#Fun! #WordPress #Bloggers – You want to know this if you don’t already.

If you go into your profile and account settings, there is an option right beneath the interface language button that says “Fun.”

That option ads a check-box to your dashboard’s publish settings that says “this post is super-awesome” and you can tick that box any time you like.

We have no idea what it does beyond that, but I am seeing comments on forum threads that make me think it eventually adds other options as well. I never would have found it if not for Diana. She apparently enabled it without realizing a couple of weeks ago, and I tracked this down to figure out how to enable it on my own blog.

She’d been judiciously checking the “Super-Awesome” box for Part Time Monster‘s best work for about a week when she was Freshly Pressed.

My theory is that it does something random to your feed-posting. Like adds you to places you would never be seen otherwise. I doubt it is directly connected to Freshly Pressed. My best guess with no evidence whatsoever is she got lucky and “super-Awesome” put her near the top of the queue of a blogger who just happened to be choosing FP posts at the time, and her post just happened to be timely, opinionated, and concerned with justice. Like winning the lottery three times in a row.

I figured out how to check the “Fun” box by searching “This post is Super-awesome WordPress” then scanning forum threads until I found this. Tagging this post for my Z2H friends, because it is information I think you might appreciate.

Dark Souls: What is Wrong with You?

by Garrett Ashley

I’ve been on sort of a Dark Souls kick lately. I can’t say why. The game doesn’t make any sense unless you use the wiki or have an IQ of 160. Everything is so cryptic. The game is hard, and it fills me with anxiety. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Video games are so tame these days. They try to be like movies—they don’t want you to fail, they want you be able to move forward and see all the gorgeous textures and polygons they’ve crammed onto the disk. Dark Souls doesn’t care about polygons. Nothing.

At the beginning of the game there’s a boss fight. You die fighting an Asylum Demon, pictured above. Don’t forget to light the bonfire before going in. You’ll be tossed into Dark Souls Limbo if you don’t rest at a bonfire before dying here. After dying two or three times fighting the Asylum Demon, just try running around the room a bit until you find an opening. Pass through the opening and a wall of bars will fall down. Don’t stand next to the bars wagging your tongue at the Asylum Demon, because he’ll hit the bars with his big stick and you’ll die. Rinse and repeat, if so.

Run up to the top of the asylum, and you’ll encounter a wall of fog. Pass through the fog and you’ll fall down on the Asylum Demon. Do this as many times as it takes. Sometimes, you’ll win a boss fight, and get points and new items.

When you get out of the Asylum, you’ll have a few more boss fights. I find that the key to success in this game is desensitization. Pretty soon, you’ll be addicted to losing.

I think it’s best to play the game without an internet connection. Sometimes you need to reverse hollowing (become a human) in order to summon helpful NPCs to aid you in boss battles. But when you’re human, you run the risk of getting invaded by dark phantoms, which are neckbeards that are a lot better at the game than you. The folks at Bandai and Software have written a lore that makes online play more. . . realistic. It’ll make sense. Other people will just seem like terrible monsters to you. Don’t talk to strangers.

Anyway, you fight a bunch of bosses. Then you fight this zombie king, whose sword is on fire. I find it’s best to circle the area for about thirty minutes, shooting him in the face repeatedly with crossbow bolts. Cheating is a gameplay mechanic in Dark Souls. Don’t be afraid to exploit various loopholes, or else you’ll never get anywhere in life. When you finish the game, it starts over on a harder difficulty, thankfully.

That’s about all I have to say about this game. Dark Souls II comes out in March. Here’s a neat video that’ll help you get through tough times.

images: “You Died” screenshot, Video Gaming Hard Corps; “You so Best,” This is Privilege.

You will love this song.

This video has been bouncing around YouTube forever. It gets taken down often, but someone always puts it back up. I am sure the link will not last, but we can enjoy it today 🙂

Is this Steve Earle in the early 70s? Hard to say.

The guitar and the lower-pitched parts of the vocals say yes. The period is right. It’s definitely something he wrote. He recorded it on Train a Comin’, so the period is right. And it looks like him. But there is something about this video being on YouTube that is just too easy to believe. It’s like a perfect hoax that my mind cannot accept. What do you think? Is it him?

The video takes me back to my childhood. In my earliest memories, my grandparents’ house is very similar to this place they are having the party in.  By which I mean the construction, colors and fixtures are similar. My grandparents’ house was (sadly)  never full of long-haired smoking people with guitars, even in the 70s.

And since we are on the subject of guitars and trains,  bop over to Peace, Love, & Great Country Music for more of both. There is also a haiku.

Video game post from Garrett today, later.

Zero to Hero Friends: I haven’t forgotten about you :)

The assignments and the needs of this blog have not been well-aligned this week. No time for the daily prompt, and I tried other posting formats when I first started. I use text and embed the media I need in them for very sound reasons, I think. I already comment on three or more blogs almost every day.

I am still keeping tabs on the challenge, scanning my reader and checking out your work. I have followed a lot of you. I’ll have a Zero to Hero feature with links to some of you before the month is out. If you have learned things from Z2H that have REALLY improved your blog, write a post about it and drop a link on one of my threads. I’ll read what you have to say and consider featuring you.

I’m glad I did the first two weeks so religiously. It really improved my blogs, and I am happy I discovered you all.

Tagging this post just for you.