The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

This happened last night but I woke up still annoyed so I'm going to complain about it anyway:

Imagine rolling up to an alliance raid as a DNC and dance partnering TANK and not the BRD, the MNK, or even the other DNC
Imagine staying partnered to the tank when the two highest DPS members aren't partnered at all
I don't care if they're your buddy, you are a dumbass
(lil salty about the other DNC who partnered the SAM that died all the time but that was prooobably their buddy, and at least they were a DPS. But partnering the TANK????)

 

Having to spend 110€ on new sandals is Suffering but they're much nicer quality than the 60€ ones I'm replacing (and which I had to talk myself into replacing even though the show bed lining is half-peeled off and their cushioning is nonexistent, because my brain is convinced if something isn't literally falling apart it must still be good!!!!)

Having to spend over 50€ on shoes always makes me feel a bit faint but I'm past the point I can deal with cheap shoes physically, and wearing them until they're past the point of wearability balances it out somewhat, I think. That, and having three pairs of shoes total. (Ugh, see, I still feel the need to justify myself even though it is a completely realistic purchase!!)

Also important: they aren't hideous. Walking sandals are never particularly stylish, but my last two pairs have been u g l y, and the pair before my last I only didn't resent because they were incredibly comfy and well-made (and rare good secondhand shoe find). These are just black and not bulky.

If I could afford/justify being Fashionable I'd also get a pair of black gladiator-style sandals, but alas.

 

Win-tnessed for spending money but having good shoes.

 

Ah yes, the disability experience -- you can pick affordable, comfortable or stylish, and every once in a while a miracle happens and you can pick two of the three at the same time.

 

Took the sandals on an inaugural walk -- just a couple of km, nothing too ambitious lest I have problems -- and holy fuck they are so comfortable

They're so comfortable my legs don't feel even a little tired, which is a little inconvenient because if I don't get physically tired out I sleep poorly and it's almost 11 pm, BUT!!! This suggests that my stamina problems I've been fretting about aren't due to being terribly, hideously out of shape, but perhaps... just maybe... were due in part to bad shoes. I'll go on a 5 km walk tomorrow and see how I feel then, as that usually wears me out pretty thoroughly and leaves me with sore legs after and into the next day.

This also suggests my beloved Converse sneakers aren't going to cut it anymore either, though, which is extremely depressing to me. T_T Not that Converses are cheap here, but they're a style I love and have loved since I was a teenager, and sometimes I can get them in actual COLORS. Right now I have an aqua pair my sister sent me last year, which have about nine months of very on-and-off wear total and are still in good shape... and they're not anywhere NEAR as comfortable as those sandals, and never were. (They have the new 'more comfortable' style of sole, which I hate; the thicker soles didn't translate to more cushioning, they were just stiff and hard until I'd broken them in.)

And I need new rain/snow boots too...! *cries in fixed income*

Well, as Van said, this is the disability experience... :(

 

J brought in the mail a little while ago and one piece of it was a citizen's petition to 'stop the installation of 5G networks until their effects on humans and nature are known' and just those few words instantly sent most of my brain into Apeshit mode. Just. SO DAMN ANGRY. And also kind of wanting to burst into tears. I think everything is getting to me pretty badly.

I didn't do anything other than grumble about it with J while I ate my evening cereal, but man, my brain was having a fit.

 

More happily, I bought some maple syrup and walnut ice cream today and somehow it doesn't taste like maple syrup and walnuts, it tastes like camping. Yes, there's maple there, but it's also distinctly foresty with a hint of woodsmoke. I have no idea HOW, but it's amazing.

 

Man, I am just... not doing great mentally. On top of that, I've been sleeping poorly because it's either too hot or too bright (bedroom window faces east, sun rises at 4 am, curtain situation is unnecessarily complicated right now... it's not great), and my leg hurts all the time lately.

I really hope the FFXIV Letter From the Producer comes out next week, and not the first full week of July, because I could really, really use something to look forward to and a hit of hype about 5.3 would be perfect. In the meantime, maybe I should start ShB with Yisun finally and refresh my memory on the story.

 

please i need to hear your liveblogging about yisun not taking any of emet's shit

 

I would have finished it ages ago if I could just stop dithering on what job I want him to go through the story on. T_T I'd switch back to DRG if I actually liked playing it at all, but I really don't. He's got a bunch of other jobs at 70 or higher, but... dither, dither, dither.

I should probably just stay SMN and stop worrying if waving a book at everything is going to look lame.

 

"But what if I leveled MNK another 10 levels and used that," I mumble to myself, knowing full well that I'd just get fed up with leveling in a couple of days

 

After finding out about the orange cancer's latest fuckery my brain is basically the infinite scream twitter, for a lot of reasons.

Does anyone have any good scripts for telling a parent "fix your heart or you are dead to me"? Because I am about at that point with my mom and the stupid, awful shit she posts on Facebook.

 

After a sleep I've decided that I'm not going to go for the nuclear option yet, but god. I've got to do something.

 

It's...



THE BOY!!!

Male Au Ra are usually characterized as edgelords because of their resting bitch face and demony appearance, but their emotes are boisterous and kinda goofy -- which is Yisun to a T. My initial character concept for him ended up not clicking with me, but a bottle of fantasia and some noodling later, he developed into a hotheaded shonen hero. Where Iolis is quiet, withdrawn, and intellectual, Yisun is opinionated, loud, and very physical. He believes in working hard, playing harder, the Power Of Friendship, but being hotheaded means that (at first, at least) he's prone to starting with wrassling or fisticuffs when it comes time to settle disagreements, but he usually cools down pretty quickly. Usually.

He's young enough (18-19 at the start of ARR) that he doesn't always have the best sense of proportion about how hard is too hard. Occasionally this runs him right into a wall of exhaustion, hangovers, or awkward morning afters that a more mature person could have told him were inevitable. This happens far more often when he's experiencing sadness, loneliness, or grief; while he's by and large an optimistic person, when these emotions do hit him they hit him hard, and he deals with them by throwing himself into drinking and casual sex.

When someone has his loyalty, they have it completely, but this means that betrayal is one of the things that he's least able to forgive.

Spoiler: Spoilers up through 4.55

Yisun's adventures have dented his optimism somewhat. While he was never naive, exactly -- nomadic life on the Steppe and news of Garlemald's conquests ensured he grew up with a very pragmatic view of the world -- being the Warrior of Light comes with witnessing a lot of suffering and the darkest depths of cruelty others will subject their fellows to. He feels that he was made for this life, but there's so much. When his dearest friends fall one by one into a sleep they cannot be woken from, their very spirits snatched away to parts unknown, he genuinely starts feeling like he's coming apart at the seams. There's no time to rest, no time to center himself, just rush from one battle to the next -- even beating the shit out of the awful thing wearing Zenos as a meat puppet provides no relief because he won't stay dead--

As furious as he is with the Exarch for snatching him away mid-battle (and you can bet Yisun screamed at him), finding out his friends are still alive bolsters his spirits in a way that fairly makes him giddy. (He absolutely hugged the stuffing out of Aymeric when he woke up, propriety be damned. Or modesty. He has very little of either.)

Spoiler: Spoilers up through the lv 71 dungeon

Almost immediately, however, his optimism takes another blow -- the First is bleak in a way that's exponentially worse than the bleakness of Garlean-occupied Ala Mhigo or Doma. He's also not sure what to think of the Exarch -- he's still angry with him, even though he seems strangely familiar, and his mysteriousness is more than a little grating to someone as straightforward as Yisun. (He's very gratified -- and touched -- to find out that Alisaie yelled at the Exarch at length.) He's also distressed when the Exarch says G'raha wasn't in the tower.*

But there's the excitement of a new place, a new adventure, new things to see and people to meet on a whole new world -- it's one of the most exciting things he's ever done, which is really saying something. And his friends are alive and well (in a manner of speaking) -- but even though it hasn't been nearly as long for him as it has been for them, he absolutely scoops Alphinaud and Alisaie up into bearhugs when he sees them again (which had to be a sight to see; they're tiny little teenagers, while at 6' 11ish he's E N O R M O U S. One wonders how Estinien got him back to base camp.)

* I know why he says that, but Yisun, as smart as he is about some things, is kind of a himbo at the best of times. The emotional rollercoaster he's been on makes it worse than usual.

 

i love yisun he's my favorite

 

More Yisun Facts!!

• His father is Xaela but his mother is Raen, originally from Sui-no-Sato. He gets his hotheadedness and insatiable curiosity from her -- she couldn't bear the thought of living her entire life in the cold, austere conditions under the Ruby Sea where nothing ever changed, so she basically flipped tradition the double bird and left for land, where she promptly joined up with the Ruby Sea Confederacy. Being a pirate suited her very well; she also was usually the first to volunteer whenever it was necessary to make a trip inland for any reason. It was on one of those trips, however, that her group was attacked by enroaching Garleans. She escaped, albeit badly injured, and was lucky enough to encounter the Kha before she succumbed to her wounds. In thanks for warning them away from the Garleans, they took her in and nursed her back to health. She eventually sent word back to the Confederacy that in defiance of their rules she was not coming back, as she was down an eye and part of one hand and up one bun in the oven.
  
• That was Yisun! He's the eldest of five. He has high Big Brother energy and will swoop in to coddle and protect children and small animals. This is probably the only reason he ever goes through all the trouble to collect stories for Khloe -- he has a severe weakness to cute babies. (I don't care what her 'canonical' age is, she's realistically maybe seven years old.) This does not mean he's interested in having cute babies of his own, mind you, and while his father hopes he'll come back and settle down some day, his mother knows him better than that -- he was born to wander even more than she was, and much further afield than even the Kha wander.
• If I could customize him more fully, he'd have black sclera and seal point coloring with his scales -- dark tail, dark horns, dark scales on his hands and feet but fading to pale ivory further down his limbs and on his body.
• Unlike a lot of Xaela (because apparently most tribes don't have a written language) he knows how to read and write, thanks to his mother. She thought it would help sate some of his curiosity and keep him out of trouble... it only helped a little. Partly this was because he could never stand to read for long; it wasn't until much later and Cid noticed how he'd only ever look at maps or diagrams either standing and looking way down or at arm's length and squinting that he found out that most people didn't have trouble seeing small things close up. (Cid got him reading glasses, and then promptly found all of his engineering books being borrowed at an alarming rate.)
• He's absolutely FASCINATED by all things Allagan, which is a big part of why he started studying summoning. He's pilfered a number of trinkets and gadgets from his trip through the ruins of Dalamud with Alisaie and the floating islands of Azys Lla. That his limbal rings have taken on a peculiar glow must surely be coincidence...
  
• He is extremely bisexual and rather free with his attentions, and has a thing for older men. (He has been dropping hints to Raubhan since forever.)
• He couldn't STAND Alphinaud for a long time -- who was this pretentious little boy lording it up and ordering him around?! It was a shock when he found out Alphinaud is only a couple of years younger than him, and turned into a somewhat bitter rivalry for a while. In contrast, he got along with Alisaie instantly.
• He adores them both now -- they're two of his dearest friends. All the same, one of his favorite hobbies is still pestering Alphinaud.

 

i still laugh that our boys are exact opposites on the sibling spectrum, being the eldest and youngest of five

 

Yisun has cleared up through Il Mheg.

Spoiler: It's been a hell of a trip for him and it's only just begun. (Spoilers up to the lv 73 dungeon)

Unlike Iolis, Yisun hasn't lived in the direct path of a Calamity. He was a young teenager still living on the Azim Steppe when Dalamud fell, and while the effects of that rippled outward, the primary impact it had on him was the unsettling knowledge that there was one less moon in the sky. Seeing the aftermath five years after the fact wasn't anything like having lived through it.

So while he knew going in that there was something deeply wrong with the First, it was very intellectual -- he really couldn't conceptualize the sheer magnitude of destruction necessary for a shard to be ready for a Rejoining.The first sin eater he encountered was disturbing, especially under the circumstances, but he's seen any number of monsters under weird circumstances. Lakeland is alien, and the unrelenting light is unnerving, but it was all more interestingly foreign than anything; having many things be similar and yet vastly different disturbed him more at first. He knew the people of the First were suffering, but it didn't seem much different than the suffering of anyone from a war-torn place.

He didn't really start to understand until he saw the blasted landscape of Kholusia, the dying villages, the wreckage of ships piled around Eulmore, the patients at the Inn at Journey's Head waiting for a painless death, and the frozen wall of light with the ruins of a great city forever embedded in it, and the vast, blank nothingness beyond. He'd spent some days there by then, under the relentless light, and he began to have an inkling of how it would be to grow up under light like that, to have generations live and die under unending light, never seeing the night sky, knowing their world had shrunk to a tiny part of what it was and was slowly being consumed.

Then he saw Tesleen's transformation (one of the worst things he's ever witnessed, and he's seen many terrible things), and that drove it home that the First was experiencing a literal end of their world, which was stranger and more terrible than he had ever imagined.

His optimism has been a little squashed and his emotions are kind of in free-fall at that point. This is A Lot. As is knowing that without the Exarch bringing him and his friends here to save this world, they'd all die. It's surreal to him to know that apparently his life could be snuffed out, just like that -- he doesn't have a very good grasp on his own mortality. Mortality in general, yes, gods know he's caused a lot of it, but he thinking of being just gone is hard for him to grasp -- in part because he still finds it difficult to get his head around so much hinging on him specifically. Even with Ardbert there, an almost-tangible reminder of mortality, depressed and ghostly, dead but unable to leave, tormented by walking the remains of his ruined world for a hundred years and fraying bit by bit... until Yisun arrives and can inexplicably see him.

He's also a little off-balance by how it's been a year or more since the other Scions have seen him, but days to weeks since he saw them. He's impressed by and proud as hell of the twins -- Alisaie he knew could hold her own, but now Alphinaud really seems like an adult, not a naive boy genius. He feels like he doesn't know Thancred anymore (it's the dadliness that's throwing him off), and he feels like he never really knew Urianger, who is still a nerd, but like, a COOL one??? That thing with the Warriors of Darkness in late HW wasn't just a oneoff????

(He's still going to make a point of burning Urianger's old clothes before he can wake up back on the source. That awful hooded robe is a crime.)

Minifilia is tiny and precious, and it kills him a little inside whenever Thancred snaps at her and she cringes. He was raised such that getting in the way of a parent disciplining their child is wrong unless it's obvious abuse, but with the echo vision he had, with how she cringes, and with the conversation they have later, he's conflicted and upset.

Spoiler: After the lv 73 dungeon

Speaking to Seto was kind of a revelation, as was noticing Ardbert listening in -- and yes, he did see that lip wobble. It was at that moment he found his focus -- this has all been too big for him to think about all at once, and he's been even more rattled by how unfocused and anxious he's been feeling, but now he's doing it for Ardbert, because Ardbert can't do anything now but stand witness now matter how much he wants to set things right. Ardbert deserves better, and his world does too.

When I shut down for the night last night, Yisun has just met a Certain Someone and his first reaction was stark disbelief. The Ascians had a mad scientist, a middle manager, and now an actual fucking clown???

He was very glad to be given leave to go to his room where he could chill out with his ghost pal and trade stories.

 

And for all Yisun has major Big Brother Energy, Emiliq is arguably the more sensible and level-headed of the two! XD

 

he DEFINITELY is and honestly it's probably not in small part BECAUSE he has four battle-ready older sisters. someone needed a chill bone in their body and he didn't have to worry about being the protector. i actually think he might have been supervising the household a good bit as a "too young to be a warrior but old enough to be responsible for things" kid. sisters off hunting and/or managing the herd but someone's gotta make food.