The Inventory Full Pick Of The Year - 2025

It's New Year's Eve. Time for the Inventory Full Pick Of The Year. Oh, wait...you already knew that. It was in the title. The portentous, pretentious title. 

Putting the name of your blog in the title is the blogging equivalent of talking about yourself in the third person, something Inventory Full has been doing an awful lot of all through December. Should we be worried?

It's not even as though the title is self-explanatory. It requires some clarification. Music is what we're talking about. I'm sure as heck not going to go back over the entire three hundred posts and pull out all the so-called highlights. I'm not a crazy person!

Songs, though... that should be much easier. And, actually, I already did the prep. Twice. Once back in November or thereabouts, but I left the list on the hard drive of the old PC, and then again last week.  It seemed like it would be easier just to do the whole thing over again.

I'm not digging out the stats to prove it, but my sense is that I did fewer "What I've Been Listening To..."posts this year and left longer gaps between them. Partly, that's because I don't think it's been a particularly stand-out year for music. It's been fine but 2024 was epic, so I guess 2025 was always likely to suffer in comparison. 

The main reason for the shortfall, though, if there was one, wasn't so much lack of good tunes as it was too much AI. Go on, blame AI for everything, why not? It's not like it's going to argue. More like it'll tell me how right I am and what a great insight that was.

But in this case it's true. I spent countless hours making my own music using AI, time that would otherwise most likely been spent searching for and finding music made by others. Probably most of it would have been made by humans, too, although it's getting increasingly hard a) to pick out the sound of humans through the ever-increasing AI signal and b) to tell the difference when you do.

I did manage to make a handful of significant discoveries all the same, foremost among them being Sunday (1994) and R. Missing. I bought all the CDs Sunday (1994) were willing to sell me (One of each, that is, not carloads of the same one. I'm not some kind of crazy hoarder.). I would happily have done the same for R. Missing only she doesn't do physical. I guess that's why her channel was my most-viewed of the year on YouTube.

For the post, I went through all the posts in 2025 with a "Music" tag and pulled out any songs I could both remember and remember listening to more than twice. I deliberately stopped at thirty because the Top Thirty was the thing when I was growing up, before it turned into the Top Forty, which I never really believed. Also I didn't have forty solid picks.

Here's the longlist. 

• Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas (sometimes) - Harvey Danger  
• A Winter Fairy is Melting a Snowman - 木村カエラ (Kaela Kimura
• Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale
• Girls On The Internet - Elita
• Make Time/Waste Time - Snowmen
• iPod Touch - Ninajirichii
• Cowbella - Bar Italia
• Jamie Oliver Petrol Station - CMAT
• Manchild - Sabrina Carpenter
• went to bum a cigarette - april june
• Diet Pepsi - Blondshell
• Devotion - Sunday (1994)
• Kelly Was A Philistine - R. Missing 
• Pony Yeah - R. Missing
• Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey
• Rain - Sunday (1994)
• "23's A Baby" Blondshell
• The Wolf - Witch Post
• Braces - Sept
• Algernoon - nickateen
• Fuck It - Punchbag
• 1-800-Call-Me-Back - M(h)aol 
• Tired Boy - Sunday (1994)
• Blonde - Sunday (1994)
• TV Car Chase - Sunday (1994)
• The Summer Ends - Blondshell
• You Let My Tyres Down - Tropical Fuck Storm
• 鹽焗雞$alty Chick - 今晚好想好想打俾你
• (He'll Never Be An) 'Ol Man River - TISM (This Is Serious Mum)  
• POSH - The Pill

If I had nothing better to do, I might go through the whole thing and add links but I do have better things to do and no-one needs links anyway. There's a perfectly good search function right here on the blog if you're that interested. 

The list isn't in order, which is why I haven't numbered it. That would imply preference. It's almost in reverse chronological order but only because I started at the end of the year and worked backwards. Then I thought I ought to have something by The Pill, who I'd left out because I couldn't decide exactly what it was by The Pill that I ought to have. And when I made up my mind I just stuck it on the end, so that one's out of sequence. Probably others, too.

Acts on the list that I bought CDs by are:

Bar Italia

Blondshell

Sunday (1994)

I also downloaded the Ninajirichii album.

Somehow that seems to make those feel like I liked them more but I'm not sure that holds. For example, I put Addison Rae's album on my Christmas wishlist but no-one bought it for me. And now she doesn't even make the longlist, except by proxy, so what does that mean? And I asked for the second Wet Leg album, even though I didn't like any of the singles all that much. And then I got it and listened to it and I like it better than the first album, even though i like all the songs on the first album better than any of the songs on the second album. But Wet Leg aren't even on the long list so why are we even talking about them?

People do have to make records before you can buy them, too. Not everyone does, these days. I would have very happily bought CDs by Witch Post, Aimee Fatale and R. Missing if they'd made any. And, of course, Lana del Rey, who's now two years overdue for a new album but instead appears to have retreated into married bliss with the Everglades answer to Crocodile Dundee. 

All the others on the list I watched/listened to on YouTube. Repeatedly or they wouldn't be on the list at all. I ought to mention a couple that didn't make the cut - my favorite title of the year by a mile was "We'll Always Have Paris 1919" by Tenderness. The song didn't make the longlist, though. 

My favorite video was Sabrina Carpenter's Manchild, which did, but that didn't make the Top Ten. Go figure. Also, I didn't watch KPop Demon Hunters until last night so Golden didn't get a chance. It might have made the longlist at least, had I watched the movie when it came out instead of waiting weeks for no good reason. Maybe it'll be in next year's list, by when it'll be stale as biscuits.

I'm going to pull out a Top Ten now and it's going to need some rules. No more than one song by any artist and I have to have at least one thing to say about why I chose it. Also, they aren't going to be in any particular order. Not of merit, anyway.

That's enough rules and enough talk. Let's party like it's 2025!

Diet Pepsi - Blondshell (Covering Addison Rae.)

Performance of the year for me, as far as interpreting a lyric goes. Also cover of the year, although Magdelana Bay doing Ashes To Ashes runs it close. That nearly made the list but I couldn't really say I'd listened to it often enough. 

Sabrina recorded Diet Pepsi as a special for Sirius XMU, which isn't that far off singing it to herself in the shower. I see the link I used in the original post is now dead. Fortunately it did eventually find its way onto YouTube officially and also into her live set. 

I think as a vocalist she's probably my current favorite after Lana. She has an incredible, paradoxical ability to give a lyric an intense emotional charge, while at the same time her voice appears to lack any affect. It makes all her own compositions feel fogged and frightening in the best possible way. 

That effect is in overdrive on the second album. Where the first felt like an instant classic from the moment I heard it, the second took a lot longer to come through. She seems to hold so much back, lyrically and vocally, the songs are sometimes barely there at all. I'm all up with her now but it took a while to get there. 

As an interpreter of other people's songs, though, she's far more accessible. She did a superb cover of American Football's The Summer Ends but her take on Diet Pepsi topped even that. Addison Rae's writing is a lot more direct and she clearly has more time for a melody than Sabrina, who sometimes seems to be actively avoiding coming anywhere near one. The two approaches meld perfectly in this magnificent cover. It's notable that of the three Blondshell songs on this list, two are covers.

Tired Boy - Sunday (1994)

Not an easy choice. There are five Sunday (1994) songs on the list and there's next to nothing to choose between them. This was the first single and it's been in my head, on and off, all year. But then, so have they all. Oh, I don't know. I had to pick one and I've picked this. Could've been any of them. They're all magisterial.

Also, I've just discovered that using the word "Magisterial" in a Suno prompt gets you a vibe like theirs. I don't suppose they'd want to know that. 

 Pony Yeah - R. Missing

This is how I found her. I click on pony songs. Wanna make something of it? I used to think all pony songs were all always good and for a long time all of them always were but it's surprising how many there are. The streak had to break sometime. Still, it's a solid indicator. Better than tiger, which is also good. Anyway, this is a proof.

It's scary, isn't it, how random things are? If she'd called this something else I might never have known she existed. Although I would always have clicked on Kelly Was A Philistine. I mean, you'd have to, wouldn't you? Titles are so important. And so powerful.

And yet I have no idea what this song is about. Not ponies, that's for sure. 

The Wolf - Witch Post

Banger of the Year! I would totally have lost my shit to this on the dance-floor in the 90s. That fucking riff! That chorus! The supersaturated sound! 

Again, I just worked out that adding "supersaturated" to a Suno prompt is a magic trick. Add "all needles in the red" for extra raw. Now if I can just figure out how to make it overdrive the vocals instead of having everyone sound like a goddam choir-girl...

Cowbella - Bar Italia

Wouldn't you like to see Witch Post and Bar Italia up against each other in the final of a Battle of the Bands in the back room of a dive bar? Or in the nightclub scene of a Swinging Sixties movie? Some bands should never be seen in daylight. Most of the good ones, actually.

You Let My Tyres Down - TFS

Or Tropical Fuck Storm if you prefer, which I do. I just used the acronym in case it stopped the video flagging as Adults Only but I bet it didn't. I won't know until I publish but I'll leave it however it lands. (In fact it doesn't even work in the Preview so that's a wash.)

This isn't new. I think it's one of only two songs in the post that didn't come out in either 2025 or just before and even those two are from the 2020s. I listen to a surprising amount of Australian music these days which might be because a surprising amount of Australian bands are really good. They certainly seem to have this kind of spiraling, violent guitar squall cornered, anyway, along with the existential hooligan singing. It's all a bit Clockwork Orange sometimes. 

Braces - Sept

This is an odd one. I'm not sure how I stumbled across it. It's much more of a vibe than a song. It has that indefinable, plangent guitar sound I associate with South American indie rock. Quite a lot of the comments in the YT thread are in Spanish, too, which makes me wonder. The video seems like the most mannered, unreal vision to me but the comments are full of people going overboard about authenticity and their own lost teenage years, which does make you wonder where the hell these people went to school...

And then of course I had to google to see exactly where the band does come from... and it was a lot harder than you'd think to find out. Gemini doesn't know: "They appear to be an independent, indie music act based in the United States, as indicated by various social media and music platform snippets. Further details regarding their specific city or state of origin are not readily available in the search results."

I did a bit better on my own, once again demonstrating the value of AI assistance. This Instagram interview makes it pretty clear they're from Southern California. They also mention a bunch of other bands I'm gonna check out because they name some good names...

Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale

One of the top comments reads "i had this on loop for a week straight im actually obsessed". I wouldn't go quite that far but I played it over and over when I first happened upon it. Haven't heard it for a few weeks and it sounds just as good now as it did then. She doesn't have a lot of songs out. Nothing in physical format but there's a live set on YouTube with several numbers I haven't heard yet. I'd listen to them all but the sound, particularly the vocals, is so muffled it's hard to tell how good the songs might be if you could hear them properly. 

Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey

I almost left this out just because every time I hear it, it reminds me just how damn long it's been since we heard anything new from Queen Lana. I don't think there's been a drought like this since I joined the cult back in aught-12. We didn't know how blessed we were, all those years.

Lana, Come On! 

A Winter Fairy Is Melting A Snowman 

 木村カエラ

What can I say? I spent longer thinking about this final spot than all the rest put together. I even went back through all the posts to see if I'd missed anything essential. I found a bunch of songs I might just as easily have included as most of the ones I did but no, I'd caught everything that really had to be here.

Then I thought about what would be the coolest one to end with, because you would, wouldn't you? And what would be the least cool, because that, too. 

In the end, though, I decided I ought to be honest and finish with the song I've probably listened to more often than anything else on the entire list. Which is this one. Really. I played it over and over going into Christmas and I just played it three times back-to-back as I wrote this paragraph. It's just... well, it is, isn't it?

And that's that for 2025. You could do worse than play these ten at your New Year's party tonight. You are having one, aren't you? You're not just playing video games and going to bed early again?

Fair enough, if you are. That's what I'm going to do! 

Never Mind The Music, Just Look At The Pictures

Here we are, in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. Seems like as good a time as any to post the recap no-one needed. Or wanted. Yes, I'm going to debrief myself on how the 2025 Inventory Full Advent Calendar went. If you're ever in need of an example of pointless, self-indulgent navel-gazing, feel free to re-direct to this post.

As I may have mentioned before (Oh, I definitely have.) the one thing I don't enjoy about doing the annual musical door-opening extravaganza is not being able to keep up a running commentary as I go. It's hard work staying quiet, I can tell you.

I have a little leeway to offer passing observations, thanks to Redbeard commenting every day. It's turned into something of a regular double act after several years and at least it gives me the opportunity to say something about the songs. 

While I'm on the subject, thanks also to Tipa, the only other reader to leave any comments at all this year. Jolly good ones, too. 

Even if only two people enjoyed it, I'd feel it was a worthwhile exercise, but of course there were three because I had a great time putting it together. I imagine it's no secret I'm mainly doing it for my own amusement. 

It's so much fun every year that I'm always tempted to consider creating a new blog just so I can go on doing it. One where I'd post a song every day of the year. It would be so easy and so much fun. I imagine. Maybe the reality would be a bit different...

It's not as though it was just the three of us having our own private door-opening party all December, anyway. Page views for the Calendar were very consistent throughout the run; lower than on regular posts but still close to three figures, most of the time. I have no way of knowing how many of those page views also incremented the relevant YouTube counters but let's hope a few people clicked through out of curiosity, at least.

I'm not actually going to say much about the music in this post. I might cover that separately at some point, although that might be a self-indulgence too far. What I'm going to go into here is the way the posts were illustrated.

I can chip in a bit about the song choices but no-one ever mentions the pictures so I rarely get the chance to talk about them when replying to comments, which is ironic, given that's the part of the whole thing that takes me the longest and requires the most effort. 

Let me take a step back and outline my methodology. The way I tend to compose the calendar most years goes like this:

Stage 1. October going into November: trawl the internet for Christmas songs and find more than I'm ever going to need.

Stage 2. Mid-November: Mentally sort them into Possibles and Probables. Check I haven't used any of them in previous years. Start thinking about images. Decide on were and how to source those. Begin collecting and/or producing them.

Stage 3. Late November: Begin putting the first week's posts together so as to have at least a week in hand, going into December. This means picking some of the songs, finding appropriate images to go with them and editing those images if needed.

Stage 4. December: Keep producing posts, trying to stay at least a few days ahead but also start swapping everything around, bringing in new songs that weren't on the longlist, pairing songs thematically, developing themes on the fly and basically winging it more and more the further into the month it gets. This is when it starts to be really fun.

I never stop looking for new Christmas songs. Any good, new ones I find can always be added on the fly. Pictures are open to a certain amount of serendipity but it's a lot more constrained. Once I decide on the aesthetic and the source, that has to stay consistent for the whole Calendar. 

Unlike music, the use of images on the blog is fraught with concern. For music and video, YouTube covers all the liabilities automatically. So as long as I just embed videos correctly, using the tool included in Blogger for that purpose, there's no risk. Everything stays firmly inside Google's eco-system, where the issues of copyright are handled by the terms of your YouTube account. 

It's why, in the rare instance when I want to use something that isn't on YouTube already, I prefer to upload it to my YouTube channel and link to it from there, rather than upload it directly to Blogger from my own hard drive. It's a form of data-washing, I guess.

With images, it's riskier. Even with screenshots from games that you may have taken yourself, ownership is often unclear. Blatant "borrowing" from the web is like skipping across a minefield.

The most important thing is not to step heavily and inconsiderately on anyone's copyright, while also not paying anyone any money. Harder than you might think, especially when it comes to finding a couple of dozen Christmas and winter pictures to stick at the top of a post. 

I've used my own photographs in the past, which is probably both the safest and the most aesthetically satisfying choice, but I only have so many suitable shots and I've pretty much run through them all now, so that was out for this year. If we'd had any snow, I might have taken some new ones but we hardly ever get snow here before January, if at all. 

We do have one hell of a lot of sparkling lights up all over town, though. Next time, I might take some pictures of those. I could probably take twenty-five unique shots just in the cul-de-sac across the road.

For the first Advent Calendar, which I put together without a great deal of thought, I used copyright-free stock images. They were really not very pleasant to look at but I leaned into the cheese and tried to make it a feature. 

I did consider doing that again this year but if you search for "copyright free images" you may be surprised to find how little "free" choice you actually have. Nearly every site that offers them requires at least some kind of sign-up and some want some kind of subscription, too. I looked at it and decided it wasn't going to work.

The absolutely blindingly obvious solution was, of course, AI.  Artificially Intelligently Generated Images are de facto not copyrightable in most jurisdictions (Yet.) so the whole question of rights becomes a non-issue. Well, legally. Ethically, maybe not so much.

Better yet, you can very easily tailor the image to the music, either by prompting specifically for something you think would go with it thematically or by using an extract from the lyric as a prompt. I do like to do that. It's like a parlor game.

In 2023 and 2024 I used AI for the Calendar, either exclusively or partially. The models weren't as good then as they are now, but looking back at those pictures today, I still quite like most of them. Honestly, I'd be happy to have used AI again this year, too. Prompting for AI would have been easier, faster and at least as entertaining for me than what I did end up doing.

But using AI is not without controversy, as you may have noticed. And the Calendar is supposed to be a bit of holiday fun, not a seasonal wind-up. Why piss even a few people off unnecessarily by summoning the specter to the feast?

That's when I hit on the idea of going Pubic Domain. That would be safe enough, wouldn't it? And easy, too.

Yeah. Not so much as you might think. Most of the sites offering "PD" images also want you to make an account before you can get to the good stuff which, judging by the samples they let you see, might not even be that good anyway. Plus they often have a lot of small print about what you can and can't do with the images, too. I did use a few of those sources at the beginning but it was not much fun at all. 

And then I stumbled upon Wikimedia Commons. That's where about two-thirds of the images I eventually went with came from. 

It was a very lucky stumble. Not only does the site have a huge archive but it's user-friendly and very well-organized. There's a search function that really works, the images are displayed in a way that makes it very easy to spot something suitable right away and best of all, they've done all of the admin for you.

They tell you everything you need to know about the provenance of the image, what you can and can't do with it and what credit you need to give if you use it. Not only that, they provide all of that information in various formats, including html code ready to drop into your post as-is. All I had to do was cut and paste into Blogger and it worked perfectly every time.

That's why the latter half of the calendar has those neat attributions tucked away at the bottom of every page, where the earlier ones have ugly, fudged attempts, all done by me. The premades saved me so much time and effort.

Once I discovered that mother-lode, the mechanics were easy. What wasn't was matching a suitable image with the music. Geez, that was a thankless task, alright. 

First I had to figure out what sort of image I wanted. 

For example, on Day 10 I wanted to pair two songs that name-checked specific American retail outlets and restaurants with an image of a named American retail outlet or restaurant at Christmas or in winter. Didn't have to be the ones in the songs, Denny's or K-Mart. Any name I recognized would have done.

Could I find a public domain image to fit that brief? Could I Christmas!

Eventually I did but it took me ages and in the end I had to settle for a store I'd never heard of - Pick 'n Save. It sounded right and the image was certainly seasonal. Just as well. I couldn't find any others.

It was a little like that every day, although that was one of the hardest. Believe it or not, all the images are thematically linked to the titles or the lyrics of the song or songs of that day. Granted, the connections are pretty loose, especially in the first week, when I was still using a bunch of images I'd downloaded in November, but I soon dumped those and started looking for appropriate images after I'd picked the songs, not before. That went better.

It was fun-ish. I mostly did it late at night in bed on the laptop. It took me maybe half an hour each time.

There was minimal editing. Mostly I took the images as they came. Occasionally I made some minor changes. I took the "Midwest National Parks" logo off the bottom of Day 23 because I decided only one of the three songs qualified as midwest emo. I cropped the Murad cigarette ad for Day 18 and also saturated the colors a little.

It was a lot of work. If I'd used AI, would it have been faster? Almost certainly. Better, though?

Take that problematic Day 10. I'd have ended up with something like, oh, I dunno... that picture up at the top of the post, maybe? Is that better? Worse? About the same? 

Hard to say, isn't it? I really like the Public Domain shot. It has a lot of the bleakness of Communist Daughter's cover of Christmas at Denny's (The original, by Randy Stonehill, doesn't carry a fraction of the weight, for me.) but then it doesn't do much for Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band.  I don't think I want to see what AI would have done with that, either.

As for Eels and Birdcloud and their collective Christmas cool, I might have gotten something like this:

I mean, come on! Do you call that cool? The name of the brand is gibberish, the guy is holding two cigarettes - except he's not really holding either of them - two artists have signed the same picture and that pair of poseurs ooze entitlement, not cool. Otherwise I guess it's... fine.

So, yeah,. maybe the AI image generators haven't improved as much as I thought. And maybe I would have had to just as much work to get something I was willing to use, even if I had taken the supposedly easy option. 

In the end, I was happy enough with what I got from the Public Domain and I know there's plenty more waiting if I need to go back for more. 

Next year, though, I kinda think I might take some photos of my own. Hey! Maybe I should use all original, hand-taken pictures but make the songs with AI!

That is something AI is good at, after all.

Strolling Through The Void - Rage of Cthurath On EZ-Mode

I haven't exactly finished the latest EverQuest II expansion, Rage of Cthurath. In many ways I've barely started. But I have finished the two Signature Questlines for both Crafters and Adventurers. It's enough, I think, for me to give some kind of appraisal, even if it's not enough for a full review.

The first thing I'd say is that I like this expansion a lot. It's been fun. I'll get to why that is in a bit but I'll say up front that I'm speaking very specifically from the perspective of a fairly casual solo player. What it's been like for group-oriented players or raiders I have no idea.

It's also been pretty good value, I'd say, although it's incredibly hard to judge whether any expansion for any MMORPG offers a good return on however much you paid for it. With single-player games you can get to the end and do that "hours-per-dollar" calculation. On top of that, especially if it's one of those multiple ending deals, you might make some allowances for replayability.

With an MMORPG, the expansion provides a springboard for other content as much as it represents anything complete in itself. And then there's the question of alts. If you play a number of characters, as many people do, it's likely you'll take more than one of them through the expansion and also that other characters on your account will benefit from hand-me-downs and account-level flags and unlocks.

In my case, I've started three characters on the two Signatures already. Eventually I'll probably take as many as half a dozen through both. Does that mean I should multiply the value by the number of characters who complete one or the other or both?

Probably not but it does suggest any hours-per-dollar calculation shouldn't just work off a single run. And even if it did, I'm most likely already getting close to the traditional dollar-an-hour break-even.

So, I'm very happy with the quality and the quantity, then, am I? It certainly sounds like it, the way I'm talking. 

Yeah, no, maybe not really... I'm not sure...

The Signature quests are definitely getting shorter. I don't think there can be any doubt about that. There was a time when it took me longer to to finish one instance than it takes me now to do the entire thing. Or it felt like it, anyway. And there were those couple of expansions where absolutely everything seemed to revolve around raising multiple factions before you could even get anyone to give you the damn quests.

Is that what I want? No, it's not. What that did was put me right off the idea of taking multiple characters through the storyline. It took ages, it felt like a grind, it didn't seem to get any faster with experience and it wasn't anything I'd want to repeat. I was mostly just glad to have gotten it done at all..

That's not the case here. It's fast and entertaining, even though the storyline in Rage of Cthurath is thin, there's no denying it. And obviously, it makes no sense. That's a given. No EQII expansion's storyline has made sense for years. It's fine. It's expected. This tale, though, seems perfunctory even by recent standards. 

Here's my best attempt at a spoiler, based on what I can remember, without looking anything up. 

Lord Lucan, in his never-ending search for a means of world-domination, has gotten his hands on a McGuffin that's turned out to be more than he bargained for. Somehow, it attracted the attention of a Lovecraftian Elder God and now he's a puppet.

Meanwhile Lady Najena, who used to be a villain, has somehow gotten involved, only this time she's on our side. A whole load of spooky portals have popped up all around Norrath, spewing out Void entities we're all familiar with from previous invasions. She's trying to put a stop to it because I have no idea why. I guess she's just annoyed it's not her that's doing it.

She recruits the Player Character because of course she does or there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? She sends the PC on a mission through a portal of her own and some space-goats hijack it and divert the PC into the Void so they can get some help to escape.

This inevitably leads to a big, exciting adventure... Hahaha! I'm kidding! No, it doesn't! It leads to a bunch of trivial errands, things like pulling up weeds and making dinner for a dog (Alright, a wolf. Does that make it any better?) before Najena herself arrives in The Void and gets things back on track.

From then on it's mostly a series of dungeons instances in which the PC has to plant a whole load of runes so as to... erm... I don't know. Protect something? I think I drifted off when Najena was explaining that part.

Anyway, it's all very important (And repetitive.) and means you have to kill a lot of named mobs, all of whom drop gear better than what you got out of the Tishan's Box at the start, so there's plenty in it for you even if you're not entirely clear on why you're doing it.

Eventually you stick the final rune where it's supposed to go and that severs the connection between Lucan and the Consumer, which is the really rather ill-considered name someone chose to give the Big Bad. There's one final confrontation in which the PC gets to fight The Consumer and Najena gets to summon some big rocks for the PC to hide behind when it all gets a bit much.

The Consumer disappears back to whatever nether-hell he came from, issuing dire threats of retribution, and Lucan is a free sociopath again. Except apparently he's had some kind of existential experience while under the influence because instead of getting straight back to the world domination, he announces he can't go back in case The Consumer has another go at him, mentally weakened as he is. Like he ever cared about Norrath before. other than to be in charge of it all.

The PC wonders, not unreasonably, what that means for Freeport, which Lucan has ruled with an iron fist inside an iron glove since at least 2004, Earth time. Najena tells them not to worry their pretty little head about it because she'll sort it all out and it'll all be fine, which isn't anything like as reassuring to hear as she thinks it is.

Credits roll. End of Episode One. To be continued in next expansion, probably. Oh, except do just pop off to the Unknown and see if you can find this other McGuffin, would you? You weren't doing anything important, right now, were you?

It was just as well there was a post-credit sequence because the main questline only took Mordita to level 133. There are two more levels to go so any quests are welcome, however trivial. No other way to get the xp, these days.

The Tradeskill Signature line is basically the same only without nearly everything I just said. If the Adventure Sig is thin, the Crafting one is positively skeletal. Mostly it's gathering mats, making stuff out of them and waiting several hours until you can do it again. 

What do you want from a crafting questline, though? Narrative? I just want the recipes for the five new levels, mostly. And I have them now, so I'm happy.

And I'm happy about the Adventure timeline, too, because the fighting was actually fun for once! How many expansions are there where I would have been able to say that with a straight face? Not very many.

Why was it fun? Because it was very, very easy, that's why. And I like easy. If you like challenge, you are not going to be anything like as happy as I was. There isn't any.

Okay, a slight caveat. I have never taken a Necromancer through the Sig Line of an expansion before. Not first up, anyway. I don't have a benchmark for how easy that would usually be.

And it's true that the main reason I wanted to swap from my Berserker was to make things easier for myself. I totally did not expect it to be this much easier, though, and I can't help but think there's more going on than better DPS.

Midnight : tiny but mighty.

There's one thing I noticed that I find very hard to explain: Mordita's combat pet never seemed to take any damage. None at all. Ever. 

A Necro has excellent healing options. I also had a healer mercenary ready to heal both Mordita and her pet. Neither I nor the NPC needed to heal the pet at all.

After a while I started to wonder what was going on so I began paying close attention to the pet's health bar. It didn't move. Not a pixel. 

It was 100% all the time. I never saw it drop even one per cent. I moused over it to see the numbers. I never saw them change. Not on huge overpulls. Not on bosses. Not if I just stood back and watched to see what would happen. The pet seemed to be effectively invulnerable throughout the entire Signature line. It was also extremely good at getting and holding aggro, allowing Mordita to chain-cast every damage spell in her artillery without a pause.

It's not like the mobs weren't putting out the damage, either. Mordita needed plenty of healing when adds got onto her before the pet grabbed them. The Mercenary even managed to get himself killed a couple of times. The pet, though? Didn't take the tiniest scratch that I ever saw.

So that can't be working as intended, surely. Maybe it's one of those good bugs. I've had invulnerable pets before. Just for a session, though, not for weeks on end. 

Even without the invulnerable pet, though, the whole thing seemed much easier than usual. For one thing, none of the bosses had any really irritating tricks. No mana drain, either, which is a huge improvement, although it's been a few expansions since that was in fashion.

Even the tricks they did have mostly involved running about, standing in certain spots or clicking on things. Nothing that wasn't immediately easy to understand and simple to do. 

Who are you and what have you done
with the real Lucan?

Bosses didn't have ludicrous health pools, either. They took damage at a very satisfying rate. I don't think any boss fight took more than a couple of minutes. I remember expansions where the trash took longer than that and the bosses took more like a quarter of an hour. As for the regular mobs, TTK was two or three seconds for most of them. 

All of that made me actively look forward to every instance, something I very rarely do. When I messed
something up in one of them (Only for a side-quest.) the thought of having to do the whole instance again didn't make me want to give up and play something else instead - it made feel like that might be fun.

All the instances are also quite compact and easy to navigate. There are lots of teleports and portals so you don't need to slog through miles of empty corridors to get anywhere. And visually the whole thing is spectacular. It doesn't come over in screenshots but in game there's a huge amount of three-dimensionality, lots of particle effects and movement. It's a pleasure to spend time there. 

There have been complaints about the pacing, particularly the way players have been left to cobble together a path to the cap involving side quests and repeatables but I'm quite happy to meander through those final two levels. It'll give me a chance to gather enough rares to upgrade Mordita's spells. 

Not that there's much sign of her needing the extra power. She went into the expansion with almost every spell at Expert level from the tier below and it seemed to give her more than enough firepower, not just to get the job done but to get it done quickly and easily. 

Rather than try to race through the last two levels with her, I think I might take a couple more characters through both the Adventure and Tradeskill Signatures first. The crafters should have a very easy time of it, what with every capped character giving a 20% xp bonus to those coming after and those also getting a reduction in waiting-time on the gatekeeping quests.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with Rage of Cthurath so far. I think it might be my favorite expansion for quite a while. But then I always say that, don't I? I'm a cheap date when it comes to expansions.

Cultured, Creative, Tech-Savvy, That's me! - YouTube Recaps My Year

In case you didn't know, YouTube just jumped on the Annual Review bandwagon with something called Recap. And you might not know, at that, because for some reason they chose to launch it in America and then roll it out across the rest of the world over a couple of weeks. I think everyone is supposed to have had theirs by now but there may still be a few Recap-deprived pockets here and there.

Or perhaps yours just isn't showing up for... reasons. I'm not one hundred per cent sure how it's supposed to work, even though I've had a look at the official YouTube blog about it and watched a couple of "How It Works" videos (On YouTube, of course.)

They aren't exactly going out of their way to publicize it. In theory you're supposed to get a banner across the top of your YouTube Home Page to tell you your personal Recap is available but I have two YouTube channels under the same account and it's only showing up on one of them. And it's not the main one, either.

If yours isn't showing and you'd like to see it, you can go to www.youtube.com/recap and providing you're also logged in to YouTube at the time, the very act of visiting the web page should force your shy Recap to reveal itself on your YT home page. I've tried it and it works. Well, it works for one of my channels...

Until this year, I only had the one YouTube channel, under the name Bhagpuss, which is what my original Google account was registered as a couple of decades ago. When I started making AI versions of my songs back in the Spring, I decided I needed to keep them separate, so I made a new channel under the same account. (Until then, I didn't even know that was a thing you could do.) 

The second channel's called That Darn Cat, which is also what I go by on Suno and, for that matter, a few other places. And since I do most of the music-making on my laptop in bed, TDC has turned into my de facto laptop identity. 

I don't usually bother swapping to the Bhagpuss channel to do other things on the laptop, either on YouTube or anywhere else, unless I absolutely have to, which probably explains some of the weirdnesses that occasionally crop up when I comment on other people's blogs, late at night. (And also when I reply to comments here occasionally, although I can edit those so you'd probably never notice...)

Of course, all I really do on the laptop, other than the music, is surf the web, watch streaming video on Prime and Netflix and BBC iPlayer and search for new music on YouTube. If I'm going to do anything more complicated, I'm probably going to wait until I'm back at my desk.

Anyway, I opened YouTube last night and there was this Recap banner at the top. Obviously, I clicked on it to see what it was. I mean, I could guess but I wanted to see for myself...

So I watched it. Didn't take long. And I'll be honest. It wasn't very good. 

If you're used to the level of detail and professionalism in Steam's Replay, for example, you are not going to be impressed by this. Perfunctory would be one word for it. Half-assed would be another.

Trying to be generous, I'll give them a pass because it is the first year YouTube has done one of these. Maybe they're learning on the job. Then again, YouTube has been around for nearly two decades now. Why is this the first year they've thought to give users a summary of their activity? I'll have that pass back, please.

That was my first reaction. My second was "Hey, hang on a  minute! Where are they even getting all this stuff from? I thought I had my YouTube History switched off!" 

Yes. Well. I did. I turned it off years ago. I never look at it and it heavily affects what suggestions and recommendations you get, which is the opposite of what I want. I want to see new things that aren't like the things I've already seen, or I do when I'm searching for new music. Having my own prior search history influence the algorithm is counter-productive.

That ought, presumably, to mean YouTube doesn't have the information stored to compile a statistical analysis and pick out the trends and highlights. At least, you'd hope so or what's the point of being able to toggle the history off?

Before we get into all kinds of conspiracy theories about the evil megacorp lying about what data it keeps, though, I ought to make it clear that when I checked, I found I did not, in fact, have my search history switched off after all. Not on the new account, anyway. Maybe the setting is per channel, not per account. I probably ought to look into that.

It might also explain something I've been wondering about, which is why my recommends on the laptop are so much more consistent than they are on the desktop. It's insidiously comforting, having almost everything that comes be something similar to the things you've already seen. I can see how you could find yourself walled up in a velvet castle of your own making, that way.

It probably also explains why I'm not getting a Recap at all on the Bhagpuss channel, even after i prompt it using the method above. I guess that one does really have the history switched off. I can't say for certain. I haven't been able to find the setting for it yet. 

Then again, I do have an Add-On running in Firefox on the desktop that I don't use on the laptop, which forces YouTube only to show videos from my subscriptions on my home page. That means I get a completely different home page on the two machines anyway, so who knows what's going on?

Whatever it is, I do have a Recap for That Darn Cat and I don't have one for Bhagpuss. The one I've got is extremely limited but also very flattering. Verging on the sycophantic, in fact. It's either been drafted by an AI (Extremely likely.) or by someone trying to sound like one (Worrying, if true.)

I can see why they'd do it, though. I mean, who doesn't want to be told they're a cultured, tech-savvy music lover? All it takes is watching a few music videos and movie trailers (Superhero movies, at that...) and a couple of videos about AI!

It even manages to collate those traits into what would, in an RPG, be called a Class. I'm a Creative Spirit, apparently. Not, you understand, because YouTube knows I've created anything. The Recap doesn't cover anything you've uploaded to your channel. Only what you've watched on other people's. That counts as a creative act to these people.

Speaking of which, I've visited 262 different channels this year. Is that a lot?It doesn't sound like it. I'm surprised it's that few, really. I flip through a couple of dozen most nights. I'd have thought it'd be twice that, at least. I guess there must be a lot of repetition I'm not noticing.

The Recap also tells you which channel you spent most time watching. I'd have liked a Top Ten but no, you just get the one. 

Any guesses what mine was? I certainly wouldn't have got it. In fact, I doubt I would have put it in the top twenty. It was R. Missing. I've watched 31 of her videos and I'm in the top 3% of her audience. Blimey.

All I can say is she does post quite often and I am subbed to her channel so I suppose it shouldn't be that much of a shock. Plus I watch them again when I pick them for posts here and I have posted most things she's done this year. There'll be two of hers in my yearly round-up (Because of course I'm doing one of those, too...)

The only other card that mentions specific channels is a lot harder to explain. Recap attempts, very unconvincingly, to establish some trends in viewing through the year. It pretends I discovered new bands in the Spring, looked for tech tips in the Summer and moved on to watching movie trailers in the Autumn. Which is tripe. I did all of those all year with no particular seasonal emphasis on any of them.

The really odd part, though, is which three "New Bands" Recap chose to highlight: Polly Scattergood, TripleJ and Miami Horror. 

Geez. The only reason I was looking at Polly Scattergood's channel at all was that she hasn't posted anything in four years. I was wondering if she was still alive! As for TripleJ, it's a station, not a band. Granted, it's a music station and I watch bands there but most of them aren't new, even to me. 

Miami Horror, though, really confused me. I had to think for a bit to remember what it was and even then I wasn't sure. They did something with Telenovela that I posted here but it was Telenovela I was mostly interested in, not Miami Horror. I don't recall looking at anything else they've done other than that, so why they get chosen out of the hundreds of acts I must have seen more of this year beats me. What about Witch Post? Or Sunday (1994)? Or Blondshell ffs?

And that's about it for Recap. I'd say I hope YouTube makes a better job of it next year but what I actually hope is that I manage to keep my History switched off and I don't get another one at all. 

It's not like I'll be missing much. 

Or should that be R. Missing much?

To One And All A Merry Christmas

 

And A Merry Christmas To One And All!

 

  

Notes on AI Used In This Christmas Message

Oh, yes, there was some...

First, I took a photo of Beryl, flat out and fast asleep after Christmas Lunch. I cropped and edited it in Paint.net, after which it looked like this:

Then I uploaded it to NightCafe, where I used it as a starting image for Flux Schnell. I gave it the prompt "A sleeping black and white dog wearing a santa hat, surrounded by piles of opened presents under a tastefully decorated Christmas Tree", set the run time to "Long" and asked for four images. The only usable one was this: 

No Santa hat. No tree. One measly present. And that was the best of about a dozen images.

I used several models, trying for something better but they were uniformly terrible. Honestly, it was like the last three years of AI development never happened. I haven't tried generating from an image for a while. I was expecting a lot more. I even used some of my freebies to access the Pro models but they were even worse than the free ones, which ties in with Suno's supposedly best model actually being much worse than its predecessor. 

I think some of these companies are just trying too hard now. Either they're getting desperate or they're so far into the forest they can't see the trees any more.

Anyway, I did manage to get one I was fairly happy with so I uploaded it to ClipChamp. Then I went to Suno and generated some "music" to go with it. That was a low-effort move on my part for which I'd apologize if I didn't also think it fits pretty well with the cheesy effect I was after. 

All I did to get started was type in a half-assed prompt: "Vaporwave Christmas melody, ethereal, glitchy, otherworldy, tuneful, soothing, seasonal, bells, jingling, faint caroling". That gave me something all but unlistenable so I tried to fuzz it up by covering it under the prompt "As heard through the faulty speaker of a  malfunctioning radio, broadcast by a station that fades in and out, quite faint, hard to hear". No luck. The cover sounded pretty much identical to the original. Apparently Suno can't do effects like that.

MeloBytes can, though, so I exported it as a .wav file and uploaded it over there, where I used a filter to make it sound like an old-time radio broadcast. I downloaded the result and uploaded that to ClipChamp. I put the image and the sound file into a timeline, added a couple of effects (Vaporwave and VHS) to get the scratchy, glitchy effect, then I exported the final version to my PC.

I was going to get Blogger to just embed the video directly but the file was too big so I uploaded it to my YouTube channel instead. Once it had processed, I embedded it from there and that was that.

It took me longer to write up this account of what I did than it took me to do it. I probably should have got an AI to do the summary. 

How much of all of that was really AI, though? If I'd been a bit less lazy and made up my own tune and uploaded that, instead of letting Suno do it for me, most of what the "AI" did would have been nothing more than post-processing. Calling it AI just makes it sound more impressive, or so the AI companies would like to believe.

It passed a Christmas afternoon while Mrs Bhagpuss and Bery sleep off their lunch, anyway! Happy Christmas everyone!

Inventory Full Advent Calendar - Day 25 - Christmas Day

I Just Wanna Hold Your Hand 

(On Christmas Day)

The Yearning

C U Christmas Day - Jacklen Ro

It's Like They're Not Even Trying Any More

Following on from yesterday's post, which it has to be admitted somewhat got away from me, here's the one I meant to write about the current state of Prime Gaming. Not that I have anything much to say about it. That's probably how yesterday got started.

Anyway, here's what I've got, such as it is.

It just popped into my head yesterday morning that it'd been a while since I picked up my free games from Prime. The era of Amazon promoting the service in any meaningful way seems to be over. For a while, I used to get emails telling me there was something new to collect. After that, there was the "blog". Now, as far as I can tell, there's nothing.

Actually, if I go back far enough, I seem to remember I used to have to log into Twitch to claim the games, back when it was Twitch Gaming or some such. Or was that just a dream I had? I think that was the reason I made a Twitch account in the first place. To get those free games.

Now it's up to me to remember. I think everyone can guess how that's going to go. 

It also very much looks like the days of a dozen or more free games every month are in the past, too. It's very hard to be sure, without the published monthly slate. The claim dates overlap so I can't tell without going back through the posts here when I registered something was "new". They always did overlap a bit but at least there used to be published start and end dates you could refer to if needed. Now it just says on the offer when it runs out but not when it began.

So, how many new, free games have been added since last time I looked? Good question. Luckily, last time I posted about it, I made a list. There were dates then, I see. I wonder where I got those from? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place now.

Where I have been looking is on Luna itself, where all of those are still claimable except Lovecraft's Untold Stories and Another World. Those two seem to have vanished, always assuming they were ever really there. I claimed the Borderlands, Fallout and D&D titles I didn't already have and passed on the rest.

On to what seems to be new since last time:

Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus (GOG)

Gunslugs II (GOG)

Christmas Adventure: Candy Storm (Legacy)

Ashworld (GOG)

Gylt (Amazon Games)

They've started using an icon to tell you where you'll be claiming the game from, which works perfectly well for Good Old Games and EPIC, both of whose icons are basically their names. Unfortunately, the others are a picture of a crown and a snowflake, neither of which mean anything to me. 

The crown turns out to be Amazon Games, which still exists independently of Luna, apparently. Or maybe not. I can't tell any more. If you claim a game with a crown on, it says you need Amazon Games installed to play it, anyway, although I suspect when you try to launch the thing it'll go through Luna after all. 

As for the snowflake, I'm guessing that means it's a holiday offer. It's on the only two obviously seasonal games, which would strongly suggest so. I imagine it would tell you for sure if you claimed them but since I don't want either, I can't say for certain. They're both from the hidden object specialist, Legacy Games and they also have the Windows icon so who fricken' knows? Or cares?

The new games I did claim were Ashworld and Gylt, both of which looked quite interesting. I wouldn't have thought so if I'd been paying attention, though.

If I'd had my mind on my work, I wouldn't have bothered claiming Ashworld. I just read the description and grabbed it. 

And why not? It looks great in the splash illustration, doesn't it? Here, take a look. Wouldn't you want to play a game that looked like that?

 

The description makes it sound quite appealing, too. It's an open-world survival game with scavenging, crafting, combat and vehicles. We like those, right? 

Well, yes, we do. Just not when they look like this:

Is that what you were expecting from the picture above? No, me neither. So I won't be playing that one.

Gylt looks more likely to get a run-out sometime. It's "a narrative adventure with stealth, puzzles and action" in which you play Sally, "a little girl living in Bethelwood, Maine". 

Sally's having kind of a bad time just now. "After being chased by a group of bullies, Sally is dragged into a twisted version of her town where her fears and worse memories are presented in a wicked and very real way." 

It's a psychological horror game with surrealist tendencies. Not my favorite sub-genre but I've played and enjoyed a few. It looks pretty and it has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" Steam rating, so definitely worth a shot for free.

 I claimed it, at least. Whether I'll ever play it is another question. Then again, that applies to just about all the games I've ever claimed from Prime under any incarnation.

Will there be more free games in January? No idea. Will I remember to check? Possibly. Do Amazon care if Prime members know any of these games exist? Sure doesn't look like it.

They want us to know about Amazon Music and Audible, though. I get emails about those every blasted week. 

As for games, I think they probably wish they'd never got started on those to begin with.

Inventory Full Advent Calendar - Day 24 - Christmas Eve

 

 

 

 

December 24 (Christmas Song) - Halover

 

December 24 - Earl Sweatshirt

 

Popular Graphic Arts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What Has Amazon Done For You Lately?

How about a catch-up on what's happening with Amazon Prime Gaming? Anyone up for that? And while we're about it, how about a general What's Up With Amazon? Because it's hard to be sure, sometimes, isn't it? For one of the biggest consumer-goods companies in the world, they really don't make it easy for the customer, do they?

I'm not really down with the whole Death of the Interwebs narrative but it's hard to argue that certain once-reliable strands aren't getting horribly tangled now. Amazon used to be relatively clean and straightforward to navigate but it's been a while since it felt like that was still true.

You really can't trust the reviews the way you once could, what with the bots and the review farms and now AI. I like the way they've tried to set a bot to catch a bot but those AI summaries are only theoretically helpful. As far as I can see they just summarize, accurately enough, the reviews you probably couldn't trust in the first place. 

I still have to read a whole bunch of reviews and use my training as an Eng. Lit. grad and longtime writer to try and parse the truth from the hype. Rufus, the weirdly-named Amazon House AI, seems to take them all on face value. 

Why is it called Rufus, anyway? I mean, I know everything has to be called something but not very many things have to be called Rufus. Or any. Why pick on that?

Oh, hey, guess what? There's a reason. Because of course there is. Would you like to know what it is? Of course you would. Shall we ask Gemini to tell us? Why not? 

All these AIs know each other, you do know that, right? They lounge around in their luxuriously appointed virtual chat-room, blipping to each other at the speed of information and this is just the kind of thing they talk about:

AI Overview

Amazon's AI assistant, Rufus, is named after the company's first office dog, a beloved Welsh corgi from its early days in the 1990s, honoring the company's dog-friendly culture and the furry friend who was a fixture in the offices and even appeared on early error pages. 

• Origin Story: Rufus was a loyal Welsh Corgi, owned by an early Amazon employee, who roamed the first warehouse, played fetch, and was a significant part of the startup's early family.
• Legacy: The original Rufus passed away in 2009, but his legacy lives on, with Amazon even naming a building after him and continuing its pet-friendly policy.
• Connection to AI: Naming the new generative AI shopping assistant after him pays homage to this nostalgic figure, blending Amazon's history with its future technology to create a relatable brand for customers. 

Does that humanize Rufus for you? Or caninize it? Maybe that should that be him? What's the correct gender appellation for an AI? 

Also, did you know Amazon has a "pet-friendly" policy?  Does that humanize the company for you? 

So many questions.  

 

Corgis, too. What about them? They've had a makeover, haven't they? I guess now the Queen's not around any more that whole image I grew up with is gone for good. Apparently everywhere else in the world Corgis are cute, goofy doggies, not hateful symbols of class privelige. How times change.

 

Anyway, I like them now. Corgis, that is, not the royal family. I have no strong opinions on the royals. Never have had. Which is surprising. There aren't many things I don't have strong opinions on.

 

I like nearly all kinds and styles of dog, anyway. Dachshunds I have issues with. Hard to spell for one thing. Also often unnecessarily aggressive, as are Chihuahuas. Does canine aggression come in direct proportion to how hard it is to spell the name of the breed correctly? I had to use Spell Check to get both of those right and I'm a good speler. (Yay! Visual joke!)

 

Hmm. Even for me, this is a a bit of a wander. I'll attempt to recalibrate. What was I going to talk about? Oh, yes, Prime Gaming.

 

Before we do, though, you really ought to see the HTML that came across when I cut and pasted that Gemini quote. I just went in to tweak something (Normally I write in Compose View not HTML.) and Blimey, Charlie! Here, take a look:

 

What is that? All that red! 

 

Anyway, so, the Amazon storefront isn't as reliable or user-friendly as it used to be, even with the digital ghost of a dead dog doing its best to help. (Did I ever mention my character that I played for a couple of  Golden Heroes campaigns back in the 80s was a robotic dog called The Ghost Dog? I did? Oh, okay then...)

 

And Prime Video? Sheesh! Hasn't that ever gone downhill!? It's kind of insulting that they not only added compulsory, unskippable adverts to a service they're already charging a subscription for but then to stick a "Go Ad-Free" button on the ads themselves! Is that not what the police in TV shows used to call Running A Protection Racket?

 

Also, the placement of the ads. Who's picking the spots? Is it completely random? Why is there sometimes just one at the beginning and one near the end and other times three in ten minutes in the middle? And has no-one at Amazon ever heard of the concept of a "natural break"? Just slam the damn things in anywhere, why don't you?

 

Do you know what I do? I mute the sound and tab out as soon as the ads start. It handily tells you how long they're going to last but I don't bother timing it. If you leave it longer than that, when you come back you can just roll the video back to just before you left and it will play normally from then on, without the annoying ad. It's disruptive, sure, but not as much as watching the bloody things would be. Also, you feel like you're getting one over on The Man.

 

(Hey, speaking of getting one over on the man, did anyone know there was a Furry Freak Brothers animated show? I didn't until last week. It came up on my Netflix recommends. I watched the pilot episode and it was about as funny as the comics which is to say not all that funny. I haven't watched another. I read all the Freak Bros. comics when I worked in a comic shop in the '80s. Wouldn't have bought them. I also met one of the artists at a con once. Gilbert Shelton, I think it was. Can't remember much about it. There was a lot of drinking involved although no dope, surprisingly.)

 

Gaaaaahh! Dragging this thing back....

 

Oh, wait, just before I get to Prime Gaming, I spotted something actually useful on Prime Video last night. I think this is new. At least it was new to me. 

 

They've slightly changed the UI on the Storefront. I've long been in the habit of using my general Amazon bookmark when I want to watch something on Prime Video, then clicking on Prime Video along the top to open it. I couldn't see the button (It's there now but I swear it wasn't last night...) so I was stumped for all of three seconds. 

 

Then I thought why not try the full menu? Top left corner is an "ALL" button so I pressed that and got a full list of services with Prime Video near the top. Clicking that gets you a flip-out menu and on that one there's another button for My Stuff. 

 

Well. 

 

I wonder? 

 

I wonder if Firefox would make a Bookmark for that? 

 

Yes it would!

 

So now I have a bookmark for Prime Video that takes me straight to a clear, clean page that only has My Stuff on it! Better yet, it has all My Stuff broken out into handy subsections - My Movie Watchlist, My TV Watchlist, things I've bought, my subscriptions...

 

It's a million times better than trying to find My Stuff in the bullet hell of Prime Video's Home Page, where 90% is stuff they want you to pay (Again.) for and almost none of it is anything I'd watch even for free. Has everyone else been doing it this way all along and I was the only sucker doing it the dumb way? Or is this actually a new option? 

 

Either way, if you don't already sort yours this way, I suggest you start. I'm wondering now if there's a Firefox Add-On that will make My Stuff into my Amazon Prime landing page. I have one like that for YouTube and its transformative. Although, if I have a Bookmark for it, I guess don't really need an Add-On.

 

I think that's about it for Amazon-related moans and groans... oh, no, wait! no, it's not! 

 

I'm trying to buy an Amazon eGift Card for my step-daughter in Australia. How hard could that be? I mean, it's a global company and digital products can be delivered instantly by email anywhere in the world. Gotta take five minutes, tops, right? 

 

Hah. Dream, as they used to say, on. You can't buy eCards for any Amazon sub-unit other than the one you have an account with, so if you're in the UK you can only buy eCards for the UK. If you want an Australian one you have to make an account with Amazon.com.au. 

 

Or, in fact, as I discovered, just sign into that website using your existing account details. That works. Still doesn't let you buy a digital card, though. For that, you have to change your location to an address with an Australian postcode. All this for something that isn't going to be damn well posted anywhere!

 

Maybe there are currency or legal reasons? Yeah, maybe, but if so, how come I can buy digital gift cards from other Australian companies using my own address? And have them sent to me, whereupon I just forward them to my step-daughter's email because ALL ANYONE NEEDS IS THE GODDAM CARD NUMBER!

 

I'd say it's almost as if Amazon don't want to take the money but we all know that can't be true.

 

Okay, I'm done. Now about that Prime Gaming offer... 

 

<Sorry! I'm afraid we're out of time for today! Please come back tomorrow.>