Everyone Knows I Had Some Trouble...

Ten months, it's been. 

A looong ten months. 

Was it worth the wait?

Hell, yeah! 

 

White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter 

Lana Del Rey

It'd be very remiss of me, not to say selfish, to keep this to myself a moment longer than absolutely necessary. So here we are. No need to thank me.

Only minutes after it landed, a YouTube commenter going by K65_mdd had the lyrics. Or a version of them, anyway.

I thank them for that. And, again, share.

[Verse 1]
He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
Likes to keep me cool in the hot breeze summer
Likes to push me on this green John Deere mower
I know you wish you had a man like him, it's such a bummer
When I met him, like an arrow
Like a bird in the heart, like a sparrow
In the dark (Snap), snap, crackle, pop, tch
We're a match, he's just in my bone marrow

[Pre-Chorus]
Everyone knows I had some trouble
But I'm home for the summer
And I wanted to know if I could use your stove
To cook somethin' up for you 'cause you

[Chorus]
Positively voodoo, everything that you do
Did you know exactly how magical you are?
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, "I love you"
Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
Take my hand off the stove, hun
Yelling, "Yoo-hoo, dinner's almost done"
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, I imagine you do
Know how absolutely wonderful that you are

[Verse 2]
He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
Before I met him, Moorea boat over three summers
Now it's a ribbon 'round my neck, and it's cherry-colored
I've just been breaking, waitin' on a spirit hunter
I got a nicotine patch for the summer
Yeah, I'm a ghost, doesn't mean I feel nothin'
Put it on my ass, no tan lines, summer
I love my daddy, of course we're still together

[Pre-Chorus]
Everyone knows I had some trouble
But it's been three summers
I know it's strange to see me cooking
For my husband

[Chorus]
Positively voodoo, everything that you do
Did you know exactly how magical you are?
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, "I love you"
Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
Take my hand off the stove, hun
Yelling, "Yoo-hoo, dinner's almost done"
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, I imagine you do
Know how absolutely bad I'm with an oven

[Bridge]
Whoopsie-daisy, do you think it's okay?
Whoopsie-daisy, deposition cocaine
Yikes, like, maybe should've saved for a friend
Stick with baking, Daisy's very chagrined
Whoopsie-daisy, do you think it's okay?
Whoopsie-daisy, deposition cocaine
Yikes, like, maybe should've saved for a friend
Stick with baking, Daisy's very chagrined

[Chorus]
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Positively voodoo, everything that you do
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Did you know exactly how magical you are?
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, "I love you"
(I know you wish you had a man like him, it's such a bummer)
Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Positively voodoo, everything that you do
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Did you know exactly how magical you are?
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, "I love you"
Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter 

Couple of lines I'm not wholly convinced by there. More than a couple, actually. I'm not at all sure she says "deposition cocaine" for a start. What would that even mean? I think it's something about fish cooking but the exact wording eludes me. And as someone points out, "Before I met him, Moorea boat over three summers" is almost certainly "Before I met him, wore a bow over three summers"

I'm also pretty sure it's "Take my hand off the saucepan" not "Take my hand of the stove, hun" or at least I hope it is because the implications are very different and disturbing if not. 

"Daisy's very chagrined" seems unlikely, too, but neither am I convinced by the suggested alternative reading “Stick with picking daisies for instagram”. I imagine we'll get an official lyric video at some point, at which time all will be revealed.

My favorite lines? Oh, I'm so glad you asked!

"Everyone knows I had some trouble
But I'm home for the summer"

That's a whole novel, right there.

Also 

"Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, I imagine you do
Know how absolutely bad I am with an oven"

Again, the subtext is positively tectonic.

Whatever the exact words, the vibe is unmistakable. Doesn't look much like we'll be getting that country album any more, does it?

There are lots of comments in the thread already, going on about Lana's new Southern Gothic era and well she said she was a witch didn't she? (She did.) all of which is very fair. Surprisingly, no-one yet seems to have made the obvious Kate Bush comparisons but then Lana fans have a vested interest in her uniqueness. 

As a fan myself, I don't necessarily believe she needs to be unique, although frequently she has been. She can just be better than everyone else. Which she is. All the time.

Lana, of course, is a cultural polymath, anyway. I'm certain the whole "Kate Bush doing Indian Love Call" feel of the piece is entirely intentional. You take the parts and put them together in a new way and that's how it's done.

And thank god for that. I was saying only the other day how I tend to drift away if new work doesn't draw me back in. As they say now, we are so back! 

Now, when's that damn album coming? 

The Gallery Is Closing. Please Take All Your Memories With You.

This is going to be a bit of a sad one. Also quite short, possibly, because I don't think I have whole lot to say about it. Sometimes you just have to make the effort, anyway.

So, I read yesterday that Occupy White Walls is closing down. For those who don't remember, which I'm going to guess is nearly everyone reading this, OWW was one of the oddest, most idiosyncratic of all MMORPGs. There was and still is nothing like it and most likely never will be, which may explain why it's going away.

The game, if we're going to call it that, which we probably shouldn't because if there was a game in there, I never found it, will shut down for good almost exactly a month from now, on 16 March. It hasn't had a bad run. It first became available to the public eight years ago although the exact date is a little hard to pin down. 

I can say when I started playing. I first downloaded the client in May of 2018, when it was in open alpha, although as I mentioned in the post I wrote about it at the time I'd seen the name floating around before then. 

OWW was all about art but one of the exciting features of the project was the way it claimed to use AI. Thatit was something everyone seemed both proud to be associated and excited to engage with then. How times have changed. 

Of course, AI back then didn't mean what it does now. The AI in OWW was called DAISY and all she wanted to do was learn what kind of art you liked and show you more of it. Who could be scared about that?

Well, maybe not scared but uneasy? Sure. 

I included a video, still available on YouTube, in which Fevir, the video-maker, describes the process of interacting with DAISY as "uncomfortable". He said it made him "uneasy" and put him "on edge". He specifically didn't like the way the machine not only seemed to learn about him but then was able to prove to him that it was possible to "like things you don't think you like". If only he'd know what was coming!

Forget about the AI, though, which in any case back in 2018 would have been a plain old algorithm given a cute name and gussied up to look smarter than it was. What was OWW like as an MMORPG?

As far as the RPG aspect went, it did have progression of a kind. There were no levels or skills per se but you could open up more features and extend the scope of your existing abilities by displaying more art and attracting more visitors. 

All your abilities related either to acquiring more pictures or expanding your building options. Both were essential. The be-all and end-all of the game was building art galleries and as MMO housing goes, OWW was right up there with the best.

As for the Massively Multiple part, I was never entirely sure how that fitted in. There was always the option to visit other players' galleries, but I can't recall there being any shared spaces where players actually met and hung out together. The visitors who came to look at the art in my gallery and paid me in-game currency for the experience were all NPCs. 

Or I thought they were. Honestly, I'm not sure how I would have known. Players and NPCs used the same abstract avatars. It was all a bit confusing... 

I didn't want to interact with others, anyway. I spent almost all my time building my one gallery and I was pretty happy with both the process and the result. As in all games with building systems, though, anything I was ever going to build was always going to look primitive compared to what others were able to put together. 

It was possible even in alpha to make some very impressive structures and spaces and after the game went into Early Access those options expanded enormously. People were able to replicate real-world galleries with considerable precision as well as to create their own spectacular display spaces that breached the laws of physics.

I did not do any of that. I went for a clean, minimalist look that felt fresh and open. I enjoyed being in that space a lot.

Even so, I didn't really spend that much time in the game. Steam tells me I racked up just short of eighteen hours, which would be a very decent run for a single-player game but wouldn't normally be enough to get you out of the starter zone in an old school MMORPG. And the last time I played was June 2022.

There were two reasons I stopped. The first was that I'd finished my gallery and although by then they'd added the option of building others, I didn't want to start a new one. As I said, I was satisfied with what I'd made. It felt finished.

The second and more significant reason I lost interest was the shift in emphasis by the developers from promoting what felt like an educational tool for discovering and learning abut fine art to creating a free-for-all in which nothing had cultural weight or value. I did not like the new direction.

The closure notice sums up the change of philosophy well, when it describes DAISY as "the AI that treats everyone's taste as equally valid" and talks about "connecting artists with audiences" and making art "accessible, democratic and personal". All very laudable ambitions, I'm sure, but the effect was to turn a guided tour through the history of art into a chaotic jumble of unfiltered images of indeterminate interest, quality or technique.

As the scope of the project expanded, I found it harder and harder to get DAISY to show me anything I wanted to see. Whereas at the beginning it had felt like being given a personalized lecture on great art, now it felt like being button-holed at a convention by a bunch of would-be artists, all intent on showing you their portfolios. 

That very much seems to have been the intention. OWW may be closing down but the company behind it, StikiPixels, is very keen to assure everyone the project will continue. At some point in the life of the MMORPG they span DAISY off into a side-project called Kultura, which gives you much the same experience, only on a website instead of in a game. Kultura carries on undaunted after OWW ends.

I'm guessing it must be a lot cheaper to keep a website up than to host an MMORPG because cost is the sole reason OWW is going away. The game has always been truly free-to-play, bringing in no income at all. Keeping the servers up costs $3,000 a month and the developers have been funding the servers out of their own pockets since 2022. Unsurprisingly, they've decided they just can't afford it any longer. (And if you look at the Steam Charts it's hard to see why they've kept going this long...)

It's a shame because, as I said, they had a great building game going there for a while. I imagine that was the aspect that interested them the least but leaning into it harder might have been the only way they'd ever have made some money.

They aren't giving up on the idea of melding art with gaming entirely, all the same. They say the original motivation to make OWW was a realization that there were no video games about art (Not true at all but it's what they said...) and eight years later "the idea that started all this hasn't stopped being exciting to us."

They're not promising anything but they might be back, one day. I hope so. Whatever OWW might not have been, it was original, ambitious and for nearly eighteen hours of my life, fun. They say, "if it happens, it might be a very long time from now, and it might look nothing like what you remember" and that's as it should be. Let's not go back over the same old ground for once.

In that spirit, I won't be revisiting my gallery to, as they suggest, "Take screenshots. Record videos. Stream it. Capture the spaces you built". I'd have to re-install the client for one thing and anyway I have plenty of screenshots and several blog posts to remember my gallery by already. 

And I know from experience that all those videos I take when a game is about to sunset just sit there, taking up hard drive space and gathering virtual dust. What's lost when an MMORPG sunsets can't be regained by watching a moving image. You have to be there.

I'm glad I was. 

The Story I Made Up

Remember when I was doing that series, where I posted about all my EverQuest characters, or some of the older ones anyway? Probably about three or four people actually enjoyed those posts but they had the huge benefit for me of being something I could always drag out if I was completely stuck for ideas.

That hardly ever used to happen. I had more ideas for posts than I had time to write. Not any more. I've been at this for - what is it? - coming up for fifteen years now. Maybe I have finally said everything once, to quote David Byrne. 

Which reminds me. They - and by "they" I mean I have no idea who but probably someone in the band, maybe? - found an old demo tape of Talking Heads doing some numbers from the first album, before they were even a four-piece. I think it must have been Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz. Jerry Harrison would have come over from the Modern Lovers a little later, I imagine.

I don't why I'm guessing. I could just go read the news item where I heard about it, of which so far I've only glanced at the headline. Let me do that a sec, just so I know what I'm talking about...

Ah, that's reassuring. I got most of it right. It's cuts from the first two albums, though, not just 77. 

The first two Talking Heads albums are two of my favorite albums of all time, even if I haven't listened to either of them in twenty years. I am not good at going back and listening to old stuff, even old stuff that was very important to me once. 

I was talking to someone at work about that the other day. It's been three years since Lana del Rey last released an album and I find I'm listening to her less than I was. It takes that continual drip of new material to keep me engaged, apparently. Just sheer quality isn't enough. How shallow I am.

I bet those first two albums hold up, though. Talking Heads were unimpeachable for a while back then, until they turned into the New Wave's answer to Steely Dan. 

Not to denigrate the Dan. Does anyone call them that? "The Dan"? I very much doubt it. 

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I were talking about Steely Dan just the other day, which I would like to point out is not something we would normally be caught doing. 

We were watching an old edition of Pointless on YouTube, which very much is something we would normally be caught doing, especially at tea-time, and there was a question about the Beach Boys Top 40 hits in the UK. I remembered a few but there was one I thought might be a good bet for most people not to get, which was the one where they look back at their early days and get all nostalgic about them. 

I couldn't remember what it was called and I complained to Mrs, Bhagpuss that the main reason I couldn't was that I kept thinking of the Steely Dan song "Do It Again" and it was blocking me from the title of the Beach Boys song, which was something similar. And then the Beach Boys song came up, as a pointless answer, and it bloody was "Do It Again", so I had remembered it, even though I didn't know I'd done it. Bloody Steely Dan!

Anyway, that led to a discussion about how Steely Dan made two great singles, namely Do It Again and Reelin' In The Years, before they became so ultra-professional only other professional musicians could stand to listen to them. The same thing that happened to Talking Heads, give or take. 

No-one wants rough edges on a coffee table but on a band they're a feature. Or can be. Smoothing them all off is a mistake.

I wonder what those demos sound like. Shall we find out? Together.

Well, that was lovely. I wouldn't call it "raw punk minimalism" though, would you? Would anyone? Maybe they mean some of the other tracks on the 3CD set because that version of Psycho Killer sounds more like psych-folk than punk.

I saw Talking Heads in... when would it have been? Going to have to look it up...  May 1977, supporting the Ramones. I'd be lying if I said I remembered much about Talking Heads' set. I really only remember the Ramones for the bit when the power went out and they all stood there like puppets with the strings cut.

I really need to get on and write down all the gigs I went to before I lose the whole lot. Maybe that could be a feature. Bhagpuss name-checks gigs he went to half a century ago and tells everyone he remembers nothing about them. I can see that being very popular.

To quote David Byrne again, how did I get here? I sure didn't sit down intending to write about New York art-punk in the 1970s. Good example of how you always have something to write about even when you don't know what it's going to be, though, isn't it? Or maybe that should be I always do.

Ah! Now I remember! Back to the thing about my EverQuest characters and how handy it was to have that feature to fall back on, whenever I couldn't come up with anything better. If I ever needed a backstop like that, this is the time.

So, I've had this idea floating around for a while, now. Months. I thought I might go through all the zones in EverQuest II and reminisce about them. I thought of doing EverQuest but Wilhelm pretty much covered that for the 25th anniversary. I don't think anyone's done EQII though, or certainly not recently.

Obviously I wouldn't do all the zones. There must be a few hundred by now. Just the ones in the original game and maybe a few favorites from the early expansions. That should last me longer than than the rest of my life, given I'd probably only do a post every few weeks. Or more likely months. 

Today won't be the first because look! I've done a post already! I'm just putting the idea down in writing in the hope it might make it happen. 

Of course, it might help if I was actually playing EQII, like I was when I came up with the idea, but I imagine I'll be back in Norrath soon. Well, if I ever get to the end of Baldur's Gate 3. And if I don't go from there to Project: Gorgon, which I keep thinking I might.

There we have it, anyway. A potential new feature that will only appear when I can't come up with anything more interesting and which almost no-one is going to want to read. I bet that's sold it to you all!

Now all I have to do is come up with a snappy title... 

Black Hole Star? Layoffs Hit Playable Worlds

As you may have seen, either on MassivelyOP or TAGN, Raph Koster's Playable Worlds team has just gotten a bit smaller. How much smaller we don't exactly know yet but presumably it's a significant number or they wouldn't have needed to issue a press release confirming the layoffs.

Playable Worlds is, of course, the studio behind Stars Reach. In fact, SR is the only game they have. 

Realistically, they don't really even have Stars Reach yet. It's still in pre-alpha, which sounds really weird now I say it out loud. I had to go check to make sure that was right. It felt like the game had to be at least in full alpha by now, but no, pre-alpha it is. 

Laying people off before you even get to an alpha build does seem like a worrying sign. Hard to spin that as anything other than a crisis. 

Maybe it's not that bad. I don't want to oversell it. It's difficult to know what to say about events like this other than to express sadness and/or concern and wish the departing devs well in their upcoming search for new roles elsewhere. However you rate it, though, it can't be good.

As I've said many times now, I don't think Stars Reach is likely to be a game I'll want to spend a lot of time with. It's just not my kind of thing. I thought for a while it might be but almost every new build made that feel less likely and now we have a fairly clear idea of what the finished game will look like, I'm as sure as I can be, at this very early stage, that I won't be playing any more, other than in a fit of passing curiosity.

Nevertheless, I do think it's one of the more convincing attempts to bring a completely new MMORPG to market we've seen for a while. The team seems to have a relatively well-defined goal and the leadership looks able to retain sufficient focus not to wander off and make something else entirely, something we've seen happen more than a few times in recent years. Just because I don't particularly want to play it myself doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see it do well.

Looking a little further, beyond my own personal preferences and sympathies, there's also the potential impact a failure here could have on the overall market for new MMORPGs. That's always assuming there is a market, something I think could be up for dispute.

People do keep trying. There are a surprising number of MMORPGs in development still, some in Early Access, others in various types of closed testing. Only a tiny handful could make any kind of claim to having a presence outside their own, specific niche, though, and Stars Reach would certainly have aspired  to be one of that few. 

Whether it ever was is another question but the last thing likely to boost its profile in the wider gaming market is news that the development team is being slimmed down before the game even hits alpha. Following the high-profile implosion of Ashes of Creation, it sends the worst kind of signal about how the genre is coping with the broader issues afflicting the entire gaming sector.

Without wishing to sound like a doom-monger, this does strike me as yet more evidence that the MMORPG genre as a whole is in steep decline. I wouldn't say terminal decline because I believe there's a substantial core audience that still prefers the familiar gameplay we've grown used to over the last twenty-five years to the pared-down, sped-up alternatives. 

The problem for anyone hoping to enter the market with a new MMORPG is that the existing, core demographic is, for the most part, at least resigned, if not actively happy, sticking with the games they know. I suspect the more failures there are among the aspirants, the more strongly entrenched the incumbents will become.

 

None of which is to suggest Stars Reach won't be able to buck the trend. Raph is at pains to make it clear that development continues. He's also going to take a more direct role in that development, apparently. (See the two links above for all the relevant quotes - I won't pad things out by repeating them here.) That did surprise me a little. I presumed he was already calling  the shots.

He also talks about recent builds in the pre-alpha having been buggy of late but he doesn't explain how letting people go is likely to improve things. I'd have thought it would get harder to release better-tested, less buggy updates if there were fewer people on the team but what do I know? 

The team wasn't even all that big to begin with, it seems. Here's a quote Marketing Director Rick Reynolds gave to MassivelyOP last August:

"It’s not a big company. There are probably more people in chat right now than we have in the company, or it’s probably pretty close." 

How many devs can they afford to lose? A fair question, perhaps, but unfortunately the real one is how many they can afford to keep.

The reason behind the layoffs is obvious: lack of funds. Raph doesn't go into details but he does talk about a need to be "prudent" in what Playable Worlds spends on developing the game in future. In an ideal world, you'd like to think developers and their accounting departments would be prudent in all circumstances but in the current financial climate I guess it's more of a necessity than an aspiration.

He's bullish about the future of Stars Reach, as you'd expect and as he has to be. Development will continue and there will be no reduction in scope, although some things that have been talked about may take longer to arrive. 

And there's the real nub of the problem. MMORPGs already take a ludicrously long time to build. Stars Reach, as I said, is still in pre-alpha. Other games in the genre have taken five or even ten years to get from there even as far as Early Access, much less a genuine 1.0 launch. Anything that pushes those timescales towards the back end is very likely to see whatever interest there once was wane dramatically.

It is a bit of a Catch22. Pushing development faster costs money that may not be there. Slowing down risks potential customers walking away. Now the funding streams have largely dried up there's no easy way to find the necessary balance between financial security and getting the game finished in good time.

That said, it is possible. We have a shining example in front of us in the form of Project Gorgon. Somehow, a handful of developers and artists managed to steer that one through the rocks and rapids of lengthy development on a shoestring to the safe shore of a genuine Steam launch and a positive reception that saw the game land with a Very Positive rating and enough new players to require extra servers. And that after years in Early Access, too!

I hope Raph and his reduced team are able to pull off something of the kind. If they do, I probably still won't want to play the game but I'll be cheering it on from the sidelines.

Thirteen Songs For Friday 13. Not That There's Anything Spooky About Them. Well, Most Of Them...

Wow! We're seriously overdue for a "What I've Been Listening To..." post. When was the last one? November?! Geez... Dereliction of duty or what?

So, obviously, after all that time I must have a huge backlog of tunes, right? Yeah, not so much, as it turns out. December was all Christmas music and I really didn't listen to a lot of new stuff in January. 

Does anyone? January's never a great month for new music. People tend not to want to punt their best stuff into a dead zone and the post-New Year slump is as dead as it gets.

Still, the cycle is unbroken these days, what with 24/7/365 entertainment media, so there have been a few highlights. And once you get close to February, everything picks up speed again. I think we'll have more than enough to choose from.

Let's get on.

Punk Rocky - A$AP Rocky

That's going to be in my Videos of the Year, I'll tell you right now. It's funny and smart in all the best ways. Winona's Beavis and Butthead tee (Which is actually the Misfits as the boys, or so someone says in the YT comments.) the cop taking a drag behind the squad car, Danny Elfman on drums... I'd say it was Lynchean except Tim Burton's doing the album cover and there's Winona right there so I guess it's Burtonian. Or is that Burtonesque?

Whatever it is, it's great and so is the song. Is that even hip-hop now? Rocky doesn't really deal in genre any more, does he?  I guess that's a good thing.

Venom - COUCOU CHLOE

There's a case to be made for Punk Rocky as some kind of synth-punk variant but you wouldn't want to be the one making it after this just played. 

God's Lonely Man (feat. Iggy Pop) - Anna Calvi 

Now it's glam-synth-punk! Let's ram it all together! Why not?

Anna Calvi is one of those names I kind of recognize without really having any clear idea why or from where. Probably because she's been nominated for the Mercury three times. She has a massive Wikipedia presence that suggests I ought to have heard her long before this but I swear I never did. I'll be rifling through the back catalog now, for sure.

As for Iggy, he just goes on, doesn't he? On this he sounds almost identical to the Iggy of The Idiot, which came out just shy of fifty years ago. Terrifying. I bought that album on release, too. Of all the sixties hedonists, who'd have had Iggy on their bingo card to still be making great music in his late seventies, let alone great music that sounds like the stuff he did in his prime? 

For that matter, who'd have pegged him still to be alive? One of the great career arcs, for sure.

Dashboard Mary - Modern Woman

Another really good video. Well worth watching all the way through. It builds in intensity just like the song does.

Modern Woman are new to me but they've been around a while. They fit right into the echoing, empty space left vacant by the much-missed Peggy Sue. 

Speaking of whom...

 Day of Atonement - Tenderness

Best track so far from the soon-come debut album by Katy-Beth Young, formerly one half of Peggy Sue, now recording solo under the sobriquet Tenderness. Everything she releases is pure class but this has some extra warmth, I think.

Looking forward to the album, out in March.

Worry Angel - Witch Post

I've expressed a certain anxiety before about this feature turning into nothing more than a roundup of the latest releases from acts whose YouTube channels I follow and these last two tracks do nothing to alleviate those concerns. If these people will keep putting out great songs and videos, though, what am I supposed to do?

Witch Post feature on the NME's list of 100 Essential Emerging Artists For 2026. I scanned it eagerly, hoping - not to say expecting - to see a whole bunch of names I recognized. I mean, I sub NME so surely I'd have at least heard most of these acts mentioned, if not actually heard anything they'd done. 

Hah! Fat chance! Guess how many names I recognized? Two. Seriously! Two. So low it doesn't even qualify as embarrassing. It just isn't.

The two? Witch Post, of course, and Florence Road. I thought it was three for a moment when I saw Punching Bag on there but Punching Bag is a different band from Punchbag. I like Punchbag a lot more than Punching Bag so one point to me.

I guess I ought to work my way through the whole hundred and give some feedback. It can't be worse than the bloody Glasto emerging artist lists of the last couple of years. I trust NME a lot more than the people who book Glastonbury. Still. A hundred. It's a lot.

Legs In A Snare - Lip Critic

Here's someone new. Okay, I know it doesn't sound new. What does, these days? It goes though. It goes hard.

 Arms Wide - sadie

Sometimes all you want is autotune and a string section. All you need, I mean.

Or maybe you'd prefer a song you already know?

 Making Plans For Nigel

H. Birdbath & Andreas Bonkowski

Alert readers may have noticed a significant drop-off in the number of covers appearing here of late. Two reasons. 

The positive: I've been holding most of the good ones back for an all-covers post.

The negative: Dull covers are ubiquitous now. Inventive ones are really hard to come by.

There was a time, it seems long ago now, when to come across a cover of a favorite song was a charming surprise. Now it feels like I'm deluged with the things day in, day out. Most of them seem to try and stay as close as possible to the source, which is very boring and largely pointless. I still check the ones that look like they might be unusual but it takes a lot more to trigger my enthusiasm than it used to do. 

Not quite sure why I noticed this one, other than it's always good to hear the song again and the way she sings it is slightly off, somehow. I like that about it. Her name helps, naturally. It came up on a recommend for a song called Dead Air and who could resist clicking on someone called H. Birdbath? 

That one was an original and, once again, it falls into that slightly atonal dark-folk pit where Peggy Sue prospered. I liked it and followed through to see what else there was and there was Making Plans For Nigel and now here we are. 

Boylife in America - Dominic Fike (Cody ChesnuTT cover)

Here's that awkward question again: if it's a cover of a song you never heard before, is it truly a cover? Not going to answer that one. Or even try.

I had not heard the original, though. Or of it. Or even of the original artist. Cody ChestnuTT with the idiosyncratic typography was new to me although looking into it I'll give myself a pass. It seems it was seen as a fairly obscure pick from Dominic Fike when he covered it for TripleJ's Like A Version recently. He also covered the South Park theme tune but I never liked South Park.

And now we're pushing into double figures so I guess I'd better wrap things up. Plenty left in the barrel. What to choose? hemlocke springs? Frost Children and Ninajirichi? Fcuckers? Goldie Boutilier? Telenova? All very familiar names here. Let's try again.

How about

 Ants In My Room - Carter Vail

Hmm. Is that a justified pick? Or is it cutting in and by cutting in I mean cutting out something more deserving? Novelty or quality? Does it matter?

I Know Where Mark Chen Lives - Joyce Manor

No questioning the quality with that one. Joyce Manor have gravitas to spare. 

Hands up, who knows who Mark Chen is. Not where he lives. No-one's expecting you to know that even if they do.

No, Mark Chen is not Lead Researcher for OpenAI, no matter what google just told you. That's a different Mark Chen. If Joyce Manor were telling us they knew where he lived I think the whole song would have a much darker vibe to it.

Their Mark Chen is - or rather was - "a singer and songwriter for the bands Summer Vacation and Winter Break". Two more bands I never heard of. Here's the pitch. And here's what they sound(ed) like. Very long, silent intro on that video, by the way. The song itself is barely a minute long.

I credit Joyce Manor with inculcating me into the elusive joys of midwest emo and its related sub-genres even if I'm not sure that's what they play any more. They mostly sound like a really, really good rock band these days, or they do to me, but what do I know?

 SPEAK SOFTLY - Camp Claude

And finally, a band I've liked for a long time now. They don't make a lot of records and they never seem to get anywhere but they persist. 

As do we all.

Slightly More Than Zero Expectations

Disco Elysium was always going to be a hard act to follow, even without the drama that overtook development studio Za/Um soon after after the game became a hit. Now, with that stinking fish hanging around the necks of whoever held onto the name, a second success has quite the headwind to overcome, as the comments following the just-released "First fifteen minutes of gameplay" video for the follow-up, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, make all too clear.

Here's a taster of the general sentiment:

"Brought to you by the people who stole Disco Elysium".

watch the NOCLIP documentary on the making of "Disco Elysium" instead

Can’t wait to pirate this

Same shit, but way worse. Good luck trying to sell that lol

Forced, uncool, soulless, and most of all- not disco.

All of which is fine but I'd have to say a video of the first nineteen minutes of Disco Elysium itself probably wouldn't come across as a work of genius, either. It took me quite a while to get into  that one and I wasn't completely sold until on just how good it was until I was maybe halfway through my forty-hour run.

Here's the whole video if you want to make up your own mind.

Having watched the whole thing, I would have to say there are some fairly obvious problems, foremost amongst them the voice acting. There are only two speaking parts in the clip but neither is enjoyable to listen to. One is just dull but the other is very annoying, something that's especially worrying considering it's coming from the character you are going to be playing for upwards of thirty or forty hours. 

For some unfathomable reason they've chosen to give her an abrasive and unconvincing estuary accent, all glottal stops and dropped consonants. I'm not sure how that comes across in other territories but in the UK it comes with a lot of baggage that's quite hard to override. 

For anyone, I would imagine it has a certain lack of charm. It's distracting and misleading given the context and although I did begin to tune it out by the end, my strong feeling was that if I was playing the game I'd have to turn the voice-over off altogether.

I'm not alone in my discomfort, either:

Narrator's voice is fkn terrible, can't imagine a sane person listening to this for 20+ hours

narrators voice is horrible

turn-a! in-a! ... they really f'ed up with voice ... played disco Elysium 3 times and i enjoyed the narration there ... here it sounds just annoying.

If the voice acting is disappointing, at least the writing doesn't seem too bad. I'm not sure there's enough in the video to tell if it's going to end up feeling like a pastiche of the original but I fear it might. The vibe is similar for sure but how far it might diverge from the template it's too soon to say.

One thing that jumped out at me early on was a reference to "The Whole Sick Crew", which appears in the dialog in quotes. The Whole Sick Crew is a phrase I attempted to popularize as a name for my friend-group in the 'eighties, which sadly never caught on. I also used it here as a title for one of the sidebar collections until I thought better of it and changed it to something less potentially offensive.

I'm not claiming to have invented it. Like whoever wrote the in-game dialog, I stole it. For anyone who doesn't recognize it, it's the collective name given to a group of characters in Thomas Pynchon's novel "V". To see it used in a video game is both encouraging and worrying although the fact that it appears to have been used as a throwaway does incline me more to the positive end of the curve.

I also don't know how far along in development the game is but there are a few moments when the voice-over doesn't match the text. Then again, that's true of almost all finished games, presumably because if the actor ad-libs or extemporizes or has a slightly variant script to follow, it's too much trouble and expense either to re-record or get the art department to alter the visuals.

Speaking of the visuals, that looks to be one area where there won't be too many complaints. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (Which is a truly terrible title, by the way...) looks like Disco Elysium (A superb title.) but better, somehow. The images look bigger and clearer without being in any way less painterly. I particularly liked the animation on the player-character, which seemed unusually naturalistic.

What little gameplay there is on show in the video looks as though it might be slightly more challenging than the first game. On the other hand, there's such a scripted feeling to the entire fifteen minutes it's very hard to be sure. 

There are counters for things like Anxiety and Delirium that quickly go into the red and require some corrective action but it's impossible to tell if there's anything the player could have done to avoid ramping them up to that extent. It looked to me as though they were going to go critical no matter what, possibly for plot reasons.

Anyway, I'm not about to start reviewing the game on the basis of a video of someone else playing the first quarter of an hour. Even though I was obviously starting to do just that...

No, what I am going to do is review the demo, which isn't available yet but soon will be. It's going to be part of the next Steam Next Fest, which runs from 23 February to 2 March. It includes "two quests...various side stories... and some of the quirky and questionable characters..."

I do already have the game on my Wishlist although, like everyone else, I am somewhat dubious about the provenance and suspicious of the circumstances that brought it into being. I'm hoping the demo will be enough to make it clear whether the people that retained the name also kept the talent. 

We could certainly do with another RPG as good as Disco Elysium. Whether this is it remains to be seen. 

Sorry, But I'm Going To Have To See Some I.D.

So, what about that Discord then, eh? Age verification? Not likely, matey!

Except, why? Or, rather, why not, exactly? Because we don't trust them with our data?

But who do we trust? Who hasn't had a "breach"? We give this stuff out and it gets stolen or sold all the time. 

I used to have an app (Well, it was before we called them "apps" so I guess it was a program or maybe just a service.) that was supposed to tell me every time one of my many, many email addresses turned up in some Dark Web fire sale. It was a bit of a concern back then, which must have been a decade ago. Haven't thought about it for years. Certainly haven't had any updates in as long as I can remember. Of course, they might be going to one of those email addresses I never look at any more...

It's not just the security, though, is it? It's the principle. Who are these people to question whether we're old enough to be looking at adult stuff? Why do they get to be the gatekeepers of our maturity? It's the thin line at the end of the wedge. Or the thick end. The something end of something, anyway.

It's not like it used to be, that's the point. And how it used to be was better, wasn't it?  Back when the internet was the the internet. When there were no rules except all those rules we made for ourselves and yelled about (Not in CAPS of course, never in ALL CAPS!) whenever we saw anyone not doing things the way they were supposed to.

People knew their place then. Or, rather, most people didn't even know the internet was a place. It was all 14.4kb dial-up modems and we were happy! Then in came the Worldwide Web and there went the neighborhood.

I may have got some or indeed all of that wrong. I was there but not there. I certainly wasn't paying attention. I was an incomer to the just-born web in the very early '90s but not a digital native. I strongly suspect some of the people making a big to-do about the good old days were barely born when I arrived in about 1992. A lot of the nostalgia seems to come from a decade later by when the digital fields had already been marked out for redevelopment.

Getting back to Discord and its plan to enforce age verification on all users, except for the users it already can somehow just tell are old enough, although no-one's saying exactly how just yet; if it's not incompetence or the breaking of tradition we're worried about, is it some basic objection to the concept? Should the internet at large be free from mundane concerns like who exactly uses it? Ought it to be a free-for-all where, as the old New Yorker joke has it, "nobody knows your a dog"?

I guess not or we wouldn't all be making such a fuss all the goddam time about Roblox and X and all the other reprobates messing with our kids. We love to give them a hard time about it, don't we? Only it's a bit different when someone tries to do something.

Except, is it? I seem to hear a virtual round of applause every time another government or court passes a law restricting the sale of lockboxes. All that EU legislation concerning digital safety seems to get a lot of praise. Well, some of it does. It depends.

Only it's a bit different when the lawyers and policemen come around peering over our fences into our walled gardens, apparently. It's all well and good for there to be restrictions on who can do what so long as they don't get in the way of those of us who know what we're doing, humming along, minding our own business. Nothing to see here. Move along please, thank you very much.

It's all a bit fuzzy, too, because it's Discord. Do we even like Discord?  I mean, we all use it. It's the default now, isn't it? We pretty much have to. But do we want to?

There's a sentiment I've seen that says if Discord thinks it's so special, can do anything it likes and we'll all just have to put up with it, Discord just might have another think coming. Elon thought he could do what he liked with Twitter and look how that worked out! Watch out, Discord! Don't push your luck!

How did that work out for Elon, come to think of it? Didn't he sack 90% of the staff and rebrand the whole thing so the value of what he'd bought vanished overnight? And didn't everyone say the whole thing would fall apart and no-one would be able to fix it because everyone who knew how had been sacked? Wasn't Twitter finished?

Except X is still going and I keep seeing links to it in my news feeds every day just like I used to see links to Twitter. And while there are alternatives, have any of them replaced X/Twitter in the big world outside the tech-insider niche? Doesn't feel like it.

Are we going to have to go through that whole "Alternatives to Discord" phase like we did with Twitter, until eventually one winner emerges, proud possessor of a fairly distant second place to Discord itself, as it carries on as if nothing much happened? Does anyone care enough about Discord to bother?

I belong to... wait, let me count them... thirty-three Discord channels. In a good month I look at two of them. Blaugust, in which I link my posts here and TAGN, where I check what's up with the Fantasy Critic League. Very occasionally I visit one of the others to check some specific gaming announcement I've heard about through other channels but that doesn't happen often.

According to MassivelyOP, Discord has reassured everyone that 

"For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities."

In other words, if you've been acting like a dog for a while they'll assume you are a dog. And anyway, as some wag in the comments puts it, if you don't live in the EU or the UK, where there are enforceable laws about this sort of thing, you might just find you're an adult automatically, no matter what you've been up to until now.

If you don't pass that test, which is probably being administered by an AI agent, I just bet, you get marked down as a teen. What does that mean?   

Well, it means you can't join age-restricted servers, talk in some audio channels and you might get some filters applied whether you want them or not. None of which is going to affect me since I have never once considered joining an age-restricted Discord channel (Nor, until this all blew up, knew such a thing existed...), never speak in voice chat and generally switch on every filter I can see as soon as I join any new service. 

Oh, that's nice, isn't it? Doesn't affect you personally so you're fine with it. Very socially conscious. Bloody solipsists. You're only one step up from narcissists, you lot.

Yes, fine, okay, sure. Only I am kind of in favor of age restrictions on the internet, by and large. I mean, I'm in favor of them offline. Aren't you? Don't you think there should be some age limit on when you can drive a car or join the army or get married or vote? And don't you think you ought to have to be able to prove you are the age you say you are before you can do any of those things?

Maybe you don't. Maybe you're that much of a libertarian or an anarchist you think the only rule ought to be no rules. 

Probably not. Some of the people I've seen complaining about this seem to have quite firm views on other kinds of rules and restrictions. There are all sorts of things they think people shouldn't be allowed to do or say. They just seem to think rules ought to apply differently on the internet, particularly for people who, you know, belong there.

That does tick me off a little. I removed someone's blog from my RSS feed yesterday after reading a rant about age verification. It was the repeated use of the pejorative "normies" that did it.  I'd be very happy to have a filter that caught offensive slurs like that.

I hope this doesn't come over as a rant in the same way. All those rhetorical questions are a rhetorical device (Is that ironic?) designed to dilute the rage. I'm pretty sure there are bigger things to worry about than whether you have to send Discord a selfie. Is it really worth getting worked up over?

I'm not that bothered about it either way. It certainly doesn't feel like any kind of hill to die on. Discord is just an app. If people don't like the terms of use they can just stop using it. I'd guess for most people having "teen" filters would make next to no difference anyway. Or maybe I underestimate how much people swear in Discord channels.

Personally, I propose to do absolutely nothing about it. I'll just carry on as I am. If all the fuss hadn't kicked off I very much doubt I'd even have known anything had happened. 

What I do think, though, is that maybe there should be some requirement for all internet users to prove their age at a much more basic, fundamental stage than through individual apps. Something akin to a driving license, perhaps, that could be incorporated into the education system and verified in a much more practical way. In person. 

Why the internet should get a pass on it, when so many other aspects of life don't, beats me. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the header image, produced at NightCafe using QwenImage SD. The prompt, taken directly from the text, was "Discord and its plan to enforce age verification on all users." To this I added the further instruction "1980s computer gaming magazine cover illustration. Full color, line art." 

Because I keep forgetting to stop it, NightCafe always throws my prompt to an AI to re-write it in a lot more detail. The full version it used was "1980s computer gaming magazine cover illustration of Discord characters debating age verification. Full color, line art style. Vivid colors with a dramatic, cinematic lighting setup. Emphasize retro sci-fi aesthetic, with glowing neon accents and geometric shapes, in the style of Syd Mead and Moebius. ..." I really need to remember to stop it doing that. 

I can't say I can see the Moebius influence and I don't actually know who Syd Mead is, although the name rings a bell. Looking him up, I probably should have known who he was. 

Out of curiosity, I ran the original prompt through the same model again but with the AI "Prompt Magic" that expands on the prompt switched off. That got me the image above, which appears exactly as it was generated. It looks like I cropped it, badly, but I didn't. 

Looks like I either need to keep Prompt Magic switched on or write longer, more detailed prompts.