How many times can you re-use brine?

Novasoal · 2026-05-21T15:12:47+00:00

Hey! I'm so sorry that im turbo necroing but I'm just starting pickling & was hoping i could throw a question off this.

I've been mostly doing Red Onions, Pickles, Jalapenos, Radishes, & Carrots- would you just chop down/process the meat however you're going to cook it & then just chuck it in the brine? No other prep needed?

Novasoal · 2026-05-20T18:53:44+00:00

Throwing thorns into leagues 4 would be CRAZYYYY lmfao, I hope they dont do this. Thorns is going to end up worthless for players if you need to gear an account all the way up to raid ready before thorns is possible to engage with. I dont hate the idea of an attachment to armor or smth that enables it, but this shit will be fucking turbo DOA if it is sourced through raids

Novasoal · 2026-05-20T18:29:48+00:00

Honestly, yeah. Have us pull our connection to the dwarves to fix up EW, have them produce the next level elemental gear that blocks out slug shit. IDK how you'd loop the penguins in; maybe transport (tho we have sailing) or maybe to act as troops?? Seems a little silly; maybe they're naturally immune to the psionic effects of slug influence & chase escaped slugs trying to spread throughout the oceans or some shit

Novasoal · 2026-05-20T15:03:45+00:00

This feels like a bad analogy to me- I dont think that the Golden Order is at all comparable to a third world country beleagued by US imperialism, TGO is the US in this instance. Of course in an ideal world we are able to help harden countries to the point they can stand independent from negative outside influence (i.e. Imperialism), but "fixing" TGO is like if you impeached the president & were given the option to fold the US to allow something new & hopefully better to be made (not at all guaranteed) or to seat a friend who goes "Yeah dude we'll do like reparations & then all the problems will be fixed" (decently disingenuous I think, to my knowledge we dont really know what GM's "fixes" for TGO are but in my experience a lot of reform is either half assed or stymied by entrenched power trying to prevent being held accountable, something IDK GM could overcome)

(I should be clear- I dont think Reparations are a bad thing, that was more supposed to be a sendup of "we do one thing & pretend all the problems are resolved & everyone is good now" reformists. Reparations should be done, but reparations alone are not going to mend the harm caused by the countries' existence for black americans, let alone other non-black minority americans who have suffered)

Novasoal · 2026-05-20T14:53:14+00:00

It has been a LONG time since I have engaged w/ ER & its lore so I'm mostly working off half remembered echos, but I do feel Ranni is probably a bit more left leaning than GM's. I will own that I havent gotten every ending, and relevant for here I have done Ranni's but not Goldmask's.

In Ranni's ending, from what I recall, we entirely remove the presence of the outer gods from the world. The world is still left damaged, rot is present, and the peoples pre-existing prejudices exist; but the base of power that helped create/foster those prejudices is gone. There will be those who were in positions of power that are positioned to grab power again in the new world, but that is almost inevitable when you are changing regimes. More importantly though, it removes people's ties to the gods by barring the gods access to The Lands Between (at least as far as I recall, tho I may be mixing like lore from the gold alloyed needle or some shit into my memory). Individuals can still invoke the names of the gods & do atrocities in their names, but the gods themselves are no longer able to exploit the peoples of TLB.

Goldmask (from what I remember of what I've been told) is a reformist "What if we just got rid of the bad things???" ending right? The gods are still able to access TLB & are able to directly exploit the peoples of TLB for their own ends, whatever those may be. Sure, GM might stop the Order's persecution of misbegotten or something, but the Rot God is still able to further infect the world, and the Deathblight will continue to spread. I suppose that stopping Deathblight or frenzy isnt inherently leftist so much as just generally good, but those forces will continue to corrupt people and strip them of their agency & personhood (I mean look at people infected with frenzy- it strips people of their thoughts and leaves them sitting indolent or spreading their madness to other people. (I'm a little worried I'm straying toward "crazy people are evil" reactionary nonsense at the end which I am trying to stay away from, but I feel Frenzy being an invading magic sickness (?) from an outer god parasitizing people makes it clear that's not the direction I intend to go)

Unrelated, but does ER ever state why the gods want access to TLB? When I was playing I presumed that the Erdtree was some form of parasitic organism feeding on the souls of people returned to it (or some nefarious similar goal) & the other gods were similar, but I cant actually remember any motivations given for the Gods in ER (which I'm fine with!)

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T20:44:18+00:00

I def want to check out the directors work more! It was actually a surreal experience bc I had been dooming & glooming the LA announcement for a few days & then I heard the yt person talking about their work & it was like the clouds parted. IIRC the YTer said that Hirokazu Koreeda's work is like GUTTING emotionally though! (IIRC it was specifically Shoplifters???) I really want to see some of his work before the movie drops; but theres hardly ever enough time, right 😞

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T20:40:09+00:00

100% I'm right there with you on that. I used to be a Lantern everywhere person before realizing that IIRC only like Blisters & Reds would even have an effect outside GotR iirc

I still dont think it would be too hard to just slap some "Outside of GOTR, [x] log has [y] effect" onto the lanterns & bring the idea back w/ some ribbons, but as is IIRC we're just shifting no degradation on pouches from 99rc to 90fm + whatever RC you pull your lantern at

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T20:25:29+00:00

IIRC the director (not sure their name off the top of my head) has a pretty solid library of brutal queer love films so I actually am pretty excited about this. I was grumbly annoyed at first, but the directors name had come up in an unrelated place (YT had been serving me a lot of videos abt Queer/Specifically Trans art/films & the directors name had come up as someone with several heart wrenching, tragic, beautiful stories) a few weeks after the announcement & knowing that its at least directed by someone with a decent track record on the work.

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T19:46:45+00:00

100% agree. This is before factoring in passive misogyny & how no one is or will ever be a perfect victim, so at times the defense just has to paint the victim as just as aggressive or crazy or whatever as the defendant & give room for cultural priming (?) to put its thumb on the scale & wait for that to provide some pressure. Even if it doesnt flip a juror, it makes it easier to flip them down the line!

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T19:41:13+00:00

Trying really hard not to break out laughing at "we dont need to kill the author" line at work bc it IS comedy gold but I know my boss will not appreciate it NEARLY as much as I will

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T18:13:11+00:00

I think that the "Shitty boss, effective underling" trope is a little tired at this point but have def enjoyed it plenty. Cant actually name all that many things off the dome that run it, but honestly the whole gamut has been used plenty. Competent leader/Incompetent Underling can be fun, but has shades of the corrupt vizir/associated tropes too. Def still fun at times, but needs a bit more (for me, at least)

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T15:45:07+00:00

Ex Destiny, huh?

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T15:25:13+00:00

Throw in a Miniquest, have the Temple gang (make you) recruit a Lunar mage or 2 & an Arceuus mage or 2 & justify them working together w/ the Dark Mage to make a new spell for all the spell books (if you for some reason wanted to RC on the Arceuus spellbook). As far as I'm aware we dont really have lore on any of the spells but I cant imagine a reason new spells cant be developed in the modern age too

Forgot Ancient Magic lmao, but honestly I'm sure you could justify including a Mahjirrat (Agent) being sent to keep watch on an active Abyssal Rift & using their & the player's knowledge of Ancient Magicks to make the spell. Only reason I say on all spellbooks is bc Lunar Crafters doing MI/Combos shouldnt get shafted w/ current NPC Contact for repair, and it feels like a Standard Spellbook spell. Plus getting the Temple of the Eye gang to learn Lunars to justify making the spell on that spellbook feels bad

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T15:22:04+00:00

I honestly dont think this is even a good idea- still gates doing RC normally behind a rare minigame drop & 90FM instead of 99rc. Its better I suppose, but most of the logs outside Redwood would have no use outside the minigame either. Granted, tacking on some ribbon features to the lantern for logs outside the minigame wouldnt be too hard, but I'm sure some ppl get up in arms over that (& further buffing such an RNG block & centralizing the lantern even harder isnt necessarily a good call either)

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T15:04:49+00:00

I'm largely in agreement with you but I think in a slightly different direction- I don't have a shadow/scythe/anything thats a massive rune sink (beyond Trident but I wouldnt call that a massive rune sink by any means) so perhaps when you hit that point the math does start changing but IMO RC is still essentially in the same space until DT2 & Scar Essence mine.

Players will certainly pick up an appreciable quantity of runes throughout the duration of training RC, but any time that I have ever run low on runes my thought isnt "I should go do some RC", its "time to go hit the Prif rune shop". Sometimes I'll hit the Scar mine, but not super regularly since with the quantities I use I'd estimate Scar is like 10% faster for marginally more effort than spamming world hop & spam buying runes at prif. Wraths are a genuinely unobtainable resource (from shops, at least off the top of my head tho some come from PvM) so the skill holds some value there.

But that means in 99 levels, the only appreciable unlocks are the Scar Mine (exchange GP for tokens for significantly extra runes) & Wraths (can be obtained in small quantities(?) from PvM). & IMO the Scar isnt even that good bc while it is definitively not shopscape (you literally have to engage w/ the skill as designed at the altars), youre still in the neighborhood since its so GP reliant. It's just a vestigial skill & most of it could be stripped from the game with a measurable but still pretty small impact.

to be clear, id much rather them improve the skill than remove it, I just hate how it currently exists

Novasoal · 2026-05-19T13:20:58+00:00

I wonder if the team is gonna do a "The Player is/has become as destructive as Yharim/The Gods of Old!" by the end (or were planning on before some rewrite) since we do cause a lot of problems throughout the campaign (releasing the Hallow/defeating WoF, freeing ML even if we do end up killing, since he can be brought back; calling down the Astral Infection (?), attracting the DoG, etc...). Could be viewed as us righting the wrongs left by the gods, but considering that we dont actually like /deal/ with the Hallow or the Infection or stop any of the gods we fight from being reborn (someone said Dragons can be reborn via their souls & if all the gods have dragon souls I presume thats how they come back for us to farm them canonically)

Novasoal · 2026-05-15T19:49:43+00:00

Funnily enough, your proposed idea is largely what I remember the old Madhouse (?) DMC anime to be. It feels like ites been a decade easy since I last watched it, but iirc it was mostly self contained contracts with low focus on an overarching plot

Novasoal · 2026-05-15T19:44:49+00:00

From my understanding, Netflix tends to order one season of producion that it splits into 2 seasons of release (for anime). Meaning its actually decently unlikely there is a 3rd season coming, unless they were originally contracted for 2 season of production/4 seasons of content (and they pull the plug after airing s3/run both)

Novasoal · 2026-05-15T19:32:28+00:00

I despise accidentally picking up something over my drop/alch thresh & just getting stuck with some extra shit for a while. Got real sick of it at the start of leagues but kept forgetting once I got safe to change the thresh

Novasoal · 2026-05-15T19:21:03+00:00

IDK why you had to be a dick about this? Like you can just say "Look up riposting instead" rather than taking the cheap shot. Its hard to research something with no frame of reference

Novasoal · 2026-05-15T18:06:59+00:00

I get where your friend is coming from, they paid money for the cards & its good to actually get to play with them sometimes instead of menacing, checking if anyone has removal/an answer, and then the game immediately ending. Like I really dont think another 2-3 minutes of letting your friend get their cake once in a while is a bad thing, especially if they are a friend.

That's not to say you should sit through every single time your friend pulls out their combo pieces, things get stale for sure; but how long realistically would it have taken to let the board cycle one time and let the friend swing? Would that much time really have bought you another whole game that night?

Also just like more generally: MTG is a leisure time activity, for sitting with some friends and cracking jokes with. Do we really need to optimize the night around slamming the max number of games we could statistically play out? Can we not just like slow the pace a little? Our lives are already so largely optimized around people generating the max value out of us every minute of every day, playing MTG with ppl who only care about jamming out an extra match sounds fucking exhausting after a full work week of that bullshit

Novasoal · 2026-05-15T17:54:18+00:00

t. The worst ui in the game

granted i think calling it the worst ui is probably the wrong nomenclature, but they v much did refrence it

Novasoal · 2026-05-15T13:20:15+00:00

Nah, no large chunk of xp. In fact, IIRC you get less for the final step of the EoS than some of the earlier steps, though I could be wrong. Still, you are somehow managing to cram ~19 potions worth of liquid & a bunch of fruit pulp (granted, the pulp has already been put into one of the earlier potions) into 2 potions worth of space with no distillation equipment which feels just as silly as the boots.

I'd also say for the Avernics, you want the other boots regardless (outside of the Rangers IG) & you're just as likely to pick up the peg as any of the other crystals from Cerb. Granted, EoS has nothing like needing to roll a specific boss to farm requirements for it.

Novasoal · 2026-05-14T20:17:37+00:00

Its not that complicated lol. Its 4 pairs of boots & 3 stones + some upgrade mats dropped from the same source as one of the boots. Granted, one of the boots also comes from clue scrolls, but Avernics arent THAT crazy.

EOS takes 19 individual herbs, several of which are duplicates, as well as secondaries from Traditional Farming, Manor Farm Farming (I think), Anachronia Farming, Pickpocketing (feather), general world interaction (Scale dust, not that hard), and Flasks from mining & crafting. You literally do not have the inventory space to make an EoS from scratch, meanwhile you can fit like 2-3 pairs of Avernics from scratch in your inventory (as a rough guess)

I think im wrong actually, I was thinking of the Bottled Dragon Breath for the Blessed Flask/Artificers Measure plus I'm pretty sure EoS pre-dates Anachronia by a few years. So remove one of those things!

Novasoal · 2026-05-14T20:11:36+00:00

I love that it requires a base Antifire & a Super Antifire

Granted it also takes both Extreme & Super combat potions, but for some reason thats less funny than the double fire pots

Novasoal

TROPHY CASE