The Owls Are In The Walls (IYKYK, Right?)

In a vain attempt to prevent this blog from turning into All Neverness To Everness! All Day! Every Day!, something it could so very easily become, seeing as how I have so many ideas for posts - posts about what I'm doing in the game, what I'm thinking about the game, what the hell is going on in the game (Big mystery there and I don't mean the plot because - erm - what plot?), I thought I'd post about a TV show I just watched instead.

And for once it's something current! Not an old show from the nineties I finally got around to catching up with or even something from five or ten years ago. No, I actually watched a new show on Netflix while it was in the Top Ten. It was at #1 for a short while in the UK so I guess at least a few people reading this might have seen it too.

If that's you, feel free to carry on. If not, you might want to know up front that the whole of the rest of this post is going to be 

SPOILER CITY!!

Ah, yes. Spoilers aaall the way down from here on. At least I didn't use that flashing gif for the warning this time. That can be really annoying.

Okay, that's probably given everyone who wants to leave enough time to skedaddle. On with the post...

Didn't mention the name of the show yet, did I? It's The Boroughs. 

Let's see if I can do a quick precis of the premis: 

A bunch of old, rich people settle down to enjoy their golden years in a full-service, luxury retirement village somewhere in the desert only to find creepy monsters are sneaking into their condos at night and sucking out their brain juice. Shenanigans ensue.

Yeah, that about covers it but I left out the immortality, the sociopaths and the sentiment. Stir those in and you're good.

So, what actually happens is grieving widower, Sam. (Alfred Molina. Excellent.) gets dropped off at his new condo that his dead wife insisted they get before she died. (I'd say "obviously" but actually it's not so obvious as all that, as it turns out, since she keeps turning up after she's dead. In dreams. On the TV. In the kitchen.) 

Sam does not want to be there but if he leaves he loses all the money he put into buying the place. Or renting it. Or however it works. It's never explained, just like nothing in the whole damn show is ever explained. 

All he wants to do is get out of the contract and leave but he'd lose all his money (Seems unlikely but there it is.) so he's stuck with it. Until he has the great good luck to be attacked in his own home and lightly stabbed by the previous occupant, Edward (Ed Begley Jr. Great as always but wasted in a such a small role.)

Despite being offered all his money back if he'll just keep quiet and leave, the grumpy old git has started to make friends so he decides to stay. Bad idea. The very next day he finds one of his friends (Bill Pullman, good but brief.) dead of a heart attack because a nightmarish creature has been visiting him in the night and sucking out his cerebral fluid. Unsurprisingly, no-one believes this. More fools them. They'll learn.

I won't rehash the entire plot, although I could because I can remember it all, something that suggests it was quite vivid. It was that, alright. It just wasn't coherent, believable, convincing or sane. None of those. It was fun, though, which is the most important one.

The whole show is fun. It's so high-concept you could sky-dive off it. If you did, it'd be a bad idea to stop and think about it on the way down because you'd be none the wiser when you hit bottom and you'd have missed the great view. If you're the kind of person who likes things to make sense or be explained then you might not have such a good time with it as I did.

I don't always mind if things don't make sense so long as I'm having a good time. It's like riding a roller-coaster (Not that I like those. I do not like those.). It doesn't matter how the car stays on the tracks so long as it does. A thrill ride is a thrill ride so long as you don't come off at the corners and The Boroughs always manages to make those tight turns, somehow.

A lot of that is down to the cast. It's an impressive line-up. If you wanted to get a bunch of old people together for a TV show, you could do a lot worse than this. As well as the aforementioned Molina and Begley and Pullman you get Geena Davis, who does not look even close to being old enough to be in a retirement village. (I just looked her up and she's two years older than me. She looks twenty years younger in this and I look good for my age, let me tell you!) You also get Alfre Woodard, Denis O'Hare, Clarke Peters and a bunch of other people you absolutely will know from big shows and successful movies. 

These people know what they're doing and watching them do it is probably enough reason in itself to go with it but the script is pretty good, too. It doesn't have a whole lot of zingy one-liners but it's frequently wryly amusing and rarely feels awkward, which is quite the achievement if you stop to think about some of the things these people are doing, which honestly you really should not, not if you want to stay in the story. Some good meta bits, too, like the whole Thelma and Louise riff the writers have going on for a while.

Not that any of that makes a whole lot of sense but then what does? This post could so easily become one long litany of "Well, that wouldn't happen..." because even if you accept spider-like monsters that come out of your microwave oven at night to suck out your spinal-cerebral fluids through your open mouth as you sleep then go back to pump it into their mother-monster, who's being farmed by hundred year-old psychopaths for her blood because it makes them immortal, then The Boroughs is still hard to believe because of the way every single person deals with it when they find out. It's like they think they're in a TV show or something!

I mean, for one thing these people aren't prisoners. Okay, yes, eventually they are prisoners but not for most of the run of the show, they're not. They have cars and phones and families in the world beyond the gates. You're not telling me they don't go on vacation or on trips. They're clearly all pretty damn rich. They can leave if they want. We actually see one of them drive in and out and wave to the guard several times. It's only much later, when everything's already gone to hell, that they're trapped inside.

If you found out there were brain-sucking monsters in tunnels under your condo, monsters that were coming into your bedroom while you slept, sticking their feeder tentacles down your throat, making holes in you that can still be seen the next day if you just shine a light down there and look, would you stay another night to see if it happens again? I bloody wouldn't!

Of course, if anyone ever behaved rationally or logically in any supernatural horror show, there would be no supernatural horror shows. Just a lot of aerial shots of jammed roads as everyone tries to leave town at once. 

This is a supernatural horror show, in case that wasn't immediately obvious. It's from the same stable as Stranger Things. Well, the next stable along, maybe. The Duffer Brothers had something to do with it, anyway, although I suspect it may not have been that much. They're listed as "Executive Producers", which means nothing. Netflix is keen you should know the show bears their imprimatur all the same, obviously hoping that'll be enough to grab your interest. It works, too. That's how I came to start watching.   

But The Boroughs is nothing like Stranger Things. Except when it kind of is, which now I come to think about it, is quite often, really, what with all the tunnels and monsters and men in suits stepping out of big, black cars...

The pacing, though. That could not possibly be any more different. The Boroughs positively zips along. As soon as anyone has any kind of idea or plan they're on it the very next minute. No discussions. no arguments. No making diagrams or taking notes. Straight to the execution.

Events and even set pieces that would have filled a whole episode of Stranger Things barely manage a couple of scenes. Oddly, it doesn't make things feel rushed, probably because what's been left out is all that character stuff Stranger Things was so big on. Those countless hours when what we mostly got to see was people getting to know each other. Slowly. The Boroughs has none of that. It takes everyone two days, max, before they're best buds.

Partly it's crisis bonding but mostly it's because there's no time for anything longer. They're old! They don't have much time left! 

Everyone's painfully aware of their own mortality, evil immortals included, which is ironic, isn't it? As for our heroes, it's a bit rich considering how fit, healthy and good-looking they all are compared to actual old people but then the definition of "old" in the show is hazy anyway. Wally reveals he's only 62 at one point, not even state retirement age where I live, let alone where the show's set. 

That looks like it might be Nevada. Where the atom tests were, which might explain the monsters, although it could also just be me, trying to retrofit some kind of origin story onto the whole affair since the writers can't be bothered to come up with one. 

Wally does have terminal cancer though so, yeah, mortality is knocking harder for him than the rest, even if the years aren't. They all make friends fast because they have to get in there quick before one of them dies, I guess. They do go on about it a lot, that's for sure.

And they need to get on with it, too, whatever they're thinking, because friend-bonding is what this show is all about. That and romantic love, which apparently saves some people and damns others. You may remember me citing sentiment as a big factor in the show, up there at the top of the post. The entire motivation behind the insane enterprise that is The Boroughs can be summed up in five words: We Did It For Love. 

Well, one of the two big bads Did It For Love, anyway: Blaine. (Played by Seth Numrich. Numb, scary, nuanced, good.) He just wants to make everything perfect for his beloved wife. Forever. At any cost.

Sideabar: Blaine? Really? He was supposedly an adult in the 1950s. Who was called Blaine in the '30s? Did the name "Blaine" even exist before the 1980s, when it became Hollywood code for "slick, rich, guy who looks cool but everyone knows is hollow inside"? Which is what he is, I guess. So, fair. (Also, edit for truth, I looked it up and Blaine was popular in the 19th century. Peak year for babies called Blaine: 1884. My bad but don't say you never learn anything on this blog.)

His wife, Annelise, (Alice Kremelberg. Plays her like a robot, presumably intentionally but it's hard to be sure.) never gets enough lines for us to work out what the hell she's in it for. She gets to be really, disturbingly, Evil with a capital E. Cartoon evil, that is. 

She makes as much of the part as she can but she's never playing anything you could call a real person. She's like the wicked witch in a Disney movie. Her polio backstory that's presumably supposed to explain her fear and need is so under-sold you could miss it if you were eating popcorn when it's revealed, which you very well might be because this is a total popcorn show. And even if you're paying attention, it explains nothing about her pathological cruelty. 

Was she like that before? Did her pain turn her evil? Was it the alien blood? Who fucking knows? Not me. And not the writers, either, apparently.

Where The Boroughs is like Stranger Things is in the whole chosen family thing. Most of these people have an actual family outside the Boroughs - children and grandchildren that they occasionally mention - but we only ever get to see Sam's daughter (Jena Malone. Excellent and underused) and her annoying husband (And very briefly, at the end, their children, who don't get anything much to do or say.) There's occasionally some talk about family but as in Hawkins, in The Boroughs your family ends up being the people who'll fight monsters with you. If you're related to them by blood, great, but it's by no means obligatory.

There's a good deal of front-loaded irony, what with time running out for the good guys because they're doing the right thing ideal butting up against the immortals being really, really evil and possibly getting to live forever. Some people waver and try to fudge or even change sides but it's the kind of show where you always know who the good guys and the bad guys are. Sometimes they wobble on the line but they never fall over it. Not to mention the ever-popular "But who were the real monsters, anyway?"

It makes the whole thing kind of heart-warming. Everyone who isn't an out-and-out villain is kinda-sorta nice. There's a bit of the grumpy old geezer thing going on but under the crusty exterior or the selfish spend-it-while-you-still-got-it indulgence, you know there's always a good heart. 

The villains are far more underwritten but it makes some of them quite interesting for the space that leaves. I'd have liked to know more about the woman who shows new arrivals around the homes or the doctor who manages Mother. And especially the Police Chief, who looks confusingly like a fatter, slobbier David Harbour playing Stranger Things' Hopper's evil cousin. He gets a weird moment near the end that almost humanizes him, which is very odd. I could have done with a little more of that.

Mostly, though, everything wraps up very neatly in eight episodes, so long as you're happy to accept that absolutely nothing about any of it is ever going to be explained to anyone's satisfaction, yours or the cast's. (What are the monsters? Where did they come from? How did Blaine find out what they could do? What was that peach all about? And that weird goo bath? Why do old cathode ray TV sets have such a devastating effect on the immortals and why not the same effect on all of them? How could those tunnels have possibly been constructed without hundreds of people knowing? And on and on and on...) You'd think it was a mini-series, never intended to continue, except...

Oh, yes. Except. There's always that one hook, right at the end in every mini-series, isn't there? just in case it goes really well and they want to come back for an encore. In this one it happens just before the final credits, when Sam's image glitches in the mirror. And that final shot, too, the one where it looks like the stars go out. That's a door being left open.

I hope there is another season. And if there is, I hope it doesn't explain anything any more clearly more than the first. Mysteries are intriguing but solutions are often disappointing. Leave it all out there in the desert. With the dead crows.

Of Time And The Cities

When the promo videos for Neverness To Everness started popping up a year, two years ago, it looked like nothing I'd seen before. I couldn't entirely figure out what the game even was. I just knew it was cool and I wanted it.

Then it arrived and it was as amazing as I'd hoped it would, juste not exactly what I'd imagined. It felt a lot more relaxed, laid-back and less intense and it had the most remarkably detailed representation of an actual city I'd ever encountered in any video game.

Hethereau isn't just a few detailed areas amid some spectacular buildings for a backdrop. It's a completely convincing urban environment with districts and suburbs and parks and commercial residential districts and a full transport infrastructure that actually works. In many ways, in numerous locations, it reminds me quite specifically of actual cities I've visited and stayed in. 

I thought that would make it the benchmark for game cities for a good while to come, always excepting GTA6, as all video game discussions must, just now. If NTE made bank then, sure, I'd expect to see clones and copies cropping up all over but even at the highly accelerated production rates of the game mills in China and South Korea, it takes a while to build a city like Hethereau, let alone to fit a game around one. I certainly wasn't expecting to be writing about another this summer or even this year.

And then Nimgimli left a link in a comment on the last post here, pointing to a video on YouTube for a game called Moon Gaze, a name entirely new to me, either in that English version or under the original Mandarin title, Wang Yue.

I watched it immediately, of course. And here it is, so now you can, too.

It's an "Exploration" promo so it mostly shows movement around the city. There's not much in the way of gameplay per se. Or narrative. Or anything.

Looking for some context, I also watched a "Character and Scene" video and "Gameplay" trailer. The former doesn't give much away and the latter is both untranslated and also made before they completely redid the graphics, which they appear to have done to such an extent that it barely looks like the same game any more. That's why I'm only linking them, not embedding them. They may be misleading.

The new graphics do look extremely impressive. They're closer to photorealism than to the rather flat, cartoony look of the previous version or even the more polished, anime-inflected style of NTE.  

Tianyue City looks astonishingly convincing and immersive, visually at least. I certainly wouldn't say no to a few hours exploring it, when the game releases, which presumably won't be at least until next year. There's no date set and the game is still in closed testing, in China only.

Beyond that, I can't say I'm all that interested, let alone excited, by anything the developer, who goes by the unwieldy name of Guangzhou Shiyue Network Technology, has shown so far. Icy Veins seems more impressed, suggesting it might be "the most unusual gacha rpg" so far although how they figure that out beats me. Their bullet-point list of features is mostly a reiteration of what's already in NTE, except for the creature collecting, something I personally could do without, having had more than enough of it in other games by now.

There's also mention of "construction and building systems", which I admit does sound intriguing. It's apparently along the lines of what you can do in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, although that doesn't help me any, since I've never played. Still, building options are always welcome.

The problem is, regardless of the features, I don't get any sense of the vibrancy or zest that infuses everything that comes out of Hotta as they promote NTE. Everything they show just oozes individuality. 

For example, just take a look at this recent short, featuring Lacrimosa. It's a small work of art, hugely enjoyable even if you have no interest in playing the game.

The Moon Gaze material seems bland and generic by comparison, other than the character movement of course, which is breathtakingly well-done in places. I'd love to have a go on those roller skates. It doesn't help, of course, that the only narrative content on show hasn't been translated but I get no sense there's anything happening I'd be likely to care about, anyway. 

And if Moon Gaze doesn't come up to snuff against Neverness To Everness, imagine how it does when you put it up against this:

That's Ananta, another urban open-world RPG, developed by NetEase and Naked Rain. You may have heard of it. I didn't think I had but as usual I was wrong.

If you're getting a slight sense of deja vu, it'll probably be because I wrote about Ananta last September, in a post that included that same, seven-minute video along with another, even longer. 

If you don't remember, I forgive you. I didn't, either.

I make no apologies for embedding it again, partly because if nothing else the soundtrack is great but mostly because I've just had to re-write four paragraphs when I finally realised Ananta was not, after all, a brand new game to me that I'd just discovered. Not only had I posted about it eight months ago but at the time I had to remind myself it wasn't new to me then, either. 

That was the second time I'd written about it. This is the third. It's like Groundhog Day around here sometimes and I'm not Bill Murray. Tipa talks about having trouble remembering people. I can't even remember what I've posted, even when I've done it three times! Some of us need to be reminded about stuff as often as possible. I count this repetition as a public service.

More than just good taste in tuneage, Ananta would appear to have strong characters with distinct personalities capable of engaging in snappy repartee while carrying some kind of interesting plot. Not to mention an intriguing backstory. And then there's that stunning megalopolis to explore. You wait decades for a proper city and then three turn up at once!

Except not quite at once, I guess. NTE made it out the gate first and Ananta was supposed to be following close behind, with a projected release date of Summer 2026 but now that doesn't look like it's happening. If it was coming out in a a month or three, I'm pretty sure they'd be telling us all about it but there's been radio silence from the developer since I last wrote about the game. I pre-registered on the official website back then but I've heard not a single word since.

As this report by Gamesphere suggests, that release date may have slipped into next year. If so, it's a shame but at least it means not having to make a hard choice between Ananta and NTE just yet. Yes, obviously I could play both. At once, even, in theory. But I'm having a hard enough time right now, keeping up with just the one urban open world rpg. Two might be more fun than I could handle.

Also, in a more practical sense, a 2027 release date will give me time to upgrade my hardware to something capable of playing even the most demanding titles with ease. Not the best timing, perhaps, given the way the entire gaming hardware industry seems to be disappearing into the all-devouring maw of the AI leviathan but assuming there's still something left to buy later this year, I should be coming into a little money about then, so it could still be good timing for me.

If not, it shouldn't matter too much. Looking at all these games, you would think you'd have to have state of the art equipment to run any of them but no, apparently not. Leaving aside my recent technical issues, which I now think may have been initiated by running NTE from an external SDD via USB, it seems even a mediocre rig can cope. 

How that's even possible, when you look at the graphics and the gameplay, beats me. But then, I don't need to understand it. I just need to enjoy it.

And I plan to. 

Making Sense Of Neverness To Everness - or - The Genshin Impact

I've been having an interesting conversation with Mailvaltar in the comments to his recent post on Neverness To Everness. I had too much I wanted to say to fit into a comment thread so I told him I'd probably spin it up into a post of my own. And then he pointed out he'd already posted something very much along the same lines five years ago, back when Genshin Impact first came out.

I had a look through my back pages and it turned out so had I. It's quite hard to remember what an... er... impact that game had when it arrived. How strange and unfamiliar it seemed. In my own First Impressions piece, I said "just about everything in the game I've seen so far, is confusing". I'd never played a game quite like it although apparently millions of players, who'd made their way through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, saw things a little differently. 

Breath of the Wild wasn't an MMO, of course, but then again, neither is Genshin Impact. Probably. There seem to be varying opinions on that. It was one of the things I was confused about. I'm not sure it's much clearer now. 

All of these games seem to live in a nebulous, undefined hinterland, somewhere in the liminal spaces of a Venn Diagram overlapping MMOs, RPGs, Visual Novels, Life Sims, Co-Op, Single Player, Open World and a bunch of other genres and playstyles. I'd say it's indisputably a genre but if it has a name anyone's agreed on, I don't know what it is.

Oh, wait... yes I do! We call them Gacha Games. That's the catch-all, isn't it? 

Except all that's gacha about them is their main source of revenue. As a descriptor, it's about as helpful as Subscription or Free To Play. It tells you how the company stays in business but it doesn't give you much of a clue about the type of game you're going to be playing.

Except it sort of does. As Mailvaltar observes, gacha games are "extremely alike mechanically...even if the actual gameplay hails from completely different genres." 

And that's especially true of the way they handle character progression. His almost six year-old post linked above, my own from a month before and the post by Tobold that provoked it, all deal with the way Genshin Impact requires a huge amount of grinding to sustain the progress needed to keep the combat as easy as it was when you were starting out. Without that, combat can eventually get too tough for casuals like me and Tobold.

As a general rule, this seems to be approximately how all the games that followed Genshin's huge commercial success roll. They also follow what's looking like a genre convention of odd, quirky, enigmatic names - Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Star Rail, Noah's Heart, Wuthering Waves, Neverness To Everness.

The shorthand in use for all of those is "Gacha Games", so I suppose, by default, that is what the genre's called now. It might have made more sense to follow the gaming naming convention that gave us Roguelikes and Metroidvanias. We could have called them Genshinlikes. But we didn't. So gacha games it will have to be.

And as Mailvaltar explained in very helpful detail in yesterday's post, there's a very specific way to play a gacha game if you want your characters to be capable and your progress smooth as you work your way through the storyline. You'll have to get to grips with a number of quite complex systems and then, when you've figured out what you need and how to get it, you'll have to grind your finger-tips off, killing the right mobs and doing the right quests to get the gear you want. Just as though it was EverQuest in 1999.

That was enough to do for Tobold back in 2020. As he said " I'll be farming elite monsters for weeks. And I don't want to." And who can blame him? I don't think he's played a Gacha Game since. 

I also noped out of Genshin Impact the moment it got hard but unlike Tobold it didn't put me off trying again. And it's as well I did because subsequent entries in the genre have been far less demanding. There have been a few barriers to progress in some of them that I've had to make some effort to clamber over but nothing like the harsh, early roadblocks of Genshin Impact. 

I was stuck for a while in both Noah's Heart and Wuthering Waves before I did some work to improve both my teams and my tactics but in both cases, though, it happened much later than in Genshin. It was easier to fix, too. And as Mailvaltar suggests in his most recent post, that easing continues. Neverness To Everness may be the least-demanding gacha game yet.

The thing about Gacha games that I really wanted to  dig into a little, though, is the apparent disconnect between content and delivery. It's a dissonance that echoes what Jack Emmert was saying about the importance of knowing your audience and the dangers of feature creep. The Gacha game studios, hearing Jack talk, must be muttering "Hold our beer..."

One of the strongest drivers to engagement gacha games have is story. Right from the beginning, with Genshin Impact, the bar for storytelling was pushed through the roof. Back in 2020 I said "Genshin Impact is one of the best-written video games I've played.", something  I put down to "the tone, the very thing so few video games get right." 

I said at the time I might put a whole post together about why the writing was so good but then I stopped playing because getting to see any more of it got so hard and that post never got written. The story was great but the way it was delivered sucked. Who the hell wants to grind and grind and practice and practice just sot hey can see the next episode of their favorite show?

Since Genshin, that's never been quite the same problem but the underlying issue persists. The content gets ever better, which makes the hoops you need to jump through to get to it feel more and more inappropriate. 

And it is getting better and better. The writing in Wuthering Waves is better than I remember it being in Genshin and so is the voice acting. The animated sequences are more frequent, longer and approach cinematic quality. It's like watching high-quality anime with some awkward interruptions.

My impression of Neverness To Everness so far suggests the evolution of Gacha game story content into some kind of mass media entertainment format isn't over yet. In the four chapters of the main story the game shipped with, there's barely any combat at all. What little is there presents little challenge and doesn't appear to increase in difficulty as the story moves on. Instead, there are a variety of interesting non-combat mechanics that enhance the storytelling instead of getting in its way.

The "cut scenes" are longer and more sophisticated, too. It feels like playing a complex visual novel, complete with that same sense of watching a movie play out around you that sometimes leads people who like a bit more action to dismiss those games as "walking simulators". Not to say they don't have a point. I've seen more than a few comments on reddit and YouTube from NTE fans who'd like Hotta to go the whole way and make an actual anime based on the game and I have to say that it does often seem like that might be a better use of the material. 

In the case of Neverness To Everness it's not only the quality of the writing, acting and storyline that's competing for attention with the Gacha revenue stream. There's also that whole Life Sim thing they have going on. It's something that hasn't been nearly as well-developed in other gacha titles I've played.

Genshin had none of it that I can recall from back when I played but that was five years ago so maybe it does now. Noah's Heart had housing and affection bonds with your team but the whole game was a bit clunky and under-cooked so none of it had much impact outside of a dedicated few loyalists, of whom I was one. I don't know how common these features are in other gacha games because I haven't stuck with any long enough to find out but I can't say I remember any from the ones I've tried.

In NTE you have plenty of non-combat, non-story options. You can run a business, either behind the scenes as management or out front with the customers if you want. You can be a street racer in your car, go fishing or play mah-jong. You can deliver parcels around the city or moonlight as a taxi driver. You can date, go to the movies, hold hands and hang out with your imaginary friends. You can own multiple properties, decorate them and, if you can build up sufficient bonds of affection, have your friends move in and live with you.

None of this requires any fighting so the entire material grind that so upset Tobold back in the pandemic would seem to have no purchase here. It exists but you don't need to worry about it. You're not going to be punching anyone or anything. 

Or are you? I'm not so sure. All those characters I was talking about the other day plus all the others that will inevitably come into the game as time goes on, how will you meet and get to know them if you aren't pushing through the story? You can roll on the banners and you might be lucky but I'm a bit vague just now about how that works when it comes to interacting with the same characters in the world. I seem to have some I can team with but I can't get them to work in the cafe or come to my house. I think I might need to meet them in context before that can happen.

Or maybe I've just missed something. Gacha games are ferociously complicated. 

In his recent post, Mailvaltar does an excellent job of explaining some of the systems I've been struggling to understand. Not that I've really been trying. I have no real interest in learning how they work. I just want to figure out the bare minimum to get by and then never think about them again. But even if I was fascinated by the complexity of it all, I think I'd struggle to keep all the details straight. There's a lot to remember.

In the end, the best approach for anyone who doesn't enjoy the process is probably just to play the game and only worry about it when you get stuck. After all, if it isn't a problem, it isn't a problem, right? And a problem only becomes a problem when you can't fix it. 

Gacha games want you to be able to fix it. If you can't or if it looks like it'll be too much trouble, then like Tobold you might walk away and that's the one thing they really don't want you to do. Yesterday, when I uninstalled NTE, only so I could re-install it, Hotta responded with a heartfelt exit poll asking what they'd done to upset me and how they could make it better so I'd consider coming back.

They already have, I suspect. They've made everything easier. In retrospect, Genshin was quite an unforgiving game, expecting high levels of both performance and compliance from an early stage. In comparison,  Neverness to Everness positively welcomes slackers.

So far... 

Never Say Neverness

Nobody wants another post about my computer problems so I'll keep this short. 4reelz this time! I just thought it would be worth mentioning that I'm typing this on the new machine, the one that was apparently glassed yesterday.   

How? Beats me.

What happened was that it occurred to me I had a bunch of quite important stuff on the hard drive in the machine I was about to send to the other end of the country, stuff I might need before I got it back, so I tried to remove the hard drive so I could put it in an enclosure and copy what I needed. Only, when I went to do it, I found I couldn't get the drive out. It's super-neatly tucked away and fixed, firmly, with a couple of screws, one of which appears to be accessible only by dismantling the entire case.

That would involve opening the one and only section that has a "Warranty void if opened" sticker, which seemed like it might be a bad idea, seeing as how I was about to return it under warranty. To get around it, there was even a moment when I was contemplating running cables to the drive from one PC while it was still installed in the other and trying to get into the files that way... but then I had an unusual moment of clarity and realised what a fucking stupid idea that would be and didn't do it.

While I was fiddling around in the case, trying to get to the last screw, I removed the PSU, although I didn't disconnect it. I also pulled the connectors out of the hard drive but I'd also done that yesterday and it had no effect on anything then. Those, as far as I know, are the only things I did. 

If I was a sensible person, I'd have left it that and gone back to the replacement machine but I'm pathologically incapable of letting things lie in these situations. I can't help thinking "I wonder if..." Since it only meant plugging a couple of cables into the back, I connected the dead PC to the monitor (Via the integrated graphics port since the GPU was already in the other machine.) and powered it up, just to see what would happen.

And it worked.

Well, kinda. At least the monitor received a signal, which is more than I could get it to do in four hours of fiddling with it yesterday. 

It didn't exactly log in. It did that thing where it told me there was a problem and it was fixing it. Then it told me it couldn't fix it so it offered me a couple more options to try. I plugged in a keyboard and mouse, connected it back up to the network and after a couple more "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" moments it offered me some more choices, one of which was just to start Windows and see what happened. 

So I did. And it worked. Again, only not kinda this time. It actually, properly worked.

I immediately set about changing the video drivers. That was what stopped the replacement PC sending a signal yesterday, right after I updated it to the latest GeForce drivers. I had them down as #1 suspect. 

I was in on the integrated graphics, though, and those are Radeon. But as it happens, I've been getting an error message about them every time I log in pretty much since I bought the machine. I assumed it was because I was using an Nvidia GPU and there was some kind of minor conflict but now it was still doing it without the card even being in the case... 

So I updated the Radeon drivers and the message went away. How about that? Who'd have thought? Thing must have shipped with the wrong drivers to begin with, although the ones it was using did still work.

Next. I re-installed the GeForce 4060 and went to roll back the drivers to the previous ones that used to work just fine, only the roll-back option was greyed out. So I went to Nvidia's website, picked one from a month ago, before the problems started, and installed that instead. Then I went into Windows Defender and added all the individual Neverness .exe files to the whitelist and the whole folder to the Exception list just to be on the safe side.

Finally, I logged into the game, just to see what would happen. It's a always a thrill ride around here, I can tell you.

It was a new installation on the external SDD. I uninstalled and reinstalled yesterday, when I was trying to get it to run over there - without success, I might add - and then I played NTE for about twenty minutes. 

The final test came when I logged out, of course. That's when the trouble was going to start, if there was any coming.

But this time nothing bad happened. I hung around for a while, waiting. Still nothing. I read a few blogs. Still nothing.  Then started this one and I'd been at it a while before it was time for tea. I powered the machine down - another test of sorts - then I came back an hour later and powered it on again. 

And it worked. Normally. No halts, error messages or crashes. Here I am now, typing the last couple of paragraphs and everything still seems fine.

I have no clue what got me in. I don't know if any of the changes I've made will mean I can stay. It might be a permanent fix or tomorrow I might be back where I started. I'd be a lot happier if I knew how I managed to get the thing working again But I'll take the win anyway. I was not looking forward to boxing the thing up and sending it off so anything that means I don't have to bother is good with me.

I really hope this is the last time I'll be posting about computer issues, at least for a while. I wouldn't count on it, though. Remember the old superstition about things only work when you give up trying to make things happen and start complaining about it instead?. It used to be a meme in EverQuest back before there were memes, particularly when people were trying to spawn the Ancient Cyclops for the J-Boots quest.

Funny how often it seems to happen that way, isn't it?

Things To Do On A Hot And Sunny Day

Well, it turns out the problem with my PC I was talking about on Monday may not have been anything to do with Neverness To Everness after all. I logged out of EverQuest II yesterday and the same thing happened, only this time I couldn't get the machine to wake up again. 

I spent most of this morning trying every fix Gemini, reddit and YouTube could suggest, including but not limited to reseating the ram, swapping it around, reseating the GPU, changing cables, changing monitors and removing and replacing the CMOS battery. Nothing had the slightest effect. 

So here I am, blogging from my old PC, which works fine (Fingers crossed, touch wood...) It's still on Windows 10 but I'm good for security updates until October, when all support ends, so it'll do me until I either get the other repaired or replaced. It's still under warranty but it's back-to-base of course, which is pain. I've submitted a request so we'll see how that goes.

The only real drawback of (Temporarily.) reverting to the old PC is that it won't run Neverness To Everness. I'm a bit surprised because it ran Wuthering Waves flawlessly and I wouldn't have thought there was that much difference. I think it's one of those annoying hard-coded blocks, where the launcher checks the exact specs of the machine and refuses to go on if they don't meet the minimum. I'd much rather they just let me try it and find out. I've run plenty of games perfectly well on machines that didn't meet minimum spec before.

Actually, I just googled (Yay! Live blogging!) and it isn't that at all. Apparently NTE does run on sub-standard hardware, so I need to look into why it's not doing it on mine. 

It'll be a shame if I have to stop playing for a while, not only because I was really enjoying it but because I was up-to-date, for once. I've finished all the main story quests that were in the game at launch and I was ready to start on whatever comes with the new update, Dreamwalk Corridor, which lands on June 3. 

And the live blogging continues... I looked into it and NTE runs on Google Play Games for PC, which I have installed on this old machine already although I don't think I've ever used it. And i'm not using it now, either.

I tried it and it told me I wasn't entitled to play games with Google because I don't have hardware virtualization enabled. Also, while it was pointing out my deficiencies, it told me my graphics drivers were out of date.

I just updated those the other day on the new machine and when I swapped to this one I also moved the good graphics card across so I knew where to go and which ones to get. I did that and then looked up how to enable hardware virtualization, which requires going into BIOS and flicking a switch.

I powered down and restarted and... nothing. Well, something. I got as far as the Windows logo, then a spinning circle and then nothing. I tried doing that a few times until the fun wore off, then I tried booting into Safe Mode and that didn't work either because there didn't seem to be any such option.

I did manage to get into the BIOS, though, by accident, so since I was there anyway, I enabled hardware virtualization. Then I got on the laptop and looked up how to enter Safe Mode now there's no sign of it at boot-up. It's a good job there are three PCs in the house, isn't it? (Actually, I think there at least five that work. Well, four now, I guess...)

I followed the instructions on how to get to Safe Mode, which are ludicrously complicated these days. The walkthrough is literally a 12-step program, which is what you're going to need if you try and fix your own computer problems. At the 11th step, whoever wrote the list whispered an aside ("Isn't this so much easier than pressing F8 on start-up?") Litotes and irony! Gosh-wow! They really must have been pissed.

Anyway, at least it worked. I was able to get in and roll the video drivers back to the last ones. You know, the ones that worked. 

And now I'm wondering if that could have been the problem with the new PC. When did Forza Horizon 6 come out? 19 May. I have a feeling I updated my GeForce drivers the same day, although not for that reason. Which would have been about the time I started having problems...

Tempted though I am to open the cases and swap everything around again just to find out for certain that it wasn't the reason, I have a better idea. I'll stick an old Radeon card in there instead and see if that works. It's not going to use the GeForce drivers so it should, if the drivers were the problem. Hang on...

Nah. Wasn't that. Never thought it was, really. The PC also has integrated graphics that don't use Nvidia drivers as far as I know and they weren't working either.  Still, nice to be sure.

Getting back to the main plot, once I was able to get in again, I went back to Google Play Games to get NTE and bloody Google told me it still wouldn't let me play because my CPU wasn't up to the job. Well screw you, Google! Just because it's, like, a decade old...

It's looking like no Neverness To Everness for me until I get my PC fixed or replaced but the good news is I just got confirmation that the company I bought the PC from is happy to look at it under warranty.  Even if they can fix it, I very much doubt they'll do it in time for the big NTE update, especially since I don't even have the boxes to send it in yet. They want me to send it back in two boxes, one inside the other, assuming I didn't keep the original packaging, which of course I didn't.

As it happens, I did keep the box. It was a nice, big, solid one and I thought it might come in useful for something but luckily it hasn't so it's just sitting there, waiting to be used. Believe it or not, though, I don't also have a second, slightly smaller box to go inside it or indeed a second, slightly larger one tp put it in. I'll have to get one or the other before I give a date and time for the courier to collect it.

And that was how I spent my day. Aren't computers fun? 

Luckily, it was only the second-hottest of the year, after yesterday's record-breaking hottest Spring day ever. (33C in the shade in our back garden. I took a theromemeter out and measured it. Don't tell me I don't know how to have a good time!) Nothing I like better than doing several hours of fiddly tech stuff with sweat dripping off my nose into the electrics...

For the time being, I imagine there'll be a pause in posts about Neverness To Everness, which will probably come as a relief to some readers. On the other hand, they might be replaced by posts about Wuthering Waves, if I decide to get my anime fix there instead for a while, so don't get too comfortable.

Or I might just play EQII for a bit. I was doing some things there before NTE knocked me off course. At least my old PC can run that one. Suck on that, Google Play Games!  

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Three images from the AI-generated suggested prompts I use every day to get my daily done at NightCafe. I never even look at the details beyond checking if there's some kind of animal involved and if there's neon or cyberpunk or noir in the description. I also never change the model so I guess it's whatever I used the last time I cared. Since I'm burning up the planet making these things, I figure I might as well get some use out of them. 

And they are quite pretty. Particularly the fox. I really like that fox, with his waistcoat and his weak left eye. It's not his fault he's artificial...

This Is Your Situation

Jack Emmert, CEO of Cryptic and one of the names behind a whole slew of MMORPGs you'll have heard of, if not played, including all his current studio's titles and also City of Heroes and DCUO, gave an interview to GamesIndustry recently that seemed to me to be at one and the same time both clear- and short-sighted. His thesis is that there's a pent-up demand for MMOs that's currently going unmet and his primary evidence for it is the number of people who bought New World, apparently estimated to be a staggering 10 million.

First, ten million? Really? The source quoted by GI is Video Game Insights, whose website comes under the umbrella of something called SensorTower. It seems to offer a service very similar to what SuperData used to trade on so give it whatever credibility you used to give them, I guess?

Ten million sounds like a lot of customers to give up on, though. Impressive chutzpah from Amazon, throwing that many under the bus. Jack's explanation for that is "I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it" although if Amazon don't have the infrastructure, who does? Still, even if it was actually "only" half of what VGI claim, jack's right. That's a lot of players willing to give an MMO a go.

But not to stick with one, obviously. Just like the millions who didn't stick with Lost Ark or any of the other big ticket launches of the last few years.

Jack also cites the continuing millions believed, if not proven, to be playing World of Warcraft and "the Daybreak games, or whatever" as proof the interest is still there. All of which is uncontroversial enough, I guess, although I'm not entirely convinced it means a huge pent-up demand so much as a lot of people stuck in games they used to love, now finding themselves unwilling to move on...

I'm more interested in his analysis of why the demand, if we accept it exists, isn't being met. Apparently it's because the new games are simultaneously empty of meaning even while being overfilled with content.:

 "These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again."

I think he's talking about what Wilhelm often complains about with games in development - that desire to be everything to everyone rather than sticking to what you're good at. "Feature creep" as it's sometimes called. Jack goes on to explain that when he was designing Neverwinter Online, he had a simple mission statement: "Kill shit and take their loot."

He doubles down: "That was it, over and over again.". Then he adds, almost as an after thought, "And make it fun." The fact that NWO is still running is cited as proof the concept worked. 

A lot of MMOs are still running, though. As has been noted many times, they're harder to kill than cockroaches. I could log into half a dozen I can think of immediately that have been up as long or longer than NWO and I'd lay good odds I'd be one of fewer than a dozen players online in any of them. Persistence is evidence of something but I'm not sure that something is demand.

My real problem with Jack's thesis, though, isn't the existence of a substantial demographic interested in massively multiple online games. Undeniably, there are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people playing MMOs of various kinds. 

If we assume Jack means the kinds of games he makes and that he's name-checking, though, all of which are MMORPGs, not just MMOs, I'll still allow it. Lots of people do play those, albeit nowhere near as many. And logic does suggest there are orders of magnitude more players, who used to play games like those but don't any more.

Where I diverge from his argument is that what the people, who currently aren't playing MMORPGs but might one day, are impatiently awaiting are games where they can

 "run the same goddamn dungeon a hundred times" 

so they can get better and better loot, progress their character and improve their playing skills, which is what Jack thinks is needed to bring those lost sheep thundering back into the fold.

"It's not that I need a gajillion number of dungeons. What I need is to make sure the progression is worth it. In fact, I enjoy doing things a gajillion number of times, because each time I get a little bit better, and then all of a sudden I'm an expert and I'm telling other people what to do."

I'm happy for Jack. He's like Mark E Smith from the Fall. Well, in one way. They both dig repetition. 

I do, too - in music. In games, not so much. I'm over here, in the camp Jack dismisses as irrelevant:

"But other people will say, 'Well, that's impossible, people get bored or whatever'.

Oh, god yes. Try to make me do that and I will get bored. And leave. But appraently

"That misunderstands the point."

Sorry? What point was that, again? It was the lack of any need for variety or content in a new MMORPG.

"The launch does not need to be everything with an MMO. It does not need to be 200 hours of unique content. It just flat out doesn't. Running the same dungeon multiple times is perfectly fine at the start, then three months later there's something new, and three months later there's something new… And once you do that, the players are sold."

Except that the evidence of numerous Steam Charts past is that by the time you get to that first, quarterly content drop, 90% of your players will have left. And few of them are going to come back to see what else is new three months later because by then your game is going to be just some old game they wish they hadn't wasted their money on. The demand may be there but the patience sure as hell is not. 

You may be able to frog-boil WoW vets into running the same content over and over and over at higher and higher difficulty forever and ever but that's a form of conditioning that takes years to induce. It's not going to bed down in a couple of weeks, which is, at the outside, about as long as you'll have before the players get bored and wander off to find  something less tedious.

The two genres that have been eating MMORPGs lunch for half a decade now are Survival-Crafting and Open World RPG Gacha. One of those does indeed exemplify Jack's wish to "focus on economical use of assets and environments" and reliance on repetition, although the repetition in question is rarely if ever multiple dungeon runs. The repetition has more to do with creativity than compliance.

As for the other, it's the total antithesis. Pure entertainment. Also a six-weekly content cadence that leaves players struggling to keep up rather than lost for new things to do. 

What neither of them rely on is running the same goddam dungeon over and over and over until your eyes bleed, just so you can add 0.1% to your Critical Chance stat, if you're lucky. There are people who like doing that, true, but I suspect very, very few of them are actively looking for a new game that will allow them to do it. They're being very well-served already in a number of games that were last truly popular at least a decade and a half ago and most of them are not going to be moving unless that game actually shuts down.

None of which is to say Jack doesn't have a good business plan. He has. It's very realistic. A lot of developers would do well to follow it.

"I'm a niche developer in the grand scheme of things, because I identify... something with a passionate fan base, and then I try my best to create an authentic experience."

There's the future of the genre in a nutshell for you: niche product serving a pre-existing fanbase. I'm not going to argue against it. It'll work and if someone cares to apply the method to an IP I care about, I'll play it, too.

I'm just not sold on the idea that there's some larger, untapped, unsatisfied audience out there, desperately waiting for someone to make an MMORPG that will let them run the same dungeon over and over and over... 

Or maybe I just hope there isn't. God! that would be depressing...

Vibe Blogging

Today's post is going to be a bit of a mixed bag, I think. 

Not a Grab-Bag. I have a sort of format for those and this isn't going to fit it. It's just a few things I wanted to post about that probably won't make full posts of their own. 

Then again, maybe one will blow up into something bigger as I write, in which case I'll just come back and delete this introduction and no-one will ever know! <Twirls mustachio. Supervillain laughter.>

Always On

First, something that definitely isn't worth a whole post. I just want to moan about it. Unlike some people, Nimgimli for one, I've had absolutely no technical problems with Nevernesss To Everness so far. No bugs, no UI glitches, no performance issues. For me, playing on PC, it runs as smoothly as any viscous liquid you care to name. 

Playing is no problem. The problem comes when I stop. In the last few days - I bet since one of the frequent updates, although I couldn't nail down exactly which - whenever I log out of NTE, about half a minute or so later Windows tells me it's "run into a problem" and needs to reboot. That would be annoying enough but it turns out Windows can't reboot and I end up staring at a black screen until I switch the power off and restart, after which everything works perfectly until the next time I stop playing NTE.

Apart from being annoying, I worry all this sudden stopping and starting will damage something, so I googled for explanations and fixes. First, I did it the old-fashioned way. I checked reddit threads and watched YouTube videos but no-one seemed to have the exact problem I did and nothing they suggested seemed particularly helpful, so I thought I might as well let Gemini have a go, since it kept on offering.

Gemini was extremely co-operative. It asked pertinent questions, gave me lucid explanations, offered fixes, walked me through what to do when I had difficulties implementing them and basically acted like the best kind of IT department I've ever had to speak to (And I've spoken to plenty.)

All of which would be great if the solutions Gemini provided had worked. They did not. Oh, they worked in the sense that all the commands and instructions were accepted when I followed them and they did what they were supposed to do. It just didn't stop NTE crashing my PC on exit.

But then, neither did any of the non-AI fixes and suggestions I tried. If it was a football match it'd be a no-score draw. (But then, I just used Gemini to fix a perpetually annoying issue I have with Blogger getting the color of links wrong and it sorted it out perfectly in ten seconds, so I guess AI wins in injury time.)

Of all the various possible reasons offered, by far the most likely seems to be a conflict with the Anti-Cheat software NTE uses. From long experience with online games, the most likely fix is going to be putting up with it until the developers patch again and it magically goes away. Until then, I might just try shutting the PC down immediately I log out to see if I can beat the crash. That'll be fun. [Edit: Tried it and it works so that'll be my temporary solution for now.]

Had Gemini's fix actually worked, I might have been here today singing AI's praises. That'd be a popular post, I'm sure. If anything, anti-AI sentiment seems to be growing. It used to be mostly in my gaming and music feeds but now it's increasingly present in just about anything I read. As for positive sentiments regarding our would-be artificial overlords (That's Google and Amazon and whatever Elon Musk is calling himself today rather than the inert and blameless software itself, of course.), those seem to be very thin on the ground indeed. 

 

Search Me 

All of which does make me wonder, even more than usual, how this is all going to pan out. I heard the rumor that Google plans to replace search entirely with some kind of Agentic AI (I do love that word - Agentic - don't you? Doesn't it just ooze futurity? Algorithms never had that kind of PR.). It sounded a bit worrying so I checked (Using Google Search, inevitably.) and it turns out to be the usual kind of hyperbolic over-exaggeration humans have been using to get Eyeballs or Clicks or whatever the metric is these days since at least the day Buzzfeed went live. Which was exactly twenty years ago. I just checked. (Google>Wikipedia.)

In fact, Google Search continues as before, according to a statement Google gave USA Today, who bothered to ask them, but there will be a new All-AI front end as well. That, inevitably, will be Google's new focus and I'm sure it will be the first/main thing you see, which means most people will use it without thinking any more about it. I imagine their hope is that Search itself will wither away from neglect and disuse and they'll be able to discontinue it at some future date when no-one cares any more.

Will that happen? Hard to say. How did Google take over from all those other search engines - AltaVista, Netscape, Yahoo and the rest - in the first place? It was faster, more accurate and more comprehensive, that's how. People used it, found it did the job better and stopped using the older search engines. 

Have people changed that much in a couple of decades? If they find the new AI Agents are worse than the search they had before, will they not move away from Google to something that gives them what they want? Isn't it just handing a huge opportunity to a new "Traditional Search" provider to come into the market? 

Or, much more likely, will most general internet users find AI means much less fiddling about and reading websites and a lot more getting quick answers that work well enough, often enough, which will be plenty to keep almost everyone at least happy to go along with it? Too much effort just to get back to something they probably won't miss anyway.

So, yes, I imagine AI Agents are going to replace search if only because I'd bet the huge majority of users never really liked searching to begin with. It was always a necessary inconvenience for most people and I'll bet they'll be glad to see the back of it. People who actively enjoy searching as we've known it have to be a pretty small minority of web users, surely?

I'm kind of on the fence about the whole thing. I definitely don't hate AI. I just wish it was better. Maybe it will be, one day. Or maybe the current technology, which seems to be part brute force and part black magic, is a dead end and it'll never be entirely reliable. I suspect that's more likely but it's too soon to jump one way or the other. 

You Want Me To Draw You A Picture? 

All of which brings me to a little discussion that took place in the comments on a post over at The Friendly Necromancer, where Stingite was talking about feeling guilty for using AI art to illustrate his (Other.) blog, rather than, for example, hiring an actual artist to do it.

I said in the comments that it's a notional argument. No hobby blogger is ever going to commission an artist to provide illustrations for posts except on an absolutely exceptional basis. I must have read tens of thousands of blog posts now and I can't remember ever seeing it done. It didn't happen before AI so AI isn't stopping it happening now. No artist is starving because a blogger stopped commissioning spot illustrations for their posts. 

Very, very occasionally I have seen someone commission a piece of art to be a permanent feature on a blog. I remember Belghast doing it for a masthead a couple of times and I have a vague idea one or two others may have done something similar. But no-one who posts several times a week is going to pay a commercial rate to a professional artist for even one illustration per post, let alone the half-dozen or more most people who use pictures at all like to throw in

And that in turn got me thinking about The Olden Days. I'm not talking about Ye Olde Webbe of Yore that so many people, most of them barely old enough to have experienced it the first time around, seem so struck on bringing back. I'm talking the way things were before the worldwide web even existed.

When I came back from college in the early 1980s, one of the first things I did was start a comics fanzine with my then-wife, a friend of ours and the guy who owned the comic shop I worked in. We put out seven issues over two years and then our friend took over the editing and publishing of a bigger, more successful 'zine, which he eventually turned into a semi-pro operation. I switched to writing for that and we pulled the plug on our own zine.

Every issue of our original zine was stuffed with what we called "Spot Illos" - either decontextualized images, used to break up the text, or more targeted images, intended to support it. We also had comic strips sometimes and full-size cover art for every issue.

A minority of the pictures were drawn by my wife, who was a great comic artist and should have made a career out of it, but most were done by people who read our zine and who were active in comics fandom at the time. Some of them already had a foot in the door of professional comics publishing, some went on to be professional comic artists later, but most remained hobbyists and amateurs.

Whatever their status and ability, no-one got paid a penny. No-one expected to be paid. Paying people for art that wasn't going to be sold for a profit was not a thing anyone did, wanted to do or even thought about doing. All people wanted was to see their work and their names in print. If they did have professional aspirations, they'd add it to their portfolio so they could at least show potential employers something they'd had published but most of our contributors weren't even that ambitious. They just liked to draw and enjoyed sharing the results.

If something similar was part of blogging culture, the way it was always part of the 'zine culture I grew up with, no-one would need AI to draw them a picture. There'd be no shortage of people happy to provide it for free. We always had far more submissions than we could use. 

And we had a smaller readership than many hobby blogs, too. From memory, I think our print run was about 300 at the peak although the semi-pro zine my friend ended up editing and publishing ran to ten times that eventually. And I don't believe he ever paid anyone anything, either, until a bigger publisher picked him up and gave him a budget to go pro with an actual comic.

There could be a place on the web where bloggers could ask for images to illustrate posts and artists could supply them for nothing more than credit and a link. The technology has been in place for years to allow something like that to grow into a global free exchange of talent. Granted it would never be quite as instant and frictionless as generating an AI image but the results would be so much better it would be worth the wait. Probably. Although now I think about some of the pictures we published, let alone the ones we didn't...

Maybe something like that does exist already. I know it does for paid, commissioned art. If it does, though, the evidence has never shown up in any blog I ever read. And I'm certainly not offering to set up any such kind of website myself, although ironically I imagine I could get an AI to to code it for me if I was. They're supposed to be good at that sort of thing.

And even if someone else did all the donkey-work, it wouldn't be great for me as a user anyway. It would better suit people who write their posts with at least a little lead-time. I tend to bash mine out on the day and I don't think there are many artists out there who'd be happy to get a request after lunch asking them to knock out half a dozen pictures before tea. 

That's how AI wins, I guess. It may be soulless but it sure is fast and it never complains or makes excuses. It never says "Do it yourself. I'm busy." Or fobs you off with "I've just got to walk the dog and do a bit of shopping. But I'll get to it as soon as I can. Promise!" 

And yet, I don't use a lot of AI art here any more. It's not even because readers don't like it. When I do drop a few AI illos into a post, most people just ignore them, I think, assuming they even notice. As Stingite says, AI's much better at doing art than it used to be so it doesn't stand out the way it did.

No, it's more that I find it a bit dull, now the novelty value isn't there any more. I'll use it if I need to but it's purely functional, not the crazy thrill-ride it could be a few years back. I get better results dicking around with images in Paint.net, anyway, and that feels a lot more creative than writing prompts. I'm not at all sure it is but it feels that way.

Hmm. I seem to be wandering away from whatever point I had. Not that I expected the post to go anywhere but at least I got a few things off my chest. I had a couple more somewhat-related topics to talk about, too, but since this has clearly gone on long enough already (More than, probably...) I'll save those for another time. 

Now... shall I use AI to illustrate this post? Would that be ironic? Post-modern? Provocative? 

Or just plain lazy?