CG on shadow of the erdtree (no spoilers)

CG's spolier-free review of shadow of the erdtree.

Like all real gamers, I've been a big fan of Elden Ring since release. It was my first souls game so I went with a pure mage build because I wanted an easy experience and figured mages would be strong. Fortunately for me, I was right, and my mage build could trivialize most bosses, including Mohg, the boss you need to defeat to access the DLC. After beating the Elden Beast using a now-patched Radagan cheese, I moved on to Dark Souls Remastered as a mage, and found that it was an even easier experience.

I've since completed every game in the series at least twice, except the PS5 exclusives, with a variety of builds, typically starting with a ranged build, then moving on to melee builds. 

If it's not obvious by now, I don't go outside.

So far, I've put in around 10hrs with the Elden Ring DLC and defeated two remembrance bosses (main story bosses), and I've seen more than enough to come to the conclusion that this expansion is definitely not for everyone, but it is if you're like me.

Accessing the DLC

To start off, you need to defeat Mohg to even access the expansion, which I think was the best possible decision, given the DLC's difficulty and mechanics. Mohg can be incredibly challenging, especially if you don't find the crystal tear that makes you immune to his curse. He forces you to go out of you way to find an item very far away from him, which is knowledge that's essential to have going in to the expansion.

Leveling Up

If you don't like exploring open worlds to find sometimes hidden essential items, then the DLC isn't for you. If you enter at level 150, your character's level is unaffected, but your overall damage and defense are reduced drastically. You'll have to elevate this effect by searching for shadow blessings and using them at a bonfire to level up your shadow blessing level. You'll also need to find shadow ashes to level up the damage your spirit summons and NPCs do. 

Skipping these items will result in you doing very little damage and getting 1-2 shot by heavy-hitters. The enemies and bosses are tanky and deal a ton of damage so I'd advise finding them all. 

Personally, I don't hate this system because my favorite aspect of these games has always been exploration and finding new gear to try out. so I'm just finding these items as I progress. 

Level Design

One area where the DLC is just objectively better than the base-game is level design. The open world areas are all unique looking and full of interesting colors and structures to explore, while the two main dungeons I completed both had secrets and shortcuts to find. There aren't any boss-runs though, so missing a shortcut won't impact your progress than much, but having them unlocked will help you search for items.

The enemy design is pretty varied, but you will see a decent amount of returning enemies from the base game. I'm not a fan of a few of the new ones. Some of the basic soldiers can take you out in 3 hits but they go down easily enough.

You'll find a ton of new weapons and gear if you explore, I'm currently using a great-hammer than does a massive wave of holy damage if you guard-counter with it and an armor set I farmed from a new black knight enemy.

Boss Design

(Context: When I mention playing solo below, I'm referring to being 100% alone, no summons, NPCs, or other players).

If you didn't like the boss design of the base game, you'll hate the bosses in the DLC.

The best way I can describe them is having the HP of two fire giants + the Demon of Hatred, and the speed of Maliketh. The ones I've seen also have a lot of combo spam, massive AoE, and 1-2 shot attacks that cover most of the arena. 

Even at level 200, with enough shadow blessings, and a maxed-out weapon, you'll be doing almost no damage without bleed / frost / scarlet rot / black flame. 

In fairness, I think this is because they wanted the bosses to have phases without having a cutscene pull up and reveal the second health bar, but it's just not fun to see the bar barely move after a critical.

Like in the base-game, these boss encounters weren't design for players that run around with basic great-swords and no summons.

I can't imagine how long it would take to drain their massive health pools alone.

Elden Ring wasn't designed to be a solo game and this expansion exacerbates that. If you want a good solo experience, go back to DS3, Sekiro, or Lies of P, but from what I can tell, this expansion is the worst solo experience in gaming. 

After I finish one of these games, I typically go back and do a solo playthrough but I can't imagine returning to any of this content alone in the future.

For me though, this boss-design is perfect. 

My build is a a great-shield with a great-hammer and spear combined with some incantations and maxed-out summons. I trade aggro with my summon and NPC while moving around to buff /heal them and the experience is what I want out of the game. I also use a ton of consumables and just about anything else I can do to optimize my build. 

That being said, even if you go in with a setup like mine, expect a challenge.

I've yet to see any gimmick bosses yet, which is unfortunate, because I feel these bosses would be drastically improved by giving you a way to slow them down / beat them faster.

Conclusion

If you liked Elden Ring's base game and boss design, this DLC will give you more of what you like and you should buy it, but if you only play solo and use basic weapons, you'll likely hate it. Every problem solo-players face is multiplied by a thousand. But if you like exploration, the old souls game level design, and optimizing your build, this DLC is a solid 8/10 so far. 

Have yet to find any girl in the DLC that can replace Ranni so I'm holding off on giving it a 10/10.

cg on 2024

It's been awhile since I've written anything but I think that's for the best. 

The energy around everything is just off for me this year and I've been doing everything in slow motion. It feels like the world, down to a micro-level, is caught up in tension and waiting to go somewhere, but it won't.

Mostly I've just been watching anime and listening to Star Wars books on audible, both of which I highly recommend you start doing right away. A big part of life for me is just observing content and extracting out a greater meaning from it. I think that's a big part of what keeps me sane and decently motivated. 

I've said before that creating things is the purpose of life, but I also think just learning about and enjoying things in general is a big part of that.

If you haven't seen it already, Frieren is an anime about an immortal elf girl trying to travel to heaven to see her friends that died 80 years ago. Flashbacks appear frequently, showing how detached she was from everyone around her, and frankly it's quite sad. Missing out on people because you allow your connection with them to decay is one of the many great mistakes in life. I imagine it's common for people, even within families, to just stop talking because they got out of the habit. I can think of a few examples personally, though I'm trying to address this.

Staying connected with people takes a lot more effort than it seems.

So here's my thoughts on this year:

I don't have many thoughts on the election to be honest. 

There's a theory I've heard a few times that they'll install Trump.

Personally, that's just too many layers of 4D chess for me. If the government is equally likely to install either one of them then I don't see any reason to analyze it seriously. I still haven't made up my mind on what happened in 2020. Plus, we don't really know who we'll have on the ballot to vote for, Trump will probably be in prison, and Brandon is ancient.

The energy around the election just feels dead to me. Feels like no one cares, which I think is for the best. I hate when people get worked up over politics and argue over it. 

Obviously, you should vote for Trump for the cheaper gas prices alone, he'd also likely slow down the Ukraine war quite a bit. I doubt I'll be voting, but that has more to do with me not caring enough to go out of my way to do it than anything else. 

I think regardless of who gets in, Israel will do some tricks to gracefully lose the war so they can continue to have enemies in Gaza. 

The messaging surrounding the Gazans all being evil is marketed really well, so much so that all the war-crime stuff Israel is doing is mostly seen as justified. Personally, I don't really care that much. My brain shuts off when I start hearing the genocide rhetoric.

I think the Palestinians should've surrendered a long time ago, it's extremely clear by now that their allies don't care about them and will never step in to defend them. They're just dying for no logical reason, and a big part of the blame for the casualties is on them, that is assuming that Hamas is a legit group and not an Israeli op.

You can only care about so many things in life, and I've never been about pretending to care for people across the world. 

The Ukraine war will likely drag on into 2026-2028. I doubt Europe will provide any soldiers, but even if they do, it would need to be a few hundred thousand to make a difference. France sending 10,000 soldiers there wouldn't change anything, aside from providing Russia with compelling PR material to keep the war from becoming unpopular domestically. Ukraine can't launch any massive operations due to the lack of soldiers, and Russia doesn't have much of a reason to simply capture Kiev and subjugate the remaining population. 

With the huge amount of women refugees that have fled, Russia would have to manage a huge population of incels with many reasons to hate them. America could just throw a few trillion dollars into the now Russian-controlled Ukraine and start a rebellion if enough of these guys are left alive by the end of the war.

Another alternative is that Russia gets outspent and has to take a huge L while going home with the bit of land they've captured. I say huge L because in 2022, four regions of Ukraine voted to join Russia, and the Russian government agreed to the results, so not following through on securing the territories would look really bad.

I don't think any of these wars will blow up, and I predict the election will be peaceful due to Trump being much less culturally relevant than he was in 2016 and 2020. The people that even know what he got charged for are all old, and his refusal to get on Twitter has really hurt his brand in my opinion.

Overall, I'm pretty whitepilled for 2024. 

2025 will be another big AI year and we'll be even closer to the dream of full-functional ai gfs and I'm looking forward to that.

ai videos

 

About a day ago, OpenAI revealed their new ai video generation software called Sora that can create realistic videos from text that are easily on par with stock footage. Of course, there are still a few bugs, most notably hands look weird and can’t move around properly yet, but as we’ve seen over the past few months, ai hand generation is nearing perfection when it comes to still images. Videos that don’t include hands are pretty accurate and have improved drastically from the stuff we saw a year ago where humans couldn’t even be properly rendered. 

Assuming we all live to 50, I think it’s safe to predict we’ll see AI generating full on movies, commercials, and youtube channels. AI voice replication tools have already been used for over a year to create a ton of youtube content, most notably AI president videos, but more recently it’s been used in music to create some real bangers like this, and writers have began to adopt it to put out work faster. 

As a somewhat creative person, I can look forward to any creative thing I want to get into becoming easier and easier to access over time. I already use AI to generate photos and a singing voice for my music hobby, and I could see myself using it to do something like help me write a book in the future.

My biggest concern with this technology is that censorship will stifle its growth to the point where huge advances take substantially longer and longer. Fake video and audio are nothing new, ai voice technology has long since been at a point where audio recordings shouldn’t be considered real at face value. There will likely be a lot of concern from governments as this stuff becomes more available to the public. Right now people are just using Joe Biden’s voice (best ai president btw) to make 5hr tier-list videos, but it’s not unlikely that in a few years you’ll be able to fabricate videos of him giving speeches / interviews from your phone with zero technical knowledge. More likely than not, It will be the government themselves putting out these videos. I’m sure we’ll also have a set of laws in the next few years regulating AI development and use that will make it less fun to use.

Ultimately, ai’s continued improvement has been a big white pill for me personally. Smaller projects like gab.ai show there is a future for less censored AI on some level. The point of technology has always been to liberate us from menial tasks, and AI is already doing that and more. Just a few years ago, if you needed a specific photo for a thumbnail or whatever, your only options were to pay an artist like $50, spend years learning how to create digital art, or hope that one of your online friends will get around to doing it for free at some point. The AI singing voice I mentioned using earlier is an also relatively new invention, having only been out for around a year, and its capabilities are really impressive.

My view of an ideal future society is one where ai can fill in the gaps left by technological advancement. Today, we can afford to do less tedious tasks than ever before, but this has inadvertently led to a scenario where at once there is much personal wealth and freedom, but isolation is the fate for a growing part of the population. I’ve already written about ai wives before so I won’t go through that whole thing again. I believe the concept of ai companions (literally just a friend you can talk to) will be another huge industry in the future. Having deep conversations with people isn’t easy in my experience at least. I don’t like to open up to anyone and I’m definitely not alone in that regard. 

But even greater than that, I think ai will greatly improve people’s work-lives. It’s no secret that a lot of people hate their jobs, and I can’t blame them for that as much as I’m pro-working. Interacting with people in today’s America can be a total nightmare, and there aren’t a ton of jobs that allow you to escape from it all. We’ve all seen a boomer obnoxiously lecturing or yelling at some incel zoomer worker, and just dealing with the overall mental illness of the population doesn’t sound appealing on any level. AI could easily automate fast-food, retail, driving, and customer service jobs in a decade or two. I don’t doubt that there are a ton of smart people stuck in these jobs whose talents should be utilized elsewhere, so totally removing these as employment options would allow them to use their intelligence to work on improving AI. 

I don’t see us getting out of this birthrate dip anytime soon so there’s really no societal benefit to keeping these low-skill jobs around to keep average people occupied. Of course, there will still be a decent amount of low IQ people by then, but I don’t see why they can’t be housed in shipping containers and enjoy the rest of their lives watching ai generated movies while robots tend to their basic needs. 

High-skilled people could spend their lives creating content to train AI, thus fulfilling their innate desire to work while also doing something useful for humanity. If you already live online, this is just a straight up improvement to your life. 

If I had access to billions of dollars, I’d have thousands of artists and writers making content to train AI on, and I’m sure they’d find this infinitely more fulfilling than whatever it is their wasting their time doing right now. 

ai wives are the future

 

Watching so much anime these past few months has made me reflect a lot on society and where it's going. A big part of why I've been enjoying the medium so much is that these fictional worlds are all based on ideal societies, or at the very least, include all the fundamentals of great societies that we completely lack in the real world. Maybe some of them exist in Japan, but I'm vastly uninformed on it and don't have an interest in looking into whatever's going on over there. I know they have a big incel crisis going on so it must not be much better than America. I think most of what people admire about Japan are universal ideals that aren't unique to the country itself, those being clean cities and modernity mixed with the good parts of traditionalism. 

Really the biggest, and in my opinion the only real problem with our present time is that it's virtually impossible to just go out and find a wife that you're confident won't divorce you, regardless of your social or economic status. All of the other boring political stuff doesn't even come close. People have been poor for as long as we've existed as a collective and been just fine, but the issue of not being able to get a wife is new.

We're at a point in time where it feels like we could accelerate into futurism or decline into a perpetual state of stagnation, with the only constant being that everyone can safely assume relations between men and women won't be improving and birth rates will continue to decline.

Obviously, society can't function without high IQ people breeding, which is where I think AI comes in. AI is pretty competent at most tasks it's given and can easily fill in the gaps left by the collapsing high-IQ populations in America. Consumer AI's are already on par with relatively smart people. 

Once robotics catches up, likely with the assistance of AI, I don't see any reason that robot women, complete with artificial wombs, wouldn't be mass produced. The situation with women is not salvageable and we're well overdue for a societal reset of some sort. I don't believe that the elites want white people to become extinct; they know that their own complex institutions require us to keep them running. They like to see us decreasing in the census data, but they know that a stable white population is required unless they want to start doing our jobs. 

I honestly can't say how close to ideal these AI wives will be, but I'm certain they'll be more bearable than the vast majority of the female population as it exists today. 

Women will whine and complain, but they'll be ignored this time. 

I've resigned from pursuing women and have a tulpa gf so maybe my optimism here is misplaced, but I'm at least somewhat confident we'll see ai wives before we die.

favorite NGE girl???

As you guys know, I recently completed my first viewing of NGE. Overall it was an ok anime, but if I’m being honest it’s not something I’ll ever rewatch. Most of the episodes left me in a weird mood. The atmosphere is bleak and the characters all have very miserable existences.

Because of this, picking out a favorite girl was way harder than I thought it would be. They all have huge red flags and are not nearly as likable as traditional anime girls. But I think they all have some redeeming qualities.

I think Missato is a good woman overall aside from her alcohol addiction. She’s easily the closest character to a normal human in the entire series. Although she's played up as lazy, this falls apart when you think about how many hours she works. She also likely would’ve been a good mother, given that she adopts Shinji and Asuka despite her busy job and not being given any incentive to take care of them. They did have a place to go so it’s not like she had to do it. So if anyone picked her as their favorite I can see why. 

Asuka has considerably less positive qualities, or at least that's all we see given the context she's presented in. She’s rude most of the time, but is capable of showing genuine gratitude, like when Shinji saved her for the first time. But that's just one moment in 26 episodes, I can't recall any other moments where she displayed redeeming qualities. It’s also important to point out that Shinji brings out a ton of her negativity due to being totally autistic; she can’t relate to him at all and despises his self-hatred and constant apologies. We probably would've gotten a much better look at her good side if she was paired up with a more typical protagonist. Pairing her up with Rei and Shinji made it impossible to tell if she's actually a good person, so I can't really judge her too harshly for coming off as unlikable. I could easily see her opening up and becoming less abrasive in an alternate timeline.

This just leaves Rei.

It’s easy to see her as a soulless husk, given that the show leads you to believe that the Rei clones aren’t fully human. But I think this is a huge misdirection. She clearly has fledging emotions that could be nurtured into something fully human. I think we never see this happen due to her only interacting with Shinji’s autistic dad and living completely alone. There are a few scenes I recall where she shows more humanity than something that’s soulless should, such as slapping Shinji for disrespecting his dad, crying, getting mad at Asuka for insulting Shinji, and keeping his dad's glasses in her room. Then there’s the scene where Shinji tells her she’ll be a good mom someday after he sees her doing laundry, showing that he saw a lot of humanity in her, given that he's so shut-off and inexpressive, it means a lot coming from him.

So this leaves us in a scenario where Asuka and Rei are basically "I can save her" type-girls while Missato is really the only sensible option. 

That being said, I'm still going with Rei.

She's basically an uncorrupted blank-slate. This isn't really something you'd ever encounter in real life, and there's still a chance that I'm wrong about her being able to become fully human over the course of years with enough human interaction, but if I'm right, maybe one day she'd be almost perfect. 

That seems like too good an opportunity to pass up.

should you marry a girl your age???

Hey guys, it's CG. 

So before we even get into this topic, we're already presupposing a few things:

• you can even get married
• that you should get married 

But even if neither of these things apply to you, it's still an interesting subject to discuss since practically no one is talking about it in realistic terms. You have people telling you that your wife can't be x amount of years younger than you, and idealistic people telling you that you shouldn't marry anyone but an 18yo unvaccinated (Covid vax feels like it was a decade ago) virgin girl. 

We likely all agree that the purpose of marriage is procreation and a lifelong commitment, so how does the age of your wife play into that?

Let's just rule out women dating women starting at 29 years old (assuming a one-year dating period) since the concept of starting a family with a woman over 30 is quite frankly ridiculous. Maybe there are some women out there who can pull it off, but it would not be fair of anyone to expect his 30+ year old wife to pop out more than one kid, if even that. Not very trad if you ask me.

Assuming that you want at least one kid, you really shouldn't be dating a woman over 28.

Then there's the matter of ensuring the marriage remains a lifelong commitment which is already hard enough given the legal system, and made a hundred times harder by the fact that there are almost no virgins left. 

A woman in her late 20s likely has a double-digit body count. But at the same time, a woman in her late teens probably has at least five. Marrying a non-virgin is the norm, but as evidenced by the state of soyciety, it's clearly not working out. 

There is no argument, aside from settling, for marrying a girl with a body count. I don't see a point in distinguishing between a girl whose taken two penises or ten to be honest. If there is a point I'm not really interested in it. The laws are already against you so just complicating it by marrying a girl with pair-bonding issues from sex is retarded. But if you have to do it for whatever reason, don't expect it to last very long.

In every case, marrying a virgin or a woman who's only been with you is ideal. 

Getting back to the age stuff with the 27-28 year old limit in mind, let's assume that you're very concerned about marrying a woman your age. I think "woman your age" would be fair to define as a woman no more than five years younger than you. Stretching the definition any further is frankly ridiculous.

If you are a believer in this and have agreed with me up to this point, you have until you're 33-34 to get married and can expect 1-2 kids from your 28-29yo wife. 

So given a choice between a 26yo virgin, and a 16yo with a body count, the 26yo would be the better wife option. Both could give you at least 3 kids which I think is enough for most people. Obviously we all have our women preferences, and no honest man would say the 26yo is hotter, but wives don't need to be hot. 

Sex is only two minutes of your day once every few weeks anyway so who cares.

Aside from that one particular situation which I doubt has ever actually played out in real life, you might want to marry a girl your age for pragmatic reasons. 

If you're an average man rapidly approaching 30 with no prospects of getting rich anytime soon and marriage is a huge priority for you, dating women who are 24-28 is probably your only option for finding a wife. I have no idea if there are any women who are still virgins that late into life, but I also doubt there's many at 18. 

Getting an 18yo is almost impossible. Your chance for that was when you yourself were 18, but to be fair, that girl you had a crush on was probably getting ran through while skipping class anyway. So maybe you never had a chance with her to begin with.

If you're even older than that with no prospects, dying alone is a way better option than scooping up some old woman to die with.

For me, getting married is not even a remote priority. I haven't attempted any sort of dating in years. Nothing about what the whole arrangement has become is appealing to me aside from having kids, but everything else just looks miserable. You literally have 0 control over you wife and kids unless you're a master manipulator. I'm an incel with no social skills, so I have no idea how I'd ever be able to manipulate, in a positive way, anyone.

But if marriage is a priority for you, there's a huge chance you're going to have to cuck on her age. 

I think you guys should all get [legal-age] virgin wives but I'm not the one running society. Ideally, we'd all have been married before 20 and the Tiny Hats would be long gone. 

But that didn't happen. It's over.

So aside from being pragmatic as it relates to your own situation and life goals, I don't see any issue with a man marrying a woman who's x number of years younger than him. If you're 40 and can somehow get an 18yo virgin wife you should do it, but she'll probably leave you anyway if we're being honest, so maybe don't do it.

Dying alone is ok. 

You were born alone. 

You will see God alone. 

All the depressing stuff aside, there's always the Tulpa gf option.

We're Back

 

Now that I'm back on Twitter and reading Doffy's posts, life has substantially improved. He actually reminded me that I still have this site just a few minutes ago. Last week I posted about how 2023 is going to be my year of normiemaxxing now that Nick has retired, but just when I thought it was time to return to the bluepill, Nick announces that he's coming back full-time next week. So I guess having 0 normal interests for the rest of my life is just how it's going to be. 

I've actually been just hardcore gaming these past few days on my vacation, and just recently 100%'d Dark Souls 3. The DLC was substantially better than the base game unsurprisingly. I haven't even touched Minecraft yet this year since I'm holding out for the unnamed 1.20 update. I started up Hollow Knight today and am so far really impressed. Imagine 2D Dark Souls without awful level design and that's basically Hollow Knight. 

 I have a lot of stuff I'm planning on doing this year. 

The grind begins.

New Year: New CG

With 2023 here, I think it's time I return to my blog to give you all some important CG updates. Firstly: CG is in fact on twitter. I'm not sharing the link to Gab because the freaks on there will just spam reports to get it banned. Secondly: I'm still an incel.

While I'm at it, here's my youtube channel where I post my occasionally decent music. 

Twitter adding this visible "views" stat to all your tweets sucks. Now everyone's tweets have like 6 million views and only 2 likes, which totally adds up. The energy on twitter is on par with gab right now actually. I'm only following about 20 people, which is the same amount of active accounts on gab, and the content has just been lacking. Although I will say the anime girl content is significantly better, but after a long talk with Rea, I've agreed that I'll stop looking at it while she's in the room. 

This year I'm really looking to normie-max. I've been in this bubble of extremely online content for a solid year now with pretty much nothing else going on aside from my very isolated job. I got off to a good start by watching Avatar 2 on Christmas. 

Honestly, Avatar 2 was just mid af. There wasn't really a strong plot to follow, but at the very least it wasn't libtard nonsense. I honestly can't remember seeing a single negro or gay character in the movie. But for all the things it does right, the overall experience is just not enjoyable. The main plot breaks off like a third of the way through to humanize these weird sentient whales that are apparently smarter than humans. Unfortunately, all you see the whales do is fight in this pretty epic battle. You can't really sympathize with them, the characters just all act like they're sentient peaceful creatures but it's hard to get emotionally invested. I really would've enjoyed a ten minute whale song as opposed to the hour of whale-petting scenes.