socket's goblin den - currently playing BG3 EA

oh!! also i discovered a Forgotten Cache Of Last Year's Christmas/Birthday Money And Vouchers yesterday, so i treated myself to Darkest Dungeon because..........well, because i'd been listening to a bunch of its music for D&D Reasons and when i looked it up it looked good??

i SUCK at it, but it is good!! i'm just.............there's a lot to take in here, huh. nearly died in my first dungeon (well, my paladin fella nearly died) because i don't think i'm very uhhh efficient. in combat. but i'm learnin!!

it's been a while since i played a fresh viddygame though, so i'm happy C:

 

we met a very sweet friend today. he’s lovely, my friends are all lovely, it was the first time wyrm had met him in person (he is her friend in particular but we also talk and he’s LOVELY and KIND and all the things I wish more straight cis guys were bc he’s just An Gentle, Compassionate Guy and the world needs more) and I’m just like

God we went so long having sort of terrible people for friends. We just sort of accepted whatever we could get bc it was like Well, It’s Company! and we were too socially awkward to set boundaries....and NOW

our crops flourish. we friend only the people who care about us and will treat us with kindness and apparently genuinely love it when we ramble abt the things we like, and who make us feel appreciated and warm and Good and tell us (excitedly, joyously) fun weird facts about the place they live as they show us around

no more trash boys!! only sweet humans now!! we have Evolved. we have learned what to watch out for and also what to seek

Also he gives the Most Fantastic Hugs. Oh my god, have you ever been warmly hugged by someone six foot tall.

I LIKE OUR NEW FRIEND OKAY

 

He’s not the only one, we made ANOTHER sweet boy friend lately and it’s so lovely to know him! He’s a big dork and very kind and we have those good good 3am chats together and we can talk super easily. He’s also a very enthusiastic person who Respects Our Boundaries But For Real (WE HAVE BOYS WHO DO THAT PRAISE THE LORD) and has the same weird sense of humour

Our boy luck rn is AMAZING. I thought they were a pretend thing for a bit ngl. We had such a bad run. Then we realised we were ignoring our discomfort and THAT is why we kept “liking terrible people by accident”. We didn’t Want to be around them! They made us uneasy! I can’t believe it took this long to go “trust. your damn gut.”

 

oops i keep forget to kintsugi, i need to come back here and socialise ever - i forget how to do that!

what's new in socketlife, um

• might be getting a house soon, so that's fully buckwild. wyrm and i have been living out of a single room in her parents house for (checks watch) 10 years. so the mere concept of 'a living room' or 'somewhere to put the books that are by now existing in 5 discrete stacks in front of the full-as-hell bookshelf' is full starry-eyes situation. scary because independence? YES. deeply exciting? ALSO YES.
• joined a new dnd game last week! it's very fun and good and it's run by my best friend from my teen years who i've been reconnecting with over lockdown. she's still the exact same great human, i can't believe we went so many years communicating by one sporadic run-on facebook conversation, it's great to have her back and (aaaaa) be playing D&D together!
  
• i'm reading harrow the ninth and i am lost in a sort of fantastic i-have-no-idea-what's-going-on-but-WHOA delirium the whole time i'm reading it. finding books i really enjoy again has been hella and also if you've not read gideon the ninth, like, do? it's necromancy in space, it's gay as hell, it's just a full romp that is unafraid to shatter your heart into so many little shards, kickass fight scenes, also a mansion mystery, it's a lot of things and please read gideon the ninth??? (fair word of warning: it's a book about necromancy, expect death and bone-and-body horror. i find it delicious but i know others might not!)
  
• i started watching fantasy high and it's my new comfort show, how did i never know of brennan lee mulligan before, man's got energy unlike any i've seen!! (also gorgug is my sweet boy and i'm luv gorgug)
• idk man i just wanted to come back and yell happily into my yellin' pit because there ARE good things in this world

 

also i think i'm finally starting to stop being so horrendously coy about the fact that Yes I Am Autistic which is nice!

being autistic kicks ass actually, the world is just rude, neurotypicals wish they could enjoy things as much as i am capable of enjoying my special interests! i am out here making friends within similar neurotypes and can i just say it is a profound relief to have opportunities to just punt my mask into space and just engage in straightforward communication sans all the weird arbitrary guesswork. not that i do not also love my neurotypical friends with my whole heart, but it's nice to simply never feel weird when talking to someone for once because we're all weird. feels good!!

 

I’m trying very much to not get excited about houses, because it does not do well to get invested, but Wyrm’s going to look at what seems to be a really lovely place in what is definitely a really lovely area of town tomorrow, and I’m like........oh man how cool would it be. If we don’t get that one, it’s no big because we’ll keep looking and there are always gonna be other places, but there is something exciting regardless about just.....oh my god, we’re gonna have our own fridge, with only our food in it.

The idea of being in a house for the first time since my childhood where I don’t feel like a guest is like, mind blowing.

 

Also I’m gonna have September stuck in my head for 30 days, just like I do every year, and this is genuinely delightful because for some reason I don’t ever really get tired of it.

DO YOU REMEMBER

 

Soooooo we made an offer on the Really Lovely Place, and it got accepted.

This was yesterday and it still doesn’t quite feel real now! There still room for it to fall through, but...it doesn’t look likely to. Which is wild, just utterly surreal. SUPER cool, SUPER terrifying, whoa.

 

Also I’ve been playing Pokemon Soulsilver again and it’s so lovely and warms the cockles of my heart. Over the last few generations I got scared that I was falling out of love with the longest special interest of my life, but it turns out....nah. Still ready to play the Pokeathlon for hours!

I just missed the games feeling challenging and full of tasty content, is all! HG/SS are SO good and my Flaafy is my best friend

 

imminent house is really kicking my ass into gear about art things, which is cool! (adhd brain, i would love you if you didn't require urgency as a motivator, but i will take what i can get!)

it's been really fun actually to get back into doing the Pokédoodle - i'm up to Ampharos now, look at me go! (since my return i've done natu, xatu, mareep and flaafy) and i...hm, i forgot how much external feedback and just actually finishing art at all, oh my god fuels my dopamine machine?? i post things on dA, get favs, get comments and oh NOW i'm actively motivated to make art that I finish. i guess it makes sense?

this is cool because i now have a strategy for hacking my motivation to do other art things that will not get the amount of attention the pokédoodles get! step 1: make pokédoodles. step 2: ride the high of that free dopamine right into a different project. step 3: when i get bored make another pokédoodle. if the only way i can reliably secure those choice attention-motivation chemicals is to cheat the system by drawing pokemans,,,,,,,,,,,like that's completely win-win.

i wish so bad nintendo would just partner with redbubble instead of swooping down to remove all pokemans content because, like, urgh some of these would make really nice stickers. nintendo pls let me post porygons

 

BG3 romance update....oh I’m Very Bi... good lord

 

Absolutely heart eyes at Shadowheart in motion and absolutely heart eyes at seeing Astarion smile

In less Hopelessly Smitten reactions to the update, I’m very taken with how GOOD the game’s looking. Character creator looks snazzy, there’s plenty of really lovely to look at armour, and how cute the female gnomes are makes me really heavily consider playing a gnome when early access drops? And Wyll’s background being folk hero I’m....intrigued, deeply, bc that sure ain’t something you hear alongside “fiend pact warlock” every day is it??

The delay to EA pains me because I just....want....to be playing it SO badly....this IS my next big hyperfixation I feel it in my BONES

 

Oh! And in other news (hello, anyone who actually reads this thread, it’s very sweet of you to be here considering I still persistently fail to Socialise and continue my classic routine of just talking to myself in my goblin-den and figuring I’ll learn how to talk to another person eventually) I actually got around to contacting the ADHD clinic, since they hadn’t contacted *me* since March, and while yes we are having a plague so I get it, an update for Plague Proceedings would have been rad...?

Turns out they were closed for a few months and just have started processing stuff again this month and doing video appointments and what have you. Soooo maybe I will be able to have my prescribing appointment in the not too wildly distant future! I really, really want to know what having a brain that I actually control the directional focus of feels like. Pls. My brain is fun to have (mainly) but is not exactly convenient! I’d love to be able to sit down and like...worldbuild, ever, without BSODing from “too many mental tabs open”. Like maybe it won’t fix that but like...hey, I don’t know if I don’t try! And just generally not feeling my mind slide off stuff like it’s been metaphorically drenched in soap.

so fingers crossed it won’t be too long before I can start seeing if my brain can be convinced to do normal-ish brain things!

 

hey so is anyone else playing bg3 early access because i am and i'm so very alive!!

(unlike my favourite boy. i'm not biased, okay, astarion is just extremely good. by that i mean he's extremely awful and the worst and i have a weakness for pretty elves who introduce themselves to me via threat with sharp objects because presumably i imprinted like a baby bird back when wyrm played DA:O. i'm 3-for-3 on murder-elf crushes)

it's really interesting to actually experience a game as it's developed - all the glitches and oddities and places where the polish hasn't been applied yet, i love it?? one time a tiefling talked to us and only his face was moving. a goblin got shot and started ricocheting around her cell wildly. i am having the time of my life. i'm enjoying myself plenty with it in a still rough-edged state, so i anticipate having the time of my life when it's completed :D

 

Spoiler: Hardly BG3 spoilers but

when the vampire gives you puppy dog eyes and his best “please, I’m just so tiiiireed lately, don’t you want me to be fighting fit? oh please I am just functioning terribly and I would feel so much better and I won’t take a drop more than I need I promise” how can you say no, he’s got the woe-is-me-I-can’t-help-being-hungry-for-blood act down to an art and its transparency itself is hilarious

he’s laying it on so thick, I have to laugh, Astarion pls. love our awful bloodthirsty boy.

 

uh, interesting new experiences: suddenly dermographia??? (aka skinwriting, aka my skin sees scratching/friction/mild pressure and goes "is this an allergen?")

rather inconvenient in many aspects, but on the upside i'm now a living graffiti board: if you draw a dickbutt on my back with your fingernail i will have a dickbutt on my back for at least half an hour, which is hilarious. we spent like three days trying to work out what in the hell my skin was reacting to until i looked up dermographia, wrote OwO on my arm to check and indeed had OwO on my arm for most of the evening xD

....i am hoping it's one of the "goes away in a few months" cases instead of "never goes away at all" because i'm apparently one of the unlucky few for whom it is itchy >:(

 

getting commissioned to draw people's D&D characters absolutely rocks. people's characters are so cool!! like yes PLEASE tell me all about your stylish kobold swashbuckler this RULES

also in other news, i live in A House now? so that's all very new, even a few months in. it's really lovely to have our own space, where nobody's dad is blasting music at 4pm til late, and where kitchen trips don't come with the danger of unexpected need for socialisation. instead our only unexpected socialisation is the neighbor's cat* who invited himself into our conservatory (still reeling that my life trajectory humanly allowed me to end up somewhere with a conservatory. what.) and has decided to take a tour of our living room and kitchen. i feel a lot more steady since i've been here, even if the first week or two were A N X I E T Y C E N T R A L where i was freaking out about everything, including but not limited to

• does i has enough money to Survive in this Unambiguously More Good Environment?? (yes. a little more would help but it's Fine)
• I HATE GAS STOVES WOE IS ME COOKING IS TERRIFYING SUDDENLY WHY DO PEOPLE USE FIRE (i have since tamed the fire spirits. i remain slightly hypervigilant about the stove but at least i've got roughly the hang of what burners i need to use to not burn the fuck out of rice)
• I Think The Toothbrush Charger Is Going To Explode (yes seriously. the first time Wyrm plugged in her toothbrush i unplugged it when she left the room because our chargers have two sides for different power requirements and she put it in the higher one, and my weirdass brain went "what if it needs to be on the low one. what if it needs to be on the low one and CATCHES FIRE because it's not on the low one and BURNS OUR HOUSE DOWN" because that is a very normal thought. spoiler: no, it needed to be on that one.)

but that settled down pretty quick so!! i think everything was just very new, and if i didn't understand anything or was uncertain in any way my brain translated it to primal panic and also i guess the fear of somehow losing the Good Thing or not being able to maintain it. but so far? we're fairly on top of the cleaning, we've found out which meals are good but not 'spensive, and nobody's burned the house down even though we cook on the gas stove more nights than we don't.

*that cat was amazing by the way. there are so many good cats here.

also it's autism pride month baybeeeeeee, hell yeah. i intend to spend it being just generally noisy on twitter, and maybe drawing those comics about The Autistic Experience As Experienced By Me i always claim i'm going to draw. (i won't do this, but it's nice to imagine i will! xD maybe next year.) it's pretty rad now Wyrm got successfully diagnosed (woooo!!!!! although strongly fuck the nhs adult diagnostic pathway and assessment criteria because what an unnecessarily fraught experience they make the whole thing.) and we're just here boogying down together like awww yisssss. we're both weird and yet oh! look! give us our own space and we are thriving. she's happier than i've ever seen her. i'm happier than i've ever seen me. it's the best.

i'm really hoping i'll have the time and brainpower to try and Do A Socialise digitally-speaking some time soon, instead of just dropping in to yell into the void. there are many nice people here who i'm in the mutual orbit of who i'd love to actually try talking to but I gotta conserve my energy for all the new life-admin i have to do and also keeping on top of art stuff?? still workin' on it! i want to say hi to people though. and socialise. i totally know how to do that.

but i guess yeah this has been an life update to the digital diary?? that's what i've been up to! also i might go by joey now. that's a thing i'm trying. it's certainly nicer to type than the given name i don't hate but refuse to say. :P

 

also we're playing BG3 a little bit again after the big patch and good LORD our bard is gorgeous. their name is Serendipity and i'm a little bit in love

 

wait they're not a bard they're a bloody cleric. that's such a different thing. don't mind me.

 

Vibrates with excitement

my dispel dice have shipped!!!!

come to me my pretties.....it has been a long two years....lemme cronch ( but not really I promise)