally escaping back outside, all before her Stealth Boy wore off (seriously, it lasted AGES)

V. Taking a moment to raid the nearby Nash residence for booze and two skill magazines (including one on programming) and the top of the Bison Steven Hotel for booze, drugs, and some pretty LOUSY binoculars (they have the world’s most pathetic zoom – but as they aren’t a scope for a gun, they’re the only thing P. D. can use to get a closer look at things)

VI. Heading into the Vikki & Vance Casino to meet the cowering citizens of Primm – including one Johnson Nash, a trader who warned her that the place had gone to hell before buying all her guns and stimpacks and selling her a bladed gauntlet in return (can’t have too many melee and hand-to-hand combat weapons!) – before meeting back up with Deputy Beagle! He patted himself on the back for his adventurous escape, but then noted that the convicts were still loose, and insisted they needed a sheriff to help restore law and order. And no, he couldn’t become sheriff – he was the deputy. And he couldn’t even be that without a sheriff! Chain of command and all. XD (Jon apparently absolutely loves that bit.) He suggested that P. D. either infiltrate the nearby NCR Correctional Facility to find and free a prisoner with the right qualifications, or else tell the NCR that the town was ready to join up with them in exchange for their help with the escaped convicts, but P. D. had a different plan…

VII. Reprogramming the robotic greeter for the casino, Primm Slim, to be the sheriff! Because he WAS a Protectron, and thus had the combat skills necessary to take down the convicts hidden somewhere in his electronic brain – plus a cool hat. Everyone knows the sheriff needs a cool hat. XD And she didn’t even need to crack open the programming magazine to do it – just take some mentats to counteract the lingering effects of all the booze on her intelligence. XD

VIII. And enjoying the rewards of her good work – a bunch of XP that got her well into Level 3 (she chose to boost up the Unarmed, Speech, Melee Weapons, and Sneak skills all just a little), and all the relieved citizens leaving the casino, allowing her to loot it in peace and – very importantly – pick up a set of Spiked Knuckles! A small, light Unarmed weapon with really good damage that Jon hinted might turn out to be the real MVP of the run...

And that’s where Jon left off, with P. D. enjoying the sunrise over Primm! Next time – who knows? Jon could go visit Nipton, and from there head over to Novac! Or perhaps swing by the Mojave Outpost for the side quests there? Maybe visit the NCR Correctional Facility anyway to see what’s what? Or he could even risk the Lonesome Road, if he thinks he’s hard enough...we’ll find out with him next Sunday! I am looking forward to it. :)

Writing: I am very pleased to announce that I finished Chapter 4 of “The Van Dort Vacancy” tonight! :D With the last just-over-a-page featuring:

A) Victor assuring Smiler that yes, he did have some happy memories – meeting them and Alice, for one thing! And then clarifying he had other ones when Alice told Smiler that they should have specified “memories more than four days old.” XD

B) Victor being tempted to break the masquerade mask he found and leave it on his bed for his parents to find as a sort of final “fuck you” to them – and then remember Elder Gutknecht and his offer and instead just stripping the feathers off it (and leaving THEM on the bed) so he could take it with him and turn it into a Whisper’s spirit mask. Smiler was absolutely THRILLED when Victor told them this and ran over to give him a hug, while Alice was like “oh no, they’re going to be INSUFFERABLE about you changing your mind after I convinced them we couldn’t talk you out of living here” (though she was genuinely happy that Victor was getting out of his abusive situation and following his dreams)

C) And Victor finding his slug stories and helping Alice and Smiler pack his carpet bag so everything fits, before taking one final look around his room because – well, he couldn’t help but feel a little weird about the fact the was never going to see it again. Smiler quickly reminded him that he was moving onto a better, happier life, though, and the chapter ended with them asking him if he was ready to go – and Victor slinging his bag over his shoulder and going, “More than anything.”

Awww – so yeah, that’s all set now. :) Tomorrow, we start Chapter 5, with the gang fetching Barnaby and Kasimir from the wine cellar where they left them – and having to find a way past Mrs. Pemberly...but as I rolled a critical for starting the score back when I did the outline, that won’t be hard at all. XD

Other: As previously stated, I answered all of Moose’s messages this morning, just like I’d hoped, yay~ Good to have a nice clean DW inbox again!

Aaand I am very pleased to announce that, as of this sentence, it's 11:58 PM, so watching as much of Jon's F:NV YOLO video with my workout worked out perfectly. :D I am heading off to bed before I am tempted to stay up too late by something else now. XD Night all!

One because I have officially gotten my period (though my body happily gave me enough warning signals that I was prepared and had a pad in when it actually started at work), and two -- well, see the "Work" section (and, to a lesser degree, the "Superliminal" section) below:

Work – Well, my second half-day Friday started out okay – while I was working in the front alone (my coworker having taken the day off), I was doing just fine – working on the GL, putting on the checks that came in the mail, talking with my supervisor about rearranging some of my vacation days (as my Mom said that it would be better for us to go where we’re going in September), posting some last-minute Easter Collection, and sending a file to my supervisor once my lunch break was done. I was just about ready to wrap everything up by doing some of the roster maintenance he forwarded…

Aaand then the assistant director showed up like ten minutes before we closed with another batch of gifts for me to put on (EXTRA last-minute Easter Collection). *grumble* I managed to do it, simply because there were only four gifts and I was able to put them on very quickly, but it was still annoying to have that happen just as I was getting ready to leave. But I put it out of my mind as I got everything put away and headed out the door. I had a decent commute home, and managed to arrive at the house at about 1:45 PM…

Aaaand that’s when I came upon my Mom ordering plane tickets to our destination. Or, rather, trying to, because she was having trouble with one of the bank cards, and – yeah. Cue her and my Dad having some real problems with trying to verify the charges as real (apparently the e-mails they were getting were VERY confusing), and me retreating to my room as quickly as possible so I didn’t get wrapped up in it. Though I could still hear them both yelling at the various customer service reps they were dealing with from time to time. *wince* Yeah, that – that was not fun. At all. I managed to play my video games like I wanted (see below), and the tickets were eventually successfully acquired, but it really put a damper on the whole afternoon. Ugh. *shakehead* Gonna be very glad to leave this week and all its various annoyances behind, that’s for damn sure...

Superliminal – Well, I got through the “Dollhouse” level today – which took longer than it should have, because that final fucking puzzle in this level is a fucking pain in the ass, especially if you’re doing a Collectibles Run. *huff* But I got everything in the end, which included:

A) The “Chair” constellation room, which was hidden in a fake shadow behind the right-hand exit door for the Relaxation Room (the room with a looping image of clouds being projected on one wall) – and I’m pleased to say that I got the stars for the chair lined up pretty quickly! :) Then again, it wasn’t hard to spot the big old clusters of stars that made up the chair – I just had to back myself into the right position. Still, happy it was one of the easier constellations to get!

B) The first blueprint of the level, which was atop a stack of boxes in the room where you end up after going through the window you have to resize so you can slip through the missing pane (making yourself smaller in the process) – just a simple hop, skip, and jump up said boxes, and I had my dream architectural sketch.

C) The blue king chess piece, which was atop the small doorway you have to go through to reach the pool room of the “hotel” you’re traveling through in this level – coincidentally, right next to the boxes where you get the first blueprint! It’s tiny, so it’s hard to see, but I spotted it right away after collecting the blueprint and made sure to give it a good click. Another one for the old computer chess game!

D) The second blueprint of the level, which is located atop the doorway you got through in the middle of the locker room for the pool (where, when you look up, you see a SECOND locker room stretching out above you, perpendicular to the one you’re traveling through) – all I had to do to get it was retrieve the bouncy castle floatie from the empty pool, head back to the doorway, and set down the floatie in front of it, resized so I could climb up it and onto the top of the door, scoring the blueprint lying on the “wall” next to the first bank of sideways lockers. Appropriately, it was the blueprint for the locker room itself. :) I mean, I had already figured all the blueprints were for the bits of the level where you found them, but this was the first one where it was really obvious!

E) And the third blueprint of the level, which is located atop the punch clock in the “employee break room” where you find yourself after completing the “resize yourself using these two linked doors (which you can resize using perspective tricks as usual) to get out of a locked box through the keyhole up above” puzzle. And THIS is where everything went wrong, because –

I. When I tried to complete the puzzle the FIRST time, right after finally getting one of the doors tiny enough to fit into the keyhole, when I turned around to go through the big door next to me to shrink myself and creep through said keyhole, I suddenly found myself glitching THROUGH the door to the other side of the piece of wall it was on, instead of coming out its linked twin. And after a couple more unsuccessful attempts to go through the big door, the door itself vanished, leaving me stranded in the box with no way to get up to the tiny door and thus get out. O.o I’ve heard of this bug before (or at least something like it), but I’ve never actually EXPERIENCED it, so it was a very confusing moment! (I wrote down in my notes that this was the game getting me back for managing to glitch my way into being the correct size for a door I was a little too large for after resizing the bouncy castle floatie slightly wrong in the previous puzzle. :P)

II. Then, after successfully completing the “through the keyhole” puzzle on my SECOND go, after falling in tiny form down onto the table with the chess game, I realized I had no idea how the hell I was supposed to actually get over to the blueprint atop the punch clock because I was one, so tiny, and two, moved INCREDIBLY fucking slowly (I tried to get to the end of the table, and I had to check if I was actually moving at one point by looking at the chess pieces behind me to see if they were receding at all!). Hell, I wasn’t even sure where the punch clock WAS, even though I knew it had to be in this room because of the description of the blueprint’s location in the guide I was using. The only thing I could grab in the room was the little cardboard dollhouse, and THAT only provided me with the exit to the level itself. So I went back and looked at the video included with my guide –

Aaaand realized that the author was using the linked doors from the inside of the box to resize themselves to something actually able to move around the room more freely and get to the punch clock. *facepalm* Makes sense once you see it!

III. Then, after resetting and redoing the puzzle, I attempted THREE TIMES to grab the doors and take them with me – all unsuccessfully. One time I just straight up accidentally dropped one of the doors onto the table below, making it so tiny in the process that I couldn’t actually pick it up again; the other two times, I managed to use the linked doors and resize myself at least a little, but not big enough to actually climb up to the top of the punch clock! I gave it the old college try, of course, using the chunk of wall the “embiggening” door was in as an extra ledge to try and climb onto the edge of the recycling bin right under the punch clock, but all I succeeded in doing was falling into the trash bin and the recycling bin respectively. Feel like I should get achievements for those failures, honestly. *grumble*

IV. FINALLY, realizing I was getting too frustrated, I took a moment, saved and quit, hopped on YouTube, and found a guide to getting all the blueprints that I could watch. I then skipped forward to the final blueprint of the “Dollhouse” section and watched what the creator, CarbonCarl, did, then got back into my game and did my best to copy his actions as exactly as possible. THAT worked, and I was able to resize myself back to roughly normal size, hop onto the table with all the boxes and the chess game and such, then collect the blueprint atop the punch clock. *huffs* I then proceeded to struggle with making the dollhouse big enough for my oversized ass to pass through so I could reach the exit elevator and end the damn level, but I managed it in the end. Very glad I did NOT have to reset from the checkpoint again – I think I would have cried. Thank you CarbonCarl!

So yeah, that was my experience getting all the “Dollhouse” collectibles. Easy-peasy up until the last one, and then FUCKING HELL. *pinches the bridge of her nose* At least it’s cleared now… Anyway, here’s the list of Other Fun Things I Noticed/Experienced While Playing This Level:

( Because This Gets Long, As Per Usual )

Aaaand there we have it – another level of Superliminal cleared! Tomorrow, we tackle “Labyrinth,” the one level where I haven’t gotten ANYTHING cleared. Mostly because it’s meant to be played with a sense of urgency, not a sense of “looking for collectibles.” :P Hopefully it goes well!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – last night on the bike, last night with “The Sims 4 Enchanted By Nature Build & Buy Overview” by James Turner! The second half of his overview focused on household items – bedroom stuff, bathroom stuff, kids’ room stuff, living room stuff, etc. Plus a quick look at the Required New Bar (which, admittedly, was gorgeous, and had an AMAZING bar back that looked like a glimmering galaxy), some of the unlockable stuff from working your way up the Apothecary skill and the Naturopath career, and some of the debug/live edit objects. And while he was once again overall impressed with the commitment to fairy tale styling and themes, and how beautiful everything was, he once again had some criticisms:

A) He felt one particular “leaf” rug was a LITTLE too cartoony compared to the rest of the items, explicitly comparing it to something you’d find in Animal Crossing

B) While he liked the new kitchen counters overall, he wasn’t wild about the visible seams between the joined counters...and even less wild about the low-quality wood textures on the top, with visible pixelation. Took him right out of the game! He also didn’t like that the “outer corner” matching cupboard piece with a big empty shelf didn’t have any slots to put anything on

C) He was not a fan of the fact that there were so few “clutter”-type decoration items (to go along with his annoyance over the lack of wall art), and that most of the few that we had were locked behind advancing in the Apothecary skill or the Naturopath career – he’s not against unlockables in theory, but it just seemed odd to him that you’d put basic clutter behind learning a few levels of a skill, or advancing in a career

D) While he was glad there was a full bathroom set, he noted that the pieces didn’t go together very well – the sink was very clean carved wood, while the toilet was a mossy stump, and the shower and tub were both made out of crystals and stone (which meant they matched ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the rest of the pack). They all looked good INDIVIDUALLY, just they didn’t make a very cohesive set when put together. Also, the wall mirror was set just a little bit too low to be used with the sink without clipping

E) He was utterly confused by the addition of a single ordinary park bench in among all the other fairy-tale-themed stuff one could sit on – especially when he realized the world around the lot he was showing everything off on was using BASE GAME benches. O.o Like, what the hell, guys? Why make a new ordinary bench if you’re not going to USE it anywhere? (Though maybe the bench is used in a different neighborhood – I think he was in Sprucederry Grove, and the bench looked like a good fit for the Coast of Adhmor and its aesthetic)

F) He pointed out that a few very important things were missing – namely, the bedroom set does NOT have a single bed (it goes bassinet – crib – toddler bed – big old canopied double bed); the living room set is missing a two-seater couch (aka a loveseat – and the weird Ordinary Park Bench does not count); and the kitchen set was missing THE ACTUAL KITCHEN. Literally, all we got for kitchen stuff is the counters, the cupboards, and the sink, which does double duty as a bathroom sink. No fridge, no stove, no nothing! James was like “that’s probably because one of the big things about this pack is living naturally without such appliances” but COME ON. Not everybody is going to want to have their Sims do that! You could have at LEAST included a campfire one could cook on!

G) And he reiterated how baffled/annoyed he was that the Enchanted By Nature pack didn’t come with any new outdoor plants, showing that there was TONS of fun stuff hiding in the “debug” section that could have been shoved into the catalog proper! Lots of bright colorful flowers, giant mushrooms, cool mossy stones – all stuff that I’m sure Simmer would LOVE to landscape with! It’s baffling why it’s all hidden behind a cheat!

So yeah – while James was very excited to build with the pack and play around with all the fun fairytale vibes, he wasn’t shy about revealing where he felt the pack let him down. And it does feel utterly stupid that they don’t have any outdoor plants, or a single bed to go with the double bed, or a single kitchen appliance. I mean, I really like the stuff I saw in this pack – major Wonderland vibes, especially with some of the fun mushroom-themed décor – but cripes. This is definitely a “get on sale” pack if I do pick it up! You can’t be bothered to give me all the items I should be entitled to in an expansion pack? I can’t be bothered to give you full price. *shakehead* That being said, I do look forward to seeing James build with this pack, as it is probably going to lend itself to some fun houses. In fact, he already noticed that one might be able to recreate the dollhouse included in the kids’ stuff as a full-sized house, given all the stuff in it is just tiny versions of actual assets in the pack...

2. Edit WeirdKev’s Gift Fic: Check – the “Glomgold details his plan for getting rid of Zan Owlson, involving Trojan Butts and ghouled sharks and fake Santa Clauses throwing chum, to LaCroix’s growing bafflement and annoyance” fic got its second draft today! Which, honestly, was not really much different from the first draft – I just reworded a few sentences here and there to make some of LaCroix’s lines sound a bit more like him, added in a couple of new lines, and reworked some awkward ones. Otherwise, it’s pretty much exactly what I wrote last week, with the most chaotic, ridiculous plan this side of Ducktales. XD Hopefully WeirdKev will like it – he’s the one who came up with all of Glomgold’s nonsense, after all! XD

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – got another video out of my Watch Later tonight: “Innisgreen World Secrets And Features | The Sims 4 Guide” by Petey Plays It! A tour of the new world that comes with Enchanted By Nature and its three neighborhoods – Everdew, Sprucederry Grove, and The Coast of Adhmor! And happily, while each neighborhood is kind of compact (especially Adhmor, which is just crammed full of admittedly-adorable colorful houses), they all have plenty of stuff to see and to interact with! Including little parks with benches for Sims to nap on, woohoo bushes, and sometimes swingsets and/or barbecues; Fable Boards to find the Sims that can handle out “Fables,” the EBN version of the Cottage Living Henford-on-Bagley “Errands” (which offer rewards from the mundane to the fabulous); various bodies of water to splash around or bathe in; plants to harvest (including the new magical plants that come with this pack); and rabbit hole businesses to shop at (like a used bookstore, or a grocery)! Each neighborhood has unique features too – for example, Everdew has the headquarters of the fairy council, a good place to research fairy lore and the history of the land; Sprucederry Grove has the tree that allows you to summon Spruce Almighty, creator of PlantSims and gnomes; and the Coast of Adhmor has the Giant Gnome, who can influence your luck if you ask him nicely (or attempt to kick him). All in all, it’s a very pretty world, and Petey was on the opinion it was one of the more solid ones when it came to both interactivity and feeling alive. *nods* A point in the pack’s favor, that! ...Still probably gonna get it on sale, though. :P

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – we had the reverse of yesterday’s situation, where I had nothing to do on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) (as the queue was already sorted), but I did have something to stick in the queue on Valice Multiverse – another reblog on the “helping Seth find his brother Richard” thread that I have with The Coven Wars in the Forgotten Vows Verse! Their latest reblog saw the group indeed find Richard (who was still wandering in a daze near the square where Seth last saw him, happily), with a worried Seth asking him why he’d run off and Richard responding “...They’re loud today.” (For reference, the kid suffers from hallucinations, like Alice – Alice feels a bit of a kinship with him as a result.) I had Alice comment that she’s had days like that too, pointing out that Victor would know, while Victor introduced himself to Richard (as they hadn’t met previously). We’ll see what happens when Coven Wars next responds!

So yeah -- not the greatest Friday, but at least I accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. And now I have to go to bed, as I have a full Cleaning & Laundry Saturday tomorrow, meeeh. At least it comes with getting to listen to the last episode of Oxventure Presents: Blades In The Dark! Other things I hope to do include working more on "The Van Dort Vacancy;" getting through the "Labyrinth" level of Superliminal as indicated above; and watching at least one of the videos in my Watch Later (maybe the OXBoxtra crew reacting to super-fast carriages in Red Dead Redemption 2?). Hopefully all goals that can be accomplished -- night all!

What I mean by that is:

-->My morning computer time was cut short because I found yet more little ants crawling around my cereal box when I had breakfast this morning and had to tell Mom (the cereal was summarily disposed of -- my parents got me a new box, and transferred all the cereal to a new plastic container with a snap lid)

-->And my evening computer time was also cut short because we had to discuss vacation plans after Mom and Dad watched some videos of some of the rides at the Canadian theme park we were thinking of going to (Canada's Wonderland), and Mom got spooked because it looks like a lot of them are extreme thrill rides (a swing ride that takes you way up into the sky, for example), and Mom's not a fan of those. (Despite CONSTANTLY going on coasters with Dad when I was younger and scared of them myself...) Cue us trying to find other things to do, like tour the Ben & Jerry's factory (this was eventually dismissed due to it being too far to drive for one thing), or hit up Boston for a day or two to do some stuff there (like the speedboat "Codzilla" ride). We're still not one hundred percent on what's going to happen, but it appears Canada's Wonderland is definitely out.

So yeah -- my time on the web was severely curtailed today, and thanks to PMS, I am extra not happy about that. *grumbles* Yes, I know it's a small problem in the scheme of things, but the hormones do not listen to logic. They only care that I didn't get to do everything I hoped to do tonight. *sigh* Speaking of which, here's the write-up:

Work – A pretty quiet, boring day at work – still not allowed to process, so I did what I could by going through the obituaries in the paper, then looking up more online. Along the way I also had another check-in call with the credit card people (useless as always, as all the person I talk to can do is forward the problems I point out to the guy who never seems to have time to fix them); helped stuff some envelopes for a mailing; and completed multiple puzzles from the paper while trying to look busy. *shrug* I have had days much worse! Probably better for my PMS for me to be bored rather than frustrated, honestly… We’ll see what tomorrow brings!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back with the final chunk of “Oxventure D&D: Wyrdwood | Chapter 2: Rootbound!” Today was the big fight against the tree and its possessed villagers, and it went down roughly like so:

A) Happen – who was still trying to pretend to be a fully-possessed villager protecting the tree instead of just a partially-possessed one managing to fight off its influence – after his Web attack didn’t go off like planned, deciding to try and ignite the remaining shreds of web hanging from the tree by firing an arrow at the ax resting on the ground and hopefully sending a spray of sparks up onto them. However, when he rolled the attack roll, it proved to be time to praise Cadence, because crit 1. Happen thus accidentally killed one of the other villagers with an arrow to the forehead. He tried to play it off as “he meant the tree harm” –

And, luckily for him, that’s when Cressida and the others burst into the clearing with the three, and combat officially started, so he wasn’t immediately harmed. XD

B) Willowfine, Lug, Morven, and Happen all trying to take down the villagers and destroy the tree while Cressida dealt with the compulsion to protect it! This resulted in, among other things, the following:

I. Willowfine hitting the tree with a bunch of radiant damage (partially because the saving throw for avoiding it was Dex, which, as you might imagine, a tree was weak in) – which, while technically not being fire damage in and of itself, DID successfully ignite the webs shreds and get her some bonus damage due to fire being a weakness for, again, a tree

II. Lug successfully smacking some people around with his hammer for a change, killing one and getting the other stuck on the end

III. Morven walking into the crowd and casting Arms of Hadar to inflict a bunch of necrotic damage on the villagers (managing to use her sorcery to exclude Lug and Happen, but NOT Cressida – didn’t have enough points) – Johnny got in some REALLY good creepy description of the villagers rotting like WOOD rots instead of flesh, revealing horrible white roots where there should be a nervous system, brrr...and then describing Cressida feeling the seed inside her growing into HER nervous system

IV. Happen continually making his Constitution saving throws to avoid the tree’s influence, which was honestly pretty badass, even, if it was just the result of lucky die rolls, and shooting a couple more villagers

V. Ellen needing a moment to figure out what Cressida was going to do to “protect the tree” (leading to some fun moments of the others getting to use opportunity attacks – Lug tried to shove someone into the fiery webs, but failed, while Happen successfully cut open the belly of a passing villager and yanked a root from their stomach, eugh) – and then, when it came back to her, deciding that Cressida would try to throw a wineskin full of “water” on the tree to put it out. She did not succeeded, and everyone promptly called Cressida a “wine aunt.” XD

VI. Lug once again taking the lion’s share of the damage during combat by getting smacked by a tree branch for 13 bludgeoning damage (Johnny was SO delighted he wasn’t raging and thus had to take the full amount)

VII. Willowfine doing good work with the radiant damage and taking out the remaining villagers; Lug (not realizing Cressida was under the tree’s power) deciding to use his turn to get out of branch-smacking range so he could watch the tree burn; and Morven attempting to use Toll The Dead on the tree, only to fail and promptly Misty Step away in shame XD

VIII. Happen alerting the others to the fact that Cressida was possessed by using his turn to try and drag her away from the tree (she successfully resisted and tried to use Prestidigitation to put out the flames, which didn’t really work), which led to Willowfine trying to grapple her on HER turn to try and drag her away –

And BOTH LADIES getting crit 1s on their roll. (Praise Cadence!) It was initially decided that Willowfine did manage to grab Cressida, but couldn’t move thanks to how much she was squirming, then that they’d gotten pretty thoroughly entangled when Lug used his turn to pick up Willowfine (and thus Cressida by default) and carry them BOTH away. XD Well, that’s one way to solve the problem!

IX. And Morven happily hearing me shout at everyone “KILL THE TREE! KILL THE FUCKING TREE! IT’LL SOLVE YOUR POSSESSED FRIEND PROBLEM IF YOU KILL THE FUCKING TREE!” and slamming it with FIVE Magic Missiles. :D Granted, Johnny ruled that it still took two hours for the tree to finally die after all this abuse, but it was nice to see someone being proactive about KILLING THE FUCKING TREE.

C) Everyone watching the tree burn (restraining Cressida and, eventually, Happen (as it was decided he’d have to bork one of those saving throws EVENTUALLY) until the seeds inside them died and they were themselves again)...except that Morven finally nodded off at one point during all that, meaning, welcome back Robin! He was naturally rather bewildered about what was happening, and the gang (by which I mean Willowfine, as everyone else passed the buck, though Lug DID hop in at one point to help) explaining what happened and what’s going on with him. Robin was, understandably, not exactly keen on sharing his body with someone else’s spirit, but the others reassured him that no, of course they weren’t going to knock him out whenever there was an emergency – in fact, if he fell unconscious, they’d knock Morven out to get him back. (“Playing both sides,” as Happen put it. XD) Though Happen did make it clear that Morven probably saved their lives with her spellwork today, so they SHOULD at least think about getting her a body of her own to inhabit. But he was sure that Robin was just as capable in a fight! Cue Robin agreeing before checking if his bread had gone stale, then attempting to cast a spell through sheer willpower. XD I think you might be getting knocked out in an emergency, Robin!

D) And finally, a message coming through from the team investigating the North on the “copestone” message tables they were given, revealing that two of them were injured, and to be careful as the Wyrdwood was ANGRY. Willowfine tapped out a message back saying they were fine and asking if the North Team needed any help – and as she did so, Happen noticed a strange rabbit made of black shadow hop past the burning tree and into Willowfine’s shadow before melding into it…

Cue the end of the episode. XD Well, except for the rolling of the D100, aka the Ball Of Numbers, to see if anyone’s going to have Fun Times the next time they try to cast a spell – not yet! But yeah – seems like the next adventure, they might need to take care of that little bunny problem. Though they’ll want to do so carefully, mind, as they MIGHT be in trouble with the Wild Folk already for burning that parasitic ash. Key word there being “might” – as Johnny told Lug, them killing the tree was a bit of a weird situation, vis-a-vis keeping things chill with the Wild Folk. Because the tree was clearly a punishment on the village for breaking the “Windfall Bargain” (presumably “let the holben imps stay in their bramble homes in your veggie patches and you get to have nice vegetables”), BUT it attacking Lug and company, explicitly NON-villagers, could be construed as it getting greedy for more slaves and overreaching its bounds. *shrug* We’ll see what happens once some Wild Folk show up! Which I assume will happen eventually...

2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice made a little forward progress in the latter portion of Grout’s maze today, finding her way out of the mostly-upside-down bedroom via discovering picking up the telephone makes the far wall turn (and that there was a convenient electric candle lever on the other side to shut it up again); going up some stairs and discovering a landing with a few different ways to go – and another clawed ghoul, who promptly attacked her (Alice was like “never thought I’d be happy to see one of YOU, but given you’re not a creepy mannequin); and managing to successfully lure the clawed ghoul back to the mostly-upside-down bedroom and trap him in there with judicious use of a kick to the ankle and that candle lever (she just didn’t want to have to fight and possibly kill him if she could avoid it). I left off with her deciding to check out the green corridor the ghoul was hanging out in and see what he was guarding – tomorrow, we get a creepy room with writing all over the walls! Every mansion-turned-makeshift-asylum has to have at least ONE.

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: No check – as stated above, my evening computer time was severely curtailed by the “what are we doing on our vacation” chat, and this resulted in me deciding to skip the YouTube entirely in favor of making sure I got my fanfic writing done. *sigh* Hopefully tomorrow will be better!

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – just Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about tonight, thankfully! And while I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to even put in there for the next few days, going looking through the “#blades in the dark” tag on tumblr introduced me to user “ghosts-just-wanna-have-fun,” who had a couple of things I wanted to put on my blog:

A) First, I stuck into my queue –

I. A post he reblogged from “door” (yes, that was the username) complaining about why so many fantasy books these days have exactly ONE nonbinary person in them for Thursday (mostly as a reminder to myself to make sure Smiler isn’t the only nonbinary person in Valicer In The Dark – I can probably at least put in some nonbinary background Advocates if nothing else!)

II. And a post he reblogged from “shisasan” with a quote from Franz Kafka: “I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly” for Friday (because awww, the OTP/OT3 mood~ :) )

B) And then I stuck in my drafts a really cool picture he drew of his BITD character, Lorelai (a woman with literally-smoking purple eyes and horns, in a blue Southern Belle-style dress, surrounded by the ghosts of women in various states of decay) because that was the thing that caused me to go on his blog in the first place – I’ll have to stick it in the queue during a particularly VITD-focused week.

So that’s all set for another couple of days, yay. :) We’ll sort out Song Saturday tomorrow!

And yes, as you might expect, I am officially up too late. *sigh* Time to get to bed and hope that tomorrow is a little better, or at least doesn't set off the PMS-rage so much. Night all!

Like, it wasn't fantastic, but it wasn't horrible either. You had ups, you had downs, and overall, it was just one of those days. *shrug* Let me tell you all about it via my usual write-up:

Work – A pretty quiet start to the work week, with not a lot of calls or activity – which is good, because we still can’t process any gifts, and had to tell the couple of people who DID call in with credit card stuff that we’d have to call them back later. I spent the day doing the GL (uh, such as it was – just had the one write-off); helping my supervisor get the audit reports off the file-sharing site and over to Fiscal; doing a few more obituaries; and going over a QC file for the next capital campaign billing. Oh, and looking through the latest batch of exceptions that we got back from our processors at the end of the day...which included more shit than I thought, because they sent back the WHOLE batch from one of the parishes that had a few problem envelopes instead of just, you know, the problem envelopes. *heavy sigh* People sometimes, I swear… We’ll see what we can do with it, and the other exceptions, tomorrow!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike again today, and back to Oxventure for some more folk horror D&D with “Oxventure D&D: Wyrdwood | Chapter 2: Rootbound!” When we left our heroes, they were heading northwest on a mission, given to them at Folkmoot (the town that serves as a meeting place for all of Heorth): check on those who lived in Heorth in that direction; seek out oddness and find the cause; and see if they can get ANY hint as to what’s happened to magic to make it so unstable. Accordingly, the first chunklet of the second episode featured:

A) Our heroes making their way through the Wyrdwood, led by Lug (the firbolg barbarian, played by Mike) and Happen (the human “luck pervert” ranger, played by Luke), and with Willowfine (the aasimar cleric, played by Jane), Cressida Blackwater (the half-human half-elf wizard, played by Ellen), and Morven Hellwain (the spirit of an aberrant sorcerer currently sharing a body with Robin Oatcake, human commoner, played by Andy) bringing up the rear. Cressida and Morven in particular were bringing up the rear, as Cressida was unused to walking such long distances and thus wouldn’t stop complaining under her breath, and Morven had been awake for two days straight in a desperate effort to stay in control of Robin’s body and thus was walking a lot slower than normal. Cue Happen murmuring to Willowfine that they basically needed to stage an intervention, and Willowfine trying to talk Morven into getting some sleep because, well, sleep is healthy (and keeps you from getting things like a level of exhaustion that drops all your dice rolls by -2). Morven was VERY reluctant to go to sleep and give up control to Robin (stating if something dangerous happened or they found the answer to what had gone wrong with magic, she wanted to be awake for it), but then Happen pointed out that they could simply knock Robin out if they needed Morven’s talents for anything. Morven liked that idea, and an accord was reached where she’d get some sleep once they found a place to lie their heads, and let Robin do all the boring walking, like Lug suggested. :P

B) The gang coming across the little town (or, at least, a village with notions of being one) Oakburn in the Wyrdwood – so named because the area where it sits was cleared by a fire, leaving the soul rich with nutrients. Everything seemed pretty normal there, with people going about their business (hanging up the washing, fixing a hole in a house roof, banging away at the anvil in the blacksmith’s shop) as they do in every little town, and nothing particularly out of the ordinary happening. Though especial mention was made of their verdant vegetable gardens, with a little patch of brambles and weeds in the corner of each for the “holbans” (little satyr-like imps) to stay in – a symbol of their all-important bargains with the local Wild Folk... Anyway, the group was approached by a helpful man, who – upon hearing what they were up to and that they could use a place to rest – took them to see their “village elder,” Ashling, who greeted them cheerfully and said that, while some strange things had been happening in the village in the wake of the boom, they were doing pretty well, all things considered. But they’d be only too happy to let the group stay for a while and refresh themselves (offering them water and, in Cressida’s case, wine) before they headed off to aid people who needed help more. Hell, she ended up giving them full access to her own house, assuring them that she’d find a place to bunk down, the people here were willing to share. Sounds lovely, right?

Weeeell, not really. A few key things happened while they were talking to the man, and later Ashling at the big communal cottage where she received them before taking them to hers, that made Morven and Happen in particular feel a liiittle on edge:

I. Both the man who originally greeted them and Ashling talked a bit – oddly, at times. They needed a minute to respond to certain questions – and, more noticeably, they were a little TOO cheery about offering their help and homes to the group. Cressida said “no customer service person has ever been that nice to me” – and while that came from the stuck-up city snob of the group, it was still worth noting

II. Morven tried reading the thoughts of the man who initially greeted them, and found only two things going round and round in there – namely, get the gang water from the well, and bring them to Ashling. Very simplistic thoughts, as she noted later!

III. Happen got his ear tugged by his sprites at one point during the meeting with Ashling (thanks to Luke using the Special Luck Die when asked to make a Perception check), a silent urge from them to listen – and when he did, he realized that the sounds coming from outside had mysteriously slowed. And when he peeped out the window to see what was going on, he found the townsfolk (well, the one guy on the roof that he could see) moving in slow motion for some reason. They quickly sped up, and Happen was like “maybe it was just tiredness,” but – yeah. Something was definitely up!

C) The gang discussing how weird the town was, and deciding that, even if it wasn’t strictly MAGICAL in nature (as Morven hadn’t successfully detected magic on anything Ashling gave them), they should probably investigate, which led to the following:

I. Most of the gang taking a lunchtime nap to refresh themselves, with Morven eschewing rest in favor of keeping watch (despite Willowfine’s best attempts to lull them with a lullaby – it got Cressida instead XD) – Morven happened to spot that creepy guy with the hat that was all brim that was at Folkmoot laughing at the chaos in front of the house across from them, but when he motioned her to meet him down a nearby alleyway, she followed him in to find he’d vanished like smoke. Even trying to detect his thoughts didn’t work...though it did let her hear that the only thing the nearby villagers were thinking was “midday meal, midday meal,” adding to the creepy vibes

II. Upon Morven coming back and reiterating how many bad vibes this place gave her, Happen, Willowfine, Cressida, and Morven all ransacking Ashling’s house to see if they could get some clues as to what’s going on – what they mainly found was evidence that the house hadn’t actually been lived in for a while, with Willowfine in particular finding some letters from Ashling’s sister, worrying about her and the village, with the latest one being from two weeks ago and expressing some concern that she never got an answer to her last letter

III. Lug, meanwhile, deciding to go ask the holbans what THEY knew and if they’d be willing to lead him to the village’s secret...only to find in the nearest vegetable bramble patch three dead ones. Slain by some outside force an unknown amount of time ago. :O And when he went to check the goat pen, remembering that Ashling had said they keep goats for milk, he found it completely empty. D: That’s not good.

So yeah – bad shit is going down, and it’s likely linked to those dead holbans and somebody breaking the ancient pacts with the Wild Folk. I left off with Lug arriving back at the house to report his findings to the others, who’d already come to the conclusion they needed to find where Ashling went when she headed off after letting them have the house. Tomorrow, we see if they manage to track the wayward village elder down...and if anything comes of the fact that both Morven and Cressida sipped the town’s well water at their meeting with her...

2. Continue writing “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Check plus tonight, I am pleased to report –

A) First, I got another page done on Chapter 4! Mostly featuring the gang getting a bit more packing done (taking all of Victor’s pictures off the wall and getting his suits and shirts in the carpet bag) while Victor continued to stress out about the fact that he had a lot of clothes and Alice and Smiler reassured him some more that they didn’t feel like he was flaunting his wealth or anything like that. What can I say – after seeing how poorer people live, and becoming friends with two of them, Victor has a lot of unnecessary guilt about the advantages being a Van Dort has given him. Fortunately, Smiler and Alice are willing to say things like “don’t punish yourself for your parents’ sins” and “you’re not spoiled, you’re slightly off at best” until he believes them. And to remind him that he is their friend and they enjoy his company and he makes them happier. :) I ended things with Alice and Victor being playfully snarky at each other – next time, we’ll see about getting the rest of his things packed up!

B) And second, I added two things to the BG3 Master Doc’s section on Smiler that I wanted to make sure got brought up at some point in the future, when I do that “the gang has to take on Dr. Kelman” story:

I. While writing the “don’t punish yourself for parents’ sins” line from Smiler, I got to thinking about how they knew what they were talking about because of Kelman, and their decision to run away from him at age 12 – and then had the thought “what if they had to break out of their room because they’d been locked in? Would explain how they know how to pick locks.” So yeah, I’m retconning in that Smiler was lying when they said they’d never picked a lock before in “A Murder Shared Is A Murder Thirded” – they have picked ONE, the one on their bedroom, to escape the Sanctuary after a bad fight with Kelman. Naturally, since they try to avoid talking about that period of their life whenever possible, they weren’t about to bring it up to their new friends right then! Victor and Alice will have to wait to learn that tidbit…

II. And, inspired by adding that, I finally added a note about someone I’ve been thinking about a bit lately – Smiler’s birth mother. You may notice that Dr. Kelman’s always been a single father whenever he pops up in an AU? Well, the reason for that is because I never gave much thought to who Smiler’s birth mother should be – I was always more focused on their relationship with Kelman. I always figured that she’d probably died or left when Smiler was a baby and thus was never going to be important to an AU…

And then, in the shower a few weeks back, I had an awful idea – what if, after Smiler was born, she started suffering postpartum depression...and Dr. Kelman tried to “fix” her with his horrible brain surgeries? D: Yeaaah, so now Smiler’s birth mother is another one of Dr. Kelman’s failed “experiments,” and there is a non-zero chance the VITD trio will run into her while roaming the Sanctuary. Talk about a gut-punch for poor Smiler! I just need to give the poor woman a name now...

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – watched a fun video that popped up in my Recommendeds just today: “FUNNIEST Baldur's Gate 3 Mods | We React to the Most Out of Pocket Mods for BG3” by OXBox! :D Ellen, Mike, and Andy reacting to footage of a bunch of weird-ass BG3 mods inflicted upon them by Jane! Including:

A) Prudence demonstrating the power of the Thomas The Tank Engine summon (complete with glowing red eyes in the character portrait and 69 health)

B) A tour of Baldur’s Gate itself, showing off how all the chairs in the game had been replaced with the cute froggy chair from Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Ellen instantly recognized it and had a squee moment)

C) The reveal that Gale had been shrunk into a halfling...and then having him meet with an Elminster sporting a pair of, uh, “big naturals” (tumblr meme, it means he has amazing, if hairy, cleavage now)

D) Bananastarion (aka a naked Astarion in a large banana with his face, pecs, and ass poking out) braving the Nautiloid and waking up on the beach after the crash (Ellen could NOT stop laughing)

E) Prudence having chats with a “yassified” Shadowheart (think horrible plumped lips and hollowed cheeks), a Joker-ized Astarion (the makeup actually didn’t look half-bad on him), and a Withers with Big Naturals (which everyone concluded that, given the amount of decay, HAD to actually be silicone – Andy was like “correct the mod name mod maker!”)

F) Prudence demonstrating the power of the summoned Shrek (who looked particularly goofy given he lumbered about like any other ogre in this game and had a particularly dead-eyed stare XD)

G) Prudence returning to Baldur’s Gate to show that it had been taken over by giant rabbits (Andy and Mike were concerned, Ellen deeply charmed – and then horrified when Prudence chose to attack one of them)

H) Prudence having a chat with a “handsome” Astarion with a huge nose and cleft chin and even more sunken-in cheeks than the yassified Shadowheart (everyone was horrified by his giant lips – oh, and fun fact? The person who made that mod also made the “Alt Lae’zel Hair For Tav” mod that I used for Smiler’s haircut for a bit)

I) Prudence leading around a bunch of gnome-ified versions of the Origin characters, causing a lot of jokes about her leading kids around on a school field trip (though Ellen wasn’t a fan of Lae’zel having a normal nose in this mode)

J) Prudence leading around Shadowheart, Gale, and Astarion – who kept running around on all fours (Shadowheart constantly, Gale about half the time, and Astarion when the mod remembered – Ellen, Mike, and Andy were like “that’s creepy” and “this is definitely a kink thing”)

K) And someone (Jane insisted it was someone else’s save file) romancing both Lae’zel and Handsome Astarion...as a character whose head was just a throbbing brain (an Elder Brain, according to the mod linked the description) – the trio officially tapped out when Handsome Astarion went in for the kiss XD

Delightful stuff – some of these mods I already knew about thanks to the “Modding Mayhem” short, but others were, uh, very much new. XD Bananastarion was fantastic, and the gnome versions of all the Origin characters were so cute. ...Could have done without seeing the “Elder Brain Head” character, admittedly, but eh. Rest were great! I do love these “react” videos they’re doing now – they find some excellent weird-ass stuff!

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: N/A, as it usually is on Mondays, when I have just Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about and no truly pressing drafts to work on. *shrug* Hopefully I can figure out my Wednesday-through-Saturday queue when the time comes tomorrow!

Not bad, I think -- but now I really have to go to bed, as I am TIRED. Night all!

As you shall see once I present to you today's write-up:

Tumblr: Decently productive day over on the tumbls –

Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here, I spent the time before lunch working on the “Teen Valicer Save” post, just like I wanted! Specifically, I made it my mission to finish off the sections covering the individual goals I had for each member of the trio through their teenhood, college years, and adulthood (updating the “general overview” section to match as I went – for example, I took out the line in there about Smiler definitely going to Foxbury for college because I saw some Britechester degrees – Communications and Drama – that might suit them better). I’m pleased to say I mostly succeeded – everyone now has line items talking about what part-time jobs they might get in high school, and what after-school activities they might join; what I’m considering having them study in college, and what organizations they might join; what their occult status will be; what aspirations they’ll be tackling; and what they’ll be doing vis-a-vis careers as once they have their degrees. I just need to finish off Victor and Alice’s sections on their aspirations a bit (I listed four for Smiler to tackle, and I want to make sure Victor and Alice have the same number listed for theirs) and write a concluding paragraph or two (covering the main reasons I haven’t started the file yet – bugs, yo). We’ll see if I can get to that tomorrow!

Valice Multiverse – And over here, I spent some time tonight:

A) Answering an anon ask about how, even if your father embarrasses you, at least he’s never done what Vince McMahon did once and referred to you as “the product of his semen” on TV – I had the Inevitable High School version of the Valicer trio answer, with Victor and Smiler being grateful their dads have never done that, and Alice being like “same – I mean, mine’s dead, but I still don’t think he would have done that if he were alive” XD

B) Having a brief DM conversation with WeirdKev about whether or not it was a good idea for a Kindred to donate blood – my initial thought was “no, because that’s a good way to accidentally ghoul someone” (as I believe you can become a ghoul through injecting the blood, not just drinking it); Kev countered that vitae has some major health benefits, and anyway, doesn’t vitae lose the ability to ghoul/enslave people the longer it’s out of the vampire? I admitted I had heard that and did some research –

Aaand discovered, as per this wiki article (which, warning, has a kind of gory picture front and center), that not only does vampire vitae lose the ability to ghoul within a few minutes of leaving the vampire’s body and being exposed to air, it ALSO stops being vitae and becomes a mix of ordinary blood from multiple different sources. Meaning that, while it wouldn’t be a ghouling risk, it would also be absolutely useless for transfusions. So no, still not a good idea for Kindred to donate blood!

Sims 4: Well – after spending most of the week watching Sims-related videos with my workouts, and spending my pre-lunch time today working on the “Teen Valicer Save” post in the Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) drafts, how could I not jump back into this game for a little more building action? :) Though I forewent downloading any patches in favor of playing offline again – I wanted to keep using the little bit of CC I’d put back into my Mods folder. Mostly because the current build I’m working on is that “Smiler’s Potion Caravan” lot, and I wanted to keep the Crypt-O-Club wallpapers and doors and all that with their bright yellow and blacks in there. They’re just so very Smiler! Even if they aren’t particularly “fantasy,” like the build is supposed to be...eh, I have so little yellow-and-black stuff in this game that really suits them, I think I can forgive these items for not being quite on theme. ;P Anyway – here’s what I accomplished today:

A) First things first – I took out all the furniture currently in the build, then went ahead and removed the columns and spandrel I put in last time to open up the “selling room” bit of the caravan to the outside, replacing them with a regular wall (though I did have to move the roof temporarily to fix a visual glitch that then popped up on the top of said wall). Reason? Well, my original plan for that room was to have the columns and spandrel create a “doorway” into said room, then see what decorations I could use to fake having a pair of big double doors on either side that could theoretically swing shut to cover the gap. But right as I was loading into the game today, it occurred to me that I could, you know, just use a pair of double doors there. XD I needed just the right pair of double doors, though, so (after a brief moment taken to see if I liked the bright yellow Growing Together shingles better on the walls – that was a big fat “No”) I spent some time considering my options and playing around a bit with the wall heights (as for some reason all the Realm of Magic double doors only come in “Medium” or higher, meh). In the end, I decided that the best fit for this particular build was the Horse Ranch Crossbuck Sliding Doors in black (as the yellow swatch was a little pale for my liking). Mostly because they looked like the kind of doors you’d have on a caravan like this, that could be easily slid open and shut depending on the circumstances. There was just one problem with them –

They wouldn’t get along with the stairs. I had to delete the stairs I’d placed for people to walk into the little “shop” room previously to get the doors on the wall, and after I placed them, I couldn’t replace the stairs without deleting the doors. Which, uh, kinda confused me, because the stairs were playing nicely with the OTHER door in the build! Then again, that door is a normal “swing” door, while the Crossbuck doors are sliding, as per the name – maybe the game thinks the doors couldn’t slide over the stair bit? The landing DOES have a bit of a lip on it… Still, I wanted Sims to at least be able to theoretically access the “shop” area (I may want to actually use this build one day, after all!), so since I couldn’t have stairs, I experimented a bit with lowering the foundation instead to make it possible for Sims to step inside without needing the extra help. However, after dropping the caravan down a few notches, I couldn’t help but think that it looked a bit silly on such a low foundation...plus I couldn’t remember if that “if only one step up, Sims don’t need stairs” rule held true for foundations, or only platforms. Like, I was PRETTY sure it works with foundations, since those came first, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. So I decided to abandon that problem for a while and turn my attention to the next item on my list –

B) Wheels! Because it’s not really a caravan if it doesn’t have a way to travel around, does it? And I’d recently discovered where I could get some wheels, thanks to this lovely article by Sims Community about cool fantasy builds perfect for the Enchanted By Nature pack! Specifically, the second build on the list, which was the “Tiny Fantasy Wagon” by Devon Bumpkin! As you might imagine, such a build was VERY relevant to my interests, and I’d made sure a few days earlier to pop into the included build video, just long enough to see where he’d gotten the wheels for his wagon. Turned out they were a debug item (the back ones being sized up with the help of the TOOL mod), which meant I could track them down in my own game once I got the debug stuff to show up in Build/Buy! So, after a quick save (because the last time I tried to use cheats in the offline version of Sims 4, the damn game crashed), I opened up the cheat bar, typed in both “bb.showhiddenobjects” and “bb.showliveeditobjects” and began searching! It took me a while to find them, though, and along the way, I came across a couple of contenders from Cottage Living that nearly took the intended wheels’ place – a big old rusty metal wheel with treads, and a pair of wheels attached to a plow-thing that I thought I could hide in the foundation. However, the plow-thing ended up being too narrow to fit properly on my build – and when I put on “bb.moveobjects” so I could resize it, I discovered that trying to size it up made it HUGE. Like, WAAAY too build to use on this build! And while the rusty metal wheels kinda looked cool, I couldn’t get them close enough to the foundation to make them look like they were actually ATTACHED, even with the power of the ALT key. So I ended up going with the original debug wheels I’d seen in Devon’s build/video (a Horse Ranch item, as I’d guessed) – grabbing a set of four once I found them in the rows of items; raising the caravan’s foundation back up a little so the “axle” portion of the wheels would line up properly with the bottom lip of the foundation; then carefully placing them with the help of the ALT key until they were nice and close to the foundation, and all lined up with each other. Had to move the “front door” and attached stairs over a bit to accommodate the first front wheel, and fiddle around with getting them lined up on one of the grid lines so I could mirror them properly on each side, but I got it all to work in the end! And then immediately saved again so I wouldn’t have to do it again. XD So now the caravan has (admittedly small and slightly broken) wheels, yay!

Oh, and as a side note – while I was placing the wheels, I decided to see if having the “move objects” cheat on would allow me to place stairs going into the sliding doors…and it totally did! :) So now I have a set of stairs going into the “shop” room again, yay~ Dunno how functional they are, of course, but we’re not worrying about that right now. XD

C) With THAT done, I turned my attention to another matter – namely, Smiler’s bed. I’d originally gone ahead and thrown the single version of the “Burst of Pride” bed in the nonbinary swatch into the build because, well, they’re nonbinary and it’s very them – but I saw in that “Tiny Fantasy Wagon” build that Devon had chosen to use a loft bed in his wagon build. And I couldn’t help but think that one of the more “rustic” loft beds from Horse Ranch or Werewolves might suit the build a little better AND give Smiler a tad more floor space, if necessary. So I went and looked at my options for both beds. The Werewolves loft bed I quickly eliminated, as it had no good swatches, but I did find a reasonably acceptable yellow bed from Horse Ranch that I thought might work. I stuck that in the room that had previously been the long and thin bathroom (as I was rethinking Smiler having a bathroom in the caravan anyway – make more sense to have to use whatever nature provided outside, right?) to see how I liked it. So far, I’m thinking it’s okay, and I’ve put the “Burst of Pride” bed aside for the moment (along with the Realm of Magic toilet I was using before). I just wish that we could choose the bed frame and bed covers colors separately, like we could in Sims 2 – it would look a lot better if it was a yellow bed with a black wood frame! Meeeh…

D) Speaking of replacing things, right afterward I ended up replacing the Home Chef Hustle food stand with the Jungle Adventures selling table in the build – while I do love the HCH stand, the JA selling table had a smaller footprint, AND a more rustic look that fit the aesthetic of the build better. AND a nice color swatch with a yellow table and a purple blanket over it. :D To my annoyance, though, I still could not fit both the Realm of Magic cauldron and the selling table in the “shop” room, despite the new table being smaller! I mean, yes, I suppose I could have kept “bb.moveobjects on” and placed them like that, but I really wanted to place them without the cheat so I could be at least reasonably sure they were functional. I even tried making the middle room a little bit bigger at one point to see if that helped them coexist – nope, nothing doing. *grumbles* In the end, I decided that maybe the middle room should just be the “alchemy” area – aka where Smiler does all the brewing – and they then take the selling table out and about to sell the results. So the current state of affairs is the cauldron is in the middle room, and the selling table is out near the front of the lot. Loaded up with various potions because, hell, I had the “show debug items” cheat on, and thus they were visible in Build/Buy for the taking. :p Might as well give Smiler some freebies for the aesthetic!

E) While I was trying to figure out the cauldron/selling table situation, I realized that Smiler also needed a mailbox for this to be a functional house. However, since this is supposed to be a “mobile” home, I didn’t want to put down a mailbox on a post, so I went looking for a wall-mounted mailbox that I could stick on the side of the caravan. I stumbled across the one from Snowy Escape first – the Snailbox Mailbox – and took a look at the swatches, looking to see if there was a good yellow or black one –
And stumbled across one that had been painted to look like it had a face! :D I was utterly charmed and – convinced this was a thing Smiler would do – happily put it on the caravan by the front door. I love when I stumble across stuff like that in this game!

F) I also realized that the inside of the caravan needed doors (so you could, you know, move from one room to another) and lights, so I slapped in the “Spoopy Portals Zigzag” and “Spoopy Portals Stripes” doors from Crypt-O-Club’s “Creepy Creations” collab in yellow and black to connect the rooms, and put up some of those Realm Of Magic Totally Lit Buglights (in the purple-winged/yellow-bodied swatch) to help light the place. Though the bug lights ended up being rather too dim to light the areas properly, so I ended up also hanging a Horse Ranch chandelier in each room to PROPERLY light them up. Though I don’t know how smart it is to have OPEN FLAME in a WOODEN caravan like this...on the other hand, the one Realm of Magic chandelier is RIDICULOUSLY big and does NOT size down well, so what is a girl to do? *shrug* If I want to change it later, I can!

G) After finally deciding to just put the selling table outside with all the potions, I decided to get a bunch of items that I thought Smiler would need/want while I got their caravan back in order, including:

I. The Lovestruck acoustic guitar, since that one has the best yellow swatch – it’s currently in the corner of their little bedroom area, ready to be played whenever they feel the urge

II. The Horse Ranch variant of the pee/woohoo bush, for them to do their business out-of-doors (because, again, I’m rethinking them having a toilet inside)

III. The Laundry Day clothesline and washtub, put in the corner of the lot, so they can wash their clothes (I do love inflicting laundry on my Sims)

IV. The “ring of stones” Outdoor Retreat campfire (because I realized this was starting to look a bit like a campsite, and figured they should have a campfire in that case – good way to cook food too, even if I’m letting them keep their kitchen for the moment)

V. And the Life & Death Crowskin journal in the yellow swatch (for writing down their thoughts/alchemy recipes – it’s sitting on their selling table for the time being until I figure out if I can get them a desk)

H) And finally, I decided that I really need to get the floors and walls INSIDE the caravan sorted before I quit for the day. So I went into the wooden flooring section to see what was good there –

Forgetting that I’d previously set up some color filters to look specifically for things that were yellow, black, or purple. Meaning one of the first floorings I saw was the City Living Basketball planks in bright purple. Just for funsies, I picked it and tried it out in one of the rooms –

And was like “shit, I kind of like this. And think it’s in character.” So, uh, yeah, I put it in the entire caravan. XD I’m not ENTIRELY sure I’ll keep it, but for now it was fun, in a very “oh no, why would they do this (but they would totally do this)” kind of way. XD

As for the walls – well, there’s a reason I mentioned wanting to keep Crypt-O-Club’s wallpapers in the game, as I ended up using them here! Specifically, I used the Blank Planked wall – with a yellow paint top half, and a black wood lower half – in the “alchemy” room, the bedroom, and MOST of the kitchen, and the Checkered Planked wall – with a yellow-and-black checkerboard pattern above the planks – behind the actual kitchen stuff. I thought the latter looked good as a “backsplash.” XD Again, I’m not CONVINCED I’m going to go with this for the “final” design (as previously mentioned, it’s not very fantasy), but again, it’s fun for now.

And there I left things! Build is far from finished, but I think it’s starting to come together, at least in a small way. Maybe next time I’ll have a fully-patched game and be able to look at the Gallery again for more inspiration. We shall see!

Writing: Started Chapter 4 of “The Van Dort Vacancy” today, switching back to Victor’s POV as he led Alice and Smiler over to his room so they could pack up his things before starting their assault on the Van Dort vault! Alice and Smiler were like “we knew this place was big, but that was still quite the hike.” XD Anyway, after a bit of banter about the pair being surprised Nell let Victor paint his door blue (instead of sticking with the largely-green color scheme of the rest of the house – Victor figures his father convinced her it would be fine, who would see it), the trio headed inside, with Alice noting with some puzzlement how minimal Victor’s room was (he admitted he was not a collector like his mother); Smiler admiring Victor’s collection of butterfly pictures (Victor told them he’s been drawing them since he was small, so that’s why he’s such a good artist); and Victor IMMEDIATELY reclaiming the wallet and spirit bane charm he accidentally left behind when he left for the fateful wedding rehearsal (he won’t be making THAT mistake again...even if that mistake has had some pretty good consequences for him). I left it with Alice and Smiler taking down his pictures for him while Victor got a bag and figured out exactly what he wanted to pack – tomorrow, Victor goes in his closet to get his bag and some changes of clothes, and Alice and Smiler get to be O.o about how many suits he has. :P Fun!

YouTube: I am happy to report that, despite getting to it a little later than I wanted, I was still able to clear out my Watch Later without issue, yay~

A) First up were our OXBoxtra lists of the week:

I. “7 Annoying Side Quests that Locked You Out of the Main Game” – Ellen and Mike talking about those quests that lock you out of the rest of the main game until they’re done, and sometimes even screw up your carefully-curated build! Examples ranged from genuine side quests (“An Unexpected Journey” in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, triggered by sleeping on the Bloated Float, an inn built into a docked sailing ship – you wake up to find the ship has been taken over by pirates, and have to kill them all and free the crew before you can go back to land and continue your adventures; not a long quest, but apparently a bit of a slog), to DLC quests (“Dead Money” in Fallout: New Vegas, triggered by following a certain radio signal down a bunker – you end up trapped in the very toxic Sierra Madre Casino, forced to obey the whims of Father Elijah or get your head blown off; points to this one for warning you right before you start that it’s going to lock you into a new area until the DLC is completed, though), to actual main quests that apparently had “side quest vibes” and still stuck you in a new location that you couldn’t escape until you completed everything there (the “Guerra” part of Red Dead Redemption 2 – you find yourself stranded with Arthur’s gang on a Caribbean island, far away from the American West, and have to help the people there before you’re allowed to leave; Mike’s main complaints seemed to be “questline is too linear and they won’t let us explore more of the pretty island”). The moral? Be careful when accepting quests – you may find yourself locked into some nonsense you very much don’t like but have to see through to the end! Also, be careful visiting Mike’s friend Martin, the lock on his bathroom might be broken – apparently Mike had to climb out the window at a party once. XD

II. “7 Worst Perks You Must NEVER Take: Commenter Edition” – Andy, Mike, and Jane going through more useless or actively harmful “perks” that you are strongly advised not to take in video games, based on the suggestions from the comments in their last video on the subject! Enjoying having an extra +2 to Intelligence and Perception from “Night Person” in Fallout 4 and think taking Rank 2 would be a good idea? BAM, you’re hit with the fact that crouching gives you “night vision” now, which makes everything look washed out and blurry around the edges, and activates not only in the darkness of the great outdoors, but also WELL-LIT BUILDINGS. Think having the spell “Spontaneous Combustion” will help you against the horrors in Fear And Hunger 2: Termina? BAM, the moment you cast it, you discover all it does is burn you to death. Think the “Poisoned Chalice” trinket in Deathloop is worth taking a risk on, despite it being a gift from the woman trying constantly to murder you? BAM, you – apparently can’t read or are trying a masochistic death run, as it says RIGHT IN THE DESCRIPTION that the only thing it does is drain your health. *shakehead* Sometimes these horrible perks are self-inflicted, I gotta say. But I suppose somebody’s gotta do the challenge runs!

B) And second, fresh off C. M. Alongi’s virtual video presses, we had “CaFae Latte Season 71 - TikTok Compilation!” Gigs warned me this one was going to make me mad, and – well, let me tell you what this one involved:

I. Oscar chatting with Andy/Vet Grampa during his break about the new pastor who visited at the end of last episode (Oscar hoping that he’ll soon get moved or his congregation won’t get big enough to support the church; Vet Grampa not being so sure), which – after Drek took their plates – led to Vet Grampa revealing a pet peeve of his: the younger generation saying “no problem” in response to a “thank you” instead of “you’re welcome.” Nicole, who happened to overhear, took it upon herself to explain “it’s because we’re all riddled with anxiety over being a burden and want to assure others that helping them is not a problem so they don’t feel the guilt over asking us to help” – Vet Grampa was like “awful way to live, but makes sense; thanks for explaining” (Nicole: “No problem.” XD)

II. The ER Nurse discovering that the cafe was closed for Independence Day, and a sign asking customers to donate what they would have spent to the ACLU, or Planned Parenthood, or 180 Degrees, or a local food shelf – she chose Planned Parenthood and headed off to Vet Grampa’s firehouse to see if she could get coffee there, and C. M. put up some text slides asking what everyone’s favorite color is and revealing hers is red (which everyone is surprised by) to make sure the video reached 60 seconds so she could get paid for it :p

III. JC ranting to Cyrus about how they’ll never go back to using the men’s bathroom (because, as they discovered the first time they used it to avoid a line at the men’s during a sports game, the women’s bathroom is cleaner, and the women in it much friendlier and unlikely to give them shit about wearing a skirt or dress than men in the men’s bathroom) as a customer listened in, looking rather confused; JC then asked Cyrus about the knitted flower he was wearing, with Cyrus revealing it was from Yarn Granny and that he got it during the last day of pride. The customer said “makes you look like a girl” – cue Cyrus fluttering his eyelashes and asking if he was a pretty girl, and Rethu showing up, assuring him he was gorgeous, kissing him, then telling the customer in their no-nonsense voice to get out. Customer fled, and JC said “you should really wait until AFTER they give us money to do that” XD

IV. Drek dealing with a very indecisive customer at the counter, who was finally interrupted by the guy behind her being like “let the people who can make a decision go first – I’ll have an Italian Soda, $5, keep the change” and causing her to flounce off to Starbucks; the guy, Conner, sympathized with Drek having to deal with those idiots (Drek revealing that normally he gets to hide in the back, but someone called out sick – cut to Husniya trying to insist she can work and Asif telling her “you have a 104 fever, SIT DOWN”), then asked Drek what was cool in town since he and his dad had just moved here. Drek happily told him about the car shows that turn into riverside concerts, and the game shop down the street that’s an excellent place to play both Magic: The Gathering and D&D – Conner was like “oh, I love Magic, I asked for cards for graduation and now I gotta try ‘em out!” They exchanged names, and Conner promised he’d be back around, leaving Drek to grin after him, awww~

V. Drek approaching JC to ask how you know someone’s into men, and then how to ask them out – JC guessed he was talking about Conner, then asked if the kid had ever dyed his hair or worn Pride stuff that Drek knew of. Drek admitted he hadn’t seen anything like that so far and showed JC Conner’s Instagram… and JC noticed a Bible verse in his bio and went “bad sign.” Drek countered that Oscar, Husniya, and Asif were all religious and queer, but JC said that, in their experience, that was usually an exception, not the rule. Drek replied that Conner was a regular and nobody was hiding anything about themselves, so… JC allowed that, then told Drek that he was probably just going to have to bite the bullet and ask, stressful as that was, pointing out that being blunt was the best way because he’d know right away if he was dealing with a homophobe; a straight guy or someone just not into him; or a potential date.

VI. And Drek lingering near the front counter near the end of his shift to talk to Conner when he came in (with JC starting the dishes for him) – Conner showed up for his usual and a scone for his dad; they talked about the fact that he was applying for a job at Wulver’s Seafood; Conner asked if Bob could put in a good for him, and Drek was like “she’s not a fan of nepotism and also super scary;” Conner admitted he found women who could kill you more terrifying than men who could kill you, maybe because of their beauty; a saddened Drek was like “you prefer women” and revealed he was gay and planning to ask Conner out when Conner was like “you don’t?” –

And Conner revealed he was a major homophobe who was utterly disgusted by the fact that Drek was gay – and by the entire cafe when Drek revealed everyone there was queer. Drek told him he should probably get out until he learned to be nice to his friends, and Conner eagerly left, causing the episode to end on poor Drek crying before going back to tell JC he had the dishes. :( Awww, Drek – he needs all the hugs from his friends! And as the commenters said, it’s worrying that Conner has a name, meaning he might be back for more bullshit...fortunately, the commenters are ALSO mounting an army to take down Conner for making Drek cry, so I think Drek will be fine. :P

So yeah -- some nice Simmy vibes this Saturday! It was fun getting back to the Caravan build, and working on the "Teen Valicer Save" post. :) And now I have to hit the sack -- tomorrow, goals include finishing off that "Teen Valicer Save" post in Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler)'s drafts if I can; either playing some Superliminal or working on getting Baldur's Gate III in shape for my "this is my final attempt at starting a new game I swear" run; working more on Chapter 4 of "The Van Dort Vacancy;" getting in a workout; and keeping up with Jon of Many A True Nerd (he posted what the new series is going to be -- a You Only Live Once (aka no healing) run through Fallout: New Vegas! Which is something he's done before, but apparently this is the "remastered" version, which intrigues me...) We'll see what I achieve! Night all!

Not only did it POUR this morning -- like, it was coming down HARD when I woke up, and didn't let up for a WHILE -- the rest of the day was that most horrible of combinations -- cool, but still humid. AKA the kind of weather you can get no relief from, because bundling up just makes you feel icky from the humidity, but AC just makes you cold. *grumbles* It's supposed to warm up again tomorrow, and Dad said it wasn't humid outside when he took out the trash, but -- we'll see what happens. The weather has been a bit unpredictable as of late!

In the meantime, here's how my day went:

Work – Well, I had to brave that absolutely POURING rain during this morning’s commute in (fortunately, while I did face some big puddles near the end, none of them were “attempt to swallow the car” big), but after that, it was a pretty quiet Thursday, all things considered – there was one call from someone who needed to update her card on her pledge, and then I spent pretty much the entire rest of the day working on obituaries, with one small break to help my coworker look something up (apparent duplicate pledge). *shrug* Was a bit bored, but it wasn’t too horrible! And the rain stopped this afternoon, meaning my ride home was nice and dry, yay~ Just five hours left to get through tomorrow – fingers crossed they’re good hours!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – took my penultimate ride on the bike this week, pedaling my way through:

A) The end of “Tiny Town Finale! - Part 30” by James Turner! The finale of the finale saw our intrepid Simmer:

I. Finish off the basement of the Town Center! Which involved him –

a. expanding the Vault Room so he could stick the “display case” room for the spare Book Of Life (just in case somebody needs their saga recaptured) with its giant window on the side of THAT room to get some more wall space in the “atrium” where the Spares portraits were going to go

b. making a second “display case” room on the other side of the Vault Room for the Plumbite spire that helped keep everyone’s needs up during the tough times (presented tastefully on the tray of the butler statue XD)

c. and deciding to make a separate “Hall of Spares” coming off the end of the main hall after running into one too many problems trying to place things in the atrium because the game kept acting like he was trying to put stuff in the pond that surrounds Sonny’s lot above. :p Could not blame him for that! The new room was thus created, and filled with the portraits of pets, spouses, and kids that Krystoff had painted…

Including both portraits of Kaya, Krystoff’s own dog (as James had him paint her initial portrait against a blue background, before realizing that it should have been red to match Krystoff’s own color). Meaning the two sides were uneven, as there were six pet pictures, but only five spouse/kid pictures. No, he never did notice that he had two pictures of the same dog, much to my frustration (and the frustration of some of the other commenters). I have decided to just assume that Krystoff decided to show a little favoritism to his own pet after painting all those damn pictures (and, admittedly, the portrait with the blue background WAS a masterpiece, so…).

II. Throw a big dinner party to send off the series! Which, in typical Tiny Town fashion, did not go as planned –

a. Very few of the Sims actually ate together at the big tables James set up (though Krystoff at least immediately got the party to Gold by attempting to call everyone to dinner...multiple times)

b. Sonny, frightened of something, screamed at his own siblings when he first arrived before runnig off again (causing James to have a laughing fit)

c. The organist James had Raoul hire for entertainment was a huge victim of townie fashion, sporting some of that awful new pride make-up (James laughed even harder at that)

d. And James’s attempts to wrangle the core Tiny Towners to sit at some temporary picnic tables he placed in the “town square” was beset by constant problems, including both a naked Raoul AND a fully-clothed Camillo getting themselves stranded on Reuben’s balcony (forcing James to teleport them off), Pablo refusing to initially sit down because he was busy talking to Kyra, and the other Sims refusing to sit still for more than like three seconds. James eventually gave up and settled for pausing the game at the point where MOST of them were sitting down and Scarlet was standing at the end of the table –

And then he zoomed out, and found the organist standing in the perfect place to ruin the shot. As James put it, “if that’s not Tiny Town, I don’t know what is.” XD Anyway, he thanked everyone for watching, then unpaused the game and watched everyone get up and leave Krystoff all alone…

And then got up himself and just walked off. XD Perfect ending to the series, frankly! And now I find myself tempted by Tiny Town thoughts again...think of how frustrating it would be to wrangle all those Sims, Vic...

B) The entirety of “Baldur's Gate 3: 20+ Easily Missed Tips (Spoiler Free)” by Proxy Gate Tactician! One of earlier videos, featuring a bunch of tips and tricks for playing the game that he wasn’t sure everyone knew about, but which were super useful! Such tips included:

I. Use the “Mask of the Shapeshifter” or the “Shapeshift” spell to tactically shapeshift – like to make yourself smaller to get into tight spaces, or to use Speak With Dead on a person you murdered (who otherwise wouldn’t be inclined to talk with their killer), or to get a second helping of a healing gruel while at the tiefling camp

II. Use Shift-Click to pick up a bunch of items at once in your inventory to move them to another container; Control-Click to do the same with a specific set of selected items; and the “sort by” button at the top of your inventory screen to sort your items by weight or value and make organizing everyone’s inventories a lot easier

III. Make sure that you tell the game to ask you before using your reactions (things that go off when an enemy does something specific – for example, letting you attack them if they try to sneak past you when too close) so that you don’t use a reaction when you don’t want to (sometimes it’s smarter not to, in fact)

IV. Feel free to pickpocket Withers to get back the gold you pay him for resurrections and respecs – no matter how many times you fail, he’ll never get mad at you

V. And be sure to use the fact that you can click and drag items in the world to do things like block doors and create barriers during fights, because manipulating objects doesn’t cost any action points!

...yeah, GUESS WHO NEVER REALIZED THAT YOU COULD DO THAT LAST ONE. Which is a little sad, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Proxy use this trick in previous videos – it just never clicked with me that it was something ANYONE could do! I think I just assumed that doing that was eating up his character’s movement or something...when I finally get back into the damn game, I am going to have to try that! Sheesh...thanks Proxy!

2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice got to brave the creepy mannequin house in the hell maze today! :D Which involved her:

A) Confirming the mannequins were actually THERE, because of course she does hallucinate often and thus can’t always trust the evidence of her own eyes – Hatter assured her that they were (though he did point out in the process that he was a figment of her imagination, so… :P)

B) Getting creeped out by the two sitting rooms full of mannequins and mannequin heads having “conversations” together (wouldn’t you be?)

C) Venturing upstairs to find another pair of mannequins curled up in bed together with a pill bottle and a pocket watch (she took the former after finding out it was morphine, figuring she could sell it to Trip or give it to Mercurio)

D) Turning around afterwards to find – oh, hello, two of the mannequins moved and are now waving at her from the doorway...and, uh, the Wonderlanders are quite insistent they had nothing to do with that

E) Fleeing downstairs, only to find MORE moved mannequins waiting for her – she promptly shouted to Grout that if he was messing with her, she’d slap him no matter what, but got no response

Yeaah, Alice is not having a fun time. I mean, she wasn’t having a fun time before, but she’s having even less fun now. XD I left it with her trying to get to the door, only to hear a mysterious ringing noise – next we work on this, she gets a creepy phone call and has to deal with more mannequin shenanigans before finally getting to flee this terrible place! Hooray! :D

3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – went back to C. M. Alongi’s channel tonight to watch “The Witch Who Trades with Death - TikTok Compilation!” A series of TikToks she made as promotional material for her new book, covering:

A) The main character Khana meeting with Death, explaining her shitty situation (concubine of the evil emperor for six years, having to sneak birth control while he tried to get heirs off her; now being threatened with being turned into a zombie slave in his army for killing his favorite mistress for killing her best friend), and Death offering her the power to get out...for a tiny piece of her soul…

B) Khana escaping and arriving in the frozen lands of Pahuuda, meeting her future best friend Haz and immediately taking a food service job because fuck it, her life is already horrible – cut to a few chapters later and love interest Sava revealing that the evil empire is invading, anyone know why? (Khana: mmmnooo?)

C) Someone sympathizing with Khana’s backstory of sexual assault and asking if she wants to get revenge; Khana saying that she doesn’t, both because she doesn’t have a chance in hell at pulling that revenge off and because all she really wants is to never see, hear, or think about him again; Sava showing up to remind everyone that the emperor is invading her new home to track down his traitor concubine; and the other person saying “well now you HAVE to get revenge” – and, when Khana was like “nope just gonna run some more” – “you’re in the middle of the tundra, you’re not going anywhere” XD

D) Neta, Khana’s eventual mentor, also being like “you were a concubine to this evil dickhead for six years?” and offering to teach her how to fight back – and then, when Khana was like “no, and I am still hoping to run to avoid him invading,” pointed out that the Emperor was NOT going to be nice to her new friends in this place...if he let them live at all; cue Khana going “what was that about teaching me to fight?”

E) C. M. talking about how, despite the main pairing being cishet, there was still plenty of queer representation in this book, with Haz talking about being a bisexual disaster and nonbinary character Athicha being revealed to be in a relationship with Neta – only for the conversation to be derailed by Khana asking about Athicha’s muteness, given she doesn’t appear to be deaf. Turns out it was the result of an old battle wound, sustained in the same fight that killed love interest Sava’s girlfriend – Khana offered to try and heal it with her magic, but Athicha signed that the wound was too old and she was doing fine with sign language. Which Neta taught her, apparently, to help her and Sava come out of their respective funks. Which later led to her and Athicha fucking, and Haz deciding he’d heard enough of this conversation XD

F) Haz chatting with Sava about his crush on Khana and how he mentioned that part of his attraction to her was that she was “safe” – after all, she’s a witch who can heal all injuries and has no interest in being a soldier; Sava confirming this and admitting he wished she was a little less scared of her own shadow, at least...and then Khana showing up to reveal that she’d just enlisted to help in the fight against the evil empire invading the land, saying she was done letting fear rule her. Haz gave her a little shit for saying that with an utterly terrified expression, then congratulated her on being a little less scared of her own shadow. XD

G) Khana and Sava both going “it’s not that I’m not interested in you, but I’m dealing with my own trauma, and we’re about to fight a war here, so we should probably put all romantic shenanigans on the back burner until that’s dealt with and we’ve figured our shit out…” and then Khana saying “unless you’re free Saturday” and Sava IMMEDIATELY accepting. XD Haz and Neta were like “straight people” while the evil emperor was like “hello, busy getting ready to invade you” (Sava: “Fuck off”)

H) Haz wondering what his chances are of surviving the book, and Neta asking about the genre – and, upon being told it’s dark fantasy, telling him “I’d keep your will up to date” XD

I) And Haz then realizing “hey, wait a minute Neta, you’re the MENTOR, you have even less chance of surviving than I do!” And Neta going, “I know, now stop being a little bitch about probably dying.” (Haz: “Book hasn’t even come out yet and already I hate it” XD)

Fun stuff! Though I’d like to tell Haz not to worry TOO much, as apparently this book’s got a happy, or at least happyish, ending. That has to up his and Neta’s survival chances, right?

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – I didn’t do anything over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) because that queue is set, but over on Valice Multiverse, I chucked my latest set of Valicer Not-Incorrect Quotes (about them moving in together – hang on, I never linked those, did I? Here you go) and the “Valicer as text posts” post (For your enjoyment) into the queue! Because I had nothing else going on, and it’s fun to share some of this stuff again on my RP blog. :p We’ll see if anything new pops up tomorrow!

And that is pretty much that! And now I should really head to bed before I succumb to the temptation to look at the official Baldur's Gate III mod page again. XD Tomorrow, my goals after work are a little up in the air because I have some errands to run (get some gas, hit the bank, and buy a transponder for getting through toll booths easier) -- I was going to have a Fallout Friday, but if those take a little too long, I may instead switch tactics and see about instead finishing off my Superliminal Collectibles Run this weekend. I only have three ACTUAL levels to go (the final bit, "Retrospective," is basically just a glorified cutscene), so I might as well, right? We'll see what happens, I suppose -- night all!