ELSEWHERE

+---------+----------------------------------------+---------+
|         | ------   ------ ------ ------ Location |         |
|         | |    |   |    | |    | |    |  Banner  |  Time   |
|         | |Deck|   |Hand| |Hand| |Hand|          | Weather |
|         | |    |   |    | |    | |    |          |  World- |
|         | ------   ------ ------ ------          |   News  |
|  Stats  +----------------------------------------+---------+
|         |  Welcome to Snowtown                   |         |
|         |                                        | Active  |
|         |  It’s been quite the trip, and         |  Quests |
|         |  you’re about ready to never see a     |         |
|         |  bus again. Which is a pity, because   |         |
+---------+  you’re still at the bus station, so   +---------+
|         |  there are quite a few of the beasts   |         |
|         |  around. Still, you’ve made it.        |         |
|Equipment|                                        |   Map   |
|         |  You're in Snowtown.                   |         |
|         | >|                                     |         |
+---------+----------------------------------------+---------+
|                           Exits                            |
+------------------------------------------------------------+

ASCII mockup of potential SnowRPG UI

One mechanic of SnowRPG is that you have a 'menace' stat for each regular stat, that increases when you fail particularly hard at using that stat -- 'charm' for example, has a 'suspicion' stat because people are suspicious of you when you attempt to manipulate them and fail. A menace getting too high puts the player character in an endgame situation, where they are given a quest to try to get out of that situation, and which they can either fail or decline so as to gameover that character and roll a new one. For example, becoming too suspicious puts you in jail, where you are given a quest to escape so you can continue playing that character.

With SnowRPG pivoting to a more baseline multiplayer experience: what if you don't get that 'save the character' quest, but can instead elect to give it to a friend (or another of your characters, if you have no friends or just want to do it yourself). There could also be an option to opt-in to receiving randoms' endgame quests, as a matchmaking tool. So, Character A gets too suspicious and is sent to prison, Character B receives a quest to break them out either by being specifically sent the request by A (and either being a separate person from A's player, or the same person), or A's character opts to give the quest to a rando and B is assigned it.

I think this is a Neat Idea, but will need to be balanced very carefully to avoid ruining friendships when B fails to rescue an A with hundreds of hours of playtime invested in them and A is disappeared from the game forever. For a start, there would need to be multiple chances to succeed. Possibly A is simply never lost forever and A's player can always try again to get A back (probably with some manner of cooldown on attempts).

A thing I like about this is it allows me to continue handwaving what any sort of 'afterlife' or whatever limbo would be like for Snowtown. Figuring out how to allow characters to rescue themselves from Death™ was rough and I never managed anything I was satisfied with.

I can also come up with multiple versions of a given quest. Sometimes you rescue A from prison but sometimes you sneak them into hiding until the heat calms down. Sometimes rescuing someone from death is getting them healed in time and sometimes it's finding a resurrection potion and maybe sometimes it is travelling into the underworld to retrieve their soul.

I like this concept, I think.

(Much of this terminology ("menace") is lifted from StoryNexus and therefore probably from Fallen London, and will be changed)

Just back from the drive-in with ash! We saw Iron Lung, in general I would give it a 7 out of 10, it dragged a bit but was well written and acted and the set was neat. In terms of being a refreshing change from what the movie industry has been putting out for years now it's great and I'm loving this shift in the winds I think I'm detecting. I'm also just, really happy for Markiplier that he's accomplished this. I know he's been wanting to do something like this for years and I know it was hard getting Iron Lung in theaters. It's just so cool for him

I went into it not knowing a Whole lot about Iron Lung the game and enjoyed it anyway but I do think it will be more enjoyable for fans of it

Before we went to the drive-in, we went to the store to get snacks and as we were leaving there was a group of kids on bikes harassing everyone coming out of the store. Black man yelling at them to 'never disrespect [his] wife again' while they tried to run him and everyone else in the lot down. By the time we were leaving a white man was actively trying to pull the kids off their bikes, a white woman was videotaping the whole thing and commentating, and the black man's wife, another white woman, was on the phone possibly to the police. We did not stick around to find out the end result of all of this but I do hope the kids (teenage boys) learn there are consequences for their actions without getting too fucked up

A pretty nice day despite some less great bits! I got Sims working on the desktop computer, so that's pretty neat. And then ash and I tried to re-hang a cupboard door in the kitchen and couldn't get it to sit right -- ultimately we took the door back off to attempt to deal with again next weekend, if we can think of a solution to whatever problem it's having. I also took a lovely picture of some daisies that popped up in the backyard a while back. I need to get around to digitizing my photographs so I can put them all away

Erika, Dave, and I played some more Peak -- we continue to not make it past the second biome, but in our defence it threw the mushroom forest at us again. I did get a couple of achievements by healing Erika when she nearly killed herself, but the whole staying-alive-thing was unfortunately not to last for any of us. We did a couple runs and then switched to PlateUp! for a bit, and called it for real when something came up IRL for Erika

After that I hung out with ash because it was about time for him to start making dinner -- I read some more bad-christian-science-book to him, and then while we ate dinner we watched Markiplier's playthrough of the game Iron Lung, and then other youtubes (including season 3 of Bigtop Burger)

After all that I went back into the study to mess with the sims and spent three hours making a Katters and a Zebra. I didn't want to stay up much later, so I have not yet built them a TIMPS to live in but that'll be on the docket tomorrow probably. I have downloaded a mod to give Katters properly pointy ears but have not otherwise messed with mods yet, and I need to re-make a keit skin for her and possibly better eyes if that's an option

I did also attempt to mess with some actual productivity today and ran into a weird issue I'm going to need to attempt to diagnose tomorrow, today I didn't want to mess with it. Something has gone weird with my evennia install or something, I don't know. Nothing important has been done with it yet so I might just have to reinstall it, but at minimum I'm going to have to go look at the installation documents again and see if I missed something that would make the weirdness make sense

Alright, more dinner and watching something before bed, now

Something I think more people need to understand and accept is that sometimes you just miss a detail in a movie, and that's not the movie's fault nor is it a flaw in the movie's writing. Sometimes it's just a you problem that you don't get a plot point!

This brought to you by a reviewer who didn't understand why the "lockbox" was so important in Iron Lung (it's a black box that contains all the data stored on two different ships sent into the blood ocean specifically to gather data about the blood ocean, the entire point of the movie is a discussion of the value of human life in comparison to precisely that data)

Iron Lung is not a bad movie because you missed every time the characters talked about the black boxes, it is not bad writing that you failed to put together the details given about the black boxes

Alright! I spent most of today remaking TIMPS (referencing the old screencaps I took last time I did this) (god I hope that's the right URL, I can't actually look at imgur anymore without futzing with my vpn first and I don't want to do that tonight)

But it's all done except the lab, which I figure makes more sense to furnish as the resident sims desire skill-building objects. And then I got to actually play the dang game for a couple hours!

Katters and Zebra currently hate each other -- it's always a tossup for some reason whether or not their sims will get along, but I think I can nudge them over to friendship. And now I also can make some other characters and populate the city with them

Played a bit more sims, today, and then I decided I wanted to try making keit skins and, uh

Well, for a long time now the Sims modding community has been a Fucking Shambles with everyone splitting off to their own patreons and tumblrs and whatever, instead of uploading their shit to a single hub that makes it easy to a. find what you need and b. keep everything updated. Unfortunately another problem I'm running in to now is that one of the pillars of the community died a few years back, leaving some tools in limbo and with no one taking up the mantle to maintain or remake them. And if you try to find resources on this stuff, you are still pointed at this person's programs and tutorials, and tutorials for any alternatives are, uh, bad. No one knows how to make a good tutorial anymore. Also apparently there's a huge gatekeeping problem in the Sims community, I guess because the people who make good mods think they can make money off of doing so (also hence the splitting off to patreon and whatever) so they don't want anyone else being able to make mods the way they do.

It's a mess. And I spent today trying to navigate all that and all I want is to make a custom skin

I think I've got it now, but by the time I did ash was home and ready to social so I shut everything down to go hang out with him and watch a Queen Coke Francis and a couple digimons. We are about to add Kari to our cast of digidestined!

When I went to my bedroom after dinner and dessert, to go play Palworld with Dave, I discovered that the cat had peed on my bed so I have unfortunately rainchecked Dave games to do laundry instead. It is my fault, the litterbox got dirtier than it should have, but man I wish she'd stop peeing on the uncovered sheets in particular

I'm back in the study while I take care of all that, probably I will fire up the skininator and see if I can get a keit skin made. For now I'm going to just make the single skin for Katters specifically but I think there are ways to do some fancier stuff with colour options and having them appear differently on different ages and stuff.

Oh also the camera bag I ordered arrived and it turns out to be too small, I misunderstood the measurements on the website. This is really annoying, but it does turn out to be juuust big enough to hold my extra lenses and a couple packs of film, so it's still usable. Maybe eventually I get a size up (and make double sure the measurements are good).

Also also when I was making sure the dryer was empty I saw something in it and when I pulled it out it turned out to be a cat turd so that was fun. Today! Is sure a day.