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!