We're All Mad Here

Damn, I thought that you were going to find a weird solution. But this is my reason for disliking Halsin more than any other character.

... Because he's a highly skilled Druid who is the only one capable of understanding a deeply complex curse?

In character, he has spent a hundred years, moping around, trying to learn the way to get to Thaniel, to break the Shadow curse.

If by "moping around" you mean researching the curse and working to gain favor with Silvanus so that he can be blessed with a way into the Shadowfell to rescue Thaniel while ALSO trying his best in a position he was set up for failure at, then yes! You're absolutely right, he's been moping!

In the process it seams that he has neglectedd his duties at the Emerald Grove, which is now a hot bed of Shadow Druid intrigue.

Or, hear me out, he never wanted to be a leader, and was bad at being a leader because no one ever taught him leadership skills before forcing him into a position he never wanted after a battle traumatic enough to give him literal PTSD, and his pleas for the Emerald Grove's parent organization (the Emerald Enclave) went ignored, leaving him entirely on his own?

More than half the druids easily follow Kagha, given the chance.

More than half the USA now follows Trump. Does this mean Obama was a failure of a leader, or does it mean that propaganda from fascists is terrifyingly effective?

He hasa also never travelled to the nearby Baldur's Gate, never had contact with Jaheira, or others who were part of the battle against Ketheric. etc.

He specifically says, if asked, that he thought Jaheira died, and is relieved to learn she didn't. The only survivors he knew of were the ones he rescued himself. ALSO, even if he did find Jaheira, guess what? Nothing would happen. Jaheira says multiple times that as sad as the Curse makes her, she does NOT care enough to try and lift it. She cares about the Absolute, and that's it.

In game, he gets himself captured, requires that you save him, and kill 3 leaders, whilst he sits around in the worg pen, whittling a piece of wood or somthing.

A bold-faced lie. He offers to come help you fight, and he only stays behind if you specifically tell him his bear form is a liability.

Then IF you have done everything that he wants, when you find Art at Last Light Inn, he demands that you cover his escape whilst he wanders off to rescue Oliver.

... Do you mean Thaniel? If so, did you just ignore the part where he warns you the portal will fail if anyone else goes in with him? In fact, in earlier versions of the game, there was literally a scene where you could try to enter the portal and cause just that thing to happen, dooming the land to be cursed forever.

He offers no benefit to your party, and if you make a single mistake, the Shadow Curse stays.

"A single mistake" as in getting the only person capable of lifting the curse killed, or not doing the things necessary to lift the curse? Yes, most curses tend to stay when the conditions to break the curse aren't met. This is like watching Shrek and whining that Fiona would have stayed stuck transforming into an ogre every night if no one ever found her. That's how curses work, genius, welcome to the fantasy genre!

Most of the game Larian offers alternative solutions. This is one situation where they do not, and it feels wrong.

By being a jerk, you're actively making your life harder and less pleasant. This is because we're a social species, and we do this thing called "mirroring" usually unconsciously, so people tend to reflect the behavior you put out, back to you.

Also you can intentionally be kinder with people, and they'll be kinder to you.

It was a busy night, and apparently the bar and kitchen were both running a little behind. Mid conversation , a woman strode up to Steff and his friend and aggressively said "I get that you're having a nice time, guys, but some of us are still waiting on drinks, so do you think you could do your jobs?"

Before either could answer, the bar manager materialised.

"Well, he's a glass collector and he's one of the acts on tonight," she said politely, pointing them out. "So, neither of them can help you. But I'm the manager, can I help?"

("I specified that," the manager told Steff afterwards, "because if she's going to be a dick, I'm going to waste her time by telling her why she's wrong and has just been stupid before I help her.")

"Yes," said the woman, now gearing up to get good and annoyed to compensate for her embarrassment. "We've been waiting for our drinks for over half an hour! This is ridiculous!"

"I'm sorry about that," says the manager. "We're super busy tonight, as you can see. What's your order number? I'll check its status."

The woman gave it. The manager looked it up.

"Ah," said the manager. "I see the problem - these were ordered twelve minutes ago, but there's currently a twenty minute wait, as you can see on the board. I'll see what we can do to speed it up, though, and we'll get to it as soon as we can."

The woman grumbled and left.

The manger put her one lower in the queue.

Five minutes later, a second woman from a different group arrived.

"Sorry, it's very possible I'm being a bother and you'll get to it soon," she smiled. "But I just wondered if there's an update on our order? It's been a while."

"I'm so sorry," the manager said, "we're super busy. Let me check for you... Yes, you're still in the queue. We'll get to you as soon as possible, shouldn't be long now."

"Oh!" says the woman. "No, no worries, I just thought I'd double check to make sure we hadn't somehow dropped off the system. Thank you!"

She left, and the manager put her one higher in the queue. When her order was made, the manager added an extra bottle of beer, and a little note that said "Sorry for the wait :)"

And I tell this tale because, the thing is... If this is typical behaviour, that first woman probably goes her whole life never quite being happy, never quite content, always missing out on free moments of human connection. By contrast, the second woman goes her life getting those little gestures, being seen that little bit earlier, having a slightly smoother time of things.

And neither probably even realises. In a thousand small ways, Second Woman has a happier time than First Woman, entirely down to their behaviour.

Back before this site banned porn, it was all tagged with whatever clear label matched it. If you wanted to search for, say, bdsm, you could type that in and find exactly that. And, crucially, it meant you could filter it out, too. Meaning that people who wanted to find that content could do so with ease, and people who wanted to not find that content on their dash by surprise could also ensure that with ease.

But then tumblr banned porn thanks to pressure from the Apple App store, and ----- did porn go away? Nope. It just stopped being labelled as porn. There's still all the same raunchy content on here as there was before -- its just not tagged, or its tagged with euphemisms, or tagged with creative tags that circumvent the bans, or tagged with completely unrelated should-be-innocuous tags like "oceans" or "photography" or "flowers" or etc.

Which not only makes it harder to find, but also, more importantly, makes it harder to avoid.

Nowadays I can be scrolling my dash and get slapped suddenly in the face by a post that is decidedly not G-rated, and its because neither the OP or the person who reblogged it has tagged with anything, meaning my blocklist (which I have in place so that I'm not surprised by a raunchy gifset while I'm scrolling my dash in the work lunchroom, surrounded by colleagues) hasn't caught it and filtered it out.

And the same thing is going to happen on other platforms. If you ban porn, the outcome is never "there is no more porn" -- the outcome is just "porn is harder to find now and simultaneously harder to avoid."

This post was prompted by a random post i saw earlier today which ive since lost, but which was an advert for some """fishing gear""" that looked pretty much like a dildo. And who knows, maybe that item WAS some kind of obscure fishing gear. But it made me think of how, with the censorship and purity culture infecting every corner of the internet, it means we ARE going to wind up with sites that are selling sex toys that are labelled as innocuous everyday items.

So imagine youre a kid and you get suddenly super into fishing, and you're looking into building a christmas wish list, so you research a bunch of fishing tackle. And there, nestled amongst the lures and weights and lines and tackle boxes, is a bunch of sex toys. None of them are labelled as sex toys. Theyre labelled as miscellaneous fishing tackle. Because, unbeknownst to you, the sex toys companies -- no longer able to advertise their wares honestly -- have started labelling their dildos as fishing lures and their whips as fishing poles and their butt plugs as fishing weights. And those In The Know are aware that to purchase sex toys, you need to look up these Regular Non-sexy Products, and you'll find the raunchy products youre after.

But meanwhile, anyone who wants to find ACTUAL fishing lures and poles and weights suddenly has to contend with mislabelled sex toys showing up in their search results.

Hey. Hey. Listen. Come close. Closer. Yeah. Listen.

Paste em on, x-acto em out. Make em reusable!

Examples: