Commission Info.
Formerly baabaabelias.
Schem, aka Tyrant Zomal (amongst other things). Somewhere between a ram, a tentacled oceanid and a malevolent emmissary from deep space.
Art tag.
sometimes neurodivergence questions will be like ‘do you find activities more enjoyable when they are activities you enjoy’ and it really makes me wonder if this ‘neurotypical’ thing has just been a big practical joke all along
‘do you find it disruptive to your focus when your focus on a task is disrupted suddenly and without warning’ this CANNOT be diagnostic criteria. they are playing us for fools
Not to derail but when I was at my diagnosis appointment I kept stopping and asking for clarirfication on the questions in detal before I committed to writing down an answer and the person doing the assessment kept taking notes. I wonder why.
I’ve seen a few people talk about it, so I wanted to say - if your character uses they/them in Baldur’s Gate 3 and an NPC uses a gendered term for you, please submit a bug report! That is a flag that is being misapplied, and it can be fixed. There are thousands of pronoun cases in every playthrough, and a few are bound to be incorrect, so let Larian know.
But also be polite to QA in your form. They’re busting their ass 24/7 to provide fixes.
I don’t know what data BG3 sends/Larian QA receives with a bug report, but if you’re wondering how you can word things to help in a bug report in general (this goes for this bug & any others you may encounter), solid info you can add includes:
- Your character’s race, pronouns & class
- Location in which the bug occurred
- The NPC you were speaking to & the dialogue option selected (if you remember!)
- What quest you were on/progressing, if relevant
- Steps to Recreate/Step-by-Step of what happened, if possible (ie “NB Tiefling Paladin on Quest QUESTNAMEHERE -> talked to QUESTNPC -> Chose [PALADIN] PALADINDIALOG -> Received binary gendered response”)
The more detail you can provide, the easier it is for QA to narrow down where the bug, incorrect flag, etc is. Always be kind in your reports! Probably goes without saying, but QA is hard and stuff falls thru the cracks.
i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this
I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”
No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.
No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.
Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.
All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.
you know what i love about terry pratchett and his books. is that the girls are allowed to be ugly. Mr Terry says this woman looked like the wrong end of a dragon and has no teeth and she saved the day and her husband dotes on her. Like….in almost all fantasy novels i read beauty is almost always equated with goodness, and its just…so refreshing to see ugly girls in starring roles. His books really say you dont have to have beauty to have value. and like!! not just in looks either. so many of these ladies have shit personalities. i guess what im saying is he writes women like people, flawed, ordinary and extraordinary all at once.
when lady sybil is introduced shes dressed to muck out what is essentially a pet rescue shelter for incontinent chemichal factories that are only just barely dragons and she is described like her one true purpose in life is to wear a horned helmet and scream at the end of a wagner opera- none of this is played to diminish her as she is the romantic interest of a focus character because she has a hundred and one good qualities that blindside people and is equally as capable in many situations as her husband. yes, the husband who just bareknuckled a werewolf only to find his wife ended an international dispute when he wasnt looking
of the four focal witches of the witches of lancre books all four of them are interestingly nonconformist in looks ranging from looking like a wet hen perpetually waiting for the mythical good hair day, to complaining that the traditional witch hat made them look like someone dropped a particularly goth icecream cone, to someone who quite literally lights fires by glaring at the wood, to someone whose face looks like a cheerful apple that has been left out in the sun and this is the one who not only is implied to have had an ambitiously healthy string of lovers but is still pursuing romantic interests well into her 70s
a female troll has an argument about being upset about being expected to conform to beauty standards like buffing out her crags, and rebels by rubbing bird doo to promote lichen growth which is still nothing compared to how igor rebelled against gender roles
cheery littlebottom… just cheery littlebottom
i recall a segment where a male opera singer was wistfully describing the lost love of his youth and how she would open a beer bottle with her teeth is a phrase he uttered like he was describing divine grace
the important distinction is ‘allowed to be’ ugly, not required to be ugly or that them being ugly carries any significant meaning. theres nothing wrong with being described as conventionally attractive, though it does raise suspicion, but someone described as looking like a blind carpenters thumb in no way means they dont have great traits and people who love them their self worth was never in question at all
in all truthfulness everyone written by terry pratchett is allowed to be ugly in a lot of ways, from c.m.o.t dibbler to lu tze everyone has a certain organic way they just congealed into being with prominent flaws fully visible because often they are not really flaws, or they are flaws but they dont think of them that way. but in the case of the women that being allowed to be ugly is a very liberating status that allows them to be far more visceral and opens so many possibilities
On October 4, at about 2:20pm Eastern Standard Time (EST), FEMA is doing an emergency alert test. This means that all phones, regardless of if they have been placed in do not disturb will go off with that beeping noise. If you have a secret backup phone that you need the people you’re with to not know you have, set a reminder to turn it all the way off.
For apple phones, this means holding the power button for five seconds and swiping the “power off” switch that shows up on the screen. Same with androids and early google pixels, except you’ll be tapping a button. For google pixels 6 and later, you’ll hold the power button and the volume up button at the same time. To turn on for all phones, you’ll hit the power button and wait a sec.
Remember that the alert will still come through when you turn your phone back on, so make sure that you are in a place where that noise is safe.
Note that, for whatever reason, if they can’t put out the alert, the backup test date is October 11th.
The link below is to the official press release with the information.
