muttonchops to pork chops
May. 12th, 2020 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/3ct2b9g
Last night’s Witcher 3 adventures got off to a good start with a ramble around Novigrad. DF had been looking for all the noticeboards, to pull off notices about all of the quests.
He was also looking for the bank, to change over all the random assorted currency he’d looted and been paid and such over the course of the game. So we went and wandered around Hierarch Square, and then got lost, and watched a witch burning (which was awful) and got into a fight with a priest (he backed down and ran away), and Axii’d some drunks into leaving us alone, and such. Annnnnnnnnd next to the bank was a barber shop.
“The muttonchops are staying,” DF said, “but I concede that this hairstyle is atrocious.”
“I want the fluffy back,” MM said plaintively.
So, the fluffy (default) hairstyle is back; DF is too straight to understand what’s so great about the undercut. Sorry. At least Geralt’s hair constantly floats in otherwise-imperceptible winds at all times, now, which is what we were on this journey for.
(I did just remember that one of the only times I’ve lied in a personal essay online did feature DF. In 2001 or 2, when he was my roommate, along with another young man, the other young man had a tumultous remote relationship with a young lady who crossed some boundary of his or other, and we realized she was stalking my blog which was a brand-new livejournal account, and so as part of some shenanigans, I wrote an entry wherein I revealed some shock at having caught DF and Other Roommate in the shower together, with DF’s permission I think, and it was part of the sort of drama one engages in when 20 years old and in undergrad and relatively new at the concept of social media online. I don’t know why I feel the need to relate this at all but it is worth noting. Hm I just went and looked and I’m missing a bunch of the early entries. probably it’s still up there though. I don’t remember how the drama resolved itself. I had like, ongoing low-grade beef with the ex-girlfriend for a while, but it wasn’t really about me at all.)
Anyhow we bought a bunch of cursed objects from a merchant to do quests with later, cleared out the noticeboards, changed over money– realized you could get a loan? paid 30 crowns for the enjoyment of borrowing 100, discovering that Yennefer was the guarantor, and paying back the loan– now he says he’ll loan us more next time. Why would Geralt need a loan? Who fuckin knows man? But it’s a thing you can do. – and then we figured, y’know, Novigrod’s a bit hot for Tiny Precious Wee Flower Prince Geralt, now level 6 and slightly-better-equipped than previously. (Thanks toakilah12902 for the tip on the bank location, as we honestly would not have found it and even still had to go door-to-door around the square to locate it because it is Not obvious. Also thanks for a photo of the Only Acceptable Muttonchops in the world, which belong on a cockatiel. VALID POINT, FRIEND.)
“Okay,” DF said. “Time to do something violent.”
We loaded up Wild At Heart, which is the quest where a hunter’s wife has gone missing and he put a notice on the noticeboard for someone to come find her.
Of course I’d read a playthrough, so I was spoilered, but I kept asking what the others thought. MM was immediately convinced that the sister had killed the missing woman. “She’s shady,” she said. DF thought the missing woman had just gone feral and run off into the woods, that maybe she was the werewolf. Then, of course, the sister came and tried to bribe Geralt to stop investigating, which like, ok, there’s no doubt anymore. I tried to get DF to take the bribe but he was adamant that Geralt Would Never, so he turned her down. Later, though, he was super into the timed decision about whether to let frontier justice be served.
After that, we kind of wandered around Velen. Atakilah12902‘s recommendation we wandered vaguely Lindenvaleward, as there’s a little hamlet eastish of that called Lurtch where there’s a quest called Fool’s Gold where you get to do something bonkers? IDK– well, we were sort of lostish, and as we were fucking around we came upon a deserted abandoned church with candles lit in it.
(Side note: why are so many long-abandoned locations in this game lit by half-melted candles? Like? How long does a candle last? How long to the game designers genuinely think an unattended candle lasts? How is this a thing???! It makes even less sense than routinely looting food items from dessicated skeletons of decades-dead predecessors.)
The altar had a “Press A to Use” thing, so we, uh, used it? Which seemed to entail– oh uh it had us kneel down. Like. I guess to meditate? What the–
and then of course the grave hag comes to the door behind us, and Geralt’s like “Ah, right on time,” and we’re like ah fuck this is the grave hag quest we picked up completely by accident several days ago and forgot about. So, congrats, it’s now time to immediately learn to fight a grave hag!!
“So… time to run away?” MM said.
“Listen,” DF said, mashing buttons, “I’m strategically tumbling away.”
Incredibly, while the fight was difficult, it was not impossible, and even without preparations it went better than could have been expected. Geralt slew Mourntart fairly expediently, shoved the trophy in his rucksack, and oh hey Roach showed up unsummoned so we could stick the trophy on her, great. Now, onward!
And yeah the Fool’s Gold quest involves a bunch of chicanery with some pigs. Like… a lot of chicanery. “You walk and walk, and then you’re there!” the village idiot says, and MM was like shit that’s a good line, gonna use that one on my kids.
Geralt is Deducing Things at one point, and is like, “This is a curse someone cast with their feet,” and we all were like what does that mean, and I was like does he mean the curse-caster didn’t have hands and MM was like maybe an animal cast the curse? and DF said, “I think he just means it was cast clumsily.” We sat contemplating that a bit, chewing over various more culturally-apt, English-fluent ways of expressing that something is clumsily done, as DF navigated Geralt back along the path to check back in with the weirdly magical pigs, hm, a pig-related curse see? and finally out of nowhere I hollered
“HAM-HANDED it’s a HAM-HANDED CURSE”
I’m so proud of myself for that one. Earlier in the evening DF had been doing some really awful pun/dad-joke commentary and as MM and I were groaning I was like you know, it’s your fault, you’re the one that made him a dad and she was like i know, i know, but really he was already kind of Like That so we can’t blame ourselves. (It’s my fault they ever met each other anyway, my one and only attempt as a match-maker, I’m so terrible.) So anyway, I won the Dad Jokes portion of the evening.
Anyhow we ran around a bunch, got killed, had to Grease Up properly for the fight (it turns out as nekkers are ogroids, necrophage oil doesn’t do much of anything to them, whoops), and eventually had to Axii a bunch of pigs into following the village idiot so that we could go do a thing.
Now. I have, ah, considerable experience at real-life swineherding. Like, not a ton, but I have been one of many warm bodies involved in the vehicle-free relocation of varying numbers of hogs of varying ages as a part of my sister’s organic pasture-raised pork operation several times over the last four or five years. Once six of us had to move a young Tamworth-cross boar (about 9 months old, so about 250-300 pounds) from a pasture by the barn to a pasture several hundred feet away… which involved leading him directly past the production beds of vegetables. The vegetable manager armed himself with a shovel, and frequently had to bash the boar in the head when he would have turned; this only works because of something I hadn’t known beforehand, which is that the vegetable manager is extremely fleet of foot and also fucking hates pigs. The rest of us hauled along an assortment of fence posts and shovels, to goad him with. Several of us were burdened with a large, heavy cattle gate, which he still managed to lift and shove his way under at one point with four adult humans doing their best to prevent him from doing this.
(On another occasion, the vegetable manager, who I should mention is a very soft-spoken and extremely mild-mannered person, had to grab a market-weight sow by the ears and wrestle her to the ground in eighteen inches of mud in order to get her into a pen, and he did this so commandingly that it actually worked, and we were all completely astounded because normally that would not have worked, but he was so angry he made it work, and then had to immediately go into the shower with all his clothes on because of that 18″ of mud about a foot of it was pure pig shit.)
Another time, we had twenty-five market-weight hogs (just over 6 months, about 200-250 lbs on the hoof) that we had to lead from a pasture on a hillside to another one about a quarter of a mile away, bounded on one side by high-tensile wire with a gate we’d have to lead them through.
I found out that hogs of that size 1) don’t give a shit about you, 2) might follow a bucket of food if they care but mostly don’t, 3) can outrun you flat-out for any amount of distance, and 4) care far far more about mud puddles than about a bucket of feed. It took us two hours to move the pigs, and we only succeeded because a couple of them decided they wanted to be where the people were, and the others eventually followed. It was, maybe, the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted to do on the farm. Oh did I mention, there were seven people helping, two of them in a truck? And it only succeeded in the end because the pigs mostly ran out of other things to do.
So anyway.
Geralt’s got to Axii nine pigs, and he’s got to take them somewhere and arrive with nine pigs. Like, I wish I had Axii for pigs, but even with it, this isn’t going to be easy.
MM said happily, as the pigs wandered through the town and Geralt had to vault a fence to go reapply Axii to one of them who had gotten a different notion, “If I knew video games were like this, I’d’ve learned how to play a long time ago!”
“Video games aren’t usually like this,” DF said, frantically mashing the controller.
Unfortunately, on Death March, it seems to be a thing that the nekkers that we’d so tidily removed for this pig drive respawn, and one of them respawned as a Level 12, and that was the end of the evening. Tonight we’ll have to go back and redo the entire Axii-ing Of The Hogs and see if we can’t do better.
Last night’s Witcher 3 adventures got off to a good start with a ramble around Novigrad. DF had been looking for all the noticeboards, to pull off notices about all of the quests.
He was also looking for the bank, to change over all the random assorted currency he’d looted and been paid and such over the course of the game. So we went and wandered around Hierarch Square, and then got lost, and watched a witch burning (which was awful) and got into a fight with a priest (he backed down and ran away), and Axii’d some drunks into leaving us alone, and such. Annnnnnnnnd next to the bank was a barber shop.
“The muttonchops are staying,” DF said, “but I concede that this hairstyle is atrocious.”
“I want the fluffy back,” MM said plaintively.
So, the fluffy (default) hairstyle is back; DF is too straight to understand what’s so great about the undercut. Sorry. At least Geralt’s hair constantly floats in otherwise-imperceptible winds at all times, now, which is what we were on this journey for.
(I did just remember that one of the only times I’ve lied in a personal essay online did feature DF. In 2001 or 2, when he was my roommate, along with another young man, the other young man had a tumultous remote relationship with a young lady who crossed some boundary of his or other, and we realized she was stalking my blog which was a brand-new livejournal account, and so as part of some shenanigans, I wrote an entry wherein I revealed some shock at having caught DF and Other Roommate in the shower together, with DF’s permission I think, and it was part of the sort of drama one engages in when 20 years old and in undergrad and relatively new at the concept of social media online. I don’t know why I feel the need to relate this at all but it is worth noting. Hm I just went and looked and I’m missing a bunch of the early entries. probably it’s still up there though. I don’t remember how the drama resolved itself. I had like, ongoing low-grade beef with the ex-girlfriend for a while, but it wasn’t really about me at all.)
Anyhow we bought a bunch of cursed objects from a merchant to do quests with later, cleared out the noticeboards, changed over money– realized you could get a loan? paid 30 crowns for the enjoyment of borrowing 100, discovering that Yennefer was the guarantor, and paying back the loan– now he says he’ll loan us more next time. Why would Geralt need a loan? Who fuckin knows man? But it’s a thing you can do. – and then we figured, y’know, Novigrod’s a bit hot for Tiny Precious Wee Flower Prince Geralt, now level 6 and slightly-better-equipped than previously. (Thanks to
akilah12902 for the tip on the bank location, as we honestly would not have found it and even still had to go door-to-door around the square to locate it because it is Not obvious. Also thanks for a photo of the Only Acceptable Muttonchops in the world, which belong on a cockatiel. VALID POINT, FRIEND.)“Okay,” DF said. “Time to do something violent.”
We loaded up Wild At Heart, which is the quest where a hunter’s wife has gone missing and he put a notice on the noticeboard for someone to come find her.
Of course I’d read a playthrough, so I was spoilered, but I kept asking what the others thought. MM was immediately convinced that the sister had killed the missing woman. “She’s shady,” she said. DF thought the missing woman had just gone feral and run off into the woods, that maybe she was the werewolf. Then, of course, the sister came and tried to bribe Geralt to stop investigating, which like, ok, there’s no doubt anymore. I tried to get DF to take the bribe but he was adamant that Geralt Would Never, so he turned her down. Later, though, he was super into the timed decision about whether to let frontier justice be served.
After that, we kind of wandered around Velen. At
akilah12902‘s recommendation we wandered vaguely Lindenvaleward, as there’s a little hamlet eastish of that called Lurtch where there’s a quest called Fool’s Gold where you get to do something bonkers? IDK– well, we were sort of lostish, and as we were fucking around we came upon a deserted abandoned church with candles lit in it. (Side note: why are so many long-abandoned locations in this game lit by half-melted candles? Like? How long does a candle last? How long to the game designers genuinely think an unattended candle lasts? How is this a thing???! It makes even less sense than routinely looting food items from dessicated skeletons of decades-dead predecessors.)
The altar had a “Press A to Use” thing, so we, uh, used it? Which seemed to entail– oh uh it had us kneel down. Like. I guess to meditate? What the–
and then of course the grave hag comes to the door behind us, and Geralt’s like “Ah, right on time,” and we’re like ah fuck this is the grave hag quest we picked up completely by accident several days ago and forgot about. So, congrats, it’s now time to immediately learn to fight a grave hag!!
“So… time to run away?” MM said.
“Listen,” DF said, mashing buttons, “I’m strategically tumbling away.”
Incredibly, while the fight was difficult, it was not impossible, and even without preparations it went better than could have been expected. Geralt slew Mourntart fairly expediently, shoved the trophy in his rucksack, and oh hey Roach showed up unsummoned so we could stick the trophy on her, great. Now, onward!
And yeah the Fool’s Gold quest involves a bunch of chicanery with some pigs. Like… a lot of chicanery. “You walk and walk, and then you’re there!” the village idiot says, and MM was like shit that’s a good line, gonna use that one on my kids.
Geralt is Deducing Things at one point, and is like, “This is a curse someone cast with their feet,” and we all were like what does that mean, and I was like does he mean the curse-caster didn’t have hands and MM was like maybe an animal cast the curse? and DF said, “I think he just means it was cast clumsily.” We sat contemplating that a bit, chewing over various more culturally-apt, English-fluent ways of expressing that something is clumsily done, as DF navigated Geralt back along the path to check back in with the weirdly magical pigs, hm, a pig-related curse see? and finally out of nowhere I hollered
“HAM-HANDED it’s a HAM-HANDED CURSE”
I’m so proud of myself for that one. Earlier in the evening DF had been doing some really awful pun/dad-joke commentary and as MM and I were groaning I was like you know, it’s your fault, you’re the one that made him a dad and she was like i know, i know, but really he was already kind of Like That so we can’t blame ourselves. (It’s my fault they ever met each other anyway, my one and only attempt as a match-maker, I’m so terrible.) So anyway, I won the Dad Jokes portion of the evening.
Anyhow we ran around a bunch, got killed, had to Grease Up properly for the fight (it turns out as nekkers are ogroids, necrophage oil doesn’t do much of anything to them, whoops), and eventually had to Axii a bunch of pigs into following the village idiot so that we could go do a thing.
Now. I have, ah, considerable experience at real-life swineherding. Like, not a ton, but I have been one of many warm bodies involved in the vehicle-free relocation of varying numbers of hogs of varying ages as a part of my sister’s organic pasture-raised pork operation several times over the last four or five years. Once six of us had to move a young Tamworth-cross boar (about 9 months old, so about 250-300 pounds) from a pasture by the barn to a pasture several hundred feet away… which involved leading him directly past the production beds of vegetables. The vegetable manager armed himself with a shovel, and frequently had to bash the boar in the head when he would have turned; this only works because of something I hadn’t known beforehand, which is that the vegetable manager is extremely fleet of foot and also fucking hates pigs. The rest of us hauled along an assortment of fence posts and shovels, to goad him with. Several of us were burdened with a large, heavy cattle gate, which he still managed to lift and shove his way under at one point with four adult humans doing their best to prevent him from doing this.
(On another occasion, the vegetable manager, who I should mention is a very soft-spoken and extremely mild-mannered person, had to grab a market-weight sow by the ears and wrestle her to the ground in eighteen inches of mud in order to get her into a pen, and he did this so commandingly that it actually worked, and we were all completely astounded because normally that would not have worked, but he was so angry he made it work, and then had to immediately go into the shower with all his clothes on because of that 18″ of mud about a foot of it was pure pig shit.)
Another time, we had twenty-five market-weight hogs (just over 6 months, about 200-250 lbs on the hoof) that we had to lead from a pasture on a hillside to another one about a quarter of a mile away, bounded on one side by high-tensile wire with a gate we’d have to lead them through.
I found out that hogs of that size 1) don’t give a shit about you, 2) might follow a bucket of food if they care but mostly don’t, 3) can outrun you flat-out for any amount of distance, and 4) care far far more about mud puddles than about a bucket of feed. It took us two hours to move the pigs, and we only succeeded because a couple of them decided they wanted to be where the people were, and the others eventually followed. It was, maybe, the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted to do on the farm. Oh did I mention, there were seven people helping, two of them in a truck? And it only succeeded in the end because the pigs mostly ran out of other things to do.
So anyway.
Geralt’s got to Axii nine pigs, and he’s got to take them somewhere and arrive with nine pigs. Like, I wish I had Axii for pigs, but even with it, this isn’t going to be easy.
MM said happily, as the pigs wandered through the town and Geralt had to vault a fence to go reapply Axii to one of them who had gotten a different notion, “If I knew video games were like this, I’d’ve learned how to play a long time ago!”
“Video games aren’t usually like this,” DF said, frantically mashing the controller.
Unfortunately, on Death March, it seems to be a thing that the nekkers that we’d so tidily removed for this pig drive respawn, and one of them respawned as a Level 12, and that was the end of the evening. Tonight we’ll have to go back and redo the entire Axii-ing Of The Hogs and see if we can’t do better.
