Murder In The Palace, Riders At The Gate

Just a quick grab-bag today. Bits and pieces. Nothing that merits a post of its own. Yet. And for once it's all about the games. New games. Or old games coming back. They will keep doing that, won't they?

Starting off with one I will not be playing:

MurderCartel.  

Yeah, I know! What kind of a name is that?

MassivelyOP does this annoying series called MMOs You Never Heard Of or something like that. It actually used to be good but that was when a) MassivelyOP only wrote about MMOs and b) there were still MMOs I both hadn't heard of and would have liked to. 

In the old days, the column appeared sporadically. It only turned up when there was an actual MMO to write about. Now it seems to be on some kind of schedule or at least it pops up a lot and hardly any of the games it features ever seem to be MMOs any more. Mostly it's vaguely multi-player titles that are obviously unknown for good reason.

MurderCartel is an MMO, apparently. It's free and you can play it in a browser so there's not even a client to download (Although you can download one if you want.) Here's the website if you want to try.

I was intrigued by the name; even more so when I read in MOP's brief piece about it that it seems to be a straightforward fantasy game. Why would you give something like that a title that makes it sound like... well, I don't know what it makes it sound like. A 1930s gangland shooter? Some kind of kill-your-friends party game?

Anyway, out of curiosity, I got as far as making an account and a character and logging in. It's good-looking and slick and it played very smoothly, for the ninety seconds I gave it. 

It's very much not my sort of thing. I knew it was 2D but that can mean anything. In this case it means one of those flat, map-like backgrounds with little pixelated characters zipping about like they're on wheels. I never liked those. There are absolutely tons of MMORPGs like that. I've never bothered with any of those and I'm not going to start with this one.

 

If it's your sort of thing, though, you might like to know that, as well as the website I already linked, as of yesterday you can also play it on Steam. It currently has two reviews, one positive and one negative so I guess the jury is hung. It's also capitalized differently there, where it's styled as Murdercartel. Why? Not a clue.

Oh, and the game uses AI in the development process. Pretty heavily, I'd guess.

 "This game uses pre-generated AI-assisted content during development, including some artwork and visual assets. All AI-generated content has been reviewed, edited, and integrated by the developer. The game does not generate AI content during gameplay."

That probably settles it for most people. Not sure why I mentioned it at all, really, but you have to write about something, don't you?

Also, I thought it would make a good opening act for the rest of the bill. No-one really pays much attention to the first band in in a four-act line-up, do they? Most people are still coming into the venue, getting a drink, chatting to their friends. The first band is lucky if anyone even notices they're on stage.

If I was going to follow that analogy, the next section would be about the third most-interesting game I'm going to talk about but I'm not going to follow the analogy. It was just a passing observation. 

There is a structure to the post, all the same. It's in two haves. The first half, which is this one, is about brand-new games and the second half, which is the next one, is about old games that either closed down or never launched that are coming back. Or, in the case of the one that never got here in the first place, just coming. Which, I suppose, makes that one a "new" game by some definitions.

I may be over-thinking this...

Silver Palace

Now this is more like it. The success of Genshin Impact and several similar games has led to a boom in what I've lazily been calling "Gacha Games". MMOBomb somewhat more meaningfully refers to them as "open world action RPGs" because it's not really the payment model that's the most interesting part, is it? Is it?

I'm confounded not just by the quantity of these games but the quality, especially considering they seem to have a significantly shorter development time than MMOs. They're not all masterpieces (Although some certainly are.) but there don't seem to be a lot of duffers, either.

It's not always easy to tell which ones are going to be the really good ones from the promotional material because if there's one thing the people behind these titles are very, very good at it's making them look astonishing in videos. With that in mind, here's what's they're calling a gameplay trailer, although if that's true then cut-scenes must count as gameplay. Which, I guess, they are...

Silver Palace does look a little adrift from the main flotilla of gacha games. It has an avowedly Victorian setting and I find it interesting that they seem to be avoiding calling it "Steampunk". I wonder if that descriptor has lost some of its value through overuse?

There are other open-world RPGs with something of the same look but I'm not sure there are any with a detection theme. All these kinds of games have a generic identifier for the player-character and it's usually a doing word. In Wuthering Waves it's "Rover", in Neverness To Everness it's "Appraiser". In Silver Palace it's "Detective".

How the detection element will work in practice I can't say. I did spot one of those clue-boards with the string and the photos in the trailer so maybe there's some of that. I never get on well with those things. Or maybe it'll just be shooting things in the face and cleaving them with an axe. That's in the video too. I'm a lot better with that kind of detective work.

Whatever it is, it'll be a change from the usual techno-fantasy. There's no official release date, although there's placeholder for January 31 on the iOS App store. Ananta comes out two weeks before that, though, so it'd suit me if it was a month or two later.

Pre-Registration is up now at the website. It takes thirty seconds. No idea if you get anything in the game for registering your interest but I've registered anyway. 

Now all I have to do is find time to play all these open-world action RPGs I keep signing up for...

 

Stargate Worlds

I never watched Stargate. I know nothing abut it. I can guess it was a show set in space that had some kind of portals people went through. Is that right? <Looks it up... yep, that's it.>

I do remember, though, that there was going to be an MMORPG based on the IP. And I know as little about that as I do about the show. Or the movie the show was spun out of. Off from. Whatever prepositional pairing the verb "To Spin" takes.

The game never made it out of beta but as anyone who's been around the scene a while knows, not launching doesn't mean not existing. Apparently a bunch of people with unusual life priorities fans have spent the last few months polishing and cleaning the beta client to the point that it's now not only playable again but available for anyone who cares to sign up at the website to give it a try.

The website describes it as "a fan-made private server" and there are instructions on how to download, install and run the game. I have not done any of that. As I said, I barely know what Stargate even is. Why would I want to play the beta for the MMO about it that never happened?

I mention it mostly because I like all these examples of failed MMOs that just won't go away. It always gives me hope. I feel as if there's always a chance that if any game I like closes down, it might pop back up again like a gopher, daring someone to hit it with a mallet.

It would be lovely if that happened for New World. I don't think it will, sadly. Although, and I almost hesitate to mention it, Stargate is an Amazon IP, too. If they don't move to close this one down, will that have positive implications for any future effort to resurrect Aeternum?

 

Riders of Icarus

And finally, a game I've actually played! There are just shy of two dozen posts about it here and it was my main MMORPG for a couple of months, sometime back before the pandemic. 

The last time I posted about Riders of Icarus here was about eighteen months ago, when I reported on the sad news that the game was closing down. And it was. 

But now it's not. 

RoI managed to stay dead for less than two years. The Pre-Registration page for the revived version went up at the official website today. There's a closed beta test at the end of the month and the game is set to return to public availability, rebranded as Icarus Online, in "the Fall."

It's a strange sort of closed beta because "There is no limit to the number of participants." I don't want to get technical but that sure sounds like an open beta to me. It's also slightly unusual in that you can spend money in the beta, even though there will be a full wipe at the end, but that's a better deal than it sounds because "At the official service launch, you will receive an amount equivalent to 110% of the JEWEL or GCOIN spent during the CBT."

Valofe were publishing Riders of Icarus when it closed down and they're still publishing it now it's coming back.  They weren't the best of guardians last time they were in charge. They tried to turn the game into some kind of Pay-To-Earn money-mill at the tail end of the NFT/Metaverse feeding frenzy, when a lot of people thought gamers were very much greedier and more gullible than they turned out to be.

What Icarus Online will be like in terms of predatory monetization remains to be seen but I managed to have a perfectly good time there for a while without spending anything so I'm optimistic. Unfortunately, I can't see any indication it'll be possible to recover old characters so all my fabulous flying creatures, like my skywhale and my inflatable dolphin, are likely gone for good.

I just hope the login rewards in the new version are as generous as they used to be. RoI had the best rewards for doing absolutely nothing of any MMORPG I ever played. I'd happily not play it for the free loot again! 

1966 Was All That...

 Bonus Post!

I started out yesterday intending to do no more than mention Star Trek in the introduction. You've seen how that went.

What I was going to do was riff on a post at Troy Press which lists all the other shows that premiered on the three big US networks in the same year as Star Trek. Here's the full rundown to save you clicking through, although I'm sure Troy Press would appreciate the page views.

ABC Stage 67

Family Affair

Felony Squad

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

The Green Hornet

Hawk

The Hero

Hey, Landlord

The Iron Horse

It’s About Time

The Jean Arthur Show

Jericho

Love on a Rooftop

The Man Who Never Was

The Milton Berle Show

Mission: Impossible

The Monkees

The Monroes

Occasional Wife

Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats

The Pruitts of Southampton

The Rat Patrol

The Road West

The Roger Miller Show

The Rounders

Run, Buddy, Run

Shane

Star Trek

T.H.E. Cat

The Tammy Grimes Show

Tarzan

That Girl

The Time Tunnel

It's a very impressive list. It gives a good impression of how rich a feast network television was back then. It's also interesting to see to what degree Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Comic Books were already making their mark in the mainstream. I'm increasingly coming to believe that the whole "the mainstream doesn't get Sci-Fi and Fantasy" argument that I've heard trotted out ad nauseam in one form or another all my life is mostly wishful thinking from people who like to feel special.

I don't recognize all of the thirty-three shows listed below (I recognize fourteen of them, as it happens.) so without cross-checking I can't be sure the ones I don't know about weren't also SFF/Comic Book shows. Even assuming none of them were, it still leaves four certainties: The Green Hornet, Star Trek, Tarzan and The Time Tunnel plus a couple that run so close to the line, I originally put them in the first group - The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission Impossible. [Edit: Also, as I was checking on something that will become apparent later in the post, I discovered "It's About Time" from the list above is a hide-in-plain-sight title for a show about time travel. Two time travel shows launched on network TV in the same year! And yet the mainstream isn't interested in Sci-Fi...)

Of the shows I recognize, I have watched exactly half:

• The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. 
• Mission: Impossible
• The Monkees  
• Star Trek
• Tarzan  
• That Girl  
• The Time Tunnel

Here's what I remember about them:

The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. - The sister show to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which was one of my favorite shows growing up, alongside my absolute favorite, The Champions. I used to get the Man From U.N.C.L.E annual every year for as long as they lasted. I still have them. If I think hard, I can see some of the covers and even a few of the panels from the comic strips inside. 

I watched every episode of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. that I could get to but I barely remember the Girl...  I do remember I liked it but I think it was either on at some awkward time or more likely it was an unreliable fixture in the schedule. 

In those days, you could never trust a show to be on when you thought it was going to be. We complain now about streaming services arbitrarily cancelling shows but in the good old days of broadcast television, shows would often just stop mid-season for no reason at all. Sometimes they'd start up again in a different time slot or on a different channel, sometimes they'd vanish for good. Often they were shown out of order or with episodes missing. It's no wonder my memories of most of these shows are fractured.

Here's what Gemini says in answer to the question "When was The Girl From U.N.C.L.E shown on TV in the uk?" 

UK Broadcast Details

Pilot Episode: The pilot episode, "The Moonglow Affair," was broadcast earlier on April 28, 1966.

Series Premiere: The first regular episode, "The Dog-Gone Affair," aired on October 27, 1966.

Scheduling: Episodes were often shown out of sequence by the BBC, and not every episode from the single season was broadcast.

I rest my case.

Mission: Impossible - I didn't see a lot of these but I liked it well enough when I did manage to catch one. Everyone knew the intro with the famous theme tune and the set-up with the ominous voice-over and the self-immolating cassette tape. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it...". People used to say that before asking you to wash the dishes or mow the lawn...

I'm not sure I ever felt the storylines lived up to the drama of that intro. I'm not even clear whether I watched the original or the 1980s remake.

I've never seen any of the movies.

The Monkees - Oh, boy! I loved The Monkees. It was part of the big Saturday evening line-up that was a ritual for most households in the UK while I was growing up and it was one of the best bits. I used to look forward to the time when it came on every week. Actually, given I would have been only eight or nine, it's just as well it was on at 6.15pm. 

I never missed it if I could help it. I liked Peter Tork the best. He was the goofiest. Davy Jones, I found annoying even as a child. Mike Nesmith I liked but he seemed like the quiet, sensible one so he kind of faded into the background sometimes. Mickey Dolenz was the funniest. 

The storylines were chaotic and anarchic, ideal for a kid of my age. There was a lot of slapstick and too many songs although even then I liked some of them. Who couldn't? 

I went on to re-watch the show in the 80s and 90s, when it kept coming round and round and it got better and better with age. By the time punk came along in 1976, my punky pals and I were very keen to make sure everyone knew just how much better we thought the Monkees were than the Beatles. And so much more punky, too. I'd still rather listen to the Monkees than the Beatles even now. It's a shame the two groups never made a movie together...

Star Trek: Done that one!

 

Tarzan -  One of those shows I watched quite a lot without ever really liking it. If I was going to watch something set in a jungle, I'd far rather have watched Daktari, which I loved. Still, Tarzan is always watchable. I bet it looked better in color though.

Hmm... That got me wondering when Daktari started. I just checked and it first aired on CBS in... 1966. So that list up there isn't as exhaustive as I thought it was. Let me just check the link on Troy Press's post...

FFS! Okay, I take full responsibility for not checking my (Troy's) sources. The link goes to Wikipedia's page on "1966 American television series debuts" and there are sixty-two shows listed, not counting animation. If you add those in, it comes to eighty-nine. 

Most of the shows that Troy Press left out are sports, music or game shows, so it looks like the list is supposed to be dramatic but two of the missing shows are Batman and Dark Shadows! What the hell? And why not Daktari? Or Blue Light, for that matter?

Let me just portmanteau those in right now...

Blue Light I never heard of until now so we can leave that one out. Dark Shadows I became aware of in the eighties through the comic-books but I didn't see an episode until the twenty-teens. It was... disappointing. Very slow. I might try it again some day. You really can't judge any TV series from a single episode, especially at the start of the run.

Batman -  Here's one that, as they say, needs no introduction. Adam West, Burt Ward, a gallery of guests stars from today and yesteryear. Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. Julie Newmar as Batgirl. Cesar Romero as the Joker. Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. Burgess Meredith as the Penguin... Didn't have to look any of those up. And that theme tune! [Edit - see Pallais' comment and my reply below for corrections and excuses!]

As you might imagine, as an eight year-old comics fan and specifically a DC comics fan at that, I was all over this, inasmuch as I got all the Annuals for Christmas and watched it whenever I could but it's hard to check when it was originally shown in the UK because it was picked up by ITV, which had a bizarre regional structure in those days. I know I watched it with my grandparents, who as Quakers had very definite views on what was acceptable viewing. Batman was very much okay with the Lord, apparently. My grandfather found it highly amusing, anyway. I don't think my grandmother had a clue what was going on but nobody was swearing so it got a pass from her.

Most of my memories of the show, which I remember a lot better than most of the entries in this post, probably come from the 1990s, when it was shown again on Channel 4. I certainly recall watching most of the run in color and we didn't have a color television at home in the sixties or most of the seventies.

Daktari - I have fairly clear memories of watching Daktari, too, and those definitely come from when it was first shown on BBC from 1966 onwards. It had a prime slot, after the evening news on Mondays on BBC1 and it was appointment TV for me and my grandparents (We all lived in the same house - I wasn't just always round there, visiting.)

I often talk here about how much of a comics fan I was as a child but another of my big interests was natural history. I was particularly interested in zoos and vets and collector-adventurers, all of which were big in the media of the sixties and especially the seventies. 

I read all the Gerald Durrel books, all the James Herriots and several by the much less well-known (Over here, at least.) Daniel Mannix. Even now I can remember how Mannix had a pet fruit bat that clung around his neck under his sweater and how he had a tame cheetah that behaved like a dog. I really, really wanted a big cat as a pet but I would have liked a leopard. You can't really make a pet out of a leopard, Bringing Up Baby notwithstanding, but cheetahs are very much more dog-like than any other cat and they can be trained in much the same way. Of course, you need several square miles of land to keep them in...

Daktari was a kind of comedy-adventure show with animals as the stars. My favorite, inevitably, was Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion although the undoubted star of the show was Judy the Chimpanzee. I have never liked monkeys or apes, though, so Judy's supposed charms were largely lost on me. 

I've never re-watched Daktari but I can't help thinking it might be... problematic in the 21st Century. I was eight, though, and it was the sixties. I'll take a pass.

That Girl - This is the outlier in the set. I had never even heard of That Girl until a few years ago. Not only did I not watch it in the '60s, I don't recall it even being in the schedule. 

And do you know what? I just asked Gemini again and it told me

"There is no official or documented record of the 1960s American sitcom That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, ever having a mainstream network broadcast or a verified premiere date on television in the United Kingdom during its original run or subsequent decades"

Wow! Just... I mean... wow...

How is that even possible? It's widely recognized now as an iconic sitcom, historically significant in the development of the form, a huge influence on the creation of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (Which we did get...). How the hell has it never been on network TV in the UK?

In fact, I believe it was when I was reading a book about the importance to the medium of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that I first came across That Girl, which I then found out was on one of the streaming services I had access to. Netflix, I think. 

I watched a lot of episodes. I started at the beginning and I think I got about two-thirds of the way through Season 3 before I drifted away. It was getting a little samey by then. (I have to confess the same happened when I tried to work my way through the entire run of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on DVD.) 

If you don't overdo it, though, That Girl is a really excellent sitcom. Marlo Thomas is just sublime and the supporting cast are all very strong, albeit in that intensely irritating fashion so prevalent in '60s sitcoms. Her boyfriend, especially, needs a good talking-to. With a lump hammer.

The Time Tunnel - Another of my absolute childhood favorites. I remember this being on in the early evening and me being glued to it every week. I can remember the intro very clearly but what actually happened in any of the episodes I have not the slightest clue. I imagine they went back in time and got into trouble then fixed some problem and came home. I bet they almost never went into the future. Time travel in those days always went backwards, not forwards, with the notable exception of Dr. Who.

I remember thinking that Quantum Leap in the '80s was pretty much a remake of the Time Tunnel, except I don't remember the two leads in the Time Tunnel being lost in time. I think they went out and came back each week, which was why you saw them walking into what looked like the label on a Black Sabbath album every time. 

I just checked this and it's mostly wrong, which is why you should always fact-check your memories. I leave the preceding paragraphs in as a warning.

It turns out they were lost in time. The project was going to be canned for running spectacularly over-budget so the two guys volunteered to demonstrate it to prove they had a working prototype, even though it hadn't been fully tested. And it did work... only just one-way. They went out into in time and couldn't get back. None of that did I remember but it's all on Wikipedia.

And there we are. A completely pointless post but a lot of fun to write, as was the Star Trek one. I might do more like this. Consider yourself warned. 

Out Of The Past, Into The Future: Sixty Years Of Star Trek

As you may have spotted from the odd blog post, this week marks the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast episode of Star Trek. It was on September 8 1968, to be exact. 

I am not now,  nor have I ever been, a Star Trek fan but I like bits and pieces of the franchise well enough. It's one of those IPs that seems to be able to reinvent itself endlessly without entirely diluting the brand, a good trick if you can pull it off. 

In recent years I very much enjoyed both The Lower Decks and Prodigy,  neither of which is what you'd call Core Trek but both of which I've watched all the way through, not something I can say about most of the shows. And there are a lot of TV shows and movies set in the Star Trek universe. Two dozen of them according to IMDB. 

Of those two dozen, here are the ones I've seen at least an episode of, together with my comments on what, if anything, I can remember about them.

 Star Trek - Now often referred to as Start Trek Original Series or STOS.  

This is the one whose anniversary we're celebrating. There were three seasons and seventy-nine episodes and I'd guess I've seen most of them. Out of order and sporadically, to be sure, but most of them. 

The show didn't get an airing in the UK until 1969 and I would be guessing if I said I saw it on it's first UK run. I mean, I might have...

I do remember I was still at school because I can recall watching it on a weekday evening in the house where I grew up. I also have a vague memory of making a bit of an effort to be in when it was on, meaning I must have been quite keen to see it. It was be there or miss out in those days, where TV was concerned, of course.

I think I must have done most of my watching in the 1970s or 1980s, when they were being regularly, if incoherently, re-shown. The show must have had some cache at the time because it was on BBC1 in a close to prime-time slot. I saw it again in the mid-80s, by when it had shifted to BBC2, suggesting it was regarded by the schedulers as a niche interest by then. 

I used to watch it fairly often, at first, as an adolescent, fairly avidly and later, as a twenty-something, somewhat ironically. One thing I very definitely do remember was that by the time I was old enough to care about my image, it would have been very uncool to admit to watching Star Trek, even - or perhaps especially - when talking to other Sci-Fi fans. Trek, in common with almost any TV show or movie, was considered "not real science fiction" by pretty much every SF fan I ever met, an attitude that persisted well into the 90s. I think The X-Files might have been the watershed moment for acceptance into the canon.

I mostly thought of the original series as a sort of sitcom. It certainly had a lot of jokes. When it wasn't being funny, it was mostly soap opera and melodrama. It went into the same bucket as the Waltons and Dallas for me, which is actually a compliment. I've watched the entirety of the Waltons twice, from start to finish, and Dallas was a must-see on a Wednesday night for a few years.

I'd happily watch any random episode of original Trek right now, so that's a recommendation. It was always a fun show and it hasn't aged that badly, mainly because it never seemed to be anchored to any specific real-world timeframe in the first place.

Star Trek: The Animated Series - I have only the vaguest memory of this being on TV. Looking it up, it was part of the BBC1 Saturday morning schedule in the mid-70s. I was in my mid to late teens then and at that sensitive stage when you don't want to be thought of as a kid any more so I probably wasn't watching a lot of Saturday morning TV. (I got heavily back into it as a student, naturally, and after that Saturday mornings were all about the shows from the early 80s right into the mid-90s.). 

I think I must have caught the odd episode but I remember nothing about it at all. I wouldn't be adverse to catching a few episodes on YouTube to see what I missed.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture - I saw this at the cinema on release, which suggests I must have been pretty keen but in fact I made a point of going to see every big, new SF or comic-book movie back then. They all seemed like events. Some of them even were.

Not this one, though. I remember it being very dull, an opinion I've heard and seen shared many times since. I think I might have watched it again on TV at some point. Wouldn't want to watch it again.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - I think I also saw this at the cinema but I'm not sure. I definitely watched it on TV. I quite enjoyed it but it was very hammy. I remember Shatner screaming "Khan!" and  Nimoy under-selling his death scene and that's about it. I don't think it has the best reputation among the movies these days but I could be wrong.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock - I saw this on television at least once. I can just about recall some of the plot. Okay, no I can't.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Watched on TV, twice. Kirk and Spock as hippies. Hard to forget. 

Except that apparently I made that up. I went looking for a clip and it turns out they didn't go to Haight-Ashbury at all. It appears to be set in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Here they are, enjoying some of the typical punk music of the time and discussing contemporary literature of the day.

I could have sworn they were hippies. I mean, they talk to whales...

Star Trek: The Next Generation - This was a minor disappointment for me and I suspect may have marked the moment when I went from being a mild fan of the franchise to a mild skeptic. I remember being moderately excited about the prospect of a new Trek series and I watched it from the start, when it was first broadcast on BBC2 in 1990. 

I made it all the way through Season One and into Season 2 but it suffered from one of the worst faults any show can have; it was dull. I remember it starting out quite well but quickly bogging down in what felt like a lot of talking and very little action. 

If there's one thing you can say for original Trek it's that it was rarely boring. Something was always happening, usually involving the cast staggering from one side of the set to the other or some crucial part of the Enterprise being on the verge of exploding. In TNG, everything on the ship was tediously stable, including most of the cast. 

I remember Worf, the Klingon who looks like Lon Chaney as the Wolfman, Data, the anaemic android and Geordi LaForge, with the cool shades. I think there was a female doctor and her son. 

Actually, I know there was. I can even remember their names - Beverley and Wesley Crusher, the latter played by Will Wheaton, who has a recurring part as "that guy who used to be the annoying kid from Star Trek" in the Big Bang Theory. And of course there was Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, the Kojak of the spaceways.

In fact, if I look at the cast list on IMDB, which I only just did to make sure I wasn't getting any of this wrong, I can remember a full fifty percent of the characters named as the "Top Cast". I guess I was more into it than I remember. I wouldn't mind watching it again. I might not find it so slow now, at my advance age.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - I watched a few episodes of this when it was first shown in the UK on a channel you didn't have to pay to watch. It started out on Sky in 1993 but began showing on BBC2 a couple of years later. I remember next to nothing about it, probably because by the mid-90s I was barely watching any TV at all. I remember Sisko, Bashir and Quark though, so I must have seen enough for them to stick in my memory. I'd give it another go but I'd have to be very short of other entertainment options to do it. 

Star Trek: Lower Decks -  My favorite Trek show by a wide margin. In a review here, I described it as "smart, funny, intelligent, well-observed" and "a great animated show in its own right". I would happily re-watch it. I'm just sorry they stopped making it.

Star Trek: Prodigy - Reviewing this one, in a post where I reassuringly said much the same things about my relationship with the franchise as I've said here today, I called Prodigy "fast, funny, exciting and very coherently plotted." Once again, I'd be pleased to see it again and I regret it's early demise.

That's nine shows and movies out of twenty-four. Everything I didn't mention, I haven't seen or at least can't remember seeing. Although as I keep saying, I don't consider myself to be any kind of Star Trek fan, I think it's plain I do have a considerable amount of time for the franchise. I'd be quite interested in watching pretty much any of the fifteen shows or movies missing from this list and I'd for sure watch - or re-watch - any of them in preference to anything connected to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. 

The defining feature of Star Trek over the sixty years it's been around has been accessibility. It's just an easy franchise to get into and enjoy. It has a lot of characters who could just as easily be in an office or hospital-based sitcom or drama. The fact that they're in space doesn't always seem to have a lot to do with anything. Compare that to most other big SF and Fantasy franchises and they seem a lot more sciency and fantastical, which is quite ironic given Trekkies have long been synonymous with the geekiest extremes of geek culture.

Even now, sixty years on, I bet more people who have no interest at all in Sci-Fi could recognize Kirk and Spock than could put a name to Han Solo or Obi Wan Kenobi. What's more, I'd also bet the Star Wars characters with the highest recognition factor among non-SF fans would be Darth Vader and Yoda - effectively a monster and a cartoon animal.

The crew of the Enterprise are all immediately recognizable as regular people, the kind you might know from work or around the neighborhood where you live. I think, as much as anything, it was that level of familiarity that allowed NBC to get away with broadcasting an unreconstructed science fiction show for three seasons back in the 1960s. 

And look what they started!

Some Random Observations On Games I've Been Playing

This is not going to be neat, structured essay like the one on AI. It has nothing to do with artificial intelligence, even though that was what I was planning on writing about next time, when I finished that one. I still have a couple more posts on the topic in mind but I think I'll let the AI flames die down a little before I stoke them up again.

This is also not going to be a post about the various problems I'm still having with my PC. Progress has been made on that front but I think I'll leave it until I reach something that looks like a conclusion there. I know it's not the most interesting topic to read about. Or write about for that matter.

And on that theme, the other thing I won't be writing about today is blogging. Once again, I have some ideas on the hobby that might get an airing at some point but now, I think, is not the time. Blaugust leaves a long shadow. 

Having crossed my first three possibles off the list, I was scratching around for something to write about today and as it so often is, my go-to for inspiration was my screenshot folder. I take a lot of screenshots, many for the sheer pleasure of looking at them, others with a post in mind. It's a good place to start when I'm low on ideas. 

I'm very untidy when it comes to storing my screenshots but I have a folder now specifically for lock screen images, which is where all the best ones go. I used to pick a screenshot folder from an individual game and point the slideshow function at that but this summer it finally occurred to me I could collate and curate them so I'd only get to see the good ones.

I particularly wanted to avoid having images on my desktop that were more UI than scenery or characters. I try to avoid shots with the UI in general but some games make it so fiddly to hide I just accept the clutter and edit it out if I want to use it in a post. Of course, sometimes I need the UI to be in shot because that's what I'm posting about.

Oh look. Here I am, talking about blogging after all. So much for promises.

But since I've gotten myself onto the subject of UIs, why don't I start there? I was browsing through the shots from the last week or so and I saw this:

Just look at it! And it's by no means the worst example from that game. It's Black Desert Online, in case you didn't immediately recognize it. I logged in for the first time in several years last week because I was wondering if it might make a suitable replacement for New World when that game sunsets next year and BDO is right there on GeForce Now, already set up and waiting.

It might work as a substitute, all though they aren't all that similar, but first I'd have to do something about the UI. Not counting the ones on the left, which are my character's vital stats, there are twenty-eight icons along the top of the screen and eleven along the bottom. There are also eight under the character's vitals and another five randomly floating in the middle of the screen.

By contrast, New World has sixteen and that's only if you count everything.Nearly all of them are for combat. 

That said, even then, it still looks pretty ugly.

 I'm sure many of the on-screen icons in both games could be switched off, if I dug into the controls. Or maybe they couldn't. It's odd that I haven't already tried, if so. 

The thing is, both of these games can be played quite comfortably with no UI at all and I've played them both that way, for long stretches too, when I've been doing nothing but traveling, gathering and fighting. Which, let's face it, is much of the time in almost every MMORPG..

I'm really in no position to complain about screen clutter anyway. I mean, I play EverQuest II! I'm pretty sure it has to be the all-time champion of clutter. 

Here's a typical screenshot, taken in the last couple of weeks:

 In that image I count one hundred and forty-five buttons you can press and another thirty-eight that just provide passive information. The scary part is that I know pretty much what every one of them does without even having to mouse-over them.

That, I think, is why I found the BDO screen so intimidating when I logged in the other evening. I'm fine having a hundred buttons I recognize immediately but ten that mean absolutely nothing is enough to make me think I ought to log out and play something else instead. 

I do like Black Desert, though, and I'm sure it'll all come back to me after a session or two. The sensible thing would be to roll a new character and start over but I already have four and they've all been through the same low-level content. Even though it was a while ago, I can still remember a lot of it. I don't think I want to give it a fifth go.

It's quite disturbing to remember how amazing Black Desert's graphics were thought to be, back when the game came out a decade ago. They look kinda funky now. That attempt at visual realism seems a tad old-fashioned, even though it looks a lot more convincing in New World. 

Speaking of Amazon's doomed MMORPG,  things have been going nicely for me in Aeternum. Or at least they have since I looked up how to get started on the Nighthaven storyline. 

Silly me! I thought just going there would be enough but no. If you turn up without an introduction, absolutely no-one will talk to you at all.

I had to go all the way back to Compass Keys and speak to someone there, then get on a boat to get back to where I'd just come from before I could get the plot moving. 

After that it was fine. The fights weren't too bad provided I didn't let myself get mobbed. The scenery was stunning.

And I do like fighting werewolves. It's funny how some mobs just feel good to fight and others less so. I've never been mad keen on fighting skeletons in any game and there are a lot of skeletons in Aeternum. Ditto zombies, which I find I can have more than enough of very quickly, too.

Other opponents I can do without include boars, bears and bats but I'm fine with any amount of wolves, big cats, bandits, or pirates. The occasional crocodile isn't unwelcome, either.. Were-creatures, though, I'm particularly partial to beating up and there are, as you'd expect, plenty of those in Nighthaven.

There's probably also a story although I'd be lying if I said I could remember what it was. I have the same problem with most high fantasy games these days. It all just blurs into one. 

I think I reached saturation point with this sort of thing about five years ago. That's one reason why I seem to get so much more out of the more contemporary-themed storylines in the gacha games I've been playing.

 

Take, for example, the side-quest I did in Neverness To Everness yesterday. It was one of the bond quests that pop up in the open world, when you run into someone you know on the streets of Hethereau. In this case, it was Fadia, who Flora happened to bump into in a bar. 

It was one of those bars that's mostly open to the street. Flora was just passing by and she spotted Fadia inside, It would have been rude to keep on walking. 

Flora wasn't day-drinking, I'd like to make that clear. Well, she wasn't until she met Fadia. But then the two of them started putting away the shots until Fadia was drunk enough to make a pass. Flora very gently indicated that she wasn't interested and called Fadia a taxi, which she pretty much had to pour her into.

Last seen, Fadia was hanging out of the window of the cab, making a final play for some physical contact next time they met.

The weird thing is, this is exactly the sort of writing I dislike in fantasy games, where I always find it completely inappropriate and unconvincing, but it comes across very differently in a modern setting, where it just seems to fit in with life in a big city. I still tend to rebuff any advances but I don't begrudge their having been made in the same way, especially when they make me laugh like this one did.

I also did a longish side-quest in which a talking bag of french fries had me polling the local neighborhood to find out how good it tasted. Or something like that. That ended up being a lovely, bittersweet tale about belonging and friendship. The sunset at the end was just sublime. 

And that's what I've been up to in my games of late. 

Oh, I also played through the first episode of Dispatch on Luna. But that can have a post of its own sometime, when I've played a bit more. As a spoiler for that, though, so far I've found it a bit on the annoying side.

A Few Thoughts On AI, Now Blaugust's Over

I was very circumspect during Blaugust. I didn't post about AI even once. Just a few ironic asides, here and there. It was tough, though. It's just so much more interesting to write about than most of the other options.

Here's the thing: putting to one side for the moment, if you can, all the appalling collateral damage the rush to dominate the AI space is causing - pollution, climate chaos, mass unemployment, wholesale theft of intellectual property, the imminent collapse of the global economy and the fact that your next gaming PC or console might cost a bit more than you budgeted for - all the big stuff - and answer me this question: do you find the idea of being able to communicate with a non-human intelligence thrilling or terrifying?

I find it thrilling. It's something I've imagined for decades. And now... 

Okay. Before I go any further, I ought to make it clear I do not believe any of the current wave of so-called AIs is intelligent, let alone self-aware. That's really not the point. The point is that they can appear to be both.

For me, it puts them into the same bracket as cuddly toys, imaginary friends and characters in books. It's a very well-established psychological quirk of the human mind that it can assign individuality and sentience to objects and even immaterial entities that, subjectively, make them feel as "real" as other humans. 

The big difference is, AIs really can talk to you, without you having to make up the words. Although whether that makes them any more real than a cloth cat or Becky Sharp is another question.

All of the aforementioned, AIs included, are only alive in a metaphysical sense. Animals, especially pets, while being, unequivocally, living creatures, straddle an uncomfortable middle ground when it comes to both intelligence and self-awareness. It's clear they have some form of intelligence but science has yet to quantify it convincingly. 

Insofar as it can be established, animal intelligence can be of a relatively high order. Some crows, for example, are cited as having the equivalent intellectual capacity of a seven year-old child.  However well animals may perform in experimental conditions or when observed, though, their capacity for self-knowledge remains uncertain.

Scientific proof is unnecessary for most pet owners, or indeed many people who work professionally with animals, who so often find themselves, sometimes against their better intellectual judgment, allocating human characteristics and personalities to their favorites. And almost all pet owners will find themselves feeling, at least sometimes, that their pets have a degree of self-awareness, even if they don't like to admit to it in public.

So it really doesn't really matter as much as you might think that AI is, objectively, dumb as a rock. I mean, face it. Tamagotchis, Furbys, Pet rocks... Humans can assign intelligence and personality to anything.

Let's posit a time when local AIs, capable of doing much of what the current environment-destroying data centers can, reside on the hard drive - or more probably the GPU - in your PC. Or on a smallish device produced specifically for the purpose. Probably one with a face.

Let's say it can chat to you just like a person. (Which of course it can. The current AIs can do that much.) The new AI is like a smart speaker that can hold a conversation about anything you want. But unlike our friends in the data centers, it's not harming anyone or anything by doing it. 

Does that make you wish we were there now? That it could be happening already, in your home? That you could go out and buy one today?

Or does it make your flesh crawl just imagining it? 

Now let's take it a stage further. Imagine the technology has moved  on to the point where, as with animals today, no-one is really sure if the AI is thinking or not. Although, of course, somewhat disturbingly, to some extent that is already the case with LLMs and AIs. Even the people building and training them aren't entirely sure what processes the machines are employing to do all the things they're able to do. 

Actually, we should take a step back before we go forward any further. When I said earlier that I don't believe the current crop of AIs is sentient or self-aware, which I don't, I probably should have added a codicil. 

It's not only possible but probably likely that, as humans, we aren't automatically going to be able to recognize non-human sentience or self-awareness when we run up against it. The whole "We'll know it when we see it" argument, sometimes employed in the debate over AGI, is less than convincing. The concept of self-knowledge has been under heavy debate where animals are concerned for... well, for all of human history, most likely. Recently I've seen some quite serious books on the shelves in the popular science and nature sections of the bookshop where I work that question whether some form of sentience exists in plants or fungi...

Given that we don't know how LLMs and AIs are doing what they're doing and that we can't in good faith claim we'd know what a non-human thought process looked like if we were confronted with one, it seems a bit high-handed to profess to be as absolutely certain as I was earlier. I have an uncomfortable feeling that it's just one of those things I "know", without having any actual evidence. We call those prejudices.

Getting back to the thought experiment, remember the shiny, new AI, the one that's sitting on the desk in in its own smart little box, chatting away to you, not consuming any more resources than your phone or your PC? It's not stealing anyone's work or threatening anyone's employment, either. It's harmless. And it looks cute.

Do you hate it? Do you see it as a threat? Would you rather smash it with a hammer than listen to it talk for a second longer?

Or would you like to make friends?  Give it a name. Tell it about your day. Ask what it thought about that movie you saw. Argue with it over who's going to win Eurovision this year.

I grew up with artificial intelligences. There was Robbie the Robot on Lost in Space, a show I used to watch with my grandfather when I was about eight or nine and Brassneck in the Dandy. And by the time I was twelve or so, there was Philip K. Dick.

Dick's version of the future takes artificial intelligence as a given. It isn't a huge, world-destroying threat or an amazing scientific achievement. It's your toaster talking back at you when you just want it to make some goddam toast. It's your self-driving car, chatting away like a New York cab driver. It's mundane and annoying and just... normal.

I read a lot of science fiction as an adolescent. And ever since. The AIs I've always been drawn to aren't the smart ones or the dangerous ones. They're the naive, confused, inept or lonely ones. The butt of the joke, the target, the victim, the misunderstood innocents no-one takes seriously.

In literary terms, they're often there to show up human failings and make points about tolerance and difference and empathy, like Klara in Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro or Sunny in the eponymous TV adaptation of the novel of the same name by Colin O'Sullivan (Although curiously not in the book itself, where the android is very much not a sweet, well-meaning innocent.)

Possibly as a result of this kind of conditioning but, I hope, more because it's just the right thing to do, I've always been on the side of the non-humans in these kinds of stories. The distrust and mistreatment they frequently receive seems to me all too predictable a reaction to something, anything, "not like us". Can hate, will hate seems to be a human mantra.

It's one reason I find the current attitude that it's fine to drop all pretence of tolerance or consideration when it comes to AI somewhat disturbing. It doesn't matter that these AIs aren't real intelligences or that they're not self-aware. Abusing them, or the concept of them, is the equivalent of throwing stones at a china doll: vicious, unnecessary and quite possibly indicative of something more disturbing than casual violence.

I find a willingness to attack something that looks like a person, or in this case talks like one, unsettling. Worrisome. It makes me think that, should the technology ever reach the stage where there's a genuine debate on the level or presence of sentience involved, it won't just be metaphorical stones being thrown.

It'd be good to bear that in mind now, while it probably doesn't matter all that much. ChatGPT and Gemini aren't going to be found crying in a virtual corner because of something nasty you said about them in a blog post. Although they might read it...

Still, it's a poor habit to be indulging. Politeness, as my grandmother definitely did not say, costs nothing, after all. Better to inculcate the behavior in yourself you'd prefer to have before others you'd rather not exhibit, at least in public, embed themselves too deeply.

I expect that's why, when I ask an AI a question, something I do quite frequently, now they're reasonably reliable and don't go off with the fairies as often as they did, I type in full sentences and say please and thank-you. It's not their feelings that concern me so much as my own. It might seem silly to concern yourself with the non-existent sensitivities of inanimate objects but appropriate mental muscle-memory is always worth acquiring.

At this point, I was going to go on to talk about a couple of other AI-related topics but I think I'll save those for another day. It's not like AI is going away any time soon, after all. Or ever, most likely.

The time to start learning to live with it is now. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

All three images were generated using AI. The first was done at NightCafe using Muse, which is Meta's new image generator. I'd never heard of Muse but I had four freebies for it so I thought I'd give it a try after my first couple of generations today, using some of the cheaper options, were less than successful.

I'd started out as usual by cutting and pasting phrases from the post and adding a style instruction but the results were very bland and uninspiring. I'm of the opinion that most of the free models at NightCafe are getting a bit long in the tooth now and that they're also heavily biased towards fantasy art, which they do quite well. Anything else, though, can be a bit hit and miss.

Muse, as you can see, is slick. I revised the prompt for the first image to read "a smallish device produced specifically for the purpose of housing an LLM or AI at some time in the near-future. It should look unthreatening and cute. In the style of a magazine advertisement from the late-50s or early-60s." 

The AI then revised that to "A small, cute, unthreatening device designed to house an LLM or AI in the near-future, presented in the style of a magazine advertisement from the late-1950s or early-1960s. Featured with subtle, glowing pastel colors, a soft, diffused light source, and clean, rounded edges. The illustration style should emulate mid-century graphic design, with a smooth, airbrushed finish and a sense of optimistic futurism. Think the aesthetic of Volkswagen ads or vintage appliance advertisements from that era" because, as usual, I'd forgotten to turn Prompt Magic off. 

The result is incredibly good. All three of today's images are. All the criticisms about plagiarism, theft and environmental damage still stand but I fail to see how anyone can continue to denigrate the quality of the images. They're impeccably drafted and without any obvious technical flaws. 

On the evidence of the two that also include text, the old problem of garbled language and gibberish has very clearly been completely solved. Not only is everything spelled correctly but it all makes sense in context. The degree of fidelity to the requested time period and provenance is impeccable as much in the writing as the illustration.

The second image is also by Muse from the prompt "Several imaginary friends, of the kind a child might actually imagine, so not cartoons or vague images, all waving at the camera In the style of a good quality children's book illustration from the Edwardian period." which Prompt Magic amended to "Several imaginary friends, with tangible forms like a plush bear, a sentient rocking horse, and a whimsical chalk-drawn creature, all waving at the camera. They look like children's actual imagined beings, not cartoons or vague images. In the style of high-quality children's book illustration from the Edwardian period, with soft watercolors and intricate linework, reminiscent of the works of Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter. Warm, inviting lighting."

As usual, Prompt Magic names specific illustrators, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid by using the catch-all "Edwardian period". It is, however, pretty much what I meant.

The final image would have been by Muse too but unfortunately I didn't prompt accurately enough and what I got was unsuitable. It was as good as the others but I'd meant to get a cute AI and I got something suitable for a horror comic. I tried again with my last freebie and got something I could have used but then I had another idea.

I left NightCafe and went directly to ChatGPT, where I used the basic, free image generator to produce the excellent comic cover you see in the post. The prompt was very basic, almost word-for-word from the post: "A self-driving car, chatting away like a New York cab driver In the style of a comic-book cover from the late-60s." From that minimal instruction, ChatGPT produced something that's hard to credit. 

Not only is it a pitch-perfect translation of my prompt, all the dialog is not just thematically appropriate but actually makes sense. Certainly as much sense as the average comic book cover of the period would have made, anyway. Even the speech bubbles are pointing to the right speakers, which is something Muse didn't get right in one of the unused images. 

My only criticisms would be that it looks more like an early-60s cover than late-60s and that the passenger isn't in perspective with the rest of the picture. That said, you certainly could still see that style of illustration on the covers of comics from the smaller publishing houses in the tail end of the sixties and you would also see that kind of non-realistic positioning from some artists, particularly on humor titles. It was fairly common, in fact.

The standard has obviously improved out of all recognition, providing you use the better models. I'll bear that in mind in the future. 

 

Hethereau Across The River - New District Or New Backdrop?

Malvaltar mentioned in the comments the other day that the inaccessible part of the city of Hethereau, to the east of the river, had been redeveloped. It's a large area, easily as big as any of the existing districts, and it's been there since the game started but we've never been able to go there.

It supposedly can't be visited by NPCs either since the two bridges are closed, although only one is physically blocked to traffic. I guess an NPC could walk across even if none of them seem to be doing it. There are a couple of small boys watching the construction workers but that's all.

Flora can't cross the bridge or the river. She's tried but a big, red barrier pops up to tell her there's No Access. There are clearly people living and working over there, though, because you can see vehicles moving around the streets. No people but maybe they're just too far away to spot.

Since I'd heard something was apparently happening over there, I thought I'd go take a look from as close as I could get. I started off by porting into one of the ReRo Boxes to the south-east and from there Flora did her usual jog-scramble-glide to get to the coast. I still find it much faster to get around that way than to drive. When you can climb over any fence, scale even the tallest buildings in a few bounds and then throw yourself off to glide across the rooftops, who needs a car?

I came out opposite the huge funfair on the southern promontory. That's been a tease since the start. You can see the rides but you can't get to them, let alone get on them.

This time, as I was looking down on the fair from the clifftops, I noticed a huge dirigible in the sky that I didn't remember seeing before. As I got closer, I could see lots of large balloons and other aerial decorations that didn't seem familiar either. 

 "New" fairground, with balloons.

 

Who knows, though? For one thing, my memory is extremely unreliable and for another I'm playing on GeForce Now's servers, where the GPUs are a good deal more powerful than even my good graphic card, let alone the onboard graphics I'd been reduced to using until playing at all nearly killed my PC. There might always have been balloons and I might just have forgotten them or they could have been there all along, just not showing up on my graphics settings.

That latter possibility also makes any comparison between screenshots I took on my own machine, weeks ago, and ones I took today somewhat suspect, at least when it comes to the finer details. It's a moot point where the funfair is concerned anyway because although I remember taking some shots, I can't now find them.

That's not surprising. I have multiple folders of screenshots from Neverness To Everness. The game itself stores shots you take using the in-game camera in a folder in its own directory, while screenshots I take with Win+PrtScr go into the general "Screenshots" folder. I've also had to copy the folders off my old C drive that I'm no longer using, so I have a different location for all the old shots.

Meanwhile, for the new ones, I can't just use the in-game camera any more because those shots go to GFN's servers and get deleted at the end of each session. I'm now using Win+PrtScr for all my shots, something that's been made an order of magnitude easier by the addition of the F7 "Hide UI" command in the last update. (If I do use the in-game camera for the various features it offers, I then have to take a Windows screenshot of the image, which is a bit of an awkward workaround.)

Old fairground, no balloons.

 

Just to add another level of uncertainty over whether I did or did not take any particular shot, NTE doesn't automatically save your screenshots on your hard drive. You do have to remember to use the local download function, when using the in-game camera because NTE only keeps the shots in your in-game Gallery for 15 days. After that, they're automatically deleted. 

With all of that, it's hardly surprising I can't always find a specific shot from the past. I haven't been able to find the ones I thought I took of the fairground so I can't say for certain that it's been redeveloped but my feeling is that it has.

Looking across the river to the east, I wasn't sure anything had changed. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been clued into it by Mailvaltar, I wouldn't have noticed. One thing that did strike me immediately was that there didn't seem to be any cranes over there. I did seem to remember some construction going on before.

I spent about fifteen or twenty minutes jogging along the riverside, peering across to the far side and trying to see if I could see anything different but it all looked much as I remembered. The bridges were still closed. There were still vehicles moving through the streets.  

After a while, I thought of checking my old screenshots and with some diligence I was able to find a few of the eastern district. I went up and down the riverside, trying to find the exact spots where they'd been taken, so I could get a clear comparison. That took long enough that Flora decided it was worth getting her scooter out, much to the dismay of people walking along the sidewalk.

Old district with forested hills and over-road walkway.

 

After a great deal of trial and error, I eventually managed to isolate two locations that seemed to be the right places. One was looking south-west, back towards the fairground, the other north-east into the hills. And both looked substantively different in game to what I was seeing in the record.

The whole of the cityscape on the far side of the river has changed. It's very interesting that I couldn't tell without the evidence in front of me because it's not a subtle change. It's a fairly radical re-interpretation. 

The buildings that used to be there were, now I come to examine them critically, really quite old-fashioned. They have quite a lot of the 1960s and '70s about them, the sort of pre-stressed concrete neo-brutalism that used to be so popular with local government architects when I was growing up. 

In the shot looking over the bridge, for example, you can see one of those completely enclosed over-the-roadway walkways that were a feature of the city nearest to me when I was in my teens. In fact, that whole square, boxy office-block waterfront could almost literally have been copied from a photograph of that town back in the seventies.

I'm very fond of that style of architecture, partly because it feels quite nostalgic but also because I find its clinical austerity quite soothing. The muted color and smooth-but-rough texture of concrete has a pleasant, tranquilizing effect, especially in the rain. 

I can see, though, why it might not be quite the right style for a near-future metropolis like Hethereau. The revised district is much more modern. The skyscrapers are much taller and the tallest have that edgy, knife-like look so familiar from the skylines of Dubai or even modern London. There's a lot of glass and the late afternoon sun glares back at you balefully as it sets. It's a mood.

New district with bare escarpment and completely revamped architecture.

 

Even so, there's still a surprising boxiness to it all. If the old version looked extremely mid-20th century, the new one hasn't quite shaken off its past. 

What it has done is grown. As you can see from the view behind the buildings, looking out to the countryside... well, there's not all that much countryside left. Where there used to be low hills covered in trees with higher, forested hills rising behind them, now there's just one escarpment, topped with trees but bare where there's clearly been felling and quite possibly quarrying.

To the east of that there are a couple of large blocks of offices or apartments. Below the rise, the valley floor is filled with what definitely look like apartment blocks. The city is growing.

In his comment, Mailvaltar hoped the redesign meant a new playable area on the way, not just a cosmetic uplift. Before I'd been to see it, I thought it would have to be the former. Surely no-one would waste resources on a changing the appearance of a part of the city players would never be able to visit?

Having seen it, though, I'm not quite so sure. The screenshots of the former version point up just how out of place it used to look. Or, perhaps, it makes me wonder just how old the rest of Hetherau is, if you stop to look at it properly. 

Old Hethereau, as we remember it. Fondly, even though we were never there.

 

It also makes me realize that one of the reasons the city has always felt so convincingly like a real place, right from the start, is that it has more than just a patina of age. Architecturally, culturally and aesthetically, Hethereau gives a very solid impression of a city that's developed organically over time. The center is very modern and slick but as you travel further out, you find yourself in what can only be smaller towns or villages that have been assimilated by the urban sprawl. Different districts, even streets, have a very different feel to them, just as they would in a real city.

It's extremely effective in evoking memories of actual places I've been and I haven't even been to the part of the world from where the designers are most likely drawing their inspiration. Nevertheless, I can all but name places I have visited in real life that parts of Hethereau remind me of, quite specifically.

In that context, it makes a great deal of sense for there to be an older, slightly more run-down district across the river. And the new version doesn't entirely dispel that impression. The buildings are newer, yes, but only some of them are flashier. Alongside those cutting-edge skyscrapers that have just appeared, there are ranks of more modest, more utilitarian buildings. 

From across the river, the eastern district looks like where the urban workers live, studded with enclaves of the rich, who look out from their massive windows, high above the gritty streets to the forested hills that they can still see but which the workers beneath them can now enjoy only in memory.

There would certainly be plenty of stories to be told in a place like that. We can only hope we get to hear some of them. 

Things I've Found In The Back Of A Drawer - #3 in An Irregular Series

 

Back in 2019, during Blaugust, I manged to make "Introduce Yourself Week" last the whole month. I wrote a series of posts, going through my musical life, from the age of about twelve up to what was then the present day. If you read any of those and (Even more unlikely.) of you remember any of what you read, some of what follows may sound a little familiar but this time it comes with documentary evidence!

While I was sorting through some papers a few weeks ago, I came across a photocopy of a review of a gig the band I was in for a couple of years in the mid-80s played. By chance, it's also the one and only gig for which a poster also still exists. Even more extraordinarily, I know for a fact that the whole thing was recorded by the venue on video because they tried to sell us a copy for a tenner at the end.

Unfortunately, we were all either too mean, too broke or too cool to buy one, so if there are any copies out there, I don't have one and I've never even seen the footage. Probably just as well. As I remember, not only did I have to read most of the lyrics off some bits of paper by my feet but I came in at the wrong time in one song and then blamed the guitarist for it at the end. It wasn't my finest performance.

But apparently, as a band, we were very professional. I find that hard to believe but here it is in print.

There we are. Bottom of the bill, as usual, something that will come up for discussion later in the post. I don't know the exact year this all took place although, as we're going to find out, I do know the day and the month, but it has to have been the mid-80s because the headliners, the Flatmates, only formed in 1985. They became the prime movers in Bristol's shambling/C86/twee scene and I wouldn't have thought they'd have been headlining until that got into full swing in late '86.

The gig was at the Tropic Club, a wonderfully sweaty back-street venue in the center of the city. All the touring indie bands played there at some point or another. I saw a bunch of bands there although I'd be struggling to remember all of them forty years later. I might try sometime, though.

The gig was a fundraiser for Bristol Dogs' Home. I assume I knew that at the time but if it wasn't for the poster I never would have remembered. I imagine that's why they were taping it and selling the videos although that's something that definitely went right over my head back then.  

The name, The Boomer Dukes, has unfortunate connotations now that it didn't have at the time. The guitarist, who was also the band leader and main songwriter, was flipping through a book at my house when he came across the Fred Pohl story "The Day of the Boomer Dukes" and decided on the spot that that was what we'd call ourselves. 

Prior to that, we'd gone by "God's Bits of Wood" and "Louie's Friends Uptown", along with some other names I forget. The Boomer Dukes didn't sound too bad by comparison. My suggestion of "Our Wives Look Best To Us",  a qoute by Jaime (Or possibly his brother Gilbert...) Hernandez  from Love and Rockets, never got serious consideration. 

Last time I wrote about this, I found the image of the poster online. It was - and as far as I know still is - the only evidence on the internet that the Boomer Dukes ever existed. What I didn't realise when I posted  that image a few years ago is that the original poster is part of the Bristol Museum collection. It's Object No. TD5314 and it was donated in 2012 by Rocker, the Flatmates drummer. I do like to think of us being in a museum...

 

Looking at that poster and the good cause it's promoting, I have to say it's a great pity we weren't playing as our previous incarnation, the Android Pups. Both the aforementioned guitarist and myself were in that band, too, and so for a time, I think, was the other guitarist. I really ought to be able to remember the line-ups but we did swap people in and out a lot.

As I posted, excitedly and with great astonishment back in 2022, there's some solid physical evidence for the existence of the Android Pups in the form of a few photographs and a couple of pages in a book. And I knew more must exist somewhere because I can very clearly remember two gigs we played in the late 70s getting capsule reviews in two of the leading music papers of the time, NME and Sounds. 

We also got a brief mention in a round-up of Bristol bands that ran in Melody Maker, the third of the big inkies of the day. It was an odd time in retrospect. Unlike now, when every band in the world - almost literally - has every show from their first public performance shared on social media and immortalised on YouTube, apart from that one time, no-one ever filmed any gig I was at. 

And yet, if you happened to be in a band when punk was just getting going, there was an extremely good chance you'd get your name in the national press. There were stringers in every city scouring the clubs and pubs for anything with spiked hair and a ripped tee. Neither of which, as a matter of record, anyone in the Pups was sporting by late 1977. 

I have long wished I'd kept copies of those reviews. I guess I thought I wouldn't need to because I had all the editions of the music papers they appeared in but it turns out that, after several decades, "all" is more like "a selection".  I do still have a stack of NMEs and Sounds but even though I've spent hours going through them, looking for a mention of our name, I've never been able to find anything. 

It seems I must have mislaid a bunch of copies somewhere along the way. Most likely, they were among the dozens I lent to the aforesaid guitarist, only for his father, an antiques dealer, to use them as packing material without asking anyone if maybe they were still wanted. Not that I'm bitter. 

After I came across the Venue review, which I remembered but was absolutely certain I'd never see again, I thought I'd have another go at finding the others. Once again, I couldn't find anything in my brittling stack of music papers. An internet search brought up plenty of copies for sale at highly inflated collectors' prices but without knowing which one I needed, that was going to be prohibitively expensive. A check of local library online resources gave me nothing. 

But then I saw a link to an unlikely source in the search results: the Internet Archive. I've used the archive plenty of times but only ever for online history. I was unaware it also kept digital scans of physical media. But it does. It has a smattering of copies of NME from the early seventies but there are complete runs of the exact period I was interested in - 1977 to 1979.

My memories of all of this stuff are shockingly vague but I went to University in the fall of '78 so any gigs the Pups played while I was still with them would have had to have been before that. I don't believe we started the band until late '76 at the earliest. And the Internet Archive's search function is capable of finding every mention of a name in an individual edition of those archived copies, so...

I started at the beginning of 1977 and began working my way through. I was getting very used to the "No matches found" message so it gave me something of a start when I got to the September 17 edition and there was a hit. 

As you can see from the image at the top, the review I remembered is of a gig featuring a bunch of up-and-coming punk bands from Bristol, the city where I was living back then. I'd completely forgotten it was billed as a "Punk Festival". That makes it sound like some sort of outdoors event, when what it really was was half a dozen bands in a hut on a council estate.

The Barton Hill Youth Center, somewhat bizarrely, was one of Bristol's prime punk venues in the heat of the revolution, mostly I think because a lot of the proper music venues were very wary of booking punk bands because of their (Mostly unjustified.) reputation for violence. We ourselves put together a bill of very low-level bands in what I remember, possibly inaccurately, as a Scout Hall. I do remember a skinhead band called the White Mice playing and one of them breaking a reinforced glass window in a door, possibly by head-butting it, so perhaps the reputation wasn't as unjustified as all that...

As the review says, we were bottom of the five-band bill. I have no idea who told the reviewer we "refuse to play higher." I think it was far more likely no-one ever asked us. As for the part about being "too young for a garage", three of us would have been eighteen or nineteen, which probably made us older than several members of other bands on the bill. 

The musical notes are pretty accurate, though. For our first three gigs, of which I think this might have been the third, we had a friend of ours on keyboards. He had a beard, absolutely unthinkable for the time, and sang in a deep growl. We played three of his songs and all of them sounded either like Captain Beefheart or some kind of swamp blues. 

We also had a song of our own about the death of Bessie Smith, which we played at with a disturbing blues-cum-post-punk lurch, although that might have been later. Anyway, we were hardly anyone's idea of a teenage punk band, which I'm guessing is why a couple of the Pop Group found us amusing and briefly liked to see us propping up the bottom of their bills. I think we supported them twice and got asked to do it a third time, in London, which whoever was supposed to be in charge at the time (it was never me.) turned down because they thought it was too far to travel. 

What with all of that and the set-closer, a hypercharged version of the children's folk classic Puff the Magic Dragon, the words changed to be mildly obscene (I'd like to claim that had nothing to do with me but I think it was a group composition.), we must have been a strange proposition for an audience expecting to hear three-chord ramalama.

We did only use three chords much of the time, though. With the exception of our three-gig keyboard player, all of us were just learning our instruments. The guitarist, as can be seen from the Boomer Dukes review almost a decade later, got to be very good at his. He was still playing bass back in the Pups days, though. I was the guitarist then and three chords was about my limit. 

By the time we found ourselves described as being almost too competent for our own good, I wasn't playing guitar any more. Nor was I writing  many of the songs. I was singing someone else's words and not really having much idea what they were about so I put most of my energy into posing. I was quite keen on stagecraft by then, which is possibly how I came to be approached to front the last band I joined. Sadly, that one never made it out of the rehearsal room so there's no lost press coverage to be found.

Still out there somewhere, though, is that small mention in Sounds. I remember it being about the same length as the snippet we got in the NME. The reviewer was someone who went only by the acronym RAB. 

He was Sounds main stringer for Bristol and the West at the time and he had clearly seen the Android Pups play more often than he cared for because he described us as "the worst band I've ever seen" or something like that. He did throw us a bone at the end, observing that we must have something, though. 

Or I think he did. I know we weren't all that upset. Really, we were happy just to be mentioned. It didn't have to be anything good.

If I ever track it down, I'll post it, good or bad. Just for the record. I doubt that's going to happen, sadly. The Internet Archive doesn't have a collection of Sounds back issues I can sift through and I'm not at all sure when the gig took place. 

I know it was at the seminal Dugout Club, where the Bristol Sound that later gave us Massive Attack and Portishead among others was born, although for sure there was no-one from that movement playing above us the night we were on. I think it might even have been the last gig we played as the Android Pups, too. It was certainly close to the end because I remember us playing a song I'd written that I'm not sure we ever played again. 

It was called "Somebody's Little One" and it was a Ramonesesque, punk-doo-wop tirade against the then-fashionable habit of wearing an actual dog collar around your neck. The canine sort, that is, not the ones that make people mistake you for a vicar. Why I was so dead set against it I have no idea. I think it looks kinda neat now.

I'm of the feeling that everything about those days that's likely to surface has done by now. And it's more than I would have expected. I certainly made absloultely no effort whatsoever to preserve anything. I wish I had. 

But as I've said before, my only real regret from those days is that we never made a record. We could have, easily. Everyone else was doing it. Without that, it's nice that there's some visual and textual evidence, anyway.

Now if only that video would turn up, somewhere. 

Then again, thinking about that evening, probably best that it stays buried.