Day Eight - Nice

 

Noël Christmas

Sugar & Tiger

Day Eight - Naughty

Santa Rock'n'Roll

Faichecleres

It's Grab Bag But It's Completely Different But Also Still Grab Bag!

Listmas Is Coming!

So, I just read (Skimmed, honestly.) Stereogum's Best Albums of 2024 list, which came out, a tad prematurely I'd say, on the second of December. I mean, do they have a time machine or a crystal ball or something? How do they know the best album of the year isn't coming out next week?

Anyway, as it happens, I was ripping the #1 album(s) on that list at the exact same time I was reading Abby Jones' emotional endorsement of it. (Them.). Yes, I still rip CDs. I bought myself a new MP3 player (Yes , I still use an MP3 player.) because my ten-year old  iPod Touch is all-but full and I don't want to go through the harrowing process of choosing what to cull so I figured I'd just start afresh somewhere else, which is why the world is in the mess it's in, I guess.

Brat & Brat And It's Completely Different But Also Still Brat topped this year's poll as a double bill, to no-one's surprise, I'm sure. It's been Charli XCX's year. I got the pair of them for my birthday but I haven't listened to either all the way through yet. I need them on the iPod for that. Obviously, most of the tracks I'm already familiar with from life online but once I get this thing up and running I can hear them in the wild.

Looking down the list, there's only one other album I own and that's Romance by Fontaines DC at #28. Well, I say I own it. I don't yet. It's on my Christmas list and I'm sure it's somewhere in the house. I just don't know where. 

There's also a copy of #29 in the house or more accurately in the car but it isn't mine. That's The Cure's Songs of a Lost World. I like The Cure but Mrs Bhagpuss loves them. I was going to give the CD to her for Christmas but she counldn't wait so she bought it herself. I thought the two singles off the album were excellent so I imagine the whole thing is pretty much on par.

I do also kind of own #8, Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee. For most of the year it only existed as a two hour block of sound on YouTube. I listened to it that way and downloaded a copy for posterity. It is now available on Bandcamp in various formats so I might get the CD one day, although postage is a killer. I guess I could cut out the middleman and just buy the digital download. I do like to have a hard copy, though.

Of the rest, there are eight more albums I bookmarked at least one track from to use on the blog although in most cases I never did because I used other stuff that was around at the time that I liked more. Then there's another eight where I listened to something from the album online but didn't like it enough even to bookmark it. There's a lot of mmm... okay, I guess on that list for my tastes.

Of the rest, I at least know who everyone is, except for a dozen names new to me. You'd think, considering they're in Stereogum's best-of-year list and I read the damn site every day, I'd at least have heard of them but apparently not. Must pay more attention in class.

Still, it's a huge improvement on where I was a few years ago. It's hard work, keeping up, but it needs to be done. I really hate the way I let myself lose touch for a decade or so. Not letting that happen again.

As for the repeated assertions in the comments that 2024 has been "the best year since 2020" I'd have to go look at what came out four years ago to figure out why that might be true or if it even is, what was so great about 2020. Every year is great for music as far as I can see. And probably always will be, even if we're reduced to banging rocks together in a cave again.  

My #1 album of 2024 actually came out in 2023 so obviously it's not there. It'll be on my Inventory Full Best of 2024 list though. My blog, my rules.

The Clock Ticks For Tik-Tok.

I mentioned in passing in Thursday's post that I'd heard if I installed NetEase's MuMu emulator it might steal my data. This morning I saw the latest on the proposed U.S. ban on TikTok, an app that, it's claimed, "could allow the Chinese government to gain access to the data of its millions of American users". It's tempting to ask "So, what's new?"

According to the article in NME, the EU, along with Canada and more than thirty US states, have already banned the use of TikTok on "government-owned devices", which kind of makes sense in terms of the data that might be at risk there but also makes you wonder what government officials were doing, using TikTok in the workplace to begin with.

If the ban goes through in January, it's going to be very interesting to see how it affects popular culture, particularly in the U.S.A. TikTok-driven trends dominate the media these days and drive both production and sales in multiple businesses. Will a ban lead to a resurgence of American Soft Power or will American teens and twenty-somethings find their grip on the zeitgesit slipping even further as the rest of the world continues to accelerate away from the 20th Century? Or will they just find ways around the ban that let them lope along behind the rest of the world, just slightly out of step with the fads of the moment?

Also, why pick on TikTok? Doesn't every app steal our data now? Is it even feasible to avoid it any more? 

I sat up and took notice when I saw that Tencent had acquired a majority stake in Kuro Games. That's the company behind Wuthering Waves so I guess whatever data they were gathering now goes to Tencent, often described as an unofficial arm of the Chinese government, although not by me because I have more sense.

Of course, if it's true, Tencent already have all my data from any number of other games I've played that they own or part-own or publish because Tencent has a piece of pretty much everything. There's really no point worrying about it any more than it's worth worrying about low-level air pollution or water contamination. It's not like you can stop drinking and breathing and it's not like you can go without games and social media either. It's not physically possible. We all know that.

Make Room! Make Room!

I was rifling through someone else's grab bag yesterday, Scopique's in fact, when I came across a mention of a game called Infinity Nikki. The name sounded awfully familiar. I could have sworn I posted something about it myself, once.

I took a look but I couldn't find a tag for it. A search on the blog found nothing either but when I went to the game's website to see if I saw anything that looked familiar, I absolutely did. 

I have a not-all-that vague memory not only of reading about the game itself but also doing some digging through the history of the franchise, which seems to have been around for a while. There's a very good article about it on the Epic Games site, of all places.

When, where and why I read about it before remains a mystery. About all I can think of is that it might have come up when I was researching that similarly-named but wholly unrelated NIKKE game I foolishly downloaded from an advertisement on MassivelyOP.

Infinity Nikki looks like it might be fun. I mean, open world dress-up? What's not to like? I was ready to find out by downloading it and giving it a go only it seems that even with four hard drives and a usb stick all connected to my PC at once, I'm still running out of storage space.

I really hate deleting things (See above.) especially when I just know I'm going end up downloading them again, which is why I keep all these dozens of MMORPGs hanging around even though I'm not planning on playing any of them right now. They take up a ton of space but so do all my video files that I keep multiple copies of on multiple drives for safety-blanket reasons. It seems four and a half terabytes of storage isn't enough. I guess I'd better buy some more.

Or I could just uninstall World of Warcraft. That's a hundred gigabytes on its own. I'll think about it and when I've decided, I'll give Infinity Nikki a whirl.

Make It Stop! No! Wait! Don't! I Like It!

Nikki's in pole but there's a line forming right behind her. I was only checking on Neverness to Everness just the other day. I thought I'd pre-registered already but I haven't been getting any updates so I guess I never got around to it. Well, I have now. 

The game went into closed beta recently so with luck it should be available relatively soon. Early reviews are solid and things are looking good.

Further back in development is Ananta, a somewhat similar but somehow entirely different title from NetEase. (Them again!) The name is bleh, especially by current naming conventions, but the trailer is full-on fantastic. I've seen it described as "Anime GTA6" but since I've never played a GTA I have no idea if that makes any kind of sense.

What I'm thinking is that if the most fun I've had in a game this year was driving around in Once Human, listening to the radio and occasionally jumping out to shoot bizarre monsters, I'm probably in the target market for games where you drive around, listening to the radio, occasionally jumping out to shoot bizarre monsters. 

I should look for more games like that, especially ones where you can wear bunny ears and look cute while you're doing it. The days when I dreamed of pretending to be a short, ugly gnome or a dwarf with a huge beard seem a long way behind me now.  I really ought to update that thumbnail on my profile.

Is This A Glock 9mm I See Before Me?

Okay, so that's Macbeth. It's all fricken' Shakespeare, right? I thought we might have had enough music for the moment so instead of ending with a song, since we were just talking about Grand Theft Auto, let's end with this instead.

One of the very first things I remember doing in EverQuest back around the turn of the millennium was spending Sunday evening in the theater in Freeport, watching the equivalent of open mic night for about an hour or so. And now here we are.

If you'd have told me then...

Day Seven - Nice

Rocking With The Reindeer

John Otway

Day Seven - Naughty

 

Christmas Reindeer 

The Knife

Secret Level Bonus

I didn't make a point of it, when I posted about December's Prime Gaming offer a few days ago, but at the time I did think the list felt a bit light, at least compared to the richness that was November. Turns out there's a reason for that.

Yesterday, a second Prime Gaming blog post popped up in my feeds. Two in one month? In one week?? What was going on?

The Amazon Prime series Secret Level, that's what. Announced earlier this year, the fifteen episode first season is "a new adult-animated anthology series featuring original stories set within the worlds of some of the world’s most beloved video games", the games in question being

• Armored Core
• Concord
• Crossfire
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Exodus
• Honor of Kings
• Mega Man
• New World: Aeternum
• PAC-MAN
• PlayStation (Not a video game...)
• Sifu
• Spelunky
• The Outer Worlds
• Unreal Tournament
• Warhammer 40,000

This news seemed to pick up remarkably little traction with any of the gaming sites I follow, possibly because they tend to be MMO-oriented and the only MMORPG on this list is New World, which Amazon would like everyone to stop calling an MMO anyway.

I know I sometimes try to make out I'm not a gamer but I do usually at least recognize the names of most well-known or popular games, even if I couldn't tell you what they're about or even what genre they fit into. It doesn't in the least surprise me that there are only two games on the list I've played but it does that there are half a dozen I've literally never heard of, not to mention that two of the entries aren't video games at all. They're either franchises or platforms.

The show, which debuts in just a few days, was put together by Blur Studio, known for making "epic" trailers for video games and also as the  people behind Love, Death + Robots, a series I seem to remember being praised by a couple of people in this part of the blogosphere. 

I'm not a fan, myself. I watched a couple of episodes and didn't feel any desire to watch more. The connection actually put me off paying much attention to Secret level. 

Nothing I'm seeing so far is making me feel any more enthsiastic about jumping in when the series starts on Tuesday. Reviews so far have not been encouraging. Radio Times, with only the first four episodes to go on, highlighted the extreme and unsatisfying brevity of what they'd been allowed to see. The longest was "just shy of 18 minutes long", leading the reviewer to observe that "every episode still feels like you’re watching a trailer for something bigger."

Still, they did at least find a few positive things to say, unlike The Verge, whose reviewer saw all fifteen episodes and didn't enjoy any of them:"The 15 shorts are almost universally dull and manage to neither make their source material seem compelling nor provide new insights for existing fans."

I had no plans to watch the show and I still don't. The only reason I'm writing about it now is that it's the reason we got that second Prime Gaming post and also quite possibly why the December slate seemed a little lackluster compared to last month.

In recognition of the arrival of Secret Level on our screens next week, Prime subscribers are getting nine bonus free games, all somehow related to titles covered in the show. Not to that many of them, though. I make it just four: Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer 40,000.

For the first two, we get the actual games, which is great since I've had The Outer Worlds in mind as something I'd like to play for a while now. I claimed it right away. When I'll get to play it is another matter but it's on the longlist.

Spelunky is a platformer so I passed. The D&D titles are "Enhanced" editions of Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, which sounds great but I already have multiple editions of both. I can't be bothered to work out what's been enhanced so I'm just going to claim them anyway.

The Warhammer titles I'll need to look at more carefully (There are five of them.) before I decide if there's anything there I want. I doubt it but you can never be sure. I like Warhammer well enough as a setting and as a franchise but the games that come out under the banner are rarely in genres that interest me.

Luna users also get Mega Man 11 although for how long isn't clear. December, presumably. As for New World Aeternum, unsurprisingly Amazon have chosen not to give their "new" game away for nothing but Prime members who play will get "a surprise" and "some free in-game items" when the show starts on 10 December. Or more likely a surprise that is some free in-game items.

As I type it all out it occurs to me that it's not such a great celebration as all that. Most of the games aren't represented at all and some of those that are come in the form of variants of titles that have appeared in previous Prime Gaming giveaways. Still, I suppose we can't complain. They're not just freebies - they're bonus freebies.

I'm just happy to get an extra game I wanted.

Day Six - Nice

 Cold Snow In The Winter 

 Holly and Richard Bailey

Day Six - Naughty

 

Baby's First Christmas 

Surf Wave

Movies, Muffins And More

Phew! It's been a busy few days. I'd apologize for there being nothing to see here other than the Advent Calendar posts but honestly, if it wasn't for those, there'd have been nothing at all, so be glad for anything you get, I say.

Not that I'd have had a great deal to talk about if I'd had more time. Gaming of late has been an hour of EverQuest II in the evening and that's it. TV, I'm still working my way through The Good Place. Just a handful of episodes to go there. Something about that soon, probably, but not until I finish it all.

I have a slew of music-related topics bookmarked to cover but I think we may have enough music here already, somehow. Also, there are end-of-year lists to think about. Don't want to compromise those.

I did watch a new movie, which is unusual for me these days. It wasn't new new but it did come out this decade. I might say something about that later.

No, y'know what, let's do it now. Let's make this a Grab-Bag post because that seems to be about all I'm capable of at the moment. Then again, I like writing them and I like reading them when other people do them, so why am I even apologizing?

Flash! Oo-er!

Keen readers may remember I was watching The Flash TV show earlier in the year. I managed three seasons before I decided I really didn't much like any of the characters and took a break. I still haven't picked that one back up but I have now watched the movie of the same name that came out about a year and a half ago.

What I most remember about it from back then is all the fuss and palaver over the antics of the actor in the title role, Ezra Miller. Miller seems to be something of a throwback in cinema terms inasmuch as they don't manage their private life to benefit their professional career. The opposite, if anything. 

They behave more like a movie star from a bygone age, a time when behaving in a disturbingly off-kilter manner off-screen served to make you more in demand rather than less. As the farrago progressed I thought of Richard Harris, Nicolas Cage, Crispin Glover...

Whatever's going on with them, I like Miller in the role a lot more than I liked Grant Gustin in the TV show, even though Gustin is far more like the Barry Allen of the comics. And that, really, is the problem. 

The Flash is dull, isn't he? I own a lot of Flash comics and I always thought he was boring. I mostly bought them either because they were in continuity with other titles I was reading or because they were easy to find for cheap because everyone else thought he was boring, too. 

He was never one of my favorites. Happily married, living in the suburbs, working in a police lab. He made Clark Kent look like a livewire. Barry never seemed to have much of a personality at all, not until his wife got murdered and he went psycho - but even that didn't make him any more interesting.

As for his powers, running fast isn't conducive to either good comics or good cinema. It's basically all motion blurs and speed lines once you get up there. 

Some of his speed gimmicks are more visually arresting but it's notable that both the TV series and the movie go hard on the time-travel schtick to hold the audience's attention. Unfortunately, as well as being impossible to plot coherently, time travel stories have no specific speed-related requirements. 

You can go fast to break the time barrier but you don't need to. Plenty of people do it with devices that don't involve any running at all and frankly all of those look less daft than a guy going flat out on a treadmill while pumping his arms like a six-year old.

The plot is The Flash is pretty much the plot of the first season of the TV show so I'm guessing they're both taken straight from one of the iterations of the comic. It's a dumb plot, wherever it comes from and best ignored. 

The fun is in the set pieces, some of which are very intricately staged and come off quite well, and in  Ezra Miller's performance, which is idiosyncratic, assured and fundamentally weird. The script is about okay, not much more, but the playing carries it.

That's in the first two acts, anyway. In common with quite a few viewers it seems, I thought The Flash was two-thirds of a good movie. Miller playing Barry Allen both as a teenager and a decade or so older is worth the price of admission, which in my case was effectively nothing, since I watched it on Netflix. 

As a comedy, then, it's more than decent. As an action movie, it's not too shabby either. At times it's lively and exciting. There are some exhilarating fights, some even more exhilarating rescues and along the way we get lots of cameos and supporting roles for other DC heroes, which is fan service of the better kind. 

As a long-time DC fan, I felt well-served by it, anyway. Michael Keaton was lots of fun. So was Gal Gadot, for the ten seconds she shows up, and I really enjoyed seeing Sashe Calle as Kara. 

I knew about Supergirl's role from a couple of comics blogs I follow and I was quite pleased with the way she was handled here. Odd to see her not blonde but it's fine. Anyone can change their hair color. I've done it.Looking forward to seeing her in her own movie, now.

The problem, as it usually does with superhero movies, comes in the third act, when all the smaller-scale, emotionally impactful stuff goes straight out the window in favor of huge spectacle and massive explosions. Sometimes they pull it off. This is one of the times they don't..

I've seen the failure of the narrative ascribed to the multiversal elements. They certainly don't help but I feel it's the way they're handled here that's the real problem. No-one should expect the climax to make sense but it's not unreasonable to hope for it at least to look good. It doesn't. It's just messy and chaotic without any sense of visual style.

I don't mind multiverse stories per se, even if they do tend to devalue every significant event that comes before or after, an intrinsic problem with the everywhere all the time at once concept of the universe. But there are narrative ways to get around that. What there's no way to get around is making the whole thing look like it was storyboarded from an idea Nigel Tufnell came up with for a Spinal Tap video while he was high on mushrooms. And even that makes it sound a lot more engaging than it is.

All the same, for all its many flaws and faults, I broadly enjoyed it and it did make me think I ought to watch more movies, so that's good. Haven't actually watched any yet but I have thought about it. So that's progress.

Are You Ever Going To Get Started?

On the Scars of Destruction expansion for EQII, that is. And no, thanks for asking, but it seems I am not. Not for a while, anyway.

The expansion has been out for over two weeks and so far all I've seen is the staging post in the starting zone. I wrote a couple of posts about all the things I needed to do to get ready for some actual adventuring. I had to hit the level cap of 130 with the character I planned to take through the storyline, so he could wear the free upgrade gear and get the quests, but once that was out of the way I was ready to get started.

Or so I thought. Then I made the mistake of doing some comparisons between the maximally upgraded Ancient combat arts I was using, most of which were from two spell tiers ago, and the Expert versions from the current tier. To my surprise, it seemed the CAs and spells I could craft for myself would be upgrades, so I thought, before I got stuck into the new content, I'd just get my Alchemist out to do some quick crafting...

Yeah. Nothing's ever that simple. First, there was the minor issue of the rares he'd need. It takes two rares per combine at these levels and I only had a handful of the right ones. Making Expert versions of all the Berserker's CAs would require well over a hundred rares. They're not impossibly expensive on the broker but they are just shy of two million platinum each so I'd bankrupt myself before I'd even made even the really key ones.

That can be fixed relatively quickly by selling some of my vast supplies of Collectables. I just put the few I happened to be carrying around in my bags up for sale a few days ago and I've already made over 30 million plat. No, the real roadblock turned out to be something I'd completely forgotten.

In recent expansions the Advanced recipe books for the Expert spells and CAs have to be obtained through Research. This used to be very easy because "Research" meant a collective effort from the whole server. There were a few NPCs who wanted stuff made and after enough people had made it for them, they were ready to sell their recipe books to anyone. You had to do some of their quests to get faction or special currency but it didn't take long.

Now, you don't technically have to do any quests or make anything for the NPCs. They'll sell you their books as soon as you have the correct crafting level, which my relevant crafters all do. They don't actually have the books in stock any more though. They have to research them for you. And that takes ten days. Per book. And there are three books.

Basically, from the moment you decide you want these books, it's going to be a month before you get them all. Obviously, I should have done this during the year the Ballads of Zimara expansion was current content but I didn't, so I'm doing it now.

I ought to have it all done by Christmas because there is a way to halve that thirty day waiting period. You do daily quests for a little golem in Aether Wroughtlands. They're exactly like the quests the old researchers used to give out, just annoyingly placed in a different zone from the researchers themselves. If you do the golem's dailies, one of the rewards you get is a page you can read that knocks a day off the research timer. Do them every day and you can get your research done in half the time.

My current EQII session consists of getting those dailies with my Sage and my Alchemist then knocking the quests out as quickly as possible before swapping to my Berserker to go mining for whatever time I have left, in the hope of digging up some of the hundreds of rares I'd need if I'm ever going to upgrade everything for everyone.

It's pointless in a way because my Berserker seems perfectly capable of doing the entry-level content in the new expansion just as he is. But it's also really relaxing and ideal for the hour or two that's all I seem to be able to find for gaming most days right now. 

It does mean I probably won't see much of Scars of Destruction until the New Year, but that's fine. I'm in no hurry. As must be obvious.

Muffin, Miffin, What's The Diffrin?

I saw this on MassivelyOP the other day and because I have no sense of perspective when it comes to how many free MMORPGs I can feasibly play, I became momentarily excited by the prospect of a new one. This time it's a cosy fantasy MMO for mobile, developed by the people who made Torchlight Infinite (Which I have not played.) and published by NetEase.

It looked like it might be amusing so I went to give it a go. The website has download options for Android and iOS as you'd expect but it also has a button to download the game for Windows. On closer inspection, that turns out to be by way of a NetEase proprietary emulator called MuMu.

I already have two mobile emulators installed on my PC - BlueStacks and Nox, both of which I've written about before. Neither of them is perfect so I was willing to try a third. 

I got as far as downloading it and starting the install process before I thought I ought to do some basic research as to the safety of the thing. It seems it probably is the best emulator currently available and also that it's every bit as safe as you'd expect, by which I mean not very safe at all.

I might still have carried on - I mean, as one redditor put it, everything steals your data. At this point, who even cares? What put me off in the end was the way whoever copy-edited the "Muffin's Story" page on the website couldn't even get the title character's name right. Is it Muffin or Miffin? (It's Muffin, blast you!)

I'll probably come back to this one at some point. It looks mildly interesting. Maybe I'll just see if it runs on one of the emulators I already have installed. If those are stealing my data it's a bit late to worry about it now.

Humpty-Dumpty Syndrome

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

"Intentional Fallacy: term used in 20th-century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it." - Definition as per Britannica

"I wrote the lyrics and ought to know what the lyrics I wrote is really about" - Victor Willis, lyricist and singer, The Village People.

I recommend reading Mr. Willis's lengthy explanation of why Y.M.C.A. is not, has never been and never will be a "gay anthem" in full. You can find it here on Stereogum. As one of the comments puts it "this is one of the funniest things i've read in a while, but if i was in a different mood it might have made me quite irritated and frustrated".

End With A Song

I think it's time for everyone to just...

Chill Out - Witch Post

Day Five - Nice

 Christmas In The Midwest 

For The Foxes

Day Five - Naughty

 

Christmas In Space 

 

Count The Clock

Day Four - Nice

 

It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas

Pet Shop Boys

Day Four - Naughty

 Dubstep Christmas 

Goldie Lookin Chain

Day Three - Nice

 

Dancing Around The Christmas Tree 

Willoxen

Day Three - Naughty

 Christmas Tree On Fire 

Holly Golightly

Amazon's Black Friday Deals Can't Match These!

I was going to put up a proper post today, as well as the two Advent Calendar entries, but most of the time I'd set aside for writing I used up trying to get Mrs Bhagpuss's phone upgrade to work. My couple of hours' effort was only a partial success. All the personal data transferred successfully, although not the first time I tried, or the second. I got wifi set up nicely but the new phone only takes an eSim and the old one is too old to handshake with it, so at present we have a very small tablet with no phone capability.

I spent about three-quarters of an hour trying to get through on Live Chat and when I finally succeeded a nice chap said he'd sort it out in a jiffy then disappeared for a good while. I could see he was typing furiously but nothing appeared at my end. Eventually he came back and told me security concerns mean a visit to the phone shop with photo ID in the form of a passport or driving license before the number can be transferred to the new phone. 

Honestly, I think it was easier in the 1970s, when if you wanted to change anything to do with your phone you had to book it six weeks in advance then stay in all day for an engineer who never turned up...

Okay, point taken.

So now that's what we're doing first thing tomorrow, before I go to my uncle's funeral, so a fun day in prospect all round. If it doesn't work then I guess we'll be sending that phone back and starting again, this time with a phone you can swap a sim card into, like I thought I was going to in five minutes this afternoon. I didn't even know eSims existed until today.

Anyway, you don't want to hear about my troubles! Luckily, when I came back to my PC after boxing the phone up again I saw the latest Prime Gaming blog post had popped up in my blog roll so I'm going to rip a couple of chunks off of that and stew them up into some gnarly hotchpotch.

I'm not going to go through the whole list. I don't have the time or the stamina. I did spot a few interesting items on a quick skim that are worth calling out, though, starting with what's new on Amazon's cloud gaming service, Luna.

I don't usually bother with the games you get to play free for a month on Luna if you're a Prime member offers but I paid a little more attention this time. I'm contemplating getting a new laptop and if I do I might very well want to use it for cloud gaming, especially on a service I where I get freebies.

Among the Luna games free for Prime subscribers in December are a couple of interesting titles, Death Stranding Director's Cut being the standout. I've read so much about Death Stranding it almost feels like I've played it, even if most of what I've read kind of makes me glad I haven't. I'm not sure it even qualifies as entertainment. It sounds more like some kind of performance art project. Still, it has to be worth a look, just for the cultural cachet, just so long as I don't have to pay for it.

The other game on Luna that caught my eye this month was The Expanse: A Telltale Series Deluxe Edition. I watched and enjoyed all seasons of the Expanse TV show and I have all the books in a stack waiting for me to find time to read them so why not play the game as well? Also, I've never played a Telltale game but I only ever hear good things. 

Moving on to the Prime Gaming offers proper, there's the usual spatter of Star Wars and Tomb Raider titles we seem to get every month. You'd think they'd have to run out of them some time but clearly the well hasn't run dry yet. This time it's Star Wars: Bounty Hunter and Tomb Raider: Underworld, neither of which appeals to me all that much.

Neither does Overcooked 2 or Call of Juarez, the latter of which I already have on Steam, although I've never played it and recently uninstalled it to make room for more games I'll never play. Of considerably more interest is Dredge, about which, once again, I've heard good things. I'll at least claim that one although whether I'll get around to playing it is less likely.

Planet of Lana I always think I ought to take, for obvious reasons, every time it comes up in various offers, something it seems to do regularly. It's a platformer, though, so I never follow through. Although, looking at it more closely, maybe it's not entirely a platformer after all, so maybe I will grab it this time, when it comes up later in the month.

Nine Witches:Family Disruption looks nuts. Some nonsense about a Nazi "Occult Division" in World War 2 and an ancient curse, all supposedly given a comedy spin, which sounds in dubious taste to say the least. It's a point&click of sorts though, so I might take it. 

I also might take the very much better-looking, both ethically and visually, The Town of Light, a potentially grueling and disturbing first-person psychological "adventure", based on the real-life story of a 16 year-old girl incarcerated in a mental hospital during the rise of fascism in Italy in the late thirties. Sounds like fun, right?

I think that's probably about it. There's a bunch of other stuff but nothing that interests me much. Still, it made for a quick post so I can't complain. And if I ever actually play any of them, that'll make for another. Or maybe even more.

One last thing I would add is that all the games I just looked up on Steam are currently on sale, most of them with massive discounts. I'm not sure if the publishers discount them because the games are being given away free on Prime this month or whether Amazon scoops up a bunch of cheap games that the publishers are already discounting heavily.

Granted, the Steam Autumn Sale is on right now but it happens this way every month. Whatever the reason, it does tend to make the offers look a little tarnished. Still, gift horses and all that...

Day Two - Nice

 The Chipmunk Song
Canned Heat and The Chipmunks

Day Two - Naughty

 There Ain't No Santa Claus On The Evening Stage
Captain Beefheart

2024 Inventory Full Advent Calendar - Day One - Nice

 Christmas Time Is Here - Daniela Andrade

2024 Inventory Full Advent Calendar - Day One - Naughty

I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas
Aimee Mann

 

Black Friday? More Like Bleak Friday!

Does anyone think this Black Friday thing is getting kinda out of hand? I've been getting offers and promos for at least a couple of weeks now. There are signs in most of the shop windows in town offering sales that last from the middle of November to the end of next week. Where I work, we seem positively restrained, limiting our Black Friday event to "just" four days.

It's turning into its own holiday. Some of the offers even refer to it as one. I realize that in the US there were already three major holidays very close together with Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year but now the US gets four and we're up to three, with one of them just being shopping. 

Not that we didn't have a pure shopping "holiday" already. We just rolled it in with another, the way Black Friday started. For all of my childhood and well into my middle-age, the New Year Sales were a big enough deal to get national news coverage every year. 

I think that tailed off in the nineties, when people got too impatient to wait for the calendar to flip over. Now it all rolls into Christmas with shops opening for big sales on December 26. With the growth of Black Friday, that means we have two, huge, blow-out sale events in the same month. 

I get the commercial value of the post-Christmas sales, whatever day they start, so stores can shift all that surplus stock that didn't sell as well as they'd hoped, but isn't Black Friday just encouraging a customers buy the same things they were going to buy anyway but pay less for them? I mean, I'm not that organized but I know from long experience on the other side of the counter that many people are. Still, if everyone's doing it, right?

Boxing Day Sales - Richard Dawson

 But I didn't come here to talk about work. I have a Black Friday Grab Bag of my own to sell you.

The 2024 Inventory Full Advent Calendar Rulebook

Here's how it's going to go this year. 

1. There will be not one but two Advent Calendar posts every day from the first of December until Christmas Day. This is not an attempt to pad my post count for the year. That's just a happy side-effect.
   
2. One of the posts will be Naughty. The other will be Nice.
3. The music in the Nice posts will be something I think is wholesome or cheerful or uplifting or that celebrates the season unironically. Possibly all of those.
   
4. The Naughty posts will... not be that. They might be jarring or downbeat or express negative feelings about the holidays or generally just feel off in some indefinable way.
5. I decide which songs go where and even I might not be able to explain why so just go with it, alright?
6. The Nice posts will be illustrated with an image taken by me, most likely a still from some video footage I have lying around. It will be original work, untouched except for some cropping and maybe a filter once in a while.
7. The Naughty posts will be the same image after it's been given to an AI to play with. I'll use the original as the starter image, give the AI some prompts, maybe iterate on it a little and see what comes out. I may also futz around with it in post-production. 

I've already got the first week mostly done. I'd rather put it all together in real time but I had to do some in advance because I'm working three out of the first five days and on another I'm going to a funeral.

Even doubled, the calendar will use less than half the songs I'd bookmarked but if you want to subject yourself to the full experience, there's a Playlist on my YouTube channel. I have listened to everything on it multiple times but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. It's a lot in more ways than one.

All comments on the musical choices are welcome as always but I would be even more interested to hear any thoughts on the images and the use of AI, from an aesthetic, creative and ethical standpoints. If anyone even cares about this stuff any more, which I'm beginning to doubt. I'm very curious to get a feel for where people think the boundaries of creativity lie in this technology.

I Only Really Like One K-Pop Band And It Had To Be This One

That's not entirely true. I like a few others but my favorite by a long way has to be New Jeans. They've featured in a number of music posts here and I get genuinely excited every time a new song by them appears in my music feeds.

That hasn't happened for a while and may never happen again. Every time I see the band's name now, it's in a news article, another installment in the never-ending soap opera that's become the story of their lives. I haven't been keeping up with the fine details but New Jeans and their erstwhile producer Min-Hee Jin have been locked in an existential battle with their label, Ador and its corporate overlords, Hybe for...

... I'm not even sure what for, exactly. The BBC has a short catch-up that covers the basics but the intensity is such that it sometimes feels like the souls of their firstborn might be at stake rather than their future as a pop group. 

It's been uncomfortable to watch the story unfold at times. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say New Jeans are fighting for the existential right of members of a musical act to be treated as individual, thinking, feeling, human beings rather than corporate assets. It's both a disturbing vision of the future and a reminder of a past I thought we'd outgrown.

Whatever it is that's going on, at no point has anyone from Ador or Hybe come across, at least in the reporting I've seen, as anything more than an uncaring company shill. It's like reading a dystopian cyberpunk novel set in a bleak, corporate future.

The latest development is that New Jeans, who from my ignorant and uninformed perspective seem to be taking the same idiosyncratic and intelligent approach they've previously applied to making music, having presented a legal challenge to their owners record company, which went unacknowledged and unanswered until the absolute last moment, with a press conference saying they no longer work for Ador.

Ador appear frighteningly uninterested in anything the band might want or say. Their stance seems to be that they never did anything wrong and a contract is a contract and why won't you silly little girls just shut up and sing? It's like the Golden Age of Hollywood all over again. Or Tin Pan Alley. And we know how those ended. 

Selfishly, I'd just like the band to be able to work with the producer of their choice, who just happens to be the one who helped them make all those great records, so they can make some more. It'd be great to have them pop up in my feeds talking about their new music, not about contract law, bullying and corporate greed. As it is, they must be miserable and frustrated and no-one is making any music at all. 

How Much Is Too Much?

 Ride On Time - Black Box (Best-selling UK single of 1989)

Then again, maybe there's too much music already, so does any of it really matter? Apparently there's now more music being released every single day in 2024 than there was in the whole of 1989. 

That takes some processing, doesn't it? I mean, it's not like there wasn't plenty back then. 1989 was close to the apex of that long, cultural period, when pop music ruled everyone's lives in a way it very definitely doesn't any more (Pace Taylor Swift.) That the decline in pop music's cultural influence should co-incide so neatly with exponential volumetric growth and ever-increasing ease of access is almost certainly no co-incidence.

The "study" linked in the NME article above comes from Music Radar and appears on closer examination to be more like an opinion piece on the evils of the subscription model in music distribution. The author pretty much makes his position clear with the opening quote: “All subscription models are from Satan and there is a special place in hell for those people in charge that went for this business model” although since it's a quote from someone on YouTube, I'm not sure it has the authority he's assigning it.

The actual stat about music released now versus 1989 comes from a more convincing source, Will Page, former Chief Economist for Spotify, the company widely seen as the cause of the problem. Whatever the problem is, which is not exactly clear.

Leaving aside the fundamental issue of Spotify's indefensible payment model, something Kate Nash is in the process of sorting out right now, by means of pictures of her butt on the back of a truck (Go get 'em, Kate. You rock!) the big question in my mind is how is anyone supposed to find anything in all of this? I mean, I spend hours trawling the net, searching for stuff I haven't heard before and even then I keep seeing mostly the same things, over and over...

There are supposedly 75 million people uploading original music right now. By 2030 they say it'll be more like 200 million. And that's just the humans. Wait 'till the AIs get in on the act.

I recommend letting me do the hard work. I'll pick 'em. You just sit back and enjoy yourselves.

Speaking of the 1980s...

I pretty much never mention politics on the blog and I'm not going to start now but I came across something this morning and I found it so evocative I felt I really shouldn't keep it to myself. It's from one of the columns Hunter S Thompson wrote for the San Francisco Examiner in the mid-1980s, later collected and published under the title Generation of Swine, which just happens to my bathroom book of the moment:

"A Democratic victory would not change the world, but it would at least slow the berserk white-trash momentum of the bombs-and-Jesus crowd. Those people have had their way long enough. Not even the Book of Revelations threatens a plague of vengeful yahoos. We all need a rest from this pogrom. Ronald Reagan is an old man. It will be the rest of us who will face Armageddon."

Hunter was talking about the 1986 Senate elections. I'm not sure if I find that reassuring or deeply depressing. Probably both.

And now, some music. Well, some more music, I guess.

Peace Song - Fat Dog

See? Things can turn out alright in the end!

It's All In The Preparation

There are often rumblings in this part of the blogosphere about how tough it can be, going back to an MMORPG you haven't played in a year or so. It's true, too. And I'm here to tell you, it's not a lot better going back to one you were playing as recently as a couple of months back.

Scars of Destruction launched for EverQuest II just over a week ago and I've played quite a few sessions since then but it wasn't until a couple of hours ago I finally got as far as starting the first quest in the Adventurer Signature Timeline. Even though I had a character just a level and a half below the access requirement when I logged in eight days ago, it's taken me this long to get to the point where I could finally start in on the new content.

As I've posted already, a lot of that time was taken up figuring out how to get that last level and a half but even when I got to Level 130, I still had quite a bit of prep to do. 

The first and most important thing was to clear some bag space. I do realise this isn't entirely something the developers can do much about, what with it having more to do with my personality, psychology and playstyle than any particular flaw in game design. The name of this blog is a bit of a giveaway there. Still, I've read enough other bloggers complaining about the problem of coming back to a game only to find all their bags full of stuff they don't know whether to keep, sell or junk to know it's not just me.

The temptation is always to clear just enough space to get by and pretend the rest isn't there. I tried that. It didn't work. And even doing that little housekeeping took me an hour or more.

It left me with half a bag empty, out of six in total. Not much but I figured it might be enough to take all the free gear I knew was going to have to deal with the moment I arrived in the new lands.

It wasn't enough. Not even close.

Free stuff. It always brings the crowds.

The upside is that Darkpaw have largely perfected the onboarding process for new and returning players, at least to the extent it's possible to speed the lengthy process to a satisfactory conclusion.

Once upon a time  you were left entirely on your own when a new expansion arrived to invalidate every piece of equipment you owned. Then they moved to leaving hand-outs lying around in boxes without telling anyone where they were or what was in them, expecting players to figure it out for themselves.

Now, you get a an actual quest as soon as you become eligible for an upgrade and there's a quest-giver waiting right next to the box to talk you  through the entire process. This year, you barely even need to look in the box! The guy gives you a crate that unpacks straight into your inventory, giving you a full set of armor for your class and every piece has the correct Adornments already installed!

I optimistically opened that crate hoping for the best and it filled every available slot in my half-a-bag and carried on into Overflow. When I put the armor on, all my old gear popped off, right into the vacant bag slots, leaving me back where I'd started. So much for trying to do it the lazy way.

I gave up any idea of adventuring and ported back to Freeport, where I spent the whole of  yesterday evening working on a proper clean-out. I went to two of my mansions to place every house item I could find, put a bunch of stuff up for sale on the broker, emptied all my mats, collection items and Lore and Legend parts into the hoppers outside my crafting hall and did a few other things as well.

All of that got me one empty bag. I could have worked with it - it was sixty-six slots - but I knew I could do better so this morning, when I came back from walking the dog, I settled down for a proper clearance session. I went through five of my six bags - several hundred items - sorting everything into three piles - Keep, Sell, Trash. Then I sub-sorted the Keep pile into Bank Vault, Shared Bank, Guild Bank and so on. I have a lot of storage options.

I hung those lights, you know. The round ones. Not the lanterns.

That told me what to do with it all but before I could make any actual room I had to go check all the places I was planning to put things to make sure there was room. Of course there wasn't. So I had to sort those as well.

All that took a few hours and even when it was done I still only had two empty bags plus a few slots in the third. Everything that's left is either something I want to keep close at hand or a quest item of some kind.

Quest items are the real problem. My Berserker has a lot of them in his bags - likely more than a hundred - and hardly any of them mean anything to me. Or, presumably, to him. His Quest Journal is all but full and that's after I purged it of all repeatables and anything I hadn't actually started. I'm always very loathe to delete a quest where I've already made some progress, just in case it turns out to be needed for something later on.

It'd be easy to wipe the lot and start fresh but only this week I wrote a whole post about how useful it turned out to be to have a bunch of quests in my book from four expansions ago, so I don't see scorched earth as the best policy here. Experience tells me I tend to regret getting rid of stuff a lot more than I ever regret keeping it. That's a general principle of life, not only gaming.

Still, I know I ought to go through all those quest items, one by one, to find out what they're all for and whether I really need them. Developers in too many games I've played have not always been as diligent as they could have been about making quest items auto-delete themselves when they're no longer needed. That has gotten better but some of these go back many years, to when practice was often lax in that regard.

It wouldn't be difficult to check. The huge majority of quest items say exactly what quest they're whern you mouseover them. All I'd have to do would be cross-reference the information on the item with the quests in my Journal and the steps on the Wiki... Does that sound like a good time to anyone? 

I don't know. Maybe? I'd have to be in the mood...

Do you know who I am?

I'm not doing it now, anyway. I may only have a third of my Berserker's potential onboard storage capacity available but those are two big bags. Over a hundred and fifty slots ought to be enough, provided I clear as I go from now on.

Having leveled up and cleaned up I was finally ready to start adventuring after lunch. Well, after I sorted my new Mercenary out, that is. That's part of the process that could still do with some work. 

It's great that you get a new Merc as part of the Welcome to The Expansion quest (Not the actual quest name.) It's even better that he comes fully leveled up. It's weird you still have to dress him yourself, out of the box on the floor. How primitive!

Plus there's no specific Mercenary gear in there other than a whole bunch of Accolades. For the armor slots, Mercs can wear the same, free gear as player characters, only no-one tells you that. I nearly didn't think of it and I've done it a few times, now.

All of that and a few other things took me until mid-afternoon, at which point I was finally - finally! - ready to do some actual questing. And what did the devs have me doing, now I was all kitted out in my spiffy new gear with a new mount, merc and familiar and a bunch of special buffs? Swimming around the bay, grabbing leftover fishing floats, that's what. I could have done that in my skivvies!

There was some fighting, to be strictly fair to whoever came up with the quest. I fought some fish. Quite small fish. But feisty!

My characters routinely hob-nob with demi-gods and get called in as special consultants by the likes of Firiona Vie and the Duality but here I am, treading water, stabbing pike with a dagger so I can string up some fairy lights in the hope of getting a bunch of downtrodden orc vassals  to give me the time of day. (That's vassals of orcs, by the way, not vassals who happen to be of orcish descent.) I guess it's a living.

Anyway, I'm up and running at last. We'll see where it takes me.

When You're In A Hole... Start Digging!

Yesterday saw a couple of two-hour tests added to the Stars Reach pre-alpha test schedule at somewhat short notice. I had said in my last post that there weren't supposed to be any more until the new build arrives at the start of December but on Tuesday I got an email saying there were going to be two on Wednesday. One was due to begin for me at 2 AM so that was out but the other, as usual, was a teatime test starting at six in the evening.

On paper that ought to be prefect. Unfortunately, in practice the two-hour early evening slot coincides neatly with Beryl's Big Playtime. She's not wholly a slave to routine but she has a tendency to sleep all afternoon and come to life in the evening. Obviously, she's in charge, so if she says it's playtime for her then it's playtime for everyone and she's not that keen on video games so I can't fob her off with an hour watching me play Stars Reach.

This time she didn't come to life until a quarter to seven so I was able to get a clean forty-five minutes in before I had to log out and go play football in the hallway. I wasn't best pleased to have to stop because I was just four Survey Points short of a completed map but that's the way it goes, when you live with a Princess dog.

Apart from the early finish, I had a great test. Probably the most fun so far. The game felt very stable. I had no problems getting in or staying in. There were no crashes and no lag worth mentioning. 

I also followed Wilhelm's example and kept Discord voice chat off for the first time. Boy, did that make a difference! Without the constant chatter in the background I became completely immersed in what I was doing, much more so than in any of the previous tests. I would never normally have voice on in a game so I had been finding it quite distracting.

When I logged in I found that not only had there been no wipe, I was still in the same place I'd logged out last time. I'm not sure that's happened before. I think previously I'd always come back at the main spawn-in point. 

It meant I was still in those deep, confusing caverns I got lost in last time so my first thought was how to get out. Before I could do much about that, though, I noticed the floor, walls and ceiling of the cave I was in seemed to have a lot of variation in color and texture. It made me wonder if there were ores or minerals I could mine. I'd heard you could find them on planets, not just in space.

Having figured out the basics now, I popped up a camp and swapped in the Terraformer to find out and something odd happened. When I switched it on, instead of one violet energy beam there were two. 

I thought at first the second might be automatically dumping the tailings but after a while I got the usual "Hopper Full" message so that wasn't it. Other than slightly getting on my nerves, I couldn't see that the second beam was doing anything so I ignored it and carried on. 

I realize now that I should have reported it as a bug but honestly it's only as I write it down that it  even occurs to me it might have been one. The downside of the tests getting smoother and me getting more immersed in what I'm doing is I forget I'm in a test at all.

I spent a good while blasting everything that looked different to see what it might be. From memory, there was sand, chert, limestone, zinc, something beginning with "M" (Manganese?), chalk and... chalky. What "chalky" might be and what the difference between it and chalk is, I have no idea. Anyway, it proves it is possible to mine metals without going into space.

Once I'd sorted that out it was time to escape. Easier said than done. I managed to find a tunnel but it split several times and I couldn't find one that went upwards. After a few minutes looking, it occured to me I could make my own tunnel and get out that way.

It kind of worked. I had no trouble blasting a huge hole through the ceiling, heading up to where I assumed the surface had to be and with the aid of my trusty Gravity Mesh and parkour abilities (There's climbing in the game already.) I was able to scramble up the jagged shaft I'd made. The problems came when it was time to empty the hopper. 

Tailings appear where you point the cursor. The first time, I pointed it back down the shaft and almost sealed myself in. Not that it mattered. I wasn't planning on going back down. The second time I wasn't so lucky. I hit "Q" without thinking about it and all the tailings appeared right next to me, crushing me against the side of the shaft.

I died. It's very easy to kill yourself in Stars Reach. Back when I had Discord on, I heard people talking about how they'd managed to kill themselves all the time. This was the first time I've done it but I'm sure it won't be the last.

At least it got me out of the caves. If I'd had any sense, I'd have cut my losses and left it at that but I could see my red gravemarker half a kilometer away so I thought I'd go back for it.

I was curious to see if I'd be able to find it from above ground and, if I could, whether I'd be able to dig down and get to it. The answer to both questions is yes, although it took a bit of triangulating and trial and error. It was very satisfying when I broke through the roof of the tunnel to where I'd died and found my remains, fortunately in the neat form of a glowing cube, not a smear of blood and flesh stuck to the walls.

After that I stayed on the surface. I swapped to the Pathfinder and set about finding the two dozen or so Survey Points I hadn't found last time. As I jet-hopped around I got the distinct impression there were either fewer mobs than last time or if not, that they'd calmed down a bit. I was able to avoid most of the packs and even when they spotted me and gave chase they seemed to give up a lot faster.

Some of the remaining Survey points were on the very edge of the map or high up on crags. I climbed a lot of rock spires. I also found a field of prickly pears but I didn't have the Harvester on my toolbelt so I couldn't check if they were pickable. I also noticed a lot of patches of color on the ground, none of which I remembered seeing in previous tests.

I gave those an experimental blast with the purple ray to see what might pop out. (I was back to a single ray at this point. Not sure when it changed.) The greenish patches seemed to be either gneiss or glass, occasionally with a smattering of quartz. 

Finding glass seemed odd. I realize it can occur naturally in some extreme situations, lightning strikes or volcanic eruptions, but I hadn't seen anything of the kind in the area where I found it. I wonder if players create it by blasting the sand with one of the devices?

If I'd been able to stay longer I'd have tried to find out what all the various materials I'd gathered were good for. I did a lot of mining. I must have earned plenty of points to spend on recipes and upgrades. Sadly, Beryl put a stop to all that and by the time the next test arrives I'm pretty sure all progress will have been wiped, along with my character. Pity. I'm starting to become fond of her.

Even so, I may roll a different race next time. Mrs Bhagpuss followed Beryl in to see what all the fuss was about and as she looked over my shoulder to see what game I was playing she saw my character from behind (It's always from behind in this game - I have trouble getting the camera to turn for a selfie.) and said "Nice bottom! Are you a boy or a girl?"

I think I'll make one of the cat people for the next test.