That would sound amazing

So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys

*more than

70% of Chinese Millennials are homeowners

Soulsborne games are hard, but they’re designed to teach you how to play through death. I’m gonna teach you how to play Bloodborne.

These are tips for a first playthrough, some of this advice isn’t universal but it will take the sting and uncertainty out of the game since it actually tells you very little in the way of strategies and best practices.

1. Which weapon to pick - you start out without a weapon, the game wants you to get killed, and when you do you will get a starting weapon. I’m going to make a gross generalization here, all three weapons are great, but start with the Saw Cleaver. Its arguably the best weapon in the game, and you can choose it right after you die. You can perform a light attack with r1 and if you press l1 immediately after you will do a transform attack which is 50% more powerful than your light attack and does a ton of stagger which can break boss parts allowing you to get free hits and . You can literally just r1-l1-l1-r1-l1-l1… Combo through the entire lgame. Simple and incredibly powerful. Then, pick the pistol to learn how to parry. Put all your upgrade materials into the cleaver.

2. How to level your character - if you pick the saw cleaver, it levels primarily with strength. But your first priority is to level vitality. Level your vitality to 25 before leveling any other stat. This will give you more survivability, and most of your damage will come from upgrading your weapon anyway. Skill is also okay to level, it will give you some more damage to your weapon (not as much as str) and also strengthen visceral attacks. Arcane is if you want to use hunter tools, which are neat but strictly optional. Bloodtinge strengthens your gun, but there are only 3 weapons that scale with it and they’re more difficult to use. Endurance is optional, it makes fights a bit faster cuz you can get more hits in before your stamina depletes, but you can play the whole game with base stamina no problem. Strictly optional. The max you should level any stat is 50, the exception is endurance which has a hard-hardcap at 40. Stick to vitality, str and skill until they reach their hardcaps at 50 and then you can level whatever you want and mess around cuz you’ll likely be in ng+ or higher. Honestly levels don’t matter much, you could get a cheat that levels you to level 250 and still struggle with early bosses. I’ve seen it happen.

3. How to level your weapon - bloodstone shards are used to make your weapon stronger. You can also fit gems in your weapon to make your weapon more powerful. You’ll get lots of these but level up your cleaver until it won’t take any more of a certain type. There are 4 different bloodstones, and you need 16 to level up 3 times (except the last one which only requires 1 for the final level.) Max level is 10.

4. Other tips - you don’t have to fight everything. Lots of people give up at the beginning because there is a bonfire with a bunch of enemies around it and they try to take them all on. Or you can just run past it if you know the way past. If you get stuck on a boss explore somewhere you haven’t been, or take a break. You need a clear head. Remember the game teaches by killing you so if you aren’t trying to learn a boss’s attack patterns and trying new ways to defeat them, they can be pretty difficult. Serrated weapons like the Cleaver’s untransformed mode deal additional damage to beasts, and so does fire, like fire paper and Molotov’s. Molotov’s are great, use them, and they’re pretty cheap early game. Buy bloodvials and bullets too so you don’t get caught lacking.

You can summon other players if you have PS+ so r/huntersbell is a good place to find cooperators, and they have a discord too if you don’t like reddit. This game is so good, and has tons of replay value so don’t worry if you need a little help. The story is amazing so just get through it. The DLC is 1000% worth it, if you find yourself liking the game get the dlc. Reach out of you need help or have questions, I love this game so much, and I love helping people with it so don’t hesitate!

Reading

This is the wrong question in my opinion. What is being corrupted? One’s morals and ethics? The purity of the human soul? What is the nature of the corruption? Any time we start thinking about “purity” and “corruption” we are moving in dangerous ontological territory.

What is money? Well, it is a stand in for value. Then what is value? Where does it come from? Value comes from exchanging commodities in the marketplace. These commodities are created with human labor power, in other words, value is the crystalized time+energy that it takes on average to produce commodities. New value is created when a commodity costs less to produce than it can be sold for in the market.

In our current historical mode of production, capitalism, the labor that is used to mass produce a commodity is socialized, which means instead of a single craftsperson creating a commodity from start to finish, the production process is broken down and simplified so that it takes many workers to mass produce commodities, each worker specializing in their part of the production process, with the assistance of machines to speed up or simplify this process in order to be more productive.

In contrast, even though the production process has been socialized for the first time in human history, which was in it’s time a progressive if cruel human advancement, the fruits of that production are privatized meaning that goods become the private property of the legal “owner” of the productive apparatus, who can sell those commodities to market for more than they paid to produce them, producing profit from the perspective of the capitalist, or surplus value from the perspective of the workers.

This creates distinct classes which is where we will interrogate the effect of money on the human spirit. There are the owners of capital, who have commodities to sell at the market and workers who have little or nothing to sell but their labor to the capitalist in a labor market. This can be taken even further: there are large capitalists who own a great deal of capital and exploit many workers, small capitalists who own a small among of capital and exploit a few workers (or maybe they even self-exploit,) intellectual or specialized labor that is able to demand higher value in the labor market, and simple or unspecialized labor who’s labor can be easily replaced. A side effect of this creates another class: the unemployed or marginally employed reserve surplus population which can be used to threaten simple laborers with replacement hence driving down the cost of labor and increasing profits for the capitalist. The larger this reserve population, the lower wages can be made, and vice-versa.

Every atomized member of society is then thrown into competition with each other, with a very real threat of losing their class position, with the possibility of being thrown into the reserve population unable to find meaningful work that can support themselves and their family. A large firm can be gobbled up by a larger firm, and its specialized workers eliminated due to “redundancies”. A specializrd worker can be replaced by another unspecialized worker who has the qualifications to do their job or some technological advancement transforms that role into unspecialized or less-specialized labor.

This competitive drive forces individuals to do whatever they can to maintain or increase their class position. If company A refuses to pollute the rivers for increased profit, but company B is willing to, this makes company B more profitable, forcing company A out of business, or acquired by company B; unless the board of directors of company A (pressured by gains-seeking investors) replaces the individual demurring eco-conscious executives with people who are willing to pollute for profit; unless some outside political force steps in to regulate the entire market, creating the necessity of a governing state to manage the market and resources, lest the whole system collapse into complete anarchy. Individual workers must remain “productive” such that they continue to create profit for their capitalists or risk replacement themselves, although they can always be replaced by technological advancements or monopolizing forces as discussed above. The reserve surplus population competes for their very survival or risks starvation, homelessness and death.

So now we have uncovered the forces that cause the “corruption” of money. There is a whole other thread we could pursue here that shows how this system abstracts things like “polluting a river” into numbers on a balance sheet, hiding these forces from anyone who might observe them, and lending a plausible deniability to anyone who would be responsible and hide the real lives of anyone who would be affected. I’ll call this process objectification, which is a huge topic unto itself.

But in my opinion, what this system corrupts is the natural inclination for most people to cooperate with one another, and work creatively. When i recognizes that another person has subjective experience like me, I’ll become more likely to identify and then help them if they need it, as I can relate my own experience to theirs. Our system creates cooperation through competition, since the drive of all productive relations is to pursue profit, the mechanisms of which I’ve already described. There is a constant objectification of the outside world as a function of this pursuit for profit and others which dehumanizes and keeps us in our little competitive consuming silos.

Tldr: does money corrupt? Yes, but it doesn’t corrupt the individual so much as it corrupts the entire social superstructure that is inherent to a functioning society in which people can thrive and self actualize.

Edit: just one note on “objective fact”. Object/subject duality is only one way to look at things, and in fact separating them out like this is a form of “corruption” in that it hides certain truths and leads to certain conclusions. While this has contributed to the development of many kinds of human scientific and technological advancement, we must also understand that all things concerning humans and their experiences need to be understood by unifying subject and object. Pure objectivity is as incomplete as pure subjectivity and while both are useful to increase our understanding we have to put the pieces back together to see the whole picture.

Then you have to join in the fight for those things and educate yourself. This world is not getting better, and the reason for that is the productive political economic system in which we live.

I have the same values and I am a Marxist communist. That means I work for political struggle with the systems that oppress and exploit to for improving conditions for all, and also work to try and educate workers about the class dynamics of this struggle, and the revolutionary potential of the working class.

I appreciate the clarification and good will, comrade.

Honestly I find this comment irritating, as you’re basically accusing me of being a crypto-reformist, when I explicitly call for an end of capitalism. As if I’m not constantly educating myself, And others to guard against this tendency of anti-marxism. Because I used the term “democratic socialism”, regardless of the fact that I acknowledge the wrongheadedness of the reformist strains, still you say I might fall into anti Marxism. If that happens it won’t be because I acknowledge democracy; and the fact that you think so little of my actual irl work because of my use of this term is insulting.

I’m going to refrain from criticizing you point by point, as you pedantically have done to me, and insist that I’m actually a good comrade, and hope you’ll come to the realization that the movement needs us both. Otherwise we are just going to in-fight, which if I wanted to do that I would debate within the org that I work with, where I might be seen as a human, rather than online where the medium itself encourages back-biting, factionalism and elitism by design.

In other words, cut me a break comrade.

Yes this is what I believe as well but to many people Socialism is synonymous with authoritarianism. Many of those people are amenable to Socialist ideas if not able to be won over completely as you and I have been.

Also, (not to begin the debate about AES) but I think its fair to say that where many socialist projects have failed is in the arena of democracy. Maybe its just a feature of the tradition I come from, but to me that commitment to democracy has to be constantly renewed. Not bourgeois democracy but worker democracy. The working class has to learn real democracy in order to engage in political struggle in preparation to overthrow the ruling class.

Lenin was constantly stressing and renewing his commitment to democratic process, which was one of the reasons he was able to create the revolutionary party after 1905 that was able to seize power in 1917. And while he had no illusions about the limitations of democratic process within his historical moment, he always “bent the stick” in that direction which in my opinion was one of the things that made him such an effective leader prior to and up through the civil war period ending in 1921.

So I will always stress the importance of democracy, not only for the historic necessity and precedent but also because it is not enough to be good materialists (and there certainly has been a history of bad ones) but also good dialectitians, which means contextualizing our project through unificatiokn of the subjective and objective; and to fail to do so is to fail to be dialectical Marxists. If I have to work and debate with some Harringtonites in the process well that is just a necessity of the historical moment.

Just going to keep posting this every time it comes up.

We could reduce energy and materials cost of global production worldwide to 30% current capacity by planning production instead of leaving it to the market, and greatly increase the standard of living for everyone on this planet. But first we have to get rid of capitalism and institute democratic socialist planning.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7n1POfYMo1I3kcy0oqSm6l?si=8ikYVJN8TIupvjoaCMRssA

Morticia Adams lookin fly

I love when people describe a system better than capitalism when trying to make communism look bad.

The point of the meme isn’t about whether you personally would want to sleep with someone who is trans, and whether that makes you a good person or not, its about how the first, second, and last thing a lot of people think about wrt trans people is whether they are fuckable or not. Its not good to objectify people, if you do it is transphobic/sexist/racist/whatever dehumanizing. But if you see trans people as people, and respect their gender, their right to express themselves openly even if you aren’t sexually attracted to them, then this meme will never be a problem for you. And if you feel personally attacked by this meme, try and figure out why, because it’s probably not about you. Don’t be a creep isn’t that complicated, folks

Sorry to be a soulsborne weeb but I have something like 1500 hours in bloodborne and I still pick it up from time to time

The commons

The Elephant and Mice episode was so wild, because if I remember correctly, the elephant didn’t act afraid of the mouse, it acted afraid it would step on and harm the mouse; as if the elephant had a basic understanding and concern for the wellbeing of another creature conspicuously lacking in many human beasts

Yes and have you also considered that beans are evil

Read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels. The quickest way to actually understand Capitalism is to work toward reading Marx’s Capital with a group and other references. It might take a while to get there but this book by Engels will lay the groundwork for you to learn historical materialism and dialectical reasoning.

For Communism, read principles of Communism and the communist manifesto. But start with Socialism: Utopian & Scientific. Since communism hasn’t ever existed, there have been communist groups and parties who may or may not have established different variations of socialism, there’s nothing to study. You can study the history of communist parties and experiments, but there is a lot and much of it is sad or disappointing. Definitely learn about it, but its not where you should start.

Communism is a moneyless, stateless, classless society. Its a movement, something to work toward. It is not a system where the government owns everything. It isn’t “authoritarianism”. Its the opposite of those things.