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Not to be all negative on main - and mostly, I've been very caught up with work and got behind on creative things - but I can't lie, the whole mess with Larian and Vincke's AI stuff has definitely made me less excited to write and edit/finish my BG3 stuff. I'm trying not to let it affect things, but... rather deflating.

#tru talks #larian critical #wips

I just realised I forgot to Tumbl about when (a while back now) my friends took me to Mount Rainier National Park. Kind of a brain-blast when I'd only been in the States about fourteen hours. It instantly won awards in my head for:

Tallest trees I'd ever seen (our old oaks and yews tend to grow wide, not tall)

First native douglas firs and hemlocks I'd ever seen (and douglas firs seemed so leggy that I was quite startled to see fallen ones and realise they had a significant diameter, hence hand for scale while I went "oooh")

Highest I'd been above sea level

First active volcano I'd seen in person(!!)

First active volcano I'd stood next to(!!!)

First steller's jay I'd seen(!)

First bear-proof bins I'd seen(!!!)

First time being (slightly) jet-lagged (better than it sounds)

Deepest snow I'd ever seen(!!) (cleared roads and spring melts on a mountain, so it was about six or seven feet deep)

First big outing with American friends(!!!)

#tru talks #wait stop where are you going #come back here dammit i'm boring you with my holiday pictures #'so tru you're going on your first ever flight eh? how long is it?'#'ten and a half hours.'#'...uh.'#'well i try not to fly for environmental reasons but i can't quite catch a bus there. well. some coaches when i'm out of the airport.#going to canada on a bus.'#'you're sleeping between that and the ten hour flight aren't you?'#'yes! also standing on a volcano.'#'on a... tru. tru are you sure about this “first-time solo travelling” thing'#'it'll be great! i'll probably only die a little'#tru much information

Years back I read The Martian and thought, "Man, this is such a good premise. I sure wish it was written by someone who could write characters rather than one narrative voice, or plot devices with names. Eh, maybe if there's ever a movie." (I also found Watney difficult to spend that much time with. There's nothing wrong with a protag knowing they're smart; it's thinking no-one else is, and that there's only one kind of smart. And the book's complete lack of awareness about this not being the most likeable trait.) And then, sure enough, Drew Goddard hammered it into shape and I loved the movie. (Good acting from Damon helped, but for me the biggest things were fleshing out the crew and putting the NASA scenes in earlier - that gave a much warmer, more human story, rather than me being trapped with someone for pages and pages who thought everyone else was an idiot.)

I felt similar about Project Hail Mary when I read it last year, but a) Rocky was a big help to mock Weir's usual Protagonist Archetype mercilessly, I have a lot more time for that archetype when it's a big confused space spider, and the culture clash was something I enjoyed a bunch b) I thought, "Well, this is basically unfilmable. At least not without a huge budget." And then, fifty pages from the end, I get jumpscared by the movie trailer. (Also, I got it as a Christmas present and didn't know what it was about. I figured it'd be a more grounded take where the only alien life was the astrophage. I was as startled and delighted as Grace when I saw Rocky's ship.)

Anyway, Drew Goddard and a great cast hammered it into shape, Daniel Pemberton is one of my favourite composers ever (some composers just make "epic music" albums that can kind of go with anything; Pemberton truly thinks about the textures and story beats and has even more of a narrative focus than a melodic one). I also think Gosling was good casting; he's very good at a sort of wide-eyed, complex helplessness that stops snark getting too smug. He can lean into the smug and has played that and suave types before, but for me I think it was the lethal three-four punch of seeing Blade Runner 2049, Barbie, The Fall Guy and now this within a few years of each other. After not getting on at all with La La Land, Blade Runner is where I went, "Oh dear, this guy is rather good." It's not just his strong comic timing so much as the fact that even when he gets funnier roles, he plays them quiet as well as broad, and finds the pathos. Neither Ken nor Colt Seavers would have been nearly as sympathetic or complex without the amount of painful yearning they've got alongside the silly stuff - which accentuates the silly stuff and makes it funnier.

Went to see it at the cinema and unfortunately, I liked it. I'll tag spoilers in anything I reblog.

#tru talks

Me, bolting awake at 3 AM long after I've posted a fic: "I used the wrong version of 'horde'."

#writing #tru talks #gahh

2025 has been a hell of a year - it was very stressful at work, but I kept my head, I think. And on the other side, with the help of a lot of people, I finally got to meet three of my oldest and dearest friends (in person! I realise that was a very confusing sentence)! I got to see orcas and humpback whales! I saw a hummingbird! (That was all great. I now have absolutely no money and that's me done for the next twenty years.) I am hopefully finally going from renting and a lot of uncertainty to helping buy a house (albeit with a lot of help, I'm mostly just doing the paperwork and heckling)! I've tried out air dry clay and picked up a new craft, sorta! I ran a whole fundraising campaign at work and we actually hit the target to help clients who were struggling! Management at work is changing drastically, and for the better!

I'm tentatively hopeful about 2026. (Note the tentative, other shoe, please don't drop too hard.) I think my New Year's resolution is to try and pack away the stuff in my room for the move. We'll see if I can manage anything else, but that's a start, right?

Happy New Year! I hope 2026 is a kind one for everyone. I hope you learn something, feel pride in yourself, find something you really enjoy, and have some good times with friends.

#tru talks #trulycertain talks bollocks #new year

I'm probably going to fill in Larian's feedback form (politely, obviously) and ask for some more content for Wyll, but man am I disappointed. I kept hoping we'd get more sometime, but we're near the end of the patch cycle and... nothing on the same level as the new lines and sometimes new scenes we got for the others. The epilogue, sure, but everyone had something there.

BG3 has all these smart, wonderful stereotype bucks. You have a seven foot musclebound barbarian who's a (quite smart) woman. You have the arcs about autonomy and sexual abuse given to blokes. You have butch and femme pan rep and characters who are complex.

So surely, a character who is that rare thing, a knight with a Grail quest who's black, an interesting deconstruction of heroic ideas vs. the reality of who you are and trying to bridge the gap, and a man who pretends just as hard as Astarion in the opposite direction, should be Larian catnip. He's exactly the kind of character who fits into the narrative about autonomy and bucking stereotypes and the future of Baldur's Gate perfectly. There's no excuse not to use him. Hell, his actor's certainly been enthusiastic and publicly willing to come back for additions.

He's a fun character. Underwritten, but fun, and very well acted. There's no reason for the studio to ignore him this much. *raises brow* Well, there's one, and it's that they think the fan base will never get behind the only black character. And in that case? You stand by your work and develop that character with love and care, not cave to the idiots.