Tag Archives: Humanity

Dark Souls Sucks: Lautrec, The Four Kings, and Farming

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I’m back. A two day break is long enough after you’ve posted 34 days in a row. I’ve been bored, antsy and playing more video games, namely Dark Souls. More on being bored and antsy later. Maybe.

I seemed to have been in a honeymoon phase with Dark Souls during the last post about it. Not that it isn’t a fantastic game — I stand by every word I said about it — but now that I’m actually playing the game all the old frustrations are coming back. The game is bullshit, and in a way that’s totally bullshit. I still think this is a positive though; the fact that a game I know pretty damn well can still piss me the fuck off is amazing. I think I’ve beaten the game ten times total and I can still get pissed off about things I know are in the game. Let’s cover a few here.

Spoilers ahead if you dare to read.

Bullshit Lautrec of Carim

There’s a knight locked in the Undead Parish early on in the game. With a key (maybe) you can free him. There isn’t anything obviously wrong with the guy at first besides his mildly threatening voice, but there is nothing to hint that you shouldn’t free the bastard either. You also come across various trainers in the game, Big Hat Logan to name an example, that are locked up as well. The fact Lautrec is locked up doesn’t really mean shit in the Dark Souls world.

So you free the bastard and after triggering a certain important even he kills the Firelink Shrine’s fire keeper putting the bonfire out. This is before you gain the ability to teleport and Firelink serves as a good hub for the world except now you can’t use it as a checkpoint anymore. So you must walk to the Undead Parish, the Undead Burg, or the fucking Catacombs to use their bonfires. It’s a pain and a pain that the game barely hints at and it happens at a very inconvenient time.

Not that you can get the bonfire lit again, but it’s a massive pain. Lautrec goes to Anor Londo where you can invade him, get the firekeeper’s soul back, and relight the fire. It sounds bad already but everything about it makes it worse. When you invade, you discover Lautrec has two goons with him and one is a sorcerer who tosses soul spears at you from a distance. Also when you invade you are unable to heal. Yes, you need to kill Lautrec with two fucking goons fucking your day up when a few hits is all that it takes you kill you. I tried this recently on New Game Plus with an old tank character; I only got a single hit on the guy before I was killed. This was Sunday when I was drunk and totally threw the controller twice and quit playing that character since. Fuck that playthrough.

The Four Fucking Kings

Best Wiafu!

After my anger over Lautrec, I decided to get the dark ending and talk to Kaathe, one of the primordial serpents. No big deal, it was NG+ and I was a tank and I could summon Witch Beatrice (my Souls wiafu) to help. I was surprised to see that my fully upgraded Black Knight Axe didn’t do a fucking thing to the Kings. The bosses spawn in every thirty seconds so if you can’t kill one in that amount of time (or an little extra time) you’ll eventually have for or five kings wailing on you. They also hit really fucking hard too. Three hits and you’re dead. Witch Beatrice didn’t help much because I died so quickly.

So to hell with the dark ending on that playthrough.

More Fuck The Four Kings

I thought it’d be a fun idea to start a new playthrough with a hand-to-hand based player. I’m currently running a shitty DEX build with NEARLY FULLY UPGRADED CLAWS. It’s fun as fuck and I’m having a great time. Once again I tried to fight the Four Kings before the other three Big Bosses. (You can’t go through the red fog gates until you give the lordvessel to either Frampt or Kaathe.) The claws didn’t do shit to them and like before I quickly had three of the fuckers wailing on me before I died. Beatrice didn’t even get to fight because I was running from a horde of Darkwraiths and Ghosts and couldn’t summon her. I didn’t have any of those transient curses either. 

Frampt got the lord vessel and there wouldn’t be a dark ending on this game either. Seriously, fuck the Four Kings. I don’t remember the boss being this hard on other playthroughs.

Solaire and Farming

This is going to be a mess so bear with me here. Solaire of Astora is everyone’s favorite Dark Souls NPC. He’s cheerful, he’s helpful, and he even muses himself that you might have feelings for him. Given the rest of the dreary, bleak, and depressing NPCs in Dark Souls, Solaire really is a ray of sunlight (get it?). “Praise the Sun!” “If only I could be so grossly incandescent!” Even if you’re not the biggest fan of Solaire, you probably do have some fondness for him because he’s such a nice guy.

One thing that makes Solaire such a badass is your ability to summon him for some key boss fights in the game. The first time you can summon him is for the Bell Gargoyles and as this fight can be difficult for a new character/new player; Solaire really is a godsend here. He’s also summonable for the shitty Centipede Demon and the final boss, Gwyn. The only problem with summoning him for the Gwyn fight is that you first need to stop him from going fucking insane!

Most (maybe all?) of the NPCs have a questline that ends with them going “hollow” — insane, corrupted, and hostile towards you. Nice and friendly people you meet eventually lose their damn minds where they will attack you the next time you come near them. Solaire is no different. He’s famously on a quest to “find his own sun” and given his failure to find it during the game, eventually goes mad. His downfall is finding a group of Chaos Bugs that emit light. Since he’s lost his shit, he finds these bugs, mistakes them for “his sun”, and goes crazy. You end up putting him down like the sick dog he is and this prevents him from helping you during the last fight. It’s a really bleak game.

Here’s the bullshit part. To keep Solaire alive you need to kill these bugs before he finds them. You can’t take the normal route because this automatically triggers him to go crazy so you must find a “backpath” way to kill them. A few cheesy ways to do this are to abuse a certain pyromancy spell or some other shitty game mechanic while the most “appropriate way” is to open a shortcut door via the Chaos Servant covenant. In short, you donate thirty humanities (a certain in-game item) to a giant half-spider, half-lady NPC and the door opens.

My problem was that I didn’t have shit for humanities. I need twenty-nine of them to open the door with the sole purpose of saving Solaire. Okay. Time to farm!

Farming in any game usually consists of doing mindless runs over and over to collect items. To farm humanity, people usually go to The Depths and kill about ten rats over and over again; these are some the most reliable droppers of humanity in the game. This isn’t as easy as it sounds as their drop rate is only about 5%. So to get five humanities you need to kill about 100 damn rats. I needed thirty so consider the fact that I’d have to kill about 600 of them. With ten per each run, this means I’d have to do 60 fucking runs to collect the humanities to give to the Spider Lady to open a door to save Solaire. Okay…

Karen hard at work farming…

Luckily there is an item that boosts your item discovery rate making the rats have a higher chance of dropping humanity; this is the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring and is found in Sen’s Fortress. So, to save Solaire: go to Sen’s fortress, find Gold Serpent Ring, go to The Depths, do maybe fifty runs killing rats to collect humanities, give humanities to Spider Lady, open the shortcut (“shortcut”) door, kill the Chaos Bugs. All so I can summon Sunbro Solaire for the final boss fight with Gwyn. I hope that proved my point how shitty this game can be.

Not that I hate farming — sometimes it’s fun to mindlessly run back and forth killing the same enemies over and over — but damn does it quickly get boring. After about ten or twenty minutes farming and having only collected a few humanities, you start to think about how much time the project is really going to take. I think it took around and hour to collect thirty-five or fourty humanities (I needed a few extra to upgrade the bonfires) and I might have to go farm some more soon. Shit. And humanities aren’t the only thing you need to farm. Titanite shards and chunks, which are used to upgrade weapons and armor, are also relatively rare in-game so if you want to actually do damage with your weapon those must be farmed as well. And if you ever get stuck you need to farm for levels, also called “grinding”, which is another shitty but sometimes necessary thing to spend time doing.

That’s about all I have to bitch about with Dark Souls this time. Like I said: great goddamn game, but holy hell is it frustrating at times.

Fuck the Four Kings.

Loneliness Sucks

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Since my mood the past few months has been entering a death spiral I figure I should at least try to channel the negative feelings into blog posts. I mean if you’re feeling like shit why not try to do something sort of productive with it? Grab life by the balls and capitalize on it. Lemons into lemonade or whatever that means. Writing has always been a cathartic experience and I find I do feel better after writing. This experience is somewhat minimized when when you write a public blog post as opposed to privately writing, but it still does help.

First it was my near nervous breakdown or whatever it was, and last post was about the anxiety. I suppose this is a good post to follow the anxiety one as many of the themes are similar; I’m talking about loneliness here. Anxiety and loneliness feed off each other and you can feel lonely because your anxious and anxious because you’re lonely. They might be two sides to the same coin really. I haven’t thought about it too much but this post and the last post are eerily similar.

On the surface I don’t even know why I’m lonely and this makes it even more frustrating. How can someone with a loving family surrounded by people who care about them be lonely? How can someone surrounded by friendly people at work feel lonely? How can someone in a world of 7 billion people feel alone? It’s like a slap to the face to be lonely in these circumstances. Like how the hell are you lonely when you’re never actually alone? It makes it worse.

Obviously it has something to do with your mind. If it didn’t the solution would be to simply find people and be around them. I could go to a park, be around people, and feel better. This doesn’t work though. For me it seems there’s no meaningful connections between people, and if there ever is a meaningful connection it is either so fleeting as to not even matter, and in this case it makes things worse because you feel some connection and it’s gone. It makes you want to connect with people more. Sometimes it’s due to not being able to open up fully about your mind and your thoughts with those that are around you. You never want to bother people, especially family members, with the shitty thoughts you have as they’ll worry about you. Or they’ll try to blame themselves. It’s easy to just bottle things up and not talk about it. And this makes you feel totally and utterly alone. Like you’re your own island. Or like a boat out on the ocean isolated and alone. There’s all the other people in the world, and then there’s you. Loneliness makes you think if you disappeared no one would even notice. It’s a bad thing to feel. 

Like the anxiety post I wonder if other people feel this way as often or as strongly as I do. This is another thing you can’t talk about either. You can’t go up to people you know and ask them if they’re lonely. Its creepy, weird, and makes people worry. Sometimes I think we’re all this way and that everyone in the world is terribly lonely and constantly looking for some human connection to make them feel a part of something. And that maybe everyone is too scared to take this risk so we all suffer in our own personal isolated and lonely hell. Like what if it took one brave person to go out of their way to make another not feel lonely? One person to break through to some deeper, hidden, and scared aspect of another lonely person. This person could change the world for the better.

Or it could just be that I’m fucked up in the head. I don’t really know if it’s more comforting knowing that everyone else is also lonely or that it’s just me trapped in my head. It’s a scary but darkly comforting thought to think that everyone is just as lonely and as miserable as you are. At least I got friends that are suffering with me. But that sounds really selfish and dismal, in a way I hope this is just a me problem. I wouldn’t mind being lonely if it meant that everyone else isn’t.

Maybe I should devote some time and energy to make others not feel lonely, maybe be this hero to other people if they need it? Like go out of my way to talk and make conversation to others. Be cheerful and outgoing. This is a pain because it takes self-confidence and motivation, and if you’re writing a post like I am now you’re probably not the most confident person in the world. It’s hard to go out and be a positive influence when you feel like shit. It’s a risk, and a scary risk to take, and might be why no one else goes out of their way to connect with other people. Maybe they don’t need it. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say here. Look out for your fellow humans I suppose. You never know who could be going through a crisis and how any little actions can be the tiny but immensely important thing that makes their day and life just a slightly bit better.

Work Sucks: Detached Survival

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Work Sucks. That’s right. I mean in case you weren’t aware of it. Work really sucks, but it sucks in such a way that is obvious but not-at-all-obvious when you think about it in depth. Work sucks — we all know that — but exactly why does it suck? If you’re like me, you might think that work primarily sucks because it’s something you have to do. Strangely, I’ve realized that if my job were voluntary, where I could show up and work whenever I need and wanted to and could take days off at will, I would probably still show up and work, but somehow I’d be much happier at going. This speak volumes towards the “I have to go to work” complaint as to why Work Sucks. But this doesn’t quite explain it all because even if you had a purely optional job, eventually you’d have to go (what with you being starving and homeless…) and then you’d be back at where we started at: work sucking because you have to go. But why is that? If your survival is dependent upon work you’d think you’d enjoy it a little more.

Work Sucks because it is required, because money is required, and shelter, food, water, and transportation are all required. Work is essentially for us to survive. But with a person’s survival on the line, you think people wouldn’t mind work too much. The alternative to not working is dying, so yeah, work isn’t too bad! Work is required so we can each survive, but it doesn’t really seem like that when you’re at work. To us, work seems very detached from the idea of survival where no one sees their jobs as important to their wellbeing.

People at work aren’t like “I’m doing fairly well, although I need to take some extra hours because I’m on the verge of starving to death! How is your day going Jerry?” At work, and in our greater society as a whole, money, food, shelter, and survival seem really distant, almost like an afterthought. Also realize the fact that you probably do stupid shit at work that seems so pointless and redundant to basic survival that it’s amazing to think that your own person survival really does depend on it. That’s crazy! You as a cashier must listen to people whine and bitch so you can survive. You as a taxi driver must drive people around so you can survive. And me, well I move Amazon boxes from an airplane into a semi-truck, so I can survive. It seems really dumb that my survival is dependent upon such a stupid thing.

I don’t think survival has always been this detached from everyday life either. Think back to how life was 200 years ago, as if you would be living on the family farm all pastoral style. You’d wake up when the sun comes up, and do a bunch of chores to take care of animals. But you have to do this so you can kill the animals and eat them because if you didn’t you would starve and die. You’d have to work in a field harvesting vegetable and canning them, because if you didn’t you’d starve and die. You might have to hunt for wild animals, or build and repair a fence to keep the cows in the pasture, so you don’t STARVE AND DIE. Before winter you’d have to have enough firewood on hand so you didn’t freeze to death during the coldest months of the year. My point here is that day-to-day life was almost directly attached to survival, and while you’d probably have to run to a store periodically for fabric, clothes, tools, and the rare food item (like salt), most of your life didn’t suffer from the detachment to survival that we deal with today. I bet people were happier and perhaps the Amish are onto something…

..Nah. Society is pretty cool with how comfy it’s made life. Instead of worrying about my next meal I can work a few hours, buy a box of doughnuts at the gas station, and sit on my ass at home wandering around a virtual world in Minecraft. It’s almost laughable how easy things are and you have to appreciate how nice it is when you think of life hundreds and thousands of years ago. We have time for leisure activities and most of us don’t deal with day to day survival like a gazelle in Africa has to deal with when drinking water. Babies don’t die from preventable diseases, and our drinking water is clean. It is nice not waking up day after day worrying about living or dying. But I don’t think this can happen freely without some sort of tradeoff, without some compromise happening within our human spirit. In our day-to-day lives, at work and at home, survival and existence are so far detached from anything we deal with that we forget that it’s there. It makes us go mindlessly to a job day after day without really thinking about survival at all. It seems really pointless and mind numbingly mundane. Jobs, while attached directly to survival just don’t seem important enough to care about. I work for my survival, but not really.

So we never face the daily connection between work and survival. Our jobs are pointless, mindless, and usually involve some chain of production or service that seems to have nothing to do at all with basic survival. You work to get money to live and survive on, but there seems to be so much extra crap going on that work and survival are only related in theory. That is why Work Sucks: your shitty job is directly required for your survival but since society is cushy enough your survival is detached from your job and you never relate the two together. It makes work seem pointless and arbitrary compared with something much more important: survival and living your life.

Coworkers Suck: the Ignorant Know-it-All

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Hopefully as soon as you read the title you conjured up a mental image of a coworker whom is the perfect candidate for the Ignorant Know-It-All. And hopefully as you read this you are nodding your head constantly in agreement as I whine about this certain type of person. We all know them and we all loathe them: the person at work who is constantly telling people how to do their job, and even though they are in the same job position as you are, they seem to act like they’re part of middle management and know everything. Making matters worse, they don’t actually seem to have any clue as to what needs to happen at work even though they act like they do. I recently started a new job and it took me a total of one week to run into TWO of these people. TWO! Lucky me! I’m sure there are a few more, but whatever, they must be really low-key about being jackasses. These workers Suck, and they Suck for some very simple reasons: no one likes to be ordered around and if you are ordered around, you’d hope you wouldn’t be ordered around to do some very stupid things. The Ignorant Know-It-All Sucks.

The part of this person being an ignorant know-it-all is very important. Similar worker archetypes that lack the ignorant aspect are the know it all and the asskisser/brownoser. These people are bad enough with their constant ass-kissing of management and telling everyone what to do. But truth be told, I’m sort of a know it all, and I can understand why people end up being that way at work. When you work around people who are mostly dipshits — your co-workers and the general public — you start to get frustrated with how people work begin to correct and overcorrect your fellow dipshit workers. Yeah you probably come across as an ass, but if you keep it low-key enough, maybe people won’t hate you as much? I figure you might be an insufferable piece of shit, but you still have good intentions of helping your coworkers find the best way to do a job. This is what the ignorant know-it-all starts with, but they take it to a whole new level of insufferability by not knowing what they hell they’re talking about.

The ignorant know-it-all is just like the standard run-of-the-mill know-it-all in that they have to correct everyone on every method that occurs in the workplace, but instead of them being a know-it-all and being correct in their recommendations, they fail miserably by suggesting and ordering really dumbass things that undermine the work process. Making matters worse, they think they’re a wizard, brainiac genius, future CEO, who are God’s gift to the workplace so they’re not even aware of how terrible their suggestions are. (For further reading, look up the dunning-kruger effect.) Everyone hates them and doesn’t want to work with them, but they don’t get it. And I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell them in a polite way to fuck off, so you just end up silently dealing with these overbearing assholes.

What bothers me most about these people is their seeming inability to put together any sort of complex process in their minds. When the ignorant know-it-all suggests something, it might sound good on the surface, but upon even slightly thinking about the issue, their suggestion will obviously undermine the work process one, two, or more steps away. What might solve the primary issue at hand will ruin the work process further down the line. For example, workers are limited in the workplace and moving workers from one line of work always will take workers away from another line of work. Job one might be dependent upon job two. I unload cargo aircraft containers that hold a bunch of packages and we load them into large cardboard boxes. People have to make the boxes (job one) for us to load the packages into (job two). In this example, the ignorant asshole will suggest, upon seeing that we’re not unloading the containers fast enough, might order (even though he isn’t a supervisor) some of the box making dudes to help unload containers. Well, it doesn’t take a genius to realize if you cripple the box making process, eventually we won’t have boxes to unload the packages into! If you’re smart you might realize that there might be enough boxes to finish the job — and you might be right — but the ignorant asshole doesn’t care about that and will move people even if it will cause all work to come to a screeching halt because of not being able to put actions and consequences together.

It never even has to be as complex as moving workers either. It might be telling coworkers to use a less efficient process even though they think it’s better, or by telling people how to do a job differently even if it doesn’t have any negative effect. Some people just have their own way of doing a job that works fine, but they will still insist that you do it their way. It might be them having a sense of urgency when there really isn’t any reason to hurry. It entails all sorts of unnecessary crap these people do just to seem smart, important, superior, or to appear to be a “good worker” to management. They might take care of less important matters first (like sweeping) while ignoring more important stuff (like helping a customer). These people Suck for very obvious reasons: they’re know-it-alls but they are ignorant about their ignorance. They go around and tell people what to do, how to do it, or when to do something when it’s one of the dumbest suggestions you could think of and have no idea about how stupid they are being. You can’t tell them to fuck off because then you’d lose your job. They probably won’t get fired because they’re such a “go-getter” sort of person: even if they’re dumb and annoying they’re a good worker and are reliable. Every workplace has these wonderful people, and this is probably a large part of why people hate going into work even if we don’t recognize it. We have to deal with the damn ignorant know-it-all and it Sucks.

Society Sucks: A General Introduction

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I intend for this to be an introduction to another expected large section of the site: a section about all of the stupid shit that exists in society as a whole and why these things are stupid. The more I think of it the more topics and posts I see this category having so if there’s an “intro” post about it, maybe that’ll make it all cooler. I don’t know. Maybe I can compile them all into an ebook someday or whatever and get rich.

We are very social creatures and our survival owes a large thanks due to this fact. After all, why go it alone? Early humans could team up, split the workload that is required to survive, and help each other out. It makes such an intuitive sense to us, and since it’s ingrained in our genes, it seems dumb to ever think otherwise. Why would a single person want to hunt for themselves, build their own shelter, find water, and survive the winter alone? By splitting the workload among many, early humans could excel at certain jobs and everyone could benefit from it. If we have a single person build shelter, they’d be better at it then everyone individually building their own crap. This still continues today as jobs are very specialized; you don’t hire your plumber to also be your doctor. Anyways, we’re social and it serves us well for the most part in form of our semi-close knit community called society. So if society is so useful in ensuring the survival of the human species, why does it Suck? And if it does Suck, why is it such a large topic?

The main reason–and the reason that will show up in every post in this category–is because society has no system in place to “correct itself”. It’s an organic thing, and customs can arise, die, and even stick around in way that just sort of happens without any logic or conscious thought from anyone. Fashion is a pretty good example but not really. Why the fuck are fuzzy boots currently a popular style for women in the winter? I don’t mean boots in general which have some utility to them, but the decorative fashionable ones. The ones with the fur on the top. Yeah, there is no answer other than “they look good,” whatever the hell that means. Fashion styles arise, die, and hang around outside of conscious thought as part of society and are a good example of how things “just happen” in society.

Other things come into existence because they are needed in society and they naturally grow out of this necessity. Daylight Savings Time was started for some whatever fucking reason (was it one of the World Wars? Or something about farmers? Or synchronizing train schedules? Fuck, I don’t remember.) and it made perfect sense when it became an actual thing a long time ago. The needs of society created a thing where we move clocks forward and back. Whatever, sounds cool bro. But the original reason for Daylight Savings Time are certainly gone in today’s world but the damn thing still hangs around. Since it’s established we stupidly set our clocks ahead and back once a year, and we complain about it, but we still let it to exist.

There’s a bunch of these things too, which is why the topic is so large. Why do kids get off school in the summer? Why are a.m. and p.m. a thing? Why do the months not have all an equal number of days? What the fuck is up with February and its 28 days? Why don’t we use the metric system? There’s a ton more, but you get the idea. You might know the answer to why we do these things, and while I want to explain why we started to do these things, I really want to explain why still having them around Sucks.

It’s almost like a form of brainwashing. We do things because we were raised to do them, everyone else in society does them, and we give it no thought as to why these things are around. That’s the really damning part about it; we don’t even realize we’re thinking in a box because when everyone is inside the box, you can’t even imagine being outside of it. It’s not like there is a list of bullshit things we are given and we have the option to not use them. No. We don’t even know there are other options because being creative is hard.

So, that’s it. Society is bullshit because it sticks us in a box where we do a bunch of things without realizing they don’t make sense. It really isn’t our fault because having the creativity to think outside of the norm is pretty damn hard. Let the complaining begin!