It's All just A Game To You, Isn't It?

Not that I want to act as unpaid hype man for Neverness To Everness but damn! Have you seen the latest trailer? 

No? 

Well, here it is. 

Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Not actually a trailer. 

It's better than that. It's the opening sequence of the game itself, apparently. More annoyed than ever about the lack of beta invite now. Grrr.

The only problem is, I want to watch that anime quite a lot more than I want to play that game. It feels like the game is the consolation prize because there is no anime. Maybe that'll swap round when I do get to play it. I hope so but I kinda doubt it. 

Raises a question, though, does it not? All these very-to-extremely successful anime-inspired games... wouldn't it make sense for them all to spin off into actual animes? Movies or shows, either way. Is there really not a Genshin Impact movie in the works? Surely there must be...

Wait...

I'll check...

Well that was more confusing than helpful. Maybe all that guff about the death of the web does have some validity after all because it certainly is full of nonsense these days. And I don't mean AI halucinations or deep fakes or any of that trendy buzzword clamor, either.

Has anyone actually tried to use IMDB for anything meaningful in the last, oh, five years, for example? Nothing there has made much sense since at least the pandemic. I used to be able to go there and get solid, straightforward details on movies, just like looking them up in a book. Now look at it! 

Case in point: do a simple google search for "Genshin Impact movie" and the top result is IMDB - Genshin Impact (TV Series 2019...) Hmm, interesting, you think... how did I miss that? And did Genshin Impact really come out that long ago? 

No, it did not. It launched at the end of September 2020. So, what then? The game is an adaptation of an existing IP? How did I miss that?

No, it isn't. There was no "TV series", not in 2019 or any other time. The entry lists 250 episodes but it looks as if what IMDB has chosen to do is list every cut scene and trailer for the game as if it was an episode in TV show. 

That's not nearly confusing enough, though. We can do much better than that. It seems HoYoVerse has been hyping a TV show based on the game for years. Or a movie. Or both. There are plenty of links to times they've said one in the works, complete with a few details on which studio might be producing it. No actual show has yet appeared or even been scheduled.

Well, except for that one that one that ran from September 2020 to August 2031, of course. I mean, we all know about that one, don't we? It was "one of Netflix's most streamed Asian programmes" and it won "Anime of the Year Award in 2022 at the International Anime Awards". 

Don't say you didn't hear about it? It's right there on the web in black and white (Actually white on black because in some parts of the internet it will be forever 1998.)

Someone put a lot of work into that Fandom Wiki entry. That is not AI. I mean, I'm not saying whoever did it didn't get an AI assist but I'm pretty sure that's all one person's fantasy there. And if they'd not chosen to project it all the way through to 2031 as though we were past then already, it would have been very convincing indeed.

So, no, as it happens I don't think AI is going to render the world-wide web unusable for any practical purposes when it comes to research. Humans got there first and are already making a pretty good job of that.

None of which was really what I was going to write about but now I've started, I might as well throw in something else I've been meaning to say about AI. Has anyone noticed how some of the AI applications that started out as services or resources are slowly turning into games?

It took me a while but once you have your eye attuned to it, you start seeing it everywhere. NightCafe, the AI image generator portal I've been using by preference for a long time, has slowly morphed from a sort of curation point for multiple models to a social media platform for enthusiasts and now it's made the full jump to becoming a game by adding... quests.

They've been using pop-ups to suggest ideas I might want to make pictures from for a long time, as though I'm going there to kill a few minutes, not to make specific images for a defined purpose, but now they're amping the casual gaming approach up to offer two-week-long challenges they've chosen to label "quests". 

Suno hasn't gone that far yet but it's well into its social media stage, with its own star creators and featured performers. It has rankings of a kind, too. I'd guess it's maybe one more iteration away from going full game.

This is the beginning of how it's going to be. AI is still bloody awful at the things the big tech companies are demanding everyone uses it for but it's tailor-made for casual time-filling. Forget the supposed danger that AI could replace the creative work of actual artists and musicians and writers in true video games. It's nowhere near ready to do that and even if it was the pushback from a very vocal segment of the audience is going to delay the (Still inevitable.) drafting of the technology into mainstream entertainment production for quite a while longer. As something for idle hands to do when there's nothing better, though? For that, it's perfect already.

The threshold for game-like entertainment at that end of the market is orders of magnitude lower than  in games aimed at console or PC gamers. It's not as though the standards of human-made games there are stellar and the expectations of the audience are infamously relaxed. If it kills thirty seconds at a bus-stop it's likely good enough.

Or  maybe that's just the view of someone who doesn't understand the market or the players. Easy trap to fall into. Still, I have heard enough about the way the Suno mobile app's being used already to understand that for many of its users, typing in a few words and having it make a song you can laugh about is considered a decent enough way to pass a lunch hour. Especially now it will happily use rude words.

Luckily, for now anyway, these apps do still retain the backend that lets them be applied to the purpose for which they were originally created, namely as creative tools. How long that will last is another matter, which is one reason I'm getting as much done now as I can before I log in one day to find the whole thing has been turned into a game. I suspect the window of opportunity for doing much other than the AI equivalent of quizzes, word-searches or sudoko may not stay open that much longer.

And once again, that won't be because of anything AI has done. It'll be because some people actively enjoy making things worse. 

Let's hope that's overly pessimistic. I'm certain there will still be professional tools using AI tech. You'll just have to pay professional rates to access them. The free stuff will be aiming at an entirely different demographic.

One thing I will commit to: it'll be a long, long time before we see anything from an AI to match the Nevernesss To Everness cut scene at the top of the post. Humans may use AI as the tool to create something like that but the AI will have about as much say in the finished product as your pen has in the words you write.

I'm not even saying I'm happy about it, either. Who wouldn't want to be able to type "Urban post-apoc magitech anime TV show with animorphs - sassy dialog, lots of explosions" into an AI app and get ten twenty-five minute episodes as good as that trailer in thirty seconds? Geez! The phrase "I'd never leave the house" would really come into play then, wouldn't it?

It's the 2020s equivalent of the 1960s jetpacks and flying cars though. Always going to happen, never does happen. 

Speaking of which, where is my jetpack? I've had it on order since at least the nineteen-seventies...

Just Because It's Costing You Nothing Doesn't mean You Can't Complain

I may not be playing many games at the moment but that's not going to stop me collecting more. 

Ooh! Sidebar! Is that a legitimate way to look at all those gaming backlogs everyone keeps complaining about? I've been in the habit of referring to mine as a Gaming Library, in an attempt to add some gravitas and alleviate some guilt (Guilt, I should clarify, that I personally do not feel but which I understand to be some kind of a general problem among the community.) by suggesting a large stack of unplayed games represents a resource rather than an obligation but how would it be if instead we re-framed our backlogs as Collections? 

Collections are cool. Everyone loves them. Every item they contain exists to be owned, treasured, curated and occasionally looked at but no-one expects you to use any of them. Collections are always growing, too. It's part of their charm and appeal. Adding to them is a hobby in itself and it gives other people something to give you as a present when they're stuck for ideas of their own.

And you can forget about the sunk cost. Sure, some collections hold their value and even increase but many don't and no-one cares. In fact, it's often considered crass to know, or certainly to talk about, how much your collection cost or how much it might make at auction if you sold it - which of course you never would.. The true value of collections lies in the pure, innocent pleasure that comes from owning and appreciating them.

There! Now don't you feel better about that backlog?

Also, congratulations to me for yet again de-railing one of my own posts. One sentence I got out before it happened! That has to be a record.

Getting back to the point, as Wilhelm thoughtfully reminded us all yesterday, the Steam Summer Sale has just started. I thought I probably at least ought to take a look at how that affected my wishlist, on the basis that if I'm still not willing to commit at two-thirds off, there's probably not much point that game staying on the list.

Definitely Maybe

As it turns out, only five games out of thirty-eight meet that criterion and I have no inclination to buy any of them. Added to that, two games on the list are currently on offer for less than a pound and I still don't feel like paying for them, which strongly  suggests I might not even take them if they were free. 

And yet I haven't de-listed any of them. The counter-argument is why bother? It's not like a Steam wishlist takes up any space. I'm not going to trip over it or have to get the ladder out to shove half of it in the attic so I can make space for more.

It's not even as though having a bunch of games on there you're never going to buy makes it any harder to see the ones you might. The list's sortable eight different ways, including by how big a discount you can get and how long a game's been on there, which seem to me to be about the only two pieces of information I'd be likely to want to know before deciding whether or what to buy.

No, I think I'm more minded to leave everything alone, just on the off-chance that something might eventually catch my eye. It seems a bit ridiculous to try and second-guess future me by taking games off now that I might feel differently about in the future.

And yet, with all that taken fully under consideration, I did take one game off the list. What's more, it was one of the games I almost certainly would have bought at some point, when the discount felt right. I had a good reason. The best.

There are quite a few games on the list I'm always quite close to buying and a lot more I'm not. I could fairly reliably sort them into four  categories:

1. Definitely going to buy on Day One at full price. Just waiting for it to release.
2. Almost certainly will buy one day. Just a question of when and for how much.
3. Probably will buy one day but only when it's a real bargain.
4. Unlikely to buy, no matter how cheap it gets.

The first three categories seem completely legit but the last is iffy. Why even put a game on the list if you're almost certain not to buy it at any price? 

Well, a couple of reasons at least. For one, it supposedly helps the developers to have as many wishlist votes as possible in the run-up to launch. I play a lot of demos in Next Fests for games I think are quite good but aren't for me and I often wishlist those just to be supportive. Costs me nothing and they seem to appreciate it.

The other reason is so I can keep an eye on certain titles I might want to blog about. Having them on the wishlist helps remind me they exist and also occasionally gets me an email from Steam if something changes.

Of course, both of those arguments cease to have much validity once the games launch. At that point, I probably should remove them. I tend not to for one very good reason: I'm too lazy. Doing nothing is always the easier option.

Not at any price.

On my current wishlist there are two games in Category 1: Nighthawks and Nivalis. Nivalis has a 2025 release date but Nighthawks, which I added to the list in 2021, still just says TBA and I suspect it may never arrive.

Category 2 has ten games, Category 3 has seven and everything else is in the last one. That means exactly half of the games on my wishlist are games I am most likely never going to buy. Worse, I'd take them on a free offer but even then I'd be highly unlikely ever to play them.

And I don't care. That's fine. They're not in my way. They can just stay there unless they for some reason start to annoy me. That happens occasionally. I can have moods.

But even with your wishlist split up into categories, you have to be so careful! Can you imagine anything more infuriating than buying a game in Cat 2 for, oh, let's say, 30% off in the Summer Sale, meaning it's actually costing you £17.99, still in my opinion a not-inconsiderable sum for a video game you aren't desperate to play Right Now, only to find - literally five minutes later! - you could have had it FOR FREE on another gaming platform?

Boy, that would suck, wouldn't it? Lucky that never happened!

Relax! It didn't. It was close, though. 

Last night, after I read Wilhelm's post, I went straight to Steam and checked the discounts on my wishlist. The best ones were all on games in Cat 4 but there were a few 50% or even 60% offers in Cat 3 that I was highly tempted by and still am. 

Nothing in Cat 2 had more than 30% off and it wasn't quite enough to get me to pull the trigger, which turned out to be just as well when, on a whim, I also decided to check Prime Gaming this morning. 

Prime Says...

In theory, there shouldn't have been any reason for me to do that. Although the Prime offers roll over, there's supposed to be an announcement at the start of each calendar month telling you what's new. There's a blog about it and they send out an email. I even wrote about the June offer back at the beginning of the month, so I ought to know what's on it, right?

Yeah, like hell I do! Either I can't read or Prime can't keep the record straight. Maybe both.

When I opened the web page today, I saw a bunch of new games had been added that I cannot remember seeing on the blog post. And I'm pretty sure I'd have remembered if something from my fricken' Steam wishlist was on there. Which it was.

Or was it...?

There seems to be some confusion over that. Pay attention, now, because this gets complicated and I'm not going to make it any plainer with my explanation.

Claim says...

The Prime Gaming website very clearly shows Stray Gods: Orpheus Edition, the most expensive version, a compilation of the base game and the DLC but with a label underneath that says "Stray Gods: Orpheus", which is just the DLC on its own. When you click through to claim it, the display changes to the page you see at the head of this post, which only mentions the DLC. 

When you do claim it, though, the confirmation plainly says you just got the twofer. And then you go to Good Old Games to install it and what do you find? 

Yep, you guessed it! Neither! Instead, you appear to have received the original, base game - Stray Gods.

It's clear I'm not going to find out what I've actually got until I install it so talk amongst yourselves while I do just that. I'll go make myself a coffee while it's downloading...

GOG Says...

Well, that's made everything clear as mud. The game I've just acquired is definitely the original Stray Gods, not the DLC or the two-pack... but it apparently comes with a saved game in which Act 1 has already been completed. 

Wasn't me! My "Played" time on GOG shows just one minute, the time it took me to log in just now.

I guess a save might make sense if I'd just acquired Stray Gods on Steam, which is where I played the demo almost exactly two years ago. I think the demo was Act 1 so I can see how progress there might have been saved towards a future purchase of the full game on the same platform.

But I just got this version from Amazon Prime Gaming and they delivered it to me on GOG, and yet somehow it looks like it knows I already played through Act 1 on a Steam demo, so how does that work? I don't even use the same email address for Steam and Prime. Or the same user name.

As they say in the movies, something's not right...

And this post has not gone at all how I expected, either. I'm live-blogging again and it's all falling apart. The plan when I started was to write about the new games that appeared on Prime and the five that I claimed today but I think I'm just going to cut my losses and save that for a separate post. In fact, I'll probably wait until they announce the games for July, because I bet these are some of them.

Just a couple of extra details and thoughts to finish. 

To re-enforce my message about being careful not to buy stuff on one platform that you already own on another, while I was checking GoG for this post I spotted I already own Kerbal Space Program there. That's on deep discount in the Steam Sale right now and I was looking at it last night and thinking about getting it. Good thing I didn't.

Also, does any of this suggest maybe someone at Prime Gaming is using an AI assistant? In my experience they have real trouble picking up fine details like the difference between a game and its expansions or DLC. Or maybe no-one at Amazon really cares about Prime Gaming any more. that tracks.

And finally, what's up with GOG, anyway? Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not wrong.) but doesn't it stand for Good Old Games? With the emphasis on Old, I always thought. Stray Gods came out in 2023. That's two years ago. 

Is that what we're calling "old" now?  I have food in my cupboards older than that and it's still in date.

Last First Impressions Of Crystal Of Atlan

When I posted my first impressions of Crystal of Atlan back at the end of May, I certainly didn't think I'd still be posting about it a month later. Let's face it, my record for sticking with new games is abysmal these days. It never was great but at least I used to manage a month or two before running off after the next new fad. 

This year, with my gaming time at what has to be an all-time low since I first started playing PC games somewhere around 1997 or1998, any new game I take a look at can consider itself lucky if I come back for a second session. If I was interested in self-flagellation, I could go back through this year's posts and tally up all the games I've posted about once or twice and never again. It'd be a lot.

Let's not run away with the idea that I've played a lot of Crystal of Atlan, though. This will be the fifth post I've written about the game and that won't be too far off the number of sessions I've played. I haven't been counting but I'd guess it's no more than seven or eight. Still, that's a lot more than I was expecting, when I downloaded the game on a whim.

Given that there are very many better games I could be playing, plenty of them as new and some of them already sitting on my hard drives, why is COA the one that keeps getting the nod? It's a more-than-decent anime-styled action RPG that looks good and tells a good story but there are literally dozens of those. Why this one?

I wish I knew. It's not just "because it's there". As I said, I have plenty of games already installed, just waiting for me to choose them, some even in the exact same genre. And yet somehow, when the mood comes over me to play a video game, something that happens less and less often as the sun keeps on shining and being outdoors seems like a much better plan than sitting in front of a screen, it's Crystal of Atlan that gets the nod.

There's the dopamine hit, of course. My one and only character dinged 42 yesterday. That's quite fast progress and it comes in spurts, often at the end of a dungeon, when all the accumulated xp is dumped on her at once and she jumps a level or two at a stroke. That feels good.

The game also employs my favorite method of gear upgrades, drops from mobs. That's not the only way they come but it's how I've been getting most of mine and it's a significant attraction and another dopamine hit. Why developers ever moved away from gear drops to points systems and quest rewards beats me.

Then there's the look and feel of the thing. In recent years there's been a torrent of very good-looking games, to the point where I feel the baseline for "acceptable" is now somewhere above what would have classed as "outstanding" just a few years ago. COA doesn't stand out as particularly impressive by those standards but it certainly meets them and more by dint of its unfussiness and concentration on making a big, splashy impression.

Where other games of its kind offer a mutiitude of small details to create their worlds, this one sticks with the big picture. Everything is oversized and most of it seems to be built out of slabs. The place feels solid. There's also no shortage of neon and stained glass and everything is brightly colored, often in single tones. It's not subtle but it works.

The game describes the setting as "Magitech" and the style as "anime" but for my money the overarching aesthetic is "children's picture-book". It has that illustrative look to it, designed to appeal to an audience not quite old enough to read all the words yet. I'm not saying COA is a children's game, though. Far from it. It's probably just as well if the little ones can't read the words here, given what those words are saying.

I'm not about to say Crystal of Atlan has a great plot or that the writing is inspired. It definitely doesn't and it certainly is not.  It is often charming, though, and quite often amusing. Most importantly, it's a pleasure to read. Mostly it will be reading, too. There's some voice acting but not that much.

There are also plenty of cut scenes but they're much shorter than in some games I could mention and seem to concentrate mostly on scene-setting and local color. One thing I found interesting was that when I looked at the screenshots I'd taken of a couple of cut scenes, I noticed there was a lot more going on than I'd realised as they played out in front of me. Whether that says more about the game or me is another question. 

The plot as far as I've followed it mostly revolves around drug dealing, corruption and child exploitation, which it has to be said is an unusual approach for a game of this nature. Of course, the drug in question is a magitech performance enhancer with side effects that turn people into monsters and the children are Dickensian street urchins with amazing thieving and combat skills, but still...

Speaking of combat, it's good fun so far. I read an opinion piece over at MMOBomb earlier, where the writer, Mathew D'Onofrio, tried his first gacha action RPG and was impressed with the look of the thing but much less so with the combat. "Looks Good, Plays Bad" was his tl;dr.

That game was yet another new anime-gacha-action RPG I'd never heard of: Mongil: Star Drive. You can't throw a stone without hitting one of the damn things nowadays. 

What he didn't like about the combat was that there wasn't enough to do: "all I was doing was left-clicking, occasionally dodging with the right mouse button, and spamming Q and E for skills and ultimates." He followed that up with another complaint: "It felt like I was brute-forcing my way through every fight."

I quoted that in full because it does a fair job of summing up what I like about combat in Crystal of Atlan. The less I have to do, the better I like it. That said, there's actually quite a bit more to COA's combat than Mathew found in M:SD. I can't quite remember what it is but I know I was hitting more than just two buttons. (1,2,3,4, for skills, 5 for the pet, R for potions, Q and E for specials/ultimates, shift for dodge...)

Whatever it is, it's manageable for the moment. No doubt it will spiral over my skill ceiling at some point but so far it's comfortably below it and I'm enjoying the fights. Just as well because it is pretty much a fighting game, with an inverse ratio of combat to dialog as Wuthering Waves. 

Perhaps the biggest draw so far is the set pieces. Some of those are very impressive. Last session, I had one of those classic fights on top of a moving train. It was visually thrilling, as I would have loved to have taken some screenshots to demonstrate, but it was take photos or don't fall off and I chose to keep my footing.

The current series of dungeons I'm enjoying give a nod to Alice in Wonderland but really seem more like a fairground. It's a big upgrade, visually, from the sewers and back alleys of the previous chapter. It's nicer to be fighting in a clocktower filled with stained glass windows or next to a whirling carousel with prancing painted horses rather than a tunnel filled with sludge, that's for sure.

There's a whole exploration side to the game that I haven't yet... erm... explored, where you can search for collectible cards and take photos in scenic areas. I'm a lot more likely to do that when there are attractive views all around. 

The animations are striking, too. I used not to be much of a one for animations but play enough action RPGs and you start to get a taste for them. I very much enjoy the way my character does leaps and flips and I spend as much time doing it as I can when there's a fight going on. Whether it helps I'm not sure but it feels good and if I could get a screenshot I bet it'd look good, too.

The thing I'm most displeased with is what my character's wearing. It's still that embarassing maid's outfit. I really need to look into how to get something less humiliating. Of course, I could always spend some money and buy an outfit in the cash shop. That'd be a first!

As that last paragraph suggests, I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll need to do some proper research on how the game works, what there is to do and how to get the best out of it all. Otherwise I fear I'll just be funnelled down the main storyline into dungeon after dungeon, which will most likely cease to be fun as soon as the fights start to be in any way challenging.

At Level 42 I really ought to be past the First Impressions stage anyway, so I think this is going to be the final post in that line. Next time - if there is a next time - I might have to start talking about the game as a game, not just a novelty. 

If I ever get that far, I'd call it a win for Crystal of Atlan. 

Let's Play Grab Bag Catch-Up

I know it's Wednesday but here's a grab-bag anyway. Why should Fridays have all the fun? All these have been around before but there may have been... developments.

A Stone Rolls Up A Hill...  

Let's start with... I want to say a rant but it's more of a whine. Regular readers may (But almost certainly won't.) remember that three weeks ago I dinged 51 in the EverQuest II version of Overseer and immediately posted to complain about how freaking slow it was going. I said then that it had taken me the best part of three months to get there from the mid-40s and that getting to a new season just meant I had to start from scratch all over again.

Well, guess what? Here we are, three weeks later and how far have I got? Not quite halfway through Level 52, that's how far. Impressed? I'm bloody well not!

Getting through 51 was a pain. Since it was a new Season, I was back to just two blue missions, which meant having to log in several times a day to recycle them. Slowly - oh so slowly - I managed to scrape up enough missions to fill out my allotted ten per diem but as I got a few yellow ones, with longer timers and cooldowns, I still had to set them several times a day to maximize my chances of getting more yellow ones.

Eventually - and it seemed like a lot longer than three weeks - I scraped up enough yellow missions that I could justify setting all ten once a day. That doesn't mean I have ten yellows now.  That's the dream. No, I have seven and I'm willing to sacrifice three daily slots to blues just so I can log in after breakfast to set and forget.

Well, not forget, because if I did that, the next morning when I logged in I'd have all the missions completed but they'd go on cooldown for several hours as soon as I collected the rewards. I have to remember to set them in the morning and pick them up in the evening now, so they come off cooldown overnight, ready to go again first thing next day. As for purple and green missions... not seen a single one drop yet.

This is not "playing a game". This is, at best, admin. I don't hate it because stuff like this does at least give some structure to my days, which otherwise might start to feel a little untethered. That's always a danger when you (Semi-)retire. Still, it's hardly what you'd call fun.

As I also think I said last time, I'm unclear on exactly how far I have to go to catch up to where I should be in Overseer. Accurate information is harder to come by than it should be. There is an achievement for hitting 55, though, and another for 61, the latter of which states "Become a Level 61 Overseer to unlock season 7", so I assume I need another nine-and-a-half levels.

Based on how long it took to do the last ten, if I keep this up without missing a day I don't think I can count on being Level 61 by the time the freaking expansion comes out! I always wondered why one of the higher-cost packs included the current Overseer Season as a perk. Not any more!

None of this really causes a problem if you play EQII the way people used to play MMORPGs, by which I mean all the time and obsessively, as though it was a vocation, a job and a religious belief all rolled into one. With that mindset, daily Overseer missions become just one more thing to do on a never-ending list. 

It's comforting, in a way, the repetition, which I guess is why people accept it or even welcome it. Certainly saves you having to think of anything else to do. For a game that you're playing casually, though, it makes no sense whatsoever. So why am I doing it?

I guess at some level I must enjoy it. Probably best not to think about it too hard.

Don't You Know Who I Am?

I was simultaneously excited and annoyed yesterday to read the news over at MMOBomb that Neverness To Everness is about to go into closed beta. Excited because NTE is by some margin my most hotly anticipated new game right now. Annoyed because I signed up for testing at the first opportunity and so far I've never heard a word.

That sounds awfully entitled, doesn't it? Why should he think he's going to get an invite? Millions of people sign up for these things. What makes him think he's so special?

Yeah, not that. What annoys me isn't that I haven't gotten into any round of testing so far, it's that I've never had a single communication from Hotta, the company making the game, at all. And that's odd. 

Usually, as soon as you sign up for testing, the company behind whatever it is starts to deluge you with promos and news and offers and more sign-ups. The whole reason they offer the places in testing in the first place is to harvest contact details so they can do exactly that. Or so I always thought. 

Either I'm wrong or this game's being made by people who think differentl. Or - and this is what really bothers me - my sign-ups never made it through the process at all and I'm not even registered as an potential source of future income.

I said "sign-ups" plural there. You might have spotted it. That's because I already had this worry last time they opened some kind of test. I suspected then that I might already have signed up but I tried again just in case. It didn't entirely seem to work but it wouldn't let me try again so I left it at that. Didn't have much choice, really, other than to sign up under different contact details, something I know from experience would almost certainly come back to bite me in the backside later on.

That's still a possible course of action I might take. Not that there's any real point to any of it, of course. It's a F2P game that I definitely wouldn't put much time into during a testing phase anyway, and it's most likely under NDA so I couldn't even blog about it. So why do I care? 

Because I want to play the damn thing! That's why! Even just for a few hours, to satisfy my curiosity and scratch this irritating itch.  It's nice to have at least one game I'm actually excited about and it's frustrating to feel locked out, even from the publicity cycle.

You know what? I might just go and sign up again after I finish this. It's not like I'm short of email addresses I could use.

There Can Only Be One... More

People, and I'm one of them, often complain about how there are far too many streaming services these days and how it costs a fortune if you subscribe to all the ones that have something you want to see. My solution, again like a lot of people, from what I hear, has been to drop some of the ones I had been subbing and watch less, rather than to spend even more money adding more.

I put Netflix on Pause last month for a start. I've barely been watching anything since I started making AI music, which is what I do late every evening in the time-slot I used to reserve for watching shows. (Also in the morning and in the afternoon but let's not go there just now.). 

I checked with Mrs. Bhagpuss if she was watching anything on Netflix at the moment and she wasn't so it seemed like we were paying to not watch anything on Netflix, which I figured we could probably do for free. A few weeks before that I cancelled Disney+ for the very good reason that we both agreed it was a big disappointment. Everything there I want to watch I've already watched even before it was on the service and the originals and exclusives aren't exciting enough to get me to watch them before I get to a whole load of unwatched shows and movies on services I already have or don't have to pay for.

In place of the two losses there was one addition. Amazon Prime had an excellent offer on Apple+, £3.99 a month for three months. I took that and even with the music pushing everything else aside I have actually used it. I'm watching Murderbot and catching up on Mythic Quest. In fact, those two make up 100% of my viewing right now. 

With all that in mind, what would it take me to subscribe to another streaming service? Obviously I'll unpause Netflix at some point, most likely when either Stranger Things or Wednesday arrive, but a completely new one?

This.   This will do it. I will, without hesitation, subscribe to Hulu if that's what it takes to watch the Buffy reboot when it happens. If Neverness To Everness is my most hotly-anticipated video game, this is its televisual equivalent.  

Want to know the best thing Sarah Michelle Gellar says in that interview? It's not that everyone, dead or alive, will feature in the reboot (If she has her way.). That's fantastic and I'm one hundred per cent behind it but there's something even better than that to look forward to: 

“It will be lighter than the last few seasons of the original”

Thank-you! Thank you so much! I've been wanting to do a full rewatch of Buffy for a long time but for once it hasn't been finding the time that's been the problem. It's that I can't summon up the willpower to put myself through all that trauma again. 

If there's a longer, bleaker run in a supposedly upbeat, humorous, popular fantasy series I don't really care to know about it. (And nobody better mention Bojack Horseman.) When I was watching Buffy the first time, there were days when I didn't want to hit Play. Even when I really, really wanted to hit Play just to find out what happened next..

I'm not saying I'd like to go back to the Monster of the Week slapstick of the first couple of seasons but damn! There has to be some acceptable mid-point. 

Okay, it looks like I've gone on so long about not very much I've taken all my allotted time and space. Which is great! Now I can go have lunch! 

The Taste Test 

Let's end with a song, like the comedians did, back in the really-not-that-good-after-all old days.

A little while back, Blondshell did an exclusive cover for in-car streaming service Sirius XMU and some kind soul put it up on YouTube. I featured that version here but it cut off just before the end. Checking back to the post (Which just so happens to be the same one I already linked above.) it's also now "Blocked in your country on copyright grounds".

Fortunately, Sirius XMU have officially released official version so I have absolutely no hesitation in sharing it again. Let's hope that's not blocked too. I can't actually tell until I post it.

What's more, the cover is now a highlight of Sabrina's live set, as must be obvious from the audience reaction in the next clip. For an artist of her prominence, she sure does still play some small clubs, doesn't she?

She's playing a club like that in the next city over from where I live in a few months and tickets are still available. I'm thinking about it. Haven't been to a club gig in twenty-five years or so. It was already feeling a little odd when I was in my early 40s so it'd be very weird now. 

Of course, it'd be fine if I wanted to see all the same bands I saw back when I was young - everyone who does that is old, onstage and off. Maybe I should do that a few times, just to get back into the rhythm of things before I try seeing anyone I actually want to see. It certainly wouldn't be because I wanted to see any of those old duffers again...

All The Old Dudes

When I wrote something about the deaths of Brian Wilson and Sly Stone a couple of weeks ago, I began by saying I didn't want to get into the habit of posting every time some significant performer or artist died because there are just too damn many of them. It's an unfortunate artifact of decade after decade of pop culture, a snowball rolling down the hill that's never going to stop.

I went on to say that I'd try to stick to "marking the departure of people, the news of whose death has some more than usual personal resonance for me" and I do hope to stick to that, which is why I'm writing this post. Either that or because I've got a half-decent anecdote. Could be both.

Almost the first thing I read this morning, when I started to go through my entertainment news feeds, was that Mick Ralphs had died. The news did not create a strong reaction. My first thought was a very mildly nostalgic "Aww... Mick Ralphs died...", immediately followed by "I didn't know he was still alive." Not exactly visceral.

As I read the report on Stereogum, it became apparent why I hadn't heard anything about Mick in a while. He had a major stroke almost a decade ago and hadn't been active since. He was "bedridden", in Stereogum's curiously Victorian phrase, until his death at the age of 81. 

Mick Ralphs doesn't have the name recognition of superstars like Brian Wilson or Sly Stone but he was a founder-member of one of those bands who had their fifteen minutes as "The Biggest Band in The World". That was back in 1974, when Bad Company's first album went quintuple platinum. I am very much not remembering Mick today because of that. I didn't like Bad Company then and they certainly haven't gotten any better with the benefit of time, for all that this year will see their induction into the Rock Hall of Fame.

My affection for Ralphs rests wholly on the work he did before then, when he was lead guitarist and co-songwriter with Mott the Hoople. At one time, when I was in my mid-adolescence, Mott were close to being my favorite band. Never quite, but always close.

As the obituaries are explaining today, Mick was with Mott long before they settled on their idiosyncratic name. Mind you, the one they started with wasn't much better. I knew they were called "Silence" before they were called Mott but until today I didn't know they started out as "The Doc Thomas Group". Clearly this was in the days before focus-group marketing.

Whatever they were calling themselves, like most people, I only became aware of  their existence when longtime fan David Bowie chose to sprinkle a little of his glitter dust over them in the form of All The Young Dudes and production duties on the album of the same name. That was in 1972, when I would have been about fourteen and just emerging from my thankfully brief heavy metal and prog rock phase into the sunlit uplands of art rock and New York sleaze.

I was also entering my cultural hunter-gatherer phase, something I have yet to grow out of more than half a century later. Back in the early seventies the pop culture slag heap was nothing like the environmental hazard to young minds it is today but it was still pretty damn huge and I spent most of my free time picking at it like a half-starved crow. 

Having latched onto Mott thanks to one very catchy single, I proceeded to chase down just about everything they'd done, which was a lot. They'd released four largely unsuccessful albums and were on the verge of breaking up when Bowie tossed them a lifeline. 

Mick Ralphs plays at least some guitar on every Mott album, even the one released after he left the band, but for the first half-dozen (Out of seven.) he's the keystone of the group. Ian Hunter, recruited in 1969, almost immediately became the face and de facto leader of the band but Ralphs was always the heart, which was why, almost as soon as he left, the heart went out of the band and they called it quits.

Or so it seemed from a fan's perspective, anyway. There's a lot of reportage and personal testimony from the insider point of view that suggests a much more complex narrative but I was a fan so I'll have it my way. 

I can remember being pretty gutted when Mick left Mott, not least because at that time I hadn't yet managed to see them live and now my chance at the classic line-up was gone. Also, by then I'd bought and listened to most of the back catalogue and it was pretty clear that, while Hunter was a great rock lyricist, Mick had the best tunes.

Or so I thought at the time, although it's an analysis largely unsupported by the evidence. My favorite Mott album has always been Wildlife, their third and the one with the strongest country/folk feel. It's drenched with Ralphs' unmistakable, ringing, lyrical lead guitar and that always led me to think of it as an album filled with his compositions. 

In fact, he wrote four tracks, Hunter three, and the rest is covers (Including their version of Melanie's Lay Down, which suggests another reason why I found her death so affecting a while back.) What's more, the tracks I like best on Wildlife (Waterlow, Angel of Eighth Avenue) turn out, on investigation, to be Hunter's, whereas Mick's contributions, particularly the opener, Whisky Women, can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to prefigure his much more commercially successful, yet much less aesthetically pleasing, work with Bad Company. 

All of which was just the kind of thing I filled my head with when I was in my teens. Lucky for me the internet wasn't around back then or I'd probably never have gotten out of the house.

As it was, I got out a lot and mostly what I got out to do was go to gigs. I saw a lot of bands in the seventies and eighties, some of them many times, but sadly I only got to see Mott the Hoople once and that was after Mick Ralphs had left. They'd just released what was destined to be their last album, the follow-up to their most commercially successful, Mott. They chose to call it "The Hoople". No, it didn't seem like a great idea then, either.

When it came time to tour the new album, Mick was off forming his supergroup Bad Company with Paul Rogers, Simon Kirke at al and Mott were stuck with the job of replacing him. As other bands have proved, successfully replacing even a key founding member is not an impossible task but Mott really fluffed it by bringing in Aerial Bender. 

As you may have guessed, Aerial Bender was not the name he was given by his parents, who knew him as Luther Grosvenor, which was also what he was called when he played guitar in the not very well-remembered rock group Spooky Tooth. Weirdly, Mick Ralphs was indirectly responsible for Grosvenor's name change. 

The scarcely-believable story, which also involves diminutive singer-songwriter Lynsey de Paul, involves Ralphs walking down a street in Germany, bending the aerials on a series of parked cars for reasons unknown. Apparently Lynsey, who was there with the band following a German TV appearance, used the phrase "aerial bender" about the incident in Ian Hunter's hearing and for some inconceivable reason he remembered it and later offered it to Grosvenor, who needed to work with Mott under a name other than his own for contractual reasons.

For even more inconceivably, Grosvenor accepted the suggestion and that's what he called himself for quite a while, even after his short stint with Mott was over. He was still with them when I finally got to see them, though, and let's just say he wasn't very good. Maybe it was an off night.

I was exceptionally unlucky to catch Mott in this short window of mis-opportunity. Immediately after Bender departed, he was briefly replaced by Mick Ronson so I missed the chance to see two of the best guitarists of their generation live. Except I didn't.

When Mott broke up soon after Ronson joined them, he and Ian Hunter formed the Hunter-Ronson Band, who I saw play live on their first UK tour. They were excellent. A lot better than the dying Mott had been, except for one moment in that gig - the encore.

In a scene that later came to feel like an eerie pre-echo of one in Spinal Tap, after a not very impressive showing from Aerial Bender, an assessment of their performance I remember being obvious from the stage if not from the audience, Ian Hunter came to the mic to announce a very special guest for the encore: Mick Ralphs. The audience's inevitable reaction must have been very uncomfortable for the great man's stand-in.

So I did get to see the classic line-up or something closely approximating it at least, if only for a couple of songs. Sadly, the brief appearance did not lead to a Tufnel/St Hubbins style reunion for the band. Mick went back to Bad Company and the immense commercial success it brought him, while Ian Hunter left Mott to carry on pretty much as before, only without the hits. The rest of Mott struggled on for a while without either of them then called it a day until the inevitable re-union bandwagon brought various combinations back together again in the new century.

By all accounts, Mick Ralphs was a jolly nice chap who played guitar really, really well. He also wrote some good songs. He had a good voice too, when he chose to use it. He made it big as a rock star without ever being anything like a rock star but I don't think I'd be writing about him now, all these years later, if it wasn't for the work he did with Mott in those five years at the start of the seventies. 

And especially if it wasn't for those few minutes at the end of one gig, when his unexpected appearance really did make me feel like the roof of the venue had opened up and the sun was shining down on me in a great ray of light from heaven. 

For that moment, Mick, many thanks and rest easy.

When In Rome...

As of now, I am officially up-to-date with the main storyline in Wuthering Waves. I have the screenshot to prove it, too, but it's a really boring screenshot, so I'm going to make it super-tiny so it doesn't spoil the look of the post.

There it is. Get your magnifying glasses out. Of course, I'm absolutely nowhere with the rest of the bazillion side quests, which would probably take me the rest of the summer to finish , if I did nothing else, but that's not the point. My goal in the game, in so far as I've ever had one, is to follow the really very good main story and that I am just about managing. Let's not get ambitious.

How did I reach this welcome but largely unexpected position? The latest update, gloriously named Lightly We Toss The Crown (Whoever it is at Kuro Games that keeps coming up with these titles deserves a raise.) arrived two weeks ago, a week after the eight-minute (!) promotional video.

As you can see, it's taken me a while to get around either to writing about or playing it but I've now done one and here I am doing the other so that's all good. Of course, as I've suggested already, "doing" the update only means I've made my way through the latest chapter of the MSQ. 

As you can see, if you're crazy enough to sit through the full eight minutes of the video, that's just a very small part of the new content. I continue to be completely in awe of the sheer amount of gameplay added with every update but then I did play Guild Wars 2 for a decade. My benchmarks are shot. 

Some of it only sticks around until the next one but most of it is flagged "Permanent" so the total size of the game increases significantly every six weeks or so. How long that's going to be sustainable is another question. I'd seriously hate to be starting now and the game's only been out for a year.

Same picture but bigger in case you didn't click

Speaking of which, when I logged in a few days ago to try and get caught up, I was expecting to have to go through whatever was added to the MSQ with the Anniversary because I'd been running one update behind for a long time. I was surprised and very pleased when the game took me straight to the start of the current chapter. It seems whatever happened in the Anniversary celebrations wasn't part of the main storyline at all. 

I still don't actually know what it was, only that it generally wasn't well-received. Naithin at Time To Loot, the only other blogger around these parts who writes about WW, mentioned  a couple of times that he was unimpressed by whatever it was and expressed some curiosity about what I might think about it, when I got around to doing it, but I'm going to have to disappoint him there because I haven't and now I probably never will.

Unless, of course, it was the thing with Encore and the video game sponsored by the Pioneer Association... If it was, I can see the problem. After I finished the latest chapter of the MSQ, I went back to see if I could figure out what I'd missed and that looked like the most likely candidate so I went to give it a go.

You may well ask, Abby...

It started out well but it ended badly. The conceit is really similar to GW2's Super Adventure Box, a gimmick I never much liked. In both cases a character in the game you're playing creates a video game inside the game your playing for the characters in that video game to play for fun. And also in both cases that video game looks much more like what a video game would look like if you asked someone who doesn't play video games and has no particular love for them would imagine all video games probably look like, namely childish and dumb.

Aesthetically I prefer the one in Wuthering Waves, which is called... no, I've already forgotten. Super Adventure Box has it beaten hands-down on the naming front. SAB is a great name and very easy to remember - it's three years since I last played GW2 and I remembered it instantly, whereas it's about half an hour since I played this one and I'm going to have to look it up... Second Coming of Solaris. That's it. Not very catchy, is it? Must have given the job of naming it to an intern, I guess.

Anyway, it starts out quite charmingly but soon devolves into some huge arena fight where you play a character that isn't you, which we all love so much, don't we?  I got a warning at the start that all my resonators were too low for it but I carried on anyway because they were the best ones I had so what else was I going to do? 

There has to be an easier way to travel.

The warning was on the money. Unsurprisingly, my team, all 40-60, couldn't make much of a dent in the level 90 mobs they had to fight and pretty soon everyone was dead. I tried to exit the arena but there was no way to do it without spending a Revive token to get someone up, so I force-quit the game and rebooted... and came back in exactly the same position. So I had to revive and then quit, which annoyed me.

If that was the thing you didn't like much, Naithin, I didn't like it either. I'm not surprised people were up in arms about it.

The current update, though... SO much better! I really loved it, actually. It's spectacular but also subtle, with a throughline from previous chapters but also plenty of new and different elements of its own. I found the plot involving, the setting evocative, the new characters engaging and the gameplay satisfying. Pretty much straight As all round from me.

I'm not going to do any plot summaries. Frankly, the plot is now so arcane and abstruse I can barely follow it while I'm playing, so it's going to make no sense to anyone who isn't. And that, you'd think, would be a negative but it's far from being that.

There are inns?

It's true that I do, in general, enjoy narratives that I can't unravel but they also have to be stuffed full of interesting or exciting details and moments to keep me engaged and this one really is. So much is going on all the time it's impossible to follow but instead of feeling confusing it successfully creates a sensation that there are huge, hidden forces moving beneath the surface, creating ripples strong enough to knock you off your feet. 

And that's quite thrilling. I'd be happy never to learn what's really going on. Indeed, I might prefer it that way. I'm happy just watching the ripples spread.

The update adds a whole new playable area, which I have yet to explore to any meaningful extent. In fact, when I look at my map in the game and at the achievements associated with exploration, I see that I have yet to explore almost everywhere other than the territory that came with the original launch and wherever the story's taken me since. I really am letting the explorer archetype down.

How about one of those inns I was hearing about?

The new city is called Septimont and it has a vaguely Roman theme inasmuch as everyone wears either a toga or roman legionary armor and the big ticket in entertainment is gladiatorial combat in the arena. A good deal of the chapter involves pairing up with one of the locals and competing in the four-yearly Agon, a knockout competition for gladiators. 

That's very clever. A previous chapter had us competing in similar competition that was culturally inflected. It shows just how rounded a personality the player-character must be, that they can beat entire populations at both the arts and in combat. But then, if you've been following the plot, you'll know that the PC, for once, really is superhuman. I know all games tell you your character is the Big Kahuna but in Wuthering Waves the lore and the storyline back that up with evidence.

The writing and the voice acting is excellent as always. I particularly liked the thoughtful observations on the effects of fame and the relationship between performers and fans. That seemed extremely up with the zeitgeist. 

Are you looking at my tail?

The new character you pair up with, Lupa, I found both delightful and fascinating. She's full of nuance. I couldn't entirely figure out either her motivation or her trustworthiness for a long while. In the end I decided she was - mostly - what she a) said she was and b) believed she was but there's definitely some part of her that's neither. 

Her name, of course, means Wolf, which is fine... except she apparently is a wolf. I mean, she has a tail and she keeps sniffing people. Yes, really. I am not sure exactly how that goes in Solaris-3. 

There was that whole side-quest ages ago, with the guy who was a wolf, and he had a tail like hers but as far as I remember he had to pretend he wasn't really a wolf, just a boy with a false tail pinned to his pants or else he'd have been lynched. Maybe I'm misremembering or maybe Septimont is just more socially advanced and wolf-people there don't suffer the same type of prejudice.

Lupa's voice actor, like most of them, does a bang-up job but I do feel I ought to call attention to a rare case where that... erm... isn't exactly true. If you watch  the first couple of minutes of the promo video I linked earlier, you'll soon see what I mean.

I'm sorry? I didn't quite catch that. Did you know you have quite an accent?

Yes, it's Augusta. What is that accent she's doing? I honestly can't even tell what it's supposed to be, let alone what it is. Sometimes it sounds Scottish - or rather it sounds like someone who once saw a phonetic version of a Scottish accent one one of those amusing seaside postcards but has never heard an actual Scottish person speak. Quite often it sounds Welsh but as if whoever's talking is trying, unsuccessfully, to pretend they don't have a Welsh accent. Mostly, though, it sounds like nothing on Earth.

Arguably, that could be okay. Solaris-3 isn't Earth. There could be plenty of accents there that no-one here has. If so, it's just weird only Augusta has this one. But then, I bet the actor playing her is the only one that could do it...

As you'd expect from a plotline involving trying to win a knock-out competition for gladiators, there's a fair amount of combat in this chapter, although even then not so much as you might expect. Once again, I'm extremely pleased to say, all the fights are well within the capability of an under-geared, under-prepared, casual player with minimal skills and a tendency to button-mash.

A girl's gotta make a buck, right?

The only time I lost a fight was the Final, on my first attempt, at which point the game popped up a window to suggest that before I tried again I might do something about my Echoes. That was good advice. I had five of them slotted as I should but only one had been upgraded. The others were all zero level. 

Once I'd swapped some of them around, adding a healer, which seemed like a pretty crucial omission, and upgraded them all, my second attempt was cake. And anyway, I didn't even need to finish the fight, which changes for story reasons several times, at what seem to be set points, into different fights with bigger bosses, all of whom also turned out to be quite manageable.

Most of the gameplay, as usual, isn't fighting at all. It's watching a rather good movie, this time one with a spectacular ending, stuffed to bursting with special effects. It was very impressive. And also satisfying. I had a really great time.

Lupa is great but it's Buling I really want to see more of next time.

I didn't have a stopwatch running but the whole chapter (And I did nothing else in the game until I'd finished it.) took me three sessions. I don't play very lengthy sessions these days but all three were well over an hour, so I'd guess the whole thing must have been at least four hours long.

And now, for once, I'm technically up with the story. Well, the MSQ, at least. It'll be another month before the next update, if past cadence is a guide, so I've got time to go do some exploring on my own time, without pointers telling me where to go.

I think I'd better make the effort or they'll throw me out of the Explorer's Guild. 

Tunes To Burn

Well, I checked and it really has been two weeks since the last What I've been Listening To post. Feels more like a few days. I guess time really does fly. I'm mildly determined to keep this feature on track so a couple of weeks is about right for another round.

Of course, that's predicated on my having actually listened to something lately. Which I have. My own stuff. I haven't just been spending most of my time making my own music, I've been listening to it, too. Obsessively.  I even downloaded everything I've been doing to my phone so I could listen to it at work. And as bad as it may sound, I find I like listening to me more than I like listening to almost anyone else.

Still, I have managed to rack up a few good tunes that I had no part in and the upside of the flood turning into a trickle is the quality's consistently high. So there's that. The less satisfactory aspect is a general lack of any kind of theme or throughline other than "Oh, hey, I just heard this and it's pretty spiffy!" But then, not every post has to have some deep subtext. Which is just as well...

Let's have a rummage, anyway. See what's in the bag.

 Cowbella - Bar Italia

It sounds even more like Wire than Elastica used to and that saying plenty.

And wow! That's a very disturbing, very NSFW video. I only just watched it this minute, when I put it in the post. Before, I just started it running and tabbed out and left it on in the background, which is always a risk. I do watch them all before I post them, though.

I kinda want to know what the lyrics are now...  I'm not as good with lyrics as you'd think I would be, being so writery and all. Mostly with lyrics, I hear a few lines and they become the whole song. The rest kinda slips by. In this one it was "You got a lot of friends, got a lot of friends But how many like you?"

Hmm, that's not very enlightening. I do like the idea of a narrative video that doesn't remotely follow the lyrics of the song, though. Is that too smart for its own good?

Alright Alright Alright - Westside Cowboy

These are the people the Glastonbury organizers decided were the best new band in Britain this year. Or the best that applied, anyway. I mean, I don't want to sound old...

Goes some, though, doesn't it? 

POLLYANA - Just Mustard

The Glastonbury new talent competition is open to acts from the UK and Ireland. I can only assume none of the ever-growing number of frighteningly strong Irish bands bothered to send in a demo. It seems like most of the really striking and original stuff I'm hearing comes from that direction just now.

Most of them aren't that new, though, I suppose. Just new to me. I do my best but it's hard to keep up with the flow.

 Jamie Oliver Petrol Station - CMAT

And then there's wilful stubborness. That doesn't help. For reasons it would take a skilled therapist to uncover, I took against CMAT from the moment I saw the name. And it had nothing to do with who or what they might have been because I had no clue. I just really, really didn't like those four letters, in caps, in that order. Like, I really didn't like it. Like you wouldn't like a bug crawling up your arm under your sleeve. Go figure.

I did eventually find out who CMAT is, when she turned up on some festival I was streaming or something. I forget exactly. Still didn't shift the irrational aversion to the name. Then this one started turning up in all my feeds and on YouTube recommends and I wasn't having that either. Wouldn't click through.

Until yesterday, when Stereogum dropped the usual 5 Best Songs of the Week feature and it was on there too. And that's always an extremely reliable tip so I finally cracked and clicked and guess what? It's great! Maybe that'll shift my freakish disinclination. 

Also, I'll append the 'Gum's handy explanation of the title for American readers: "The titular phrase “Jamie Oliver Petrol Station” is sheer gibberish to most Americans. Jamie Oliver is a celebrity chef, petrol is gas, and some gas stations over there sell Jamie Oliver-branded food at their convenience stores."

I once worked with someone who hated Jamie Oliver's face so much he regularly used to claim if he had the chance he'd cut his lips off, so I'd say Ciara doesn't really have that much to apologize for in the very competitiive I Hate Jamie's Face stakes. 

 Sunday Love - Bruce Springsteen

Geez! That was a hard turn! Sorry about that. Hope no-one got whiplash. 

CMAT is famous enough to headline main stages at festivals but she's no Bruce Springsteen when it comes to name recognition. Or, I'm pretty sure, to productivity. Bruce writes and records so many songs he doesn't just have some to spare, he has whole albums of them. Multiple albums.

He's just released another collection from his vaults, the second, and there's a third on the way. This one has seven complete, never-before-heard (Except by invitation.) albums by the Boss. There's a really good review on Stereogum that I recommend to anyone interested in either Bruce himself or the creative urge that might lead to such over-production, an urge with which I can't help but empathize just now.

I only own a handful of Springsteen albums and of those the only one I ever really played much was The River. I'd listen to him doing his Burt Bacharach impression all day long, though. 

Lou Reed - Corey Hanson

As has been obvious for a long time, I have a thing for songs whose titles are, or include, the names of famous people, so this was a gimme. It's a lovely tune, too. Jazz really is coming back, isn't it?

 Murda - Lil Yachty

I put this next, thinking it was going to stem any unwanted slide towards jazz, but damn if it isn't pretty jazzy too. That sample is from Maggie Rogers' Alaska, just to save you the trouble. I never really liked the original, even though I probably should have. I listened to it after I heard this a few days ago, just to remind myself what it sounded like and it's the first part I don't like. The sample's from when it gets good. But then we already knew Lil Yachty has good taste.

Love Is Cruel - Miles Kane

Every time I hear Miles Kane I have to wonder whether Luke Haines has a voodoo doll somewhere with a few strands of Miles' hair poking out of the weave. Not that Miles has a lot of hair to spare, based on this video. 

This is so retro it could almost be a parody. Maybe it is. If you had a voice like Miles', though, would you care? I bloody wouldn't.

 MOONBEANS - Alissic w Au/Ra

And finally, some original work. Not by them, by me. And by "original" I mean something I found for myself without being pointed there by a professional reviewer and also something that's most likely new to you, dear reader. 

How that came about was that I forgot to email myself the lyrics for the song I was working on last night before I went to bed so I couldn't carry on working on it on the laptop. And I was too lazy to get up and switch the desktop back on just to do it so I watched an episode of Mythic Quest (I'm on Season Four now - expect a review here before long.) and then went on YouTube for an hour.

It's all circumstance and serendipity in the end, isn't it? I didn't find a nest of gems but I did turn up a couple of nuggets and this was one. Alissic appears to be fairycore-adjacent although the hyperpop glitching doesn't seem wholly on brand for that. The lyrics and the vocal tone do, though, and she literally has a song called Treants so I'm fairly sure of my ground.

It Went (It Comes And Goes Remix) 

 Cream Flower

Damn, but the first few bars remind me of Go Chic. I really wish there were more Go Chic songs. Go Chic were amazing. Cream Flower are great but they're not Go Chic. I miss Go Chic.

Cherry Blossom Girl - AIR (feat. Charli XCX) 

Always end on a high.

Well, it was either that or Yawn Mower