Claiming My Title As Elden Lord

If these ideas are intriguing to you, maybe you wish to subscribe to my newsletter.

Other writing:

I’m still recapping Shōgun for Vulture, and it’s been really exciting to work on this project over a longer period. It’s likely going to cut into my newsletter writing time (and brain power), so thanks for bearing with me for the next 5 weeks.

• Shōgun Episode 3 Recap at Vulture

• Shōgun Episode 4 Recap at Vulture

Losing Time

When I fired up Elden Ring again, I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen. Like all the games from From Software, it’s an extremely difficult game based on memorizing patterns if you want to excel in combat. But it’s also a fairly open-ended role-playing game that lets you pick how you want to play. My first time through Elden Ring I was a guy who wielded a katana and did magic on the side. Now I’m a guy whose got two daggers and uses incantations. My first playthrough was around 168 hours, my current one has me clocking in at around 45 hours over the last few weeks. Maybe, I thought, I’ll just see how it goes when I try something different. Maybe it won’t completely eat up my life.

Needless to say, I haven’t done much else. It’s not that I love particularly difficult combat. In fact, I’m terrible at it. I hate it. I want easy combat, to be able to roll through any situation and just wipe the enemies off the map with one quick swing of my sword (or a few swings from my daggers). But what I’m addicted to is sorting through how to pick a weapon and how to customize it to a style of play that’s interesting to me. And I have buried countless hours into finding the exact perfect combination of everything. And then I immediately go to a new area and get smoked by a bad guy. And I yell swear words under my breath.

Video games, for me, aren’t as enriching as picking up a novel or sitting down to listen to music, but recapping Shōgun has been cooking my noodle each week. It’s a dense show and, damnit, I wanna do a good job. What digging into a game gives me is a chance to execute the problem-solving parts of my brain that are constantly firing on all cylinders without needing to do any of the actual mental processing. I would argue that the morning tinkling piano music of Breath of the Wild rising as Link crests a grassy knoll is a multi-media experience just as enriching as any book or movie I love, but Elden Ring is different. A lot of people love the environment storytelling of Elden Ring; I love Elden Ring for its absolutely bonkers leveling system. Pick a weapon, add a skill to it, add a scaling attribute, combine it with other weapons or spells or incantations. Try another weapon.

It’s amazing how many hours I can lose to a game just because I want to see what it might look like if I apply a different system of attack to a new dagger. And though it might not engage the creative side of my brain as much as writing does, I’ve been leaning into this sort of video game binge recently and it’s nice. Sure, it’s letting escapism dominate my free time, but hey, it’s still too cold out to go for a nice walk.

Maybe next week I’ll have a more exciting and engaging bit of media criticism, or maybe I’ll finally have made my way to the Altus Plateau and I’ll be sitting pretty on the road to Leyndell. Who can say.

At least you know you can expect another Shōgun recap.

Read

• Elden Ring Strategy Guides

Elden Ring is extremely opaque, so if you’ve got an idea about a certain spell you want to use or incantation to try or weapon attribute to focus on, you might want to research a bit and see what other people have found. It can be a really, really nice addition to your playthrough to save you from having to flub your way to victory for some of the tougher battles.

Watch

• Highway To Hell on Tubi

This movie is not necessarily good, but it’s definitely not bad. Written by the guy who wrote L.A. Confidential and some other movies and directed by the guy who did Drop Dead Fred, Highway To Hell is a really interesting early 90s movie that’s perfect for its time: modern enough to avoid cheesy 80s tropes but just weird enough to exist before movies were sterilized in the 2000s. In it, a guy’s girlfriend gets kidnapped and taken to hell, which is a sort of fucked up desert with crappy diners and weird ghouls and the like. I love depictions of hell in media, and this one is great.

Listen

• Sorry You Couldn’t Make It by Swamp Dogg

Swamp Dogg is a man with an incredible career as both a songwriter and a performer, making it big in the freakout R&B sub-culture of the early 1970s. But while a lot of luminaries from that time maybe didn’t last, he’s been on a tear over the last few years putting out new albums in conjunction with indie rock labels and a boost from Bon Iver (who helped introduce him to autotune). Sorry You Couldn’t Make It from 2020 is part of a long history of R&B, blues, and jazz musicians tackling country music (Ray Charles, Sonny Rollins, Solomon Burke, Millie Jackson, etc.), and the album also includes some of John Prine’s last recordings before he died of COVID in early 2020.

Consume

• Rishi Tea & Botanicals English Breakfast

I used to do a fair amount of tea education in a past job, and one thing I’m extremely fond of is a modern English Breakfast tea. Most English Breakfast is a blend of really harsh assamica variety teas that were picked and processed and cut to be astringent and tannic so that you can add lots of milk and sugar. Rishi’s version is usually a rotating single-source tea that’s a semi-broken grade from parts of China or Thailand and offers lots of sweetness, deep maltiness, a beautiful ruby hue, and virtually no astringency. It’s easy, comforting, and actually tastes good so you don’t need condiments. If you’re tea curious, it’s a great way to jump into higher-grade stuff without needing expensive tea wares to brew it. I like having these tea bags around for weekend afternoons when I’m just sitting around and want to enjoy something slowly.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.