Another All Right Thursday
Oct. 15th, 2026 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickCertainly wasn't the greatest day -- for example, my commute home took way longer than it should have thanks to the main drag being backed up to hell and me needing to stop for gas, and Mom's pretty sure she's got a cold, which means I will probably be getting it soon rather than later -- but it also wasn't the worst. And as you will see below, I was quite productive:
Work: My time in the office today was split between the following –
A) Doing the morning credit card reports – there were no checks in yesterday’s mail, so there were no checks for me to scan (and there were no checks in today’s mail either! Nobody wants to send us money anymore it seems :P)
B) Noodling around with the obituaries and going through more people with the same name/same last night to clean up more duplicates and deceased donors (always a good way to kill some time)
C) Doing a bunch of credit card updates, as today ended up being “Oh Shit I Need To Update My Card With You” Day for a number of folks. XD Did four credit card updates and one big catch-up payment, with my coworker doing a fifth. Not sure why they all decided to contact us TODAY, but it helped make the day go by
D) And doing a bunch of puzzles, including another crossword and some more cryptography stuff (including a celebrity quote and a “crypto-quip”)
*nods* So yeah – not the busiest day, but we had stuff to do, at least! And it was all slightly more interesting than folding up programs. :p Just gotta get through Friday now!
Workout: Tonight’s stationary bike ride was all about the OX crew, as I pedaled my way through –
A) The last 19-odd minutes of “DREAD: A Jenga Horror RPG 🎃 | Oxventure's One-Shot Wonder | Hallowstream 2022!” The big finale of Oh God Killian (Andy) Is Dead, Now Brad (Mike) And Madison (Ellen) are on their own featured –
I. Having constructed a bonfire to hopefully eventually use as a lure (and decided not to add any dead animals to it), Brad and Madison deciding to try and get some sleep, with Luke encouraging them to do so by stating he’d reduce the severity of all future block pulls by one to reflect they’d actually had some rest. They had to each pull a block first to see if they could even get to sleep, though. Ellen went in and, after a few nervous nudges here and there, backed off, stating that Madison couldn’t sleep –
And then Mike went in and made pulling out a block look easy, declaring cheerfully that Brad went right to sleep and slept like a baby on the soft moss. Ellen thus went back in, figuring if Mike could do it, so could she –
And toppled the tower. She promptly collapsed onto the table, laughing, before sliding onto the floor. Once she got up, Luke explained how Madison died – basically, Brad was snoring too loudly for her to get any sleep by the bonfire they’d set up, so she went to the edge of the clearing and passed out there. Unfortunately, by the time she woke up, it was dark out, the moon was up, and the werewolf was upon her. Cue her getting chomped and having to leave the table. She was thanked for her potential contribution to Brad’s survival. XD
II. Post-tower reconstruction/partial disassembly (Mike had to pull six blocks this time!), Brad waking up to see Madison getting eaten by the creature (recognizing her dismembered torso), and said creature turning toward him with murder in its glowing red eyes. Brad tried to argue that it couldn’t be that hungry after eating Madison, but Luke noted it might just want to kill him. On the plus side, Brad was willing to accept that it was a werewolf after seeing it stand up and prepare to charge him – Ellen roleplayed Madison’s ghost calling “I was riiiiight” on the wind. XD
III. Luke describing the werewolf as having a lanyard around its neck, with the remains of an ID card from the company the group had hired for this detox expedition reading “Benningt-” – followed by Luke admitting that was a memory test for Mike to see if he recalled that the other tour guide, leading the group climbing out of the canyon, was named Bennington. Mike did not pass the memory test, though he argued that it wasn’t exactly relevant information for Brad right now!
IV. Brad deciding as the werewolf charged at him to fire off his flare gun right into its mouth – after making a couple of pulls to have successfully dried it out by tucking it under his hot armpit as he slept – and having to make four pulls to pull off the maneuver – one to steady his nerves, one to have the werewolf stop in time for him to make the shot, one to actually fire off the gun, and one for the werewolf not to turn its head in time. The tower wobbled, but Mike made all four pulls, leaving the werewolf spinning around on all fours as it tried to deal with having a flare shot into its maw.
V. Brad THEN choosing to rip Eric’s silver peace sign pendant off his neck and jam it down the werewolf’s gullet – Luke was like “yes, because he remembers that the teeth marks on Eric’s neck were shallower than the ones on the rest of his body because the guy was wearing silver,” and Mike was like “sure” with an expression indicating that Brad had not remembered that at all. XD After going through what he wanted out of it, Luke made Mike pull four more times – one to steady his nerves again, one to rip the pendant off and not drop it, one to thrust his arm and the pendant into the werewolf’s mouth, and one to get his arm back out again. The tension was high as Mike made each pull, with the last one being particularly tense as the tower swayed dangerously – Luke told him could back out and just deal with losing his arm, but Mike refused –
And made all four pulls! Meaning Brad successfully pulled off the maneuver AND kept his arm! Leading him to scream “TOUCHDOWN!” as the werewolf dealt with the silver pendant burning its way through the roof of its mouth and into its brain, killing it terribly.
VI. Luke asking if Brad spared a thought at this moment for his lost companions, and Mike declaring that Brad somehow produced a second football and spun it on his finger – and Luke, cracking up, demanding he make a pull to pull that off. Mike NEARLY toppled the tower at the last moment because he too was laughing so hard about what he’d made Brad do, but he got himself under control enough to make that final pull and thus successfully celebrate his victory.
VII. And the adventure ending with a half-feral Brad stumbling out of the woods and into the ranch a few days later (where it turned out the crew of the plane HAD seen the flare and were helping everyone send out search parties for the missing college students), flanked by wolves because, having killed the werewolf, he’d secured his place as the pack’s new alpha. Everyone had a good laugh as Luke apologized to their mostly-nerd audience for the jock surviving. XD (Personally, I like to think Brad trained all the wolves to spin footballs on their noses.)
Good stuff – genuinely tense in spots, but with that patented ridiculous Oxventure ending. XD Looking forward to watching 2025 Halloweenstream episode where the gang played another round of Dread with GIANT Jenga with my workouts next week! That one will be completely new to me. :D
B) And this week’s OXBox list – “7 Patronizing Ways AAA Games Hold Your Hand!” Featuring Andy and Jane complaining about the ways in which some games will essentially act like a helicopter parent toward the player to ensure that they’re being played “correctly” and nobody’s getting frustrated – which, ironically, often results in the player getting frustrated with the game for the unwanted help. Top offenders included:
I. Extremely obvious trails in the game world leading you to your next destination, such as the glowing “scent trails” that Logan follows to get from location to location in the Wolverine game (nicknamed “fart gas” by players because, well, that’s what they look like). Jane allowed that nobody liked getting lost in a game, and said that PLAYER-PROMPTED TEMPORARY TRAILS were fine (like the holographic line that Isaac can bring up to figure out the best path to his next objective in Dead Space), but always-on nonsense like the “scent trails” were just annoying. Even as someone who OFTEN gets lost in video games because I have no fucking sense of direction, I have to agree. Let ME decide when I need the visual aid! Allow me some small smidgen of dignity!
II. Quick-Time Events (you know, where you have to quickly push a button in a cutscene to have the protagonist do something in time) that couldn’t actually be failed and thus had no reason to exist – such as arm-wrestling Sabretooth in the Wolverine game (embarrassing that this one showed up twice!). Again, Jane made it clear that she wasn’t talking about having a “QTE Autocomplete” setting in the game menu for players who simply COULDN’T do the QTEs – that was an accessibility feature and was absolutely fine. No, her gripe was with QTEs that could simply be ignored with no consequences either way, making you wonder why they were even put in. The whole point was to give the player a bit of agency in the moment! You can have a QTE moment, or you can have a pure cutscene – you cannot have both, game designers!
III. And games offering the option to switch to a lower difficulty if you’ve failed a few times doing something, like Forza Horizon 6 offering to drop the difficulty if you’ve lost a few races. Again, Jane was not against having different levels of difficulty – everyone should be allowed to play a game like they wanted – she just felt like the game was judging her when it asked if she wanted to knock the difficulty down a notch. Like, she knew she was failing, game! She was getting her feet under her! Give her a chance before being like “maybe you want to go to Easy Mode?” XD Personally, I just thought this one was interesting because it synced up nicely with that “Semi-Ramblomatic” I watched recently with Yahtzee musing on difficulty levels and how they should presented to the player – he noted himself that players tended to get tetchy and defensive when the game suggested going to Easy after a number of fails, and that’s why adaptive difficulty – where the game never TOLD the player it was taking it a little easier on them – was the best.
...I swear that Andy also featured in this video – I just ended up highlighting all the examples that Jane did. XD But yeah, those are the ways that current video games can be a touch condescending. We’ll see what happens when the commenters start bitching about their least-liked “helpful” features!
Writing: I returned to Valicer In The Dark and “They Would Have Done It For An Ottoman” tonight, writing the first page of Chapter 5! The start of which covered –
A) Our brave trio shoving their new couch into place (in the “living room” near the stairs leading up to Smiler’s workshop and the library) with one final big push – Smiler checked it over afterward and declared it looked even to them, to everyone’s relief. :p Alice admitted that she hadn’t realized how heavy their new couch was likely to be, with Victor echoing the sentiment and adding that the dining table they’d gotten had also been a pain and that they’d been lucky it fit through the front door –
Causing Smiler to clarify that they were lucky it had fit through all the doors leading to the dining room. XD But they’d gotten it there, which was the important part!
B) Alice promptly plopping herself down on the couch to enjoy the fruits of their labor, with Victor and Smiler quickly following – Victor noted that it really was a nice couch, and Smiler agreed, commenting that it had some nicks and dings and whatnot, but that just showed it had been loved. And then adding that it also wasn’t yellow while shooting Alice a wink. XD Alice laughed and assured them that she was grateful to the Advocates for helping them out with the cots, but she appreciated the variety of getting to have a piece of BLUE furniture. :p
C) Victor humming his agreement, then commenting on how glad he was that they were able to get that list for Aldo and Cundey – and not just because it got them some new furniture. Aldo looked so relieved when they handed it over! Smiler agreed and admitted that they were pretty sure their clients had been a LOT more worried about what might happen to their coworkers and their families, and that they were very glad they could relieve the pair of their burden. Alice echoed the sentiment, though she allowed that the job could have gone a bit more smoothly –
Prompting Smiler to assure her and Victor that they’d do better next time. Cue Alice and Victor both being like “?” and Smiler going “Oh, we all know I was the weak link in that score, I should have done better by you both” while doing their best to push down the embarrassment they felt over getting their own Eyeblind poison in their face and their flash bomb going off rather more pathetically than they’d hoped. They then added that they would try harder next time –
Only for Alice to cover their mouth with her hand and go “No” very firmly. And then tell them that they didn’t let her or Victor get away with putting themselves down, so they didn’t get to get away with it either – and that they’d done just fine during the job. Smiler was like “there’s a creaky floorboard that would like to argue that with you” – Alice promptly retorted, “the same one Victor and I stepped on? Getting arguably more attention than when you stepped on it? Not convinced.” XD I left things off there for the night – tomorrow, Victor gets in on the action, and Smiler gets a taste of what it’s like to talk to, well, them. XD
YouTube: Tonight’s YouTube Short was all about Baldur’s Gate III as I watched “One Companion Is Not Like the Others #baldursgate3” by SuNStereO! Which featured a glimpse at Malus Thorm, the Scalpel of Shar – a twisted doctor you encounter in the Shadow-Cursed Lands of Act 2, with mechanical hands and a taste for mutilating and murdering his patients – and the companions’ reactions to seeing him preach about how the word “absence” is the word most perfectly suited to expressing the very heart of Shar, followed by him murdering an unlucky patient in front of them while talking about the “scalpel-led journey that leads from pain to peace.” In order, we had –
A) Wyll declaring “Hells – only a monster would inflict misery and call it medicine!”
B) Karlach wondering “what the fuck is this loon talking about?”
C) Astarion snarling “He’s just like Cazador – utterly insane!”
D) Lae’zel snapping “Only a beast of a man toys with his victim!” ...before adding with a faint smile that it was “entertaining, if not efficient”
E) Gale (blessed via mods with a ridiculous mustache) asking in horrified tones “Gods! What living nightmare is this?”
F) And Shadowheart sadly noting it was “a stinging truth...but a truth nonetheless” – because at that point in the game, she’s still buying Shar’s bullshit
So yeah – I know that it’s Shadowheart that’s supposed to be the odd companion out, but I think you could make a case for Lae’zel given her addition about finding the horrors entertaining! Girl is pretty fucked up when you think about it – but then again, growing up in Gith society, especially under Queen Vlaakith, is not really much better than growing up as a Sharran...
Tumblr: I didn’t have anything to do on Valice Multiverse again tonight...but over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), I ended reblogging a bunch of stuff I saw on my buddy thesatiricaldemon’s tumblr. In order, we had –
A) A thread from stuckinapril talking about how the Palestinian genocide has not ceased despite the “ceasefire” in place, quoting an article from Al Jazeera about how “94 percent of Gaza’s population remained in urgent need of shelter and basic household assistance” and “65 percent of households were living in tents or makeshift shelters” and begging people to spread the word because it was important news to disseminate
B) A thread featuring posts from transattacks and dirt-mann warning about a “45 day enforcement surge” by ICE in California, with the fuckers starting in San Diego and working their way north. Apparently they’ve been told they can go after anybody they want, which – we knew they were going to do anyway, but fucking still. *grimaces* I hope California can weather the storm like poor Minnesota!
C) A post by hannlecter, a Brazilian, letting the rest of us know about how the country is “on the verge of electing a fascist candidate who wants to hand our country over to the United States for free” and that their elections are not looking particularly fair, as Trump has been giving a LOT of support to said fascist candidate. They’re worried that their country is going to sink like the other ones in Latin America. :( Just another post reminding us that things are bad in the rest of the world too!
D) And, to end things on a somewhat more pleasant note, a post from landmineblogging simply stating “reblog to thank prev for being here” :) As I reblogged it from Satirical, I thanked him in the tags of my reblog :)
*nods* Some heavy but important stuff, and a little bit of niceness at the end. I’m happy enough with that, I suppose.
And there we have it! And now I need to go to bed and try to get some sleep, since I still have one day of work left. (Barring waking up feeling sick and needing to call out, of course). Night all~
Work: My time in the office today was split between the following –
A) Doing the morning credit card reports – there were no checks in yesterday’s mail, so there were no checks for me to scan (and there were no checks in today’s mail either! Nobody wants to send us money anymore it seems :P)
B) Noodling around with the obituaries and going through more people with the same name/same last night to clean up more duplicates and deceased donors (always a good way to kill some time)
C) Doing a bunch of credit card updates, as today ended up being “Oh Shit I Need To Update My Card With You” Day for a number of folks. XD Did four credit card updates and one big catch-up payment, with my coworker doing a fifth. Not sure why they all decided to contact us TODAY, but it helped make the day go by
D) And doing a bunch of puzzles, including another crossword and some more cryptography stuff (including a celebrity quote and a “crypto-quip”)
*nods* So yeah – not the busiest day, but we had stuff to do, at least! And it was all slightly more interesting than folding up programs. :p Just gotta get through Friday now!
Workout: Tonight’s stationary bike ride was all about the OX crew, as I pedaled my way through –
A) The last 19-odd minutes of “DREAD: A Jenga Horror RPG 🎃 | Oxventure's One-Shot Wonder | Hallowstream 2022!” The big finale of Oh God Killian (Andy) Is Dead, Now Brad (Mike) And Madison (Ellen) are on their own featured –
I. Having constructed a bonfire to hopefully eventually use as a lure (and decided not to add any dead animals to it), Brad and Madison deciding to try and get some sleep, with Luke encouraging them to do so by stating he’d reduce the severity of all future block pulls by one to reflect they’d actually had some rest. They had to each pull a block first to see if they could even get to sleep, though. Ellen went in and, after a few nervous nudges here and there, backed off, stating that Madison couldn’t sleep –
And then Mike went in and made pulling out a block look easy, declaring cheerfully that Brad went right to sleep and slept like a baby on the soft moss. Ellen thus went back in, figuring if Mike could do it, so could she –
And toppled the tower. She promptly collapsed onto the table, laughing, before sliding onto the floor. Once she got up, Luke explained how Madison died – basically, Brad was snoring too loudly for her to get any sleep by the bonfire they’d set up, so she went to the edge of the clearing and passed out there. Unfortunately, by the time she woke up, it was dark out, the moon was up, and the werewolf was upon her. Cue her getting chomped and having to leave the table. She was thanked for her potential contribution to Brad’s survival. XD
II. Post-tower reconstruction/partial disassembly (Mike had to pull six blocks this time!), Brad waking up to see Madison getting eaten by the creature (recognizing her dismembered torso), and said creature turning toward him with murder in its glowing red eyes. Brad tried to argue that it couldn’t be that hungry after eating Madison, but Luke noted it might just want to kill him. On the plus side, Brad was willing to accept that it was a werewolf after seeing it stand up and prepare to charge him – Ellen roleplayed Madison’s ghost calling “I was riiiiight” on the wind. XD
III. Luke describing the werewolf as having a lanyard around its neck, with the remains of an ID card from the company the group had hired for this detox expedition reading “Benningt-” – followed by Luke admitting that was a memory test for Mike to see if he recalled that the other tour guide, leading the group climbing out of the canyon, was named Bennington. Mike did not pass the memory test, though he argued that it wasn’t exactly relevant information for Brad right now!
IV. Brad deciding as the werewolf charged at him to fire off his flare gun right into its mouth – after making a couple of pulls to have successfully dried it out by tucking it under his hot armpit as he slept – and having to make four pulls to pull off the maneuver – one to steady his nerves, one to have the werewolf stop in time for him to make the shot, one to actually fire off the gun, and one for the werewolf not to turn its head in time. The tower wobbled, but Mike made all four pulls, leaving the werewolf spinning around on all fours as it tried to deal with having a flare shot into its maw.
V. Brad THEN choosing to rip Eric’s silver peace sign pendant off his neck and jam it down the werewolf’s gullet – Luke was like “yes, because he remembers that the teeth marks on Eric’s neck were shallower than the ones on the rest of his body because the guy was wearing silver,” and Mike was like “sure” with an expression indicating that Brad had not remembered that at all. XD After going through what he wanted out of it, Luke made Mike pull four more times – one to steady his nerves again, one to rip the pendant off and not drop it, one to thrust his arm and the pendant into the werewolf’s mouth, and one to get his arm back out again. The tension was high as Mike made each pull, with the last one being particularly tense as the tower swayed dangerously – Luke told him could back out and just deal with losing his arm, but Mike refused –
And made all four pulls! Meaning Brad successfully pulled off the maneuver AND kept his arm! Leading him to scream “TOUCHDOWN!” as the werewolf dealt with the silver pendant burning its way through the roof of its mouth and into its brain, killing it terribly.
VI. Luke asking if Brad spared a thought at this moment for his lost companions, and Mike declaring that Brad somehow produced a second football and spun it on his finger – and Luke, cracking up, demanding he make a pull to pull that off. Mike NEARLY toppled the tower at the last moment because he too was laughing so hard about what he’d made Brad do, but he got himself under control enough to make that final pull and thus successfully celebrate his victory.
VII. And the adventure ending with a half-feral Brad stumbling out of the woods and into the ranch a few days later (where it turned out the crew of the plane HAD seen the flare and were helping everyone send out search parties for the missing college students), flanked by wolves because, having killed the werewolf, he’d secured his place as the pack’s new alpha. Everyone had a good laugh as Luke apologized to their mostly-nerd audience for the jock surviving. XD (Personally, I like to think Brad trained all the wolves to spin footballs on their noses.)
Good stuff – genuinely tense in spots, but with that patented ridiculous Oxventure ending. XD Looking forward to watching 2025 Halloweenstream episode where the gang played another round of Dread with GIANT Jenga with my workouts next week! That one will be completely new to me. :D
B) And this week’s OXBox list – “7 Patronizing Ways AAA Games Hold Your Hand!” Featuring Andy and Jane complaining about the ways in which some games will essentially act like a helicopter parent toward the player to ensure that they’re being played “correctly” and nobody’s getting frustrated – which, ironically, often results in the player getting frustrated with the game for the unwanted help. Top offenders included:
I. Extremely obvious trails in the game world leading you to your next destination, such as the glowing “scent trails” that Logan follows to get from location to location in the Wolverine game (nicknamed “fart gas” by players because, well, that’s what they look like). Jane allowed that nobody liked getting lost in a game, and said that PLAYER-PROMPTED TEMPORARY TRAILS were fine (like the holographic line that Isaac can bring up to figure out the best path to his next objective in Dead Space), but always-on nonsense like the “scent trails” were just annoying. Even as someone who OFTEN gets lost in video games because I have no fucking sense of direction, I have to agree. Let ME decide when I need the visual aid! Allow me some small smidgen of dignity!
II. Quick-Time Events (you know, where you have to quickly push a button in a cutscene to have the protagonist do something in time) that couldn’t actually be failed and thus had no reason to exist – such as arm-wrestling Sabretooth in the Wolverine game (embarrassing that this one showed up twice!). Again, Jane made it clear that she wasn’t talking about having a “QTE Autocomplete” setting in the game menu for players who simply COULDN’T do the QTEs – that was an accessibility feature and was absolutely fine. No, her gripe was with QTEs that could simply be ignored with no consequences either way, making you wonder why they were even put in. The whole point was to give the player a bit of agency in the moment! You can have a QTE moment, or you can have a pure cutscene – you cannot have both, game designers!
III. And games offering the option to switch to a lower difficulty if you’ve failed a few times doing something, like Forza Horizon 6 offering to drop the difficulty if you’ve lost a few races. Again, Jane was not against having different levels of difficulty – everyone should be allowed to play a game like they wanted – she just felt like the game was judging her when it asked if she wanted to knock the difficulty down a notch. Like, she knew she was failing, game! She was getting her feet under her! Give her a chance before being like “maybe you want to go to Easy Mode?” XD Personally, I just thought this one was interesting because it synced up nicely with that “Semi-Ramblomatic” I watched recently with Yahtzee musing on difficulty levels and how they should presented to the player – he noted himself that players tended to get tetchy and defensive when the game suggested going to Easy after a number of fails, and that’s why adaptive difficulty – where the game never TOLD the player it was taking it a little easier on them – was the best.
...I swear that Andy also featured in this video – I just ended up highlighting all the examples that Jane did. XD But yeah, those are the ways that current video games can be a touch condescending. We’ll see what happens when the commenters start bitching about their least-liked “helpful” features!
Writing: I returned to Valicer In The Dark and “They Would Have Done It For An Ottoman” tonight, writing the first page of Chapter 5! The start of which covered –
A) Our brave trio shoving their new couch into place (in the “living room” near the stairs leading up to Smiler’s workshop and the library) with one final big push – Smiler checked it over afterward and declared it looked even to them, to everyone’s relief. :p Alice admitted that she hadn’t realized how heavy their new couch was likely to be, with Victor echoing the sentiment and adding that the dining table they’d gotten had also been a pain and that they’d been lucky it fit through the front door –
Causing Smiler to clarify that they were lucky it had fit through all the doors leading to the dining room. XD But they’d gotten it there, which was the important part!
B) Alice promptly plopping herself down on the couch to enjoy the fruits of their labor, with Victor and Smiler quickly following – Victor noted that it really was a nice couch, and Smiler agreed, commenting that it had some nicks and dings and whatnot, but that just showed it had been loved. And then adding that it also wasn’t yellow while shooting Alice a wink. XD Alice laughed and assured them that she was grateful to the Advocates for helping them out with the cots, but she appreciated the variety of getting to have a piece of BLUE furniture. :p
C) Victor humming his agreement, then commenting on how glad he was that they were able to get that list for Aldo and Cundey – and not just because it got them some new furniture. Aldo looked so relieved when they handed it over! Smiler agreed and admitted that they were pretty sure their clients had been a LOT more worried about what might happen to their coworkers and their families, and that they were very glad they could relieve the pair of their burden. Alice echoed the sentiment, though she allowed that the job could have gone a bit more smoothly –
Prompting Smiler to assure her and Victor that they’d do better next time. Cue Alice and Victor both being like “?” and Smiler going “Oh, we all know I was the weak link in that score, I should have done better by you both” while doing their best to push down the embarrassment they felt over getting their own Eyeblind poison in their face and their flash bomb going off rather more pathetically than they’d hoped. They then added that they would try harder next time –
Only for Alice to cover their mouth with her hand and go “No” very firmly. And then tell them that they didn’t let her or Victor get away with putting themselves down, so they didn’t get to get away with it either – and that they’d done just fine during the job. Smiler was like “there’s a creaky floorboard that would like to argue that with you” – Alice promptly retorted, “the same one Victor and I stepped on? Getting arguably more attention than when you stepped on it? Not convinced.” XD I left things off there for the night – tomorrow, Victor gets in on the action, and Smiler gets a taste of what it’s like to talk to, well, them. XD
YouTube: Tonight’s YouTube Short was all about Baldur’s Gate III as I watched “One Companion Is Not Like the Others #baldursgate3” by SuNStereO! Which featured a glimpse at Malus Thorm, the Scalpel of Shar – a twisted doctor you encounter in the Shadow-Cursed Lands of Act 2, with mechanical hands and a taste for mutilating and murdering his patients – and the companions’ reactions to seeing him preach about how the word “absence” is the word most perfectly suited to expressing the very heart of Shar, followed by him murdering an unlucky patient in front of them while talking about the “scalpel-led journey that leads from pain to peace.” In order, we had –
A) Wyll declaring “Hells – only a monster would inflict misery and call it medicine!”
B) Karlach wondering “what the fuck is this loon talking about?”
C) Astarion snarling “He’s just like Cazador – utterly insane!”
D) Lae’zel snapping “Only a beast of a man toys with his victim!” ...before adding with a faint smile that it was “entertaining, if not efficient”
E) Gale (blessed via mods with a ridiculous mustache) asking in horrified tones “Gods! What living nightmare is this?”
F) And Shadowheart sadly noting it was “a stinging truth...but a truth nonetheless” – because at that point in the game, she’s still buying Shar’s bullshit
So yeah – I know that it’s Shadowheart that’s supposed to be the odd companion out, but I think you could make a case for Lae’zel given her addition about finding the horrors entertaining! Girl is pretty fucked up when you think about it – but then again, growing up in Gith society, especially under Queen Vlaakith, is not really much better than growing up as a Sharran...
Tumblr: I didn’t have anything to do on Valice Multiverse again tonight...but over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), I ended reblogging a bunch of stuff I saw on my buddy thesatiricaldemon’s tumblr. In order, we had –
A) A thread from stuckinapril talking about how the Palestinian genocide has not ceased despite the “ceasefire” in place, quoting an article from Al Jazeera about how “94 percent of Gaza’s population remained in urgent need of shelter and basic household assistance” and “65 percent of households were living in tents or makeshift shelters” and begging people to spread the word because it was important news to disseminate
B) A thread featuring posts from transattacks and dirt-mann warning about a “45 day enforcement surge” by ICE in California, with the fuckers starting in San Diego and working their way north. Apparently they’ve been told they can go after anybody they want, which – we knew they were going to do anyway, but fucking still. *grimaces* I hope California can weather the storm like poor Minnesota!
C) A post by hannlecter, a Brazilian, letting the rest of us know about how the country is “on the verge of electing a fascist candidate who wants to hand our country over to the United States for free” and that their elections are not looking particularly fair, as Trump has been giving a LOT of support to said fascist candidate. They’re worried that their country is going to sink like the other ones in Latin America. :( Just another post reminding us that things are bad in the rest of the world too!
D) And, to end things on a somewhat more pleasant note, a post from landmineblogging simply stating “reblog to thank prev for being here” :) As I reblogged it from Satirical, I thanked him in the tags of my reblog :)
*nods* Some heavy but important stuff, and a little bit of niceness at the end. I’m happy enough with that, I suppose.
And there we have it! And now I need to go to bed and try to get some sleep, since I still have one day of work left. (Barring waking up feeling sick and needing to call out, of course). Night all~
