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

I've got an hour and 15 minutes before the servers come up, easily enough time for a workout and a shower, and what am I doing? Sitting here vibrating with excitement instead.

I think my brain is partially ENOUGH WORK WANNA PLAY, too -- yesterday was a walk, a store visit, doing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, and making two Endwalker celebratory goodies:



That's a spinach and goat milk feta tart and an extravagantly expensive pumpkin pie (due to covid... everything, imported pumpkin is up to 8€ a can). Bottom crust only because I don't like to have a lot of crust; I made both crusts with half almond meal, half my usual buckwheat/rice flour blend. I was pretty low on butter so I used both butter and olive oil for the tart's crust; while it stuck to the pan because I keep forgetting that even pie crusts need a greased dish, it turned out very nicely. For the pie's crust I also put in chopped pecans to make it a little extra special.

It's all for meeee because J doesn't like either item (he doesn't feel left out; he knows if I want any particularly special goodies I have to make them myself, and this is a special occassion) -- While there's 8 pieces of each, I figure they'll realistically last me from four to six days, total.

I also have candied ginger, orange chocolate buttons, and pecans for my in-between snacking, a frozen pizza for dinner, and lots of tea and coffee to keep me hydrated. :3 I'm not going full goblin mode past today though, no matter how much I want to. XD

 

Endwalker early access update: I FUCKING LOVE REAPER. Thank you SE for this delicious food job.

 

There's nothing like going full goblin mode on a video game to insulate oneself from wank, drama, and doomscrolling. Like, a few of the people I follow are vaguing about the same general thing right now. What's it about? Who the fuck knows! Do I care? Absolutely not!

Endwalker is a blast so far. My very loose expectations have been turned entirely on their heads, damn near every theory I'd seen about the story has been blasted to smithereens, and I'm not even halfway through the main storyline.

 

(Meanwhile I'm extra smug for calling one of the big twists.)

(Like, not down in the details, but the main beats of it.)

 

That's awesome :D What was it? (Although I'm only lv 84 and just about to leave the fourth area, so if it's beyond that don't tell me yet XD)

Most of the theories I saw were shit like

Spoiler: Endwalker spoilers!

"Zodiark will be the final boss and we'll deal with The Sound in the next expansion" or "Hydaelyn is actually EEEEVIL" or other lazy, I-have-no-reading-comprehension nonsense. (Which, well, that's what I get for reading the ffxiv subreddit.) I didn't try to theorize too hard myself since I didn't want set myself up for disappointment with Big Expectations, but I had a few general ideas, like Zodiark not being what we expect and that The Sound was too inextricably linked to Z and H to just leave it for later.

Spoiler: Spoilers through lv 84 / the fourth area

And I was right! Holy shit was I right. Well done Fandaniel, you crazy motherfucker. You played us all for fools, and although you're loathesome, I will forever treasure the gift you gave me of Zenos's shocked pikachu face.

Love how Zenos goes off in a sulk after the trial and the WoL doesn't even deign to watch him leave.

But I did figure out one thing out while playing -- not much before the reveal, but I did clue in:

Spoiler: BIG zone 3 / lv 83 spoilers

This is re: Garleans thinking Varis is still alive and thinking they heard his voice through the radio; I put that together with the limbs in the core of the towers and how they were channeling aether into the Garlean tower and went, oh shit, did they make him into Anima?!

And... welp. (That was a fucking awesome dungeon boss... and it was cool that it was a dungeon boss and not a trial, like a bunch of people were thinking despite the info about the trials just being an ominous HIDDEN image.)

I've had a couple of gripes with the storytelling so far -- and that we're not given as much of a breadth of choices in how to respond -- but overall I'm having a really good time.

 

Oh, you're not up to the twist I called, actually, but if you figured out the towers, then you'll probably figure this one out, too. There's also a bunch of Brand New Information coming up so I recommend steeling yourself to this not being a mystery you could have solveed, but rather a story you're still in the process of experiencing.

 

I'll keep on rolling along, then! I've enjoyed just going with the flow and seeing where the story goes, so I'll continue to do just that.

 

I got to lv 86 and the fifth area tonight.

HOO BOY.

 

I think that was the part where I told my sibling they should go to bed because they had to go to work later and they said they couldn't go to bed yet because "the story is the same emotion as my stress dreams."

 

I saw a great screencap opportunity, so I took it:

Spoiler: BIG BIG fifth area/lv 86 spoilers

From left to right: World's Grumpiest Man, Shard of the World's Biggest Busybody, and World's Most Attractive Troll.

I have shout chat in quarentine but I glanced at it briefly yesterday while I was in Elpis and it was full of people being cheerfully scandalized at how goddamn pretty Hythlodaeus is. SE had no reason to make him devestatingly attractive -- his featureless shade was a fan favorite based on personality alone! -- and yet they did. (J, after walking past while Hythlo was talking and asking who that was was also cheerfully scandalized at how pretty he is. Absolutely egregious.)

And I'm still not over how he rambles at the WoL about how his purpose is to help his two dearest friends fulfill their purposes and when that happens they can all 'return to the star' (die) together. It's messed up but ridiculously romantic and if SE didn't want me to see Emet-Selch/Azem/Hythlo as a polyamorous triad then they fucked up big time.

ANYway, I've got some very strong guesses about the source of The Sound now, having met Hermes and Meteion. :( Some fucking utopia.

 

Post-lv 87 dungeon:

Spoiler: BIG SPOILERS

My brain, spinning at 10,000 RPM as I go through this: Hermes and Meteion are probably the cause of the sound. Or... is Meteion just a conduit for the sound? Oh for godssakes can I just tell him about the dragons-- oh hell Emet stop being bossy you're just making things worse OH GOD OH FUCK OH GOD OH FUCK

At first I was like oh no, I'm making a divergent timeline! But now I have a feeling I just completed a time loop instead...

 

YO ENDWALKER WAS RAD AS FUCK

I'm... still processing. Holy shit.

I took screenshots of all the cutscenes from the fifth area on and my screenshots folder is weeping :')

 

Eyelid infection problem is still a problem, so I took it to urgent care and got more (and different) antibiotics and instructions to come back if it didn't improve over the weekend.

BLUH.

Also, for as pained as I feel about spending €€€ on new boots and guilty for pining over some emerald green ones, my 'kind of insufficient against cold and wet but still wearable!!!' pair are severely lacking in cushioning at this point, leaving my joints and feet aching after only a short walk. Clearly it's time to replace them, since I don't think new insoles are enough to help at this point.

:thinking: I bought them at some point when I was in the mandatory therapy phase of my transition, so... late 2015 maybe? Yikes. No wonder my feet hurt wearing them.

 

noOOOOOOO the boots I wanted sold out in my size

sob

 

nooooooooo :(

 

So I just checked the site again, wondering what I'd get that I'd still like okay, and they had the green boots in my size back in stock. I mashed that order button just as fast as I could.

 

YAAAAAAY

 

New boots acquired! It turns out they're not just green... they're shimmery green. I didn't expect that but I love it.

The clerk enthused about my choice -- she has the same kind and just loves them -- and I said I saw them and since I finally admitted I needed a new pair, I couldn't resist. She looked at what I'd been wearing and said, very gently, that it looked like I'd used up all they had to give. :') (The voice in the back of my head that was still muttering about frivolity went O_O; and suddenly went quiet at that....)

She's not wrong... I bothered to look at the tread of the old pair and I've worn it completely off in spots. No wonder they're uncomfortable, and why my feet were practically crying with relief when I put the new pair on to wear them home. I still need to fine tune the lacing on the right boot, but otherwise they were immediately comfortable. Ecco might be as expensive as hell, but they've done a lot to prove to me that they're worth it.

 

Shimmery green *__* pics pls

 

One of the funniest fandom things to me is when time travel comes up in a story and people get super serious about whether or not it 'works' and how you can't have closed time loops and offshoot timelines and so on, all the while acting like time travel is something absolutely feasible and not the domain of highly theoretical and abstract physics that the average fandom nerd (self included) doesn't understand anywhere nearly well enough to be making grand pronouncements about Time Travel Can't Possibly Work Like That (especially in stories where time travel is just one more impossible thing on a pile of impossible things). And most of the time said nerds aren't talking about the actual physics of time travel anyway, they're talking about philisophical views of time travel as if they're immutable truths (as if stories don't regularly turn supposed immutable truths on their heads anyway).

I respect the "I don't like time travel in fiction" stance a lot more than endless blathering (with poorly supported justifications) about how any given fictional time travel is bad and innacurate, since that usually boils down to "well that wasn't how I'd do it!".