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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • About a year ago I got a high-speed (so-called “gaming”) hard drive on sale for about 100 USD. It has 8TB, so I kinda stopped uninstalling games or worrying about file sizes.

    I don’t really play any games that have more than 80GB file size anyway, but I imagine at around 90-100 is when I’d start being reluctant to download.

    As for what I prefer, I feel like smaller file sizes usually yield better games on average. If I find a game that has 100MB download, I’m already lookin like this: 😏
    I’m pretty happy with anything up to 10GB. If the original Dark Souls (my favorite game) is 8GB, surely that’s within an order of magnitude of the maximum file size a game can reasonably be, for me at least.




  • I did find it more difficult than DS1 but, as in my metaphor, in a more artificial way. I’m thinking of the nerfed rolling frames (before you level ADP), more difficult parry timing, far more multi-opponent bosses, and especially the way that dying will reduce your max health. Any of these on their own would be totally unremarkable, but all together it feels like there was much more explicit focus on adding things to make it more difficult (which I believe was also reflected in the marketing of the games).

    I also think that the atmosphere and artstyle of DS1 was much more serious and unique, whereas DS2 has comparatively much more ghoulish cartoony vibes, which just made it feel incongruent. Eg: the undead are now green and less scrawny, making them seem more like generic goblins rather than how they were in DS1. I just feel like there was an overall shift in the focus to be less about the unique world and its story and more about a Ghosts 'n Goblins -esque rage game.

    I don’t think Dark Souls 2 is the most difficult in the series but I think it’s the first one where the difficulty started to feel unfair and like it was missing the point.

    Basically here’s the vibes I get from each game:
    DS1: A somber and holy journey
    DS2: Ghosts 'n Goblins but 3D
    DS3: Killing cool bosses is so cool
    ER: All of the above


  • I agree with your critique of souls-likes, but there was something really special about the original Dark Souls that none of its successors really captured. This was before they decided that “ultra-hard” was a good selling point and the attack patterns were far more simple. The atmosphere and difficulty were still there, but they made sense and fit with the rest of the game and its ideas very cohesively.

    Not sure if anybody will understand this, but it’s like the difference between spicy food that’s spicy because it has peppers and spicy food that’s spicy because they added a bunch of artificial stuff. Spicier usually means tastier, because it has more of the flavorful peppers. But in the case of, for example, Dark Souls 2 or Elden Ring, it’s like they just added a bunch of capsaicin (difficulty) without including any more flavors of the peppers. The difficulty is beyond the degree to which it was artistically meaningful in the original Dark Souls.



  • I used to be always on vibrate, but then I found out I can schedule do not disturb via calendar events, so I have started leaving my ringer on with it automatically disabling when I don’t want it on.

    This is my ringtone: Moment (instrumental) from Marmalade Boy. Watched this anime with my friends and this track is unforgettable. The show is about this girl whose parents divorce and get remarried to another couple who also got divorced, and then she tries to date her step-step-brother who is both her mom’s husband’s son and her dad’s wife’s son.
    This track plays any time something dramatic happens, which is like every 5 minutes.


  • “Learn” and “bird” are pronounced very differently depending on the accent of English. Wiktionary has “learn” RP pronunciation listed as lɜːn and American as lɝn, although personally I don’t believe in ɝ so I would write it as lɹn and bɹd.

    Slight rant about American English IPA, but Wiktionary even has American “bird” listed as bɜɹd, which is frankly ridiculous. Say bɜɹd out loud and it sounds absolutely insane. Be’rd. Nobody says bɜɹd, it’s gotta be bɹd. English spelling treats R as a consonant, but American English functionally treats it like a vowel. If we spelled with R the same way it’s pronounced, it would be brd, lrn, teachr, wrking, etc. Not suggesting a spelling reform, because the current system works so well for uniting different accents of English, but it seriously bugs me when people talk about how American R (ɹ) is a consonant. It’s not!





  • Also, I don’t think anybody honestly believes the argument that it is immoral to have children “without their consent.” The idea that you cannot do anything to someone else without their consent is a very useful idea in 95% of situations, and this is clearly one in which it does not apply. I did not consent to being born, but I would have if I could. Imagine a bureaucracy in which to apply for a passport, you needed to have an existing passport. It just doesn’t work. I can see the logic, but the idea has failed on a functional level. You can apply this to anything and make fake disingenuous arguments for any cause: “I don’t think we should elect a president unless they’ve already been president before. I think it’s a role where you absolutely need to have prior experience.” “You need to consent before being born. Since it’s impossible to do so, I guess it’s just immoral to have children.” See: Catch-22.

    It is more difficult to have children now than it was 20, 40, 60 years ago. Some people feel the need to further justify their decision by convincing themselves that would be immoral to do anything else.