Patty And The Hag

I'm just going to keep throwing it out there that I have a lot going on right now, one way and another, so posts here may be more sporadic than usual and definitely shorter. I really don't like missing a posting day, though, so in that spirit, here's a makeshift follow-up to recent commentaries.

First, Baldur's Gate 3. I've clocked up 45 hours so far, all of it in Act I. I finally moved on to the Mountains, which I think is Act II, although they don't seem to use that term in the game, so maybe it's still Act I. 

Anyway, I went to the zone line to see if the warning about finding it "bitterly difficult" had gone, which  it had. There was just the notification that once you leave you can't come back. I didn't really have much left that I thought I ought to do. Make an Adamantine weapon, I guess, but I wasn't keen on hunting for the mithril, so I went through the one-way door.

Of course, it's only one-way if I don't reload the save I made right before I crossed. In the Mountains I've done one fight so far and had one long conversation. Nothing I couldn't do over. So maybe I'll go back to the Forge after all. I probably should go look up how important having one of those weapons is later on. 

That would be cheating but what else have I been doing since the start? Is there any limit on how many times you can save the game? I must be closing in on three figures by now.

[Edit: I must have misread that warning. It seems like it's not a one-way trip after all. I came to another transition that went to a "Goblin Camp" and it turned out to be the same one as before.]

The last thing I did before moving on from the Wilderness was deal with Auntie Ethel, the elderly eye-fancier. Getting to her was a whole hell of a lot harder than killing her, that's for sure. I was always going to kill her, obviously. I've read Prince Caspian often enough not to be fooled by a Hag.

What with that and going along that upper walkway in Grymforge earlier, most of today has been spend disarming traps. It was fun in a puzzle game sort of way but it wouldn't have been if I hadn't saved and reloaded every time the pathing made one of my characters walk over something I specifically wanted them to avoid. BG3 has really bad pathing, even when you un-group the party and move them all separately.

I was expecting the Hag fight to be tougher than it was but I imagine it was meant for a group a little lower than my lot, all closing in on Level 6. I had to do it twice to save Marinya because the first time the cursed pathing took me the wrong way to the control device and I was too late to stop her plunging to her death. The second fight was a bit tougher because I made sure to get Marinya out of the cage first but it was still pretty straightforward.

As for the extremely annoying Nere, the Dark Elf True Soul, who seemed determined to start a fight no matter what I said to him, I spent so long trying to come up with a way to get him out of his predicament without letting him start a war afterwards, he ended up dying of that poison gas before I made up my mind. It's his own damn fault.

What happened was, I camped and came back to find him dead on the floor and the entire Duergar occupation force gone, presumably back to wherever they came from. I have to say it made exploring the rest of the area a lot more fun.  I could open all the boxes without starting a fight and it was great not having to listen to the astonishingly unpleasant conversations of those vile tunnel dwarves. If I ever play this game again I'll be sure not to talk to any of them before I kill them.

So much for BG3. The other update I want to give is on the RetroTV app I was talking about a couple of days ago. I said then that I wasn't sure if it included full shows or only clips but I can now confirm there are indeed some complete episodes in the mix. 

At least, I know there's a full episode of The Patty Duke Show because I watched it last night. I was watching a channel in the 1960s section, 1964 in fact, and after a couple of tunes by Freddie and the Dreamers and The Dave Clarke Five, up it came.

Without that, I doubt there's much chance I'd ever have watched an episode of a black and white sitcom from more than sixty years ago starring someone I'd barely even heard of. Or any British Invasion Beat Groups, either for that matter. Whether that's a point in the app's favor I'm not entirely sure.

There were two reasons I watched the whole thing. The first was to see if it really was going to run to the end but the main reason was the plot, which was bizarre to to the point of absurdity.

Here's my precis from memory:

Patty, who appears to be about fourteen, comes home from school, full of talk about the American Labor Movement, which she's been studying in class. She starts her own union for children, the membership of which is her, her brother (Maybe 11 years old?) and her "identical cousin" Cathy, who inexplicably lives with them and is also played by Patty Duke. 

The rest of the show involves negotiations between the children, as unionists, and Patty's parents, who represent management. There's lots of talk about fringe benefits and rights and how being in a union is so very American. They keep name-checking someone I didn't recognize, who appears to be the founder of the Labor Movement.

There's much to-ing and fro-ing, with the children making demands and taking votes and both sides hammering out a compromise, only for neither side to feel happy with the result. The children withdraw their labor (Notably, the word "Strike" is never mentioned.), the parents form a union of their own, there's some marching  and placard-waving and eventually both sides agree the whole thing was a bad idea. They each take a vote to disband their unions, carried unanimously, and everything returns to the status quo as it was at the start of the program.

I got the distinct impression the writers - and the network - wanted to get through the whole thing without offending any unionists or managers who might be sitting at home watching. Why they thought it was a suitable topic for a sitcom about a teenage girl's home-life in the first place is the real puzzle, though.

I looked it up after and the episode, Patty The Organizer, is Episode 4, Season 2. I've embedded it above if you want to watch it for yourself. It looks like the entire run of The Patty Duke Show is on YouTube, so if you get the taste for it, there's plenty more.

I think I'll be happy with that one episode but it does stand as a great example of the way the RetroTV app can introduce you to things you would never otherwise have known about. It's like having YouTube on shuffle.

Which, come to think of it, is something Google really ought to think about doing.