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I’ve mentioned I’m playing through Dark Souls 3 again. This was my third playthrough. The first one, I hit a wall and had to stop playing because I couldn’t come even close to beating any of the game that was left. The second was as a strength-focused build and, while I beat the game, there was still one boss I couldn’t come close to killing no matter how hard I tried. He was optional, though, so I could just skip fighting him and still beat the game.

I was playing as a sorcerer for this run, for the first time. Playing as a sorcerer in Dark Souls 3 is kinda strange. You’re frankly just not that tough for most of the game until all the sudden at the very end you turn into a monster. My wife went to bed early last night, and I’d gotten to the point where I had three bosses left to beat the game– Lorian & Lothric, who I’d beaten once with the strength build, the final boss (ditto) and the fucking bullshit-ass Nameless King up there and his bullshit-ass dragon that he rides in on that you have to kill first. I had never beaten the Nameless King. Never even really come close. I told my wife I was gonna take a couple of stabs at the last couple of bosses and then come to bed, hoping that I’d get through one of them in half an hour or so and then make a sensible decision.

I beat Lorian & Lothric on my second try, and frankly I only lost to them the first time because I got overconfident and sloppy, and Dark Souls is a series where the most basic enemy in the game will demolish you if you stop paying attention for a minute. It took over an hour of trying on my last build to get through them and I still felt like I’d gotten kinda lucky at the end there.

“Screw it,” I thought, “I’ve been playing for less than ten minutes and I’m still not ready for bed.” (In my defense, it was barely nine– I wasn’t kidding when I said Bek had gone to bed early.) “I’m gonna give the King a try.” Now, this was dangerous– I know what I’m like, and it was entirely possible that I was sentencing myself to a night where I was still up at Goddamned midnight frustrated and tired and still losing to this annoying-ass boss and his annoying-ass dragon over and over again. Because, again, I’ve never beaten this bastard.

And then I demolished his ass– over half my health reserves left– on the first try. And everyone else in the house was in bed, so the proper response to an achievement of this magnitude– tearing my pants off and running around the house yelling swear words while waving said pants over my head– seemed inappropriate. So I just sat there in mild disbelief for a moment, thought “Ah, fuck it,” and went and beat the game. Which also took two tries, but mostly because the last boss does something halfway through the fight that I’d forgotten about and I got way too close and he wasted me.

So, yeah. If you’re a Dark Souls fan? Try a sorcerer build. It won’t come together for a while, but when it finally does? Holy shit.

It’s snowed twice this winter. The first time was last week, which was basically just a dusting– a bit wetter than that, maybe, but nothing that was any big deal. It melted within a couple of days.

My neighbors, down the road, have a full-sized snowman in their front yard, and it’s been there for a week. At one point, it was completely surrounded with green grass since the rest of the snow had melted. It’s as tall as I am. It’s been snowing for the last day and a half or so, way more than the first time it snowed, and I still feel like there’s not enough snow on the ground to make a proper snowman. I don’t have any idea how they pulled this shit off; there are cul-de-sacs all over the place in the neighborhood so there are plenty of crossroads to sell your soul to the Devil at, but it seems like a snowman is maybe not the best use of that transaction.

I’m this close to knocking on their door and asking them how the hell they did it. I’d speculate about some sort of snow-packed-onto-a-giant-kids’-ball thing, but I’m no more certain that’s possible than building a snowman out of no snow.

Explain this to me, someone.

I’ve spent my weekend playing The Witcher 3 and reading. Neither is going well. I just bailed on Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, which is as openly convinced of its own cleverness– the narrator literally brags about it– as anything I’ve ever read in my life. I know people who would probably really like it, and I’m not sure I’d bother arguing with someone who loved it, but it’s one of those “not for me” things. I’ve had bad things to say about the Witcher in the past, but the huge number of accolades it’s continued to receive and a sale over Black Friday weekend where the game and both its DLC expansions went on sale for less than twenty bucks managed to catch my attention.

And as of right now? Meh. It’s keeping my attention– it’s not terrible, by any means, but I’m going to lose interest before I finish it. I slaughtered a bunch of guards at one point for making a rape joke. It’s that kind of game.

Diving into Michael J. Sullivan’s The Death of Dulgath next, which ought to hit the spot. It ain’t gonna be art, but I don’t really need that from my fantasy. And I’ll keep playing Witcher until either the next rape joke or the combat gets boring; we’ll see what happens first.