Mostly Cleaning And Periody Saturday
Jul. 19th, 2025 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
What the hell does that title mean, you ask? Well, as for "Periody," it was the second day of my period, meaning I was rather moody, sluggish both mentally and physically, and dealing with a murder scene every time I went to the bathroom today -- fucking biology, I swear. And as for "Mostly Cleaning" -- well, see below --
Cleaning & Laundry: Yup, we had a full load today, with me both needing to clean my room and do the monthly wash of all my blankets and my bathrobe along with my sheets. And unfortunately, it was also one of those days where I had a bit of a slow start, and everything took a little longer than I thought it was going to take. :( Which I think can be blamed on a combination of my period making me feeling generally drained, and me deliberately drawing the dusting out some I could listen to the whole two-and-a-half-hour final episode of Oxventure Presents: Blades In The Dark, “Magic, Ghosts, Danger & Death.” XD What, I really love it and I wanted to make sure I heard the whole thing! How could I pass up hearing the gang finally reaching the Barricade? Cheering them on as they battled Amadeus Astor in one final massive boss fight? Laughing my ass off as Barnaby threw a flask of water on someone because he thought it was some strange exotic chemical concoction? XD Yeah, that kind of highlights the problems with listening to these things while I clean – they’re really fun, but they DO slow me down because I get so into them. Should probably go back to just plain music now that I’m done!
Anyway, regarding how the actual cleaning went – initial dusting started around 10:30 AM-ish, and I threw the laundry in around 11:30 AM-ish. Lunch was kind of late today (mom had to bake the bread for sausage-and-pepper sandwiches because we had no premade rolls or anything), so I was able to get the dusting and Swiffering done and my laundry in the dryer before we finally ate a little after 1:30 PM. I’d hoped to get to my vacuuming right afterward, but a combination of having to help dry all the dishes (working around Mom making meatballs for supper) and an – unfortunate intestinal incident – driving me to the toilet for an embarrassingly long time (I don’t know if I ate something that somewhat disagreed with me, or if my period is just encouraging my intestines to be bastards, but – yeah) meant I didn’t start vacuuming until about 2:50 PM, and didn’t wrap up until just after 3 PM. At which point, my blankets and such were ready to come out of the dryer, so I just went and go those and folded them up while listening to the Superliminal title screen music. Meaning I finally finished and got to start my video gaming around 3:20 PM. *sigh* It would have been earlier if my guts had declined to be such bastards! Meeeh...
Superliminal: I went through the “Labyrinth” level today after finally finishing my cleaning today – and this was another one where getting some of those goodies took some real doing, let me tell you! But I didn’t falter in my mission and, with the help of my guide (and a bit of reloading), I managed to collect:
A) The red pawn hiding in a secret corridor in the sideways room you fall into after falling down a hallway you were previously walking down! This room has a gimmick where there’s an exit door up on the wall high above your head that’s interactive – however, the first time you try to interact with it, it just falls off and hit the wall-floor that you’re standing on. Picking it up again puts a hole in the floor that you can use to escape the room and continue the level. However, there’s a bright blue corridor up on the wall where the exit door originally was, and to reach it, you have to manipulate the exit door into becoming a big old ramp that you can climb up. Hidden in that corridor, under a window in the floor (because of course the corridor is sideways too), is the red pawn. It took me two tries to get the door into the proper position to become a ramp – the first time I ended up shrinking it to tiny size and eventually dropping it through the level architecture, forcing me to reload – but I did it in the end. Moving to another position so I wasn’t fighting the benches nailed to the floor-wall next to me helped a lot, let me tell you! And I also found a fire extinguisher I missed in that corridor, so doubly-glad I got up there!
B) The first blueprint of the level, which was atop the scaffolding sitting on the right-hand side of the “waterfall” pool room, where you have to climb the ledges with the help of a die – which disappears on you when you climb the first ledge, then reappears on the next ledge up with a cheeky smiley face drawn on it. Annoyingly, when this first happened, I turned around too quickly to try and catch the die reappearing, and fell off the first ledge, preventing myself from grabbing the die and forcing a reload – lucky for me the game made a checkpoint right at the start of the room! *sigh* Anyway, to get up onto the scaffolding, you have to climb up the ledges with the die, then go into the backstage area just beyond the room, get a soda from the Dream Soda machine, then use the soda and the die to create a crude pathway up to the top of the scaffolding (generally by making them both really big in a way where you can still climb up them). This REALLY took some doing, as I couldn’t get the die to balance properly on the soda can for the LONGEST time, and kept shrinking the damn thing by accident, but EVENTUALLY I got something that worked and was able to get up on the scaffolding and get the damn blueprint. *shakehead* Oh Pillow Castle (the people behind the game), why are you like this…
C) The blue queen chess piece, which was stuck to the cord of a lamp in the corridor just beyond the room with a yellow button you have to weigh down with a chess piece to open the way forward (at least, that’s how it looked to me – it was dark up near the ceiling!). And using the yellow queen chess piece in the room with you won’t work, because if you put that piece on the button, it immediately turns into a painted image on the wall (it’s delightfully freaky). What you do for the puzzle is stand on the button yourself, see the yellow knight chess piece waiting for you in the corridor beyond, and pick it up and put it on the button to weigh it down and let you proceed. What you do to get the blue queen is to then grab the knight chess piece from the button (thanks to how this game works, once it’s in your pointer hand it’ll be close enough to you not to disappear when the door closes again – it’ll just be small), resize it so you can use it to climb onto the big green pipe running along the side of the room, then grab it and put it on the pipe with you near the lamp, leaning against the wall so you can use it to jump onto the lamp and get close enough to the blue queen to click it (as she’s easily visible from the floor, just too far away to interact with). This one was also a bit annoying, as I had trouble getting the knight into a good position on the pipe so I could use it to leap onto the lamp, but I got there in the end!
D) The second blueprint of the level, which was at the end of a little corridor behind where you land when you drop into the faux-cubism art gallery room with the die that, when you pick it up, suddenly turns the room into an overlit “simulation” room with white lights everywhere and the avocado bed in the middle of the ledge that you you have to climb up. If you turn around instead of immediately picking up the die, you can go around a corner and find some blueprints for, interestingly enough, the NEXT level, “Whitespace,” depicting some of the giant chess pieces there. This is probably one of the easiest blueprints in the game to find –
As evidenced by the fact that, when I went to collect it – I found that the blueprint was already completed. Meaning I’d already clicked on this at some point in the past. O.o I’m guessing that, at one point during one of my original runs, I must have turned around and come this way thinking that maybe it was the way I was MEANT to go, clicked on the blueprint, gone “???”, and then just continued playing because I don’t think I knew about all the collectibles when I first played this back in 2022. XD Welp, at least I knew that one already counted toward my total!
E) The “Projector” constellation room, which was in the overlit simulation room you find yourself after picking up the die in the previous room! Or, rather, it was under it – there’s a square of rectangular white lights in the floor on the lower level of that room, and behind the fake elevator door behind you, there’s some hidden stairs leading down to the corridor that leads to the star room (or you can just wander around until you fall down the hole, like I did XD). I found what I thought were the stars for the constellation pretty quickly, but lining them up took a minute as I struggled to find the right angle to make the projector. Figured it out in the end, though, and was pleased to see the image come to life! That’s almost every constellation collected now, yay~
F) And the third blueprint of the level, which was atop the little room that appears in the endless parking lot once you’ve walked far enough to turn all four horizons you were heading for into four solid walls (I’m – not sure how to explain it any better than that). My guide said that the best way to do that was to climb up the electrical box on the side of the room – I did so, with the help of a nearby chair, and discovered the blueprint lying on the roof. Glad it didn’t require me to drag any items along with me to climb up there! I would have been so annoyed…
So yeah – that’s the penultimate set of collectibles snagged! And as for interesting things I noticed along the way:
I. The electrical boxes you see in various places in this level have proper warning signs on them, telling people not to mess with them – I’d say “safety first,” but this is a game that actively encourages you to empty any fire extinguishers and pull every fire alarm you find, so… XD
II. The water fountains you find while navigating the corridors of the section where the Standard Orientation Protocol stops the Emergency Exit Protocol from waking you up have a sign over them that says “WARNING: This machine is remotely controlled and may start without warning.” I do not think the water fountains actually turn on at any point – but after seeing that sign, they really should! Those two, at least. (Honestly, I think you should just be able to click on them and dispense water, like you can click on the fire extinguishers. Have an achievement for it: “Hydration Achieved” or something like that.)
III. I also got a good look at one of the corkboards in this area, which had two things of interest pinned to it –
a. The mysterious “How To Start It” paper I’ve seen in the reception area of other levels, finally in a place and at a size where I could read it! Turns out it was something Dr. Glenn (yes, two “n”s, apparently I misspelled it before) Pierce typed up while trying to come up with greetings for people who were starting their SomnaSculpt experience! Ranging from the casual “Hey, Glenn here – welcome to your first ever Somnasculpture!” to the fanciful “Greetings, traveler. Welcome to the wonderful world of SomnaSculpt. I am Glenn Pierce, and I will be your guide on this journey.” to the egotistical “Welcome to the future of medical treatment. My name is Dr. Pierce, and I invented SomnaSculpt. Given time, we can, and will, solve everything.” XD And yes, his familiar “Hello. My name is Dr. Glenn Pierce” was on the list too, because it had to be. Honestly, I’m glad he went with that one – him going “Hey, Glenn here” at the start of every message like Cave Johnson from Portal 2 would have had a much different vibe.
b. And a paper covered in code for – well, I thought it was actual code from the game, but apparently it’s code for how the SomnaSculpt system itself works! Which is pretty neat, though much neater are the two Post-It notes stuck to the code printout, one saying “Always asking WHY we’re doing this,” and the other saying “Keep making the game, keep going, don’t mess it up, don’t worry about the bugs in your brain, just do everything by the time it’s over with.” Which is – kinda creepy! But this whole game is kinda creepy, frankly, especially this level – yeah, I know “Blackout” is the explicitly horror-themed one, but this is the one that implies you’re going to be trapped in a dream forever by the incompetence of your carers, which is a lot scarier. I feel like whoever we’re playing should sue Dr. Pierce after this is all over!
IV. There’s a bit in the part where you keep being teleported back into your room whenever you try to leave it after the Standard Orientation Protocol stops you leaving where you fall out of a sideways version of your bedroom and into a big backstage area with a lot of tables and chairs set up for dinner and an alarm clock on a chair, beeping at you (which, when pressed, teleports you back into the standard version of your suite). Now, after playing through “Blackout,” you’d think dinner would be beans, but instead they chose to reuse the chopped-up carrot assets from the “knife jumpscare” moment right before you reach the “IDEA” generator. Maybe the staff accidentally re-enacted the famous fart scene from Blazing Saddles and decided they need more vegetables in their diet or something. XD
V. Something does make a return from “Blackout,” though – the RySan boxes from the box maze! One is in one of the corridors in the backstage area where you’re trying to make your escape, right before you end up falling down a hallway that’s suddenly turned sideways onto a giant red pawn.
VI. Those blue recycling bins you see around the place are apparently only for recycling cardboard, according to a sign above one right next to that giant red pawn. Good to know!
VII. There’s a weirdly shiny SOMETHING attached to one of the walls in the room just below the breakaway floor room (where you THINK you have to resize some stairs to reach an exit high on a wall, but making the stairs bigger makes the floor break apart under you and drops you into a basement area), reflecting the doors on the opposite wall – no idea what it was, but it was interesting!
VIII. The room you go through right before entering the “waterfall pool” room with its moving dice shakes as you go through it, and sounds like a subway train is traveling over it – given SomnaSculpt’s headquarters are in a strip mall, I wonder if this is a reference to something happening in the real world?
IX. Remember that disappearing die in the “waterfall pool” room? What’s interesting is, when it disappears, you can actually hear the die land behind you with a “thunk” – hearing that is what caused me to spin around too fast and fall off the ledge my first time in there.
X. At one point, there’s a maze where you have to find the correct path through a bunch of elevator doors, eventually aided by arrows on the floor (the actual “maze” is pretty small, as per the director’s commentary, because with every room looking alike, they didn’t need to make it big – they just needed to loop people through the same few rooms a couple of times). By sheer coincidence, I managed to speed-run it, taking the right path so that I ended up where the last arrow actually points you to the door that leads outside to the seemingly-endless parking lot. I have no idea how I did that and could not tell you the path I took if you put a gun to my head, but – I’m proud of myself regardless. XD
XI. In addition to the room with your bed that appears in the parking lot once you’ve closed it in, there’s also a separate wall containing a door with a welcome mat, plus a fancy griddle stove next to it for some reason. Complete with a pot on the stovetop. O.o Oookay then. XD
XII. And the big one – when I consulted my guide on where to find the “Projector” constellation room, the person who wrote it mentioned they called it the “Moon Projector” constellation because the projector appears on the main menu screen after you find it, and projects a big old moon on the wall. I was like “ooh, cool,” and – once I was done with the level – returned to the main menu screen to check this. To my delight, I discovered that the guide creator had not lied, and the projector was there, resting on a shelf and projecting the moon on the wall –
And then I looked around the main menu screen and went “hang on. Are ALL the constellation objects in here? Have they ALL been gradually added after I find the rooms and I just haven’t noticed because I haven’t paid that much attention to the main menu?” I thus did some research this evening – and yes, I do believe that is the case! Mostly because I found a couple of examples of a main menu from people who hadn’t yet played the game, and THOSE images didn’t have the Dream Soda machine, or the coffee cup on the ladder, or the cheese wheel on the desk, or any of the other objects I’ve found! So that’s cool – wish I’d noticed earlier! And, apparently, once I find all the constellation objects, I unlock a way to dynamically CHANGE the main menu screen if I want. :D So that’s something to look forward to!
*nods* And that is – NOT that for “Labyrinth,” because unfortunately while I found all the collectibles, and the one fire extinguisher I hadn’t yet emptied, I did not find any unpulled fire alarms! I don’t know where the missing one is lurking – I was looking HARD for those! *frowns* But yes, “Labyrinth” now joins “Optical” in the category of “Levels I Will Have To Replay Later To Get A Missing Item.” Tomorrow, though, we concentrate on finishing off the game proper with “Whitespace,” the final actually playable level (as the actual finale, “Retrospective,” is basically just a big cutscene). And fortunately, as per the Level Select, I HAVE found all the fire alarms and fire extinguishers in there, so I just need to get the collectibles proper. Wish me luck! (Not in finding them, since I’ve got the guide, but in just grabbing the fiddly little bastards. XD)
Writing: Got another page written on “The Van Dort Vacancy” – Victor, Alice, and Smiler got Victor’s clothes, books, sketchbook, and quills packed up today, with Victor lamenting that he didn’t dare take his inks or paints for fear of them spilling, or his easel because it was just too unwieldy (Alice promising him they’d earmark some of their ill-gotten gains to buy him a new one). Smiler suggested Victor also take the big purple blanket on his bed (aka my big purple blanket, which I included in what I believe was one of the first VITD short stories I ever wrote (for the first Polyship Week I participated in, if I recall correctly) – I had Victor explicitly think he was glad he took it from home in that story, so I had to include it here), which prompted Victor to realize that he wanted to take something hidden under said bed – his collection of “slug stories,” aka the Duskwallian equivalent of Victorian “penny dreadfuls.” Hey, my regular Victors read stuff like “Varney The Vampire,” so my VITD Victor had to have a similar vice! :P Anyway, he rooted around for them under there for a bit while talking cheap periodicals with Smiler and Alice (allowing me to bring up the “Amusements” magazine Smiler was reading in one of my more recent VITD stories for Multiamory March – Alice and Victor were very surprised to learn it was NOT an Advocate publication) –
Only to instead find an old fancy masquerade mask. From a party where he was forced to stand around in a stiff, elaborate, horrible costume, and where, when he attempted to woo some ladies the way he saw the other men doing, he got laughed at so cruelly he ran and hid by the buffet for the rest of the party. I ended the chunklet with Smiler asking if Victor had ANY happy memories. I am starting to wonder that myself, Smiler! But don’t worry – tomorrow, Victor’s going to make an announcement that’s going to make YOU very happy, at least...
YouTube: Well, I was hoping to watch more than just the one video, but circumstances forbade. So instead I focused on getting out of my Watch Later the one video I most wanted to watch: “Fast Traffic in Red Dead Redemption 2 is CARNAGE | We React to Ultra Fast Carriages in RDR2” by OXBox! Another one of their newly-beloved “react” videos, this one featured Mike letting Andy play his copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 while Jane watched on, giving Andy control of John Marston in the town of St. Denis and tasking him with getting over to the train station – with Andy and Jane adding the goal of getting to the tailor first, because neither of them approved of the shitty outfit Mike had stuck his John Marston in. There was just one small problem with this plan – Mike had installed the mod “Rampage Trainer,” which makes every carriage in this game travel at the speed of light. As you might imagine, this caused no small amount of chaos, and no small amount of trouble for poor Andy as he tried to get around town. XD Highlights of the video included:
A) Andy starting the challenge being wanted for murder because so many people had died from all the carriages crashing into the buildings/the ground/each other, and then promptly making things worse by shooting every policeman who came for him, all while desperately trying to dodge the carriages – it ended with him having to die so he could start clean
B) Andy having a horse just taken out from clean under him by one of the ultrafast carriages while trying to figure out how to cross a busy road in front of him
C) Andy finally getting John to the tailor (after yet more horse death, flying horses from all the crashing carriages, some very Silent Hill-esque juddering from a carriage on fire caught in a small tunnel off a building, and a brief stint in jail from John being accused of murder AGAIN thanks to being near all this carriage death) and the editors having to speed up how long it took him to chose a new outfit for John (to be fair, I have heard via my friend Squid, who also plays this game, that the clothing system in RDR2 is TOP NOTCH, so him taking a while to get it just right makes sense)
D) Andy getting double-tapped by two carriages in short succession after thinking he found a safe place to stand on the tram line in an area where there are almost no carriages, being launched practically to space, and then falling down and landing perfectly on the top of the tram, giving him three seconds to actually heal up
E) Andy having to deal with another carriage slam knocking John Marston onto a boat in the nearby harbor as he finally got near the station – which was a problem, because John canonically can’t swim (if he drops into swimmable water, his stamina bar INSTANTLY drains). Fortunately, there was a ladder nearby that he could climb before he drowned, and he managed to avoid death by carriage
F) Andy finally getting John to the ticket station...only for the ticket seller to be too busy cowering in terror of the carnage outside to actually sell him a ticket. So Andy instead had John get into the trainyard and climb into one of the train’s freight carriages, and they called that a win. XD He then stupidly climbed out of the carriage to investigate why a dead horse was on a rooftop, and got creamed by another flaming carriage wreck. XD
Fucking hilarious – it’s amazing how much fun you can have with just one mod adding a specific bit of chaos. XD Totally recommend watching this – it’s fourteen minutes of pure superfast carriage comedy!
Other: Got myself a frozen hot chocolate from Dunkin Donuts for the first time in years this afternoon, after playing Superliminal – I felt like, after all the cleaning and the intestinal nonsense, I deserved a treat. Was very tasty, AND I had a gift card that I found in my drawer at work, so I didn’t even have to pay for it. Yay! :)
So yeah -- not the worst day, but I wish I'd been more focused and hadn't had to spend most of it cleaning or, uh, pooping. *shakehead* Hopefully Sunday will be a little better -- hoping to answer Moose's messages; play Superliminal and finish off "Whitespace;" work some more on "The Van Dort Vacancy;" and keep up with Jon's latest F:NV YOLO Remastered video (probably gonna see if I can watch most of it with my workout). We will see what happens! But right now, I really have to get to bed -- night all!
Cleaning & Laundry: Yup, we had a full load today, with me both needing to clean my room and do the monthly wash of all my blankets and my bathrobe along with my sheets. And unfortunately, it was also one of those days where I had a bit of a slow start, and everything took a little longer than I thought it was going to take. :( Which I think can be blamed on a combination of my period making me feeling generally drained, and me deliberately drawing the dusting out some I could listen to the whole two-and-a-half-hour final episode of Oxventure Presents: Blades In The Dark, “Magic, Ghosts, Danger & Death.” XD What, I really love it and I wanted to make sure I heard the whole thing! How could I pass up hearing the gang finally reaching the Barricade? Cheering them on as they battled Amadeus Astor in one final massive boss fight? Laughing my ass off as Barnaby threw a flask of water on someone because he thought it was some strange exotic chemical concoction? XD Yeah, that kind of highlights the problems with listening to these things while I clean – they’re really fun, but they DO slow me down because I get so into them. Should probably go back to just plain music now that I’m done!
Anyway, regarding how the actual cleaning went – initial dusting started around 10:30 AM-ish, and I threw the laundry in around 11:30 AM-ish. Lunch was kind of late today (mom had to bake the bread for sausage-and-pepper sandwiches because we had no premade rolls or anything), so I was able to get the dusting and Swiffering done and my laundry in the dryer before we finally ate a little after 1:30 PM. I’d hoped to get to my vacuuming right afterward, but a combination of having to help dry all the dishes (working around Mom making meatballs for supper) and an – unfortunate intestinal incident – driving me to the toilet for an embarrassingly long time (I don’t know if I ate something that somewhat disagreed with me, or if my period is just encouraging my intestines to be bastards, but – yeah) meant I didn’t start vacuuming until about 2:50 PM, and didn’t wrap up until just after 3 PM. At which point, my blankets and such were ready to come out of the dryer, so I just went and go those and folded them up while listening to the Superliminal title screen music. Meaning I finally finished and got to start my video gaming around 3:20 PM. *sigh* It would have been earlier if my guts had declined to be such bastards! Meeeh...
Superliminal: I went through the “Labyrinth” level today after finally finishing my cleaning today – and this was another one where getting some of those goodies took some real doing, let me tell you! But I didn’t falter in my mission and, with the help of my guide (and a bit of reloading), I managed to collect:
A) The red pawn hiding in a secret corridor in the sideways room you fall into after falling down a hallway you were previously walking down! This room has a gimmick where there’s an exit door up on the wall high above your head that’s interactive – however, the first time you try to interact with it, it just falls off and hit the wall-floor that you’re standing on. Picking it up again puts a hole in the floor that you can use to escape the room and continue the level. However, there’s a bright blue corridor up on the wall where the exit door originally was, and to reach it, you have to manipulate the exit door into becoming a big old ramp that you can climb up. Hidden in that corridor, under a window in the floor (because of course the corridor is sideways too), is the red pawn. It took me two tries to get the door into the proper position to become a ramp – the first time I ended up shrinking it to tiny size and eventually dropping it through the level architecture, forcing me to reload – but I did it in the end. Moving to another position so I wasn’t fighting the benches nailed to the floor-wall next to me helped a lot, let me tell you! And I also found a fire extinguisher I missed in that corridor, so doubly-glad I got up there!
B) The first blueprint of the level, which was atop the scaffolding sitting on the right-hand side of the “waterfall” pool room, where you have to climb the ledges with the help of a die – which disappears on you when you climb the first ledge, then reappears on the next ledge up with a cheeky smiley face drawn on it. Annoyingly, when this first happened, I turned around too quickly to try and catch the die reappearing, and fell off the first ledge, preventing myself from grabbing the die and forcing a reload – lucky for me the game made a checkpoint right at the start of the room! *sigh* Anyway, to get up onto the scaffolding, you have to climb up the ledges with the die, then go into the backstage area just beyond the room, get a soda from the Dream Soda machine, then use the soda and the die to create a crude pathway up to the top of the scaffolding (generally by making them both really big in a way where you can still climb up them). This REALLY took some doing, as I couldn’t get the die to balance properly on the soda can for the LONGEST time, and kept shrinking the damn thing by accident, but EVENTUALLY I got something that worked and was able to get up on the scaffolding and get the damn blueprint. *shakehead* Oh Pillow Castle (the people behind the game), why are you like this…
C) The blue queen chess piece, which was stuck to the cord of a lamp in the corridor just beyond the room with a yellow button you have to weigh down with a chess piece to open the way forward (at least, that’s how it looked to me – it was dark up near the ceiling!). And using the yellow queen chess piece in the room with you won’t work, because if you put that piece on the button, it immediately turns into a painted image on the wall (it’s delightfully freaky). What you do for the puzzle is stand on the button yourself, see the yellow knight chess piece waiting for you in the corridor beyond, and pick it up and put it on the button to weigh it down and let you proceed. What you do to get the blue queen is to then grab the knight chess piece from the button (thanks to how this game works, once it’s in your pointer hand it’ll be close enough to you not to disappear when the door closes again – it’ll just be small), resize it so you can use it to climb onto the big green pipe running along the side of the room, then grab it and put it on the pipe with you near the lamp, leaning against the wall so you can use it to jump onto the lamp and get close enough to the blue queen to click it (as she’s easily visible from the floor, just too far away to interact with). This one was also a bit annoying, as I had trouble getting the knight into a good position on the pipe so I could use it to leap onto the lamp, but I got there in the end!
D) The second blueprint of the level, which was at the end of a little corridor behind where you land when you drop into the faux-cubism art gallery room with the die that, when you pick it up, suddenly turns the room into an overlit “simulation” room with white lights everywhere and the avocado bed in the middle of the ledge that you you have to climb up. If you turn around instead of immediately picking up the die, you can go around a corner and find some blueprints for, interestingly enough, the NEXT level, “Whitespace,” depicting some of the giant chess pieces there. This is probably one of the easiest blueprints in the game to find –
As evidenced by the fact that, when I went to collect it – I found that the blueprint was already completed. Meaning I’d already clicked on this at some point in the past. O.o I’m guessing that, at one point during one of my original runs, I must have turned around and come this way thinking that maybe it was the way I was MEANT to go, clicked on the blueprint, gone “???”, and then just continued playing because I don’t think I knew about all the collectibles when I first played this back in 2022. XD Welp, at least I knew that one already counted toward my total!
E) The “Projector” constellation room, which was in the overlit simulation room you find yourself after picking up the die in the previous room! Or, rather, it was under it – there’s a square of rectangular white lights in the floor on the lower level of that room, and behind the fake elevator door behind you, there’s some hidden stairs leading down to the corridor that leads to the star room (or you can just wander around until you fall down the hole, like I did XD). I found what I thought were the stars for the constellation pretty quickly, but lining them up took a minute as I struggled to find the right angle to make the projector. Figured it out in the end, though, and was pleased to see the image come to life! That’s almost every constellation collected now, yay~
F) And the third blueprint of the level, which was atop the little room that appears in the endless parking lot once you’ve walked far enough to turn all four horizons you were heading for into four solid walls (I’m – not sure how to explain it any better than that). My guide said that the best way to do that was to climb up the electrical box on the side of the room – I did so, with the help of a nearby chair, and discovered the blueprint lying on the roof. Glad it didn’t require me to drag any items along with me to climb up there! I would have been so annoyed…
So yeah – that’s the penultimate set of collectibles snagged! And as for interesting things I noticed along the way:
I. The electrical boxes you see in various places in this level have proper warning signs on them, telling people not to mess with them – I’d say “safety first,” but this is a game that actively encourages you to empty any fire extinguishers and pull every fire alarm you find, so… XD
II. The water fountains you find while navigating the corridors of the section where the Standard Orientation Protocol stops the Emergency Exit Protocol from waking you up have a sign over them that says “WARNING: This machine is remotely controlled and may start without warning.” I do not think the water fountains actually turn on at any point – but after seeing that sign, they really should! Those two, at least. (Honestly, I think you should just be able to click on them and dispense water, like you can click on the fire extinguishers. Have an achievement for it: “Hydration Achieved” or something like that.)
III. I also got a good look at one of the corkboards in this area, which had two things of interest pinned to it –
a. The mysterious “How To Start It” paper I’ve seen in the reception area of other levels, finally in a place and at a size where I could read it! Turns out it was something Dr. Glenn (yes, two “n”s, apparently I misspelled it before) Pierce typed up while trying to come up with greetings for people who were starting their SomnaSculpt experience! Ranging from the casual “Hey, Glenn here – welcome to your first ever Somnasculpture!” to the fanciful “Greetings, traveler. Welcome to the wonderful world of SomnaSculpt. I am Glenn Pierce, and I will be your guide on this journey.” to the egotistical “Welcome to the future of medical treatment. My name is Dr. Pierce, and I invented SomnaSculpt. Given time, we can, and will, solve everything.” XD And yes, his familiar “Hello. My name is Dr. Glenn Pierce” was on the list too, because it had to be. Honestly, I’m glad he went with that one – him going “Hey, Glenn here” at the start of every message like Cave Johnson from Portal 2 would have had a much different vibe.
b. And a paper covered in code for – well, I thought it was actual code from the game, but apparently it’s code for how the SomnaSculpt system itself works! Which is pretty neat, though much neater are the two Post-It notes stuck to the code printout, one saying “Always asking WHY we’re doing this,” and the other saying “Keep making the game, keep going, don’t mess it up, don’t worry about the bugs in your brain, just do everything by the time it’s over with.” Which is – kinda creepy! But this whole game is kinda creepy, frankly, especially this level – yeah, I know “Blackout” is the explicitly horror-themed one, but this is the one that implies you’re going to be trapped in a dream forever by the incompetence of your carers, which is a lot scarier. I feel like whoever we’re playing should sue Dr. Pierce after this is all over!
IV. There’s a bit in the part where you keep being teleported back into your room whenever you try to leave it after the Standard Orientation Protocol stops you leaving where you fall out of a sideways version of your bedroom and into a big backstage area with a lot of tables and chairs set up for dinner and an alarm clock on a chair, beeping at you (which, when pressed, teleports you back into the standard version of your suite). Now, after playing through “Blackout,” you’d think dinner would be beans, but instead they chose to reuse the chopped-up carrot assets from the “knife jumpscare” moment right before you reach the “IDEA” generator. Maybe the staff accidentally re-enacted the famous fart scene from Blazing Saddles and decided they need more vegetables in their diet or something. XD
V. Something does make a return from “Blackout,” though – the RySan boxes from the box maze! One is in one of the corridors in the backstage area where you’re trying to make your escape, right before you end up falling down a hallway that’s suddenly turned sideways onto a giant red pawn.
VI. Those blue recycling bins you see around the place are apparently only for recycling cardboard, according to a sign above one right next to that giant red pawn. Good to know!
VII. There’s a weirdly shiny SOMETHING attached to one of the walls in the room just below the breakaway floor room (where you THINK you have to resize some stairs to reach an exit high on a wall, but making the stairs bigger makes the floor break apart under you and drops you into a basement area), reflecting the doors on the opposite wall – no idea what it was, but it was interesting!
VIII. The room you go through right before entering the “waterfall pool” room with its moving dice shakes as you go through it, and sounds like a subway train is traveling over it – given SomnaSculpt’s headquarters are in a strip mall, I wonder if this is a reference to something happening in the real world?
IX. Remember that disappearing die in the “waterfall pool” room? What’s interesting is, when it disappears, you can actually hear the die land behind you with a “thunk” – hearing that is what caused me to spin around too fast and fall off the ledge my first time in there.
X. At one point, there’s a maze where you have to find the correct path through a bunch of elevator doors, eventually aided by arrows on the floor (the actual “maze” is pretty small, as per the director’s commentary, because with every room looking alike, they didn’t need to make it big – they just needed to loop people through the same few rooms a couple of times). By sheer coincidence, I managed to speed-run it, taking the right path so that I ended up where the last arrow actually points you to the door that leads outside to the seemingly-endless parking lot. I have no idea how I did that and could not tell you the path I took if you put a gun to my head, but – I’m proud of myself regardless. XD
XI. In addition to the room with your bed that appears in the parking lot once you’ve closed it in, there’s also a separate wall containing a door with a welcome mat, plus a fancy griddle stove next to it for some reason. Complete with a pot on the stovetop. O.o Oookay then. XD
XII. And the big one – when I consulted my guide on where to find the “Projector” constellation room, the person who wrote it mentioned they called it the “Moon Projector” constellation because the projector appears on the main menu screen after you find it, and projects a big old moon on the wall. I was like “ooh, cool,” and – once I was done with the level – returned to the main menu screen to check this. To my delight, I discovered that the guide creator had not lied, and the projector was there, resting on a shelf and projecting the moon on the wall –
And then I looked around the main menu screen and went “hang on. Are ALL the constellation objects in here? Have they ALL been gradually added after I find the rooms and I just haven’t noticed because I haven’t paid that much attention to the main menu?” I thus did some research this evening – and yes, I do believe that is the case! Mostly because I found a couple of examples of a main menu from people who hadn’t yet played the game, and THOSE images didn’t have the Dream Soda machine, or the coffee cup on the ladder, or the cheese wheel on the desk, or any of the other objects I’ve found! So that’s cool – wish I’d noticed earlier! And, apparently, once I find all the constellation objects, I unlock a way to dynamically CHANGE the main menu screen if I want. :D So that’s something to look forward to!
*nods* And that is – NOT that for “Labyrinth,” because unfortunately while I found all the collectibles, and the one fire extinguisher I hadn’t yet emptied, I did not find any unpulled fire alarms! I don’t know where the missing one is lurking – I was looking HARD for those! *frowns* But yes, “Labyrinth” now joins “Optical” in the category of “Levels I Will Have To Replay Later To Get A Missing Item.” Tomorrow, though, we concentrate on finishing off the game proper with “Whitespace,” the final actually playable level (as the actual finale, “Retrospective,” is basically just a big cutscene). And fortunately, as per the Level Select, I HAVE found all the fire alarms and fire extinguishers in there, so I just need to get the collectibles proper. Wish me luck! (Not in finding them, since I’ve got the guide, but in just grabbing the fiddly little bastards. XD)
Writing: Got another page written on “The Van Dort Vacancy” – Victor, Alice, and Smiler got Victor’s clothes, books, sketchbook, and quills packed up today, with Victor lamenting that he didn’t dare take his inks or paints for fear of them spilling, or his easel because it was just too unwieldy (Alice promising him they’d earmark some of their ill-gotten gains to buy him a new one). Smiler suggested Victor also take the big purple blanket on his bed (aka my big purple blanket, which I included in what I believe was one of the first VITD short stories I ever wrote (for the first Polyship Week I participated in, if I recall correctly) – I had Victor explicitly think he was glad he took it from home in that story, so I had to include it here), which prompted Victor to realize that he wanted to take something hidden under said bed – his collection of “slug stories,” aka the Duskwallian equivalent of Victorian “penny dreadfuls.” Hey, my regular Victors read stuff like “Varney The Vampire,” so my VITD Victor had to have a similar vice! :P Anyway, he rooted around for them under there for a bit while talking cheap periodicals with Smiler and Alice (allowing me to bring up the “Amusements” magazine Smiler was reading in one of my more recent VITD stories for Multiamory March – Alice and Victor were very surprised to learn it was NOT an Advocate publication) –
Only to instead find an old fancy masquerade mask. From a party where he was forced to stand around in a stiff, elaborate, horrible costume, and where, when he attempted to woo some ladies the way he saw the other men doing, he got laughed at so cruelly he ran and hid by the buffet for the rest of the party. I ended the chunklet with Smiler asking if Victor had ANY happy memories. I am starting to wonder that myself, Smiler! But don’t worry – tomorrow, Victor’s going to make an announcement that’s going to make YOU very happy, at least...
YouTube: Well, I was hoping to watch more than just the one video, but circumstances forbade. So instead I focused on getting out of my Watch Later the one video I most wanted to watch: “Fast Traffic in Red Dead Redemption 2 is CARNAGE | We React to Ultra Fast Carriages in RDR2” by OXBox! Another one of their newly-beloved “react” videos, this one featured Mike letting Andy play his copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 while Jane watched on, giving Andy control of John Marston in the town of St. Denis and tasking him with getting over to the train station – with Andy and Jane adding the goal of getting to the tailor first, because neither of them approved of the shitty outfit Mike had stuck his John Marston in. There was just one small problem with this plan – Mike had installed the mod “Rampage Trainer,” which makes every carriage in this game travel at the speed of light. As you might imagine, this caused no small amount of chaos, and no small amount of trouble for poor Andy as he tried to get around town. XD Highlights of the video included:
A) Andy starting the challenge being wanted for murder because so many people had died from all the carriages crashing into the buildings/the ground/each other, and then promptly making things worse by shooting every policeman who came for him, all while desperately trying to dodge the carriages – it ended with him having to die so he could start clean
B) Andy having a horse just taken out from clean under him by one of the ultrafast carriages while trying to figure out how to cross a busy road in front of him
C) Andy finally getting John to the tailor (after yet more horse death, flying horses from all the crashing carriages, some very Silent Hill-esque juddering from a carriage on fire caught in a small tunnel off a building, and a brief stint in jail from John being accused of murder AGAIN thanks to being near all this carriage death) and the editors having to speed up how long it took him to chose a new outfit for John (to be fair, I have heard via my friend Squid, who also plays this game, that the clothing system in RDR2 is TOP NOTCH, so him taking a while to get it just right makes sense)
D) Andy getting double-tapped by two carriages in short succession after thinking he found a safe place to stand on the tram line in an area where there are almost no carriages, being launched practically to space, and then falling down and landing perfectly on the top of the tram, giving him three seconds to actually heal up
E) Andy having to deal with another carriage slam knocking John Marston onto a boat in the nearby harbor as he finally got near the station – which was a problem, because John canonically can’t swim (if he drops into swimmable water, his stamina bar INSTANTLY drains). Fortunately, there was a ladder nearby that he could climb before he drowned, and he managed to avoid death by carriage
F) Andy finally getting John to the ticket station...only for the ticket seller to be too busy cowering in terror of the carnage outside to actually sell him a ticket. So Andy instead had John get into the trainyard and climb into one of the train’s freight carriages, and they called that a win. XD He then stupidly climbed out of the carriage to investigate why a dead horse was on a rooftop, and got creamed by another flaming carriage wreck. XD
Fucking hilarious – it’s amazing how much fun you can have with just one mod adding a specific bit of chaos. XD Totally recommend watching this – it’s fourteen minutes of pure superfast carriage comedy!
Other: Got myself a frozen hot chocolate from Dunkin Donuts for the first time in years this afternoon, after playing Superliminal – I felt like, after all the cleaning and the intestinal nonsense, I deserved a treat. Was very tasty, AND I had a gift card that I found in my drawer at work, so I didn’t even have to pay for it. Yay! :)
So yeah -- not the worst day, but I wish I'd been more focused and hadn't had to spend most of it cleaning or, uh, pooping. *shakehead* Hopefully Sunday will be a little better -- hoping to answer Moose's messages; play Superliminal and finish off "Whitespace;" work some more on "The Van Dort Vacancy;" and keep up with Jon's latest F:NV YOLO Remastered video (probably gonna see if I can watch most of it with my workout). We will see what happens! But right now, I really have to get to bed -- night all!