Tigger

I was grumpy, wound up, distracted, and/or tired for much of the day -- which is only to be expected on the second day of my period, but still. Meh. *shakehead* Anyway, I'm currently in the really tired part of the cycle (mostly because I've stayed up too late again), so here's the daily write-up:

Work – My last day at work this week ended up – somewhat awkward. Not because of anything that happened during the actual “work” portion of the day – that was pretty quiet, with me doing the GL, researching some pledges with overpayments and contacting the donors (and doing a reversal after one got back to me asking for the money to go to the next Appeal year), doing a final payment on a pledge with a guy who needed to update his credit card (got hacked right before finishing!), and researching some returned mail to see if there was anything that I needed to do with it (there was not). No, the awkwardness resulted from me coming in and seeing a decent-sized Christmas gift bag sitting on my desk from my supervisor – containing a mug-with-mini-hot-chocolate-envelope-and-marshmallows gift set, an extra envelope of hot chocolate, a $25 Amazon gift card, and a mini-bag of LINDOR chocolates – and then getting a larger bag of LINDOR chocolates and a $25 Kohl’s gift card from my coworker when she got in. Because, well, I’d gotten them gifts too –

But my gifts were a $15 Dunkin gift card each. Because I didn’t know if we were even doing Christmas gift exchanges this year – nothing was discussed – and Mom convinced me it would be a good idea to have the gift cards on hand, just in case. Which, yes, it was, but – yeah. I would have gone for at least a bigger dollar amount if I’d know this was coming my way! *facepalm* Suppose it’s better than not having ANYTHING for them, but...meh. I really wish we’d talked about it first! Ah well – Mom and I are discussing using at least part of the Amazon card to get some snacks for the office, so that’ll help balance the books at least a little in my head.

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – last night on the bike, last night with the Terry Pratchett classic Hogfather! Which saw me pedal through the following –

A) The end of the TV movie itself, which featured:

I. Post DEATH’s dispatch of the Auditor Wolves, Susan looking around and finding blood on the snow, and the dead Hogfather boar a little ways away; however, as she was weeping over his body, declaring this wasn’t how the story was supposed to go, the mountains were suddenly illuminated by the sun...and the boar transformed into a tattooed man, who greeted it with arms raised (because remember, it’s blood and sacrifice that brings the sun up)

II. The reborn Hogfather, now back in his modern look and robes, being escorted back to his sleigh by DEATH and Susan – and discovering DEATH’S false beard on the seat when he sits on it. XD An embarrassed DEATH apologizes, and the Hogfather gives him and Susan a little nod before heading off

III. Susan asking DEATH if he was sure she would survive all that (“I HAD EVERY CONFIDENCE”) and then inquiring what would have happened if she HADN’T saved the Hogfather; Death explained that the sun would not have come up, but rather that a mere ball of flaming gas would have shone over the world. Susan was like “I see – you’re saying humans need fantasy to make life bearable” –

And DEATH clarified that humans needed fantasy to BE HUMAN. To be “WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.” And that little fantasies like the Tooth Fairy and the Hogfather are needed to help train humans to believe in the big ones – like Justice, and Mercy, and Duty. Because if we don’t believe in things that aren’t real – how else can they become? It’s a hell of a scene, and gets quoted a LOT in Pratchett circles, especially around this time of year.

IV. DEATH taking Susan back to her house, then asking if she’d like to come home for Hogswatch; Susan regretfully admits they’ll be expecting her here, but invites him in for a drink, taking him to the living room and having him grab a biscuit from the tin on the mantelpiece before going to make some hot cocoa. Cue Twyla coming in, informing DEATH that Susan has a poker and that she’ll come back and watch Susan beat him up once she gives her brother Gwaine his stocking, and leaving again. DEATH is a little unsettled by this. XD

V. Susan then coming back into the room with the kettle – held at swordpoint by Teatime, who has finally found her again. D: He’s delighted to see DEATH, and comments on how killing him might not even be seen as murder, but instead a civic duty – then overhears the children playing and tells Susan to call them in, as seeing this will be “educational.” DEATH gives Susan a wink (aka the blue light in one eye briefly flickers out), so Susan does as he asks –

And in come Twyla and Gwaine, who are unimpressed with Teatime, and even more unimpressed by Teatime trying to make them afraid of the skeleton. After all, the skeleton is eating a biscuit, and Teatime is the one with the creepy eye. Teatime decides to show them how creepy he can be and uses his fast feet to get behind Death –

VI. Prompting Susan to throw one of her fireplace pokers (which she managed to stealthily pick up while putting down the kettle) straight through DEATH and into Teatime’s stomach, killing him. Teatime is a little confused, wondering how it went straight through DEATH without getting stuck –

Cue Twyla informing him as he dies “It only kills monsters.” And, as has been said elsewhere by others, the kids can see who the REAL monster in the room is.

VII. Susan getting DEATH to stop time so they can have a conversation, and snapping at him that she thought he had a plan – turns out said plan was to watch what she did. XD He assured her that he would have come up with something at the last minute if things hadn’t worked out, then turned and told Mr. “Teh-A-time-Eh” to stop pretending to be dead. An astonished Teatime’s spirit rose from his corpse, shocked he’d gotten it right first time, and thus dissipated into the ether. DEATH promised to take care of the corpse, then asked Susan if she’d known for SURE the poker would go through him – Susan: “I had every confidence.” XD

VIII. And everything ending very sweetly, with DEATH giving Susan a Hogswatch card (wet from snow, and with just a feather on the front because he couldn’t get the robin to stay on it – Susan was very touched); Albert having a nice Christmas pudding fry-up and having a smoke – though he decided he didn’t like the latter; Banjo, back in the Tooth Fairy’s castle, getting his puppy; and DEATH using his powers to go back in time and buy the giant model wooden horse for Albert (warning the proprietor of the toy shop, one Joshua Isme – played by Terry Pratchett – about the boy with his nose stuck to the front window), apparently completely unaware of the fact that he’d just created a stable time loop (or maybe fully aware but not caring so long as Albert got the horse at SOME point)

B) Part of one of the special features – an interview with Terry Pratchett about the movie and his books! I unfortunately couldn’t watch the whole thing – it was too long to fit into the time I had left – but I was able to see him talking to the interviewer about such things as:

I. How the theme of Hogfather was how what sets humans apart from the rest of the world is their imagination (he even said he considered humans more pan narrativus, the “Storytelling Chimpanzee,” than homo sapiens)

II. Why this was the first live-action adaptation of a Discworld book – basically, the people behind it were geniunely enthusiastic, actually knew the material (which is apparently not common with filmmakers looking to adapt something), and happily consulted with him on all sorts of things and actually listened to his suggestions

III. And what mythologies found their way into the Disc, especially when pertains to the Hogfather (he joked about how he looks at British mythologies the way a carpenter looks at trees – namely, as something to be sawn apart and joined together again in more interesting shapes :P)

Good stuff – I’ll have to take a moment and watch the whole thing at some point. *nods* Maybe Sunday? We’ll see...

2. Work on “The Van Dort Vacancy”: No check – the combination of it being Game Night (Trivial Pursuit – I ended up winning thanks to a lucky guess on my final question, yay), me needing to do the write-up above, and me insisting on keeping up with the OXmas videos as they’re released (below) meant that I just never got to this. *sigh* It’s really getting on my nerves. I have to block out some time tomorrow and just fucking edit my little heart out. Maybe it’ll make me feel better.

3. Watch something on FreeTube/Invidious: Check – it was back over to OXBox today for more OXmas fun, with “XMAS CHALLENGE Day 7: Jane vs. Andy | Point Blank Light Gun Challenge! 🔫” Which, uh, thanks to being a video all about Jane and Andy going head-to-head in a light gun game, is full of flashing lights! Like, a vast majority of this nine-minute video features flashing lights. If you are epileptic or otherwise medically triggered by flashing lights, you will probably want to skip this one – and even if you AREN’T, you may not want to watch the screen at all times. All the flashing gave me a headache by the end. :( We’re all very fortunate the video is short!

Anyway – as previously stated, today’s challenge saw Jane and Andy take each other on in the various minigames available in the arcade shooter Point Blank! Which has been ported to consoles and includes special light guns with coin buttons on the sides that you press to “add quarters” and thus give yourself the ability to continue after you lose all your lives (you get three per go unless you manage to earn more). Mike loaded up both competitors with three continues each – equaling a total of nine lives – and let them get on with things, with the single rule being whoever ran out of lives first was the loser. How did it go? Well, let’s take it challenge by challenge –

Shoot The Targets – Andy and Jane had to shoot the targets falling from the sky while avoiding parachuting bombs! Neither shot enough targets to make the game’s arbitrary quota (I belive it was 15), though Andy shot more targets (11) than Jane (6). Both lost a life.

Shoot The Ninjas – Andy and Jane had to hit the ninjas going to and fro across the level! The game demanded that they shoot 18 or more to win – Andy hit quota (getting 30 ninjas), Jane did not (picking up only 11) and lost a life.

Shoot The Lava Bombs – Andy and Jane had to blast the chunks of volcanic rock that were threatening the muppety Dr. Dan (or was it Dr. Don?) who was flailing around on screen, running from side to side, before any of them hit him! The pair did their best, but the Doctor did eventually get a lava bomb to the face, causing them to fail the mission (though, again, Andy shot more targets (14) than Jane (1!)). Both of them lost a life, and Jane was forced to use her first continue.

Shoot the Moving Targets – Andy and Jane had to hit at least 12 targets going to and fro across various hallways in front of them. Andy made quota with a healthy 15 hits; Jane got a mere 6 and lost yet another life.

Shoot the Ducks – Andy and Jane had to hit at least 12 ducks matching their on-screen colors (red for Andy, blue for Jane), while avoiding each other’s ducks and the bombs that occasionally popped up. Both ended up JUST failing, with Andy getting 11 ducks and Jane getting 10. Andy was thus forced to use his first continue – and Jane had to move onto her third, as she’d ALSO hit two bombs during the round and thus lost all her remaining lives in one go!

Shoot the Dragon’s Head – Andy and Jane had to land 24 shots or more on the head of a long snake-like dragon that was moving VERY rapidly and VERY erratically across the screen. As you might imagine, both failed miserably, with Andy getting 7 shots in and Jane getting 4. Both lost a life again.

Shoot the UFO – Andy and Jane had exactly one shot apiece to destroy the UFO darting around the stage! Sadly, both failed to keep up with the UFO jerking around all over the place, and both lost a life.

Shoot the Lined-Up Targets, Very Hard Edition – Andy and Jane had to shot down a bunch of lined-up targets in a backyard without missing a single one – the game wanted them to try and get at least 38 targets, but both Andy and Jane missed their shot after three and failed the challenge. Cue Jane losing her last life (even as the game informed her “hey, congrats, you actually came first in that round for reasons even I don’t understand”) and thus having to concede the challenge to Andy!

Bonus Stage & Skeletons – Having won the Xmas point, Andy did a victory lap by playing a couple more rounds, the results of which were mixed – he successfully guessed which chest he had to shoot in the Bonus Stage to get an extra life, but then proceeded to fail to make quota on the stage where he had to shoot a bunch of skeletons jumping around in the dark (the game wanted him to shoot 22, he only got 16). Ah well – he still won the challenge!

And with that, Andy pulls even with Jane, with both of them having two points apiece! Tomorrow, single-pointer Ellen goes up again zero-pointer Mike – can our boy get on the board, or will Ellen join Andy and Jane in two-pointer land? Time will tell...

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – I had nothing to do over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), but I did have one anon ask over on Valice Multiverse to queue up – a rambling screed about how they were going to open an Italian fusion restaurant on the board of California and Arizona and call it Calzonia, and do things like have the Californian half of the restaurant open and close an hour later than the Arizona half (except during Daylight Savings, as apparently Arizona doesn’t observe that); have separate menus for each half, and pay the workers differently depending on which half they worked in (complete with trackers to change their wages should they step over the dividing line) –

Which ended with “The food is kind of mid but it's a calzone what do you expect?”

...cue me whipping up a Meta answer from a random Alice who informed the anon that, rather than doing a proper witty or interesting or insightful response to their ask (though she did take a moment to note that Calzonia sounded like an awful place to work or visit), she and her fellow muses were busy keeping me from telling the anon how great calzones are. Because they ARE fucking great, I had some freaking DELICIOUS ones for lunch on Wednesday! I will defend calzones to my last breath! Just far away from this guy because obviously he doesn’t want to hear it. XD

And now it is time for me to go to bed, because yikes I'm tired. Tomorrow is a Cleaning Saturday (though not a Laundry One -- that has to wait until Sunday as our brand-new washer decided to quit today, argh) -- I also intend to make it a Video Saturday, as I have a few videos I'd like to catch up on (I haven't had time for any but the Required OXmas stuff this week), and a Writing Saturday because I MISS VALICER IN THE DARK DAMN IT. We'll see what happens, obviously, but hopefully those are achievable goals. Night all!

...on how many times I've bitched about how bad my PMS has gotten and how I wish my period would hurry up and arrive -- only for the red curse to strike the very next day. Like, specifically me going "for fuck's sake, can't wait for my period to get here," not just general complaining about the PMS malaise/brain fog. I'm just curious how often it happens. Anyway, yes, as you might imagine, I got my period today, midway through the morning (fortunately no clothes stainage happened, as I caught it right as it started), and that has had a distinct effect on how the rest of my day has gone. As you will probably see below:

Work – Not a great day back at the office, and not just because I got my period in the middle of the morning –

A) First, I heard from my coworker that she had some issues helping a lady make a payment via credit card on her Capital Campaign pledge, and had to figure out what had gone wrong (a validation issue) and how to fix it (talk to the credit card people and get them to do something about it)

B) Then, I got a call from a guy who’d previously asked us to take him OFF automatic payments and send him reminders so he could send in checks, only to have apparently completely forgotten that once he GOT the reminder, meaning he kept asking me stuff like “how long are you going to charge me” and “why didn’t you just double up on this payment” – ended up doing a final payment on his pledge for him over the phone on his newest card, but dude. DUDE. *shakehead*

C) And while dealing with him, I discovered a previous payment hadn’t been imported to our database, so I ended up spending most of the rest of the day working on tracking down more missing payments and letting the credit card people know about them. Who knows when they’ll get back to me, but at least I can say I did my part!

Yeah – as you can imagine, any day where I have to deal with credit card bullshit isn’t a great day! But I suppose it at least went by quickly...and tomorrow is Friday, which is a good thing. Fingers crossed there’s less nonsense to annoy me!

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with the TV movie adaptation of Hogfather! And after taking a bit of time to rewatch the “DEATH saves The Little Match Girl” scene (both to figure out where I needed to add it into yesterday’s recap and because it’s such a good, heartwarming scene), I picked up where I left off last night and got through:

A) Susan explaining to Bilious how the Tooth Fairy Castle runs on child logic (going “is it?” when he indicated that he thought that was a good thing) and why DEATH couldn’t come here himself (basically, he doesn’t exist for children – they’re told people who die just “go away,” leading to anyone killed in the castle fading away and falling into the real world to be reaped), before the two find Violet; she gives Susan a bit of information (namely, that one of the men who kidnapped her dressed like an Assassin), and then she and Bilious get lost looking in each other’s eyes after Bilious confirms that she’s a teetotaler. XD Susan leaves them to it and goes off to do more important things, like find Teatime

B) DEATH explaining to the wizards back at Unseen University about the Auditors and how they’re trying to kill the Hogfather – and how people have to believe in the Hogfather, or else the sun won’t come up tomorrow; Ponder notes this means that Hex was right, causing DEATH to ask who Hex is – and, upon being told that he’s the biggest thinker on the Disc, asking to meet him

C) Bilious leading Violet down the stairs so they can escape and explaining who he is – only to get jumped and strangled by Chickenwire; however, before Chickenwire can finish the job, the deadly wardrobe of his childhood nightmares appears behind him and forces him to get inside...and when Bilious and Violet check a moment later, all they find is a muddy pair of boots

D) The wizards getting distracted in their questioning of DEATH by the sudden appearance of Chickenwire’s corpse, crunched up in a cupboard, having clearly arrived by magical means; Death uses the opportunity to slip off and speak to Hex – and, after confirming that the magical supercomputer knows what is at stake, tasking him with believing in the Hogfather. Which Hex does...to the point of writing the Hogfather a letter asking for presents; DEATH, resigned to this being how the deal works, asks how old he is and if he’s been naughty or nice XD (I don’t remember if they show this paying off in the special or not, but in the book, Hex gets a teddy bear that he refuses to work without)

E) Susan proceeding up to the top of the castle, where Sydney is busily unlocking all the locks magically...only to get surprised by Teatime, who grabs DEATH’S sword (which she armed herself with before seeking the Hogfather) from her and backs her up to where his minions are busily working, talking about how her family motto (“Don’t Fear The Reaper”) is in rather bad taste, and refusing to be distracted by her clowning on his last name (I forget if I’ve ever mentioned this, but our villain pronounces it “Teh-A-time-EH,” and is – unfortunately for Susan – very used to people getting it wrong and making jokes)

F) Sydney finishing his work on the locks, and Teatime allowing him to leave – he races off, passing Violet and Bilious on the stairs, only to start coming back when he hears snapping scissors; Violet pegs him as a former thumbsucker (mostly because he keeps putting them in his mouth), and she and Bilious flee as the Scissor Man, who snips up children who suck their thumbs, finally catches up to poor Sydney (I actually genuinely feel sorry for him dying like that – he was the most pathetic of the group, and earned a little sympathy from me by offering to help Banjo escape too during his first attempt earlier)

G) Teatime telling Susan his plan, about how the end of the Hogfather is only the start, and soon he’ll be able to force people to believe whatever he wants them to believe...only for Banjo, who was not aware of the end goal of this whole scheme, to be like “But there has to be a Hogfather!” Teatime, realizing that there’s trouble afoot, attempts to get Banjo to believe that Susan is responsible for the Hogfather’s death, but that runs into Banjo remembering Ma Lilywhite telling him not to hurt girls and thus being very reluctant to do anything to Susan, and allows Susan to get the upper hand briefly by poking at the old raw wounds of Teatime’s childhood – namely, that he was the creepy kid nobody liked and thus never had any friends

H) Ma Lilywhite showing up as Banjo and Medium Dave’s worst fear, and swallowing up Medium Dave for not taking care of his brother; Teatime using the distraction to get the sword to Susan’s throat and tell her that he knows how this place gets in your head, but he’s in touch with his inner child, so he has nothing to fear – and then making the mistake of pulling Susan’s hair, causing Banjo to shake off his control and toss him out onto the balcony

I) Teatime flipping himself up onto the railing and answering Susan’s furious proclamation that her grandfather will stop him by trying to kill her with the sword...only to discover it doesn’t actually work, because Death doesn’t exist here; cue Susan informing him “Hello, inner child – I’m the inner babysitter” and shoving him off the railing :D Unfortunately, he does manage to grab her and drag her over with him; fortunately, she’s able to grab onto the railing, and then the decorative tooth beneath when her fingers slip, and her dress gives out before her hand does, sending Teatime and the sword toppling

J) The wizards settling in for their big old Hogswatch feast – only for Teatime’s body to come crashing down onto one of the tables, right in front of the poor Bursar; the wizards, not realizing who he is, make the mistake of reviving him, and he reclaims the sword (after it slices through another of the tables) and makes his escape

K) Banjo saving Susan and pulling her up onto the balcony, then asking what he’s supposed to do; Susan lets him try into her hanky for a bit as he comes to grips with things – then notices the door to the Tooth Fairy’s inner sanctum has opened. Poking her head inside, she comes across an old woman, who – upon being told by Susan “no, I don’t believe this, it’s too perfect” – turns into a series of scary things before revealing himself to be the original Boogeyman, who ended up liking the children he was supposed to scare...and, upon finding that there were much worse things in the world than him, deciding to protect them by gathering the teeth; unfortunately, he’s very old, and weakened himself too much trying to defend the place against the thieves, so he’s on his way out. Susan assures him that she’ll make the teeth safe again, and he fades out peacefully

L) Susan heading downstairs to find Banjo cleaning up, having deconstructed the pile of teeth, and telling him that he should do the job of the Tooth Fairy until she comes back; he’s delighted by the idea of no one telling him what to do anymore and promises to keep the teeth safe, before asking if he can have a puppy (Susan assures him that one will turn up). Bilious and Violet arrive back on the scene then, having decided they should actually help instead of just run – Susan tells them that the others have gone and that Banjo is now in charge, and that they should probably help him out, which – after a little incredulous laughter at Banjo being in charge – they agree to do

M) Susan riding home on Binky and preparing to return to normal – only for DEATH to appear and explain he needs her to save the Hogfather once and for all; they return to the mountains where the Castle of Bones was, to find the Hogfather in his original form of a giant boar, being pursued by the Auditors in the form of wolves – DEATH warns Susan that if they catch him, it will be like he never was, and tasks her with keeping him safe, as it’s a human thing and, well, he isn’t

N) Susan leaping onto the Hogfather’s back and riding him across a narrow passage to safety – he’s badly hurt as the pathway crumbles beneath them, forcing them to jump, but Susan stands guard over him and smacks away an Auditor Wolf that tries to get him; DEATH then appears (busting out of a snowman behind the wolves, in a case of absolute tonal whiplash) and gives the Auditors what-for for breaking the rules and trying to destroy the Hogfather, before asking them one final question: “HAVE YOU BEEN NAUGHTY...OR NICE?” ...it’s much more awesome the way it’s portrayed on the screen, trust me.

Excellent stuff as always – I found myself getting choked up when Susan stood guard over the dying Hogfather. I left off with DEATH sending the Auditor Wolves to their doom down a deep crevasse (since, having taken living forms, they were now subject to him and his scythe) – tomorrow, we finish things off with the final confrontation! Looking forward to it!

2. Work on “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Quarter substitution check – I didn’t get anything done on the fic itself, because period brain is real and I just could NOT get up the mental energy to give it the attention it deserved. :( But I did at least do a couple of things over in the master worldbuilding/story ideas doc:

A) I officially changed the name of the “Victor fights ghosts with this world’s version of Bonejangles” story from “Who Ya Gonna Call?” to “I...Might Be Afraid Of Some Ghost,” as I think the latter is better and much funnier

B) I officially just went ahead and canonized earwax as one of the ingredients in Victor’s translation spell ritual/potion – I couldn’t come up with anything better to represent hearing, and having such a gross ingredient should help keep Victor from abusing it

C) And – inspired by a certain Hogfather scene I watched tonight, and the story I queued up for tomorrow – I wrote up a quick plot summary for a story featuring the gang encountering their own little match girl freezing on the streets of Duskwall, Hanna Anderson (named for Hans Christian Andersen, author of the original tale), who tells them that she can’t go home until she’s sold her matches or her father will beat her. Victor and Smiler promptly wrap her up warm and take her to Houndsditch, while Alice heads to the Anderson house for a “talk” with Hanna’s parents. XD

So at least there was SOME progress! But yeah, hoping I can get back to the actual fanfic tomorrow. Bleh – stupid period brain.

3. Watch something on FreeTube/Invidious: Check – we reached the halfway point of Oxmas today, with “XMAS CHALLENGE Day 6: Andy vs. Ellen | Phasmophobia Ghost Jenga Challenge! 🧱” on OXtra! This challenge saw Andy and Ellen enter the janky, janky world of Phasmophobia and – well, play Jenga. Because, as it turns out, there’s a little loft area with games in the “home base” your characters stay in in between going out and identifying ghosts (and possibly getting killed by ghosts) in random suburban houses, and one of those games is a giant off-brand Jenga tower just sitting on the floor, ready to play (the others are a ring toss, a little nine-pins set-up, some cornhole beanbag toss games, and a basketball hoop on the opposite wall). It was agreed immediately that this would be best out of three because Phasmophobia IS jank, and thus the mechanics for picking things up and putting them back down aren’t the best (picking things up is okay, but putting them down is tricky, because once you select a spot, you can’t change your mind and pick a new one – all you can do is rotate your thing and hope it all works out) – here’s how the rounds went:

Round One – Andy won the coin toss and elected to go first, successfully pulling a block but messing up placing it on top because of the aforementioned mediocre mechanics. Ellen then pulled out a block nearer the bottom that made the tower lean dangerously, then caused it to topple entirely once she placed it next to Andy’s on the top (at least she tried to put it in a better spot than he did). Whoops!

Round Two – After a lengthy interlude of experimenting with and laughing at how far forward and back their character models can bend (Ellen comparing herself to one of those drinking birds, while Andy wobbled forward and backward singing and sauntering), our contestants finally got back to the game, and Ellen was allowed to go first this time to keep things fair. She promptly grabbed a block from one row lower than the one she was trying to click on (jank!), making the tower lean – then, in trying to get at a good angle to place her accidentally-chosen block on the top, knocked the entire thing over with one ill-timed nudge. Ellen proceeded to lose it at the Andy Cam shot of her character still bent over the collapsed tower, block in hand. XD

Round Three – Despite having already gotten the point thanks to Ellen’s bad luck, Andy insisted that they play the third game, just for fun – and, of course, the game that didn’t count turned out to be the only one where they got to play something resembling a PROPER game of Jenga. At the very least, it lasted for more than two lousy pulls! And, of course, the game that didn’t count turned out to be the one that Andy lost – Ellen did hit the tower again while trying to place her first block, making it go all wonky, but despite that it stayed up until Andy tried to pull a block very low in the tower, and instead yanked one out of the very base thanks to the same misclick problem Ellen had. Cue the tower falling over, and Ellen celebrating that it wasn’t her this time. XD

Fun stuff – I never knew that you had minigames like that in Phasmophobia! I thought it was all hunting super-creepy ghosts… But yes, thanks to janky Jenga antics, Andy now has himself a precious Christmas point! Will Mike be able to get on the board? Only time will tell...we’ll see what happens tomorrow!

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Substitution check – I didn’t have anything over on Valice Multiverse, and while my queue is set on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), I did find a trio of posts that I decided were worthy of straight-up reblogging:

A) A little thread featuring a bunch of now-deactivated accounts engaging in what the first, spillybun, called “ominous positivity” – throwing out such bangers as “You will be okay. You have no choice,” “Everything will turn out fine. You cannot stop it,” and “You will succeed. It is inevitable.” I thought “well, this is the most The Smiler-coded shit I have ever seen” and put it on my blog, with tags joking about how my Smiler would say this to Victor and Alice with a big spooky grin to playfully creep them out and how Victor and Alice would poke them in return. XD

B) A post by mrpinchy with a link to a blog post on flamedfury.com about how to turn off all the generative AI bullshit Firefox is starting to shove into its browser, because it has a new CEO who wants to ride the wave before the bubble bursts. *grumbles* As I said the other day, can’t enjoy anything without it getting covered in ooze…but at least you can still turn it off if you know what you’re doing.

C) And a post by katyusha454 about Baldur’s Gate III, simply stating “I saw a comment on Reddit that Aylin is powerful enough to be a warlock patron and damn, that needs to make it into a fic somehow.” Aylin being an important side character and the daughter of the moon goddes, Selune – you can rescue her during the main missions, and she becomes a powerful ally if you stay on her good side. And yes, given her canonical power, she probably COULD be a warlock patron –

Which immediately made me think of poor Wyll, trapped in a contract with that wretched Mizora that Larian won’t let him punch because they love neglecting him. I promptly reblogged the post with tags hopeful for a fic where Aylin beats up Mizora and takes over Wyll’s contract, because that’s what he deserves. Seriously, that poor guy needs so much more love...

...okay, that's a little more than I expected to get done on the first day of my period, I gotta admit. But it also took me longer than it should, so I'd better get off now and get to bed. Just one more day to get through tomorrow -- hopefully it goes well! Night all!

Yeah, today was not great for me time management-wise -- I will get into why a bit more in the write-up below:

Work – Most of my day at work was fairly quiet and boring – I ran the daily reports; I ran through the QC file for the next Capital Campaign pledge billing; I went through the exceptions that came back from our processors; I did a payment over the phone for a guy who I contacted as a result of those exceptions (the card number he originally sent in got compromised); and I did another set of obituaries and related roster maintenance. But I did get a rather big surprise around mid-morning – my new supervisor and my coworker coming in with a big “Happy Birthday” bag and a dozen grocery store cupcakes. Apparently the luncheon tomorrow was supposed to be partly a birthday celebration for me (because, you know, we’re never at work for my birthday, given how close it is to Christmas and all), but with it canceled due to the CFRI director getting the flu, they decided to just go ahead and give the stuff to me. Said stuff consisting of the cupcakes, a card, and a little space heater! Because there’s been plenty of “transitional” days in spring and autumn where it’s really cold in the building but they don’t have the heat on, meaning unless you have your own source of heat, you end up freezing. My coworker has her own space heater which I’ve borrowed on occasion, so maybe this was just her making sure she could keep hers and not lend it to me. :p And it was all very thoughtful, it just – also completely blindsided me because WTF, I was not expecting that! Especially not the present, because that’s not typically a thing on birthdays in the office. O.o And now I feel like I have to do something for them in return… Mom already got me some Dunkin gift cards to pass out if we did an office Christmas gift exchange – I suppose those’ll do?

To-Do List –

1. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and back with the Discworld Hogswatch classic, Hogfather! Tonight’s pedal session saw me get through:

A) Susan going into DEATH’S archives to find the Hogfather’s autobiography (an accounting of his life automatically written as it happens), and struggling because much of it was in a language that she couldn’t read; fortunately Quoth the Raven (an intelligent raven who sometimes serves as steed to the Death Of Rats) was there to lend his beak in aid, explaining how the Hogfather started out as a god of sacrifices and blood, overseeing the common people who slaughtered animals and humans to ensure the sun rose again after the darkest, longest night of the year...and then had to make a hard pivot into delivering toys to kids after people started figuring out that the sun comes up on its own and there’s no need to give sacrifices (or tithes of any kind) to the people doing the sacrificing; however, as Susan figures out, he’s still intrinsically tied to the concept of the sun rising after midwinter, so if he’s dead...yeah, there’s a problem

B) Ridcully encountering the Veruca Gnome in his new bathroom (and NEARLY having a poke around his sack – the Gnome explained who he was just in time XD), and learning that the Veruca Gnome was apparently very new to being the Veruca Gnome, having only just woken up into existence recently

C) Ridcully explaining to the Veruca Gnome how it was a good thing that the bathroom had a special pot for toenail clippings because they – along with hair or teeth – could be used to control people transitioning into Teatime planning to do just that with the teeth everyone’s piled up and Sydney’s spellwork; as you might imagine, Sydney was very nervous about screwing things up

D) DEATH’S turn as a Department Store Hogfather, which included freezing a mother in place temporarily so the daughter could tell him what she REALLY wanted; giving said daughter not only the requested toys, but a real sword, to the shock and horror of the other adults (“IT’S EDUCATIONAL.” “What if she cuts herself?!” “THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.” XD Albert did manage to convince him to make it wood, though); revealing to the mother that the gifts were free when she protested she couldn’t afford them – to the chagrin of store owner Mr. Crumley; and avoiding being arrested by Corporal Nobby Nobbs when Crumley called him and Constable Visit in to get rid of the “impostor,” mostly by sucking Nobby into the Hogswatch magic and gifting him the exact crossbow he wanted. XD A very fruitful stop indeed for the DEATHfather!

E) Unfortunately, despite some hiccups caused by the above bolstering belief (causing teeth to spit themselves out of the pile), Sydney managing to pull off the control spell for Teatime (just in time too, as Teatime already had the knife out), and the spell taking effect to allow a delighted Teatime to start controlling the kids and destroying their belief in the Hogfather – as exemplified by Susan’s charges, Twyla and her brother, hearing what they think is the Hogfather in another room and running in to catch him in the act...only to discover their father dressed in the costume; cue the Hogfather’s face on a nearby Hogswatch card changing to match their dad’s as they sadly slump away :(

F) Ridcully bringing the Veruca Gnome to Ponder Stibbons and his magical supercomputer Hex to figure out what brought him into existence; as they discuss the issue while Ponder fires up Hex, he happens to mention how it’s weird there’s a god of drinking but no god of hangovers – and then asks if anyone else heard that tinkling noise...

G) Susan traveling to the Hogfather’s Castle of Bones to try and find whatever might be left of him – only to instead have to rescue the newly-incorporated Bilious, the Oh God of Hangovers, from the Castle as it falls apart under the lack of belief (intercut with images of Teatime’s creepy smiling face)

H) Medium Dave and Chickenwire finding goodies to loot in the castle (specifically, property deeds and titles) – only to be stopped in their tracks by Teatime, who isn’t about to let them leave just yet, and is more than happy to demonstrate to Dave how much control he has over poor child-like Banjo now he’s in the grips of the spell

I) Mr. Brown calling Teatime up to a high door he’s just opened, and the group finding the door leading into the Tooth Fairy’s secret quarters – guarded by another guy who Teatime kills; DEATH takes a moment out of his busy Hogfather schedule to reap the guy and learns about how Teatime and company have taken all the teeth, and realizes that, if the group gets to the Tooth Fairy, everything he and Albert are doing tonight will have been for naught...unless Susan gets there first

J) Teatime trying to learn if Violet knows how to open the door into the Tooth Fairy’s room – only to discover this woman just does NOT SHUT UP; in fact, she only pauses briefly when he puts a knife to her neck. Luckily for her, she has some minor plot armor (she’s part of the small romantic subplot that will be coming up shortly), so Teatime just regags her instead of murdering her

K) Susan taking Bilious to Unseen University to get the help of Ridcully and the other wizards (preparing to enjoy their Hogswatch feast) in clearing up his head; Ridcully is rather surprised that she decided to take Billious to the University to help him think straight XD

L) And DEATH arriving at a poor rural house and learning one of the downsides of being the Hogfather – namely, that, thanks to socioeconomic factors and the power of hope in driving people on through life, he’s not allowed to give truly nice stuff to the poor. He is not happy about this

Once again, I feel like my recap isn’t doing the special justice – there’s a lot to keep track of, and I feel like I keep forgetting stuff, or putting it in the wrong order (there’s a lot of jumping back and forth between characters and locations too, which I think I mentioned yesterday). This could be just PMS screwing with me, though. *shakehead* I think I’ve covered all the most important beats, at least! Anyway – tomorrow we pick up with Albert telling DEATH a little anecdote from his childhood, and go from there! And let me tell you, things are going to get creepier going forward, that’s for sure...

2. Work on Christmas Gift Fic/“The Van Dort Vacancy”: No check on either – this I blame on getting a message back from Newt on tumblr today apologizing for accidentally ignoring me (saying that his memory for what he’s answered and what he hasn’t just keeps getting worse), saying that I shouldn’t feel like I have to write anything for a gift fic as he doesn’t really have any ideas and hasn’t been reading that much (and is also five years behind on gifts for me), and that he hopes I’m doing okay. And it took me much longer than it really should have to answer that message, because I just – part of me wanted to be like “yeah well I DID feel ignored because not only did you not answer this message you ignored asks from me on your writer’s memes TWICE, and you know what, don’t even fucking bother with the gifts, because it’s not like most of the people I interact with on tumblr ever do anything for ME these days despite me CONSISTENTLY writing fics for Christmas and birthdays,” and the other part of me knew that wasn’t going to help matters and thus had to wrestle the other part into being more diplomatic (acknowledging that I am shit at contacting people and should have reached out again sooner, and that life is a fucking lot these days). It was just a mess, made worse by my PMS, and I… *sigh* Whatever. I’ll have some extra free time tomorrow – hopefully I can get some writing done then.

3. Watch something on FreeTube/Invidious: Check – it was back over to OXtra today to continue the OXmas chaos with “XMAS CHALLENGE Day 4: ANDY | Battlefield 6 Plane Murder Challenge! ✈️” This one was interesting, because it was sort of a pseudo-one-v-one challenge – you see, the person Andy was trying to murder in Battlefield 6 with a plane was Mike. XD Basically, what happened is the two loaded into the game (playing on each other’s accounts, which was delightfully confusing for a second); Mike presented Andy with a small tarmac full of jets in the middle of what looked like a big oil field (while Andy shot at his feet and tried to get him to dance); then Mike raced off to a nearby tower that was jetting flames from its top to stand on the railing of the observation deck just below and on the opposite side of the flames (while Andy rolled around on a jet nose and found a way to shoot himself in the dick XD). Andy was then tasked with flying one of his jets over to said tower and bumping Mike off his perch with his wing within 15 minutes – and without dying himself, Jane and Ellen were firm on that. Doesn’t sound that hard, does it?

Trust me, it was very hard. Mostly because:

A) Andy found the jet rather hard to control, crashing a couple of times just from going too slow while trying to turn

B) Andy needed a LOT of space to turn so he could swoop around the tower to get close to Mike, but the map itself wasn’t very big – and he and the others quickly found out that, if you leave the combat area in this game, you get exploded after like a nine-second countdown (Andy got killed a couple of times by that, and had even more close calls)

C) Mike was a very small target, and the wings of Andy’s jet were pretty darn stubby, meaning he struggled a lot to line things up JUST RIGHT to topple Mike. (And I’m sure it didn’t help matters that, on Andy’s very first run, Mike almost wasn’t even there – almost immediately after Andy took off for the first time, Mike ended up falling off his railing and had to deploy his parachute and glide his way over onto a lower platform so he could climb back up. A few commenters complained that Mike should have paused the timer after he fell so Andy didn’t lose any time from him climbing back up, but I’m with those who said “no, after Andy’s shenanigans in the Egbert vs Corazon duel in Baldur’s Gate III two years ago, Mike is allowed a tiny bit of cheating.”)

Yeah – definitely one of those “harder than it looks” challenges! And while Andy gave it his all over the course of the 15 minutes – to the point where they had to pause the timer so Mike could reset the map and refresh his plane supply TWICE – and came extremely close to hitting Mike multiple times (like, he nearly got Mike THREE TIMES during what I think was his tenth attempt), he never actually fulfilled the brief of the challenge. He just kept crashing himself in various spectacular and occasionally glitchy ways (when he wasn’t being forcibly exploded by the game for boundary breaking). So no Christmas point for Andy this night! Meaning, so far, this is definitely a Girl Power Xmas over on OXBoxtra. XD Tomorrow, the PROPER one-v-one challenges start – I’m looking forward to seeing what the first match-up will be, and in which game!

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check, if later than I’d intended –

Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here, I put that story about the two “Evil Hallmark Boyfriends” meeting in the airport lounge while preparing to fly back to the big city after being dumped by their respective small-town Christmas-loving girlfriends and falling in love while sharing their stories that I reblogged last year into my queue for tomorrow – it’s a good story and it’s something seasonal to reblog! Plus, it’ll be a good lead-in to that “Hallmark Horror Movie” post I’m still hoping to do...which hopefully I can get sorted tomorrow so I can pop it into the queue...

Valice Multiverse – And over here, I finally answered that anon ask I couldn’t get to on Sunday: “Thanksgiving is the Middle child to Halloween and Christmas.” I ended up queuing up a reply from Fallout of Darkness!Victor (as the most American of the Victors), commenting on how it’s not even that anymore post-War – the holiday seems to have been lost after the bombs dropped, as he’s only ever seen Diamond City decorated for Halloween and Christmas (this is a real thing that happens in Fallout 4 if you visit the city on those dates, by the by). And how maybe that’s for the best, as he’s not sure how dangerous a radturkey would be. XD Probably pretty damn dangerous, given how everything in the Fallout universe is pretty damn dangerous. XD

Yeah, just -- that message really threw off the rest of my night. Good thing I don't have work tomorrow, so staying up a bit later is okay -- though I don't want to stay up TOO late, so I'd better get to bed. Tomorrow's big things are going to my dentist appointment and having my teeth cleaned, and seeing about getting the oil changed in my car (it just started alerting me it needs one) -- we'll see what I can fit in around all that! Night all!

I slept better, at least -- going to bed AFTER 2 AM seemed to guarantee I'd be tired enough to get at least seven-odd hours, even with an early-morning wake-up to use the toilet -- but shortly before lunch, Mom sprung decorating the living room for Christmas on me, so I lost a pretty decent chunk of the day helping her do that. Which, fine, it's nice to decorate for the holiday, but I'd really like to be told in ADVANCE so I know it's coming! *shakehead* At least now I know she also wants to decorate outside on Wednesday, during my time off for my dentist appointment... Anyway, that threw things off a bit, and I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped --

Tumblr: Didn’t have time tonight to answer the ask on Valice Multiverse, sadly, and I only got a bit done over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) –

A) First, I reblogged thesatiricaldemon’s post squeeing over the arrival of his Mortasheen TTRPG book – the dude has been following bogleech and the project for years, and his joy over finally getting to hold the book in his hands and show it to all of us was palpable. :) He even shared the pages of a few favorite monsters – the Xenogog (a little space-guy with a “face” of pulsating red rings and hidden arm-needles that it can manifest to inflict targeted deep-flesh – or deep-brain – burns), the Gibbergeist (a monstrous shadow-creature that likes rhymes and songs and will stalk its prey – which includes children – from their closet or under furniture for a few days before closing in), and the Maladirge (essentially a sentient fleshy set of bagpipes with an inflated sense of its own musical prowess and the ability to induce psychedelic trips in others with its terrible songs). It’s not quite my jam – I like some of the monster designs, but others are too gross for me – but I’m happy to share in his joy!

B) And second, I went into my drafts and worked a little more on my Not-Incorrect Valicer Christmas Quotes – specifically, the one about Smiler being good at wrapping things. I managed to come up with some backstory for their mother Carol – she used to work in a mail room and learned all her tricks from a friend there, Dolores – but before I could figure out things from there, I got called in to help with the decorating. Meeeh. >( Hopefully I can finish these later this week – should have at least a LITTLE time on Wednesday!

Portal: I did pop back into the world of Aperture Science for a little bit this afternoon after Mom and I finished decorating the living room, entering the world of the Advanced and Challenge Maps, and trying out:

A) The Advanced Chamber 14 Map! Because apparently I already beat the Advanced Chamber 13 map at some point in the past. O.o All righty then! Anyway – as a refresher, Chamber 14 is the one where you have to go left at first and fling yourself up onto a metal pedestal to get a cube to put on a floor button, then go through the door the floor button opens to a side room, where you then have to pass over some platforms rising and falling out of killer goo so you can direct the high-energy pellet being released on the other side of the room through some portals into the receiver back near where you got the cube, which activates the lift out of the chamber. The Advanced Chamber 14 makes things more difficult by changing the wall you normally fling yourself from to get the cube to metal, meaning you have to find a different way to get at it, and by removing the platforms in the goo room, meaning you have to portal yourself across and think about how you’re going to redirect the pellet more carefully. I admit, I struggled a bit with trying to get the cube at first – my attempts to fling myself at it from the wall above the pellet receiver always fell short because, even with the giant pit the game provides once you get up to the area where the cube is, I couldn’t get up enough momentum to actually land on the pedestal it was sitting on. I eventually resorted to looking things up on my phone to see if anyone could offer me some tips –

And, the minute I looked up the chamber on the Portal Wiki, I was once again reminded that falling through a portal and bouncing up from another portal was indeed a thing I could do. *shakehead* One of these days I will learn to think with portals...anyway. Once I put a portal at the base of the pedestal and THEN flung myself into the pit, I was able to bounce up and get the cube pretty easily. That went on the button, and from there it was into the side room, where I was tasked with figuring out how to redirect the pellet –

Which, after a few minutes of thinking and a little experimentation with portals, proved to be pretty easy – basically, put one portal where the pellet hits the wall after being released, and make sure the other portal is on the side that leads back to the main chamber. Then you follow the pellet once its released, allow that one to fizzle out, and head back into the chamber and over to where the pellet receiver is, putting a portal above it on the ceiling. Next pellet released goes through the portals and activates the victory lift! :D Not too hard at all, in the end – and it got me the “Cupcake” achievement for having solved two out of six Advanced maps! Only 18.2% of players have it – which is sad, because who doesn’t like cupcakes. :p

B) The Advanced Chamber 15 Map! Which is the one where you keep having to fling yourself through emancipation fields and redirect various pellets into receivers and eventually hop across a series of moving platforms backwards (relative to how they’re moving) via portals. The Advanced version makes everything harder – and I soon learned HOW hard when I entered the first bit of the chamber and found most of it was made of anti-portal material. There was exactly one square chunk of floor, one square chunk of ceiling above the floor, and one square sticking out of the wall by the door that I could shoot portals onto. I quickly worked out that the idea was that I’d use the squares of ceiling and floor to create an “infinite drop zone” to gain momentum, before hastily hitting the square sticking out of the wall to launch myself through the emancipation field, but in practice...yeah. I’m not good at trying to fire portals while I’m falling through portals, and I kept messing up and ruining my infinite fall. I ended up leaving that one pretty damn quickly!

C) The “Least Time” and “Least Steps” challenges for Chamber 13! Which puts you back in the normal version of Chamber 13 (where you have to get a cube from the starting room (normally locked off from the rest of the chamber unless something’s weighing down the floor button in there) and a cube on a moving platform (which has to be powered up by redirecting a high-energy pellet into a receiver so it’ll pass under a portal-able section of ceiling so you can drop down onto it) and put them on elevated buttons so they’ll activate the lift and door out of there) but tasks you with trying to complete it in the shortest time, while taking the least steps, or by using the fewest portals. I figured “Least Time” and “Least Steps” would be easier than that last one –

Aaand I was wrong. The target time for the “Least Time” challenge was 40 seconds – but thanks to various screw-ups (like repeatedly failing to drop the cubes onto the buttons from above), I ended up taking 2 minutes and 44 seconds. And the target steps for “Least Steps” was a mere 30 – I gave up on that one halfway through, when it became very apparent I wasn’t going to hit it. *shakehead* Might try them again in the future, but damn – these challenges do NOT mess around, that’s for sure!

D) And the “Least Time” challenge for Chamber 14, as that one was 50 seconds and thus I thought I had a better chance of hitting it. And I suppose I did better than I did in Chamber 13 – I ran through the chamber twice, trying to do things like portal myself up to where the cube was (so I didn’t have to waste time waiting for the stairs to raise and lower) and do the “portal myself across the goo room, then put a portal where the pellet goes and follow it across to get back to where I need to be faster” trick I learned from the Advanced map – but neither time did I manage under a minute. Times were in fact 1 minute and 28 seconds, and 1 minute and 21 seconds. *sigh* I tried!

And that was that for today – at least I beat one Advanced map, and got one achievement out of it! We’ll see next week if I want to try any of the others – I feel like I could at least get bronze for the “Least Time” challenge on Chamber 14, but we’ll see…

(Oh, and side note – opening splash screen was the “camera looking at the relaxation vault” one. I’m starting to think it is semi-random, but weighted so you’ll get that one more often than the “cake and radio” one after you unlock the latter.)

Workout: Got back on the bike this evening, bringing along something seasonally appropriate to watch this week – the two-part TV movie adaptation of Hogfather! The Discworld book where DEATH has to sub in for the titular local equivalent of Santa Claus because the Auditors of reality itself want him dead so humans become less human and more easily managed. ...yeah, it sounds weird, but trust me, it’s a really good book. And a really good TV movie adaptation too – the first half-hour saw me pedal my way through:

A) The introduction of our protagonist, Susan, granddaughter of Death and a governess to a newly-rich family, reading her own take on “Jack And The Beanstalk” to her charges (her take involved listing all the crimes Jack did to the Giant and his family and noting that nobody ever called him out for these because he was a “hero”) on Hogswatch Eve, and informing them when they start asking if the Hogfather got their letters and when he would come that if they didn’t believe, there wouldn’t be any presents, so go to sleep

B) The Auditors approaching the head of the Guild of Assassins, Lord Downey, and commissioning his guild to “inhume” (aka kill) the Hogfather, with a promised reward of three million dollars, and Downey giving the job to the INCREDIBLY unsettling Jonathan Teatime, a man who nails dogs to ceilings to stop them barking on jobs and who, as a hobby, has thought about how he might kill Death himself

C) Twyla, one of Susan’s charges, coming to tell her about a monster in the cellar, and Susan going to beat it up with a fireplace poker – her parents and their Hogswatch guests, listening in for a lark, think she’s just using some psychology to calm Twyla down, but once they’ve all gone, Susan drags a real monster out of the cellar and throws it out of the house, because naturally the monsters in the shadows are real on the Disc, at least around kids

D) Teatime assembling a team to help him with his plan to kill the Hogfather – Medium Dave and his childlike brother Banjo, their associate Chickenwire, Sydney the student wizard down on his luck, and Mr. Brown the locksmith – and starting things off by knocking out one of Banjo’s teeth; as he’s still got a child’s mind and thus a child’s belief, when he puts it under his pillow, he’s visited by a tooth fairy, who the gang promptly kidnap, before proceeding to hijack the carriage full of teeth that she was supposed to be picked up by

E) Ponder Stibbons and the rest of the Inadvisably Applied Magic department causing a bit of an explosion with their thaumic accelerator (don’t worry, that happens all the time), and Archchancellor Ridcully opening up the Archchancellor’s personal bath house – the other wizards object, pointing out that Bloody Stupid Johnson, the Disc’s worst inventor, designed it – Ridcully, however, is undeterred, sure that BS Johnson couldn’t have made WATER dangerous…

F) Teatime and his gang forcing the carriage driver, Ernie to show them how to get to the Tooth Fairy’s palace, and then Teatime knifing him (despite previously indicating he’d let him go if he helped) and driving the carriage through the magical portal in the wall; cue DEATH showing up to pick up Ernie and ask him what happened, and the Auditors muttering about how DEATH is getting worse each year with his fondness for humans, but fortunately Teatime’s method of killing the Hogfather means he can’t interfere

G) Susan dealing with another monster problem for Twyla and her brother – a boogeyman under Twyla’s bed; cue her intimidating the boogeyman into leaving by using her special DEATH voice and threatening him with having his head put under a blanket covered in fluffy bunnies, and the children complaining it wasn’t as fun as the time she kicked one of them in the crotch XD

H) And Teatime and the others arriving at the palace of the Tooth Fairy, and murdering the guards there, who promptly vanish and fall into the real world…

Yeah, things are just gonna get weirder from here, I assure you. XD But it’s really good, and I’m looking forward to watching the rest of it! We’ll pick up tomorrow with Death collecting the souls of the fallen guards and go from there!

FreeTube/Invidious: Managed to fit in both the videos I wanted to watch on FreeTube today, hooray –

A) First up, we of course had “XMAS CHALLENGE Day 2: ELLEN | Death Stranding 2 Christmas Delivery Challenge! 🎁” by OXtra! Reigning Christmas Champion Ellen’s solo challenge took her into the unknown territory of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach (the second installment of that weird post-apocalyptic package delivery game where you play as Norman Reedus, aka Sam Porter Bridges, delivery man extraordinaire, apparently trying to connect survivors in Australia to a special network while delivering goods and supplies to them – I tried looking up a plot summary on Wikipedia, but honestly I just got more confused), where, playing as a clad-in-festive-red Sam, she was given 79.4 kilos of “festive Christmas packages” (including a jar of yeast paste, aka off-brand Marmite, whose contents were already 89% damaged) and tasked with getting them from the starting delivery station (I think Sam’s personal ship) up into the rocky hills that housed the bunker of the Lone Commander in under ten minutes. Jane was kind enough to plot out a route with waypoints for her to follow, and told her that she was allowed to pick up her stuff if she dropped it (though the timer WOULD continue running, of course), and that as long as she made it up to the bunker with 75 kilos of the original 79.4, they’d give her the point. (Andy and Mike were initially insistent that Ellen had to get the yeast paste specifically up there for it to count, but Jane was like “it might self-destruct on the way there, it’s VERY damaged.” XD) And if you’re thinking, “Sheesh, this doesn’t sound like much of a challenge,” you have to remember two things:

I. This was the first time Ellen had ever actually PLAYED Death Stranding 2, and thus she was unused to the controls (though they let her run around the starting area at first a little to get a handle on them)

II. When you transport stuff in DS2, especially huge towers of heavy stuff like the one Jane piled on Sam’s back, it’s affected by physics as you move around, and you have to keep shifting your weight in order to keep yourself balanced and not eat dirt and spill (and possibly break) all your stuff. And having 79.4 kilos stacked on him meant that Sam was “heavily loaded” and thus was going to have to deal with all those physics issues a lot more.

Yeaaah – doesn’t sound so easy now, does it? So, how did Ellen do?

Shockingly well, I am pleased to report! She did have a lot of near misses as she got used to the controls and directed Sam up all the rocky slopes and whatnot, but for most of the journey she was able to save herself whenever disaster loomed, sprinting to save time when on level ground and even showing off some sweet parkour skills by having Sam climb up some of the rocks in his way. It wasn’t until she got within sight of the bunker that her hubris finally caught up with her and Sam toppled over, losing all of his stuff and upsetting his poor BB baby, Lou. (...porters in this verse need a not-fully-developed human infant that lives in a tank to help them traverse the dangerous world – don’t ask, I don’t know the specifics.) Fortunately for her, she was able to soothe poor Lou by bouncing her tank gently up and down and pick up all of her stuff without wasting too much precious time, and arrived at the Lone Commander’s bunker with 3 minutes and 45 seconds to spare. :D AND she improved Sam’s carry capacity and endurance, causing them to level up, AND even managed to save the yeast paste! It was 96% damaged inside its bottle, but everyone agreed that all the broken glass just made it taste better. XD So she got on the board with a precious Christmas point! An auspicious beginning indeed for her. :) Tomorrow, Jane takes her turn with the solo challenges – will she once again get the “Giant Killer” soccer-based one? Time will tell… :p

B) And second, we of course had “Fallout New Vegas: You Only Live Once Remastered - Part 22 - Bring Down The House” by Jon of Many A True Nerd! The continuing adventures of our favorite Drunken Melee Courier P. D. Shoot, as she –

I. Headed back to the Strip to take down Mr. House, because – as per the commenters correcting his memory in an earlier episode – he did the House ending in the previous YOLO (with the P. D. who got to use a sniper rifle), so he decided he wanted to do something different this run (even if he hasn’t yet decided if she’ll go NCR or Legion). P. D. thus:

a. Headed up to House’s private penthouse and snuck around over to the terminal that opens the secret door into the secret antechamber that leads to the secret elevator down to his secret life support chamber

b. Downed some Rad-X, an Atomic Cocktail, some Med-X, some Slasher, and some Turbo to make sure she was going as fast as possible past all the soon-to-be-her-enemy upgraded Securitrons and well-protected against any shots they might get off

c. Used the terminal to pop open the door, ran to the terminal that controlled the elevator, got THAT working, and went down to the life support chamber, all without taking a single shot (even if she did get worryingly close to one of the Securitrons along the way)

d. Used the terminal in the life support chamber to pop open Mr. House’s actual pod (which took ages because she was STILL under the effects of Turbo for most of it), informed him that killing him was “just business,” and – because she couldn’t VATS him – used one of her unarmed power moves to throw deadly sand in his eyes. While standing on a catwalk. ...look, Jon just thought it was funny. XD (Though, according to the comments, he actually gave up some XP – apparently there’s a mini-achievement to kill him with a golf club. Not sure why…)

So yeah – as per the game, the House has officially gone bust. Now we just see which of the other factions P. D. picks to side with...though, personally, given how she’s been acting so far, I’ll be surprised if it isn’t the Legion. Jon seriously seems to think that faction has all the best goodies.

II. Headed back to The Fort to tell Caesar that she’d assassinated House as asked, and share with him the good news that the Boomers already liked her and would do as she asked when he asked her to form an alliance with them. Caesar was very pleased with her good work and promptly instructed her to next approach the White Glove Society about an alliance, telling her to use their status as former cannibals to manipulate them as necessary –

Only to be cut off mid-sentence by a sudden, massive headache. P. D., having decent Medicine skill, noticed something was wrong and asked if this was the first time he’d had a sudden-onset headache; he admitted to her that he’d never had one this bad before, and moments later declared he was going to lie down and she should come back tomorrow. P. D. thus backed away and let him go (because, as per Jon, if you bug him while he’s trying to sleep, he just orders everyone to kill you, and you have to fight your way out of the camp), and simply enjoyed the fruits of her labor – a bunch of XP, a new quest to do in the future if she is so inclined, and – most importantly – an official reputation bump up to “Idolized” with the faction! Which came with a reputation downgrade to “Mixed” with the NCR, but Jon wasn’t too worried about that because “Mixed” just meant that the NCR was back to feeling neutral about her. She hadn’t yet burned her bridges with them! And now that the Legion Idolized her, she could do a bunch of jobs for the NCR and work against the Legion’s interests without worrying about them changing their minds, because she’d done enough good things for them that they could never bring themselves to actually HATE her for doing bad things to them in the future. The most they could do is return to a neutral status! (This is because Fame and Infamy with each faction is tracked on different scales – you don’t lose Infamy when you get Fame, and vice-versa. If one outweighs the other, the faction likes or hates you to varying degrees; if they’re equal, the faction is neutral toward you. P. D. has maxed out her Fame with the Legion, so now it can never be lower than her Infamy with them – hence, why they can at most decide they’re neutral toward her existence should she work against them. As per the comments, this is a system Obsidian LOVES to use in all their various games – it certainly makes becoming friends with people and factions more interesting!)

III. Swung by the Legion dropboxes as she hadn’t gotten an alert from her quest log to go clear them out lately, and Jon wanted to make sure that she got the opportunity to raid them now that she was idolized. Because apparently, once you hit that level, they can just give you Stealth Boys sometimes. More than you will ever need, in fact! And while she’s more or less past needing Stealth Boys in the BASE game, Jon’s of the opinion that they might be necessary while tackling the DLC. So, in hopes of resetting the quest timer, she went and emptied them all out. Got a bunch of Legion money and a good amount of stuff to sell, including SEVEN doctor’s bags! Man, if she was allowed to use healing items, that would have been an amazing haul...at least she should get good money for them!

IV. Raided Vault 11 for the final part she needed to bring back to the Brotherhood of Steel in Hidden Valley to fix their air filtration system! Jon had been initially worried about going there, but decided that, since P. D. wasn’t going to be doing the quest that actually requires you to properly explore the place (“Democracy In Action” – I am pretty sure this is the vault where they were tricked into sacrificing someone every year by being told if they didn’t, EVERYONE would die, leading to a twisted democracy where whoever was voted in as the Overseer got murdered at the appointed time until there was like two people left, who then learned it was all a “test of character” or something like that), but instead running straight to the end to get the part, it should be doable. P. D. thus –

a. Traveled to the vault and snuck into the rock tunnel leading to the entrance, where she waited for the mantises there to kill the scorpions attacking them, then attempted to sneak up on the mantises to kill THEM – unfortunately, her sneak failed her in this instance, and she was forced to do some Turbo to murder the mantises with the Embrace Of The Mantis King arm

b. Used the power of Turbo (while it lasted, anyway) to nyoom through the living quarters, killing oblivious mantises and rats all the while (hell, she missed one mantis THREE TIMES while standing right next to it, and it never detected her! Sneak, man – it is OVERPOWERED)

c. Worked her way into the lower levels, killing more rats and refusing to open any doors, before coming to the flooded bit at the end, popping on the rebreather and some Rad-X, and going for a swim to get to the submerged locker with the part she needed

d. Retraced her steps back up and out of the vault, killing one rat she’d missed along the way

*nods* The girl is now fucking sneak incarnate, I swear. Well, except when she gets cocky and accidentally alerts the enemy to her existence. XD At least she managed to avoid taking any hits!

V. Returned to Hidden Valley and delivered the air filtration parts to Senior Knight Lorenzo, then reported to Elder McNamara, who praised her for her good work and admitted he was humbled by all she’d done for them. He then said that he’d studied the scouts’ reports in detail and realized that he’d severely overestimated the threat the NCR posed to them, admitting that he’d been “scarred by fear” after they lost the battle for HELIOS One and that it had made him – perhaps overly cautious. Now that he knew that there was nothing to be afraid of, though, he was happy to lift the lockdown and allow the Brotherhood to operate freely on the surface. (Which should hopefully lift Veronica’s mood a little bit!) He gave P. D. a key to one of their safehouses in thanks, though Jon was much more interested in the 1,110 XP she got for completing the quest (apparently the safehouse doesn’t have much interesting stuff in it). P. D., on the hunt for more XP, then asked if she could maybe join the Brotherhood –

And, despite having raided three Vaults for them to fix their air filtration system and keep them all, you know, alive, she was told that she hadn’t done them a service quite good enough to merit that honor. *shakehead* The FUCKING BOS, man… Fortunately, Elder McNamara did have a quest for her that he felt would push her over the edge – going up to Black Mountain and bugging their communications array with a remote signal transmitter so the Brotherhood could use whatever tracking equipment still existed up there. The group had previously left the array alone out of respect for the mutants that lived up there...but having heard that the mutants had turned violent, they figured “well, no need to respect them anymore” and decided to try and take control of the stuff. P. D. cheerfully agreed to this mission –

Mostly because, well, in an earlier episode, she’d successfully gotten the mutants to calm down and move on by fixing one of their broken robots. So the place was abandoned anyway. XD The biggest danger she faced was picking up some rads on the way there (because, for some reason, the fast travel spot for Black Mountain isn’t in the facility itself, but just down the road, in the most radioactive spot), and even that wasn’t as bad as it could be thanks to her lovely rad-resisting space suit and some Rad-X. She got in, planted the bug, and promptly returned to McNamara, who proudly named her a Paladin of the BOS –

And gave her power armor training! Which is something you need in this game to wear the stuff, for some reason. Of course, P. D. being someone who likes traveling fast and light wasn’t about to start wearing power armor all the time (especially since the set she’d been given was pretty crap) – but, while shopping in the local store (which now was setting out all the good stuff due to her being a proper member of the faction), Jon noticed a quirk about the helmets. Namely, that they were classed as LIGHT armor, not heavy. He thus had P. D. drop some caps on a good 51b helmet to max out her DT when she was in danger without sacrificing movement speed. Not a bad “reward” for all her good work –

Especially since she didn’t get any XP for that last mission. Yeah, Jon thought it had bugged out, but according to the comments, the quest just doesn’t grant any. Well, that sucks! One more reason to hate the Brotherhood of Steel! Ugh…

VI. Headed over to the Crimson Caravan to tell Alice McLafferty that she’d finally delivered that invoice to the NCR scientist, and to pick up a few more jobs from her – specifically, negotiating with one Cass to buy out her business, Cassidy Caravans, and getting one Henry Jamison to quit the company (Alice couldn’t fire him herself because of his family connections). There was also a job to invade the Gun Runner’s weapons factory to steal their weapon specification plans, but P. D. was like “have to burn a Stealth Boy to complete that safely, wanna save the ones I’ve got for now, no thanks.” Fortunately, thanks to P. D.’s high Speech skills (and numerous ways to boost it even higher), both of Alice’s missions went swimmingly –

a. First, P. D. traveled to the NCR Outpost where Cass was currently drinking her troubles away to talk buyouts with her – only to learn that Cassidy Caravans had apparently been reduced to a pile of ash. A pile of ash that Cass was reluctant to part with, because of the history she had with it. P. D. promptly whipped out her Speech skills to tell Cass that if she was responsible for bringing Cassidy Caravans into the world, she was responsible for killing it – and when an angry Cass was like “what did you just say?” pointed out there was no reason to hold onto a dead caravan. Cass realized she was right and signed over whatever was left of the company, admitting that she felt strangely relieved to give it up. Apparently all this had just been weighing her down something awful. :)

b. Then, P. D. traveled to Freeside and visited the Atomic Wrangler to find Henry using one of the slot machines there. His initial response to her talking about ending his employment with Crimson Caravan was “no, fuck you, my dad said I get to run the New Vegas branch” –

And then he unwisely admitted he owed some money to the Omertas and needed the job to earn the funds to gamble with. Seeing an opportunity, P. D. threatened to tell the Omertas that Henry wasn’t good for what he owed them, and a panicked Henry immediately agreed to quit just to keep her mouth shut. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

VII. Talked to James Garret while she was in the Wrangler and asked if he had any work for her while she was in the area – which resulted in Garret telling her about how some of his clients on the, uh, sexier side of things had some pretty specific desires, and if she could round up some escorts to cater to these fetishes, he’d pay her a finder’s fee for each. Specifically, he needed a ghoul cowboy for a wealthy client who had fetishes for both; a smooth talker for all the people who said they’d pay more for a proper “boyfriend experience;” and a sexbot for all those nasty horrible robot fetishists of whom he is definitely not one. XD P. D. agreed to the job and headed out into the town, picking up –

a. Old Ben by the gate into the Strip as the “smooth talker,” convincing him that he could be a “beacon of light” for sad people – he was pleased with the idea of being a muse for some, and helping relieve the stress and tension of others, and agreed

b. Beatrix Russell, who lived with the Followers of the Apocalypse in their old Mormon fort, for the “ghoul cowboy” – she was initially into it when P. D. suggested the idea, but then was like “I don’t know if I want that jerk owning me;” fortunately, P. D. was able to sweeten the deal by suggesting she could get a discount on the booze, and Beatrix agreed to at least head over there and negotiate terms with Garret

c. And the Fully Integrated Security Technetronic Officer, aka the infamous FISTO, from Cerulean Robotics as the “sexbot!” Or, rather, she made him by sneaking into the place, killing all the rats inside, and then using her science skills to program in some sexbot routines.

AND THEN TESTED OUT THOSE ROUTINES BECAUSE FISTO TELLS YOU TO “ASSUME THE POSITION” ALMOST THE MINUTE HE’S ACTIVATED AND YOU CAN GO “WELL I GUESS I SHOULD MAKE SURE YOU WORK PROPERLY BEFORE SENDING YOU TO THE WRANGLER.” XD XD XD Oh my GOD. And then P. D. was mean enough to insult his performance. YOU PROGRAMMED HIM THAT WAY, GIRL! XD Anyway, she sent FISTO over to the Wrangler (HOPEFULLY after wiping him down first XD) then headed over herself to let Garret know the good news. He was happy to hear that Ben would be joining the team; mostly happy to hear Beatrix would (apparently his customer wanted a male ghoul – ah well) –

And fucking ECSTATIC to hear about FISTO. He tried to cover it, but he did not succeed. Especially given he kept chucking extra money at P. D. after she told him FISTO was primed to obey his commands. XD Oh God, this game…

VIII. Returned to the Crimson Caravan company to update Alice on Cass and Henry – which earned her not only a bunch of caps, AND a reputation boost with the NCR (who now consider her a “Smiling Troublemaker” – that seems right), but enough XP to finally get her up to Level 24! Which was her goal this entire episode. She promptly got Lockpick up to 75 and Repair up to 51 (because there will be many tough locks in the various DLCs, plus possibly some very important Repair checks), and then took the perk that Jon had been so desperate for her to get all this time – Slayer. Which makes all unarmed and melee attacks 30% faster. Jon demonstrated what that meant outside, showing off how P. D. could swing her beloved Embrace Of The Mantis King arm much faster, and turn small light weapons like Chance’s Knife into a blur of steel. And when you combine THAT effect with her beloved Turbo...ooooh boy. Suddenly P. D. is a very dangerous person to know indeed!

And so the episode ended with P. D. preparing to brave the horrors of the DLCs again, starting with a return trip into “Lonesome Road!” Which apparently has many tricks up its sleeves for the unwary, so Jon and P. D. will have to be on their A games when it comes to navigating it. *nods* Looking forward to it! This is such a fun series, I love it. :D

Yeah -- really wish I'd gotten more done on tumblr, or gotten some proper writing in! But I can't go back and change things, so I'd better just get to bed. Night all!

I am starting to suspect that I'm moving into PMS mode, as I'm more easily angered by stuff, I had some insomnia this morning (woke up early needing to use the bathroom and then couldn't get back to sleep), and I'm feeling more distracted by things than usual. All signs that the hormones are going out of whack and I should expect blood sometime in the future! *sigh* Fortunately, despite this (and despite not getting nearly as much sleep as I'd hoped), I still got a lot done --

Tumblr: Had a fairly productive day over here, all told –

Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Pleased to say I got a bunch of stuff done over here –

A) First, I went back through my dash to straight-up reblog a trio of posts:

I. One by petricorah, with a follow-up by second-beat songs, talking about how KOSA and other age-verification bills have passed sub-committees in the House and are now heading to the House, so if you want to see these bills killed, it’s probably time to call your senators again and inform them “hey, so, don’t support these fucking things?” Important internet information is important!

II. One by anewbrainjughead showcasing a video of James Acaster (one of my favorite British comedians) and Ed Gamble (another British comedian who I have fond memories of from various panel shows) talking to another guy who I don’t know about his latest projects on a show called “Off Menu” – specifically, the guy making up a movie for himself that starts with an H sound, and James coming out with “I thought you were going to say you were in the new Harry Potter thing.” And then, while Ed and the other guy laughed, he proceeded to cheerfully mock those actors who were in said new thing but who hadn’t been announced yet, depicting them as being incredibly nervous about being attached to the project (because, you know, JK Rowling is an enormous transphobe who has funded and continues to fund things that make it harder to be a trans person, especially a trans woman, in the UK) and praying that people react to the announcement of their role with excitement, like in the old days. And planning to go “I didn’t know” or “I don’t agree with her, but I can still work with her” if anyone asks directly (Ed joined in for that bit). XD It’s just nice to know that James and Ed, whose work I have really enjoyed, are capable of clearing the (admittedly low) bar of acknowledging JK Rowling is a cunt hurting people and that the other actors maybe should rethink being part of her next project.

III. And one by florencemachines, thisishowyoumakemovies, and bliss-bliss-bliss-bliss talking about and showing lots and lots of love for the costumes in A Muppet Christmas Carol – basically, florencemachines started things off with a big old gifset highlighting a bunch of the costumes (for humans AND Muppets); then thisishowyoumakemovies offered up a video by Abby Cox, a fashion historian, talking about how great the costumes are, along with a nine-video playlist by Nichole Rudolph using historical techniques to recreate Gonzo’s iconic Charles Dickens costume; and then bliss-bliss-bliss-bliss went OFF about just how amazing and historically accurate the costumes really are, showing how certain looks are ripped straight from fashion plates available from the time period of the book (the 1840s and thereabouts) (using screenshots from Abby’s video) and how they even made sure that the poorer characters, like Kermit and Miss Piggy as the Cratchits, are wearing clothes that are older and out of fashion and been altered over time. Honestly, it’s genuinely very cool to learn how much love the costume designers Ann Hollowood and Polly Smith put into these costumes – here, see for yourself!

B) Then I went into the archive for VLA(NS) to grab my collection of Not-Incorrect Valicer Christmas Quotes and start drafting out this year’s additions! So far I have two completed scenes and the beginning of a third, though not in that order:

I. A scene with the trio wrapping presents, with Victor commenting on how good Smiler is at wrapping stuff, and Smiler saying they learned from their Mum – this is the one that’s incomplete, because I have a specific endpoint in mind – namely, Smiler looking Victor up and down and saying he’d be easy to wrap, making him blush – but right at the moment I’m not sure how to get there. Hopefully I can figure it out soon!

II. A scene with Alice and Smiler listening to the radio when “My Favorite Things” – you know, the Julie Andrews song from The Sound Of Music – comes on, prompting Alice to be like “???” and Smiler to inform her that, for some reason, the local radio stations consider that a Christmas song now (they don’t know why, as they’ve never seen the movie, and neither has Alice); Alice decides that it’s at least better than constant covers of songs like “Let It Snow” and “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” and Smiler agrees…

Then makes up their own lyrics to the third verse talking about THEIR favorite things (specifically, Alice, Victor, and the love they share). Which would have been sweeter if Smiler hadn’t started things off with the lyric “Girls in blue dresses with blood-spattered aprons” and thus been forced to make Victor’s line “Boys we have saved from a terrible matron” – Alice rightfully laughs at them, and Smiler is like “Hey, YOU come up with a rhyme for apron on the fly!” (Me, I had to look up potential rhymes! Suppose I could have changed the first line, but it fit the meter too perfectly…)

III. And a scene with Smiler greeting Alice when she wakes up on Christmas morning and taking her to see the present they left for her under the tree...which proves to be a wrapped-up Victor; Alice snorts and says that it’s very thoughtful, though she suspects that it’s as much a present for Smiler as herself. XD Fortunately she’s sure there’s enough Victor for both of them, which Smiler agrees with, before jokingly reminding her that a Victor is for life, not just for Christmas. Alice assures them she has no intention of returning Victor, then asks how he’s doing –

And Victor admits he’s a little cold, because he’s actually naked under the wrapping paper. XD Alice, who thought he was in his pjs, apologizes and says they’ll get him unwrapped and back into their nice warm bed. XD This is the first scene I wrote, because it’s been on my mind a lot – the first, currently-incomplete scene is intended to be a bookend of sorts.

Not too shabby, I feel! And I’ve been meaning to start on the Christmas Not-Incorrect Valicer Quotes, in order to have them ready in time for the actual holiday. Might try and poke at that first one some more tomorrow – if I can get it done, that’s one less thing to worry about!

Valice Multiverse – And over here, I had an anon ask to answer after my FreeTube watching (below) – someone asking “You remember when your grandma would tell you that life was all there is and when you die you’re gone forever? Were you also disappointed to find out that wasn’t true?” I took the question as directed at Victor, specifically one of the ones who knows the afterlife is real, and thus had Forgotten Vows!Victor respond, essentially, with “...no?” XD He elaborated that he personally never heard such a sentiment from his grandmother, and that he finds it comforting that there’s something after death, since it means that you can reunite with lost loved ones – and he’s sure Alice feels the same way. He did make sure to add that he doesn’t feel like this devalues life at all, though, specifically stating that he’s enjoying sunshine as long as he can. *shrug* Sorry anon – you asked the wrong guy THAT question!

Portal: Okay, so – if you’re looking at the listed game and going “??? Isn’t today Saturday?” – yes, yes it is! But I decided to play the big final boss fight against GLaDOS today anyway. Why move my usual Sunday game up a day? Two reasons:

( TL;DR Version: Mod Issues With BG3, Need Time For OXmas Shenanigans Tomorrow )

Sooo yeah – ended up being a Portal Saturday! With me sending Chell to face off womano-to-super-computero against GLaDOS, blasting cores off her (after listening to as much of her dialogue as possible, because she does has great dialogue) and throwing them into a fire! How did that go?
...much harder than I expected! Mostly because:

A) I’d forgotten about the time limit GLaDOS hits you with after you burn her Morality Core and start the fight proper – namely, in addition to having her rocket turret fire rockets at you (which you then use to knock cores off of her via portal shenanigans), she’s pumping neurotoxin into the room – and Chell has exactly five minutes before the amount of neurotoxin in the air overwhelms even her determined ass and kills her. So you have to get all three remaining cores off GLaDOS and chuck them in the incinerator very quickly, while the room fills with deadly green fog. Not exactly an easy environment to work in, I think you’ll agree!

B) GLaDOS is QUITE hard to hit with those rockets, especially after you get the Curiosity Core off her – she wriggles around a LOT, and if you don’t have your portals placed just right, the rocket is just going to pass by her. And it doesn’t count if you hit the machinery holding her to the ceiling, or her bevy of screens – you HAVE to hit GLaDOS herself right on the money! Come on, throw me a bone here!

C) When you do hit her, you then have to get whatever core has fallen off her – and that isn’t always easy! Curiosity isn’t so bad – the core lands atop some pipes and you can easily use portals to grab it – but Cake is definitely harder, requiring you to fling yourself up onto a high platform among all her various wires to grab it, and Anger is the worst, as it just FLOATS IN MID-AIR, meaning you have to fling yourself at it and then manage to grab it or knock it down on your way to the ground. Which is NOT something I’m good at in this game! It took me a DISTRESSING amount of tries to both blast Anger off GLaDOS in the first place and then to grab it and bring it to the incinerator. Made me very glad that I was smart enough to quicksave immediately after burning Curiosity and Cake!

D) And I made the whole thing harder on myself by not always thinking with portals – took me a surprisingly long time to realize that it would be faster to just portal the wall atop the stairs leading to the button that opened the incinerator and the wall next to the incinerator itself so I could quickly pop between the two instead of either trying to leave the core atop the incinerator in a way that might cause it to fall in once I opened it, or trying to bunny-hop my way back down the stairs to the incinerator in time (as Chell moves a bit faster when she jumps). *facepalm* To be fair, I did manage the “balance the core on the incinerator so it falls in when the aperture opens” trick with the Morality core (since there’s no time limit to burn THAT one), so that probably didn’t help matters. *shakehead* One day I will remember that with a portal gun, I don’t NEED to traverse a straight line between A and B!

Despite all this, though, I did eventually beat the fight, burning all three cores and causing GLaDOS to break apart and suck both herself and Chell back up to the surface (at least until the Party Bot came to drag Chell away) with ELEVEN SECONDS remaining on the neurotoxin countdown clock. *shakehead* I earned GLaDOS’s rendition of “Still Alive” over the end credits in this playthrough, let me tell you! And now, having gotten to the end of the main game, let me share with you some Fun Facts I discovered in this last episode:

I. The color of the light on the portal gun changes to match the color of the portal you last shot – if you shot a blue portal, the light on the body and in the tube sticking out the front is blue, while if you shot an orange portal, it’s orange. The little lights at the joints of the “grabbers” on the business end of the gun are always orange, though – dunno why they don’t change, but they don’t.

II. The screens just above GLaDOS’s main body flash loads of images that go by a little too fast to see properly – but I did manage to spot that, along with multiple pictures of cake, there were also “STOP” and “DANGER” signs mixed in. Basically an early hint that she shouldn’t be messed with! (...they also kind of remind me of the circular screen underneath the Marmaliser, which similarly shows a variety of images – though obviously the Marmaliser one is much more high-tech and concentrates on “happy” images.)

III. GLaDOS’s design in this first game is actually way different to her design in the sequel – her “faceplate” is different and has a central orangey-yellow eye that bulges out (a comparison photo I found online seems to indicate that her Portal 2 look is the result of her losing chunks of her original “faceplate” after the events of the first game – given how violently she was sucked up to the surface, I can believe it); her body in general looks cruder and is much more white/light gray than it is in the sequel; and despite me complaining about her wiggling around during the boss fight, she seems in general to have less range of motion – specifically, I never saw her really lift her head up like she does in Portal 2. She seemed to be stuck staring at the floor, poor girl! The cores are also a different, cruder design, with big solid-colored eyes and very limited ability to emote – funny to think they’re probably technically meant to be MORE advanced when you compare them to the cores from the sequel! (Then again, maybe after Wheatley, Fact, Rick, and Space all failed in their jobs, the scientists decided simpler was better?) Even Chell looks different – her jaw seems more square in this version of the game, and her hair’s a lot messier. Amazing what a few years of advancing technology and art direction can do, huh?

IV. I got the regular “camera watching the Relaxation Vault” splash screen when I first loaded into the game – however, when I completed the game, it faded from that screen into the “cake on the desk” screen I saw when I first started my playthrough, and at the beginning of last week’s session. Still don’t know if they alternate or if the game just jumped the gun on giving me cake last time…

But I DO know that, if you let the splash screen sit for a moment, the camera will slowly pan to the right – revealing the Companion Cube sitting on the other side of the desk, hanging out with you and your cake! :D I didn’t see that before! Probably because I didn’t linger on the splash screen long enough...still, that was a nice way to end things, seeing old Cubey again. :)

And so that is Portal done! Well, the main story anyway – I might try some of the “Advanced” and “Challenge” maps before moving onto the next game. Dunno if I’ll be any good at them, of course, but – nothing ventured, nothing gained? XD

Writing: Spent some time this evening editing Satirical Demon’s Christmas gift fic – the one where the Valicer In The Dark crew end up inside of an Omega Mart and have to deal with all the weirdness while trying to figure out where the fuck they are. This is another one where I ended up writing the initial draft twice, though in this case I willingly chose to do so after confirming with Satirical that Omega Mart and its employees would not appreciate foreign products and salespeople entering, even accidentally. The edited version features:

A) The group near the stretched-out Dairy section, talking about how this is the weirdest market they’ve ever seen (specifically, in a joke I saved from the very first draft, Victor comments that the store is “off-kilter,” causing Alice to respond that she doesn’t think this store ever HAD a kilter, and Smiler arguing that they wouldn’t be surprised if the place sold kilters)

B) The group being confronted by the employee from the training video compilation I watched, an androgynous redhead with a nametag reading “YOU,” telling them cheerfully that they’d violated Omega Mart policies, and explaining that the problem was Smiler’s case of Joy Serum when the trio were like “???” Victor and Alice explained that they’d been brought into the store by some sort of swirling vortex (YOU was like “oh dear, you must have encountered a difficult spill”), but YOU was unwavering that they couldn’t have non-Omega Mart products in the store, it might confuse the Exceptional Customers –

C) Cue Smiler asking, “what if Joy Serum became an Omega Mart product?” and hitting YOU with the full force of their cheery salesperson act, telling them how glad they’d be to partner with Omega Mart as a distributor and how they could maybe even help the company get a presence back in Duskwall, noting that the Advocates would love Happles (smiley-faced apples). Poor YOU was a little shell-shocked, being like “wait, no, I’m supposed to do this to you, not the other way around,” and asking the trio to wait as they went to confer with their manager.

Which they did by entering one of the coolers in the Frosty Drinkables section. Alice suggested running, but Victor pointed out they didn’t know where to go, and Smiler said that maybe the manager could help them. Besides, this section of the store seemed safe enough! (Victor: [points at the stretched-out dairy section nearby] Smiler: I said safe enough.)

Fun stuff – I very much enjoyed writing this story! I might give it one more look-over tomorrow, but I think I’m ready to consider it done! (Well, unless I can figure out how to fit the “rose beef” flowers in there...we’ll see what happens.)

FreeTube/Invidious: While the distraction kept me from watching anything particularly long, I did get in two short videos:

A) “XMAS CHALLENGE Day 1: MIKE | Outer Worlds 2 Nude and Pursued 🏃‍♂️” by OXBox! Because, as previous stated, it is OXmas season, and I want to keep up with all the videos as they’re released so I don’t miss any of the madness. XD They’re doing the same format as last year – four solo challenges, six one-on-one challenges, and two free-for-all challenges – and today featured Mike taking on the first solo challenge: the ever-amusing “Naked Punching” challenge! (Now possibly renamed “Nude and Pursued” as per the title of the video, as Jane and Ellen came up with that phrase while talking about what was going to happen to Mike and ended up really liking it. Can’t go wrong with a good rhyme!) Mike was tasked with entering the settlement of Fairfield on Paradise Island in The Outer Worlds 2 and punching – or, well, hitting with the butt of his empty shotgun, as TOW2 doesn’t allow you to unequip your primary weapon, and apparently has no unarmed fighting options – the two highest authority figures in town, Acquisitions Officer Kaur and Minister Milverstreet (hanging out in a nearby building), and escaping back to his ship. All while wearing nothing but his skivvies. XD He was allowed to use his medical inhaler to keep himself alive longer in case of trouble (possibly because he was punching two people instead of the traditional one – I don’t recall if healing items were forbidden in previous runs), and he had three attempts to pull off the punches and his escape. How did he do?

Not great! His first attempt ended very quickly, as he successfully hit both targets, but was then almost immediately taken out by poison spray from – I THINK Kaur, but it may have been from one of the allied robots nearby. He didn’t get a chance to use his inhaler or even leave the building. The second attempt went much smoother at first – with Mike sprinting from target to target, hiding behind cover briefly to avoid the poison spray, and using the companions who were hanging around him to draw aggro, allowing himself to escape – but once he got outside, things took a bad turn, as he was forced to use his medical inhaler after being very shot, then ended up going the exact wrong way into the scrub outside of town. He ended up exploded by something before he even got near his ship. And the third attempt...well, he did his best, but he did get caught by the poison spray as he left the building, and then got domed by a guard before he could use the medical inhaler. Meaning the challenge was failed, and Mike does not get the first Christmas point. Shame. :( Tomorrow, we see Ellen, the previous Christmas Champion, take on her solo challenge – I’m looking forward to seeing what she picks!

B) “Portal any% Speedrun in 5:07 (WR)” by SiDiouS! Because, having just finished the game over the course of nine weekends, I found myself curious as to how the speedrunning community had handled it. What can I say, I think they do cool stuff! I thus searched “portal speedrun” to see if I could find a video –

And find one I did, of SiDiouS here setting a world record by glitching his way to glory in five minutes and seven seconds! (Well, five minutes and seven seconds without loading times – they don’t count those because different systems load things at different speeds.) I’m – not entirely sure I can describe what he did – he was naturally moving very fast, and doing a lot of shooting portals around the maps while jumping back and forth between them, staying mostly out-of-bounds – but essentially it seemed like he used the radio in the initial relaxation vault as an aid to jump his way out of bounds, then used various glitchy means to slip into the chamber where you get the single-portal gun and used that to shoot portals all over the place to do various skips (jumping backwards all the while – I guess Chell moves fastest like that?), before glitching back into the chamber to get the fully-killed out portal gun, then doing more skips via shooting portals all over the place while essentially clinging to the outside of the elevator shaft (he definitely stayed close to the elevator, I know that much), before getting back into the game right near the end chamber, grabbing a turret, and I think using it to shoot all the cores off GLaDOS early (getting shot massively in the process himself), before banishing them to the nether realm and ending the game! Possibly having died from 65% more bullet per bullet (the ending screen was VERY red), but I think defeating GLaDOS is the point of the run, so…it was very confusing, but very cool to watch. XD Oh, and this is very recent – the video was uploaded a mere three weeks ago! Awesome to think that people are still testing the limits of this rather old game! :)

Yeah, that's not bad, given my focus not being great today! But now it is time for me to go to bed and hopefully get more sleep than I did last night. Goals for tomorrow: work some more on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) drafts; maybe play a Portal challenge map; keep up with the latest OXmas episode and F:NV YOLO Remastered episode; do some writing. Hopefully all achievable goals -- night all!