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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Soulsborne games are hard, but they’re designed to teach you how to play through death. I’m gonna teach you how to play Bloodborne.

    These are tips for a first playthrough, some of this advice isn’t universal but it will take the sting and uncertainty out of the game since it actually tells you very little in the way of strategies and best practices.

    1. Which weapon to pick - you start out without a weapon, the game wants you to get killed, and when you do you will get a starting weapon. I’m going to make a gross generalization here, all three weapons are great, but start with the Saw Cleaver. Its arguably the best weapon in the game, and you can choose it right after you die. You can perform a light attack with r1 and if you press l1 immediately after you will do a transform attack which is 50% more powerful than your light attack and does a ton of stagger which can break boss parts allowing you to get free hits and . You can literally just r1-l1-l1-r1-l1-l1… Combo through the entire lgame. Simple and incredibly powerful. Then, pick the pistol to learn how to parry. Put all your upgrade materials into the cleaver.

    2. How to level your character - if you pick the saw cleaver, it levels primarily with strength. But your first priority is to level vitality. Level your vitality to 25 before leveling any other stat. This will give you more survivability, and most of your damage will come from upgrading your weapon anyway. Skill is also okay to level, it will give you some more damage to your weapon (not as much as str) and also strengthen visceral attacks. Arcane is if you want to use hunter tools, which are neat but strictly optional. Bloodtinge strengthens your gun, but there are only 3 weapons that scale with it and they’re more difficult to use. Endurance is optional, it makes fights a bit faster cuz you can get more hits in before your stamina depletes, but you can play the whole game with base stamina no problem. Strictly optional. The max you should level any stat is 50, the exception is endurance which has a hard-hardcap at 40. Stick to vitality, str and skill until they reach their hardcaps at 50 and then you can level whatever you want and mess around cuz you’ll likely be in ng+ or higher. Honestly levels don’t matter much, you could get a cheat that levels you to level 250 and still struggle with early bosses. I’ve seen it happen.

    3. How to level your weapon - bloodstone shards are used to make your weapon stronger. You can also fit gems in your weapon to make your weapon more powerful. You’ll get lots of these but level up your cleaver until it won’t take any more of a certain type. There are 4 different bloodstones, and you need 16 to level up 3 times (except the last one which only requires 1 for the final level.) Max level is 10.

    4. Other tips - you don’t have to fight everything. Lots of people give up at the beginning because there is a bonfire with a bunch of enemies around it and they try to take them all on. Or you can just run past it if you know the way past. If you get stuck on a boss explore somewhere you haven’t been, or take a break. You need a clear head. Remember the game teaches by killing you so if you aren’t trying to learn a boss’s attack patterns and trying new ways to defeat them, they can be pretty difficult. Serrated weapons like the Cleaver’s untransformed mode deal additional damage to beasts, and so does fire, like fire paper and Molotov’s. Molotov’s are great, use them, and they’re pretty cheap early game. Buy bloodvials and bullets too so you don’t get caught lacking.

    You can summon other players if you have PS+ so r/huntersbell is a good place to find cooperators, and they have a discord too if you don’t like reddit. This game is so good, and has tons of replay value so don’t worry if you need a little help. The story is amazing so just get through it. The DLC is 1000% worth it, if you find yourself liking the game get the dlc. Reach out of you need help or have questions, I love this game so much, and I love helping people with it so don’t hesitate!








  • Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it’ll go through a grift phase first.

    Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one



  • Scientific research indicates we see colors pretty damn similarly, with edge cases for colorblindness and also people who are more color sensitive.

    One way this can be studied is by studying the metamerism of different colors by different observers. Metamerism is the study of how colors change given different light sources.

    There are other objective qualities that give hints that we have similar ways of experiencing colors. You mention that colors are nothing more than our brain assigning “color” to frequency of light – but light is itself just a frequency of electromagnetic radiation, namely the frequencies that make up the bulk of the radiation emitted by the sun.

    So to a normal observer without colorblindness, there are more variants of colors of green than any other color. Green is of course situated in the very center of the roygbiv spectrum, it is the “most visible” color. The colors with the least amount of variations are red and violet, which are situated at the edges. Frequencies above violet or below red become invisible making up infrared and ultraviolet radiation.

    Where we get tricked up, and I used to have identical suspicions as you did, is that we consider color to be purely subjective, because we aren’t taught to unify subjectivity and objectivity into a united whole. Color isn’t completely imagined, there are certain surfaces that absorb and reflect certain frequencies of EM radiation just as the structures in our brain that process this ocular input are more or less similar. Things that are subjective aren’t usually associated with being “real” the same way that objectively “real” things that exist out in the phenomenal world are. However, color is socially real, we can almost all identify colors that are the same and colors which are different. Since the set of colors which are “red” are fewer than the set of colors which are “green” then there is no way that what I experience as red is the same as what you experience as green. Artists use colors to convey emotion and are able to achieve this with many many different observers. Warm colors are warm, and cool colors are cool. There may be different levels of sensitivity but in my experience this can be somewhat trained into an observer though no doubt there are outliers who have a unique sensitivity to color differences.

    So there are objective factors which align with subjective factors let’s say 90% of the time, which strongly supports the idea that we experience color more or less the same way. The trouble is not that subjectivity and objectivity are irreconcilable, in fact it is when we fail to reconcile them that our troubles begin. In my opinion, this is a huge problem that creates all kinds of issues when we try to relate to each other; it may be the most prominent philosophical problem of our age. Luckily it is fairly easily remedied with a slight change in the way we think about subject and object. Its useful to separate them sometimes but we need to be able to reunify them, which just takes practice in my experience.



  • This is the wrong question in my opinion. What is being corrupted? One’s morals and ethics? The purity of the human soul? What is the nature of the corruption? Any time we start thinking about “purity” and “corruption” we are moving in dangerous ontological territory.

    What is money? Well, it is a stand in for value. Then what is value? Where does it come from? Value comes from exchanging commodities in the marketplace. These commodities are created with human labor power, in other words, value is the crystalized time+energy that it takes on average to produce commodities. New value is created when a commodity costs less to produce than it can be sold for in the market.

    In our current historical mode of production, capitalism, the labor that is used to mass produce a commodity is socialized, which means instead of a single craftsperson creating a commodity from start to finish, the production process is broken down and simplified so that it takes many workers to mass produce commodities, each worker specializing in their part of the production process, with the assistance of machines to speed up or simplify this process in order to be more productive.

    In contrast, even though the production process has been socialized for the first time in human history, which was in it’s time a progressive if cruel human advancement, the fruits of that production are privatized meaning that goods become the private property of the legal “owner” of the productive apparatus, who can sell those commodities to market for more than they paid to produce them, producing profit from the perspective of the capitalist, or surplus value from the perspective of the workers.

    This creates distinct classes which is where we will interrogate the effect of money on the human spirit. There are the owners of capital, who have commodities to sell at the market and workers who have little or nothing to sell but their labor to the capitalist in a labor market. This can be taken even further: there are large capitalists who own a great deal of capital and exploit many workers, small capitalists who own a small among of capital and exploit a few workers (or maybe they even self-exploit,) intellectual or specialized labor that is able to demand higher value in the labor market, and simple or unspecialized labor who’s labor can be easily replaced. A side effect of this creates another class: the unemployed or marginally employed reserve surplus population which can be used to threaten simple laborers with replacement hence driving down the cost of labor and increasing profits for the capitalist. The larger this reserve population, the lower wages can be made, and vice-versa.

    Every atomized member of society is then thrown into competition with each other, with a very real threat of losing their class position, with the possibility of being thrown into the reserve population unable to find meaningful work that can support themselves and their family. A large firm can be gobbled up by a larger firm, and its specialized workers eliminated due to “redundancies”. A specializrd worker can be replaced by another unspecialized worker who has the qualifications to do their job or some technological advancement transforms that role into unspecialized or less-specialized labor.

    This competitive drive forces individuals to do whatever they can to maintain or increase their class position. If company A refuses to pollute the rivers for increased profit, but company B is willing to, this makes company B more profitable, forcing company A out of business, or acquired by company B; unless the board of directors of company A (pressured by gains-seeking investors) replaces the individual demurring eco-conscious executives with people who are willing to pollute for profit; unless some outside political force steps in to regulate the entire market, creating the necessity of a governing state to manage the market and resources, lest the whole system collapse into complete anarchy. Individual workers must remain “productive” such that they continue to create profit for their capitalists or risk replacement themselves, although they can always be replaced by technological advancements or monopolizing forces as discussed above. The reserve surplus population competes for their very survival or risks starvation, homelessness and death.

    So now we have uncovered the forces that cause the “corruption” of money. There is a whole other thread we could pursue here that shows how this system abstracts things like “polluting a river” into numbers on a balance sheet, hiding these forces from anyone who might observe them, and lending a plausible deniability to anyone who would be responsible and hide the real lives of anyone who would be affected. I’ll call this process objectification, which is a huge topic unto itself.

    But in my opinion, what this system corrupts is the natural inclination for most people to cooperate with one another, and work creatively. When i recognizes that another person has subjective experience like me, I’ll become more likely to identify and then help them if they need it, as I can relate my own experience to theirs. Our system creates cooperation through competition, since the drive of all productive relations is to pursue profit, the mechanisms of which I’ve already described. There is a constant objectification of the outside world as a function of this pursuit for profit and others which dehumanizes and keeps us in our little competitive consuming silos.

    Tldr: does money corrupt? Yes, but it doesn’t corrupt the individual so much as it corrupts the entire social superstructure that is inherent to a functioning society in which people can thrive and self actualize.

    Edit: just one note on “objective fact”. Object/subject duality is only one way to look at things, and in fact separating them out like this is a form of “corruption” in that it hides certain truths and leads to certain conclusions. While this has contributed to the development of many kinds of human scientific and technological advancement, we must also understand that all things concerning humans and their experiences need to be understood by unifying subject and object. Pure objectivity is as incomplete as pure subjectivity and while both are useful to increase our understanding we have to put the pieces back together to see the whole picture.







  • Is Rust as close to the metal as C? Seems like there would still be a need for C. I could see Rust replacing Java as something that’s so ceremonial and verbose, but from my limited perspective as a sometimes java dev, having only the most glancing experience with C, it seems like C would be hard to replace because of what it is. Buy I honestly don’t know much about Rust either, I just think JS is so finicky and unpredictable whereas web assembly seems extremely fast and stable.