Fracturing The Fractal

Who wants to read another post about AI, then? Always a popular subject, I know. But I think we may be past the point where putting our fingers in our our collective ears and singing "La! La! La! not listening!" is going to work.

Did anyone ever actually do that, by the way? It seems like one of those things you grew up knowing other people did, somehow, rather than anything you ever would have done yourself. 

Mrs Bhagpuss and I are collectively and separately reading Homework by Geoff Dyer. Mrs Bhagpuss got it for Christmas, or maybe it was her birthday, and it's been the bathroom book for a while.

Does everyone have a bathroom book? I first came across the concept back in the 'eighties, when I stayed at a friend's place and saw they had a bookshelf over the cistern. It was all the same book, too. Not literally the same book. Now that would be weird. No, I mean a series of books. I can't remember what the series was except that it was a comic strip. Peanuts maybe?

No, it definitely wasn't Peanuts. I did  have another friend back then... he's dead now, been dead a while... who was, I won't say obsessed with the Peanuts strip but he sure did like it. But then everyone liked Peanuts in those days.

Peanuts is back in fashion now. Did you know that? It goes up and down, somehow. The high point was back in the 'eighties or 'nineties, when there was even a shop in town that sold nothing but Peanuts products. Then it kind of dropped out of the cultural conversation for a while but now it's back. I have no idea why. These things happen.

Oh, that brings me back to what I was saying about the Geoff Dyer book. So, Geoff is exactly the same age as me, give or take a few months, and he grew up within less than an hour's drive of where I grew up. His book is a memoir about that but since he's a... wait, what is he now? 

We were talking about that, Mrs Bhagpuss and I, back when we both started reading the book. I knew his name very well from work but I couldn't exactly put my finger on what he was best known for. With most writers it's easy to go "Oh, him? Yeah, he writes historical crime novels set in the Reformation" or "I know her. She's the woman who writes all those romantasy books with the dragons..."

Authors generally stay in their lanes or they do if they want to have a long-running career. Same as musicians, which is why that Spinal Tap line about "Hope you like our new direction" lands so hard. Nobody ever does.

Some writers, though? Their lane is not being in a lane. The emperor of all of them is Bill Bryson. Bill is real nuisance. People come into the shop all the time and ask "Where are your Bill Brysons?" and the answer is "Depends what he's writing about".  Not the answer anyone wants to hear.

Geoff Dyer is like that, I think. He's a novelist, an essayist, an editor, a critic and I guess he's best described as a cultural commentator. And now he's a memoirist, too.

Except his memories don't exactly tally with mine. Or Mrs Bhagpuss's. She's a couple of years younger and grew up a couple of hundred miles further East but she's still solidly in the same growing-up space as Geoff and me. And both she and I recognize all the experiences Geoff relates but we don't always relate to the experiences. Or not the way he does.

It's a thing about the culture, isn't it? Pop culture, I mean, specifically. I nearly said it's the thing about it. It's fractal. 

Now, see, there's a thing. Another thing. Do I mean fractal? Is it the right word? Do I really know what it means and if I do or if I don't, is it appropriate to the context?

I'm not sure it matters. What does matter is that it's an example of itself. Hey! Recursion again! Recursion is really my jam at the moment. Oh boy, another example.

So, fractal was a moment in the nineties. We sold a lot of books on the back of it and some of us got at least a vague idea what lay behind the pretty pictures and weird optical effects, which led to the word slipping into the language as a vague, hand-wavey metaphor. Kind of but not exactly like I said "jam" there, without really having grown up saying it or having the automatic cultural appreciation of its nuances you get from encountering something while your synapses are still settling in. 

As time goes on, these things get layered in like laminate. It's all surface but add enough surface and you have depth.

Like Peanuts. Peanuts goes back to the 1950s, to a Charles Schulz strip called Li'l Folks. Actually, the 1940s. I just looked it up. It ran from 1947 to 1950. Li'l Folks isn't Peanuts, though. It just looks like it and sounds like it. And was written and drawn by the same person. 

But Li'l Folks is not in the culture in the way Peanuts is. I know it because I've been a comics fan for almost as long as I've been alive. You probably know it too because chances are you came to this blog, directly or indirectly, because it is or at least was a gaming blog and comics is to gaming as jazz is to blues.

Is that fair? I feel like that's an order of magnitude too close. Or maybe the whole analogy doesn't work. This is why editors exist. Cut me a break. I'm wearing a lot of hats, here.

Peanuts is one of those cultural artifacts that transcends both taste and preference. If you lived in a certain place at a certain time you will know who Snoopy is. You may not care but you will know. This is what reading Geoff Dyer's Homework is like. 

It's filled with anecdotes and stories that reference all the same things both I and Mrs Bhagpuss grew up with but the importance Geoff places on them and the conclusions he draws from his experiences with them frequently don't tally with ours. And ours don't always tally with each other, either, although they do come closer more often, which I suppose goes some way towards explaining why we've been able to stand each other for over thirty years.

And understand each other, too. Sharing a cultural identity does lead to a degree of understanding even if it's often as confusing as it is comforting. All experiences are unique as the cliche goes, if I didn't just make that up.

So, yes, pop culture is fractal. I was right all along! Maybe.

AI, though.. 

Ah! Look! We're back to AI. Lulled you into thinking I'd forgotten, did I? Well, I said at the top that was where this was going, although I'd almost forgotten, myself.

Here's what I was thinking. You know the AI bubble that was going to burst? Is it, though? It seems to be taking it's time to pop, doesn't it? And meanwhile new AI stories keep cropping up. Gaming stories, I mean. (Here's the famous writer, staying in his lane.)

Like Roblox (Ptuiii!) and its "agentic AI  tools" or the $50m fund to "invest in AI-driven games". AI is going to "save the games industry." Or at least the part that isn't swearing on a stack of Bibles that it's never going to use AI at all...

I don't have any links to the people saying that. They tend not to be very interesting. People fervently advocating for the maintenance of the status quo rarely are.

A lot more interesting are the people willing to engage not just with the future but the immanent present, even if I'm not sure Infinity Nikki is the best example of the ineluctable importance of the human soul.

I'd be happy to engage if someone would hand me the controls. Here's what I'd like AI to do for my gaming. I'd like it to let me prompt for a game featuring my characters, the same ones I've spent the last year recovering from the dead spaces of the past and turning into songs. I'd like to see them walking around, interacting with each other and with me. And no-one else.

I wouldn't want to share them. They wouldn't become part of the shifting, drifting cultural backdrop, not even to the degree this post you're reading has. And congratulations if you are still reading. You have some stamina!

AI has the potential to create hyper-local cultural bubbles. It's nothing new. The Brontes were doing it on a family scale with Glass Town two centuries ago. Li'l Folks was doing it, an order of magnitude larger, for the people of  St. Paul just after the war. (You probably need to be the same age as Geoff Dyer and me not to need to add a qualifier to "war" there...)

My wished-for bubble would be the smallest of them all. I'd be the only one in it. Me and my imaginary friends.

I've always had a thing for imaginary friends but they're had to sustain without psychosis or psychedelics once you get past seven or so. Paper and pen has been the best way for me but it is, frankly, a lot of work. Uplifting, elevating, wonderful work but work all the same.

Wouldn't you like to have a faithful amanuensis to turn all that creativity into a playground designed and built just for you? I imagine I would but maybe that's just my imagination. The reality might not taste as sweet.

If it did or if it didn't, though, I'd be the only one tasting it. 

And where does the culture go, if everyone's creating their own?  

 

AI used in this post

The three images. Obviously. Although none of them is what you'd call original AI. I fucked around with all of them in paint.net. I think messing up AI images with filters and effects is both fun and aesthetically pleasing. Artistically valid is another question.

The thing is (I do say that a lot, don't I? It's like a nervous tic.) it's quite hard to get useable images out of non-visual prompts. Go figure! And I tend mostly to use AI for illustrations only when I don't have obvious visuals to work with. Otherwise I'd use a screenshot or take a photograph.

For this post, I did the old "pull out a sentence and see what the AI comes up with" routine. I think it did a very good job with the one I used for the header image. That was with the very catchily-named Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. Who's in charge of these naming conventions? Clearly not the Marketing Department. The prompt was the entire third paragraph of the post, which I'm not going to repeat here. Just scroll up if you're that interested. I added the style instruction "1950s comic strip. Sunday color page."As for the settings, honestly these days I'm past caring. I don't even look at them so whatever the default was.

The next image is by Qwen Image SD from the prompt "fractal was a moment in the nineties. We sold a lot of books on the back of it and some of us got at least a vague idea what lay behind the pretty pictures and weird optical effects". No style instruction.

The final picture is a hybrid created by both the previous models. I had Qwen Image SD make something from the prompt "So, yes, pop culture is fractal. I was right all along! Maybe." with no style instruction and then I used that image a starter for Flux blah blah blah, only using the cut-down prompt "pop culture is fractal" and the style instruction "line drawing, ink wash, color."

Then, as I said, I really messed them all up. If you think they look ugly now, you should have seen them before!

Also, is it really obvious I enjoy doing these "AI used..." postscripts as much as or maybe more than doing the posts themselves? I can see why all those actors and directors love to doing the commentaries on the special editions of the DVDs...

 

Recursion To The Max

Now there's no more leveling to do, it's time to start filling out the many gaps in Mordita's character sheet so she can become the do-it-all character Conkers was. I did a fair bit of prep on that last year but there's a long way yet to go.

And it's complicated, not to say confusing, deciding what's essential, what's merely desirable and what's mostly irrelevant. One problem with bringing a new character in at the current end game (Solo end game, that is. Let's not get carried away.) is that by definition they weren't there for all the previous end-games, so whatever the point of doing those might have been, you've missed it. Haven't been there, haven't got the T-shirt. 

Every expansion comes with a bunch of features that require you, at minimum, finish the Signature quest-line to get the full benefits. Often there are side quests and other content you'd be expected to do as well, if you want to make sure you've got all the goodies. There could be skills and abilities and items and spells... all kinds of things you probably don't want to be without, not least because, when the devs are designing later content for subsequent expansions and updates, they may very well assume most people have them.

A surprising number remain relevant for years, while others are swept aside and forgotten. For example, there's a crafting quest in 2016's Kunark Ascending that gives you a buff that makes gathering materials very significantly quicker. You really wouldn't want to miss out on that, especially if you were used to having it on a previous character. It's like gathering treacle without it.  

On the other hand, there's not much point back-tracking to get the widget that lets you see Shadow Nodes and gather from them, much less spend the many hours needed to raise the skill. To everyone's relief, the deeply unpopular Shadow Prospecting from 2019's Blood of Luclin expansion never made it off the moon.

But you could if you wanted to. All of this stuff - indeed very nearly everything there ever has been in the game - is still there, waiting for anyone that feels they missed out. Some of it is worth doing for the fun of it, even if the rewards don't mean much any more. If you're just trying to catch a new main character up to where you left off with the previous one, though, you'll probably want to be a bit choosy.

The question is, where to start? There's a lot of quality of life stuff that isn't essential but that's exactly what I miss most, when I suddenly run into something that reminds me I don't have it. Like languages, for example. It's always a pain when you try to speak to an NPC you know has a quest you want, only to find you can't communicate with each other.

These days, you can just buy a book from an NPC to learn most languages but there are still a few you need to do some work for. The question is, which is which? I probably ought to take Mordita to the vendor and buy everything she hasn't already got, then compare her language skills with Conkers, my Berserker and make some notes on what's missing. Then I'd have to look up how to fill in the gaps.

It's some work, changing Mains in mid-stream, for sure. Not everyone enjoys the admin. Luckily I do. Mostly.

In theory, QoL improvements ought to take second place to combat efficiency but as I've been saying all along, as a Necromancer I'm suddenly finding the solo content a lot easier than I was used to, back when I was playing a Berserker. If she's winning all her fights easily already, is the effort involved in upgrading all her spells going to be worth it?

And let's not pretend it wouldn't be an effort. I got my Sage, Barnabus, out yesterday to see how many Expert spells he’d have to make and how many rares it would take. I make it thirty-three spells. Every spell requires two rares these days, so sixty-six rares.

The rares for cloth caster spells are Flowfall Vines. There are enough on the Broker to make everything but they go for about 25m plat each so that would be 1.65b plat for the lot. Hyperinflation is rampant in Norrath these days. It's true Mord did have a windfall recently. She got a key Inquisitor Master as a boss drop and sold it for 1.7b. I wasn't planning to spend it all on crafting mats, though.

The preferable alternative is to gather the vines myself but they call them rares for a reason. Last session, I spent about three-quarters of an hour gathering and I got five, which was honestly a pretty impressive haul. Maybe I could average six an hour if I was really lucky, so eleven hours of gathering, but realistically I'd expect it to take more like double that long.

Which is fine. I like gathering. It's restful. I generally don't listen to the radio or podcasts any more when I play games but gathering mats is made for it. If it was June and the cricket was on...

If I was going to do it seriously, of course, I'd need to get Mordita's Rare Harvest Chance stat as high as possible. And her Bountiful Harvest stat as well. She already has the AAs for both but there's gear with boosts she and her mount could be wearing that they're not. 

Well, the mount has some, now. I had Barnabus make a saddle and hackamore with relevant stats since I already had him working. He, or any of my high-level crafters, could make other items, too. The Artisan pieces, at least. Any crafter of high enough level can do that, always assuming they've scribed the recipes. There are consumables too...

Except the problem with the whole plan is that a lot of Mordita's existing spells are already upgraded to a degree that means the Experts from the new spell books, which I just got Barney to buy because he didn't do much in the last expansion or three either, won't actually be upgrades for Mordita. Although I haven't been playing her as much as Conkers these last few years, I have been keeping up with her free, time-gated spell progression and as a result all her important spells from before the level cap went up (And a lot of the less-important ones, too.) are Master level or above. 

That means I'd be gearing Mordita up so she could get mats so Barney could make her upgrades she doesn't really need, which wouldn't upgrade the spells she already has anyway. And yet I do still need to do it at some point, if not right away.

She may not need those upgrades now, but if I keep on passively upgrading her old spells without replacing them, at some point they'll be maxed but still be too low to be really effective. Every expansion comes with power creep as a built-in feature, whether you want it or not. 

I could certainly leave it until the next expansion, later this year. That won't come with an increase in the cap so it should be fine. If I do, though, in two years, when the cap goes up, I'll almost certainly need to swap to at least the new spells that came with this expansion and if I make the Experts for those now, I'll have a year and a half to upgrade them with the passive system, meaning they'll be more powerful than the Expert-level spells in the expansion-after-next.

Yeah. Makes my head hurt, too. I think the percentage move is just to keep gathering every time I'm out doing anything, pass the vines to Barney and have him make the key Experts piecemeal as and when I have the mats. There are probably only a dozen or so spells that really need to be kept at peak effectiveness. That should be easy enough.

Of course, that's just for one character. I have a whole lot more clamoring for attention. At one point I had half a dozen at cap although that was when leveling took hours not weeks. And the above examples are just a few of the things that need to be done to get Mordita to where she could be. Where Conkers already was before I swapped over. 

There are all those adornment slots that could be improved for a start. She could make the Adornments herself if she did the dailies to skill up. And she ought to max her Tinkering, too. I think Transmuting is already done just from clearing the many unwanted drops from doing the Overland dailies and Weeklies and the instances in the last update. Come to think of it, she only did one of those because the rest were Level 135 Required. I guess I should run her through the rest at least once, just to see what's there...

And so it goes. On and on and ever on. But to what end? 

Don't look at me. After more than twenty years I think it's clear the only reason I'm doing any of this is so I can keep on doing more of it. I'm seeing recursion everywhere these days.

I kinda like it...

A Warm Drink And A Comforting Toy - The Lucy Dreaming Demo

Just a very quick post today since normally I'd be at work at wouldn't be posting at all. Instead, I'm on "holiday", which is to say I didn't book any time off at all before the cut-off point so someone just gave me a bunch of weeks and this is one of them.

That's how come I was able to spend the last hour playing through one of the demos I downloaded the other day, Lucy Dreaming. Fifty-two minutes to be precise. A very good length for a demo. 

And it's a very good demo, too. Exemplary, in fact. If I was going to rate it specifically as a demo, I'd give it five stars. 

It's not only the right length - long enough to get the measure of the game but not so long it feels like you've actually started playing it for real - it's also a satisfying gamelet in its own right. Playing through it feels like a complete experience and also like a tailored one, not a fragment of the full game ripped loose from context.

Which is a clever trick because in a way that's exactly what it must be - the introduction to the full game. Not even the first chapter, more like the prolog. Only you can tell it's been adapted for the demo, not just pulled out and dropped in as-is from the self-referential little asides that contextualize it as a version specifically designed to be played in demonstration mode. 

Plenty of demos do that. They put up walls or pop up messages with some variation on "Not included in Demo". That's better than just leaving you to figure out why something isn't working but the Lucy Dreaming demo goes further. It incorporates the explanations into gameplay, so when you try to interact with something that's not relevant to the subset of the game you're being allowed to see, it tells you so within the same framework it tells you everything else. 

That sounds a bit vaguer than I meant but unfortunately (Or more properly the opposite of that.) I was so engrossed in the gameplay I neglected to take any screenshots when it happened, leaving me either to paraphrase from memory or fall back on a broad overview of the technique. 

Oh, alright then, I'll semi make one up. It was close to what I'm about to tell you but I can't remember the exact phrasing. You can take it that it was more amusing than what I'm going to come up with, though.

The whole demo takes place in Lucy's house. It starts in her bedroom and from there you can explore the upstairs landing, the downstairs hallway, the lounge and the garage. There are three more doors you can't enter - her brother's room, her parents bedroom and the bathroom. Oh, and the front door and the garage door, which lead to the outside.

The garage door is locked. The front door opens but there's just no option to go through it. Lucy's brother, Lloyd, is in his room and he's not about to let his little sister come in. Lucy very reasonably balks at going into her parents bedroom, commenting she doesn't even want to think about what they do in there.

That leaves the bathroom. You can try to go in there but when you do, Lucy tells you the bathroom isn't available in the demo. And then she adds that it's just as well she doesn't need a wee.

It's only a little thing but it adds to the feeling you're not just playing a demo but a short game that someone has really thought about. That's one example I can remember but there are a few more and they added to the sense that Lucy Dreaming is a game someone cares about.

But you can tell that from everything about it, really. One thing that often annoys me in adventure games is the way you can only examine objects that you'll need to use. Lucy Dreaming feels a bit like one of those open-world RPGs that claim if you can see somewhere you can get there, only in this demo that translates to if you can see an object, you can examine it.  

That's a lot of work, adding a line or two of text to everything in the house and, again like those open-world RPGs that let you open every single container in the world, it risks annoying the player almost as much as making most of it inert would. If you're going to tag everything with a line of dialog, you have to make most of them worth the click and Lucy Dreaming manages to do it. 

At least it does in the demo. Which, as I said, is less than an hour's gameplay. Whether the writer(s) can keep it up for the whole game I suppose won't be apparent until its too late, if you've been suckered into buying it by the attention to detail in the short version and it turns out not to be sustained. But then, we should be alert to that risk. It's there in every MMORPG ever made. The starting zones and tutorials are always the most complete and polished part of the game. Never judge an MMORPG by its tutorial.

Lucy Dreaming, of course, is no MMORPG. And anyway, I really don't think that'll be the case here. It feels like one of those hand-crafted labors of love that wasn't a labor at all to the people who made it. It has that sense of the creators having fun and of that fun transferring well to the audience.

Which brings me to the advertised "British Humour" (British spellings look really weird to me these days. I've been using American spellings for so long...). As a British person (That's what it says on my passport, anyway.) I'd have to say that I really didn't notice much "British" humor in the demo at all.

British accents, yes. Lucy herself speaks in a British accent that I found very easy on the ear. Not exaggerated for comic effect. Just a naturalistic Northern burr. The only other speaking part in the demo, Lucy's dad, only gets a couple of lines and those are enunciated in such a strained and peculiar way, as appropriate to the circumstances, I couldn't really tell what accent he had.

A British accent, though, even a Northern one, does not in and of itself constitute humor. There are plenty of jokes in the demo, some of them quite funny, but none that I noticed seemed particularly nationalized. 

The house itself looks like a British house but I'm pretty sure it could pass for one in any number of other countries. It's a child's bedroom, a couple of hallways and a garage. How different, culturally, can those be between English-speaking nations? The lounge is the most British - English, really - of them all but even there it has a ceiling fan and I can't say I've ever been a suburban home in this country that had one of those. We don't get the hot weather to need anything like that.

As for the dialog, most of which is Lucy talking directly to you, the player, I'm pretty confident you could give the same script to an American actor and you wouldn't have to change more than the odd word or two. If it was the Britishness of the humor that sold you on the game, you may be disappointed. You're not going to see much of it in the demo. Can't say I was sorry about that. 

Graphically, it's retro as has been the fashion in a large corner of the adventure game market for a while now. There's an admirable attention to detail and the color palette is easy on the eye. What's not to like?

Also, it is quite specifically an Adventure Game. There are several fourth-wall-bending gags about that. The demo is never afraid to go meta-fictional, another thing that predisposed me to like it.

Gameplay is rock-solid point & click puzzle-solving. Examine everything, pick up everything that looks remotely useful, figure out what to use on what. We all know the drill. 

In the demo you have to complete half a dozen tasks to get Lucy ready to go to sleep. All of them are completely realistic, like putting on some calming music, getting her into some suitable nightwear and making her a warm drink. As you complete each one it crosses itself off a list, which made solving each puzzle feel oddly satisfying.

The puzzles themselves are very fair. Most are even rational, although I wouldn't have warmed Lucy's bedtime drink in quite the way the game expected. Then again, she's a small child. I can totally see a child doing whatever it was Lucy did. 

No, I'm not going to tell you. Go play the demo if you really have to know!

Mostly, though, I thought I knew exactly what to do and I was almost always right. The problem was figuring out how to do it and the solution was usually guessable in no more than a couple of tries, which is the mark of a good point & click in my book. I never once had to look for a hint so I don't even know if there's an in-game hint system. If the whole game is as well-designed, you won't need one.

All in all, as I said at the start, this was an exemplary demo. Or maybe not because at the end of it, although I'd had a great time figuring out all the puzzles, I didn't immediately wishlist the game. That's because the demo gave me almost too vivid an impression of what it would be like to play the finished article and I wasn't sure I liked the idea of that as much as I ought to, if I was going to buy it.

Sometimes you need just a little grit to make the pearl. (Apparently that's not really how pearls get made but a cliche is a cliche.) I wouldn't remotely call this demo too slick or too easy but after I'd finished it I didn't get the feeling I needed to find out what happened next. Maybe the demo was too well-constructed and complete in itself

I might still pick the game up at some point but I have the feeling there are other Adventure games I might find a little more compelling. Still, don't let that put you off trying the demo. If nothing else, it's a fun, self-contained, satisfying experience all of its own. 

Video Games And Blunt Force Trauma

As threatened  promised - a music post for Friday. Why is it Fridays and Saturdays always seem like the time for one of these? Hangover from the days when weekends meant something, I guess, and when what that meant, often as not, was going to a gig, which in turn meant playing a bunch of songs really loud before we went out, to hype ourselves up.

Been a long, long time since I went to see live music and almost as long since I worked a schedule that gave weekends much meaning. Post-pandemic, my work week has literally been weekends on, weekdays off. I ought to do these on a Sunday and a Monday by that reckoning.

Yeah, but that'd just be weird, wouldn't it? Sunday might be good for a lazy, kickback playlist but Monday? Who puts up music on a Monday?

So, Friday it is. And it's been a while since the last time. A little over a month. In fact, once a month seems to be the self-regulating cadence right now. Seems reasonable, although I notice, even when I'm not putting the time in to search out new stuff specifically for posting, I'm still ending up with more good tunes than I can fit in each time. Could be a month is a tad too long.

Want numbers? I got numbers. Bookmarked for possible inclusion since last time: fifteen new songs by what you could call regulars plus a dozen either by people I'd never heard of until now or acts that don't generally turn up here. Plus a bunch of curios and covers and live performances that I saved mostly for my own interest.

That's more than double what I can fit into a post without going so long no-one's going to get to the finish. Speaking of which, I should probably just get on with it and stop yakking.

First Light - Lana del Rey 

Well, that's a gimme. Not just a new song from our queen but the theme tune for a video game. Can't get much more on point than that, not for this blog.

The game is 007 First Light, a James Bond joint due out towards the end of May. I was not aware of it although I certainly should have been because Ula picked it for the TAGN Fantasy Critic League. If I'd known Lana was doing the theme song, I might have bid on it but I'm not a fan of the Bond franchise so it never occurred to me. 

Lana may or may not be a Bond fan but she's certainly had it in mind for a while that she'd like to sing the theme to a Bond movie some day. This sounds like she's delivering her calling card to whoever's handling the production duties now it's not the Broccolis. (I just looked it up and it's Amazon.). It could hardly be any more Bond-Thematic.

Of course, Lana has a history with video games. Her breakthrough song, the one that made her a star, was literally called Video Games.  I've never been sure whether the lyric is entirely complimentary about the form, either. It's so hard to tell with Lana, something that's caused her no end of trouble over the years. 

She's woven some video game textures into the arrangement and the lyrics here and I'm not entirely sure it works. But it's Lana, so of course it works. 

Elizabeth Taylor (So Glamorous Cabaret Version)

Taylor Swift

Been a while since I really liked a Taylor Swift tune. Probably the long version of All Too Well and that was... blimey! 2021! Really? Well that's disturbing...

And even though I'm a sucker for songs named after famous people in general and movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor in particular (Cf Elizabeth Taylor by Clare Maguire. I bought a whole album by her off the back of that one.) I don't especially like the original album version of this, either. It's harder and brasher but most importantly it doesn't sound like Taylor doing her best Lana del Rey impression. 

This version does. And she does a good one, too. 

Something To Give - Witch Post

Is Witch Post my favorite new band or is it Sunday (1994)? Is it any co-incidence they sound a little bit alike? Do they sound a little bit alike or is that just in my head?

You decide.

Shame - Sunday (1994)

Now that's a disturbing video to go with a disturbing lyric. Is it less or more disturbing if you know the song was inspired by Peter Jackson's first film, Heavenly Creatures? Maybe I'd be able to tell, if I'd seen the movie.

It's surprising I haven't seen it in a way. It looks like the sort of thing I would have gone to see, back in the day when I went to the cinema. But I can tell you why I didn't, I think. 

Heavenly Creatures came out in 1994. Know what else came out in 1994? Fun. Heavenly Creatures is a movie about two teenage girls who kill an older woman. Fun is a movie about two teenage girls who kill an older woman. 

I did go to see Fun at the cinema. It was a tough watch, as I recall. And for once I do recall. Once seen, never forgotten. I also recall reading about Heavenly Creatures in Empire Magazine and thinking "Y'know what? I think one movie like that's probably enough for now." 

I never got around to watching the second one. Maybe now I will. 

Quiet Light - Postinternetfame

Let's have someone we don't know, shall we? Also something that doesn't sound like it was made ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Great lyric on this one although it's hard to pick out through the hyperwall. Full transcript in the YouTube description but here's a highlight:

God I love you we could have 10 kids
And move wherever you want 
I’ll get another job I’ll change my name 
I’ll do anything that I need to do 
To get you to stay
Say that you’ll stay.

The standard for lyrics is higher now than it's ever been. It just is. I don't know why but it makes me happy. I mean I know why it makes me happy. I just don't know why it's happening.

 Mike Johnson Is A Mechanic - PARKiNG

Titles, too, amirite? This is like that Joyce Manor song I shared a while back, I Know Where Mark Chen Lives. Not that it sounds anything like it, although Joyce Manor did used to sound a bit like this. No, I mean the title just makes you want to hear the song. Well, it does me. 

Going Shopping - The Strokes

Have I ever shared a Strokes song before? Not sure I have. They're a big gap in my timeline. I missed their whole ascendancy. I always like them when I hear them but this is really fun. Great title, great seventies groove and that autotune! 

God, I love autotune. Why doesn't everyone use it all the time?

Okay, maybe that would be a bit much.

 Better Angels - sadie

Yeah... but would it, though?

I Go Up, You Go Down - My Precious Bunny

Or maybe you prefer your vocal distortion a little more old school? Lily has you covered. That's Lily Wolter, who made the extremely sensible decision to go out under the name My Precious Bunny. Not there's anything wrong with Lily Wolter as a name but I wouldn't have clicked on a link to find out what Lily Wolter sounded like. 

My Precious Bunny, though? I mean, you have to know, don't you? 

Names matter so much.

 Another Time - Zoh Amba

Want an irrefutable counter-argument against that really dumb idea I had just now? You remember it. The one about how everyone ought to fuck around with their vocals all the time? 

There you go.

 Radio - Junior Varsity

Then again...

Okay, I'll stop now.

Black Cherry Liqueur - Silver Gore

Does anyone actually like liqueurs? To me, they're always those sickly-sweet things you end up drinking at three in the morning, when everything else has run out. Or they're the garish bottles you bring back to give to people to show you went somewhere exotic, always knowing no-one is going to drink them, that they'll just stay in the back of the cabinet until years later, when someone's having a clear-out and throws them away.

Okay, just one more and it's a doozy, as no-one's said unironically since about 1972.

Boots On The Ground 

Massive Attack/Tom Waits

Tom Waits is someone else who never really features here as much as he might. I suppose the same could be said of Massive Attack. I'd have to say this sounds 90% Tom, too. If it hadn't said otherwise I'd have thought it was all him.

Tom Waits is one of those artists who's so consistent there comes a point where you think to yourself "Y'know, I think I may have enough of these now." Then something like this comes along and you realize how it's kind of a short-sighted position you've taken.

And that about wraps it up for today. I'll try to make it a bit sooner next time but no promises.

In The Event...

Just three days ago, Kay at Kay Talks Games was looking at Steam's Hidden Object Fest and saying how nice it is that the platform hosts such events for anyone that cares to put one together. I have no interest in hidden object games but the post started me thinking about how quite a few bloggers in this part of the 'sphere, myself included, jump on Next Fest just about every time it rolls around and yet hardly anyone mentions any of the other Steam "Fests" or events.

I don't even have any idea how many there are, much less what they're about. Is there always one running, every week for the whole year, except when there's a seasonal sale on? More than one? And why doesn't Steam really publicize these things? 

There's that pop-up window that appears the first time you log in that tells you about some promotion or other, usually some kind of sale from a specific publisher, but even when Next Fest runs I sometimes have to dig around a little to find it.I certainly never seem to get any emails about Steam events, whereas other publishers deluge me with press releases and promos (/wave Square Enix.)

Did you know, for example, that there are two events on right now?  One is getting the pop-up treatment and the other isn't. Unless , of course, they're taking turns.

The one in the shop-window today is Lovecraftian Days, "The fourth annual celebration of the widespread influence of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the cosmic horror genre in gaming ", hosted by Fulqrum Publishing. I'm not a big Lovecraft fan but I clicked through anyway, just to see what was there and after I pushed my way through the inevitable forest of tentacles, I came to Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.

I'm a lot more interested in Holmes than I am in Cthulhu. A 90% discount on a £39.99 game from 2023 with a Very Positive rating seemed like a tempting prospect. I was pondering on whether I'd actually get around to playing it when I spotted a banner across the top of the game's Store page. It read   

Hmm. Weird. A Sale Event within a Sale Event? What was that all about? 

So I clicked on the banner. It took me to the expanded version, which looks like this:

Half an hour's browsing later and here I am, writing about it. I have a couple of things to say and the first is, who knew there were so many crowdfunded games? 

Not me, for sure. I mean, I feel like I ought to have known but I really didn't. When I think about it, though, it seems obvious. I must read about a new fundraiser at least every few days and those are just the ones in the genres the niche gaming sites I follow feel the need to cover. Anything that's not some kind of MMO or RPG probably isn't going to ping my radar at all.

Then there's the spread. These are games old, new and yet-to-be. There are some titles in the sale that have been around for years, names you'll recognize, like My Time At Portia or Sunless Sea. There are games just about to launch that you also might recognize by name, things like Outbound or Your Crown Is Mine, both out in May. And then there are the games with no launch date at all, just "crowdfunding soon". Games from developers who, presumably, would still like you to chip in so they can get them finished. 

There were more games than I could readily evaluate. I scrolled through what seemed like hundreds of titles and didn't get to the end. I'm not sure how many crowdfunding platforms for games there are. They can't all be Kickstarters, surely?

Those were the games the event organizers were hoping you might buy or fund but of much more interest to me were the demos. I only knew there were demos because one of the sort categories is "Top Demos". I started scrolling and it went on and on. If those are the top ones it makes me wonder how many there might be with the middle and bottom ones thrown in. 

And that was when I started to wonder why we make such a big deal of Next Fest if there are always dozens of demos just waiting to be played. I like playing and reviewing demos and it's a long time between Next Fests or it can feel like it. It'd be good to have another snack of them between-times.

So I had a look at what they had and I picked a few. Not too many. I can't be sure of finding the time to play, let alone review them.  For Next Fests I usually go for six to eight but this time I settled on four,

And they are:

Lucy Dreaming - "Discover a dark family secret and rid a young girl of her nightmares in this splendidly British point & click comedy adventure. Playing as sharp-witted Lucy, explore both dreams and reality to meet all the colourful characters who'll help you solve puzzles, gather clues and find a murderer."

When it comes to games, normally I just have to see the words "British" and "Comedy" in the same sentence and I'm on to the next. It almost always means labored Monty Python or Terry Pratchett pastiches and I'd had more than enough of those by the '90s. I liked the illustration for this one, though, and the title. And it's a point&click...

I watched thirty seconds of video. It was... mildly amusing, no more than that. But much more importantly it wasn't Pythonesque. Or Pratchetty (Can that be right?) 

I heard Lucy say "I bloody love queuing, me!" and I was in. Self-deprecating irony and cultural stereotyping! Now that's British comedy! And the developers, Tall Story Games, are based in Telford, so they'd need a sense of humor....

Phoenix Springs -  "Lose yourself in Phoenix Springs – a modern point-and-click set in a mysterious neo-noir world. It begins with an investigation: find your brother Leo. You already know where it ends."

Arthouse point&click with an aggressively over-designed visual style. Featured review quotes on the Store page from the New York Times and the Guardian. Ah, I know where we are!

I'm always up for a bit of pretension and the voice-over on the trailer is deliciously dry. Just hope it doesn't take itself too seriously.

Love, Money, Rock 'n' Roll -  "the romanticism of the Eighties, mystery and intrigues, betrayal and sacrifice, hatred and passion — all this and more in the new game from the creators of the legendary visual novel Everlasting Summer!"

Didn't even look at the video. Saw the title, read the description, hit download.  

It's just as well I didn't. I have watched it now and if I'd had to listen to that caterwauling racket, I'd most likely have passed. Visuals are good though. If the story is too, maybe I'll play it with the sound off.

Habromania - "A dreamy Alice in Wonderland-inspired RPG that follows 19-year-old Alice as she tries to escape the surreal, cozy hellscape that is Wonderland—hopefully with her sanity intact."

Not even sure this one is in the event. I might have just grabbed it when I was looking at the Store before this all started, when I was checking the price of Equinox: Homecoming, whose demo (That I wanted to finish.) no longer works since the game launched. I'll almost certainly grab it if it goes on sale again at a decent discount.

Back to Habromania: it looks charming but I'm curious as to why Alice is nineteen. that seems weird. In the books she's seven, which is one hell of a leap. Would any of the story work if Alice was an adult instead of a child? Then again, there are so many versions of Alice, I guess by now she's whatever people want her to be.

And that's the lot. If I play them I promise I'll write about them but I'm not promising I'll play them. I probably will, though. I mean, how long does it take to play a demo? 

Oh, and Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened? Never did get around to buying it. 

Out But Not Down

I'm short of ideas for a proper post today, or at least ideas that won't take hours to put into words and pictures. Can't even come up with anything much that'd run to a few paragraphs and make up a Grab Bag. 

I do have a few little squibs to throw out, though. Let's see what comes of that.

Hmm. I wonder how many people reading this will know what a squib is and why someone would throw one?  I just googled it to see what would come up.  

Wikipedia has a whole piece on explosive devices as used by the military and in special effects for movies, which wasn't at all what I was thinking of. The folks at Oxford know what I'm talking about, though:

"1. a small firework that burns with a hissing sound before exploding

2. a short piece of satirical writing." 

That's exactly what I had in mind. The first one, anyway, although the second is handily close, too. Not that there's going to be a lot of satire here but a short piece of writing was exactly what I was getting, although I was using the firework as a metaphor to get there, which seems a little tautological now I come to think about it. 

When I was a child, Fireworks Night, which was what we generally called it, rather than November 5th or Guy Fawkes, was a Big Deal. I could do a whole nostalgic number here on the ritual of buying the fireworks a couple of weeks in advance, bringing them home and lining them all up on top of the piano so I could look at the brightly-colored wrappers every day and imagine setting them off...

I'll save you all that self-indulgent claptrap. The point is, on the actual night, my extended family, including my cousins, would start the evening by standing in the dark in the crazy-paved courtyard, tossing lit squibs at each others' feet. I loved to make one of my cousins scamper! 

What? No, no-one got set on fire or even singed! Well, maybe a bit singed... It was, as they say, a different time...

Where was I? Oh, yes...

 

Outbound Isn't Inbound After All

Well, it is... It'll just be a bit late.  

Remember Outbound? It's the game where you drive around some very pretty scenery in a camper van, solving mysteries of an extremely cosy nature. I played the demo in Next Fest and reviewed it here. 

I liked it. What's more, I thought it had promise. In fact, I thought it had so much promise I chose it for my imaginary game publisher, Pretty Blue Fox Games, in Wilhelm's Fantasy Gaming League. Anyone want to chip in with why I called it that? Don't google it!

Crossover readers of both blogs may remember that I was the unlikely winner of the inaugural season back in 2025. I'd love to be able to tell you I was on track to repeat my success this year but in fact I have yet to see any game I've picked launch at all. 

Outbound was going to be the first with a release date of April 23rd but there was an announcement today that launch has been delayed almost a month to May 14th. The stated reason is the late identification of "an issue... that could negatively impact your enjoyment of the game." I suppose that's a good thing. Still annoying, though.

It means my first scheduled launch will now be Mixtape on May 7th. Assuming that doesn't get put back as well. At this rate we'll be half way through the season before I have a single game on the board. And looking at the rest of my slate, I might not have many more by the end. I might ought to rethink.

 

Why Does EverQuest Legends Even Need To Be An MMORPG?

Obviously the answer is "Because it's EverQuest, dumbass!" but that's a recursive argument, isn't it? Sure, it's EverQuest but it's an EverQuest you can solo. 

Not an EverQuest where you can solo. That would be a very different concept. Or rather a very familiar one. To me, at least.

You could solo in EverQuest very effectively and enjoyably in 1999. I did and so did thousands of others. After they added custom chat channels, I was in one for a while that was dedicated to soloists and it was very busy. Nearly everyone was a Necromancer but there were a few Bards and Druids and probably a Wizard or Magician or two in there, somewhere, all soloing away happily. Okay, not always happily....

No, EverQuest Legends is supposed to be a version of EQ you can solo as in Game Over. Every last mob, quest, dungeon and even raid you'll be able to complete without any help from anyone. Mostly in instances. Where there will be only you, if that's your preference.

So why does it need to be an MMORPG? Conceptually, I mean. 

I don't have any problem with it being one. Nothing wrong with a graphical chat channel where lots of people can play the same game alongside each other and shoot the breeze as they go. People have used MMOs like that as long as there have been MMOs. 

It seems, though, that EverQuest Legends could equally well be packaged and sold as a single-player, open world RPG. An offline RPG at that. It could have co-op for grouping. After all, group size is going to be just four people and raids are only eight. The whole "Massively Multiple" part seems like overkill.

I was thinking about all that partly because I'd been reading about the upcoming Closed Beta, to which I have not been invited (And for which I would now most probably not accept an invite anyway, since there's going to be a strict NDA...) but mostly because something very similar did just happen to another would-be MMORPG. 

 

Tiny Gets Tinier

Book of Travels was an MMORPG that I never understood. From memory - and this may not be entirely accurate - it was a Kickstarted game that promised to bring some very slow gameplay to a small population of pacifists. The term "Tiny MMO" got thrown around a lot although exactly what that was supposed to mean I didn't know then and don't know now.

Unlike some Kickstarters in the genre, Book of Travels did at least get as far as Early Access, where it drifted along for the best part of five years, never really going anywhere and making about as much impact as you'd expect of something so tiny. If you're interested in the details, MassivelyOP has a history primer on the game, complete with links. 

Probably to no-one's surprise, Might and Delight, the company behind BoT (Unfortunate acronym, there. Does no-one think of these things before the press releases go out?) has finally thrown in the towel, announcing the closure of the servers (Or probably server, singular, I imagine.) on July 31st.

What is a little more surprising is that Book of Travels won't disappear altogether when the servers go dark. It will convert into an offline game, presumably one no longer even Tinily Multiple and definitely not Online.

Something very similar happened to Nightingale, a much more successful and popular game that still couldn't scratch up enough interest to justify the MMO tag. It makes me wonder how many of these MMORPG projects, Kickstarted, Indie or even occasionally with major studio backing, would have been better conceived as single-player or co-op RPGs in the first place. I mean, it's nice that they're getting a kind of after-market half-life when they fail but maybe we could have skipped the painful process of disappointment and decline and gone straight to the end result.

The odd side-effect of this particular development spiral is that, having not thought about the game for years and never having had the least interest in playing it with other people, I'm now feeling curious enough to give it a try. As an offline game it's going to retail for just $4.99 on Steam so it's hardly a big investment just to find out if there was ever anything there. 

Perhaps the really unusual decision the developers have made, though, is not only to allow modding of the game but to actively encourage it. That's starting even before the shutdown, too. I get it for the offline version but how you mod an active MMORPG beats me. Maybe it never really was an MMO to begin with?

And that's all I have. Managed to stretch it out quite nicely, I think. Just time for a closing song, as is the Grab Bag tradition. Hmm. I guess this was a Grab Bag after all...

What shall we have? Plenty of choice. This was nearly a music post, I have so many songs stored up. I thought I'd save that for Friday or Saturday, though. End the week with some bangers.

Now, when I say "bangers", does everyone know that's what we used to call these little fireworks we'd throw around, back in the day...

 I Know - Swapmeet

I literally just found that! It was in the recommends for the track I was going to use and I had a good feeling about the thumbnail. Boy, was I right!

If this was a music post I'd follow it with... 

 

idk idk idk idk idk idk idk idk - Jim Legxacy

And my work here is done! 

I swear I missed my vocation. I should have been a radio DJ. 

Progress Is An Illusion

This is barely even going to be a placeholder post so don't expect too much. Or much at all. It's only here because if it wasn't there'd be a gap where a post should be and there's been altogether too much of that sort of thing lately. 

What I'm about to talk about wouldn't normally merit a whole post of its own, either, but I'm going to see if I can eke it into one, somehow. It's a topic I'd most likely have given a couple of paragraphs to in a "What I'm Playing" post. Just a little oddity that struck me as curious enough to mention, since I'd happened upon it.

It came across it while I was playing EverQuest II on Sunday. After hitting the cap I decided, as I often do on such occasions, that it was probably about time I sorted my bags. It's not as if I keep them tidy at the best of times but in a leveling frenzy I tend to let anything and everything fall into inventory, to be sorted out later. After a while it turns into a problem that can't be ignored.

One nice feature that came with the Rage of Cthurath expansion was the Illusion Keyring. Even more useful than the Petamorph Keyring we got with the expansion before that, I guess, because everyone can use illusions but only pet classes use Petamorph wands. (Probably. Don't quote me on that. Cf the rest of this post.)

EQII is very generous with illusions. They come to you from all directions; holiday events, collections, crafting and quests are among the many possibilities sources. The problem is, apart from the spells that some classes get, illusions are all attached to items that take up inventory. I have a ton of the things stashed in banks and I keep plenty more - the ones I always think I might use - in various characters' bags.

But of course I never do use them because it would take me an hour to find any of the ones I wanted. Even the thought makes me not want to bother, so I don't.

The exact same thing used to happen with Petamorph wands. At best I'd keep one on hand and make do with that but unless I had a particularly annoying pet, I wouldn't even do that much. I'd just put up with whatever dumb-looking undead or elemental or beast my current best-in-class spell gave me, however hideous to look at or annoying to listen to it was.

Actually, that's not 100% true. There's another mechanic that was added who knows how long ago, whereby you can set any of the appearances attached to any of the pet spells to which you have access to be the look of the one you're actually using. I used to do that, long ago, but when I picked up with Mordita again last year, it'd been a while since I played a pet class and until I started typing this paragraph I'd completely forgotten it was a thing you could do. (Cf the rest of this post.)

And it needs to be a thing because some of the pets you get are blimmin' annoying!. Some of them are so big you can barely see what they're fighting, for a start. I hate that. 

Again, you get a spell to do something about it - Shrink Pet or some such - but I've been forgetting  to use that one, too. There was a time when I'd cast it automatically every time I summoned a pet but that was a long time ago. Use your skills, folks, or you will lose them!

More annoying than being too big is being too noisy. Or too flappy. Or both. Pets of all kinds in EQII, cosmetic or combat, come with a full set of animations and behaviors, which is great for authenticity and ambience, sure, but also fricken' annoying, when you have to listen to them grunt or whinny or bark for the ten thousandth time or when they're flying around your head, making a noise like a broken umbrella in a thunderstorm and getting in your line of sight every two seconds.

Mordita's best tank pet is hideously ugly and it's asthmatic. It groans and wheezes all the time. You wouldn't want it anywhere near you if you had the choice, which you don't. All pets of every stripe in EQII love to cling to you as closely as they can, shuffling around to be near to you every time you move. I had a cat like that once and I had to give it away to someone who appreciated the attention.

Having Petamorph wands on a Keyring means I have all the ones I own, ready to hand and easy to find. Granted, I still have to mouse over them to see what they are but at least they're all in the same place. Before the Keyring, I tried doing something similar by keeping them all in one backpack but I begrudged the space and anyway they always ended up in the wrong place no matter how I tried to keep them together.

So, anyway, to get back to the point, back in the  last expansion, the arrival of the Petamorph Keyring meant I suddenly got interested in Petamorph Wands in a way I never had been before. I went through everyone's inventory, sent them all to Mordita and I even did some holiday quests just to get new ones. Mord hooked them onto her keyring and now she uses them all the time, swapping from one sort of pet to another as the mood takes her.

The addition of the Illusion Keyring means I'm just beginning to do the same thing with all the illusion items I've picked up over the years. And there are a lot, not least because it seems every quest that includes a bit where you have to pretend to be something other than yourself leaves the item in your inventory to keep forever. 

I went through Mord's bags and added all the ones I could find in there, then I went through the shared bank looking for the good ones I'd left for everyone on the team to grab, which of course none of them ever did...

And about now, I'm betting you're thinking this is a post about appearance items, aren't you? Yes, well, it probably would have been, if I'd thought of that at the start, but I didn't. This is just some scene-setting aside that got out of hand.

The only reason I mentioned it was to put a bit of context on why I was going through Mordita's stuff so carefully in the first place. I was clearing her bags, as I said, and one reason I tend to avoid doing it for far too long is that it means examining every single item and making an assessment of its worth and usefulness. It's fun for about an hour and then it's progressively less fun and unfortunately an hour barely clears a couple of bags these days. Bags in EQII are big.

After a while, I was done with the illusion items and I'd moved on to checking for gear upgrades. I'd picked up a few things before I dinged that you had to be 135 to use, so there were some good ones. Most of the decision were very straightforward: check the Resolve. If it's higher, swap it in.

As I was going through them all, though, I came across a couple of items that seemed slightly unusual. They had an extra line of description for a start. It read

 "An upgraded version of this item can be purchased from the Norrathian Armory Merchant Sirius". 

And it had a passive effect. Sick Star II, that adds 32.5 Fervor.

I couldn't recall seeing anything like that before so I googled it. And guess what? There's a whole feature that got added to the game back in July 2024 that I've never even heard of!

It's called the Norrathian Armory and there was a press release about it at the time. It explains the whole thing. The tl:dr is that it's a cash shop deal that lets you share specific items across the account. You buy a token from the cash shop and then your alts can use it to buy any of the items you've found as a drop.

Bloody stupid idea if you ask me. It's Heirloom items you have to pay real money for, as far as I can see. Granted, the items are better than Heirloom items would be but even so...

My point, though, isn't to moan on about Darkpaw trying to screw a few extra dollars out of the hardcore. This isn't the official forums. That's the name of the game when the name of your game is EverQuest II, anyway; when most of your money comes from the same few thousand people. 

No, my point is how very complicated older MMORPGs become and how very easy it is for even regular players to miss whole features and mechanics. You just have look away for a minute and there you are, out of touch.

It's lack of knowledge of these kinds of systems that puts new and returning players at such a huge disadvantage. Hard to know what you don't know. And even when you do know it, hard to know if it's worth knowing.

Here's another one I found while going through my loot. Several pieces of armor in my bags that were upgrades for me came with the note

 "This item may be converted to an alternate version using Matter Mallea". 

Really? Converted to what alternate version? And what is Matter Mallea? None of it meant anything to me but apparently it's a feature that came with the Rage of Cthurath expansion. As per the wiki, it exists "primarily to allow players to convert excess blue stat Critical Bonus into much-needed additional orange stat Critical Bonus Overcap". 

Riight...

As for the Matter Mallea itself, it's "crafted by players, from uncommon recipes that drop from the Cthurath-era Invaders of The Unknown Public Quests scattered across lvl 110+ Norrath zones (and The Unknown) ". I guess if I'd done any PQs in this expansion, I'd probably have known that.

The idea seems to be that committed players will have hit the cap on Crit Bonus and will be willing to pay in cash to convert the wasted points to Crit Bonus Overcap. That raises a whole load of awkward questions for me, like for example, how many non-hardcore players even know there is a cap on Crit Bonus, let alone what the cap is? And more importantly, why even have a cap if you're then going to create another stat that raises it? Why not just raise the cap?

Those last couple of questions have been answered by the devs already, I'm pretty sure. I vaguely remember reading about the logic of it a few years ago. But who can keep up with all this stuff? Clearly not me.

It's no wonder returning players tend to bounce. And it's no wonder the most popular server is Anashti Sul, the Origins server. The quasi-Classic ruleset there is so much easier to understand. Everything makes more sense. And there's a lot less catching-up to do.

The other side of that coin, of course, is that on Anashti Sul, a casual player most likely has to work harder and take more care just to do regular content. As I've been saying, on Live, at least as a Necromancer, nothing puts up much of a challenge even when you aren't especially well-geared, even as a soloist. Those complicated systems and mechanics designed to min-max your combat efficiency don't really mean all that much when you're winning all the fights easily already.

The main effect unfamiliar mechanics have on me is to make me curious. I don't like people writing mysterious messages on my boots. I want to know what they mean. Over the years I've invested quite a lot of time, learning how to use systems that I probably could have quite safely ignored. It's fun learning but a lot less fun using what I've learned.

The evidence is right there in my thousands of storage slots - all those arcane materials and devices I used to think I needed but never quite got around to using. I threw a few of them out on Sunday but then I decided better safe than sorry so I woke up someone I hadn't seen for a while and told her to store them for me. In the end, that always seems like the easier option and EQII gives you so much storage space.

Speaking of which, Mordita has over two hundred free slots in her inventory now. Should be good for a couple of weeks before she needs another clear-out. There's no knowing what she might find then...