Problem Machine

Started in on a SL1 run today. Went real smooth right up until Quelaag, who took me 15 tries or so... partially because I forgot to grab the large ember or upgrade my estus, so instead of having a +7 weapon and +1 estus I had +5 and +0. In a couple of days I'll resume and get Capra and move on to Sens. I'll probably start uploading to youtube sometime here and will post about it here.

Boy it's been a while since I posted a track here! Here's a brand new one fresh out of my musickal synthesizer: Amidst Her Glorious Device Also, I apparently never actually posted my album here once I finished it, which is very silly. Actually, I thought it was a bit unwieldy as an album, so I ended up releasing it as a 50-minute long album with eight tracks alongside a 20-minute mini-album with four. Here those are too. From Spare Parts and Parts Unknown Please Don't Make Me Leave If you like any of these, it would of course help me out a lot if you a ) told friends, for word of mouth b ) told me, for invaluable moral support, or even c ) actually bought the albums on bandcamp. That's all gravy though, I appreciate just listens too

just fuckin squirt that shit everywhere it's basically a miracle in a can. sorry about your majo-depresso tomato

I'm pretty self-conscious about swimming and working out in general, which is why I've primarily opted for a workout I can do alone in my room. I'd hit the weights at a gym, but they generally want money for the privilege and I don't have the money to give.

I've started alternating days between doing as many pushups as I can manage and walking a couple of miles. It feels like a pretty good compromise for someone who's allergic to scheduling and wants to avoid running (I weigh enough that I'm pretty sure I'd destroy my knees/feet if I ran regularly).

For people who enjoy let's play type stuff, I just started streaming my first (blind) run of Dark Souls 3 on twitch and uploading the streams to youtube. Streams are daily 1-3pm pst through this week, we'll see after that based on experimental data (suspecting I might get more viewers streaming at night than during the afternoon). Check it out if that sounds like the kinda thing you might be into. Thanks!

Added and followed. Also updated mine since I apparently hadn't in a while

Want me to add you to the first post? And, if so, any info like schedule, content, etc I should include?

Got my new comp set up, will be streaming Dark Souls 3 starting at 1pm PST Monday and, if all goes well, continuing at 1pm PST all week.. Also continuing with music streaming, next one probably at like 8pm Monday.

I think I'm going to do a little experiment and try streaming some music composition starting at 3pm pst today.

I'm currently in the process of ordering parts for a new computer so I can FINALLY STREAM DARK SOULS 3 LIKE I WANTED TO ALL ALONG. If I haven't been around much, it's partially because I don't want to catch up on the cast until I play enough that I don't need to be afeared of spoilers. YES I HAVE WEIRD PRIORITIES. This thread is set to notify me though, so if anyone wants to get added to the first post or update their stream info just make a post here or pm me and I'll do that. Oh and in case anyone's curious here's the computer I'm making. A friend of mine was kind enough to donate the video card and SSD, so I'ma be able to build the whole thing for like $350

I like the characterization in the new SU episodes, but where's the singing??? Also, has anyone noticed the animation got a lot more sterile, with harder lines, more consistent models, and less stylistic variation?

Oh yeah, you should know that the game ends and immediately goes to NG+ when you beat the last boss, so you should do any other optional stuff you want to get done before you do that or you'll have to play through at least half the game again to do so.

Curse isn't too bad as long as you know how to handle it, it's just that if you don't know any better the game tells you to go to ghost city when you get cursed rather than just buying a purging stone from oswald or the moss merchant.

I had a moment like that too with the Anor Londo archers. "Is this REALLY the way I'm supposed to be going...?" I think it's kind of cool that they made you take weird roundabout routes to get in, so it feels like you're kind of sneaking into the realm of the gods, but having it be both a weird way to get in AND heavily defended made that pretty confusing for me.

Oh, sorry, Crestfallen merchant. He's also a knight, or at least looks like one, so that's confusing, but two different characters. And yeah, if you really want a good standard shield that gets a bit tricky. Personally, since I never parry, if I really want a good shield I usually just use stone shield.

I discovered on my last playthrough that I really didn't need to grind for shards at all to get my weapon to +15, and I didn't bother upgrading anything else -- The crestfallen knight and giant blacksmith both sell large titanite, and if you go down to New Londo there's nearly enough chunks in chests and stuff and even without grinding the darkwraiths will probably drop the last couple you need. The real pain in the ass is getting a slab, which requires going back to the undead asylum or something. Well, I wasn't doing a SL1 run though, so I had enough endurance that I could stack on Havel's, which is un-upgradeable anyway, and still have a mid-roll. I should try doing a SL1 run: If I still can't get DS3 working in a week or two maybe I'll stream it.

Hm, if Gaping is taking that much punishment you might have a weapon issue. He certainly takes more damage than capra, but isn't excessively tough as bosses go. Domnhall also sells the crystal greatsword, which is a great stopgap weapon to use until you can get a weapon you like to +10.

I had a really easy time with her like the first four or five times I fought her and then just on my last run she ended up giving me a lot of trouble. I think how tricky she is might depend a lot on how you approach the fight -- or, possibly, I just didn't pump my damage stat enough

Excellent. Added and followed.

Yeah poise is the real reason armor is useful: The damage reduction is nice but stacking defense to max makes you take maybe like 1/3rd damage vs being completely naked, so the marginal benefit of full havels over something mid-tier isn't especially worthwhile... but being able to take an enemy's attack without stumbling is SUPER useful.

Yeah you might want to look up some info on stats. If you're not planning on going deep into sorcery stuff that's really high int, and resistance is, as mentioned, not a great stat. Mostly you want to pick a damage stat (str, dex, int, or fth) and pump the hell out of that up to like 40 where the benefits drop off sharply. You can pump two of those, but instances where you want to invest heavily in more than two are pretty rare -- what you're moving towards now is sort of a barbarian-wizard build, which could work, BUT I should mention that int and faith don't affect pyromancy damage. If you're going to focus on strength, you should try to look for a weapon that scales well off of strength: if you look at the detailed info for weapons in the equipment menu, you can see letter grades for how well they scale off of each stat. Longsword IIRC is like C in str and dex, so only really reaches maximum effectiveness with both those stats pumped. It's good enough for Blighttown, but something you should start to look into. Endurance is basically the best stat in Dark Souls. It both increases your equipment load, which lets you either put on heavier armor or lets you roll better and recover faster, and also boosts your stamina. Once you get your damage up, endurance is top priority. Also, this was a big sticking point for me, you pretty much never want to go above 50% equipment load: The relative load determines how well you can roll -- below 25%, you get a very fast and useful acrobatic roll, above 25% but below 50% you get a slower but serviceable roll, and above 50% you get a 'fat roll' where your guy just slams his bulk into the ground and slowly gets up. You can also technically go over 100%, but your character will just slowly walk around and be unable to roll or run at all. For a first time through, you should probably try to stack as much defense as you can while below 50%. Story-wise, you mostly just want to soak it in. Don't worry too much about the nitty-gritty until you finish the game: By then probably a lot of things will make more sense, and you can do additional research as you like to fill in the gaps.

Hm, so I'm having a really hard time maintaining a schedule, just because I always have a really hard time maintaining schedules. I'm thinking now that, since no one really watches live anyway, I'm probably just going to start directly recording videos to go up on youtube, aiming for maybe 1-2 30minute videos a day, and just stream for like 3 hours every Sunday. Of course, again, that all goes out the window the moment I figure out a way to play Dark Souls 3, at which point I'll probably just set up a whole new schedule and play the shit out of it since, seriously, seeing everyone else play this shit while I can't is driving me crazy. And for once the tomato is appropriate.

You'd think it would be difficult to draw skeleton pornography but life, uh, finds a way.

What's weird is that given the truly staggering amount of dirty fanart the other characters have accrued since the game's release he was at most just a little bit ahead of the curve here.