ELSEWHERE

(Just wanted to say I love when you post here and I love reading about your life from inside your head. Nothing at all useful to say or anything, just that I’m glad you do.)

 
I spent the day playing video games, because there's only so productive you can be on lack-of-sleep and worry. Erika's Superliminal talk reminded me that I had never finished listening to the developer's commentary, except that I was mistaken and had done so after all. So I worked on some other achievements and easter-egg-hunting until about 9 AM, at which point I switched over to Kairo for a few minutes before deciding I wasn't actually in the mood for it, and then switched over to Tormentum, because I also remembered (correctly this time) never actually finishing it.

Tormentum is a giger-esque game that isn't the giger-esque game that came out recently. It's a point-and-click adventure about being sentenced to suffer in an afterlife, and escaping that suffering and going on a quest to find redemption. This story of course means that the game makes some moral pronouncements, and those pronouncements of course aren't going to mesh with everyone's personal moralities (a very obvious and potentially upsetting example is the classic 'committing suicide is shameful and cowardly' angle). If you can accept that sort of thing being true in-universe without necessarily being a judgement applicable to real-life, then it's a very fun game. Has that foreign weirdness that I love, and none of the abstract point-and-click jank you might expect. That said, obviously the themes and art aren't going to be to everyone's taste.

So once I finished a run of it, I decided to run through another couple times to see other choices/endings and to unlock achievements. ~5 hours to 100% it with three playthroughs (though only two would be necessary if you were purely going for endings/achievements).

Anyway, by then it was going on 5 PM, Lee'd been home for a bit and was settled in, and I was quite tired, so I got ready for bed and went to sleep. And now here I am, not asleep.

Might be time to jump back in to Elden Ring

Hmmmmm, do I want to try to 100% one of the Dark Soulses

Tried to do a javascript lesson but, as you will be completely unsurprised to learn, I was too braindead to really follow it. I thought I was, but then it got to the 'put what you just learned into practice' part and I had no idea what was going on, so I guess it was in one ear and out the other

I did set up the PS4 and started downloading whatever Elden Ring updates I don't have, so once that's done I'm going to fire it up and see if it grabs me. I'm also going to, but not right now, renew my PSN subscription so I can do the online things. God it's dumb I have to pay for that

But it's done updating now so I'ma go do that, see how long it takes me to remember how to play

Oh yeah I was midway through an area and grinding a miniboss for runes

Welp time to trial-by-fire my way back into the game

So once again Elden Ring is trivially easy to pick up again after months of not playing it, I was back to a decent enough skill-level to hold my own within a few minutes. I spent a day wandering around trying to figure out where I should be going and what I should be working on, but have by now found four or five areas I'd never seen before, so that answers those questions. I also found The rune farming area, which is nice. I'm one funny hat away from truly optimising the grind, but that's kind of a pain to get so for now I'm just going to keep going without it.

This is such a well designed game. I don't know of any game that's this intuitive and feels this good, mechanically, to play

Look at this damage, My God

I'm in new armor because I was going through my chest and discovered I had Lionel's set, which is super heavy but has great defence and great poise*, so I've been messing around with that at the expense of having to use one of my talisman slots on the 'raises how much weight you can have equipped' talisman. I'm also using a new weapon because I looked up that boss's weaknesses ^ and then went to check against what I had equipped, and discovered both that he is weak to bleed damage and that I had just gotten a weapon earlier today that does bleed damage. So I went and had it boosted to +6 and also discovered that it does more general damage than what I've been using anyway; I need to go through the other weapons I have and see what they boost to, maybe I have a hidden gem in there that I've been ignoring because it seemed weak at +0

Unfortunately that equip load put me into heavy even with the talisman, so I had to swing by the farming spot and put 8 levels into endurance. But boy was it worth it, did you see that video.

To think I've been handicapping myself by using the same weapon for like fifty levels

 
*Poise: your ability to withstand being stunned/knocked down

Beat another two bosses in quick succession and opened up a questline I Really Wanted to do (and had in fact been beating my head against for ages when I'd last been playing) which required beating one of them. So tomorrow I get to do that quest! But right now I need to be asleep so I can go to the doctor

(source)