Bartimaeus

What I found to be really disconcerting was that she went straight from "YOU SURE ARE AN UGLY BASTARD" to "HEY I'M QUITE FOND OF YOU, NOW I THINK YOU'RE VERY PRETTY" in literally the next line. I was dying inside so much, and was like...okay, I guess this is one of those games where I'm going to have to not talk to my companions sometimes. I'm not playing a visual novel or dating simulator here, I don't want characters to immediately glue themselves to me in the cringiest manner possible. Honestly, I wish I could just disable the approval system entirely and just leave everyone at neutral or maybe mild approval with no way of going higher. Yeah, that's pretty much my situation: there really hadn't been any combat that I needed to do anything besides cast cantrips and shoot arrows for a very long while, and I was making judicious use of always sneaking around and attacking before being seen, which usually means that my characters get two attacks before enemies get even one. Most battles end before enemies can move. (Also, while all of that could be accomplished in "a couple of real life cRPG hours", in practice it took significantly longer because of wandering around looking at every little thing I can.) It's definitely not constructed in a way that I feel I can really get into, and I think that's a shame. My sense of time, direction, pacing, and just...there being any sort of realness/grounding to the game world or its characters are all severely off for a myriad of reasons, both little and large...and though I seem to enjoy myself fine enough when I am actually playing it (which has been a handful of hours each week - shorter sessions being my way of trying to pace the game, perhaps), there's this increasingly grave feeling of discontent looming over me that I really don't like. Actually, it's very similar to the feeling I get when I try to watch a show that is just fun or funny without offering much anything else that I care about, like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. For a few hours, that might be fine, but it becomes a much tougher ask with longer durations. I've been using the "manually enter turn-based mode" 'pause' button a ton whenever I'm playing. It's too useful for a number of situations to ignore. Also, no day/night cycle is about as bad as there being very little environmental audio, if not worse: it feels like I've been in daylight for bloody forever. Never underestimate the power of a windy or even rainy night. P.S. Confession time: I thought the turn-based combat would be my biggest problem in this game, but honestly, it feels like combat moves faster in this game than it did in Pillars of Eternity, or maybe there's just a lot less of it, or its use feels more appropriate, or...something. It surprisingly has not been too much of an issue for me, which makes it doubly unfortunate that I'm having trouble sticking to the game because of other issues.

I've continued to play little bits here and there, not making a ton of progress but a little. I finally went to camp once and Astarion and Lae'zel seem to already have the hots for me real bad, and it's kind of skeeving me out. Like...guys, I just met you. Today. Literally today. Could we, like...not?

Wisconsin is widely considered to be the most gerrymandered state in the country, and the state could feasibly (though nowhere near certainly) switch from Republican super-majorities* in the state assembly and senate to a Democrat trifecta if the maps are fairly remade by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A lot of positive change could happen in a very short amount of time a la Minnesota if that comes to past - but the very least, the maps being remade and a Democrat staying in the governorship should make certain Republicans never even sniff super-majorities in Wisconsin ever again. It is what I am most excited for (as opposed to anxious or dreading) with regards to the 2024 election season, assuming it happens by then, and I pray that it does. *Actual overriding super-majority in the state senate at 22/33 seats, almost overriding super-majority in the state assembly at 64/99.

RIP Arleen Sorkin, original (and best*) voice of Harley Quinn: the only one that could ever make me like a Brooklyn accent. She also played a long-time main character on Days of Our Lives, Calliope Jones, which was actually a major influence in the creation of the Harley Quinn character. There was a bizarre dream sequence on the show where Arleen dressed up and played as a wacky jester; Paul Dini, a friend of Arleen's and a key DC Comics character designer working on Batman: The Animated Series, needed a random henchwoman for the Joker and used Arleen's portrayal of the jester as inspiration...before then getting Arleen officially cast to voice the character as well. Though it was only intended that Harley Quinn appear in one episode, they liked the character so much that she would return numerous times before eventually solidifying the character as a mainstay of DC Comics.

They should drop the "X" entirely and only mention it as "the website formerly known as Twitter".

I thought this was generated by an AI, but apparently it's real.

CRPG romance has been off-putting and kind of downright pathetic since basically forever. Seeing friendships and even romances develop between characters that are not your own would be waaay better IMO, and it'd more similar to watching characters develop like you would with a movie or TV show. I think player-to-character friendships can feel more organic, because it's usually less characters being boiled down to "you click da right buttons in order to unzip their pants" vs. "you did not click da right buttons to unzip their pants" and more "hey, the player is actually taking the time to talk to and seemingly care about the characters around them". Maybe I'm wrong and it's just rose-tinted glasses to think that, e.g., the PST party characters feel way more cohesive/grounded and less artificial in how they're presented and developed over the course of the game, I don't know. But I do know that seeing characters rubberband up and down with their "I LOVE/HATE YOU" meters as a result of usually minute decisions about (what are supposed to feel like) spontaneous situations and conversations seems farcical. That sort of thing should really be reserved for decisions with major value implications (...maybe like, um, violently stomping squirrels to death or tossing bards off cliffs for no reason, both of which everyone in your group just gives a thumbs up to and blissfully ignores), as I just don't think that's how these things usually work out in reality. Though actually unresolvable incompatibilities between characters should probably lead to conflict, and yet they inexplicably hardly ever do in these types of games as well! It's a "you can have your cake and eat it too" situation, except the cake tastes kind of bad. Never mind that only characters mirroring one another liking and/or falling in love with each other is super boring. Most works of fiction with an ensemble team of characters are about people with all sorts of different backgrounds, beliefs, ambitions, values et al. growing to respect and like each other as they learn to appreciate those different qualities, particularly as those qualities come to use in a variety of ways in different kinds of situations. Imagine if Star Trek was just 10 of the same characters running around agreeing with each other: it'd be absolutely terrible. If Lae'zel and Shadowheart magically grow to respect and/or outright fall in love (uh...well, maybe not) with one another by the end of Baldur's Gate 3 instead of keeping on with same old same old, I will happily eat at least some of my words here.

The Conquerors for Age of Empires II...Artorias of the Abyss for Dark Souls 1 (though it may be the single worst example of an expansion that is technically integrated into the base game but due to hilariously terrible design is easily missable)...Mask of the Betrayer for NWN2...Lord of Destruction for Diablo II... Well, that'd be my list anyways. There are probably others I'm not thinking of. Completely unrelated: I've been meaning to mention this: with the original BG2 CD installer, the installer was not able to parse apostrophes, meaning that if the game was installed to e.g. "Games\Baldur's Gate II", it would silently strip the apostrophe and it would become "Baldurs Gates II" instead. I don't know what it looks like for Steam, but the official GOG installer installed my copy of Baldur's Gate 3 to..."Games\Baldurs Gate III". Default install location doesn't have an apostrophe. Nobody will probably find this as funny as I do: I used to have a discrete registry key I kept on hand that would fix where Windows thought BG2 was installed to, so to see history repeat itself 20+ years later is just too much for me.

I remember watching some long-form essay video on someone playing Shadows of Amn for the first time and them marvelling at how dark, dirty, and chaotic Athkatla is, and how it made it really feel like this wonderfully lived-in and organically constructed city, especially relative to most other games' cities - even much more modern games. Environmental audio and visuals alike definitely play into that, and I sometimes think about that video when I consider how attentive and perfectly at home I feel with certain games' environments while feeling completely out of sorts and not thinking anything of or even really paying attention to those of other games. Some games just do a much better job of creating a believable illusion, and it can be difficult to quantify. From what I've played of BG3, I can't say that the game really quite gets me in this way even to the standard of BG1, and note that I love and obviously think a lot more of Shadows of Amn.

Some people should not speak on camera, good lord that video was intolerable. On a side-note, you should really manually go into turn-based mode before pickpocketing anybody - makes running away hilariously easy if you get a full turn of movement before the "I've been stolen from!" timer starts to run*. Upon seeing how broken pickpocketing was, I immediately implemented a "I can only steal enchanted and quest items from NPCs where there is no other apparent/satisfactory method of obtaining them" rule, because just stealing everything is incredibly lame and boring. (e): *Also, you can steal multiple items if necessary/successful before that timer starts to run. And also, the character can't move around while you're in turn-based mode. Overall, it just...doesn't make any sense not to be in turn-based mode.

I'm imagining taking this idea to its most extreme logical conclusion: a future where all the Democrat voters run the Republican primaries, and all the Republican voters run the Democrat primaries, with each group voting for the absolute worst candidate possible to try and outdo the other side to make their own look more palatable. Cue everyone wondering why all our candidates are always so bad. Well, that seemingly happens a lot of the time anyways, but it'd be even worse.

can they remake bg3 in the infinity engine instead

I've run into two weird bugs repeatedly (at least five times each) so far: 1. My controls get "desynchronized". Essentially, I will click to move somewhere, and instead of my character moving to where my cursor is, it goes somewhere else completely different. When this happens, it's not just that one click, but rather all further attempts at doing anything (including even using the hotbars and menus) are busted in this manner, and there is no apparent fix except to restart the game. I wasn't able to determine the how/why of this happens, but it may be something to do with minimizing the game, I'm not entirely sure. 2. The timestamps and order of my saves get muddled. My latest quick saves will suddenly start to have wrong and much earlier timestamps, and the game will place them many slots below the one prior to the bug starting to occur (maybe as much as 20 or 30 slots), and thus quick loading will load the old quick save instead of the new quick save. Making new quick saves does not help, the game must be restarted to start getting correct timestamps again (which will make new quick saves appear at the top of the list and be preferred for quick loading once again).

It was honestly already a problem in primarily text-based games like even BG1/2, but it gets even worse when you throw in fully voiced dialogue*: there are going to be significantly less options to choose from due to the expense of having to voice what NPCs say back. So you get a lot of bland and/or mildly window dressed dialogue options that will work to get the same responses. There's definitely a lot of dissonance for me as well, as I'm playing a baby-faced Dark Urge Cthulhu-warlock, who I kind of imagine as being Elizabeth Bathory, and trying to navigate between "I'm fantasizing about tearing off and eating that person's face right now", "hello, I'm Mr. Krabs, and I like money", and "oh, the poor widdle bardy bard needs some help writing her sad little song about her dead master :'(" can be a lot of whiplash. I want to try to roleplay as my character, but I don't necessarily want to play Stupid Evil and murder everyone she meets. I feel like you almost have to imagine your own responses that at least sound more suitable for whatever you're trying to play, rather than what's literally written...but that basically takes you down the path of a kind of meta-gaming, as now you're thinking about dialogue options as "what do I want to happen" instead of "what should I say", and that's not great. Of course, I know how it would take an utterly ridiculous amount of just writing (never mind voice-acting!) to really cover all one's bases, which is probably a point in favor of always playing a very generic main character that you view simply as a narrative tool rather than a real character. I mentioned a while back about it being very difficult to take roleplaying seriously in these kinds of games, and this has always definitely been one of the big problems with it. *Mind you, I'm still of the opinion that semi-voiced is much better than fully voiced. I like characters having voiced lines to give them their unique flavor while also indicating their particular style and tone, as well as using voiced lines for dramatic punctuation and whatnot, but I prefer being able to go through dialogue at my own speed, which having everything be fully voiced is a huge impediment to. And I'm not going to sit through and listen to all of this idiot bard's entire dialogue tree, but constantly skipping all of their lines feels pretty disruptive and dissatisfying as well: semi-voiced a la the Infinity Engine games made for a delicate bridge between those two competing issues rather effectively.

My hatred for bards has expanded well beyond the simple confines of gameplay at this point: I despise the general concept of a bard and the type of character that plays them in of itself. When I clicked on the class during character creation and saw my character play the ridiculous animation in their foppish clothing, it instantly rekindled my forgotten loathing. It surely doesn't help that every time you run into one in these games, they're the absolute most annoying people that you naturally want to shove off the nearest cliff. Well, a little more than "want" in my case, considering I actually do it. There should be some kind of satisfying crunch sound for if someone dies from fall damage: what better music indeed than the succulent symphony of a bard's spine imploding into dust?

It was for the greater good. All bards are bastards.

I keep playing about an hour at a time and feeling like I made zero progress because there are far too many little things to do. I, too, am looking forward to less dense parts of the game. Though I am also playing the Dark Urge, I haven't done too many evil things. But true to my word, I did toss some awful bard that was torturing some squirrels(?) with her terrible music right off a cliff and she died upon impact, though she landed right in front of a bear who sniffed her and then went back to catching and eating fish. Yeah, I don't blame the bear for not wanting any part of that either. I rather appreciated that nobody else seemed to notice or care, which is just how it should be when it comes to murdering bards.

When we were leaving San Diego back in...I want to say probably 2007, a large section of the county was being evacuated due to fires. It seemed like a huge fire at the time, but I was only in my early teens at the time, so looking back, I'm unsure how big of a deal it actually was relative to what's been going on in recent years. A few years later, we left the state entirely, and I can't say that I miss the constant fires. Love the ocean and the climate (minus any droughts) and the beauty of the state, but I am content with instead being on the shores of one of the Great Lakes instead, particularly as I find the speed of life to be more to my liking than what I experienced in California. But...especially seeing pictures like those, it's hard not to miss it nevertheless.

Makes me miss California and the forested mountain just beyond my backyard.

Crystal Skull isn't horrible...for the first 45 minutes. Sure, most of the action looks pretty sloppy, it's a bit of a shock to see a significantly reduced Indiana Jones doddering about, there's already too much CGI, the nuke-refrigerator scene is kind of dumb (though that's really more just symbolic of the film feeling wholly silly and unreal in both tone and style - you can immediately feel that trademark George Lucas-ian lack of restraint even though he's not actually in the director's chair), and maybe Shia LaBeouf with his little tough boy act is a bit off-putting...but otherwise, it's not totally lost by that point. Most of the dialogue is fine, the motorcycle chase scene is pretty decent, and they're doing a funny thematic thing with Indy kind of turning into his father along with some other stuff... Alas, there turned out to be a few other issues with the film thereafter. I'm curious to see how much I hate Dial of Destiny.

They sure took their sweet time in making a second season. I watched the first season, but it was a "I kind of enjoy it but I also kind of hate it" thing.

Fun (or at least I thought so) discussion between GN's Steve and Intel's Tom Peterson on a new tool and associated measures that should help identify bottlenecks between CPU and GPU in a more transparent manner, and possible expansion into even identifying specific causes of bottlenecks (e.g. too high resolution textures), which could be used by end users (and hopefully developers) to better optimize settings. Discussed at a mostly low level that should be understandable to all of us here, I would think. I don't really know that much about the whole "let's make a frame" pipeline, but they simplified it enough where I felt like I got the basic idea at least.

I treated They Live very seriously when I watched it, and so I thought it was pretty awful. If I had known in advance that John Carpenter explicitly intended for it to be a scathing but humorous criticism of 1980s capitalistic America and its conservative politics, I probably would've enjoyed it more. Alas, the lack of context and my own inability to read the room doomed it for me. Perhaps worth a re-watch at some point. Man, I can't even handle one Bruce, never mind a whole bunch of clones.

The Forgotten Girls, written and obviously heavily referenced by the author for the first article, is a fairly enjoyable read - it's mostly an autobiography on the author growing up in dirt poor Arkansas and how some relatively innocuous desires and choices during her youth allowed her to escape that life while dooming virtually everyone else she'd ever known during her childhood in the face of rural America being in terminal decline. If you enjoyed the article, you'll probably enjoy the book, especially as it weaves in narratives and themes with the intertwining of poverty, politics, and religion.

From what I've played of the game so far, it's pretty much fine. Which is infinitely better than I expected, and way more than I get out of almost anything AAA-released these days. If I get farther into the game and my mind changes, I'll let you all know. I mean, I always do, don't I?