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

I forgot to take an actual good screenshot of Coco'a's cute sch glam, so instead a little preview from the Keeper of the Lake cutscene:



I love that dumb little fashion hat lol

 

Got through Giruvegan and the Great Crystal; it was... long. And that was after fussing with my gambits for an hour to get them tidied up.

I do like the combat system, and the fast forward button makes it less painfully slow, but it gets so tedious to set up or switch things on the fly that it really wears me out, so small wonder I start getting squirrelly when I start doing side content.

Happily though, the pieces of the plot all just fell together and I am extremely :eyes emoji: about it.

 

For the first time in years, I've finally had a fanfic plot bunny strong enough I'm excited to pursue it, all due to getting to A Time to Every Purpose with Coco'a and suddenly having a thought of "What if Wilred became the WoL?"

Spoiler: FFXIV 2.55 Spoilers

Instead of Ilberd's men successfully murdering Wilred, they assume they've done the job and leave him to die. When the WoL arrives in the area with the scholar he's protecting, they find Wilred's sword, shield, and torn, badly bloodied coat, and assume he was killed. And normally, he would have died, but something happened... he blacked out to see a vision of a starshower, and a woman's voice repeating "Hear, Feel, Think", and then quieter, weaker, "It's not your time. It's not your time. You must live..."

Wilred wakes up later -- perhaps in the care of the Sylphs, or perhaps hidden away by a Hearer, who was told by the elementals to find him -- still pretty badly hurt, but he'll live. (He got a regular sword wound, after all, not a wound that ruptured his physical aether. Those seem to inevitably be fatal, and very quickly so.) And he also finds out that he's presumed dead, the Crystal Braves loyal to Ilberd have taken over the Rising Stones, and the Scions are wanted criminals -- and missing. He's eventually guided to Alphi and Tataru in Ishgard, and from here I could go one of two ways:

1. The WoL is dead, executed on the spot for the assassination of the sultana. Unlike in canon, he fought back when Teladji's guards attempted to take him into custody, which, Teladji claims, only proved his guilt. Otherwise, things proceed the same, albeit with Alphi even more wracked with guilt.

2. The WoL is with them as in canon, or possibly missing and on the run, and they'll find him later.

I'd go with the default trailer WoL, so when Wilred is all armored up it's easy to assume he's the first WoL -- they both use the male midlander model, with Wilred being a bit taller -- up until he takes his helmet off. This is poignant and sad in case 1 -- he'd probably have to deal with feeling like he's walking in the first WoL's shadow, that he can't measure up, guilt that he brought this upon himself and if only he'd been less naive, more careful, if he'd just told someone else, he could have prevented this.

Midgardsormr would have to transfer to him, as would the crystals of light somehow -- which could well be Grandpa Middy's doing. He may be in tiny dragonet form when he manifests, but that he was able to seal away Hydaelyn's blessing and stow away somewhere in the WoL's aether suggests that that may be in his capability.

In case 2, it'd be a cause for Shenanigans. Some real spy stuff, but also a lot of potential for humor, angst... romance...

Either way, the general direction of the story would be the same. Wilred would have a lot of feelings about Ilberd's continued survival (and hopefully Wilred's survival would spook the hell out of Ilberd, who coldly had his own countryman murdered to further his own agenda) and Ala Mhigo's situation.

Spoiler: FFXIV ShB spoilers

In case 1, Wilred would have the shared soul with Ardbert and Azem.

In case 2, one of them would be Azem, and one would be Hythlodaeus, which would delight the shade of Hythlo to no end... and just IMAGINE the turmoil going through Emet-Selch's head the whole time! His two favorite people, sundered and incomplete yet still, somehow, as impossibly infuriating as he remembered them. :3

 

I would vote for version 2 because I cannot resist a good shenanigan tbh

 

I enjoy some good, meaty angst, but the shenanigan potential for version 2 is really good, it's true... It also has the potential for adjusting some of the pacing issues in HW with frequently dropping everything to run back to Ul'dah. (I don't get why so many people bellyache about SB's pacing and act like HW is perfect when HW has it's own major clunk, but I digress.)

Spoiler: 3.0 spoilers

Like, running off to rescue Raubhan -- suppose instead that Tataru gets intelligence about it while Wilred is off doing stuff, but by the time he's come back Alphinaud comes up with a puzzled expression telling them that some mysterious stranger already got to it. Dare they hope it's the WoL...? (Yes. It was definitely the WoL, possibly working in secrecy with Yugiri's people because there just wasn't the time to do otherwise.) It could also introduce some intrigue if Alphi and Tataru haven't let on that their companion is not the WoL, making him seem to be in two places at once and really making Ilberd and the Monetarists sweat. Once the WoL has rejoined them, the Scions take advantage of that later.

 

Coco'a outfits!



Maybe I went a little overboard but what else am I going to use all of Iolis's hoarded crafting mats for? I don't need the money.

 

I was going to press on in FFXII, maybe get a few espers before going into Ridorana... and instead I spent all day rearranging the flowers on my ACNH island. I broke something like seven shovels, and I'm still not done.

 

I'm reading a HIGH DRAMA Animal Crossing reddit thread about how awful people who time travel are and how that's CHEATING and it's. So dumb. They're so worked up about other people playing a sandbox game wrong.

It's also dumb that I'm reading it, but hey.

 

Currently staying sane by playing Littlewood, which is a very engaging and chill town building sim.

Well, ostensibly chill -- I've been playing it with feverish intensity. I was concerned after a couple of days of this, but then I remembered... *gestures at all the political stuff*... and was like, oh.

Anyway, it's pretty cool how streamlined it is -- your inventory manages itself and all tool use is contextual so you don't have to switch around. You can handily teleport to town or your house with a right click and select the menu option. There's no real time passing pressure because time in the game passes based on your energy use, and things like walking around and build mode don't use any energy. There's no combat. Certain events do happen on a schedule but there doesn't seem to be any 'accomplish this goal by this time' pressure, including for the event days; you have all day until you go to bed to accomplish them. You also can't cheese relationships -- you can talk to everyone every day, but you don't give gifts, you give compliments, and you can only give one to one person per day. At some level you get a choice to flirt instead of compliment, but it only comes up occasionally, and not for everyone at the same time. Not sure on the mechanic behind that, but it means it's better to just be chill and take it easy.

Not that that's stopped me from rushing goals, because I am Like That (and the storyline is actually pretty engaging??), but it definitely isn't required to play. I think it was a suboptimal choice of playstyle for my first playthrough, tbh, as I'm constantly running out of resources and having to scramble for more. As tempting as it is to rush upgrades, it's better to just chill out and gather for some days and build up a stockpile.

What I'll do differently on any new savefiles:

• take advantage of build mode immediately to start arranging the town to my liking, before I have 10+ buildings to juggle
• gather, gather, gather, and not fuss about getting houses upgraded asap. Townspeople don't care if they have no furniture! (But maybe do Bubsy's first page of requests to get the watering can asap, as flowers are a low effort source of income)
  
• concentrate on upgrading the hot air balloon platform, smelter, lumber mill, and town hall first. IGNORE upgrading the shops until much later, they're low priority.
  
• focus on energy+ and weed price+ bonuses first. Only get dewdrop find+ bonuses for townspeople I'll actually take with me regularly. Ignore decor+ bonuses until I need them. Don't go completely ham on crop+ and fruit tree+ bonuses.
  
• always grab a hang out buddy!! A significant portion of income comes from found dewdrops.
• always have something to sell at the marketplace to build up merchanting skill because the sooner I unlock the 3 stack per stall option, the better.
• consider buying every blueprint I can get my hands on in Port Deluca because I still haven't seen some of them again and poor Lilith still lives in a damn shack.

 

YOOO LOOK AT THIS FUCKING AWESOME WEBCOMIC A FRIEND OF MINE JUST STARTED RELEASING

(her and her writer have been working on it for months and months and they're both professionals so I trust them to keep to a reasonable update schedule!)

 

Littlewood update: now that I'm getting close to 100%ing everything, in retrospect it would have been waaaay better to take my time with building up resources, maybe concentrate on a couple of things at a time. At endgame the neat overpowered goodies are useless and it doesn't matter that I can make money hand over fist now because there's literally nothing to spend it on.

Buying every blueprint in Deluca the moment I see it at the furniture merchant is in retrospect the best thing to do, because the way they rotate in and out is weird. The final upgrades of people's houses results in them giving some really useful item blueprints... assuming that you didn't have to wait until you were already done with almost everything already and don't need the bonuses anymore, like what happened to me. I feel like the blueprint selection should prioritize the items earlier residents need until they're bought up, or at least until you've upgraded Deluca to certain stages.

Other things to do differently:

• ignore filling the museum until I've accomplished everything else, since it doesn't give you any rewards other than letters with incidental items in them and the donations are more useful for crafting. Only donate when I don't need the item for other things anymore!
• npc level only seems to affect whether or not you can flirt with them, so there's no point to talking to EVERYONE every day.
  
• once fishing trips and catacomb tree are unlocked, they're worth looking at daily to see if they offer anything useful.
• in the forest, prioritize chests and rare trees, then whatever else. Chances are that unlocking Deluca's auction house to get the tree totems will take way too long.
  
• same for rare ores

One big complaint I have about the game is how childish the romances are. It's a light hearted and kid friendly game, but the dating is gratingly infantile -- it's mostly the npc being sooo embarassed about how they want to hold hands and cuddle and oops hehe I KISSED you!!! It'd be one thing if it were one or two npcs, but it's almost all of them, and there's very little talking about themselves or their actual relationship to you. That you can propose to them after three dates that never progress beyond shy giggling about kissing is bizarre. Overall it feels very forced and like an afterthought.

 

I am... FINALLY... almost done with FFXII. I got allllllll the way up Ridorana and past Hashbrowns before I had to call it a night.

Also, yesterday I dusted off a WIP I started four years ago and petered out on for various reasons -- including the orange despot sucking the joy out of the world -- and wrote the bones of a roadmap for it. I didn't really have a plan back then and got thoroughly stuck, but in the past four years (god) I've worked out a rough shape of the entire thing. So... here's hoping I can get a momentum of some sort going, since I haven't written a word of fiction since last winter. I've set myself a minimum of five words a day, because even creeping along at the speed of the world's most geriatric snail is better than stalling out for almost a year, again.

 

I did it, I finished XII \o/

While I don't think I'll play it again, I did enjoy it. The story is kind of messy and has its problems (like Vaan and Penelo being just sort of there for the most part) but it turned out to be really interesting -- and Balthier and Fran make up for a lot of its flaws. God, I love those two. That tender moment between them at the top of Ridorana made that slog up to the top completely worth it.

The designs of the Occuria were fantastic -- almost a shape to be familiar, relatable, but far enough off to be incredibly unsettling. Vayne hulking out was properly horrifying in the way Judge what's-his-face doing similar at Mt. Bur-Omnaice wasn't. And I admit it, the ending cutscenes made me a little emotional.

Now I need to figure out what to play next... the next relic stage in FFXIV is coming out on Tuesday so that may eat up a lot of free time, but I do want to get through my game backlog. Not sure if I want to move to FFX, or try something entirely different with Transistor.

 

Three hours of cleaning today... my dust/cat allergies started not dying down for more than a few hours after vacuuming, so that meant time to mop all the floors and do some dusting. i had to remove my desk clutter, dust everything on it, remove all the coffee table clutter and wipe it down, remove all my bedside table clutter and wipe it down... then vacuum and mop, and somehow with short breaks this took three hours and was completely exhausting?? That doesn't seem right.

At any rate, it's helped considerably already, even though I'm still recovering from all the dust I stirred up by moving stuff. (I am... bad at keeping up with dusting.) Hopefully I'll feel more rested in the mornings and be able to wake up a little easier.

 

God help me, I'm back on my bullshit again

"Hey," my brain said, "you know what would be really fun? A DA Morrigan expy WoL."
And then one of the lines you can respond with in SB popped into my head: "I'll kill your god if I have to. Maybe even if I don't."

"Oh no," I said. "She'd be perfect."



I lamented my bullshit to J and he was like, "I have 15 LotRO characters. You should make as many alts as you want." HUSBAND, YOU'RE NOT HELPING...

 

I'm considering what job to start Morrigan as and leaning toward WHM for queue times, since it's still magey and not as painful to do solo quests on as BLM, but kind of wondering just how much she'd hate it. Then I looked on the Lodestone to see how many other DA-inspired Morrigans (based on name combination -- Morrigans with surnames like Wilds, Korcari, Flemeth, or any of the other characters' surnames (with an extra big LOL for Theirin) are clearly DA- inspired) I could spot on Aether.

While there were a fair amount, almost all are low-leveled and abandoned. Most were made with DA Morrigan's looks in mind, with a few outliers who are using the name but have wildly different looks.

And there's one on Cactuar who uses a similar face to the one I came up with and is clearly played regularly. Her at-max level job is... WHM. Someone has good taste! :3 And she's currently leveling MNK -- the idea of Morrigan deciding to hell with this staff-waving business, she's going to be a muscle wizard instead is strangely funny to me. XD

Now I'm looking for more DA-Morrigans in other datacenters, just for fun. I salute the one I just looked at for using 'the Dragonsong' for her title. Good choice, good choice. (... She's also got WHM as her 80. This is increasingly funny to me.)

Anyway, if I commit to this character, I'm not sure where I'll put her. I'm tempted to put her on an EU datacenter but I'm genuinely worried that playing with low ping is going to ruin me for playing on NA datacenters. I'd also have to suffer scrubby newb clothes for quite a while until I could afford what I want for her DA outfits (Dalmascan draped top and Thavnairian wool dress, at the least), and that just won't do.

 

So when your character has a super, super rare name that you came up with via mangling some stuff and happens to also be what looks like an obscure Greek surname, it's pretty fuckin' weird when shit like this turns up:



I'm genuinely hacked off, especially since like... if you're going to copy me like a huge asshole, at least copy me PROPERLY. Lune is fucking French, you twit. 'Iolis Sun' just looks fucking stupid.

I wish we could use visual LB3s just wherever so I could find this guy, switch to MNK, and Final Heaven his ass. God.

 

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

 

I'd be more flattered if they'd at least tried to get the bit right. >:[ They even copied his patron deity and birthday... an ice-aligned deity (whose symbol is the moon), and a winter birthday. e_e

 

I'm still weirded out; this is the kind of shit clingy people with boundary issues do. I have a difficult personality that doesn't usually attract those types, but it has happened on occasion, so this put my hackles WAY up... but I can't think of anyone who would do this, which strangely enough makes it extra unsettling.

J said it's probably just some random kid who was impressed by my character and made an alt to be similar, but eh. Ehhhh. I'm going to try not to think about it too much.