It's Been All Fun and Games for a While Now

Feminina O'Ladybrain

Apr 3

Spoilers for some side quests in Baldur's Gate

Butch:

Yup. Got nothing. Nothing. The streak is over.

Band concert got me.

Was a nice concert, though this is the time they go to this big evaluation/competition/festival thing that they've been doing since I was in high school, so the program is more serious and artsy.

Given that we wonder these days about groups of people who do things like collect old catalogs, let us add a group to that list: people who write artsy, experimental pieces of music designed to be played by high school bands. Like, how do you get into that?

Maybe when you finally get that last catalog you've always wanted, you get all "Well, nothing to do now. I need a new hobby. I know!"

Feminina:

Thank you for identifying the thing I'm going to do when I'm tired of video games!

Butch:

Not to dash your dreams, but reimagining the folk classic "Shenendoah," which you likely sang around many a fire in your younger days in Montana (cuz that's what you do in Montana) as what it would be like if it rained in the Shenendoah Valley by making it all dark and slow and in minor keys and making large chunks of the band put their instruments down to snap their fingers (rain, see?) has been done.

Someone beat you to it, dude. I hate to be the one who has to tell you.

Feminina:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

That just throws down the gauntlet, man. Makes me more determined than ever. I'm going to do "don't fence me in" as a protest against busy highways that cut through neighborhoods. I'll set it in a weird irregular rhythm to symbolize the challenges of pedestrians trying to cross the street, and replace several of the instruments with car horns.

Awards. Will. Be. Won.

Oh, and I found Brage. Didn't even fight him, just answered his riddle and took him to the temple for forgiveness, which Khalid was very impressed by ("Gorion would be proud of you!", and Kagain (I went back to get him again once what's-his-name abandoned us to go hunt bandits on his own) thought was stupid.

And found Christopher Nibley or whoever, the archeologist. Went on his dig with him.

Butch:

Dude. DUDE. You're a natural!

There was a piece written by a disabled person that was all dissonance symbolizing her difficulties!

You've found your calling, Femmy. YOUR CALLING!

Yeah, I felt kinda bad for Brage. I guess the moral is "identify your swords." I take it you identified his sword.

But there's more family, right? I can't decide if all this family stuff is coming up for reasons or if it's just cliched trope.

I also take it you left the idol alone because we're the same person. And turned down the guy that wanted to double cross the guy. Because we're the same person.

I felt bad for those diggers.

Feminina:

Yes and yes and yes: we are the same person once again. That's a relief!

Oh, except I gave the sword to Dorn. Kidding!

I did feel bad for the diggers. They were just doing their job, trying to earn a living, and because of some weirdo out-of-towner with a quest, they all got possessed by some god of chaos and ended up thoroughly killed by me.

I'm going to imagine Mr. Nibley paid to have them resurrected, although he was really going with the penniless academic thing, so he might not have been able to afford it.

Poor Brage. May not have been his fault, but he's sure got to live with that forever.

Butch:

He does. There's a lot of guilt surrounding family in this game. I even got a sense that Basilius felt bad in the end. Given that our dreams seem to suggest that there's something not quite right with us, that may be a theme. As it is, we feel bad about Gorion.

It would be pretty steep to bring all those dudes back to life. That it would. Poor guys. They weren't even worth that much XP.

Feminina:

I did find that one option in the conversation with the guy who wanted us to take/sell the artifact kind of amusing, if we were playing this evil. "I need no excuse to engage in bloodshed! They will die tonight."

Because that could so easily be the truth if we were talking about, say, kobolds or hobgoblins or bandits or any of the things we attack without hesitation.

Granted, all those are also things that attack US without hesitation, which is always where the line is for me. Attack some random person with a blue circle? I feel kind of bad about it, even if they're a skeleton and apparently have Bassilus' holy symbol which I need in order to get paid.

Attack anyone with a red circle? Not really feeling bad, unless it turns out they were all defending their tiny Xvart village.

But yes, family...human connections...the guilt we suffer when we injure family or merely escape injury when they do not.

Butch:

Indeed. I don't start things. Finish them? Sure. Unless I die.

There is some darkness in this game. Another way Divinity is like it. Sure, BG has a dude with a space hamster and all that, but there's an edge. Sure, Divinity had talking cows and snowmen (who were really DOCTORS) and "The Ghoul that Used to Guard the Lighthouse," but there was darkness.

Hmm.

Feminina:

It's all fun and games until somebody loses a soul.

Butch:

WEIRD T SHIRT!!!!

That would likely sell well in certain parts of the country and they wouldn't get the joke behind it.

Feminina:

Ha! So true. The Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons crowd (if they still existed) would wear it very seriously.

Butch:

Oh right! The Bothered About D&D crowd! I forgot about them!

I guess video games distracted them.

Good to know my hobbies consistently piss people off.

Feminina:

Yes...throughout time and space, we irritate uncool people, and that is living the dream.

Butch:

Amen, sister. Amen.

Something has to be the dream because, as it is now spring, Mrs. McP is, once again, finding things to do to the house. This is very much not the dream.

Our contractor just showed up again. Oh, how I have missed the contractor.

Why did we buy a house?

Feminina:

"Freaking out the squares." "For the lolz." The dream of weirdos from time immemorial.

That contractor missed you, I bet! You're probably buying him another wine cellar.

Keep supporting the economy, man. Way to go, you.

We, on the other hand, can't get a contractor to deal with our thing (our house is too close to the neighbors' house, there's no room to work, it's annoying and they'd—understandably—rather do some less annoying job), so I guess eventually the whole wall will need replacing and it'll be a big (i.e. expensive) enough job that someone will take it even though it's annoying. At which point insurance won't cover it, because the insurance company told us to replace the deck years ago and we didn't because no one would take the job.

Oh MAN homeownership is great!

Anyway. It's fine, probably. For now.

Butch:

What? Too close to...what kind of nonsense is that?

I hate houses.

Feminina:

No argument here!

The only thing worse is sleeping under a tarp on an empty lot after razing the house to the ground, which is another alternative I've contemplated.

Of course, you almost invariably get awakened in the middle of the night by ghouls or kobolds when you try to rest out of doors, which is the main reason it's a bad idea.

I got woken up twice in one night while trying to rest last time I played. Third time was the charm, though.

Butch:

So rude of monsters. Hard enough to get a good night's sleep as it is.

You know, children and kobolds have a lot in common. I've never noticed that before.

Feminina:

You're RIGHT!

Small (initially), noisy, attacking at any hour when you least expect it...

Butch:

I think this is the first time we've done something with kobolds since we had children.

We were so naive.

At the very least D&D should've given us hints, like, whenever a kobold was around you'd lose all your money, or make it so kobolds live on pasta and chicken nuggets.

THEN we would've seen......

Feminina:

You failed us, D&D. You failed us!

But then again, we were so young and confident...we were blinded by our own sense of invulnerability. We could never have imagined the awful truth.

Perhaps there was nothing D&D could have done.

Butch:

We were also blinded by beer and pizza.

I blame the pizza.

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