Read All About It! Cat Scratch Fever Hits Hethereau!

Any fear I may have had that Warren Continent would prove so compelling, I'd forget all about Hethereau itself, has proved unfounded, albeit not through any conscious choice of mine. I was just starting to work my way through the second difficulty level, Challenge, when I was interrupted by external factors (Social visits, work...) and next thing I knew I was back doing the regular dailies. City life just seemed quietly to reassert itself.

In fact, I found myself playing for an hour or so today before I remembered the 999 Nights content was still there. Oh, how soon we forget! I will get back to it soon. I need to kill the Molten Dragon one more time and do a couple of other things to fill my dance card for the update, if nothing else.

Mostly, though, I want to go back just for the fun of it. My general suspicion of repeated content of that sort has been pushed aside thanks to the excellent entertainment on offer in this particular case. And anyway, I'd hardly have a moral leg to stand on, looking down at repeated content, considering what I've been doing instead. Something that makes re-running dungeons look positively benign. 

That's not addicted behavior at all, is it? Not compared to frenziedly buying and scrubbing away at scratch cards, anyway. Which is what I was doing this morning. Not, thankfully, outside the newsagent around the corner from my house, if only for the extremely good reason there is no newsagent around the corner any more and hasn't been for a couple of decades. 

No, I was scratching away, standing on the sidewalk outside a Midnight Catzebo In Hethereau. I can't remember which one it was. There are a bunch of them now. They're new. And they're run by cats. Very big cats.

Maybe I should explain what they are. I'm not sure the name really gives it away. "Midnight Catzebo" is a chain of newsstands dotted around the city of Hethereau. Allegedly you can buy papers and magazines there but I can't say I saw them sell any. 

What they do sell are scratch cards. They have five kinds at prices ranging from 10k to 50k. Specifically, there's a 10k card, a 20k card and three 50k cards. The prizes range from 10k to 2.5m, with the higher-price cards offering the biggest wins.  

There's a limited number of cards of each type available at each stand. I'm not sure what the limit is but I bought one stand out of 10k and 20k cards and it felt like I bought maybe twenty of each? Bit of a blur, if I'm honest.

I'm also not sure if each stand is independent of the others, with its own stock, or whether draining one dry drains them all. I couldn't easily tell by googling it and I'm sure as hell not going to go round spending my own money to test it.

They refill overnight, meaning you can theoretically buy all the cards once a day, every day, for as long as the event lasts. Oh, yes. It's an event. I didn't realize that at first. It was added with the 999 Nights update but I totally missed it because I totally missed everything about the update, except for Warren Continents, which absorbed 100% of my attention for a week or so. 

The name of the event is Mews Flash, which makes me wonder whether someone came up with the pun first and then decided to make the stallholders cats or if it was the other way around. There's a backstory of sorts, although it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Allegedly, the Midnight Catzebos were set up by Grandpa Miles as a way to fund his Midnight Newsstand, possibly the last functioning newsstand in the city. Social media and smartphones have basically done for newspapers in Hethereau. 

As Catvioli explained to Flora this morning,  Grandpa Miles sank all his savings into the project. Where the cats come in is anyone's guess. I met two of them They both had "cat" names, Catvioli and Cat Cake. I feel like I need to visit every stand in the city now, just to find out what the rest are called. 

When I saw Grandpa Miles' name, it reminded me I was halfway through a quest involving him. Before the game went all medieval on us, Flora was trying to find out why he was suffering attacks of delirium. Was he showing the early effects of dementia or was there an anomaly at the root his confusion?

Flora met Grandpa Miles when she happened to be passing his newsstand and noticed a blue exclamation point hanging over his head. That being the universal symbol for "Talk to me and you may learn something to your advantage"  in every game since 2004, she jogged over and introduced herself. 

Thus began a very long, well-written, emotionally satisfying quest concerning an old man, his childhood friend, her grand-daughter and the old man's busy but concerned son. The narrative touched on the changes technology brings, the impermanence of memory and how the past needs to be preserved if it's not to be lost. 

Everyone involved showed exemplary levels of responsibility, self-sacrifice, compromise, and empathy, including the JTF officials, who turned up towards the end, looking suspiciously like Men In Black, as they always do. The whole storyline felt rich in compassion and adult in theme, making it yet another fine example of why I find this and similar games an awful lot more satisfying to play than more traditional fantasy titles these days. (Ironic, considering the Warren Continent digression, I know...)

Having been reminded of its existence by a cat in a suit, I went back and finished the whole thing before I bought any more scratch cards. (At that point I'd only bought a couple, just to try them out.) The quest, which goes by the name of either“Gift for the Little Book Lover” or "Books Are Like Old Friends", depending on whether you've accepted it yet or not, is a lengthy one but it would be one whole hell of a lot longer if you waited for each of the many two-day delays to pass in game-time.

This is a mechanic I just do not get at all. I understand how developers might want to time-gate progress for any number of reasons but why would anyone build a whole bunch of delays into a quest like that and then allow all of them to be freely bypassed by moving the clock forward? 

Even that might make sense if events in the game-world took place according to a fixed calendar, as they do in the "My Time At..." series or any number of Stardew Valley type games. Then there'd at least be some notional cost to skipping a few days. Missing a festival or an event, perhaps.

As far as I can tell, though, there's no such mechanic in Neverness To Everness. Turning the hand forwards on the clock makes the sun go down and the moon come up and that's about it. The only discernable effect I could see when I did it was a change in the light and the removal of the restriction preventing me from carrying on with the quest. 

Oh, and the rain. It was gloriously sunny on the day I set the clock spinning for the final time but when the hands stopped moving we were in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was raining as hard as I've seen it in Hethereau. The streets were awash. There was forked lightning flickering across the sky. Everyone either had their umbrellas up or they were holding books or magazines over their heads and running for cover.

NTE has some of the best weather effects I've seen in a game. Everything changes when it rains, from the quality of the light to the reflections in the wet surfaces to the behavior of the people all around. Except, of course, for all those poor NPCs who have to talk to the player. They just stand there, getting drenched. As did Flora.

We got it all sorted in the end, despite the rain. Between us, we managed to bring Grandpa Miles back to himself without destroying Aria's grandmother's precious diary or nullifying the Old Diary anomaly, which turned out to be entirely benign. It was the Good Ending, for sure. Not that there was any alternative.

All of which didn't entirely jibe with the giant cat's assertion that Grandpa Miles, having brought his past and present into alignment, had then rushed out to invest his life savings in what can at best be described as a venture of dubious morality or, probably more accurately, a flat-out scam.

Although that, I imagine, will depend on how you feel about gambling. I'm neutral about it, myself, but as several reddit threads confirm, some people are less sanguine to see it added to the game. (Again, ironic, considering it's a gacha game...) Then again, I imagine you  might have some doubts about the event if you'd just lost two or three million Fons on it. 

I did not lose that much. In fact, after what felt like about half an hour of non-stop scratching (Could have been more, could have been less. I didn't time it.) I think I was pretty much back where I started (Didn't keep an exact tally of my wins and losses, either, but the numbers look much as I remember them.)  I do know I'd had fun, though. And I got a whole load of gifts to hand out to all the characters I'm trying to ingratiate myself with because you get one of those every time, win or lose.

I really enjoyed the tactility of the whole thing. You get a different scratchcard on screen for each of the five types you can buy and you can scratch off each image with the mouse, It's an extremely convincing replication of the physical version, or what I remember of it, not having scratched an actual card in a decade or two. 

There is a button to remove all the coatings instantly if you don't, as I do, find doing it yourself with the mouse hugely satisfying. That seems daft to me. Why simulate a scratchcard and then invite people not to scratch it? Why would you be in such a rush you'd skip the whole thing? Presumably because you only bought it to win the money. In which case more fool you! Of course, you aren't going to win the money!

The most I won was 160k on a card that had five small wins. About 80% of the cards had a single win that gave the exact amount the card cost. A few had nothing and a few had slightly more or less than the cost of the card. 

That meant it felt pretty safe to keep buying the 10k and 20k cards, which I did until they ran out. They mostly paid for themselves. As soon as I got to the 50k cards, though, it was clear two or three bad cards in a row would put me further behind than I'd be likely to make up, so I stopped.

I found the whole thing an entertaining diversion. I'll probably do it a few more times before the event ends but I certainly won't be trying to grab every card, every day, the way some people supposedly have been doing. 

There's a conspiracy theory on reddit suggesting Hotta have added the event purely to bankrupt people so they'll have to buy more Fons with real money. Seems a bit far-fetched to me but then I would say that, wouldn't I? I've never had a real problem stopping before I lose only very slightly more than I'm happy to lose. 

And it's not as though you get nothing for your money. I have a whole load of gifts to give away. 

Now, who am I going to give them to? 

Say Anything? Challenge Accepted!

I have a few ideas for full-length posts floating around but I don't feel like going deep on a warm Saturday afternoon so I guess it's Grab Bag time again. Saturday Selection I could call it, if I had no shame at all. Or no standards, for that matter. 

Usually, when I do one of these things, I have a few ideas bookmarked but not this time so I'm just going to have to wing it. What's the minimum number of sections for a Grab Bag anyway? Got to be at least three, doesn't it? And in my case a song to end, like the old vaudeville performer I have apparently become.

There's an interesting beginning. I'm a couple of years shy of seventy now, terrifying though that is, but even that advanced age puts me well shy of any age you'd need to be to have experienced Vaudeville. Hell, my mother, who was 93 when she died earlier this year, was too young for Vaudeville. Wikipedia dates it from the 1870s to the 1930s. 

Added to that, it was distanced from me by space as well as time. Vaudeville was a purely North American phenomenon. Over here we had Music Hall as our nearest equivalent. Music Hall flourished from "the early Victorian era until around World War I" (Wikipedia again. This is why I occasionally give them money when they come begging. Without Wikipedia, I'd have to do some secondary research. Or get an AI Agent; which, screw that!)

So how and why do I even know what either of them is? 

There's some excuse, or at least an explanation, for Music Hall. When I was growing up I had to suffer through the interminable tedium of a TV show called "The Good Old Days" (To which I will not link. You can thank me later.) in which much the same bunch of comedians and singers that did the rounds of all the variety shows back then (And there were far too many of them - performers and shows both.) got themselves dolled up in nineteenth-century drag to drone their way through the kind of material that got stage door johnnies hot under the Eton collar, back when Marie Lloyd or Vesta Tilley flashed an ankle.

O. M. G. ! Just look at that last sentence!  Why in the name of sanity do I know what a "stage door johnny" was or what they wore? Or who Marie Lloyd or Vesta Tilley were? How does this stuff get into your head in the first place and why doesn't fall out again, seconds later? I can't remember 90% of anything I actually want to remember and yet apparently I can trot this stuff out without blinking.

Before someone chips in to correct me on Vesta Tilley, she's there to both prove and disprove my point. I did easily remember her name and she was a massively popular Music Hall star but she wouldn't have been flashing her ankles because she was a male impersonator. I had to google her to check what she was famous for and it was that. 

I heard a whole program about her on the radio once and yet I only remembered who she was and when and where she performed, not what she did, which was the important part. Shows how superficial this knowledge is, much of the time.

As for Vaudeville, my knowledge pretty much starts and ends with the Marx Brothers. I love the Marx Brothers but then who doesn't? I was introduced to them at an early age, when they may even all still have been alive (I'd have to check the dates.) although none were still performing. 

My mother was a big fan and I grew up watching their movies, not only on television, whenever they came on but at the cinema. The Marx Brothers became swept up somehow by the counter-culture as did a whole slew of icons of the past (Viz. Peter Blake's cover for Sgt. Pepper.) and their movies were shown surprisingly often in art-house cinemas when I was still at school. They were also a staple of the college film societies when I was at Cambridge at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties.

How the hell did I get started on this in the first place? Oh yes, I remember. (I don't. I had to go back and read the beginning of the post to remind myself...) I was saying how a grab bag post had to be three items minimum plus a song at the end, although that last bit's just me. 

Hmm. I'm nine paragraphs in now (Actually thirteen after the edit...) That's six hundred and fifty words. (Seven-eighty now...) Is it worth getting back to the original Grab Bag?  I could just carry on riffing on Vaudeville, I guess, but I don't know anything about it or indeed have anything I want to say. Still, when has that ever stopped me?

It occurs to me this is one of those post I sometimes do for Blaugust, when we hit Advice Week or whatever we're calling it that year. Are we doing those this time? The themed weeks? I didn't see anything about it in the opening posts but I'm not sure we've had the full agenda yet.

Based on the last couple of years, though, I don't feel qualified to offer advice to would-be bloggers any more, even though I've been doing this for a decade and a half and I've written well over three and a half thousand posts now. Blogs in the third decade of the twenty-first century don't look much like the blogs I learned from before I started, let alone like this one. 

In a way, they tend to look more like, well, web-logs. It's like regression to the meaningless. 

Rather than long-form posts on specific subjects, topics or activities, most of the newer blogs I still read, the ones I picked up from Blaugusts past, are day-to-day diaries or sets of notes or quick thoughts on this and that. My go-to advice on sitting down and typing to see what comes out, then calling it a post, looks a bit redundant these days. That's what everyone seems to be doing already.

And why not? It's bloody easy, isn't it? Yesterday's Palworld post took me all day, on and off. Probably at least four hours altogether. And here we are today, almost a thousand words done (More than a thousand, post-edit.) and how long has it taken me? About half an hour so far. 

And I can keep this up all day. I'm not kidding. It's the easiest thing in the world, just tapping away at a keyboard, letting your thoughts flow onto the page, lightly editing as you go along and giving the whole thing a final pass at the end. If you ever get stuck for something to say, just say anything.

Ooh! Now I want to watch Say Anything, the 'eighties movie starring John Cusack and Ione Skye. You know it! It's the one where he stands on the lawn under his girlfriend's bedroom window, holding a ghetto blaster over his head. Iconic image. I'm going to grab it and stick it in here later. (Or, in fact, use it as the header.)

That's not my favorite part of the movie, though. My favorite part is where he has dinner with his girlfriend's family and when her father asks him what he's going to do with his life he says "Kickboxing. Sport of the future!". (Except he doesn't, as I'll explain later. It's just another misremembering.)

I used to quote that a lot, often à propos of nothing. Kickboxing! Sport of the future! I'd say. Just like that, out of nowhere. I'd like to say I've stopped doing it but I'd be lying.

It's curious I can remember that quote and those scenes (Albeit in a mistakenly composite fashion, it turns out...) but I have no idea what song was playing on the ghetto blaster. I'm sure it would have been significant. I'm pretty sure it was some awful power ballad. Probably Huey Lewis and the News or Phil Collins or something equally unbearable. 

Oh, you know I'm going to have to look it up now. I was going to embed the clip anyway. 

Hah! It's Peter bloody Gabriel!  I guess that's a step up from the drummer of his old band, at least. Still a horrible song, though, but then Lloyd Dobler isn't exactly Mr Sophisticated. That's kind of the point.

As for the scene where he actually says "Kickboxing. Sport of the future." it's weirdly hard to find online. It's not, as I always misremember, the dinner party scene although everyone else seems to think it is, too. The quote is used numerous times as the title or in the description of clips on YouTube but then the clip is almost always the dinner party scene, where he doesn't say it at all. 

That one does include the superb speech, where Lloyd explains what he won't be doing for a living:

 " I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

If you haven't seen that one, do yourself a favor but the only clip I can find on YouTube of the actual scene where he says the key phrase, which is when he comes to pick Diane up for a date, has almost inaudible sound. I might have to find my copy and upload the damn thing myself... 

The key moment is in the trailer above, though.

I said earlier I was too young to have any excuse for knowing literally anything about Vaudeville or Music Hall but I'm also too old to have a deep emotional attachment to teen movies from the 'eighties, aren't I? Say Anything came out in 1989, when I was 31. And I doubt I saw it until the early 'nineties anyway. 

I must be emotionally unstable anyway, I guess, (Quiet at the back!) One of the reasons I haven't rewatched a lot of those 'eighties classics for the longest time is that I get too emotionally involved. Pretty in Pink, Fresh Horses, The Sure Thing, Some Kind of Wonderful... I want to watch them all again but do I want to put myself through the trauma? I'm just going to have steel myself and buy some tissues.

The only one I have re-watched in recent years is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I think we have about four copies in the house, in different formats. We kept re-buying it for a while. It's a lighter watch, on the surface at least, although not once you stop to think about it. Plus it's the gift that never stops giving. Always something new. 

I have plans to start re-watching and re-reading a lot of stuff once I officially retire. Not that I'll have that much more free time. It's more of an existential decision. Much though I love new things, I'm starting to think I might have overdone the neology just a tad in recent years. The past has its place, too. And not just as somewhere to run to for comfort. There are always new things to find there. 

If I follow though, and I think I will, expect more posts like this, only much more focused and coherent. Not that it would be possible to be much less focused and coherent. Although I could give it a shot if you like...

And with that, I think I'm going to stop. Absolutely not the post I thought I was going to write, although I guess it's kind of a grab bag in its way. A grab bag of memories and associations. 

Didn't I say I was going to end with a song? I think that's how all this started. And it's not going to be Peter Gabriel, I'll tell you that for nothing! 

Modernism - Perennial

Weirdly appropriate, wouldn't you say? 

Also, 2000 words, ninety minutes, including the edit and an hour off for tea but not counting the digression into exactly when Lloyd Dobler talks about the sport of the future. That's how to do it! 

Second First Impressions - Palworld 1.0

Palworld. It's a game I played. To be strictly accurate, it's a game I played for just over forty hours, back in 2024, when it was the new hotness. Seriously, it felt like everyone was playing it. The title of my first post about the game was "If All Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge..", in which I mentioned sales had already hit five million. 

By my next post the following day that had jumped to six million. By the fourth post a couple of days after that it was eight million. After that I stopped mentioning it but a quick google tells me sales climbed to more than 25 million during Early Access, with the total number of players estimated at 40 million, the discrepancy presumably coming down to Palworld being available on other platforms as well as Steam.

I liked Palworld well enough until I got tired of it, which didn't take as long as all that. Forty hours is a decent wodge of game time but other survival titles have hooked me much harder and for much longer: Valheim 358 hours, Nightingale 166 hours, Dawnlands 105 hours...

All survival games are samey. Formulaic is perhaps a better word. Palworld, despite having a new twist on the formula in the Pals themselves, still managed to feel samier than most to me. The Pals were wacky, sure, but wackiness only takes you so far. I can hardly believe it's me saying this, given my incredibly high tweeness resistance but after a while even I kind of wanted there to be something a little more substantial beneath the primary colors and kindergarten shapes.

It's also a bit rich of me to say so, given some of the negative things I've written about the inclusion of portentous, over-complicated narratives in MMORPGs, but I do like a bit of a plot, if only to tell me which direction to go. Back when I was giving my First Impressions, I said I'd been led to believe the game did have a story of some kind but in all the time I played, I never found out what it was.

One thing that often holds me in survival games is the building but I complained that the mechanics in Palworld were a bit fiddly and I very definitely got fed up with the management-sim aspect of the whole affair. It's all very well having Pals do your work for you but it got to be so it felt as if I was spending more time looking after their needs, to keep them happy and productive, than it would have taken me to do their jobs myself.

With a couple of years now, between me and the last time I played, my memory is of a game that started out fun before becoming first a little tedious, then quite annoying and finally something of a chore. Looking back at the posts I wrote at the time, though, it seems like I was having a better time than I remember. 

I published my penultimate, full length post on Palworld on Valentine's Day 2024, less than a month after the first. At that point I'd played for 35 hours so I only had about another six or seven to go, not that I knew it at the time. I was still very positive about the game but already I had my eye on a replacement: 

"How long all this can go on is less than certain. The world is curated not procedurally generated. Given time, I'll have cleared all the fog from the map, captured all the Pals, learned all the recipes... or I will if I stick around long enough. That's unlikely. I'll be surprised if Nightingale doesn't nudge Palworld into the background and after Nightingale there's going to be another game and another..."

My played hours suggest Nightingale did a lot better at holding my attention. I even finished it, after a fashion. But Nightingale was a commercial failure. It's still there and it's still theoretically getting updates but it's been downgraded to a single-player, offline title and it's in effective maintenance mode. 

Or maybe that should be upgraded. An awful lot of games that require you to have an internet connection to play would work just as well or even better for many people without one. Palworld, for example.

But Palworld doesn't need to retro-fit an offline mode. Palworld is a success. A big success. 

After two years in Early Access, this month developers Pocketpair made things regular with a 1.0 launch and as Wilhelm reports, players came flooding back. Well, some of them. I'm absolutely certain most developers would kill for 800,000 players all playing their game on Steam at the same time, two years after a soft launch, but it's a long way short of the twenty-five million copies they sold or even the two million concurrent all-time Steam high.

And of course, as I'm sure you've guessed, one of those 800,000 players last night was me. I'd been thinking about it since I heard the game was leaving Early Access, particularly given the developers were recommending everyone start over from scratch because of how much things were going to change with the 1.0 build.

The new player experience had supposedly been extensively re-vamped and there was even talk of a proper storyline. That sounded worth looking into, if only to get a post or two out of it. I could use something to write about during Blaugust other than Neverness To Everness and AI.

What finally swayed me was knowing I could play Palworld on GeForce Now. I'm really enjoying the stability and ease of access of the service. It feels a bit like when I finally succumbed to Steam - playing games locally feels a bit clunky and awkward now, just like starting games from their own launchers began to feel slightly old-fashioned once I got used to having everything in a nice, tidy Library.

Yesterday evening, having nothing much else planned, I logged into GFN and opened Palworld on Steam. Just writing that makes the kerfuffle about physical copies over at Playstation Towers look a bit provoncial, doesn't it?

Just under an hour later I logged out. I'd started a new character and a new world as instructed and I'd played through the tutorial until I got as far as the first settlement. My new character was Level 5. She had a dog, three sheep and a penguin. And everything seemed just the same as I remembered it.

Okay, not exactly the same. New things I noticed included

• Fast Travel Towers
• Quest NPCs

Er... that's it.

Just to be sure I wasn't imagining the similarities, I went back and read through my first First Impressions posts. What I described myself doing then was pretty much what I was doing now.

Character creation didn't seem to have changed although I at least managed to avoid making a sour-faced misery-guts like last time. She started in the same place, though, and I had to stop myself putting down the crude workbench and palbox in exactly the same spot, since it was clearly the best and most obvious place to build.

That led to me picking a really dumb spot instead, just to be different. I'm going to have to change it if I plan on playing any more, something that's still in the balance. Other than having a base in the middle of a bunch of trees, next to a ten-foot drop, where I can't easily place anything, it all felt very familiar.

Supposedly some things have been made easier but I kind of messed up my own experiment there by choosing the easiest, casual setting when I made the world. Last time I played on "Normal" but with the repetitive tedium of the game still large in my mind and this only being a quick dip to test the waters, I thought I'd try and make things as painless as possible.

Consequently, I can't now tell if it's easier or not. It feels exactly like I remember it, even with the difficulty at rock-bottom. It was easy then and it's easy now. I don't remember it getting difficult until quite a bit later. I guess it can't be, though. Unless it's all so simple at the start the settings don't do anything. Wouldn't be the first time.

Also supposed to have been tweaked are the progression trees or the recipes or... something. It's meant to be smoother and faster to progress at low levels, anyway. Once again, I don't remember having much of a problem with any of that to begin with. In my posts from '24, I certainly seem happy enough with the way progression worked then.

The first thing I noticed that definitely seemed to be new were the magitech pillars with eagles on the top that you can use to teleport around the world. You still have to be at one to use the system, though. It's not instant travel via map as it is in most games nowadays. 

I recall traveling being very slow and annoying back when I last played, especially when I needed to get back to places I'd been before, especially when I was jogging back to pick up all the stuff I'd dropped when I died. (I have that switched off now.)  Any fast travel, even a limited version, is an improvement on that.

The second new thing was a pair of NPCs, squatting by an archway by the path at the end of the first stretch of grass. I have a vague memory of someone being there before but I don't think it was these guys. And I'm sure I didn't get a quest to deliver a pie to the settlement. What is this? Misty Thicket? The Shire? 

Someone - I think it was one of those two - also told me about the World Tree, the huge tree you can see in the distance from pretty much everywhere. This, by the way, seems to be a trope of survival games. Valheim has one, Nightingale has one... 

And part of the trope is that you can never get there. Not in Early Access, anyway. I seem to recall reading that in both Valheim and Palworld the way will be opened when the game officially launches. Too late for Nightingale, sadly.

There's also a huge transparent dome out to sea that I don't remember from last time but that might just be me. It certainly looks more like somewhere you might want to visit than a big-ass tree, though. Unless you're an elf, of course. Or a woodpecker.

Anyway, I didn't head off to either the tree or the dome. I went to the settlement to deliver the pie. Also to get the hell away from the awful spot I'd picked to live in. 

And I got killed going there. Of course I did.

Not by a mob (Or should I say a Pal?) I saw some wolves but I steered well clear of them. It was avoiding the buggers that got me killed. 

I went down a cliff into a river to get past them and from there I had to swim. I couldn't get out of the river. The sides were too steep. That was fine. Since it went right into the settlement I didn't want to get out. Not until I ran out of stamina and drowned about ten yards short of the gate, that is. Even on the easiest settings the game can still punish you for poor decisions.

I revived back at the very start because reviving in the settlement wasn't an option. Then I ported back to my pathetic base and logged out. Will I log back in again? 

Well, yes. I already have. I didn't take a single screenshot last night so I had to go in just now to take some for this post. (There's a nifty photo mode now. That might also be new?)

As far as taking another real run at Palworld goes, I can't say I'm keen. Everything about the game feels far too much like it did when I gave up on it two years ago. 

And the Pals are really quite annoying, aren't they? If they're supposed to be cute or endearing I'm not exactly feeling it, which is the opposite of what I felt when I first saw them a couple of years ago. Their charm wears out fast. 

I might give it another session or two to see if things feel any better further in but my second first impression is that even if Palworld has changed, I don't think it's changed enough for me.  

The Surprising Afterlife Of Blogs

I wasn't planning on writing two posts about blogging in a row. That would be gauche. But, oh well, what the heck. I guess it's the season for it, isn't it? So here we go...

It all started when I was idly pondering if, whether and how far, if at all, to add, link to or include the inevitable torrent (The Blaugust Firehose of Posts, as owls has it.) of new blogs, either here, in a post, or in the blog roll down the side, or in my Feedly feed. 

My current feeling is that I'm not going to bother. Just trying to keep up with the names was overwhelming last year. When I started participating in Blaugust, I got into the habit of putting up a post at the start with all the links and maybe updating it once as we went along. Some years I added them to the blog roll as well. A couple of times I gave them their own section there.

It's always been a bit of a chore but it was fun at the start and for a while the numbers made it very manageable. The last couple of years, though, the increasing popularity of the event has made it a challenge to keep up and as long-time readers will know, I am not one of those who reads "challenge" as a positive. More like a threat.

Last year, it wasn't just the initial rush that was the issue. We kept picking up blogs all the way through, like a stone somehow magically managing to gather moss, so keeping up to date would have meant an ongoing process, not a just couple of isolated posts. 

Adding blogs to the roll would avoid having to write whole posts but my blog roll is already unfeasibly long and Blaugust has spread its net so wide now, most of the new blogs each year aren't really in my sphere of interest. The blog roll is broadly supposed to nudge readers towards other blogs I read and enjoy and I can't pretend that applies to the majority of the intake, these past two or three years. 

On that topic, I wrote a post at the end of last year's event where I listed all the new blogs I proposed to keep following. There were only a dozen and a year later I'm still reading seven of them. A couple just stopped, either during or at the end of Blaugust 25: the others three I got fed up with for some reason during the year and dropped from my feeds. 

Even the ones I still read, though, I mostly follow through Feedly. They tend not to make the blog roll because they don't really have much to do with anything I write about here. Not that I pretend to be consistent about that. It's a mood thing, mostly.

And so, I was looking at Feedly this morning, wondering if I'd even have room to add this year's crop. I'm on the free plan (Of course.) and I think there must be some limit to how many feeds you can follow for free. (There is.  I just checked. It's a hundred. And I'm up already up to eighty-five, not counting the nineteen at the bottom marked "Unreachable". I guess those don't figure in the tally.)

If I want to add another tranche this time, I'm going to have to make a cull. But as I've said many times, I don't remove old blogs from the blog roll when they go silent because you never know when one will sputter back to life. Only this month, for example, Domino, the ex-EverQuest II tradeskill dev, posted on her blog, The Domino Effect, for the first time in nearly a decade.That's exactly the sort of moment I don't want to miss.

That's great for blogs that have gone dormant but some blogs are fully dead. The links go nowhere. They're not coming back. If I was going to start clearing the deadwood, that would be where I'd begin. And as I said, Feedly flags the ones it can't reach any more as "unreachable" and dumps them into a holding pen at the end. So I thought I'd check if those really were dead or if Feedly just wasn't looking in the right place.

Oh boy. Did that open up a can of fresh fish... 

The first dead blog I tried was Killed In A Smiling Accident. I used to like that one. I clicked on the link in Feedly and got a page flagged Unreachable in red at the top. But it also had the usual, big green View All Articles button at the bottom. So I pressed it. 

That gave me the familiar list of post headings, just the same as any current blog would show. I clicked the first on the list and it opened the text of that post, still in Feedly. It was a post from March 27, 2024 in which Zoso informed his readers he was giving up his self-hosted site and moving back to Blogger. 

The text on Feedly included a link to that new blog, which worked, although presumably some internet magic was at work, because as far as I could see, even though it shows the Blogger symbol on the tab, the url is still kiasa.org just as it was before. 

How it was deemed "unreachable" by Feedly isn't clear (I'm guessing the rss feed data doesn't migrate automatically? Not really my field.) but there were newer posts, going up to March of this year, so I added the "new" blog to Feedly and now I have a link to KIASA in both the Live and Dead sections. 

That got me thinking. Again.

Another blog I used to enjoy was We Fly Spitfires. That hasn't seen action for at least a decade and a half but it's still there in the Live section of Feedly. I have checked on it in the past but not for a while. I clicked on the link and got a completely normal-looking Feedly page, exactly as you'd see for any operant blog. 

Only, when I clicked on the the name, all it got me was Server Not Found. A google search gets "The domain weflyspitfires.com, formerly home to an EVE Online gaming blog, is currently inactive and listed for sale." along with a link to someone that can sell it to you. I guess that's why Feedly still thinks it exists even though, in any meaningful way, it doesn't. 

So far, so very confusing. But one thing I'd noticed as I was wading through the swamp was how all these sites, dead, alive or something in-between, still showed lists of posts on Feedly, just like any other blog. And now I came to think about it, the two I'd clicked on had both opened full texts of those posts with working hyperlinks. Intriguing.

For my next experiment I chose Fluff Factor, a blog I barely remember. Fluff Factor is rated "Unreachable" by Feedly and the last post was in.August 2017. I clicked on that and got "flufffactor.wordpress.com is no longer available. The authors have deleted this site." which was, at least, unequivocal.

So all the content from that blog is lost, I guess, unless it got picked up by the Internet Archive?  Nope! Not at all. It's still on Feedly!

Well, actually, Fluff Factor's a bad example because it was one of those annoying "Here's a taste, now come read the rest at the blog" ones, so all Feedly still has it whatever crumbs the blogger chose to throw it. Any blogs like that, you can write off for good. By confining their audience to their own specific websites they've effectively written themselves out of history. Don't make that mistake, would-be bloggers!

For those of us willing to risk our fine words being seen through an rss feed, darkly though, a faint glimmer of immortality beckons. Or if not exactly immortality, then at least life after death. Depending on how they were embedded, even some of the images still remain.

At this point I imagine all the rss experts, of whom there will undoubtedly be many in this part of the blogosphere, are probably going "Well, duh! Of course! That's the whole point!" And maybe it is but it was news to me, which is why I thought I'd share it. Maybe someone would like to go back to an old blog they remember, that they thought was gone forever, and have a pore through the back pages.

Take, for example, West Karana.  That's the blog Tipa used to have, then lost, and now has back again. Only that's the new West Karana. The old West Karana is still there in my Feedly, down in the Unreachable Zone. And if I click on it, I can read nearly three hundred posts, going all the way back to May 2013.

It even includes the five posts from whoever stole the site in 2019, although no-one in their right mind would ever want to revisit those. But the rest... that's a treasure trove! 

In fact, the whole of my Feedly Index must be like a dragon's hoard of blogging gold by now. I'm not sure if there's a limit how far back you can go but for me it goes all the way to when I first started using Feedly, right after Google announced they were shuttering Google Reader in 2013. (Actually, I  found some posts going back to 2012 so who knows?) 

I only started blogging a couple of years before that, so for me it's not far off the whole time I've been active in the hobby. I did read a lot of blogs before, but that's blogging pre-history now.

For some blogs, it's a mountain of content I couldn't even bring myself to scroll through but fortunately those are exactly the blogs that are still up and running so I don't need to. For the ones that were prolific once but no longer, it's manageable. And for all those that shone brightly but briefly, it's everything. 

At the moment, most of the blogs I've added to Feedly over the years are still in the main section, alive and available even if they haven't posted for a very long time, although as the We Fly Spitfires example shows, just because Feedly knows how to find them doesn't mean there's anything there. 

And anyway, as time passes, more will inevitably slip below the line to become "unreachable". Until today, I thought that was the end. Now it seems it's just the start of a new half-life, lurking in the shadows of the rss feed.

All of which raises some difficult questions. Presumably this invaluable historical record is only going to exist as long as a) Feedly itself and b) the people who run Feedly choose to allow it. Should I attempt to construct a local archive of any thought-to-have-vanished blogs I have a particular fondness for, before they really do slip away into the night? 

Now that I've discovered the inconsistencies in the records, should I check every silent blog, just to see if it's still there or if there's nothing left but the shell? Is it worth the effort? (I imagine UltrViolet or Tipa would just get an AI to do the grunt work for them but my LLM-whispering skills aren't quite up to that, yet.)

And finally, what am I going to do with all the new Blaugust blogs, when they come flooding in? That's how all this started and I still don't have an answer. 

On this evidence, I can't be deleting any blogs just to make space... although I guess I could clear out the ones that only give you a paragraph before you need to leave the feed. At this rate, I might even have to subscribe to Feedly to get more blogs on board, which really would be a last resort.

Then again, this blog post suggests older users of the Feedly free plan may have unlimited feeds grandfathered in. I think I might just keep adding them and see when Feedly balks. Blaugust is certain to give me enough ammunition for a test run.

Kick the can down the road, then. Always works for me. 

Blaugust Is Back, Baby! Or It Will Be In A Couple Of Weeks...

Roll up! Roll up! Roll up! The circus is in town! For one month only, the amazing Festival of Blogging returns to amaze, delight and entertain! Get your tickets now!

Erm... or next month, actually. It doesn't start until August. And there aren't any tickets. Other than that everything I just said was totally accurate...

Every year I do this and every year I think to myself  "But surely everyone knows all this already?" It's hard to imagine many people reading this blog and not having previously participated in, or at least heard about, the traditional summer event. I mean, it's been going for thirteen years. (Actually fourteen but it lay fallow for one.) 

For the few who don't know all about it already, let me direct you to Contains Moderate Peril, where  Roger "Mr. Peril" Edwards engages in conversation with himself to explain what Blaugust is all about and how it came to be. For the rest, I'll do my best to keep things entertaining.

And now I see that, since I added that link, Krikket has posted the official version. Well, as official as we're going to get now Belghast isn't here to set the tone, pace and agenda.

As most people reading this will likely know, Belghast was both the instigator and the inspiration for the whole thing. Very sadly, Bel's no longer with us following his sudden, unexpected and tragic death at the beginning of July but his spirit remains and sustains us in making sure the event he created continues in both his absence and in his memory. 

Krikket took point last year, when Bel was also unable to take charge through personal circumstances, and she and some of the other Mentors are stepping up once again to make sure this year's event goes ahead as Bel would certainly have wanted. Between her post and Roger's, I imagine most questions should be answered but if not, you're always welcome to drop into the Blaugust Discord and ask.

In fact, why not just go there and hang out? It's fun! And friendly! And free! 

Let me also show you where to go to sign up. That's probably the most important part. Maybe I should have led with that...

But Bhagpuss! Didn't you say I wouldn't need a ticket? Yes, Victoria, I did! And indeed you won't, if all you want to do is enjoy the show. But if you'd like to win some of the many, many prizes on offer you will need to leave your name at the door. 

Ah, yes, the prizes. What are they? Well, these are the ones we've been using for years. Belghast invented them and tweaked them as the event developed:

Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You joined Blaugust for the very first time and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result, we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.

Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2026.

Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2026.

Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2026.

Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the original challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2026. 

This year, The Committee (Please don't call us that! - Everyone.) has come up with a lovely, inclusive, attainable, set of goals intended to drive community engagement:

Make a post on your blog on or before August 1st, 2026 inviting other bloggers to participate in Blaugust. Make sure you link the signup form.

Make at least 5 posts directly inspired by a post by another Blaugust participant. Make sure you provide a link back to the post in question.

Engage with other Blaugust participants at least once per week.  Read posts, leave comments, join discussions in the Blaugust Discord and share posts written by others on social media. 

Guest post on another Blaugust participant’s blog – or have someone else guest post on yours!

Create or join in a group project – choose a topic, find some other bloggers, and each post your own take on that topic on the same day.

You don't have to do all of them. Okay, since they're entirely voluntary, technically you don't have to do any of them. But if you do decide to join in and you want a badge at the end, you need to do at least three of them. That will entitle you to the Community Builder Badge which I'm really, really hoping looks something like this:

Ah... That reminds me.

One thing that's worth mentioning is the room-elephant known as AI. Funny name for an elephant. Although, what would be a normal name for an elephant? Blessed if I know. They can't all be called Jumbo or Dumbo, surely?

Anyway, we have some rules about AI this time. (I imagine we had some last time, too. I just can't remember what they were.) This year, though, they're very simple. Roger summed it up as "AI may assist your creative work, but it should not replace your creative contribution." and I'm going to gloss that as "Make AI your servant, not your master." It's a tool, much like spell-checkers or image editing software. 

Here's an example, from this very post, of a totally legit use of AI no-one is likely to have problems with. (And even as I type, I know someone is taking umbrage with at least two words in that last sentence...) 

In the earlier paragraph, I was going to say "...and Paint.net"  because that's the app I use but then I thought I really ought to use a generic description rather than a brand name. Only I didn't know what people generally called programs like Paint.net.

So I googled it and an AI, presumably Gemini although it didn't introduce itself (Rude!), told me "These programs are called raster graphics editors or image editing software." I didn't like the sound of "raster graphics editors", which didn't seem like anything a lay-person would say, so I picked "image editing software", which sounded vaguely familiar and not so much like something an AI would have made up.

I'd call that an acceptable use of AI. It's very definitely acceptable under the rules. Asking AIs for advice, guidance, clarification or even suggestions is okay. I mean, asking is okay. I'm not saying the answers they give you will be. It's a crap-shoot still.

More likely to get me some side-eye but still well within the rules is the picture of a badger I used up there to make my little joke. I had the highly amusing idea of adding an "r" to the phrase "Community Builder Badge", a bit like the old "Lost Consonants" feature that used to run in The Guardian back when I was working somewhere that provided free newspapers for the staff to read at lunchtime, only in reverse. (Yes, Victoria. Free papers. It was the '90s. A different world...)

The joke really needed a picture but if I tried to draw a badger it'd be more likely to come out looking like a bagel, so I asked an AI to draw one for me. And I think it did a pretty good job. Probably nicked it from somewhere but then I've been "borrowing" images and fucking them up in Paint.net here for years and no-one's ever said anything. 

It's a tradition that long pre-dates blogging. I was doing it with found images, SprayMount, a scalpel and a photocopier nearly fifty years ago. In that respect, AI's just another photocopier to me.

Under the new rules, AI Community Builder Badger is permissible, although I'll lay good money a few people will be hissing and booing just at the thought. (And now I want to go generate an "AI Community Builder Badger" too. For all the angst over AI, it's still fair game for a cheap laugh in my book.)

Not all blogs are literary, though. In the past we have had several that featured almost no writing at all, relying instead on nothing but images. For a blog like that, AI images are not allowed. (I'm not sure if an image-focused blog would be entitled to have AI write the captions or the linking text. It would only seem fair...)

But let's not get bogged down in pettifogging, nit-picking detail, hugely entertaining though some of us (Well, me, at least.) may find it. The whole point of Blaugust is that it's a celebration of blogging and an encouragement for people to start a blog, dust off an old blog, get some extra use out of the blog they already have or just generally carry on blogging as usual but in company.

The event is all about inclusion and encouragement. No-one's going to be policing any of these rules beyond the minimum necessary to keep the whole thing on the rails. The badges rely on self-certification and trust. 

The absolute bottom line for all of it is "Don't be a dick", to which I'd add the other golden rule - "If you feel uncomfortable posting something, don't." 

In other words, we all know where the boundaries are, both our own and the community's. And we know they're there to keep us safe. Stick within them and you'll find there's more than enough space to play.

And play is what you should do. Have fun. Try new things. Experiment.

 Blaugust is a safe space. And it only comes around once a year. Make the most of it!

 

AI used in this post. Community Builder Badger! I love him already. I might get Gemini to knock up one of those picture books with him in it. 

But for the single image in this post I used a freebie I had for GPT Image 2 Low at NightCafe.  The prompt was "Community Builder badger. A socially-minded badger in overalls, wearing a hard hat and possibly carrying a hammer. 1930s childrens' book illustration." All settings, weights etc left on default.

And They All Lived Happily Ever After... Or Did They?

I was going to skip posting today [Edit: yesterday.] seeing as how I posted yesterday [Edit: the day before yesterday.], when normally I'd have been at work. 

Sidebar: I'm on holiday again. I didn't book any holiday this year but leaving it until you actually have a reason to book it isn't deemed acceptable any more. If you don't book the whole year by the end of April, someone you've never met, who works in another city, books it for you. So that happened and I got given a week off in every month from June to October which, unbeknownst to the person who booked it for me, is when I'm going to retire. All of which means I'm not working another full month, ever. And I only work two days a week now to begin with. Yay me!

Sidebar: Wow! Sidebar after one sentence! That's a record. And now another! They don't teach you this in blogging school.

Getting back to the point, although whether you can get back to somewhere you never went in the first place is an interesting piece of metaphysics, I was going to give myself a day off from posting but then I finished Warrens Continent on Story Difficulty and I thought I probably ought to record that somewhere for posterity. It's 8pm though [Edit: 8.40 am now.] and I can pretty much guarantee Beryl will be in any moment to demand at least an hour's entertainment, so chances are this won't get posted tonight anyway. [Edit: It did not.] I could have left it for the morning but we're here now, so let's press on. [Edit - For a while, at least.]

As Nimgimli said the other day, "if AI wrote these posts it wouldn’t add all that superfluous preliminary junk. That’s how you can know I still write my own posts!" Whether that's a good thing or not, I'll let the reader be the judge. 

Getting back to getting back to the point, finishing the story in a major update in a gacha game isn't all that unusual for me, although doing it less than a week after it landed certainly is. What's more unusual is that I've also completed most of the associated Event Table. There are three parts to it; I've done two of them and I'm 7/9 on the third. I just have to repeat-kill a couple of bosses and get Shinku to 60 to finish but I'm not logged in right now so I can't check.

That puts me at 21/23 on the full Events Reward progress bar, the "Grand Prize" for which is five Fabricated Dice. That strikes me as the kind of  "Grand Prize" you'd give a seven year-old for coming third in the sack race at Sports Day but what can you do? It's not like I paid an entry fee.

And anyway, I didn't do it for the reward. I didn't do it for the glory, either, although it's true the Fuzzies are building a statue in my honor. Well, in Shinku's honor mostly but Flora gets a smaller statue as one of her Trusted Companions. The Dice Lord told us that in the epilog.

No, I did it for the fun. And boy, was it fun! Most fun I've had in a game for ages and by that I mean sheer, knockabout, punch-em-inna-face, rock-em-sock-em fun. The story was up to NTE's expected, excellent standard but it was mostly the non-stop, explosive combat and the showers of loot that kept me coming back. Twice a day most days. Playing longer sessions than I most likely would have otherwise.

GeForce Now can take some credit. Super-smooth 99% of the time. Never lost connection. Maybe 30 seconds of intermittent lag in ten hours play. All with my PC sitting there, quiet and calm as you like despite the weather. The only one overheating was me. 

Sidebar: I do have to give NVidia a demerit for not allowing the use of keyboards to control games on GeForce Now when you play via TV. I'd have been downstairs in the relative cool of the lounge if they'd let me use my keyboard. I didn't find that wouldn't work out until I'd already set the app up on our Google TV and bought a new wireless keyboard and mouse to go with it. The mouse works fine but the keyboard isn't recognized once you get past the GFN front-end. 

I had to google it to find out why. It's NVidia's policy, for some bizarre reason. You can only use a controller to play games on their servers if you're playing on a smart TV. No idea why. And just to make it even more awkward, GFN isn't fussy what controller you use but NTE is. Neverness To Everness only officially recognizes the PS5 Dual Sense Wireless Controller, apparently, which is not what I have.

I don't want to play NTE with a controller anyway so I'm not going to get one. I can just run an HDMI cable from the laptop to the TV and do it that way if I really want to play couch-style. I bet NTE would look amazing on the big screen though...

All of which tells you very little about the actual in-game experience of the Warrens Continent end-game. Or the Story Difficulty end-game, anyway. What happens when you go back to do it on Challenge and Nightmare difficulty I can't say because I haven't done it. Yet. [Edit: I had to go back in to get a screenshot so I can tell you a little but that's coming later...]

That "Yet"speaks volumes. I never repeat content on higher difficulty. I'm not sure I've ever done it, in any game. I've always struggled to understand why anyone would want to do the same thing but harder. Personally, if I was going to do the same content again, I'd want it to be easier. 

But this was so much fun the first time... And who knows if it's going to be the same each time? Maybe something different happens on each difficulty setting. If so, I'd want to see it. 

It's not like I saw everything the first time. I didn't even take a look at all the mini-games and events, much less finish them. I only completed one of the half dozen or so quests I took. I could maybe catch up with all of that on Challenge, if the content is exactly the same. If not, maybe there'll be new quests and events.

One thing I definitely won't be doing is going back to Story Difficulty to catch up on all the things I left undone. I tried that this morning and you can't. Once you kill the Crimson Dragon, watch the cut scenes and get transported back to Hethereau, you're done with Story. If you try to go back, you'll find a big "Completed" over that button and no option other than to start again on "Challenge".

That did irritate me. I bet it will irritate some completionists a lot more. All those unticked boxes! Fortunately, Hotta are on the case, as usual. When I poked my nose into Challenge mode, I found I'd already ticked off quite a few of the goals there. Things like "Gather 100 Resources" or "Activate 2 Set Effects" that I'd done in Story Mode turned out to be on the list and my prep-work counted. 

I hope that works both ways because there's only one thing I missed in Story Mode for a full sweep - lighting a single campfire. I lit 29/30. I don't generally care about loose ends but coming that close and missing would rankle even me. If I'd noticed, I'd have made sure to have found one extra fire but I was having too much fun to check fiddly little details like that.

This has been a fairly spoiler-free report so far, except that thing about Shinku and the statue at the beginning. I'll try to keep it that way but I'll give fair warning now there may be a few minor reveals in the rest of the post.

There's more about Shinku for a start. It turns out she's the key to the whole thing (No surprise there.) She goes through every fight as a passenger until almost the end. She doesn't have a class, she can't equip anything that drops, she levels more slowly than the rest of the team. She'd be a liability if you ever let her do anything although if you have any sense you'll just keep her on the bench the entire time.

And then, very late-on, she gets her moment and suddenly she's the big hero. I'm not sure if you have to use her for the final battle with the Crimson Dragon but you'd be daft not to. 

She did about two-thirds of the damage when I did it. I started off using Iroi and the Lambs but the Crimson dragon was too smart for that so I brought in Shinku and she soon fixed his wagon. The team beat the dragon on their first attempt. I doubt they'd have done it without her.

It would be a bit weird if you weren't using her, though. You'd have to be pretty stubborn not to take the hint. And it would mess up the story. There's a big cut-scene when you get the dragon to about a third of its health and it all revolves around Shinku. If she'd not been in the fight before then, as she hadn't been for me in every other, it wouldn't make a lot of sense. Luckily, as soon as she had her epiphany, I'd given her the lead so the plot flowed perfectly for me.

There's a fair amount of exposition in the cut-scenes but I still wouldn't say I understand Shinku's backstory. I was a bit confused over what was metaphor, what was internalized conflict and what was memory. Maybe that'll be clarified later but if not I don't mind. I prefer a little creative ambiguity in my narratives.

Speaking of which, there's some of that after Flora and her pals return to Hethereau. They all go their separate ways. Bizarrely, the Appraiser gets to stay on, alone, in Mint's apartment, where I'm ashamed to say she took every opportunity to snoop around like some kind of creepy stalker.). Then Shinku sends the Appraiser a message to say she had such a good time playing 999 Nights she's tried to buy a copy of the game for herself but it's sold out.

No big surprise there. It's the most popular game in Hethereau right now. But she's also discovered no-one selling the game has even heard of the Warren Continent scenario. She names a couple of other scenarios she was offered (Which I'm thinking could be content for us, some day.) but the one they all just played? No sign of it anywhere.

Flora, being the smart cookie she is, asks Shinku why she didn't just get Mint to tell her where she got her copy. Shinku, also being a smart cookie, tells Flora she asked her but Mint couldn't remember. 

Now, as we all know, Mint is a bit of a dumcat, but in this case I'm pretty sure it's not just absent-mindedness. The Warren Continent version of the game just somehow appeared in her apartment. She can't recall buying it, even. And Mint herself said, when they emerged back into reality, that the whole thing hadn't even felt like they were in an Anomaly Realm. It had felt like somewhere real.

I suspect if 999 Nights turns out to be a very popular and successful addition to the game, we might find out more about what all of that implies. If, on the other hand, as seems quite likely, the overall reaction is "That was fun but can we please get back to the real game now?", we might never find out what was going on.

And I'll be fine with it, either way. I hope it's all going somewhere but if it's a mystery never to be solved, that's okay too. Pursuing this storyline to far might be a mistake, anyway. For the health of the game, that is.

Dropping an entirely different game into the middle of one that's barely gotten going was an extremely high-risk choice, both commercially and aesthetically. It looks like Hotta are going to get away with it through the sheer quality of the work they've done but maybe it would be best to quit while they're ahead. 

I was skeptical when I heard about it but I'm having a great time. If it was a game in its own right, I'd carry on playing it. Even so, it'll be good to back to the city. There are more fantasy RPGs than stars in the sky and quite a few cyberpunk dystopias but upbeat, cheerful futuristic cities make for a much rarer backdrop. Maybe stick to your lane in future, Hotta?

Or maybe that's just what they are doing. Maybe they plan on making unpredictability NTE's USP. 

I could live with that. 

Chocolate Milk - or - The Dragons Of Warrens Continent

I'm not sure I can think of any precedent for what Hotta's done to Neverness To Everness with the 1.2 update that landed last week. Something similar must have happened somewhere before because there's nothing new on this earth but if it happened in any game I was playing, I can't remember it. And it does seem like something you'd remember.

The closest I can think of would be Super Adventure Box in Guild Wars 2 but that wasn't remotely on the same scale. 999 Nights (Which, I'll remind you, because it never ceases to amuse me, is pronounced "One Thousand Less One Nights.") is a complete, full-featured ARPG, playable from within NTE. 

It's not a holiday event or a mini-game or even a special zone. It's a whole fricken' game! Last time, I estimated it might keep someone busy for about 30 hours but having played through the first two big dungeons, I'm going to have to revise that upwards. There are two more to go so it's going to take me maybe fifteen hours just to do it all on Story mode and there are two further difficulty levels.

That's just the main quest, which is what I've mainly stuck with so far, (There are also side-quests. I went all round the Fuzzy Village, where the not-really-sheep live, and picked up about half a dozen, although so far I've only finished one.) but there are a large number of other attractions, quite a few of which I've done, some several times, mostly because curiosity has led me to go up to a lot of creatures and objects and most of the events are on a proximity fuse.

Some you have to speak to an NPC to start, some start automatically when you get near and some have portals you can go through. The overworld is handled very much like the way Shroud of the Avatar does it, albeit a lot more stylishly. The map is some kind of model village, with the player character taller than the buildings as they wander down the paths from place to place. 

You can't jump or climb and there are lots of invisible walls. It's a representation of a place rather than a place in it's own right and I find it works very well.

There's a good variety - ring events, jumping puzzles, arenas, logic puzzles and more - and they're all as repeatable as you care to make them. I wandered about, doing some at random for a while in an attempt to level up and it was good fun. 

I wanted some more levels because, as I mentioned last time, Flora and her team did not do well on their first run at the Molten Dragon. Defeat was so swift and inevitable, I figured there had to be some trick to it, which did indeed turn out to be the case. Before I even tried to figure out what that trick was, though, I thought I'd give the the tried-and-trusted over-leveling method a go.

Gaining a few levels does help but the effect is limited by the much higher influence of gear on combat effectiveness. The primary way more levels help is that they allow you to equip higher level-limited items but since, at least as far as I can tell, you need to beat the bosses before you gain access to the areas where the next tier of gear drops, it's kind of a Catch 22. 

Luckily, a random comment I just happened to spot on a reddit thread gave me a clue what was needed. Someone tossed an aside into a thread where people were talking about the problems they were having with the first boss, saying there was an "artifact" that would protect one member of your team against dragon fire. 

It was the fiery breath of the dragon, or possibly some kind of massive fiery AE, that had done for my entire team in seconds. I figured if I could find the artifact and give it to Iroi, she could heal herself well enough against the rest of the dragon's damage to solo the damn lizard if she had to. 

That would turn it into one of those long, attritional boss fights I'm all too familiar with from both GW2 and EverQuest II. Not much fun, sure, but if you get it right, you only have to do it the one time and that's bearable. 

I was settling myself into the idea but first I had to find the artifact. I thought maybe the mysterious sheep vendor might sell it but it was more obvious even than that. It turned out the person who'd left the comment on reddit was making it sound more abstruse than it really was.

The so-called "artifact" that nullifies the effect of dragon flame isn't an artifact at all. It's an accessory and it drops off... who knows? Not me. Not google, either, as we'll see. Probably just a low chance off any mob in Chocolate Volcano, I imagine. When I came to look in my bags for it, I found I already had two of them. 

They were still in there because I hadn't even noticed there were accessories or slots to put them in. It tells you something about how I play games because the slots are right there on the paper-doll and yet somehow I hadn't noticed them.

My feeble excuse is I hadn't been looking at the paper dolls when I was gearing my team. I'd been using the scrolling list of slots down the left of the screen to swap out and upgrade gear and you have to scroll that one down past the bottom of the display to see the accessory slots. They're right down the bottom, after the boots. 

I found that out by chance, not long after I'd been reading about the artifact. I just happened to scroll a bit further down than usual by mistake as I was swapping out gear. Once I'd noticed the slots for accessories were there, I clicked on them, which brings up anything in inventory that might fit the slot and it turned out I'd already looted quite a few rings and gewgaws. I'd been lugging them around in my bags for ages without knowing about it.

And guess what? There were two copes of the "artifact" I was after. It's called Hot Spring Egg and it "Grants immunity to monster burn damage." Perfect! 

Here's the really weird thing. Google doesn't seem to know the Hot Spring Egg exists. None of my searches then found it and even now I know what it's called, I'm still coming up blank. Even with the name of the game and the item there are no results. Well, no meaningful results.

If you search, as I did just now, for "Accessory in Neverness To Everness Warrens Continent that negates NPC fire damage.", the AI summary confidently informs you "In Neverness to Everness, the "999 Nights" (Warren Continent) content does not feature a single accessory that universally negates all NPC fire damage." Even if you use the exact wording from the egg and call it "burn damage" it's the same. Doesn't exist, apparently.

Yeah. Well, it does.Shows what you know, Gemini!  I have three of them now after another dropped yesterday. And you're not restricted to using the Egg on just one character, as the reddit comment implied. They're not whatever NTE's equivalent of Lore-Equip in EQII would be. Everyone on the whole team can have one. 

I probably wouldn't have known that if I hadn't found two of them in my bags. I'd have gone with my initial plan to use just Iroi and it would most likely have worked, even if it would have been teeth-grindingly slow.

With two Eggs, I had a better plan. I stuck one on Iroi and one on Flora, figuring the two of them could duo the dragon easily enough if they weren't on fire. The Appraiser has good DPS and Iroi is an amazing healer. Since plot mechanics mean Shinku has barely contributed anything to the team anyway, I've effectively been trioing the fights all along. Things would go slower without Mint's DPS but with Flora involved it would certainly be a lot faster than with Iroi on her own. 

I was almost looking forward to it now. I was about to port back and give it a go right then, when it occurred to me I might as well fight my way back through the whole volcano and get a couple of levels while I was doing it. 

That really says a lot about how much fun I'm having. It's the first time I've ever felt like I got the point of an ARPG. Killing hordes of mobs and picking through heaps of loot for upgrades hasn't really been my thing until now. I guess it can't have been the mechanics that were putting me off when I've tried other games that use them, after all. It must have been something else - the setting or the aesthetic, probably. 

It really helps that all the main armor slots displays, there's a great variety of looks to discover and the avatars are large enough to see what it all looks like, something that's never been the case in any isometric-perspective game I've played. The developers have done a really great job, not just adding a complete ARPG to the game but making me enjoy it, too.

So that's what I did. I enjoyed it. Specifically, I enjoyed the return match with the Molten Dragon and I especially enjoyed kicking the crap out of it. 

By the time I got to the dragon's room, the whole team had dinged 21 except poor old Shinku, forever a level behind. But she wasn't going to be fighting anyway. 

Flora woke the dragon up up and whacked it about with her sword. Iroi tagged in to drop her big heal when it was needed. I think Mint might have made a brief appearance, too, mostly to drop her Ultimate then vanish again. She couldn't hang around for long, not having an Egg of her own.

With its fire and lava attacks proving utterly ineffective, the dragon went down pretty easily. As did the  second dragon, over in the Milk Ice Mountain, which was where I went next. I was expecting to have to find some new item to protect me against freezing damage for that one but no. I never checked what damage the Frostspike Dragon who lives there was doing but whatever it was it didn't have much effect on my team, three of whom had the Hot Spring Egg by then.

Maybe that dragon does burn damage too. Or maybe it was my clever strat that did for him. 

I'm being ironic, at least somewhat. No strat I ever come up with is likely to qualify as clever. I think I'm doing pretty well if I know what my characters' main abilities do. Combining them for some kind of dramatic payoff is generally well beyond my remit. 

That is what your supposed to do, I think. NTE, like all the gacha games I've tried, assumes players love complexity. It's ferociously complex in terms of synergies between characters, gear, effects, abilities and a whole lot of other factors, all of which I'm sure the developers imagine the players will just lap up (And probably spend money trying to min-max.). Luckily for me they also seem quite forgiving of lazy bums who can't be bothered to figure out how it all fits together, which is just as well or I'd not be playing.

Sometimes, though, things happen that are hard to ignore. On the way up the milk mountain, something weird occurred often enough to make me tab out to try and find out what the heck was going on. Three-quarters of my team kept turning into flying lambs mid-fight. After that, I couldn't control them at all until combat ended, when they snapped back into their own forms as if nothing untoward had happened.

Fortunately, google knew what it was. It's what happens when you hold down "E" for a little longer than just a key-press, when Iroi's on the field. E triggers what I think of the "ranged" skill. (The game calls it Redirect.) Everyone has one but I'm not sure they all vary on a short and long press. 

I wouldn't necessarily know without looking it up because I rarely use the long-press at all. I hadn't been doing it intentionally this time, either. It was just a fluke but a very fortunate one. What happens when Iroi does it is that she turns the whole team into her puppets. In that form, they can't be damaged at all but they can still attack. 

Given that Iroi is an amazing healer who can keep going for ages on her own, it means she can tank the mob while her flock of lambs whittle away at it. (The lambs all have special attacks as well but I haven't figured out how to get them to work yet.) Perhaps best of all, if Iroi does die, all the characters who were lambs pop back up as themselves, at full health!

That's what happened in the Frostspike fight but by then the dragon was at about 10%. Flora and Mint finished it off with no trouble. And that was the second mountain done.

Next, it's off to the lake. Amber Syrup Lake, to be exact. And to tell the truth I've already made the trip. But that's a story for another day, if only because so far I've only gotten as far as the first campfire so there's not a lot to tell.