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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 17th, 2024


  • Is it particularly more your fault that things don’t better in Souls games than in any other game in which you are meant to save the world? I think the only difference is that in the Souls ones and others like them, the world is already horrible and needs repaired in some way rather than on the verge of becoming horrible

    Interestingly Elden Ring went for quite a different direction. The world is, unquestionably, still an enormous mess that would be horrendous to live in, but they’ve left in far more of the beauty. I particularly like how every so often you hear hostile NPCs playing music or singing if they haven’t spotted you yet, and how there’s a little puzzle side quest about a painter; people are still making art in this ongoing apocalypse. One important allied NPC even actually openly makes an argument that the world is worth preserving if it looks like you’re going for the “destroy everything” ending

    Of course the atmosphere and gameplay are still heavy going, both in the Souls trilogy and Elden Ring. I get why that wouldn’t be for everyone. It’s like playable Cormac McCarthy stories, except you can punch your way out of most of the misery if you get it right





  • The gear would not have saved you. The game gets substantially more difficult as you progress, even accounting for your character getting stronger, and if you don’t do a decent job of levelling up appropriate skills that will compound the issue. The starter gear for most of the classes is actually perfectly viable all the way to the end of the game for most players too, it’s not notably weak at all

    I love Elden Ring, but I can absolutely respect why it wouldn’t be for everyone. No sense in playing it if you’re not enjoying it, the point is still to have a good and/or interesting time





  • There are some pretty big buildings in there! Apparently the site (the Mummy Cave ruins in the Canyon de Chelly park) consists of about 70 rooms between the different buildings. Not sure how many buildings there are, I can see three distinct ones in this pic but since only one of them is still mostly standing I can imagine there are others than are harder to see






  • I think it was substantially influenced by the traditional four humours. Carl Linnaeus’ work was not the first to call East Asians “yellow”, but it was very widely spread and influential. He categorised humans into four races and associated each with one of the humours, then describing that race as having the characteristics associated with the humour (hence the equally-odd “red” description for Native Americans)





  • No, not quite. Cargo cults didn’t worship the vehicles, rather the notion of the abundance that they brought. The famous Melanesian ones in WWII happened in societies in which gift-giving was already the key to social power; when WWII came along, both the Japanese and Allied forces brought unbelievable quantities of supplies to the islands and then also intentionally handed out a lot of stuff in order to play into that social practice. It was enough that some locals interpreted it as a sign that they could return to their old ways that had been suppressed under Christian colonial rule, the first signs of a coming new age of prosperity

    Anyway all that is to say that no, uncontacted tribes can’t have cargo cults because part of the formation of a cargo cult involves contact