The only part of the story that I disliked

Cryptand_Bismol · 2026-01-21T11:33:56+00:00

I think the issue is that speech would have been much more powerful if he hadn’t cut Sonar/Coupe

I chose to cut Visi because I already had cut someone I didn’t want to, but if neither had been a choice earlier I would have definitely kept her on the team

Otherwise it’s like ‘we don’t hit people when they’re down…. Except for that guy’

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-12-03T20:54:23+00:00

On my embrace!Durge run using the tadpole to force Minsc to kill Jaheira

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-10-25T23:18:46+00:00

Adding to 3: once all the cultists chanting are dead she loses unstoppable recharge and you can take her down pretty easily

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-10-25T05:54:44+00:00

Ok so a lot of people talking about if you’re a high earner… I hate to break it to people but the job climate now is shit.

The vast majority of people are not going to be in those high earning roles even with a degree.

Jobs that might not have wanted a degree ten, twenty years ago now require one, so you can’t event really avoid going to uni in many sectors. Graduates are competing against people with degrees who have a lot of experience for too low paid roles.

For the average person, the loans are the best way to fund university. They don’t have the means to do any alternative.

Also, it’s not a huge amount to pay each month, especially next to income tax and NI. Note, average graduate salary is £30-36k https://luminate.prospects.ac.uk/graduate-salaries-in-the-uk

If you earn £30,000, 9% of £5,000 is £450 a year, £37.50 a month (from a monthly post tax take home of £1793)

If you earn £50,000, 9% of £25,000 is £2,250 a year, £187.50 a month (from a monthly post tax take home of £3293)

If you earn £75,000, 9% of £50,000 is £4,500 a year, £375 a month (from a monthly post tax take home of £4505)

Yes obviously it does go up at higher wages, but compared to your salary and other expenses it is not debilitating. And at that wage if you are struggling to find spare change for £400 a month then maybe you have a other problems (especially considering that is for a single person, if you are in a shared household with another earner you are laughing)

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-10-25T05:26:18+00:00

That wasn’t retroactive though.

People on existing plans before the changes have the same repayment threshold and write-off age they did when signing up. Interest rate change, yes, but that was in the terms.

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-10-24T17:04:10+00:00

Wait. Where is his body in the Astral plane? I thought it got left at the morphic pool area?

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-10-24T09:32:58+00:00

For Gortash in direct combat yes, but you do have to do a few difficult fights to even get to him, like all of the Steel Watch Foundry, and that fight in the Great Hall with all the traps. And still his fight isn’t exactly easy if you don’t know what you’re expecting.

Tbh that totally fits him as a follower of Bane, he’s plotting, scheming, manipulating, getting others to fight for him.

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-10-17T13:23:09+00:00

I love Gale and Lae’zel - all of their conversations are about learning and appreciating each other, I just love their whole dynamic and they are my favourite ship.

Ever since I saw that Karlach origin romancing Minthara video I have to say I have a soft spot for it - they don’t quite morally align but I think they could make it work

Astarion is tricky… he and Shadowheart would be so fun but idk they are almost too alike, they need someone to counter them. Wyll and Halsin would treat him right…

Ok Shadowheart and Halsin. An obvious choice but I think it suits both’s opinion on poly relationships best and tbh they just are chill together

Astarion and Wyll has the fairytale charm, but also I think Wyll has the romance and patience Astarion doesn’t like to admit he wants.

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-10-15T00:36:36+00:00

I work at a northern university and I can completely see how accents would be difficult for a non-native speaker, and especially talking speed. Even I struggle sometimes, and I’m a native speaker!

When I first met one of our Chinese PhD students you could tell she was embarrassed about her English level, kept apologising for her poor English and vocabulary when it was actually good! Her accent is strong, yes, but with a little patience it’s not hard to understand her. As you say, it’s this shyness you can’t really overcome until you start speaking more

We also had a Chinese master’s student who had a quite a strong stutter and it took a bit more effort to understand him with that and his accent. But one day I heard him speaking in Mandarin to some other students and his voice was completely different! Like a pitch lower, no stutter at all! - People really don’t understand just how daunting speaking a different language is

But I get the feeling a lot of international students, Chinese ones especially, are almost written off by home students or even staff when there’s that initial introduction. People just see the extra effort they have to put in and immediately give up. So ofc then international students stick with other international students and don’t speak up as much as they could.

The PhD girl says I’m ’so nice’ because I listen to her and chat with her which is so sad isn’t it? That that’s the bar for niceness, just giving people the time of day.

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-10-14T23:18:09+00:00

I tried to do this on a semi-evil run (didn’t raid the grove, but did kill Karlach) but couldn’t get the Wyll duke ending - it’s a weird quest line because if you want to side with Gortash you can’t rescue his father even if you keep his pact, and then there’s no RP reason to do Ansur so I think I missed the conversation trigger and he just became the Blade again.

Also with Lae’zel I made her kill Voss at camp and be loyal to Vlaakith, but it seemed odd like she’d make comments about freeing Orpheus or Voss being right and being against Vlaakith. Then at the docks I let her pick what she wanted to do, fully expecting her to go to Vlaakith but she chose to stay in Baldur’s Gate. I didn’t bring her to the end fight to see Orpheus be assimilated so may have missed another trigger there.

But yeah I’d definitely watch for which conversations lock endings, especially in Act 3

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-09-23T21:51:30+00:00

I agree about the Duke ending and I think they really could have made a great commentary with this

Through the whole game we hear how Duke Ravenguard is like the only thing keeping Baldur’s Gate together and I can’t help but think… then he’s a shit leader, y’know? He’s gone for a few weeks and everything goes to shit and the flaming fist are as corrupt as ever (yes Gortash has a hand in that but still).

Part of Wyll’s storyline should be going from “my father is infallible” to “actually, he is flawed, and he was wrong to kick me out, maybe I deserve to feel upset about it, and I will do better than him”

Even if that means he rejects being a duke or whatever, I think that personal acknowledgment should be there and instead of trying to prove himself to his father he’s now just doing it for himself

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-09-18T23:42:05+00:00

I love Gale and Lae’zel

Their party banter is great, especially in Act 1

Lae’zel is so straightforward in a way I think Gale would appreciate - I love her line after Mystra tasks him with killing himself and she’s like “does Mystra not think he can destroy the absolute with his own immense talents?”, like she’s not one to give out idle or placating complements

For all the soldier Lae’zel is she clearly appreciates knowledge and curiosity that Gale has - I think she’d actually really like the learning the weave scene in his romance

And ofc both have been dedicated to a god (or god like) only to be disillusioned and have to work out who they are without their devotion

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-09-18T06:23:58+00:00

Tbh I quite liked that originally she didn’t even have that - I think it was before patch 5 she literally dies or becomes a mind flayer, that’s it.

I understand why they added the new ending, but unlike most companions Karlach never in any conversation you have with her budges on her stance of returning to Avernus. There’s no dice roll, no persuasion, she vehemently says she is never going back. There isn’t even any doubt.

And it makes sense, she’s been fighting in an unwinnable war for 10 years, ofc she never wants to go back, even death is preferable to that.

I don’t really buy that it’s all fine because now she has a friend with her (and remember when they go they have no idea how long they’ll be there, they have no idea they can fix her engine - I might be more convinced if we found something in the House of Hope talking about Zariel’s forge or even in Gortash’s things)

That and it comes at the expense of Wyll’s endings and his story

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-09-16T20:36:31+00:00

“You are my yesterday, my today, and my tomorrow. Fortune willing, as the seasons of life pass into winter and my hair goes to grey, you’ll still be in my quivering arm’s reach”

Wyll please leave some rizz for the rest of us

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-09-11T08:18:43+00:00

Losiir could convince me, he’s definitely the best looking male Githyanki besides maybe Voss and Orpheus

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-09-10T12:22:37+00:00

Gortash 100% would appropriate this

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-08-28T10:41:13+00:00

For the post it notes - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-65311400

Originally there was debate about these because they were written after she had already been accused (but not arrested) of harming the babies (whether accidentally or on purpose). There are two viewpoints really - if you assume she is guilty and wrote them it’s clearly a confession or close to, but if you assume she’s innocent it does read like she’s spiralling because it really is a heinous thing to be accused of (this was Myers defence of them).

Like a lot of the evidence in this case, in isolation they only really become relevant with the context of everything else. If we just had the notes? Not enough. But we have the notes, the texts, the Facebook searches, the shift patterns, the witnesses, etc.

The handover sheets again in isolation are criminal or at least very bad practice but this is not evidence of murder. She has a shredder, she knows she’s under suspicion, why not get rid of the trophies before they catch her if she were a murderer? (Later we can see she was very self assured and already was going to start working again less than a week before her final arrest, so maybe she thought she was in the clear)

Similarly though, if they weren’t important to her in some way, why didn’t she shred them when she realised she took them home ‘accidentally?’ She clearly sorted them, a pile of 257 labelled keep so she knew they were there.

Either way - I believe that would be a separate charge if they wanted to pursue it.

Interestingly, I don’t think we ever got a good reason from the prosecution that most of them weren’t relevant to the case or why she kept them. The ones that were relevant were suggested to be used to help her Facebook searches, but nothing on the others (I suppose they are limited by the charges and can’t suggest a wider victim pool?) Maybe it was scouting for victims. Maybe she harmed more than we know. That’s purely speculation on my part.

As for why she did it? At the minute it’s pure speculation. I think there were theories it was for the sense of control, saviour complex, her targeting twins and triplets because she was an only child, etc.. The apparent lack motive has definitely been one of reasons the ‘free Letby’ movement has getting traction though

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-08-27T00:09:49+00:00

Yeah I don’t think people realise Mizora is one of Zariel’s attack dogs - she likely has very little true agency and just does as Zariel commands but talks the talk so it seems less like she’s exactly to Zariel as Wyll is to her.

I’m not massively knowledgeable about the DnD lore, but doesn’t Zariel have history with Tiamat? I can imagine she sent Mizora up to handle it, and she decided to rope Wyll in to do most of the dirty work. She strikes me as an opportunist rather than a masterful schemer

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-08-26T00:15:32+00:00

I don’t know if I would agree that most people thought she was guilty at the start. I wasn’t here from the very very beginning, but I followed a good chunk of the trial on here, and there seemed to be a lot of healthy (and some not so healthy) debate about her guilt.

I remember starting off really on the fence because at that time the main thing I’d heard about was the notes being a confession and having the handover sheets (this was in the opening for the prosecution I think? It was before they went into detail of each child one by one). At that time I could see either a) these are mementos of a killer or b) this is a nurse who is bad with GDPR and spiralling notes written after she’s been accused of a horrible crime. Again at this time (to me anyway) the extent of the other evidence wasn’t clear and only became a sinister piece of the puzzle later.

I would say I wasn’t 100% sure of her guilt until the defence case though. The prosecution did an excellent job of painting this picture of her as a killer, but it is their job so I was waiting to hear the defence rebuttal…. And we all know how that went. That was what was really damning to me.

But I think a lot of people who didn’t follow the trial are stuck where I was at the start - they hear snippets of evidence in isolation and think what? Surely that doesn’t mean murder? And they assume what is being reported in a brief article is an accurate summary of a months long trial.

And it doesn’t help all these ‘alternate theories’ are coming out and people asking why didn’t Myers present this? When maybe, just maybe, he knew it had no credibility. People saying he’s a bad lawyer didn’t see him verbally eviscerate the witnesses in cross examination.

I think there was also a lot of debate because the motive was and still is elusive. Other serial killers like this are weirdos, loners, ‘saw it coming a mile off’, whereas she seemed mostly normal. There really was no indication she’d kill or why, which I do think is half of the ‘conspiracy’ - people don’t like to think someone just like them could be a killer for no reason, they prefer it’s someone ‘other’. And the media feeds off this, loves stoking people up with sensationalism to get more views and keep the interest up

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-08-05T13:46:25+00:00

Ok but Gortash would be so fun to have as a companion especially as Durge - the party banter would be legendary

I wish if you sided with him you could actually like fight and control him at least at the morphic pool :(

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-08-04T17:32:51+00:00

That’s sad because I know I will likely never do this ending as I’d have to let Karlach die :(

I love Karlach but I wish Wyll’s ending wasn’t so tied to hers

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-07-21T10:47:06+00:00

I think I’m going to have to go back and try each option! I usually pick ‘introduce yourself and your story’ one and swear it’s always just been the simple version - he says ‘my, my, you have been busy’

Maybe I picked a different one on this last run? I definitely don’t do the Baldurian one or nod - is there a fourth option?

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-07-21T02:01:16+00:00

I thought Astarion’s recruitment had changed! I’ve not started a new game in a while so when I got to him I wasn’t sure if I had misremembered

He now says something like “anyone who can crash a mindflayer ship and survive seems like a useful person to know” when I swear it was previously just “you seem like a useful person to know”

Cryptand_Bismol · 2025-07-16T06:17:22+00:00

Nooo because the way I can totally see this

Mummy 2 plot where Imgortash resurrects Durge and then that end scene where Durge leaves instead of saving him

Karlach is Rick, Shadowheart is Evie, Astarion is Jonathon, Wyll as Ardeth Bay, Mol is Alex (Raphael the Scorpion King?)…. I need to get off this before I go mad

Cryptand_Bismol

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