Nothing is explained

It makes a lot more sense if you have the context from the Soulsborne games. The series started much simpler, with (mostly) linear progression, fewer weapons/abilities, and shorter “quests.” Part of the appeal of those games was the mystery, and the community that grew around solving the unexplained quests/mechanics/lore. The games were shorter, and the maps smaller, so it was easier to explore on your own.

Then with Elden Ring, it just exploded with content, built around the same game play mechanics. For veteran Soulsborne players, it plays like the next title in the series. The only really novel mechanics are the open world and spirit ashes. The downside is (at least for me), the world is so large that it’s a chore to explore everything. I finished my first play through and lost the will to start a +1 game. In contrast to Dark Souls 3, where I completed at least 6 play throughs.

But if you don’t have that context…yeah i’d imagine Elden Ring is overwhelming in its complexity and scale. Trying to figure out Soulsborne mechanics and navigate this giant world with little direction sounds daunting. Pitting you against the grafted scion to die immediately, and right after putting the tree sentinel in your way, was a confusing way to start the game, even for me.

It’s honestly infuriating to realize half of the people running the country rely on the moral principles of ancient religious texts, translated multiple times, to make policy decisions, while also taking every opportunity to bash the scientific process. Not sure which ones are more frightening, the ones who actually believe what they’re say, or those who don’t.

Fun probably-already-known fact: NASA accidentally destroyed a $200 million Mars orbiter from of a missed imperial->metric conversion, because NASA does generally work in metric, and some Lockheed-Martin software provided numbers in imperial (while claiming to be metric)

I’m a tinkerer as well, but I’m at a point in my life where I need to prioritize my tinkering haha. Like buying stir-fry takeout (Windows/MacOS), cooking it by buying a pre-packaged bag (packaged mainstream Linux distro), or starting from scratch, experimenting with literally everything from chopping technique to cooking temp for each ingredient, until you realize you’re missing an ingredient you need, then you have to go back to the store (Arch lol).

Late to the party, but Mass Effect, Dead Space, and the Arkham trilogy are all extremely solid choices haha.

I do something similar (though less secure) for general purpose passwords; I have a couple of common “base” passwords that are decently secure that I commit to memory. Then for each website/service, I pick a pattern based on the name/url (maybe something like the first two and last three characters of the url), and append them to one of my “base” passwords, so each site gets a unique password, but I only have to remember a couple of them + the pattern

Is there a distro you recommend? I’ve toyed around with Tails, but the lack of persistence and forcing all traffic through Tor instead of a VPN (I guess the whole point of Tails) is too inconvenient for daily use.

I fucking love how nerdy this place is

Watch him as he codes

Not to be “that guy” on top of you being “that guy,” but it’s not unheard of to completely redirect a dammed river with a chute spillway. I’m gonna pretend the spillway exits that mountain to the right of what we can see lol

'Cause the town came first. Town was built on the original river, which was later dammed for power/water reservoir for said town.

I don’t think OP knows what “lore” means lol. GTA ≈ ATLA ≈ Star Trek? DESTINY > DR WHO?!?!

Me, with ASD and ADHD: “Porque no los dos?”

“Damn, this is going to be a tough time for her. Better be sure to make zero effort to inject levity, or take her mind off it, or remind her that I’m also here to take responsibility for my part in this life we’re creating. She should remain 100% FOCUSED on how painful and humiliating this experience is for her. For the entire 20 hours she’s in labor. Just going to continuously remind her to keep breathing. So she knows how much I support her. Yup, that tracks.”

You must be a fun person to go through traumatic experiences with lol.

Me if I were in my 20s in 1994: “Hey wait is that that spastic drummer from Nirvana? What, thinks he can pull off being a front man? Psh…”

Thanks Dave Grohl for being like, the chillest rock star ever.

Wow, actually sounds like a pretty light sentence, considering it seems like the ATF was intent on nailing him to the wall haha. Maybe just more interested in stopping the broadcast of doing stupidly dangerous shit with guns and explosives…

Base 10 time makes me irrationally angry though lol

Humans are a blight upon the natural world they inhabit

If you’re so insistent on humans living in an environment counter to their own evolutionary instincts in favor of squeezing every drop of sustainability possible out of the maximum number of human lives (literally forcing humans to live in artificially dense population centers), why are you on the internet? You’re wasting electricity that was either derived from fossil fuels or generated using renewable technologies reliant on rare minerals obtained through strip mining. Not to mention the plastics and metals that went into making the computer/phone you’re using.

Still wearing clothes? Think of the water being wasted on manufacturing that! What about the resources devoted to growing the plant fibers, raising the livestock, or weaving the plastic fibers? The land that was destroyed and all the native life that was culled to create the farmlands? We should all be forcibly relocated to temperate regions and forced to live in dense nudist colonies.

Do you exercise? You know how many calories and how much oxygen you waste by doing that? Human physical exertion should be limited to only the bare minimum required to sustain the minimally healthy body weight. You know how much food we’d save if we banned all sports?

Don’t get me started on the arts. Brain power costs calories too! What a waste. All human creative resources should be pooled together to create the most efficient base of entertainment media possible that enables a livable experience. No more unique languages, everyone will be forced to learn Chinese Mandarin or Spanish, so we can eliminate waste on similar media across languages.

Obviously MASSIVE /S

Now I don’t want you to misunderstand, I’m very pro-renewables, rather pro-regulation, and even a bit pro-social-engineering. But literally seizing property and assigning concentrated living quarters to people who’ve owned their homes for generations is some seriously dystopian shit.

For sure, there’s no community as large and passionate as religion. BUT there are other communities that are centered around goodwill to others, living a better life…some of them even have chanting, if you feel like you’d be missing that part lol.

Those communities usually involve doing work though (volunteering, performing, teaching, etc.) while you can just show up to church and kinda pay attention, and you’re in.

I feel like, at their core, most religions boil down to two things, for most people:

• Giving you purpose/security/scapegoats (“I’m living a good life so I can go to heaven,” “the Lord has a plan/is watching over me,” “Satan/sinners/demons tempted me”)
• Dissuading you from inquisitive, critical thought (out of self-preservation, I’d imagine)

Personally, I prefer to define my own purpose, live a more “dynamic” lifestyle than is traditional, think critically, and question authority. Doesn’t make me “better” than religious folks, in fact they’re probably overall happier than I am. But I can’t imagine living that way, regardless of whether or not I believe in a magical sky Santa who can’t decide whether he loves us unconditionally or whether or not he’s actually omnipotent.