Set it in stone.

…maybe something more basic like this:

That or posting on mobile while sleep deprived as fuck. Rereading a post made in bed the night prior is always a humbling experience.

It’s not so much button mashy vs not; it’s the responsiveness. Take a step back from videogames even: if you were some medieval knight or w/e in a sword fight IRL: your sword is raising as you’re initiating an attack, and you notice your opponent moving his blade toward a vulnerable spot you just left exposed.

So do you just follow through with the attack knowing there’s a blade closing in on your axillary artery, accept your fate, take the blow, bleed out and die? Or, do you abort the attack in favor of a defensive move like lifting your shield or turning a bit so the blade hits your armor instead?

The former is what combat is like in DS (and MH… haven’t tried the others).

It’s unsatisfying flavor of difficulty… again comparable to sabotaging the controls of an otherwise not difficult at all experience (sponge taped to gameboy). Or like… say you need to do the dishes, and up the difficulty of the task by tying a toothbrush to the end of a 5’ stick and scrubbing them with that from the far corner of the kitchen. The task is difficult now, but that doesn’t make it fun, just tedious.

Just pulled up Remnant - I don’t think I’ve ever seen that game before. The Steam pics/vids look pretty great: I’m getting VERY strong Secret World Legends vibes (which is a fantastic game despite having god-awful combat). I’ll throw it on my wishlist and see if I can snag it on a good sale.

‘clunky’ is the end product, but the biggest contributing factor is the absolute committal nature of initiating an animation. Need to take half a step to the left to dodge an arrow? Fuck you, I’m only one second in to a 2.5 second sword twirling animation! …and actually you double clicked at the start of the animation, so I’m gonna do it again for another 2.5 seconds! …so you die, respawn, redo that fight but this time you know when the arrows are coming so you don’t use the long animations. Clear the fight, wooooo you got gud… but trying to dodge arrows and not being able to cuz your character is busy doing a dance routine is some of the least fluid combat I’ve experienced in a videogame. Any keystroke that comes with an animation is always in competition with other keystrokes that have animations.

Combat boils down to memorizing attack patterns and playing a mental macro on repeat until the enemy is dead. There’s no responsiveness from the player, you just die until you know why you’re dying, and tweak the sequence until it works. Eventually the final boss is dead.

I’ve been told that for whatever reason it feels way less clunky on a controller - I’ve only ever played it on a mouse and keyboard.

idk.

Like I said, to each their own. I’m a little jealous of whatever it is the fanbase is feeling when they play those games, but it’s a miss for me.

Any of the Dark Souls. They’re hyped up for being difficult, but the only thing that makes them difficult is the clunky controls.

Like, I could make Pokemon Yellow equally difficult by taping a dish sponge to a Gameboy and requiring the player to operate the buttons through an inch of fluff.

The story’s kinda there if you dig for clues, but it comes off as random bullshit if you don’t.

They are fucking gorgeous, I’ll give em that.

I’ll never understand the ‘git gud’ circlejerk… I 100%'d DS2, and made it a good chunk through Elden Ring (think I was about 80% done before finally saying fuck it). I ‘got gud’… But DS never got fun.

I absolutely love the style, setting, visuals, and music - I really wanted to like DS… but the combat and clunky controls absolutely murder the experience.

For me at least… to each their own.

Professionally, never bitch down or laterally. If you’re going to bitch up, do so in private.

…I think that was from some war movie… Saving Private Ryan? But fuck if it isn’t solid advice!

The good news is we can correct that surgically. The bad news is… well…

8=

If that’s not an instance yet, it needs to be.

There’s still Templar and Dragon!

All you need to do now is inhale a bee and trash your apartment with the superpowers it gives you.

And only once they ping you to ask if you’re working on it.

This right here is the winner.

I’ve been told to do so much unnecessary bullshit during my combined time in the workforce… finally clicked that unnecessary bullshit also equals unmemorable bullshit, so new hypothesis: management knows it’s unnecessary bullshit and care about that task’s completion even less than I do.

After years of rigorous testing: hypothesis confirmed, management don’t give a fuck either.

New evidence based practice:

Be told to do something; agree cuz they are in fact the boss of me; find something more critical that happened in the same timeframe that you can use as an excuse if questioned; ideally that’s it, cuz management has now forgotten; if they do remember and check in on it later “Oh my bad, I spent the couple days after agreeing to do that stuck in patient care, so I never got the chance, and now it’s been so long I had completely forgotten - thanks for the reminder, I’ll get on it as soon as I can!” …repeat as many times as you think you can get away with; if management persists and they actually really do care about the unnecessary bullshit, then fine, go ahead and get it done.

Fuckin’ hate busy work. Give me something real to do, or let me go home.

I use Amazon as a search engine to narrow down to a few options for a product, then go to those manufacturers’ websites and order directly from them. Been a while since I’ve ordered directly from Amazon.

“I require privacy not to conceal some malice in my own actions; but to protect against the malice of those seeking to abuse that authority.”

New vandalism idea: smear some strawberry jam into the nooks and crannies of a swasticar, then let nature take it from there.

IIRC the line that gets people worked up about sex before marriage is just something like “Keep the wedding bed pure” …kinda vague, and to me personally it reads a lot more as “don’t cheat on your SO” than anything to do with timing of sex.

Definitely not a theologist though, so grain of salt.

Iirc, the law specifies exposure of the female nipple and areola as the things that are indecent…

So… get some titty tassels with a large enough sticker plate to completely cover your areola, and you’re 100% legal!

You may consider also carrying a taser.

Taco Bell has always been a particular case of “how the fuck are they still in business??” …on top of way over priced, subpar quality, and subpar taste, they sell a product in a saturated market, and nearly all of their competitors are better.

Even if we’re talking shitty fast food, there are dozens of Taco Bell like chains, and almost all of them are better than or at least equal to Taco Bell.

And outside of shitty fast food, actual Mexican food is all over the place. To include more authentic taquarias that usually sell tacos and burritos for like half of what Taco Bell does and their product is fucking delicious. We have one of those near were I live - right across the street from a Taco Bell… and every day Taco Bell has a line around the fucking building, while the cheaper, better, and ready-to-take-your-order place is right fucking there! Drives me insane.

Get a 1/3 cup measuring cup from your local dollar store. Two scoops will land you at almost exactly 10 tbsp.

No one should be expected to count all the way to 10 during that shitty period between waking and caffeine!! 2 is much more manageable.

If there’s a Winco near you, they have good-might-be-stretch-but-significantly-better-than-Folgers coffee in their bulk section that you can grind in store. It’s fairly cheap - no idea if it’s a better or worse deal than Folgers. Decent variety of strengths and flavors.

If you don’t have a Winco nearby, you might have something similar- on a scale of [normal grocery store] to [Costco], Winco is kind of right in the middle; I’m guessing it’s not the only chain that’s like that, and that similar stores will have a similar inventory.

Archaeologists circa 2184 will have a much more interesting job.

Oh, right on! I’ve only worked at a few different hospitals, so the sample size of my anecdote is pretty tiny, but I’ve noticed two trends that seem to contribute:

With newer surgeons, women are quicker to recognize when shit’s getting out of their experience level, and ask for help from their seniors before an emergency unfolds. Men tend to dig themselves into a hole first, then call a senior for a rescue as an absolute last resort.

With seasoned surgeons, women tend to be nicer to their team; men tend to be assholes. This is problematic if someone on the team is more timid - there have been instances where someone notices something like a hole in the surgeon’s glove, but didn’t say anything about it because they were afraid of inciting the surgeon’s anger… and then the patient ends up with an infection. As the tech or nurse in the OR, you need to bold as fuck sometimes. I.e., when I was a couple years into this job, we were wrapping up a big open-belly case, surgeon starts closing while the nurse and I were doing our counts. Counts were no good - one of our lap sponges was unaccounted for. “Doc, stop closing, we’re missing a sponge” …he ignored me and kept closing… so I reach over with a pair of scissors and cut the needle off the suture he was using. He proceeds to lose his shit, we do a sweep of the abdomen, and sure as shit there’s the missing lap. Then he doubles down and starts snapping about how lucky I was that it was in there. Both the nurse and I start chewing him out - literally doesn’t matter if it’s not in there, if your surg tech says there might be a retained sponge, you stop what you’re doing and start looking for that sponge. Were I less blunt with that dude, he’d have finished that stitch and closed the cavity, so now the nurse has to chart that a cavity was closed with a wrong count, then legal gets involved. I literally saved that dude from some serious trouble, but he was too butthurt to be anything other than pissed.

Anyway, women tend not to pull shut like that. Every time I’ve needed to call the room to a halt with a female surgeon, she’s just been on board with addressing the problem. Men feel like I’m challenging them personally that they need to contest; women see it as a challenge to the entire team that we all collectively need to resolve.

To be clear, most surgeons male or female just want what’s best for the patient and don’t put up a fight when I raise a concern… but when there is pushback, it’s generally from a man.

so the ones that make it are more skilled on average than men who don’t have to overcome those challenges?

Hadn’t considered that, but you’re probably right. Female doctors get a lot more stupid pushback. A year or so ago, I was in a thyroid case, doc was one of the younger women on the ENT crew. Also super small. …and people treat her like a fucking child. Anyway, we had recently had issues with pathology following her orders, so once she was done taking specimens, she ran them down to pathology herself to make sure everything went smoothly… the lab tech who received them literally told her to ‘go back to the OR and ask the surgeon to clarify the order’ lol. She would have been 100% justified in exploding at that tech, but she didn’t cuz she’s actually a decent person. That kind of shit never happens to men. I’ve been called ‘doctor’ more times than I can count, despite the giant green “TECH” label hanging below my name tag. “Quite the promotion, sir, but if you’re not trying to kill the patient you should probably bounce that question off of someone who knows what they’re doing.”