agentshades
AgentShades馃挅馃挏馃挋
Space invader, lookin' cute in a human suit.
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Things My Wife Has Said While Playing Baldur's Gate Part 6
We keep playing, she keeps saying. Everybody give it up for @everyoneinmckinneyisdead
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
*after casting Fireball, and to the tune of "Blinded by the Light"*
Kelsey: "Blinded by the baaaaaallll!"
---聽
*Myrkul appears*
Kelsey: "Is that literally three skeletons in a trenchcoat?"
---
Shadowheart: "How could you have known that? I told very few people. Certainly not you! And yet, you knew!"
Kelsey: "Lisan al-Ghaib!"聽
---
*Looks at the spell description for Moonbeam*
Kelsey: "Only 20 damage? That's not very much..."
Me: "Being a Sorcerer may be skewing your perception of 'not very much...'"
---
*after building Jaheira into a Circle of Spores Druid and realizing she can make spore zombies*
Kelsey: "HA! Take that Astarion! What can you do? Bite people, stab people, and stab people sneakily? Zombies!" *gesturing at screen*聽
---聽
*The person Kelsey is talking to shapeshifts. Orrin appears*聽
Kelsey: "Wait, she was just that random guy? I just picked some random dude to talk to and it happens to be her? Crabby tits?"
---
*she tries to target two enemies with lightning bolt but an ox is also in the blast radius*
Kelsey: "NOOOO THE COW! I don't want to kill cow but I want to hit both of them. Ughhhhhhh."聽
---
*when invited to join a clown on stage for a magic trick*
Kelsey (to me): "I bet you'd just go up on the stage with him instead of doing literally everything possible to get out of it like me. Cause thats what you'd do in real life. You weirdo."
---
*when a guard demands 200 gold to get into Baldur's Gate*聽
Kelsey: "What?! I'm not paying her! Its an open road! I pay taxes! Probably!"
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Things My Wife Has Said While Playing Baldur's Gate Part 5!
We continue to slowly make our way through Baldur's Gate 3 and @everyoneinmckinneyisdead remains a font of snark!
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Kelsey: "I feel that it is an OSHA violation to perform necromancy in open-toed shoes."
---
Me: *finds a ring on a body* "True Love's Caress" *starts reading item desciption*
Kelsey "I'll show you true love's caress"
*beat*
Kelsey: "You didn't even acknowledge my romantic overture."
Me: "Oh! Sorry I didn't register, I was reading the item description."
Kelsey: "Put THAT on your tumblr. Roasted yourself."
---
*every time we climb a ladder*
Kelsey: "SNAKE EATERRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!"
---
*Ketheric Thorm talks*
Kelsey: "Oh! That's uh, thats! *shakes her fist in the air* thats the guy "Bring me pictures of the True Soul! You know!"
---
*Ketheric takes a halberd to the chest*
Kelsey: "Oh, I guess no more pictures of True Souls."
*Ketheric pulls the halberd out and stands up*
Kelsey: "Pictures are back on the table!"
---
Kelsey: "Ugh! Every time I try to loot the viscera Karlach sneaks up behind me and tries to talk about our relationship!"
---
*Gale, sitting alone in a clearing waving his hands around magically*
Kelsey: "Gale, you manic pixie dream girl, what are you doing?"
---
*Shadowheart gushes about a Shar statue*
Kelsey: "Girl, they're trying to kill us, put your lady boner away!"
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Me and the guy I talked into playing Alan Wake and Control
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Things My Wife Has Said While Playing Baldur's Gate Part 4!
That's right, after an extended break playing Alan Wake 2 (twice...Final Draft is worth itttttt) we're back to Baldur's Gate and @everyoneinmckinneyisdead is still snarky
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
---
Halsin: "Speak to Rath, for your reward."
Kesley: "I've already done enough for you man, dont make a fetch quest out of the rewarrrrddd."聽
---
Karlach: "Wait up for me, I'll come find you after the others have gone to bed." *walks away and quietly does a little fist pump while saying "Yes!"
Kelsey: "SUBLIME!"
---
Kelsey: *after a conversation with Gale* "What does erudite mean?"聽
Me: "I'm actually not sure."
Kelsey: "GOOD. Now you'll know what it feels like to have to google something."
---
Astarion: "I was hoping for more than a pat on the head and...vinegar for wine."
Kelsey: "You drink blood! You don't get to have an opinion on fine wine!"聽
---
*when debating telling someone about being infected with a mind flayer tadpole*
Kelsey: "I'm hesitant to tell people about this because they either offer me some garbage fake cure thing or they point at you and say 'The pox! A devil sits upon thee!'"
---
Me *inspecting some enemies we're about to fight* "Death...Shepherd?"
Kelsey: "Death Wrex."
---
Me: "Oh I think we walked too far, that's the body of that racist woman that tried to kill us."
Kelsey: "Everyone in this realm is racist. And most of them try to kill us!"
---聽
Kelsey: "Hey did you know that you can Zelda stuff?" *smashes barrels*
(Six seconds later)
Kelsey: "Um, so don't Zelda *all* the barrels because some of them uh...blow up."聽
---
*in the myconid treasure vault, Kelsey finds a book on Flumph mating rituals*
Kelsey: "Imagine, if you will, that you're a soldier. You save the kingdom,and the king says "Go in to my private treasure vault, and take whatever you find inside. And you go inside. And its spore porn. It's sporn."
---
*Upon leaving the myconid colony*
Kelsey: "I have to check and see, cause I'm sure someone on AO3 has written some sporn."
*searches*
Kelsey: "Wow, nothing. Honestly I'm kind of disappointed in the internet."
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Through the confrontation and integration of his Jungian shadow by way of multiple convoluted self-inflicted gunshots Alan Wake qualifies as a Persona user and very likely a member of S.E.E.S. In this essay, I will...
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I finally read through This House of Dreams and GOD I LOVE POETRY AND THE REMEDY CONNECTED UNIVERSE
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Me, two months ago: "I wonder if we'll get a new Old Gods of Asgard song when Alan Wake 2 comes out?"
Me, right after finishing Alan Wake 2:
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So we know Quantum Break isn't technically part of the Remedyverse, but it clearly contains a lot of references and on my latest playthrough I noticed something a bit clever on Remedy's part:
One of the first things you can find in the game is this poster for Stonecrow, which is an Old Gods of Asgard Tribute band
And then very soon thereafter we're introduced to Paul Serene - who will become extremely important later on and who is currently leading a project to try to build a time machine. He's wearing a Stonecrow t-shirt:
Ok, so Paul likes Stonecrow, so what? (Also, peep Bright Falls, WA on the tour listing...) This doesn't actually come around full circle until later in the game when we learn that everything Paul is doing with the time machine is based on research originally performed by William Joyce, whom we find some videotapes of about midway through the game. And what is William wearing when we see him working on his original research?
An Old Gods of Asgard shirt!
So, in its own subtle way, the game nods to William being the OG Time Science Boi(TM) and Paul Serene is just, in essence, a tribute act using his material.
#remedyverse#remedy entertainment#old gods of asgard#quantum break#bring Dominic Monaghan into Control 2 please Remedy I beg you
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Cosplaying Barry Wheeler (complete with Flaming Eye of Mordor) at DragonCon this past summer with my wife repping the Torchbearers.
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Ok ok, but something's up with Bob Baldur
**spoilers for Alan Wake 1 and 2***
So, Bob Baldur - the mysterious 3rd member of the Old Gods of Asgard. I actually thought he was a new character for Alan Wake 2 when I first played it, a sudden new person in what had always been an iconic rock duo. Suddenly there and mentioned in a newspaper article as having died sometime in the past.
But! Then now I'm replaying Alan Wake 1 and Alan Wake's American Nightmare. In the scene where Alan encounters the Anderson brothers at Cauldron Lake Lodge, if you hang around long enough, Tor will tell Alan that he should have been at the parties they threw at the farm. He then specifically mentions "Fat Bob Baldur" throwing an Amp out the window and hitting a "hippie chick." He then mentions that Bob died, and Odin quickly cuts in to yell "leukemia!" With a speed that makes me wonder if he was trying to interrupt something else Tor might have been about to say.
Then, in Alan Wake's American Nightmare, there's a radio in the motel courtyard that plays an interview with the Old Gods and again, Fat Bob Baldur is mentioned and again it comes up that he died, and again Odin hastily shouts "leukemia" before redirecting the conversation.
That's all got me properly suspicious as to what actually happened to Bob Baldur. But then we see him for the first time in Alan Wake 2, oin photos of the band from back in the day, in the projection during Dark Ocean Summoning, and in the musical sequence with young Tor and Odin. But he's not fat. He's possibly the skinniest member of the band. Now, this could be explained either by Remedy changing their opinions on depicting fat people in a joking manner with changing cultural attitudes on fatphobia or just a desire to have Baldur also played by a member of Poets like Young Tor and Odin are (and none of the Poets being particularly weighty guys). But it could also have some unknown significance.
What I find more interesting is that Bob appears with Tor and Odin in the musical. Neither Tor nor Odin are dead, they have simply entered the Dark Place via the Lake. Time being meaningless there, they can look young if they want to I guess. *But* Bob is supposedly dead. Dead people don't go to the Dark Place, it isn't hell or something. So how is Bob there unless the reports of his death are fabricated and he somehow ended up in Cauldron Lake or some as yet unknown other entrance to The Dark Place?
What's more, what little we know of the Old Gods' backstory parallels a lot of things about Scandinavian mythology: Odin loses an eye to Door, Tor calls lightning to banish Door presumably into the Dark Place, and Baldur dies.
But Baldur's death in mythology means something very important.
Baldur's death is the beginning of Ragnarok, the end of the world.
Just what really happened to Bob Baldur, and what might it have set in motion?
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Ok but can we take a second to recognize how brilliantly Remedy uses music in its games? I don't even just mean soundtracks, but like, the tracks that play at chapter ends, the musical sequences like the Anderson Farm or the Ashtay Maze, and even just random songs that play on in game radios.
I don't know who's picking the tracks but they're so *perfect* for building the tone of the game and the world. Especially the chapter end songs in both Alan Wakes and Quantum Break. It's the perfect little emotional break in the action and lets you sit and digest what just happened while the music just drives home the tone of the moment. It's intangible and it's lovely and I'm obsessed with it.
I even made a playlist of every single song I could find on Spotify from the games in more or less the order they appear. It's four and a half hours long and I've listened to it so many times.
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Painted up a Victor for Battletech as a Com Guard from Comstar. Your favorite encouragement to pay your space phone bill! Painting white was slightly terrifying but I love how it shows off the weathering when it's done.
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***MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ALAN WAKE 2 BELOW***
Having just finished Alan Wake 2 last night, my head is abuzz. Swarming with darkness, you might say. But amid the spiraling thoughts one sticking point is coalescing into a theory for me, so hear me out:
We're told over and over in the last bit of AW2 that Scratch is just Alan, Taken by the Dark Presence. It's just the same Dark Presence that was inhabiting Barbara Jagger, but now it's inhabiting Alan's body. Because of the weird non-linear nature of time in The Dark Place Alan or others could convcieably encounter TakenAlanScratch in The Dark Place at any point in time and not realize who it is, but my impression is that this isn't usually what's happening, that instead The Dark Presence is encouraging Alan's belief in a truly Other being that's trying to get him because it leads him to make decisions that benefit the Dark Presence.
(As an aside, the fact that they also call TakenCasey "Scratch" seems to just be Saga and Alan using that term to mean "a person possessed by the specific Dark Presence Entity vs a generic Taken that's controlled by but not actively inhabited by the Capital D Dark Presence. A concession to the fact that the game's audience needs to connect the two and realize its the same Entity and not Casey suddenly revealing himself to be Evil All Along or something.)
All the times Alan thinks "Scratch" is doing something it's really just him at another point in the LoopSpiral either actually possessed by the Dark Presence or just Alan being tricked into thinking himself at a different point is this separate person called Scratch (such as when he thinks Scratch burst into the Writers Room and shot him to stop his editing of Return and when he thinks Scratch is writing Return so he bursts in and shoots his other self in the head. No actual "Scratch" here, just Alan being duped.
So is Scratch an actual entity apart from Alan? It doesn't seem like AW2 supports that hypothesis. It presents pretty strongly that Scratch doesn't exist apart from Alan, that he's just Alan at a different point in the loop, possessed or not.
But then what about the end of Alan Wake 1 when Scratch is standing next to Diver Tom? Or all of Alan Wake's American Nightmare which Sam Lake has explicitly said is still fully canon? In American Nightmare, Scratch spends the whole game running around taunting Alan while he is trapped in a time loop that Scratch claims to have created and acting like a psycho. In fact, the end of American Nightmare is Alan using a film projector to destroy Scratch and escape that loop. During that boss fight "Happy Song" by Poets of the Fall is playing.
So...my theory.
What is Thomas Zane wearing when Alan first meets him in Alan Wake 2? A tattered version of Scratch's costume from Alan Wake's American Nightmare.
What are we told over and over again Zane loved to do in his films? Play evil doppelgangers of people.
What song is playing in the first scene we meet Zane? Happy Song by Poets of the Fall.
Who does Zane now inexplicably look like? Alan and by extension Scratch.
What does Zane do in Alan Wake 2? Tell Alan where the murder sites he needs to go to to continue the loop are located, as well as feed Alan's mistaken belief that Scratch is a totally separate entity.
So...I believe that Scratch in Alan Wake's American Nightmare is Thomas Zane playing the role of Scratch to cause Alan to continue his loop of trying to "destroy" his way out of the Dark Place (what Alice alludes to in the mid credit stinger). He plays Alan's evil doppelganger specifically to push Alan further along the LoopSpiral. In Alan Wake 2, we find him "fresh off the set" so to speak, still in the clothes he was wearing in Alan Wake's American Nightmare when the film projector "destroyed" him. When questioned about his motives for helping "Scratch" later, he claims Alan had stopped writing, thereby refusing to move forward along the LoopSpiral. He had to help "Scratch" write Return because it was the only way to get Alan moving again.
Thus, for reasons we don't fully know Zane wants Alan to complete the Spiral, and in my theory he has cast himself as Scratch the Doppelganger in order to push Alan into continuing the Spiral. Then later he participated in/helped Alan write Return (potentially after Alan was possessed by the Darkness because time is all weird in the Dark Place) because he knew it would force Alan to write again and thus push him along the Spiral.
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*****Alan Wake 2 Spoilers ahead******
***You Have Been Warned***
I cannot express to you all how many *e m o t i o n s* I have tied up in the We Sing/Herald of Darkness chapter of this game. If you are only getting in on the Remedy fandom with Alan Wake 2 (welcome, by the way) then you may not fully understand how incredible it is that Alan Wake 2 happened at all and may not have the full context for how much that song and sequence represents.
Back in 2010 when Alan Wake was first released, Remedy had originally planned to follow it up immediately with a sequel (hence why it ended on such a cliffhanger.) But this was the early 2010s. Multiplayer was king, and EA was doing stupid shit like saying "Single player games are dead" and Microsoft, Remedy's publisher at the time, had zero interest in doing a single player sequel, especially not with an IP they did not own, like Alan Wake.
So years passed with those of us who loved the first game essentially left to conclude it wouldn't ever get a sequel. We had a decade of teases, references, and nods that Remedy hadn't forgotten about us but it seemed like the stars were never going to align for poor Alan. It got even worse for a while when musical rights issues caused the original Alan Wake to be pulled from stores and become literal abandonware for a while. You could not legally buy the game. Not great for hopes of a sequel.
So for the sequel to finally, finally happen and incorporate everything Remedy has learned over the years between AW1 and AW2, take it all one step further, and then to include a fucking *20 minute choreographed interactive rock opera celebrating everything that is special about Alan Wake* just floored me. I've shed tears over how beautiful it is. It feels like Remedy literally singing from the rafters that no matter how bad it got they never forgot about us and that now that they can finally make the game they've wanted to make for over a decade they're going to celebrate it as much as we are.
That little *grin* on Alan's face at the very end after his cheeky sip of coffee from an Oh Deer Diner mug says it all. In the middle of everything, in a capitalist hellscape where artistic integrity and actually making stuff that makes people happy seems to constantly fall victim to parasites in corporate board rooms we got it *this.* We got the game we'd hoped for and not only did it live up to our expectations it blew them out the God Damn Window. I'm probably going to finish the game tonight, based on the climactic vibes I'm getting, and I literally felt myself getting emotional in the car on the way to work today because I will never get to experience this for the first time ever again and that moment is almost over.
And if you are looking to support Poets of the Fall as Old Gods of Asgard they dropped the single of Herald of Darkness today, so maybe give it a listen or twelve and let them know how much we appreciate their work!
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Finally finished up a pair of Free Worlds Guard lances for Battletech. Alpine camo because it's practical, purple arms because this is Space Feudalism and nobility are vain bastards.
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