There Must Be Something You Like...

And so, Blaugust moves into Creator Appreciation Week. That sounds like a nice, easy post. I like stuff. I can name people that make stuff I like. I can say "Thank you, person who makes stuff I like. I appreciate it."

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? How hard could it be? But I'm having a bit of an existential problem with the concept. 

Creator Appreciation Week used to be Developer Appreciation Week, which was a lot more specific. I also found it very easy to ignore. I'd been playing games for decades before I really came round to the idea that anyone "created" them and even when I did, I thought the idea of thanking them for doing it was weird. 

Actually, when I break it down, it's not quite that simple. There's a progression that makes some sense of my shifting attitude. Here's a rough timeline of my engagement with video games:

Late 1970s - Very Early 1980s - Arcade Games. Played almost exclusively in pubs. Mostly made by companies whose names I didn't know or, if I did, meant nothing to me.

Early 1980s  - Atari 2600 Console on which I mostly played games I rented by the weekend. Either Atari's own or with brand names that again meant nothing to me.

Early- Mid 1980s - ZX Spectrum - Bought on cassette or rented for the weekend. Games made by teenagers, hippies, visionaries and rip-off artists, many of whom were treated like rock stars by the media, especially in the gaming magazines that suddenly filled the newsagents racks.

Late 1980s - Early 1990s - Amiga 512 - Mostly games by larger, more faceless companies or, increasingly, not games at all.

Mid 1990s to Late 1990s - PC games from what seemed like fairly large companies although who knows? They were in high street stores so that was my assumption.

Early 2000s to Present Day - Digital purchases, usually direct from the developers or publishers or from the storefronts of  various aggregators like Steam.

There's plenty of bleed-through in those porous date divisions. The final one incorporates a whole raft of attitude changes that directly affect my reaction to the idea of appreciating the work that goes into making a game. I'll come to that later. perhaps, but for now I can say, with a degree of accuracy I think, and with not too much benefit of hindsight, that of the first five divisions, the only one for which it would have made sense to me, at the time, to think of in terms of "appreciation" would have been the ZX Spectrum era.

Spectrum game developers were like indie bands. They either put out weird games that weren't like anything else or they put out bad copies of whatever the others were doing. Sometimes they blew up, mostly they sank. By no means all the games really worked, either. I never had one that literally wouldn't play at all but some of them were, shall we say, unoptimised...

There were a lot of one-hit wonders and a handful of developers who managed a couple of successful sequels. A lot of not very good games were sold on the strength of a single decent title somewhere in the past. I can still remember the names of a few of them and not because I liked them, either. 

There was Melbourne House, who did the Hobbit, one of the most boring takes on Tolkein it's been my misfortune to suffer through. The sentence "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold" is still stuck in my head to this day. Then there was Llamasoft, the home of the obnoxious, post-hippie surrealism of Jeff Minter, none of whose games I ever played but all of which were unaccountably loved by the gaming press, most of whom must have been Gong fans. Or, even more likely, bong fans...

The one and only Spectrum developer for whom I did, in fact, feel a modicum of brand loyalty was Ultimate Play The Game. Ultimate, for short, was the software house behind Attic Attack, Sabre Wulf, Cookie and the rest. The very fact that I can remember their name and three of their games without resorting to Google search just shows how into them I was. If I was ever a fan of a game developer it was Ultimate Play The Game. 

And then they put out something I didn't much like and that was the end of that.

No, that's not fair. What really happened was that they outlived the useful lifetime of the platform they were developing for. The ZX Spectrum had a good run but ever-developing technology and Clive Sinclair's bizarre obsession with unconventional personal transport did for it in the end.

I never knew what happened to Ultimate after that. Or cared, frankly. I was onto a new machine and more interested in playing dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder or sampling Twin Peaks to make Dale Cooper hip-hop pastiches. Looking it up, I see now that Ultimate morphed into Rare, before being purchased first by Nintendo and then Microsoft. 

Had I wished to express my appreciation for those great games, it wouldn't have been easy to know how to assign it. As a fervent reader of (And very occasional contributor to.) the gaming press in the '80s, I did know the names of the Stamper brothers, Tim and Chris, who together were the driving force behind Ultimate, although I can't pretend I remembered them until I read the Wikipedia page just now. 

What either of them actually did, though, I haven't a clue. As it says in the entry, Ultimate was a very secretive organisation and no-one outside the company really had a clear idea who did what. Even in those golden days, when gaming was a new frontier and mavericks roamed the lands, it still came down to brand names over individuals in the end.

And that's one reason I have never really felt comfortable offering appreciation to game developers. Unless it really is one of those (Increasingly common and successful, I'm feeling...) solo developers, it's never really clear who deserves the praise. Worse, the field is cluttered with Big Names From The Past, all still trading on successes that came decades ago, if they even were successes at all. Is that something we want to encourage? Do we want to stoke up more Chris Roberts for the future?

By the mid-90s, after that brief but thrilling moment of chaos, when you might easily switch on the news and hear about some 17 year-old who'd just made a million from a game he wrote over half-term, it became a lot harder to pick the relevant names out of the inordinately lengthy credits at the end of the manual. Have you seen the credit list for the original EverQuest? I'd show you, if I could find my original boxed copy which, somewhat unsettlingly I can't right now. I'm sure it will turn up. 

I do have the credits from the second expansion, Scars of Velious, to hand though, and they're bad enough.

By the time I started playing online RPGs and then MMORPGs, it had all started to feel much more like going to see a blockbuster movie at the multiplex than buying indie singles in a grimy record store up a dark backstreet. Everything was a huge production with a vast team, almost all of whose names appeared in tiny print at the end, where almost everyone could be guaranteed to ignore them.

 I suppose the likes of Brad McQuaid or Mark Jacobs could have been seen as the equivalent of directors, particularly if you bought into auteur theory, which was going out of fashion around the same time, but the suspicion was always that maybe they were more like film producers than directors. And who appreciates a producer?

When I learned that there were conventions where fans gathered to listen to these people speak I was dumbfounded. I used to compare it to going to meet the people who'd made your refrigerator. I mean, yes, sure, they were necessary to the process but why would you need to know their names, let alone go gawk at them?

As I got more deeply embedded in the culture, the idea of celebrating individuals involved in the making of games got to seem less completely crazy than it had done but even now I struggle with it a little. When you go to a gaming convention, what do you actually get from the developers who attend? At a comic convention, an artist can draw you a picture of your favorite character. A writer can at least sign a comic they've written. What's a digital artist going to do? Draw on your iPad?

All of that was a roundabout way of saying I've always had issues with the concept of Developer Appreciation Week. You'd think it would be a lot easier now the remit has stretched to include just about any medium you care to throw into the mix. But that comes with issues of its own, mostly that I feel I'm doing plenty of appreciating already.

I do plenty of music posts. By implication, I'm celebrating the creativity of anyone whose work I share. Embedding a video is a very practical way to express appreciation, I'd say. 

I've done posts about authors I like and once I retire from bookselling I plan on posting a lot more about books and the people who write them. I do TV and movie reviews whenever I've watched something I like. If I like something, chances are I'll have used this blog to soapbox about it. It feels a bit invidious to pick anyone out for special treatment in a designated "Appreciation Week". 

In fact, I don't very often post about things I don't like. If I'm writing about anything there's a good chance I'll be appreciating it at least to some degree, even if I'm being critical, too. I'm only saying it because I love you! 

What I would like to do for Creator Appreciation Week is take the name in its very specific, 21st century context and thank some "content creators" who run YouTube channels I watch or podcasts I listen to. Those almost never get a post to themselves and not very often even a passing mention in someone else's. 

 Only I'm not listening to any podcasts at the moment and I haven't added a new channel to my YouTube subs,or not one that wasn't a band or a musician anyway, for at least a year. There are only two non-music YouTube channels I watch regularly and one of them is entirely dedicated to AI, so that's not going to go down well... 

The other is so unhinged and open to misinterpretation that the couple of times I've mentioned it, I've kept it pretty low key. I really would love to express my profound appreciation of astryuuna and encourage people to watch her channel. I do think she's a genius or at least an inspiration but whether she ought to be encouraged, let alone promoted, is another question entirely. And as Roger was saying, there are some things you just don't write about...

Looking back at last year, I can see I was an awful lot more positive abut the whole thing. I focused on appreciating Blaugustinians and I'm happy to say that I'm still reading some of the blogs I mentioned and using the utilities they put me on to. So thanks again for that.

All in all, this hasn't been much of an appreciation at all, has it? I do apologise for that. But hey, it's a whole week! Maybe I'll take another run at it in a few days, see if I can't do better.

There must be someone I can say something nice about... 

Is It That Time Already?

Do you ever get the feeling someone's messing with the timeline? I was thinking about what to post today and I thought, well, it's Friday... I could do a What Have I been Listening To... But then I thought, oh, no, I can't really do another yet. I only did one last week. 

Still, memory being what it isn't, I checked. The last one was all the way back in July. Three weeks ago! I swear that can't be true but I just went through every post since then, in case I'd forgotten to add the label or something, and it is.

So, that's today's What To Post? dilemma solved. Or it will be if I've bookmarked enough bangin' new tunes. 

Sidebar: I'm amazed we're still saying "banging" and "bangers".  I'm old. I'm really old. By the time I get to become aware of any new coinage it's already been devalued and about to go out of circulation. I tend not to bother picking it up if I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to put it right back down a few weeks later.

But this one's been hanging on for what seems like forever. I guess I first noticed it a few years back, which puts me about a decade behind the moment it entered the mainstream, sometime in the 2010s. I asked Gemini "Can you plot me the timeline for the appearance and adoption of the words "banger" and "banging" to describe music?" and it gave me a lengthy essay, starting in the 1970s with heavy metal, heading through the 90s to rave (Where, now I'm prompted, I actually do remember it being used.) then drum&bass and UK garage, bleeding over into hip-hop around the turn of the millenium and finally entering the wider culture in the 2010s.  And it's stuck there ever since, probably because it's really useful and pretty much self-descriptive. 

Hey! That can count for my entry in the Blaugust community "research something" project that I saw someone talking about the other day. I'd link to them if I could remember who it was. Pity all the research I did was ask an AI but there's the modern world for you. Now I suppose I'll have to footnote it too, even though I already explained the AI use in the body of the text. Footnotes to sidebars. What are we becoming?

I think we'd better have some music.

Robotboy - Yung Lean (Robyn cover)

I was going to link to a post I wrote about Drain Gang, back when I first heard about the Swedish collective, which was many years after they started but before some of them got famous enough to hang around with pop stars like Charli xcx. Only apparently I never wrote that post. Or never published it. Search can't find it, anyway. Which is... worrying.

I was going to make the point that, while I might have been late on the case where Yung Lean was concerned, at least I got there eventually, which is more than I can say about Robyn. She's in the disturbingly large file marked "Vaguely Know Who These People Are But Haven't Ever Heard Anything By Them". 

I'm going to put a stop to that right now. Let's have Robyn's original and see how it compares. I ought to film myself doing one of those "First Time Listening To..." videos and put it up on my YouTube channel. That'd be the best way to make sure no-one ever saw it.

Robotboy - Robyn

Wow. That's annoying, in the best way. I bet it drove people mad, coming out of the radio back in 2003. If it was a single. Was it a single? No, it wasn't. Only an album track. As you were then. 

I prefer Yung Lean's version anyway but then I heard it first. 

 I Used To Kill - daine, aldn

As the excellent Tom Breihan pointed out, that's basically an emo song with a lot of smear. Also a real clickbait title. Good work all round.

The Afterglow - Lily Seabird

And that one's an emo song with a singer-songwriter skin. Everything is everything else, now.

Hammond Song - Wolf Alice 

Next to the big folder of acts whose names I know but who I haven't taken the time or trouble to listen to is another, maybe not quite as big, marked "Acts I Ought To Like But Don't, Much". Wolf Alice is in there. I have heard them a few times but while they seem fine nothing really grabs me, which makes me a bit puzzled for all the attention and plaudits they get. 

And alongside that folder, there's yet another, this one titled "Acts I Thought I Liked Based On One Song Until I Bought A Whole Album By Them And Found Out It Was Just That One Song..." Yeah, I need to come up with smaller names for these folders, don't I? That's never going to fit on the label.

I heard Hammond Song by the Roches on the radio back in the '80s and I bloody loved it. The harmonies! The sadness! Just overwhelming. When I saw a cassette of one of their albums with the song on in some charity shop I bought it without hesitation. And Hammond Song was pretty much the only thing on there I liked. So that was 49p wasted.

This version, which is pretty faithful, features two guest singers because there's only one singer in Wolf Alice (Ellie Roswell.) and you can't really do Hammond Song on your own, unless you're one of those buskers who spends ten minutes setting up the loop pedal before every song so they can harmonize with themselves. The guest vocalists are Bria Salmena, who I hadn't heard of and Julia Cumming from Sunflower Bean. 

Here's the Roches original. And them doing it live. Listen and marvel.

 Coldplay - Coco & Clair Clair

Let's just hope that's the one and only time the word "Coldplay" has to appear here. They really are singing about the horrifically dull band, too. Just proves you can make a silk purse...

One One - Coco & Clair Clair

One One makes two. And those final few seconds are genius.

 Heavy Tobacco - Angela Autumn

Remember how I keep saying I never hear anything nowadays that doesn't remind me of something else? Yeah, well, about that...

What even is this? Can you hang a genre on it? I can't. It's got #americana in the description but if it's Americana, it's Americana that fell down a mineshaft. Or got pushed.

Want more? Of course you do!

 Millionaire Money - Angela Autumn

Is there such a thing as Goth Americana? There might be a bit of Violent Femmes in there... that's all I got.

 Draw Blood - Told Slant

So, I heard this one and I thought it was nice enough but I wouldn't have used it here only someone was talking about Told Slant being some kind of New York institution and I do have a thing for New York bands and if there's a sound a city can have, as people often say there is, then New York's a city that has it. Anyway, I thought I'd see what else the guy or the band or whatever it was had done and boy, howdy...

 I Am Not - Told Slant

Now that takes me back. When I first started to emerge from my EverQuest-induced decade-long Rip Van Winkle coma, one of the first musical trends I latched onto was anti-folk. That would have been around the time this video was shot, at what's very clearly a private party in someone's New York apartment. I thought I'd scraped up most of the names in the movement back then but I must have missed this lot.

The biggest name, I guess, was probably the Moldy Peaches and then Jeffrey Lewis, as seen on this guy's shirt. This guy, by the way, is Felix Walworth and doesn't he have that something about him? Yes, he does. It's specifically that something that will never, ever get you more than a cult following.

But it did get his band a wikipedia entry. Not a long one but they're still going so who knows? I guess I can add this to my Blaugust Research Project too, although I didn't read the rules so I have no idea if it ought to count. No AI, anyway. Wikipedia is like AI made out of raffia, though.

All that anti-folk stuff predated my adding music posts to this blog. I ought to do a post sometime and bring a bit of it back. Still sounds good.

 WannaCry - Ninjarichi & Porter Robinson

Begin with a banger, end with a banger. That's what I say. If the post seems a bit thin with a lot of repetition there's a reason for that. It is. 

Okay, that's not a reason. 

The reason is, my PC was playing up again and in the absence of any better ideas, I disconnected the drive with the OS on and replaced it with one from an old PC. And that worked, which is how I'm typing this. Only, the drive I took out had the installation of Firefox with my bookmarks on it. This Firefox has bookmarks from 2025. I've had to work from memory. Lucky there's anything here at all!

On the positive side, it looks like the drive may have been the issue all along, even though none of the checks seemed to find anything wrong with it. I hope so, anyway, because I have a new drive coming from Amazon today and with a bit of luck by the end of tomorrow I'll have a working PC again, always assuming I can install Windows without anything else going wrong.

If not, I'll be posting from the laptop again, like I did yesterday.

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

So we're really doing this? Okay, then. I asked Gemini a question. Gemini answered it. I summarised the answer. And that's that. 

Things I've Found In The Back Of A Drawer - #2 In An Irregular Series

Once upon a Blaugust, I hatched a plan to fill out the extra days by posting about my badges (Or buttons. Or pins. Whatever your local vernacular calls them.) At the time, I'd just found a plastic bagful and it seemed like something I might be able to spin up into a mini-series.

Well, that didn't happen. And it's not going to happen this year, either. When I tipped the bag out and looked through the collection it didn't spark much joy, as the extremely trite and glib saying goes. I didn't think I'd be able to come up with enough amusing or interesting anecdotes based on the random selection of cheap metal buttons to justify a post, let alone a series.

Times change and so do moods. Looking a that bag today I reckon I could work the contents up into something. Whether it would be something worth reading is another matter but a thousand words is a thousand words. And one day I might do it, too, but this is not the day and those images you see up there at the top are not those badges.

Nope. This is another bunch of badges I found at the back of a drawer a week ago, which qualifies them for inclusion in this Blaugust's pointless makeweight series, Things I've Found In The Back Of A Drawer. They literally could not be more qualified. It's not even a metaphor!

Why these ended up there instead of with the rest I have no idea but it's an eclectic selection. 

When I was a teenager and a twenty-something, badges were very much A Thing. Everyone went around covered in the things; on jackets, on bags, on hats, on anything you could stick a pin through. I bought or otherwise acquired dozens of badges over a couple of decades and I took as much care in the wearing and display of them then as I do with my tee-shirts now. (I'm known in certain circles for my tee-shirts, I'll have you know. I might have to do a post about that some day. They're all modern, though, my tees. I don't collect them, I just buy them and wear them.)

This selection is very mixed. It's a bit of a cross-section of the whole, in a way. I have no idea why these particular examples ended up in the same place. They certainly couldn't have been worn all at the same time. I think they're all broadly from the '90s and that's as tight as I can narrow it.

Let me take you through them, as far as I can. There's a few I don't even recognize. They might not be mine. Well, they are now...

1 - Batman. Specifically, the Batman from the highly-rated 1990s TV show, Batman: The Animated Series. Catchy title. I own this on VHS but I only watched a few episodes. The animation is excellent but I found it a little dull. No idea where I got the badge from. (That's a sentiment you're going to get very fed up of hearing by the end of this post.)

2, 4, 10 and, I believe, probably 7 and 8 as well - Fresh Nation. Fresh Nation was a clothes shop and brand in the '90s. I used to shop there quite a bit. They specialized in a kind of rave/skate/graffiti culture look, lots of cartoon figures and bold graphics. I'm a little surprised there's no Wikipedia page. Looking it up now, it seems it was a much more local operation than I was aware of at the time. I might still have a couple things of theirs at the back of the wardrobe (I don't actually have a wardrobe.) but they haven't been fit to wear for a couple of decades. I imagine I picked those badges up off the counter as freebies when I was shopping there.

3, 11, 26, 29 - Literally no idea. Can't remember ever seeing them before. I did wear slogan badges but usually the messages would either be surreal or humorous. "Deal With It" is not a phrase I would ever have been likely to say or indeed think. 

As for the cat, it's more of a brooch than a badge. It's nice, too. I'd wear it now. I was Team Cat for the longest time, before I became Team Fox and now, thanks to Beryl, Team Dog. I didn't wear cat badges often though, unless they were famous cartoon cats. 

The little one is some ineffable design that means nothing and the last one means just as little, even with the word "Touchmark" slapped all over it . Looks like a brand logo but I can't recall ever seeing it before. Google has no suggestions.

5 -  I've never been to Paignton Zoo. I'm not sure I've even been to Paignton. I probably bought this in a junk shop or a market. In the 90s, I bought a lot of stuff that way before I started playing EverQuest and switched to collecting completely useless virtual crap instead.

6. I ate a lot of Mini-Rolls as a child. And I mean A Lot. I had the kind of metabolism then that let me eat ridiculous amounts of sweets, biscuits, cakes, chocolate, bread... you name it, without putting on an ounce. If it was sweet or stodgy and full of useless calories, I ate it. And I was stick-thin. It didn't catch up with me until my mid-20s, when I finally stopped being able to eat enough for three people and still look underfed. Luckily for me, once I figured out what had happened, my reaction was to eat less so I've carried on looking much the same all the way through to now. That badge is a 90s one, I'd bet, so clearly I still must have thought Mini-Rolls were cool then. I know better now. Mini-Rolls are not and have never been cool. No wiki entry for Mini-Rolls, either.

9. Aha! This is a good one! Strumpet is the name of a song by one of my favorite bands of the 90s, My Life Story. I saw them three times. Might have been four. I imagine this badge came from one of those gigs. I have a much better trophy, though. It's framed on the wall a few feet from where I'm sitting. The number 12. I believe I may have told that story, such as it is, before.

12 - Another Batman badge. I don't even like Batman all that much. Why all the badges beats me.

13 - Hmm. That's a weird one. The wolf looks vaguely familiar but I can't place it. It's a thin metal circle with no rim. The writing looks Cyrillic? Again, it might be a bit ravey? Rave culture was big back then...

14, 18 - Two Proof of Admission badges from UKCAC, the United Kingdom Comic Arts Convention. It was organized and run every year by some close friends of mine, all through the 80s into the 90s. I think I was at all of them. I worked some, too, but mostly I tried to avoid doing that. If you're hosting a panel it means you can't really start drinking seriously until it's over and that's no fun!

15 - I can't even... what? Heinz Meanz Bard?  Is there a joke there I'm not getting?

16 - Everyone likes crisps (Chips to you, if you're reading this from the States.) but Golden Wonder, despite being very successful, are not great crisps. Not something I'd want to advertise or even associate myself with. Can't imagine how I would have come by it or why I kept it.

17 - Fantastic was a comic published in the 1960s by Odhams. Along with its slightly less-successful sister publication, Terrific, it specialized in reprinting Marvel Comics several years late, in black and white and re-sized. I worshiped it as a child. It was my gateway drug into the Marvel Universe. 

I already had a DC addiction from the much stronger, undiluted real thing which was freely available in most newsagents. So were Marvel comics but distribution was utterly unreliable, so the single-issue stories DC were still putting out were much more appealing than Marvel's multi-issue epics, half of whose episodes you knew full well you'd never find. Except in Fantastic. I still have all those Fantastics and Terrifics. They're in the loft. They might be worth something if I hadn't cut all the back covers off. There was usually a super hero pin-up on the back and my bedroom wall was covered in them. 

The badge looks like an original but I didn't get it in the '60s. I bought that one in the '90s, I'm pretty sure.

19 - As I did this nifty, enamel Butlins pin. I have a vague memory of going to Butlins as a child but I can't remember much about it. I have an equally vague memory of buying this badge about thirty years later because I thought it looked cool in an ironic, retro style. It was all bloody post-modernism as far as the eye could see in the '90s.

20, 21, 28 - And the same motivation would have led to me buying these three. I mean, look at them... They're still weirdly retro-cool even now, after that sort of thing has been absolutely flogged into the ground. The Ever Ready Solar Spaceman one is really tempting. I might start wearing some of these again, as ironic contrast, on my very modern tee shirts. Hmm. KPop Demon Hunters tee with the Esso Tiger... [Edit: Looking at it more closely, I think that's actually a badge from a protest about Esso, not an Esso badge. Greenpeace ran one in 2001 so Google tells me but that image doesn't feature. I coldn't stand Greenpeace then anyway. Or now, if they still exist.]

I don't, in fact, own a KPop Demon Hunters tee, to be clear. But I'm not averse to the idea of getting one.

22 - Another quality enamel pin. I'm guessing that logo might be Warner Bros.? Not sure.

23 - Glaxo Babies! Now that has to be an original. It's water-damaged, too, suggesting it saw some wear.  The Glaxos, as we used to call them, were one of my favorite Bristol bands of the late '70s. I saw them a bunch of times, headlining and supporting, and they were always great. They had that herky-jerky post-punk funk sound down to perfection. Their first album is really excellent. They had to change their name after a while because of legal threats from whoever owns Glaxo (It's GlaxoSmithKline, of course, now known as GSK.) They changed it to the Gl*xo Babies. That told those pesky billionaires!

They'd disappeared into the fog of time until Alex Turner and Miles Kane's Last Shadow Puppets started covering the Glaxos'  This Is Your Life. 

24 - Hang on! Bootlegger turn! This one's an official NVQ pin. You got one if you successfully completed the program, which I did back in the '90s. In fact, I beta'd the damn thing. I was working at British Telecom at the time, one of the UK's largest employers, and my bit of the company was asked to test the rollout of the new National Vocational Qualification. With a degree already, I didn't really need a non-degree level equivalent but what the hell. They gave me time to do it at work, so I did it. Technically I have that on my CV, for what good it ever did me.

25 - Peppermint Patty is my favorite Peanuts character, as I'm pretty sure almost anyone who's been paying attention would easily have been able to guess. Red hair, freckles, sassy as hell, always looks cool, has massive self-confidence except when she thinks too much... pushing all the buttons there. I like Snoopy too. Who doesn't? So it's a double-header. It's also one of those big badges that you can really only wear one or at most two of at the same time without looking like a local radio DJ.

27 - It's fate! Saved the best for last without even trying! Dolly Mixture are/is, as any fule kno, my favorite band of all time. I have a post to come in this very series about something very interesting relating to the Dollies that I found, yes, in the back of  a drawer.  I'll save the details for the post. This badge, though...

It's from the late '70s/early '80s. I remember wearing it all the time back then. I think I had more than one, though, so this might not be the actual one I wore. Did they throw them out at gigs? I don't think so. Maybe I got it in a record shop? I doubt it because I never saw a physical record by them until long after. It's a mystery. Although not much of one, admittedly.

And there we are. As pointless posts go, this one's right up there but I did at least manage to keep it fairly short. 

Short is good.

Rising From The Moonlit Fog... It's... It's... A Bicycle!

Rising From The Moonlit Fog is the next milestone update for Neverness To Everness. Don't you just love these titles? MassivelyOP had a compendium report on three upcoming gacha game content drops yesterday and they all had names that sound like Jon Anderson might have considered them a little too much, when he was drafting the lyrics for Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Alongside the title I just mentioned, there was Tower of Fantasy's relatively tame Dreamland Beyond The Void and Wuthering Waves' frankly bananas Lamplight in Mirage, Sword’s Resolve in Heart. What does it all mean? And what drugs are these people on?

The NTE update comes out in exactly a week, on August 19th. I'm really looking forward to it. Inconveniently for me, since I'm currently attempting to play both of them, Wuthering Waves drops its new content the day after, on August 20th.

It would be a problem if I really was trying to stay up to date in both games but since I'm already about six months behind in WW, it's not going to make much practical difference. I'll be focusing on NTE and plugging away at the storyline I've missed in WW when I either want a change or if I run out of things to do in Hethereau.

Looking at the six-minute YouTube trailer for Rising From The Moonlit Fog, that doesn't seem too likely. There's a lot in there. Let me break it down a little.

First, here's the video. Take your time. I'll wait. 

And now I'll tell you what you would have seen if you'd watched it, which I'm betting hardly any of you did. Top Tip for Blaugust: if you find yourself short of original content, find something someone else has done and summarize it. 

We open with just over a minute of excerpts from the main storyline. I found it extremely confusing. There's some sort of game, arranged by that sociopathic woman from Daffodil's past, which looks like it takes place in some Anomalous Realm. Apparently we may "choose one thing in the Fogden as a reward" but we have to beat out all comers because "the Fog Coffin only allows one victor."

Is anyyone getting this? And if so, would they care to explain it to me? 

It looks like there are lot of people on the Appraiser's team. A whole gang. In one long shot I think I can count seven of them. Of us, I guess that should be. 

Two of them are the new draws, Zankou and Linko. They look like they've been selected to appeal to very different parts of the audience. Also, why do so many characters in NTE have names that make them sound like they used to be in the Marx Bros?

Honestly, you could start putting the characters into teams just by archetype, now. Zankou looks like one of the sultry, grown-up femme fatales in the mold of Hotori and Jiyuan while Linko is obviously Team Cute 'n' Crazy along with the likes of Chiz, Iroi and Haniel. 

Yet again, there are no new male characters. Hotta knows its audience. Looking at the wiki, including the two about to be added, the roster is now five male to fifteen female. A three to one ratio in favor of the girls, although you could subdivide that again into adults, adolescents and children. All we need now are a couple of robots and a few cuddly animals and we'll be all set.

 

Also looking at that wiki list, I see Zankou is supposedly a member of The Scarlet Letter, which makes her a baddie. Can she be one of the bad guys and a playable character? I guess we're about to find out.

So much for the story, about which I feel like I now know less than I did before I watched the video. On to the non-story content. There are a few very interesting additions to the game there.

Before I get to those, though, there's a whole racing "Expansion" to get through, if we're following along with the video. I don't think they mean expansion as in Wrath of the Lich King or Ruins of Kunark. I think what they mean is they've literally expanded the course. Made the race tracks longer. Or added more of them. Or both.

I wouldn't know. I don't race in Neverness To Everness. As I've said before, I find steering  four-wheeled vehicles in the game difficult to the point of being stressful and I do absolutely as little of it as possible. I am not the target market for any expansion of the racing side of the game. Although as we're about to find out, I'm not averse to more vehicular options.

After the video's done showcasing the new tracks and challenges it's on to the catwalk. There's almost a minute and a half of fresh fashion, beginning with outfits for the new characters. There's a clear explanation of how to get each of them, which is nice. It's good to be able to set goals. 

Unfortunately, few of those goals will be easily achievable or cheap and never both at the same time. You can roll for them or grind for them or pay real money. Them's your choices.

Fortunately for me, I don't much like any of the new clothes except for Linko's Couch Potato outfit, which is just a sweatshirt and shorts. I really would like some ordinary, unpretentious, casual clothes for my characters; things that don't make them look like they're cosplaying anime characters at an off-brand comic convention.

 

Then again, it could be worse. Much, much  worse. Until my recent return to the game, I'd forgotten - or more probably driven from my mind for the sake of my mental well-being - what the player-character is forced to wear as a default outfit in Wuthering Waves. It's hideous beyond belief. The default PC look in NTE is orders of magnitude more acceptable.

Still, I'd like that sweatshirt. Only there are two problems. No, three. First, I'd have to roll for and win Linko. Second, I'd have to grind to Bond Level 10 with her. And third, I'm guessing only Linko can wear it, so I'd have to be Linko. I don't imagine any of that is going to happen.

The second half of the fashion show is all beachwear. In my opinion, they could have more usefully introduced this with the last update. Summer will be nearly over by the time this one arrives. Not to mention the last update was actually set on a frigging holiday beach resort island! Does no-one think these things through?

The beachwear itself is okay, although it seems odd that it's character-specific. What's everyone else supposed to do? Stay at home? Or maybe sit at the beach cafe and watch while the lucky few have fun on the sand. 

For once, the boys get by far the best of it. The male Appraiser outfit is nicely ordinary but the best of the lot is Chaos's wetsuit, which really does look good. Other than that, I like Mint's big straw hat and that's about it. Oh, and the female Appraiser look is awful. She seems to have put her bra on over the rest of her clothes. Is that a thing, now?

After the outfits comes the first Very Interesting Addition: Beach Volleyball. I have no clue how this is going to work. Since NTE is primarily a single-player game, I assume it's something you play with NPCs but it would obviously make a great co-op game. I seem to remember playing soccer in an MMORPG before (Free Realms, I think...) but never volleyball. I'm extremely curious to try this one out.

 

If you thought volleyball was a left-field choice for a new activity, Hotta would like you to hold their beer. Next up is another mini-game. It's called Brick By Brick and from the video it would appear to involve driving a fork-lift in a warehouse. 

I know what you're going to ask... WHY!!!??? For the sake of all that's holy, why? Did someone fill in that box at the end of one of the surveys, saying "I really like the game but it's lacking one, vital element - repetitive manual labor, preferably warehouse work". Who wants to drive a fucking forklift truck when they could be doing literally anything else in the game?

I bet I end up loving it. 

But from here, I'm a lot more interested in the next section - new vehicles. Yes, I don't get on very well with cars in NTE but these aren't cars. 

For a start, one of them's a jet ski. Which, for some reason, the video doesn't call a jet ski. It just calls it "New Water Vehicle". It even has a name: Tide. Guys, we can see it's a jet ski! 

And it looks great. The big advantage the sea around Hethereau has over Hethereau itself, when it comes to driving a vehicle, is that there are no roads in the sea. And no walls, buildings, bushes, central reservation barriers, buses or zebra crossings. I'm not saying it'll be impossible to crash into anything but it's going to be a lot harder.

Jet skis are not uncommon in video games. I've ridden one or two before. I'll tell you what I've never ridden in any game though and that's a bicycle.

Which is odd, when you come to think of it. Loads of games have motorcycles but I can't think of a single game I've ever played that had pushbikes.The mechanics must be the same, mustn't they? Once you've done the work for the motorbike, it's just a different skin, isn't it?

Well, no, I guess there's the leg animation to consider. You have to pedal a bicycle. They're famous for it. Maybe that's why no-one bothers to add them. 

 

The animation looks excellent. Very convincing. And you can give someone a ride on the back, too. Can you have another NPC ride pillion on the motorbike? If so, I hadn't noticed the option. 

There's also a kind of dune buggy/quad bike deal called Sirocco that looks like it might be fun, especially if you like running people over. Seriously, that thing's going to be a menace, on and off the beach. 

The bikes (There's more than one model.) and the buggy can be bought with Fons but the jet ski comes from "Mystery Boxes", which I assume means loot boxes you buy. If these are a thing in the game already, I hadn't noticed. Since I would like the jet ski, I'm going to have to look into it. Maybe it's like the sports car event. I never even looked at that one.

After the vehicles comes housing. Normally, I'd be all over a new housing option but NTE is one of those rare games that's already too generous when it comes to setting up home. You can get five massive houses now and the only real obstacle is amassing enough in-game cash to buy them. I have two and even that feels like it's one too many.

Consequently, I wasn't very hyped to see we were getting a sixth... until I saw what it was. It's on a completely different scale to the others, by which I mean it's much smaller and more manageable. It's down to earth and best of all it's an actual house, not an apartment. 

Stillmeadow House has a garden and a car-port and a lovely, suburban setting and I want it. It's buyable with Fons so I can have it, too. I just have to stop going to the Catzebo every day.

Finally in the video we come to the "And also..." section, which is really pretty interesting. I had to freeze-frame this part because it all flips by too fast to take in and not all of it has been translated but when I was able to read the tiny English text along the bottom, I saw quite a few things I liked the look of.

Nanally gets optional glasses to go with her Popular Kid outfit. I don't have Nanally's Popular Kid outfit. In fact, I don't have Nanally. If and when I do, though, I will certainly have her wear them. Glasses are second only to hats as essential accessories in games.

 

There's a bonus to speed of city stamina consumption coming with Tycoon Level 16. Until very recently I had no interest in City Stamina and had no idea why people seemed so fussed about it. I still don't really understand how it works but I do know it's a way to make money and as of this update I'm going to need a lot more of that. Anything that makes it come faster is welcome.

Speaking of which, you'll be able to grow crops in your garden in the new house and sell those for Fons. And so farming comes to Hethereau. I am not a fan of farming, as a rule, but it does depend on the implementation. I reserve judgment until I try it.

Also on the money-making trail, Pink Paws Heist is getting a mini-map. That's very good news. I have no idea where I am in that damn bank. Not even with a walk-through. With a map, I might actually be able to grab some cash and get out in time. 

But then, there's an incomprehensible rules change to Pink Paws that now somehow ties it to a weekly volleyeball challenge match... What do beach volleyball and bank robbery have to do with each other? Will I ever get my one million Fons? I very much doubt it.

One coming feature that sounds half-baked at best is "Random Outfits". As of the update "Characters will automatically swap to a random outfit from their wardrobe whenever you log in or change scenes." 

Excuse me? So I spend either time or money or both getting the look I want and then the game randomly swaps it for something else? Is that good business sense? Did anyone ask for it?

It'll be fine if it's optional. It had better be optional! Although at the moment, since I only have two outfits, it's hardly going to be a pressing issue for me. But if I get more, the damn game had better let me wear the ones I want, whenever I want!

There are, of course, a whole raft of limited-time events, some tied to the new stuff I've been talking about. But then there always are. Let's not bother with any of those.

No, I've left the very best part of the entire update to last. Here it comes! Ready...?

 

"A button will be added to the main screen to hide the UI with a single tap"

OMG! That's exactly what I wanted! That one change will make a massive difference to my gameplay. I know that for absolute certain because Wuthering Waves has it and it's been transformative for me there.

The issue is that because I play both NTE and WW on GeForce Now, any screenshot I take with the in-game camera gets sent to Nvidia's servers not to my PC. In order to take screenshots I can use on the blog, I have to use Win+PrtScr, which works perfectly, but which captures the full screen as it appears on my monitor, UI and all.

To get clean screenshots in Wuthering Waves I just have to toggle the UI off using Alt-C but in NTE I have to hit Escape to get to the "Mobile Phone" menu, open Settings, click on the Video tab and push the UI Opacity slider back to zero. And then, when I'm done taking screenshots, I have to do it all again in to put the UI back.

Being able to click one button on the screen instead of doing all of that is going to be so much easier. Huge quality of life improvement.

I'm really looking forward to Rising From The Moonlit Fog just for that.

Okay, not just for that... 

People Have The Power

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uh oh. Rabbit-hole Alert!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Judge A Book...

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

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

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

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

Krikket's Invaluable Primer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those will have to wait 'til tomorrow!

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In The City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I'll do another screenshot post...