Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Fort Joy Harbour 21hr49 New drip, a dragon, and returning to Fort Joy. Tonight's first stop was the dungeon where the source vat is. Blessed the lever, went inside, got more source, opened up the over-elaborate magic chest, took the helm. So I've got the helm, hands, and feet of this set, I assume we're therefore looking for a chest piece as well, at minimum? I feel like I've been almost everywhere on the island so far, but there's still the area with the shriekers. Then I got more source and went to the chest with the force field. Blessed that and released a skeleton slave ship captain, he summoned some minions to fight us and ran away. He's the last soul jar that I have, so it's going to be another one of those. Killed the minions, read his diary, went to a cave that I had seen but forgotten about, and spoke to his door. Now here I don't think I was going to make it past a dialogue check to avoid combat with him because I have yet to pass a dialogue check in this game. Unfortunately without having a chance to break his soul jar. Also his spare hand attacks us right off the bat, that's rude. This is definitely the hardest fight I've done so far. It was nearly impossible to use my biggest moves because it was such a tight space. His minions do a ton of magic combos that clearly indicate their AI is better than my strategy brain. They're even using skills I haven't even seen before, I guess because they're level 8 and we're still level 7. They killed someone for the first time after brainwashing nearly everyone, it was a bad time. So I reloaded to before the combat and just broke his soul jar, but then there's no combat and I felt like I was missing out of EXP possibly by doing that. So I went back in a third time and tried combat again. We had another death, Fane got taken down, but succeeded in the end and then very quickly opened and smashed the soul jar so he couldn't respawn. Asshole. But he did leave us a cool armour set for Anar, which is a small upgrade on everything she was already wearing and the whole set makes you exude a Charm effect around you which is funny. From there we went to the dragon and reluctantly gave it a wand so it could be free. It expressed some possible reciprocal lizard solidarity in the future and fucked off. But we still have another source wand so nbd. Looking at the map again, I decided what I should really do is go back to Fort Joy and clear that out now, collect some EXP see if I can get to level 8 before running the final gauntlet. There's a warp point next to a pulled up bridge into the fort, and I did some teleporting to get a few characters up to behind the harbour without triggering combat. And, yep, the level 4 Magisters just got wiped out by us now without breaking a sweat. Picked up lots of lockpicks and nails around here. Also found a hole in the ground that goes into the dungeon, that place is a sieve there's like 5 different ways in and out. There's a corpse on a beach down there that I went down to take a look at via teleportation, but it's just an elf who demands to be eaten. Unfortunately I don't have an elf in the party, sorry. I guess I'll take her hand with me for a bit in case one turns up? I'm pretty sure Sebile dies if you leave her here though. It was tempting to go into the fort from here, but I know it will take a while to fight all these magisters. Next time. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Fort Joy Harbour 21hr49 was last edited: 5 hours, 32 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-29-dos2/ #fortjoy #harbour #exp #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Braccus' Tower 19h47 Terrible people and undead. A lot of last night really felt like a waste of time so tonight I was a bit more focused and productive. I went back to the refugee camp first and met the one former pig I was able to talk to after saving and she has a great merchant inventory. I got the whole gory backstory of the priestess and gave her her soul jar. Since she's helping us out it only seems fair. And also I can't really use the soul jars that easily so who cares. I understand you can absorb source from them and sort of keep them as a mobile source of Source. Once I'd sold and bought some stuff I waypointed back to Braccus' Tower and actually went inside. There are three undead in there who are definitely in the soul jars that I have with me. Got into a fight almost immediately. However I kinda forgot about the eternal dead thing and was rummaging around in jars when they respawned. I fought them one more time, then got the jar out and only got halfway through the dialogue required to destroy it when they respawned anyway! So I reloaded back to just after the first time I killed them and rushed through two of the dialogues without really reading them. One of them still respawned but then that was faster to deal with. Sheesh. I probably could have thrown them or teleported them or dropped them on the ground and attacked them or something but I don't know that it would have been faster. With free run of the tower, we ran into yet another friendly rat. This one only speaks in lies. So I tried the same thing as worked on the other one, casting restoration on it, but that killed it. :( Should have known it would be the reverse. I also didn't see anything in here to deal with the eternally burning Historian either. Instead I found a secret room, a cursed chest that required leaving and going to get more Source and coming back to Bless it, and then getting a set of gauntlets attached to some sort of quest. There is also a well in here with three corpses who want to be given water and then want to be given coin to pass through the river Styx or whatever. I first tried to throw a water balloon at the well and somehow they just... stuck to the top of it? And then nobody could reach them? So I had to teleport it right next to the well and fortunately that worked. I mean I could have used Rain but I thought this would be fine... I remembered some sort of exploit regarding this well so I looked it up, if you give them 150 gold they'll give you a random purple item in return. And you can do the dialogue with them on every character, and if you use Fane's mask you can do it as every race on every character but I didn't have the patience for that. Behind the tower is a difficult to find path down to a beach and there's another cursed chest here surrounded by a force field. The Journal says this is where the disembodied hand was pointing. But I'll need more Source to get in here as well. I also went into the witches' cave, but this wasn't as involved as I thought it would be, just straight into a fight. Since Anar isn't going to be seduced by a necromancer. And saw what happened to her last partner. This fight was genuinely a bit risky, we were taking a shitload of damage from the fucking beetles she summoned and she managed to cast Diseased on Lohse as well as Chain of Pain so we just had to... ignore that. Sorry Lohse. We killed the witch so that's nice. She has a black rose which I also know from videos you can brew into a tea or something like that to get a more extended stat boost effect from it? So I'm just going to hold onto it. I'm already carrying around so much crafting shit what's one more flower. After I offload some more shit at the camp I might as well un-curse the lever that lets you into the dungeon area where the source dispenser thing is. I already have two wands that should deal with the shriekers at this point, the one from the witch and one from Braccus' tomb where the soul jars are. They are limited use, but IDK how many shriekers we'll really need to kill. This place sure is just packed with terrible people and gross environments hunh. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Braccus' Tower 19h47 was last edited: 6 hours, 15 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-28-dos2-2/ #tower #got #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026 Week 44 Links Pumpkin muffins, a zen goalie, just doing things, and some other stuff. I'm not working this week and haven't gotten my November work shifts yet so I'm just being anxious about that. Got my covid and flu shots today and am back to masking indoors and on transit as much as possible. Had some financial stuff come up that I now have to deal with and am pissed about having to deal with. Being on benefits means even just accepting free money is complicated and hazardous. I made pumpkin muffins from this recipe this weekend for the second time and they're pretty good. For the second round I roasted some pumpkin seed kernels with just vegetable oil and salt and those are pretty good too. They should be FODMAP safe if you're okay with gluten. I know the vast majority of people reading the blog don't give a shit about sports, but even if you don't I have to link to an interview with Devin Cooley, goalie for the Calgary Flames (hockey). Goalies are known for being eccentric, but the vast majority of professional atheletes give the most mind-numbingly boring interviews possible because they are a) not very creatively minded people, and b) media-trained to within an inch of their life by the time they're a teenager. But Cooley has been giving hilariously candid post-game interviews after the last few games where he goes into his zen-like process for achieving flow state during games. The media people are going to stop making him available for interviews at this rate, he's just too interesting. The past is dead, there's nothing for you there." (Also I love how he responds to questions with a firm "Yes." to give himself time to think and never makes eye contact. God bless.) If people would just by Herman I believe firmly that nobody should ever (seriously) use the phrase "If only people would just..." because it automatically assumes that people are stupid and don't know what's good for them and it's their fault for doing or not doing whatever it is. If people aren't just doing something then clearly it's not just that easy. It's honestly usually a sign that somebody doesn't know what they're talking about, because no problem is solveable with something that is just. If you think it is, that means you don't understand the problem. And if you're wishful thinking that people will just change their behaviour, you'll be waiting a long fucking time for that to happen so better not to start. Change systems and structures to make things actually easy and people will just do it. If they aren't just doing it, by definition it is isn't easy. Why isn't it easy? Solve that first. I know when Canadians complain about our housing prices a lot of people in other countries (especially Americans) commiserate, but seriously by every measure I've ever seen Canada is much much worse. Just ignore the anti-immigration fascist this article chose to quote as to the reason why. It's not immigration. Fran made a blog palimpsest Stealing this article about AI vibecoders stealing game concepts from demos to remind everyone of that game 2048 that was briefly popular in about 2014. It was a generic and substantially less difficult rip off of indie game Threes! which I have had on my phone continuously since about 2015. This Olympic sprinter is now bedbound for 22 hours a day by Katie Falkingham (BBC Sport) about a woman who has post-covid CFS/ME. She pushed herself to do the interview despite the possible post-exertional malaise consequences because she knows that it's much harder to say an Olympic sprinter is just "lazy" or "making it up". MapQuest is now showing surveillance camera locations across Canada and the US and the most interesting part of this article is that they don't deserve the credit for this at all, they're just using OpenStreetMap data. The Price Tags of War by Joseph Busby (naked capitalism) about the world of "reinsurance". Very unfortunately relatable article interviewing multiple people who have been laid off or quit from video games journalism by Luke Plunkett (aftermath) Did you know that one guy can be credited to implementing ukuleles as a teaching instrument in Canadian elementary schools? A cute blog post by David on behalf of his dog on the topic of their move Laura Michet on a game called Dog Online that evokes Neopets, which I played as a kid due to being exactly that age, but never really got as emotionally invested in it as some people. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay 2026 Week 44 Links was last edited: 3 hours, 47 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-27-week-44-links/ #cooley #devincooley #calgaryflames #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Braccus' Tower 17hr23 Pigs and dragons and gargoyles. I shouldn't have played so late so I'll keep this brief. With the Bless power from the goddess I went back to the burning pigs and blessed one of them and it was no longer in flame. This took much longer and with much more swearing than I am really happy about because they keep moving around and there's no way to stop them to target them except to have one character trap them in conversation, but that is its own challenge. Once it was blessed and I exited the convo, the pig started running off, so I ran after it to try to dialogue with it. It, unintentionally I think, lead us into a trap with a Voidwoken and a bunch of undead. Didn't know that Voidwoken could talk, that's creepy. Genuinely a tough fight, they were really focusing on Fane and his HP was getting pretty low. And once it was done the pig was gone, but one goddess or another spoke up, I didn't actually read/hear what she said because I wasn't paying attention and there isn't any log in this game so idk. She put down a healing spot so I think it was probably the goddess with the water in the sanctuary, but it was annoying because it kept damaging Fane every time he walked over it. And we did a lot of fucking walking in circles and avoiding poison and stepping in oil and being slowed down trying to catch the rest of the pigs and Bless them and then needing to find more Source. There were at least two puddles nearby and one of them seemed to respawn, but when there was one pig left there was no Source nearby so I had to have one person hold it in conversation and have Anar run back to the dungeon with the source vat and slurp up more and then come back. And I'm not sure it was worth it but the EXP was nice. Upon doing some more wandering I found one of the healed pigs and sent it back to the Sanctuary so maybe we'll get a reward out of this. After that realized I explored some more and went back to where I had run into a Source dog before and spoke to it and there were a few more skeletons in there as well. Then further wandering lead to a beach with a bunch of ice, where we found a chained up dragon. Broke down the pillars holding it chained up and spoke to it and it indicated we should chase down his ex in a cave nearby to free him. The Journal indicates that we are doing this because maybe the dragon can fly us off the island but I'll just do it because lizard solidarity. Going towards the map marker there's a waypoint there, but also I saw the building up on a cliff above the cave and decided to try getting in there first. Going up to it makes a gargoyle talk to you but since we already have Braccus' ring it teleports us inside what is obviously a maze. With a bunch of locked doors. So time for some tedious teleportation! Anar can self-teleport, but then Fane and Lohse have to teleport each other and Red Prince through every barrier. Eventually we got to a room with a burning Historian and there was an annoying ambush. Anar was the only one actually in the room, the rest were behind a locked door, so I had to waste time moving people into range. And turns out after all that Bless doesn't work on this burning asshole so there was no point. Waste of Source. I should have Examined him before trying, it says it's permanent although I'm not sure but I think the pigs also said it was permanent. Whatever. Teleporting back out of the maze feeling like I wasn't rewarded at all for all that. Maybe I'll have to go through the witches' lair to kill her and free him or something or other. I wonder if this witch is one of the ones we have a Soul Jar of, that would make defeating her faster. We also healed a rat of its curse to only tell the truth, that didn't lead anywhere either. But at this rate Anar is going to get elected Patron Saint of Rats. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Braccus' Tower 17hr23 was last edited: 1 hour, 28 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-28-dos2/ #voidwoken #bless #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Amadia's Sanctuary 15hr34 Skinks and rats and goddesses and illusory assholes. Right before I decided to get off for the night I decided to at least offload some of the wares I'd picked up. And I accidentally just gave about 400 gold worth of stuff to a merchant for free because I didn't balance the fucking barter. Argh augh eugh painful. And my last save was way back before I did a bunch of inventory management and re-equipping of things, I'm not doing all of that. The merchant doesn't even sell anything good, the bonus to attitude is useless. I feel like this game should auto-save whenever you use a waypoint, but nope. I got so much stuff to sell because after exploring and talking to everybody in the Seeker camp I followed the pointing skeletal hand and got to a secret cave that has been marked on my map for ages. On the way there we fought some more evil lizards that looked like giant skinks. I say again: why are all the enemies lizards. It's unfair. The seeker camp itself is pretty bare bones, not a lot of people to talk to, no idea how these people aren't going to all get killed trying to take on the Magisters. The priestess here has a crying statue and gives us the hint of where to find the source wands, even though we've already had five hints as to where they are and why we want them. She also asks to bring back any soul jars we find, that's going to become relevant later. Once past the poor skinks, we entered the cave and ran into a rude asshole who makes illusions named Trompdoy - like trompe d'oeil as in opical illusions, geddit? Anyway tried to ignore him and his little traps and just travel through the caves, but had to fight him and his illusions twice. The first time he popped up and said something rude I tried to teleport him into what looked like a river, but he landed on an invisible platform so that revealed that gimmick conveniently. No real risk of dying, defeated him sufficiently to make it to a room with a riddle statue. A nearby rat gave a hint and with some pen and paper I got it fine. Still opened all the incorrect doors anyway because that's just the kind of game player I am. A bit fun doing an old school dungeon like this. Lots of rewards in here and a source wand and a bunch of soul jars. Including one for Amadia herself, revealing why she can't leave this island for real. We already killed the necromancer lady who is in one of the other jars, but I picked up all of them to deal with them later regardless. I don't always pay attention to NPC names very carefully, maybe I've already met all of these people. It was after leaving here that I did all the inventory management and waypointed back to the sanctuary that I accidentally gave away a bunch of stuff. Ugh. What a waste. We didn't find the owner of the skeletal hand though, maybe I overlooked it or maybe it's somewhere else. Oh yeah and met a god. I wasn't expecting it to happen here but I've watched enough videos about the game to kind of know what was going on when we landed in the god zone. It sounds an awful lot like one of those situations where gods are using people for their own benefit without much regard for the people themselves. Anar ignored the seductive song of her goddess and the "ooh look at all the power I can give you" stuff is creepy. The conversation with Sir Loras afterwards was much more interesting. I like his idea of a giant acorn (asteroid?) hitting the planet and wiping everyone out. The gods in this world may be just basically powerful aliens who are raising a champion in order to ascend them to godhood and thereby fight for them on the godly plane of existence against other gods, but that's not our problem! At the same time, the whole "gods are just like people and don't deserve to be worshipped" stuff is so reddit atheist teenager it's hard to take seriously as a concept. Like sure I'm agnostic as a rule but it automatically makes anyone who feels genuine belief in a deity out to be malicious or naive which is a boring oversimplification. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Amadia's Sanctuary 15hr34 was last edited: 3 hours, 11 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-25-dos2/ #originalsin #divinityoriginal #amadia #act #sanctuary #seeker #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Hollow Marshes 13h24 Lots of undead and a bear and a lizard lady. It's amazing how much time I spend in this game not just with inventory management but skill management. I loathe that the game adds any little thing you pick up into your skill hotbars. Between that and switching skills around between battles it becomes a mess. Since last time we finished up in the ruins in the sort of middle-north coast area I continued along that path and ran into a dead bear, a sad bear cub, and a blinded magister. Killed the magister after trying to get the story out of him, sounds like undead, sure whatever. Going along a bit further I found some more shriekers and a guy who was level 7 so left them alone and decided to start going more south and back west where we came from. There's a crumbling stone viaduct and from up there you can see a bunch of pigs running around on fire. Found out that it was necrofire, did not have anything on hand to put it out, so I guess I'll just have to leave them to their eternal torment or whatever. Going back towards the waypoint triggered a fight with an undead necromancer who didn't want to be friends and so we had to finish her and two minions off. Very easy fight, so hopefully that means I'm at an appropriate level for this area at least. Going further south here to the southern coast and then following that along east lead to finding a skeleton hand sticking out of the sand. Continuing along with our non-aggression towards the undead policy Anar pulled it out of the sand and it started pointing in a certain direction. So we picked it up and started going. There was a skeleton buried on a cliff up there, but that wasn't the answer. Going into the forest a bit from there, there are a bunch of exploding bulbs that seem to be immune to all forms of damage. They're in a circle around a chest with a bunch of corpses around. Hmmm seems suspicious! So I had Anar separate from the group and zoop (shadow step type skill) up to the chest and open it, triggering all the trap bulbs around her but not hitting her. There was some stuff in there. We've been accumulating some okay armour since getting out of Fort Joy but only one purple item, and it's a bow and I don't have a ranged character. :/ I could respecc Anar to Rogue/Huntsman to try it out, but going back to the mirror in Fort Joy is too risky right now and I need to live with my decisions to a certain extent. Anyway, taking a closer look at the map, the cliff with the skeleton we dug up is pretty close to a beach that allows us to bypass the bulbs, so did some teleporting to get everybody over there and turns out this is the Seeker camp we were supposed to be looking for. Go figure. Looks an awful lot like a certain other camp of rebels in a certain other game. Very cute lizard lady on guard here. Would love to find a merchant to offload some crap here. I suspect this isn't where the skeletal hand wanted to go, but we'll get there eventually. Also noticed that since it's a skeletal hand you can pick locks with it -- and it might not be single use. Keeping a random undead hand around to use as an infinite lockpick would be very funny. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Hollow Marshes 13h24 was last edited: 13 hours, 54 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-24-dos2/ #going #fortjoy #anar #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026 Week 43 Digest Starting new job, reading more British mysteries, playing video games, listening to new music. I've had my first two training shifts for the new job. Day shifts are definitely more boring than nights. And there are still a lot of questions I don't know the answer to. But it's a chill atmosphere and low stress and the managers have been good to me so far. I wouldn't say I'm enjoying it as much as Previous Job, but also I'm already sliding into winter malaise and general discontent and that won't be going anywhere until March. Reading Cecil John Charles Street had about a half dozen aliases because he was so prolific in writing mystery novels he otherwise would have flooded the market. He was a bestseller and member of the Detection Club. And now, apparently, nobody has heard of him and most of his books are out of print. They are definitely more of the action-adventure genre and his writing is very to the point, but I like that. I hate reading constant odes to the English countryside. The Secret of High Eldersham (1930) by "Miles Burton", Street's most prolific alias, starts in a distinctly Edgar Alan Poe occult-in-a-remote-inbred-village manner, but this is a Detection Club mystery and we are not allowed to murder people with magic, so a Scotland Yard police inspector and a high society Peter Wimsey kind of guy have to figure out what's really going on. If you've read enough novels from this time period I think the explanation of what's going on will be pretty predictable but it's still pretty fun getting there. It's not a true fair play mystery though, the solution to the actual murder is almost impossible to come up with on your own. I liked this sufficiently to see what others of his books I could dig up and Death in the Tunnel (1936) was next easiest to acquire so that's what I'm reading now. But these are definitely on the "fun romps" side of mystery novels rather than the intellectual puzzle or deep character development. Playing I've ended up liking the current Fate/GO GUDAGUDA event more than I expected. I also found out that Oryou is actually Orochi the snake god so of course had to pick up Sakamoto Ryouma to get her. My collection of serpent god(desses) is ever-growing. I got him after 33 pulls which is not bad at all. But I don't have enough items to ascend him all the way and I don't have enough QP to up his skills. :| So back to the grind. I've started putting my DOS2 playthrough diary on here instead of mastodon. It's better for longer form stuff instead of making a 5-post thread. And it's not like anybody interacts with it much on mastodon anyway. I'll be backdating a few posts from mastodon I think, when I have time. Watching Still watching Traitors Canada, Celeb Traitors UK, Survivor, Great British Bake Off, Taskmaster, and Traitors USA which pretty much covers all 7 days of the week. Listening I bought a bunch of new albums last week: Arcade High - Arcade High URTOPIA - VHS Glitch I also highly recommend VHS Glitch's Halloween themed albums such as They Made Me An Animal, Night Hunt, and Carved. Walk With Me - Sabrepulse rhythm pools 02 - effervescence - 2 Mello Human Voice - Four Tet ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay 2026 Week 43 Digest was last edited: 22 hours, 31 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-23-week-43-digest/ #detectionclub #high #arcadehigh #job #traitors #reading #previousjob #still #street #charlesstreet #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Hollow Marshes 12hrs Rats are better people than people. Having escaped Fort Joy proper I figured we'd get some leisurely exploration in, but it was just one combat after another. Can't go five metres in this place without somebody trying to kill you. First went along the north coast and ran into the witch who was on the slave ship, who said some ominous things and then died. Fane got the mask he wanted without me having to find one of every race to face-rip, win/win. Further along there we found a turret with some electrified smog at the top and some corpses, got some good loot out of there. And you can see a big ship that I assume is the one we're going to commandeer out of here eventually. Going back inland a bit there were some vines up into a nice flowery area where we met someone who didn't want to kill us - she's one of the Seekers and gave us some hints as to where to go and that we needed to hopefully find one of two people. Also met our first Shrieker. Interestingly enough, electrified crucifixion came up in a book I read recently... Catholics, amirite. So sneaking around behind the Shrieker I just wanted to take a look, but I heard some weird sound effects and when I used the "spy mode" (cursor mode? it's L3 by default I think) to take a look there was a battle going on. So I tried to sneak people into better positions, but it didn't work, we got caught, and it was another incredibly awkward and slow battle but at least we had the high ground. I need to get a better movement skill on Red Prince because right now he has to run to his enemies to get into melee range and it's a PITA. Then there's lines of sight and banisters fucking up my ability to spellcast. Anyway, we saved this Gareth guy, I go to walk out the front door, whoopsie, there were a bunch of enemies out there waiting. So another battle with awful positioning. I didn't even realize until like 80% done the battle that Lohse hadn't even joined the battle, she was far enough back in the group that she didn't get sucked in, so I was fighting a person down the whole time. So I guess I'm either pretty okay at combat in this game or pretty bad. Once Gareth was gone, we could go into the crypt thing itself and found a dying diseased guy. Got all the deets from him and then put him out of his misery -- from a distance. Then found an infinite source dispenser? Thing? I don't even know how Source magic works yet, Anar is the only one with her collar off so she's the only one who can use it anyway. But good to know it's there I guess. We also chatted with a very funny rat and promised to come back to chat more later. I think Anar has more successful conversations with animals than with people. 12 hours in, probably going to do some more wandering next, see what else we can find out here. Everybody in Fort Joy was all "oooh it's so dangerous out there!" but so far the only danger has been the Catholic assholes I've been fighting all along. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Hollow Marshes 12hrs was last edited: 3 hours, 9 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-22-dos2/ #fortjoy #going #got #shrieker #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Fort Joy Leaving Fort Joy. 10hrs 30mins and I've made it out of Fort Joy. It's a good thing I did a run around making sure I'd got everything. I remembered that Fane needed a Face Ripper and supposedly someone in the dungeons was supposed to have it. But I already had talked to all the prisoners. I missed that the guy most likely to be ripping people's faces off is... the psycho torturer guy. Now that I have the teleport point down there I can bring the whole party in and just walked right up to the guy and started a fight. I'm glad all the tongueless monks didn't join in though, just a couple. I love Teleport, I love just yeeting enemies across the battlefield to where it's convenient for me. I don't have movement skills on all my characters yet so it's pretty necessary. So after killing him we practised using the face ripper on his face, so there's a human mask whenever I can find the other ingredients for crafting. I then left the dungeons and did a run around to make sure I didn't miss anything and found a hidden trap door in the cave with the blind seer. That leads down to some Dark Souls looking guy in armour pinned to a wall with a spear. If this was a Soulsbourne there's no way I'd release him, but did this time, then realized he's the owner of the suspicious jars in the suspicious chamber in the prisons. Soooo found yet another entrance to there from the big Braccus Rex statue and picked the right one and broke it to release him. Lots of EXP out of that quest. I also did the Arena fight and Anar was deemed possibly, maybe, The One. Sure. Then it seems like the merchant will take off the collar, but only for Anar, not any of the others. Bah. Fortunately when we were down in the dungeon we killed some Magisters that were hassling some kid, and the kid said he knew somebody who could help us if we left on a boat with him. So with all that done, the team is level 5 which seems very reasonable level to leave the starting area. So decided to take that rowboat out of the dungeon and see what happens. What happened is I finally was able to make friends with the kitty cat and can now summon it whenever. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay Divinity Original Sin 2 - Act 1 - Fort Joy was last edited: 12 hours, 53 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-21-dos2/ #fortjoy #originalsin #divinityoriginal #act #leavingfort #faceripper #sure #anar #teleport #darksouls #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026 Week 43 Links Music organization and the week's links. A couple years ago I went through my archive of music files and re-organized and re-tagged them using MusicBrainz Picard. I then discovered that the music player I use on Android, Musicolet, uses only an older version of the tagging standard so every time I edited a tag on the app, for example to change the genre, it totally fucked the rest of the tags up. Up until now I've been syncing a selection of music files with syncthing and using Musicolet or other local players, but I'm finally trying to make the switch to navidrome/subsonic on the NAS and then some sort of streaming app on the phone. But Navidrome has its own tagging preferences. So I'm going through them all again. The number of loose files, remixes, Japanese albums, rare soundtracks, and other files that simply do not exist on MusicBrainz in a sensible way makes this take a long time. But once you figure out how it works, this is a very powerful organizing tool. I'm testing out various Android apps now to see if any of them match Musicolet for customization and functionality. Ava discusses an Austrian case of a student wearing Meta glasses at school Canadian PM is lobbying the UK not to nationalize water on behalf of CIBC 'You are not fragile. You are outnumbered.' by Peter Fonagy (British Psychological Society) The quote that stood out to me was: There is something else I have learnt, both from my own experience and from many years of research. We often think that people must first recover before they can return to education, work, friendships and ordinary life. But the relationship works in both directions. Belonging, having something to do that matters, feeling useful, being understood and having people who are interested in you are not simply rewards for becoming well. They are often part of how we become well. A collection of illegally recorded live concerts on cassette is being slowly digitized as they disintigrate once again proving that copyright law merely hinders the preservation of human creativity, not help it. Waymos are coming to Toronto and thanks I hate it. The leap second has been abolished 'Sovereign Citizen' conspiracy theorists defrauding the CRA for millions meanwhile chasing down disabled people who mistakenly received too much as covid benefits. Clothing Repair Help at iFixit What is happening with India's Unified Payments Interface, the world's largest real-time payment system? by Nick Corbishley (naked capitalism) ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay 2026 Week 43 Links was last edited: 20 hours, 19 minutes ago https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/2026-10-19-week-43-links/ #links #musicolet #navidrome #musicbrainzpicard #britishpsychological #peterfonagy #psychologicalsociety #sovereigncitizen #nickcorbishley #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit