That title either made perfect sense to you or no sense whatsoever. So, for the second category of readers, let me explain; no, let me sum up….
Elden Ring is a role-playing action videogame renowned for the difficulty of its combat. In particular, there’s an optional boss toward the end, Malenia, Blade of Miquella, that has spawned literally hundreds of YouTube videos of players playing (and screaming and swearing) for hours before they finally defeat her or give up in tears.
Pointcrow is a Twitch and YouTube streamer who tends to play a lot of Zelda games. He likes to give himself wacky challenges in the games he plays, like streaming a new game nonstop (except for short breaks to eat and sleep) until he beats it. He sometimes bets his viewers that he can do these things within certain benchmarks, and if he fails they set penalties that he films himself doing like skydiving while playing a saxophone.
Finally, Pointcrow owns a goldfish named Tortellini.
Put this all together, and you get…total madness. If you’re going to watch the video, caveat spectator: there’s substantial video-game violence and some moderate swearing from Pointcrow; Tortellini, on the other hand, is a perfect gentleman.
If you don’t have time to watch or don’t care, here’s the TL;DR for you: Pointcrow gets a friend to write a computer program that allows Tortellini to select buttons on the PlayStation controller merely by swimming around his glass tank: behind the tank there’s a grid filled out like a bingo card with the names of the buttons in a tiled configuration (because you need the “heal” button to always be pretty close to where Tortellini is swimming or it’s gonna be a short-lived experiment…). A camera keeps track of where Tortellini is on the grid and feeds that info to the computer, which inputs the appropriate command to the game. You would think it would be a complete disaster, but it turns out, as Pointcrow sagely notes, that a fish randomly swimming around performs better than many human gamers (including myself, I’m quite positive). It’s true that Pointcrow helped the little guy out by levelling up his character’s armor and weapons for him to expert levels, and it’s true he only got Malenia to her second phase. But even that accomplishment–on top of beating a couple of tough previous bosses–is extremely impressive and totally hilarious.
The Rookery 