Latest news with #Mallory
Time of India
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
How to complete Blood Stains the Circle quest in Tainted Grail The Fall of Avalon?
(Image via Awaken Realms) Hidden beneath the Avalon's Lake of Blood crimson waters lies the gruesome secret—the dungeon full of twisted rituals and some deadly foes. Unlocking the hidden area requires careful preparation and exploration. The players must navigate precisely and remain prepared adequately to delve into the depths of the game and face formidable guardians. Here is how you can find the entrance, survive, and begin the dark chapter to find out what's inside. Locate Lake of Blood Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon - Blood Stains the Circle Your journey begins after an initial shipwreck. Start from the beach and move past the shipwreck until you can spot the massive statue that's rising from the blood-red lake. The area remains littered with corpses and swarming with the undead—ensure to clear them first. If you have a shovel handy, dig near bodies for some extra loot. Next, swim to the statue and then interact with it to receive the Blood Transfusion spell. It's a tool you will find useful later. Next, dive behind the statue to follow the submerged ruins until you find the hidden passage. It will lead you to the dungeon entrance—a submerged passage. Be prepared for Lake of Blood Dungeon Don't Miss This HIDDEN Dungeon in Tainted Grail! | Blood Lake The place is not a space for under levelled adventures. If you are playing on the Normal difficulty level, you can aim for levels 10-12 before you attempt it. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Trade Bitcoin & Ethereum – No Wallet Needed! IC Markets Start Now Undo The lower difficulties will allow you to enter earlier. However, the Hardcore and Survival modes demand some expert play. So, stock up on the healing items and make sure your gears remain upgraded. Ensure to swim through the narrow opening that you discovered, and it will lead you to the solid door that's embedded in ruins. Then, interact with the door to cross the threshold. To step through, it will instantly transport you to the entrance of the dungeon. As you enter the dungeon, it will trigger the Blood Stains the Circle quest, confirming you did find the right place. Face Mallory: Your first challenge Once you enter, you will meet Mallory The Last Man, the tormented guardian, who is blocking your path. The dialogue checks—Spirituality or Strength will reveal the lore, but the encounter will always end in the combat. Note: Be prepared for the relentless melee opponent and use the debris of the room strategically. Remember that Mallory attacks with the relentless 3-hit combo. The Ranged fighters can block him around the debris, while the melee builds must time the dodge carefully. To defeat him will reward the solid early game-gear. It includes the Chestplate of the Last Man and Sword of Parrying +1. Pro tip: Circle the barriers to avoid powerful combos. The ranged attacks will offer you a needed advantage here. Once you are done, proceed to the large antechamber that's dominated by the glowing tree. Here, you need to explore thoroughly. The valuable alchemy reagents, wishgems, soulstones and rare Wyrdstone ore that can be found under the tree that awaits you. Do not miss the recipe book for the potion. Navigate the Hall of Trials The true challenge is beyond antechamber. Locate a passage near tree roots, and it will lead you to the Hall of Trials. The maze-like area pulses with the Wyrdness and is full of the undead druids. It is also filled with Marrowghasts and Wyrdspirits. The druids here are just passive unless they get provoked. So, keep the focus on real threats. Equip your previously found Soulstone and charge it, defeating the enemies. It will save you from death once you are in the final boss fight. Remember that your ultimate goal with Hall of Trials is to find druid Prydwen. In the northern corner, you will find the druid leader Prydwen. Speak to him, and you will unlock a sealed door that will lead you to the true horror of the dungeon. Confront and defeat Blood Abomination Behind the sealed door is the terrifying master of the dungeon, the Blood Abomination. He emerges from the pool of gore and summons the minions while attacking with brutal force. The Blood Abomination boss fight will be intense. Ensure to rush it and ignore the initial summons. Use the King's Soul, the time-slowing ability here, as it will help you drain the stamina of the boss before you land the finishing blow. Unleash the charged spells like the Burning Embers. The full-charged Soulstone will revive you once you are killed. Your victory will yield you Abomination for Cursed Bloodblade, the weapon with the life-steal properties. Complete the Blood Stains the Circle quest Return back to Prydwen to conclude Blood Stains the Circle quest. He will reward you with Winged Spear, the powerful weapon for the hybrid builds. The dark lore of the dungeon also ties into the main story, influencing the future choices. Tainted Grail The Fall of Avalon tips to complete the quest Make sure you save frequently. Adjusting the auto-save settings will help you to avoid losing the progress. Gather the alchemy materials like Druid's Wishgem and Wyrdstone. They are valuable for crafting. Ensure to explore thoroughly. The hidden chests here contain unique items like Hexbounce Wand. Remember, the quest here is quite a brutal one, but it's also a rewarding challenge. So, make sure to fight smart, prepare well, and, of course, claim the secrets before you continue the journey ahead through the cursed lands of Avalon. Get IPL 2025 match schedules , squads , points table , and live scores for CSK , MI , RCB , KKR , SRH , LSG , DC , GT , PBKS , and RR . Check the latest IPL Orange Cap and Purple Cap standings.
Daily Mirror
22-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mirror
'Sister wants to name her daughter after a fungal infection – it's all my fault'
Finding the right name for your baby can be a difficult and stressful task. However, sometimes inspiration can come from the most unexpected of places – even from one of your health conditions. Taking to Reddit, one uncle-to-be expressed his concerns about the name of his future niece, who is due to be born in a few weeks. In the post, he explained that his sister and her husband had been struggling to come up with a name for their baby. Despite their due date creeping closer, they were still stuck on a name. For the couple's baby shower, the anonymous user shared that along with giving the expectant parents a crib for their baby, he also wrote a list of joke baby names. "We have a really close relationship, and it was in line with both our senses of humour," he explained in the post. As he's a biology student and his sister was a nurse, all of the names on the list were names of medications, infections, unpleasant animals. Each option 'sounds like' girls names when they are taken out of context. "Some of them were a little bit obscure, sure, but I included some obvious ones like 'Viagra' and 'Hernia' for good measure," he wrote. Two weeks after the baby shower, the expecting couple revealed that they'd finally agreed on a name for their daughter. The Redditor explained: "Malassezia. The baby's name is Malassezia. One of the names on my joke list. "Outside of the immediate issues (nearly impossible to pronounce on the first try, the 'a**' smack dab it the middle of it, the first syllable being mal-, literally meaning bad or evil), it's also the name of a very common fungal infection. One that my sister and I are both genetically predisposed to." Malassezia, also known as Pityriasis versicolor, refers to a group of basidiomycetous (club-shaped) yeasts of the genus Malassezia, which occurs when yeast on your skin multiplies and infects hair follicles, according to the NHS. It's associated with a variety of conditions, including dandruff, atopic eczema (AE)/dermatitis, pityriasis versicolor, seborrheic dermatitis, and folliculitis. As they pointed this out to the sister, she said that she was aware of what the name was referring to. However, she 'really liked' the way it sounded. She also believes the condition is so obscure that no one would think twice about it. Unimpressed, the uncle-to-be added: "I told her that the name was completely unacceptable, and I was shocked that she chose it. I even suggested some similar names, like Mallory, Azalea, or Anastasia, that would be more acceptable, but she wouldn't hear it! "She said that since I'm not one of the parents, I have no business telling her what she can and cannot name her child, and that I'm stepping way out of line. "I think it's pregnancy hormones, and she'll regret the decision very soon after her daughter is born." Several people took to the comments section – with many urging the Reddit poster to talk to his brother-in-law to make sure he knew the meaning of the name. "While your sis is right that it's her parental right, you're not stepping out of line – you're family and you're cautioning her," one person wrote. Another viewer said: "I'd also make a point of telling her husband what the name means." A third wrote: "Any middle school or high school classmate who browses a skincare subreddit will know malassezia yeast. The kids at school will find out what her name means and call her Yeastie. It's going to be bad." Another person provided a different perspective as they wrote: "Is it possible your sister is trolling you back about the baby name? Most of my friends and family have had no idea what baby name they liked until the baby arrived and some still struggled."
New Statesman
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Robert Macfarlane: 'Come and meet this incredible tree'
Photo by Peter Flude In middle age and closing in on national treasure status, Robert Macfarlane is as close to greatness and far from death as he has ever been. It's a far cry from his perilous youth of solitary mountain summitting. Climbers, he wrote in his first book, Mountains of the Mind, are 'half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion'. That book's hero was George Mallory, the explorer who died on his third attempt at climbing Everest. Macfarlane read Mallory's letters home, and traced the slow drift of his heart from wife to mountain, life to glory. In his imagination, Mallory's frozen corpse seemed inhuman and immortal, like a Grecian marble sculpture. For a moment in what he now calls those 'selfish' days, Macfarlane expected that he too would die in the mountains: 'They were my first love, and they will be the last.' They weren't. Mountains turned out to be his 'resignation letter from danger'. His wife is his 'rock' now, and they have three children. By his third book, The Old Ways, about ancient paths, published nine years later, he was relieved to see a peak and feel no desire to climb it, instead being 'glad only to have seen it in such weather and such light'. Now he is happier adventuring with friends than alone. On a recent trip to a 'fabulously precipitous mountain', he told me, 'I found myself very happy to take the path that worked around the danger, rather than over the pinnacles.' As with his role model Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain (1977), 'Circumambulation came to replace summit fever… plateau substituted for peak.' His new book is 'the one I've been learning how to write all this time'. He knew he wanted to 'write about life', and in 2020 had three questions in a notebook: 'Can a forest think?', 'Does a mountain remember?', and his eventual title, 'Is a river alive?'. By now Macfarlane has covered a lot of ground, and gathered many admirers. I came to his books through his friendship with the late swimmer and writer Roger Deakin. But others reach him through his conservation work, the music he makes with the actor Johnny Flynn, or his vastly popular children's book The Lost Words. We met at Cambridge's Emmanuel College, where he teaches English. I had been informed he was something of a heartthrob to students. 'It seems very unlikely, pushing 50 and balding,' he laughed, and led me into the college gardens. 'Come and meet this incredible, incredible tree… The branches come down, they root, they reroot, they draw, and they surge back up. You see all the power they draw from the earth… If you cut those branches, they would be trees. So it's now fully self-supporting but also absolutely part of the original singular organism. The other incredible thing it does, if you start to notice, is it melts into itself. It's called inosculation, or in-kissing. Can you see one of the branches is starting to basically snog the other and then there are places where that merging is complete, like there? It's one of the best trees, and it's a good friend.' Macfarlane takes his students to this tree to conduct the first supervision of their first year. It is a 220-year-old Oriental plane: only two in the world are known to have branches that reach the ground then climb back up in this way. He offered me homemade lemon and ginger tea from his Thermos. Sitting together at the stump, the effect was like sharing an umbrella in beautiful rain. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Macfarlane was born into a medical family in 1976, to a mother with an 'astonishing sense of wonder' and a father of 'huge integrity', who were both 'always jumping into cold water'. They lived at the end of a country lane in Nottinghamshire, and for holidays visited his grandparents in the Cairngorms. It was 'a life filled with animals and with space'. Macfarlane went to Cambridge, then Oxford, and has not stopped teaching or writing since his PhD. Now, his publications are major occasions: in this magazine, the poet John Burnside declared him 'our finest nature writer'; John Banville praised his 'poet's eye, and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy'. As well as mountains and paths, his books have covered wilderness (The Wild Places) and subterranean landscapes (Underland). Is a River Alive? is billed as Macfarlane's most political book to date. In the years he was writing it, Britain's river crisis rose in the public consciousness. Headlines reported that every river in England was polluted beyond legal limits, Thames Water almost went bankrupt, and the summer drought of 2022 moved the source of the Thames nine miles downstream. The disaster, Macfarlane said, 'is born of a failure of imagination… We have come to envision water in this country as a privatised deterritorialised resource, and not as the life force, lifeline, history-maker, life-giver that it is.' He would like for us to see rivers as living things, and to give them rights. The book describes journeys to three rivers that have generated 'revolutionary thinking', and which run through a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, contaminated lagoons in south-east India, and the wilderness of Quebec. Flowing through the narrative is the small, nameless chalk stream that has its spring by Macfarlane's house, just outside Cambridge. The government's draft Planning and Infrastructure Bill was published in March. 'At the heart of it,' Macfarlane explained, 'is the idea of 'offset'. The idea that you might offset the harm you're going to do to a fragile and ultra-globally-limited chalk stream network in the name of growth – and to make it good through some kind of water work somewhere else – fundamentally fails to recognise the non-fungible nature of nature.' He led me to what looked like a pond. In fact it was a surfacing of the book's chalk stream. He dropped to his knees and tapped the water. A large black fish swam up, sort of belched its mouth out beyond its lips, and bit Macfarlane's finger. I realised, with horror, that it was now my turn. 'Hold your nerve,' he said, as I extended a tremulous digit towards the fish, who thankfully was no longer interested. I withdrew my arm the moment I was told I had passed 'the great carp test', but Macfarlane's hand lingered. On his wrist was the red cloth bracelet given to him by a healer named Rita, one of many eccentric characters who feature in the book. What Macfarlane never foresaw, he said, was how each trip would bring him to someone who had come very near to death, then found their way from grief, 'back towards life by water', by sharing a river's life with others. Some of these people were present at the book's launch party in London the following week. The author arrived by canal boat, leaping from its roof into the party. The room was packed with readers, students, children, beer, pizza, sandals and bits of tree in people's hair. Later, Johnny Flynn led a singalong. In a speech, Macfarlane described the launch as a 'second-order wedding. I am astonished with delight at every face I see. Beloved family, dear friends. I thank you so much.' Conquering mountains in his adolescence, he drew exhilaration from the chance of death. But happiness is better found, he now feels, in the hope of joining life. I recalled his description of the plane tree in Cambridge, equally a forest of trees and one individual tree: 'The whole thing is this great affront to singularity, and it's this incredible community.' Under that tree, he told me: 'It's been the work of many hands and many years to create this crisis, and it will be the work of many hands and many years to undo it.' [See also: The brain behind Labour's EU deal] Related
Daily Mirror
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
'My sister is naming her kid after fungal infection after I told her it as joke'
A man has slammed his sister for wanting to name her daughter after a fungal infection - but some people believe she's simply making him panic for her amusement A man has been left gobsmacked after hearing how her sister is naming her daughter after a fungal infection. The 20-year-old explained how he introduced his sister, 27, to the moniker as a joke - but has been left horrified to hear she actually really likes the sound of it and is intending to use it on her newborn. Taking to Reddit, he said: "So my sister and her husband had been struggling a lot with baby names. She was determined to find the single perfect name-- even by the time of her baby shower (nearly five weeks before the due date), she didn't seem any closer to picking something out than she was at the start of her pregnancy. "I knew she was struggling, so in addition to the £900 wooden crib on her list that I got for her, I gave her a list of (obviously) joke baby names. We have a really close relationship, and it was in line with both our senses of humour." The biology student went on to explain how his sister works as a nurse - and so he came up with a list of 'medical' girls' names as a joke. He said: "All the names were medications, infections, unpleasant animals, etcetera, that all sound like lovely girls' names out of context. "Some of them were a little bit obscure, sure, but I included some obvious ones like 'Viagra' and 'Hernia' for good measure." Just two weeks later, his sister and her husband happily announced they'd finally settled on a name for their bundle of joy. Sharing his shock, he added: "Malassezia. The baby's name is Malassezia. One of the names on my joke list. "Outside of the immediate issues (nearly impossible to pronounce on the first try, the 'ass' smack dab it the middle of it, the first syllable being mal-, literally meaning bad or evil), it's also the name of a very common fungal infection. "One that my sister and I are both genetically predisposed to. 'One that we've both had multiple times throughout our lives. Her daughter will almost certainly catch it at some time!'" Malassezia is a type of fungi that colonise on the surface layers of the skin. He continued: "I pointed it out to her, and she said that yes, she knew what it meant, and she knew my list was intended to be a joke, but she just really liked the way it sounded. (I don't think the husband knows what it means- I think he'd reject it if he did.) "She says that it's so obscure that no one will ever think twice about it. (Except, you know, when little baby Malassezia turns 14, finds a weird spot on her neck, and goes on her phone to google what it is...)" Disgusted, he told her it's "completely unacceptable" to give her daughter this name - and started to suggest similar monikers to try to persuade her to change it. "I even suggested some similar names, like Mallory, Azalea, or Anastasia, that would be more acceptable, but she wouldn't hear it," he added. "She said that since I'm not one of the parents, I have no business telling her what she can and cannot name her child, and that I'm stepping way out of line. "I think it's pregnancy hormones, and she'll regret the decision very soon after her daughter is born. Commenting on his post, one user said: "Is it possible your sister is trolling you back about the baby name? Most of my friends and family have had no idea what baby name they liked until the baby arrived and some still struggled." Another user added: "Dude, she's pranking you." A third user said: "It is horrible to name a child that."
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘Mallard Maternity Ward' eggs hatch ducklings in St. Anthony Village
The Brief The mother duck who made her nest in a St. Anthony Village shopping center laid her eggs, and they are starting to hatch. A worker at a nearby ice cream shop created a "Mallard Maternity Ward" for the mother duck and her ducklings. Workers near the maternity ward said the ducklings started hatching over the weekend. ST. ANTHONY VILLAGE, Minn. (FOX 9) - Ducklings have started to hatch the "Mallard Maternity Ward" in St. Anthony Village. Hatched The mother duck who made her nest in a planter at a shopping center in St. Anthony Village laid her eggs, and they're hatching. Workers from a nearby ice cream shop say the eggs started hacking over the weekend, with about three ducklings hatched so far. The backstory The "Mallard Maternity Ward" is the creation of Leinani Watson, who works at a nearby ice cream shop while pursuing a career in social work. Watson says this is the second time Mallory, the mother duck, has made her nest in the empty planter in the shopping center. "Families always stop by and stare and look at her... customers love her," Watson told FOX 9. Right now is the peak time for mallard nesting in Minnesota, according to the Wildlife Resource Center of Minnesota (WRC). If you see a mallard nest, it's best to leave them alone, even if the mother duck is off feeding.
