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Two nights ago, after Mom had gotten a pack of burger buns with sesame seeds, I asked her if she could make some Bubba burgers we have for dinner. She declined to have one herself, and since I know how to cook a burger patty, I ended up making dinner for just myself while she re-heated a slice of last week's pizza.

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Brian, his friend Arvind, and his girlfriend in turn Usha, had come over late last night. Brian slept in Marie's room, and has just woken up a few minutes ago, but Arvind and Usha are up in the apartment, presumably still asleep. Brian says they're supposed to be leaving at 8.

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Mom and I installed my air conditioner yesterday, for real this time. She actually took the time to read the instructions properly, although she did tell Brian when he called later that they weren't so easy to understand as they should be.

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Mom had some watermelon wedges cut up for me, Brian, Emily, and Maris by the time I came home from work. I had a few, and Maris also had one while Brian played with her on the driveway.

Brian and Emily left later in the afternoon, while Mom put up some fencing around those new trees.

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Brian and Emily came down for Hanalei's birthday and Father's Day this weekend, arriving just half an hour after I arrived home from work.

I asked Brian if he saw that YouTube video, but he said that he hasn't even read my blog lately, where I originally figured he'd follow from. First thing he did was have a nap, and I left my blog up for him to read whenever he'd be ready, but he kept winding up busy with different things starting with a conversation with Mom after he'd wake up (I was reading The Week when I overheard).

Mom decided to order a couple of pizzas, and I went with her to pick out a cream soda and a gelato. Brian asked me to pick him up a root beer, to combine with some vanilla ice cream he had brought over for a root beer float.

Mom and I went inside together, and while I initially looked up my phone clock to decide on a soda flavor, Mom asked me to hurry up so that she could pay for everything, and I wound up defaulting instead to grape, since I never saw that flavor there before.

Brian or Emily had put on Thomas the Tank Engine for Maris while we were out, and we let that run while eating.

Shortly after I finished, I sat down and picked the remote up, and Mom asked me if there was anything I wanted to show everyone. I specified Brian in particular, and he and I instead went into the office to show him that clip once and for all.

During the buildup, he asked me if I was rolling dice to decide what to retrieve from Escargo Express, to which I specified actually zeroing in on the one Rust Promoter. (Even in the walkthrough, I usually sort whatever's relevant at a given point into groups by priority, although Rulers, Protractors, and Picture Postcards, the three items that serve no actual purpose at all, tend to be last since you might as well make such purchases "count". In this case, I had already sent the Rust Promoter in question off just before my first trek to Fourside, because there are no metallic enemies in the gold mine or the department store, and enemy encounters on the streets are so infrequent that you might as well stick to PSI instead before either a cheap or free rest in Monotoli Grand Hotel or back in Dusty Dunes Desert, or Paula's abduction in the store.)

After all played out, Brian then showed me someone's TikTok footage of Grand Theft Auto V, where they fly a blimp into some building where a cutscene awaits you, without the person you're visiting bothering to question what's going on. Here is that on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBbxlP6NXXs

Walked a lap up and down Masem Court. Upon coming back, Brian or Emily had set YouTube up for Maris with the videobook adaptation of Pecos Bill.

Emily brought Maris to her parents' house after it ended, and has spent the night there. Brian went into the apartment to sleep, so this morning is not a good time to get a recording in while he's still likely sleeping.

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Deciding two days ago to hit Bagel Boss for lunch, my order on the app included a chocolate cigar for my snack. Upon arriving inside, I found the actual snack case to feature cake pops now, and asked someone at the counter if he could replace my original snack with one of those. He let me just have a freebie instead, and I saved the chocolate cigar to bring home.

After I finished eating, I asked a different employee why they weren't on the app to order in the first place. She told me they're actually new, and offered me another one for free, not knowing of my previous interaction with someone.

Put both that and my chocolate cigar into my drink bag after I had my Body Armor later, and would put the bag itself in the fridge when I'd arrive home. Mom asked me about that, and put them instead into a container, still refridgerating them at my request.

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Mom had half a day at work yesterday, in order to come home to drive me to this week's physical therapy session. I was finishing my lunch when she arrived home, we also had the landfill to dispose of some dead bushes at, and she offered to boil me some tea when we'd be back home to have with that second cake pop.

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Even though I had already had a snack, yesterday was so hot that Mom offered me some ice cream from McDonald's after therapy. I saw an ad for a new smores McFlurry flavor, and decided to get one of those while Mom ordered an M&M one.

Entry tags:

brunette saga

(no subject)

Sure enough, I could see a difference between what I uploaded to YouTube yesterday and the actual beginning of my recording, when I checked the latter to verify the arms dealer's menu for five items instead of four as per the Starmen.net walkthrough (I had a Big Bottle Rocket to buy as per my preceding numbers online, but would have spoken to him anyway for a price comparison with the main hack). Even though the receptionist and elevator lady's hair almost looks gray in such dreary surroundings, Paula's looks even more brown in the department store, outdoors, and the bakery (had a Lucky Sandwich, a Croissant, and two Rust Promoters to get, after having saved previously in the dept. store) than in front of the alpha channel in my palette (should I perhaps have left the background there white, unlike with commissioned graphics for Starbound?).

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It took a good bit of googling, starting during my fifteen at work, but I managed to share that video (the actual video, not just a link thereto) on Reddit and Discord. Managed to find some working instructions for Reddit on WikiHow, but someone on the Discord server Earthbound / Mother suggested I contact a mod or so there. Started with one, and then two more, one of whom was denoted online at the moment. The first one got back to me after a few hours, and said that while a bot is supposed to enable me to embed videos a week after I join, my account probably fell through the cracks. He enabled it for me, and all I had to do from there was copy the regular video link from YouTube, with the video showing up automatically upon posting.

(no subject)

Yesterday morning, after defeating the Dept. Store Spook, I visited the Monotoli Building for context purposes. After having called Escargo Express from the department store itself to pick up the Franklin Badge, I called EX again inside the Monotoli Building to deliver me a Rust Promoter to use in Moonside.

The agent arrived and then left just before Pokey's bodyguards could warn me never to visit Pokey again, and the actual dialogue played out after they went back into Pokey's chamber. The game froze thereafter.

This is one false recording I've decided to keep, and have even just uploaded such a funny moment to YouTube. What luck that I just so happened to take place in a playthrough I was even recording in the first place; just imagine how hard something like that would be to replicate.

https://youtu.be/iu86daQlAB4

Entry tags:

brunette saga

(no subject)

Created a set of twelve versions of Paula, including my pre-existing one, using various other characters to base the different shades of brown on. Some of them came out looking gray, green, or peach, and I brought this up on Uguu Blue.

Marie did not take long to get back to me with some answers she received from Google Gemini. What she relayed explained the visual perception of a different color as the result of its surrounding colors, and advised mostly to adjust the RGB values to bring out the desired effect.

Pulled my reference pic of Mai back up, and it became obvious: While Paula's skin carries the values of 238/170/136, Mai's (at least from the cover art of Makeruna! Makendou Z) is 252/241/225, which made Paula's face look white as a sheet when I tried applying that to her.

From there, I spent the rest of the day adjusting the RGB values of various versions by increments of 12, both to differentiate them from one another and to avoid anything that could be mistaken for auburn or dark blonde, until I saw fit to organize them all in a line from light to dark.

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For the first cooking something for us in months, Nancy drove to our house yesterday afternoon to deliver some breaded chicken cutlets, and met Mom in the frontyard while she was mowing or something. Mom decided to slice those up to put on top of some salad.

Entry tags:

brunette saga

(no subject)

Having noticed Paula's hair almost blend in with the floor in the gold mine, I did consider yesterday, making a point to create a lighter brown for her as well, based on Mai from Makeruna! Makendou (my main userpic), just to showcase the actual range of shades that appeal to me. Another part of that also comes from Honoka from The Honor Student at Magic High School, which I started re-reading when we drove to Brian's for Maris' birthday, and Akatsuki from My Stepmom's Daughter is My Ex, which I've discovered in passing not too long ago.

Having thought about it, though, I could easily end up from there creating much more than dark-brown and light-brown, using multiple different characters equivalently to paint chips. I already had been planning to recommend two different shades of brown for Natalie in Epic Battle Fantasy 4, since her hair appears orange in cutscenes and more crimson on her field and battle graphics. However, a full range to include, say, War Nurse, would likely be best reserved for Disgaea, where each game has multiple character classes lacking a brunette tier. Here, too many choices could end up barely distinguishable from one another.

Maybe four, as the number of screenshots allowed on onsite content pages on ROMhack.ing. (No more than twelve if I decide to go further.)

(no subject)

In the first of what turned out to be several re-recordings that ate up my morning yesterday (not a complete waste of time, as I did manage to flesh out the walkthrough page after one ending in a game-over), with your party still at the door whenever a performance comes on, I accidentally left the auditorium when I meant to cross it over to the dressing room. Coming back inside cued Venus' performance, but talking to her in the dressing room did not get me the Signed Banana, nor does Mr. Spoon offer you a secret if you talk to him inside the nearby dinosaur museum at that time. (Talk about an inversion of the corresponding savestate Mr. Tenda had sent me so long ago.)

Entry tags:

brunette saga

(no subject)

[T]he four grown women I left blonde are not decent people. A big part of why brunette girls appeal to me so much has to do with Saga, the kind and cheerful human protagonist of A Little Snow Fairy Sugar. While people of any hair color do come in all stripes, someone like Miu from Strawberry Marshmallow is a perfect example of a brunette girl I don’t like, because of how she treats her friends. Admittedly, my tastes are more complex than that, but Lardna and Miss Fake, unlike Paula, are still not people I would want to end up lumping together with Saga Bergman, Yui Hirasawa, or Sakura Kinomoto.

-Planned for my YouTube video.

I originally saw the name "Miss Fake" on videogamesprites.net, and later saw it as her page title on Wikibound. Recently, I saw it in an actual script dump, but assumed it was someone in the Runaway Five who uses the name.

Yesterday's recording was of the Dusty Dunes Desert gold mine mission that leads up to the Runaway Five's final act at the Topolla Theater. Following said act, I went into the dressing room, and discovered that their leitmotif comes on there, even though only Venus is actually there. That's something I should look into ironing out personally after Mr. Tenda is able to make three changes I have just assigned him.

(I do recall Mr. Tenda somehow setting me up with his previous build, with Poo yet to join me, to obtain the Signed Banana from Venus in order to test a dialogue I requested for after you exit Fourside Sewers, but her actual performance initially did not activate. I wonder if this had anything to do with what seemed like a ROMhacking bug at the time.)

Having had a look at the script through CoilSnake, I could see that whoever mentions Miss Fake, prior to obtaining the Diamond, suggests traversing between DDD and Fourside by foot for exercise. However, loading my savestate from before the gold mine, I spoke to everyone I could find outdoors in Fourside, except for the hint man; at first, he didn't seem like he'd know the manager's "name", but it suddenly became obvious when I went to ask on Reddit.

For the sake of the aforementioned part of the video, I'm gonna have to redo the gold mine raid in order to include that guy at the end of the recording. (Not a complete waste of time, though, because yesterday's run did allow me to flesh out the corresponding walkthrough page.)

(no subject)

Whenever my schedule gets updated, Mom and I go over it each week to mark down in her memo booklet. Yesterday, she asked me if my shift was from 11 to 3, and I naturally assumed she had read it from her book and said yes. Discovered at 2:57 that it was actually 10 to 2, and I wondered if I had misread it to her, but I later saw the correct times in her book.

Well, my attendance score currently lies at 0, with 5 being the maximum you're allowed before you're fired, so no big deal if I get half a point here.

(no subject)

Mom and I got me a pair of in-soles yesterday at the clinic, that were planned for me from the start.

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The controller I have been using seems to have conked out yesterday. I had just started a recording, and while fighting the Mole Playing Rough in Dusty Dunes Desert, the cursor froze while the background remained in motion. Even after recharging the controller for the few seconds that the LED can remain blue anymore, the emulator still didn't detect a signal whether I tried resetting the game or re-entering the inputs.

Tried switching to my yet-unused controller, and sure enough, the LED does blink when I press the button combination in the instructions before plugging in the receiver; the other controller doesn't even do that. Was able to re-enter the inputs with my fresh one, and only had to click the emulator window for it to actually play the game.

Gonna keep my used controller in the drawer for until the fresh one wears out; maybe it'll work again then, or I'll figure something out. They're pretty cheap otherwise.

(no subject)

Mom sold that recliner chair yesterday that Brian and I had picked up back in October, not just to create space between our dining and living rooms, but also to have one less reminder of Dad in such a state as he was in by that point.

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Discovered yesterday while viewing on my phone, what I transferred so far to GameFAQs, that multi-line text in charts appears double-spaced when viewed through mobile.

(Click for full size.)

I have just tried to upload the above screenshot to a new forum thread, but it came out huge, and that's why I'm creating this particular entry.

Here is the thread now, in case you'd like to follow that along:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/7-site-suggestions/80990055#1

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Heard on the store radio that yesterday was National Hamburger Day, and relayed to Uguu Blue: Lemonade Crew. Marie later asked me what my favorite burger place is, to which I replied Applebee's, to tie in with Cold Stone for dessert.

Mom and I decided to go there for dinner after she picked me up from work.

Got myself a quesadilla burger and some blue-raspberry lemonade.

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From what I read via Google Discover, the flavor I got last time was one of two new flavors available there; the other one, Better Nutter Butter, is said to contain sugar crystals, like that donut from before.

Despite that, this isn't something I'd pick out again; it did not surprise me to contain crushed peanut sandwich cookies, which are kind of dry for my tastes.

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Mom went out to see some opera yesterday afternoon.

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Yesterday was the third consecutive day I called in sick (feeling much better today, but have off by default). Still sick as I was, I had at least recovered enough to come with Mom to Target to unload a shopping cart from the pickup, that someone had left at the edge of our frontyard.

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Had my first physical therapy session last night at 7. The doctor there gave me some daily exercises that Mom promised to coach me through when she comes home from work (I'm not feeling well enough today for my own job).