2024 is done, here's what's been on the blog:

• It was an election year and one with captivating choices by SCOTUS.
• The Outer Web (née Web 1.1) got better and better. It doesn't cover the entire internet, but with an index of 250k predominantly good pages, it's a robust, lightweight way to link web contributors.
• Two playthroughs of BG3 dominated my Steam hours while Cattle and J getting their gameholes sorted meant there was plenty of Remnant II and PUBG. There was also a Helldivers 2 LAN WAN party. Dani and I played Stray and Katamari.
• I snuck in a few renovation and wrenching projects.
• Dani has reached a really fun age. She played soccer and we've done some travel.

And now for the most clicked-upon images and posts from the year...

1.Wandering

Here's another installment of web 1.1:

Because text walls are no fun, I've sprinkled some discovered imagery throughout this post.

I came across a reference to this lightweight indexing notification system supported by Bing and a few others. Coincidentally, Google has yet again moved much of my site from indexed to "discovered but not indexed". Lol.

I've seen the occasional alternative search engine post on HackerNews, they weren't impressive. The author of the above post has a living list of search engines, big and small. Right Dao, Infotiger, and Secret Search Engine were pretty good.

Another random post that popped up from my indexer:

The internet isn't always about brainy stuff though. Sometimes it is amusing or personal, like Sambas.

And then there's the comments section:

[Full post]

2.Tune in

Tomorrow we'll hear oral arguments for Trump v. Anderson (the Colorado ballot one). It's been a great opportunity to learn some more US history and etymology - what is an 'officer', anyway?

There has been no shortage of amicus briefs submitted to the court, including a laughable one from Vivek that basically says, "This (conservative-initiated) lawsuit only happened because Biden is afraid he can't win re-election."

I wonder how much of tomorrow's proceedings will focus on the words 'officer' and 'support'.

From another amicus brief:

While the K&D LLC v. Trump Old Post Office and Federalist 69 talk is riveting, perhaps there's more to this than terminology.

The Prof Amar brief was a good read, though it was a bit short on details of the January 6th-like gathering for Lincoln's inauguration. It mainly focused on a variety of treasonous acts by the outgoing administration leading up to the Civil War.

[Full post]

3.Resolution

SCOTUS handed down its ruling on Trump v. Anderson today; unanimously deciding that states cannot remove officers of the federal government based on the Fourteenth Amendment. I fear I'm doing way too much scotusposting these days but since I've been following this one I have to close the book on it.

The per curiam opinion more or less says that viewing the Fourteenth Amendment as anything except a transfer of power from states to the federal government is simply wrong.

Reading this reminded me of the ideological debate about how to teach grade school students the causes of the Civil War, namely if it was mostly about slavery or states' rights. While it would be no shock to see someone at a Texas PTA meeting describe the Civil War Amendments as a power grab by the federal government, I would expect SCOTUS to take a broader view of the things that ended slavery and enshrined equal protection of the law.

[Full post]

4.A random walk

My previous post about indexing and connecting the subsurface internet focused on how the sausage was made so I'm finally following up with a demonstration.

My objective is to provide external links to (hopefully) good and related content on each of my posts but this works just as well when connecting arbitrary pages from the crawl corpus. In the style of the Dating Game...

Bachelors, what is driving a wedge into modern society?

Bachelors, if you were a long range missile, which would you be?

Bachelors, nobody likes to do SQL so just ramble I guess.

Another way to explore the web is via image links. With an index of somewhat-vetted links, I can generate a random (or topical) index of images, this one is random:

I didn't do much to prune the results - just a few logos (that slipped by my dimensions threshold) and some domains that needed to go on the blacklist.

[Full post]

5.Moon of Vega

I wanted to (cross)play some Helldivers 2 with J. I already have it for Steam, he bought it for PS5 since Steamdeck compatibility is spotty.

When either of us clicked 'Accept' on our respective friend requests, nothing happened. What the heck?

Google gave me a whole bunch of AI-generated non-answers that started with describing Helldivers and proceeded to talk about the importance of co-op play. We've talked about this before, LLMs are sometimes pretty good via chatbot, they're atrocious when laundered through Google search and SEO.

Despite its 'enshittification', there's the old standby, "put 'Reddit' in your query". That gave me this post which recognizes that there is an issue and suggests workarounds.

[Full post]

6.For Super Earth

My impressions of Helldivers 2 after ten levels of carnage.

Helldivers 1 was a top-down squad shooter released almost a decade ago that, like Risk of Rain, was promoted to 3D for its sequel. Gameplay was like this:

It was a great formula for an indie-ish game and is entirely worth playing if you like bullet hell/Smash TV-like shooters. Replay value came from unlockables (weapons/armor/specials), increased difficulty (new enemies), and the three enemy factions that are very different.

Helldivers 2 plays surprisingly similar to the first game considering the addition of a z axis. In fact, 1-4 from above still apply:

Like its predecessor, Helldivers 2 has equippable special attacks called 'strategems'. You select four of a few dozen unlockable strategems and a squad passive. Strategems include large weapon drops, air/orbital strikes, and deployable defenses.

[Full post]

7.Starchart

My web 1.1 indexer has been chugging away, though not like 24/7 or anything.

I mentioned this previously: keeping out the bad web isn't easy. Commercial links are everywhere and even the honest cases need scrutiny, e.g. a tech blog linking to Apache docs or something. This is particularly bad for SEO-minded sites that want to create outbound links for rank.

On the subject of wheat and chaff, to paraphrase:

He's right, of course, I've often described this effort as linking the blogosphere, not the corposphere. Referring back to my original plan:

In the original design, each recommendation set would offer a handful of personal web links and a separate handful of mainstream links. I wasn't sure how to approach the latter other than: "The Atlantic, not Newsweek", "IGN, not Electronic Arts". I should come back to this quandary once I've fried some bigger fish.

[Full post]

Time off for the holidays has meant travel, projects, and jumping back into Persona 3 Reload so I don't keep Jeff's disk forever. Incidentally, I drove a Cybertruck enough to write some words about it and had a novel interaction with FedEx customer service.

Gliderport

Dani and I took a quick trip to the gliderport just as thick fog rolled in over the water. She's in a climbing phase, so the terrain was a big hit.

There's some stair/retaining wall work being done at the top of the Black's Beach path.

I'm always scoping other people's methods, so to continue the wood preservation saga, I noticed that 10w-40 was being used for water/termite mitigation.

Family

We spent a few days up in NorCal.

Toys

Dani is all about the Legos. We built a space shuttle, a go-kart, a beach cabana, and a sizeable Animal Crossing set with a building that "looks like the Mayor Goodway house" (Adventure Bay city hall). Dani's old daycare teachers remembered her love of PJ Masks and got her a book and slide projector as well as a Yoto player. She's loving the Yoto and, for me, switching out the story cards was reminiscent of NES carts. The graphics quality on both systems are about the same.


Dad bought a Cybertruck and so I did a lap to and from Napa in it.

The cyber

As with any Tesla, the Cybertruck has the bells and whistles of an always-on, everything-by-wire electric vehicle. Some examples:

• The infotainment system is the usual Tesla fare with a few more settings for truck stuff (towing, ride height, etc.). Compared to normal cars, it's a superb amount of configurability. And yet...
• ... as far as I could tell, the seat warmers/coolers have low-medium-high-auto settings. There was no obvious 'off' for the front seats and since we managed to find it for the rears I'm inclined to believe Tesla only wants you ass to be hot, cold, or frequently oscillating to meet the climate setting. I didn't dive deep enough to see if other configurables were similarly limiting.
• I haven't even paired my phone with my truck so most of Tesla's electronic features aren't a check in the good or the bad column for me. The needle moves toward 'bad' when the vehicle's integration with the rest of my life becomes obligatory. Perhaps you can use valet key permanently but the cameras are still rolling - when the infotainment system comes out of sleep it shows a banner saying, in short, "We respect your privacy".
• The physical knobs vs touchscreen debate is well-trodden so I won't re-trod it.

The aesthetics

Source.

Some love the low-poly design. Some hate it. For me, it looks great from some angles and atrocious from others. The fender flare shape is probably the least-bad solution for transitioning between hard edges and round tires. To its credit (and the chagrin of pedestrians), the Cybertruck is the first production vehicle to look remotely like the concept model.

The design aesthetic means hard edges are everywhere, inside and out, except the stuff passengers could headbutt in a collision. The triangular side mirrors are silly, the rear-view mirror is tiny - both probably only exist for regulatory compliance. A Tesla person would say that the rear camera display is all you need. The rear display is big, wide, and pans when you signal for a lane change. That said, the rear view picture is too fuzzy to distinguish, say, an Altima from a Crown Vic beyond a carlength or two. Perhaps a future software update will use object recognition to highlight law enforcement because it might be useful on a vehicle with the Cybertruck's power, stability, and je ne sais quoi that screams "ticket me!".

The drive

The truck drives more or less the same as the Model 3 we rented sans the noisy, leaky weather stripping. For a 6,800lb vehicle, it's quick and responsive and overall pleasant to drive. I did notice a constant, almost-imperciptible jerking left and right on the steering wheel, I'm not sure what that was.

I liked the small, Roadblasters-like steering wheel and its 10:00/2:00 grips were useful when turning. The wheel has a few physical buttons, I mostly used the one that activates the gigawiper because the truck's droplet detection was too aggressive for intermittent sprinkles.

The truckness

Because it's big and electric, there's tons of room in the CT's cabin. Everything in the interior looks and feels solid but I didn't do any destructive testing.

I told my dad he needed to keep his Nissan pickup to do actual projects since the CT is a glorified minivan. He was adamant it functions fully as a thing that can haul lumber and gravel and stuff. Given the vehicle's price point alone I'd be shy about doing any serious work with it but then again, after the PPP dropped all of the pool guys in my area started hauling chlorine in F150 Raptors.

Whether or not the Cybertruck is a good handyman vehicle, the motorized tonneau, cargo gate, and electrical outlets make it good for recreational truck stuff like tailgating, toting surfboards, and car camping.


It's entirely on me to have ordered from B&H late in the game. That said, they offered free overnight shipping and had the package to FedEx a day early. When Christmas Eve rolled around, I made sure someone was there during the three-hour delivery window so it was inconvenient and surprising to see a "sorry we missed you" email later that afternoon. The shipment tracking site showed me a door tag that was very much not the destination door.

It was only a little unsurprising that the package was not delivered on time. The phony door tag photo, on the other hand, irked me and made me concerned that the package would be delivered somewhere else on the 26th. Two kids in Ted's caucophonic living room confused FedEx's automated call support so it put me through to human customer service. I informed the representative of my concerns and his response was, "The driver lost his mind, but don't worry, the package will be delivered to the correct address another day."


GBES went (back) to Battlemage for the December event, then meandered over to Booze Brothers for some couch conversation and awesome smashburgers.

I recently posted a recap of some posts related to search, SEO, and an ostensible Google campaign to deindex broad swaths of the internet.


After seeing most of this site move from indexed status to "Discovered - currently not indexed" a couple years ago, Search Console reports that my indexing stats are increasing. Three guesses:

1. SEOs got mad so Google created an index purgatory that's shown as indexed.
2. All of the domain and SEO abuse pushed Mountain View to change course.
3. Google has Gemini or something helping to sort the wheat and chaff.

In this post:

1. 'Parasite SEO', the latest installment in the ongoing battle between search engines and web marketers (it's more entertaining than it should be).
2. A feature request becomes a side project (see: Web 1.1) becomes an actual thing.

But first, a walk though the neighborhood:

Source. Pic related.

Me	Do you know who that is? He's from one of your books.
		The Grinch?		Dani
	That is a really good guess, he's also green and looks a lot like The Grinch. Do you remember Yoda from your Jedi Adventures book? That's Yoda, he looks like The Grinch but has really long ears.
		I haven't seen a Christmas Yoda before!
	You're right, The Grinch is a pretty common Christmas character, in Star Wars there really isn't Chr-- ... hmm well Star Wars and Christmas aren't often associated with one another.

It's these kinds of conundrums that make parenting hard: do you lie to your child about the existence of the Star Wars Holiday Special to protect her from it?

Skip ahead if SEO and AI-generated product reviews are old hat.

Recap: SEO

If you're not a web publishing person you may not know what SEO is. Search Engine Optimization is the tailoring of websites to coax search engines to put them near the top. Google et al publish guidelines for getting ranked well and so web publishers often contort their pages to fit the latest guidelines. It's why you see "Key Takeways" (and similar) at the bottom of informational pages you might happen upon (e.g. MontyAtWork's comment here.

SEO itself is boring and dumb and hurts the internet. And so I'd expect myself to prefer to talk about video games and photography and cyber, but I've found myself fascinated by these SEO stories for a couple of reasons:

• It's basically a joust between Google and SEOs where Google sets the rules and the web tries to break them. It's sort of like a CTF or gamebreaking RPG character build.
• There's an inordinate amount of drama. Google seems to change the rules quite often and this burns a lot of small-time publishers. (I'm not unsympathetic toward them, I'm just a bystander who is happy to not be beholden to the whims of Google's business department.)
• AI has been a total wild card. SEOs use AI to generate volumes of meaningless, regurgitated nonsense in order fool lesser algorithms into thinking they have expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness (EEAT). Meanwhile, tech companies are adopting AI for search without destroying their existing business processes.

A few notable installments in this saga:

• 03/2023: I learn about SEO, Google Search Console and deindexing.
• 07/2023: Google moves from trying to index the entire web to indirectly telling publishers, "nah, we're not going to index that". Also in this one: using and abusing "long tail" keywords for SEO success.
• 11/2023: Text content in the uncanny valley.
• 12/2023: I try Bing AI search and run into SEO cloaking.
• 06/2024: A precursor to this post, legacy media gets the private equity treatment as Google kills EEAT.
• 08/2024: Additional discussion on Google choosing not to index the whole web.

Recap: AI and sponsored media

From a year ago:

Me

WaPo did a story about a product review site called Reviewed whose parent company is USA Today and/or a media company called Gannett. The tldr is that writers for Reviewed noticed articles published on their site penned by authors they didn't know. The content appeared to them to be extremely generic and SEO-y, hallmarks of AI-generated text.

This wasn't an isolated incident. Legacy newspapers and magazines have outsourced their brands to marketing companies. With brand power comes both consumer confidence and the search ranking equivalent: domain authority.

Parasite SEO

Linked recently in Hacker News was a SEO blogger's post about two media companies that are a bit like AdVon (discussed in the posts above) but different. Rather than work with the 'trusted' media company (or their new private equity owners) to create a marketing offshoot, these companies simply purchase the publications themselves. As such, they don't acquire household names like USA Today or Sports Illustrated but instead get sites with monthly visits in the six and seven figures. Some examples named in the post: Techopedia, ReadWrite, or Business2Community. The latter already sounds fake af, but crucially these sites rank highly in search for certain keywords.

recleudo.com

"We've found evidence to suggest that Finixio's MO is to buy old, high-authority tech sites that aren't as profitable as their owners might like. Then, they leave the site structure and most of the original content up, and simply add new material that's not relevant to the site's original purpose."

It makes some sense that Techopedia would link to crypto sites but plausibility goes out the window when you see online casinos links on a Swedish spaceport initiative or a Welsh history site. Closer to home:

recleudo.com

Like Augusta Free Press, the East Bay Times is a regional paper gone digital: big enough to survive the destruction of local papers that took place in the 2000s, too small to live on its subscribers like the NYT, would be my guess. So like its Shenandoah cousin, and like Forbes and however many other media sites, it has a sponsored content section. And despite being based in San Francisco, where there isn't... that big a Swedish community, it's a Swedish-language page about Swedish gambling laws.

This was apparently not appreciated in Mountain View:

recleudo.com

Since then, Google seems to be catching up to the biggest parasite players and imposing manual penalties sitewide, resulting in big drops in traffic; the Forbes Marketplace playbook may be played out as a result. Google also just rolled out an update to its definition of site reputation abuse that perfectly describes parasite SEO practices: "Site reputation abuse is the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site's ranking signals." Link.

Recleudo's follow-up post discusses how the offending sites illegitimately got back into Google's good graces by showing googlebot one thing and users the other.

Shady business

Source.

So while AdVon seems to predominantly be directing, say, Sports Illustrated readers to phony "Top 10 Hockey Stick" listicles that reap referral money, the companies discussed in the recleudo posts are focused on online casinos and crypto. Because of the varying legal and regulatory issues, this means the associated businesses aren't particularly forthright with their ownership and org chart - until they are looking to hire.

The corporate shell game isn't worth recapping here but it makes the recleudo posts read equally like an SEO tech breakdown and a Hindenburg Research article. Tangent: Hindenburg's Wags Capital post was quite entertaining.


Long ago I posted a feature request to have a mechanism by which webpages could link to one another by topical similarity. The underlying functionality has been going strong since reaching initial operational capacity, but only as a tool internal to my static site generator. If you're viewing this post (url ends with ".../the_outer_web.html" not ".../2024/12/index.html"), an example of this feature is at the bottom under "Related / External".

With some neat front end code by Rob, we showed that the same functionality could be provided to anyone:

I closed out my second playthrough of BG3 wherein I wanted to beat Tactician difficulty, perfect my character builds, and try some of the other narrative paths. Gameplay and plot spoilers throughout, I will occasionally refer back to my first playthrough. I last left things having killed most of the Baldurian oligarchy. Except that I let Viconia go and missed out on her sweet, sweet shield. Regret.

I choose you

You get one squad for the final series of battles. I wish they'd worked out a way to let the player choose a few teams to rotate through for different stretch, e.g. Squad A attacks [place] from the west and Squad B attacks it from the east and the main character bounced between them. With death and desertion it wouldn't be straightforward but it beats leaving most of your allies in camp. In any event, I rolled with:

• Minthara. I put the most thought into her build and, as it turns out, she kicked ass throughout Act III. As indicated in the screencap above, I was able to swap the Hill Giant club out for a sparky lance thanks to the Hill Giant gloves I indefinitely borrowed from Raphael.
• Astarion. One of the issues with having large gaps between play sessions is being struck with the vague recollection of saying "looks like I'm going to have to roll with Astarion against the brain" and not remembering why. Regardless, his crit build was very effective at dealing damage.
• Gale. I kinda wanted to see his shortcut ending but when the time came I just killed the brain the old fashioned way.

It's a trap

I speedran/sneaked the boat-to-autofail leg of the endgame. There wasn't any loot worth getting and my characters had been max level for a while.

Kaiden or Ashley

The Githyanki are basically Klingons with zero charisma, so choosing the Emp over Prince Orpheus in PT1 was a no-brainer (so to speak). In the interest of seeing alternate plot paths, I chose the prince this time, taking solace in the fact that my persuade+intimidate build would likely mean I could convince him to mindflayify himself. The fact that he more or less volunteered to become the thing he hated for the greater good made me feel a bit guilty - to the extent that one can feel guilty for being overly prejudicial toward the personality of a video game NPC.

Aside: The gauntlet

Source.

Oftentimes the best part of a video game directly precedes the final boss. It's the point where your build and equipment are the most dialed in, the plot is the most developed, and you can use items almost willy-nilly. Sometimes being maxed out makes this sequence too easy, though it becomes an opportunity to pat yourself on the back for working so hard in the early game. At it's best, this final gauntlet is challenging but allows they player to demonstrate the strengths of the build/play style they've developed.

The Halo games did this quite well, as did Fire Emblem. The best single example I can give is Where Angels Fear to Tread from Borderlands 2.

The BG3 gauntlet

The BG3 tower charge starts off well. The plot narrows itself down to "kill the boss". You meet the allies you've gained throughout the game and have a final chance to buy gear.


The final pre-boss combat set piece is a sprawling castle courtyard filled with low- and medium-tier enemies. Despite its size, complexity, and 'war horn' mechanic, it's unfortunatly quite easy/dull.

After passing through the door at the end of the courtyard, you climb some stairs to the boss arena while mindflayers spawn every round and a Githyanki airship lobs explodey stuff at you. In PT1 I went up the left staircase, this time - you guessed it - the right. My squad was sufficiently powerful to not be bothered by the mindflayer spawns, the only trouble was finding gaps between the mortars, though I don't know for certain they'd have done that much damage.

Dragonslayer

The first phase of the final boss battle is a round arena with a portal to capture on the other side. The arena is conspicuously occupied by a mind-controlled dragon and, in this plot branch, the Emperor. I didn't kill the dragon last time so became a personal goal for PT2. He - and the rest of the arena - didn't give me too much trouble for three reasons:

1. Ally summons. Quick recap: the (non-squad) friends you make throughout the game become summonable allies during the final battle. I didn't use them too much the first time through because it cost a valuable main character action - I think, either the game was patched to allow squadmates to do the summon action or pebcak. With Minthara, Astarion, and Gale able to summon allies, I soon had damage-dealing, aggro-drawing NPCs all over the betentacled cranium.
2. Speed potions. They give you an extra action every round, if it's taken in bottle form (vs spell) it does make you lose a turn when it wears off. I didn't use these much in PT1, though being shy about using them was somewhat validated in this playthrough when Gale needed to take a breather on a disappearing platform (Dimensional Door to the rescue).
3. I don't now what roll he needed, but Gale landed a first-try Hold Monster (stun and all incoming hits are crits) on the dragon. This took the dragon's damage off the board and also meant my summoned allies were considerably more lethal.

Anyway, the ability to fully leverage ally-summoning (and, by extension, my choices throughout the game) made the first phase considerably more gratifying. After dispatching the dragon and the Emperor, it was something of a cakewalk to the portal.

The motherbrain

It's been six months, but I remembered that the netherbrain second phase had a disappearing platform mechanic. I momentarily forgot that the chosen platforms were highlighted by a glowing orb. And so Prince Orpheus fell to his death, despite having the illithid ability to hover. Losing the only person that could defeat the netherbrain (in a cinematic) wasn't an immediate game over, so I suspected he'd be glitched back into existence after landing the final combat blow. Worst case, I didn't care for him that much anyway and maybe I'd see an uncommon ending subsequence.

Somehow, the Prince returned.

Denouement

Me	If being congratulated by a video game isn't sufficiently destructive to the fourth wall, well, some of these scenes show how atrocious the game's graphics look when not showing the default tactical view or the conversation view.

I pebcak'd my images in PT1 but now I have an example:


They did fix the scene where I just stared at an ox cart for a long time.


Karlach's gamelong struggle with a terminal condition is one of the game's better plot arcs, especially her dialogue over the corpse of Gortash. The denouement starts with Karlach's death scene, unless the player convinced her to go illithid. It's an okay scene that's undercut by the fact that it's jammed into the parade of final cinematics. It's also undercut by...


"Wait, hold on, you can just return to the hells with Wyll." That could have been suggested before Karlach's final goodbye but I'll take the win-win: Karlach lives and Wyll goes somewhere else.


Minthara's character progression progresses from 'evil and mind-controlled' to 'evil but on the side of good'. If Lae'zel can be convinced to give up zealotry and live for herself, I'd expect Minthara might be amenable to adopting a mentality of tactful evil. After all, she personally slayed numerous Baldurians because they took the evil thing too far. Oh well, her scheming and sociopathy is charming in dialogue.

Reunion

I said previously that ascended Astarion is lame - he becomes the ultimate vampire but doesn't get a single stat increase. I admit I was unaware that ascending means he gets a really dope jacket in the reunion scene. Disclaimer: he may have had this in PT1 and I just don't remember.


The reunion scene pleasant, Withers brings it home with a toast and then wags his finger at some paintings on a wall.

Scratch, you scamp.

Don't die!

?

I don't have any fireplace pictures but I assure you we've had a few evenings by the xmas tree and fire.

The chilly weather has meant cozying up inside... of whatever.

Weekends and sick days inside have featured jammies, snacks, and art of all mediums:

We even did some low-voltage electronics thanks to Rob.

And for Cooley's birthday we obliterated some hot pot.

After some time away, I'm finishing up my tactician-difficulty lizard paladin run on BG3. As mentioned previously, the last few hours of the game are about hopping between archvillains, in any order.

1. Gortash

The Gortash battle wasn't too challenging this time around, though I had one false start when I tried to get a sneaky hit on him. Last time through I baited him outside, away from his turrets. This battle was far more straightforward: off-tanks smashing snooty conspirators.

2. Viconia

The House of Grief battle has swarms of ads and jerks that cast Bone Chill nonstop. I reverted to my PT1 strat and progressively fell back down the entry path, casting overlapping Hunger of Hadar and Spike Growth. I kept my concentration characters out of harm's way and used my tanks to light up the enemies that trickled through.


In PT1 I let Shart kill her parents (per their desires), this time she saved them against their will. Meh.

3. Cazador

I was going to talk to Cazador, but with some pleasant Dancing Lights to set the mood. Turns out, the light (which vampires are not fond of, who knew?) aggroed him immediately so I just rolled with it, not sure if the discussion sequence was necessary to ascend Astarion after combat. Cazador never even trapped Astarion, which - from my brief reading - was supposed to happen regardless of the conversation. I guess I read too briefly:

BG3 Wiki

Daylight can also be used to trigger the fight with Cazador and skip the cutscene completely, allowing you to start the fight with Astarion already free.

... boring conversation anyway.


On PT1 I sheltered in the nook underneath the entrance and caught the melee characters in brambles. With this unexpected start of combat, I set up on the stairs and bottlenecked everyone there - everyone except the jumping werewolves. But with Cazador's ads stuck behind my tank, we wailed on the elder vampire when he dove straight into the thick of things.


As suggested earlier, this run is largely about 'the road not taken' so I did the semi-evil thing and ascended Astarion. That, of course, meant paying 10k in indulgences to the oath police. As a gigavampire, Astarion has (drumroll) one additional bite skill. Seems oversold.

4. Ansur

Ansur took a couple of tries. His AoE attacks and reactions are no joke and he kept killing Gale in the first round, before the wizard could get up his invulnerability dome. Sanctuary is a super-useful ability that I barely employed in PT1 and could have helped with this predicament. Alas, only my main carried Sanctuary and he needed to escape his post-conversation proximity to the dragon. What's more, I quickly realized that the elementals needed to be dealt with right away because they did an unreasonable amount of damage to my squishier units.


Eventually I got the elementals killed and a globe up and was able to range Ansur from safety and occasionally melee him, tanking the reaction damage. Triggering Ansur's reaction strike with a summon was helpful for a few turns. Dragonslaying arrows were surprisingly useless; this one was all about having several Globe charges. Notably, the Globe had to be in the center of the map otherwise Ansur would simply hang out beyond ranged range.

5. Orin

For the Orin fight, it was nice to have killed Gortash beforehand so I could convince Orin to leave her captive alone. Who says there's no honor among assassins? On the minus side, I quickly found that demon-Orin could, in one turn, jump almost everywhere and multiattack a tank to death.

Other than being super lethal, the Orin mechanic is having Sanctuaried characters that refresh her stacks of Unstoppable (invincible for n hits) every round. Since these minions are in Sanctuary, one has to AoE them (or similar) to interrupt their buffing. I tried Sleet Storm to see if this would stagger the casters. I think it did but, more importantly, the ice knocked Orin prone.

The battle got a little weird after that, Orin ran downstairs and summoned a few skellies from a dead lizard with no clothes, meanwhile the remaining ads attacked my squad. Orin then went up onto the balcony and wandered around before eventually returning so I could kill her with a squad that was on HP fumes.

"I'm not like Orin, am I? Am I???"

6. Raphael

I found Raphael to be fairly challenging in PT1 so I was steeling myself for a tough fight on Tactician. He was easy and I'm not entirely sure why. Things that might have helped:

• I knew about the battle mechanics - buffing pillars and second phase.
• I brought blugeoning equipment for the pillars and Gale packed Artistry of War (it's super effective).
• Everyone drank elixirs of flame resistance before the fight.
• I had Yurgir fighting for me rather than against me.

Raphael didn't really do much in his first phase. I cast Darkness on him (I thought he had darkvision?) and hit him with some mild debuffs. He had a difficult time hitting anything and I eventually cast Hideous Laughter when he finally emerged from the smoke. The ads got close to killing Gale, but Hope was there with the heals. Perhaps I had enough summons out that Raphael wasted his precious few rounds targeting them.


By the time Raphael entered his second phase, he was surrounded by my main, Minthara, Yurgir, a deva, and an elemental.


The Remnant II final boss has either been buffed or is a lot harder one difficulty level up, so Me and J rolled another Remnant campaign to level a bit. I think we're going to try a few more runs at the boss and then jump back in to the Elden Ring DLC.

Danielle's creation.

You, subject name here, must be the pride of subject hometown here.

?