The worst to me is everyone now including a shitty bag to put the product in. Like it MAYBE makes sense to include a case for travel headphones or something but no I do not need you to include something for me to put the external SSD drive in.

Yeah I told my partner about some of the stuff that goes on and her first thought was ‘they shouldn’t allow kids in religion until they’re old enough to decide for themselves’.

I grew up in a sect that I like to often describe as Beer Drinkin’ Christianity because it’s really chill about most things including homosexuality and gender. It wasn’t until I had grown out of it and basically gone full agnostic that I really realized how coercive even my version of religion had been. I could go on and on but the funniest thing to me was realizing during an Abnormal Psychology 101 course in college that my Church Camp basically used every last technique they listed for brain washing. It was a fun camp and not scary in any way but yet extremely manipulative in a subversive way.

I think their point is that nearly every other phone is in the Android ecosystem, isn’t it?

I thought the larger point was that they’re using plenty of sources that do not lie in the public domain. Like if I download a textbook to read for a class instead of buying it - I could be proscecuted for stealing. And they’ve downloaded and read millions of books without paying for them.

Yeah you say that until you get a tusk in the crotch

Looks like a big un - is she a mixed breed? I can’t really put my finger but there could be some Percheron and Belgian coloring in there.

It’s what Google does, launch products -> cancel them, buy products -> cancel them. I have been burned enough times by them that I don’t use anything they make anymore out of the certainty that it’ll get canceled just as soon as I’ve grown to depend on it.

You mean the guy next to the guy that sorta looks like Snoop Dogg?

Yellow Bird

Man I always forget to use that stuff. I really need to finally jump into NG+ and just do a mad consumables run

Parody and satire have taken a real beating in the last years so I’d say ¯_(ツ)_/¯

That’s the one thing I finally learned with the DLC that I should have learned long before this - leaving and coming back later instead of fighting and dying to a tough boss 30 times in a row

Huh, is this maybe the newer Tomb Raider?

I’d do this too but every screenshot I posted would just be Elden Ring.

Absolutely my favorite podcast ever

I guess I’m OOTL - what happened with Valheim?

Are the eBay buttons as buttony as these tho

Yeah I see where you’re coming from. I know as a creator it’s really hard to strike a balance between achieving an artistic vision and separating their pride in that from real accessibiliy concerns.

And like I said in my other comment, I cherish the way Fromsoft uses difficulty to direct players and tell stories and I hesitate to want to do anything to water that down. Too many games take the route of making that game for everyone and Fromsoft games are for me that gaming oasis I can escape to.

Oh yeah I 100% agree with you! I always try to make sure to point out all the other options available to people if they’re frustrated with difficulty. I think people don’t understand that a lot of the ‘options’ in Fromsoft games are not in menus - they’re baked into the gameplay itself with in-world/lore reasons for doing them. Like how co-op uses a sign instead of a multiplayer interface ‘room’ like most other games.

It is the best thing about Fromsoft games IMO, that everything is a vessel to help tell the story and create more immersion, and a difficulty slider is game-y and creates less immersion (as well as what you said - would ruin the opportunities the difficulty affords in directing pleayers).

All that being said, if they added a slider that would only affect others, the only way it affects me is that I’d be bummed that they didn’t get the great experience that I love about the game. I mean the other person mentioned Celeste which I also really enjoyed and I wasn’t even aware that it had difficulty sliders. So that’s how much they’d affect my enjoyment of the game.

I should say that I appreciate the candid discussion, nice to have a civilized chat on the internet. Also - in the end it wouldn’t really bother me if Fromsoft did implement a simple difficulty slider. I think it’d be a bit more difficult than you are assuming however since it is also a multiplayer game. I guess they could limit the difficulty options to offline players only.

But as a very long time fan, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that they have actually gone a long way to addressing the difficulty complaints of their games. ER is their most accessible game and there are a lot of in-game opportunities to customize the amount of difficulty one faces. I could go on and on about it but I’ll leave it at that for now.