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

So my eye was getting better and then started getting abruptly worse aaaaand tl;dr I think I'm allergic to the antibiotic cream. I've taken an antihistamine and an antiinflamatory and it all feels much better, and I'll call the doctor in the morning, but. Bluh.

SIGH!!!

 

Finished Death Stranding a couple of days ago and need to write a proper review; the short version is that I loved it, it's easily one of my favorite games, and it's extremely well put together.

 

Nothing like being woken up by a nightmare to set the tone for the rest of the day. Ugh.

On a different subject entirely, my friend Paula linked me this FF15 video review saying it feels like a weird seizure but it brings up some interesting things. She wasn't wrong, it's a bizarre experience, but it does have a lot of good points and it pretty funny besides.

One of the comments calls it "The worst game I ever loved" and... yeah. Yeah.

 

Lately when I've played FF14 I've been playing on my Crystal alt (so much so I got a housing demolition warning for Iolis and had to make sure to log in with him and go into his house, oops). It's weird that it feels almost... liberating? Being alone in a crowd of strangers is pretty comfortable. I don't feel beholden to or dependant on anyone. Players (in leveling content, anyway) are generally more chill, too. Crystal gets shit for not having a lot of raiders, but it seems like the end result of that is that it doesn't have as many self-absorbed wannabes who huff and puff about how terrible everyone else is. IDK, we'll see how it goes when I'm eventually doing stuff at level cap.

OTOH, I feel alone in the FC I'm in on Cactuar because I'm largely ignored. People who are online when I'm on are pointedly doing their own thing; any inviting people along to do stuff is happening at times when I'm not around, and any inviting I do usually gets no response. Best I can usually hope for is someone being around to fill in an empty tank or healer spot in a trial or dungeon if one of the random matches drops out. I'm hoping it gets more lively once Endwalker drops, but honestly, the mood has gotten colder and more insular there over the past couple of years (most of the conversations on the FC discord apparently only happen in the raid channels now), and markedly more so since one of my friends stopped playing.

I'm probably not going to leave that FC any time soon, but I no longer feel any qualms about trying to relocate my house (which is currently next door to the FC house and home to our max level striking dummy) to Ishgard once housing there opens.

I know I gripe about this a lot, but my social group in FFXIV has been one of two social groups I've even had for years, so seeing it dwindle down to almost nothing aside from a few friends scattered across different servers who all have their own shit going on really sucks.

 

... Well, this is outside of RP circles. I used to RP during the days when IRC was big; I know how nuts RP community drama gets. RPing outside of super close friends is a hard no for me, so that's not something I'm likely to have to deal with!

 

My mom has been having some pretty unpleasant health problems, one of which is foot deformities which make it hard for her to walk. (She'd always had flat feet, but I'm betting the 20+ years of factory work didn't help.) She just told me that she wants to get a seated walker, she just has to convince her husband. While externally I was polite and asked her if she would like for me to have a talk with him about it, internally my mood was DO I NEED TO CUT A BITCH???? BECAUSE I WILL FUCKING CUT A BITCH. LET MY MOTHER GET HER WALKER, YOU FUCK.

This man may be six inches taller than me and almost twice as wide but I would absolutely go rabid weasel on him in person if I had to. Fuck. I'll have to see if my sister is willing to apply some pressure of her own, since she actually lives in the same part of the world as our mom...

 

Is there a button for "I may not know your mom, but I would hold your coat"?

 

Thank you <3

He's been (as far as I know) a perfectly decent person up until this point, so I'm flabbergasted that she'd need to convince him.

 

Like, I know she's only 63 but disability don't give a fuck! A person who needs a mobility device is a person who needs a mobility device, age is irrelevant!

 

The delay on Endwalker means I have way too much time to dither about one of the characters I'm going to fantasia to male viera (Fawn, since I couldn't get attached to him as either lala or hyur). I was able to make really good versions of two of my OCs as m!viera, and they'd both fit the jobs I have on Fawn, so I'm extremely torn.





They're both beautiful, I'm very fond of both OCs, and I'd have to rename that character in either case, so it's a very tough decision...

 

On the plus side, there is no bad choice there.

 

In their original incarnations, they're both fae. The red-haired one, Briory, is an elf (but very much of the Fair Folk kind, with all the trickery and sideways morals that implies); he's very, very old, but as impish and tricksy as a youngster, and as dramatic as a whole troupe of theater kids. He likes living amongst mortals because their short, bright lives are very interesting to him, and there's an infinite variety of ways he can screw with the uptight, the petty, and the narrow-minded. Every so often, however, the weight of all those years and the lives he's seen come and go weighs on him and he has to go off and be a tree for a while or cause some absolute mayhem. He enjoys playing the violin, elegant clothing, and messing with people. Someone as chaotic neutral as he is is a pretty poor candidate for being a Warrior of Light, honestly, but it'd be funny, especially as he's not the fighting type at all -- he gets what he wants through trickery, charisma, and seduction.

His animal affinity is for foxes, so being a rabbit boy is also funny. He doesn't look quite right since the most texture hair in FFXIV has is 'wavy, if you're generous about the term'; it should be fluffy waves that border on curls. They'll be getting more hairstyles with the expansion than the racial ones, so even though the right hair texture doesn't exist, I might find a style that's more him.

The green-haired one, Lorne, is a nix(ie). They don't have a malevolent streak (and thus no interest in drowning people), and are far more of an introvert than Briory. They're soft spoken and gentle, and love song (of course), plants, cats, and wandering. Their water form is more dragon than horse, with golden scales, and in humanish form they still have a faint sheen of golden scales on their skin. They're not as well developed as Briory as they're more of a side character I haven't written or RPed much, but I've got the general shape of their personality down. They're more the fighting type than Briory, despite their more gentle personality.

Either way, the jobs they'll inherit suit them well enough as they're bard and white mage -- even if white mage is no longer very nature themed.

 

Lorne definitely sounds more WOL-ish, but on the other hand, just look at Briory. I love neutral-to-evil trickster characters as a matter of course so I am biased.

Whichever you pick will look amazing, I'm sure.

 

I like the look of Lorne a tad more. They look like someone I would like to go raiding with.

 

That's entirely fair, as Briory looks exactly like what he is -- a beautiful asshole. XD

I think what I'll do is at some point after I've finished Endwalker on my main, I'll make a couple of throwaway alts to test out emotes and poses and look at clothes on each of them, and then decide from there.

 

Sometimes I wonder if I have some sort of chronic thing going on since I have a very hard time getting past a certain fitness level, I'm always fairly low energy, and I have odd bouts of stiffness and pain, but I can't shake the feeling I'm just doing something wrong, like sitting too much. Then again, my mom was diagnosed with fibromyalgia recently and I take after her when it comes to health issues, so who fuckin' knows.

 

So like, from experience, auto immune issues run in families a lot and I can say at least that part of my rheumatism (which comes comorbid with fibro, you know, for fun and flavor), lack of stamina, stiffness, generalized fatigue and pain are the main issues i have most of the time and what's made any attempts at fitness or building muscle a fucking ordeal. If you're lucky, tho, you may just have persistantly low levels of some sort of micronutrient, which is much easier to fix. Hope you can get medical help, it sucks to be fatigued

 

Starting to seriously question how much of the pain is simply muscle tension, because I've been so increasingly stressed the past couple of weeks that my entire chest and upper back refuses to unclench and even morning exercise doesn't mean I won't be in pain by evening. >_< I don't love Yet More Mandatory Physical Activity but I'm gonna have to do a stretching routine every evening to mitigate this.

The stress has come in large part because I need a doctor's checkup before I can get my prescriptions renewed, but I haven't yet been able to get a doctor's appointment because the clinic is only scheduling week to week and they're always full by the time I call. I called yesterday morning and they were only able to get back to me this morning and nope, no appointment times... It's a covid problem, I'm sure of it, since Finland had a record number of new cases yesterday. :( I got a temp renewal for my ADHD meds though, so HOPEFULLY this next week I'll remember to call on Wednesday when the schedule flips over and elbow my way in to an appointment (esp since I need to mention a couple of other issues, like this huge damn sty on my eyelid that still hasn't gone away). Bluh.

I was a couple of weeks completely without the aDHD meds and like, I can live without them, but my cognitive functioning suffers really badly. My memory goes completely to shit, I have a hard time staying moored in place and time, and I basically have cotton fluff between my ears instead of brains -- and it's excaberated pretty badly by SAD. I haven't been able to read a text longer or more complicated than the average shitpost, which is a real problem with one of my courses being the basics of AI. I'm still not at the deadline though, so hopefully I can knock that out in the next week.

Fingers crossed I can get that appointment ASAP though, as I only have a month left of my mood stabilizer and going off of that would be extremely bad. Besides being crazy again (NO THANK YOU), the side effects from going off of it apparently includes seizures. idk if that's just for people using it for its original purpose as an anticonvulsant, but I really don't want to find out.

 

My medication situation has improved my stress levels enough that the tension in my upper back is mostly just gone. Absolute relief. It helps I took one this morning after I got the call (I had saved a couple for Emergencies) and feeling clear-headed and able to think again has also improved my mood considerably. Ahhhh.

I also got to talk to my mom for an hour and a half today over video chat. God, I've missed her and her endless rambling. I wish so much I could visit, but with covid how it is, I do not want to get on a plane any time soon.

 

All prepped for Endwalker! Time to vibrate intensely for the next day and a half until it's landed. I'm crossing my fingers that I like how Reaper plays, since aesthetically it's pretty much exactly my jam.