...Anticlimatic Friday The 13th
Feb. 13th, 2026 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickAs in, it actually wasn't the worst day of the week. Like, it wasn't perfect -- I got woken up early by hearing what I think was Dad throwing up (though he seemed okay the rest of today, so...); Mom had to pester a LOT of people to get a proper prescription for Dad's pain meds again; and the fried chicken she got for dinner was rather tough and dried out -- but it was pretty chill, all things considered. And I actually got a decent amount of stuff done:
Work – It was a pretty quiet day at work, happily (especially since my coworker took the day off today) – I did the morning reports and the GL; I researched more pledges with missing payments; I put on the checks when they came in after matching them up to donors; I looked at the latest Capital Campaign pledge billing QC file; and I took a handful of phone calls, including one credit card call. Nothing particularly exciting, but trust me, that is fine with me. We had enough excitement earlier this week! Though no, the credit card people did not get back to me about my question yesterday...and my ride home was a little annoying, full of slowdowns and people driving like idiots. >( Ah well – I’m free of it for three days now, at least!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – my final night on the bike saw me return to Proxy Gate Tactician’s channel to watch “Can You Beat Baldur's Gate 3 Using ONLY Poison Damage?” Having discovered poison was absolutely garbage in BG3 – there’s almost no spells that inflict poison damage, and a whole truckload of enemies are immune to it – Proxy of course had to find out if it was at all possible to beat the game using only poison damage. So he whipped himself up a green dragonborn Dark Urge sorcerer named Ivy (natch) and sent her out to try and murder her way through the game with just poison damage…
Aaaand almost immediately descended into cheesing, because the answer to the question posed by the title is a very hard “NO” – you can just about get through Acts 1 and 2 with it, but the run stops if you try to take on Ketheric legitimately, as he’s both a mandatory boss and straight-up immune to poison. So Proxy was forced to get creative. The two major instances of cheesing were as follows:
A) Using a weird combination of kidnapping and “shoving a dead Shadowheart in a box and flinging it into the void” to send Astarion to the secret developer plane in the sky where NPCs hang out when not needed so he could drag Cazador back to the Ravaged Beach to burn in the sun. Why? To get his staff, of course – Cazador unequips it at a certain point when at low health, and Astarion was eventually able to pickpocket it off him as his evil vampire master got stuck in a loop of endlessly burning (as the game wouldn’t actually let him die in Act 1). A fun little duplication trick using Shadowheart’s “Invoke Duplicity” cleric power (which lets her make fake copies of herself to distract enemies) then gave everyone a copy of Cazador’s beloved Woe to use – though they couldn’t use the spell attached to it because it dealt necrotic damage, not poison. Did up their spell hit chance – which was very important as they were relying heavily on the Poison Spray cantrip to deal damage – though, and provided 1D4 healing with every successful attack (even if that attack was on something like a broom or a barrel, as Proxy later discovered). Good stuff, and I rather enjoyed seeing Astarion getting to carry his hated master into the sun. >D
B) And spending the majority of Acts 1 and 2 having Ivy and company make NPCs their official allies (that is, they have a green border around their picture when they show up in the initiative order during a fight) – for example, selling the grove out to Minthara and her goblins, or attacking the Strange Ox at Last Light to force it to reveal its true form and get the Harpers to help in the fight – before betraying said allies by killing them directly or indirectly – for example, having Astarion “kidnap” Zevlor during the resultant fight with the goblins so the rest of the team could poison their allies at their leisure, or luring a plant monster into Last Light (admittedly, Proxy did not expect the damn thing to kill ALL of the Harpers). And then gathering up the dead bodies and toting them around in a big old chest. Why?
To get a zombie army to fight Ketheric with! Because the rules stated that only the members of the party that Proxy controlled had to use poison and only poison. Allied creatures could fuck shit up as they would. But how did he turn them into zombies?
Simple – “Bitter Divorce,” the magical wand that Auntie Ethel was making for her captive, Mayrina. This wand resurrects Mayrina’s dead husband Connor as a zombie, and if you have the wand, Connor essentially functions as a temporary zombie summon. BUT, thanks to some weirdness in the game, if you have another dead creature nearby, and you point the wand at that instead of Connor’s corpse, “Bitter Divorce” will resurrect both Connor and the other creature! And if the creature was allied to you at the time of death, it will be chill. And since Ivy made a point of only killing her allies...zombie army! Granted, this method had a lot of drawbacks – Proxy had to save and reload constantly between resurrections to trigger the other zombies to kill Connor so he could start the whole process over again, and getting them up to fighting strength involved putting potions of healing on the ground near a group and then hitting it with poison so it broke and gave everyone nearby a dose of hit points, both of which took FUCKING AGES. He could NOT recommend this as a method to take out Ketheric to ANYBODY. But it was pretty cool to watch the army of zombie allied creatures take on Ketheric (stun-locked in the mind flayer colony thanks to the party breaking a few bottles of Karabasan’s Poison on him – didn’t hurt him, but it did Paralyze him) and later the Avatar of Myrkul and his necromites. Apparently you can’t trust Zombie Aylin not to destroy her allies with stray Moonbeam, but you can trust zombie Wulbren Bongle to take out as many necromites as he could! Which is funny, because in life Aylin is an awesome paladin and Wulbren Bongle the biggest asshole of a gnome possible. :p
But yeah – apart from that, and some other weirdness like “swapping to Wizard around Level 11 (earned by getting 1 XP off killing poor Naaber) to get a water elemental summon that, when poisoned, could release an aura of poison on nearby enemies and using it to – less than great effect during the Gortash fight” or “it’s possible to just straight up wait out the locked door at the end of the maze where you have to fight the murder ghost in Bhaal’s secret sewers,” a lot of this video was just showing off what a long, painful slog it can be to fight (or, more often, run away from) enemies using poison damage only. And having everyone make extremely questionable decisions (like selling out the grove, or siding with Ketheric’s minion Balthazar to kidnap Aylin and avoid fighting Ketheric on top of his tower, or resurrecting Ivy via the normal Withers way instead of the proper Resist Durge special Withers cutscene way) which led to a bevy of bad endings, including Ivy losing her mind and crashing the epilogue party with a knife (and pants full of wee). Fun times, of course – Proxy makes even the longest slog through the game fun – but man, does it make me glad I decided to have my Tav Smiler specialize in psychic damage and not poison!
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines”: Check – got a little over a page done today, featuring –
A) Alice descending into the basement, hiding herself away behind the stairs, and checking out Victor’s basement map by the light of the Liquid Demon Seed machine. She was rather annoyed to see that the floor plan he’d sketched was rather maze-like (given how much of her time has been spent navigating confusing corridors), but had fairly high hopes that Victor’s fears of a second guard materializing in the CCTV room near the entrances were unfounded, given the lack of security upstairs (though she allowed the basement might just have more guards) –
And then she noted just how many cameras he’d drawn in, and started worrying if her Obfuscate would protect her from them like it did living guards. Fortunately for her, while Cheshire did tell her that normally mechanical eyes in the sky like that would be immune to her favorite discipline’s mental trickery, he also noted that she still had plenty of Victor’s emotionally-charged blood left in her system – and that, combined with her own natural talent for and hard work developing Obfuscate meant she’d have no problem getting past the cameras, at least tonight. Alice was very pleased to hear that, as you might expect (though she could have done without the Wonderlanders’ suggestions on how to thank Victor for all his help)!
B) Alice thus activating her Obfuscate – and getting confirmation that, yes, Victor’s blood IS very much boosting it, as she could practically feel her blood singing in her veins as invisibility settled on her, light and easy and utterly concealing. :) Thus hidden, she snuck out into the main basement area and around the CCTV cube near the front doors, noting the guard and all the monitors inside and internally commenting that she was now extra-glad that she was hidden from the cameras, as she didn’t think that the guard would react well to seeing a strange girl on his monitors – especially one that he couldn’t see in real life. Rabbit pointed out it was only one night past Halloween, so maybe he would think she was just a ghost, having arrived late for work, as it were –
Causing Alice to joke that he could also think it was the super-assassin The Specter, having moved into artifact theft after killing the head of the local Russian mafia. XD To be fair, he wouldn’t even be wrong if he thought that…
C) And Cheshire telling Alice that there was a book she might want in the CCTV room, given she was getting into thievery (a reference to the fact that it contains the “security” skill book in the game, “Sobchak's Guide to Personal and Home Security”), only for Alice to decline trying to get it because it would require her to break Obfuscate for a few vulnerable seconds. Alice promptly complained that what she really needed was a version of Obfuscate that let her open doors already –
And Caterpillar countered that what she really needed was to complete her task already. Because Prince LaCroix’s temper was short, and liable to get shorter in the near future. Alice told him she didn’t need reminding of that and affirmed that she wanted to get out with the sarcophagus as soon as possible. And then maybe try to negotiate for a night off. God knows she deserves one!
And that’s where I left off, with Alice preparing to sneak deeper into the basement along the red line meant for museum staff. Next time, we’ll see where she ends up, and how successful she is at making her way to where the sarcophagus is!
3. Watch something on FreeTube: No check – though, admittedly, this is less because I had a super-long write-up about my workout video to deal with (you’ll notice I kept it relatively short with this Proxy video) and more because it was Game Night (Parcheesi – I won both games, go me) and thus I just had less time in general on the computer. We’ll see what happens tomorrow!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – fortunately, there was nothing to do on Valice Multiverse tonight, allowing me to focus on finishing up my queue for Saturday on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler)! And finish it I did, completing both my Valicertine’s post and my “bonus image” post (text, alt text, and tags), and adding my Song Saturday pick to the end – “Bury This” by Azimuth, one of my favorite quiet, soft poly songs. :) So now I am fully prepared for Valicertine’s Day, yay~
Aaand I am VERY tired, so I am going to drag myself to bed now. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, but it is also a Cleaning Saturday (bleh) -- plans include playing Fallout: New Vegas and sending Victor and those he recruited in Goodsprings up against the Powder Gangers; finding some Valicer stuff to indulge in; and keeping up with whatever CaFae Latte content may be popping up. We'll see how it all goes. *nods* Night all!
Work – It was a pretty quiet day at work, happily (especially since my coworker took the day off today) – I did the morning reports and the GL; I researched more pledges with missing payments; I put on the checks when they came in after matching them up to donors; I looked at the latest Capital Campaign pledge billing QC file; and I took a handful of phone calls, including one credit card call. Nothing particularly exciting, but trust me, that is fine with me. We had enough excitement earlier this week! Though no, the credit card people did not get back to me about my question yesterday...and my ride home was a little annoying, full of slowdowns and people driving like idiots. >( Ah well – I’m free of it for three days now, at least!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – my final night on the bike saw me return to Proxy Gate Tactician’s channel to watch “Can You Beat Baldur's Gate 3 Using ONLY Poison Damage?” Having discovered poison was absolutely garbage in BG3 – there’s almost no spells that inflict poison damage, and a whole truckload of enemies are immune to it – Proxy of course had to find out if it was at all possible to beat the game using only poison damage. So he whipped himself up a green dragonborn Dark Urge sorcerer named Ivy (natch) and sent her out to try and murder her way through the game with just poison damage…
Aaaand almost immediately descended into cheesing, because the answer to the question posed by the title is a very hard “NO” – you can just about get through Acts 1 and 2 with it, but the run stops if you try to take on Ketheric legitimately, as he’s both a mandatory boss and straight-up immune to poison. So Proxy was forced to get creative. The two major instances of cheesing were as follows:
A) Using a weird combination of kidnapping and “shoving a dead Shadowheart in a box and flinging it into the void” to send Astarion to the secret developer plane in the sky where NPCs hang out when not needed so he could drag Cazador back to the Ravaged Beach to burn in the sun. Why? To get his staff, of course – Cazador unequips it at a certain point when at low health, and Astarion was eventually able to pickpocket it off him as his evil vampire master got stuck in a loop of endlessly burning (as the game wouldn’t actually let him die in Act 1). A fun little duplication trick using Shadowheart’s “Invoke Duplicity” cleric power (which lets her make fake copies of herself to distract enemies) then gave everyone a copy of Cazador’s beloved Woe to use – though they couldn’t use the spell attached to it because it dealt necrotic damage, not poison. Did up their spell hit chance – which was very important as they were relying heavily on the Poison Spray cantrip to deal damage – though, and provided 1D4 healing with every successful attack (even if that attack was on something like a broom or a barrel, as Proxy later discovered). Good stuff, and I rather enjoyed seeing Astarion getting to carry his hated master into the sun. >D
B) And spending the majority of Acts 1 and 2 having Ivy and company make NPCs their official allies (that is, they have a green border around their picture when they show up in the initiative order during a fight) – for example, selling the grove out to Minthara and her goblins, or attacking the Strange Ox at Last Light to force it to reveal its true form and get the Harpers to help in the fight – before betraying said allies by killing them directly or indirectly – for example, having Astarion “kidnap” Zevlor during the resultant fight with the goblins so the rest of the team could poison their allies at their leisure, or luring a plant monster into Last Light (admittedly, Proxy did not expect the damn thing to kill ALL of the Harpers). And then gathering up the dead bodies and toting them around in a big old chest. Why?
To get a zombie army to fight Ketheric with! Because the rules stated that only the members of the party that Proxy controlled had to use poison and only poison. Allied creatures could fuck shit up as they would. But how did he turn them into zombies?
Simple – “Bitter Divorce,” the magical wand that Auntie Ethel was making for her captive, Mayrina. This wand resurrects Mayrina’s dead husband Connor as a zombie, and if you have the wand, Connor essentially functions as a temporary zombie summon. BUT, thanks to some weirdness in the game, if you have another dead creature nearby, and you point the wand at that instead of Connor’s corpse, “Bitter Divorce” will resurrect both Connor and the other creature! And if the creature was allied to you at the time of death, it will be chill. And since Ivy made a point of only killing her allies...zombie army! Granted, this method had a lot of drawbacks – Proxy had to save and reload constantly between resurrections to trigger the other zombies to kill Connor so he could start the whole process over again, and getting them up to fighting strength involved putting potions of healing on the ground near a group and then hitting it with poison so it broke and gave everyone nearby a dose of hit points, both of which took FUCKING AGES. He could NOT recommend this as a method to take out Ketheric to ANYBODY. But it was pretty cool to watch the army of zombie allied creatures take on Ketheric (stun-locked in the mind flayer colony thanks to the party breaking a few bottles of Karabasan’s Poison on him – didn’t hurt him, but it did Paralyze him) and later the Avatar of Myrkul and his necromites. Apparently you can’t trust Zombie Aylin not to destroy her allies with stray Moonbeam, but you can trust zombie Wulbren Bongle to take out as many necromites as he could! Which is funny, because in life Aylin is an awesome paladin and Wulbren Bongle the biggest asshole of a gnome possible. :p
But yeah – apart from that, and some other weirdness like “swapping to Wizard around Level 11 (earned by getting 1 XP off killing poor Naaber) to get a water elemental summon that, when poisoned, could release an aura of poison on nearby enemies and using it to – less than great effect during the Gortash fight” or “it’s possible to just straight up wait out the locked door at the end of the maze where you have to fight the murder ghost in Bhaal’s secret sewers,” a lot of this video was just showing off what a long, painful slog it can be to fight (or, more often, run away from) enemies using poison damage only. And having everyone make extremely questionable decisions (like selling out the grove, or siding with Ketheric’s minion Balthazar to kidnap Aylin and avoid fighting Ketheric on top of his tower, or resurrecting Ivy via the normal Withers way instead of the proper Resist Durge special Withers cutscene way) which led to a bevy of bad endings, including Ivy losing her mind and crashing the epilogue party with a knife (and pants full of wee). Fun times, of course – Proxy makes even the longest slog through the game fun – but man, does it make me glad I decided to have my Tav Smiler specialize in psychic damage and not poison!
2. Continue editing Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines”: Check – got a little over a page done today, featuring –
A) Alice descending into the basement, hiding herself away behind the stairs, and checking out Victor’s basement map by the light of the Liquid Demon Seed machine. She was rather annoyed to see that the floor plan he’d sketched was rather maze-like (given how much of her time has been spent navigating confusing corridors), but had fairly high hopes that Victor’s fears of a second guard materializing in the CCTV room near the entrances were unfounded, given the lack of security upstairs (though she allowed the basement might just have more guards) –
And then she noted just how many cameras he’d drawn in, and started worrying if her Obfuscate would protect her from them like it did living guards. Fortunately for her, while Cheshire did tell her that normally mechanical eyes in the sky like that would be immune to her favorite discipline’s mental trickery, he also noted that she still had plenty of Victor’s emotionally-charged blood left in her system – and that, combined with her own natural talent for and hard work developing Obfuscate meant she’d have no problem getting past the cameras, at least tonight. Alice was very pleased to hear that, as you might expect (though she could have done without the Wonderlanders’ suggestions on how to thank Victor for all his help)!
B) Alice thus activating her Obfuscate – and getting confirmation that, yes, Victor’s blood IS very much boosting it, as she could practically feel her blood singing in her veins as invisibility settled on her, light and easy and utterly concealing. :) Thus hidden, she snuck out into the main basement area and around the CCTV cube near the front doors, noting the guard and all the monitors inside and internally commenting that she was now extra-glad that she was hidden from the cameras, as she didn’t think that the guard would react well to seeing a strange girl on his monitors – especially one that he couldn’t see in real life. Rabbit pointed out it was only one night past Halloween, so maybe he would think she was just a ghost, having arrived late for work, as it were –
Causing Alice to joke that he could also think it was the super-assassin The Specter, having moved into artifact theft after killing the head of the local Russian mafia. XD To be fair, he wouldn’t even be wrong if he thought that…
C) And Cheshire telling Alice that there was a book she might want in the CCTV room, given she was getting into thievery (a reference to the fact that it contains the “security” skill book in the game, “Sobchak's Guide to Personal and Home Security”), only for Alice to decline trying to get it because it would require her to break Obfuscate for a few vulnerable seconds. Alice promptly complained that what she really needed was a version of Obfuscate that let her open doors already –
And Caterpillar countered that what she really needed was to complete her task already. Because Prince LaCroix’s temper was short, and liable to get shorter in the near future. Alice told him she didn’t need reminding of that and affirmed that she wanted to get out with the sarcophagus as soon as possible. And then maybe try to negotiate for a night off. God knows she deserves one!
And that’s where I left off, with Alice preparing to sneak deeper into the basement along the red line meant for museum staff. Next time, we’ll see where she ends up, and how successful she is at making her way to where the sarcophagus is!
3. Watch something on FreeTube: No check – though, admittedly, this is less because I had a super-long write-up about my workout video to deal with (you’ll notice I kept it relatively short with this Proxy video) and more because it was Game Night (Parcheesi – I won both games, go me) and thus I just had less time in general on the computer. We’ll see what happens tomorrow!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – fortunately, there was nothing to do on Valice Multiverse tonight, allowing me to focus on finishing up my queue for Saturday on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler)! And finish it I did, completing both my Valicertine’s post and my “bonus image” post (text, alt text, and tags), and adding my Song Saturday pick to the end – “Bury This” by Azimuth, one of my favorite quiet, soft poly songs. :) So now I am fully prepared for Valicertine’s Day, yay~
Aaand I am VERY tired, so I am going to drag myself to bed now. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, but it is also a Cleaning Saturday (bleh) -- plans include playing Fallout: New Vegas and sending Victor and those he recruited in Goodsprings up against the Powder Gangers; finding some Valicer stuff to indulge in; and keeping up with whatever CaFae Latte content may be popping up. We'll see how it all goes. *nods* Night all!
