Welcome Back. Now Get To Work!

It's a testament both to the compulsive pull of survival game mechanics and the specific way they've been implemented in Once Human that, despite having other things I'd rather have been doing, and despite the glorious sunshine streaming through my window, I just spent the last two hours making a new character and playing through the early stages of the game, as far as Deadville. I only meant to log in for maybe ten or fifteen minutes to get some screenshots of the Returning Player rewards for a post but things kind of spiralled, in what I suppose I ought to see as a good way.

It was fun, anyhow. I mean, it wasn't very productive. I could much more usefully have spent the two hours tidying the house or starting to get the garden back in shape or working on another music video or just taking Beryl out for a walk in the sunshine (Although she wouldn't have thanked me for that, having had one walk already and not being the most active of dogs...)

I didn't do any of that, though. Instead I spent the first fifteen minutes finishing making my new character, having already spent half an hour on her last night. I already knew I was in trouble, even then. 

There's a handy Save option for appearance so I didn't have to start over from the beginning. I was trying to get a character that didn't look like my other one, which is why I ended up with someone with blue hair and a big scar. The problem as always is that if I don't feel right about a character from the start I'm very unlikely to keep playing them and the range of looks that make feel comfortable is quite narrow. If i make anyone that doesn't look quite a lot like all the other characters I make in all the other games, chances are I won't stick with them.

That braid is going to have to go. And you need to dye your hair...

I think I did alright with this one. She feels like I know her a little already. I certainly know the opening tutorial by now, having played through it at least half a dozen times. It's very good but it's not short. Even tabbing through all the dialog it took me about twenty minutes to get through.

And that's not the only reason it turns out coming back to Once Human isn't quite as simple as Starry would like to have you believe. This dev team has always had the most back-assward, over-complicated way of doing things and that hasn't changed a jot. I notice the game now has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam, which seems quite appropriate. I'm all but certain if they'd made the choices at the start that they've slowly and grudgingly made over the course of the first year, that rating would be Very Positive instead but they like to do everything the hard way.

All I was trying to do was get the rewards and take some pictures so my first choice was to log in my one existing character and claim them with her. I was also looking forward to moving her to the new scenario that allows access to the full map, the original areas plus those added in the Way of Winter. My further plans would then have been to stay on that server indefinitely, now the option to do so exists.

Except it doesn't. Not yet. Here's a detailed explanation of how it works now and how it's going to work later. Even after a competent journalist has gone through the whole thing and reframed it in clear, concise terms, I still find it confusing. 

Gimme the good stuff!

As far as I can tell, you have to pick a server and play through whatever Scenario it's running up to the end, when you would normally be forced to leave. That usually takes around six weeks or so. When it  happens, you still get kicked to Eternaland as always but, after kicking your heels there for a couple of hours, you can indicate you'd like to go back to where you came from, rather than choosing a new server or Scenario as you always had to before.

Once you're back where you started, you just need to make sure you log in at least once a month to avoid being kicked off the server for good. Later in the year that grace time will be extended to once every six months. 

All well and good but my character didn't have server to go back to. She's been in the limbo of Eternaland since before Christmas, which was when I last logged in. 

No problem. I just needed to pick a new Scenario and go from there. So I looked for the one where the whole map was open and... I couldn't find one. For a very good reason: one doesn't exist... yet. 

The full map will only be available with the "Endless Dream" Scenario, which is due to arrive "this year". It seems I've come back a tad early. Oh, well...

The jacket is some kind of reward too but for what I'm not sure.

Also, I ought to mention that the Endless Dream seems like it might be more of an endless nightmare:

"You might find yourself engulfed in darkness or afflicted with strange vulnerabilities—becoming unusually weak, flammable, or even explosive."

That wasn't quite what I had in mind when I envisaged a permanent server I could call home for the foreseeable future. Even so, if that's what it takes...

For the time being, though, I've gone very much the opposite way in my return to the game: E-Z Mode.

I looked at all the available Scenarios and decide that if I was going to start over, I might as well do it properly. So I re-rolled on a Novice server. 

I hadn't seen much point making new characters before, what with having to start over from scratch every couple of months anyway, but things have changed. Not only can we now have as many as ten characters on a single account (I seem to remember it was just one to begin with and then it was three but don't quote me on that.), they now all share a number of benefits on an Account-held basis, not just currencies but also blueprints, mods, accessories and most importantly - cosmetics.

No more wandering around for days with no pants! No more looking like Jethro from the Beverley Hillbillies in your full Rustic crafted gear! As soon as I got past the introduction and into the game proper I got a series of pop-ups telling me all the shared stuff I was now entitled to use and the first thing I did was give my new character a new look.

Aww! Now we can't see your blue rinse.

And what that made me realize was that I've never put nearly enough effort into finding or buying cosmetics. There didn't seem to be all that much point before; once I get a look I like, I tend to stick with it so there's not a lot of point building up an extensive wardrobe. Now, though, I can have as many as ten looks I like and stick with all of them.

I'm probably not going to go that far but I am re-motivated to go hunting for new things to wear and I'm very happy to know I can do it on my high-level character, where it will be relatively easy, and my low-level characters will reap the benefits. 

There doesn't appear to be any limit to the number of times you can share things or to the number of characters who can use them, either, although presumably once currency is spent by anyone, it's gone. I ought to check if two characters can wear the same hat at the same time, I guess. I'll try and remember to test that next time I log in.

And that will be soon, I imagine, partly because I had a really good time playing again this morning but also because some of those Welcome Back rewards are time-limited until you complete a Reward track to make them permanent.

I have fifteen days to do that. Will I? 

Well, let's just say one of the rewards is that giant cat I used to have, right back at the start. I've always wanted that back.

Sometimes It Pays Not To Play

Since I'm not playing any games right now, about the best I can manage in the way of posts about gaming is either to poke at the news or to talk about the games I would be playing, if I was playing games. I have a couple of ideas for the first but I'm saving those until I have enough for a Grab Bag. Or until I'm desperate for something to write about, which could be very soon, the way things are going.

This morning, though, I'm going with the second option: games I might start playing any day now, if the weather wasn't so damn glorious and I didn't have this unquenchable obsession with creating an imaginary past where I really did something with all those songs I wrote in the 'eighties. 

And the game in the spotlight today is, once again, Once Human.

I got an email from Starry this morning. It was one of those "Come back! We miss you!" ones that all the good PR departments toss out like old toddlers throwing bread to the ducks. Bread, as we all know, is really bad for ducks but most ducks are too dim to know that, so they all pile in and scarf it up anyway. 

I'd like to think of myself as smarter than the average duck and even if I wasn't I'd hope at least to have better self-control and more discernment. In order to maintain that delusion, I try not to hurl myself at every inducement to return to games I stopped playing for what were probably very good reasons, if only I could remember what they were. 

The litter of past posts here, chortling over freebies I've claimed for games I went on never to play again, or at best that I played only for a desultory number of sessions after I filled my imaginary pockets, is all the evidence anyone could need to convict me of self-deception and maybe even hypocrisy. I say one thing and do another all the time although not, I hope, when it involves anything that actually matters.

It's true, then, that I'm a sucker for a freebie but it's also true that there are plenty of offers I can easily resist. And most of the "Please come back" offers plop squarely into that pot. Blizzard send me begging letters pretty much every week and so do ArenaNet but I haven't touched World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2 for years now. 

Of course, that might be because their offers aren't all that. Certainly ANet's aren't. The best they ever seem to be able to come up with is long notes about what I'm missing and promises to sell me stuff for a bit less than they usually ask. Blizzard occasionally tempt me with some kind of "Play for a while for Free" but they largely scuppered their own ship there, when they came up with the endless free trial.

I try to avoid regionalist generalizations on the lines of "Asian games be like this but Western games be like that" but there are times when it's hard. Cultures do differ and its daft to pretend they don't. 

And one way the Eastern and Western gaming cultures definitely differ is that the Eastern ones give better freebies. They hand out more stuff, more often and it's better stuff. I've been taking their largess happily for years and it still puzzles me why they're so generous. It makes it completely unnecessary to give any of them any money at all. 

Cultural differences aside, as has been pointed out by angry players on both sides of the continental divide many times, developers are prone to giving you more stuff if you don't play their games than if you do. I receive a continual stream of inducements to return to games I haven't played in years but do I get any "Thank You for being a Loyal Customer" emails from the games I'm actively playing?

No, I do not. I get emails telling me what's new and suggesting I log in and enjoy it but they rarely, indeed almost never, come with rewards attached. The theory seems to be that if you play the game already, you can damn well log in and play it if you want stuff.  

It's no surprise. It's the way the world works now. Apparently I'm an idiot for not changing my utility suppliers at least every six months and I should be swapping my savings from bank to bank every time the interest rates change.

Well, screw that. There was a time - and I'm old enough to remember it - when the norm was to find something you were happy with and stick with it and that suits my personality a lot better than all this chopping and changing. I'm fundamentally lazy and I don't mind paying a small surcharge just to be left alone.

Unless, of course, all it involves is my pressing a few buttons. If it's that simple, why not? 

I pressed a few this morning and now Once Human is downloading to my external SSD. Again. Let's hope it's easier to keep updated this time.

To be fair to myself, it wasn't just the "10+ cosmetics" that hooked me back in. Or the 40k Starchrom currency. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Starry have finally seen sense and opted for permanent servers. They've also added a Scenario in which the whole of the map is available. Those two moves directly address and to some extent resolve my two biggest problems with the game: impermanence and artificial boundaries.

So, I was going to come back at some point. What the latest offer did was bring that point forward to "Now". Whether I'll do any more, once the game has finally downloaded and installed itself, than log in to claim my loot, I can't predict. I suspect not but at least the client will be back on my hard drive and the possibility will be there again.

Since I was thinking about the game and since it was right there in the email, I also took a moment to pre-register for the upcoming Mobile version. I thought I'd done it already but it seems not. More than thirty million people have, though. Once Human is a popular and successful game.

There are freebies for pre-registering, naturally, along with a draw for real-world prizes ranging from in-game goods to computer peripherals and money. Top prize is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

You get draws for various "tasks" - registering your interest, providing an email or a phone number, following the game on social media and so on. I got two draws for registering with an email address and I won... a thank-you. That's an actual prize. I got thanked twice.

I imagine most people get a thank-you, unlike the Lone Ranger, who famously never did. I would hope quite a few people also get the "In-Game Bundle", whatever's in that. As for the rest, well they have been kind enough to reveal the probabilities. Not that I can make much sense of them. I'm not sure how there can be a 60% chance of a "Redeem Code" if there are only 30,000 of them and more than thirty million people have pre-registered...

For once, though, I'm not in it for the freebies. I want to see if the game will run on my phone. I don't imagine it will but it will be an interesting experiment, provided it doesn't catch fire trying. 

Steam is still working on getting the PC version up and running as I type and the mobile game doesn't go live until 23 April so for now it's back to what I really want to do - enjoy the spring sunshine and start work on another music video for my new YouTube channel. 

Once Human can wait. It's not going anywhere and anyway, if I leave it long enough, they'll almost certainly give me more stuff. 

Scooby Gang X Drain Gang

Another Friday, another grab-bag, helped by a couple of interesting tidbits that came in late yesterday's news. Plus I have actually listened to some music that isn't my own for a change, so there'll be some of that, too.

We've Got Some Work To Do Now

First up, the best entertainment news of the year so far. As per the NME, there's a Scooby-Doo live action series coming to Netflix. Or you can have it straight from the Great Dane's mouth, so to speak.

There have been a lot of Scooby-Doos. "Three theatrical films, and more than a dozen animated series" according to Netflix, which isn't even counting the numerous, long-running comic-book series, the novelizations, the games, the toys... It's a major franchise.

Still, even the most ardent Scooby Gang buff would have to own that most of them haven't been all that. And yet, news of another always stirs... something. The heart? The imagination? Not sure exactly what, but I was more excited when I read the headline than seemed reasonable. 

And that was before I even noticed the really exciting part: "Produced by Greg Berlanti".

Greg Berlanti is the guiding hand behind a whole raft of TV shows, chief among them, from my persepctive at least, Riverdale and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina plus pretty much the whole of the DCTVU, including Supergirl and Titans, all of which I very much enjoyed. He and his production company seem like both the obvious and the perfect drivers for the Mystery Machine.

Berlanti is producing but the Showrunners are Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, whose credits include the much-maligned live-action Cowboy Bebop. I liked that one a lot more than the critics or the installed fanbase so that's not a warning flag for me, although I guess it may be for some. 

Granted, the lived show wasn't anything like as subtle or nuanced as its source material but the anime was "hailed as one of the best animated television series of all time". Scooby-Doo is well-loved but I don't think it can claim the same aesthetic status and as I suggested earlier, the bar for revamps is already set pretty low. I'm confident this one will clear it with room to spare.

There's no release date yet. I'm not even sure if they're shooting. It was reportedly "in production" in 2024 but who knows what that means?  Whenever it comes, I'll be there for it.

Let's have a break for a song, shall we? And for a change it's one everyone's going to recognize.

 Ashes To Ashes - Magdelana Bay (Original David Bowie)

 Magdalena Bay are critics' darlings just now, or they were last year at least, and they richly deserve it. Triple-J churns out an endless stream of covers, by no means all of them memorable or worthy of their originals but it's a high-profile promo slot for artists and some people really get competitive about it so there are some standout performances. 

This is top of the range. It starts out sounding a little flat (As in unemotional, not off-key.) but when Mica Tenenbaum starts to sing... oh boy. She really works her way into every corner of Bowie's peculiar phrasing. 

As Mathew Lewin, the other member of the duo, observed, "It’s a great kind of weird, experimental pop song". They haven't made it feel any less weird but I guess forty-five years have smoothed away some of the odder angles.

Even so, it still sounds weird. Imagine what it sounded like in 1980!

Oh No! He's Back!

Some people may count this as good news. I don't think I would. It is news, though, provided you're inside a certain bubble, which everyone reading this either is or has been at one time.

Yes, John "Smed" Smedly has returned. Whether his latest venture will bear any more fruit than the last two remains to be seen. Certainly, the precedents aren't encouraging. 

The much-hyped "Hero's Song" was cancelled before it got a full release, although Smed did get some credit for giving all the money back. As for his six-year stint with Amazon Games... anyone remember what he did there? I don't.

He left Amazon in 2023 and since then he's been quiet but it seems he hasn't been idle. He's back, alongside another name you might remember from Sony Online Entertainment, Matt Higby. Higby was Creative Director for Planetside 2, a game I think I played twice. Maybe three times. He also worked on pretty much every other SOE game at one time or another. His full credits include EverQuest, EverQuest II, Free Realms and Clone Wars.

The two of them have been cooking up something from pretty much the moment Smedley quit Amazon so I imagine he went straight from the one to the other. These people never seem to take a day off. 

As to what they've been working on, no-one's saying, yet. MassivelyOP are speculating it could be some kind of military shooter, based on what's showing on a couple of monitors in the background of the publicity shots. If so, it's of little interest to me and anyway I imagine, whatever it is, it's years from being something any of us will play. 

More More More - The Molotovs

A little less than a year ago, I did a whole post about the Molotovs, which seems like an odd thing to have done, in retrospect. I think it was the raw energy that got my attention. That and the covers they were doing at the time.

They did have a couple of originals even then and now here they are with their first, official single, a self-penned number called More, More, More, demonstrating that you don't always have to cover other peoples' material to be a covers band. 

Honestly, if this sounded any more like the Jam... well, there's no good way to end that sentence because it would be impossible for anything to sound more like the Jam than this does without actually being the Jam. I bet it sounds more like the Jam than Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler's From The Jam ever did, and they were the Jam!

Whether sounding exactly like a specific band from the late 'seventies makes any kind of sound, commercial sense is up for debate. I think the retro needle has swung well into the 'nineties now, maybe even the 'aughts. 

Then again, Britpop was built on a foundation firmly laid down in the 'sixties and the Jam were mining tthe same sources for all they were worth, back in the 'seventies, so I guess it's all there and thereabouts the same thing, seen from space. 

It is endlessly fascinating to me that these sounds can just go on and on, fascinating and attracting people of a certain age. It's as if something happens to the brain in mid-adolescence, making neurons fire every time there's a valve amp with the gain turned up, a guitar with too much treble and and a barking voice that sounds like it ought to be flogging china down the market.

I like it, anyway. I mean, I've heard it a million times but I can always hear some more. Some More. More More even.

Less, Less, Less

That's what I'm asking for. I can't face another ninety hopefuls all in one go. Yes, it's the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Longlist again. 

There's a playlist if you can face it. It's over two hours long. I haven't even started on it yet and I'm thinking this year maybe I won't. The returns seem to get slimmer every year.

I scanned the full list, which was surprisingly hard to find, to see if there was anyone on there I'd heard of. Usually there are a few. This year the only name I recognized was Dirty Blonde and I don't much like them. Too rawk for my refined tastes. They are good, though.

Given they were the opening act on the Big Top stage at last year's Isle of Wight Festival, it would seem they're also overqualified. I'm sure the publicity will be welcome all the same but it's a bit like those established acts who enter Eurovision, only to come 23rd. More risk than perhaps the reward could ever have been worth for them. I mean, the big payoff from the ETC is £5k and a slot on one of the main stages. Dirty Blonde might have been in line for one of those anyway. A 2pm slot when no-one is paying attention, sure, but still... 

I don't have anything left but music now so if you're not into digging the new scene I'll bid you goodbye. For the few that remain...

The Wolf - Witch Post

You know those songs that go on too long? Yes, I know. It's most of them. Well, this isn't one. I could have this on a loop for hours. Maybe I'll make one and post it to YouTube. People do that. I'm learning all sorts about making videos and content just now. I could branch out.

Also, it's one of those songs you just can't hear loud enough. And the video is great, too. Really, it's got everything. I wasn't quite as keen on their first single but the last one was good and this is way better again. All the videos are good, too. They could be something, maybe.

I think that's about it. Oh, alright then. One more, since you ask so nicely. Would you like Yung Lean being shot full of arrows or would you rather have Sept hanging out with their girlfriends? Difficult choice, I know. Let's have both, then.

It's always both, isn't it?

Babyface Maniacs - Yung Lean

Remember when Yung Lean was off the radar of anyone under twenty? And Drain Gang sounded like it was probably something from an Anthony Burgess novel? Yeah, well, those days are long gone.

All the critics call Yung Lean a rapper but I'm not sure that's what he's doing here. Or anywhere, really. Then, why would I know? Whatever he's doing, he's not doing it for me. I like it all the same.

Braces - Sept

The song goes back to 2022 but the video is brand-new. It's a real mood piece, the song. The video is more of a vibe. I'm not one hundred per cent convinced they go together.

The lyrics, all of them, run like this:

I said I liked you, I said I missed you
Never forget you, said I won't let you
I did it wrong
And now I cannot believe

Just like my braces
You're caught between my teeth
Like

You're in a hurry, I'm cold cut
Say not to worry, I love you, but
I didn't know
How could you see me so clean?

You hate yourself
But you don't know what that means
Like...

 

I dunno. They look like they're all having a much better time in the video than that would suggest. 

I could listen to that one a loop, too. I really ought to look into how to make those. Like I need another project right now...

The Backing Of The Five Thousand: The Stars Reach Kickstarter Is Finally Over

And so the Stars Reach Kickstarter comes to an end and with it, perhaps, the deluge of emails swamping my inbox day after day. Maybe. Not sure about that. Someone at Playable Worlds really does love to write press releases. 

The campaign was set to close at seven in the evening, my time, yesterday. At just after four in the afternoon, I received my fifth email of the day from Playable Worlds directly or via Kickstarter, all updating me on the progress of the campaign and trying to persuade me to pledge. Which, of course, I already did, weeks ago.

"This is our last email before the end of our Kickstarter." the fifth email said but of course that didn't mean it was the last I was going to get. It wasn't even the last of the day. By the time I went to bed I'd had two more and when I checked my email this morning after breakfast there were two more. I'd had a dozen in twenty-four hours.

I think it's safe to say I have never been involved in any Kickstarter campaign that was as determined to put itself forward as this one and it hasn't stopped yet. Late pledges are still available "for those who did not hear about the campaign before it ended." although frankly I find it hard to believe there's anyone likely to be interested who hasn't already been made very well aware of the options. Not unless they've been in a coma or down a mineshaft for the last four weeks.

Yesterday, on and off, I watched the numbers go up throughout the day. I never realised you could see the dollars and the backers ticking up in real time as the pledges roll in. That must have been be a thrill ride on the opening day, when the campaign hit its target in the first hour. 

By comparison, the end wasn't exactly a flood but it was very steady progress. I haven't seen the graph for the full campaign but I'd guess it looks more like the traditional "U" than the "J" that's supposedly replacing it. The final total came in at $740,097 according to Kickstarter's official record but those late pledges have now tipped it over the psychologically significant three-quarters of a million. At time of writing it stands at $752,969.

We can debate just how successful that makes the campaign but there's no arguing with its success per se. Playable Worlds set a target, met it within the first hour and went on to more than triple it, maybe to quadruple it by the time the final late pledge comes in. They also set a secondary goal of five thousand backers and achieved it, the current total being 5,319.

Before the campaign started, I had a notional, minimum target of $1m in mind. Raph Koster had made it clear the purpose of the Kickstarter wasn't to raise all the remaining funds needed, which would be millions, but to prove there was sufficient interest so the project would become attractive to outside investors. When the $200k total was announced it seemed far too low to for that. Then, when the Kickstarter funded in less than an hour, it seemed clear the team had wildly underestimated the potential.

In the end, though, they didn't even get close to that million dollars that I thought ought to be their low-end ask. Instead, they tapped out just shy of $750k, which seems respectable, if not spectacular, especially in the current tough funding climate. Given that with forty-eight hours to go it didn't look nailed on they'd even get that much, I think you'd have to say the team probably got it just about right. Had they gone for the big seven figures, the campaign would have failed and that would have holed the whole project below the waterline.

In the event, the campaign did precisely what was intended. Raph certainly thinks so, anyway. The lengthy and detailed press release I received this morning quotes him as saying

“Our goal was to prove to the world that there was market appetite for this game, at a time when the industry financial landscape is challenging. We turned to players to help us make it happen and to provide that proof. And that approach worked: the success of the Kickstarter has already unlocked additional investment and set us on the road to Early Access later this year.”

A couple of other statements from the team added some interesting detail to that:

"We’re continuing to raise funds from both traditional and non-traditional sources to support development and expansion. We've been quite pleased -- and flattered! -- to receive offers to invest from several playtesters and close observers of Stars Reach in development.!"

"... several players of the pre-alpha asked if they could invest in the company. Last week we accepted a first investment greater than the total dollars from the Kickstarter."

I suppose I should be surprised to hear that one player in pre-alpha was so taken with what they saw they decided to stump up more than three quarters of a million dollars to push development forward. I should be but I'm not. Not really. 

As has been observed a few times before, there's something cultish about the whole Stars Reach project. It harks back to an era some people clearly see as a lost, golden age. Their lost, golden age. Rich people are wont to throw money at their dreams, especially when those dreams involve recovering their youth.

And that's fine. Money is money. But there's clearly an element of provenance involved, too. Sometimes it comes with strings.

Investors with a more direct stake in the eventual success of the game, seeing it not just as an investment but as something they plan to play, clearly bring a different kind of dynamic to the development process. Money men without the emotional involvement would presumably be more likely to sit back and let things go where they need to, just so long as it means a good return on investment.

Whether having highly committed players as major investors is going to be a curse or blessing remains to be seen. As does the game itself, most of which still exists only in outline. Particularly with the aggrssively short timescales. there's more than a whiff of the whole thing starting to spiral. 

The latest press release is very keen on making points about the ever-expanding possibilities:

"The current pre-alpha playtesting continues to be a revelation. The cooperation and meaningful iteration with players is the best thing that's ever happened to Playable Worlds and Stars Reach. Last week the players nearly invented the steam engine as part of their work with the cloud-powered underlying simulation that also included a working ice skating rink and a halfpipe skate park. Players have built seed vaults and test gardens and written whitepapers about the propagation of in-game plants. This kind of invention and discovery is only possible in Stars Reach, which is driven by proprietary AI simulation that enables novel gameplay as players interact with a world that reacts realistically to everything they do.. Players have redirected rivers, planted forests (and burned them down), and worked to build whole cities, including a replica of a Wild West town complete with a suspiciously familiar time-traveling car…"

Which is all very interesting but which also seems a long way from the game I thought we were testing. The further into this we get, the more it's starting to feel like Landmark In Space, albeit a version of Landmark where the underlying technology actually works.

One thing that came to light very late in the campaign was that the only way into the next phase of testing will be via a pledge at Reacher level or above. As one of the last emails put it:

"Only backers at the Reacher Tier and above will get full access to our game preview sessions after the end of the Kickstarter! "

Underlined, so you couldn't miss the implications. There was also a new pledge that nuanced access to give some backers priority over others. They really were working all the levers right at the end there.

As I've said a few times, the further we get into this thing, the less interested in it I find myself. I never thought it was going to be the game for me but now I'm not sure it's even going to be a game. Almost everything I read about it these days makes me feel less inclined to log in. If I wasn't in the testing process, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't now apply, even if anyone was taking applications, which they're not.

Frankly, almost all of it sounds like work and I don't just mean in the testing phase. The entire game as now envisaged looks very much like it should come under a heading my grandparents would have recognized and approved: making your own entertainment. 

I get that plenty of people find that liberating and exciting. I don't. I already have plenty of real-life projects that reward that kind of time and effort a lot more efferctively and which come with much more tangible and long-lasting rewards than anything I could expect to achieve by playing a video game. 

I would have felt differently twenty years ago but I don't look back on those days with a particularly warm and rose-tinted glow. It's more that the options available to me then weren't great. I have more and better choices now.

It will, nevertheless, be very interesting to see where things go from here. I have paid my $30 so I will be able to get hands-on time with whatever comes next. The schedule looks extremely... optimistic, shall we say. There could be fun times ahead.

A lot of promises have been made, that's for sure. A lot of hopes have been raised. Now comes the hard part: fulfilling them.

We'll see how that goes...

"Can You Sing It A bit More Like This...?"

Time for the next episode in our thrilling story! So far it's been all set-up and no action. Will today see some new music being made at last?

Maybe, although I see three potential points of contention just in that last sentence alone. 

1. How "new" can music be if it was written and recorded forty years ago? 
2. Is it really "music" if an AI is making it? 
3. And can an AI actually "make" anything?

I'm going to take a bit of a position on this one right away. Having spent many hours with the tools and having listened to the results, I'm going to say yes to all three. This is music. I did make it. 

As for it being new, it's new in the form it exists now, although it also remains time-locked in some essential, existential way. It's sometimes seems to me, as I listen to the new versions of these old songs, that they were written by someone I scarcely recognize. Someone who isn't me any more. It's the good old intentional fallacy brought to light yet again.

I'll get to that later, probably. First, the mechanics. So, in the last two installments, I reported on how I got the old recordings off tape and onto my hard drive and how I decided what software to use to try and turn them into something that sounded like the music I was hearing in my head.

At that point I was under the impression I'd be able to upload the files to one of the AI apps and tinker around with it to get what I wanted. That turned out to not to be the case at all. Not at first. 

Like that's going to help...

The mistake I made was to assume that the "Edit" option in Suno would allow me to do things like specify instrumentation and vocals and have the AI replace my strumming and singing with a facsimile of someone who could do it properly. Then I could ask the AI to add drums and bass and so on until I'd built up a composite version that sounded how I imagined it should.

This is categorically not how the software works. There is an Edit function but it doesn't really do any of that. It lets you extend the song, replace sections of it, crop it, fade it and change the lyrics. It's still the same damn song, though. 

I played around with that for a bit but it was totally useless for my purposes. It was still me singing and playing and it still sounded like a bad recording of a bad singer and a bad guitarist.

I was pretty fed up at that point and on the verge of giving up on the whole idea, at least until the technology advanced some more, when I happened to notice, purely by chance as I was fiddling with the settings and pressing buttons to see what they did, that there was something called a "Cover" function.

I looked it up on the Suno blog and here's what it says:

"This feature lets you take anything from a simple voice memo to a fully-produced track and transform it into an entirely new style, all while preserving the original melody that makes it uniquely yours."

There's a lot more. You can read it all at the link if you're interested. The tl:dr is that the Cover function does exactly what the name suggests: it creates a cover of whatever you feed into it. It's just as though you'd asked a performer or a band to cover a specific song, given them a recording and let them get on with it. 

It's magic, basically. Actual magic. 

This immediately had two effects on me, other than making me punch the air and yell "Yes!", obviously. As I began to play around with the Cover function I realized I could either try to get the AI to produce the closest possible match to how I'd always wanted the songs to sound, if I could ever have gotten a bunch of people to play them the way I wanted - or I could indulge myself with endless variations, hearing my songs being performed in all kinds of deeply inappropriate styles, the way Nouvelle Vague or Postmodern Jukebox have been doing for years.

The Cover feature is still in beta.
Can't wait to see what it's going to be when it's done.

Naturally, I did both. I couldn't stop myself. I still can't. I realize now that doing it the way I have has implications I hadn't considered when I started but it's too late to worry about that now. Also, those implications are probably best left for another post altogether.

For now, let's stick to the mechanics. So, how does this Cover thing work? 

It's simple - until it's not. You upload your source material to Suno, click the menu option for "Cover", specify whatever style or genre you want, along with any other specific instructions such as mood, type of singer etc. Then you hit "Create" and sit back and wait.

Not for long. It takes Suno maybe thirty seconds to spit out two covers. You always get two. Suno does everything in pairs. And even though the instructions are identical, the two versions are often radically different.

They are also often radically different from the instructions and sometimes from anything you could possibly have expected. Here's something you really need to know about Suno: it has a mind of its own.

Suno's wild fantasies can be amusing or bizarre but it wouldn't be much use if it didn't do what it was told most of the time. Better than eighty per cent of the time, I'd say. Then, it sticks fairly closely to whatever you've told it to do.

I'm not going to buy into the whole "Prompt Engineer" malarkey but there are some basics anyone needs to pay attention to. Suno doesn't parse long lists of styles and moods well, for example. If you ask it to produce something that's "Indiepop, Dark Pop, Dreampop, C86, Janglepop" it won't usually try to meld all of them together into a pleasing gestalt; it'll pick one and go with that. 

It also doesn't especially like to try and create unlikely style or genre combos like "Twee Funk Psychobilly" although sometimes it can be persuaded to give it a go. On the other hand, it clearly finds some combinations very comfortable, so it will happily give you "Futurepop Kawaii Bass" or "Dark Ambient Vaporwave" if you ask nicely. 

From the very handy
but by no means exhaustive
Music Genre List

Suno also recognizes or can interpret an absolutely astounding number of genres and moods. I've yet to find anything it can't at least have a recognizable stab at, although the results can be variable in the deep woods of microgenre.

One thing I discovered early on is that it almost always follows clear instructions on vocal gender. If you ask for "Female Vocals", that's what you get. 

Trying to get a specific kind of female vocal is a bit harder. I never really wanted to be the lead singer in any of the bands I was in (Makes it sound like there were dozens of them - there were four, in fact.) even though that's what I always ended up being. I always wanted us to have a female singer but we only ever managed to persuade our girlfriends to sing back-up. 

All the same, I've always imagined most of the songs I've written being sung with a female voice, so that's what I hear in my head. I know what kind of voice it is, too, but getting Suno to sing it the way I want to hear it reminds me altogether too much of how it used to be, when I was on the receiving end of "Can you sing it a bit more like this...?" at pretty much every rehearsal.

I tried using just one adjective and I tried using several. I tried whole descriptive phrases. I was never sure which worked better. A lot of the voices were almost right but just not quite. In the end, I ended up using "world-weary", sometimes in combination with "innocent" or "naive", which generally seemed to give me something close to the personality I was after.

Of course, once I'd got it on one song, I had to try and get it again and again on the rest. There is a function called "Persona" that allows you to save a particular voice and/or style and re-use it for other songs, lending them all a consistency that makes them seem like they were recorded by the same singer or band. That was exactly what I needed, but frustratingly, it can't be used for covers of songs that have been uploaded.

The reason for this would seem to be the makers of Suno having an understandable desire not to get sued out of existence by the megacorps. I mean, they already are but why give them the ammunition? There are a number of safeguards built into the system to try and prevent that happening.

I never had any intention of making the covers of my songs publicly available on Suno, which is just as well because it turns out you can't. Even though you have to tick a box to say you own all the rights before you can upload anything, all uploads and covers thereof are automatically blocked within the app from being lited as "Public". No uploading someone else's song then trying to pass it off as an original after you've had Suno "cover" it.

"it's never going to be exactly
what you originally had in mind."

With similar caution, the Persona function cannot be used on uploaded content or covers made from it. If it could, presumably you'd be able to upload your favorite singer, clone their voice and then apply it to anything. If you want to do that, best talk to Grimes. She's up for it. 

This is one of the limitations of making covers of your own songs using Suno. There are several more, probably the most awkward of which is that uploads can be no more than two minutes long. 

I didn't notice at first because the songs I started with were less than two minutes long to begin with. They were the ones I wrote specifically in the late 'eighties, when I was trying to get a C86/Twee band together. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out. 

I uploaded them and Suno happily gobbled the lot. It was only when I got around to some of the longer songs from an earlier phase that I realized it was cutting them off before they'd finished.

In most cases, this is less of a problem than you might imagine, at least if you're dealing with traditional pop or rock song structure. You can select which two minutes of the track to upload and Suno easily recognizes verses and choruses. (You can specify them but I haven't found it necessary.) 

The AI picks up melody, phrasing and even intonation almost perfectly and it can extrapolate from what it knows, so if your three minute song has a traditional verse-chorus structure and just carries on the same to the end, it doesn't matter to Suno that it only has two-thirds of the song to go on. It'll get the rest right anyway.

The problems start when there's a change of some kind outside the part Suno knows - a middle-eight or a coda or a solo or something. Structurally, Suno works from the lyrics, plus any additional instructions you type in in square brackets, such as [Middle Eight] or [Guitar Solo]. When it hits something that doesn't match the pre-existing pattern, the AI will have a jolly good go at coming up with something appropriate but it's never going to be exactly what you originally had in mind, which means that cover is going to have a little more AI influence than perhaps you wanted.

"poorly-recorded caterwauling
converted from forty-year old audio-tape"

There are ways around this, although it took me a while to work them out. You can, for example, cut and shut parts of your original recording so it comes in under two minutes but has all the separate elements of the structure and melody. Suno will then apply the right melody, rhythm or phrasing to the lyrics that match what it knows. It's very clever like that.

And that brings us to the lyrics, where there's another problem to look out for. When you upload your song to Suno, it does its damnedest to figure out what you're on about and write it all down as accurately as possible. If you articulate clearly and don't use a lot of made-up words, it does a more than fair job of it, too. There were a few uploads where all I had to do was make a handful of minor corrections.

On the other hand, if what you're feeding it is mostly poorly-recorded caterwauling converted from forty-year old audio-tape, Suno takes a wild stab at the few bits it can just about make out and gives up on the rest. For most of the recordings, I had to get out my old lever-arch file with the hand-written lyrics and type the whole lot in.

Which I really enjoyed. It was a lot of fun going back over those old lyrics and figuring out what I'd been trying to say. A bit like reading an old diary, which I guess it what happens if you tend to write from experience.

There were several distinct phases, the best, at least from my perspective four decades on, being the time when I seem to have been mildly depressed and obsessed with weather and the turning of the seasons. Or, put it another way, when every bloody song I wrote was about the rain, one way or another.

And that, I fear, is about as far as we're going to get today. This does go on, doesn't it? And there's quite a lot more to come. In Part Four I promise I'll get to some of the actual songs although I'm not promising there'll be examples you can listen to. I'm in the process of making videos for all of them. I've done five so far. I have about twenty more to do.

But that's another post altogether. 

Notes on AI used in this post.

The header picture and two spot illos. All done at NightCafe using Flux Schnell with default settings, other than Aspect Ratio (Changed to 4:3) and Runtime (Changed to Medium.) 

All prompts were taken directly from the text and are shown in the captions except for the header image, which was generated using the quote in the post title plus the next part of the quote "at pretty much every rehearsal", and the color illustration, which also had the instruction "Band rehearsing" appended to be sure of getting something suitable.

I also added a style instruction, "Line art", after all prompts to be sure of getting drawings rather than photographs.

Pictures Or It Didn't happen

This is going to be a different post to the one I planned and a much shorter one, too. That's not so much of a problem from my point of view because I have something else I'd rather be doing anyway and the post I was planning was going to require a certain amount of research, by which I mean googling some stuff then cutting and pasting some links and screenshots, which if we're honest pretty much sums up most "research" these days and I'm not just talking about mine...

So, that was a snippy introductory paragraph. Possibly because I'm feeling a bit snippy, thanks to Windows 10 or my PC, one or the other, assuming it wasn't the pair of them, getting together to prank me, which I certainly wouldn't rule out. What happened was that I took a bunch of screenshots of various things I was thinking of writing about, all of which would have made up the infrastructure for two somewhat unrelated posts, one of which I may still get around to one day and the other of which I probably won't.

The first post was going to be a list of all the standalone game launchers I use - Daybreak, Amazon, GOG, Epic, NCSoft, Steam and a bunch of others - comparing them and commenting on which I like, what they do right or wrong and so on. I thought that might be interesting but obviously it would take some effort so I wasn't going to do it today when, as I said, I have other things to be getting on with.

I was nudged towards the idea by two things: firstly, the ongoing awfulness of Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online launcher, which is so bad I can't even bring myself to stick with it long enough to get into the game to see if I can move my characters over to the new 64-bit servers. There was that moment when it looked as if the "One Launcher" might fix things, until that turned out to be just as bad if not worse. Did that ever improve? I gave up on it almost immediately so I have no idea.

Secondly, there was Kuro's launcher for Wuthering Waves, which I discovered, when I went to log in this morning, has just been upgraded or updated or replaced or something. I could be be a bit more specific if I had those screenshots because a couple of them were of the announcements explaining it. Unfortunately, wherever they went, if they went anywhere at all, I can't find them. They should always go in the default Windows Picture folder but not today they didn't, none of them. I took about a dozen. 

After I found they weren't there, I took a few more to test what might have happened. For some reason, although a screenshot of the desktop still saves as normal, a shot of the desktop with the Wuthering Waves launcher open doesn't. It does go into the clipboard but it just sits there and then gets overwritten by the next one.

At this point you may be thinking "But Bhagpuss, the Windows clipboard saves the last twenty-five entries. If you only took a dozen shots, why can't you get them all from the history?" and that would be a perfectly good question, to which my answer would be "Because I had the history turned off, that's why!" 

I have it turned on now but horses and stable doors and all that. In my defense, I had no idea there even was such a thing as a clipboard history until today but ignorance is no defense, as any competent brief will tell you.

So, that was one post I could have written today but now I'm not going to, although if I'm going to be realistic, I probably wouldn't have anyway. Too much work. I'll add it to that ideas folder I haven't got. Maybe I should start one.

The post I really quite likely would have written today because I was quite interested, not to say excited about it, arose from an in-game survey I took almost as soon as I logged into Wuthering Waves. Kuro are always doing player surveys, asking how us how we like certain aspects of the game and what other things we'd like to see added or changed and so on. They hand out in-game currency and other rewards for filling them in although I would happily complete them for free because I like filling out questionnaires and always have done.

This one was interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it specifically asked if we'd like housing. 

I always put "Add housing" in the "Any other feedback" section so I was very happy to see an actual line item about it. Whether it'll happen is another matter but at least they're thinking about it. (This time I put "Add non-combat pets" in the suggestions box, in case anyone was wondering.)

That wasn't the thing I was going to post about, although believe me I could make a whole post about one line in a survey if I wanted to. There was something in the survey a lot more suited to a full post: a list of upcoming games Kuro wanted to know if we were looking forward to.

I thought that was taking quite a risk. They often ask which current games we're playing, usually accompanied by a list of a whole bunch of titles I have never played, considered playing or even heard of, but there's an existential difference between naming the games that might have been your competition in the past and putting the names of games that might be your competition in the future into the heads of your customers. Brave move.

Anyway, there were maybe a dozen names on the list, only one of which I'd heard of, that being Neverness To Everness. As it happens, that is a game I'm very much looking forward to, so I ticked that box, but I also immediately wondered: if that one was on the list, might I not also be interested in some  of the others? Told you it was a risky move.

So I took a screenshot, intending to go look them all up after I finished playing to see what they were like and if any of them looked any good. I wanted to do that partly for my own satisfaction but also because it sounded like a great idea for a blog post. Lists and previews are both kinda my thing.

Except of course, when I went to look at that screenshot, it was nowhere to be found. And obviously I can't remember the names of any of the games. Not one. I mean, if I'd known the screenshot wasn't going to save I'd have written them down...

Also the survey isn't anywhere online that I can find. I already tried that.

It is possible, although not very likely, I might be able to get to the survey again from within the game itself. I don't think you can go back to old surveys but I'll have a look next time I'm playing, just in case. I'm not going to do it now, though. I just played through the whole of Act 1 of the Averado Vault storyline and that took me two hours. I'm Wuthering Waved out for the rest of the day.

And that's why there's no interesting post here today, just this. Sorry. 

I did take several screenshots while I was playing, using the in-game camera, though. And those all saved properly, so at least there are some pictures to brighten things up. So there's that.

Be grateful for small mercies, eh?

The Past Is Always With Me

Thanks to spending all my time leafing through my own musical back pages these last couple of weeks, I don't have a huge amount of new music by anyone else to share. Neither do I have a lot of random items of interest bookmarked for bullet point analysis.

I do have a few of each though. Time for a bit of the old mix and match!

Let's open with a tune, why not? 

Bonnet Of Pins - Matt Berninger

I've never paid much attention to The National. No, that's not fair. I've never paid any attention to The National. They were the favorite band of someone I used to work with and if she hadn't mentioned them a few times, I'm not sure I'd ever have noticed they existed. Based on this magisterial performance by the band's lead singer I seriously need to take a look at the back catalog. 

This is magnificent stuff of its kind, which sounds dismissive, now I read it back. Not what I meant at all. What I did mean is, this is the kind of thing too many people take a run at and miss. Hard to describe, the rolling, building, tumbling, white-water force of all those words and sounds, rushing towards the moment where it's jump or be swept away. Get it wrong and you're the Waterboys.  Or worse - much, much worse - the Alarm. Matt doesn't get it wrong.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things #4382

I'll follow that with just a brief mention of the most dispiriting musical story that won't get out of my feeds. Just this morning I was greeted by the deeply depressing news that a Seoul court has granted management company ADOR's injunction, prohibiting the members of K-Pop band New Jeans from "pursuing independent activities" under their new name, NJZ.

K-Pop can be a bit of a culture shock all round, what with band members having to text pictures of their lunch to their managers before they're allowed to eat any of it, but this farrago has really exposed the feral nature of the process. About the best possible spin you could put on it would be to call it indentured labor. If you wanted to be hyperbolic you might start throwing around expressions like slave labor.  

However you define it, it's extremely unsavory and goes straight into the "Things Up With Which We Shall Not Put" barrel. Except, of course, we all do put up with it, like we put up with all the rest of the bad stuff that lies behind our hedonistic pleasures and our idle fancies. There is no love in this world any more, as Pete Shelly told us all the way back in 1979. Not got any better, has it?

Also, I'd forgotten just how long that Buzzcocks track is. Over seven minutes! So much for the myth of all punk songs coming in under three minutes, eh? I mean, I was there and even I get fooled by that one.

Of course, I wouldn't even be mentioning any of this if it wasn't happening to the only K-Pop band I really like, would I? It's all about me as usual

Except it's not at all about me, is it? I'm not helping. I didn't even sign the petition, not that anyone asked me. 

Fight the power, girls! Easy for me to say. Weird how guilt makes you feel complicit, isn't it? And don't I ask a lot of rhetorical questions?

WE'RE ALL MADE OF STARS

 Miami Horror (Feat. Telenova)

Of course, as the disclaimers have it, other views are available. "You can be anything you want" says... erm... Miami Horror. Are you quite sure that's the name you want to go with?

This is one of those ones where watching the video changes the entire impact of the track. In audio only, it's an uplifting anthem that leaves you feeling high on life. The images turn it into something wholly other. Worth watching all the way through - well, not the credits, maybe. Nothing clever happens at the end of those. It's not a Marvel movie.

Obviously I came to this by way of the excellent Telenova, which is why algorithms are our friends. Sometimes, anyway, but we'll get to that later. Time for some gaming news.

Play To Earn Is Real, Y'All!

Look, don't shoot me. I'm only the aggregator. I pick this stuff up, I pass it on. I didn't come here with the intention of harshing everyone's mellow. I have to work with what I've got.

Have a read of this. Too busy? Okay, I'll pull out a few choice snips:

"50% of mobile players have now received a reward with real monetary value from a smartphone game"

"72% of that group say real-world rewards are now "important" when it comes to them selecting a new mobile game to download"

“What we are currently seeing is real-time transformation in how gamers choose what they play based on rewards"

The rewards we're talking about here are things like "cash, Amazon credit, or payouts of other currencies of real-world value" and players are getting them for "reaching particular stages or achieving certain tasks within a game".

It turns out that if you give people credit they can spend in regular shops rather than bizarro world crypto crap you can't spend anywhere, people really will Play To Earn. As the article concludes 

"It’s a total rewrite of how and why users engage with gaming content"

Just what we wanted, eh? And if it's working in mobile, you can guess where it's coming next...

 Locals (Girls like us)[with gabby start]  - underscores

I heap a lot of praise on the YouTube algorithm these days but I have some bones to pick with it, too. Like, how come it never told me about underscores before? She's a big deal, too. I mean, just look at the size of her Wikipedia page!

YT didn't bring me to this one, either. I got to it old school, through a link on a virtual inky. Can't remember which one. NME? Ah, apparently I can remember!  Score one for my short-term!

Anyway, Alice Harper Grey is on my radar now. I have her very highly-rated album Wallsocket cued up, ready to listen to. I imagine posts will get written to that one although first I need to watch it, since she's also done it as a single-continuous-shot video. 

At least I think that's what it is. I mean, I didn't check the whole fifty-five minutes for cuts but it looks like that's what she's done. Look, get off my case, alright?

Would You Trust Netflix With Your MMO?

That article about underscores I just linked claims she's "turning her focus to emotion and comfort" so maybe she'll be in the target market for Spry Fox's upcoming cosy MMO, Spirit Crossing. 

I'm not sure I am. I'm having some issues with cosy games. A couple of years ago, I thought they sounded like they'd be right up my queit, leafy, sleepy suburban avenue but that was before I'd played any. They can be kinda... boring, can't they? Nothing really happens. And then it doesn't happen some more.

This one does sound good, though. According to MMOBomb "The game will offer most of the things players associate with cozy games such as exploration, crafting, and customizable housing", which does sound great. And MassivelyOP reckon the promo video makes it look like “Miyazaki Palia.”, which certainly sounds like it'd be an improvement on regular Palia.

Netflix, though... they don't exactly have the best rep for patience, do they? Or sticking with things for more than five minutes. These days their brand is virtually shorthand for "Second season cancellation".  Can anyone see them keeping a low-key, niche-market, borderline profitable  MMORPG chugging along year after year after year? Because that's the business model.

Then again, maybe Spirit Crossing will be the next Animal Crossing. Look at the name. Can't be a co-incidence. That'd keep it safe from Netflix Cancellation Dept. for at least... well... erm.... Nope, not seeing much of a long-term future for this one. 

And that's it for news stories. Let's wind things up with some tunes. Three, to be precise: one original and two covers. 

Gumshoe (Dracula from Arkansas) 

Youth Lagoon

All the good stuff, there. Distorted vocals, lyrics that sound like they'd be fascinating if you could only hear them, glitching Super-8 home movies, lyrical interludes, interpolated found footage, sampled speech...

If I was, oh, I don't know... thirty-five? Forty? this might be the sort of thing I'd want to be doing. It's not the work of a young person, that's for sure. (If I was a bona fide Young Person I'd more likely be doing something like this.)  

Youth Lagoon aka Trevor Powers, which explains why he took a stage name I guess, is thirty-six. I think this sounds like something someone a tad older might have made but he's been doing much the same thing for a decade and a half so it shows what I know.  

There's not much of his very old stuff on his channel. Maybe he wants to move on. This is eleven years old so he'd have been twenty-five when he made it. Feels like the work of someone older, sonically and visually. 

These things are hard to quantify, though. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were talking about cool the other day; what it is, whether it still has currency. I was suggesting I'd seen a strong recurrence of the kind of cool we grew up with and it felt like something more than nostalgia for a time you never knew. I thought it felt like a trend but here it is a decade ago so maybe it never stopped. They do say fashion passes but style is forever.

 Our House - Cream Flower (Original CSNY)

Case in point re that old anemoia we all love so much. Cream Flower, a two-person band (Remember when we called those "Duos"? How sweet and innocent we were, once...) from Manila, are very hard to find out anything about but looking at the pictures on their Soundcloud page I guess they look about, what, mid-twenties?

If so, Our House, would have first come out around three decades before they were born. The song was a centerpiece of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's seminal 1970 album Déjà Vu, which was itself a cornerstone of the then-burgeoning hippie nostalgia boom. The folk-rock supergroup were looking back fondly to the kind of life they imagined their parents might have led, had several wars and objective reality not got in the way. 

So, we have one bunch of twenty-something in the twenty-first century getting all warm and fuzzy over another bunch of twenty-somethings thirty years ago, who were getting all warm and fuzzy over something that probably never even  happened several decades before that. 

Good though, isn't it? And so are Cream Flower. That Manila indie scene really is something.

Can You Feel My Heart (Incorporating Heart-Shaped Box)  

Fontaines D.C. (Originals Bring Me The Horizon/Nirvana)

Geez. That's a mouthful. And an attribution minefield. Can't help feel they missed a trick not calling it Can You Feel My Heart-Shaped Box? Although maybe that doesn't quite set the right tone...

It does feel like picking low-hanging fruit, featuring the Fontaines on the blog yet again. Right now, they can't seem to put a foot wrong. Sorry. Bad choice of words.

Grian Chatten gets all the focus as the lead singer and he has got a very distinctive voice, it's true, but I can't help noticing how really very good the backing vocals are, particularly from Conor Deegan, known to the fans as Deego. Backing vocals are generally underrated in most bands but these really matter.

This is one of those covers where it might as well be a brand new song to me. I've never heard the BMTH original and although Heart-Shaped Box is super-well-known, I couldn't hum it at gunpoint. The only Nirvana album I own is the Unplugged one. I wasn't a big grunge fan back when it was big although I have a lot of time for some of the bands coming along right now who claim its influence. Same goes for drum'n'bass, techno, rave...

Hmm. Might be a post in that.