Evelyn Starshine's Space Adventure

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Mutuals we are doing this

reblog if its friday and you made it

though I still love Chronicles of Narnia the older I get and the more I learn the clearer it becomes to me why it would have driven Tolkien completely insane

The Santa part almost ruined their friendship

Tolkien: you can’t just patch random things together because you like them, everything has to fit together in a dense textural weave of reasonable causes and effects

Lewis: and then the witch from the other dimension turns the fox to stone for having a contraband tea party …

Tolkein is the nerd that complains that characters’ costumes and weapons are impractical and Lewis is the nerd that thinks the designs fuck

It's crazy that these strikes are happening given that all the writers and actors are asking for is less than 0.3% of the revenue these studios make.

This is what gets me. The writers and actors aren’t asking for much but these CEOs are digging their heels in

For them it’s the desire to have all the power. The unions could ask for a single dime and the studios would say no because they don’t want employees to have any power to ask for anything

it's so weird how much content you lose out on being evil, while not even getting any exclusive rewards in return... i think that if you choose to kill minthara, she shouldn't drop the lyre, lol. you can get around the shadowcurse if you're smart (stick in the darkness until you hit last light). maybe give an exclusive item for raiding the grove (i mean come the fuck on, helping mol steal the idol gives a better reward than anything in the evil route).

i mean, you're missing out on the tieflings, who appear several times throughout the game. you're missing out on the ability to help lift the shadowcurse (which the game guilts you over, for some fucking reason? even though i didn't even know i could do it because halsin was dead? even though my character was the dark urge so they wouldn't have given a shit?). you miss out on karlach, wyll (and mizora! you miss out on mizora, what the hell!). potentially gale, potentially jaheira + minsc!

there is just literally no reason to do the evil route unless you know that minthara is going to be recruitable, and the only way anyone could possibly know that is through paratext. the game does NOT give the player any good reason to actively side with the goblins: at worst, a self-interested character would just leave these two groups to their bickering, at best... why would you side with the group where one of the three leaders actively tries to kill you? (anyone else think it's weird that dror ragzlin and minthara just... don't comment on it lmao)

and everyone still wants to recruit minthara on a good run! to the point where i genuinely would not be surprised if larian's hints to new minthara content is in that direction, tbh

ideally i think that if they were going to let minthara be recruitable on a good run, it should be knocking her out -> making her a camp prisoner for a bit, she starts off with negative approval and is more likely to leave the player. that way players who are still evil get rewarded (with the romance scene + positive approval) and players who are good still get access to minthara (and maybe they get to rp an enemies to lovers situation)

obviously this isn't feasible unless there's a fair bit of rewriting, and i don't expect them to actually implement anything like this... i'm just daydreaming

Not only should Minthara be recruit able in the good route (her story of returning to MR only to be arrested for her failure and then joining you works better if you defeated her than sided with her !!) (Also i don't think she'd be more likely to leave the player, she is primarily driven by hate against the absolute and wanting to destroy it and knows leaving the party means falling under it's control again. She's a vengeance paladin even! it's her whole thing. it'd make the romance harder not her as a valued companion and team member)

but, the teeflings should be able to survive the evil route, given how important they are to later game content, you should be able to tell them hey the grove is about to be attacked leave now, then open the gates and betray the druids. Having the 'infiltrate the absolute to learn information to defeat them' path also require, lose half your party and much late game content, is just bad design when there is nothing to compensate it!

This is so awesome

Lae'zel sketch because she's my babygirl

lest we forget

BTW I think we should focus more on Embracer deliberately picking the last day of the month to shut down Volition so they wouldn't have to pay for their health insurance for September

And not to mention announcing this exactly the moment Starfield embargo ended, hoping that the hype and news coverage of Starfield would bury the news that they shut down one of their more popular studios

BTW reboot wasn't even selling poorly and was predicted to be "decently profitable".

The reason they decided to fire 200+ devs wasn't because of reboot's failure, but because they were supposed to have a deal with Saudi Arabia that fell through, so now they gotta fire thousands of employees to make up for the fact that they lost billions in acquiring studios cause they counted on earning back that money from Saudi Arabia deal.

Volition is the 2nd studio Embracer shut down this month, and Gearbox was also hit by massive layoffs cause of Embracer.

Gotta love monopolies!

this is what finally broke me. it's scumfuck enough that they waited until they didn't have to take care of their former employees.

the fact that everything IdolNinja did for these games, all the work and dedication and love that he put in to the day he died, may just disappear because the publisher fucked up their finances... I have actual tears in my eyes.

#perfectly articulated

Residential school survivor Dennis Saddleman reads his poem Monster, a Residential School experience

Orange shirt day tomorrow. Once again, I’m of mixed feelings. Happy that we have a day that let’s non-Indigenous people know.., but sad we even have to make a day to be noticed or cared about.

Trying to spread awareness and love.

🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡

Orange Shirt Day is September 30th.

Here's what you can do to help.

Hey you! Do you love evil older women who love vengeance and fucking!? Then you'll love Minthara Baldur'sgate3!

Do your pets have a last name/surname, and if so, what is it?

If you don't have any pets currently but WOULD use one of these, feel free to answer accordingly.

The tags on my whiteness post said to me that white people (at least those that are racially aware) and colonized natives perhaps have more in common than most people think. Or at least more than they talk about it in public.

Not that they're the same. Misogyny and transphobia are not the same, but they are both veins of oppression in a patriarchy. Similar.

In the same way, that empty hollowness white ppl feel where your culture should be is not unlike what I feel as a native, from what I've read of your accounts. Learning your ancestors chose whiteness and safety and comfort over culture and identity. That now you have nothing because of the colonization and assimilation your grandparents experienced when they got to the USA. Because of whiteness. Because of the power it has even just as a concept in the US.

We experience these for much different reasons and at least your loss bought you privilege.

... but they aren't total opposites either. A hollowness where you know rich history used to be? Having culture but feeling a disconnect where you know More used to be? Feeling like you only have scraps of the culture your family used to have? Clinging to what you can get your hands on? Feeling like it's so detached that it's not really yours?

I get that and I bet I'm not the only one.

The USA's habit for white supremacy, racism, and colonization hurt all of us.

And it will benefit all of us to discard the systems those things built. They're still there and still hurting every one of us.

We can build a future that benefits us all instead as soon as we all start working on that together.

But we can't do that if some of us refuse to admit the system is what's hurting us. If we refuse to acknowledge that even with perfect politicians our Systems would still prevent progress because they are built on outdated and white supremacist ideals we'll just continue to suffer together under those systems instead.

We can't keep attacking each other just because some of us refuse to look at the ideologies fueling our current reality.

#i always frame the journey my ancestors took to whiteness (conditional or otherwise) as a deal with the fucking devil#you feel it the most as a jewish person but it's a conversation i've had a lot with my irish-irish friends about my irish half#how irish-americans paid for their whiteness by becoming the enforcers of white supremacy (i.e. police)#and honestly i see a lot of parallels in this same vein between diasporic jews and indigenous people#the erasure of language and pressure to assimilate#being constantly displaced and/or murdered because we were inconvenient or someone felt entitled to what little we had#being cast as a scapegoat or some other unifying enemy for those trying to consolidate power#the goalposts that move from 'if you convert you're our equal' to 'actually you're just bad by birth bc you're part of these people'#so yeah op this is a really lovely statement of solidarity#right back at you

[Image description: a GIF of a Native American person saying, “Just ‘cause you can’t see something don’t make it less real. Eh?”. End description.]

The lack of ending slides in Baldur's Gate 3 is still very much ridiculous to me. Not only is it a staple in the CRPG genre, but it also serves as a total and complete closure, the consequence of all the actions that the protagonist has ever taken. How each of your companions fare or what they will do after the event of the game, each of the world's specific regions and how your character's decision has affected it. I want to know!

Exhibit 1: Pillars of Eternity and the consequence of your action on Dyrwood.

Sure, the romance companion epilogue is somewhat of a saving grace, but if you somehow didn't romance anyone (or romanced a certain someone who was bugged), it truly feels abrupt.

I think the companion that's most affected by the lack of an ending slide is unromanced, vampire-spawn Astarion. You solved his personal quest, freed 7000 of Cazador's vampire spawns into the Underdark, and what do you get in the end? A 15-second footage of him scurrying away because since the tadpole is gone, his sun immunity is also gone. Better run fast or turn into dust! Then the game ends. Credit rolls, black screen, a little tune plays, and you see your clownish reflection on the screen, asking yourself if anything you've done really matters at all.

One ending slide that left a very strong impression on me was Devil of Caroc's in Pillars of Eternity 1's DLC The White March. It was so beautifully written. I expected BG3 to have something that could give me that same (or even better) impact, especially after hearing "Baldur's Gate 3 Has 17,000 Ending Variations" used as a selling point. Turns out it's just the companion saying slightly different lines and like... three actual ending cinematic.

Bummer!

Exhibit 2: Ending slide of Devil of Caroc - a minor companion from Pillars of Eternity's DLC the White March.

I know that they will be "expanding" the epilogue, but it's been nearly a month after release. So many people have already finished the game, and it's quite unfair that the early adopters of a seemingly completed-for-release game get the short end of the stick.

Me when for the whole month I was hyperfixacting on Baldur's Gate 3 and was waiting for cool ending slides to show how the world has changed because of my actions...and there were NO ENDING SLIDES