Get Thee Behind Me, Blaugust!

It's the last day of Blaugust so I guess I'd better scrape together some kind of summary of how my Blaugust has been. I just checked Krikket's invaluable calendar and I see it's also the last day of "Lessons Learned" week, which I thought didn't start until the event was over, so you can see how much attention I've been paying.

I can say for certain that I enjoyed it more than last year but that's not necessarily the ringing endorsement it could be, since at this time last year I was wondering whether I might be done with Blaugust for good.

Or at least that's how I remembered it. When I look back at the post I wrote on this same day last year, though, it doesn't immediately appear that I was feeling that way at all. 

I opened that post with what, on the face of it, seems to be a pretty positive assessment: 

"Last day! Has it been fun? I'd say so." 

If you subject that statement to rigorous critical analysis, though, you'll notice the questioning tone is resolved with a conditional and that's a classic way to undercut certainty with doubt.

I think I was probably being more polite than truthful, although I certainly meant it when I said I'd enjoyed the dozen new blogs I went on to list, most of which I've carried on reading and several of which I've enjoyed seeing in Blaugust again this year.

I think my main problem last year was the sheer scale of the event. We had the largest ever slate of contributors in 2025. As Wilhelm records in his exhaustive history of the event, 162 blogs signed up. 

That record did not stand. This year, the total ran to 171. Statistically, Blaugust is more successful than ever.

One lesson I learned last year is that you can indeed have too much of a good thing. The main reason I remember not enjoying the month as much as I was expecting was that I started out trying to read every post from every blog. That lasted about a week but the burnout halo from that misguided attempt hung over the rest of the month, even as the torrent of posts slowed to a flood and the flood to a stream.

This year I didn't even try to keep up with everything. On the first of August I added every new blog to Feedly but I didn't go back again to add anyone who joined after the event started. I have a notion to go take a look at some or even all of them after Blaugust ends, when I can take my time but for August I felt I already had more than enough to read just with the ones that made the starting gun.

Irrelevant image, cynically employed to break up wall of text

With those, I did begin by sampling every blog at least once but I very quickly stopped looking at any that didn't immediately catch my interest. That still left a lot of blogs and a lot of posts every day. 

For the first half of Blaugust, I gamely clicked through to read each and every one on the blog itself but by the third week I was reading some in Feedly, something I almost never do during the rest of the year, and for quite a few I was pretty much just skimming the title, guessing if it would interest me and skipping it if I thought it wouldn't.

I'm not very happy about any of that. I preferred it when I could read all the posts every day. I don't like skimming or skipping. But this is Lessons Learned week and the lesson I learned last year was that Blaugust has become too big to be treated the way I used to treat it, as a banquet to be devoured. Now it's more like a buffet to be sampled.

The other lesson I learned last year, which has been reinforced in 2026, is that even if I was able to read all the posts, I wouldn't necessarily want to. 

The relative explosion of interest in Blaugust from outside the event's traditional hinterland of blogs largely or wholly related to gaming has introduced me to quite a few very enjoyable and informative writers who focus on all kinds of non-gaming topics. That's fertile ground for me. I love slice-of-life posts and odd digressions into abstruse hobbies. People writing about their pets or their collections or their holidays - all fun things to read about.

Conversely, there's been a significant influx of blogs that focus on quite specific topics that don't interest me at all. There are writers who can make anything sound interesting and we're very lucky to have several of those as regulars in Blaugust but other bloggers are clearly only writing for a very specific audience, one which doesn't include me. 

Some, I literally can't understand and I don't mean the welcome influx of blogs not written in English. Those I can translate, thanks to the magic of the internet. I mean the IT professional blogs, some of which might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the sense I can make of them.

I use the internet but I have no real interest in how it works, any more than I want to know how my refrigerator makes ice. I just want it to do what it does and not bother me with the details. At some point I may write a post about the disturbing trend towards finding Rube Goldberg solutions for problems that, from my perspective, have already been solved but for now I'll just say that, while I love reading bloggers writing about blogging, I'm not so keen on reading bloggers writing about how to build a blogging platform from scratch.

Another irrelevant image but hey! At least it's not AI, right?

And there's this year's lesson learned: I don't have to read a blog just because it's there. Not even in Blaugust.  I didn't figure it out last year, which was why I finished the event feeling so down on it, but reading, like writing, is always optional. 

Once I'd figured that out - and it took me a few days this year, even after last year's experience - I enjoyed Blaugust as much as ever. Which, again, is a nuanced affirmation. If I'm brutally honest, I've always found Blaugust slightly hard work. A whole month is a long time for an event like this. 

I have wondered in the past whether it wouldn't be more effective, as an incentive for bloggers to start and maintain a blog and enjoy doing it, which is the fundamental purpose of Blaugust, after all, if there were two or even three mini-Blaugusts every year instead of just one big one. We could have a week-long event in, say, December and April and a two-week event in August. Spread the load, spread the joy!

Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen. Blaugust has momentum now and it's growing. And, counter to what it may seem like I've been suggesting, I'd like to see it grow further. Only I'd like to see it grow in some new directions.

Blaugust has picked up quite a degree of traction in some non-gaming sectors but blogging, while it may not be the cultural force it was fifteen years ago, is still surprisingly strong among some interest groups we rarely see represented in the event. There are blogging enclaves in comics, music, cinema, sport, books...

It would be nice to see some of those bloggers signing up next year. As someone who doesn't really use social media at all, I'm not sure where they hang out but I bet there's some Discord or Bluesky or reddit or Mastodon channel that would get the word out. I'm just putting it out there now, twelve months ahead of time, in case anyone has any thoughts.

Other than that, I don't think I've learned anything new. I didn't do any prep for this year and that was fine. Next year, I might, though. Having done it both ways, it does make for a different experience, either having posts in hand or needing to wing it every day. I like both versions but winging it is definitely the easy option for me. Prepping is just extra work.

Also, next year I might not add every blog to Feedly at the start. I might just go through the spreadsheet and sample all the unfamiliar names on a taste-and-try basis. I think that would take a lot of the pressure off and make the whole event feel more spontaneous and fun. I might try to think of it more like a fairground or a market, full of stalls I can wander around, rather than a list of appointments I have to keep.

Unlike last year, though, I'm not entertaining any serious doubts about my own participation in 2027. If I'm still here and Blaugust is still here then we'll come together for a month in August, just like we usually do.

Thanks to Belghast, wherever he is, for inventing and building on Blaugust and thanks to Krikket and The Committee for keeping it going and growing now Bel's gone.  

Looking forward to next year!

Clearing The Fog From The Fogden Game

 

Yesterday I mentioned I'd played through the latest story episode in Neverness To Everness but I didn't say much about it, other than that I enjoyed it. Let's fix that.

The episode goes by the name "Fogden Game" and when I saw that I did wonder for a moment whether it was going to be a second game-within-a-game, like 999 Nights. That was a worrying moment. I think they got away with it once but...

Luckily, it's nothing of the kind. The story carries on from exactly where it left off, at the end of Dreamwalk Corridor, almost three months ago. Only, as we learn, in the game not much more than a week has passed. Nanally is still very much not herself, as anyone wouldn't be, if they only had half their soul. It's past time for us to do something about that, instead of playing 3DD&D with Mint!

A note left by Hotori tells us she's going to be away for a while and we should all look after the store while she's gone. Obviously she's up to something and equally obviously she's going to need our help. Otherwise why would it be in the story? 

Do you have trouble keeping your metadata straight in these situations? I know I do. What do I know? What does my character know? What have I read outside the game? It's a narrative minefield.

Luckily, somehow - I forget exactly how - the Appraiser knows just where to find Hotori, who for some equally unknowable reason, Flora (And everyone else.) has suddenly decided to refer to as "The Shopkeeper". This brought me up short the first time it happened. I wondered if I'd missed something but no, apparently it's new to this chapter. 

 

Whether it'll stick remains to be seen. I quite like it. I also like the idea that everyone at Eibon gets a job title. There's the Appraiser, the Shopkeeper, the Butler (Adler), Eibon's Handyman (Taygedo), the Bodyguard (Daffodil) and the Ichi Daimi (Nanally, although that one's very much a self-appointed title rather than something that describes her role in the shop.) 

Edgar could be the Researcher, which just leaves Sakiri. I have no idea what her official title would be. She fights and she sets her pet anomaly, Kiroumaru, on people. Apparently she also posts lists of rules on the fridge. I guess we could call her the Enforcer. 

As it transpires, Hotori is about to go rescue Daffodil from the Scarlet Letter along with a team from BAC, specifically from ETD6. This plays into the part of the game I find the most fascinating - the enmeshed, interlinked networks of professional and personal relationships that suffuse the world with both nuance and confusion. I purely love it when I don't know what's going on but I know it's something.

Hotori has some kind of history with the Director of BAC, Alphard. That's how come the Appraiser, the player character, ends up at Eibon in the first place. Alphard has a very heavy professional rep while Hotori is barely ever sober, so they seem like a total mismatch but they're both exceptionally heavy hitters when it comes to a fight and they go back a long way. Theirs is a history about which we know next to nothing. Catnip laced with cocaine to me.

 

The ETD6 team is Chaos, another character I find increasingly enigmatic and intriguing, Nitsa, who I can't remember much about except she's quite sweet and Linko, who we haven't met before. Linko is a pathfinder of some kind. She has a huge backpack and she gets hunches that the game signals by having a lock of hair on the top of her head wiggle about. She's cartoonish and cute and - surprise, surprise - she's one of the two banner characters in this episode, the other being Zankou, one of the villains.

I'm going to jump out of chronology here to question that last part. We can roll for Zankou right now and if we win her, we can add her to our team. How, exactly, is that supposed to work? I already have enough issues with the way the team-building mechanic allows characters who aren't present and have nothing to do with whatever it is you're doing to magically appear and fight with you, wherever you happen to be, but at least so far they've all been friends or colleagues.

Zankou is an enemy. Granted, she's conflicted in her loyalties but she's very much not any kind of friend or ally. But putting even that aside, at the debriefing at the end, Alphard tells the Appraiser Zankou's crimes are so heinous there's no deal to be cut and she's going away for a long, long time. 

If she's in prison, how does she get to pop up whenever she's called to fight alongside the player? Does she get day release? It's a step too far for any kind of hand-waving lore explanation to wish away. It's just Game Logic and we have to accept it and ignore the implications, the way you can swim in plate armor in every MMORPG ever made, I guess.

Getting back to the plot, the Appraiser invites herself along and because she's universally considered both a wild card no-one knows anything much about and a Good Egg, of course that's fine. I mean, who knows what she mightn't be able to do? Everyone goes into a disused industrial facility out in the woods somewhere and a lengthy puzzle sequence follows. 

I like the puzzles in NTE, for the most part. They're easy enough to understand, not too fiddly to execute and don't outstay their welcome. This one involves a lot of running along derelict corridors and up stairwells, looking for messages and being taunted by Inanna, the really nasty boss of the Scarlet Letter, who appears in television screens all over the place.

This was one of my favorite parts. I could write a whole post about the way every game goes straight to old, boxy cathode-ray television sets whenever they want some way to present a sinister, remote presence. Flat-screen TVs might as well never have existed. 

They all do it but NTE is the first I've ever seen dig into that trope and open it up. There's a whole conversation about how Inanna had to scour second-hand electronics stores all across Hethereau to source enough old but still-working TVs for her dramatics. I think she says she could only find a dozen in the entire city. (Six, in fact...) That's the kind of commitment to the bit that really sells it for me. 

Eventually, we find our way to the top of the building, deactivate the final, taunting TV, get in the elevator and go all the way back down to the lobby and go through the door in the tree. (Didn't I mention there was a tree with a locked door in it? Well, there was and now the door is open.). And on the other side of the door is the Fogden. Where the game happens.

So, what is the Fogden Game? Ah, that's the question. Here's how I remember it without looking it up. It might not be accurate but it'll be an accurate impression of what I got from it. Very much not the same thing. The more important thing.

The Fogden Game is a game that takes place in the Fogden, an anomalous realm under the control of a Rules Anomaly called the Fog Coffin. A Rules Anomaly is an entity that both sets and enforces rules within its sphere of control and is one of the most terrifying concepts I've happened on in the whole of my gaming career. Seriously, these things would give Harlan Ellison nightmares.

Every so often the game starts up. I don't know the cadence  but it's apparently been happening for at least two hundred years. This is telling. It's easy to think of anomalies as only having been in the world for a few decades but the Fifth High-Level Anomaly Outbreak that occurred forty years before the time the game is set was only the trigger for anomalies becoming widely known to the general public. Prior to that they were a government secret, controlled by the agencies. Inanni tells us she has a couple of hundred years history with the Fog Coffin so she's clearly an insider. 

The game itself involves a whole load of people entering the realm and hunting each other until only one is left alive. Whoever wins gets to ask the Fog Coffin for any one thing that's in the Fogden. It can be material or immaterial.  

 

As we learn later, Inanni has set the whole thing up to get Hotori into the game so she can win and ask the Fog Coffin to give her Hotori's esper ability to manipulate time. Inanni believes this will make her truly immortal instead of whatever bargain basement version of living forever she has now. I mean, she's the one who tells us the Fogden Game was happening two hundred years ago, which she knows because she was there, so her current immortality mod can't be that shoddy but arch-villains never will settle.

That's the plot in a nutshell. Obviously, we have to make sure it doesn't happen, especially because only one person can leave the Fogden alive once the game starts and even though we didn't sign up, we're in it now. 

We get introduced, visually at least, to the other competitors, a motley crew ranging from small children to an old guy in a wheelchair. In theory, we're going to have to kill all of them but of course that's never going to happen. They can sure kill each other, though, and they do, although mostly off-camera. 

Or maybe they don't. It gets very confusing from here on in. Up to the point where the actual game begins, I'd been able to stay on top of the plot quite comfortably but once it all starts, it's everyone for themselves and it's hard to know just where you are. 

Or who, because Fogden Game is one of those episodes where you spend a lot of time not playing your own character. I used to dread those in MMORPGs but they make a lot more sense in gacha games, where you play a gestalt a lot of the time anyway. And I'd have to say that, in the gacha games I've played, which is, like, three, so I'm no expert, the whole body-swap deal is much better-handled than in any MMORPG I ever played. 

 

In this episode you get to play as the Appraiser, as Daffodil and as Linko. I think that was all. There's not a huge amount of fighting although there are several boss and sub-boss fights. Mostly it's talking, running, collecting and puzzles.

Anyone can do all of those. Doesn't matter if you never saw the character before. You can run, talk, pick stuff up and figure out puzzles just as well as if you were on your main. Usually the problem with having to play unfamiliar characters is having no chance to figure out what their abilities are, something that matters a lot in most MMORPGs. In gacha games, though, there's a good chance you'll have the character on your team already so you'll know what they do and even if you don't, button mashing is going to get you through. At least, it will in NTE.

It got me through just fine, anyway. Daffodil felt overpowered and Linko and Nitsa did more running away than they did fighting. In their big, set-piece fight with a giant, flying, skeletal snake, I barely ever managed to target the damn thing, let alone hit it and we still won. 

In fact, I never died once in the whole thing. Didn't even come close. Some of the fights looked hard going in but turned out not to be. I don't think they're actually scripted so you can't lose but there seems to be a big margin for error and a lot of "sit back and watch and let the characters show you what they can do" moments. I found it all very well-paced. 

 

Daffodil's segment mostly involves her travelling through a seemingly endless series of bleak, wet caverns, taking Lumen Circles from the petrified corpses of failed competitors from previous games. I never did figure out what the Lumen Circles were or why Daffodil wanted them, except that they somehow figured in getting her to where she needed to be, namely facing down Inanni.

Along the way, Daffodil fights a pair of siblings or lovers or friends or business partners (Missed the relationship but they're a couple.) and the guy in the wheelchair. The couple are bittersweet. The old guy is obnoxious. Both were memorable. She also spends some time talking to a girl who, I think, is a contestant in the game who's given up to protect her injured sister. Then Daffodil meets her own "sister", Zankou.

Daffodil's history with the Scarlet Letter is fascinating. I don't believe she and her sisters are blood-related. Ananni adopted them, presumably without benefit of paperwork, and brought them up to be assassins, murderers and all-round villains. Daffodil escaped. Zankou and Poinsette stayed. 

Zankou is not happy about Daffodil's defection. Poinsette is conflicted. I found both their stories quite affecting. I was pulling hard for Poinsette to switch sides and eventually she kind of does. It was very satisfying.

While all that's going on, Chaos, his team and the Appraiser and Hotori are heading through a different part of the Fogden. Chaos, the Appraiser, Hotori and Thyme, the enemy-turned ally from the Dreamwalk Corridor episode, who's also turned up somewhere along the line, all get separated from Linko and Nitsa, who spend most of their time trying not to be squashed by falling boulders and edging along narrow ledges with their backs to the cliffs as the entire part of the Fogden they're in tries to kill them. It's intense!

Eventually, after a great deal of exploring, emoting and fighting, everyone ends up in the same place for the final battle. But I think that's enough for one post. 

Let's make it a two-parter.

Something Of The Night

Joar of MMO Casual has a post up about tracking gaming hours. As I was saying only the other day, it's not a thing I've ever done, or not with any precision or intent, at least. I've always been happy enough with a rough estimate. 

It used to be very easy, back when I was working something close to full time. I could add up evenings and weekends and come to something pretty close. Playing mostly one MMORPG at any given time made it easier to keep track, too.

Sidebar: I've actually not worked fully full-time for most of my life. I did two or three years of full-time work in the mid '80s, then maybe five years in the 90s and perhaps as many again in the twenty-aughts going into the teens. I did a longish stint of four days a week after that, all the way through until I got sick in 2019. That came close to being full time but it doesn't count if you think of a working week as a minimum of 35 hours across five days. Since the pandemic I've never done more than three days a week and now it's just two, which I count as being semi-retired. 

Mostly, though, I've done all I could to avoid working full time. One of my life goals that I set myself, when I was still at school, was to work as little as possible and think I've made a fair go of it. And in about six weeks I won't be working at all, which was always the dream.

The less structured my days become, the harder it gets to be certain exactly what I've been doing. The days blur a little and run together, especially across a long, extended period of sunny, hot, dry weather as  we've enjoyed this summer. So it did come as a bit of a shock to find I'd been playing a lot less than I thought.

I know a lot of people worry about how much time they're spending on games but I'm somewhat the opposite these days. I worry I'm not playing enough. I quite often don't even think of logging in to a game until quite late in the day and then, when I do, I often find myself feeling like I've been playing for long enough after what I can now see from the record is likely to be less than half an hour. That's incredibly lightweight. Barely even counts as casual gaming!

But then, I've never been one for really long sessions. Even when I was in the deep snows of my EverQuest obsession, it would have been rare for me to play for more than three hours at a stretch before taking a break. I'd never have needed GeForce Now's six-hour sessions, which would have seemed disturbingly generous to me even then.

Less than half an hour a day, though... that's disturbing. That suggests a drifting away. With the prospect of gaining two more free days in October, it seems like a poor time of life to be shedding interests and hobbies. 

 

So, after I wrote that post, I gave myself a good talking to about not playing enough video games and I'm pleased to say it's had an immediate effect. The very next day I buckled down and finished the latest story episode in Neverness To Everness. That took me just over two hours (The whole thing took just over four.) There will, no doubt, be a post about that soon enough. It was very good.

That was in the afternoon. By evening, I was ready for more. But not more NTE. As I've said before, my main issue with the gacha games I've been playing is that the story is too good. Too intense. Too involving. Too emotionally demanding. 

Whenever I play through a section of the story in one of these games, I feel very much as though I just watched a particularly immersive and powerful movie. I need time to process what I've just experienced and I need a break before I do it again. Obviously, the six-week cadence allows for recovery time more than adequately but equally obviously, the NTE story session put what might otherwise have been my first choice, Wuthering Waves, right off the table, as far as a same-day follow-up went.

But for that, Wuthering Waves would have been my preference because I really want to see that Edgerunners content. I'm almost up to it as a skip-forward but overall I'm way behind in the main storyline. I'd guess there's something like fifteen to twenty hours of narrative I need to catch up on. At the rate I'm able to handle it, that's going to take me a few weeks, even if I push my own limitations as far as they'll stretch and of course more story keeps coming all the time.  

There's another limitation, too. One that's only started to affect me relatively recently and only since the games I play began to rely much more on fast mouse action for combat than the stately tab-target of the MMORPGs I played for so long. 

It's not that the fights are hard. I'm very happy that combat in Neverness To Everness remains mostly unchallenging. Iused to say I'd prefer there was none at all but that's an exaggeration. I quite like there being some fighting. It breaks up the very frequent and very lengthy cut scenes and does quite a lot to add to the feeling of personal involvement that makes playing games a different experience from watching movies. If it was all cut scenes then there really would be no difference at all.

Hard fights, though, and especially fights that have to be repeated because they were too hard to beat in one attempt, have the exact opposite effect. I blame the terrible, abrasive, attritional, repetitive, wholly unwarranted boss fights in Guild Wars 2 for my eventual disenchantment with that game. Well, that and the story being consistently so very bad, something that made the interminable fights you had to go through to see it seem like a sadistic joke.

Neither NTE nor Wuthering Waves currently suffers from that kind of hubris. The stories are great and the fights are fun. There are very few "trash"  fights and when they do pop up they're barely an inconvenience. The set-piece boss fights, which are also well-spaced, are exciting, explosive, visually stunning and, crucially, short. 

Best of all, they're tuned to my extremely limited capabilities. I'm not a complete duffer. I do a little better than pure button-mashing but not much. And yet, I can't remember the last time I lost a boss fight in a story segment of either NTE or WW. They're that well-judged.

Not infrequently, as the player you don't even need to do all the work yourself. It's quite common for the fight to switch to a cut scene, when you've reduced the boss's health to, say, thirty per cent. Then you get to sit back and watch your character execute a series of stunning, balletic moves to bring the baddie down.

I really love that. It's so much better than doing it all myself and yet, because I've done the prep for it, it still feels satisfying. It also gives my wrist a chance to recover.

That's the real problem with combat in NTE and WW. I'm in my late sixties. My hands and wrists aren't really up to the kind of physical punishment they're getting from hammering the mouse buttons non-stop for minutes at a time in frenetic bursts across a couple of hours. After that last session in the Fogden, I was really feeling it.

So, for both physical and emotional reasons, an evening session in Wuthering Waves that same day was out. But those aren't the only two games I could have played. I have a raft of unplayed games on Steam, many of which are available to play on GeForce Now. 

Let's see. Earlier this year I was playing Road 96 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Both of those are on GFN. I started afresh in Palworld when it launched officially a few weeks back. I bought Brok the Investigator, Kathy Rain 2 and Mutant Year Zero this year, with the intent of playing them immediately, and I haven't started any of them. 

Going back further, I have unfinished games of My Time At Sandrock and Sable waiting to be picked back up. I was even playing The First Descendant for a while. All of those are on GeForce Now. Plenty of choice then. So what did I play?

New World. Or should I say New World Aeternum. Let's not forget the rebranding because that was so successful. Sure. Why not go back to a dead game walking? That makes sense.

But it worked. On Thursday evening I played New World for an hour and eighteen minutes, meaning I played video games for almost three and a half hours in one day. And then I played New World for another fifty-five minutes yesterday and we didn't even have the internet until lunch time.  

Operation success, I guess, or so far at least. Now I just have to keep it up. And in that regard, I have to say New World is helping quite a lot. I want to go play it right now...

It's always been such a comfortable game. I've always been able just to log in and potter around and find things are getting done in a satisfying fashion without me really needing to plan anything. 

Everything gives xp of some kind so you're always making progress. Nothing's very difficult unless you want it to be. You can spend a whole session not fighting anything and come away feeling you've been well entertained. And there's always something interesting to look at. It reminds me a lot of Black Desert Online in that respect. 

(Hmm. I wonder if Black Desert's on Ge Force Now? I wouldn't mind playing some of that again and it might make a good alternative when New World goes away next year.)

 

I'm not that much of a goal-oriented player but I do like to have some vague plan in the background, just for the sake of structure. Last time I played New World, back in December, I was working on mount progression. From memory, I had to stop because the next part was in Nighthaven and you have to be Level 65 even to go there. 

The first thing I noticed when I logged in was that there's double XP across the board. I'm guessing that's a permanent addition until the sunset. Since I hadn't played for months, I also had full rested XP, which, combined with that server bonus, put a x4 modifier on xp gain. That seemed like a gimme for getting to 65 so off I went.

First off, I went to Brimstone Sands which, at 63, seemed like it was level-appropriate. It was, but it was also a bit more like hard work than I was keen to get involved with, so I looked on the map for somewhere a little softer and came up with Great Cleave. 

I don't remember a lot about Great Cleave and my suspicion is that that's because there didn't used to be a lot there to remember. As I was later to discover with Edengrove, quite a bit of content seems to have been added to New World since I played regularly. Both zones seem to have a lot more going on than I remember. I had no trouble picking up a slew of new quests, ones I didn't remember seeing before. 

I roamed around the snowy mountains of Great Cleave, following quest markers, picking off the required mobs or opening the necessary chests as I came across them. The questing was fun, even if the quests themselves weren't. 

I'd forgotten that every quest in New World is fully voiced. That's a place Amazon could have saved some money. The quality of the voice acting is, to put it politely, variable. As, for that matter, is the quality of the writing. Some, I read and listened to with pleasure. Others, I had to skip through as fast as possible. And I hardly ever skip quest dialog. It has to be pretty bad to make me feel bad for whoever had to read the words out loud. A couple of these were that bad.

The best of the bunch by a long way was a multi-part quest involving a woman who wanted me to find some bits and pieces for her so she could put them together to make a poppet that she thought might then turn into a real child. If this wasn't Aeternum I'd have assumed she was deranged but in that cursed place you can never be sure. Reality is malleable there. 

The quest ended with nothing having happened but when my character expressed disappointment that no child appeared, the woman said it was too early to tell if it had worked and we'd just have to wait and see, which I thought was an excellent conclusion. The quest may or may not continue at some point, possibly with the spawn of some kind of devil-child but it'll work for me whether it does or it doesn't.

A few quests and a lot of random slaughter along the way took me through 63 to 64 pretty handily. I logged out on Thursday evening half way through the level and the next evening I dinged 65. All quite painless and indeed quite enjoyable. New World is a weirdly cosy game for something that's probably situated somewhere in the horror genre.

Since the whole point of the exercise was to get to Nighthaven, before logging out for the night, I got on my horse and followed the twisty, winding, confusing sand-trails across Brimstone Sands to the unlikely border with the cold, dark forest next door. From there I cantered down the better-kept roads of the Mittel-European province to the main settlement, where I camped for the night.

I'm quite looking forward to getting back to find out what the story is there. And to carry on with whatever it was I was doing with those mounts back before Christmas. There are another five levels to the cap so I might time it so I only play while I have rested xp. The game has another six months or so to run so there's no hurry. I'd like to have a character at the cap when it goes.

Why? I don't know. So I've done it?  So it feels complete? Closure? 

No, not really. Mostly just to have a vague direction to be heading, I guess. I suppose I do need some kind of goal to keep me moving in the right direction after all. Otherwise I'm likely just to wander off and find something else to do instead.

As with all these returns to games I used to play, it's bound to be fleeting but that doesn't make any of those brief visits less than worthwhile. If nothing more, it's worth spending a little time with old friends who you know won't be around much longer.

Okay, that went a little darker than I was expecting. I'm just saying New World was always a fun diversion and that's not going to stop until the servers go down. 

And it doesn't really feel like a dead game yet. There were plenty of people playing when I was on. A steady hum of conversation in general chat. People passing on the roads and doing things in the settlements. The Steam Charts have numbers holding steady at an average of around five hundred concurrent all year. There are MMORPGs that have been running twice, three times as long as New World that would be delighted with those numbers. It's a shame it has to go.

How long I'll keep playing while it's still around is anyone's guess. History suggests not much more than a week or two. But that should be enough to get me to 70. 

After that, I'll probably be done. 

Sorry, Not Sorry

It's been a trying day. I woke up to no internet and it took three hours and a remote factory reset from Virgin Media before it got fixed. At least Beryl and I got a nice long country walk in while we were waiting.

After lunch, I sat down to write this post. I was looking forward to it. I love doing music posts and I'd had to wait all morning, which is probably why I got over-excited. 

I'd just got into my stride when I hit the mysterious key combination that on too many previous occasions has instantly deleted my entire post in such a way as to make it impossible to recover. 

I've never been able to figure out how that happens. I wondered if maybe ChatGPT could. So I asked it 

On a number of occasions I've been typing in Blogger and some combination of keys has instantly deleted the entire draft post in such a way that it can't be recovered with the Undo function. It simply ceases to exist. It always happens as I'm typing quickly and I can't figure out what combination of keys is responsible. It isn't Ctrl-A-Delete or Ctrl-A-Backspace. Any idea what it might be?

 ChatGPT knew. It told me

"Yes. I think there’s a very strong candidate: Ctrl+Z itself. And, frustratingly, this appears to be a long-standing Blogger editor bug rather than you accidentally selecting the whole document.

Blogger’s own current help page lists Ctrl+Z as the normal Undo shortcut. But there are numerous reports in the Blogger support community of Ctrl+Z suddenly emptying the entire post, after which Blogger autosaves the now-empty editor contents and the original draft effectively disappears."

Bloody Blogger! That's exactly what happens. So now I know. Whether it'll help me not to accidentally fumble those two keys when I'm frenzy-typing is another matter. I guess I should just calm down and type more slowly but when you're in the zone...

Luckily, I'd only written the intro to what was (And still is.) going to be another What I've Been Listening To Lately. I was patting myself on the back over getting another one out exactly two weeks after the last.

It was a better introduction than this but it's dust in the wind. Let's forget it and move on.

 serena joy - Olivia Rodrigo

I was saying in the lost intro that I have over twenty tunes bookmarked for this post and quite a few are by what you might call regulars. Not all of those are going to make the final cut (Oh no? We'll see about that... The Regulars.) but this one's a killer. 

I've seen it called "new wave" but it reminds me a lot more of one of my favorites from the start of the twenty-teens, Go Chic's magnificent Hard Date. I was absolutely certain I'd had that here before but search can't find it. So let's have it now. 

Hard Date - Go Chic

If I still went out nights, that'd be my prep song. None better. And who knows, I might start again, when I retire. Could happen. I mean, I'm going to see a movie on Sunday. Second this year. You're only old once.

TOM WILL SMACK UR ASS - Sorry

I happened on this at Stereogum, where the estimable Tom Breihan ran it with a riff about how no, hell, he did not and would not and hadn't ever even thought of, all of which I found pretty funny.

Then I listened to the song and it was good. And then I listened to half a dozen of their other songs, Sorry's other songs, and they were good too. So now I follow Sorry on YouTube.

The video, though... All that wobbling... Kinda distracts you from the words, which I still haven't listened to closely enough to know what the song's about. Not that there's anything so unusual in that. I rarely know what songs are about, sometimes not even after I read the words.

Still, it's all jolly good seaside postcard fun, right? Not like their other video, for a song called Candle. That got banned by YouTube. You can watch it at that link on their own website. It has bottoms again. Well, one bottom. And bullfighting. Nothing worse than you'd see on the TV in a backstreet bar in any small town in Andalusia, as I can say from personal experience. The bullfighting, that is, not the bottoms. You'd need to go to the beach for those. It's got a chorus you probably won't be singing on the bus back from work, too. 

Still not quite sure why it would breach YouTube's terms. I bet it's the bullfighting. I think Sorry might be one of those bands, anyway. Best keep an eye on them.

Crazy, Baby - Cara Delevingne

More bottoms! What is this? 

Didn't she used to be a model? Or was it an actress? Worth watching to the end, this one. She does a bit of acting then. She's quite good, too.

 DEADTOME - MGNA CRRRTA

This one stretches right across the screen on YouTube. Let's see if I can replicate that... 

Nope, not really. Go there and see it.  

I wasn't so keen on their last one but this is a real return to form. 

 aimee lou wood freestyle - untitled (halo)

I don't know... I feel I have to say something about typography now. I don't want to but it's all getting out of hand. 

I have a simple rule here: if it's on the artist's official channel or their record company's, I type what they typed. All caps, all lower case, some wacky mix of both, fine.Their choice. 

Problem with that is, if it's a live version or a fan video or off some TV show or whatever and it's non-standard orthography, then I have to try and cross-check with an official source. Except, of course, if it follows the accepted conventions, then I don't check, but then how can I know that's what they wanted? So I should. But I don't.

And then I have my own, local conventions, here on the blog, which have developed organically over time, like lichen on a wall or maggots in a recycling bin. Like, I always have the song title in italics and the artist not. That seemed fine when people just capitalized "normally" but now I realize I'm overwriting an aesthetic when someone, like the last two, clearly has such defined ideas on how it's meant to look on the page. I bet they don't want their titles in italics.

And then there's what's in the title itself. According to her Instagram, Aimee Lou Wood does not habitually lowercase herself. Does she have objections to being de-capitalized like this? She might. And anyway, who the hell is she? She has three million followers on Insta so I guess I ought to know.

And let's not even get started on that band name. Good song, anyway.

 hide-a-lullaby - Winter (Feat. Peel Dream Machine)

That's exactly the sort of video I imagined, playing on a wall-screen with the sound off, back when I thought every house would be using video for decoration instead of posters and prints. That was in the '90s. Of course it was. And if it had happened, that's exactly what it would have looked like. That video could have come off an old VHS dub of SnubTV. It's how the future was going to look, back when that present's future was the future.

Why don't we all have videos on the walls instead of pictures, anyway? Why did that never happen? I mean, the technology has literally been there in the shops since the '90s, although the  one and only thing it ever seems to be used for is pictures of your family. 

I imagined having scenes from my favorite movies, playing at random or on a loop. Maybe whole movies. It must be possible. Easy, even. Does anyone do it? I've never seen it. Do you do it?

I might do it. I could still have my 90s future. It's not too late.

The 90s seem so far away now...

Fur Elise - Blondshell

Look, I'm having this one, alright? It's Blondshell. It's not like I'm not. But, yes, I hear it, too. 

And now, even as I type, everything changes. 

God, she's good. 

Cleveland - Squrrel Flower

Y'know, I wasn't keen on grunge the first time around. Dinosaur Jr. and that was about it. People change. Times change. 

Apparently technicolor doesn't, though. Technicolor is ever in vogue.

Violet - Slayyyter (Hole cover)

Hang on a minute. Were Hole grunge? I loved Hole. Well, that album. Played it a lot, especially in the car. 

Another supposed pop star who won't stay in her lane. Fuck lanes.

On & On - Sylvan Esso

I never thought about Sylvan Esso's name before. I must have seen it hundreds of times and I always thought it had an elfish tinge to it, somehow. But just now it occurrs to me it has a quite specific meaning. It's an Esso gas station in a forest. 

And here's another thing. Until this minute I thought Sylvan Esso was a person. I just googled to check what pronouns I ought to be using, because I've been reading Charlie Jane Anders and that's reminded me how to be polite, and stap me if Sylvan Esso isn't a band!

Specifically, Sylvan Esso is "an American electropop duo from Durham, North Carolina". Their Wikipedia page, which comes with a warning that "This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use.", although just how would they know that, exactly, I'd like to know? includes the helpfully specific information that "The band derived the first part of its name, "sylvan", from a character in an early iOS game titled Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP" but there's nothing about where they came up with the second part.

Esso isn't even a brand name in the USA. Not for a long time. It's been Exxon there since the early 70s. Why sling it on the end of the name of a character in a video game and call it a band? Sounds fishy.

Oh, yeah, there was a song, wasn't there? Lovely, it was. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. I did. It seems like a long time ago, now. But that's the internet for you.

 I Don't Think About You At All 

Angela Autumn

Well, how about that! Say "forest" and there one is. It's a summoning! Also, since we've had Winter and now Autumn, maybe we should have

Summertime Ain't Easy - Aimée Fatale

Aimée, Tiger La Flor, Goldie Boutilier... they're all getting to be a bit too retro for me, now. I'm here for the post-Lana vocals but the faux-authentic, sixties AM radio aesthetic is becoming just a tad irritating. I lived through all that and trust me, it wasn't as great as you're imagining it was.

I wasn't going to use that one until the seasonal thing clicked in. And I wasn't going to give you Tiger's new one either but what the hell. Let's have ourselves a fake sixties party, why not?

 Hollywoodland - Tiger La Flor

All the way through that video I couldn't stop myself from thinking "You're not wearing a seat-belt, Tiger!" It was seriously unsettling. But then, I guess no-one did in the sixties, back when life was cheap.

Two more and we're done. I already overran thanks to the last two muscling their way in.

eat the pavement - Dev Lemons

OMG! No-one's going to believe I didn't plan that. Ride around in a convertible down a mountain road without a seatbelt and what's going to happen? Right! You're gonna eat the pavement!

Imagine how great these posts would be if I actually planned them! Or not.

Shop Girl - Kate Bollinger

Well, that shifts things on by a decade or so. Take the win, I guess. Next time, though, please can we have some music that sounds like it was made this decade?

Yeah. About that. It's harder than you'd think. And getting harder all the time. 

Thursday Grab-Bag

As we draw near to the last days (Of Blaugust! Put that bug out bag back!) I feel I don't need to hoard my ideas like a cartoon dragon trying to spread all four limbs and a tail across a heap of gold coins. With just five days to go, I think I ought to be able to come up with something for each of them without having to stretch an idea worth a couple of paragraphs into a full post.

And with that in mind, it's Grab Bag time. Three or four things that would strain anyone's patience, stretched to fill, but which might slip down easily enough in small bites. Hmm. Not sure that even qualifies as a mixed metaphor. Oh well. On we go. Keep moving, hope no-one notices...

Ananta launches on 15 January 2027.  

The gaming feeds have been busy this week with announcements and reveals from Gamescom 26. I can't fathom these things. I skim the news and maybe one item in twenty vaguely piques my interest. It's a whole lot of information I don't need about games I'll never play.

Occasionally, though, a bright, shining sliver of joy bursts free from the grey clump and this time it's an actual release date! Glory be!

The game in question, top of my list, pingingest on my radar, most anticipated, wanted, desired and devoutly to be wished for, is, of course, Ananta. I want it so much I can even remember what it's called without having to look it up. Pays to have a short, easy-to-remember title. 

Ananta, in case you haven't been paying attention, is "the anime GTA". Obviously, that's not what developer Naked Rain or publisher NetEase is calling it but everyone else is. Although not me because I've never played GTA. I'm calling it NTE on steroids.

Okay, no I'm not but you get the idea. You can judge for yourself how accurate any of those comparisons might be from the latest promo video. It's a good one. 

The game has a slightly strange premise. As the central character, known only as Captain, you have to find your missing father and rebuild the failing peace agency you work for and you have to do it by... becoming an internet influencer. 

I'll hand that off for now. Don't want to thnk about it. 

More cogently, the game features not one but two huge metropolises, Nova City and Chongxiao, the latter supposedly "a fully explorable sandbox featuring recreational destinations including gyms, restaurants, mahjong parlors, cat and maid cafes, clothing stores, hot springs, and more." 

I'm guessing both cities are "fully explorable" but maybe Nova City is where the plot happens and Chonxiao is more of a simulation? Speculate away because in just four months all will be revealed. 

That's perfect timing for me. Who does anything in January? Plus I'll be retired then. I can play all day!

I Wish I'd Spent More Time Playing Video Games

I've often fancied having that on my tombstone. Or as my Famous Last Words. Which brings me to a somewhat embarrassing confession. I'm about to out myself as a gamer who doesn't actually play any games.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration but only a very slight one. I had cause to look at my GeForce Now account page for the first time yesterday and I happened to notice there's a section where you can see your "Playtime History". Out of curiosity, I took a glance at it. Then I did one of those cartoon double-takes. Then I really took a look at it.

Oh boy. 

 

I'm not and never have been one of those gamers who keeps meticulous track of how much they play, which game and for how long. I don't keep spreadsheets or run any of those apps that track your gaming time for you. I don't care, frankly. Why would I?

Since I started playing most of my games through Steam, of course, I've had some of that information to hand, since Steam records it whether you want it or not. I sometimes sort my library by "Hours Played". I also often glance at the timer at the end of a session to see how long it took, something I also do occasionally, but less frequently, on GeForce Now because there it requires an extra button-press.

That's for specifics and it can be quite interesting. For a more general idea of how much I've been playing in any given week or month, though, I've never felt the need to refer to any kind of statistical record. I've always, instinctively and without trying, been able to say roughly how many hours I've spent gaming over any given period. 

Or so I thought. Apparently not any more. In the last month or so, I've pretty much only played games on GeForce Now, so what's recorded there is almost a full tally of my hours played. I did play one session of Stars Reach directly on Steam before Playable Worlds added it to GFN, so that was about another hour and I think maybe I logged into EverQuest II once, for no more than half an hour at most. 

 

Excluding that possible extra 90 minutes, my entire total time spent playing video games between August 8 and August 27 - just under three weeks - comes to six hours and forty-one minutes. Add it in and you get a grand total of just over eight hours at most. That means I've played, on average, less than thirty minutes a day for most of this month. Many of the sessions are less than half an hour and there are multiple days when I didn't log in at all.

If you'd asked me, I'd have said I was playing at least twice that. Maybe more like three times. I wouldn't have been lying. I'd just have been very wrong.

In the measured period, I've played just one session that lasted over an hour. That was on August 21, when the new update landed in Neverness To Everness. Outside the time-frame, I also played a couple sessions of similar length in Wuthering Waves, which I know because I mentioned it in a post on August 9, when I wrote that the content I'd just completed " took me several hours to finish". 

Adding that in, I'd estimate I've probably played maybe as much as sixteen hours in the calendar month, which still comes to not much more than half an hour a day. I mean, I knew I wasn't playing as much as I used to but I hadn't realised I'd turned into a half-hour-a-day gamer!

Something will have to be done!

Where Does The Time Go?

That brings up the inevitable question of what have I been spending my time doing? It's an easy one to answer. I estimate that, during August, I've spent at least three hours every day writing a blog post and at least an hour, probably more like two, reading and commenting on other people's posts. Blaugust probably accounts for five hours of every day.  

Every day. Are we in Lessons Learned week yet? Because if so, the lesson I've learned is that that's too much.

I've also spent at least two hours every evening making songs on Suno. There will be a post about that but out of politeness to some delicate sensibilities, I'm saving it for after Blaugust ends. 

Beryl accounts for about two to three hours a day, walking and playing. Computer problems, legal and financial stuff and household chores probably take up another two or three. That's already about a dozen hours a day. Add in meals and sleep and general, unspecified stuff and it's amazing I've been able to fit any gaming in at all! And that's on the five days a week I don't have to go to work.

The end of Blaugust, wetter, colder weather, less daylight, the conclusion of the wrapping up of my mother's estate and my full retirement should all lead to much more time being available for gaming in the autumn and winter. Maybe I can even get up to the couple of hours a day I thought it already was!

I swear, I played literally five times as much when I had a full-time job. Time is so weird.

Walks Like A Duck

I mentioned computer problems in the last section. I'm pleased to say I have now resolved at least one of those. With ChatGPT's help, I managed to find and recover the missing product key to activate the new installation of Windows so I don't have to look at that irritating ghostly reminder message any more. 

It was a strange conclusion to the whole affair. I bought an enclosure for the suspect M2 drive and ChatGPT talked me through several means of interrogating it to try and figure out if the errant key was lurking somewhere in the data. As we were trying various things, I just happened to notice a document file titled "Windows Key".   

After all the endless searching through registries and running commands it turned out the damn thing was sitting there in a named file in the root directory. I didn't put it there. I can only assume it was already there when I got the machine because it was dated two weeks before I bought it!

You might well think the person I spoke to at the helpdesk of the company that supplied the PC might have known that. It would have saved me one hell of a lot of time and effort. Instead, they gave me two random keys that didn't work and then washed their hands of it. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

In the end, I can't even say I needed ChatGPT's help, incredibly thorough, detailed and accurate though it was. I could just have bought the enclosure, found the drive was readable, seen the file, opened it, tried the key and it would have worked. 

Nevertheless, I did find working with ChatGPT to be thoroughly satisfactory and indeed enjoyable process. Certainly a superior experience to most I've had, working with humans in similar situations. Not only was the AI patient and calm, it was constantly reassuring and on several occasions objectively empathic. This is not projection. It's self-evident in the logs.

Again, I'm most likely going to do a full post about this when Blaugust is out of the way but I'm of the opinion that it doesn't necessarily matter if software is sentient, provided it gives the impression of sentience. I know full well no extant AI has either autonomy or self-awareness but I'm a lot less convinced that's as relevant as we think it is. Consciousness is overrated.

Goodbye, Dolly 

And finally, in honor of the passing of a legend, we'd best have something by Dolly. Everyone knew her, even those who'd never listened to a country song in their lives. And it seems everyone loved her. Not many stars of any stripe can claim such universal affection. 

Given the length of her career and the extent of her fame, I find it slightly shaming I only know that same half dozen of her hits everyone knows. I can't say I've ever even heard anything else but then I certainly never went looking. 

Here she is, duetting with Porter Wagoner in the early 'seventies. As they say every day on Radio 4 Extra, it contains attitudes of the time so be warned. 

They were a professional duo for a decade and the break-up was difficult. When she wanted to quit, she wrote "I Will Always Love You" to "express what I feel and have him understand" and she sang it to him when she went to tell him she wanted out. How about that for a letter of resignation?

And she wrote Jolene the same day.  Geez. Save something for the rest of us, Dolly!

International Dog Day

 Today is International Dog Day. I know, I know... every goddam day is international something day but this is dogs. It's a big one.

According to Wikipedia (Who are asking me for money again and I suppose I probably ought to give them some, since I link to them all the fricken' time...) it's

"...an annual observance held on August 26 to celebrate dogs of all breeds and backgrounds, promote dog adoption, and raise awareness about the welfare of dogs around the world. It also recognizes working dogs and the roles they play in human society, including service, police, military, and search and rescue dogs." 

It hasn't been going that long. It started in the USA in 2004 and spread, although not, apparently, all that successfully to where I live. I could only find one local event linked to it and that's a party for dogs at a pub in town. I'd link to it but all the info is either on Facebook or Instagram and I don't like to encourage that sort of thing. The event starts in an hour and I very much doubt I'll even have finished this post by then, so it's a bit of a moot point anyway. 

Instead, in honor and celebration of the day and because I thought it would make for a nice, quick, easy post for Blaugust, I thought I'd do a list: "Ten Things You Didn't Know About Beryl". I even had ten pictures to go along with it that I took this morning, when we were out on a walk, so they're good and fresh, which is more than I can say about Beryl.

Unfortunately, when I sat down to write the post, I couldn't think of ten things to say about Beryl or at least not ten that didn't make either her or us sound deranged. Plus, ten pictures take up a heck of a lot of space in a post, unless you make them really tiny. 

So it might end up being fewer on both counts. Maybe a lot fewer. We'll have to see how we go. Here's the first fact, anyway. 

1. Until she was something like two years old, Beryl really wasn't all that interested in food.  Half the time she had to be persuaded to eat and treats didn't really motivate her much. That led to us feeding her by hand a lot, which we still do, much of the time. Well, I do. Mrs Bhagpuss says she has more sense. It also means that, of late, we've had to train ourselves out of feeding Beryl on demand or praising her just for eating something because now she's often eating as much as she can get, just like any other dog. Well, so long as it something she likes. She can still be very picky, at least by dog standards.

2. Possibly related to her earlier disinterest in eating, Beryl will not take any treats from strangers, even if they're her favorites. She also won't drink from any bowl put out by kind, thoughtful dog-lovers in hot weather, even if she's really thirsty. She seems to think everyone is out to poison her. There's certainly no need to warn her about stranger danger. Except...

3. Beryl loves old ladies. Pretty much any old lady will do. She's not discriminating. She has three modes when meeting strangers: suspicious, aloof and enthusiastic. She's suspicious of most people who appear to want to pet her. She backs away and has nothing to do with them. That's her most common response. Less often, she just stands there and lets petting happen to her, without in any way participating in or endorsing it. When it's an old lady, though, she acts as if she's just met a long-lost friend. She pants and simpers and stands up on her hind legs like some kind of performing... erm... dog. Of the three, the only one that isn't potentially embarrassing (For us, not Beryl, who is impossible to embarrass, like all dogs.) is her neutral stance. 

4. Beryl used have just a few favorite places to sleep but in the last few months she seems to have decided anywhere will do. She particularly likes sleeping in doorways. She tried the back door, the door to the living room, and all the bedroom doors but her favorite is possibly the bathroom, which is great fun if you need to get up in the middle of the night for a pee. Today she decided to try the kitchen doorway for a change. We think she may be trying to kill us.

5. Although she looks like a cuddly lap-dog, Beryl is an excellent watchdog. She's alert to the slightest unusual sound, even when she seems to be asleep. She doesn't bark much but as soon as there's any hint of a threat, like someone trying to deliver a parcel or ask if we've found Jesus yet, she barks fit to raise the dead. Scares the life out of me, sometimes. 

6. She may be ever-alert to potential human intruders but as she gets older and wiser she's becoming more and more laid back about other animals. She used to chase madly after birds or squirrels but now she mostly just looks at them with disdain. The two exceptions are cats that think they can take a short cut through our garden and pigeons that think it's fine to sit on the corrugated plastic roof of the conservatory. If she gets even the slightest hint that either of those abominations might be happening, she goes berserk. The cats then climb up something and sneer at her and the pigeons, already being well out of reach, just ignore her. She'll probably get the message that she's never going to reach them eventually and then she'll pretend she never cared in the first place, just like she has with the squirrels.

7. Unlike most dogs, Beryl loves going to the vet. Our vet's, which is an actual animal hospital, is five minutes' walk away and when we go there, as soon as we get near to the entrance she starts pulling to go in. She must be the only dog that runs up the path to get into the vet's. Once she's through the door, she's straight onto the scales to weigh herself, something she also does in the Garden Center pet shop, where they too have a stand-on weigh-your-dog device. She only starts to look nervous if she has to go past reception into the back, where the examination rooms are, but even then she's about ten times less anxious about it than she is when she thinks she's going to the dog groomer. She is not a fan of bathing and blow-drying.

8. She's not a fan of swimming, either. She likes to go in water but only up to her knees (If dogs have knees.) Even if other dogs are swimming, she won't join in. It might be because once, when she was a puppy, we were walking across some unfamiliar fields and we came up a slope and Beryl, who was on her lead but forging ahead, walked onto a nice, flat patch of very green grass that turned out not to be grass at all. It was duckweed floating on the surface of a deep pond. She went straight through and disappeared, completely out of sight underwater. It was like a cartoon. I'm surprised she didn't stand there for a second, do a double-take, then sink. Since she was in a harness, I just yanked her straight up and out and she shot into the air and landed back on dry land about a second later. I don't think she had any idea what had happened except that she was somehow soaking wet. An experience like that would make you think twice around water in future, I guess, although future, I guess, although really it ought to be grass you'd need to be suspicious of.

 9. Beryl likes both town and country walks but mostly she likes walks that go somewhere interesting and preferably somewhere new. For a small, fluffy dog she's very adventurous. She'd be quite hard to place in a classic D&D alignment. She's very lawful when it comes to following paths, for example. She does not like to take short-cuts or deviate from the designated route and she looks at us sternly if we do. If  there's a closed gate with a dog-sized gap next to it, she'll wait for the gate to be opened rather than go through the hole. But if there's some free exploration to be had, like climbing up or scrambling down slopes, she can be positively chaotic. Little excites her more than a good clamber.

10. Beryl loves to play. Just not with other dogs. Or outside. Playing is for indoors, with humans. If a dog tries to get her to play, she looks at them like they're having some kind of psychotic break. In four and a half years I think I've seen her play with other dogs fewer than half a dozen times and for less than five minutes in total. Conversely, every single evening without fail she comes to me and demands I play with her for at least half an hour. In the house she'll chase a squeaky toy, pick it up and bring it back for another go over and over again but try it outdoors and she'll look at you like you've lost your reason. 

Phew! There we go. Ten things. I'm not saying they're ten interesting things but then that was never in the contract. As for pictures, five seems about right. 

Have a great rest of your International Dog Day! 

May The GeForce Be With You

Following on from yesterday's post (Which is still today's post as I'm writing this.) I thought I'd say something about GeForce Now. 

Eh? What? Was there something in that post about GFN? I don't remember anything...

No, there wasn't. But what there was was me saying I hadn't had to post anything "desperate" yet to keep up with my Blaugust schedule. Yes, well, that may be true but there have been a couple of posts that I definitely wouldn't have published (Or probably written.) if I hadn't been on this post-a-day kick. 

This is another of those.

It has to be because I'm working tomorrow and work and blog posts, especially solid, researched, well-thought-out, substantive blog posts that take three-to-five hours to write, don't mix. They might if Beryl didn't have a say in it but she does so there it is.

I am doing my best to keep the bonus, work-day posts to topics I would have posted about anyway, only without Blaugust they might well have been sections in a Grab Bag, rather than autonomous postings in their own right. Luckily, tomorrow is the last day in August I'm working so this should be the last time I have to scrub up something the day before. This is the third time this month I've had to write two posts in one day, or at least a post and a half, and I'll be very happy not to have to do it a fourth.

So, then: GeForce Now. It was a bit of a punt when I decided to pay for a year's subscription up front a couple of months back. I'm not much of an impulse buyer but I can be tempted by a good deal and the price they were offering certainly looked like one of those. Had I ended up not using it much, it'd have been a false economy, If I'd hardly used it at all it would have been a complete waste of money. I think I can say already that it won't be either.

I've used my GeForce Now subscription pretty much every day since I got it. I've played quite a few sessions that exceeded the free version's one hour limit (I think three hours was the longest.) and I've played all of them on the powerful subscriber-only machines at the highest graphic settings, with no lag or performance issues at all. 

 

The whole thing has been extremely smooth and efficient. Everything just works, first time, no questions. The UI is attractive and practical. I can easily see what games I can play, including a good percentage of my Steam games, now I've linked the two platforms. I have more choice than I need by a wide margin.

Mostly I've been playing on my desktop, which is working just fine again now I changed the drive the OS was on, but I've played a few sessions of Neverness To Everness on the laptop, where it runs perfectly. I even tried to play on the big TV downstairs, since it hosts GeForce Now natively, but it wasn't practical because the TV won't recognize a keyboard as a controller. Not GFN's fault and at least I have a wireless keyboard now. 

In fact, since I subbed to the cloud gaming service I have barely played anything on my own machines. I did play a session of Stars Reach on the desktop when it went into Early Access. It was okay but the PC crashed as soon as I logged out. I believe that's what started the problem I started having a few months ago and I don't want to repeat the same process and corrupt the new Windows installation, so I was thinking that would be my last run in Stars Reach for the foreseeable future.

And then Playable Worlds suddenly announced that due to "popular demand" Stars Reach would be available on GeForce Now. I was delighted but also astonished. How did that happen?

Firstly, what's all that about "popular demand"?  Stars Reach has been on Steam since it began. If there was any problem with that, as far as the testers were concerned, it must have passed me by. I'd have guessed the core audience for the game was pretty conservative. If anything, I'd have imagined they might have preferred a standalone client even to Steam. I mean, they seem to want everything else to be like it was in 2003.

I definitely wouldn't have bet on there being a significant faction that would prefer to play Stars Reach on a third-party, cloud gaming, streaming platform. Especially one for which they'd have to pay an additional fee if they wanted anything more than a bare-bones service.

 

So there's that. And then there's the question of numbers. Just how low is the bar to get your game onto GeForce Now, anyway? Even putting it in the most positive, favorable light, Stars Reach Early Access is a niche game. Steam pegs the EA peak at just under 700, and that's already fallen by 50%  in the first week.

I don't really know how GFN works but presumably they have to open a discrete client for each account that logs into any given game. I just asked Gemini and it tells me, via reddit, that "GeForce NOW assigns a completely separate, isolated virtual machine (VM) and a distinct game client instance for every single user session". So, yes they do. 

I suppose, on one level, a game that few people play puts very little demand on the system, so maybe they're happy to have any old thing on there. I know I could play Cloudpunk or NeoCab, for example. Cloudpunk currently has about the same number of people playing as Stars Reach. NeoCab has five.

I hope that is the case because I'm already starting to see GeForce Now in much the way I've come to see Steam, as my preferred portal for gaming. For a while now, if a game's on Steam I've been more likely to play it than if I had to sign up for some other platform and now I'm starting to feel I'm more likely to play something if I don't have to run it on my own hardware at all. 

It saves so much time and effort with updating, for a start. And it means I don't need even an entry-level gaming machine. Any device that can connect to the internet would do, although in practice, because of the games I play and how I like to play them, it does need to be something with a decent keyboard and mouse option. And once you start talking about connecting a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to your phone you probably need to get on your water-skis and have Ritchie aim the speedboat for the nearest shark.

There is, of course, the ever-present question of how long any of these services will last. I certainly wouldn't be paying any annual sub to play on Amazon's Luna. I'm beginning to think, though, that given the spiralling costs of consoles and gaming PCs, cloud gaming might actually be the future the companies behind it were trying to tell us it was going to be a few years ago. 

And frankly it's ridiculously cheap at the moment. My annual sub to GFN is less than what my my annual sub to Daybreak All Access will be next month, if I renew it. And I guess maybe I shouldn't because I've barely set foot in Norrath for months.

 

I'd be more inclined to keep the Daybreak sub if I could play EverQuest II and DCUO on GeForce Now. There are 4000 games you can play on the service but neither of those is on there. According to Gemini, that's down to " publisher Daybreak Games' virtual machine restrictions and policies." I think we can be certain more people are playing either of them than have ever played Stars Reach (And possibly ever will...) so it can't be that NVidia doesn't think they're popular enough to merit a slot.

It's all a bit confusing for me. At some point I'm going to have to decide whether to pay upwards of a thousand pounds for a moderately capable gaming PC just so I can play the kinds of games that don't make it onto GeForce Now, or I could choose to stick with what is on there, which is already orders of magnitude more titles than I'm ever going to play, and save myself all that money.

While there's no guarantee GFN's subscription charges will stay as low as they are now, they'd have to go up one hell of a lot before buying a PC or a console would start to look like the more economical deal. And prices for hardware are only going to increase, even in the short term. GFN could treble their prices and I'm still not sure it would cost more over five years than buying and upgrading a low-end gaming PC over the same period. If you're talking about a gaming PC that's the equivalent of the ones my games are running on at GFN then forget it. It'd take a decade to catch up with those costs. 

But you do want to be able to play anything you want, don't you? It's a dilemma. I'd better just hope nothing really amazing comes out in the next few years that I have to play but which for some reason doesn't end up on a cloud gaming service. And also that cloud gaming doesn't go the way streaming movies and TV has, so you have to keep swapping from one to another to keep up with where your favorites have gone.

As for Stars Reach, I'm afraid to say that playing it at maximum graphical fidelity with no appreciable lag did not markedly improve the gameplay. In fact, with all of the friction removed, it was just easier to notice how dull it was to play. My first and so far only session with the Stars in the cloud lasted barely half an hour and I quit because I was really quite bored.

I'll put up with a lot of things to play a game - lag, stuttering, rubber-banding, bugs, glitches - but I won't put up with boredom. That's a game killer.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

I asked Gemini two questions. The questions and the results are documented in the text.