What I've been up to

How to not make money on Substack.

The problem I’ve had with writing in this space is that Substack Mindset has been expanding, and the arrival of each new, serious newsletter makes me paranoid about the frivolity of this one.

It was never supposed to be anything else, but I felt like a diary substack should record events, and I’ve spent time in only two ways recently: Working, which I write about and loafing, which I like reading about, but couldn’t start a sentence of my own about.

I finally settled on why. My downtime fits into four categories: time at home off deadline, nervous time between deadlines, travel time when I can’t be doing anything else, and vacation. When I have time at home, with a few hundred books and a trillion hours of stuff to watch, with a very nice Taylor acoustic guitar gathering dust in a case (which is itself gathering dust), I typically pick up my PS4 controller. For the past few months, that’s meant hacking my way through the “Dark Souls” trilogy, from the middle out (II is easiest).

Do you want to hear about this? One beauty of the Souls games is the existence of a zealous, obsessive fanbase; for playing the game, for building archives of its lore, and for manipulating the game’s code. In a manic phase, like right after defeating a particularly awful boss, I am so giddy that I want to talk to people about nothing else.

My goal here is an old-style hobbyist blog, with occasional serious posts, and I repeatedly entertained myself by reading other gamers’ rankings of the Souls bosses. I’m a completionist, which is dangerous for gaming, but I’m also middle-aged, which keeps me from becoming obsessed to the exclusion of work or major life events. Everybody else who finishes these games seems to defeat every single boss, discussing them like oil paintings afterwards. I’ve confronted most of the bosses in the three games; I have beaten all but one, the final boss, in “Dark Souls.”

Why not beat it? If you do, you start the game over, a harder version that lets you keep the weapons, spells, armor, etc you found or built. Having spent a silly amount of time in this world, I want one last look around the house before I go.

What I can do now, helping me move to other topics, is reflect on beating these bosses and joining the gamer fraternity that I knew nothing about before a pandemic shut down IRL. These are not nicknames, they are the names that appear on the screen, over health bars, to tell you “this is serious.”

A short introduction on how this game is played. You start out as one of 10 “classes,” each with some advantages and starting weapons, but nothing that can’t be discovered by any character somewhere in the game. A cleric is initially skilled at “miracles,” a form of magic; a pyromancer (which I chose) is skilled with fire spells. Every enemy you kill dispenses souls, which can be spent to buy items, improve weapons, or increase your power levels - hit points, strength, and so on. It’s D&D rules, basically, complete with “Vancian” magic that allows you to load only a couple of spells at a time.

To win, you kill nearly everything you see. You can strengthen that attack, you can pick lighter or heavier weapons, you can focus on magic instead of weaponry - choose your own adventure. But it’s very easy to die. Any opponent at early levels can kill you, easily. Block a sword blow with a shield, and it depletes a little “stamina",” which refills quickly so long as you put the shield down. Roll away to dodge an attack, and you spend stamina. Swing a sword or cast a spell and you spend stamina. Use a healing potion (Estus Flask, refillable at every save point), and it spends no stamina, but you are a guy (undead on a quest to save or doom civilization, technically) standing in the middle of a fight drinking a potion, and if you time it wrong, someone can kill you while you do it.

There’s more, but your patience is being tested. On with my Dark Souls portrait gallery.

I met the Asylum Demon after emerging from a cell in the Undead Asylum - should’ve been a hint. When the game begins, you’re zombified (“hollow” in game lingo) and dressed in rags, and must scramble through a prison to find a sword and shield. Unless you’re a daredevil like ymfah, you typically make a few mistakes, figure out the game mechanics while dying, and run past this prick until you’re armed. I knew what I was getting into, plunged on him from above, then learned the basics through humiliation. The most essential one: Don’t get greedy and take a swing that over-extends you.

The Taurus Demon confronted me on a bridge while escaping a village of the undead, and killed me a few times, before I figured out two things: The skeleton archers in the arena could be killed, and I could plunge on the boss with a sword if I climbed up to where the aforementioned skeleton archers were. Lacked the talent to actually out-fight the guy with, at this point in the game, an ax. But got lucky once and the schmuck fell off the bridge while taking a swing. The risk you take when you’re easily as wide as the bridge you’re traversing.

The Bell Gargoyles put me off the game for a few weeks, nasty bastards who knew when to catch me off guard, with a sole gargoyle being joined by a companion halfway through the fight. This is the sort of thing fans adore about the game. Just as “Stop Making Sense” begins with one member of Talking Heads being joined by another, then another, the game teaches you something new with nearly every level, nearly every boss. In real time, it’s a massive pain, and I didn’t crack it until I had the revelation to apply “gold pine resin,” which imbues weapons with electricity, at the start of the fight. It doubled the damage I’d been doing from whacking them with an ax.

This asshole. The Capra Demon is infamous among Souls players because, looking back, you’re humiliated that it was so tough for you. It’s like coming across an old SAT prep test where you don’t know what “lugubrious” means. The demon can go down with four or five good hits, a dream compared to what’s coming. The trick is that he’s accompanied by two zombie dogs (most organic matter in the game is undead, I’ll stop citing it now), which run at you as soon as you pierce the fog gate that separates you from the boss. Dogs in this game are hilarious, possessing the ability to jump backwards immediately after snapping at you, and infecting you with poison. You can block that with your shield, but if the Capra Demon hits you with his stupid-looking clubs, you stagger and the dogs go to town.

Sounds irritating? It was. Eventually figured out that there was a stairway behind them (the boss room is incredibly small) and hot-tailed it over, swinging wildly at the fast dogs then repeatedly baiting the slow demon.

The Moonlight Butterfly was the first boss that made me question whether I’d screwed up irrevocably in building my character. The Butterfly, while breaking the D&D monotony of the first few bosses, is gimmicky. If you have not learned how to dodge efficiently, he will kill you by flying too far away to whack him with a sword by shooting small crystalline bursts of energy at you. (The game has “divine” magic, “crystal” magic, and “magic” magic. Again, I’ve spent a lot of time with this.) I goofed around until I could obtain a spell of my own - a “soul arrow” - and hurl it at him during the parts when I wasn’t dodging or he wasn’t too far away to hit. Easy, once I figured that out. Also, I’d just gotten the Claymore, which I plan to finish the game with.

Later games from this studio put cut-screens in front of every major boss. The first game only uses them a few times, and the introduction of the Gaping Dragon is the best: A kaiju starts rising out of a gutter, and when it rears it’s head - no, wait, that was a tail, the dragon’s body is one split-open mouth. Horror gaming at its finest. Actual fight was a pain until I figured out that you can’t lock on (hitting the right joystick so you’re focused on a single character) a giant boss, and moved to his side and cut him until he died in a burst of toxic waste. Very satisfying, apart from the way this melts your equipment.

The best single design of the game that far, Chaos Witch Queelag wasn’t too bad. The boss arenas are very thoughtful in this game, and Queelag’s - a real pain to get to, over a lake of poison and past boulder-throwing giants - is enormous. I ran around, learned when it was and wasn’t safe to hit her, and took advantage of the lengthy wind-up after her spider-torso spat lava in front of it. It was around this time that I was fully taking advantage of the weapon-reinforcement mechanic, running back to a blacksmith to infuse my claymore until it did more adult levels of damage.

I took full advantage of the online resources about this game, and discovered the Stray Demon through the complicated, unintuitive process of 1) jumping halfway off an elevator ride onto a broken aquaduct, 2) rolling from there to a bridge, 3) climbing a stairwell until reaching a bird’s next, and 4) curling up in a ball on the nest for 30 seconds until a giant crow transported me to the Undead Asylum again. Great concept, glad I checked it out, just took me a few tries to beat this boss, which is the first of “two” tweaks of the obese demon that starts out the game. You learn how to time your dodge away from an all-range blast attack, which I appreciated.

The Ceaseless Discharge is the game’s first optional puzzle boss; that is, you can fight him straight-up or solve a puzzle that will kill him. I picked the puzzle route, the first of my moral gaming compromises. When the fight began (by me picking a suit of armor off of a rock), I ran back to the starting gate until this idiot got stuck and fell down a chasm. Knew I could try it during a period when I was stuck, and use the souls (points) I picked up to improve my lil’ guy.

The battle with Sif is your first with a giant monster (cute dog, technically) that can move incredibly quickly and deny you time to heal even if you skid far away. It feels ridiculous to die here, but die I did, repeatedly getting sliced in half by a giant sword in the hand of a giant dog. Reportedly, if you take his legs out, he whimpers. I went for all four legs, never saw anything, got it over with by getting under him and never giving him space to rush me.

I learned after the fight that Iron Golem can be a player’s introduction to NPC (non-playable character) summoning, a sort of heroic cheat that lets you invite a partner into a battle to distract a boss and even get hits in. I didn’t try it: I had found a lightning-infused spear in the (ungodly hard) fortress that led up to the fight, and just bobbed and weaved around the golem, stabbing him, in a dignified way.

Ornstein and Smough is the most storied fight in the game, the most common “wall” for even experienced players. A big guy with a hammer is fighting you alongside a skinny guy with a lightning halberd; when you kill one, the other absorbs the other one’s power and you have to fight him again. This, at last, was the point when I summoned an NPC, after coming close too many times for my own patience. The battle between me, these jerks, and Solaire - a sun-loving knight, sort of a game mascot - was incredibly satisfying, not least when I thought I’d been struck dead and realized I had around 8 (of 1000) hit points left, with a tired enemy right in front of me, and enough stamina for me to kill him. I felt like a million bucks for days.

Just as legendary as the last boss, and for the exact opposite reason: Pinwheel may be the easiest challenger in the history of this game. He teleports, he creates clones of himself, he is far far weaker than the army of invincible skeletons you fought to reach him.

A little orange button informed me that I am out of space on this post, which I didn’t know was possible. More of this next time!