existentialspiral

[existentialspiral]

It's technically a meme-complex, not a single meme. Basically, the whole thing throughout the previous games where the only horses found were dead, with people littering the corpses with messages and the occasional "There is a horse in Dark Souls!" post featuring a picture of one of the corpses. It even got referenced in one of the more enjoyable fan comics back in the day, Priscilla! The Warm and Fuzzy Dark Souls Theatre. But the whole, "there are no (living) horses in Fromsoft" thing was just always so amusing to me.

Until Torrent came and ruined it.

My favourite (pure) Souls meme was the thing about dead horses. But the Torrent came and kinda nuked that...

Which one was that? I don't remember this meme at all.

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Oh god, I love Soulsborne games. In what other series and genera can you spend three hours slowly clearing out a dungeon, peering around corners and setting mindflayers on fire, carefully stopping whenever you burn through too much blue, getting lost and doubling back repeatedly, eventually killing that one boss-saving asshat and shutting down a giant iron maiden made of ballistae, and just barely starting to gear up for a coming magic-focused boss fight... only for some off-screen rando to shoot you right in the forehead, your character falling backwards after being one-shot by some jackass with a crossbow.

Fucking hilarious. Funniest thing I've seen all week.

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On Return

It has been exhausting being dead. For how long have I lingered in my grave? It is time that I leave behind the world of my father, and enter the world of Epictetus.

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It isn't really difficult to accept that you aren't a good person. Nobody is, not really; the amazing few people who really are good are just reality's margin of error. But realizing you're an even shittier person than you thought, that stings.

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It really is true what they say about creators hating their old work. It's damn near impossible for me to go back and read a lot of my old posts on this blog just for my overuse of commas, to say nothing of the other problems present. Seriously, what was wrong with me? It's hard enough for me to get any writing done these days because I have to fight to pare my sentences down from the tangled mess they tend to become, but I recoil in horror over how bad I used to be. Like, Kringlefucking Christ on a pogostick, how did anyone read this? How are people still reading it? I still get new notes on the old classpecting posts (shoutout to @balencia for being the most recent victim of my old writing to leave notes), and I have nothing but regret for the lacking quality of the writing.

Not regret for the content of the writing (mostly), but the writing itself. The sheer quantity of commas, the complexity of nested clauses and subclauses, the overall length of individual sentences, I cannot help but cringe at the amateurishness of it all. I know my writing is still imperfect, that I still have most of these flaws present to a thankfully-lesser degree, and that I have a new bad habit of overusing semicolons. But looking at the sheer mess that I was back in the day is... uncomfortable.

But what's more uncomfortable is the fact that, for how atrocious the craftsmanship of the writing was, things actually got written. It wasn't good writing: it was messy, it was needlessly complicated, and it was almost entirely unedited, but it actually got finished and published. How long has it been since I could actually finish a damn thing? How long have I been trapped in this unproductive limbo of depressed distraction and hopeless apathy?

I've had a partly-finished draft for a Seer of Time analysis saved to my laptop for at least 4 years now, and 6 seperate rewrite drafts of various degrees of completeness (and a half-dozen other analysies I started but never finished). I have no doubt that the sections that actually got written are each incrementally better than the one before them, and that the latest draft is leagues better than anything I wrote back in the day. But at least I was able to finish things back when my writing was an inexcusably over-punctuated spiderweb of tangled sentences and unformated logic.

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Hang on here, kinda late to the party, but can I get some sources on all that? Because I don't remember almost any of that, and a quick google of Aldia's dialogue doesn't really support it either, and neither does the information we get from DS3 and its DLC. For one thing, Aldia makes a very explicit statement about it being Gwyn's actions that damned humanity to the Curse of the Undead, and the terrible lies behind it all, and he is outright explicit about it being the Lord of Light (Gwyn) whose actions damned mankind to mortality (a "fleeting form) with only the illusion of life.

I definitely agree that the Linking of the Fire isn't the First Sin, as Aldia clearly states that the whole ritual is the work of a true monarch (rather than, say, a sinner), but the Linking of the Fire wasn't what "banished Dark, and all that stemmed from humanity." That, as shown in the Ringed City, was the seal of fire that Gwyn and the gods placed upon humanity and their works, as explicitly stated in multiple item descriptions (exempli gratia, the Ringed Knight Armor). If anything, the information revealed in the Ringed City provides plenty of strong evidence toward the First Sin being the betrayal of mankind, including:

The information that humanity directly assisted in the war against the Everlasting Dragons, turning the seal from an act of tyranny into one of betrayal, an explicit sin throughout the series.

The statement (from the Ringed Knight Hood) that the use of Abyss-tainted cloth was to "reveal that which the seal of fire has occluded, a subtle defiance of the gods' wishes." This links back with Aldia's lines, "A construction, a facade, and yet... A world full of warmth and resplendence." That the gods would try to specifically hide the Dark, and force humanity to only see the light and heat of Fire seems to link these together rather strongly.

The timing of events between cycles lines up better this way. As Aldia says, "Shackled by falsehoods, they yearn for love, unaware of its grand illusion. Until, the curse touches their flesh." The curse of Undeath that shatters the illusion doesn't sweep over mankind when someone Links the Fire, it returns when the Fire starts to fade, a direct inversion of such a premise, and entirely unconnected to the events of Chaos.

As Aldia takes care to mention, "Peace grants men the illusion of life," and, "All men trust fully the illusion of life." Meanwhile, as each and every item with the words, "Ringed Knight" states, "The [armor/arms] of early men were forged in the Abyss, and betray a smidgen of life. For this reason the gods cast a seal of fire upon [these], and those who possessed them." Emphasis here is mine, but important: these items have life in them, real life, and the gods sealed them away, along with humanity. And, as Aldia states, the "life" humanity since has experienced is fake, with the deception only being revealed once the Curse starts to take over.

Aldia thrice uses the word "yoke," and in a very specific way. First, he uses it to describe the illusion that chains humanity, and that its bondage is "as true as the Dark that churns within men." He then asks if we are "intent on shattering the yoke, spoiling this wonderful falsehood?" Finally, he states, "I sought to shed the yoke of fate, but failed." Here, fate doesn't need to refer explicitly to foretold events, some inevitable future, or a grand destiny, but can also be used to refer to things which have already happened, a state you have already found yourself in. With this secondary definition in mind, and all information from the Ringed City, the meaning shifts to his attempt to be rid of the seal of fire rather than being rid of mortality or undeath (and, as we can plainly see, he is quite fully consumed by fire).

So evidence seems to point to the gods' betrayal of humanity to be the First Sin, especially as this happened just subsequent to the defeat of the dragons and, therefore, prior to both the Linking of Fire and the Chaos Flame. Meanwhile, the evidence to the Chaos Flame sin is... that Aldia experimented with Fire and looks jacked up with tree roots. But the Bed of Chaos isn't the only thing with ties back to tree roots and plant matter. For one thing, the giants were pretty much animate trees, and we know for a fact that Aldia was tinkering with those, so it seems a simpler explanation that the giants might have more to do with that.

Further, we have some (minor, but extant) evidence against Aldia being tied to Chaos by the fact he isn't dealt extra damage by the Black Knight weapons, weapons which (as both DS1 and DS3 show) deals extra damage to Chaos. Now, I know that there are other demons in DS2 and that they don't take any extra damage from the Black Knight weapons, but they clearly aren't the same sort of demons as those birthed by Chaos. The Covetous Demon was once a man, then transformed into a demon (and beings transformed into demonic entities, like the Demonic Statues, Bed of Chaos, and Ceaseless Discharge, aren't dealt extra damage by the weapons). The Demon of Song was associated with water, which rather clearly seperates it from the fires of Chaos. The Smelter Demon is explicitly stated to be a mass of iron given life, closer to a golem than a true demon, and (like the Demonic Statues) wouldn't be dealt the extra damage. The only enemies we face in the Old Chaos are the Charred Loyce Knights, not demons. Meanwhile, the explicitly Chaos-born demons of DS3 do take extra damage against the Black Knight weapons, seeming to indicate that this property never went away, only that nothing in DS2 was a true Chaos demon (Note, I do consider this the weakest point of evidence, being rooted in game mechanics from the black sheep of the series, but evidence is evidence).

Finally, Chaos seems way too insignificant for the much-hyped First Sin to be, "Witch Izzy fucked up, demons popped out, and property values went through the fuckin' bedrock." I mean, Chaos is pretty self-contained and well understood, with limited and localized effects, not some world-defining secret. Maybe in Demon's Souls, but not really in Dark Souls. In Dark Souls, the worst you can say about demons is that they're trying to kill you and they're communists. The former is true of damn near everything in the games, and the latter seems much less of an offence when you compare Anor Londo to, say, Blighttown. But locking humanity away from the truth of their souls, and maintaining a lie that is only revealed when reality itself starts to break down? Now that sounds like something worthy of such a dark accolade.

Also, before anyone brings her up, the Lost Sinner is the Lost Sinner, not the First Sinner. We've got plenty of sinners in Dark Souls, they have their own church and everything. It'd be easier to say that Velka was the First sinner at this point.

Of course, if you have any evidence in the other direction, I am more than willing to hear it out; it wouldn't be the first time I've had my understanding of Dark Souls lore shaken or torn down.

The Lost Sinner did not, in fact, commit the first sin. She was framed by Aldia, the true perpetrator, and she spent her days of "self-punishment" practicing for the day she would break out and get revenge.

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100% agreed!

Correction, 99% agreed. The swamp can fuck right off, but everything else is golden.

I am actually sick and tired of people, especially on twitter, shitting on Elden Ring based on trailers and gameplay review alone. What did you expect?! I knew from the start it would be Open World Dark Souls! And that is ALL I EVER WANTED. Stop overhyping games. FromSoft is a small enough company to need a publisher. Be glad they went with Bandai Namco again so that it would release on multi platform and isn't locked on PS5. I personally look very forward to Elden Ring. To "Doesn't open from this side.". To "You died" screen. I want to see the poison swamp, I want to get killed by a bullshit trap in the beginning and I want to see the same character animation they used for opening doors since 2009!

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Sometimes, scientists get deeply into disapointingly stupid "problems." Like the guys who point out that, if any of the universal constants were slightly different, life wouldn't exist, and what are the odds that we just so happen to live in a universe where the laws of reality line up perfectly to allow us to exist?

100%. The odds of that happening are exactly 100%. This is because, as you might note, we happen to exist. As such, it doesn't matter if it is dramatically unlikely, because our ability to recognize any improbability to life is dependent upon life existing to be able to recognize that unlikelyhood. We are in a position that is automatically privilaged in that we exist, regardless of all other factors. But there are still somehow people who think of this as some sort of paradox.

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That seems pretty arbitrary, and self-contradictory in application. I mean, a longsword is an obvious danger. Swords are designed for killing things, and anyone surprised by them being dangerous is an idiot. Poisoning the longsword doesn't somehow make this obvious danger into something subtle and unseen, it just means that the target dies of a swift poisoning instead of lingering wounds or infection, assuming they don't get killed first by being beheaded or stabbed through the heart with a full meter of cold steel.

Does the thing about paladins and poison include venom?

Paladins are immune to disease, not poison. You’re thinking of monks, I think.

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One of those particularly-unsettling weirdnesses: coming across obvious propaganda, but being unable to figure out what the intended message is. You know that it's propaganda, it's obvious that it's supposed to be glorifying a particular political viewpoint and denigrating the opposing viewpoint, but you can't figure out exactly which one it's trying to champion, or even what the subject of debate is supposed to be. It's uniquely disquieting.

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No, no, it actually has a full bingo. Somebody forgot about the suicidally depressed Marianne, who is both a unit and a hub NPC.

Is your game like Dark Souls?

Are you tired of all these game journalists comparing your game to Dark Souls? Well, how about you use this handy bingo to find out if your game REALLY is like Dark Souls?

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That last helm:

I’m pretty sure that as far as “infuriating helmets you’d hate to see before you get stabbed” go, this one is definitely up there

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A part of being an adult is living with regret and not allowing it to consume you. The older you get, the more mistakes you’ve made, opportunities you’ve missed, people you’ve disappointed. And every day you have to remind yourself to be kind and forgiving of yourself. You accept and love the you from the past and understand that it’s all a part of the process. Then you move on and live your best life, knowing now as old as you feel today, you’ll never be this young again.

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Well written, but a bit backwards. I meant something more like, "Paladins fall and lose their powers, sure, but if the evil paladins break their rules and lose their powers, is it really a 'fall'?"

Is it really a fall if they started out Conquest or Treachery?

“It’s such a quiet thing, to fall. But far more terrible is to admit it.”

Darth Traya

In other words, declaring yourself as one with darkness is in and of itself worse than any fall. A fall is ultimately a spiritual collapse, a breaking of the self and sometimes that can lead us to better paths as better people. Most of us put ourselves back together not too different from who we used to be.

A traitor or a conqueror, whether they fell from grace or sought this low place for their own, they’re not falling when they take that mantle. They’re letting you know what they’ve become.

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Imagine, for a moment, the end of days. Humanity is long-dead, extinction coming from long ago as evolution twisted them into something new, back in those halcyon days when life was able to survive. The dry, dusty, red-baked dirt below your feet had been a part of the planet known once as "Earth," just as it had been a part of a dozen other planets at one point, and just as a thousand other planets had been recycled again and again to produce the ground you stand upon. The sky is pitch black to everything you know as sight, colder than anything you have ever known, more than the lingering and long-decayed cosmic background. Even those with eyes designed for the task would barely be able to make out the faint red glow of the iron star that hangs in the sky, energy being drawn out as nickel-62 slowly tunnels its way into iron-56, a far cry from the nuclear furnace of hydrogen and helium that the universe knew when it was still young and full of living potential. Now, all the hydrogen has been lost, escaping beyond the cosmic horizon, or been consumed to produce the dying heart of iron above you. Reality is at its close, existence drawing its last breath, dying words ready to be said as even this final heartbeat of creation comes to an end. Entropy and universal expansion ready now to draw the final peaks and troughs of energy apart into straight lines and oblivion. Even here, 10-to-the-10⁷⁶ years in the future, they continue to work on Final Fantasy MMMCMXCIX-2.

The "Final" once came in desperation, Square unable to make ends meet and risking it all in a final, desperate attempt to achieve their fantasy of success. Now, it is a statement of intent: that when all else comes to a close, theirs shall be the final work of fantasy.

if its called final fantasy why are th

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Because I’ve lost control of my life