The Rain, Arlo Parks and Other Things

I still have an unconscionable amount to say about Noah's Heart but I think it's probably time for a break on that front. I also have a music post brewing but I'm working Saturday and Sunday, so I think I'll save it for the weekend. Music posts are always relaxing and fun to put together after a long day at the book mines.

Since it's the end of the week, let's have a good old Friday grab-bag, why not? I'm sure I can come up with something... 

I'll even throw in a few screenshots I took last night the Olmec Rainforest, the brand-new island that got added to Noah's Heart in the most recent patch. It's very close to the mainland. I think you're supposed to arrive by boat but I was able to fly across the narrow straits on my jetpack. Did I mention we get jetpacks?

All the content there requires level 75 so I wasn't able to do anything more than ride around but it looks amazing. Shame about the never-ending rain but then, y'know, rainforest...

Ok, here we go! This is a good one. Sure to cheer you up.

Snoop Dogg and Eminem to deliver metaverse-inspired performance at 2022 MTV VMAs. 

I lifted that verbatim from a headline at the NME, where news reporting tends to be text-book neutral in tone. If you click through and read the whole thing, you'll find it's even more disturbing than it sounds.

Snoop and Eminem are inarguably two of the biggest, most recognizeable names in the most commercially successful form of popular music in the world. Granted, both of them base their fame on work done quite some years ago, but they still have A-list name recognition and immense cultural clout. 

Their impramature is significant so it shouldn't be too surprising they've given it to the best-known of the upstart NFT/Crypto tyros, Yuga Labs, the Bored Ape people. That in itself is concerning to those of us who fear the wrong metaverse is coming but there's something a lot closer to home to worry about for mmorpg fans, specifically.

The VMA performance is going to be actual not virtual, unlike the upcoming Charlie Puth gig in Fortnite. (I had to google Charlie to find out who he is. I'd heard the name but I thought he was an actor.). It will apparently be inspired by “the world of the Otherside metaverse”, which is “a gamified, interoperable metaverse” that “blends mechanics from massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) and web3-enabled virtual worlds”. It will, of course, be fully integrated with and reliant upon NFTs and Cryptocurrency, specifically ApeCoin.

Given the heft of the names here, I think it's reasonable to feel a frisson of doubt about where this all might be leading. I know we all like to handwave the future away when it doesn't suit us but change happens. None of us want this kind of multiverse but we might be getting it anyway.

Of course, as we know, making mmorpgs is a lot harder than people seem to think it is and takes a lot longer. Making mmorpgs that anyone wants to play for more than a few weeks is even harder still. 

The chances of Otherside turning out to be something other than a cultural curiosity seem slim, especially since even Mark Zuckerberg, with all his money, doesn't seem to be making much progress. On the other hand, I'm old enough to remember when mobile phones were comedy gold and the bursting of the dot-com bubble spelled the end of the internet. I wouldn't assume all this is going where we'd like it to go just yet.

It was Guild Wars 2's 10th Anniversary this week but I couldn't bring myself to care, much less log in. It's been well over a month since the last time I played. I understand there's no such thing as a cure and it's one day at a time but things are looking good.

There's certainly nothing in the current celebrations to tempt me back. If there's any company that underplays anniversaries like ArenaNet I've been fortunate enough not to play their games long enough to notice. Here's what you can get for ten years loyal service:

•   Birthday Booster (guaranteed) (2)  Teleport to Friend (guaranteed) (5)
•   Bag of Spirit Shards (guaranteed)  Birthday Card (guaranteed)
•   Black Lion Statuette (guaranteed) (2)  Proof of Legend (guaranteed)

Let's summarise that, shall we? 

• Two basic utitlity items you can get from daily login rewards. My banks are stuffed with them. 
• A bag of the kind of shards I get dozens, maybe even hundreds, of every day. 
• A "birthday card" with no picture and no greeting that can be converted into five thousand Karma, the game's legacy currency, of which I have tens of millions already.
• A couple of tokens for the cash shop. Enough to buy you some extremely basic utility items and nothing more.
• And finally, the one item original to the actual 10th anniversary itself, a measly single token to go towards the new "Decade’s armor set". It won't even buy you a single piece.

Compared to the never-ending shower of gifts anyone playing any of the latest imprted titles has come to expect, this is a joke. Those games also depend on cash shop sales but somehow they manage to give away mounts, skins, hats, weapons and every kind of boost and utility as a matter of course. Would it really bankrupt ANet to come up with some actual gifts once in a decade instead of clearing out the lint from the bottom of Evon Gnashblade's pockets? No, it bloody wouldn't. 

In other GW2 news, the game finally went live on Steam this week but only for new accounts. Existing accounts can't be linked for tedious but understandable financial reasons (Valve's 30% rolling finder's fee, basically.) I did briefly consider making a new account, as I did when the game went Free to Play, so I could do a blog post about it. I still might but as far as I can tell there isn't any substantive difference between the Steam version and the regular F2P so there's probably not much to say. Also, I really don't need a fifth GW2 account.

And in other, other GW2 news, it also arrived on GeForce Now this week. Didn't see that coming. Since one thing I've never had any cause to complain about in GW2 is any kind of frame-rate lag and my ancient PC can run the game as well now as ever, I don't think I'll be adding in the extra step but it's good to know the option exists. 

On a similar theme, I finally pulled the trigger on a VPN this week. I've toyed with the idea many times but it always seemed like too much of a bother to go through the set-up and payment process. Then, in the middle of the week, Firefox sent me yet another promo for their in-house version, at a discount.

I clicked through and read the details and it looked good but before I made a decision I looked at some reviews of the service, from which I learned that Mozilla uses a pre-existing VPN from another provider, Mullvad.  Firefox rebadges that service and charges about twice as much for it.

 

Granted, if you have a Firefox/Mozilla account it's neat and tidy to keep it all under the one roof but it turns out Mulvad is almost pathologically dedicated to avoiding any kind of paper trail, so setting up an account with them is about the simplest operation imagineable. You can literally send them cash in an envelope if you want.

I didn't do that. I paid by PayPal. It's very cheap. Five euros a month, flat rate. No discounts for longer contracts because they don't do contracts. For that they'd need to know more about you than they want you to tell them.  

It was super-easy, too, and very fast, as was the set-up process. And the service works just as advertised. I tried it for a while, logging into various U.S. media sources that usually block my I.P. All of them worked just fine. 

The problem is, anything worth watching still requires a paid account. It's all very well being able to fool HBOMax or Warner Bros into believing you're dialling in from New York but they still want to be paid. If I ever decide to subscribe to a service that doesn't operate over here, I would certainly use Mulvad to do it, always assuming I could find a way to pay that didn't trigger cross-border alarms but for now I can't see that I'm going to find much use for  a VPN.

The whole thing also has a downside that none of the reviews or discussions I read mentioned. It was all very well telling new websites that didn't want to know me before that I was now One of Them but old sites that already accepted me suddenly had no idea who I was. Using the VPN, I kept having to sign back into places that normally let me in on the nod.

Consequently I have the thing switched off most of the time, only flicking the switch if I want to visist some ring-fenced oasis of culture like the CW. It defeats about 95% of the point of having a VPN at all, which as far as I can see is to be able to creep around the World Wide Web like some kind of ghost-ninja, leaving nary a trace. 

Personally, I gave up caring who knows what I do online years ago. If anyone wants to track my progress from MassivelyOP to BBC Cricket to Pitchfork and back, good luck to them. I think it must be at least a couple of decades since I knowingly visited a website I wouldn't be happy to mention on the blog. I'm old. Nothing I do is likely to be interesting to anyone.

I doubt I'll renew the subscription to Mulvad when it expires in a month but I'd certainly pay them another five euros any time there happened to be TV show I wanted to see, if it was showing on a free service I couldn't access. It's a very low price for even one season of a good show.

And finally, out of my random sack of fun, I pull a video! It's Arlo Parks covering Julia Jacklin for Like A Version, which is one of my YouTube-subbed channels. Arlo Parks was one of my "discoveries" from this year's BBC coverage of Glastonbury. She won the Mercury Music Prize in 2021 for her album Collapsed in Sunbeams, something I failed to notice even though it was reported on all the music sites I follow. Shows how much attention I was paying.

Anyway, better late than on time, as any fashionable party-goer will tell you. 

I was even later to the Julia Jacklin party but now I'm through the doors, I'm having a great time. There's something about her voice and the arrangements she uses that have an almost ASMR-like effect on me. She has a new album out. I read a review today on Pitchfork and it sounds great. I already know some of the tracks, including the wonderful Lydia Wears a Cross and the excellent I Was Neon, both of which have already appeared here.

I'd buy the album now but this is the time of year when I have to start thinking about what to tell people when they ask me what I want for my birthday and Christmas. Yes, I do need to start building my wishlist that far in advance. I'm going to put Pre Pleasure on it. In fact, I think I'll go and do it now.

It's kind of an approrpriate title, now I come to think of it...