Elden Ring plot details below. I dunno if "spoilers" is correct, but I'll hide it below the fold anyway.

I'll admit that, even as a word guy, the presence of "scadutree" confused me. But later it became clear, and many online sources confirmed, that much like the old English names for the other two trees, Erdtree (Earth Tree) and Haligtree (Holy Tree), scadu is derived from Old English for shadow. The original spelling was sceadu and would have been pronounced something like "sheadow", which of course evolved into the modern English shadow.

Like the Evergaols being from Old English for Ever Jail, gaol being pronounced much the same as the modern word. And various other examples throughout the game that I can't recall.

2015 was a long time ago. Almost a decade as of this writing. Long enough ago that I wasn't a completely different person, but I was not the same either. I was working a night shift job for most of Qtoid's existence, coming home at 7AM and going to bed at 4PM.

I was with Destructoid as a reader and an active member since before 2012 when my account was made, since before Disqus, in the days of the Outer Heaven chat room, when we had Podtoid and Britoid and the Springboard webplayer playing Rev3 news recaps, then Toilet Edition and Huge memberships and... and a lot of things we don't have anymore.

The Cblogs were an old old part of Dtoid. "C-Blogs" were how several staff members became staff members back in the day. Quickposts, later Qposts and then Qtoid, were an offshoot of Cblogs and part of a big community oriented refresh in 2015 that essentially allowed anyone to post on the site with a Twitter-like character limit. Likes, or "faps" could be given to posts more than once per user (it was supposed to be based on the number of Dtoid accounts that were following you). Qtoid launched around about the same time as the shutdown of the original forums and an exodus of a number of people who essentially only used the forums. It was a time of realizing that social media spaces can be shitty spaces if you let them. And Dtoid was making a pivot away from the hyper masculine roots of gaming websites past to something less... destructive. A lot of people left. If you remember Jimbox or Stealth, then you know types.

Qtoid was a bespoke Twitter. It was Cohost a decade before Cohost. I can't imagine surviving the internet in 2016 if I were still on Twitter. We weren't free of bullshit but with a local mod team, we were about as close as you could get on a large platform. I know not everyone agreed with the mods, and neither did I 100% of the time. But I'll take being told "don't post that, it's a spoiler or it's NSFW or it's not cool" over the hellscape of mainstream social media sites any day. And I did. For about 9 years.

This article has reminded me why I love English as much as I do.