There's No Motivation...

It's Week Four of Blaugust and we're into Staying Motivated Week. Krikket was kind enough to post a list of questions back when all this started and I think I'm just going to answer them. Sounds like that'll just take a lowish level of motivation, which is about as much as I can summon up today.

Here they are in bullet point format:

• What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?
• What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?
• What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals?
• What drives you to blog?
• Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?
• How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall?
• Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them!

You know what? I'm going to replace those bullet points with numbers.

1. What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?
2. What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?
3. What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals?
4. What drives you to blog?
5. Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?
6. How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall?
7. Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them!

Is that better? I think it makes the whole thing look more official, don't you?

1.  What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?

Well, one thing I do is mess around with the form to keep myself amused. Like, I might take a set of questions, copy them, paste them, look at them and think "Those would be easier to answer if they were numbered." Which, obviously, they wouldn't, so that's an affectation. Then I'd cut and paste them a second time and change the bullet points to numbers. And then I'd write something about how that's what I'd done, as if it mattered.

It's completely pointless but it's fun. Doing things like Sidebars, Footnotes and Edits, having an imaginary conversation with myself or the imagined reader, interrupting the flow, using tenses that don't seem to sit well together and figuring out how to make them work grammatically, getting all meta and self-referential and generally arsing about. All those keep me motivated.

Also, ignoring the question I've been asked and answering the one I thought I'd been asked or that I wished I'd been asked. That's a good one. And writing the post that wants to be written instead of the post I thought I wanted to write.  Never be afraid to take a hard turn into something you hadn't planned to post about. 

That's actually a serious point, that last one. Look, I've highlighted it to make it stand out, so it must be. Also, playing around with the fonts and the colors is another good one. I don't do that often enough.

As for tricks, when something other than writing a post feels impossible, I don't know! What d'you think this is? Therapy?

2.  What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?

Hmm. Do I have blogging goals?  I'm not at all sure that I do. I think I had some, once. I probably started out hoping that someone would read what I posted and leave a comment. And then that happened and for a while I hoped more people would read and comment. And that happened. And then I kind of stopped caring so much about al of that and instead what I mostly hoped was that the same people who were already reading and commenting wouldn't stop. Which has mostly happened although if I go back and look at comments of years past, it's unsettling how many regulars just disappear. Luckily, new ones appear to take their place. Sometimes.

As far as all of that goes, Blaugust is, if anything, counterproductive to my goals. I've said before that while I don't trust any of the stats I get from Google and Blogger, they can at least be compared against themselves for consistency and what they tell me every year is that fewer people seem to look at this blog during Blaugust than at almost any other time. 

I'm not saying it's my participation that causes it so much as that, when Blaugust comes around, there are more posts for everyone to read and attention gets stretched thin. I find myself reading more widely but less deeply. I'm skim-reading posts on blogs I normally read in full and slipping posts on blogs I usually skim. I bet a lot of other people are, too.

You might think that any loss of attention from regular readers would be more than made up for by the influx of new ones from all those extra Blaugust blogs but I get the strong feeling almost none of those bloggers pay attention to this blog at all. Certainly few of them leave comments, this year or any year. And I suspect, from things they say one their own blogs, that they don't much care for the more traditional, long-form, comment-enabled gaming blogs. Why should they? It's just a bunch of old people, posting about old-people stuff, in an old-people sort of way.

So, no, I don't think participating in Blaugust is getting me much closer to where I want to be but it would be a lot easier to tell for sure if I had any idea where that was. Which I don't. Not really. I guess I mostly just want to stay where I am and not go anywhere in particular.

 

3.  What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals? 

Didn't we just cover that in the last question? I haven't got any... oh, wait! Blaugust goals. Not blogging goals. Geez. Good thing this isn't an exam. Remember how the teachers always used to say the most important thing is to read the question?

Okay then. Blaugust goals. Well, I started out saying I wasn't going to aim for 31 posts, which is exactly what I said last year, and then, again just like last year, I ended up doing precisely that. I've posted every day so far and I've made some considerable efforts to do do it, too. Apparently I can give advice about taking it easy and not getting wrapped up in hitting the numbers but I'm completely incapable of following it. As if that's news.

If we accept that 31 posts is a goal, even though I said it wasn't, (And we should because by their actions, not by their words, shall ye know them (Which sounds like a quote because of the archaic way I phrased it, with a "ye" even, but in fact I just made it up...)) then I guess I'll get the knowledge that, once again, I've proved I can stick at a pointless task for as long as it takes to finish it, even if I've said I wasn't going to do it in the first place. Go me!

If I'd said up front that I was going to post 31 times, I guess it would be a data point towards my being able to keep a promise, stick to a plan and generally do what I say I'll do.All of which would be good things. But since I specifically said I wasn't going to do that, I guess it suggests I can't be trusted.

In fact, if I was going to complete my Blaugust goal, (I still have a week to go so let's not tally the hens just yet.) I'd need to make sure there's at  least one day in what's left of August when I don't post anything. Then I' really would have completed my only goal. But what would I get out of that? I bet I'd be really annoyed with myself. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get anything positive out of it. So I'm going to try not to do it.

Hit my goal by missing a post, that is. Was that not clear? 

4. What drives you to blog? 

Ooh! An easy one! A love of the sound of my own voice, obviously. That, plus an innate ability to sit in front of a keyboard and have words spew out of my fingertips without even thinking about it. If I found any of this hard, do you think I'd do it? Half the posts on this blog are about how much I hate a challenge. I like things that are easy and blogging is really, really easy. Not blogging would be a lot harder.

As for why I blog rather than, say, keep a diary or write in a journal, it's much the same reason: it's easy. Blogger does most of the work for me. I just have to write the words and stick in the pictures and it's a lot easier to do in Blogger than it would be writing it all out longhand and pasting the pictures into a scrapbook. 

Plus I like getting comments and chatting to people about what I've written and what they've written. There's a social element. You don't get that with a diary or a journal. Also, a blog is a diary and a journal, so it's a threefer.

 

5.  Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?

Hmm. Am I happy with my Blaugust? My Blaugust? I guess so, if by that we mean what I've done. I've lied to myself about not intending to post 31 times but I didn't believe my own lies so that's good. I've posted two dozen times in two dozen days, so that's good. I haven't posted anything I'd call desperate just to keep the streak going, so that's good. 

If we mean am I happy with my experience of Blaugust overall, then in Steam review terms I think I'd have to give it a "Mixed". It's certainly been better than last year, when I got quite pissed off with the whole thing for a while and finished thinking it might be the last time I bothered with it. I've also learned a few things, about Blaugust and myself, but I'd better keep those for Lessons Learned Week. I'd hate to talk out of turn.

Blaugust, generally, has always been quite vexing, anyway. I'm not at all sure happiness is an emotional state I'd associate with it to begin with. Am I satisfied might be a more pertinent question. And yes, so far, I think I am.

6.  How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall? 

Back to that again? This is all getting a bit goal-oriented, isn't it? Not to say goal-obsessed. I feel I'm at risk of repeating myself, although when has that ever bothered me? 

I'd say in the most general terms I like to have some vague idea of what I'm trying to achieve but not much more than that. I don't do goals, in the sense of specific outcomes, other than for practical issues where it can't be avoided. 

For those, it's extremely important to reach them as quickly and effectively as possible because then they go away. In life, as a whole, I prioritize the completion of goals that either have to be done by a specific deadline (And I very, very rarely miss a deadline.) or by how much I don't want to do them. The more I don't want to do something that, for practical reasons, I can't get out of doing, the sooner and the faster I get it done. 

That's for unavoidable necessities, though. I'm very much not in the habit of inventing "personal goals". I have things I fancy doing and I do them if I remember and when I feel like it. If I don't do them, who cares? Not me, that's for sure. I'm very happy with giving up on any project at any stage if I've lost interest or if something more exciting comes along. Usually, if that happens, and it happens often, I'll never think about whatever it was again. 

If I do remember it at some point, I might go back and carry on or I might just think "Oh, yeah, that was a thing I was going to do. Oh, well..." and put it back in the forget-about-it box. That's a great box. If you don't have one, you should get one.

 

7.  Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them! 

I do have one. I bookmarked it to use as the springboard for a post of my own and I may well write that post at some point but I'll throw in a link to it now.

It's a post by Bongo Twisty, one of the few new blogs I've discovered this Blaugust that I've really enjoyed. It's called "How do you know if someone hates AI?" and it sums up my own feelings on the controversy very well indeed. Go read it.

Better yet, go read the Substack post by Cedric that Bongo Twisty quotes. Cedric makes a number of excellent points about why the policing of AI in blog posts is likely to be more problematic than the AI usage itself. Worth bearing in mind for next year's Blaugust, I think.

I particularly liked the bit at the end, where Cedric informs Substack of the numerous ways their side-step into the role of Internet Policeman violates his legal rights under the EU's extremely serious GDPR legislation. I have to comply with that at work and I can tell you it is not something you want to mess with.

While we're on the subject, I'd suggest reading some Philip K Dick. Or Kazuo Ishiguro 's Klara and the Sun for a bit of perspective. Or maybe get one of those bags of flour you draw a face on and treat like a baby for a week. Only instead of a face, write the name of your most-hated AI on there instead.

There we go. Questionnaire complete. Did I pass?

Notes on AI used in this post.

I had a bit of a problem with the part where I changed the bullet points to numbers. Blogger kept indenting the numbered list too much so I copy-pasted the html into Gemini and asked it to explain what was wrong, which it did. Then Gemini asked if I'd like it to re-write the html for me so it would work properly and i said I would, thanks. 

I copy-pasted Gemini's version into Blogger and that didn't work either so I reverted to the old version and hand-altered it according to what Gemini had said was wrong with it and that worked perfectly. Which means there's no actual AI-generated content in this post, not even in the html, but there is the faint trace of some AI advice still hanging around like a miasma. 

I wonder if there's an AI detector that can catch something like that? The lingering scent of an AI that passed through, leaving no digital trace? If not, maybe we'd better all just give up on the internet altogether. We're never going to be certain what's human ever again, are we? 

Also, I used Snapedit to remove a few bits of UI from a couple of the screenshots. But as I've said before, I'm not convinced that's real AI. 

 

Duskwood By Night

 Since I knew I was going to be working on Sunday, on Saturday evening, after I'd come home from work, had tea, played with Beryl and caught up with my bloglog (That's a portmanteau I just now came up with for a backlog of blogs. Think it'll catch on? No, me neither.) I figured I'd better at least make a start on preparing a post for tomorrow. That's today if you're reading this on the day I'll be posting it. I think those are the right tenses. Don't you just love grammar?

I'd already decided on a screenshot post showcasing the new region, Duskmoor, the one got added to Neverness To Everness with the most recent update. I was thinking that, thanks to the miracle of GeForce Now, I could run around Duskmoor in bed on my laptop, a sentence wide open to misinterpretation, I know, but we're all gamers here, aren't we? I'm sure everyone knows what I mean.

  Once I got into the game and opened the map to figure out where to go first, it occurred to me right away that the obvious thing to do would be to visit all the Rero Boxes (Red phone booths.) and open up the teleport system for the new map. There are only three of them so it oughtn't to have taken long. (There go those tenses again...)

Except, as noted, Duskmoor is fricken huge! I started jogging towards the first box from where I left Flora last time, which was  at the entrance to the Fogden instance, then I realized it was a kilometer and a half away.

 I'm in the habit of running everywhere in Hetherau, by which  mean I open the map, locate the teleport location nearest to wherever it is I want to go, port there and jog the rest of the way. You can teleport to all sorts of things in NTE, not just the Rero Boxes, so there's usually something close by.

At least, there is in the city. Duskmoor is very much not in the city. Duskmoor is out of town and it's about 90% forest and lake, as far as I can tell, with a tourist and resort strip along the coast and not a whole hell of a lot of civilization anywhere else. 

But it does have highways. And I do have a car. I don't use it much but I have one. And I can drive it. Not very well, I'll grant you, but well enough to get around.

 I whistled for my trusty steed and along the road it came. With no-one at the wheel. How does that work? An Anomaly, I imagine. If anything odd happens in Hethereau, there's always an Anomaly behind it.

I got in and started to drive and in about ten seconds I realized why it is that Flora goes everywhere on foot. If only that unseen Anomaly could drive the car when she was in it, too. 

But wait! Maybe it can!

There's an auto-drive option. I've tried it before and never got it to work but there's always a first time. 

I hit the key to put the car into auto-drive and for the first time it I didn't get an error message about not having a target. The car set off down the road without Flora's hands on the wheel. It was night and we were careening along at top speed but fortunately traffic was light, although not, as it turned out, nearly light enough.

 I learned a few things on my trip through Duskwood.

1. Autodrive requires you to set a target destination before engaging. That's what I'd been doing wrong all those other times. 
2. Having the car drive itself does not mean you smash into other vehicles. In fact, on this evidence, I'd say it's even more reckless than Flora.
3. If you get out of your car and leave it in the middle of the road, a huge traffic jam will form behind it, even if it would be easy and legal for them all just to pass. Also, NPC drivers get really cross if you do that. 

 Even using auto-drive, which was a lot more efficient than having Flora take the wheel, even allowing for the collisions, it still took quite a while to drive the route that took me past all three Rero Boxes. I wasn't timing it but I'd guess it was something like fifteen or twenty minutes, counting the time Flora spent getting out and going to the boxes, all of which were very close to the road.

There was surprisingly little to see other than some very lovely scenery. Even the spots where the boxes were didn't seem to have a lot going on. It wasn't entirely clear why someone would have taken the trouble to place them there in the first place.

 The oddest thing I found was a ramp, clearly designed for a car to run up at speed so it could launch itself over a cliff. Flora walked up it and peered over the edge and decided it looked like a sure way to kill yourself in  blazing car wreck so she declined to do a solo Thelma and Louise and moved on.

I'm guessing it had something to do with the racing circuit that came with the update. Indeed, the whole of the extensive Duskwood highway system, which appears to be serving no-one and nothing, might be there just for the purpose of giving people somewhere new to race. It certainly seems a more realistic plan than setting up new courses in the city itself.

 And that was all I had time for, other than to jog through the woods to take a look at a tall steel pylon, which turned out to be frustratingly just beyond the limits of the explorable area. It immediately made me wonder if further expansion in that direction is planned because if not, why put the damn thing there at all?

All of that took place at night, as you can see from the pictures I took (The new "Hide UI" toggle, now available on F7, makes it so much easier to take quick snapshots.) so it's highly likely I missed something. I could have changed the time to make it daylight but I was so involved in what I was doing (You can call it immersed, if you must.) that I forgot it was an option. 

So far, I can't say I have a very clear idea what Duskwood is for. It's big and it's beautiful but what does it do? Then again, maybe it doesn't need to do anything. Maybe it just needs to be. 

Good advice for us all.  

She's One Smart Cookie

Is it still Creator Appreciation Week? I think it might be. Or if it isn't, it was on Friday, which was when I started this post.

I'm going to throw a little appreciation at Neverness To Everness but not to the whole team, much though they deserve it. I think it's already apparent how much I appreciate their work from all the highly complimentary posts I've been writing about the game since it started.

No, I'm going to be a little more specific, although by no means as specific as I'd like to be. I want to say how much I appreciate both whoever it is that writes the dialog for Zero aka The Appraiser aka Coco aka the Player Character aka Flora (In my case only, that last one.)

Gacha games are unusual in that they have a central character that's simultaneously very clearly the avatar of the player, in the way a character in an MMORPG would be, but also a scripted NPC in terms of the main storyline. PCs in MMORPGs can do pretty much whatever they like, central characters in RPGs have to operate within very specific parameters but gacha leads get to walk a middle path.

That puts them in a very awkward place when it comes to relatability. They can either go the Silent Protagonist route, all nods and eye rolls, or they can be fully scripted. Both choices have their attendant risks. Both risk alienating the player if the balancing trick doesn't come off.

I used to be very firmly in the Silent Protagonist camp. I felt quite strongly about my characters having words put in their mouth. I'd much rather only hear them talking in my imagination than have to listen to someone else getting it wrong out loud.

In a fully scripted RPG, it's only a problem if the writing or the voice acting is really bad. There, you know you aren't playing your own character. You're not really "playing" a character at all. You're just steering one around the screen. You're borrowing them. You don't own them. You're not them. They have their own agenda. Your job is to facilitate them in achieving their goals.

 

In an MMORPG, conversely, even if the character you're playing is given lines to speak, you're most likely going to ignore them. Your character is either yours or it's you, depending on perspective. The great majority of the time, you won't be interacting with NPCs in conversation anyway, nor choosing responses in cut scenes; you'll be killing monsters and chatting to your friends and guildmates.

Gacha open world rpgs, though, kind of straddle the fence. There's a strong, linear storyline that's going to take up a good deal of your time but there are also countless other activities in which you'll be either alone or with NPCs. A lot of those won't involve much talking but some will and the ones that do are likely to be the more interesting ones, like the ones where you get to hang out with your imaginary friends and just chat.

It gets even more confusing when the game uses the peculiar convention of the genre that sees you naming a character in Character Creation, only to find all the NPCs calling them something completely different. This is an annoying but supposedly necessary function of many voice-acted games, where clearly the voice actors can't magically enunciate the names of thousands and thousands of player-made characters so a generic substitute (Like "Commander" in Guild Wars 2.) has to to stand in for whatever the character calls themselves. 

I'm surprised, all the same, that with modern technology that can't be improved. Maybe that would be an acceptable use of in-game AI: to slot the player character's name, correctly enunciated, into pre-recorded dialog.

It already happens with text dialog, of course. Occasionally NPCs will even ask you what you'd like them to call you. And then sometimes they forget and call you something else anyway!

The whole thing is prone to both confusion and frustration. If you find yourself stuck playing a character who keeps saying things you can't imagine "your" character saying, it not only breaks immersion, it can break your relationship with your own character, too. It's probably even worse when you have to listen to "your" character talking in a voice that sounds absolutely nothing like the voice you hear in your head.

 

I'm extremely pleased to say that not only does none of that happen for me in Neverness To Everness but that everything that Flora says and everything about the way she says it rings completely true to her character, as I imagine it. 

The Appraiser, a job title I have come to like very much in the past few months, since it really does seem to describe what she does, maintains a deliciously dry, skeptical attitude to pretty much everything. She's never cynical or dismissive but neither does she take anything at face value. She's always alert for nuance and subtext and she can spot it lurking in the floweriest language. 

People do not easily fool The Appraiser. Appraisa  l isn't just her job; it's a core aspect of her personality. She can spot a scam or a con almost before it starts and she's ever alert for someone presenting themselves as something other than what they really are.

Some of this is expressed in the kind of mildly questioning response you might give to a friend who's telling a story you feel might be a little exaggerated. You can imagine her raising one eyebrow as she does it although I'm not sure NTE's animations quite run to that yet.

What really reveals the depth of her skepticism, though, are the internal monologues. The Appraiser frequently runs what someone has just said through her internal monitoring system and we get to hear her thoughts. That's when I sometimes laugh out loud.

All of that is in the writing. I don't know if the same person handles all the main character's dialog or whether duties vary but however it's done, so far it's been extremely consistent. I would absolutely love to be able to offer my appreciation to the individual writer or writers responsible but as is almost always the case, there's no direct accreditation. 

I just tried googling it and Gemini tells me "Specific individual writer credits for the player character's (the Appraiser / Esper Zero) dialogue in Neverness to Everness have not been publicly named by Hotta Studio". Exactly as I expected.

 

If I could make a single change to RPGs and MMORPGs it would be to add the writer's credits to the text that shows up in the quest journal. It would be so easy to do and it would allow players to follow writers in games just as they can in other media. If any game does it, though, I've never seen it.

It's a lot easier to find out the name of the voice actors who bring your favorite characters to life. I'm not sure why that should be, other than that writers tend to be bottom of the heap when it comes to respect in almost all collaborative media. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, write books. At least there you get your name on the cover.

The voice artist for the female version of The Appraiser is Suzie Yeung and she does a superb job. She hits  just the right tone; confident and yet somehow still a little uncertain, friendly and caring, yet slightly reserved. She gets that "...erm... really? Are you sure about that?" skepticism down perfectly. There's no conflict whatever between Flora's voice as I hear it in my head and how it comes out of the speakers. Suzie Young is Flora now.

There is always a risk in getting attached to a particular vocal rendition of a character in an online game, as I saw - or rather heard - to my annoyance in GW2. Sometimes actors move on to other jobs or can't be booked for certain updates because of scheduling conflicts. Or the studio for some reason doesn't choose to keep using them. It's jarring when a character you're familiar with starts talking differently, especially when it's your character.

I hope that never happens to The Appraiser. Long may Suzie Yeung keep speaking for her. And long may whoever it is that's putting words in her mouth keep doing that, too! 

6-5 - Mint To Serve...

 Summer's here! No, wait, that's not right... summer's nearly over. But not in Hethereau!

It does seem odd, dropping a summer-themed update in late August, but then a lot of games do it. It seems even odder when you consider that the big Summer Break in virtually all the regions where these games are played is just about to come to an end in a couple of weeks, whereas the beach-themed content is likely to be with us for a month and a half, well into the start of the new school year.

Of course, it's not only kids or even college students who play these games but given the kind of events and activities that feature in many of them, it's hard not to believe that's the target audience. If it was intended to appeal to an older demographic, there'd be a lot more alcohol involved.

The new update for Neverness To Everness brings a bunch of seaside fun, as I mentioned in a post a week or so ago. What I didn't mention then, because I didn't know, is that the seaside resort where it all takes place is in a new part of the city. 

The district is called Duskmoor, which doesn't sound remotely like anywhere you'd go to eat ice-cream and stroll along the promenade. It's described as "a vast mountainous region north of the Miguel District" and they are not kidding. It's gigantic, although I suspect a lot of it is open country.

I'd be a bit more authoritative but I've only taken a quick look so far and that was on the laptop, in bed the other night, so I don't even have the few screenshots I took, near to hand. (And I'm too lazy to go into the bedroom, power up the laptop and mail them to myself...)

 

I didn't do anything while I was there anyway, other than run all the way to the Wertheimer Tower to register the teleport and get the region opened on my map, which was when it became immediately obvious just how big the place is. It's damn near as big as all the rest of the districts put together. I'm very much looking forward to exploring the whole thing.

But first there's a story to get through. I started it this morning although that wasn't my plan. What I was going to do was try out some of the new summer events and I did, for a while, starting with the volleyball because when I logged in the intro quest for it, Jade Star, was already up on my tracker. 

I have no idea why it was there. I must have been looking at it when I was on the laptop, I imagine, although I can't remember doing it. Anyway, Flora was in Duskwood, next to the Anomaly Tower, and the blue quest marker was pointing towards the beach half a kilometer away, so I just went with it. I was curious, anyway, to see how this volleyball thing was going to work.

I did wonder if it might be player vs player. It's very easy to forget, but NTE is a an online co-op title and it seems a four-person sport like beach volleyball would be a perfect fit for four-person co-op. 

It might be yet, for all I know, but that's not how the event starts out.

Sidebar: By a synchronicitous co-incidence, a very odd thing happened as I was running through Duskwood today. A window popped up on screen, asking me if I wanted to accept a request from someone called Jana to join me in my world. This is the first time anything like that's happened since I started playing the game. I had no idea it was even possible. Jana was waiting for a Yes or No but the whole thing took me completely by surprise and I just stared at the pop-up, not responding, trying to figure out what was happening, until the timer ran down and it vanished. Sorry, Jana.

After it was gone I rummaged around in the settings until I found the section that tells you who else is playing and allows you to set parameters on invites. You can have Private, Friends or Confirmation Required. I had no idea any of that was there until this morning. I considered setting it to Private but in the end, considering I've only had one in several months, I figured I might as well leave it as it was. Next time, if there ever is one, I might even accept a request, just to see what happens. It might be someone wanting to play volleyball...

The volleyball event starts with a conversation with someone going by the highly unlikely name of Uncle Loong. I know, thanks to playing the MMORPG Loong many years ago, that a loong is some kind of traditional Chinese dragon. Any time I meet an NPC in a game and they have a name like that, it makes me suspicious. 

I don't think "Uncle" Loong is a dragon in human form but you can never be sure. As to whose uncle he might be, your guess is as good as Flora's. He looks about twenty-two, though, so that makes me even more suspicious...

Whoever or whatever he is, he sets you up for a warm-up match so you can learn how the game is played and show him how good you are. You need a partner but luckily Mint volunteers so fast you don't even have time to finish asking her. 

She's there in a nanosecond, dressed for the part. I had actually been wondering if Flora was going to have to play beach volleyball dressed in her pant-suit. She looked bad enough trotting along the sand dressed that way, weaving between all the beachgoers in their bikinis and cut-offs. Luckily, once the game starts, Flora magically re-appeared, dressed in some suitable beach-wear I had no idea she owned. It's absolutely hideous but that's by-the-by.

The game itself has quite a few controls to master. I haven't yet mastered any of them. By the time I'd played two matches, I just about knew how to serve and that was it. 

The Warm-Up is the lowest possible level of difficulty and I still only won one of the two maches. The first was a close-run thing that Mint and Flora eventually won 9-7. You need to get to seven and then be two points clear for a victory.

 

In the second match we were doing much better. We served to open and I seemed to have gotten the hang of that to the extent that we were 6-1 up by the time we lost serve. Unfortunately, I very much had not gotten the hang of returning serve, so we lost our massive lead and ended up losing 8-6. 

At that point I felt like I'd probably had enough beach volleyball for the time being. It seemed like something I'd probably be able to get to be at least passable at, with practice, but I wasn't convinced I had the motivation. It is fun and it's beautifully animated. I could do without Mint apologizing every time she misses a shot but other than that I enjoyed it a fair bit.

I was very surprised to find, when I spoke to Uncle Loong again, that we'd somehow met with his satisfaction, despite only winning one match. The quest completed and immediately another replaced it, telling Flora she needed to go to Eibon right away. So she did.

That turned out to be the start of the new Main Story Quest. I spent the next hour and a half on it and it was excellent. But that's a tale for another post. 

Reaching Too Far?

 Well, that was a bit of a surprise. A pleasant one, too. I finally managed to get in and play some Stars Reach and guess what? I quite enjoyed it.

I played for about an hour and a half. Maybe a little more. I didn't time it and I can't remember exactly how long I already had on my Steam counter, which carried over from the pre-alpha.  

As well it might. They can call it Early Access if they like. (They are calling it Early Access.) They can sell expensive Founders Packs (They are selling expensive Founders Packs.) but anyone who was in the pre-alpha test can see it's basically the same build.

Although not exactly. Or at least, not for me. I didn't bother to log in for the last couple of hefty pre-alpha updates so some significant aspects were new to me. 

For a start, there's a proper introductory sequence now. There have been several but none of them really looked like the sort of thing you'd expect to see before a game begins. This one does.

 It has a simple narrative that, for the first time, explains clearly and simply where the game takes place, how your character got there and what's expected of them. It also has a hint of a suggestion, right at the end, that there could even be some kind of plot lurking somewhere in the background. I thought Playable Worlds were above little things like narratives and plotlines but maybe not.

It helps that they've gone with a visual style for the intro that really works for me, a kind of comic book crossed with children's educational publishing aesthetic and it works very well. My compliments to the graphic designer.  

The introduction is over quite quickly and then it's on to Character Creation. Yes, it exists! It's pretty basic by modern standards but it would have looked decent enough fifteen or twenty years ago, which does seem to be the era of gaming Stars Reach is looking to emulate. 

I wanted to be a cat-person, of course, but I couldn't remember the name of the race and when I scanned down the list I missed it so I ended up making one of the demon-types, the ones with the horns. I got mine to a state where I was quite pleased with her before I realised she wasn't, in fact, a cat. They do look pretty similar. Ears, horns, what's the diff?

Since it had only taken a few minutes, I tried again. The cats are at the bottom of the list, it turns out, and they don't have exactly the same options as the demons so there is a bit of variety there. 

Weirdly, I couldn't find any option to change either hair or eye color, which you'd think would be a given in any character creation process. You could pick your hair color in EverQuest almost thirty years ago. Conversely, you can change jaw lines and cheek bones, although not by much. Still, it seems odd you can morph your bone structure that but you can't change your hair color. 

Maybe the option is there, somewhere. I might just have missed it. That'd be a lot easier to believe than that it isn't there at all. In 2026.

After that it's into the Controls Tutorial in the metal tunnels. It's completely arbitrary and pointless in any narrative sense. I think the ship we were in got attacked or something? The whole thing is only there to explain WASD, Crouch and Jump and it's been pared down to an absolute minimum now so if there ever was any story to it, it's long gone. That takes about fifteen seconds and then you're on Haven for the real Tutorial.

I've always had a problem with Haven and it's only gotten worse as they've improved things. The trouble with Haven is that it's precisely what the name suggests: a lovely, comfortable, safe place. They keep tweaking it and it gets nicer and nicer. Why would anyone want to leave?

At some point since I last played, it must have received a substantial makeover. In the current build, it's very impressive visually and also much larger than it used to be. The grass is deep and lush, there are flowers everywhere, snow-capped mountains loom in the distance and to cap it all there are now giant arches of rock soaring over the town. It's spectacular.

What's more, it's entirely explorable. Those impossible ellipses, tens of thousands of tons of rock hanging in the air, suspended by nothing, so terrifying above your head? You can climb them and look down on the city from the clouds. I did and it was the single most interesting thing I've done in Stars Reach since it began.

Haven is the sort of place I'd love to explore in depth and detail. It would make a seriously satisfying zone for any MMORPG. And they've just thrown it away as a one-time only tutorial area. The Mayor makes a point of telling you, as he gives you the Key to Space, that once you leave you can never come back. 

If I was a refugee from a doomed solar system, transported halfway across the galaxy by some Elder Gods and dropped into somewhere like Haven to make the best of things, I wouldn't leave. I'd stay there. They'd fricken' have to drag me out.

There's food on the trees, no aggressive wildlife, buildings to sleep in, even a dance club. Why would you take the risk of flying into space, especially after you've had a glimpse of the alternative on the aptly named "Crucible"?

Crucible, the volcanic planet nearest to Haven, never made any sense and it makes even less now, if that's possible. There used to be a series of missions there but now there's just one and it takes about thirty seconds. They moved the ore you need to mine to within sight of the guy who wants it. All you have to do is walk about fifty paces, blast it with the Terraformer and take the bits back for the hand-in.

 Then it's back to Haven and you never see Crucible again. Obviously the entire planet only exists because you can't mine on Haven and they want to show you how before they let you loose on a real planet. And equally obviously mining is only banned on Haven because Playable Worlds doesn't want you digging up the starting area, griefing newbies with your Terraformer and making the first place they see look like a disaster area.

It's a kludge on a kludge and it's indicative of the underlying problems Stars Reach suffers in so many areas. Too many of the mechanics feel more like temporary fixes than permanent solutions. It's the hallmark of a game still in relatively early development. What they need is to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, not shifted around and shored up so they kinda-sorta work, for now.

This has always been present in the development process but it's getting harder and harder to pass it off as work in progress. Haven looks so much better than either Crucible, which is just horrible, or the next planet I went to, the name of which escapes me, which is ugly as fuck.

I just don't understand why, if you have an art department and a graphic engine that make somewhere as attractive to look at and spend time in as Haven, you'd want to encourage your players to leave it as quickly as possible to go somewhere very much less pleasant. It just seems calculated to drive people away. Why is so much of the game so damned ugly when clearly they could make it look so much better if they wanted? 

 But then, very little about Stars Reach makes sense, least of all the decision to go to market with what was openly described only a few weeks ago as a "pre-alpha build". I'm all too aware that Early Access is a widely-abused term but this really is pushing the margins of what's generally deemed appropriate.

My feeling on Early Access is that it ought to be somewhere around the equivalent of what we used to call Open Beta. An Early Access build should include the full gameplay loop, sufficiently polished to be fully playable and fun to play.

The "Early Access" descriptor tells you you're getting to see it before it's in a final release state but it does not mean it's still in testing. It doesn't need to be "Feature Complete" but it has to be fully functional. 

There could certainly be more content to come. Additional systems and mechanics. More landmass. An extended narrative. It's fine for there to be more of just about anything on the way but what's there already has to be complete, in and of itself.

This isn't a pipe-dream. It isn't an unreasonable expectation. It's exactly how the games that have been moderately to extremely successful have handled it: Valheim, Palworld, Enshrouded... Do Early Access right and you don't just sell a lot of games, you build trust and loyalty. Do it wrong and everyone except your hardcore loyalists will take a quick look and leave, never to return.

The irony is that this Early Access build does feel like a step forward for Stars Reach. I haven't had this much fun playing since the very early days, when it was all new. It looks a lot prettier and gameplay feels smoother. If this was the latest update to the pre-alpha playtest, I'd say things were moving in the right direction. We might be almost ready for alpha!

But this isn't a playtest. It's Early Access, for which they're asking a minimum of $30 and as much as $80. There's no way to play now other than to buy your way in and once you tell your customers they have to pay to play, you're not in testing any more. You have launched.

I keep drifting on Stars Reach. Do I like it or do I not? I have had some good sessions. I have had some fun. I had a good session today. It was fun. The game looks much better than it used to. My character was much more customiseable and crucially didn't change appearance every time I zoned. Combat was noticeably better. 

Good things are happening but they're small good things and they're happening slowly.

As many, many people have been saying, including most of those whose reviews lean towards the positive, Stars Reach is not ready to be in Early Access. It's a pity because there are signs that it could, eventually, become an interesting and enjoyable game. Unfortunately, as things stand, it seems extremely unlikely it will get the chance. 

Early Access may be the end of the journey for Stars Reach, not the beginning. And that would be a real shame. 

In Jazz They Call It Improvising

 

Another half-assed post today, I'm afraid. What is wrong with me?

Well, to be honest, it's mostly that I just seem to be really busy. I have no idea why. It's 6.30 in the evening now and this is the first chance I've had to think about writing a post. Let me walk you through my day because that's what everyone wants from a blog about MMORPG gaming, isn't it? Someone running through a repetitive list of mundane daily chores. Oh, wait...

Anyway, like it or not, that's what we're getting, so buckle up. Buckle in. Which is it? Or maybe it's buckle down. 

Okay, we're doing that are we? Alright then. I did an English degree, albeit nearly fifty years ago. I ought to be able to do this without looking it up.

There's "Buck up" but I'm not talking about that one. That's completely different. (Or is it...?)

Then there's "Buckle in", which I can't in good conscience say I've ever heard anyone say. I've heard people say "Strap in" or more likely "Strap yourself in", which obviously means the same thing, there or thereabouts. A strap has a buckle, after all, or it's not much of a strap.

What is it that Bette Davis says in All About Eve?  In my head I hear her saying "Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride" but I bet that's not right. It's been almost as long since I saw All About Eve as it has been since I did that degree. In fact, I first saw the movie at one of the college film society showings, although I have seen it on television since. But that was in the eighties. Hardly surprising I can't remember the exact line.

 Hah! The exact line is "Fasten your seatbelts! It's going to be a bumpy night!" Bette's not buckling anything. Not up, in, down or sideways. She's fastening.

That didn't help much, did it?

Let's come at it from the other side. What I meant was something like "prepare yourself". I wasn't trying to suggest it was going to be difficult, let alone turbulent. Just that you should face the fact that it's coming, like it or not, so you might as well accept it.

I'm not sure any of the buckles or straps quite do the job there. I think I actually was unconsciously eliding the "pull yourself together" encouragement of buck up with the "get ready for trouble" implicit in buckle in. 

All of which gets us precisely nowhere. Bloody philology.

So, Beryl wakes me up at about 7.30am, which is an hour later than usual, probably because the heatwave has receded and it's nice and cool. She won't get on the bed and settle down because she wants to play but it's too early for all that nonsense so she goes off and lies down at the top of the stairs while I lie around in bed for half an hour, listening to Hancock on the radio until I'm properly awake.

To be strictly accurate, it's a fairly modern recreation of one of the "Missing Hancocks", one of the shows from the fifties that was scrubbed or skipped or lost, recreated by a bunch of actors impersonating the original cast. I stopped listening to the real Radio 4 sometime around Brexit, for obvious reasons, and I've never started again.

I only listen to Radio 4 Extra now, which is a weird hodge-podge of old sitcoms, drama, whodunnits, panel games and documentaries, all running on a daily loop so that if you listen all day, you'll hear everything three times. Which I often do. Hear things three times, that is, not listen all day. 

The big attraction for me is that it's the only station that has absolutely no news at all. I'm more than happy to hear the same awful 1980s sitcom dredged up from the dregs of Radio 2 if it means I never have to find out what's going on in the real world.

I get all my news from various entertainment websites through Feedly, which does give me a slightly (More than slightly.) skewed world view. I know a lot about the legislative program when it comes to things like the collapse of the live music infrastructure in small venues around the UK, the problems bands have touring in Europe post Brexit and the issues arising out of huge companies gaining monopolies over ticketing.

I know who's died within hours of them joining the choir invisible, which is presumably what they are doing, since most of the celebrity deaths I get to hear about are musicians. On the other hand, I didn't know Bill Oddie had died until someone at work told me. I'm not surprised Stereogum and Pitchfork didn't think it was worth mentioning but shame on the NME! The Goodies had five singles in the Top Twenty back in the seventies and Bill Oddie wrote all of them.

I just want to make it clear I don't think that's a good song, by the way. Or even a funny one. Bill Oddie wrote a lot of much better, funnier songs than that, although he didn't write any of them for The Goodies. But that was their biggest hit. #4 in 1975. You can see why we needed punk to come along...

Anyway, getting back to the plot, after I get up and have breakfast (A wholemeal bagel and a piece of wholemeal toast, both with sliced banana, and a cup of tea.) I go and do the weekly shop, as I always do on a Wednesday. After that, I catch up with all the Blaugust posts from overnight and leave a few comments. (Is this historic present working? I think it was at the start but not any more. I'm going to drop it.)

Since I was at the PC I sorted out the issue with Stars Reach not updating. It's ready to play now but it's 7.45 PM as I type this and I still haven't found the time to log in.

Then I had a bath and after that I moved a whole load of stuff out of the "conservatory" (Lean-to, really.) into the car so I could take it to the recycling center, where I had a 2pm appointment. After that I hung out the washing that I'd had to bring in last night because there was rain forecast. 

Then Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if I wanted to take Beryl on Paw Patrol. That's what we call a twenty minute loop around the neighborhood that Beryl likes to do at least every couple of days so she can reacquaint herself with the messages left by all the other local dogs and add her comments. It's dog blogging, basically.

Not long after I got back, I got a text telling me I had some stuff I needed to do, relating to the sale of my mother's house. That involved logging into a website, reading a bunch of legal nonsense and printing it out so I could sign it and get it witnessed, which is going to have to wait until the weekend when I'm at work because I don't talk to any of the neighbors except about dogs so I can hardly pop round and ask them to witness me signing a legal document. Put a paw-print on it, maybe.

That took me pretty much up to lunch and lunch took me up to the time when I needed to get in the car and go to the recycling center.

After I'd done that, I had to take two bags of clothes and two more of books to the charity shops. I say "shops" because there are about half a dozen in the same road but at any given time only one or two of them will be accepting donations. Today was a good day. The first one I tried took the lot. 

Since I was there, I went round all the rest just to see what I could find. I do not want to get into a death spiral of clearing stuff out only to fill the space with more kipple but I'm okay with the odd replacement, now and again. I got a book by Peter Bogdanovich called " "Who The Hell's In It?", which should make a good bathroom read.

I always forget Bogdanovich was a writer. I think of him as a director but he was a critic before he directed, just like Truffaut, Godard and the rest of the Cahiers du Cinema crew. And now I want to watch some of his movies again. And Truffaut's. Not Godard's, though.

By the time I got home it was about three in the afternoon. I'd said I was going to look for some places we might go away for a couple of days in September so I did that for about an hour until Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl came back from visiting a granddaughter. I sent her links to a few holiday ideas (Mrs Bhagpuss, not Beryl or the kid.) and then I just had time to read some more Blaugust posts before it was time for tea. 

After tea I sat down at the PC again and booked one of the places, under Mrs Bhagpuss's instructions, and then I got myself up to date with Blaugust before starting this post at half-past six. And even then I only got as far as Bette Davis before Beryl bounced in to tell me it was playtime, which took up another forty-five minutes.

And now here we are, gone eight in the evening and I haven't logged into a single game yet because I haven't had time! This is most days at the moment. No wonder I only play games in short bursts.

I'm going to say I think this will improve, in respect of the blog, when a) Blaugust finishes and b) the days get shorter. I do a lot less around the house in the Autumn and Winter and that frees up a lot more time for gaming. And I do think Blaugust leads to a lowering in quality all round, approximately commensurate to the increase in quantity. There are a lot of filler posts and I'm writing too many of them.

Can do better. Will do better. 

Tomorrow, with luck, I might actually play Stars Reach for half an hour and then I can post about it, which will be the only reason I'm playing it. In the meantime, I'm sure everyone's already seen Wilhelm's report. Also there're the new updates for  both Neverness to Everness and Wuthering Waves this week so it's not like I'm short of something to play or to write about.

But now, though, I'm going to have to slap a couple more pictures in this post, think of a title, press Publish and then go take Beryl for her final walk before I wash up and go to bed, where I plan on watching some more Dr. Who and maybe another episode of the positively bizarre anime Chainsmoker Cat, which I'm determined to get through if only so I can blog about it.

Three Reasons Why This Isn't The Post It Was Going To Be

Thanks to ChatGPT, I don't have time for much of a post today. 

Thanks to time zones I don't have time for much of a post today.

Thanks to hoarding I don't have time for much of a post today.

Take your pick.

Let's start with the AI story. We all hate AI, don't we? Don't we? Except when it's really useful, of course.

Regular readers with absolutely nothing better to do with their time will remember I've been having problems, on and off, with this relatively new PC. First I thought it was conflicts with the graphic card and the onboard graphics. Then I thought it was a hardware issue. Then I thought I'd fixed it. 

I hadn't fixed it. But I have now (Fingers crossed, touch wood.) After a few weeks of behaving itself it started to play up again, even though I wasn't doing anything different and I started to think it was a software issue, probably some corruption of the OS. I reinstalled windows but that didn't help so I figured it might be the drive.

To test that theory, I took the hard drive out of my old PC, connected it to the new one, directed it to boot from the old drive and it worked. As I was playing around with that, I noticed the old drive had Windows 10 on it but in the new PC I could upgrade it to Windows 11. Well, why not?

I know now! I didn't then! 

So I tried that and it didn't work. The upgrade kept hanging, possibly because the drive was almost full. In the end I thought "Why am I even bothering?" and stopped. I decided to get a new drive and install Windows on that, even though disk checks hadn't found any problems.

When I was looking at drives on Amazon, I started to wonder if I could use one of those new-fangled M2s so I checked if my motherboard had a slot and it did. Then I checked if the one I was going to get was compatible and it was. So I bought it.

When it came and I tried to fit it I couldn't find a slot and do you know why? Because I already had an M2 drive and it was using it! It was the faulty one with the OS on it and I never even realised. The one I'd disconnected when I hooked up the old one wasn't even the right one! No wonder disk checks hadn't found anything wrong. I was checking the wrong sodding drive!

 

Anyway, I got all that sorted out, figured out how to fit this weird new drive, stuck the USB with the installation into the slot and let the process run. And to my great surprise it all worked perfectly. Now I have a PC with a clean installation of Windows 11 Home on a 512GB M2 drive with nothing else on it and it runs beautifully. And fast!

Except... there's always an "except", isn't there? Except I can't Activate Windows. I can use Windows, which is all that really matters, but I have an irritating watermark in the lower right corner of the screen now, reminding me I need to "Activate Windows" and there are a few minor personalization tweaks I can't apply until I do. Other than that, I can't see it makes any difference.

But of course I couldn't leave it alone so for the past few days I've been tinkering with it. I found and applied a whole bunch of fixes, none of which worked. I contacted Microsoft and they were very helpful apart from the doing anything about it part. I contacted the company I bought the PC from and they were very helpful. They sent me a couple of new 25 digit keys, neither of which worked. 

They didn't have any other ideas so I thanked them and told them I'd manage. By then, though, I'd noticed  that although I definitely have Windows 11 running, the system thinks I installed it in 2009 so I wondered if by swapping the hard drives I've somehow managed to get the details of the two Windows installations conflated. 

So I thought I'd ask ChatGPT if that was possible.

I only meant to ask a quick question but I ended up having an in depth conversation with ChatGPT for an ahour and a half. The AI asked a series of intelligent questions and made a series of practical suggestions. It was like being on the phone with a really polite, knowledgeable, patient  IT department. If you can imagine such a thing.

We (It's the convention to personalize conversations with AIs, I believe, so I will. I feel like we know each other now, anyway.) narrowed down the issue until I think we're pretty clear on what's happened.  We're down to it being one of four things:

a Windows 10 → Windows 11 licence/edition mismatch,
a digital licence that is attached to the wrong Microsoft-account device record,
an OEM/retail licence issue,
or simply a licence that needs to be re-associated after the clean installation.

Since the original M2 drive won't boot up, I need to get an enclosure to see if we can interrogate the old drive externally and maybe narrow it down even further. I'm dubious we'll ever get to the point where I'll be able to activate the current installation but it's fun trying. 

And that's the thing about working with AIs. They do make it feel like fun. It's almost identical to live chat with customer support (I was doing that with Microsoft today on the same issue, too.) but all the pressure is off. There's no rush to reply, no sense you're holding anyone up or that if you don't answer fast enough they'll terminate the call. I was able to get up and do other things inbetween replies. It all felt very relaxed.

Best of all (Or worst, then best.) because I hadn't logged in to ChatGPT properly at the start, when I'd been chatting for about 45 minutes the session timed out and I had no record of it at all. But when I logged in properly and told ChatGPT what had happened, even though it didn't have the actual record of the conversation, it was able to reconstruct it pretty accurately from my brief summary and we carried on much as before.

So, that was one thing that got in the way of the post I was going to write today. Another was that apparently the 18th of August doesn't start, as I thought, at midnight, but sometime after tea. 

I was going to log into Stars Reach and write something about the EA launch but there turned out to be a couple of problems with that.

Firstly, I didn't have a key. It took me about half an hour of trying different accounts, reading Kickstarter, looking through my Pledge history and generally faffing about until I finally figured out which email and account I needed. They say they make it easy but they really don't. They make it possible, which isn't at all the same thing.

 

I got that sorted eventually and registered my Steam key but then I discovered I was going to have to wait because Playable Worlds' idea of being able to play from 18 August is very different to mine. At time of writing I do, finally, have an "Update" button but using it gets me the peculiar message "No Internet Connection". 

I have an internet connection. Steam has an internet connection. I tested it by starting the download for First Descendant and that's going just fine. I can only assume it's Playable Worlds that's offline. So that post is going to have to wait until tomorrow.

[Edit: Just after I typed that paragraph I received an email from Playable Worlds telling me "Today is the day! Stars Reach is now out in Early Access!" Two of them, in fact. It still won't update.]

[Edit to the Edit: Googled it and found it was a cache problem. Updating now.] 

And finally, when I found out I couldn't write about Stars Reach, I ended up taking four bags of publishers proofs and a huge box of VHS cassettes to recycling. Not even our local recycling. I'm going there tomorrow with a load more stuff but you have to book a slot and they were fully-booked for today.

Instead, I drove a few miles to the really big recycling depot in a nearby town. Publishers proofs are a real pain because you can't legally sell or give them away. They have to be destroyed or recycled. And I have literally hundreds of them. A couple of hundred less as of today, thankfully.

As for VHS cassettes, these were all movies I'd recorded back in the 90s. I've been hanging on to them because I know there are quite a few that aren't easily available on streaming or DVD or BluRay. And I do have a working VHS recorder so I could play them.

But I won't. I know I won't. I've reached that time in life where I can admit to myself there are some things I'd theoretically like to do but that I will never do and watching badly-recorded movies on old VHS tapes is one of them.

So that's why there's no proper post today. If it hadn't been Blaugust I could just have skipped a day but you know how it is. Please don't feel you have to read this nonsense.

Oh. A bit late for that now, I guess, if you've made it this far... 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

None. Well, except those four possible reasons. I cut and pasted those from the ChatGPT log. So that, I guess...