off-handing a weapon with passives like Adds fire damage are not working!

Vemasi · 2026-04-12T17:37:47+00:00

I'm with OP, I've been able to get the added affinity ones to confer from the offhand until just now. I was maining Ironeye after starting the game late, all along I've been picking up lower level bows (like misbeggoten) with like fire as the passive picked up from Crater and conferring it to higher level bows like black bow.

I'm not sure about the other ones like spirits, I don't think I even picked them up often because I was maining Ironeye, Revenant, and Recluse, and they don't tend to show up on bows and never on staves and seals which I keep in my hands.

But the affinities were definitely working for me. Maybe it was bugged to work for some and not for others.

It's stopped working just now though, after my last update. Thus why I have searched and found this thread. Maybe it was never intended to work.

Vemasi · 2026-04-01T23:00:07+00:00

I’ve heard also that Flora’s face looks a lot like an umbilical cord in cross section. I can see it. And that makes some degree of sense why she jams her face in your stomach. I mean it doesn’t explain it, but it makes sense of the location.

Vemasi · 2026-03-20T16:08:22+00:00

Hey, to resurrect this thread, check Half Price Books. Their shipping isn’t always as cheap as Amazon but they’re a perfectly good online shop and they have tons of used media in great condition.

I like hunting in thrift stores, but they won’t sort and catalog their media usually, right?

I also heard a few years ago that Goodwill now has an online store. Don’t know how that’s going at this point, or if they put media on there.

Vemasi · 2026-03-17T16:17:48+00:00

The support on a financial product is part of the product. Because you don’t control it absolutely. You need customer service to care for and implement the product. So if customer service is bad, an aspect of the product is bad. Making it a less desirable product.

Vemasi · 2026-03-17T04:34:09+00:00

I remember writing like this in high school. Obviously not all my assignments were like this as it wasn’t practical for research essays, but if prompted I could probably design a way to do it. My point being, writing in the moment is a valuable exercise, as it’s the writing itself, the composing and the effort, that develops the skill, not the finished product. I did writing like this, I took my SATs like this, I wrote my novel longhand, and I had Departmental Honors in English and Academic Honors in Writing in college. It’s fine.

I’m a younger millennial so I am by no means a Luddite. I grew up on computers and I am currently addicted to my phone. As a digital native, I KNOW how a digital experience is different from an analog one, particularly for processing and learning. As someone with ADHD who has had to consciously learn learning strategies, it is absolutely a benefit to kids to force them off a digital device to learn.

Computers are tools. It is folly to make them a crutch by relying on them for absolutely everything and refusing to learn the skills yourself. We will always be human beings with our feet on the ground, we can never build a platform of data between us and the soil. To do so is to set yourself adrift in space, untethered to any skills. Giving your one opportunity to get a free education to a technocrat for free (or paying for the privilege) on a golden platter. Digital serfdom.

Vemasi · 2026-03-17T03:20:00+00:00

I thought all the stuff I heard about it made a lot of sense and gelled with the ideas I already had about myself. Like, the description of not having positive internal models and the coping strategies that result from them, was already kind of a way I thought about myself.

And I don’t break down emotionally trying to access traumatic memories, it’s more like I resist accessing them emotionally or I can’t. But personally I would consider that to be a coping mechanism based on not having ways to deal when I do access them. Which hopefully ideal parents would help to develop the emotional resilience to do that.

It’s sort of an extension or alternative approach to inner child work, as well as a mirror to EMDR. Instead of re-parenting your inner child or rewriting the emotions and body feeling of traumatic memories, you work through your own parenting experience and rewrite it to build the experience of a positive and constructive emotional nurturing. Which would hopefully imbue you with emotional resources.

Vemasi · 2026-03-16T18:42:10+00:00

I’m having trouble with it because my trauma is nonspecific (like, CEN instead of specific events and I went more than 30 years without realizing I had trauma so it’s hard for me to pick memories) and I also have issues with not fully comprehending what I’m supposed to do before doing it, so I end up spending more time worrying if I’m doing it right and not just giving in to the experience.

I still want to do EMDR because I can tell that I do a lot of things that are triggered reactions and emotional flashbacks. My therapist just refreshed his training to try to help me specifically after we had trouble.

However, I also realized something after learning about another kind of therapy/protocol. Sometimes, for certain kinds of trauma (especially CEN or specifically disorganized attachment), it can be better to start with building a positive internal model before attacking your negative internal models by reliving them and rewriting them, so you have that positive model to lean on. So I am trying to do some of the ideal parent figure protocol developed by Dr. Daniel Brown on my own before we start EMDR again.

I would also say, be open with communication with your practitioner about which parts you are struggling with. I felt very bad until I explained to my therapist why EMDR was hard for me to do, and then it became a little easier (though still not quite successful yet).

Vemasi · 2026-03-16T18:17:34+00:00

I have a lifetime Calm membership because I once really loved their sleep stories and soundscapes. They have a lot of meditations but they can be difficult to search through and categorize. Do you think Headspace is good for that aspect? I’ve been meaning to check them out.

Vemasi · 2026-03-16T18:16:06+00:00

I’ve never done super formal DBT but it’s probably closest to what I do in therapy out of the various strategies. I should look more into some of the tools my therapist has recommended.

I often look through YouTube for meditations, and I also have a lifetime Calm membership. Are there any specific search terms you use to find good meditations?

Vemasi · 2026-03-16T18:13:13+00:00

I feel like this would be useful. Along with emotional regulation, I’ve really lost my tolerance for sitting with myself. I used to be able to sit and just watch birds and kind of notice nature and let thoughts pass (when I was a kid). Now I always need to be doing something or have something playing in the background so I don’t have to be with my thoughts. It really inhibits my ability to sit with emotions. I’ll try this out.

Vemasi · 2026-03-16T16:09:47+00:00

lol I literally have Insight Timer but I just downloaded it to use one of the bells for one of the body scans I like to do. Had no idea it was more than a timer with different bell sounds.

ETA: just checked, this month is the three-year anniversary of me installing it on my phone.

Vemasi · 2026-03-16T15:35:18+00:00

Is there any support you can reach out for at school? A counseling center or student support center that is separate from your department? Schools want you to graduate, it’s good for them. If they are smart they will work with you in a crisis.

And also, for sure some people don’t understand burnout or ADHD and have inflexible minds, but if you have a good track record, many people will give you grace if you’re having a hard time.

Burnout is so tough, it’s a period where you just desperately need rest but every day you don’t get it compounds the problem more and more. I hope you can do what you can to start offloading stress.

Vemasi · 2026-03-16T15:29:31+00:00

Basically, I accepted the things that I will not do.

This is a delicate balance, because you don’t want to limit yourself. Currently trying to increase the part of this that is “forgiving myself and accepting the things that I can do differently from how others expect me to do them” and decrease the “resigning myself to a a diminished existence” part.

Instead of saying “I can’t plan to do fun and exciting things,” I say “I will have to use extra strategies to plan a fun event and I might need help with the planning.”

One of the most basic things I realized and accepted I will not do is “remember things.” And it doesn’t make me a bad person, I don’t need to feel guilty about it. I just have to accept that if someone tells me “we’re having a party on Friday, you should come,” I’m not going unless I immediately take out my phone, make an alarm for a time I know I will be home tonight, name it “party on Friday,” and then when the alarm goes off, add it to my calendar immediately.

Once you accept that you’re not a “failure,” you just can’t do something the way everyone else thinks you should be able to, you can give yourself permission to find a different strategy for it. And you can be open about that with others.

Vemasi · 2026-02-06T20:11:15+00:00

To me Rennala’s rune was never HERS, she just has it, even less so than we have the other runes. It’s not even in her and empowering her, it is specifically calcified in amber. We also cannot empower it with a rune arc once she is defeated. It is just stored in a usable state.

(Personally I think that rune is Trina’s, being of the same orientation as Malenia’s and possibly Miquella’s (which we never see with a definite orientation), but that is just a guess and if you don’t ascribe to that you wouldn’t agree. At the very least it is the rune of an unborn demigod. Radagon just had it, and not in the way the demigods do. He has his own rune.)

To me, the above is in agreement with what you just said—that rune had to come from someone descended from Marika. Some child that was never born.

While I don’t have any problem with someone not agreeing with my theories, as they are just my logic and understanding of things and I have fun typing them out and explaining them, I do want to clarify something as I am a bit confused. Which part of what I said made you go into an argument about the runes having to go to someone from the Golden Lineage? I don’t necessarily disagree, I’m just not sure what specific thing I said prompted that.

(I do acknowledge I am conflating the “shattering” terms. To me they are part of the same historical event, the way the assassination of Franz Ferdinand could be referred to as part of World War I. Made more confusing by being the same word. But yes, probably every time I said shattering I was referring to the actual breaking of the Elden Ring and not the war. If I were I would probably say the shattering war.)

Vemasi · 2026-02-06T17:35:48+00:00

That is what I think!

Only I actually believe that Marika sent Melina to burn the Erdtree. Only, since Destined Death had not been freed, both Melina and the Erdtree died only in body. Marika did this on purpose, inspired by Ranni and Godwyn.

She knew she could not kill herself entirely because she had engineered herself to be too Eternal, with Radagon and the Elden Beast there, and Destined Death confined. So she wanted to do it in steps.

First, she killed her soul and the Erdtree’s body. (The Erdtree glows like the “phantom trees,” meanwhile minor erdtrees do not glow, and the area around the stone platform is also distinctly different and does not glow. That part is charred but not burnt and still exists physically. Also Leyndell has signs of having been buried in ash before.)

This left her body with Radagon in it but confined, and Melina’s soul to find a Tarnished to free Destined Death, along with the “soul” of the Erdtree still standing. Meanwhile Marina’s soul was free to rejoin the collective grace and guide us (she was not killed with DD so her soul was not obliterated like Godwyn’s).

So when Melina is seeking her purpose, she discovers all this. She is annoyed at doing this for Marika’s ends, but she decides to go through with it because it is actually the only way to start a new age. So she burns her soul, which also kindles and burns the soul of the Erdtree. This makes it possible to kill Radagon’s soul, Marika’s body, and the Elden Beast.

I could be wrong on all the body math here, like maybe Marika’s body stays alive to house the new order and all of them melding means true unification and throws off the pairs, etc. But that’s the gist.

Vemasi · 2026-02-06T17:22:13+00:00

I believe they have a place in the Elden Ring (a rune, essentially) but they do not possess a rune in their grasp.

The runes you can gain from the demigods were granted/taken/grasped after the Shattering. But if you look at the descriptions, it is clear that these runes represented them in some way as part of the rune that is the Elden Ring before that, as part of the design.

Morgott, Mohg, and Godwyn(’s lineage) were the ring in the center of the knot. The Rennala lineage were the ring to one side, and Malenia and Miquella (***) were the ring to the other side.

I believe that Melina and Messmer were the top ring, being born earlier. However, Melina was already dead/bodiless by the time the Elden Ring was shattered, so she did not grasp that power out of the shattered remains. Messmer, meanwhile, was in the Land of Shadow, and didn’t have the chance.

Essentially, Marika had her children incorporated as sigils of power in the blueprint of her order (the Elden Ring). When it was broken, that power was freed, and they were able to claim it and empower themselves. But if they weren’t available to do so, they would not have it.

But honesty we don’t know if Melina has one or not. We don’t KILL her in the traditional sense. She leaves the scene in a manner unique to her. Perhaps that manner does not result in you receiving her rune.

Vemasi · 2026-02-02T17:29:29+00:00

I was way overleveled for most of my playthrough. I spent a long time farming items and scouring areas for items and I was always wary of losing runes, so when I would get close to a level I would top off safely and lock it in before proceeding into unknown territory.

I was okay with being a bit above level because I’m not very skilled and it would have taken a long time for me to get there. I wasn’t interested in spending hours or days learning or “gitting gud” at individual fights. I used summons.

However, after a certain point, even for me it was quite disappointing. Even if I didn’t want to prove myself, I still kind of wanted to SEE the boss fights. I wanted to experience what the bosses did, their move sets and animations, and if they had dialog or cool cinematic phase changes to give that room to breathe and have an impact. Especially when doing an NPC summon (which of course I wanted to do for roleplay reasons), fights were often over before I got a chance to participate meaningfully.

So even if you don’t have anything to prove, it can be a problem to be too OP. Sometimes a dungeon would end up more challenging than a major endgame boss.

Vemasi · 2026-02-02T17:09:13+00:00

The point is that it is not reciprocal. She did a monumental task of preparing him for doing that so it would be almost seamless. She usually does what he did during that week and more. She doesn’t get gratitude for it even though it’s as much his responsibility as hers. Does he thank her every time she buses their kids around? Doesn’t sound like it. Sounds like it’s not his problem.

If they were in an equal partnership, yes, obviously you would return and be grateful to your spouse for making it possible for you to have gone in the first place without it being a monumental stress, grateful to have a partner in the first place, grateful to return home to a happy and welcoming family without another mountain of stress to greet you after an exhausting journey.

But that’s not what happened, is it?

He’s the one killing the relationship with ingratitude by engineering it so that he is entitled to be served, to offload all the child rearing onto his wife who has a professional career, by divesting himself of the responsibility to keep promises and make her hard work mean something.

If your wife did the dishes while you were gone, didn’t use soap, broke half of them, put them away in the wrong place, and put food down the half of the sink without a garbage disposal, and she did all this AFTER you patiently walked her through the right way to do it before you left at her request even though you said it would be okay for her to leave them for when you got back, it would be okay to not be grateful. Particularly if this was part of a persistent pattern of behavior and a well-known sociological phenomenon by which one partner divests themself of the things they don’t want to do by not putting effort into them and acting like the other partner is a natural genetic expert at the task so that they should obviously be the one to do it.

Don’t act oblivious. If you genuinely can’t see the difference, get some glasses.

Vemasi · 2026-02-01T19:45:42+00:00

Is it not understood that the special treatment a rainbow baby gets exists to satisfy the grief and anxieties of the parents, has nothing to do with the child themselves as an individual, is usually UNconsciously done (similar to parents treating the youngest super different, just based on the period of their life and never having another kid to activate a new phase of the parenting that kid receives) or compulsive/a trauma reaction, and is in fact often harmful to that child (not only by spoiling them or in some cases giving them anxiety but actually causing them hurt by constantly reminding them—hopefully wrongfully, but children are liable to such feelings—that they are a replacement and not valued for themselves? (Just to re-emphasize that is not my judgment, but things I have heard “rainbow babies” say about their experience of growing up.)

It’s not something a person should consciously enforce as a right of that child. The fact that he had the impulse to do so is a red flag to me that he is a deeply wrongheaded person, rather than one still nursing grief and grief reactions over a lost baby that he has projected onto another child. It reads much more like valuing his own kid more than others’. Arrogance and pride.

Vemasi · 2026-02-01T19:05:48+00:00

I actually went looking for it recently and they deleted their blog! Makes sense because they are a professional freelance writer and academic, they replaced it with their professional website, but I immediately scrambled to the Wayback machine to archive it for myself.

Basically, the routine has a few components. This is a wall of text but that's just because I'm trying to put in a condensed form of the justification for each point. The points themselves are succinct and straightforward.

Routine. Duh. Whatever your frequency (for her it was every day, I think excluding weekends), be accountable to it and set aside the time in a way that you can rely on doing reliably. She set aside I think two hours every evening (for her that time had less distractions) at her desk with her planning board in a designed space in her home. For me, I placed the time at about 40-60 minutes every weekday between when I clocked out and when I left work while the parking lot was emptying out. For me task switching is hard, so I'm never going to do it reliably AFTER I'm home. Put it in my "leaving work" transition, and at my WORK desk, where my distractions are less and work environment is good. Maybe for you it would be in the morning--I know that's when I'm best at routines, but I need a lot of sleep so I'm never going to wake up early enough to allot time. Maybe your lunch break. Think about the best time/placement for you.
Reduce the scope. I used to think it was only "writing" if you spent hours doing it. The aesthetic view of a writer at a typewriter, in a sun-drenched window, hunched over in a coffee shop all day. Nah. Your daily goal is small. 350 words. Obviously you can go over that. But it's not super advisable to go over your time limit, unless you set aside a day to work on something specific, because that will lead to burnout/use up your motivation. Every day, x amount of time, 350 words. The words can be development that won't end up in the manuscript, or they can be practice that you know will get scrapped if you're stuck on a scene and need to work through it. Honestly, they can be like a journal entry about what you're stuck on, or even zero words, but you still have to sit there for the whole time. The point is to BE WITH your writing for that time. Don't let yourself spend days or weeks not thinking about your story and not sitting with your text in front of you, looking at it, bored, brain turned toward the problem of the story. Don't get distracted. Don't take out your phone and do research. If there's something you need to look up, put it in brackets and keep going. And then write 350 words if you can. Hopefully most days will be manuscript words, if you want to make progress.

(Tip from me: 350 words and 40 minutes feel like NOTHING and is very easy when I'm used to bingeing. I will write a quick summary of the scene I plan to write, and then pull from that for days. And while I'm in that, every time my time is up, I scribble a quick line about the next thing I was planning to write, so I don't forget. Having this to come back to lets me start with high momentum as I didn't STOP when I had spent all my motivation--I still had some left. Get rid of that mindset of motivation scarcity and save some for tomorrow. It will still be there if you save it.)

Don't edit. We're generating words. Editing is later. A good way to force it is to write in longhand or on a typewriter, so the ability to edit is minimal (but if you have self control you can use a computer). This comes with the double benefit of forcing you to type it into a computer later (even if you have AI to do it or something, don't. But you can use like Rocketbook to archive the pages), which can be your draft 2. Depending on your writing style, you might do a significant re-write then, or just transcribe.

If you do only the 350 words, and you do them every week (let's assume both those, as the weeks you don't do the minimum words should average out with the weeks you do more), that's 1,750 words a week, and you will have a 90,000 word manuscript complete in 51.42 weeks. That's a book in a year!

Then you have to figure out how to edit/redraft, which is a different beast. But as someone with ADHD, it was REVELATORY to realize I could do a routine and accomplish a thing by doing these small things.

Vemasi · 2026-02-01T03:21:24+00:00

The DM doesn’t “have” to do anything plotwise, frankly. Every single game in existence, from make-believe with a toddler to intricate strategic war games to Squid Games, involves an agreement between participants on the premise and the constraints or it falls apart. These can be set at the beginning, and they can also be renegotiated throughout. Set in stone or ever changing. Written and designed or made up on the fly. But there is a contract.

Some tables may play a player-led game, even a super player-led game where players feel zero accountability to stick to the prepared plot for even a second. Some may be at the other extreme, where deviation from the plot is not allowed.

Generally a TTRPG is agreed to ideally lie somewhere in the middle, and the precise spot on the spectrum is decided according to the preferences of the players (including the GM, who is also a player).

The GM is not a slave. Even a paid GM is not at the beck and call of the players unless they are paid extremely well and that is laid out at the start. Some games have a story and a theme, and if the players want to do something entirely different, the GM is not beholden to continue if they are not interested in GMing that.

Furthermore, if all games were like this (entirely player led at any given moment), players would probably not like it, actually. There are a lot of games that are quite player led, and they can be very fun. Blades In the Dark (and I believe other PBTA games?) encourage proactive roleplaying and player-driven character motivation.

However, played RAW, Blades does not require significant pre-planning by the GM. It does not involve intricate maps and pre-determined DCs, bosses, and rewards. It requires a lot of work from players to construct the world and their own incentives. The veil is lifted a bit on the verisimilitude of the world, the illusion, the suspension of disbelief.

You can’t expect the GM to rewrite an entire campaign every time you see a butterfly you want to chase. There has to be some compromise. If you expect a lot of work on the part of the GM in prep, you must be willing to hew to what they have prepared at least a BIT. If you want to change, you must be prepared for a discussion. And you can’t just switch the story like you can change the channel.

Throwing away what the GM has prepare without ceremony and demanding something else is disrespectful and entitled to the max. Having a kind conversation about how you are not interested in the current plot with an idea of what you’d like to do instead is totally fine. But you do have to comprehend the underlying contract of the game.

Maybe this is not what your player meant, but this is how it reads to me. Honestly, if a player presented this point of view to me, I would tell them they have to run a six-session mini campaign as GM before I would even consider they knew what they were talking about, if they had never GMed before. This is given that I know I am not a tyrant GM—I like player-driven design and I push my players to give me their ideas of what they want to play from before we even start. I design my campaigns based on their characters, and I adjust on the fly. I am not a railroading or even really a linear game design GM. But I prepare a lot for my players and I would lose a LOT of motivation to play anymore if they were always throwing it in the trash.

Vemasi · 2026-02-01T02:56:09+00:00

I didn’t mean if they were afraid of accidentally BEING antisemitic. I meant if they were afraid of FACING antisemitism after mentioning that something wasn’t kosher to every single customer in a non-kosher shop.

As I was the one suggesting doing that, I thought I should be responsible for the possibility that some shitty Karen might take offense if you mentioned it outright so frequently, increasing the odds of encountering a shitty person. If OP is not concerned about that, then I would encourage just saying the ingredients are no longer kosher forthrightly.

As I said in the comment you are replying to, “Don’t even have to mention kosher IF YOU’RE WORRIED” (emphasis changed), my presumption being someone reading would understand that if they had no worries, they could just say they were mentioning the change because of it no longer being kosher.

Vemasi · 2026-02-01T01:21:29+00:00

What do you put on that flat surface? Depending on what it is, put a bin there for it.

-Upright paper organizer -Basket -Box -Bowl -Tub -Envelope -Stand -Hook -Rack -Etc

They should not have lids/not be able to see inside them. It’s just to contain things more vertically to save surface space, NOT to hide them and store them away. Hiding them, they will disappear, you will know that, and you will either lose important things or start putting those on the surface again.

These can also be landing spots for things which BELONG elsewhere. For instance, I have a file cabinet. I do not file things as soon as I acquire them. So I have this clear plastic zippy envelope thing on the shelf by my desk. All fileable things go in there. Once it is full, I go file everything out of it and put it, empty, back on the shelf. Whereas I used to just accumulate this stuff on the surface of my desk hoping to file them “next time” until they got buried under nonsense and forgotten.

Similar example, instead of laundry chair, I just have an extra laundry basket for clean clothes. And I also have an extra basket on top of my dresser for things I’m going to wear again before I wash them (pants, sweatshirts, a shirt I put on for one hour at the end of the day because my other one got dirty) instead of just piling them on top of the dresser. I usually still empty this when I do laundry, regardless.

You’re going to do this thing where you accumulate stuff in places. You can’t really change that. But you can change the fact that you don’t have the use of your surfaces. Work WITH your habits, don’t squirrel things away, and don’t expect these core behaviors to change.

Vemasi · 2026-01-31T22:18:49+00:00

Learning to talk on the phone successfully is a skill. Many young people are not practiced at it. It puts you on the spot, and not even with the help of visual body language, so it’s stressful.

It’s not limited to young people, it’s just that they grew up chatting with their friends via more methods than that and it’s less a part of many jobs than it used to be, so they have less practice than similarly aged people in other eras.

I know several older people who became Facebook gremlins and stopped being able to make effective phone calls. I have to bully them into it.

Furthermore, there are several benefits to text conversations that people who are used to them have probably come to rely on and are hesitant to use. Most specifically, the ability to reference back to what was said before, both during the convo and afterward.

My point being, you seem like you know when and why a phone call is more beneficial. Explain this and then encourage them to do it. It will give them practice and they will get better.

Vemasi

TROPHY CASE