![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
( books: Pratchett )
yarning
Sunday I delivered 25 hats to my contact for the children's shelter at yarn group. Had a nice time. Started balaclavas for ICE protesters in Minneapolis with Walmart yarn. Started a donation kickbunny for the new momcat at Kitten Academy. Received yarn today to make more balaclavas. Got an etsy order today for two catnip-silvervine hearts. Yay!
healthcrap
I've had a low grade fever off and on with a constant runny nose and sore throat, and also I bit the crap out of my tongue, on the side at the back, so I've added benzocaine gel to the meds lineup. And thyme tea, since I can't take guaifenisen, which is in all the cold meds. Also, the med I'm titrating off of causes hot flashes as a withdrawal symptom, which can go on for a month after the med is totally stopped. (Grr. I'm so impatient to feel better.) And I need to get those labs done at some point, oops.
#resist
+ https://standwithminnesota.com
+ https://projectreliefme.com (mutual aid in Maine -- the ICE surge in ME is over, but they arrested 200 people there and their families still need help.)
+ Feb 17th: #50501 Protest: Impeach, Convict, Remove, Defund
+ March 28: #50501 No Kings Protest #3
I hope you're all doing well! <333
yarning
Sunday I delivered 25 hats to my contact for the children's shelter at yarn group. Had a nice time. Started balaclavas for ICE protesters in Minneapolis with Walmart yarn. Started a donation kickbunny for the new momcat at Kitten Academy. Received yarn today to make more balaclavas. Got an etsy order today for two catnip-silvervine hearts. Yay!
healthcrap
I've had a low grade fever off and on with a constant runny nose and sore throat, and also I bit the crap out of my tongue, on the side at the back, so I've added benzocaine gel to the meds lineup. And thyme tea, since I can't take guaifenisen, which is in all the cold meds. Also, the med I'm titrating off of causes hot flashes as a withdrawal symptom, which can go on for a month after the med is totally stopped. (Grr. I'm so impatient to feel better.) And I need to get those labs done at some point, oops.
#resist
+ https://standwithminnesota.com
+ https://projectreliefme.com (mutual aid in Maine -- the ICE surge in ME is over, but they arrested 200 people there and their families still need help.)
+ Feb 17th: #50501 Protest: Impeach, Convict, Remove, Defund
+ March 28: #50501 No Kings Protest #3
I hope you're all doing well! <333
Tags:
I received word today that an old friend from my Sentinel days, Yvonne McCool, passed away last month.
I knew she'd been very ill but it still hits hard to know she's gone.
I knew she'd been very ill but it still hits hard to know she's gone.
Tags:
(![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_maintenance Feb. 3rd, 2026 10:25 pm)
mark posting in dw_maintenance Feb. 3rd, 2026 10:25 pm)Hi all!
I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.
Thank you!
Artorias is a DLC boss.
Beating the final boss of Dark Souls puts you straight into New Game Plus, so you need to do the DLC first, but yeah. I have in fact completed the base game up until you enter the last area. And there is a general consensus that the final boss is not the hardest in the game.
The DLC bosses are all substantially harder than the base game ones, and I have two more left, so it remains to be seen whether I can beat them, but at this point the odds look decent that I will at least be able to finish the base game.
I would like to remind you all that my initial goal was to see if I could beat the tutorial.
Beating the final boss of Dark Souls puts you straight into New Game Plus, so you need to do the DLC first, but yeah. I have in fact completed the base game up until you enter the last area. And there is a general consensus that the final boss is not the hardest in the game.
The DLC bosses are all substantially harder than the base game ones, and I have two more left, so it remains to be seen whether I can beat them, but at this point the odds look decent that I will at least be able to finish the base game.
I would like to remind you all that my initial goal was to see if I could beat the tutorial.
Tags:
And I am still buzzing and I am so so so proud of myself and I need to talk about it and I only know two people who know what it means.
If anyone has 80 seconds, I rec watching Symbalily's first encounter with Artorias the Abysswalker:
Like O&S, this is one of the most iconic fights in the entire Dark Souls series. But I would say it's as much of a difficulty spike again relative to them as they are to the game before them.
Context: Artorias is the great legendary hero you've been hearing about all through the base game. But now he's been defeated by the Abyss, with his left arm shattered (his sword arm, so he's fighting you by swinging a sword with his off hand) and his mind mostly gone.
(There is meta to be meta-ed about FromSoft's long line of incredibly badass disabled characters; I don't know if it's necessarily #unproblematic #goodrepresentation, given that so many of them are trying to kill you and it's often being used to evoke ruin and tragedy, but it's not nothing either. Adaptive king Artorias.)
The way he howls and shakes reminds me of nothing so much as the Tumblr story about the rabid raccoon. It's eerie and wrong and awful.
He is incredibly aggressive and incredibly fast, and if you start chipping his health down he draws on the Abyss to power himself up further in a way that can rapidly make his hits unblockable (at least for most builds), so you can only try, desperately, to dodge. And after one or two power-ups, he can and will one-hit kill you, and then do front flips on your corpse.
I think I had to level my brain up to do this fight. Holy shit.
I have been IMMERSED over the last few days, learning his patterns and rhythms, and now I feel weirdly close to Artorias and emotional about it. More than any of the other bosses so far, Artorias feels like fighting a person. I gave his soul to an old friend of his to take care of. Sleep well, dude.
If anyone has 80 seconds, I rec watching Symbalily's first encounter with Artorias the Abysswalker:
Like O&S, this is one of the most iconic fights in the entire Dark Souls series. But I would say it's as much of a difficulty spike again relative to them as they are to the game before them.
Context: Artorias is the great legendary hero you've been hearing about all through the base game. But now he's been defeated by the Abyss, with his left arm shattered (his sword arm, so he's fighting you by swinging a sword with his off hand) and his mind mostly gone.
(There is meta to be meta-ed about FromSoft's long line of incredibly badass disabled characters; I don't know if it's necessarily #unproblematic #goodrepresentation, given that so many of them are trying to kill you and it's often being used to evoke ruin and tragedy, but it's not nothing either. Adaptive king Artorias.)
The way he howls and shakes reminds me of nothing so much as the Tumblr story about the rabid raccoon. It's eerie and wrong and awful.
He is incredibly aggressive and incredibly fast, and if you start chipping his health down he draws on the Abyss to power himself up further in a way that can rapidly make his hits unblockable (at least for most builds), so you can only try, desperately, to dodge. And after one or two power-ups, he can and will one-hit kill you, and then do front flips on your corpse.
I think I had to level my brain up to do this fight. Holy shit.
I have been IMMERSED over the last few days, learning his patterns and rhythms, and now I feel weirdly close to Artorias and emotional about it. More than any of the other bosses so far, Artorias feels like fighting a person. I gave his soul to an old friend of his to take care of. Sleep well, dude.
Tags:
( books (Pratchett, Robert) )
yarning
no yarn group Sunday due to the ice storm, such as it was. We didn't get as much freezing rain as forecast, but we got enough to make it unsafe to drive here, where we utterly lack the infrastructure for it. I've been making more hats for the children's shelter. A ridic number of hats. Like, twenty.
healthcrap
after the shingles shot, I didn't feel right until *Sunday*. Thanks for the sympathetic words on my last post. (We'll do it all again for shot #2 in a couple of months.)
#resist
+ https://standwithminnesota.com
+ https://projectreliefme.com (mutual aid in Maine)
+ Jan 30-31: ICE OUT OF EVERYWHERE shutdown and protest
+ Feb 17th: #50501 Protest: Impeach, Convict, Remove, Defund
+ March 28: No Kings Protest #3
+ There's a drive for knitted or crocheted balaclavas for the Minneapolis protesters, so I'm looking into doing that, except I've used nearly all my appropriate worsted weight yarn that's not earmarked for money-making projects. Not sure what to do. Anybody got a yarn stash they don't need? Or I guess I could go to walmart, which, sadly, is cheaper than Michaels. Or I could order an equivalent $ number of balaclavas from amazon and have them sent there. Hmm.
I hope you're all doing well & keeping up your spirit in spite of all the horrors. Much love! <333
yarning
no yarn group Sunday due to the ice storm, such as it was. We didn't get as much freezing rain as forecast, but we got enough to make it unsafe to drive here, where we utterly lack the infrastructure for it. I've been making more hats for the children's shelter. A ridic number of hats. Like, twenty.
healthcrap
after the shingles shot, I didn't feel right until *Sunday*. Thanks for the sympathetic words on my last post. (We'll do it all again for shot #2 in a couple of months.)
#resist
+ https://standwithminnesota.com
+ https://projectreliefme.com (mutual aid in Maine)
+ Jan 30-31: ICE OUT OF EVERYWHERE shutdown and protest
+ Feb 17th: #50501 Protest: Impeach, Convict, Remove, Defund
+ March 28: No Kings Protest #3
+ There's a drive for knitted or crocheted balaclavas for the Minneapolis protesters, so I'm looking into doing that, except I've used nearly all my appropriate worsted weight yarn that's not earmarked for money-making projects. Not sure what to do. Anybody got a yarn stash they don't need? Or I guess I could go to walmart, which, sadly, is cheaper than Michaels. Or I could order an equivalent $ number of balaclavas from amazon and have them sent there. Hmm.
I hope you're all doing well & keeping up your spirit in spite of all the horrors. Much love! <333
Tags:
.