bluflamingo

And I am still buzzing and I am so so so proud of myself and I need to talk about it and I only know two people who know what it means.

If anyone has 80 seconds, I rec watching Symbalily's first encounter with Artorias the Abysswalker:



Like O&S, this is one of the most iconic fights in the entire Dark Souls series. But I would say it's as much of a difficulty spike again relative to them as they are to the game before them.

Context: Artorias is the great legendary hero you've been hearing about all through the base game. But now he's been defeated by the Abyss, with his left arm shattered (his sword arm, so he's fighting you by swinging a sword with his off hand) and his mind mostly gone.

(There is meta to be meta-ed about FromSoft's long line of incredibly badass disabled characters; I don't know if it's necessarily #unproblematic #goodrepresentation, given that so many of them are trying to kill you and it's often being used to evoke ruin and tragedy, but it's not nothing either. Adaptive king Artorias.)

The way he howls and shakes reminds me of nothing so much as the Tumblr story about the rabid raccoon. It's eerie and wrong and awful.

He is incredibly aggressive and incredibly fast, and if you start chipping his health down he draws on the Abyss to power himself up further in a way that rapidly makes his hits unblockable (at least for most builds), so you can only try, desperately, to dodge. And he can and will one-hit kill you, and then do front flips on your corpse.

I think I had to level my brain up to do this fight. Holy shit.

I have been IMMERSED over the last few days, learning his patterns and rhythms, and now I feel weirdly close to Artorias and emotional about it. More than any of the other bosses so far, Artorias feels like fighting a person. I gave his soul to an old friend of his to take care of. Sleep well, dude.

Mostly to create some space in my head. But holy shit, Minnesotans, you are extraordinary and we see you. Across the fucking ocean, we see you.

( Cut for US politics, violence )

How To Help If You Are Outside Minnesota by Naomi Kritzer

Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders. They live there. It is their country.

They are legally Danish citzens. Greenland is largely self-governing, with the possibility of becoming independent if they choose to.

Denmark can't "sell" them or their country because Denmark does not own them.

And after a number of centuries and some debate, a general consensus was arrived at that selling people is not ethically acceptable, you know?

Even if they wanted to, Denmark can't "sell" Trump Greenland any more than the UK could sell him Scotland.

Also N.B. 85-90% of the Greenlanders are Inuit.

I am very certain that this is absolutely about thinking that Native people don't really count as citizens and they don't really own their land; it is Terra Nullius, and they can be sold off in a deal between the "real" nations of Denmark and the US.

(Or their land can be sold out from under them and they can just be forced elsewhere, which I'm sure Trump would be just fine with.)

If the US wanted to try to ethically acquire Greenland, it could talk to the government of Greenland and offer them a great deal with significant benefits if they wanted to become independent and then have a free association deal with the US.

Or rather, it could have, maybe, because now the Greenlanders are fucking pissed off and scared over the threats and offers to buy them, and if they have to choose between the US and Denmark they are unambiguously choosing Denmark:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgx8w4pgk0o
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/14/us-invasion-threat-greenland-trump-denmark

Their calendar is here -- creator sign-ups open on the 26th Jan:

https://fandomtrumpshate.dreamwidth.org/53196.html

Their list of non-profits they're supporting is here:

https://fandomtrumpshate.dreamwidth.org/53468.html

Apparently last year they raised $127K!