notapaladin

[notapaladin]

The progenitor of electronic music, Ada Lovelace,

[notapaladin]

'you still listen to music from 10 years ago 🤨?' bitch if prehistoric humans had audio recording technology id be sat up here listening to grog and unga bunga's greatest hits don't play with me

[notapaladin]

overwrought again about Karlach and Wyll each seeing in the other the same impossible revelation and promise that goodness can endure in and emerge from the Hells, and together being an unbreakable feedback loop of hope and faith and strength.

#bg3 #if wyll/tav/karlach isn't canon i don't know WHAT is #or wyllach if tav's romancing someone else

[notapaladin]

googling ‘jobs for autistic people’ and realising that everyone still thinks autistic people are either sheldon cooper or really tall toddlers

[notapaladin]

One of the oldest buildings in Hattfjelldal municipality in Nordland, Norway.

[notapaladin]

online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.

[notapaladin]

a message to people who design websites for companies: i do NOT want websites to move!!!! i don't want to to automatically slide through sections i don't want a moving websites i want a MENU that lets me SELECT the section i wanna go to and i do NOT want all sections in one place moving with my mouse i'm gonna CLICK if i wanna go somewhere else

[notapaladin]

thinking about my tags on this post, I'm pretty sure the best way to do an au in which Team Tadpole forms without tadpoles, pre-tadpoles, because Wyll keeps heroically saving the day partly by befriending at least one key henchperson per major enemy...is if Ulder disowned him rather than exiling him, so Wyll became the Batman Blade of the Gate. Living in the shadows, stubbornly alone, helping the people who even the Flaming Fists can't, or won't... He has a firm principle of only killing "monsters", so for pettier criminals, he usually sends them walking up to the nearest officer of the peace with a friendly Suggestion that they turn themselves in for their crimes. This makes Ulder's teeth grind like coffee beans. Their dynamic isn't so much Batman & Gordon as Spiderman & J. Jonah Jameson.

All that really needs to happen for him to pick up Shadowheart as a sidekick is for one person to ask the Blade for help because the Sharrans stole their child/are aggressively cult-recruiting their friend/other typical dubious Sharran thing; and then he unravels that whole temple like a ball of yarn - or at least, enough that Shadowheart leaves and becomes local secondary superhero...the Pale Priestess? the White Wolf? (In this house we stan werewolf!Shadowheart!)

Then the Blade notices a barely-noticeable pattern of disappearances that's been going on for over 200 years, and the bloody trail leads right to Szarr Mansion...

(Wyll does not deal with the slightly-under-7,000 vampire spawn in the basement. The Blade leaves a note for the Flaming Fists and their ducal commander, along with a pile of evidence of Cazadar Szarr's crimes, and a pile of dust that was once a vampire lord.)

(Possibly this attracts Raphael's attention, because it was a loss for Mephistopheles? Raphael would be almost as good a comic books-esque recurring villain as Bhaal cultists.)

Gale somehow becomes their Guy in the Chair - still living in Waterdeep, mind you; he communicates mostly via Scrying, Sending, etc. Typical archwizard aloofness. Until The Incident, in response to which maybe he asks the others to get him books from Sorcerous Sundries, which leads to Lorroakan turning himself over to the Fists :) on charges of Apprentice Abuse [I'm sure Rolan wasn't the first] and general Being The Worst.

All throughout this Wyll is angstily - while acting the confident, ever-optimistic hero - refusing to talk about how he has devilish magic or why he Needs to leave the city to go kill a random specific devil/demon/other monster once a month. His friends know he made a pact and that's it. They offer to help. Wyll refuses lest Mizora make his life and theirs a living hell.

They start looking into Enver Gortash and his numerous sketchy dealings. In this AU, too, the Blade tracks Karlach down through the battlefields of Avernus...to ask her some questions about her former employer. He doesn't have much hope for answers from a notorious battle-devil, but it's their only lead...

But then she's Karlach, so he offers to help her escape instead. They're nearly out - or they are out? - when Mizora appears and orders Wyll to stand down. Wyll does not stand down. Karlach tries to behead her, so Mizora leaves him alone...for a little while. She catches him alone later, back at his base, and drags his soul through the fires of hell and turns him into a devil.

They ally with Orin, possibly unknowingly, to attack the Bhaalspawn leader of the Cult of Bhaal! She betrays them, right after murdering her kin!

[insert something here that's like speedrunning the whole plot but backwards]

Lae'zel shows up at some point, bleeding and halfway through her own character arc which she's been doing solo, having been snatched and tadpoled, killed a Sharran to regain the Prism, nearly killed by her own people for being tadpoled, regained the Prism via a lot of murder... She's now on the run from pretty much everyone but she's determined to re-prove herself to...somebody...by singlehandedly killing the Netherbrain.

(She tries to kill our heroes because she assumes they've been tadpoled.)

Wyll breaks his pact for good and is willing to go down fighting for his city even without any powers; then Ansur with his final-for-real-this-time dying breath gives Wyll draconic magic, so he can be the sorcerous Dragon of the Gate.

Epilogue: the Heroes of Baldur's Gate answer a call for help from their neighbors in the Reclaimed Lands to deal with all the ex-cultist goblins who've still been running around kidnapping and, idk, eating people since the Netherbrain was destroyed. They arrive to find that the goblins are already being bloodily Dealt With...by an amnesiac Dark Urge, who isn't actually being very bloody about it at all by their typical standards, and who has no memory of anything before like a month ago.

Everyone points weapons at them except Wyll, who insists that if they've truly reverted to ignorant innocence, then they should have a second chance, to mend their ways and help fix what they broke in the world. This is, fundamentally, a group wherein a bunch of morally dubious assholes (except Karlach, who's an angel and we're delighted she's here) outsource their moral compasses to Wyll; and honestly it's not like this is surprising behavior from him, so...welcome to the team!

#bg3 #i love this

[notapaladin]

“Karlach, speak to me. What’s the matter” Shadowheart

“ just give her a moment” lae zel

“They took my heart. My heart…from my mother.” Karlach

This particular piece is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Everything down to the character, shading and storytelling for Karlach. I love this woman so much and her story is absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking. I’ve done numerous paintings of her but I wanted to capture everything about her. Including her lady friends that are ready to stand by her and descend to avernus for her. Whatever she can’t stand, they will take for her.

I really hope you enjoy this piece as much as I do. This is a long post dedicated to Karlach and prints will be available soon.

Thank you so much for all of my new followers and support lately. It was greatly appreciated.

#bg3

[notapaladin]

Love them✨

#bg3

[notapaladin]

queen of the world to me

[notapaladin]

New hema jacket patches what up

[notapaladin]

average act 3 experience

#bg3

[notapaladin]

BG3 Epilogue : Origin Astarion (Spawn) x Gale

BOOK CLUB IS REAL

Well, they read for a reason.

#bg3

[notapaladin]

rip to all the “fuckyeah___” blogs that carried our society at one point </3

[notapaladin]

This might be unpopular but I’m not going to use simpler vocabulary in my writing if it’s out of character for the narrator. If my POV character is a botanist, he’s going to call a plant by its name. If you don’t know what it is you can either Google it or move on just knowing it’s a plant of some sort.

I don’t like this trend of readers being angry that not everything is 100% understandable for them. I want my characters to be believable as people and sometimes people use words people outside of their field will not understand. That’s not a bad thing.

You don’t have to understand every word to get the gist of what’s happening. I’m not going to slow down an action scene to describe every weapon because someone might not know them by name. They can just assume it’s a weapon because that makes sense in the context of the scene.

[notapaladin]