Same Same But Different

I was going to take (another) day off from posting because I was out for much of the day and I didn't have anything I particularly wanted to talk about but then I was idly scrolling through all the Amazon Prime Gaming and Steam games I haven't played (or installed) yet and I happened to notice two or three occurrences that looked like they might tie together into a quick post. So here we are.

It's something of a follow-on, thematically at least, from the post I wrote on Monday about playing the gaming field and not staying loyal to a single game, a topic and a concept I'm still mulling. With Solasta out of the way, I've been in search of a game to fill that pause-friendly, tactics-heavy, somewhat cerebral slot and I was browsing the possibilities to see if I already had something that would fit the bill or whether I'd need to find something to buy.

To forestall the inevitable suggestion, obviously the best choice would be Baldur's Gate 3 but I'm definitely not spending that much money. I may see if I can get someone to give it me for my birthday or Christmas although if there's one major downside to  digital distribution it's that it renders video games entirely unsuitable as gift recommendations for aging relatives. Until then it'll have to be something on a budget or preferably free.

While I was dithering, I took a side-turn and started playing Crowns and Pawns, a classic point & click adventure I bought on sale earlier this year. It ticks the pause and brain boxes but as I discovered, after an hour of mostly enjoyable puzzle-solving, it does absolutely nothing to scratch that tactical itch. I'll definitely keep on with it because it seems like a really good game - just not the game I'm looking for right now.

I also tried Shadowrun: Dragonfall, a tactical rpg I picked up at 90% off recently, which ought to have been exactly what I was after but very much wasn't. While it absolutely nailed the tactical elements as well as being fully pausable, it failed to engage my interest in either the characters or the plot. The minute size of the characters and the lack of anything much in the way of visual effects had the unfortunate effect of making the combat seem perfunctory, even though it probably has at least as much going on as the games I'm comparing it with unfavorably. I might give it another go but I suspect I won't.

With nothing meeting my exacting standards, I found myself idly scanning the news along the top of the Steam screen, which was where I was reminded of a couple of items I'd read earlier, along with some new news I hadn't seen before. Two games I'm kinda-sorta still playing are on the cusp of turning themselves inside out in the hope of attracting interest and players and it occurred to me that, if I wanted to see how that went, I'd probably have to start both of them over from the beginning.

Starting over seems to be a recurring theme just now. I wrote recently that I'm on hiatus from Once Human because I haven't quite decided if I want to start afresh on a Seasonal server, either right now or as soon as a different scenario becomes available. Now it seems I can add both Nightingale and New World to that decision tree.

I hadn't really considered the quasi-relaunch of New World, under the New World: Aeternum brand to be something that would necessitate a clean start. I suppose it doesn't, per se, but having read Tyler Edwards' piece on his experience of the press version of the upcoming beta it seems fairly clear that there's at least an opportunity to begin again anew.

The Nightingale marketing department, meanwhile, is urgently attempting to explain to worried punters that that the upcoming Realms Rebuilt update, a rewrite so extensive I have seen it described as a relaunch, will allow players to clone their current online characters to the offline version of the game. 

This, apparently, will take place in something called Legacy Mode, the explanation for engaging with which requires a very complicated FAQ, which I have skimmed but don't yet fully understand. It appears that as of tomorrow, when I next log into Nightingale, all my character slots will be empty but somehow I will be able to recover my "old" characters and play them offline, even if I haven't done anything to prepare for the wipe.

I have to say all of this came as a complete surprise to me. I didn't even realise the update constituted a full character wipe. If I was currently playing Nightingale I might have been a tad miffed. Since I'm not, though, I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity to start the game again from the beginning.

But is it an opportunity I want to take? I enjoyed both New World (Almost 250 hours played.) and Nightingale (Over 100.) but do I want to do it all over again, slightly differently? 

I certainly didn't get much value out of My Time At Sandrock, which I bought at a very early stage, while it was still in early development, then ended up hardly playing at all. I jumped on it because I'd really enjoyed My Time At Portia but it transpired that playing what turned out to be a very similar game (At least at that early stage of development.) didn't light the same fires.

Now I see that the My Time crew are trailing a Kickstarter for a third game in the series, My Time At Evershine and for no good reason whatsoever I find myself quite excited by the prospect all over again. I have at least learned my lesson. I won't be pledging or buying in to Early Access. Even so, when the game finally arrives in a full-featured, launch version, I wouldn't bet against me buying it anyway

A few years ago - okay quite a few years ago - starting over in games and playing through the same content only slightly differently was pretty much standard operating procedure for me. As my EQ25 series is more than amply demonstrating, I used to make a lot of characters in the same MMORPGs, especially when there were different starting areas.

Yeebo posted today about the attraction of all those very different class stories in Star Wars: the Old Republic. I commented to say that the sheer number of stories had actually put me off the game and it did to an extent but I'm sure it would have the opposite effect had the game been around back in my EverQuest days. I'd have taken it as an opportunity to play lots of characters without having to go through the exact same content every time.

The question I'm asking myself, as I look at the revamps of New World and Nightingale and the possibility of a third My Time game, is whether I still find the prospect of rolling a new character in the same game as appealing as it once was. It's a question that applies, not equally but to a significant degree, to my search for a suitable replacement for the turn-based, tactical combat titles I'm craving.

To some extent, every return to a familiar genre or style of game could be said to be tantamount to playing the same content with a different skin. It's just a matter of degree. There's a considerable appeal to the familiar and the more I think about starting over, the more I remember how much I used to enjoy it.

Maybe I'll take the opportunity to see if any of that enjoyment is still there to be had. I could even give SW:tOR another run. 

Okay, let's not get carried away...

#10 - Osterberg - Born 13 May 2000 - 6 days 16 hours

Before we get started, I feel I really ought to apologize for the abomination you see directly above. I have no idea what Osterberg is wearing but clearly he ought not to be allowed out in public dressed like that. He looks like a still from a slasher flick with the polarities reversed.

And he's such a nice chap, too - for an Iksar Shadowknight. Arguably the most evil class and race combo you can get in EverQuest, although I wouldn't say it out loud anywhere near Neriak. Dark Elves have a rep to keep up.

It might be quite surprising, looking back, to hear it took me exactly a month after the launch of EQ's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, to get around to making an Iksar, the new race that came with it. I can remember exactly why it happened. It was because I was worried that if I made one right away I'd find it too distracting. At the time, I was on a break from Rachel, my druid, after her disastrous introduction to the new continent but I was planning on getting back on the Druid horse and I felt having a whole new city and no fewer than four fresh starting zones to explore might pull focus from that plan.

Ruins of Kunark is considered by some to be the best expansion for any MMORPG ever and while there's always going to be a great deal of partiality in any such assessment, it's hard to argue with the sheer scale of the thing. Arriving less than a year after the launch of EverQuest itself, RoK all but doubled the size of the game. It came so feature-complete it could have operated quite effectively as a sequel, let alone an expansion.

Instead of bolting the new content on to the top of the level range, as has become the custom for most expansions in most MMORPgs ever since, Kunark simply duplicated the entire base game in a different setting; specifically a jungle. It came with a huge, new city, Cabilis, big enough to need splitting into two separate zones, East and West, in which lived a new, playable race, the reptilian Iksar. 

In the classic language of Dungeons and Dragons, Iksar were Lawful Evil, with a complicated, hierarchical society largely dominated by Necromancers and Shadowknights. There were other class choices available to them, most notably the new Monk class, which turned out to be extremely popular, but I kept my own monkish experiments for the PvP server, Rallos Zek, about which we will hear no more, mostly because whoever my character there was, he no longer exists.

I decided to make an Iksar SK rather than a Monk because... No, at this remove, your guess is as good as mine. Possibly I'd enjoyed the Necromancer and fancied something similar but more robust. Who knows?

One thing I do remember is that I was very impressed by the starting options available to new Iksars. They had four full-size starting zones! What the heck were the devs thinking?

The zones were Field of Bone, Swamp of No Hope, Warsliks Woods and Lake of Ill Omen. Strictly speaking, I suppose only the first was a pure starter zone, with mobs tapping out around level 20. The others all had content that went right into the low 30s. But all four could be accessed directly from Cabilis and all began at Level 1. It was perfectly possible to level up in any one of them or in any combination.

If you could find your way out of the damned city, that is. I never could, not without going wrong half a dozen times first. 

Eventually I became quite fond of Cabilis but for a long time I found it extremely frustrating. Not only was it a confusing maze of streets, it also had canals everywhere and more three-dimensionality than any of the original cities, even treetop Kelethin. There were ladders in Cabilis and you could climb them, which was just as well because when you fell in the canals that was the only way you were going to get out.

I don't remember a huge amount about hunting in any of the starting zones other than Field of Bone, where I spent most of the first ten or twelve levels. As you might guess from the name, FoB is full of undead, which worked out very nicely for a Shadowknight - or at least it did when they got spells at level 9. Until then it was all straight-up melee combat much like a warrior.

I know I got spells well before I decided I needed a change of scene. In fact, I got to the second set at level 15. By then, xp in Field of Bone was slowing down somewhat and it was a few years later because I hardly played Osterberg most of the time. He quickly became one of the many characters I was "working on", which meant I logged him in now and again, when I remembered, for bit of leveling before I rested him for another few months.

For most of my first decade in EverQuest I didn't just make a lot of characters, I played several in every session. I would routinely spend two or three hours on whoever I was supposed to be leveling at the time, then another thirty minutes or an hour or so each on  two or three others, often on different servers. It's no wonder it took me years to get any of them to the cap.

Osterberg got played non-stop for about two weeks, which seems to have been the limit of my attention span back then, after which he was mostly forgotten. He was stuck at level 15 for a very long time until finally I decided I'd had enough of Kunark and moved him to Antonica. In a way, it was a repeat of the Tarquinn episode, undertaken for much the same reason and with much the same result. 

I don't have any clear memories of the trip except that it was a lot easier because by then we'd had the Plane of Power expansion so getting from one continent to another was very straightforward. You just clicked on one of the new books that popped up on pedestals all across Norrath, particularly in starting zones, and ported yourself up to the Plane of knowledge. From there, you just needed to find the Portal for the city or zone you needed and port yourself back down again.

That got Osterberg out of Kunark but it didn't endear him to anyone in the old world, where Iksars are even more reviled than Trolls. Even Dark Elves won't tolerate them, mostly for reasons of religion, I believe. 

Unlike a Troll Shaman, though, an Iksar SK does have some options. They can use the bank by feigning death next to it - apparently even dead people can use a safety deposit box. Even better, they can turn into a skeleton, at which point most Dark Elves become quite comfortable with them and are more than happy to trade.

Or so the rumor has it. Osterberg wouldn't know. Back when he was in the leveling business, SKs didn't get Feign Death until level 30 and Shroud of Death not until fifty-five. But it didn't matter. He could always jog back to the book and port himself up to Plane of Knowledge, where everyone's money is good. Or use the Spires to go to the moon of Luclin, another egalitarian society.

One of the defining factors of Norrath is how its inhabitants became progressively less psychotic, less ready to kill strangers on sight, as the years rolled by. With the exception of the xenophobic Iksar, just about every subsequent outpost of civilization that revealed itself in an expansion was happy to open, if not its arms, then at least its banks and stores to outsiders. 

If I wanted to go back and play Osterberg now, which having written this I feel I just might, I could do it with little more difficulty than any of my more broadly-tolerated characters, always provided I took care not to stray into any of the unreconstructed pits of bigotry that pass for towns and cities in Antonica. Or the strongholds of Faydwer, either, obviously, although no-one goes where there are that many elves, not if they have any sense.

There's only one thing left to say about Osterberg and that's to tell how he got his name. I named him after Iggy Pop because Iggy does look kind of like a lizard and "Iggy" just sounds reptilian. Then, having thought of it, I decided Iggy was too obvious. Everyone would know why I'd picked it and I couldn't be having that!  So I borrowed from Iggy's real name, James Jewel Osterberg, instead.

Even then,I was sure someone would spot the reference and ask me about it. Of course, they never did. No-one ever does with any of the names I pick. In all the time I've played EQ, a few people have sent me tells saying they like the name of a character I'm playing but only one person has ever asked me why I chose it. 

That was when I was playing Osterberg but it had nothing to do with Iggy Pop. I got a message one day while I was playing him, asking me aout the name and when I explained how I'd come up with it, they clearly had no idea who I was talking about.

"Oh, I thought you might be a friend of mine. That's his name. Osterberg" was all they said and I never heard from them again. 

Social gaming, eh? It's so overrated.

Currently Playing...

Time for a quick update on what I'm playing, I guess. Because that's what we do here, right? 

Not sure I could explain to a space alien why it's what we do, even assuming it's anything a space alien would want to know, which seems unlikely, now I come to think about it. You'd imagine, if they'd come here all the way from Alpha Centauri, which always seems to be where most of them come from, any self-respecting space alien would have better things to do with their time than quiz random bloggers on why they keep telling everyone what games they're playing.

Or not playing, come to that. It's not like I'm keeping a tally but I'd have to guess I've read as many posts about what games someone has stopped playing as I have about those they still are. And that's not even getting into the count for games we're all thinking of playing!

So, what started all this introspection, if that's the word? ( I was going to say "nonsense" but I think Belghast has that one trademarked.) Well, if you really want to know it was Jeromai.

Jeromai's signal blinked back to life yesterday after a couple of years of silence, proving yet again how crucial it is never to remove anyone from your blog roll. Well, not anyone you would actually want to hear from again, that is...

The name of Jeromai's blog is Why I Game, which seemed exceptionally appropriate for his post on coming back to Guild Wars 2 after a long layoff. Among other things, he talks about coming home to a former MMORPG and indeed back to the corner of the blogosphere where he used to chat about such things. His conclusion is that you can't really come home to somewhere that was never really home in the first place, which really puts another layer on that overused line of Thomas Wolfe's. 

I have a seasick feeling I covered all that stuff here once before and anyway it's not what I wanted to talk about today. I'm a lot more interested in something I said in my reply to Jeromai's post (Well, there's a surprise...).

Looping around to those blogging about blogging discussions that always come up during Blaugust, I've mentioned a few times how I tend to just sit down and type to get a post going and how that sometimes means I end up writing something I wasn't planning. Like this, in fact.

It goes further than that.

Writing the way I do, not just in posts but in comments as well, sometimes means I hear myself saying things I had no idea I thought. It's not that unusual for me only to find out what I think about something when i read back what I've written. It's even more common for me to think I think one thing, only to discover, as I try to put it down in words, that I don't quite think that at all but something else entirely.

In this case, what I discovered when I replied to Jeromai is that right now I prefer not having a "main game", as I did for more than twenty years from the late 90s onwards. It's liberating. And relaxing. And more fun.

I remember how important it felt to have that one game, always an MMORPG, naturally, as the spine of my gaming anatomy. How unmoored and at sea I felt whenever I reached the end of my time with my game of choice at the time.

There were many times when I felt the urge to move on but it always seemed extremely important to have a new game to go to whenever I considered leaving an old one. Gaming was like serial monogamy back then. You stayed faithful to one game until you broke up, then you either began a new relationship with some other game you'd been eying up for months or you thrashed around desperately until you either swallowed your pride and went back to what you knew or somehow managed to convince yourself you'd fallen in love all over again with something else - anything else.

The life of an MMO gamer could all too easily descend into a series of intense, increasingly short-lived relationships or, if you prefer a less emotionally taxing metaphor, an endless skip across a line of ever-decreasing stepping stones, heading always into deeper water, farther form any safe shore. OK, that wasn't much more re-assuring.

It absolutely wasn't just me, either. It was the way it was for a lot of people. Leaving one MMORPG for another was reckoned a Big Deal. There used to be all kinds of talk about loyalty that seems positively delusional now: loyalty not to the people you might have been playing the games with but to the games themselves. As though they knew or cared.

Some of that still clings to the periphery of the hobby but the zealots and loyalists eem ever thinner on the ground. No-one cares as much and ironically that feels like progress to me. Or  perhaps I mean persepctive.

Even calling it a hobby is telling. No-one ever called it a "hobby" back then. It was a lifestyle as much as anything. Maybe even a calling, a vocation.

Now, it's a hobby. Maybe even a pastime. A bit of fun. If we're lucky, a lot of fun. Just not anything that really matters any more. That has to mean some kind of emotional growth, doesn't it?

It feels that way, to me, anyway. Or it does at the moment. In that comment to Jeromai I surprised myself when I said "I tend to get heavily into each as it comes, play for 50-100 hours then get caught up in the hype for a new one and move there instead to do it all again. I think it’s a vastly more healthy way to play games than getting stuck with one and just trying to keep convincing myself I like it because it’s familiar." 

It's true, though. And now I point it out to myself, I realise I've been doing it ever since I stopped playing GW2, which may have something to do with how loathe I am even to consider going back. I don't want to become one of those bitter vets who can't leave their old game alone even though they haven't played for years but sometimes the metaphor that comes to mind is less one of a relationship that soured than of a substance finally purged from the system. And you know how careful you have to be about those.

This blog has always been a record of my gaming infidelity, of course. I've played countless games, gotten excited by them, posted frenetically about their pleasures, then dropped them and moved on to the next. And often I've gone back, again and again. As with romantic relationships that turn into friendships, it's always good to keep in touch and hang out together occasionally. Sometimes, though, you have to make a clean break.

All of which is an extremely long and uneccessarily introspective introduction to a post that was going to be about my having completed the main questline and all the sub-quests added to Wuthering Waves for the Moonchasing Festival, about having done as much of Solasta as I think I'm ever going to and about why I'm not playing Once Human at all at the moment

I was full of praise for Wuthering Waves' first major update, when I wrote about it almost three weeks ago and I'm very pleased to say the high standard was maintained throughout. There's hours of content in the event, all of which I found involving and entertainning. The storytelling is solid, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is convincing and the mini-games are fun. 

I didn't run a timer but I would guess the whole thing took me six or eight hours to do, a great deal of which was watching and listening to scripted narrative of sufficient quality to hold my attention throughout. There was hardly any combat at all and the couple of set-pieces that did pop up were quite manageable even for someone as bad at the fighting part of the game as I am. (I'm really bad.)

The whole thing ended with an excellent, lengthy cut scene of the quality usually reserved for promotional trailers. Don't take my word for it, though. Take a look for yourself.

Of course, without the kind of parasocial relationships built up between player and NPCs over dozens of hours in game, the emotional impact is lost, but the production values still shine through. Wuthering Waves is a quality game.

So is Once Human as far as I can see, although even people who like it insist on describing it as "janky" and "full of bugs", neither of which has been my experience. I was fully intending to carry on with OH once the Season system came into operation but I just haven't and I can't even say why, for certain.

It would be neat to claim it had something to do with the way the Seasonal process derails progression but I'm playing Wuthering Waves still and that has absolutely the worst "progression" system I've seen in years. I probably ought to do a whole post about that but the tl:dr is that almost every reward and drop is some kind of consumable used to upgrade your character but as yet I haven't felt that upgrading any of them is something I much want to do. I just do the bare minimum I can get away with and then carry on enjoying all the excellent narrative content, most of which doesn't seem to care whether I've upgraded or not.

At the moment I'm sort of thinking about letting my server in OH expire, forcing me to Eternaland, then waiting for the next PVE scenario, whenever that is, before picking the game up again. By doing that, though, I feel there's a real danger I might just never get around to going back in any serious fashion at all. Once Human would then become yet another in my large pile of games I used to like but don't really think about any more. Which would be a shame.

And yet, I can't say I really care. That old loyalty to individual games that used to come so naturally is a lot harder to find, now. It burns hot still when the games are new but allow it to cool and it gets harder and harder to fan it back to life.

It seems much easier and a great deal more enjoyable to get excited al over again about something new. If there was a shortage of good games to try (Or, indeed, old ones to revisit.) then cultivating a loyalty to a specific title might make more sense. As it is, though, I feel the problem revolves more around finding the time to try all the interesting new possibilities than finding something to hang onto like a life-raft.

Which brings me to Solasta, about which I haven't really posted anything and now most probably never will. I've been playing it somewhat obsessively and with considerable pleasure for what Steam tells me is more than fifty hours but now I'm all but certain I'm done with it. 

A couple of nights ago I found myself unexpectedly in the midle of what felt like it had to be the grand finale, the big battle to decide the fate of the world. I was completely unprepared for it, both in terms of where I'd thought I was in the game and in the sense of being in a position to have any chance of succeeding. 

After the first couple of catastrophically unsuccessful attempts I did some googling and found that, yes, it was indeed the very last fight but also that, if I somehow managed to win, the game would literally flash up a Game Over screen and that would be that. I wouldn't even get to loot the corpses of my enemies.

That put a pretty large dampener on the prospect of completing the game at all but I still might hve tried because the comabt in Solasta is a lot of fun and I would quite like to have finished that last fight. When I found out through trial and error that there didn't even seem any way to back out of the whole thing and start over, having prepared myself a bit better, short of going back to a save that was several hours of progress in the past, it seemed to me that the rational reaction was simply to treat the game as over and move on. So I have.

An that's a good thing. I was never a completionist. I never felt I needed the closure of a Game Over screen in a single player game and I'm happy to say I no longer feel the need of a "good reason" to stop playing an MMORPG. 

Now I think when it's time to stop, you know. And if you don't know why you're still playing, then it's time to stop. At least, that's what I think now. I'll know what I think tomorrow when I read what I've written about it then.

#9 - Maggottypie - Born 5 May 2000 - 17 days 11 hours

First of all, doesn't he look great? No-one would have to tell you he's a magic-user. He really looks the part. He also looks pretty darn scary with that austere expression and those eyebrows. How many people's eyebrows turn grey before their hair does? Unless maybe he dyes it...

And look at what he's holding. Some kind of voodoo doll in his left hand and a serrated dagger in the right. A jagged blade says you're serious about gutting your enemies. Those things are banned for a reason.

All of which goes to show just how misleading looks can be. Maggottypie was always one of my sweeter characters despite his forbidding appearance and frankly disturbing name.

Ah, yes, the name... At the time I chose it I was under the impression it was a relatively familiar folk term for a magpie. I'd seen it in Shakespeare and quite possibly in Pratchett but I also thought I'd heard my grandmother use it.

No-one else seemed to have come across it. Certainly no-one playing EverQuest in 2000. I got a few comments about it, mostly along the line of wouldn't it look better on a Necro? Googling it now, I see the actual Shakespearian expression is maggot-pie, which is even worse. Lucky I didn't go with that. I think I wanted to but couldn't because EQ doesn't allow punctuation in character names.

Maggotty, as everyone called him ("Everyone" being Mrs Bhagpuss and one or two others.) is a Magician. Not a Mage, as I confess I have fallen into the habit of calling the class these days. Back then, people would happily correct you if you used the shortened version of the name. I think it might have had something to do with another game using the term, although I was never really sure just why some people disliked it so much.

At that time, EverQuest had two classes that could summon "pets": Necromancers and Magicians. In theory, this made them more suitable for soloing since, in effect, there were two of you. One of the two wasn't very proactive and didn't have any initiative, sure, but then that could happen with any group.

Necromancers, however, were in direct competition with Bards for the Swiss Army Knife of Norrath title, whereas Magicians were very much a one-trick pony. Well, they were then. Now, not so much, as we'll find out later, when we get to #17.

I'd been soloing a Necromancer with some success, on and off, but I'd read a lot about how much more powerful a well-played Magician could be and by "powerful", what people generally meant was faster at killing stuff. Necros mostly employed damage over time spells to rot and poison things to death and DoTs, by absolute definition, take a while to do their wicked work.

Magicians, in contrast, deal their damage up front. They blow stuff up. Not as spectacularly as Wizards, the kings and queens of devestation, but quite spectacularly enough. Plus Magicians have the pet to take the hits while they're doing it, which is a crucial advantage.

Back-tracking for a moment, "pet" was what we called any creature you could either stand behind while a mob battered on it instead of you or any creature you could sic on a target like a (Very badly-trained.) attack dog. In these early days, both pet pathing and pet aggro were huge issues, particularly in dungeons. Misbehaving pets would frequently bring the entire contents of a wing or a floor back to an unprepared, soon to be extremely angry and mostly dead group. The Magician always got the blame even though there was often nothing much they could do to stop it.

It certainly put some groups off taking Magicians, who would often be asked to dismiss their pets if the group needed to move from its pull spot. Since summoning pets cost money in the form of reagents, having to re-summon several times in a session was not a trivial expense and no-one ever re-imbursed you for it the way they fell over themselves to give peridots to clerics for buffs. 

Non-summoning pet classes like Enchanters and Druids were even worse liabilities, since they had to make do with charming mobs. Charm spells had a tendency to break at inconvenient times, meaning their so-called pets could - and regularly did - turn around and try to kill their masters. Woe betide the group who suddenly found themselves having to deal with an enraged former pet mid-fight, especially one that had been buffed to the eyeballs by its erstwhile owner.

We may get to that in more detail when we meet my first Enchanter. For now, let's stick with the real pet classes, the ones who summoned their pets, loyal servants who would stay with them until death or dismissal and who would at least attempt to follow the orders they were given. 

At low levels, Necros got relatively weak skeleton pets that didn't do a lot of damage or take a lot of hits. They improved radically later on but it was a long slog to get to the good ones. Magicians, however, got great pets from the start, one for each of the traditional elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water 

Their roles in a group were generally clear but the debate over which was best for soloing was furious. The easiest, safest option was Earth. The Earth elemental grabbed aggro and held on to it like velcro, not least because it kept casting Root on whatever it was fighting. It also had a ton of hit points and could take a real beating. 

Earth made a serviceable tank even in groups and solo it was like fighting from behind a wall. It could easily hold the mob's attention even while you nuked the stuffing out of it. The Earth Ele didn't hit very hard, so while using one made for a safe option, it could also feel slow.

Water was the all-rounder. It did more damage than Earth and healed itself so it was also quite robust but it wasn't quite as good at keeping the mob's attention and if it lost it, there was no Root to get it back. It was also immune to poison, which could be handy.

Fire did the most damage by far but had the lowest hit points and could often die before the mob did, leaving the Magician exposed. There was a technique for chain-summoning Fire Eles but it was both high risk and high maintenance. I never really got the hang of the rhythm required.

The Air elemental had the best chance of not being hit and also procced a stun fairly reliably, making it a decent option for tanking. It also did quite a lot more damage than Earth, about on a par with Water but not up to the standard of Fire. At higher levels, a lot of Magicians swore by Air for soloing and I eventually came to understand why.

All the elements had their advocates but Earth was by far the most common choice with players new to the class, even though quite a few guides recommended Water.  Air, as I said, was often the choice of more experienced Magicians and Fire was for the real high-rollers as well as being the first choice in groups, when the Magician had been hired to do DPS.

I mostly used Earth at first. After a while, following some guide or other, I tried Water, which I remember not going so well, although it was good for mobs like rattlesnakes which, without their poison attack, turned out to be pretty easy prey. Or maybe I was just better at hunting by then. I mean, you'd have to hope so.

After a while, though, I went back to Earth and stuck with it. I tried Air but Maggotty never really trusted it to keep mobs off him. I don't believe I really got to grips with the Air pet until I played my second Magician a few years later. Back in 2000 I wasn't in that much of a hurry anyway. I was a lot more concerned about not dying than scraping every last point of XP out of each session. Earth kept me safe so I was happy with that.

Other than summoning pets to fight for them, the thing Magicians were best at was playing Quartermaster and that seemed like it might be a good way to get groups. Everyone was always running out of something and Magicians could pull all kinds of stuff out of thin air, from food and drink to weapons and bags. In practice, though, most people I grouped with didn't want much of what I had to offer. The good stuff didn't come until quite a bit later.

Post Kunark, at high level Magicians also got a spell that made them very popular with groups hunting in far-flung places, which in Norrath is just about everywhere. Call of the Hero allows the Magician to summon a group member to them: just the thing when your tank leaves and their replacement is on the far side of the zone.

Needless to say, Maggotty never got to summon anybody. He didn't even get to the level where he could scribe the spell and anyway he rarely grouped. I did actually enjoy grouping as a Magician - it was just that no-one seemed all that keen to take one. Maybe that name put them off. 

Mostly I soloed him, always hoping to see the fast kills and easy xp Magicians were supposedly known for. It never appeared.

Instead, I either ended up spending to much time summoning new pets to replace the ones that had died or going so carefully, trying to make sure that didn't happen, that I hardly killed anything at all. In the early days, your pets would kill themselves if you crossed a zone line, too, so that was another limitation. 

I found playing a Magician a lot fiddlier than playing a Necro. There seemed to be far more reagents to cast the spells and a lot more set-up time in general. I didn't really mind re-summoning a skeleton. It was just a couple of bone chips and a rusty weapon. For a Magician it was a gem and maybe armor and weapons and there was a small random element to how powerful a summoned pet might be, which meant when I got one of the good ones I really didn't want to waste it.

I also found the summoned items annoying in that they were all No Rent, meaning they vanished forever when I logged out so next time I had to start all over again. Worst of all, the extreme reliance on the pet tended to counterbalance any advantage it gave.

And yet, despite all of that, my highest character today is a Magician and I wouldn't, from choice, play anything else now. But we'll get to her later. 

I remember Maggottypie fondly as a cheerful fellow, who rarely lost patience with what was quite often a difficult role. He was fun to play in small doses and on the rare occasions when he managed to get a group I could see why some people rated the class so highly. Maybe now I know how to play a Magician better than I did back then I ought to get him out for a run sometime. He deserves it.

Prime Picks For September

After yesterday's massive post (Almost four thousand words; took me pretty much all day to write.) I am not in the mood for another epic. Luckily, here's Amazon Prime Gaming to do most of the work for me.

It's ironic that almost as soon as I decided to stop covering each month's free games because the scraper had clearly reached the very bottom of the barrel, someone at Amazon decided to do something about it. Not only has the quality of the games returned to something not too far off what I used to expect but the quantity has increased considerably and claiming the numerous titles that come from somewhere other than Amazon has been made a lot easier.

Dealing with that last first, for quite a while the majority of the giveaways have actually arrived as codes to be redeemed at a third-party website, usually either Good Old Games or the Epic Store. To get your games that way you obviously had to have an account with the outside company as well and you needed to link it to your Amazon Prime account. 

As far as I remember, until last month you also had to log into that other account every time you claimed a game, navigate to wherever codes could be redeemed there and paste in the code Amazon gave you to get your game.

Now, you don't. 

I'd already opened GOG when I realised that, when I'd claimed the game on the Prime Gaming website, not only had the code appeared but Amazon had generated a direct link to my GOG account. All I had to do was click on it to go straight to a Redeem screen with the code already entered. One click and the game wasadded to my GOG library. All done in a moment.

Games claimed via Epic now work that way, too. It's surprising it took so long. (Unless it'sbeen like this all along and I never noticed...) Not only does it make the whole process significantly quicker and easier but from Amazon's perspective it also has the benefit of keeping the customer firmly within their ecosystem. 

Sending someone to a competitor's storefront, where they might see something they'd buy, always felt like a strange choice. I don't think it's going too far to say that in my case it's mostly Prime that's been reminding me I even have accounts with Epic and GOG. This way, the chances of me actually stopping to look around when I get there to see what I might be missing are minimal.

So much for the back end. What about the games?

I am not going to go through them all. There's a lot this month. If you care to see them, they're all listed on the Prime Gaming blog along with the dates when they become available. By my rough count there are twenty-eight free games to claim for your permanent collection and about a dozen you can play on loan at Amazon Luna, assuming you live in one of the "supported" countries.

Highlights include three Borderlands titles (They must have been hoping the movie was going to be a lot more popular than it was.), three Lord of the Rings titles (Ditto the second season of the TV show.) plus a Hobbit game, a Tomb Raider title, LEGO Indiana Jones, Greedfall and Kerbal Space Program. Not all of those would be my picks but at least they're games and IPs I've heard of, which was far from the case a few months ago.

It's also very encouraging that when I went to Steam to harvest the links (Isn't it revealing that even in a post about Amazon giveaways, the natural thing to do is provide links to Steam?) I noticed pretty much all of the games I'd chosen had good to very good reviews. Also, just about all of them were on heavy discount, which I don't imagine is any kind of co-incidence.

The games I claimed were:

LEGO Lord of the Rings - I really don't like LEGO as a base for other IPs. The aesthetic does nothing for me. This looked like it might be a decent game in itself though, so I thought I'd get it anyway. It's odds on I'll never play it but what the hell.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor - I seem to remember reading a few people talking positively about this one. Probably too action-oriented for my tastes but again, why not? It's free.

Borderlands 2, Borderlands the Pre-Sequel! - I have never played a Borderlands game but I've always thought the series looked interesting. There's a third title due later in the month. I'll grab that as well. I also must be about the only person on the planet who thought the Borderlands movie trailer looked more interesting than the one for the Fallout TV that released in the same week. I still want to see the Borderlands movie more than I want to watch the Fallout show even now but then I have Madam Web in my watchlist. There must be something wrong with me.

Greedfall - I've seen this one mentioned all over the place. It does look to be right in my wheelhouse. Likely to be the first of the bunch I actually fire up and play although when that would be is anyone's guess. I'll have to finish Solasta first for a start.

Eternights - This is slightly out of my comfort zone but I thought it looked worth a shot. It's a "dating action game, blending a love story with adrenaline-driven combat", plus everything happens on a timer, which sounds like a car-crash combination to me but the screenshots are pretty and the actual gameplay sounds like something I might enjoy so, once again, what the hell. I could probably do with stretching myself a little.

I also claimed a couple of titles I seem to have missed from last month

The College Atlas - I don't even know for sure what genre this is but it looks very odd. It's described as a "pen and ink adventure" and it looks like the adult coloring books that were popular a few years ago. Took it out of curiosity more than in any expectation of actually playing it.

Spells and Secrets - Harry Potter without the license, basically. I don't even like Harry Potter all that much but tactical combat and puzzle-solving using spells sounds fun.

Later in the month I will definitely claim Kerbal Space Program, about which I have only ever heard good things and the third Borderland giveaway, Tales from the Borderlands.

LEGO: The Hobbit is a possible and there are a couple of others I might think about but I'd want to take a closer look at them first. There's no link to the upcoming titles in the blog and I'm not interested enough to google them for myself so I'll wait until they appear on the slate.

Finally, for anyone who wants it but doesn't already have it, which is going to be no-one reading this, and also for anyone who hasn't already bought it when it was incredibly cheap in a sale and thinks it ought to be free anyway, well now it is: Black Desert, that is. Last one to drop in September so set your calendars.

As the Prime Gaming blog warns, though, "Please note: The Black Desert offer is not available in select regions." I can't help but think it would be nice if they'd said which regions but then what can you expect for nothing?

Endings And Beginnings

Having cleared out the tunes locker it's time to do the same for shows. I haven't been watching as much TV of late, for which you can thank a combination of Beryl, Blaugust and something that doesn't begin with B, namely Solasta, into which I have now put more than fifty hours, most of it in the last month.

Even so, I have managed to see my way through to the end of a couple of shows since I posted about the final season of Umbrella Academy. I didn't mention it then because until it was all over, I had no idea, but the creator of  the comic the show was based on is the guy out of My Chemical Romance, a third-wave emo band considered quite controversial in their day (At least by the Daily Mail, but then who or what isn't?) I'm not sure how that knowledge would have colored my view of the show, had I known it earlier.

I think everything I've watched for the last three or four months has been on Netflix. There's a simple reason for that. Well, two simple reasons. And one of them's not all that simple, now I come to write it down...

The easy reason is that I haven't found much I want to watch on the other service I'm paying for, Amazon Prime. If it was down to just the media on offer I'd have unsubbed Prime long ago but of course the primary reason I pay for it is the free and/or expedited shipping and the secondary reason is the free games so anything I watch there is pretty much a bonus anyway.

The more complicated reason I'm not even checking to see if there's anything new on Prime is laziness technical. I mostly watch TV on my laptop, in bed, and my laptop is both ancient and falling apart. Half the keyboard doesn't work any more so I have to use a wifi keyboard alongside it, which is awkward in the dark because it's not illuminated and I can't see the keys. It's also running Windows 8.1 (I think it was Windows 7 when I got it.). 

I've been using a VPN for a while now, partly for the enhanced security but mostly to get access to some shows that aren't otherwise available in the UK. The VPN I use, Mullvad, doesn't support anything that old but it does have some kind of reciprocal agreement with another VPN that does, so I had to link the two of them to get it to work, a mildly complicated procedure which works perfectly but also means I can't just flip the connection around the map at the touch of a mouse like I can if I'm using Mullvad directly. 

Amazon Prime flashes up a panicky "Not in this house!" kind of warning if it senses a VPN so I'd have to take it off every time I wanted to watch something on Prime, then put it back on when I wanted to do anything else. The extra step is enough to make me not want to bother so I don't.

Well, that was a long, boring explanation of something no-one needs to know. Yay me! Anyway, the point is I've been stuck to Netflix like it was the 1950s and there was only one TV channel, so Go Progress! I guess...

Luckily, I'm having no trouble at all finding plenty to watch there. More than I can handle, in fact, which I think is just how it ought to be.

The Conners - Seasons 2 to 5

Attentive readers (Are there any?) may recall I originally took the VPN option to watch three specific shows and seasons: Housebroken (Season 2), The Conners (Seasons 1-5) and Roswell: New Mexico (Seasons 3 & 4).
I already gave my thoughts on Housebroken and the first season of The Conners. The subsequent seasons of the Roseanne sequel were somewhat mixed. I enjoyed the whole thing but some of it was shot during the pandemic and the way that distorted both the narrative and the production was bizarre. 

I actually think it would have made more narrative sense for the writers to have ignored the real-world situation entirely rather than incorporate it into an ongoing storyline although clearly the supposed rootsy, quasi-realistic, highly contemporary tone of the show would have made that more difficult than it would be for most sitcoms. I am wondering now how many shows did do Covid storylines and how that worked out for them. It's going to look really weird in reruns in a few years.

Other than that, the writing was a bit up and down and so was the acting. Laurie Metcalfe, in particular, looked like how she played a scene depended on whether she'd taken her meds or not. As for passive-aggressive, gaslighting Ben, with his bottomless well of self-pity and his unconscionable double standards, I took against him and his hideous beard from the moment the pair of them walked into shot.

For a brief moment, when he appeared unexpectedly clean-shaven, he actually looked almost like a person for a while instead of some kind of cartoon bear. If he'd kept it up I might conceivably have begun to pay attention to him as a character rather than wishing he'd just fuck off back to Jellystone but sadly his filthy face fur grew back all too fast and any interest I had in him died before it could properly say it had been born.

I don't really believe it's a co-incidence that Ben so much reminds me of a bear. Bears are about my least favorite large mammal for their habit of gutting their prey and leaving it to linger on, alive but in agony, just so they can go back and snack on bits of it whenever they fancy. That's barely even a metaphor for what Ben does to Darlene, albeit emotionally not with actual teeth and claws. 

 

Typing the word fuck reminds me I'm going to talk about Kevin Can F*ck Himself in a bit and while I know it was inspired specifically by Kevin Can Wait I do think it could just as easily refer to Ben's manipulation of Darlene. I pretty much worshiped Sara Gilbert for years, mostly for her portrail of that specific character, who I always took to be in complete control of her own, real, true  self and an aspirational role model.

Apparently that was a misreading on my part because Sara Gilbert is largely in charge of the direction of the reboot as far as I can tell and she plays the adult Darlene with no such respect for her past. Instead both she and the writers clearly remember nothing much more than a depressed adolescent with no self-knowledge at all, who made serial bad choices mostly through fear and stubbornness and now has to live with the consequences.

Gilbert is still brilliant in the role but much though the script tries to portray the adult Darlene as making rational, reasonable decisions for the first time in her life, I couldn't see most of them as anything more than finally giving up. She's portrayed as having spent thirty years trying to be a writer and when she finally abandons those dreams to settle for being a middle manager in the factory where her mother used to work, we're supposed to cheer? And then she gives even that up to become a lunch lady at a state college so her precocious son can afford to go there. Geez...

Similar fates befall just about everyone in the show, which could easily be seen as very depressing indeed if all of them weren't so sharp and witty and slick with a one-liner. For a supposed sitcom the whole thing has a real soap operatic, doomscrolling feel to it. 

And yet I still really enjoyed it, partly because it is frequently very funny but mostly because I feel quite connected to most of the characters, having lived with them one way or another for more than half my life. And at least some of them grew and changed in ways I liked. 

I was very surprised by how much I came to like Becky, for example, a character I barely noticed most of the time in Roseanne. She also has her ups and downs in the series but she's possibly the only one of the original cast who always seems to be moving forwards despite all that. She's played with enormous warmth and verve by Lecy Goransen, who I would really like to see in something else now.

The new characters, with the exception of Beastly Ben, are all very fine, especially Darlene and David's kids. John Goodman is as good as he always is and the whole extended cast is generally excellent but no matter how funny everyone is and how strong the performances, it was still a bit of a tough watch at times. All of that may change in the final season, of course, but most annoyingly, Season 6 is currently not on Netflix and I haven't figured out how to watch it for free. I might actually have to buy it!

Kevin Can F*ck Himself - Season 2

Since I mentioned Kevin Can F*ck Himself just now, I'll do that next. I just finished watching the second and final season last night and I absolutely loved it. I thought it was significantly stronger than Season One, which itself was really good.

Given that I enjoyed it so much, it might be surprising to hear that I was also delighted to learn there won't be any more of it. When the final episode ended I actually said to myself "I hope there's not going to be a third season" and the first thing  I did after the credits ended was google to check. I was very happy to find there was no prospect of any more episodes to undo the great work done by the finale.

It seems a definitive statement was made even before filming began on Season 2 that it would all end there. It wasn't originally planned to be a two-season series but that's how it ended up and I couldn't be happier. 

I can't exactly say why without giving away a major spoiler, something I'd rather not do because I really hope someone reading this might decide to go watch the show as a result of my recommendation. What I will say is that anyone who's familiar with almost any strand of popular culture will get to the end of the final show and think the same as I did, namely "Well, I know where that's going...". And I guess it might have, had there been a Season 3. Except there isn't and now it won't, thank god. 

Instead we get an ending. A good ending. A positive, hopeful but very believable ending. We don't get many of those. It'd be a shame to lose even one.

In one way it's surprising there'll be no more. The show as a whole has been well-received, critically, and very deservedly so. I thought the sitcom/drama conceit (Referred to in most reviews as multi-cam/single-cam, which seems a bit insidery to me.) was more effective in the second season, partly because it was more familiar and therefore less distracting but also because the border between the two wasn't quite as clearly delineated. There was a lot more bleed-through, albeit very subtle. 

Especially in the later episodes, I noticed characters in the sitcom scenes saying the kind of negative, critical things to and about Kevin that I don't remember them saying in Season 1. Conversely, there was a moment when Allison seemed almost to gain some understanding of who Kevin was and how he saw the world that wasn't wholly negative. The entire thing, which was already highly nuanced in the first season, took on even more of a grayscale quality, with nothing being quite as black and white as before. 

Creator and writer Valerie Armstrong has done a lot of interviews about the show. I'm always very conscious of the intentional fallacy so I don't necessarily take what creators believe about their creations as anything much more than one possible meaning among many. All the same, it's always helpful to know and in this case I didn't find myself much at odds with most of it. It looks very much as though what's on screen is what she hoped to put there, only I'd say there's a fair amount more besides, as there should be in a collaborative medium like television.

Once again, this was a show with an exemplary ensemble cast. I find it interesting that the first season was promoted as a starring vehicle for Annie Murphy, ex of Schitt's Creek, but the second was described in some places as a two-hander, co-starring Mary Hollis Inboden. It's certainly the case that Allison and Patty make up a classic double act. The chemistry between them really drives Season 2 and it's at the heart of what makes the ending work so well. 

Everyone is good in the show but apart from the two leads I'd single out Alex Bonifer as Patty's brother Neal. In the first season he's basically an idiot but Season 2 shows that absolutely is not the case. He's no more the dimwitted sidekick Kevin turns him into than Allison is the ditzy, air-headed wife. 

That, however, does not make him a nice person. He's a user: unpredictable, self-centered and dangerous. Unlike Kevin, though, he may have the capacity to change. That aside, almost the most impressive part of the whole of his character arc is the way he utterly fails to come to terms with having been knocked unconscious, twice, at the end of Season 1. 

It's incredibly unusual to see any show - sitcom or drama - deal with the long-term effects of an assault of this kind. In very nearly every genre I can think of, hitting someone on the head is mostly just seen as a convenient way to remove them from the action temporarily. At the most it might lead to a bump or a bruise or someone might turn up with a plaster or a bandage in a later scene. I can't recall ever seeing a character spend time in hospital afterwards with a vicious head-wound that requires their hair being shaved off , much less suffer from persistent and disturbing PTSD for the rest of the season.

Neal not only has to deal with all that, he has to deal with the fact that one of the assaults was by his sister and the other by the wife of his best friend, both of whom he still has to see every day. He knows he deserved at least one of the blows. Patty only hit him with a bottle because he was trying to strangle Allison at the time. I'm not quite so sure it was strictly necessary for Allison to hit him with the kettle but at the very least it counts as payback so in the end he has no-one to blame but himself.

I found the whole context of the sprawling, complex, messy, ugly situation far harder to parse than appears to have been the creators' intention and I put a great deal of that down to the subtlety of the playing. It's hard to see characters as representations of  behaviors when they make the motivations and understanding of the characters feel so human. Valerie Armstrong seems very clear on who the good guys and the bad guys are and I don't think many viewers will disagree but some of the playing is just so strong it's not always quite as certain as perhaps it was intended to be.

So, anyway, obviously I enjoyed that one a lot, even though I had to take a break between episodes not once but twice because watching the show made me feel too wound up to sleep for worrying what might happen next. I imagine knowing that would make the cast and writers quite happy.

Roswell: New Mexico - Seasons 3 & 4

Anxiety on behalf of the characters is something I never had to worry about while watching the third and fourth seasons of Roswell: New Mexico. Sure, bad things happened to people all the time, everyday things like being sucked into a pit of quicksand and coming out in a pocket dimension or having your arm cut off and having to replace it with a mechanical hand or waking up after spending fifty years in a pod but even when people died you knew they were probably going to get better. Except when they didn't, which is a plot point and probably a spoiler.

None of it ever really mattered all that much, though. That's the difference. As I said last time I wrote about the show, everything seems to happen at some kind of meta telenovella level, where even the characters know how ridiculous their lives are but go on living them as though they weren't. 

I loved this show. Not quite as much as the original Roswell, which I absolutely have to watch again now, but in its own right as a roller-coaster thrill ride through a theme park full of craziness.

Like Kevin Can F*ck Himself, the final episode leaves so much open it makes you sure there has to be another series on the way, which indeed there should have been. Once again, both the tied and untied knots of the plot are down to a cancellation notice that came in time for the writers to react. There was indeed going to be a fifth season, which would have been the final one in which all plotlines would have been resolved and all relationships finalized. 

I'd still like to see that season, should it get made someday, a possibility which certainly can't be discounted, but ending the show with a wedding and a series of heartfelt farewells as the characters dispersed to their various destinies and futures is certainly a much more satisfying way to conclude than most shows ever get. What happens after that, who knows? Just like life, then.

These days, as I get older I often find myself complaining not that I don't have enough to keep me busy in my increased leisure time but that there's so much I somehow find it harder than ever to fit it all in. I often wonder, on finishing a show or a novel or a game, whether I'll ever find the time to revisit it. 

I just said I want to re-watch the original Roswell, which I own on DVD. I also feel I need as much as want to re-watch all of Buffy and Bojack Horseman and Veronica Mars because one viewing cannot be sufficient to calibrate works as significant as those. I also already feel like I want to watch Schitt's Creek again, even though it seems like hardly any time since I saw it the first time. If I can rewatch the entirety of Friends and Big Bang Theory, surely I can manage six seasons of Schitt's.

There are plenty more like those but to go through any show, end to end, takes days of a life. Weeks, even. I used to think I'd have time for all that when I retired but I'm all but retired now and it turns out I don't. I talked to a few people at work, five to ten years younger than me, coming up to the point where they're starting to think about these kinds of things too and everyone agrees. Those extra kick-back hours you imagined you'd get later, when you were young? They don't come.

I doubt I'll rewatch Roswell: New Mexico. It was a ride but it's over now. I loved it while it lasted but it's gone. I might watch a few scenes now and then if only for that breathtaking scenery and Liz's inimitable pout. The ludicrous plot, though, I don't believe will give me anything more second time around. I'll let it lie.

Star Trek: Prodigy - Season 2

I almost forgot this one. Not because I didn't enjoy it, which I did. Just because it seems like a very long time ago now that I saw it.

I don't have an awful lot to add to what I wrote in a comment in reply to Tyler Edwards' post on it at Superior Realities, so I'll just re-direct to that. I will say I enjoyed the season overall, The middle got a bit baggy but the very strong final four or five episodes really made up for any lack of direction earlier. 

There's no official word about a third season but the final episode of Season 2 is pretty much nothing but a (Very well thought-out and presented.) set-up for one. This is definitely one case where it would be a shame if all the only further adventures of this crew were ones we made up for ourselves.

The Future

And so to what next? I was going to move on to Dead Boy Detectives but the wind got taken out of those sails with the news that it's already been cancelled. It's more than a tad irksome to think that Lockwood & Co. most likely got shelved to make way for DBD and now that's going dark too. Two with one stroke of the red pen.

I probably ought to watch that Fallout series but I was really never feeling it and, now it's slipping into the past, even less so. I still haven't picked the Flash back up after taking a break at the end of Season 3. Just the thought that there are more episodes left than I've seen already makes me twitch. With that one out of the picture, my inclination to try Legends or any of the other Arrowverse shows is at a low ebb, too.

I did watch the first episode of the final season of Supergirl but it felt a lot like more of the same and I haven't carried on. I will, but not just now. I have a lot of possibles on the list, shows like Arcane that I passed over at the time but about which I have since heard good things; shows I know from the source material and am curious about, like A Good Girl's Guide To Murder; shows I meant to watch but just never got around to, like the second and third seasons of Sweet Tooth. 

What I actually will watch is most likely far more random. I seem to pick things up without quite knowing how. I'm currently in the second season of an anime called Overlord, which is getting odder by the episode. I can no longer even remember why I began watching it in the first place but I'm not about to stop. 

I imagine I'll settle down to something more substantial soon enough. Nights are getting longer, the weather's getting colder, we're entering the season for staring at screens. And whatever I watch, I'm sure I'll end up talking about it here because what's the point of watching television if you don't talk about it afterwards?

Why, none whatsoever.

Stardust Memories And Other Short Stories

I'm so absolutely, hopelessly, irrecoverably behind on What I've Been Listening To posts now it's not remotely funny any more. I had no intention of doing a music post on a Tuesday. That would be madness! (Erm, not the nutty boys from the 1980s. Bad choice of words there.) If I don't do it now, though, it's only going to get worse so let's just get on with it.

Let's see how many there are in the pot... good lord! Over a hundred. Okay, that's not going to fly. And I already junked a bunch last time. And I haven't even checked the laptop...

This is getting out of hand. I'm just going to have to apologise, admit there's a whole load of really good stuff I'm never going to be able to share and just pick some favorites. Then I think I'll have to clean the slate and start fresh.

So, where shall we begin? See who makes the cut? 

Tailor Swif - A$AP Rocky

I mean, come on! The tune's fine but that's the best video I've seen in, like, forever! How did they even do that? Any of it! 

If you never click through any of these music videos, make this the exception. Even turn the sound off if you like. Just, if you do, don't tell Rocky I said to. I don't think he'd see the funny side. Then again...

Speaking of having a sense of humor, "Taylor Swift fans" aren't amused, apparently, although when any of the big music sites say "fans" like they mean all of them, what they nearly always really mean is "a couple of people on Twitter." (I actually typed "X" there just to see if it worked. It doesn't. I knew it wouldn't, too. Dunno why I bothered.) I imagine all the Swifties who have a sense of humor find it as funny as everyone else.

What's Fair - Blondshell

If grunge had been like this the first time round I'd still be wearing flannel shirts. Oh, wait a minute...

One Hit Wonder - Olivia O.

Hey! You can't fool me. This is just that last song again, only slowed down!

Casual Drug Use - Katie Gavin

I am so shallow. If this had been called "Some Days" or something, would I have clicked on it? No, I would not. I guess clickbait works for song titles, too.

Also, you can bring up Joni Mitchell if you want. I wouldn't dare.

Wasn't There - X-Cetra

I was going to do a whole post on this one and I still might. It feels like it really should be a lot better known than it is but then I guess there isn't a whole lot to say about it. I've left myself some room by keeping the last few so short, though, so let's do the basics right here.

Wasn't There comes from an album recorded almost twenty-five years ago by four girls aged between ten and twelve. Or nine and eleven. Depends who you believe. 

One version of the story goes that they were typical Califonian tweens whose dream of being pop stars was indulged by a radio DJ called Don Campau. Don not only happened to have some kind of independent record label but also access to a whole load of 1960s/70s mellow/funky/psychedelic backing tracks that had never been used. Don't ask me how or why. He gave those to the girls and they did the rest. Then he put out the album on his label, Lonely Whistle.

A more authorative telling has one of the girl's mothers, a musician by the name of Robin O'Brien, who had a home studio at her disposal, recording the girls' original lyrics and performances over some backing tracks she'd obtained through a tape-trading circuit (I remember those...) from a German musician by the name of Künstler Treu. Where he got them from is anyone's guess. Then the album came out on Lonely Whistle, so that part's consistent, at least.

Speechless - X-Cetra

Whatever the exact truth, the important thing is that the girls wrote all the lyrics and somehow made them fit with the instrumental tracks they'd been given to create one of those indescribably poignant accidental classics in the vein of the Langley Schools Music Project or the Shaggs, both of which have become very famous in certain circles. 

The album they made is called Stardust and it's like nothing else I've ever heard. You can hear it all on YouTube. I'd buy a CD if I could figure out who's selling one. 

As for what it sounds like, I can't do much better than to give you the list of descriptors that someone on Discogs came up with:

"surreal, mysterious, minimalistic, female vocalist, love, rhythmic, lo-fi, quirky, breakup, nocturnal, melodic, atmospheric, bittersweet, hypnotic, introspective, sentimental, cold, lonely, eclectic"

Yeah, what they said...

X-Cetra seem still to be flying mostly under the radar as far as I can see. There's no Wikipedia page for them and most of the results on Google just quote the same couple of paragraphs of information (Here's the best of them.) I guess I'm just adding to that problem by doing much the same right here.

Boy Obsessed - Robin August & Mercy Cappellino

So, Bhagpuss, just how did you come to hear about this strange record anyway? I'm glad you asked!

You may recall (You won't.) that I included a tune by Robin August in a huge grab-bag post back in Blaugust. I came to Robin via the regular channels - something on one of the music sites - and since I liked what I was hearing I went poking about in her back catalog, which is where I found the above stomper, Boy Obsessed. 

Robin wrote that one with her friend Mercy when the pair of them were ten years old but didn't get around to recording until last year. YouTube's algorithm somehow managed to pick up on the age reference and offer me some tracks by X-Cetra as "Related" titles. 

And that's how the trick is done.

Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild - Merce Lemon

I don't remember exactly how I came by this one but I'm betting it was either when I was going through a bunch of Nick Drake covers (This isn't one but it sure as hell sounds like it could be.) or maybe YouTube just thought Merce sounded like Mercy from the last one. Sometimes I swear that algorithm literally picks up on something in a video, like a striped tee, and gives you all the videos where people are wearing horizontal stripes.

You Are A Dog - Jagged Baptist Club

Then again, it could have been while I was trawling for songs about dogs for a post I'm thinking of doing. There are a lot. I can easily afford to throw one away. I won't leave myself short when the time comes.

Beloved - Hank Heaven feat. Beach Bunny

Nine tracks in and no autotune? That can't be right!

God, I love autotune.

Every 2010s Pop Song Be Like... (Part 2)
Elise Ecklund

Some people never use it , of course. Elise doesn't. Everyone knows that's her real voice.

There's actually a longer version of that one but I think the looped, shorter take is better.

Karma Police - cumgirl8

1. No, it is not a Radiohead cover. Do me a favor.
2. I don't need to give a NSFW warning, do I? I mean, look at the name of the band.
3. As they say on the BBC "Contains very strong language from the start." Always a recommendation.

 

Princess Pink Toes - Marontate

I mean, where do I even begin? And that's them at their more accessible.

Okay, this has been all over the place. I mean fun. This has been fun. Let's end with a rocker, eh?

TV Star - Du Blonde

Not rawk enough for you? Okay, how about this?

Wrecking Ball - Le Butcherettes

Yes, it is a Miley Cyrus cover. I was going to save it for my next Covers collection but I have so many now, including another one by this lot that's even better, so why sit on it any longer. I mean, it's six years old already. Leave it any longer and it might go off.

I can't explain why I never heard of Le Butcherettes before. It seems like I should have. Can you imagine what else is still out there? Come to that, can you imagine what's left in the folder I'm about to delete, that I'm never going to post here?

Don't have nightmares, all you completionists!