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.

My one resolve, as I enter my greying, is to never become one of those dipshits.

The kids are alright, a little straight edge for my tastes but they're alright.

Everyone is getting stupider except you right? Like you're not one of the dumbed down lazy people are you? or your loved ones?

People have said this shit since we have written records.The whole idea of fallen man is the foundation of the Abrahamic religions, probably others I don't know of too.

People are doing alright, actually go talk to some. Yeah yeah a lot aren't crazy educated but even the most educated intellectual titans of our age are uneducated in the overwhelming majority of things.

We do alright, there are many problems but they're not because people are getting less intelligent. We are no smarter or stupider than the first humans, or at least we have no reason to believe otherwise. We have better access to information and we're also facing some very large problems, but so did bronze age people.

Read the epic of Gilgamesh, it'll chill you out some.

There might be but keep in mind longer arms needs more force to drive and trans women generally don't have the testosterone to grow large muscles.

Also like all sport is unfair, it's inherently the point. When a tall, muscular, woman wins a swimming contest nobody is waiting in the wings to measure her serium testosterone level and determine whether it was legitimate. We accept that people have physiological variations, different economic opportunities, and different mental capacities. We are interested in exploring what a person can do within rough approximately fair bands of competition.

Trans people generally want to transition early, so there's not a huge amount of time for puberty growth or lack thereof (remember trans men dammit!) given proper support for most people. Even later transitioners don't seem to have any significant advantage, given the lack of winning they're doing. I suspect any advantage that may exist is massively, massively, dwarfed by being wealthy enough to hire competent coaches/take the time to train + good childhood for high likelihood of positive psychological coping with stress.

Trans people generally lose on both those fronts.

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.

hey man, we exported the fascist cooker that got their fascist cookers into power.

It's an ouroboros! yaaaaaaaaaaay

I understand, today my own nation votes to slap down a hand outstretched in peace and warmth. In my own state police deploy anti terror powers to crack down on anyone attending a rally against Israeli militancy.

But if we give up nothing will improve, and everything good we have started small and grew into unstoppable movements.

Larger scale action takes smaller scale first

The Israeli government is able to pursue its horrible policies because of a lack of support for palastinian people.

Preventing protest in powerful nations stops public opinion changing. Public opinion allows the political establishment to continue to avoid historical responsibility.

If western nations drop support of Israel and start using sanctions etc it would be much harder to destroy Gaza.

This ban will allow the Israeli state to continue murdering an entire people unchecked

I don't think that's likely, we are apes not angels.

Sometimes we have conflicts, some are probably resolvable, some represent fundamentally opposed interests.

We can try to make society different, so there are fewer situations that lead to irresolvable conflicts. That project will never end.

Whether this gives you hope or grief is largely up to you.

Just don't do what I did. You start with some basic mix right? good old 20/80/trace and you're happy. But you wonder, who doesn't wonder, so you try some different stuff right? I mean it's there, can't hurt to know cannit?

Maybe you try a little high/low humidity. you think hehe this feels a bit funny. Then it's just a small step to puffing clouds at high altitude right? next think you know you're chasing that forever. It's strange and weird but then breathing down on the ground feels so exhilarating. Nothing can stop the road you're on now.

You'll be trying diving mixes, pure oxxy, vox mods with helium and shit. You're sleeping among empty gas tanks. It's no life man, no life at all.

Make better choices, it's too late for me.

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.

While it is true that insane propaganda is off the charts, for example in my own country Australia we're chaining ourselves to the fading star of the usa and the UK militarily despite having:

• different trade interests
• different geopolitical interests
• different cultural interests

all while the usa government tries it's hardest to undermine our economic policy, erase our culture, and distort our politics towards their own demended lines.

There is zero evidence the chinese government does not want to do the same. They have interfered in our media, our education systems, there has been stupid petty trade squabbles with both "sides" using us for their own ends.

When chinese diplomats speak to our media, even in excruciatingly fair interviews, the pattern is the same slimey deny deny deny and legal quibble that usa diplomats engage in. Their media is insanely critical of Australian life too.

There are no good guys in this power struggle and looking for one is childish thinking.

Even this article refuses to address the notion that the chinese government has ever conducted itself in a condemnable manner.