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

Just barely caught the Nintendo eShop sale and snagged a few interesting looking games for very cheap -- Cattails, Aer: Memories of Old, and Gorogoa. I wanted a few more games for my Switch so I can have something to putter around on without being tied to my computer -- not that there's a lot of places for me to sit around the house, but hey.

Cattails looks adorable (an RPG about being an actual cat!), Aer looks like fun, and I've been wanting Gorogoa for a while on Steam, but decided it'd be a good addition to my Switch library instead.

I also got Saga Frontier Remastered because I've been promising to buy it for myself for a while but just... haven't. Well, that's what the Chrimbo money is for! I'm looking forward to giving this favorite old oddball game another spin now that I'm older, a little better at games... and this game is now properly finished. (I was so disappointed about Asellus's route being unfinished way back when...)

 

Cattails is pretty cute but has a really sad start -- you're not just a feral cat, you're an abandoned cat T_T It's pretty repetitive and simple; it seems like the sort of game that's probably most fun played a little bit at a time.

 

I've been thinking about what I want to do for Coco'a's Actual Backstory, because I don't make just joke characters, but it didn't go anywhere until the last patch. That made me remember an idea I had for a Sharlayan astrologian that fled Sharlayan for Reasons (probably due to the Sharlayan astrologians largely being such fuckheads they're willing to murder anyone who teaches non-Sharlayans astrology) and started life anew in Limsa, becoming an arcanist with every intention to get skilled enough to get a position at the guild and spend some time hiding out as a magical bookkeeper. I'd intended to buy an AST job boost to facilitate this so I could rush MSQ, but I never bothered doing it because it was kind of expensive just so I could have a catboy alt.

I mostly forgot about that idea, and then they trimmed ARR so I had a reason to make my catboy alt to try it out (ok yes I could have new game plus'd it but it wouldn't quite be the same as leveling from 'scratch' (xp boost earring nonwithstanding). I started him as arcanist so I could get the two-for-one deal it gives with jobs... but now that we're going to have Sage, and Sharlayan is going to be a Big Deal in Endwalker! So, depending on Sage's lore, that might be his backstory job, and he feels safe enough to pick it back up when he goes to the First because it's not like Sharlayan exists there.

Either that or he was just some poor librarian that fled for Reasons lol

Either way, Coco'a Mentha is probably an assumed name. Probably. I might just play it straight.

 

J's started making a bunch of plans to meet up with friends and I am extremely Not Thrilled. We've had ONE dose each, my dude, and your younger friends have not had ANY, and you're planning on hanging out with them indoors and unmasked?! Finland has recently had an outbreak due to a bunch of people going to soccer championships in Russia and coming back infected. My health is notoriously fragile. What in the actual fuck are you thinking?

EDIT: I told him I'm not okay with this and pointed out that WHO's recommendations are to wear a mask inside even among other vaccinated people. He checked the Finnish health institute's website, saw they make the same recommendations, and had to concede that it is risky and not worth it and canceled/moved his plans.

I get that he wants to see his friends in person. I understand it sucks to not be able to do that. I'm actually pretty depressed myself that a bunch of my plans to study and go to hobby groups and possibly make local friends at the beginning of 2020 got utterly torpedoed and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Hell, I miss just being around other people casually, as a stranger, in cafés and stores.

But I haven't been willing to take more than minimal risks because I also like being alive and not any more disabled than I already am. If I get even a 'mild' case of covid, there's a good chance it will fuck me up really badly.

 

My PotD group wiped on floor 189 tonight due to eight patrolling garms converging on our spawn room from three directions.

Even if we'd been 100% on point our chance of survival was vanishingly small. That they took us completely by surprise? Yeah, they just mopped the floor with us. Our PLD popped our last raising pom and ran away off, but after he died, they started moving away, and he raised... they all turned right back around and killed him, even the ones that had been most of a room away.

We'll be back on it on Monday!

 

Picture courtesy of our DNC. They popped a witching, but uh... it doesn't look like it actually took effect before the garms wiped the floor with us. D:

 

I started FFX a while ago and immediately got put off at the first minigame-locked thing. It's an absolute pain in the ass to do on a keyboard.

It's also only for Blitzball and fuck Blitzball, tbh. Sorry Tidus, I'm going to ruin your self-image by being bad at it and then never touching it again because I fucking hate mandatory minigames. At least, if I can get up the willpower to go back, because... I fucking hate mandatory minigames!

 

On top of "mandatory minigames suck," I would like to delicately place a single lego on the floor beside the bed of whatever game designer thought it would be a great idea to introduce any minigame at all with a gigantic wall of menu-based text, followed by being thrown into a level of the minigame that is extremely difficult even if you know what you're doing (apparently, I never wanted to touch it long enough to actually learn how to play) and where half the crap that was in the menu doesn't apply, so you're locked into a like 5-minute sequence where you pick commands randomly and things you don't understand happen and then you lose and then the outcome affects nothing whatsoever.

 

Finally realized that maybe I didn't have to reinvent the wheel re: text adventure engines and after only a tiny bit of searching I came upon a page with a whole bunch of recommendations. Most of them were for more interactive story types of things which isn't what I'm going for (at the moment, anyway), but Quest looks extremely promising after a readthrough of about half of the tutorial. First thing I'm going to do is try remaking the adventure I made in Scala, since I always wanted to share it around but felt weird sharing something that was built on the course's framework. (I think it was allowed to do so, but it bothered me, and I couldn't in good conscience use it to build further games.)

Even though it would be an interesting exercise to make my own text adventure game framework from scratch, I'd rather just get to making games, tbh.

 

I wholeheartedly support this. I have a friend who’s a game dev who only started to really learn scripting after publishing several games. If the code is hindering your creative process, fuck it. My friend would probably have never had a career in games if the barrier for entry were being able to program.

Some of the I-will-throw-down-over-this best text games I’ve ever played are Porpentine’s Twine games.

 

Yeah it's like -- it'd be really cool to have something I made 100% from scratch, but I'd have to learn so many things before I could even get to the game-making stage of it, and it's really not worth it to me to do that. Work smarter, not harder, and all that!

The programming knowledge I do have has already come in handy, because the workflow of Quest immediately made sense to me. I'm feeling pretty positive about this. :)

 

I once won a debate on this topic in a software engineering class. It was about whether extremely abstract programming solutions, so abstract you would never interact with anything much resembling code, are good or harmful. My position was that they’re good. I argued that they have a very important role in allowing people with a good idea but not many resources to realize it. Not everyone should have to be a programmer if that’s incidental to their actual goal and may prevent them from achieving it. The students, all programmers, overwhelmingly voted in my favor. It may have been unanimous, but I was so surprised at getting such a positive response from a room full of aspiring career programmers that I don’t really remember very clearly. I even convinced myself, and I’d honestly started out with a pretty negative opinion.

I remain convinced to this day. One size does not fit all, with both problems and people.

 

Also -- visual scripting suites, packaged game engines, drag-and-drop creators are all tools that already exist. They were made to be used, and most of them are extensible until they're literally unrecognizable if you so choose. The devs of those tools made them b/c they really want people to have a more welcoming entry into the art form :)

 

I got stuck on the idea of making my own framework because I've been like, "I need to learn more about programming and not forget what I've already learned! I need to do it in a way that interests me or I won't do it! AHHH!" -- and then of course I got bogged down in the enormity of the task I set myself. And like, I do want to learn more programming, both for myself and to at least maintain the appearance of trying to be Useful To Capitalism so my benefits don't get axed, but maaaaaybe not like that.

Thank you for the support, you two!

 

Bad: my shitty-but-adequate big box fan/swamp cooler died last last night -- seems like something about where the cord goes into the machine went fucky, but it's not user serviceable so into the appliance waste bin it went. My night of sleep was rather unpleasant and insufficient.

Checked Clas Ohlson's website, saw they had various models in stock, crossed my fingers hard that they'd still have anything the next day. Went there today rather later afternoon than I would have preferred, and they only had four tower fans left. That was it. It wasn't what I'd wanted, and J asked if we should check Prisma and K market before buying; I did some quick assessment, noticed some other customers beelining for the fans, and went NOPE. We're getting this.

I went to Prisma after for some milk and all they had left was some too-big-for-a-desk-but-rather-small-for-floor fans, some all metal boutique brand, for ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING EUROS. Why!!

Anyway the tower fan is okay... it's kind of cheap and wobbly (even though it was 40€ *grumble grumble*) and a little underpowered compared to the other fan but it's much quieter (the old one rattled like crazy and the fan was unusually loud). Getting it arranged beside the bed so both J and I get decent airflow will be... a trial, but it's better than just my little nightstand tower fan, which is extremely insufficient for even one person in the heat we've been having.

(It doesn't help that I run hot, and even hotter than I used to due to HRT; add to that the fact that my temperature regulation is Not Great and even worse on days I take my ADHD meds, and hoo boy is this heat hard on me. Like, I have to have a fan running over me at night if it's over 10C outside; it's pretty miserable when it doesn't get below 20.)

 

Mimir is going to translate over to a male model very well.

I'll lose the intense eyebrows unfortunately, and all of the noses are narrower for some reason, both otherwise I'm pleased. He's only going to be losing 3.5 cm of height so that won't be disorienting (although it's going to look like more in cutscenes because the male viera posture is, quite frankly, fucking awful). I may even progress the MSQ with him a bit more because he's not going to look so different it'll be jarring.

 

Tower fan is working out better than I feared, which I'm happy about. It's narrow enough I can put it by my side of the bed (which is closest to the wall) instead of it being out by the doorway, so I get the direct airflow and J doesn't get cold. It's really helped with being able to sleep decently... now, if I could only manage to get to bed even remotely on time. Being up until 3-4 am doesn't help with the whole apartment cooling down situation!

In other news, in a "it's silly I'm even frustrated about this" front, I tried to make some of my OCs as male Viera since they very much fit my preferred aesthetic and absolutely none of them looked right, and they all turned out terribly boring. Meeeeh. X(

 

Well, I griped too soon--



In their canon they're a nixie, with kelp-ish colored hair and gold-ish skin that has a faint metallic sheen in the right light (and the vague impression of tiny scales). They worked out very well, possibly because I didn't have a strong idea of their appearance to begin with.

They're also in need of a name. They had one, but I've adjusted their origins considerably so the old one isn't appropriate anymore.

 

We did it.



We cleared Palace of the Dead.

 

Ever since I found out games made in Quest can't be exported to a stand-alone install (the player either has to get Quest to play it, or the creator has to upload it to the textadventures.co.uk site and direct people to play it there) my motivation to work in it has just tanked. My brain is like "Well if I can't distribute it myself and have to rely on outside hosting or an outside program then what's the point" and I'm pretty sure that's not a useful way of looking at it...

I could use some reassurance T_T