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

(I personally love time travel unless it is egregiously stupid/silly/deus ex machina, and see no contradiction with having different 'kinds' of time travel in one story. It's fiction! Make up your own rules and go to town! Nerds who obsess over time travel not being capable of working that way need to give their imaginations more exercise!)

 

This isn't shade toward anyone I know, btw, it's all my frustration toward pedantic nerds on social media.

 

One of the more frustrating people I have ever deliberately spent time around was this guy in my old IRC server who had many hot takes about how every work of fiction that wasn't Worm or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was doing it wrong, and one of them was that basically every work of fiction that involved time travel was doing it wrong if the time traveler(s) didn't attempt to retroactively unhappen every obstacle they encountered. Half the examples he gave did in fact have fairly obvious reasons why this wasn't an option (e.g., in Doctor Who, messing with fixed points in history makes the timeline get eaten by time bats, and even if you wanted to mess with everything else, the TARDIS is hard to steer), which he dismissed out of hand.

 

I have quite a few reasons why I don't raid in ffxiv, but one of the biggest is that I absolutely cannot and will not deal with huge egos and unhinged mean girl antics. Difficult content in this game is difficult enough that I will be absolutely miserable trying to do it if I don't vibe with the people I'm doing it with; add in huge egos or people pulling two-faced bullshit and it's an instant NOPE for me.

(Just found out about some particularly egregious examples tonight, so I am extra in a mood about it.)

 

Went to bed angry, woke up angry. Why are these jackasses still in the FC discord when they think so little of the person who runs it.

 

That has since been resolved. Pointedly. Good riddance.

In other news, I present to you... THEY



I went with Lorne because I saw a lot of bunnies with Briory's coloring, and it turns out I don't really like how that face preset looks in-game.

 

They are super cute in the ao dai, my goodness. I like the green! Most of the bunbois (or Viera in general, really) on Louisoix are variations on black or gray.

 

I like the hair!

 

They're not a model, the camera just went off like that 8)

 

Aether has a lot of pastel bunnies, but also a lot of edgy bunnies, which are funny to me because I do not find male viera intimidating or threatening in the least. Every last one of them is a precious, adorable twink and I am constantly resisting the urge to /pet them.

I've seen some bunnies with similar coloring to Lorne, but most don't dress like they do. Aether in general is low on people who favor more earthy, nature-y colors.

 

I prefer avoiding new year's resolutions because they usually turn into guilt sticks to beat myself with, but this time I have two:

1. No more doomscrolling + more aggressively filtering my feeds: I'm not better informed by the firehose of bad news, I'm just paralyzed and sad. It's useless. I need to pick a couple of news sites and check those maybe two, three times a week.
2. Very limited ffxiv subreddit time: Staying away until I was done with Endwalker reinforced to me that I'm way, way happier with the game when I don't go there often! There's some good good posts on there, but there's far more people with zero to negative reading comprehension who do nothing but whine when the story is more complicated than "find Bad Guy, punish them", and a lot of loudmouthed egotists who love to carry on about how everything aside from top tier raids is easy content for little babies and you have to be literally braindead to ever have any problems in it, and the playerbase all sucks (except for them, of course)(but then bitch about doing anything to facilitate helping people learn in normal mode content because 'it's just normal mode who cares'). I've come to the conclusion that most of them have nothing going on for them except being good at a video game so they've made that the entirety of their personality, even if they actually suck.

*breathes*

Anyway.

 

As I said on my Twitter



why grind tomestones when you can play Pretty Bunny Dressup instead?

I need to work on Mimir's look next -- he has a ton of clothes but figuring out new outfits I was just... bored. Butching him up as fem!Viera was interesting, but now I'm left with the fact that all of his clothes are black or dark blue, and I'm extremely over it. I'll need to pull out my color palatte book and find one that suits.

 

This is a good top for Iolis, too.

 

So, kind of a neat thing --

Back a few years ago after my granny died, my mom and aunts posted pics of the funeral on Facebook. A young lady made comments on them saying she missed granny so much and she'd done so much for her. I was confused because I didn't recognize this young lady or her name, and she wasn't any of my cousins' kid, so who was she? And then I remembered the kid my granny fostered for a long while before she got too frail; he reasonably would have such an attachment to granny, and he was black like this young lady is. I hadn't heard anything about him in quite some time, but perhaps granny's foster kid... was transgender, too?

I meant to ask my mom but it's awkward to ask about that sort of thing so I dragged my feet about it and then ended up forgetting to ask at all, but recently I started doing video chats with my mom since J and I have a webcam now. Granny came up and in passing mom mentioned granny's foster kid, [young lady's name], and I was thrilled I'd figured it out correctly. (And, admittedly, kind of upset; my mom doesn't always connect the dots the best, but I thought she might like, think her trans kid might want to know another person in the family is also trans? Even though she's about young enough to be my kid? Oh well.)

I hope she's doing all right -- granny lived in a tiny little town in Eastern Oregon, and Eastern Oregon is, well. Chock full of bigots, basically. And she didn't really get me being trans... I hope it was easier for her to deal with foster kid coming out, since I think she might have understood wanting to be a woman more than wanting to be not-one.

 

I've been feeling the sims urge again, so I went to cull my mods so I don't have so many to update and because some are probably throttling entertaining game stuff for 'realism'. Then I updated the ones I kept and... somehow ended up downloading more mods... /o\

 

I don’t even pc gaming much and yet as a thrift store fanatic, I relate to the Core Issue here. u_u

 

Oh man, you don't even want to know how many custom clothes I have... :'D And I'm SUPER picky!

 

I hadn't changed Lorne's search info away from "philosophical vagabond", and decided what the hell, their existing personality fits well enough... they can continue to follow in Snufkin's footsteps. I've even still got the Snufkin glam I put together... they can't wear hat, unfortunately, but they can have a similar flower crown to what's on the hat, at least.

 

Been thinking about my various ffxiv characters and names, as pertaining to...

Spoiler: Endwalker spoilers

... their past lives as Ancients.

Iolis: he's been difficult for me to decide on. He's a kind, ultimately gentle person, but there's also a reason he's a Dark Knight. Nemesis (retribution) would be just as fitting as Iris (rainbows/messenger).

Yisun: Also difficult. He'd fancy himself as Eros because of his ridiculous libido, but I don't think so, buddy. The on-the-nose-for-Azem name Helios would suit him pretty well, but so would Prometheus.

Coco'a: He's nervous and flighty in present day, which is what happens when you flee Sharlayan with a head full of Forbidden Knowledge knowing you're going to be looking over your shoulder for assasins for possibly the rest of your life, but in his heart of hearts he's a rabble rouser and likes to party... he'd be Dionysus.

Lorne: I'm really not sure. As my OC, they're a nix, but none of the nymphs really translates well. So... Orpheus, perhaps.

Mimir: Hecate, because he's always been a spooky goth (but he was a lot more cheerful about it as an Ancient). By pure coincidence, his Forever Minion has been the black wolf pup, and black dogs are one of Hecate's sacred animals.

Jai: Considering the OC I based her on, either Eris or Nyx.

 

As an unironic liker of clowns, I give the All Saint's Wake outfit an A+. (Mixed and matched a little, of course...)