Roberto Burioni

2025-09-11 09:29:04

In giornate strapiene di bruttissime notizie, eccone una buona. La medicina compie un altro passo contro il cancro al polmone.

404 Media

2025-09-11 19:00:43

Does Silksong Seem Unreasonably Hard? You Probably Took a Wrong Turn

There is an aggrieved cry reverberating through the places on the internet where gamers gather. To hear them tell it, Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel to the stone-cold classic 2017 platformer, is too damned hard. There’s a particular jumping puzzle involving spikes and red flowers that many are struggling with and they’re filming their frustration and putting it up on the internet, showing their ass for everyone to see.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Even 404 Media’s own Joseph Cox hit these red flowers and had the temerity to declare Silksong a “bad game” that he was “disappointed” in given his love for the original Hollow Knight.
youtube.com/embed/3yxR6H_Zh0M?…youtube.com/embed/GD8ZyYE1K7k?…youtube.com/embed/ZsmxOMijLtE?…
Couldn't be me.

I, too, got to the area just outside Hunter’s March in Silksong where the horrible red flowers bloom. Unlike others, however, my gamer instincts kicked in. I knew what to do. “This is the Dark Souls Catacombs situation all over again,” I said to myself. Then I turned around and came back later.

And that has made all the difference.

In the original Dark Souls, once players clear the opening area they come to Firelink Shrine. From there they can go into Undead Burg, the preferred starting path, or descend into The Catacombs where horrifying undying skeletons block the entrance to a cave. One will open the game up before you, the other will kill new players dead. A lot of Dark Souls players have raged and quit the game over the years because they went into The Catacombs instead of the Undead Burg.

Like Dark Souls, Silksong has an open-ish world where portions of the map are hardlocked by items and soft locked by player skill checks. One of the entrances into the flower laden Hunter’s March is in an early game area blocked by a mini-boss fight with a burly ant. The first time I fought the ant, it killed me over and over again and I took that as a sign I should go elsewhere.

High skilled players can kill the ant, but it’s much easier after you’ve gotten some basic items and abilities. I had several other paths I could take to progress the game, so I marked the ant’s location and moved on.

As I explored more of Silksong, I acquired several powerups that trivialized the fight with the ant and made it easy to navigate the flower jumping puzzles behind him. The first is Swift Step, a dash ability, which is in Deep Docks in the south-eastern portion of the map. The second is the Wanderer’s Crest, which is near the start of the game behind a locked door you get the key for in Silksong’s first town.

The dash allowed me to adjust my horizontal position in the air, but it’s the Wanderer’s Crest that made the flowers easy to navigate. The red flowers are littered throughout Hunter’s March and players have to hit them with a down attack to get a boosted jump and cross pits of spikes. By default, Hornet—the player character—down attacks at a 45 degree angle. The Wanderer’s Crest allows you to attack directly below you and makes the puzzles much easier to navigate.

Cox, bless his heart, hit the burly red ant miniboss and brute forced his way past. Then, like so many other desperate gamers, he proceeded to attempt to navigate the red flower jumping puzzles without the right power ups. He had no Swift Step. He had no Wanderer’s Crest. And thus, he raged.

He’s not alone. Watching the videos of jumping puzzles online I noticed that a lot of the players didn’t seem to have the dash or the downward attack.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Get This Bag (@get_this_bag)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by PromoNinja PromoNinja (@promoninja_us)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @mariworld0

Games communicate to players in different ways and gamers often complain about annoying an obvious signposting like big splashes of yellow paint. But when a truly amazing game comes along that tries to gently steer the player with burly ants and difficult puzzles, they don’t appreciate it and they don’t listen. If you’re really stuck in Silksong, try going somewhere else.

Permanately stuck in Catacombs? :: DARK SOULS™: REMASTERED General Discussions

I am trying to leave the Catacombs completely from the new bonfire near Vamos but cannot seem to do so. I cannot warp to other bonfires yet.

^{steamcommunity.com}

404 Media

2025-09-11 17:44:39

Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way

Thursday morning, Ezra Klein at the New York Times published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein’s general thesis is that Kirk was willing to talk to anyone, regardless of their beliefs, as evidenced by what he was doing while he was shot, which was debating people on college campuses. Klein is not alone in this take; the overwhelming sentiment from America’s largest media institutions in the immediate aftermath of his death has been to paint Kirk as a mainstream political commentator, someone whose politics liberals and leftists may not agree with but someone who was open to dialogue and who espoused the virtues of free speech.

“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.”

“I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness,” Klein continued.

Kirk is being posthumously celebrated by much of the mainstream press as a noble sparring partner for center-left politicians and pundits. Meanwhile, the very real, very negative, and sometimes violent impacts of his rhetoric and his political projects are being glossed over or ignored entirely. In the New York Times, Kirk was an “energetic” voice who was “critical of gay and transgender rights,” but few of the national pundits have encouraged people to actually go read what Kirk tweeted or listen to what he said on his podcast to millions and millions of people. “Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high,” David French wrote in the Times. “In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.”

This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.

Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,” “School Board Watchlist,” and “Campus Reform” for nearly a decade.

“America’s radical education system has taken a devastating toll on our children,” Kirk said in an intro video posted on these projects’ websites. “From sexualized material in textbooks to teaching CRT and implementing the 1619 Project doctrine, the radical leftist agenda will not stop … The School Board Watch List exposes school districts that host drag queen story hour, teach courses on transgenderism, and implement unsafe gender neutral bathroom policies. The Professor Watch List uncovers the most radical left-wing professors from universities that are known to suppress conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.”

These websites have been directly tied to harassment and threats against professors and school board members all over the country. Professor Watchlist lists hundreds of professors around the country, many of them Black or trans, and their perceived radical agendas, which include things like supporting gun control, “socialism,” “Antifa,” “abortion,” and acknowledging that trans people exist and racism exists. Trans professors are misgendered on the website, and numerous people who have been listed on it have publicly spoken about receiving death threats and being harassed after being listed on the site.

One professor on the watchlist who 404 Media is granting anonymity for his safety said once he was added to the list, he started receiving anonymous letters in his campus mailbox. “‘You're everything wrong with colleges,’ ‘watch your step, we're watching you’ kind of stuff,” he said, “One anonymous DM on Twitter had a picture of my house and driveway, which was chilling.” His president and provost also received emails attempting to discredit him with “all the allegedly communist and subversive stuff I was up to,” he said. “It was all certainly concerning, but compared to colleagues who are people of color and/or women, I feel like the volume was smaller for me. But it was certainly not a great feeling to experience that stuff. That watchlist fucked up careers and ruined lives.”

The American Association of University Professors said in an open letter in 2017 that Professor Watchlist “lists names of professors with their institutional affiliations and photographs, thereby making it easy for would-be stalkers and cyberbullies to target them. Individual faculty members who have been included on such lists or singled out elsewhere have been subject to threats of physical violence, including sexual assault, through hundreds of e-mails, calls, and social media postings. Such threatening messages are likely to stifle the free expression of the targeted faculty member; further, the publicity that such cases attract can cause others to self-censor so as to avoid being subjected to similar treatment.” Campus free speech rights group FIRE found that censorship and punishment of professors skyrocketed between 2020 and 2023, in part because of efforts from Professor Watchlist.

Many more professors who Turning Point USA added to their watchlist have spoken out in the past about how being targeted upended their lives, brought years of harassment down on them and their colleagues, and resulted in death threats against them and their loved ones.

At Arizona State University, a professor on the watchlist was assaulted by two people from Turning Point USA in 2023.

“Earlier this year, I wrote to Turning Point USA to request that it remove ASU professors from its Professor Watchlist. I did not receive a response,” university president Michael Crow wrote in a statement. “Instead, the incident we’ve all now witnessed on the video shows Turning Point’s refusal to stop dangerous practices that result in both physical and mental harm to ASU faculty members, which they then apparently exploit for fundraising, social media clicks and financial gain.” Crow said the Professor Watchlist resulted in “antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic attacks on ASU faculty with whom Turning Point USA and its followers disagree,” and called the organization’s tactics “anti-democratic, anti-free speech and completely contrary” to the spirit of scholarship.

Kirk’s death is a horrifying moment in our current American nightmare. Kirk’s actions and rhetoric do not justify what happened to him because they cannot be justified. But Kirk was not merely someone who showed up to college campuses and listened. It should not be controversial to plainly state some of the impact of his work.

ASU President: Turning Point USA crew accused of 'bloodying' ASU professor's face

Arizona State Police released footage of an incident between an ASU English professor, a reporter and cameraman from Turning Point USA that happened on Oct. 11. University president Dr. Michael Crow released a statement calling the men "cowards."

^{Jessica Johnson (FOX 10 Phoenix)}