18 March, 2022

“Plot” is sort of a strong word when it comes to FromSoftware games. There’s certainly a critical path here — you’re seeking out big bads in order to kill them and collect pieces of, you guessed it, a really old ring — but you could spend dozens if not hundreds of hours playing without any real sense of what’s going on or why things happen, and still have a satisfying experience with this game. Information is parceled out in often easy-to-miss dribs and drabs; you primarily learn tidbits about the world by reading item descriptions, or by talking multiple times to the same NPC (gamer speak for “non-playable character,” like a merchant), and even then it doesn’t necessarily add up to a single neat whole. The world you inhabit has suffered tremendously, has fractured beyond memory, and that sense is prevalent as you are dropped in without foresight or plan and begin to collect breadcrumbs.

I thought I’d be frustrated by the lack of direction or narrative propulsion, but haven’t found that to be the case at all; in fact, it’s liberating to feel like there’s nothing I’m really “supposed” to be doing and therefore can spend my time riding my ghost-horse halfway across the map to a location that just looks kind of cool. And when something does snap into place — when an NPC shows up in a location you never expected, or you realize why it was so important you picked up that seemingly useless item 10 hours back — it bears a strong resemblance to the satisfaction you feel after winning a hard battle. Above all, the game is generous; it rewards puttering around unearthing whatever seems interesting to you.

If you’re looking for more concrete-ish backstory to the FromSoftware games, there are countless streamers and YouTubers recording their playthroughs, tips, and interpretations of lore, and quite honestly part of the fun of the game right now is seeing all of that sweet, sweet content get created. As a starting point, VaatiVidya is a popular YouTuber who explains everything from the series’ more missable plot points to how to find important items early on, and my friends over at Into the Aether (a lowkey video game podcast) have been streaming their runs on Twitch.

How long is it?

Really quite long, unless you’re a speedrunner who’s managed to complete it in under 30 minutes, which, go with God. The average playtime on Steam thus far is around 48 hours, but anecdotally I’d say that the overall game runs longer if you’re exploring and poking around (and getting absolutely stomped by gigantic evil bears); most people I know who have already rolled credits have put in at least 60 hours, and many folks have reported putting in well over 100. Considering the game came out less than a month ago, that’s a lot.

Why do people enjoy it if it’s so hard?

Difficulty is arguably the hallmark of FromSoftware games, but it’s not meant to be frustrating for the sake of frustration; rather, it serves a narrative function, and provides the rhythm underpinning the entire game. You’re supposed to try again and again to overcome a challenge; you’re supposed to learn an enemy’s unique cadences and timing and battle techniques in order to gain just an inch more of an edge from attempt to attempt.

“If death is to be more than a mark of failure, how do I give it meaning? How do I make death enjoyable?” Miyazaki told the New Yorker upon the game’s release. In the same interview, he said, “I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy that comes from overcoming hardship.”

This is obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, nor should it be. If it sounds like the opposite of how you’d like to spend your leisure hours, that’s deeply reasonable. But I will say that as someone who has often been attracted to gentler games, where sometimes there isn’t even a hint of a reanimated skeletal warlock who can one-shot you from an in-game mile away, I’ve found it far more accessible than I’d anticipated, and frustration isn’t even in the top five of my emotions most of the time I’m playing.

I want to be clear here that I’m not very good, at this game or really even these types of games; I tend to prefer turn-based over real-time combat, which basically means that I like to agonize over making a move for a plethora of seconds that is absolutely not available in a game this fast-paced. But I can figure it out; I can use the tools at my disposal, memorize the movements of enemies, and hack and cast my way through most hardships eventually. If I can, you probably can too.

Isn’t George R.R. Martin somehow involved?

He sure is. According to the New Yorker, Martin and Miyazaki were mutual fans of one another’s work, and the Game of Thrones author “provided snatches of text about [the world]’s setting, its characters, and its mythology” rather than writing the actual script of the game. See if you can spot the somewhat unexpected place where his initials show up.

Do I need a (still notoriously hard-to-find) PlayStation 5 in order to play?

Nope. If you have one of the older consoles, like a PS4 or an Xbox One, it runs there, as well as the newer PS5 and Xbox Series X and S (it is not and likely never will be on Nintendo platforms like the Switch). It’s also on PC, and if you are one of the lucky few people who have managed to snag Valve’s new SteamDeck, which is essentially a handheld PC, it apparently runs pretty well there too. Just know that it is a massive, massive game, and as such there have been a variety of bugs reported, particularly among PC users.

Is there discourse about it?

You bet there is. The question of difficulty is sort of perennially central, among other somewhat related topics like user interface — there’s a corner of the hardcore FromSoftware fandom that apparently believes the only way to “properly” play Elden Ring is by ignoring any element that might make battle easier (long-range magic, summoning ghostly creatures to provide backup, playing online co-op with other players to take down bosses), in a way that can veer into snobbery and dismissiveness when it comes to less- seasoned players. There’s a sort of meme-mantra in the community known as “git gud,” which, as Jade King writes over at the Gamer, is “shorthand for hardcore players laughing in the faces of newcomers who found themselves struggling with tough enemies and obtuse systems when learning the ropes of FromSoftware’s masterful vision.”

If you spend time on Twitter and Reddit reading about or discussing the game (which is, IMO, one of the more enjoyable parts of playing it at the same time as so many other people), you’re bound to encounter this attitude, although at this point you’re probably more likely to see its vocal opposite, decrying the above as elitist gatekeeping.

I tend to fall closer to that end of the spectrum: All those in-game elements are there for a reason, after all, and essentially serve as difficulty modulators (although the recent patch update might have defanged some previously overpowered items and skills). Above all, though, anyone who disagrees with your play style did not pay $59.99 in order to have access to your personal game file, so truly who cares what they think.

Any tips for someone just getting started?

The Resties, a sub-brand of gaming podcast The Besties, is co-hosted by Polygon’s Russ Frushtick and Chris Plante, and one of their recent episodes has an excellent list of tips for beginners, many of which I found naturally over the course of my own gameplay.

They recommend choosing a starting class that has some facility with magic if you’re new — I wound up going with the Astrologer, a mostly magic-and-occasional-melee unit that can project bolts of power from far away, which means I don’t have to go directly toe-to-toe with many of the stronger enemies. I’d add that it’s totally fine and even fun to start the game over a couple of times if you want to experiment with different characters; I’d originally chosen the Ranger, a class that focuses on bows, and while I wound up bouncing off in the first couple of hours because it was just too hard for me to do any real damage, I’m really glad I got a feel for such a dissimilar unit. I’m already planning to do future runs with a variety of builds. (See, this is how you get to 100 hours without blinking).

Another piece of advice they offer, and I heartily cosign, is to get comfortable just straight-up running away from situations you find you can’t handle. You get a horse early on (his name is Torrent, which some players speculate is so if you Google “Elden Ring torrent” you’ll get a bunch of pictures of the horse) and he can go faster than virtually any enemy I’ve encountered; it might feel cowardly or unnatural at first, but there’s a certain glee and even humor in the moment when you realize you’re absolutely in over your head and need to frickin’ book it.

That’s probably my last and best piece of advice: Let yourself find the humor in Elden Ring. It’s a serious game, to be sure, full of darkness and terror and unanswerable questions about the nature of life and death and legacy, but it’s also fairly hilarious. I don’t often laugh out loud at games, yet there have been more than a few moments when I’ve been absolutely ganked by an enemy in such an unceremonious way that I can’t help but burst into giggles. The writing, though spare, is often dry and arcane to the point of self-aware absurdity, and the character and level design is capable of evoking simultaneous paroxysms of terror and a hefty dose of WTF.

Really, my overall hesitation before playing this game was fear: fear of the dark and of vastness and of monsters with heads grafted onto their elbows, sure, but mostly fear that I would suck, and that it would not be at all fun to suck. I’m here to report that I do, and that it absolutely, totally is. Now the greatest challenge is snagging the PlayStation controller before my partner gets to it first.

In the last years of his life, frustrated by the failure of the civil rights movement to change the day-to-day financial circumstances of Black Americans, Martin Luther King Jr. turned much of his focus to questions of economic justice, and increasingly landed on one possible option. In 1966 testimony in front of the US Senate, King declared, “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most revolutionary — the guaranteed annual income.”

More than 55 years later, King’s dream of a guaranteed income is about to get a test in his home neighborhood: Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. Later this month, the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund (GRO), a community racial justice organization, and the nonprofit GiveDirectly will be launching the largest guaranteed income program so far tried in the American South. They’ll be sending out cash transfers averaging $850 per month to hundreds of women in predominantly Black neighborhoods throughout Georgia over the next two years. Starting in the Old Fourth Ward, the program will expand to other urban, rural, and suburban areas in the state, ultimately providing aid to about 650 women in all.

While direct cash giving programs have proliferated in the US and the rest of the world in recent years, the Georgia program stands apart in its intended targets and its ultimate aims. Income and wealth gaps by race and gender are persistently wide in the US — more than 25 percent of Black women live under the federal poverty line, compared to about 20 percent of Black men, 12 percent of white women, and 9 percent of white men. According to a 2019 Federal Reserve survey, the median Black household holds less than 15 percent of the wealth of the median white household.

The GRO Fund and GiveDirectly program is meant to center groups that have been pushed to the economic margins. But just as importantly, it can demonstrate that direct cash giving can help create a just system that works for everyone, said Hope Wollensack, executive director of the GRO Fund. “If the economy can work for Black women — who have faced some of the highest income gaps, are most likely to live in poverty, most likely to get stuck in poverty — if we can start and develop policies among those who are facing some of the most acute impacts, then we are developing policies that will work for everyone,” she told me.

As King understood decades ago, guaranteed income can change lives. But the way that the organizers of the Georgia program are targeting their plan — predominantly if not solely for Black women — raises questions about the political trade-offs of framing and targeting cash transfer programs as an issue not just of economic justice, but racial justice as well. Those questions have relevance for progressive priorities that go beyond guaranteed income.

The Georgia cash giving program, explained

What’s being tried in Georgia is not a universal basic income program, which provides steady, unconditional income over the course of years to everyone in a targeted area, like GiveDirectly’s work in Kenya. Rather, it’s a guaranteed income experiment of the sort that is growing around the world, and which have been connected to positive effects on employment, mental health, housing, and more. Unlike UBI, guaranteed income is more narrowly focused to temporarily help demographic groups that are more likely to experience poverty. The amount of money going to each recipient will often be too small to pay for all of someone’s basic needs — though potentially still big enough to be a life-changing amount.

The GRO/GiveDirectly program will study what recipients use the money on, and the effects of the program on their mental and psychological well-being. “We wanted to listen to the voices of recipients,” said Miriam Laker-Oketta, GiveDirectly’s research director. “We’re looking at multiple areas where we believe that cash should be able to have an impact, but we’re listening to stories of the recipients instead of just numbers.” (Since program recipients are not randomly assigned to a treatment and control group, the researchers won’t try to make causal claims for the program.)

A key aim of the program is to explore the difference between providing much of the cash up front in a lump sum versus parceling out payments over time. Half the women will receive $4,300 up front and $700 for the remaining months — 24 in all — while the others will receive $850 each month. The total payments will be the same for both groups: $20,400.

Another difference from other income experiments is exactly who the program is looking to target. While recipients might not exclusively be Black women, it’s being explicitly framed by the organizers as “a guaranteed income initiative focused on Black women across the state of Georgia,” and will take place in neighborhoods with large Black American populations.

The impetus for designing the program this way is clear: There are deep wealth and income inequalities around race and gender that persist in the US, Georgia, and the Old Fourth Ward.

Black women face some of the highest levels of poverty of any race or gender group in the state, where about 26 percent of Black women live below the poverty line. (Twenty-nine percent of Latina women live under the poverty line, but make up a much smaller share of Georgia’s population.) Though the Old Fourth Ward is ethnically diverse, 38 percent of Black women there live in poverty, compared to 26 percent of Black men, 8 percent of white women, and 5 percent of white men.

But contemporary income gaps don’t get at the full historical extent of racial wealth, income, and opportunity gaps. A 2019 study found that Americans vastly underestimate the extent of the racial wealth gap, and the size of that overestimation has grown over the past 40 years. Americans believe that the racial wealth gap has narrowed over time when in reality, while both Black and white Americans have made income gains, the wealth gap has barely narrowed.

This is a divide centuries in the making, going back to slavery, through Jim Crow and GI Bill-era exclusion from education and housing benefits, to mass incarceration in the present day. The fact that Black Americans have been consistently paid less throughout America’s history — and nothing through much of it — has compounded over time to account for most of the wealth gap we see today, researchers at the Cleveland Fed found.

One in four Black Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, compared to one in 13 white Americans, but the gap goes further. Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit organization that focuses on social mobility, found in a report that race is a major factor for generational mobility even within neighborhoods, and Black-white gaps are even larger in low-poverty neighborhoods.

While guaranteed income alone won’t be a magic fix to the historical injustices around race in the US, cash transfers that reduce contemporary income gaps can begin to make a dent in racial wealth inequalities. To think about it another way, if cash transfers had been given to low-income families in 1960, it would’ve lessened the racial income gap back then, which in turn would have compounded into a smaller racial wealth gap today. We didn’t do that in 1960, but we can start today.

The politics of race-based framing

The Georgia program is different from GiveDirectly’s other programs in that it’s the first to use racial justice as a framing strategy and as part of its targeting. For many activists working on narrowing the racial wealth gap through anti-poverty programs, racial justice is at the moral center of their goals, and to downplay this would be to draw attention away from the point of the programs. But historically it’s been easier to garner support for plans that emphasize the economic benefits of poverty reduction.

Racially targeted programs such as affirmative action and reparations tend to be unpopular. Opposition to these programs is largely driven by white Americans; they tend to be far more popular, if not universally, among Black Americans and other Americans of color. As of 2016, far more Americans, including Black Americans, supported progressive anti-poverty programs such as a public option for health care and raising taxes on the rich. That segment of the population also holds more conservative views on racial justice than people who do not support progressive economic programs but have progressive views on race.

Still, researchers at the University of Illinois have found that, since 2016, a “more structural understanding of racial inequality” has intensified among Black Americans and also has grown among white Americans, meaning it’s plausible that race-based framing of programs has gained some popularity in the years since, marked as they were by the Trump presidency, the Black Lives Matter movement, Covid-19, increased support for cash transfers in general, and increased progressive framing of programs around race.

The fact that race-based framing is still less popular than economic framing — even if the approach has gained some ground — raises the question for activists working on guaranteed income: Should racial equity be central to their framing?

Any program that effectively addresses poverty in the United States will disproportionately benefit Black Americans because poverty in the United States disproportionately affects Black Americans. That’s part of the case for tackling poverty: Among all its other benefits, it will reduce some of the financial harm done by a history of racial discrimination in America.

It’s not necessarily an either- or. Ivuoma N. Onyeador, a psychologist at Northwestern University, warned against changing programs to address these gaps out of fear of backlash because the gaps are real. She discussed the importance of universal framings to build empathy with all people living in poverty: “It’s hard to lift yourself out of poverty when you don’t have food for your children.” These can be combined or complemented with framings that explicitly note how racial wealth disparities tend to be underestimated, along with appeals aimed to change views over time, such as deep canvassing — long conversations to develop empathy between people with different views and convince people on policy issues in the long- term.

The Georgia program is privately funded, but as guaranteed income grows into public policy, future, larger programs will have to handle the politics of framing such programs in a democracy. And the choices they make may be consequential. The reality is that while racial justice is a major moral goal of guaranteed income for many working on the issue, a racial justice framing may sacrifice possible popular support, which in turn may make a socioeconomic argument more persuasive and more politically sustainable. But a popularist approach can require its own assumptions about which groups to prioritize, and may also underestimate the extent to which voters’ minds can change.

Few Americans did more to change the minds of their fellow citizens than Martin Luther King. Civil rights were not a popular cause in his time, yet he persisted not merely by appealing to popularity, but to concepts of justice — and in doing so, changed the nature of America.

Guaranteed income has gained attention only in recent years. It’s possible that different framings around guaranteed income can work in different contexts, or can work in conjunction with instead of in opposition. Given how different poverty is for Black and white Americans, if guaranteed income is to take off as King envisioned and work for everyone in society, it can’t avoid grappling with the hard problem of racial inequality.

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From Jokes Subreddit

A blind girl was giving me a handjob once -

She says “Wow, this is the biggest dick I’ve ever layed my hands on!”

I’m like “Nah, you’re just pulling my leg”

submitted by /u/CaptainLostInAugust
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So it’s ok when a season does it… -

How come when spring comes early everyone gets excited, but when I do it my wife cheats on me with the neighbor.

submitted by /u/SpiretRaider
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Putin goes undercover as a drill sergeant. Talking to a new recruit, he asks -

Where are you from, private?
Sir, St. Petersburg
Oh, I’m from there too. Who’s your father?
Sir, my father is President Vladimir Putin.
That is impossible, how can that be?
Sir, people always say that President Putin is father of our country.

Surprised but pleased, Putin tell the recruit:

That actually makes sense, but really who’s your mother then?
Sir, my mother is Russia.
How so?
Because people always say Russia is mother of all people, all ethnic, all nation.

Laughing out loud, Putin’s liken the new recruit with great hope and ask him friendly.

Spectacular private, what role model do you want to become?
I want to be an orphan, sir.

submitted by /u/Zan_Jr
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What is the preferred pizza for epileptic midgets? -

Little Seizures.

(I am so sorry)

submitted by /u/HoggyOfAustralia
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Two factory workers are talking among themselves. -

The woman says, “I can make the boss give me the day off.”

The man replies, “And how would you do that?”

To which the woman answers, “Just wait and watch.” She hangs herself upside down from the ceiling.

The boss comes in, takes a look at her and asks, “What are you doing?”

The woman replies, “I am a light bulb.”

The boss then says, “You have been working so much, that you have gone crazy. I think you need to take the day off.”

As the woman leaves, the man starts to follow her. The boss stops him, saying, “Where are you going?”

The man answers, “I am going home too. I can’t work in the dark.”

submitted by /u/Lava_Wolf_68
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Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

What’s the plot?