Beryl On The Bill

I just got back from a couple of days by the sea. Well, a few miles from the sea to be more accurate. On a farm, in fact. Lots of geese, hens, sheep, cows, ducks...

We went to Portland Bill yesterday, which is one hell of a weird place, let me tell you. Much bigger than I expected. Very windy, unsurprisingly, since it sticks out into the Atlantic. It's an island but it's connected to the mainland by a bridge and a causeway.

You can't say a certain word there. It's like saying the name of the Scottish play in the theater. They had to change the name of a Wallace and Grommit movie when it played.  Like I said, weird place.

As you can see from the pictures, we had great weather. The sea was blue. Not used to seeing that in England. 

Beryl had a fine old time. She likes the seaside and the wind.

She's been under the doctor as the old joke used to go, with an embarrassing condition I don't think she'd want me to broadcast to the world. It's not serious in itself but it could become problematic and lead to an even more problematic operation if it did so let's hope that doesn't happen.

She's on antibiotics and they seem to have worked - fingers crossed, touch wood. She was pretty droopy just before we were due to leave, though, and we thought we might have to cancel but in the event she was much better on the morning we were traveling. We figured an adventure would take her mind off her problems and it did.

Beryl's an excellent traveler. She thinks the car is just another room in the house. Mostly she falls asleep as soon as she gets in. It was only about a two-hour drive anyway.  

She also loves new places and exploring so she's no problem to take on holiday. We were staying in a pretty large cabin in the orchard of a farm in the back of beyond beautiful Dorset countryside and about five minutes after we got there she was settled and ready to stay there forever. 

It did take her somewhat by surprise when half a dozen geese turned up to eat fallen apples just a few feet from the gate to our cabin but she's met a lot of animals in her time - pigs, hens, sheep, horses, alpacas - and she's always up for meeting a new one. At a safe distance, that is.

We did an inordinate amount  of walking, some of it along Chesil Beach, which is extraordinarily peculiar and really hard to walk on. Even harder for a dog. 

Beryl tried to run on the deep shingle which was pretty funny to see. She was a lot more impressed with the flat rocks around the lighthouse on Portland Bill. I had to stop her trying to drink seawater out of a rock pool there. She's mad enough already without that. 

I took a lot of photos and I was quite pleased with some of them and I just wanted to get something posted tonight so here we are. I might do a follow-up because this has been a real rush job but I expect other topics will quickly push their way to the front and this will be the last we'll hear of it.

By the way, Beryl is in that last picture with the lighthouse but not only is she tiny, I used the free version of SnapEdit to remove Mrs Bhagpuss, who would not be pleased to have herself included, and it slapped the watermark right on top of poor old Beryl. Still, you can gauge the scale from what little you can see of her, which was why I picked it over a lot of better shots of the lighthouse itself.

And I'm going to leave it at that because it's late and I'm tired. Normal service may very possibly be resumed tomorrow. Let's hope so.   

 Bonus picture of the geese. No Beryl in this one. They'd have made very short work of her!

What Are The Chances?

It's going to be slim pickings here for the next few days because we have a lot going on, one way or another, but I'll try and get something together. Don't be surprised if there are gaps, though.

One thing I was going to do was record another success in the lottery that is adding a new character to the roster in Neverness To Everness. I have had a modicum of luck with gacha draws in the past. In Genshin Impact, back when it started, when the fist banner arrived I got Diluc, a highly desirable five-star character (Although not, according to the search I've just done, an S-Class.) almost on my first roll, which certainly gave me the impression it was going to be easier than it was.

I didn't stick with Genshin long enough to see my luck change and in Noah's Heart, the gacha I played the longest, they gave so many free rolls all the time I still had hundreds left when the closure of the game was announced. I think I had pretty much everybody by then. And even if I didn't, I certainly had far more characters than I needed.

 I can't remember who I rolled on in Wuthering Waves. Whatever was going on there, I don't seem to have made a big deal of it. There are 43 posts labeled "Wuthering Waves" here and the only one that seems to be about a successful roll is the one where I say "I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull."

At that point I was clearly still figuring out how it all worked, which is odd considering it was the third gacha game I'd played. You'd have thought I'd have known by then. 

Part of the problem, if it can be called a problem, is that I don't much like swapping teams around for combat. And in the open world I almost always want to play the character I started with. That's "my" character. None of that fits very well with a game design that assumes you'll constantly flip between characters, always looking to play the best one at any given time. Although it is interesting that, in cut scenes and quest dialog, the game usually shows the player-character as the Appraiser, regardless of who was being played before.

 It's a little bit different in Neverness To Everness in that some of the characters seem to have more obvious roles than I noticed in previous games, both in and out of combat. I was keen to get Iroi, for example, because I thought she'd make a good team healer. I wanted Hotori because her time-stop outside combat looked like it would be fun. I wanted Lacrimosa because she's fricken' vampire. And Nanally can run up skyscrapers...

Hotori, and Lacrimosa, I got extremely cheaply. Nanally, I haven't yet rolled for. Iroi, I tried to get and failed.

Then there was Linko. I wanted Linko because... I have no idea why I wanted her. Because she has a backpack? Because I found her conversations with her devil-doll funny? You tell me. I don't even know what she does. 

But I wanted her anyway, so I skipped rolling on Zankou, the first character in the current update, who I had no interest in and waited for Linko.

 I did not get Linko. Not on my first roll. Or my tenth. Or my twentieth. 

I wasn't keeping a close count but it probably took about thirty goes before i got her. I went in with a tally of about forty unsuccessful rolls behind me, following my unsuccessful attempt to snag Iroi. I used ten Fabricated Dice out of the thirty-five I had, then I bought another twenty-five or so with various currencies I had saved up.

Before I'd used all of those, I hit the threshold at seventy failures, where the chance of winning increases substantially. I won Linko on my first roll after that. 

It was very exciting but once the thrill wore off I realised I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with her, now I've got her. For now, I'm just working on building a bond of affection between us so she can come and live in my apartment, along with Lacrimosa and Chiz. Mint is still living in my old apartment.

The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. But I'm doing it anyway. 

Next time a character turns up that I want to roll on, I won't have a feather-bed of forty failures to fall back on. But if I don't get that one, I will for the one after that. It looks like every other character is an odds-on win. 

Seems like decent odds to me. 

Have You Heard...?

A day late, a dollar short. Isn't that the saying? Only I guess it can't be a dollar because, as J.J. Barrie said, there's no charge. 

Ye gods, but that was a dreadful record. I'd all but wiped its existence from my mind but then someone gave it as an answer in a rerun of Pointless Mrs Bhagpuss and I were watching as we had our tea the other evening and now I have the damn thing stuck in my head again. 

Actually, I don't. I have the concept stuck in my head. Fortunately the tune, if it ever had one, has stayed in whatever hell it went to after the seventies ended and the likes of St. Winifred's School Choir and Lieutenant Pigeon receded into that grim darkness reserved for one-hit wonders with hits no-one would ever admit to having bought.

Okay, fair dues. I didn't buy Mouldy Old Dough but I did quite like it. It is, at least, jolly, unlike, say, Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs or  Grandad. It didn't make me want to chew my own arm off to escape when it came on Top of the Pops, at least. I'm not linking to any of these, either. If you already know them then just my naming them will have put the awful earworms back in your head (You're welcome!) and if not, trust me, you're so much better off that way.

All of this is making me think I ought to do a One Hit Wonders post some time, although if I did it would have to stop in the mid-90s, which is about the last time I was paying attention to the charts. I do, often, think of making some effort to follow the charts again but one of the few old people beliefs I do subscribe to is that the charts aren't real charts any more.

I mean, they were artificial enough before digital downloads and streaming, back when sales only counted if they were from a specific list of "Chart Stores" and all kinds of shenanigans went on to make sure the right records were in the right shops on the right day so the sales would all count. But at least they were sales. Money had to change hands. I'm not sure what the charts are even supposed to be a record of these days.

And with that cloud firmly shouted at, it's on to a selection of mostly new recordings, few of which, I suspect, will be bothering whoever or more likely whatever it is that compiles the mainstream charts these days. Let me just have a quick shuffle through the options... but nope. I could be wrong - I hope I'm wrong - but I can't see any of these troubling the top 40. There's no Olivia Rodrigo or Charli xcx this time around. No Sabrina Carpenter or Addison Rae. Not even a CMAT or a Magdalena Bay...

The Peace - underscores (Frost Children remix)

Y'know, I think underscores might be the biggest name in today's list. She's really come on. Charli xcx brought her out for the opening night of her Music, Fashion, Film tour in Philadelphia last night. They did a track from underscores new album, which is really spotlighting the guest artist.

This whole thing about "bringing people out" is very strange. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were talking about it in the car the other day. Musicians have always guested on each other's records and at each other's concerts but until the web we didn't always, or even often, hear about it. It was one of the things I found highly exciting at first, when I came back into music in the twenty-teens, but now it all feels a bit formulaic sometimes. It seems like if you're an act of a certain status it's almost obligatory that you "bring someone out" for any big gig. I wonder if there's a rota?

Getting back to the song, this is more of a Frost Children joint, I think. I like what they've done to it - clubbed it up, basically - but I prefer the original underscores version, which does in fact sound not unlike what Charli's doing these days.

Junior Beat - DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ

I was, happily, off the scene when Flat Eric was king for a week. Somehow I don't think this is going to replicate that success but it's a great groove and a super-clever video for something Sabrina knocked together in an afternoon. The video, that is. I have no idea how long it took to make the song.

 Drop Your Spirit - Brutalismus 3000

Heheheh! Okay, I'll stop with the club mix after this one. Another great minimalist video though. 

Speaking of clubs, has anyone noticed YouTube now automatically tells you the date, time and place of the next, nearest public performance of whatever act you happen to be looking at? It's just about the most useful, helpful and unobtrusive use of targeted advertizing I've seen. I really like it.

In fact, it's acting as quite a strong nudge to make me seriously consider going to see someone play live for the first time in decades. Not this lot. The nearest they're playing to me is Boston. And not even Boston, Lancashire. Boston, Massachusetts.  Underscores, though, is playing about a dozen miles from where I'm sitting. On my birthday...

 Scam Manifesto - M(h)aol

I read the Warhol Diaries for the first time this year. He was an excellent writer and he wrote a lot, too. I must read the rest.

The Devil - Young Jesus

Hmm. That does sound a bit like John Cale's viola-playing with the Velvets, which I hadn't thought about when I programmed it after M(h)aol and their slinky sixties subculture allusions. The subconscious is wonderful thing. Or is it the unconscious? I always get those two muddled.

 Sailor - Told Slant

Okay, you got me. There's nothing unconscious about the placement of this one. That's the thing about Warhol and the Velvets. Say their names and it can't help but summon up the spirit of Old New York. And who embodies that spirit better right now than Told Slant?

I can't believe I only just found out about Told Slant a few weeks ago... 

Haha! Joke! Of course I can! There is So. Much. Music. So much good music. There's all this fuss about AI swamping the streams but they were already swamped beyond all hope of draining. Or navigating. An algorithm isn't going to guide you through the mangroves to the best alligators. You need a guide like Lana's old man. 

I can prove it, too. The other day at work, my fellow Lana fan (One of them. We have several.) asked me if I'd heard Jessie Murph. It seems Lana had given Jessie the nod on socials. Instagram, probably. Lana likes Instagram.

I am not on Instagram or any socials so I don't follow even Lana because you can't follow if you're not on the road. I follow her on YouTube but she only ever posts anything there if it's an official release. It's not like she chats.

Anyway, I went home and watched some Jessie Murph, which you're about to do, too. If you click. I was expecting someone new and relatively unknown. I'd certainly never heard the name and I read three music news feeds every day and click through dozens of YouTube recommendations every week.

 Heroin - Jessie Murph

This one has just over 600k views but it's a live video. Some of her official videos have 8m, 12m, 15m, 29m views. I cannot fathom how I've never even seen her name before. My working theory is that I have but it's such a bland name it didn't register.

That doesn't really work for the titles, though. I'd for sure have clicked through to see if a song called Heroin was a cover of either the VU all-time classic or Lana's own, excellent song of the same name. And I wouldn't have missed clicking on something called Drunk In The Bathtub or A Little Too Drunk or Sobriety or even Ur Bill Is Big As F*ck either. I don't know... you do the work, you put in the hours and it's still not enough. Thank god for word of mouth, that's all I'm saying.

Everything In The Shade - Fine

As I was saying to my friend at work, though, there are a lot of post-Lanas. And I mean, like, A LOT. You could spend your whole day sifting through them, looking for the good ones. 

Aren't you glad you have me to do it for you?

The World Keeps Spinning - Almeda and Foushee

Almeda doesn't sound like Lana. Almeda doesn't sound like anyone, much, other than Almeda. If you sounded like Almeda, would you want to sound like anyone else? No, of course you wouldn't.

One thing that's great about the way everyone guests on everyone else's songs now is the way it introduces you to new artists. I guess that's another personal recommendation, in a way. Parasocially personal. 

What I'm saying is, Fousheé is worth checking out, too. In case that didn't come through.

Soft Spot - P!lot

Short, isn't it, that one? But so sweet.

Following bands on YouTube is like adding blogs to the blog roll. I add them and then forget about them if they don't post anything new for a while. Then, one day, could be months later, could be years, up pops a new song or a new post and it's a little gleam of sunshine in the day. It costs nothing to leave them there forever so why not?

And now I guess it's time to take things home...

WALLFLOWER - DOMINIC FIKE

About time we had something in ALL CAPS! Plus I suppose Dominic Fike might be someone who'd get into the charts. Is he still a thing? He was a thing wasn't he? Once?

Whether he was or whether he wasn't, I have to say I didn't remember him sounding like this. I had him mentally filed somewhere not too far from Rex Orange County. 21st century blue-eyed soul. But Rex also has a new song out that sounds literally nothing like I remember him sounding, either. It sounds like an out-take from Red Rose Speedway ffs! Are the Beatles still a thing? 

Don't answer that!

Why won't people stay in their goddam lanes?

 I Do - Sophia Stel

This does sound like Barbie Girl, doesn't it? It's not just me?

 

 when we first met - twisted teens

I worked it out! They're America's answer to Sleaford Mods, aren't they? This is from their new album, due out in November. It'll be their third album. This year...

Lotta back catalog to get through... 

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.