I have spent a couple of hours over the last two days struggling to beat this sonofabitch so I can move on with my Dark Souls III Let’s Play, and I am defeated; I just had to upload an episode that was nothing but me losing, because I’m not as far ahead as I usually am and the alternative is having no video at all to upload.
It is possible you recognize the picture! I have griped about the Nameless King before; this is a boss I have only beaten (twice, I think) with magic, long-range characters. I have never beaten him with a melee character, and my current build is a Strength build. Again. The big difference here is that the first time when I wasn’t able to beat him I wasn’t recording my ignominious failure to put it on YouTube. I’ve gotten close a couple of times, but no success yet, and I am at the point right now where if I can’t paste him tomorrow within half an hour of getting home I’m going to just give up and go beat the game.
I love this game, but Christ do I hate this boss.
EDIT: Got ‘im. On the very next try, as a matter of fact. With nine heals left. I could see the fucking Matrix.
First of all: I reviewed Hoa when I first played it– spoiler alert, I really liked it– but I promised to link to the Let’s Play when it was up and I never did. So here it is; all five episodes are live so if you have some time to watch, feel free. Hit that subscribe button, too.
Second, it’s weird how this whole YouTube thing has affected the way I actually play video games. This is not at all surprising, but I find it interesting anyway. To be more specific: a game I did a Let’s Play series for just released some new (free) DLC, and I don’t know how to play it, if that makes any sense. Before, I’d just play it or not. Now, I’m going back and forth between doing regular episodes, a livestream where I just run through the whole thing, or– crazy, I know– possibly just playing it off-camera, y’know, like a normal person.
(Looks it up, discovers it requires a fresh playthrough to be done right, decides not to play at all)
Still, though.
In related news, I’m playing Far Cry 6 right now, and that’s set in the “real” world, so to speak, and so features licensed music whenever you enter a vehicle. I uploaded a bunch of new episodes yesterday and immediately got hit with a ton of more-or-less bullshit copyright claims, but the way YouTube arbitrates copyright claims puts all the power in the hands of the people claiming that you’re violating your copyright. Now, granted, I’m hundreds and hundreds of followers away from monetizing the channel and will probably lose interest well before it gets that big, but it annoys me that there could be a 13-second clip of a song that was licensed to the game in my video because I jumped into a car for a few seconds and because of that these folks feel like they’re entitled to all of the revenue that video might generate, as if those thirteen seconds are the fucking reason people are watching the half-hour video. It’s horseshit. I’ve turned off the radio option for any further episodes I record so this won’t be happening again, but I’m thinking about re-editing the videos that have claims on them just to pre-empt any future bullshit. The way I record preserves my commentary and the game audio in separate files, so it would take some time to do but in terms of the actual work involved it would be pretty trivial to snip the songs out. We’ll see if my appeals go through or not.
Bathroom work is proceeding apace. Not as exciting today as yesterday, but I’ll post pictures later anyway.
Am I excited about this? HELL YES I am excited about this.
I got into the Elden Ring network test beta, naturally on a weekend where I’m going to be out of town Saturday to Sunday, but I’m going to be live-streaming all three hours tomorrow night (10:00 pm – 1:00 am EST) and there’s a slight (read: nonexistent) chance that I’ll even be up hella early in the morning streaming as well. The test has five three-hour chunks over the weekend and I plan to stream for two of them even without the crack of dawn thing, so I’ll get at least six hours in of checking the game out and every last second of it will be online for the Internet’s perusal.
Unfortunately, I got home from work tonight and went straight to parent/teacher conferences for my son and then came home and had to grade, so this is the limit of my energy for the day. But best believe I’m going to spend all day waiting for 10:00 to roll around tomorrow. I’ll take a nap when I get home if I have to.
YouTube channel update: We finished up Kena: Bridge of Spirits yesterday, which was super cool, and today we’re starting Tails of Iron. I’m far enough ahead on my recordings that I might actually beat the game tonight, and if I don’t it’ll be tomorrow; expect 19-20 episodes total out of this one, so about a week and a half or so. I’m up to 42 followers, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things but I figure the numbers are still going up so that’s good. Go subscribe!
I’m still having fun with this, although it’s taking just a bit more of my time than I’d like since I’m getting home so late this year. If I was still on last year’s schedule I don’t think I’d feel like it was such a time sink since I’d have more of my late afternoon/evenings to do stuff with. Like, my schedule most days is get home from work, eat dinner, record for an hour, write a blog post, decompress for half an hour, and then bed. I feel like, y’know, some family time or something might be cool.
(Thinks)
Yeah, that’s what I’ve got for tonight, I think. Nothing significant happened at work today and I haven’t read or watched anything since my last book update, so I am, at least, blessedly drama-free right now. I’m sure now that I’ve said that the entire world will explode.
We watched Suicide Squad last night, so there is a review of that coming, but I decided today would be the day I finished recording my Dark Souls II Let’s Play– which ran 45 episodes!– for lutherplaysgames.com. That series is currently running and will be ending around the 22nd or the 23rd; for your edification, I’m letting you watch the first episode right here! Aren’t I nice?
Tomorrow, work for school and curling up in a tiny stress ball. It’ll be fun.
Because capitalism, let me begin by reminding you of two things: that I have a new book out and that my YouTube channel is going strong and could use some more subscribers. The game we’re in now, A Plague Tale: Innocence, is particularly narratively strong and I think would probably be quite a bit of fun to watch. It’s a game where you’re occasionally called upon to feed Inquisition soldiers to rats! You’ll love it.
(Why “Pt. 18,” in the headline there? This is year eighteen of teaching. Eighteen fucking years. Madness.)
School has not started yet, and won’t for nearly two weeks (two weeks from yesterday, I think, is the kids’ first day) but my rosters showed up today when I went looking for them, and I was greeted with smaller classes than I thought I was going to have (alarmingly small, honestly; I can imagine a world where if some of these kids don’t show up they collapse a section on us) and an organizational change that will make grading and record-keeping a lot easier, at least once I get done redoing the planning that was predicated on things working like they did last year. I am fighting off the urge to go to Target tonight to do a touch of supply shopping for stuff I know I’m going to need, and I will be in my classroom for the first time this school year tomorrow. I likely won’t be there much longer than an hour or so– long enough to take a quick inventory of what I want to do with the classroom now that I’m actually decorating it (remember, I’m in the same room I was in last year, but I never really decorated last year) and figure out what I might need to buy over the weekend.
I will be in my classroom Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week doing setup, Thursday and Friday are all-day meetings downtown, Monday the week after I’ll be in my room, then Tuesday is the first day for the teachers and the kids are back Wednesday. So this is the last weekday of summer, basically, since I’ll have Job Stuff every weekday from here on out.
So, yeah: here we go.
Let’s see, what else? I have a Family Thing this weekend; not one as extensive as last time, just for a day– but it’s for my wife’s side of the family, and I don’t know any of them especially well. Unlike my own family, I’m also not a hundred percent sure I can trust the vaccine status of everyone who will be there, a lot of whom I won’t know at all, and while I like my wife’s cousin and her kids, her cousin’s husband is still … I’ll say a potential danger spot in terms of his and my mutual ability to get along with each other. I have, as of yet, no concrete reason to distrust the guy beyond vibes, but we haven’t seen each other in a couple of years for obvious reasons and in general the people I might be interested in staying away from seem to have gotten worse at hiding their bullshit since this all started. I will do my damnedest to be a good guest– or, at the very least, I will make damned sure that while we’re driving home angry after leaving early, it won’t be because I was the asshole.
This is where my life would be easier if I was capable of talking about sports, by the way. Sports is a great thing for men to talk about when they don’t want to talk about other things. That said, talking about sports right now is pretty much talking about politics anyway, so even that refuge may be gone. Hopefully what happened last time will happen again– that the teenagers will decide to hang out with me, and I will thus immunize myself (heh) of any accusations of refusing to socialize while still insulating myself against stumbling into a Don’t Want None Won’t Be None situation with anyone else.
It’ll be fine, but cross your fingers for me anyway.
I promise I’m not going to get into the habit of doing this a lot, but I figure early on it can’t hurt: we’re up to Day 3 of our Little Nightmares II playthrough, with new episodes being posted at noon EST daily until I’ve beaten the game. You can subscribe to the channel here, and really, you should go do that even if you don’t use YouTube. In fact, especially if you don’t use YouTube, because then my silly vidya gaemz videos won’t even annoy you.
More later, by which I mean “I’m going to start writing the post now, so this isn’t a bluff.”
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