Barenaked Ladies - One Week

(I promise this is not a porn link lmao)

gonna take a couple hundred years to decipher that spellbook

Why not both?

Used to be I never cried at anything. Ever. Then I started watching the saddest shows I could find specifically for the purpose of making me cry because I figured that wasn’t healthy. Now I’m a total crybaby and I gotta admit, I’m happier for it.

I used to be a massive weeb so most of my sad moments are from anime, but if you really want to bawl your eyes out, Violet Evergarden and A Silent Voice are my two go to picks for when I want to absolutely destroy myself.

wtf he looks sooooo yellow and smelly (I love him)

every maths professor I’ve had in college told me to use the simplest numbers possible in my answers because arithmetic is annoying.

meme format is “Hey guys” “incorrect name” “That’s not what I’m called” though the last line is covered up here.

Character is Bridget, a famous trans character from the fighting game Guilty Gear, who became a meme to misname after someone mistakenly called her “Brisket”.

I’ve had a nebula subscription for a couple years, and honestly I don’t think the lifetime subscription is worth it. If you can find a deal on a year plan it’s crazy cheap, and I don’t think nebula is big enough to be certain it’ll still be relevant by the time a lifetime plan would pay itself off. Maybe if it got more popular, but its place as a more specialized type of video platform, and especially a subscription based one, makes me a bit doubtful that it’ll grow significantly any time soon.

It’s really pretty, that was actually what caused me to start reading it! Then I was pleasantly surprised with the story too.

Recently started up a new terraria world, this time I’m doing the eternity mode from the Fargo’s Souls mod. It’s damn hard…

A shame, you seemed an honest man…

As others have said, the old monster hunter games are best played as a turn based battle. Take the fights slow. Stay safe and watch exactly what the monster does. Only go in for an attack when you know it’s safe. You might time out on a few monsters the first time, but every hunt you will get faster, as you figure out both the monster and your own moveset. The caveat though is you need to make sure you’re paying attention! Just going by feel will get you wrecked and you won’t learn anything doing it. Always be watching and analyzing. You can spend 10 hours throwing yourself at the monster and get 10% better, or you can spend 1 hour learning the monster and get 50% better.

Another thing to be aware of is that these games are capital S Slow. Fights are going to take forever, and that’s only going to get worse when you get into the guild quests, which are intended to be played with 4 person parties. Singleplayer health scaling was not added until World. If you’ve been wailing on a monster and it’s just not going down, don’t get discouraged. As long as you’re doing damage and not getting hit, you’ve got 50 whole minutes to kill the monster. You’ll get it eventually, I promise. Just keep at it and at some point you’ll break through, and the thrill of having conquered what once seemed so impossible will bring you a rush like no other! Good luck, and happy hunting.

You’re right at the end, there’s no more bosses. It’s just a bit of hiking and then a bunch of cutscenes. Then you’re in the epilogue and time rewinds so you can keep playing. Might be a bit of a weird place to start playing again though, as you just boot up the game after so many years just to watch a cutscene or two and then credits roll lol.

As you can probably guess by the chapter numbers, you are nowhere near the end of the game, sorry. There IS a bossfight, but you only have to do the first section alone, then you reunite and do the actual main fight together.

Definitely set some time aside to do the final segment. I’m not sure exactly where you are before the end segment, but assuming you’re right before edge knot city you’ve probably got about 4-5 hours left for the main story, if you take your time with it. There’s probably like an hour or two of cutscenes there though and you can absolutely rush the gameplay sections so if you really don’t care about the story you can probably shave that down to under 2 hours. It’s still a commitment though that’s for sure.

I 100% agree. Games are about what’s fun, and that differs for everybody. Difficulty selection exists for a reason. My mom LOVES the playstation first party games (god of war, horizon, etc) but she always plays them on story mode. It’s not because she can’t handle any higher difficulties (she’s been gaming since before I was born), she simply doesn’t care about the challenge and just wants to experience the story.

Games are for us to enjoy, and short of cheating in a multiplayer game I don’t really think there’s a wrong way to enjoy them. Opening up more avenues for more people to enjoy them is just a net positive in my opinion.

As a diehard(man) Death Stranding fan, I gotta say the boss fights were easily the worst part of the game. I always turn the difficulty up to maximum when I’m doing a new playthrough because the game just feels more impactful and fun when there’s an actual sense of danger, but it goes straight down to easy mode whenever a boss comes out cause I am not dealing with that lol

While I’ll definitely be doing the bossfights the first time around in DS2 this feature will probably save my future playthroughs. It’s just always nice to see more options for letting players engage with the game in the ways they want to.

I’m afraid we’ll never know

It’s hilarious that you say that because I literally just finished 100%ing Control the other day haha! I found it to be the perfect game for stopping and staring because of all the thought put into everything, and how many cool little details and experiences you can have by taking things slowly! I do 100% agree with you though, I wish they were way less aggressive with the enemies spawning. Thankfully when you get tired of it you can just turn on god mode and blast through them, but it’s certainly not an ideal solution.

Unfortunately, it’s an intentional design choice. You can see it in many, many other games too. Fact of the matter is, most players need constant stimulation or they drop off quick, so game designers specifically design their games so you never go without a new event for more than 5 minutes. You can see it especially well in games like Tears of the Kingdom, another game I love that has a godawful encounter system where you can’t go five steps without another enemy ambushing you!

It’s sadly something you aren’t going to escape from as long as you’re playing big budget games, which is doubly sad because big budget game worlds are usually extra fun to explore because they can afford to really flesh out their worlds! That’s why I appreciate games like Monster Hunter (specifically World and Wilds) which solve the issue by giving you those constanr encounters (back to back quests, running into monsters constantly out in the maps) but make it incredibly easy to just not engage and completely ignore them (most monsters not being instantly aggressive, ghillie mantle and skills that make monsters ignore you completely). This at least gives me hope that we can compromise between the stimulation bombardment and the tranquil admiration.

The author talks a lot about the addictiveness of the flow state, and how most players try to achieve thjs state to just stop thinking for a while. I found it interesting what the author said about the teacher trying to get their students to recognize the feeling of games, because that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do lately to counteract that state of not really taking things in and just passing through the game.

There’s a youtuber named “Any Austin” who really opened my eyes up to this. Now instead of doing the quests and advancing the game, I take my time with games. I actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.

I highly recommend everyone to try this out: pick your favourite game, preferably one with an actual game world you can move around in, rather than just a board like balatro, and just sit. Don’t play the game, just find something interesting and stare at it. Think about how it was made, and what purpose does it serve in the game. Keep doing this, just walk around your world and try to appreciate its existence. Stare at the skybox, the grass, the buildings, the mountains.

This has given me both a new appreciation for games, and a way to break free from the endless treadmill of going from one experience to the next, with no thought put into the inbetween. It’s a sort of mindfulness in a way, and something I feel has actively improved my real life rather than just distracted me from it. Now I find myself able to appreciate these small beauties and curiosities everywhere I go.