Nothing is explained

It makes a lot more sense if you have the context from the Soulsborne games. The series started much simpler, with (mostly) linear progression, fewer weapons/abilities, and shorter "quests." Part of the appeal of those games was the mystery, and the community that grew around solving the unexplained quests/mechanics/lore. The games were shorter, and the maps smaller, so it was easier to explore on your own.

Then with Elden Ring, it just exploded with content, built around the same game play mechanics. For veteran Soulsborne players, it plays like the next title in the series. The only really novel mechanics are the open world and spirit ashes. The downside is (at least for me), the world is so large that it's a chore to explore everything. I finished my first play through and lost the will to start a +1 game. In contrast to Dark Souls 3, where I completed at least 6 play throughs.

But if you don't have that context...yeah i'd imagine Elden Ring is overwhelming in its complexity and scale. Trying to figure out Soulsborne mechanics and navigate this giant world with little direction sounds daunting. Pitting you against the grafted scion to die immediately, and right after putting the tree sentinel in your way, was a confusing way to start the game, even for me.

It's honestly infuriating to realize half of the people running the country rely on the moral principles of ancient religious texts, translated multiple times, to make policy decisions, while also taking every opportunity to bash the scientific process. Not sure which ones are more frightening, the ones who actually believe what they're say, or those who don't.

Fun probably-already-known fact: NASA accidentally destroyed a $200 million Mars orbiter from of a missed imperial->metric conversion, because NASA does generally work in metric, and some Lockheed-Martin software provided numbers in imperial (while claiming to be metric)

I'm a tinkerer as well, but I'm at a point in my life where I need to prioritize my tinkering haha. Like buying stir-fry takeout (Windows/MacOS), cooking it by buying a pre-packaged bag (packaged mainstream Linux distro), or starting from scratch, experimenting with literally everything from chopping technique to cooking temp for each ingredient, until you realize you're missing an ingredient you need, then you have to go back to the store (Arch lol).

Late to the party, but Mass Effect, Dead Space, and the Arkham trilogy are all extremely solid choices haha.

lmfao "Astro-Slide"...they knew what they were doing

I do something similar (though less secure) for general purpose passwords; I have a couple of common “base” passwords that are decently secure that I commit to memory. Then for each website/service, I pick a pattern based on the name/url (maybe something like the first two and last three characters of the url), and append them to one of my “base” passwords, so each site gets a unique password, but I only have to remember a couple of them + the pattern

Is there a distro you recommend? I’ve toyed around with Tails, but the lack of persistence and forcing all traffic through Tor instead of a VPN (I guess the whole point of Tails) is too inconvenient for daily use.

TIL that Unicode includes hieroglyphs lol

Not to be “that guy” on top of you being “that guy,” but it’s not unheard of to completely redirect a dammed river with a chute spillway. I’m gonna pretend the spillway exits that mountain to the right of what we can see lol

I was a bit surprised to hear "victims broke their necks instantly," so I was hoping for someone else to do some math to back it up. Sigh...

Assuming ≈1000 ft/lbs to break a neck, and a 220 lb 6'10" person (so we can exclude the head to get ≈ 200 lb 6'), if it were possible for them to keep their body completely rigid, simply laying them horizontal, only supported by their head in a fixed orientation, would produce ≈ 600 ft/lbs (CoM 3' from the moment) on the neck. Which is actually a surprising testament to the strength of the human neck.

The actual math for determining the torque on the neck from a worst-case scenario of a person jumping off a moving boat and hitting the water head-first with a stiff vertical posture is a bit above my pay grade. You'd have to calculate the resistance of the water over time as the head makes contact and starts deflecting, vs how much of that force gets transferred to the body and starts to rotate it towards the water.

But just conceptually, doesn't make a ton of sense to me, as someone with a fair amount of experience with hitting the water at high speed; I used to barefoot water ski. Sucks hitting the water that fast, but the worst injury I've sustained is a ruptured ear drum.

God, there's a joke in there about 404 (famous drum sequencer, often referenced for its kick sample), but I just can't find it