Drugs are great, you take them too most like (caffeine, ethanol, theanine etc). It’s the power that fucked that shit head up.

Loads of people take ketamine and just like appreciate jazz or some other banal shit.

Smoking: easy way to quit smoking plus weed during the worst withdrawal to avoid snapping at everyone

Weed (earlier lmao, I still use sometimes but less than a gram a year really): having other things to do that require concentration and memory I enjoy. Weed is easy as it’s mostly habitual. The sleeplessness is the worst and it’s only a couple of days

Opiates: Exercise, avoiding boredom (v hard! video games, gardening, easy books, podcasts etc), lots of walking those restless nights, preparing easy food for the worst few days, counting days to know it was going to end. Be careful after surgery kids that shit sucks to come off.

There is when sprinting. although it’s shared with interact but that only really comes up when sprinting to ladders

no I didn’t. I think this about on par with ds1

I actually love ds1 in its entirity. well until the Lord vessel then the game falls apart. I’m not one for fast paced games (arthritis) and really enjoy the exploration and navigation. Sometimes I just load up a save and run around for a bit to relax :p

I’m not sure my opinion is the one to listen to in your case, given it seems you prefer the later faster gameplay with more emphasis on bosses?

All I can really say is I haven’t enjoyed a souls game much since demons souls and dark souls (although sekiro was quite fun it’s very different) until now. I’m only about 10 hours in on my third area.

I do think many people’s complaints (but not all! there are some very idiosyncratic choices) are from not paying attention. Like recognising when you can pull out the lantern to do something, when you need to fully cross into death, making full use of all the tools (e.g. regenerating ranged ammunition, the map they give you, kicks, mid combo 1h 2h swapping, powerstancing), understanding how the level designers have set traps.

If you try play it like lies of P and just sprint in parrying everything you have a bad time and get swarmed. you also need to engage in the RPG parts more, swapping rings and armour for the current challenge and so on.

I thought lies of p was an absurdly tedious game tbh with the bosses requiring lots of memorisation. I think a lot of this is subjective.

You can place temporary bonfires pretty close to bosses using a consumable you can buy or loot from certain enemies. Some people seem to be running out of them, I have more than I need and I feel like I’m using them liberally.

It’s a very similar game to ds1. It’s that sort of slower, easier game where you spend most of your time methodically exploring a large interconnected world. Once you know what you’re doing you can run through a lot.

If you thought ds1 was a bad game you probably won’t like this. If you thought it was fantastic you probably will.

One thing I haven’t figured out is if perfect parry wither damage is variable.

Sometimes it feels like I take a lot of wither, othertimes not. I’m using a shield and 2hing a lot so I wonder if it’s a shield vs weapon parry thing? Or if it’s timing based like partial parry damage mitigation in ds3.

I was too engrossed to do testing so far, have you tried at all?

What weapons are you using btw? my wife uses a giant axe and seems to yeet herself a lot. Are the certain weapons with lots of lungy movements that might be tripping people up?

Look I’m in love but it’s a very polarising game. If you enjoyed playing ds1 blind, and saw something to love in ds2 underneath the weirdness then I’d recommend it but it is not the fast and nippy ds3 onwards style. Levels are confusing if you don’t figure out what the map is telling you, umbral exploration is fascinating but tense and you have to rush sections which can make you miss what you picked up.

There’s a few baffling decisions like auto filling your quick bar with new consumables when empty, not marking new items in inventory, lore being state gated (it miiight be some arty you get the story from various perspectives thing but I’m unconvinced yet), and many people find the ranged pressure unpleasant. You’re often being shot at till you clear an area.

I (and billions of others) ignore almost all of this and eat with my hands, by the beach, dusting sand and swatting flies off chips that fall and guess what?

We’re almost all fine.

This stuff seems like paranoid germophobia to me.

agree with all of these, although sadly liquid smoke is probably not a healthy thing to have a lot of.

That said I eat onions all the time and they make me ill. Everyone makes their own judgement on the blandness for longevity trade

Thanks, that’s a lot to think about. We currently use an oled computer monitor as a TV (hooked up to a pi) and it’s beautiful but there are limits on screen size and it’s crazy expensive (you’re paying for stupid fast refresh rates and the Gamer™ markup)

our house is very bright during the day, lots of glass in sunny Australia, so it’s probably not a great candidate for a projector generally but it does have me thinking about one in the bedroom for late night movies. Probably a lot cheaper and neater than another absurd monitor.

How dark do rooms need to be for them to work? Are there issues with shared spaces where someone might want a well lit workspace?

I think a lot of people making jokes about stuff like this may struggle to understand what addiction feels like from the inside and how intensity of desire is not always a function of withdrawal severity.

The popular image of addiction is something like a twitchy looking person begging for the next hit. This is rare, even for extremely addictive drugs with severe withdrawal.

Often addiction manifests internally as a fascination with something. When I smoked it was rare to not be on some level thinking about the logistics of when I would next light up. I also over emphasised the positive effects (many of which in hindsight were merely alleviating withdrawal which is hilarious) and diminished the negative ones.

As someone with a sweet tooth it’s not so different to how I feel about treats. It’s difficult not to think of grabbing one when shopping, I typically feel a desire after dinner, I often “cave” if something is around or eat it without much intention.

Contrast this with antidepressants, which can cause debilitating months long withdrawal. Yet when stopping SNRIs I had no powerful desires to consume them, despite knowing that doing so would make it stop feeling like my soul was being sucked out the back of my head.

There are reasons to be cautious about lots of research like this, pharma companies would love to sell a solution for example, but it’s not outlandish. Nicotine is addictive because it makes your brain light up in certain ways, there is nothing special about the molecule except it does that thing (well and crosses the BBB). If there are other ways to make brains light up in similar ways without a specific chemical receptor it stands to reason that under certain circumstances addiction may manifest.

It sounds like you are basing how fine it is to hurt someone for pleasure (and that is all it is at this point) on how similar they look to you rather than any principled understanding of behaviour and neurology.

This is called speciesism and is just another manifestation of the cognitive failures that lead to most evil in the world.

It is absurd to equate grass releasing hormones that cause the production of bitter compounds with electrocuting a chicken. That is like saying steel feels pain because because it emits sparks when ground or that an amputated foot feels pain because nerves send signals for a while. Pain requires perception, we obviously have no test for an inner listener but we can compare behaviour.

This is after all why you believe I am a real person and not a sophisticated automaton.

The only real behavioural difference we can find between us and birds for example is possibly language. Parrots and corvids there is some evidence they can do language, rather than communication. Even so it’s absurd to use this as a line for acceptable suffering as you would essentially be arguing that human infants and humans with certain cognitive differences were acceptable to kill for meat.

The problem with isms is that you can’t draw meaningful lines around the world if you start from a conclusion and work backwards (in this case, animals other than humans are sometimes ok to eat). The moment you start trying to defend it you are forced to confront that the position isn’t reasonable but rationalised.

I suspect you know this, because you feel some degree of guilt and are throwing out statements like “plants feel pain” which have the objective of winning an argument rather than finding truth.

I take it you eat plant based to minimise suffering then, as well as cry when a lawn is being mowed?

If the ways we killed non humans were not cruel then we would use them on our loved ones at end of life for euthanasia etc.

we don’t because they’re cruel.

Ok, but the person I’m replying to is stating things they clearly don’t believe in order to gotcha me. How am I to respond to that?

I’m gonna need your bingo card and your debate links. We’ve no room for bigotry like that on the force.

You’re back to eating grass.

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Bugs probably feel pain given they modify their behaviour after injuries and seek to avoid them.