People Have The Power

 

And so to the post I was going to write yesterday, before I tripped over yet another digressionary rabbit-hole. The whole damn place is littered with the things!

Coming into Blaugust, I had no intentions of joining in with the Community Project but this week's prompt is too tempting to ignore. That means, when I finish this, I'll have written two Community posts when I wasn't planning on writing any. It's like free will is an illusion... 

That's the prompt, up there at the top of the post. It's a familiar question. I had the radio on this morning while I was in the bath and a variation of it came up on Just A Minute, something along the lines of "What's Your Most Useless Super Power?"

Hmm. Do I need to explain what Just A minute is now, for the benefit of my largely non-UK audience?  I guess I could link to the show on BBC Sounds but I'll bet that's blocked outside the UK, just like iPlayer. I'll just link to the wikipedia page instead. It's bound to have one.

Boy, Just A Minute's been going  along time, hasn't it? That was an almost-new episode I heard this morning but I remember, one afternoon when I was in primary school, I'd have been about nine or ten, a teacher had the bright idea of getting us to play it. It did not go well. 

Now I'm past retirement age and it's still going! And we think MMORPGs go on and on. 

Uh oh. Rabbit-hole Alert!

Dragging myself back to the subject at hand, the idea of choosing a super power for yourself is always appealing. Paeroka reflects what's perhaps the most common response by focusing on three of the big five, Invisibility, Flight and Super Speed, the other two being Super Strength and Invulnerability, of course. Or possibly X-Ray Vision if you're a teenage boy.

Roger, on the other hand, applies the less-common but not all that unusual deprecatory approach, in which he concentrates more on what would be bad about having certain powers instead of fantasizing about all the amazing things he could do if he had one of them. 

Of the two, I find myself far more in sympathy with Paeroka. Sure, there'd be some downsides but surely it'd be worth it to be able to leap tall buildings at a bound. (Oh yeah? Tell that to Bruce Banner...)

The most popular powers are the most popular for a very good reason: they'd be amazing! And also amazingly practical. Just imagine how much time and money you'd save, being able to fly like... well, like almost every super-hero you ever heard of. 

They can all fly, can't they? In fact, it barely counts as a super power. You have to be able to do something else as well. How many super-heroes can you think of whose main or only power is flight?  

Angel. The Falcon. Black Canary... Oh, no, wait... she can't fly, can she? Imagine being named after a bird and not being able to fly! Or a bat...

In fact, Flight is so unambiguously de rigueur just to be able to function as a super-hero, the Legion of Superheroes, about whom I was only speaking just the other day, issue a Legion Flight Ring to all successful applicants immediately, so as to prevent any awkwardness when an alarm goes out. You can hardly have most of the team soaring into the air, flying off to confront the bad guys, and leave one or two puffing along behind on foot, can you?

So, yes, Flight's always a good one. Great for commuting, going on holiday and generally getting around. Super speed is good for the same things but also for getting yourself into the Guinness Book of Records for things like "Shortest Time To Peel An Apple". I haven't checked but I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's a real Guinness record. (It's 16.41 seconds in case you were wondering.)

Super Strength I find harder to come up with viable use cases for, unless you're a manual laborer of some sort. Or a sports person who doesn't mind cheating. Yes, you could lift your car to inspect the damage after you'd driven one time too many over that pothole at the end of the road that the bloody council still hasn't fixed and you'd be able to get the tops off of very stubborn pickle jars easily enough but really, if you don't plan on punching a lot of super villains in the face, Super Strength is of limited value.

Invulnerability, though... You really can't fault Invulnerability. No more broken nails, paper cuts, stubbed toes... I'd take it just so I could stop accidentally biting holes in the inside of my mouth, something I seem to do at least a couple of times every month. 

And of course it might, on occasion, save your life. It really only needs to do that once and you'll always be glad you picked it over all the other, flashier, more exciting powers. But still, it is a bit dull, isn't it? Passives always are.

That leaves Invisibility, which competes with X-Ray Vision as the prime pick of the adolescent male and for much the same reasons, something we won't explore in depth just now. Invisibility, though, has plenty of more salubrious uses. Bird-watching, for example. No need to build a hide. You're not going to be frightening the birds by standing there if they can't see you. Well, so long as you keep nice and quiet, anyway.

If it's the sort of invisibility where things you pick up turn invisible too, then it opens up all kinds of possibilities for shoplifting. And to be fair, the prompt doesn't even imply you have to use your power for good. If you plan on using it for personal gain or revenge or mischief, there are few powers better suited to the job than Invisibility.

As a life-long fan of super-heroes in the comics and other media, though, I feel beholden to look past the obvious to consider some of the less-celebrated powers. Paeroka mentioned an excellent second-tier power in Teleportation but that, in many ways, is just a more efficient version of Flying. I'd certainly not turn it down if offered but I think I ought to be able to come up with something a little more left-field.

One of the least-acceptable but most useful would be the kind of psychic domination employed by the likes of the Purple Man or the Mandrill. You tell people what to do and they do it. It's coercive and pretty much impossible to use in almost every situation without committing fully to the Evil Mastermind bit (Oh yes, Mastermind! Forgot about him. He could do it too, I think.) but you can't deny it would come in handy sometimes. 

Like when you get back to your illegally parked car and find the traffic warden just slipping the ticket under the wiper. Would it really be evil to use your power to suggest to the warden that perhaps those two yellow lines actually stopped a few feet to the right? 

I suuspect the temptation to do Very Bad Things with a power like that would eventually overwhelm even a saint. Best avoided, I think.

On a more harmless level, I always liked Princess Projectra's power to create wholly convincing illusions. That would be like having your own personal 3D cinema on hand, whenever you wanted it. Shapeshifting, as practiced by any number of heroes and villains from Chameleon Boy to the Super-Skrull has its attractions too: fool your friends and make a solid living as a look-alike of anyone famous who happens to be in demand.

The real problem with an awful lot of super powers, though, is that they're of very limited use if you don't plan on fighting anyone. Most of them come down to different ways of punching people or being able to be punched by them and keep on punching. Or to knock someone through a mountain or survive having a one dropped on your head, depending on the scale of the conflict. 

Other extremely common powers like being able to shoot force rays out of your hands or force beams out of your eyes, or set things on fire or freeze them, have limited use in normal life. We have torches and laser-pointers and fridges and matches for things like that. Okay, not so much the force beams although a leaf-blower might work in a pinch. And who really wants to be a human leaf-blower?

The other problem, rarely addressed in the oft-recurring pub argument over which is the best power, is that most of the good powers require at least one other power to make them viable. If we're sticking strictly to just the one, even something as simple as flight becomes problematic. Air friction is going to be a real pain at speed, just as cold will be at height. Even being chased by fighter jets might get old after the first few times. 

You'd ideally need some combination of Invulnerability, Super-Speed and Invisibility to make the most of it and then you're talking Superman. Although come to think of it, turning invisible is one of the few tricks he can't do..

Even Invulnerability, the old reliable, has its drawbacks, depending on how it works. If it truly means nothing at all can harm you, then you're effectively going to be immortal. Which is nice but which might not be quite what you had in mind, especially after the bomb goes off and you're the only one left - alive, unhurt and alone. Forever, Because nothing can hurt you. At all. Not even time.

If it's regular Invulnerability along the lines of skin like steel, though, you might find yourself regretting your choice when you come down with some disease that requires surgery. Or even just a saline drip. Or a filling.

Hmm. It's a tough choice, isn't it? It's lucky for super-heroes that most of them have no say in the powers they get. It's rare for anyone's origin story to involve conscious choice. Powers almost always happen to people, often as a side-effect of something unpredictable, like being bitten by a radioactive spider or being showered by chemicals when a bolt of lightning strikes a nearby shelf.

After that, it's all about coming to terms with the consequences, which generally means no self-recrimination over poor choices. Well, except about not standing too close to the window in a lightning storm, I suppose.

Not to sound like a rules lawyer but I think I'd need a lot more information about most of the powers before making a final choice. How fast can you fly, for example? I wouldn't want to end up like the Blimp from the Inferior Five. And if you go invisible, can you still see yourself? And do your clothes become invisible too or do you have to go around in the nude for it to work? These are crucial pieces of information. 

I don't know. Maybe I'd go for something unnoticeable and innocuous like Telescopic Vision. We always take a small pair of binoculars with us when we take Beryl for walks in the countryside. It would save having to carry those round. 

Or Telekinesis. That's always handy. When I think of the hours I've spent, staring hard at paper-clips, willing them to move... What? It can't just have been me, surely?

Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'd put half a dozen of the best ones in a hat and draw one at random. Or just go for Flight. You can't really go wrong with Flight.

Okay, if you're forcing me to pick, I pick Flight. There. Now are you satisfied? 

Don't Judge A Book...

Week #2 of Blaugust already and it feels more like week #20, doesn't it? Every year I look forward to Blaugust  and every year, as soon as it starts, I remember why last year I told myself that would be my last.

Still, no-one said it was going to be fun, did they? Oh, wait... I think I might have done...

Luckily we have prompts to keep us going. And theme weeks. And community projects. I'm really glad no-one thought to call that the Community "Challenge". I could do without any challenges, thanks. I could do with some idea, though.

Let's see. What have we got this week? One moment, while I refer to Krikket's invaluable primer. Now, that sounds like a magic item you'd be happy to see drop, doesn't it? 

Krikket's Invaluable Primer:

  +5 Int, +10 to all casting skills, right-click for effect: "Aura of Encouragement".

I was so tempted then to plug that lot into NightCafe and gussy up a thumbnail but I suppose I'd better resist. 

Oh, what the hell. Let's make an experiment out of it!

On the left we have the image I made at NightCafe, using one of my freebies for GPT Image 2 low. It  took approximately thirty seconds to make, including writing the prompt and waiting for it to process..

On the right is one I made with Canva. That took me closer to thirty minutes than thirty seconds, using their stock images and (As far as I know...) no AI. Although it's hard to be sure. Canva certainly has AI options but I don't think they're on by default. But these days, who can be sure?

Now, honestly, that all didn't turn out the way I expected. When I saw the result I got from Night Cafe, my immediate reaction was well, that looks pretty professional. If I saw it in a game I wouldn't think twice. It would fit right in. Also it got all the spellings right. A lot of models can do that nowadays but still not all of them.

I didn't think there'd be any  hope of my coming up with something on my own that would be even a tenth as good. I can't draw at all, for a start. My first thought was to get a real book, take a photograph, upload it to Paint.net and start fiddling around with it but then it occurred to me that long before anyone ever heard of generative AI, there must have been all kinds of websites and apps that would make icons for RPGs. I thought I might even have remembered dicking around with one or two, back in the dark ages.

I googled it and got a link to a reddit thread that looked relevant. Everyone there seemed to be recommending the same three or four options, one of which was Canva. I'd seen a lot of mentions of Canva in the Mentor channel on the Blaugust Discord. It's what was used to make the lovely, starry logo you can see up at the top there, I believe.

I found Canva and had a quick look at it and it did not look promising. The search function didn't find anything even remotely close to what I asked for, which was "A spell-book as commonly seen in RPGs". That didn't even get me a book!

I was tempted to give up before I'd even gotten started but I tried a few other variations, had a scroll through the results, and decided the search function was so bad I'd be better off starting with the most general option possible and working my way back. So I just asked it find me "A Book".

Suddenly there were thousands of them. Possibly millions. It took me half a minute to find one that looked like it might work. I picked it and swapped to the Text function. I added the title and then spent five minutes resizing it, changing the font and swiveling it around so it looked roughly in perspective with the book itself. Then I did the same with the detail text.

The result looked pretty bad. It was an ugly brown and white book on a white background. It also had a huge "Canva" watermark across the middle that I'd have had to sign up for the free trial to remove and which beyond that you'd need to pay a subscription to keep off your screen. Obviously, I could have removed that using SnapEdit, but since SnapEdit claims to use AI, that would defeat the object of the experiment. Also I have no idea what the legality of removing a watermark from an otherwise free image might be.

As well as the watermark, there was also some text at the top, ironically saying "Remove Watermarks", which was the button you press to get to the payment screen. All in all the image looked pretty horrible. I wish now I'd saved it so you could see just how bad it was. 

Oh, hey, guess what? I did! Doesn't look as bad as I remembered it, either. 

Still, it was something. Somewhere to start. I downloaded it and uploaded it to Paint.net to see if there was anything I could do to improve it. I thought it would certainly look better in a post if it had the same color background as the rest of the blog, so I changed the white to the correct shade of dark blue. That looked easier on the eye. I am not a fan of white backgrounds, by and large.

The watermark still looked bloody awful, though, that being the primary purpose of huge watermarks in the middle of images. Watermarks meant to make it clear what software was used for copyright or similar reasons generally sit tidily at the bottom in small type, making themselves unobtrusive. Only the ones designed to piss you off  so much you consider springing for the cost of removing them sit there right in the middle, staring at you malevolently.

I imagine if you're really adept with Paint.net you could probably figure out a way to remove a watermark but I am not that skilled. Or skilled at all, really. I just press the buttons, see what they do and if I don't like it I undo it. So that's what I did. [Edit: as you can see below, I did figure it out. The cross-hatching is something else, though.]

I just selected the basic brown book color then drenched the area with the watermark to see what would happen. What I got is pretty much what you can see. The brown overwrote the text of the watermark but it also spread around, across and over the rest of the text and the gold-leaf bindings very much as though I'd spilled water over the cover of the book. And it looked pretty good, I thought.

Sure, it's a bit fuzzy and ill-defined now but that gives it a spurious patina of authenticity. It looks like a badly faded image of an old, leather-bound book. Serendipity works its magic once again.  

I used the same process to get rid of the remaining "Remove Watermark" text and that was that. Well, except for getting the two images to sit nicely side-by-side on the page, for which I had to get Gemini to run me up some HTML. So much for not using AI. 

But not on the image itself, that's the crucial thing. Experiment still valid!

With all of that done, the biggest surprise for me was that I actually prefer the image on the right. It's funkier. It has better eye-feel. What's even odder is that I was perfectly happy with the AI image until I saw the other one. 

The question that needs to be asked is, do I prefer the one I made mostly because I made it? The AI image was incredibly easy to produce and I feel no particular connection to it. It's not like I even spent any time on the prompt. The Canva version, though, took me a good while and I had to think about what I was doing the whole time. Do I only prefer it because of the time I invested?

Then, when it comes to creativity, is the one I "made" objectively any more creative than the AI version? All I did was pick a pre-made image, type some text and then edit it. At best it's creative editing but I wouldn't even give it that much credit. The process itself feels as soulless and artificial as using AI. It's just a lot slower and more inefficient.

Also, it should be noted both images are really only drafts. I could get something much closer to the Canva one with AI. In fact, I could upload it to NightCafe and use it as a starting image and then refine it to get it to what I want it to be. And I could carry on working with the Canva image in Paint.net, add some filters, buff it up, sand it down... just like you can see I have done, over to the right, in fact.

I think the point I'm making, to myself as much as anyone, is that these are both clearly tools, of use mainly to people who either don't have the drafting skills to create the images from scratch, or the time, or both. Under current law, both are equally legal but a lot of people would argue, quite vehemently, that morally they're very different.

If I set up my own local LLM on a PC at home, though, and trained it only on copyright-free images, something I could quite easily do, if I could be bothered, then the issues over misuse of resources and copyright infringement would cease to be relevant, leaving only the much more abstruse and metaphysical consideration of what, in essence, constitutes human creativity. I imagine the arguments over all of that could fuel enough controversy to keep Blaugust going until Christmas.

One thing I can say for sure, though, is that somehow, without even meaning to, I've come up with another 1500 words (1625 if we're being picky and most likely it'll be over 2000 by the time I get to the end of the footnote.) without ever getting to the topic I sat down to write about, namely the prompts Krikket gave us for this week.

Those will have to wait 'til tomorrow!

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

As it says above, I made the image on the right at NightCafe. I used GPT Image 2 Low, which is normally only available to subscribers but for which I happened to have a freebie. Those expire very quickly so I thought I might as well use it. 

The prompt was "A thumbnail image of a spellbook for use in an online RPG, with a rubric reading reading "Krikket's Invaluable Primer: +5 Int, +10 to all casting skills, right-click for effect "Aura of Encouragement" ", which I mostly lifted straight from the text of the post. I wish now I'd have removed the "for" because a simple "right-click effect..." would have read better but I didn't so that's that. As I said, though, if I was really going to use the image for anything practical, this would just have been the first draft.

The other use of AI was some HTML I got Gemini to write for me so I could get the two pictures to sit comfortably next to each other. Many years ago, before AI would ever have been an option, Blogger woild have done all that for me, no problem. If you go back far enough on this blog you can see lots of posts where I place two pictures or two videos side to side. 

Back then, all I had to do was add the images then drag and drop and it would work. Well, nine times out of ten it would. Now it's no times. Too many things in Blogger that used to be easy are now either hard or impossible. 

One way to fix that would be to (Re-)learn HTML or Mark Up or whatever the heck it is the kids are using nowadays. Or I could do what I bet most of the kids are really doing and ask an AI to do it for me. 

Turns out they're pretty good at it, too. I asked Gemini "Can you give me the correct HTML to be used in Blogger that will position two images side by side?" and in about three seconds it gave me seven lines of code to paste into Blogger to fix my problem.

I pasted them in, cut and pasted the correct image details, then did it again with the actually correct ones, and it worked perfectly. Took me maybe five minutes. Trying to do it without AI would have taken me a lot longer and once again, all I'd have ended up doing, if I could even have done it at all, would have been to find an example of someone else's working HTML online, using Google search, then cut and paste it into Blogger. That is literally what I've always had to do before.

Is that more authentic in some strange, existential fashion? Or is it all just copying someone or something else's work? If so, does it matter whether you copy a human or a machine, especially when you're trying to tell a machine what to do?

Also, it's fun getting Gemini to correct Blogger's mistakes because not only are they Google cousins but Gemini seems to take every opportunity to get a dig in at Blogger's expense. I'm easily amused.

And verbose. That's just over 2200 words, for the record... 

Oh, and if we're being completist about all of this, I also re-used a line of HTML Gemini gave me the other day to get text to wrap correctly around the images. Not sure if we're required to reveal repeated usages. 

In The City

This is the second day in a row where I'm only posting because it's Blaugust. Do not expect a quality read! But then, as we were discussing during the opening skirmishes of the Blaugust AI Wars, we don't really have any standards for posting other than that it should be mostly your own work. Neither quality nor word count matters a jot when it comes to putting up something that's going to qualify as "a post" for the purposes of the award tally at the end of the month.

At least say I can say, with a straight face, that this was a post I was always going to write. Screenshot posts have long been a staple of this blog, so I'm not just bunging one in so as not to miss a day. Well, not only that...

I don't always need a reason for a screenshot post, other than that I've taken some and I think they look good, but in this case I do have a minor point to make. As I mentioned in passing, in a recent post about Wuthering Waves, I was taken by surprise on my return to the game by just how exceptionally lovely it is to look at.

I remembered it was good but I'd forgotten how good. I'd gotten used to thinking Neverness To Everness looked gorgeous, which it most certainly does, but WW could give it a good head start and still come in ahead. Given that delightful surprise, of course I took a whole boatload of screenshots on my return, as you would, when you'd seen something worth photographing. 

Even as I was taking those shots, I already had it mind to use a some for a post. This would seem to be the ideal opportunity.

 All of these shots were taken while I was working my way through the twelfth act of the second chapter of the main quest, a section cursed by some ironist at Kuro with the unappealing title Stagnant Dawn on Wastelands. Whatever image that summons up isn't going to bear much resemblance to what you're about to see.

Pretty much the whole act, which took me several hours to finish, takes place inside a Sonoro Sphere in which a city called Honami is trapped, in a kind of Groundhog Day-esque perpetual time loop. The real Honami was destroyed by the Lament decades ago but an image of it remains, complete with all the citizens, known as the Left Behind, going through the motions of their final hours over and over, not knowing anything is wrong and yet somehow knowing something isn't right..

 All of which could be quite depressing if the place wasn't so damn beautiful. It's a stunning creation, all pastel washes and blurred edges, as though seen through wet eyes. To say it was painterly would be underselling it. It has a three-dimensionality paint would struggle to match.

 It also has a surreal element that lifts the whole thing onto another plane. The writers at Kuro seem to be adept at combining elements that shouldn't work together at all, yet somehow making them seem like the most perfect of fits. In Honami, we have a convincingly realistic, albeit mildly futuristic, urban environment, populated by recognizably ordinary people doing and saying recognizably ordinary things, while all  around the surfaces of the city are melting, glowing and sometimes turning into bubbles and blowing away.

 And if that wasn't surreal enough, into this twisted reality intrudes a whole gang of cartoonish capybaras, the highly fanciful incarnations of the Guardian of the city. Previous guardians we've met have been mighty dragons. Honami has a funny animal straight out of a Saturday Morning Cartoon.

It absolutely should not work, particularly given the always bittersweet, occasionally bleak nature of the story, which revolves around loss, sacrifice, bigotry, bullying and despair. But somehow it does.

 In the later cut scenes, after the enemy has been vanquished and the Left Behind released from their eternal wheel, the aesthetic changes to an elegiac, evocative, cinematic style. With plenty of lens flare, which obviously I loved. 

The conversations are heartfelt and emotional and the visuals pick up the tone perfectly. I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming anime. Clearly Kuro has both the writers and the artists to make the transition.

 I'm also very much looking forward to reaching the point in the narrative where I can branch off and experience the permanent residue of the Edgerunners collab. Based on what I've just seen in Honami, it's easy to see why that potentially disastrous collision of worlds turned out to be so well received by fans from both sides. These people really know what they're doing.

 My only regret, having finished the Honami storyline, is that I didn't spend more time in the city. True, since it only existed as a backdrop, most of it was blocked off by invisible barriers, but there were plenty of opportunities to explore at least a little off the prescribed path and I failed to take any of them. I was too wrapped up in the story to go wandering off. Now I wish I had.

I don't think the area is there to visit freely outside the story. I may be wrong. I hope I am. 

As far as I can tell, though, most of the wonderfully imaginative, finely detailed places we get to visit as we follow the exciting and complex plot, exist only as long as they're needed. If that's true, it makes the sheer quality that hallmarks each and every one even more astonishing.  I think I'm going to have to give Kuro the nod when we get to Creator Appreciation Week.

Maybe I'll do another screenshot post... 

Things I've Found In The Back Of A Drawer - #1 In An Irregular Series

 We have a lot of stuff. And I mean a lot. We live in a rather large house with a lot of storage space and over the years, particularly since the children all moved out, we've filled most of it up. 

So, now we're vaguely thinking about moving to somewhere smaller and more manageable for our twilight years, we're going to have to do something about that. And since it's going to be a long job, even though it's very unlikely we'll be going anywhere for a couple of years, I've already started on my half.

The bulk of my stuff is old. A lot of it I brought with me when I moved here thirty-five years ago and much of the rest I acquired in the ten years after that. I have plenty of new stuff, too, but nowhere near on the old scale. One big favor playing MMORPGs did me was stop both of us going round charity shops and car boot sales every weekend, hoovering up detritus from pop culture's past. If not for that we might not have been able to get into the house at all by now.

Going through cupboards and drawers has been full of fun and surprises. I won't say it's been a revelation, sorting through things I haven't seen for decades, because for all I say about my memory being terrible, I'm very good with triggers. I can't bring things to mind from a standing start but give me a visual clue and I'm right there, back in the past..

Well, sometimes. Not always. The really interesting finds are the ones I don't immediately recognize. The ones where I have no clue how I got them in the first place. Like those stickers in the picture at the top of the post.

Oh, I know who they are. Of course I know who they are. They're The Legion of Superheroes. Some of them, anyway. The LSH has a huge membership. It sometimes feels like they let just anyone in. And even the applicants they reject end up in the Legion Reserve or the  Legion of Substitute Heroes or that third-division crew who even the Subs won't take.

Of the twenty-eight characters above, I think I can name just over half on a first pass, with some ideas about a few of the others. There are several about whom I have no clue, though, which is strange. It's one thing to look at the faces and the bits of costume and not quite be able to bring the name to mind but it's quite another to find yourself thinking "Who the hell is that? I've never seen them in my life!"

Or it is if they're all characters from your favorite superhero team. The one you grew up with. The one whose adventures you followed through the aptly named Adventure Comics into all their own myriad series and spin-offs for the best part of thirty years. 

The team many of whose appearances from the early 1960s through to the early 1990s you own in the original comic book form and all of whose appearances from the very first in Adventure Comics 247 (Didn't even have to look it up!) to sometime in the 21st Century you own on a DVD of very dubious origin. The one you bought on EBay from someone in Singapore or Malaysia or somewhere equally unlikely.

So, yes, I do feel I really ought to have at least a vague idea who the big, green person second from the right on the bottom row might be. Or the woman at the top right corner, who looks like she might be wearing a hijab. In fact, it's bugging me so much now I know I'm going to have to go to the exhaustive DC Universe wiki and look up all the faces I can't put a name to.

What I won't be able to do is look up where the heck I got these stickers. Or when. I'm going to guess it must have been at one of the UKCAC (United Kingdom Comic Arts Convention) events I went to in the eighties and nineties. That seems by far the most likely possibility. 

I would have thought I'd remember but I don't. I remember a lot about those Cons. More than I remember about most gigs I've seen. 

I remember sitting in the foyer stuffing goodie bags before the doors opened. I remember introducing Dave Sim on stage and interviewing  Marv Wolfman in some back room. I remember walking Will Eisner through the corridors as his so-called security detail. I remember the costume parades and the dealers hall and countless hours in the bar and even some of the conversations we had there. I remember a surprising amount, considering how much drink was taken but I don't remember where I got these stickers.

Oh, I suppose it's time I googled it. What are the chances, though?

And there it is! I really didn't expect to find anything. I just googled "small square stickers of the faces of characters in the Legion of Superheroes" and there it was. Well, there it was eventually. After I looked at a whole load of things that weren't it at all. 

According to a 2009 post at a blog/website by the name of "Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin" they were "a promo giveaway for the Legion of Super-Heroes, 1st reboot version, from 1997."  The artist, or so Mike Sterling believes, was Jeffrey Moy. 

1997 is after I stopped buying comics regularly and almost after I stopped going to comic conventions, although I also found evidence while I was clearing things out that I went to at least one Con in the 21st Century. Jeffrey Moy didn't ring any bells with me but he has a blog, too, although he doesn't seem to have posted anything since 2020. I like his art style a lot but I'm pretty sure I've never seen his work in any comic I ever read.

There were 40 stickers originally and from the image on Mike Sterling's blog it's clear they were produced as a single sheet. Mine are all loose singles, which is odd. They could have dropped off a full sheet but given the way I found them, in a little pile at the back of a drawer, that seems unlikely. They're also not sticky on the backs any more. 

Did I peel them off for some forgotten reason? Has the glue dried out over the years? Or did I get them like this, loose and not fit to stick to anything? 

I have no clue. I was hoping typing this out would jog something loose in my memory but no dice. They're really lovely little images, though. I'm going to have to figure out something to do with them. I might get a clip frame and hang them on the wall. They look good against the wooden background in the photograph, though. Maybe I could glue them onto a piece of driftwood.

Or I might get Mrs Bhagpuss to do something with them. She's not keen on superheroes but she loves tiny pictures. She might put them in a diorama. They'd make a great miniature portrait gallery.

If it ever happens, I promise to post pictures.

Fish On Friday

 

I said we'd get there! And we have. Took a while but it won't be worth it.

Well, how could it be? It's a post about a limited-time event in a game that, by my count, two people who follow this blog might be playing. And all the event involves is fishing.

It's not proper fishing, either. Not even by the standards of the game itself, which aren't exactly rigorous to begin with. Fishing in Neverness To Everness isn't one of the most sophisticated representations of the pastime I've seen in a game. It's more of a caricature than a photo-realist painting.

To fish in Hetherau you need three things:

1. A rod
2. Some bait
3. A chair.

Every game demands the first two but that last one does make it stand out from most fishing mini-games I've played, I will admit. Usually it's enough to get close to the shoreline or the riverbank and cast. Sometimes you might need to wade in a ways to reach the fish. I can't offhand recall another game where I could only fish when seated in a canvas chair.

There are fishing chairs in numerous spots around the city although I couldn't say exactly where. They're all marked n the map, though. 

I do know there's one at the marina and several along the coastal city's long shoreline. There are probably some along the banks of the large lake at the edge of town, on the way to the mountains. I believe you can catch different kinds of fish at the various spots. 

There are certainly plenty of different species, all of which are waiting to be ticked off in your fish collection. Some can be placed in aquariums (Aquaria?) in your house. All can be sold for a shells, a currency you can then use to buy better rods and bait.

And that, vague as it is, is about all I know about fishing in NTE. I tried it when the option opened up in the Hobbies section at Tycoon Level 3 but I only stuck with it long enough to tick whatever box I was supposed to be ticking at the time.

It's not that I didn't like it. I generally find fishing a mildly diverting pastime in any game that has it, although some implementations are certainly more enjoyable than others. Here, the mini-game uses the ever-popular "wear the fish out by pressing a couple of keys" method, whereby you use A and D to chase a bubble back and forth across a bar at the top of the screen. It's meant to represent using the rod to force the fish to swim against the pull of the line and thereby become exhausted, I think.

I wouldn't really know. The last time I fished in real life, I was ten years old. And I wasn't even really fishing. My cousin was fishing and I was watching him. He let me have a go sometimes but I can't say I was pushing for a turn. I thought fishing was a tedious practice even then and I haven't had any fish-based epiphanies since to change my mind. 

And anyway, the fish we were catching were about four inches long at most. They couldn't put up much - or any - of a struggle.

I guess that's how it works, though. Seems logical. It's certainly how it works in games.

And that's fine. I quite enjoy trying to keep the marker in the bubble, especially when it's easy. It's easy here or it has been for me, so far. In some games it's easy to lose a fish or break the line, which is supposed to add some challenge or skill I guess, but if you can lose the fish in NTE, it hasn't happened to me yet. 

I'd done enough fishing before the  event to get to Level 2. There are Fishing Levels because of course there are Fishing Levels. I know we call these"gacha games" but they're RPGs under the shiny surface and what's an RPG if it isn't a massive, squirming nest of levels?

The problem with fishing in Neverness To Everness - and there is a well-known problem - is that it's grindingly, excruciatingly slow. Again, not at all unusual for an RPG but quite odd for NTE, where very little else seems grindy. I wouldn't care but one of the few outfits you can get for the player character without having to spend real money is locked behind Level 10 Fishing.

It's  not a great outfit but it's not bad and Flora would wear it so I want it. But do I want it enough to spend the estimated thirty hours it takes? Someone on Reddit claimed they heard it took someone else nine hours just to get from Level 9 to level 10 and as we all know, anything someone on Reddit says they heard someone else say is easily as reliable evidence as anything an AI will tell you.

It sounds about right, though. As I say, there's been a lot of complaining about the time it takes to level fishing since the game began. It seems as though someone at Hotta has noticed because the new event, Fishing Frenzy, removes a huge amount of the grind from leveling. Or it does on day one, at least. After that it's less spectacular but still well worth doing.

On the first day you get to catch an incredible four hundred fish, in a matter of minutes. I'd estimate it would normally take maybe three hours to catch that many. It would take the same in Fishing Frenzy, if you had to use a rod. But you don't.

The "frenzy" part of the event comes from the gear you use and the fact that you're on a timer. You start off with a harpoon. That only catches one fish at a time but you can throw the harpoon way, way faster than you can cast a line. 

At Fishing Level 3 you get a net. The net catches multiple fish each time, as you might expect. 

And at Fishing Level 5 you get... a bomb! I mean, they could have gone with the traditional dynamite but I'll take a bomb. 

(These are different fishing levels to the ones I was talking about earlier, by the way. They should have called them Frenzy Levels or something. It's confusing.)

So there you are, throwing your net and your bomb and ignoring your harpoon, because who uses a harpoon when they have a bomb, right? These days, I barely bother with the net. The fish are swarming, the timer (Which as far as I can tell is completely irrelevant and I have no idea why it's even there.) is ticking away and the experience is positively rolling in. Good times!

I went from (Real) Fishing Level 2 to 5 on the first day. It took me maybe fifteen minutes, tops. That would have been days and days of tedious casting and reeling and I would never have done it. I'm already capped on Frenzy Fishing.

I also got an unbelievable 500,000 Fons when I sold the first lot of fish. That actually excited me more than the xp. I was imagining making back all the money I've lost at the Catzebo (It's a lot.) and more. 

Unfortunately, on the second day the Fish Pool drops to just a hundred fish, which is the daily limit for the duration of the event. In total you can catch 1500 fish, which means you can drop a few days and still max out. 

It means the xp drops from a flood to, if not a trickle, then a stream. Still totally worth it, though, and miles faster than regular fishing. I'm Level 6 in Proper Fishing now. I'd guess I'll be close to Level 8 by the end. Not all the way to Flora's outfit but getting there.

The money, though, is a bit of a mystery. After that first windfall, I haven't seen any Fons at all from the event. The fish make you a pile of shells, which will be handy for real fishing later, but of Fons there is no sign. Anyone know what that's all about? [Edit: I just googled it and it seems to be related to using up your City Stamina, which explains why people go on about doing that. I've never bothered with it before. I might have to start...]

It's a topic for a separate post, really, but I will just mention that the gacha games in general and NTE and Wuthering Waves in particular suffer from what might be called a content glut. Coming from MMORPGs, and especially from a decade in Guild Wars 2, where the constant complaint was that there was far too little to do most of the time, I find it one of the hardest things to get used to.

Now I'm back in WW, I find myself looking at literally screen after screen of potential activities I could do. The menus scroll right off the page on some of them. It's overwhelming. NTE isn't that daunting yet but give it time. 

As an example, just a day or two after Fishing Frenzy started, another new, time-limited event called Warren Lucky Flip appeared. It's only a screen where you turn over cards but it's still more new content on top of the new content we only just got.

I did yet another survey for Wuthering Waves yesterday. It was a Returning Player survey so I had some proper answers this time. All of the questions are multiple choice and one gave me a long list of possibilities why I might have stopped playing. Hardly any of them were relevant because I love WW and can't find much fault with it. They didn't have one for "I stopped because it was too good and it was doing my head in, man" but I did tick a couple.

I ticked the one about wanting to play new games (Neverness To Everness, of course, the name of which came up in a couple of the other questions so it's definitely on Kuro's radar as some kind of competition.). The other box I ticked was "Too much new content". 

Yes, they had a box for that. They had one for too little new content, too, but there's always one of those. "Are we giving you too much to do?" is not something devs often ask but yes, now I come to think of it, I think you might be.

Not that I want them to stop. I made sure to make that clear in the "Any other things you want to tell us?" box at the end. Keep pumping it out and let me sift it. I'll find the things I like and leave the rest for someone else.

And I like Fishing Frenzy. I like it a lot more than I like fishing, that's for sure. But who wouldn't?

They give you a bomb! 

The One That Got Away

 

Fishing. Ah, fishing...

Every MMORPG has to have it, for reasons that I find hard to imagine. Is it such a universal pastime? I know it used to be ranked the #1 participatory "sport" in the United Kingdom, when I was growing up in the 'seventies, but people had fewer ways to entertain themselves in those deprived and forsaken times.

You know what? Let's fact-check that. Was it ever that popular? Is it still? It always seemed unlikely to me but I didn't have the worldwide web and an AI assistant to help me check back then. 

Here's what Gemini says:

"No, fishing is no longer the most popular participation sport in the UK. While it is still widely practiced with millions of participants, mainstream activities like football and swimming have surpassed it. Football boasts roughly 11 million players, and swimming attracts over 4 million participants, placing them well ahead of angling."

And as for the supposed domination it used to enjoy:

Where the Myth Comes From
Past Status: Angling was widely cited as the number one participant sport in Britain for many decades through the late 20th century.
Industry Claims: Governing bodies like the Angling Trust still refer to it as "one of the nation's largest" or "biggest" participation sports, keeping the legacy title alive in public perception. 

Hmm. A bit hand-wavy, that, although I'm pleased to see Gemini immediately labeling the supposed popularity a "myth". But obviously we're not going to accept anything Gemini tells us on face value. Luckily, it's citing sources. Or rather a source. Easy enough to check. Shouldn't take long. 

Gemini bases its claims on a 2017 report by the British Disabled Angling Association, which in turn refers to an article in the Daily Telegraph newspaper about the most popular participation sports in Britain. The BDAA piece links to the Telegraph article but the Torygraph (© Private Eye.) has long been behind a paywall and I'm not giving them money to find out what they said in some puff piece almost a decade ago.

Let's assume for the moment that someone at the BDAA read the Telegraph article carefully and quoted it accurately. If so, the reported position of angling (Which is what men who get away from the wife and kids on Sundays by sitting next to canals with a rod stuck in the ground beside them as they swig coffee from a thermos and stare vaguely into space, like to call what the rest of us know as "fishing".) in the 2017 Top Twenty UK participation sports was #19.

So where does it place now? That was ten years ago. I didn't ask for a history lesson, Gemini!

In answer to the question

 "What are the most popular participation sports in the UK in 2026?" 

Gemini, annoyingly, doesn't come up with a nice, tabulated list, as I was hoping. Instead it somewhat vaguely asserts that 

"Football remains the undisputed leader in UK sports participation with roughly 11 million players, closely followed by fitness activities, swimming (4.2 million), golf (1.06 million), and tennis (over 640,000). Emerging trends also highlight rapid growth in racket-blends like padel and pickleball, alongside soaring engagement in casual running and basketball among younger demographics."

The evidence for this comes from a 2025 Press Release about a survey conducted by EY, in which four thousand adults were polled. This survey does come with a tabulated chart, which you can see if you click through. It's ugly and I'm not going to wreck my aesthetic by embedding it. It also only goes to 15, which strikes me as an odd place to stop. Either do a Top Ten or a Top Twenty, guys. No-one wants to see a Top Fifteen.

So, who are - or is - EY? Their About us page says 

"At EY, our purpose is building a better working world. The insights and services we provide help to create long-term value for clients, people and society, and to build trust in the capital markets."

Cool. Why they commissioned a survey on sport, I have no idea but it wouldn't have been the first place I'd have looked. Apparently they were Gemini's go-to, though. 

Which is a bit of a shame, because not only was EY's survey not conducted in the year I asked for (It's from 2025.) but it's not even a survey about "participation sports". It's called an "Engagement Index" and unless there's something I haven't been told, the second most popular participation sport, one that people in the UK go out and actually do, is not likely to involve driving a $20m racing car, so why is F1 #2 after football on the list?

Wrong year, wrong topic. So much for accuracy.

Originally, though, I didn't ask for the year. I just asked Google

What are the most popular participation sports in the UK?

That got me an AI summary that looked fairly similar, but this time it was drawing its data from an entirely different source, a website called SnookerZone. They did have a nicely-presented Top Ten - and guess what? It was from 2026! 

The SnookerZone article, which focuses on the popularity of snooker, or rather the lack of it, as you might imagine it would, doesn't cite any specific source for its chart, other than a vague "Based on typical annual participation estimates..." 

I wasn't all that happy with that for an answer either so I left Gemini and drifted down into the search results proper. The top result was a link to something called SPOND, which turns out to be "an app", part of whose mission statement is "Building connections through sports". They're all about getting people to go out and play sport. 

Finally! Someone that should know the answers to the questions I'm asking! And they have a list. It's from 2025 but it looks like the best we're going to get. Again, I won't cut and paste it here but if you have any interest in the subject, it's worth a look. It has lots of facts and figures. And pictures!

What SPOND's list doesn't have is attribution. The article on their website is from February 2025 so we have a date but the only source cited and linked is to the FA for Football. My confidence in the rest of the list isn't improved by a basic editing error that transposes a whole load of detail about "Soccer" to the section on Tennis, the #4 sport on the list.  Tennis itself doesn't get a mention. 

And yes, anyone can make a mistake, but presumably that one's been there for more than a year now. Has no-one spotted it? I feel like some of this might not entirely be Gemini's fault. There's only so much you can do with unreliable data.

On the substantive point, though, once again there's no mention of fishing. Or angling, for that matter. It doesn't even make it into the Honourable Mentions section, which includes Horse Racing. Again, a participation sport? Really?? How many people own a racehorse? I mean, I know you can join a syndicate and just own a leg, but for it to count as a participation sport, wouldn't you have to ride?

So, what has been the point of all this? Other than to poke fun at an AI, which if it isn't already a participation sport, soon will be. You may well ask! It's taken me the best part of an hour and a half and what have I proved? Other than that I really like doing pointless research for its own sake.

Well I've proved, yet again, that Gemini still can't be trusted to answer a simple question with any degree of accuracy. Even when it cites its sources, it's often wrong. The AI summary at the top of Google Search looks very authoritative, sure, but that's an illusion. I regularly follow the links it provides and they are, shall we say charitably, somewhat less than 100% reliable. Sometimes they're inaccurate, sometimes they're irrelevant but sometimes they're actively misleading.

 

Look, unlike many people whose opinions I have seen recently, I am not against the concept of AIs giving me summaries of search results. I think it's a weird choice for a company, much of whose income relies on advertising, to make but that's not my call. 

No, I'd be quite happy if I could type a few words and get the information I need, in a matter of seconds, all handily packaged and ready to cut and paste into a post. If it was good information. If I could trust it not to make me look like a fool, when someone drops into the comments to point out all the errors. I don't need an AI's help for that!

Unfortunately, it's nothing like good information, far too much of the time. Certainly not good enough to use unchecked. If I have to check everything it's going to take me as long as it would to find it for myself. And I can find better sources on my own, too!

If I'm going to use anything an AI tells me here, I know I'm going to have to follow the links and read the damn articles or look at the damn websites or watch the damn YouTube videos for myself. And then, when I find out how unconvincing the sources are, I'm probably going to have to go look for something that actually tells me what I wanted to know, instead of whatever it is that the AI has picked up as matching whatever criteria it's using. 

The New Yorker, Gemini is not! I always think it's going to save me time and it never does. Maybe one day...

Oh, and the other thing I guess I've proved is what I suspected all along: that fishing isn't anywhere near as popular an activity as legend (Or "myth" as Gemini puts it.) would have had me believe when I was young. I've done my share of keeping that myth alive, too. Well, no more!

All of which is a very roundabout way back to the beginning, where I was wondering why so many MMORPG devs (And survival game devs and now, apparently, open-world gacha game devs, too.) feel their job is isn't done until they figure out some way to shoehorn a fishing mini-game in, somehow. Anyhow. Just so it's there. 

Neverness to Everness has fishing because of course it does. Shame we're out of time today or I'd have told you all about the Fishing Frenzy event. If you play, you won't want to miss it. The event, I mean, not my post about it. When I write one. 

I guess that's just going to have to wait until tomorrow! 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

I wouldn't normally bother with uses as trivial as this but since we're being reductionist for Blaugust...

I used the AI summary at the top of a couple of Google Searches as described in excruciating detail in the body of the post. Gemini is the AI in question. Other AIs are available. They may or may not do a better job than Gemini. I wouldn't know. The amusement value in running the same query through several AIs to see which would make the biggest hash of answering wore out a couple of years ago.

I also used SnapEdit to remove all the UI elements from the final picture. You can see the SnapEdit watermark in the lower right corner. That's there because I used the free version, which I recommend. I use it often and normally I wouldn't even think of mentioning it in this footnote (For new readers, footnoting my AI usage in my posts is something I've been doing for several years, mostly because I find it entertaining. If there's no footnote, I didn't use any. Most posts have no footnote.) 

At this point, I might mention that I have never really believed SnapEdit does use AI to remove stuff from images. It says it does but it's been saying so for a long time now and I'm not convinced AI was up to doing that back when I started using SnapEdit. I always assumed they just bunged "AI" in as a fashionable buzzword, like everyone else was doing back then. 

And what, anyway, is AI in that context? Does it really require an LLM to remove some text from a digital image and replace it with approximately the same color field as what would have been underneath? It seems to me that we've had software that would do that for a long time. A lot longer than we've had generative AI. I've never used PhotoShop because I couldn't afford the license but I've always thought that was exactly the sort of thing people had been using it for for decades.

We need to get some better names for this stuff. It doesn't mean anything to slap AI on every last damn algorithm any more than sticking an "i" on the front of technology or adding "punk" to the end of game titles ever has. I'd bet half this stuff is just good old software playing dress-up anyway...

Is This The Place I Come To Complain About Blogging?

 

The image at the top is there because this was going to be a post about the new fishing event in Neverness to Everness. That's not happening any more (Tomorrow, probably.) but the picture still has some relevance qua "picture", so I'm going to leave it in. It's a lot prettier to look at than the rest of the pictures in this post, that's for sure.

Now it's not about fishing, this is a post about blogging. More specifically, it's a post about Blogger, in which I moan about it. 

Whining about blogging?  Really? Do you have to? Can't we have fishing? 

No, you can't. My blog, my prerogative. It's Blaugust and if you can't moan about blogging in a blogging festival, when can you moan about blogging? Also, is anyone else starting find the words "blog" and "blogging" sound weird ? And there's nearly a month of this left to go...

Before I get into the moaning proper, I will just say it's possible some of what I'm going to complain about could be caused by my PC rather than Blogger itself. It's not like I haven't had other issues there. My money's on Blogger, though.

Yesterday, when I was talking about "my very first blog", which of course is this one, I mentioned that, back in 2010, I'd considered both WordPress and Blogger for the honor of hosting my nascent blog. That suggests I'd done some research on both of them so I could make an informed choice. It might suggest it but it's not what happened.

About all I can remember is that I signed up for both then looked at the UI and the controls and decided Blogger looked easier to understand than WordPress. I can't honestly remember but I very much doubt I did more than take a glance and maybe try to make a page. Might not even have done that much.

I very definitely had no clue how popular either of the platforms would have been at the time or which blogs I was following used which. I also wouldn't have had the least idea how well-maintained or frequently updated they were. So it was pure luck that I picked the one that never changes. 

That's the Gold Standard for software, for me. If I could, I'd lock every app at the point where I decide I'm satisfied with it, which would usually be five minutes after I've chosen to use it at all. If I'm not satisfied by then I'll already have uninstalled it. 

 

I won't say developers never make changes I appreciate but I will say that it's a racing certainty I won't need or want the huge majority of their "upgrades" or "improvements", almost all of which I'm virtually certain only exist either because someone's job depends on them demonstrating their worth to the company by "innovating"or else on the company's desire to find yet more ways of squeezing money out of the customers.

Blogger is owned and operated by Google, the megacorp that shuttered its much-loved RSS service, Google Reader in 2013, citing declining use. Google Reader's primary function was to get blogs into the hands of readers, so logic would suggest Google's blogging platform, Blogger, ought to have been next to go. If the readership was declining, surely the authorship must have been dropping away too.

And yet, more than a dozen years later, here we all still are, some of us writing, a lot more of us reading Blogger blogs. (That word's not getting any less weird the more I use it, is it?) Did Google decide they'd made a mistake, canning Google Reader? There was business there still, for sure. Plenty of new RSS readers moved into the space Google had vacated. Perhaps they saw that happening and thought they'd leave Blogger alone for a bit, just to stop anyone getting ideas. 

These things do happen. There's a furniture salesroom around the corner from where I live that's been there for a decade. It never has any customers and I mean never. I have literally never seen anyone go in or come out. 

Before it was a furniture store, the building used to be a supermarket. The new business puzzled me for a long time until someone, who keeps an ear to the ground where these kinds of things are concerned, told me that when the small supermarket moved out, one of the big supermarket companies bought the lease, although they were aware that, due to longstanding issues of local politics in the city, they wouldn't able to open their own branch there. What they wanted to do was to stop any of their main rivals getting in there instead. 

Since then, nothing's changed in local politics, so it's still an imaginary furniture shop. I imagine the cost of running it empty (Well, it does have furniture, to be fair. Just no-one to buy any of it.) isn't even a rounding error for the huge supermarket company behind it, just like Blogger won't even be a dot of dust on the screen when someone at Google is looking at a spreadsheet for those rounding errors. Blogger most likely still exists because Google is so unfeasibly huge, no-one who matters remembers it exists.

Not that I think anything so calculated is going on with Blogger. Benign neglect is the story there, or so I've always believed. And it suits me very well. I get a frisson of schadenfreude every time I read someone complaining about the latest thing an update to WordPress has broken. 

I got used to Blogger in a matter of weeks, did all the fiddling with it I ever planned on doing and now it'd be my preference if it stayed the way it was then until the heat death of the universe. So I'm not best pleased to see very worrying signs that someone at Google is starting to tinker with it. 

 

For as long as I can remember the Insert Image function has been nothing much more than a drop down menu leading to a blank window with a blue Browse button in the middle that lets you select a file from your PC or from various other sources. And that's still all it is, except one day last week or the week before, the blank window got a makeover.  

Now it has a dotted line all round it and gentle curves at the corners. And there's a big, green cloud in the middle to let you know you're about to upload your image to the cloud. 

Fine. If you must. And it was fine. Until it wasn't.

I've been using Blogger's Insert Image function ever since I started this blog. It's always worked flawlessly. I've developed the habit of editing my images in Paint.net, saving them in a file cleverly named "Blog", then uploading them to Blogger via the Insert Image window before positioning and resizing them on the page, using the tools provided by Blogger for the purpose.

For a while, after what seemed to be purely a visual update, nothing changed. And then, a couple of days ago, the whole thing stopped working. Now, when I try to upload a picture, I invariably get the message "Transfer encountered too many consecutive failures". 

 

A Google search offers a number of possible fixes for the problem. I tried a couple and they didn't work. I might have gone on to try the more invasive options but luckily I remembered that you don't actually need to use Insert Image at all. I just liked it because it was neat and tidy. 

You can simply cut and paste images straight into the draft. All the images in the posts for the last few days were added that way. They appear there huge, bloated and falling off the page but the same tools I always used to resize images soon fix that. Once they're there, you can mostly drag them around the same as always, although they're a bit more pernickety to handle. 

Overall, though, it's actually faster and easier than the old way. And it means I'm not duplicating images in storage the way I always have (Because of course I never cleared the dupes out or deleted anything.) In an odd way, I'm kind of happy with how it's turned out but it is undeniably a more primitive method and I'm only using it at all because Google broke the more sophisticated one. (Unless, as I say, it's my PC playing up...)

 

The first signs of this renewed interest in Blogger came a few weeks ago, when a new button appeared in the line of controls along the top. It's hard to miss. It's the only one that's not in black&white. On a mouseover it identifies as "Insert widget or AI powered enhancements" and until this moment I have never pressed it to see what it does. 

I'm going to do that  now. Hold on to your seats! Aha! It pops up another button that says "Insert Google Search Widget". I am not pressing that!

Instead, I googled it, in part because having google interrogate google to tell me what it's up to always amuses me. According to this very helpful link the button ought to give me a two-option drop-down menu, with the option I'm seeing plus another that would allow me to "auto add links to search." 

Apparently both of these options "create links to Google Search pages". The first, the one I have, adds a colored icon to your links, along with a relevant picture. Apparently it doesn't work very well yet, which is fine with me because I'm not going to be using it unless it's for humorous effect.

It does, at least, only put those pictures where you tell it to put them. The other new feature, the one that has an icon that looks like a magic wand, uses AI to go through your post and figure out for itself what might be worth linking. Then it goes to google search, finds a link and adds it to your post, all without bothering to ask you if you approve.

Like hell it does! Look, I'm somewhere towards the positive end of the AI spectrum, by the standards of this community at least, in that I can see uses for it and I think of it as merely a tool to be used not a threat to be stamped out but I'm sure as hell not going to abrogate responsibility for placing links to external sites on my blog and hand it over to some algorithm with delusions of adequacy!

 

Then again, I don't even have the magic wand in the menu, so it's a notional issue for the moment. I remember now, I did see it wafting around at the bottom of the screen for a while, which apparently is what it used to do before they added the button at the top, but it's gone altogether now. And good riddance!

Finally, when I was writing yesterday's post, I kept getting the feeling Blogger was trying to make me type in blocks, the way WordPress does. I kept having to move the cursor back up a line after every paragraph. It's stopped today, so maybe I was imagining it. 

I'm very familiar with the Block method from the comment sections of WP blogs, which also use it. I quite like it. Well, I certainly don't hate it. It sort of fits the way I put a post together so I'm not opposed to something like that being added to Blogger... as an option.

My feeling is that all changes of this sort should be optional. I'm sure some people have been crying out for little colored icons next to their links and I'm happy for them to get what they asked for. Just so long as I don't have to have them too.

I fear, though, that now someone at Google has noticed they own a blogging platform this will just be the start of it. At what point the whole thing will become so annoying I'll have to start thinking about other options is impossible to say but I'm sure that time will come. For now, though, I'm going to carry on as before, with work-arounds as necessary.

And I'm not going to press any more brightly-colored buttons. You never know what they might do.