#that'll work out for me

[sandflakedraws]

attempting to load back into rhonda for the road home

[bixels]

Be honest, what are your thoughts on appledash? Do you hate it or its more of not a big deal

Not a big deal to me. I like it, I see all the appeals, I just personally like Rarijack more.

[sualne]

clothes!!!

[luckycharms1701]

Oh, please, I must know now… Donnie during mating season??? :D I’m loving ur writings about this :)

alright you thirsty purple fans, it’s time!

sidenote: i am. so glad. that people are enjoying these. they’re a lot of fun to write!

double sidenote: i have added a link to my masterpost to all my bayverse mating season headcanons! you can also find them here

sooooo donnie. he's a freak in the sheets, you cannot change my mind. so especially strong spicy warning for this one 🌶️

Donnie is extremely matter of fact about mating season. The first time he brings it up with you, he’s more nervous about your answer than he is shy about explaining what it entails. (You couldn’t hear the words, but you did hear him muttering to himself before he came up to ask you. You suspect it was a pep talk.) He is very thorough when explaining mating season in general and how it affects him in particular. You are grateful and also a little turned on by the time he’s done.

Before you were in the picture, Donnie used to work himself until his system overloaded and he passed out during this time. Now he finds himself working a lot less, because he has you to focus on. He appreciates that you make him spend more time on leisure and don’t let him overwork himself. He also appreciates that you do let him work at least a little when the desire hits. Getting to cuddle with you is a surefire way to get him to rest when he needs it though. As long as you’re nearby, he’s happy to do whatever.

Donnie is a talker in general, but it gets ramped up to 100 when it’s his season. Unless his mouth is busy doing… other things… it’s basically a 24/7 stream of consciousness fest. Mostly it’s about you. How much he loves you, what in particular he loves about you, how exactly he wants to make love to you. His morning star, his starlight, his celestial beauty. Sometimes, though, he’ll interrupt himself to talk about something that just occurred to him about one of his projects. It never fails to pull a laugh out of you and make him rub the back of his neck in (adorable) embarrassment.

He enjoys physical affection and often seeks it out from you, and this holds true during his season. He won’t whine or get grumpy if you don’t want to be touching him all the time (*cough* like his brothers will *cough*), but he does prefer if you’re in contact with him somehow. He enjoys watching movies with your head on his lap and your hand in his. He especially likes it when you're on top of him.

Donnie is used to just taking care of himself whenever necessary, AND he is used to handling delicate things during his season. So there is a lot of gentle manhandling when the time comes. You can't do anything particularly engaging because he will come up and interrupt you whenever to have sex. IF you are wearing clothes at all (not often), you cannot wear underwear or pants, at most a skirt. That way he can just lift it up and enter you whenever the urge hits. He is especially fond of doing this when you're sitting on his lap while he's working (... "daddy's little cockwarmer").

Having you around does not mean that all of his toys go unused, oh no. He is very considerate, and would rather resort to them when you're getting rest. (He got your permission to stare at you while you slept and he used his toys. So considerate.) He also came up with some new toys that the two of you can use together. Having toys custom designed for your pleasure? Well. It really adds to the experience of mating season.

He likes to take his time and study you. He is always coming to you with a new experience he wants to try. He does get a lot of pleasure out of trying new things, but he mostly just wants to know how you'll react. He is intimately familiar with your body and how it reacts, and he wants to see if those reactions hold true when different stimuli are applied. His prodigious brain is always working. He particularly likes when something catches you off guard and a surprised gasp comes out of your mouth.

Donnie is not overtly possessive, even in his season. But there is always one hickey very carefully placed somewhere noticeable that you can't cover easily. He knows just how much force to use to leave an imprint of his hands without hurting you more than you enjoy. And if he catches someone looking at you? You will probably be walking a little funny the next day. When he ties you up (he enjoys tying you up. a lot.), he'll take a minute to sit back and observe you, pleasuring himself to thoughts of how you belong to him the same way he belongs to you.

When his season is over, his favorite thing to do is cuddle with you while the both of you sleep it off. He won't leave the bed, not even to work, until he deems you fully rested. (He will work in bed while you sleep on his plastron though.) His second favorite thing to do is bathe you. He takes his time to make sure every inch of you is clean and cared for. It's a lot like going to a spa, because Donnie did a lot of research into spas so that he could replicate that experience for you. And if you give him a little pampering in return? You'll get to hear him chirp and churr in complete satisfaction.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

head bonks: @yorshie @avery73 @justalotoffanfiction @thejudiciousneurotic

[billy-cockblock]

SWTD Theory

Still Wakes the Deep has been a huge brainworm for me the past few weeks, so I wanted to make a post with one of my takes. Someone’s probably thought of this already, but I can’t find anything about it, so here I go. 

I’m gonna take this time to shout out a little sub theory of mine that plays a bit of a part in my main point. 

For a little background, in populations of organisms, there are limiting factors on their growth and spread. Think of it as a series of funnels of different sizes: the rate of liquid that can flow through is going to be determined by the narrowest funnel. For example. if there’s a population that has ample food, space, and whatever else it needs, but has a restricted access to water, that water is going to limit how large that population could grow.

Before the Shape was dug up by the drill, it was probably dormant in the sea bed, doing its best to survive, the same as any other organism. Down where it was dark, wet, and cold, I think it had one main limiting factor: oxygen.

I don’t think the Shape can efficiently exchange gas underwater. Most of the untouched bodies Caz sees are only underwater, where an organism that thrives in air would struggle to access. Once it gets dug up and brought to air with plenty of organic matter to consume and grow with, its population explodes. When a limiting factor is removed, there’s nothing holding the population back any more until they hit a new limit. The Shape’s old limiting factor was removed, and it would only stop reproducing by running out of space to grow on the rig, running out of organic matter to use, or being killed (like, say, in a giant fiery explosion).

(I could go on and on about how the Shape potentially works, please feel free to ask me about it)

Now, I’ll get to my main theory:

I think Caz was dead the whole time.

Now, I don’t mean that in a “the whole game is in his head, none of it was real” way; I mean it in a “this man got Ethan Winters’ed” way. 

So, I started to do a little research into how tall oil rigs are to know how far Caz would have fallen off the helipad. I quickly learned there are many types of oil rigs and not every oil rig of the same type is the same size. I’m studying marine biology, not petroleum engineering like my brother, so I got tired of trying to guesstimate how tall the Bierra D’s helipad would be and attacked the problem with some simple math. 

Watching a video, I saw he fell for between 4-5 seconds; the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Plugging that in a calculator while not accounting for air resistance to solve for distance gets me ~80-120m, depending on if I used the 4 or 5 second count, so I’ll guess around 100m. I’ve found many conflicting sources on what the tallest heights you can safely fall into water are, but I can safely tell you that 100m is much higher than any of them. 

Now, maybe the devs weren’t going with the mathematical exact timing it would take for a guy to fall off an oil rig, and didn’t mean for it to be implied that he fell from THAT high. Still, we can agree he fell from very high up, high enough to have likely ended in injury. Maybe he’d just fall on and break a leg? Maybe an arm or some ribs?

After falling off the rig, the last frame before Caz blacks out shows the water at the top of the screen, meaning he hits the water head-first. He may be wearing a hard hat (that somehow stays on his head through the whole ordeal since he clips his flashlight to it), but he still should have cracked his skull open or broken his neck. 

When they pull him out of the water, he’s cold and not breathing, which wouldn’t be unusual for a drowning victim in the North Sea in the dead of winter, but it would usually be a death sentence. They never explain how they dragged Caz out of the water, but it would presumably have taken a long time to get him out, and time is key when dealing with someone who isn’t breathing. The fact that he’s able to cough up water and start breathing on his own is a miracle, since it doesn’t sound like Brodie or Douglas do CPR when they bring him inside.

So, fall damage, head and/or spine injury, drowning, and hypothermia. By several different factors, Caz should be a very, very dead man. So why isn’t he?

My theory is that, somehow, somewhy, the infection from The Shape healed and brought him back to life. We know for a fact it has amazing generative properties, basically able to double, triple, quadruple the amount of tissue and organic matter in the crew’s bodies with no regard for conservation of mass, so what’s just a little regeneration of damaged tissues in a single body? Once Caz’s body gets someplace with better conditions suited to life (inside where it’s warm and there’s air), it just jumpstarts his body functions. The Shape’s presumably been dormant in the seafloor for a long time, so it could be able to go dormant and kinda “come back to life” as conditions change, similar to a tardigrade, and potentially pass this ability onto its hosts.

And Caz mentions how his head hurts a lot, especially when he gets close to the Shape. 

Now, this might seem like baseless conjecture, and y’all might say “That’s a good headcanon, but there’s no evidence that The Shape could bring people back to life!” to which I would say “Oh, but there might be!"

After the helicopter on the starboard side, we get a call from Bruce, who is actively drowning. Through his gasps, he tells us that O’Connor hurt his leg and couldn’t swim, presumably drowning. And guess who we see still kicking as we’re passing through the pontoon? My thought is that O’Connor couldn’t swim, drowned, and drifted to the bottom, landing on a part of the shape. Once Caz and Brodie start working in the legs and they drain, it exposes him to air and allows the shape to start growing again, assimilating him and bringing him back to life. 

Obviously, he’s not doing as well as Caz is. My thought was that, if Caz died as he was infected, the infection would’ve had to put a lot of its energy into bringing him back, not leaving much for itself to begin assimilating him into the Shape. Since O’Connor was in direct contact with the Shape, it could hook him up to its network to help supplement that loss. Caz, meanwhile, stays as far away from the stuff as he can and doesn’t even get anything to eat all day; guy's running on empty. He has small things where the Shape affects him, like the colors at the edge of his vision, but most of his hallucinations only happen after the Shape attacks him through O’Connor. Before, I’m pretty sure the largest incident (other than when he’s blacked out) is when we can barely hear Suze’s voice over the speakers when moving through the pontoon. It’s really only after getting attacked that he starts to hear her when he’s awake, near the Shape, or over phone calls. He only hears her clearly over the speakers in administration after he runs into the shape many times when he gets swept away in the flooding.

With my main evidence out of the way, I’ll also mention that Caz sees the “light at the end of the tunnel” from the end of the game in the oil flashes when he blacks out.

But hey, that’s just a theory. 

A GAME TH- I have received a cease and desist.

Man, this became a long read. Thanks for getting this far, and I hope you enjoyed!

[boarloved-art]

trust and believe the chaser gang's unofficial coworker christmas parties went crazy. qiren goes home after an hour, xichen immediately decides this is the perfect time to get hammered, guangyao is babysitting, wen qing is losing her mind a little bit, yu ziyuan is fighting between Wanting To Leave and Wanting To Outdrink Wuxian, huaisang and mingjue show up at some point and wuxian is too drunk to remember it - which he DOES weep about when wen qing tells him the next day. they have the worlds most british karaoke session. the buffet features mini sausage rolls, cocktail sausages, and a beautiful array of picky bits. mr brightside is playing for 50% of the event.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

i keep forgetting to mention it but i just want to know why rivals has magneto's rivals skin's eyes SO blue and then his MoM/King Magnus skins have grey eyes...

[gallusgalluss]

sorry for not really being active here lately, i've been focusing on college stuff and also decided to suddenly start working on a lil game lol

^ about them btw. their name is MC. they're good at doing stuff.

[marklikely]

no literally this is how its been the last couple weeks

[eebie]

i need to go out on at least one adventure before i go back to school every time i sit outside for a while i get a little sad because it reminds me that i haven't done anything really. june was stolen by the fog.. july is going by very quickly... Tugs at my shackles

[hanakou-often]

Someone just asked me what do I see in Hanakou and I don't know how to tell them I just. Made things up

[royalarchivist]

Translation:

7 DAYS LEFT!

On the 7th at 7 PM, we will go to the Nether.... I will create a way for everyone to escape this island! I promise!

[brown-little-robin]

made more sculptures, +25 HP

[call-me-copycat]

I go to school then work tomorrow (so whole days taken up), but after that I'm free for 3 whole days (´∇｀) If nothing pops up, I should be free to get back to everyone! Most exams are done too ʕ⁠·⁠ᴥ⁠·⁠ʔ👍

[hellbeast-go-walkies]

Stefon: I just don't know what else I can do. I flirt with Seth all the time, we even took a trip together, and I think he likes me back, but we're still not together.

Anderson Cooper: Listen to me. Fake wedding.

[victorluvsalice]

Help: How Do Tav!Smiler in BG3???

Hi everyone -- say, do you remember how, way back at the end of January last year, I made a post about how I'd recently gotten my hands on Baldur's Gate III and I was going to make Smiler my "Tav?" To go with my VTMB Malkavian Fledgling Alice and my FO4 Sole Survivor Victor? Are any of you wondering how that's going?

It's -- kind of not! I haven't actually gotten that far in the game, mostly because I stopped playing for most of 2024 due to a combination of "I want to play with cool mods but I'm nervous that they'll break the game thanks to these glitches I read about on the game's subreddit" and "I am already stressed about this game, Larian, if you're going to get cutesy about when Patch 6 is actually coming out I'm going back to Sims 4 and Fallout 4." I finally picked it back up again late last year, clearing out all my old saves and starting again using the in-game mod manager to manage the mods I wanted. And I made some decent progress for once: getting past the tutorial, picking up a bunch of companions (Shadowheart, Astarion, Gale, and Lae'zel), fetching Withers from his crypt, and helping the tieflings defend their gate from the attacking goblin hordes. I was all set to head into the tiefling camp, start helping them with their problems, and pick up Wyll --

And then Patch 8 came out. And while I was waiting for mods to update (a process that involved me going "shit what's going to happen with ImpUI, the creator said they weren't updating it anymore and I'm pretty sure at least ONE of my mods needs it" and "uh, how DO you update mods in the in-game mod manager?"), something happened in my brain related to an entirely different thing that I enjoy --

That made me realize "fuck, I think I need to restart again...and I might need some help figuring out what exactly it is I want to do." Let me see if I can sum it up step by step:

I. Okay, so -- all three times I've tried to get a playthrough of BG3 going pre-Patch 8, I've always had Smiler start out as a Bard. Because, well, I like the class features they get, and I felt that it suited Smiler pretty well -- they're reasonably musical (they play guitar and drums, after all), and they are definitely a high-Charisma person, which is one of a Bard's primary stats.

II. However, I've never actually been able to come up with a backstory for my Bard Smiler, beyond "probably raised by their uncle Felix instead of Matt and Carol in this universe" and "likely a traveling entertainer/alchemist pre-abduction" (since I've always used mods to have them multiclass into the Alchemist subclass of the Artificer class to represent their talent for all things chemistry and alchemy). I never worried that much about it, though, as I wasn't really trying to make a story out of any of my playthroughs (I only need ONE project like "Londerland Bloodlines" going at a time, thank you) -- they were just supposed to be about having fun. I just thought it would be nice to know what that Smiler was all about.

III. And here's where the entirely different thing comes in. Who here has heard of the web series CaFae Latte? It's a fun TikTok series (though I only watch the YouTube compilations for each season because I don't have and don't want a TikTok account) about a group of people working in and having adventures out of a fairy-owned coffee shop in a more magical version of Minnesota, by one C. M. Alongi. My friend Gigs got me into it last year, and I've been really enjoying catching up on all the various adventures of Bob, Cyrus, JC, Nicole, and all the other staff/customers/related entities who show up. In fact, I've been enjoying it so much that recently I started writing mental fanfic for it --

And me being me, it was of course Valicer-related fanfic. XD Specifically, I started thinking, "wouldn't it be fun to have Smiler get hired as a new barista at the coffee shop? I already have them working at one in the Modern AU! Though, given this is an urban fantasy series, maybe I should go for a not-exactly-human Smiler...maybe I can do something like my VITD Smiler and have them be somehow connected to our favorite eldritch god of happiness Mar-Mal? Yeah, that'd work!" So I started imaging a scenario where a Smiler with a link to Mar-Mal (expressed, of course, through their glowing yellow eyes) got a job at the CaFae and started making friends with the people already there --

IV. Which led to me thinking of a moment where one of the characters asked Smiler if their relationship with Mar-Mal was like being a D&D warlock (since some of the characters are D&D fans). And this made me think, "Hmmm -- I know that eldritch entities ARE valid patrons for warlocks in that game -- just look at Prudence from Oxventure. But can you pick one of those with warlocks in Baldur's Gate III? I've only ever looked at the Bard write-up on the wiki in detail, I should check it out, just for funsies." So one Saturday night, I did indeed check it out, going through the BG3 Wiki's entry on the Warlock class and looking at the special features you get with a Great Old One Patron --

And. Right at level one. I saw that one of the things you get is a slightly-expanded spell list to pick from for your first couple of warlock spells. With the two extra spells Great Old Ones give you being "Tasha's Hideous Laughter" -- the most Smiler spell of the lot because it's literally INCAPACITATING PEOPLE WITH LAUGHTER -- and "Dissonant Whispers" -- a spell I had LITERALLY JUST FUCKING GIVEN SMILER during their second level-up before Patch 8, because I'd decided they should focus on Psychic damage and I could headcanon the whispers as distracting creepy laughter. And then I kept going down the page, and I kept seeing all the mind control spells I thought Smiler should have on the list of spells Warlocks could pick up as they level up, and near the bottom the "Thought Shield" stuff specific to Great Old One Patrons that both grants resistance to and reflects back all psychic damage dealt to the warlock...

V. ...and my brain immediately went "oh hey! Can you imagine a younger Smiler, maybe running away from the local version of Kelman, getting contacted by Mar-Mal and offered a pact to help them out? With their service being to use their talents to spread happiness and joy throughout the world? By any means possible?"

...cue me realizing FUCKING HELL, I MADE SMILER THE WRONG BASE CLASS. *facepalm* Like, how the HELL did I not realize this before?! One of my favorite versions of Smiler is my VITD Smiler, who -- while not exactly in a pact with their god -- does have a strong connection with them through Mar-Mal blessing them, and who I've already decided gets at least one of their special playbook powers through Mar-Mal granting it to them ("Mesmerism," for the curious -- will allow Smiler to Sway someone, then make them forget it happened until the next time they see Smiler. Mar-Mal thinks this is a useful talent; Smiler thinks Alice is gonna get mad at them if they use it). And Warlock is another Charisma-based casting class! Smiler being a warlock of some description TOTALLY makes sense!

VI. Except -- well, it's not quite as simple as that. I've been thinking about this for the past couple of weeks, and I've come to the conclusion that there are three key things about Smiler that I would like to express in the "Tav" version --

a) Their connection to Mar-Mal, and the mind- and emotion-control spells that grants

b) Their musical talents and ability to get people's attention with a show

c) Their alchemist talents and ability to craft various potions and elixirs and whatnot

Now, of those three, a) and b) are easy enough to represent -- I was already planning on multiclassing Smiler with the help of a "go all the way up to Level 20" mod, and "Bardlock" is a very legit dual-class combination, given that both are Charisma-based casters AND learning the "Song of Rest" as a bard gives you the benefit of an extra Short Rest to recharge the warlock spell slots. Plus, for Smiler specifically, Bard has the "buff your allies" spells that I'd like them to have (like "Sanctuary" -- both because it's useful for keeping enemies away from a person and because of the name accidentally referencing Kelman's little asylum of horrors :P) and, as of Patch 8, a lovely "College of Glamour" subclass that would allow them to buff their allies, automatically Charm enemies who attack those allies in melee, and order people around in combat. All things I would love for my Smiler to have! So yeah, to cover those two items, Bardlock Smiler is definitely the way to go.

As for c), however -- that's a little trickier. While the game does have an alchemy system that characters can use to craft various items, I'm not sure that just using that a lot is enough to get across the idea that Smiler is a talented alchemist. Hence why on my first playthroughs, I was using Artificer mods to make them an official Alchemist via the power of subclass. However, there's two potential problems with doing that now:

One, that would mean triple-classing, and I'm not sure if that would be too complicated a character build -- especially since I'm not sure which class should be primary (I was thinking Warlock, as per my initial reaction to realizing how well it fit them above, but given my idea is that Smiler would have at least their alchemy skills before any pact with Mar-Mal, maybe Artificer makes more sense...) and how many levels I should take of each (I want all my feats, but I also want as many goodies as I can get from each class)

Two, the Artificer mod I was using for my latest playthrough via the in-game mod manager, "Artificer for Home Brew - Comprehensive Reworks" -- well, when I first downloaded it, I didn't realize the "Home Brew - Comprehensive Reworks" part of the title was referring to another mod that this mod was designed to work in conjunction with. I thought it was just referring to how the mod creator adapted it to BG3! The mod seemed to work fine for the short time I had it ("Home Brew -Comprehensive Reworks" is not actually required to play with it, from what I can see), but as you might imagine, I am somewhat concerned that the damn thing might break if I keep using it in a playthrough without the "base" mod (and after taking a quick look at said base mod, I'm not interested in it). I know there are other Artificer and even custom Alchemist class mods out there, but I'm not sure which ones are good and/or Patch 8 ready (and at least one seems to have used AI images to generate class icons and pictures for their write-up on how the class works, so I don't want to use that one on principle). I could also fudge it with this mod that turns the "Experimental Alchemy" passive certain Wizards get into a feat anyone can pick up, but THAT requires either waiting until I hit level 4 in a class (which feels like it could take a while) or tracking down a Patch 8-ready mod that allows me to just pick up ONE extra feat (as I feel like getting feats every level or every other level like most mods is a TOUCH overpowered).

So yeah. Shit be complicated, yo. And that isn't even getting into me debating if Smiler's background should be "Guild Artisan" (gives skill proficiency in Insight and Persuasion, has a "can happen anywhere" inspiration trigger) or "Entertainer" (gives skill proficiency in Acrobatics and Performance, has inspiration triggers involving telling stories and participating in comedy contests that do feel very Smiler)! *grabs head* I just want Smiler to be right, damn it!

Which is why I'm hoping to get some advice from the rest of you. What do you people who are more experienced with the game recommend I do to get the Tav!Smiler I want? In fact, let's do it in the form of a poll, bitches love polls:

I'd add in suggestions for how many levels to take of each class (like 12 Warlock/4 Bard/4 Artificer), but I have limited poll options and limited characters within each option, so if you have any suggestions regarding THAT, please leave them in the replies or a reblog, a la Option 7. Any help is appreciated!