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

Hot take: Emet-selch FFXIV's whole thing is more compelling than Solas DragonAge's. (I thought that back in 5.0 and 6.0 only reinforced it.)

 

Spun up a bunch more of Coco'a's backstory today:

He's originally Sharlayan and worked as a sage in the Faculty of Medicine, specifically researching techniques for Transing Your Gender. His section got a lot of pushback for what was seen by a lot of the Forum as a 'frivolous' area of study, even as it was a part of reproductive research. However, that is not what got him fleeing Sharlayan -- it was overhearing something he shouldn't (possibly having to do with Guildivain's experiments and the coverup) and getting found out enough he decided it was time to change his name and take up another profession far, far away. He asked a favor of one of the gleaners and, with his help, snuck onto a boat headed toward Limsa Lominsa.

He had been using his deadname in Sharlayan, despite pressure to change it to something appropriate (i.e. his mother's name plus his birth order suffix); while he was on the boat he came up with his new name in a fit of mischief. For most people it'd be too silly, but sudden fits of mischief are extremely him. He practiced it in his head a lot on the journey, and so when he was asked it in Limsa he was able to deliver it with a perfectly straight face. It's one of his life's joys to tell someone his name and watch the emotional journey on their face as they realize that this guy's name is Chocolate Mint. It makes up for all the nervous looking over his shoulder he has to do, worried that Sharlayan assassins will come after him at any moment. (If you haven't done the Astrologian quests, those show that this is not so farfetched a worry as you might think.)

He was all set to learn the ins and outs of arcanima and become a customs agent, but infinitely curious and with a nose for trouble, he ended up doing heroics, getting recognized, and falling in with a whole group of Sharlayan scholars. He's been living in constant fear that one of these days, one of them is going to recognize him and there will be so many awkward questions (although as time goes on it becomes more and more apparent that the Scions are the type of folks to thumb their noses at the Forum, rather than turn anyone in to them, and he's able to relax a bit).

 

Here, have a picture of the little miscreant:



(well, 'little'. He's max height, but in a world full of elezen, au ra, and roes, he's pretty smol.)

 

Spent all day hyperfixated on refiguring out blender and morph making for Sims 4 so I could fix a morph, fixed the morph, then made one of my own, it turned out really well -- except there's gaps when I import it and in my attempt to fix it I messed up the base file and will need to redo it from scratch. (┛◉Д◉)┛彡┻━┻

 

I figured it out!! The morph maker program for some reason shows a bunch of gaps in the male 'robe' morphs (which are the shapes the game pulls from for robes, dresses, skirts, and the like), but unless there's actually a gap in the regular morph mesh, it will be fine in-game.

I remade last night's mesh anyway and it looks good!



Now I have to resist going MAD WITH POWER and making a ton more, but there are so few presets -- especially male presets -- that I actually like...

 

If you haven't played Sims 4, the way the presets work is that you choose them and bam, they make your sim that shape without you having to mess around with sliders, and can allow for shaping you can't get with sliders alone. This is pretty cool! However, presets made specifically for a masculine or feminine frame don't always work very well on the other frame (one reason is that masculine frames have longer torsos; the other is that the auto conversion process has some flaws) and always end up with some distortion, so the options for male sims with feminine frames and female sims with masculine frames aren't great.

The default options for those frames also aren't great; male sims with fem frames start out with wider hips and narrow waists and sliders can only mitigate that so much, but it's workable. Female sims with masc frames really get the short end of the stick, though -- something about how it autoconverts the feminine frame adds a lot of bulk to the upper torso, so they end up noticably more barrel-chested then male masc frame sims and the sliders can't mitigate that much at all. And despite there being more of a presence for trans custom content in the fandom than there was for Sims 2, I haven't found a single preset that's specifically for these frames, so I figured that maybe it wasn't possible to get the base autoconverted mesh to alter to make a preset out of.

After messing with these programs a bit, however, I realized that it might be possible, and tried it a little while ago -- basically, all I had to do was import the regular base mesh to get morph files out of it, re-import them and tell it to display them on a masc framed female sim, and then export the whole sim as an editable file. I imported that into Blender, and what do you know... there she was, weird barrel chest and all.



You can see that the autoconvert didn't just plonk breasts onto the chest; the reshaping added additional ribcage bulk up front, which continues down to the natural waistline. You can't see it here, but the converted mesh's upper back also protrudes more. The end result is that female sims with masc frames look strange and bulky (and their breasts look... well, plonked on, but that's different problem).

Anyway, first order of business is to make a base masc frame female morph that doesn't have the weird bulk, see if that actually looks decent in-game, and work from there.

 

Had a moment where I was like, oh no, if I import this will it actually allow me to import it as a masc framed female morph or will it just autoconvert it again, but no, it works fine on preview:



All I've done so far is reshape the upper torso to be in line with the masc frame male sim torso, with very little reshaping otherwise (except for the shoulders, which I've slimmed down).

... I probably should have zoomed in more on those pictures, oops.

 

Gave it a quick test in the game and it works well. I'm extremely pleased!

 

Got my booster then picked up a few things from the store (since the vax point and the grocery stores are all in the same shopping center) and already felt the malaise descending by the time I got home. Immediately washed down a panadol, and even though it's only been a couple of hours, I've chased it with an ibuprofen. I'll alternate the two and hopefully I can keep the worst of the malaise at bay, because the past two times where I had 3-4 days of being too exhausted to do anything but too awake to sleep through it really, really sucked. I can take feeling poorly so long as I have just enough strength and energy to putter around with projects or games.

 

I have a hypothesis that part of why the last two shots hit me so hard is that I often don't register illness symptoms as 'pain' until they get really bad, so I neglect to take painkillers. This time, I definitely feel achey and tired and my head is staticky, but I don't feel like a sack of lead. Hopefully it continues more or less along these lines.

 

So despite my concerns that I'd be knocked on my ass for most of a week, I've just had flu-like aches that were kept to a dull roar by normal amounts of painkillers that are... rapidly receeding?? I was told to expect pretty much the same as I had gotten the last two times + aches, but I only got the aches, and was tired, but not the crushing fatigue that makes it impossible to think. I'm still coming out of it, but that it's been so mild is a really nice surprise.

 

Ok, so, I haven't bothered to verify the information about Roman gods in this post yet: https://isa-writes.tumblr.com/post/...sten-this-is-a-very-specific-topic-to-be-iffy but it looks reasonable enough, SO

Spoiler: Endwalker spoilers

It makes me feel less weird about JP Venat being Venus (and I can see why they would have changed it for localization purposes; Venus has connotations for a lot of English speakers that I doubt they would have wanted for Venat) for one thing, but also makes me realize that the Ancients' terms and names do have some float between Greek and Roman (not that they already didn't with Venat, but also Terminus and probably some other ones I'm not remembering), so now I feel like it's less out of left field to have Iolis's Azem be Janus.

Two-faced god of Time looking both forward and back fits so well for the Warrior of Light by the time of EW, especially with the implications of what Themis tells you during the Pandaemonium unlock, and it really fits him, I feel, as someone who was once the Sun (as Azem's symbol is of the Sun), but is now (name, aesthetic, guardian deity, and association to Venat) the Moon.

Also he has a few influences from Chrono Trigger's Janus (whose name had to be intentional), so it's even better that way. :3 :3 :3

I like Janus way way WAY more than any other alternative, so I'm gonna go with this... for what little it actually matters to anything other than my personal satisfaction. Still!

 

I have a sim I've restarted about four times now, because he's an attractive himbo but his playthroughs always devolving into banging half the town gets boring. So, I set him some actual goals based on how I envision his personality, with banging people being more of a hobby, but still couldn't resist him getting busy with the first person who made eyes at him.

Well, this time the risky sex chances promptly caught up with him, as I just got a popup for naming the baby his one night stand just gave birth to. >_>; And it's the untamed magic sage... he's going to be lucky if she doesn't set his hair on fire. :')

The temptation to name L. Faba's kid Aqua Faba is nigh-on irresistible :D

 

*cackles* Poor Apollo. On vacation and immediately striking out :D

 

Little Aqua Faba (heehee) is now a toddler, and I'm trying to decide if L. would just bring her to visit, or would dump her entirely on Apollo going "this is your fault"... well, she has a "does not want a pregnancy right now" buff, so congrats on the daughter Apollo! :'D

 

Apollo is still living a charmed life -- I had to freeze his fame before he hit 5 stars, he's got PILES of money and moved from his apartment with constantly noisy neighbors in San Myshuno to a nice house in Sulani, and despite his best efforts (*coughcoughahem*) he's still only got the one kid, who is basically a prodigy despite being semi-feral.

This has all been facilitated by long lifespan, which rather TOO long, but normal is definitely too short. I'm also getting a bit bored. XD; I need to burn off a bunch of his money somehow and make him leave his house more often... and probably mess with lifespan durations a bit (yay mods) to find a sweet spot where I don't feel like sims are being hurried through their lives, but they don't end up being filthy rich global superstars by the time they're 25 with very little effort.

 

The sims' default life spans are kind of weird, tbh. Normal default span is roughly 2 days = 1 year, which works sensibly right up until a sim is a young adult and then rapidly falls apart. They hit YA at 18.5, hit adult at 30.5, and then elder at 42.5, at which point they're at risk of dying from overexertion from all sorts of things and have only have a guaranteed 5 years to get their affairs in order before they drop dead of old age, and will be lucky to see 50.

I had changed that up with my custom life spans, but it made my long lifespan extra long and clearly much too long for me (I say, even knowing I have trouble letting go when my sims die; my last try at a legacy playthrough in TS2 sputtered out when my first matriarch died). I could tweak normal again to be a custom long lifespan where three months or real age equals one day of sim time, so:

baby: 3 (9 months -- keeping it this short because TS4 babies are basically newborn level of ability to do anything, with all the personality of a home ec flour sack baby)
toddler: 17 (age 9 months up to 5 years)
child: 30 (age 5 up to 12.5)
teen: 30 (12.5 up to 20)
ya: 80 (20 to 40)
adult: 100 (40 to 65)
elder: 60 (65 to 80)

And yes I am acutely aware of how silly it is to have young adulthood to go 40, but in the default life spans young adulthood and adulthood are the same length so this is actually slightly LESS silly. They're functionally the same anyway, they just get some appearance tweaks, so whatever. Elders get considerably more time proprotionally than they do by default -- maybe not as much as they should, but even though TS4 elders aren't as decrepit as, say, TS2 elders, they're still pretty dang elderly.

 

Apollo was getting sick of being beholden to a record label so he dropped that, fucked around (... literally) for a while, then decided to become a Celebrity Explorer and hied himself and Aqua off to Selvadorada, where he's been showing off his guitar skills and streaming his ventures into the jungle. It's absolutely kind of a shithead thing to do, but it's a lot of fun XD I'll unfreeze his fame bc this makes sense as something that would catapult him to known worldwide status.

I get Aqua to follow him into the jungle by teleporting her past the first gate via shift-click after he's cleared it; once she's past that, the game does no further age checks for passing any of the other gates, so she can follow along behind him and excavate artifacts. She's going to be the world's best archeologist witch! She even already has a familiar (a stray cat she adopted and named Frankie Fabulous).

 

So Aqua is now a teen and still a prodigy and getting famous in her own right, although she hasn't done much yet. Apollo hit global celebrity status, and his free loving ways finally caught up to him -- he got two birth notifications in one day (from Nalani and one of the townies I got off the gallery), and another one (from Miko Ojo) just now. Will he learn his lesson? Absolutely not. :')

I don't know that he's going to take any of these kids, though; even though I can juggle a lot of kids, I've noticed that playing more than one sim kind of annoys me, and the annoyance only goes up the more sims I have. I probably just need to leave them at home and ignore them more often if I do take them. If nothing else, I can make a club with him and his kids and maybe some of the baby mommas; I'll also check what the mod gave them re: having kids preference and have him take any kids born to sims who don't want them (or who, heaven forbid, have the hates children trait).

 

I probably shouldn't have let it get so soap opera because the fun of that drops right off a cliff for me after very long. Oh well. I'm possibly at the end of my every-few-months TS4 binge anyway and would have been bored no matter what. If I'm not, I might swap to a new save -- I have a gleefully vicious little vampire that wants playing.



She was the result of me getting vampires off the gallery and playing with genetics with them to try to get some unique looking ones; most of the results were pretty hideous because what people upload as 'attractive' usually have features that don't play well with any other face than the one they're on, but eventually she popped out of the randomization and I was like HELL YES. She looks like the antagonist of a children's cartoon who will tattle on you and then steal from the teacher's desk while they're lecturing you, and was clearly born to cause absolute mayhem. Her name is Martina and I love her, horrible little thing.

But if I don't feel like that (increasingly likely), I do have a strong urge to write some FFXIV fanfic. I have other things I should be writing, but quite frankly, I'll take anything that gets me writing so I can shake off some of the winter fug.