Drugs are great, you take them too most like (caffeine, ethanol, theanine etc). It’s the power that fucked that shit head up.

Loads of people take ketamine and just like appreciate jazz or some other banal shit.

My one resolve, as I enter my greying, is to never become one of those dipshits.

The kids are alright, a little straight edge for my tastes but they’re alright.

Everyone is getting stupider except you right? Like you’re not one of the dumbed down lazy people are you? or your loved ones?

People have said this shit since we have written records.The whole idea of fallen man is the foundation of the Abrahamic religions, probably others I don’t know of too.

People are doing alright, actually go talk to some. Yeah yeah a lot aren’t crazy educated but even the most educated intellectual titans of our age are uneducated in the overwhelming majority of things.

We do alright, there are many problems but they’re not because people are getting less intelligent. We are no smarter or stupider than the first humans, or at least we have no reason to believe otherwise. We have better access to information and we’re also facing some very large problems, but so did bronze age people.

Read the epic of Gilgamesh, it’ll chill you out some.

There is when sprinting. although it’s shared with interact but that only really comes up when sprinting to ladders

no I didn’t. I think this about on par with ds1

I actually love ds1 in its entirity. well until the Lord vessel then the game falls apart. I’m not one for fast paced games (arthritis) and really enjoy the exploration and navigation. Sometimes I just load up a save and run around for a bit to relax :p

I’m not sure my opinion is the one to listen to in your case, given it seems you prefer the later faster gameplay with more emphasis on bosses?

All I can really say is I haven’t enjoyed a souls game much since demons souls and dark souls (although sekiro was quite fun it’s very different) until now. I’m only about 10 hours in on my third area.

I do think many people’s complaints (but not all! there are some very idiosyncratic choices) are from not paying attention. Like recognising when you can pull out the lantern to do something, when you need to fully cross into death, making full use of all the tools (e.g. regenerating ranged ammunition, the map they give you, kicks, mid combo 1h 2h swapping, powerstancing), understanding how the level designers have set traps.

If you try play it like lies of P and just sprint in parrying everything you have a bad time and get swarmed. you also need to engage in the RPG parts more, swapping rings and armour for the current challenge and so on.

I thought lies of p was an absurdly tedious game tbh with the bosses requiring lots of memorisation. I think a lot of this is subjective.

You can place temporary bonfires pretty close to bosses using a consumable you can buy or loot from certain enemies. Some people seem to be running out of them, I have more than I need and I feel like I’m using them liberally.

It’s a very similar game to ds1. It’s that sort of slower, easier game where you spend most of your time methodically exploring a large interconnected world. Once you know what you’re doing you can run through a lot.

If you thought ds1 was a bad game you probably won’t like this. If you thought it was fantastic you probably will.

One thing I haven’t figured out is if perfect parry wither damage is variable.

Sometimes it feels like I take a lot of wither, othertimes not. I’m using a shield and 2hing a lot so I wonder if it’s a shield vs weapon parry thing? Or if it’s timing based like partial parry damage mitigation in ds3.

I was too engrossed to do testing so far, have you tried at all?

What weapons are you using btw? my wife uses a giant axe and seems to yeet herself a lot. Are the certain weapons with lots of lungy movements that might be tripping people up?

Look I’m in love but it’s a very polarising game. If you enjoyed playing ds1 blind, and saw something to love in ds2 underneath the weirdness then I’d recommend it but it is not the fast and nippy ds3 onwards style. Levels are confusing if you don’t figure out what the map is telling you, umbral exploration is fascinating but tense and you have to rush sections which can make you miss what you picked up.

There’s a few baffling decisions like auto filling your quick bar with new consumables when empty, not marking new items in inventory, lore being state gated (it miiight be some arty you get the story from various perspectives thing but I’m unconvinced yet), and many people find the ranged pressure unpleasant. You’re often being shot at till you clear an area.

I don’t think that’s likely, we are apes not angels.

Sometimes we have conflicts, some are probably resolvable, some represent fundamentally opposed interests.

We can try to make society different, so there are fewer situations that lead to irresolvable conflicts. That project will never end.

Whether this gives you hope or grief is largely up to you.

Find a sense engaging ritual and do it regularly.

For me it was having elaborate spice teas or herbal teas. I’d mix up batches and keep it in the office, when I needed some sanity taking the time to just focus on a damn good cup of tea helped me relax some.

A treat you enjoy, a stretching routine whatever you can do that is highly engaging would be a good choice. Force work out of your head even for 5 minutes. We aren’t meant to work like a steam engine.

Thanks, that’s a lot to think about. We currently use an oled computer monitor as a TV (hooked up to a pi) and it’s beautiful but there are limits on screen size and it’s crazy expensive (you’re paying for stupid fast refresh rates and the Gamer™ markup)

our house is very bright during the day, lots of glass in sunny Australia, so it’s probably not a great candidate for a projector generally but it does have me thinking about one in the bedroom for late night movies. Probably a lot cheaper and neater than another absurd monitor.

How dark do rooms need to be for them to work? Are there issues with shared spaces where someone might want a well lit workspace?

I was like 12 but it was funny as shit. I think now a lot of the humour might fall flat now the zeitgeist has moved on but that storming of the beach against the teddybears still cracks me up remembering it.

Ok so we can take that stance. I would disagree that these are useful semantics because of the case I mentioned where I feel like adding a turret to a sandcaste is something meaningfully distinct from reducing a sandcastle to a pile of sand, walking 100 meters down the beach, and making a new one with the turret.

Do you disagree that this is meaningfully distinct? If you do would you feel that it’s equivalent to do those two things? That you feel the same way about them?

If you agree that it’s meaningfully distinct then why insist on framing it in the same concepts instead of using the concept of change?

You’re gonna have to start by pinning down terminology a bit.

Change is a term often used which I think most people would feel is a usefully distinct word for example if I said: said:

• “I created a sandcastle”
• “I changed a sandcastle”
• “I destroyed a sandcastle”

I think those would mean something different to most people despite all reductively applying to the literal rearrangement of a pile of sand.

So the obvious potential confusion here is in the case where I changed a sandcastle how would you decribe it? adding a turret could be taken as destroying the old one and creating a new one but it seems strange to me to argue for the throwing out of change as a concept since what I did seems meaningfully different from smashing a sandcastle, walking 100 meters, and building a new one.

So could you elaborate on what you take creation and destruction to entail?

I think mixed greens generally do better. Grass monocultures are really just for sporting fields and other very hard used areas.

Even so clover etc is often beneficial and will stay naturally if poison isn’t sprayed.

This series will make you laugh and cry at train stations. It’s truly some of the best fantasy ever written.

I’m not saying that you have to like it, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t at least check it out.

Kinda! I am a bit overloaded atm. Never finished elden ring due to an arthritis flare, absorbed with persona 5 atm, haven’t played disco Elysium yet either.

Trying to find more time for non gaming hobbies and even so a new update for oxygen not included just game out!

There’s been a glut of excellent games lately. Even stuff like Dave the diver is pretty absorbing. I’m keen to give it a go eventually though! after mechwarrior 5 proved too sloggy I’ve been a bit starved of mech games, so much so I’ll settle for weeb samuri suit shit ;p (I kid I kid it’s very silly aesthetically but we all squeeled with glee at the Pacific rim rocket punch)

I’m glad it’s not multiplayer so I can enjoy it at my leisure.

I admit to being out of the game for a while but how common is RAM encryption?

wouldn’t the overhead violate half the point of RAM?