"The origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hillside after some heavy snow and started to slip," says Miyazaki. "The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill... That's it! That's how everyone can get home! Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill, and I managed to get home safely."

"But I couldn't stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I'd have just got stuck again if I'd stopped. On the way back home I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home, and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we'd met in another place we'd become friends, or maybe we'd just fight..."

"You could probably call it a connection of mutual assistance between transient people. Oddly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time. Simply because it's fleeting, I think it stays with you a lot longer... like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much."

Miyazaki describing his inspiration for the cooperative summoning system. He's not all gloom and doom. The multiplayer is kind strangers finding each other in adversity and choosing mutual aid.

Also, how do I stop getting my friend, whomst I'm playing Dark Souls 1 with, from saying "hit the bonny" as in "before I let you play just let me hit the bonny real quick and level up."

I hate it and when I bring it up he pretends he hasn't heard what I said. He also removes the pants portion of the character's armour whenever he plays for some reason, saying it probably gives him more i-frames. I put the pants back on when I play.

Werner Herzog: [On the jungle] Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It's the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

the romans would frequently talk about how going beyond the mediterranean is a folly, dead and foreign gods dwell in the seas, elements become fickle and nonstatic, the world begins to unwind after a certain point so you may as well forget what you know, you are not as adapted to new climates as the humans there are and it felt like nature knew this. deadly animals and diseases were far more numerous and the technology was much poorer and you didnt have the logistics to fix or replace what breaks.

honestly, strong agree. theres a few pockets of oasis that we have all dug ourselves into and tamed. the world itself is dangerous as hell without modern technology.

With where we are at as a species technologically, everyone could be living better in terms of quality of life than any ruler did a millennia ago. Turns out disease and a variety of produce is pretty cool.

So bloodborne really was based on England after all