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

If you like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley type games, it's super worth a try. Instead of a farm, you're running a workshop, where you fulfill build orders for money and reputation. These can be requests to make small items, furniture, or even big machines. You manufacture a lot of parts yourself, but some you can only find by digging around abandoned ruins or fighting your way through hazardous ruins. Each day you can go to the commerce hall and take one normal commission -- and you need to be quick, because you have an asshole rival who will try to take the best one first. (You can't make friends with him because he insists on being a dick, so I just bully him by taking a commission and then having the second-best one open so he's forced to choose one of the two less desirable ones. :3c That's what you get for cheating me out of a commission at the start of the game!!)

The main story line comes into play as some of the build requests are from the city itself to construct big city works, like public transit or bridges to new areas. You aren't the only Builder taking these orders, but if you have resources stockpiled you can burn through them fast enough your rival might not get more than one or two done.

Another neat thing: the world is about 300 years post-apocalypse after a very high tech society nearly destroyed itself. The ruins you explore are what remains of mega-skyscrapers, factories, sewage treatment plants, and the like. It's clear that society is recovering pretty well, but the tech is a hodgepodge of what they can still make themselves and what they can find and make work. When you're in Portia, it's this cute, idyllic little town and you'd barely notice the ruins its built among, but even a little ways out of town you get an idea of what it's built among:



It's refreshing to play a post-apocalyptic story that isn't grim. They still have to deal with the fallout from the old society -- sometimes toxic waste leaks into the water supply from the ruins and makes people ill, for example -- but there's none of that dog-eat-dog, every man for himself bullshit. Even the main religion, which is very against using relics of the old society, aren't them being unreasonable luddites but having some very justified concerns. The priest in town comes across initially as being an unreasonable luddite, but he's not a zealot (as far as I can tell), and genuinely cares for the people in town.

 

I also just really enjoy the aesthetic. The claymationish characters kind of put me off at first but they're honestly pretty charming now that I'm more used to them, and the cute, kind of soft look to everything is really nice. The story page says the game is Ghibli-inspired and I can really see it.

The localization is kind of janky in places but doesn't render anything unintelligible. The voice acting is... okay, although they either got a lot of guys with lisps or one guy with a lisp did a lot of the voice acting because speech impediments run rampant in Portia, including in the male main character voices. Fortunately, you can choose to have no voice acting for yourself, or turn it off altogether without affecting the rest of the game sound.

Finally, do yourself a favor and turn the game speed down to minimum; the default full speed means having to haul ass at every possible moment and it gets exhausting. Having the time tick more slowly gives you time to think.

 

Happy birthday! May 2020 be full of good things.

 

Thank you! <3 <3 <3

 

Oof. I want a tablet keyboard that can hold a tablet up so I can leave the house to write, but after some quick research it looks like most of them cost as much or more than the tablet we have cost. x_x Then again, that one and the one we inherited from J's dad are Lenovo Tab 2s, so they're pretty old already.

Not as old as my poor netbook, though! That's a decade old. I've only been able to run it plugged in for years, and I stopped being able to open most webpages on it without it locking up a few years ago. It's an Aspire One with a whole GB of RAM, and stuck with Windows 7 Starter. I think it's probably a lost cause at this point and I really should just wipe it and give it to the electronics recycling. :(

Maybe I can find a keyboard for older tablets. Come to think of it, I'll probably have to find keyboards for older tablets if bluetooth specs have changed.

 

Or... not? *scratches head* Looks like both tablets are bluetooth 4, while quite a few keyboards are still bluetooth 3. (The world of tablets is new and mysterious to me so I'm kinda fumbling in the dark on this.)

And I realize I could get a new case instead of having to have a keyboard with a stand. One tablet has a soft zip-up case, but the other already has one of those cases that can flip around and stand it up -- it does need replacing though since it was the one we inherited and J's dad was a smoker. Even though he didn't smoke outside, it still smells.

 

Finally leveling gnb for real now that I can use one of my favorite glams, on a job that I'll actually play.

 

I only realized recently that I'd gotten feedback on my text adventure assignment, not just points (full points across the board, btw):

Spoiler: Feedback

Puzzles in the game were good and clear.
The puzzles were fun.
You had implemented a lot of new useful commands for the game.
There were many meaningful commands that affected the course of the game.
A new winning condition has been implemented as instructed.
The intro message was clear and informative.
The help-command really helped playing the game.
The gameworld was noticably larger than the minimum requirements. It had obviously been carefully designed.
Items had been implemented in the game as per the requirements. Using the items was a relevant part of playing the game.
Good, clear map.
The walkthrough was clear and functional.
The code is neat and easy to read.
The structure of the code is very clear and looks carefully planned.
No bugs could be found in the game.
Clearly a lot of thought went into the story; more than was even required.

I felt so sparkly after reading that!

Making that game brought home to me that my adolescent wish to make games wasn't silly daydreaming at all -- I really enjoy it. Designing a story for a game, even a tiny one, and then bringing it to life with game mechanics is more satisfying to me than just writing a story. Not that every story I have in me would make a good game -- some are going to have to be just stories -- but I very much want to make more games. Even if they're simple, even if they're mostly text, even if I never make so much as a penny off of them.

(Not that I'll work for anyone else for free, mind you.)

 

I started a new class -- which is project design, although us Open University students are only getting the six weeks of instruction and are not doing the project -- and through great effort and mental badgering finally managed to finish all of this week's assignments. Woof. Why do you have to be like this, brain.

My brain is recalcitrant because I first encountered UML through the Java course and did not enjoy dealing with it there, and the text in this course is not as, er, fluent as the Programming 1 course so sometimes it's frustrating to read, which does not help. But still, I'd like to not have to fight my brain to even get started on coursework. :| (I'd also like to not have to deal with draw.io to make diagrams, for that matter.)

 

I gave up on that class. I feel like a dumbass, but I could not concentrate on it at all.

The actual Programming 2 class has started, and, uh. The second assignment is on recursion (screams faintly) and starts out like this:



*deer in headlights expression*

There's no math prereq for this course, and yet, here we are with all of this, and me having not done any algebra for uh... 20 years?

T_T

I got a new desk chair recently, so at least I can be comfortable in my intellectual misery...

 

Oh lawks XD ... Good luck! Better you than me.

 

After reading and re-reading the relevant Wikipedia article, examining a similar problem in Java, and an acquaintance on one of the discord servers I'm on walked me through some of the basic structure of it, I was able to suss out what to do. :') I think part of my problem is that really dense, abstract academic language is incredibly difficult for me to parse at anything resembling my normal reading speed, and I get panicky. :(

I'm going to be late on the rest of this week's assignments, but sHRUG. Partial credit is better than no credit.

 

... and then I get mad at myself because THIS WASN'T ALWAYS A PROBLEM!!! If my brain hadn't broken spectacularly in my late 20s, I'd be able to do better than muddle through while feeling like I'm suffocating the entire time.

 

Fucking hell. I feel pretty comfortable with triangles and I can get by with recursion, but I feel extremely tired just looking at that. What the fuck, that's a terrible explanation of literally everything. Observe the intuition?! What the fuck is a disjoint? Do they just want head and tail recursion, and if so, why did they explain it in terms of that?

 

I keep waffling back and forth on whether or not I'm being a wimp about the obtuse language or if it really is ridiculous x_x

The first course was so good about having clear, straightforward language! :(

 

It’s ridiculous. If you were doing postgrad work or studying from certain engineering perspectives, maybe. But I was taking algorithms, a specialized 300 level class, before anyone ever actually expected me not just to skim a mathematical formula like that but actually utilize it, and it was still always accompanied by an in-depth lecture explaining the concepts. It certainly wasn’t Programming 2.

The sheer enthusiasm accompanied by the expectation that students will also find this exciting is kind of adorable tbh.

 

Had an employment office/social worker check-in, which always makes me nervous because I'm always concerned I've done something wrong, but it was fine. They checked on how my life situation is (fine, just poor) and seemed relieved to hear that I don't have any addictions or heavy debt, and that I've been taking programming classes and want to continue to pursue that (even as cranky as I am about the current one at this moment). They also gave me a card that allows me free admission to a variety of museums, concerts, and cultural events around the city, and also waives the fee of adult education courses, until the end of the year. It's a pretty cool program -- from the website:

Isn't that wonderful?? I'm amazed such a program exists and so glad it does! Lots of museums offer free days but they're often only one day a month.

I got a stern "make sure to use it!" before I left the office. I'm okay with that. X)

 

GRUDGINGLY CHURNS THROUGH LATE ASSIGNMENTS

ALMOST GETS STUCK AND THEN HAS A "wait, that's it?" MOMENT

Fucking recursion, man.

 

The benefit to not going to lectures and watching a recording after the fact: being able to turn it up to 1.5x speed because it is SO DRY and he speaks SO SLOWLY and these lectures are 90 TO 120 MINUTES LONG.

 

Although TO BE FAIR to the instructor, I have ADHD and sitting and listening to someone talk is often pretty difficult for me even when they're super interesting and I'm super interested in the topic. The nitty gritty of how computers work? Noooot super interesting since it's kind of old news to me.