oh its just occurred to me that my brother owns a fucking forge… i am going to be SO annoying to him once he’s done with finals

• BASE GAME GWENTE QUESTE COMPLETE. I AM KING.
• you know how i was saying i wanted to use a Nilfgaard deck for the aesthetic well i played a bunch of practice rounds against merchants and put together a good Nilf deck and won the passiflora running Emhyr the Relentless and it was great
• i think i might try a Monster deck for the BoW and HoS gwent quests but that’s pretty far in the future.
• also, i managed to hit 100 hours on this game without doing a single main quest in skellige lmfao
• i learned how to install w3 mods so i could put in Always Full Exp. i waited so long for skellige that nothing was giving me any exp anymore and seeing ‘received: 2xp’ after quests is kind of not fun. now i’m enjoying crossing contracts off again! overleveling is a fake gamer lie.
• i figured out the incredibly hilarious fact that geralt’s honey-collecting method involves setting the entire beehive on fire and waiting for it to drop to the ground. geralt hasn’t been friends with bees since he was torturing them with jugs as a witcherling and he’s not about to start now. i haven’t yet figured out what i’m meant to do with all these honeycombs but i sure do got ’em!
• the bit where geralt gets put in skellige prison made me chilly. they made him go barefoot :( on the other hand, geralt interacting with what passes for a justice system on this world is fantastic and heartbreaking, he is embittered and impatient and he wants everyone to hurry up and just tell him exactly how bad he’s going to get fucked over today
• the way geralt’s face fucking DROPS when eredin shows up in the cave of dreams. [MUFFLED SCREAMING]
• also, the way blueboy lists off the herbs everyone’s gotta take—hemlock, henbane, nightshade, etc.—and geralt is like whoa that’s gonna be a hell of a trip like FHSKFJSK of course mr. i-drink-poison-for-a-living knows exactly what kinda trip they’re gonna have. and he’s still just like fuck it this may as well happen to me today.
• hjalmar’s quest was actually a tremendous amount of fun, i was kind of putting it off because i don’t enjoy boss battles, but it reminded me a lot of being a kid and how much i loved reading the bits with odysseus and polyphemus (and rereading. i swear i read the polyphemus sequence over twice as often as any of the rest of it). the odyssey was one of my favorite books as a child. yes i was that child. getting folan from the rock trolls was also a lot of fun and having him around for the rest of the investigation was nice. (amazing he could fire a bow with those burns on his hands tbh.) i’m always ten times more willing to wander into horrible dark caves when i have an npc around to be friends with.
• i would smooch cerys an craite. geralt should not, that would be weird, but i would.
• I PUT THE BABY IN THE FUCKING OVEN
• i don’t even have fucking words for this quest i was like ok cerys i support you and then. oh my god. i SCREAMED. i almost missed the timed choice i was too busy freaking out. like. THIS?? THIS IS THE FUCKING CONTEXT FOR THAT???
• obviously after all that i crowned her queen. who the fuck picks hjalmar over cerys when she’s obviously the superior candidate like crach says he has no preference but the only point he can give in hjalmar’s favor is “skellige wants a monarch who’ll lead them to battle with nilfgaard” like ok sure crach but i’m gonna back the monarch who won’t immediately fling the isles into emhyr’s maw. may the reign of the first queen of skellige be long and prosperous.
• CIRI!!!! IS!!! GAY!!!!!!
• i thought lesbian ciri was just a reasonably popular fanon but no you can look a naked woman straight in the eyes as ciri and say “actually, i prefer women,” i love & support my lesbian daughter
• the entire last wish sequence killed me FUCKING DEAD
• geralt when he says ‘agh, no, not another portal’ and yen tells him to stop whining 😭😭😭
• me: ok geralt lets try for a repeat of the unicorn scene [selects dialogue]
• geralt: you wanna fuck on the top of a mountain in a dead guy’s bed?
• yen: no.
• yennefer, darling and best-beloved as she is to me, actually super needs to stop reading geralt’s mind without permission it isn’t cute or funny. it is also, as far as i can see, an invention of the games. bad cdpr [whacks with newspaper]
• i’ve now let both the succubi go so i can never make a succubus decoction. rip me. the uncraftable recipe in my alchemy tab is gonna bug me but i just won’t stab women for the crime of being Horny if i don’t have to is that so wrong
• i absolutely could not bear to kill any more fucking sirens so around this point i went to get uma. i still have sidequests and Witcher diagrams to get in skellige but sirens and mountains are annoying.
• emhyr: i give you leads as fresh as morning dew and this is what i get?
• me: well after running around the continent on fifty different side quests the leads were all uh… slightly less fresh.
• “forktails this close to the fortress? someone’s been slacking off” go on just drag eskel for filth why don’t you geralt
• time for everyone to go on their Life-Changing Field Trip with Zuko Geralt
• omfg the illusion child with the foglets that Lambert said was copied from his cohort is fucking TINY. it’s probably a reused model because the trainee witchers must have been close to full-grown when they did the trial of the medallion if they were going out on the Path right after but still like… thas bad. witchers are tragedies.
• that geralt and eskel’s idea of quality time is dissecting a katakan together (or rather, eskel dissects a katakan and geralt eats an apple…i desperately hope he got the apple out of his pack because it kind of looked like he grabbed it off the nasty-ass katakan table and that’s Gross, geralt)… these guys are fuckin nerds
• eskel managing to radiate mom friend energy while practically black-out drunk is extremely powerful
• if I was yennefer witnessing three men twice as big as me squeezed into my nice dresses i would have had MUCH harsher words for all of them. those dresses would be unwearable afterwards. also i made the mistake of taking everything off in order to wear yen’s pants which meant geralt woke up on the floor completely naked while everyone else was already busy having their shit together while fully dressed. embarrassing.
• vesemir is an extremely fucked-up old dude. ah yes, you know how old people are, nostalgic for their torture tables, just can’t get rid of those. lambert is right about everything
• emhyr may be a grade-A douché but geralt’s a little bitch. what’s wrong with morvran leading a banner to kaer morhen, i thought we liked morvran. he’s a horse girl and he’s always polite to us. you don’t even know how to command a company of nilfgaardian soldiers geralt. oh no emhyr will have intelligence about kaer morhen if morvran comes!—he would get the same if it was just the soldiers you think his companies aren’t full of spies??? suck it up and play nice for ciri we need bodies in that castle!! suspect geralt went to ask emhyr literally just to lord over him that he was going to do some fancy magic stuff with ciri that emhyr could never, smh
• i have to stop main-questing now and Prepare i want at least three more levels and all of my Witcher gear in order before i head out after ciri
• which means i gotta go kill some more sirens.
• fuck.

genuinely feel kind of bad checking things out from my library’s hoopla

brachyurans:

do you think indra das will write another novel…

i could go track down all their anthology contributions or i could reread Devourers for the third time who am i kidding i’m three pages deep and i’m already crying about alok and izrail again

do you think indra das will write another novel…

• THE GWENT QUEST NEARS ITS CONCLUSION. zero cards left to be won from players of no renown. three cards left in skellige. then…then it is only the four cards left in novigrad: the fucking passiflora tournament
• no i definitely did not spend my first three hours on skellige bopping around signposts to grab all the gwent cards before doing anything else
• technically after this i also have to go get the skellige faction deck and other assorted cards from the dlcs but this is not in my Miraculous Book of Gwent so we shall not worry about it yet.
• i love skellige and how much people in skellige respect Geralt and how nobody calls me a freak while im walking down the streets here. i also love how half the time voice actors can’t quite decide if they want to pronounce the final E in skellige or not.
• finally cleared the skellige part of following the thread and got lambert’s card right before the karadin meeting. idk if they wanted us to believe jad actually changed but his voice actor is the most insincere-sounding motherfucker and anyways the whole Aiden business aside, you can’t make up for engaging in the slave trade by sending a polite letter and donating to local schools, fuck off. i probably wouldn’t have killed him myself (we were in his house, he had no armor and his kids were next door, i don’t like to kill in cold blood) but since lamby was willing to do it for me, well,,
• i finally found my girlfriend !!! geralt loves yen so much, i love yen so much, i will literally implode, i’m so happy i got to run a heist with her making sarcastic comments and helping me not die of taxidermy-related hallucinations (sorry mousesack, i regret nothing)
• geralt be running and scrambling and hauling himself up ledges while yennefer teleported across ten minutes ago and has been Waiting. shes so extra i love her
• i can’t believe yen brought the unicorn all the way to fucking skellige. i mean i can because it’s yen but goddamn, woman, you do not travel light. i have been trying to figure out what yen finds erotic about the unicorn and i have yet to reach any conclusions. would she be interested in fucking on a stuffed horse? is it the unicorns/virginity thing? is it just proving that geralt loves her enough to do anything for her? if it’s the last one, yen, honey, peg him with your massive troll phallus or something, there is no need to haul a life-size unicorn across the fucking ocean
• all that said im pausing on skellige for now to clean up the last of the velen/novigrad points of interest, grab the unmarked sidequests, dig up the last of the continental witcher gear diagrams, and finish out my contracts. this should also net me a few extra levels before i start tackling skellige monsters which will be Nice.
  
• POIs are fun because i went all the way down the western coast of velen by midcopse cutting through lvl5 bandits and lvl4 drowners like wet paper and then hit a guarded treasure with a lvl28 hag out of nowhere and booked it the fuck away from there. are these high-level points of interest in with the low-level ones specifically to wreck the shit of overeager newbies?? what the fuck.
• i let gaetan go. killing him is probably the more moral choice but i was underleveled for the quest and i don’t love combat in this game so i just didn’t want to fight him. whoops. also iunno, still feels bad to try and kill a guy in cold blood, ’specially when he just got pitchforked in the gut and is clearly at a disadvantage from pain.
• while going to consult dijkstra about assassinations i found a male sex worker in the other side of the passiflora who ISN’T hacking his lungs out and geralt can’t even talk to him properly, all he says is “sod off.” i think this is extra homophobic.
• i love sigismund dijkstra an unreasonable amount what the FUCK.
• i also love dandelion, i would do anything dandelion asked of me, however absurd, including dressing up as a bandit and concealing my identity by putting a scarf over my mouth while doing nothing about like, the cat eyes, or the two swords. dandelion is a himbo.
  
• i’ve done a lot of sidequests and so far i think my favorite has been Scavenger Hunt: Cat School Gear. kiyan is just. mm. his story is so fucked up on multiple levels and i love him. close second might be gaetan’s quest just because i like cat witchers.
  
• best non-witcher sidequest so far was absolutely “shock therapy” wherein geralt is asked to “scare” a druid who ~suddenly became mute~ back into speaking. what does he do? proceed to just. annoy the everliving shit out of the poor druid. like, in no way is putting out the fire every time he lights it to try and warm up a form of shock therapy, that’s just being an asshole! also geralt’s surprised/guilty face when he realizes he got tricked into playing a practical joke on this man. geralt you dumb fuck i love you so much. you should have been suspicious the minute the guy offered you a gwent card rather than coin.
• other really good sidequests include aeramas’ trial of the cheeses and “fool’s gold.” i haven’t finished “reasons of state” yet but i suspect i’ll also really like that one because, well, dijkstra
• i have all the enhanced cat gear and all the enhanced griffin gear and the cat gear is just, far superior aesthetically just by virtue of not being green. sad it gains sleeves when you upgrade it but i am a fan of the cowl and it will make me less chilled when we go to skellige. i wish it was black but we are far too low a level to touch beauclair yet. sad to let my goth imperialist look go but the nilfgaard set finally became underleveled u_u
• i finally became sort of rich selling everything to novigrad smiths and then immediately hit a wall with crafting ingredients for potions. no longer can i cobble them together from stuff i picked in the forest and stripped from monster corpses. nooooo i need to buy alcohols and craft secondary ingredients. i am spending an obscene amount of money on cordials to make all the white gull i need.
• solved my bomb problem by investing a skill point in becoming immune to bomb secondary effects. now i just need to learn how to aim for shit

• this game is indefensibly white. i have not seen ANY non-white npcs. anywhere. ever. i didn’t think much of it in backwaters like white orchard and velen but having hit both oxenfurt and novigrad (fucking novigrad! not even some fucking zerrikanian traders??) it’s become very uncomfortable. i was kind of expecting that i would meet some major characters of color later when more of the named cast has gotten involved but i’ve started seeing fringilla cards in my gwent games and she is…white, so i’m starting to doubt it. i’m hoping i can find a mod to just… add some variety to the background npcs because this is Bothering Me
• my gwent quest continues. i am so close to being done with velen (3 cards left?) and i’m most of the way through novigrad as well. i peeked at the passiflora tourney, drew the most terrible first hand possible, and immediately reloaded my save and left to go get some more cards. savescumming in TW3 is pretty inconvenient honestly but i will not allow myself to lose at gwent. i considered going all the way to skellige early for cards but decided against it because idk what quests that might end up locking me out of. this does mean i can’t play lambert for a while and i’m sad about it
• i did get dijkstra’s card and speaking of him, sigi reuven is an absolutely fantastic son of a bitch. what an asshole. i love him. also, oh boy this franchise really likes its bath scenes!
• i got roche’s card also and let me tell you i was CERTAIN his name was pronounced ro-shay or something like that, not exactly like my fucking horse
• i also love how geralt clearly only pulls out the “witchers have no emotions” junk when it’s convenient to him bc it’s hilarious
• the single male sex worker at the passiflora is unattractively infected with a respiratory illness, but i still maintain that it is homophobic that Geralt cannot hire him
  
• after checking that it wouldn’t affect my relationship with yen i did hire one of the girls at lazy kate’s just to see if geralt would do anything interesting. it was the most awkward two minutes of my entire video gaming career. geralt willing to give head confirmed? she’s the only one who makes noises throughout the entire ordeal oh my god this was a bad idea, would not recommend.
• keira’s not a completely terrible person actually and she is really only the normal amount of untrustworthy for a sorcerer in this universe. however, i also did not sleep with her.
• sidenote, i’m sure they were just reusing models but why keira’s fancy clothing illusion spell puts geralt in the doublet he wears to see emhyr is slightly beyond me from a story perspective. are you into nilfgaardian nobles keira? do you fantasize about working for emhyr’s court? it’s weird because she doesn’t seem to have any interest in going south, like she was willing to try to bargain with radovid to stay in the north, but what do i know
• triss is ok. i might like her better if i’d actually played Witcher 1 and 2 but i didn’t so here we are, triss being very familiar with geralt while i press noncommittal dialogue options and wonder where yennefer is
• i would die for zoltan chivay.
• the elihal sequence is… slightly cringe. that said i don’t care what elihal claims, elihal and dandelion absolutely fucked, CDPR are COWARDS, change my mind
• i was fully expecting the “blonde woman” with dandelion to be Ciri under a false name and was surprised when it was in fact actually one of dandelion’s gfs. priscilla is adorable and talented though, i love her
• the wolven storm > her sweet kiss
• i have all the sword oils now! half of them are enhanced and i’m very slowly working on getting the monster ingredients for the other enhanced and superior versions. (erynia eyes… devourer blood… i cry) i run the enhanced versions of hanged man and necrophage by default but i switch up what’s on the silver pretty frequently. i also have all the bombs crafted but i haven’t quite figured how to use them without blowing them up in my own face. working on it. once i figure out moondust it’s fucking over for all these wraiths.
• potions are bomb actually. decoctions are still a little beyond my understanding and my tox resistance but i do use the fiend decoction (+20 inventory) every so often to enable my hoarding tendencies. i use enhanced thunderbolt and white raff all the time now and as soon as i find some more fucking buckthorn i’ll probably be using killer whale a bunch too. also as someone terribly afeared of dark corners, Cat is my best friend. tho’ i do sorta wish my Cat was still the regular version because the enhanced lasts for a long time and coming out of a cave into daylight with Cat still in your system is Not Great