Microblogging Journal through 7/22/2024

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 07/15

• 18:36 # When I wear my computer glasses while recording games, my mic headset is significantly more painful to wear. This has inspired me to use ear buds and my Rode PodMic more often, which sounds better anyway, but I haven’t yet worked out a way to position it so that a) it doesn’t get in the way of playing and b) the mic arm attached to the desk doesn’t pick up mechanical noise from the mouse moving around on the desk. Some of my Elden Ring videos sound like I’m constantly bumping the microphone and it makes me cringe.

Wednesday 07/17

• 09:33 # Last night I watched Civil War on Prime. It wasn’t what I expected. I imagined a summer blockbuster action fest but it actually had more of an indie feel to it. It was okay. Good acting, some tense scenes, but it was fairly predictable and it was hard not to notice the written-by-people-who-think-Twitter-is-real- life vibe. Wasn’t sure what the point of it was. I guess the point was, “this is all pointless.”

• 22:41 # My laptop seems to have survived a water spillage incident. Whew.

Saturday 07/20

• 09:57 # So I’ve gotten to Messmer in the Elden Ring DLC. I spend about a half hour a day trying to make even a shred of progress on what I can only describe as “yet another total nonsense Elden Ring story boss.” My Scadutree Blessing is at 11 but it feels like it should be at least 25 before even thinking about taking on this boss. There isn’t enough fire resistance in the entire world to deal with that guy.

• 14:30 # I tried Throne and Liberty for about 10 minutes, which is probably a sufficient amount of time to know and understand everything about the entire game from start to finish.

• 14:34 # I’ve had a long-standing plan to play a magic-only character in Elden Ring, or at least magic-mostly character, and I finally started a new character for that today. Rather than trying to remember where to find everything and the optimal order for getting things, I thought I’d look up what I assumed would be one of a thousand web pages out there that laid out an easy-to-follow step- by-step checklist of where to go to get the stuff you need over the first 100 levels. Turns out, no such web site exists. There are only wikis that are terrible that have terrible guides that give minimal information in the wrong order. Who knew.

Sunday 07/21

• 08:33 # I haven’t counted but I must surely have attempted Messmer a thousand times so far. Each fight attempt takes anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes. Sometimes I die almost immediately. Sometimes I get him down almost to the end. It’s one of those boss fights. By which I mean the standard Elden Ring kind, where luck and randomness is the biggest factor in whether you win or not, there is no skill involved, and there’s no satisfaction whatsoever for getting through it.

• 08:38 # I really enjoy it when my glasses somehow get tangled in my hair and I end up tearing a huge chunk of what little hair I have left out of my head.

• 16:55 # I finally beat Messmer in the Elden Ring DLC. It didn’t quite take more than 100 tries. The length of the boss fights were anywhere from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on, you guessed it, luck. I used basically the same strategy every time: I discovered in one of the first few tries that he is easily poisoned, and then after that it was a matter of practicing dodging between attacks rather than into them, and finding the rare opportunities where it was safe to heal. Needless to say, it’s another Elden Ring story boss designed to be frustrating and punitive, where one need not bother trying to apply any kind of intellectual strategy. All you have to do is keep trying until luck goes your way.

• 18:12 # I found the first season of Dragon Show kind of boring the first time I watched it. However I’ve completed re-watching the first season, and I can report that … well, it’s still pretty boring, at least until episode 9. The show begins in episode 9, so you can just skip the first 8 episodes of backstory and prologue. The dragons are mostly Mcguffins in the show, but I will say that on re-watching I finally found myself curious about their identities, since they just kind of ignore all of that in the show, and one looks the same as the next, until they’re next to each other, as was seen in the final episode. One was kind of a cute young firefly sort of dragon and the other was a hulking behemoth elder dragon. It literally took them the entire 10 episodes until they actually gave some character to the dragons in the Dragon Show.