Truth, Time And A Third Word Begining With "T" I Can't Think Of Just Now...

You ever have one of those weeks where everything happens at once? This blog's having one of those right now. 

There's Next Fest, for which I have seven demos to cover, four of which I've already played and one of which I've already reviewed, so that's going about as well as could be expected. Better, really. 

There was also that new, hot game that no-one's talking about that I downloaded the demo for before Next Fest even began. I've played (Some of) that one and posted about it already too, so ditto.

Then there's the launch of a brand-new, highly-anticipated open world RPG that's definitely not an MMO, which has been out for three years now and that millions of people have played, many hundreds or even thousands of them on the same servers at the same time, actually (Oh, stop it!). New World Aeternum, it's called. 

I downloaded that one, with considerable difficulty, yesterday and last night I made a character. She's Level 8 so that's a work in progress, pretty much the same as the game itself, which has been re-envisioned at least three times now to my certain knowledge. Will this be the version that sticks? We'll see soon enough, although whether anyone still cares might be a more appropriate question.

After that comes the second full PvE season in Once Human which, unlike the last two seasons that don't really count because they were just revamped versions of the first season with some bits moved around and some difficulty settings tweaked, brings a huge amount of genuinely new content to the game. 

There's a whole new region with four zones, as we would have called them in the olden days, before everything went seamless. That's an expansion by some people's reckoning. I can think of marketing departments that would be hanging the expansion label on an update like that and charging for it, too.

I read the latest press release for the update yesterday (Version 1.3 - The Way of Winter - that's what it's called.) and it does sound really interesting. Exciting, even. I've had had a really great time playing Once Human for (Checks Steam...) eighty hours so far so I'm looking forward to getting in and seeing all the new stuff. The update went live today and I have it downloading as I write. Now I just have to play it for a while and then post about it. 

I could get right on that today, only late yesterday evening, just as I was about to switch my PC off for the night, I got an email inviting me into a "playtest" for another MMO. I downloaded the client but as yet I haven't checked whether there's an NDA or anything. The email didn't mention one and I haven't signed anything but I probably should double-check before I start rambling on about it in public.

By a conservative estimate, I make that nine posts pending at least, assuming I give all the demos a post of their own, which I'm hoping I won't have to but which experience tells me I probably will. To make it a nice, round ten, I just finished watching two TV shows I want to talk about. At least I can usually portmanteau several of those into one post so I shouldn't have to go to eleven.

I realize I have now spent eight paragraphs basically doing one of those posts about blogging that no-one wants to read but I blame that on Stuart Lee. Mrs Bhagpuss put one of his books on the bathroom book pile and I've been reading the bit where he goes through one of his touring shows as broadcast on the BBC, line by line, with extensive footnotes, talking through his process. I have always had an unfortunate tendency towards unconscious imitation. I think this might be one of those times.

And now I have to go take Beryl for a long walk in the countryside. It's been raining for two days straight and she's barely been outside but today the sun has come out and supposedly it's not going to rain all day so she's more than due. I'll have to pick this up again later. 

At least Once Human has updated now, so that's something off the list, at least.

And now I'm back. 

Is there any point to these "stepping away from the keyboard" sidebars, I'm wondering? It's like when Joanne says she has to go pee in Nobody Wants This. Or, rather, when she does it in the fictional podcast of the same name she co-hosts with her sister, in the hit TV show, also called Nobody Wants This. 

That, what I did there, besides being confusing, thanks to the embedded metafiction, for which I'm not to be held responsible, is called tele-parabalizing. 

Okay, it's not but it kind of is all the same. Douglas Coupland coined the term in his seminal novel Generation X, where he also came up with a whole slew of descriptive terms and labels for quasi-cultural activities that I'm sure he hoped would catch on, making him his generation's answer to Shakespeare. That didn't happen, as the Observer's Christine Smallwood somewhat unkindly pointed out in 2006, fifteen years after the publication of the book itself, but I have a bunch of those definitions in tiny frames on my kitchen wall so I haven't been able to forget them as easily as everyone else.

That's an interesting article, by the way, the one I linked then, although I only skimmed it so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the detail. Still, it is curious how GenX seems to have slipped through the cracks between Boomers and Millennials. Also, what was Generation Y, described in the piece as "the kids who were teenagers when Mr. Coupland was making it big"? Anyone remember them?

My feeling has long been that all generations need to be subdivided at least once. The life experiences of children growing up a decade apart are frequently too different to be tidily conflated. We probably should talk about Early and Late for all generations, which I guess would make Gen Y early Millennials. 

I didn't come here to talk about any of that, though. I seem to have gotten myself side-tracked. Again.

While I'm down this byway I might as well mention that, if you google "tele-parabalizing" to check if indeed it might have caught on more than you thought it had, as I just did, (It hasn't.) you'll find one of my posts, the frankly wonderfully-named Sad Goth Girl And The Treehouse Pajamas, at #4 in Google's list. Now I've mentioned it again I wonder if this post will also appear in future searches for the phrase? 

Probably not because the only reason the other one ranks that high to begin with is because I misspelled "parablizing". Coupland spells it without the second "a" and since he made it up, I guess he knows.

This is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the imminent "Death of the Internet" we're all supposed to be worrying about. I mean, just how reliable was the information we were all lapping up before the rise of the AIs anyway?

I mentioned earlier that I'm reading a Stewart Lee book (It's March of the Lemmings in fact, although that's not the cover of the edition currently lying on the floor of our bathroom.) In it, he occasionally refers in considerable detail, often with dates and names, to cultural artefacts that don't exist. Sometimes he then tells the reader he's made them up but mostly he doesn't.

For example, when he mentions "an Essex folk song collected by the archivist Shirley Collins in the '50s",  he's referring to a real person but when the sentence carries "from the old traveller singer Gonad Bushell" he's making stuff up. Specifically, what he's doing is collating the name of Gary Bushell, a right-wing music journalist and cultural commentator no-one likes with the name of Bushell's old band, The Gonads.

That one's a very obvious joke but "The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion: Anadolu Psych 1965-1980" by Daniel Spicer, which I assumed he'd also invented, turns out to be entirely bona fide, as does Julian Cope's band Brain Donor, a Cope project I was completely unaware of until I read about it in Lee's book. 

At one point, Stewart also quotes a lengthy post by someone purporting to be a stage manager, accusing Lee, in an unsettlingly calm, world-weary tone, of all kinds of behaviors and actions that turn out to be provably untrue. But that's what truth is: anything someone tells you until someone more convincing tells you otherwise.

I was reminded of that when I was in the launderette a couple of hours ago (I took a load of washing round after we got back from walking Beryl. If I was a comedian I guess I might say something like "This is what my life has become" but it's pretty much what my life already was, except now we have a dog...). As the load was in the drier, I was reading a novel called Starling House by Alix E Harrow and I was struck by just how many precise, specific references the author makes to books and songs which I was pretty sure didn't exist, at least not in the form she said they did.

For example, on page 44 the protagonist, Opal, makes a passing reference to "that one Prine song that everybody still hates", which would be largely meaningless and pass mostly unnoticed if it wasn't for a footnote on the same page, in which an unnamed annotater (Definitely another character, not the author.) explains "Opal is referring to John Prine's 1971 song "Paradise" on his debut album".

This is an actual song and that is an actual album and the lyrics do concern the mining industry in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, which is where the novel is set - in a small town called Eden. Prine's father grew up in Paradise, a small mining town in the same county and the song is about his experiences there.

Prine's song does not, however, include the line "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Old Gravely's coal train has hauled it away", as stated in the footnote because Gravely Power is a fictional company invented by the author. What John Prine actually wrote and sang was "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.", which is admittedly very similar but not the same.

According to Wikipedia, the real mining company that strip-mined the real Paradise was called the Peabody Coal Company. The fictional founder of the fictional Gravely Power that did the same to the fictional Eden was John Peabody Gravely. 

This seems to me to be getting extremely close to the kinds of "hallucinations" seen in AI-produced text, albeit here intentional rather than accidental. And being set down in print, it's now in the cultural record as much as anything on the internet. Maybe it even has more authority that way, even though its in a novel. Books have gravitas.

There's more, too. Across the next four pages, Alix E Harrow incorporates the full text of a supposed Wikipedia article on fictional author Eleanor Starling. There's nothing very unusual about writers creating other writers who never existed and filling out their bibliographies as though they did but backfilling fake internet data into a printed book adds a level or two of complexity, not to say confusion. 

Here, once again, the author includes a number of direct and specific references from our non-fictional timeline. They're extrmeley well-done and wholly convincing.

For example, there's a quote attributed to Guillermo del Toro: "the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier but to lay it bare". It sounds like something the director might have said, although clearly he couldn't have said it, as the fictional Wikipedia article suggests, about the equally fictional author Eleanor Starling. I did wonder if it was an actual quote, re-purposed but in fact it's wholly made up. De Toro never said it at all.

Better yet, there's a reference to Josh Witter's third studio album, "Hello Starling", which supposedly includes a song called "Nora Lee and Me" as a hidden track, Nora Lee being the name of the girl in The Underland, the one and only book Eleanor Starling ever wrote. 

Josh Ritter's third album really is called Hello Starling, although presumably for entirely different reasons. Having the song be a "hidden track" on it is a master-stroke because, of course, hidden tracks do exist but are never listed anywhere, so even if an internet search brings up no trace of any song of that name you can never be absolutely sure it doesn't exist. All we need now is for Ritter to read the book and decide to write the song and include it as a hidden track on future editions of the album and reality will have fractured into shards.

All of this suggests that humans are and always have been perfectly capable of muddying the factual waters all on their own, without the help of soi-disant artificial intelligences and lumbering LLMs. The internet, which was always awash with nonsense, may yet become so sodden with falsehood it will sink to the bottom of the data sea and lie there, a rotting wreck filled with misinformation, fantasy and lies but whether that makes it materially different from the recorded corpus of human thought and expression from the previous several millennia is questionable at best.

Did I have a point? If I did, I think I made it. Let's move on.

Actually, let's stop. That took most of the day and now I'm one post further behind where I wanted to be. Result!

I suppose I'd better get on and play another of those demos. Or take a look at that game I'm supposed to be playtesting and see if it has an NDA.

Off I go. Wish me luck. And here's hoping I make a better job of this tomorrow.

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the final image, which was generated at NightCafe using Real Cartoon XL v4 from the prompt "Nora Lee and Me starling house the underland line drawing color dark gothic scary". It was the second attempt. the first, where the prompt didn't have the "dark gothic scary" part, turned out way too bright and cheerful, as you'd expect.