Turn Up The Gain

Didn't think I was going to have time for a post today but it appears I do so I'm going to carry on with the series about making music with the help of technology, including but not limited to AI. Or, in this case, making videos. Mostly by brute force.

I started a few weeks ago but I wasn't starting entirely from scratch. I've made a few videos before. Mostly for game-related stuff to support posts here. I also have many dozens of hours of camcorder footage from holidays, going pretty much back to the '90s, some of which I have occasionally bothered to edit and turn into mini-movies that about two people enjoyed watching, one of those people being me and the other being my mother. And I don't think she was all that interested. Mrs Bhagpuss wisely opted out of most of the viewings, even though she was in them.

I have also, even more occasionally, made videos for songs I liked. Other peoples' songs, that is. I quite enjoyed it but seemed like a lot of work so I didn't do it often and I don't think I've done any at all for more than ten years. 

In the last month I've spent more than fifty hours making three-minute videos for songs and I believe I can at least claim some improvement, even if actually being "any good" at video-making is still somewhere over the horizon. I am also a lot more motivated than ever before to keep on doing it because it turns out that, like most things, when you have an actual goal in mind, working to achieve it becomes satisfying and even fun.

As soon as I decided I was going to put all the songs I was making onto YouTube I realized there were two things I'd have to do: make a new YouTube channel and make videos for all of them. I wanted them on YouTube because that would be where I'd be most likely to watch them - and it is me I'm mostly making them for. I suffer from Reverse Imposter Syndrome, where I think everything I create is pretty damn good whether it is or not and I rarely tire of reading, listening to or watching my own work.

I also wanted them on a channel that wasn't already cluttered up with a load of other nonsense, just in case I did eventually decide to make them public. Still thinking about that.

Obviously, I didn't have to make videos at all. I could just have posted the songs with static images. If I'd done that I'd be finished already.

Millions of people do it that way. It's perfectly acceptable. As a viewer, though, I dislike it intensely. I've apologized plenty of times in music posts here for linking to songs on YouTube that have no video. It just seems rude, somehow. It's orders of magnitude more likely I'll listen to a song that also has a video than one with just a picture so I feel obligated to extend that courtesy to others, if I ever do decide to open them up to the world. 

Unless it's one of those bloody videos of a turntable going round and round. Those are worse than no video at all.

Once I'd decided to make the videos, it was pretty obvious they were going to be lyric videos. Since there's no actual performer, these being songs that have been brought to life by machines, obviously there weren't going to be any performances to share. I certainly wasn't going to film myself, as a sixty-six year old man, miming to the vocals of a twenty-something woman, not even one who only existed because I'd just made her up. 

All the songs have female vocals, by the way. Well, almost all. There are a couple that don't, yet, although they may not make it out of production that way. Given my near-inability to play male characters any more and now this strongly negative reaction to hearing my lyrics sung by a male voice, I have to wonder, sometimes. Then again, I do have a fairly strong and well-established preference for the female voice over the male, especially in popular song, so maybe that's all it is: aesthetics.

I like lyric videos, anyway. I quite often prefer them to the "official" videos, which all too often have the whiff of am-dram about them, along with far too many rubber masks, animal costumes and food fights. 

It's useful to be able follow along with the lyrics as you listen, too. That's how we did it in the olden days, when we used to sit cross-legged with a gate-fold album cover open on our laps, squinting at the badly-printed words. It encourages you to sing along, something I do more often than you might imagine. Or possibly less often, if you're a regular reader of this blog and already have your own ideas about the kinds of things I might do...

With the necessity of videos established, the next question was what would they be videos of? They had to be of something. Lyric videos that consist of nothing but words scrolling across the screen do exist but in my opinion they probably shouldn't.

Luckily, I immediately realized I was sitting on the ideal resource: all those countless hours of holiday video, much of it digitized and some already tucked away on the hard drive of the very PC I was sitting at. 

It would be totally unreasonable to expect anyone to watch straight extracts from my tedious home movies, especially given that what I mostly like to point the camera at when I'm away are very large, very old buildings, all of which tend to look much the same. In between all those castles and churches, though, are fragments of all kinds of things that just happened to take my fancy at the time. And, of course, a lot of weather.

Running the lyrics over a backdrop of blue skies, clouds, sparkling water and sunsets seemed like it might work. At least it would be pretty. Better still, as I mentioned in a previous post, an awful lot of my songs seem to be partly or even mostly concerned with the weather, so it might even be appropriate.

As it turned out, though, the weather condition I reference most often as a lyricist is undoubtedly rain and if there's one thing I don't generally like to film when I'm on holiday it's rain. I kind of want to come back with the impression the sun never stopped shining. Consequently, I have almost no footage of rain, other than a couple of torrential downpours and a thunderstorm or two, where things seemed spectacular enough to be worth recording for posterity.

Still, no-one said the interpretations had to be literal. That often looks labored and anyway, as I found very quickly, trying to fit pictures to words in anything other than the loosest fashion is bloody hard work. So mostly I haven't bothered with anything more than the odd, felicitous nod to what the songs might be about. Always assuming I know what that is. Which, after forty years, I quite frequently do not.

Having decided to do it, the next question was how. In the past, I've only really ever used the basic Movie Maker software that Microsoft used to include with Windows. They have, apparently, discontinued it now, although it's still on my PC so it must have still been there in Windows 10. Or maybe I had to download it separately. Anyway, I still have it.

The first three or four videos I made for my new-old songs were done entirely with Movie Maker and they're okay as they go but it became apparent pretty quickly that I'd already used up most of the possibilities and I still had more than two dozen to do. They were all going to look pretty samey unless I came up with a better idea.

That led me to start googling for alternatives, of which there are many. I wasn't planning on spending any money so I was limited to the free apps. I also dislike using free trials so that narrowed it down some more. 

By far the most widely-recommended free video-editing app seemed to be ShotCut. I downloaded that and had a play around with it. 

It's great for fucking up images, which is one of the main things I wanted it for. I absolutely did not want my videos to look like generic camcorder holiday snaps, that being exactly what they are, so I needed to mess them up a little, in the way everyone does when they upload stuff they shot on their phones to social media.

After some trial and error I decided my go-tos would be the filters labeled "Old Film. There are half a dozen of those and they all have their merits but I particularly like the Technicolor filter, even if it's not always extreme enough for me. I sometimes use the Saturation and Vibrance ones as well and in extreme cases the RGB Shift. That really makes it look like something I would have loved in the early seventies, when I was young and had no discernment. Not that I have all that much now...

I found the filters very easy to work with but Key Frames needed more thought. And effort. And patience. As for the subtitles, they didn't seem either flexible or intuitive. I was finding the learning curve needed to get the most out of ShotCut a little daunting so I started looking at easier options. Or maybe just some specialized apps to do specific things.

The app most widely suggested for adding titles and captions was CapCut. I installed it and found it excellent - until I tried to download what I'd done. CapCut likes to say it has a free version and it does but it also has an extremely annoying and quite clever way of getting you to buy the Pro version instead: it lets you use the Pro features for free, then asks you to pay for them as soon as you try to download the video you just made. That's really working the sunk cost levers.

Luckily, there's a workaround for that. It transpires that CapCut used to be far more generous with what it allowed free users to get away with and it's still possible to install older versions of the software that stick to those rules. You do have to be constantly on the lookout for annoying Upgrade pop-ups because once you have your nice, free 2024 edition, the last thing you want to do is accidentally swap it out for the current model. I've already had to uninstall and re-install the damn thing twice through not paying enough attention to what I was clicking on.

CapCut is very good indeed for positioning, timing and stylizing captions or titles but it is very bad at using AI to interpret what a singer is singing. Useless, in fact, although it claims otherwise. 

You don't, of course need AI to add the lyrics - you can do it perfectly well manually - but it saves a lot of time if you can get an AI to do it, especially if it also works out all the timings for you as well. I went shopping for one that could do both and I found one: Microsoft's very own Clipchamp. 

Clipchamp has an embedded AI because of course it does - everything Microsoft do has to be AI-enabled these days. This one purports to be able to produce the full lyrics from a video and turn them into subtitles. And it sort of does.

There are two problems, other than the inevitable mishearings: firstly, when Microsoft say subtitles they mean subtitles. The app is meant for captioning podcasts or spoken-word videos, I believe, and it likes to put the words along the bottom of the screen, where such things are supposed to go.

Music videos with  the lyrics running along the bottom like a Ted Talk look really stupid. Ugly. Just horrible. Even Movie Maker doesn't limit you to that. Clipchamp probably doesn't either, if you know how to use it, but I haven't tried to find out because CapCut lets you put text anywhere and also make it do things like dissolve or fly off the screen. And I already knew how to use CapCut.

After a few frustrating attempts to get something half-way decent-looking out Clipchamp, I figured out how to export the Clipchamp AI-generated lyrics in SRT format and upload the file into CapCut. Problem solved.

Well, partly. The other thing Clipchamp likes to do is skip verses, usually at the start. I have no clue why. It doesn't always do it. It doesn't even mostly do it or I wouldn't bother using it at all. Mostly it gets the whole song right but sometimes it just... doesn't. And as far as I can tell, if it decides to start transcribing only after thirty seconds once, it will always start transcribing thirty seconds in on that particular video. Even if you re-upload it under a different name. Very annoying.

Nothing a bit of typing and tweaking in CapCut can't fix, though. And honestly there's a lot of that going to be needed anyway. By the time you've corrected the bits the AI misheard and changed the font and moved the positioning around and stretched some bits and shrunk others and changed the phrasing and taken out all the punctuation the AI thought ought to have been in there, you sometimes wonder if it mightn't have been easier to type the whole thing in yourself .

So far I've made fifteen videos and I don't believe a single one of them has taken me less than three hours. Several took most of a day. For a three minute song. Actually more like two -and-a-half minutes in most cases. It's a labor-intensive process, even with all the labor-saving shortcuts.

First I have to flick through the source material to find  a few seconds here, a few seconds there, tiny bits I can use. Then I have to import those into MovieMaker, line them up, change the speeds, stitch them together to get a rough cut the same length as the song. Then it's into ShotCut to rough up the rough cut some more before taking it to Clipchamp to get the lyrics. Finally it's off to CapCut to finish the whole thing off. 

Usually at least one of those stages goes wrong, somehow, and has to be adjusted or even redone. Sometimes the whole thing just doesn't come together the way I was imagining and it's back the drawing board. As yet I haven't had to completely abandon anything, just move the parts around, but even that takes a good, long time.

And even when it works, sometimes it still doesn't. Last night I spent the best part of two hours just getting the timings of a bunch of transitions exactly right in Movie Maker. When I was happy they were spot-on, I exported the project to an MP4 file and uploaded it to ShotCut only to find half the timings were a second or two adrift, as you can clearly see in the above video. Apparently it's a known bug but since the app is no longer supported by Microsoft no-one's going to fix it.

That is the first and only time it's happened so fingers crossed it won't trouble me again. Anyway, it had the serendipitous effect of making me realize I didn't have to make these things perfect, as if I even could. They're backdrops for the words and the music, not works of art in their own right. So as long as there aren't any spelling mistakes it doesn't really matter if the color change is a few seconds behind the beat, does it?

Well, probably not, but you like to do your best work at all times, don't you? And the whole process is extremely involving, addictive and enormously entertaining, so the temptation to keep at it until it's as good as it can possibly be is high. Video editing also has the merit of being a potentially useful skill, so even if it takes up a huge amount of my free time, that's arguably time well-spent. Certainly better-spent than it would have been playing video games, anyway, which is what I would be doing otherwise.

Whether I'll ever reach the point where I even feel subjectively good at making three-minute music videos is very far from certain. I think it's a safe bet I'm never going to be objectively good at it. I am, at least, better at it now than I was a month ago, though, so that's something.

I have another nineteen songs to make videos for and then, if I want to carry on after that, I'll either have to write some new ones or do ones of other people's stuff. I wouldn't rule either out. I re-tuned my guitar a couple of days ago. First time I've picked it up to do anything other than dust around it since 1994. 

I mostly did it because I discovered there's an app for tuning now. And it works. And its free. I used to really hate tuning. And I was really bad at it. Now both my guitars are in tune. And they're both completely unplayable because they both have actions like cheese-graters and my fingers need six months hardening-up even to hold down the strings.

I'm thinking of buying a new guitar with an easier action. And an amp. Geez. What have I started? 

Maps, Letters, Videos - It's A Friday Grab-Bag!

It's Friday. End of the working week. For some. Start of mine. Well, tomorrow is. Let's grab our bags and get started. No time to waste chatting.

It's Road Map Season!

Apparently. Everyone's doing them. Here's Pantheon's.

First impression? Ugly damn thing. It's only just beginning to occur to me that one of the reasons I've not gone with Pantheon the way I expected to is the aesthetic. I'm not talking about the once-controversial graphic makeover that removed the grit and replaced it with cute. That's fine. I mean the overall appearance, the scratchy, uncomfortable spreadsheet feel of the whole thing.

It's in full effect in this image. Everyone does Road Map graphics these days and lots of them are really pretty to look at. They make me think "Ooh! I might have to go play that again". This doesn't. It makes me go "Ow! My eyes!" 

Moving on from the look, there seems to be a lot going on this year but I notice none of it expands the world, other than downwards. There are new dungeons "throughout 2025" apparently but we'll have to wait for 2026 before we get "new zones". Well, you will, if you're playing. I don't think I'm likely to be directly involved. 

Given how few zones there are in the game now, 2026 seems a like a bit of a wait. Just about everything on the list falls under the heading of "ongoing development" rather than new content. There're a lot of "improvements" and "enhancements" and "upgrades" in that line-up, along with a few "systems" but precious little adventure. That's all kept for the grey banner along the top - dungeons, raids, boss encounters, POIs. Not sure of the marketing logic there.

I saw an interesting comment yesterday from one of the people behind the Star Wars Galaxies emu, to the effect that they discovered you can't just hang an mmorpg in a steady state and expect people to keep playing. You have to dump new content on them every ninety days or there's a huge drop-off in population. 

I mean, we all know it but it's surprising how many people, players and developers, try to put their fingers in their ears and deny it. In an odd kind of way, it might be easier for games in Early Access to hold attention. If things are going as they should, there'll be a constant drip of new content or at least disruption to what's there already, which is often just as effective. It's when the game is supposedly done that the real content treadmill starts up and with it the inevitable droughts.

By the look of this Road Map, Pantheon's a loooong way from having to worry about that. EA looks like it could take a while. And I didn't even mention the baffling current obsession going on over there with FFA open-world PvP. I do wonder what Brad McQuaid would have had to say about that...

You've Got Mail

Over at the home of the game Brad made when he was practicing, Jenn Chan, that most amiable and charming of Producers, has a couple of letters out. Producer's Letters are maybe one down from Road Maps - they don't have the graphics for a start - but they mostly perform the same function: letting players know what to expect next.

Neither of the letters, for EverQuest and EverQuest II, has anything very surprising to say. At this point Darkpaw could pretty much swap out the old SOE mission statement, "You're in Our World Now" for  "Business as Usual".

The only item of real interest in the EQII letter is the upcoming Game Update, Lure of Darkness. It brings back the Void, including a new Void Anchor in Sodden Archipelago. I bet we don't actually get one of the whirling vortexes reaching far into the sky, though. I bet it's just a portal somewhere.  

I had quite a lot of fun in Void instances for a while. There was one I used to run repeatedly for platinum, back before inflation made every in-game source of income other than selling on the Broker entirely irrelevant. 

This one ought to offer me a chance to find out just how much more effective my Necromancer is in new content, when compared with my Berserker. He usually has to wait for GUs to recede into the past before he can make any progress with them. I'm optimistic she'll do better. The Lure of Darkness arrives on the 8th of April but I imagine I won't get around to it right away. I'll get to it before the next one arrives in the summer, though.

The EQ letter is more interesting in that Jenn reveals a few secrets concerning the thinking behind some of the choices the team makes when setting up new ruleset servers. There is, of course, yet another of those coming in June because new ruleset servers are the engine that drives EQ's longevity. To some extent they always have been. The concept goes back pretty much to the dawn of the game.

This one is an "experimental" TLP server. My impression is that Everquest players are more open to experimentation than EQII players, the younger game feeling oddly more old-fashioned now and certainly more conservative than the older. 

I don't get the feeling EQII's time-limited expansion server scene has ever been quite as essential or vibrant as EQ's but it's still clearly vital enough to the continuing health of the game for new editions to be rolled out at least annually. This summer we're getting a PvP Origins server, which I would have thought was limiting the appeal considerably but at least it should keep the ever-angry PvP lobby busy complaining about the ruleset for a while.

Last but very much not least in this round-up of points of interest from the two letters, I was much heartened to see the exact same degree of attention as usual being paid to this year's Pride celebrations, starting at the end of May and running on into June. Given the current unfortunate political climate it might not have been surprising to see some backsliding there but no, the two games remain exemplars of modernity, with Patches of Pride in EQII and Pride Month in EQ each being afforded the same level of attention as any of the many established dates in the packed Norrathian calendar.

That's a deal of game news. Shall we take a short break for some music? Yes, I think we shall.

That Difficult Second Album

Catch These Fists - Wet Leg

Having covered music here for quite a few years now, I find myself in the odd position of having artists and bands I "cover" in much the same way I "cover" games. There's no necessity for it in either case but if you keep up a blog for long enough, after a while you get a feel for what it's about. 

As well as the inevitable "anything that catches my interest", this blog mostly covers games I play, games I might play and games I used to play, along with music I listen to, TV I watch and of late developments in AI as they pertain to everything else I write about. 

As the years go by, there are certain games, shows, creators and performers that come up over and over and after a certain point I start to feel I "should" mention it, when I find something new involving any of them. That's why there's stuff in this post about Pantheon, EQ and EQII and it's also why there's a video of Wet Leg's first single from their upcoming sophomore album, Moisturizer.

Because I was an early adopter and because I went somewhat overboard about the first few singles, Wet Leg have become a band this blog pays attention to, even though I don't quite feel the same attachment to them I did a couple of years ago. I like Catch These Fists well enough but it isn't demanding the same level of attention from me that Chaise Longue, Wet Dream or Too Late Now did.

The band is currently out there, playing live and debuting a whole load of tracks from the new album. I watched audience videos of half a dozen of the new songs and they all sounded good but none of them really wowed me.  

Rhian Teasdale has a definite new look she's really working and the band have what keeps getting described as a punkier sound. It all looks and sounds like it would be a great time in a club or on a festival stage. As something to listen to at home, I'm not so sure. I await the album with interest to see what the songs sound like in their fully produced form. I will be buying it, anyway, or at least putting it on a list so someone else can buy it for me.

Horse Latitudes

Here's the oddest MMORPG story of the week by some margin. Have you ever thought that what the genre really needed was more horseback riding? Or more murder mysteries to solve? No? Well how about more mysteries to solve while you're out horseback riding?

It's a niche pitch, for sure, but it's happening. The game is called Equinox: Homecoming. Nothing like hanging your entire fortunes on a convoluted pun, is there? As if the concept wasn't high enough already.

It's in production from a company called Blue Scarab, the guiding force behind which is one Craig Morrison, a name that may be familiar from his time at both Blizzard and Funcom. The official website describes the game as a "multiplayer online role-playing game that’s a surprising and unique blend of cozy exploration and dark mystery. Perfect for fans of horses, murder mysteries, and relaxing, story-rich gameplay!" 

There's a trailer, which looks a bit janky in the way of most early-development footage, but which also makes me think it might be something worth keeping an eye on. The pitch is for a “unique blend of cozy escapism and true-crime” but I'm getting some Secret World vibes, too.

Morrison goes on to say

"We're very excited to see what people make of Equinox. We’ve had faith throughout development that there is an audience out there for different and interesting experiences... there is definitely a risk, but we're in a position where we can take this shot and try to provide players with a truly unique world and story."

We do all keep saying we want developers to try new things, take some risks and stop copying whatever's just made money. It'll be very interesting to see if this one goes anywhere. NetEase is backing it so it probably will.

Take Me Home

A few months back, James Gunn gave us a first look at his new take on Superman in a short trailer that featured Krypto, the Dog of Steel. The NME keep reporting the reaction to it as "mixed" but I'm pretty sure just about every actual DC fan did that thing where you relax a whole lot of tension in your shoulders you didn't even notice you were carrying. The comment thread on YouTube is that, all through.

Now Gunn's put out an extended, five-minute version with a whole narrative section from the movie and it does not disappoint. For a Superman fan there are all kinds of oddnesses, like Krypto having long fur and the Superman robots not wearing costumes but instead of detracting from the lore those differences feel like an evolution of it.

Put simply, this is Superman, in a way almost no version of the icon since Christopher Reeve really has been. It's also very clearly the work of someone who understands not just the character but the backstory. Like, all of the backstory, not just that tedious bit on Krypton before it blew up, the part that's been done to death about a million times now.

I am more than optimistic about this one. Whether the movie can survive the current resistance to all things super-heroic evident in the wider cinema-going audience is another question but I'm confident the longtime comics fans in that audience are going to be well-served, in the best possible meaning of the phrase.

And On That Blondshell

Much of what I said above about Wet Leg applies here, too, except for the implied part about the dangers of over-exposure. This is the third single from Sabrina Teitelbaum's second album, "If You Asked For A Picture" and once again I'd say it's good but not great, which is pretty much how I felt about the other two as well. I do think this one might be a grower, though. That chorus is sticking.

Where Blondshell differs from Wet Leg in this respect, at least for me, is that Sabrina's sound is a lot more amenable to repeated listening. Wet Leg have the immediacy of a great singles band. A lot of their songs sound like they were made to be heard coming out of car windows or transistor radios. Blondshell is more the sort of thing you play at home on the stereo on a Sunday morning.

For that reason alone I'd bet that, even if the two albums are equally far behind their immediate predecessors in essentiality, it'll be Blondshell's that gets listened to the most in this house and by a margin. That's already the case with their debuts, although I've probably watched the Wet Leg videos more than the Blondshell ones.

Speaking of videos, although I've embedded both of them here, I don't very much like either. The Wet Leg one is okay but feels a bit like they might be trying just a tad too hard for the wacky funster vibe they nailed so effortlessly last time around. 

The Blondshell video, on the other hand, goes right to the opposite extreme. It looks like a bunch of pals goofing around but doing it with a degree of self-consciousness that makes it slightly uncomfortable to watch. Also, they clearly bought the absolute cheapest strollers they could find, just for the purposes of the video, and they bought them as a job lot. It just looks false.

As for the song itself, I love the chorus and the overall Blondshell sound. The words are typically elliptical in that way I love about her writing but the subject matter is a little disturbing. It reminds uncomfortably of "Too Much, Too Young" by the Specials, an unnecessarily harsh and judgmental song I always disliked.

Fortunately, these days you rarely get a new song without a gloss on it from the songwriter and what Sabrina says about the lyrics makes me happier. As per Stereogum  

“The song is partially about being in your twenties and feeling like you’re supposed to know everything (your parents even had kids around that age!) yet you’re truly in the weeds trying to figure out who you are,” 

That's a much warmer vibe than the words feel like they support. I find this a lot with Blondshell's lyrics. Possibly because they're so pared-down, they often feel harsher than Sabrina's explanation of them suggests they were meant to. It's the good, old intentional fallacy at play again, I guess, although here it's working in my favor.

Anyway, I like "23's A Baby" best of the three singles to date. Looking forward to the album in May.

And with that, I'm off to make some music of my own. There may not be another post here until Wednesday, what with me working and also having something to do on Monday but we'll see.

My Prime Picks For April

I wasn't going to post anything today, for reasons of extreme laziness and lack of motivation, but I just claimed two of this month's Prime giveaways so I thought I'd mention them for mentioning's sake. I'm not going through the whole lot because a) I doubt anyone cares and b) it's not a very exciting slate but I will just call out a handful of titles that might well be of some interest to someone reading this.

For starters, there's something called Minecraft Legends, which appears to be an RTS set in the Minecraft universe. Is there a Minecraft universe? And if there is, do people refer to it as the MCU? Because that could be confusing.

Anyway, the game is available on Prime separately for PC and XBox, which is weird. I didn't know Prime gave away console titles or if I did know, I'd forgotten. I did think about claiming it but seeing I've never even played Minecraft, it seemed like perhaps that should come first. And I have no plans to play Minecraft.

Three other titles came under consideration. There's one called PaleoPines, which has the tags RPG, Simulator and Indie attached to it. It also has a lengthy description, something that's all too often absent from games in the Prime offers. 

Reading that, it seems to be an Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley clone with added dinosaurs. Graphically, it looks as if it's aimed at fairly young children although that may just be the art style, not the gameplay. 

I really don't like farming games, I'm not a big dinosaur fan and I have Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp for all my imaginary socializing needs so although this looks like something I conceivably might play, I'm passing.

I was initially a little more interested in Let's Build A Zoo. As a concept it sounded like it might be a pleasant diversion, especially with the sci-fi element of gene-splicing thrown in: 

"Try your hand at DNA splicing, and stitch together over 300,000 different types of animals, ranging from the majestic Giraffephant to the peaceful PandOwl."

Then I looked at the screenshots. It's done in that top-down, pixel-art style I can't stand. Hard pass on that, then.

Finally, I thought about Deus Ex: Invisible War. It's an RPG/Shooter set in the DeusEx world. I'm discovering somewhat late in life that I quite like shooters and I already know I like RPGs so that seemed promising. As with Minecraft Legends, though, I've never played DeusEx. It seems a bit premature, not to say presumptuous, to start with a spin-off. 

Come to think of it, I might own DeusEx from a previous Prime giveaway. Maybe I should play that instead.

So, what did I take?

I took Gamedec and Mutazione, neither of which I'd heard of but both of which sounded right in my wheelhouse. (Where does that expression come from?  What is a "wheelhouse" and why would  something that was in it feel comfortable?)

Gamedec is "a single-player cyberpunk isometric RPG" Better yet "You are a game detective, who solves crimes inside virtual worlds." Now that's an intriguing set-up, although I'm not sure it's an original one. 

Best of all "The game continually adapts to your decisions and never judges." I do so hate a judgy game, don't you?

That one may well get played at some point. I have a good record with cyberpunk adventure games - I've played a few now and enjoyed most of them. Even finished some...

Mutazione is an indie point&click adventure and my record with those is even better. This one sounds quite intriguing: 

"A mutant soap opera where small-town gossip meets the supernatural. Mutazione is an adventure game where the juicy personal drama is just as important as the high-stakes adventure part of the story. Explore the Mutazione community as Kai as she cares for her ailing grandfather. Discover magical gardens, new friends, and old secrets. They can survive an apocalyptic meteor strike, but can they survive their small-town drama?"

I do like a bit of small-town drama. The graphics are stylized but charming and it's rated Pegi7 so I was a bit surprised by how eerie and disturbing the trailer made it look. Not that those are necessarily bad things in the context of an adventure game. It has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam so I'm optimistic.

Anyway, those are my picks for April. 

Raised By Supercute Wolves

The thing that hadn't occured to me when I started playing around with AI music this time around was just how addictive it would be. It certainly hadn't grabbed me that way the first time I tried it, the best part of a year ago. Turns out there's a huge difference between having a machine churn out some tunes you never heard before and having it bring to life the sounds you've been hearing in your head for forty years.

Actually, there's a bit more to it than that. When I first played around with a couple of AI music generators last year, it was very much in the way of playing with an amusing toy: fun but inconsequential. Which isn't surprising, given that having the AI do one hundred per cent of the work leaves you no other role than being the audience. 

When all you're doing is typing in prompts, at best it's like being the guy in the mosh pit who keeps yelling out for the band to play that one song from the second album and then they do. (And yes, I have been that guy...) There's bit of a buzz and a fleeting sense that you might have had some kind of input but then it passes and you never think of it again.

That all changes by at least an order of magnitude when you stop letting the AI make up the words and type in your own lyrics instead. At that point, you do begin to feel some sense of ownership and a degree of artistic involvement in the process. And it's merited, too. I mean, you did write the words. Lyricist is a proper job title.

On a technical level, it also becomes very intriguing to see the extent to which the structure and rhythm inherant in the lyrics, coupled with your instructions on the genre of music and emotional tone to use, all come together to influence the melody. When I was experimenting with it last year, I was quite surprised by how close some of the AI's interpretations were to the original tunes I'd written back in the 'eighties.

Those, though, were the eerie exceptions. Mostly what you get is your familiar words but set to a tune you'd never have thought of and most likely wish you'd never heard. It takes a lot of tries to get the AI to come up with something that feels even okay, let alone right and even when it does it never feels like it's "your" song. It's as frustrating as it is enjoyable.

All of that managed to keep me amused for a couple of afternoons a year ago but I soon lost interest and I hadn't felt the need to go back for another go since. It's been much the same story with all the other generative AI agents I've played around with these last two or three years. It's funny to get an AI to write a story or a blog post now and again but it gets old fast. As for AI video, it's a lot of work for very little reward. A few seconds of something that looks quite fake.

None of which is to suggest these things have no genuine use cases. They certainly do. And that, really, is the point: they're good tools if you have a purpose for them but at the moment that's all they are: tools. It's still you that's going to be doing all the real work, so if you don't have an end in mind, what's the point? You don't buy a hammer just so you can wander around hitting things with it at random. Or I hope you don't, anyway...

With the recovery of my ancient audio-tapes, I finally found a project for which one of the AIs was the exact hammer I needed. That instantly turned the whole experience on its head. Instead of idly playing with the controls to see what would happen, now I was twiddling with them to get a precise result. I was using the tool to a very specific end.

Well... some of the time...

See, here's the thing. Having songs you wrote and recorded back in your youth magically brought to life, almost exactly as you'd always imagined them, that's an amazing experience. But so is hearing those same songs done in a whole range of styles and genres for which they were never intended. And when the results come out sounding exactly like the real songs being covered by a bunch of different bands.... well, it's hard to leave it alone.

I've spent half of this last month trying to get Suno to give me the closest possible approximations of the songs in my head and the other half asking it to give me versions I couldn't even imagine. I've been indulging myself wildly, coming up with bizarre and ridiculous interpretations of the very same songs. 

The former is by far the more satisfying, when it works, but the latter is arguably even more addictive. It's irresistibly tempting to see what a grim, dark, miserable song might sound like if it was covered by a hyperactive kawaii future bass act or how a 1970s progressive rock band would handle a ninety-second, sugared-up love song meant for a C86-era tweepop outfit.

Mostly the results are either hilarious or unlistenable but occasionally it just somehow works. Some of the unlikeliest suggestions end up being things I'd happily listen to over and over, like the one above, which was what I got when I set Suno loose on one of the nastiest, darkest songs I ever wrote and asked it to give me a "supercute kawaii bass hyperpop" version - one with "supercute female vocals", just to labor the point. That's actually the correct melody and pretty much the correct phrasing and emphasis, too. If you know what it's supposed to sound like it's quite surreal.

What with the one and the other I've done precious little else since the beginning of March. When I subbed to Suno for a month, I immediately cancelled so the subscription wouldn't auto-renew in April. I thought the five hundred songs that got me would be far more than I'd need for the entire project. 

Two weeks later and I'd used them all. I had to buy extra credits, even though you get enough free every day for another ten songs.

At time of writing, I have over 750 songs on Suno. I've saved them in four categories ("Workspaces" as Suno calls them.): Good, Bad, Unrated and a generic unnamed workspace for stuff I either forgot to categorize or haven't gotten around to yet. I also have a workspace for Uploads, songs I've recorded and worked on so far. 

Here's how the various categories stack up:

• Good - 373
• Bad - 51
• Unrated - 228
• Workspace - 104
• Uploads - 53

That doesn't include some that I just deleted as I went along. Also, I don't have fifty-three original songs. More like half that. I uploaded different versions of a lot of them. 

Uploading is interesting in itself. Unsurprisingly, the more finished the version, the more faithfully Suno follows it. The full band rehearsals I uploaded from my C86 years come out like more polished, better-recorded takes by the same band. Except with a girl singer instead of me. Huge improvement.

The ones with just me and a guitar tend to follow my phrasing, intonation and melody, such as it is, quite closely. They also determinedly stick to my chords and rhythm, provided I prompt for a genre in which all of the above would be appropriate. That can get very close to what I imagine those songs would have sounded like had I been the band-leader rather than just the hired frontman.

Finally, there are the songs where I don't have any usable recordings, just the lyrics and my fading memory of what they were meant to sound like. I tried singing those accapella and uploading them but my voice, which wasn't great when I was in my twenties, has very much not improved with age. 

I am a much better whistler than I am a singer so I tried whistling a couple instead and that worked surprisingly well. Of course, with only a whistled melody to work from, Suno has to make up the rest. You'd think it wouldn't have a chance of getting anywhere near the result I was looking for. But you'd be wrong.

As you can see, the Good far outweighs the Bad. Suno is really very good at what it does, something I very definitely wouldn't say about its main rival, Udio, on which I wasted ten pounds I wish I hadn't spent. Suno has a lot of idiosyncrasies but it gets the job done. Udio is a waste of time.

The Bad songs are mostly complete failures by the AI to follow instructions although a few are just plain glitches or bugs, where something went badly wrong. The whole generative process is absolutely fascinating. I'd say that about two-thirds of the time the AI is clearly making every attempt to come up with exactly what's been asked for. It doesn't always quite manage it but you can tell that's what it was trying to do.

Then there's a smaller but significant cadre of versions, where the AI appears either to focus wholly on one specific instruction at the expense of everything else or where it sticks closely to the plot for most of the running time then goes completely off-message for brief periods. There's a disturbing tendency for it to go "I've done what you wanted - now it's my turn to have some fun" and produce a decent version of whatever was asked for with ninety seconds of something completely different bolted seemingly randomly onto the end.

Over the course of the month, I've learned a certain amount about how to get exactly what I want but there's still an element of RNG about the whole affair that will feel familiar to any MMORPG player. The exact same prompt that produced a miraculously good result on one song will rarely work as well on another. Part of the reason I have so many versions of the same songs is purely through the necessity for so much trial and error.

Conversely, I finally had to admit to myself that if I wanted the songs to sound like they do in my head, I had to stick to a fairly tight range of instructions. I'd been trying a lot of new things but in the end it was mostly the same few keywords that got me what I was looking for. The whole collection represents the three musical personas I tried on between about 1979 and 1991 and there's no point trying to pretend otherwise. The fourth, missing, persona would have been my punk years, something I have wisely decided to leave where it belongs, back in the past.

Overall, the results have been astonishingly satisfying. I have multiple versions of most of the songs now, which I consider good enough to carry forward to the next stage. That's making lyric videos to post on my new YouTube channel, assuming I have the nerve to go through with making it public. For the moment I'm keeping it strictly private. (Suno automatically creates lyric videos on request, clearly meant for Tik-Tok. Not exactly what I had in mind...)

The biggest problem I have is choosing which final version to go with. For a couple of songs there's been a clear and unequivocal winner, one that I knew immediately was the version, the one that sounded exactly the way I'd always imagined it would. 

In most cases, though, I've ended up with several options, each with some small flaw or foible that stops it from being the definitive version. Then it's a case of listening to them over and over and trying to make up my mind. Or, more likely, rolling the dice again, hoping for that perfect take.

I'm about halfway through that stage now. I've completed eleven videos so far, with around a dozen more to go. Making the videos has turned out to be every bit as addictive as making the songs.

But that's a story for next time.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

 The header image is by StarlightXL at NightCafe. The prompt I entered was very minimalistic: the title of the song, which is "Raised By Wolves (Supercute Mix)". 

I'd tried that three times already, along with the exact prompt originally used at Suno to generate the song in the first place: "supercute kawaii bass hyperpop supercute female vocals". I tried it in Flux Schnell and StarlightXL but I didn't get even a single wolf. I just got cute girls with multicolored hair singing into mics. Also, I've only just noticed that some of the wolves have more than the requisite number of legs. I thought that was a solved problem with AI image generation but apparently not.

I've only just noticed that NightCafe now gives you the full "Revised Prompt" that the AI works from. If that was there before, I never noticed it. It's very revealing. The full prompt for the picture I used is

"Low-poly art. Medium shot. Wolves raising human children in a futuristic forest. Close-up. Vibrant colors inspired by Syd Mead. Neon blue wolf eyes glowing in the dark. Trees with glowing circuits and wires. Moonlight filtering through the forest canopy. Soft, pastel color scheme with neon accents. Best quality. Futuristic fantasy. Syd Mead style. Low-poly textures. Glowing neon lights. Pastel colors. Moonlit forest. Soft focus." 

That is incredibly specific. It also does something I haven't done for a couple of years, which is naming a specific artist. I decided that was a step too far ages ago but it seems the AIs do it anyway. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I also notice that even though the revised prompt mentions the somewhat essential "raising human children" aspect of the whole thing, there still aren't any humans in the picture. You can have wolves or people but not both, apparently.

So much for the image generators. The other AI in the post is the song itself, which is discussed in the text, and the video that Suno generated for it. I haven't watched the video all the way through so I'm trusting the lyrics are correct. They should be. I typed them in right. 

The annoying thing about that video is that you can change the title of the song in Suno but it still uses the title of the uploaded audio anyway. The song is called Raised By Wolves (Supercute Mix) but when I uploaded the recording it's a "cover" of I called it "Raised By Wolves Strangled" to differentiate it from a couple of other uploads of the same song. Even though I later changed the name of that upload to just "Raised By Wolves", the cover remains a cover of "Raised By Wolves Strangled" as far as Suno is concerned and I can't change that in the video.

Lucky I don't plan to use Suno's videos then, isn't it? I'll make my own and call them whatever I want!

Welcome Back. Now Get To Work!

It's a testament both to the compulsive pull of survival game mechanics and the specific way they've been implemented in Once Human that, despite having other things I'd rather have been doing, and despite the glorious sunshine streaming through my window, I just spent the last two hours making a new character and playing through the early stages of the game, as far as Deadville. I only meant to log in for maybe ten or fifteen minutes to get some screenshots of the Returning Player rewards for a post but things kind of spiralled, in what I suppose I ought to see as a good way.

It was fun, anyhow. I mean, it wasn't very productive. I could much more usefully have spent the two hours tidying the house or starting to get the garden back in shape or working on another music video or just taking Beryl out for a walk in the sunshine (Although she wouldn't have thanked me for that, having had one walk already and not being the most active of dogs...)

I didn't do any of that, though. Instead I spent the first fifteen minutes finishing making my new character, having already spent half an hour on her last night. I already knew I was in trouble, even then. 

There's a handy Save option for appearance so I didn't have to start over from the beginning. I was trying to get a character that didn't look like my other one, which is why I ended up with someone with blue hair and a big scar. The problem as always is that if I don't feel right about a character from the start I'm very unlikely to keep playing them and the range of looks that make feel comfortable is quite narrow. If i make anyone that doesn't look quite a lot like all the other characters I make in all the other games, chances are I won't stick with them.

That braid is going to have to go. And you need to dye your hair...

I think I did alright with this one. She feels like I know her a little already. I certainly know the opening tutorial by now, having played through it at least half a dozen times. It's very good but it's not short. Even tabbing through all the dialog it took me about twenty minutes to get through.

And that's not the only reason it turns out coming back to Once Human isn't quite as simple as Starry would like to have you believe. This dev team has always had the most back-assward, over-complicated way of doing things and that hasn't changed a jot. I notice the game now has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam, which seems quite appropriate. I'm all but certain if they'd made the choices at the start that they've slowly and grudgingly made over the course of the first year, that rating would be Very Positive instead but they like to do everything the hard way.

All I was trying to do was get the rewards and take some pictures so my first choice was to log in my one existing character and claim them with her. I was also looking forward to moving her to the new scenario that allows access to the full map, the original areas plus those added in the Way of Winter. My further plans would then have been to stay on that server indefinitely, now the option to do so exists.

Except it doesn't. Not yet. Here's a detailed explanation of how it works now and how it's going to work later. Even after a competent journalist has gone through the whole thing and reframed it in clear, concise terms, I still find it confusing. 

Gimme the good stuff!

As far as I can tell, you have to pick a server and play through whatever Scenario it's running up to the end, when you would normally be forced to leave. That usually takes around six weeks or so. When it  happens, you still get kicked to Eternaland as always but, after kicking your heels there for a couple of hours, you can indicate you'd like to go back to where you came from, rather than choosing a new server or Scenario as you always had to before.

Once you're back where you started, you just need to make sure you log in at least once a month to avoid being kicked off the server for good. Later in the year that grace time will be extended to once every six months. 

All well and good but my character didn't have server to go back to. She's been in the limbo of Eternaland since before Christmas, which was when I last logged in. 

No problem. I just needed to pick a new Scenario and go from there. So I looked for the one where the whole map was open and... I couldn't find one. For a very good reason: one doesn't exist... yet. 

The full map will only be available with the "Endless Dream" Scenario, which is due to arrive "this year". It seems I've come back a tad early. Oh, well...

The jacket is some kind of reward too but for what I'm not sure.

Also, I ought to mention that the Endless Dream seems like it might be more of an endless nightmare:

"You might find yourself engulfed in darkness or afflicted with strange vulnerabilities—becoming unusually weak, flammable, or even explosive."

That wasn't quite what I had in mind when I envisaged a permanent server I could call home for the foreseeable future. Even so, if that's what it takes...

For the time being, though, I've gone very much the opposite way in my return to the game: E-Z Mode.

I looked at all the available Scenarios and decide that if I was going to start over, I might as well do it properly. So I re-rolled on a Novice server. 

I hadn't seen much point making new characters before, what with having to start over from scratch every couple of months anyway, but things have changed. Not only can we now have as many as ten characters on a single account (I seem to remember it was just one to begin with and then it was three but don't quote me on that.), they now all share a number of benefits on an Account-held basis, not just currencies but also blueprints, mods, accessories and most importantly - cosmetics.

No more wandering around for days with no pants! No more looking like Jethro from the Beverley Hillbillies in your full Rustic crafted gear! As soon as I got past the introduction and into the game proper I got a series of pop-ups telling me all the shared stuff I was now entitled to use and the first thing I did was give my new character a new look.

Aww! Now we can't see your blue rinse.

And what that made me realize was that I've never put nearly enough effort into finding or buying cosmetics. There didn't seem to be all that much point before; once I get a look I like, I tend to stick with it so there's not a lot of point building up an extensive wardrobe. Now, though, I can have as many as ten looks I like and stick with all of them.

I'm probably not going to go that far but I am re-motivated to go hunting for new things to wear and I'm very happy to know I can do it on my high-level character, where it will be relatively easy, and my low-level characters will reap the benefits. 

There doesn't appear to be any limit to the number of times you can share things or to the number of characters who can use them, either, although presumably once currency is spent by anyone, it's gone. I ought to check if two characters can wear the same hat at the same time, I guess. I'll try and remember to test that next time I log in.

And that will be soon, I imagine, partly because I had a really good time playing again this morning but also because some of those Welcome Back rewards are time-limited until you complete a Reward track to make them permanent.

I have fifteen days to do that. Will I? 

Well, let's just say one of the rewards is that giant cat I used to have, right back at the start. I've always wanted that back.

Sometimes It Pays Not To Play

Since I'm not playing any games right now, about the best I can manage in the way of posts about gaming is either to poke at the news or to talk about the games I would be playing, if I was playing games. I have a couple of ideas for the first but I'm saving those until I have enough for a Grab Bag. Or until I'm desperate for something to write about, which could be very soon, the way things are going.

This morning, though, I'm going with the second option: games I might start playing any day now, if the weather wasn't so damn glorious and I didn't have this unquenchable obsession with creating an imaginary past where I really did something with all those songs I wrote in the 'eighties. 

And the game in the spotlight today is, once again, Once Human.

I got an email from Starry this morning. It was one of those "Come back! We miss you!" ones that all the good PR departments toss out like old toddlers throwing bread to the ducks. Bread, as we all know, is really bad for ducks but most ducks are too dim to know that, so they all pile in and scarf it up anyway. 

I'd like to think of myself as smarter than the average duck and even if I wasn't I'd hope at least to have better self-control and more discernment. In order to maintain that delusion, I try not to hurl myself at every inducement to return to games I stopped playing for what were probably very good reasons, if only I could remember what they were. 

The litter of past posts here, chortling over freebies I've claimed for games I went on never to play again, or at best that I played only for a desultory number of sessions after I filled my imaginary pockets, is all the evidence anyone could need to convict me of self-deception and maybe even hypocrisy. I say one thing and do another all the time although not, I hope, when it involves anything that actually matters.

It's true, then, that I'm a sucker for a freebie but it's also true that there are plenty of offers I can easily resist. And most of the "Please come back" offers plop squarely into that pot. Blizzard send me begging letters pretty much every week and so do ArenaNet but I haven't touched World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2 for years now. 

Of course, that might be because their offers aren't all that. Certainly ANet's aren't. The best they ever seem to be able to come up with is long notes about what I'm missing and promises to sell me stuff for a bit less than they usually ask. Blizzard occasionally tempt me with some kind of "Play for a while for Free" but they largely scuppered their own ship there, when they came up with the endless free trial.

I try to avoid regionalist generalizations on the lines of "Asian games be like this but Western games be like that" but there are times when it's hard. Cultures do differ and its daft to pretend they don't. 

And one way the Eastern and Western gaming cultures definitely differ is that the Eastern ones give better freebies. They hand out more stuff, more often and it's better stuff. I've been taking their largess happily for years and it still puzzles me why they're so generous. It makes it completely unnecessary to give any of them any money at all. 

Cultural differences aside, as has been pointed out by angry players on both sides of the continental divide many times, developers are prone to giving you more stuff if you don't play their games than if you do. I receive a continual stream of inducements to return to games I haven't played in years but do I get any "Thank You for being a Loyal Customer" emails from the games I'm actively playing?

No, I do not. I get emails telling me what's new and suggesting I log in and enjoy it but they rarely, indeed almost never, come with rewards attached. The theory seems to be that if you play the game already, you can damn well log in and play it if you want stuff.  

It's no surprise. It's the way the world works now. Apparently I'm an idiot for not changing my utility suppliers at least every six months and I should be swapping my savings from bank to bank every time the interest rates change.

Well, screw that. There was a time - and I'm old enough to remember it - when the norm was to find something you were happy with and stick with it and that suits my personality a lot better than all this chopping and changing. I'm fundamentally lazy and I don't mind paying a small surcharge just to be left alone.

Unless, of course, all it involves is my pressing a few buttons. If it's that simple, why not? 

I pressed a few this morning and now Once Human is downloading to my external SSD. Again. Let's hope it's easier to keep updated this time.

To be fair to myself, it wasn't just the "10+ cosmetics" that hooked me back in. Or the 40k Starchrom currency. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Starry have finally seen sense and opted for permanent servers. They've also added a Scenario in which the whole of the map is available. Those two moves directly address and to some extent resolve my two biggest problems with the game: impermanence and artificial boundaries.

So, I was going to come back at some point. What the latest offer did was bring that point forward to "Now". Whether I'll do any more, once the game has finally downloaded and installed itself, than log in to claim my loot, I can't predict. I suspect not but at least the client will be back on my hard drive and the possibility will be there again.

Since I was thinking about the game and since it was right there in the email, I also took a moment to pre-register for the upcoming Mobile version. I thought I'd done it already but it seems not. More than thirty million people have, though. Once Human is a popular and successful game.

There are freebies for pre-registering, naturally, along with a draw for real-world prizes ranging from in-game goods to computer peripherals and money. Top prize is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

You get draws for various "tasks" - registering your interest, providing an email or a phone number, following the game on social media and so on. I got two draws for registering with an email address and I won... a thank-you. That's an actual prize. I got thanked twice.

I imagine most people get a thank-you, unlike the Lone Ranger, who famously never did. I would hope quite a few people also get the "In-Game Bundle", whatever's in that. As for the rest, well they have been kind enough to reveal the probabilities. Not that I can make much sense of them. I'm not sure how there can be a 60% chance of a "Redeem Code" if there are only 30,000 of them and more than thirty million people have pre-registered...

For once, though, I'm not in it for the freebies. I want to see if the game will run on my phone. I don't imagine it will but it will be an interesting experiment, provided it doesn't catch fire trying. 

Steam is still working on getting the PC version up and running as I type and the mobile game doesn't go live until 23 April so for now it's back to what I really want to do - enjoy the spring sunshine and start work on another music video for my new YouTube channel. 

Once Human can wait. It's not going anywhere and anyway, if I leave it long enough, they'll almost certainly give me more stuff. 

Scooby Gang X Drain Gang

Another Friday, another grab-bag, helped by a couple of interesting tidbits that came in late yesterday's news. Plus I have actually listened to some music that isn't my own for a change, so there'll be some of that, too.

We've Got Some Work To Do Now

First up, the best entertainment news of the year so far. As per the NME, there's a Scooby-Doo live action series coming to Netflix. Or you can have it straight from the Great Dane's mouth, so to speak.

There have been a lot of Scooby-Doos. "Three theatrical films, and more than a dozen animated series" according to Netflix, which isn't even counting the numerous, long-running comic-book series, the novelizations, the games, the toys... It's a major franchise.

Still, even the most ardent Scooby Gang buff would have to own that most of them haven't been all that. And yet, news of another always stirs... something. The heart? The imagination? Not sure exactly what, but I was more excited when I read the headline than seemed reasonable. 

And that was before I even noticed the really exciting part: "Produced by Greg Berlanti".

Greg Berlanti is the guiding hand behind a whole raft of TV shows, chief among them, from my persepctive at least, Riverdale and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina plus pretty much the whole of the DCTVU, including Supergirl and Titans, all of which I very much enjoyed. He and his production company seem like both the obvious and the perfect drivers for the Mystery Machine.

Berlanti is producing but the Showrunners are Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, whose credits include the much-maligned live-action Cowboy Bebop. I liked that one a lot more than the critics or the installed fanbase so that's not a warning flag for me, although I guess it may be for some. 

Granted, the lived show wasn't anything like as subtle or nuanced as its source material but the anime was "hailed as one of the best animated television series of all time". Scooby-Doo is well-loved but I don't think it can claim the same aesthetic status and as I suggested earlier, the bar for revamps is already set pretty low. I'm confident this one will clear it with room to spare.

There's no release date yet. I'm not even sure if they're shooting. It was reportedly "in production" in 2024 but who knows what that means?  Whenever it comes, I'll be there for it.

Let's have a break for a song, shall we? And for a change it's one everyone's going to recognize.

 Ashes To Ashes - Magdelana Bay (Original David Bowie)

 Magdalena Bay are critics' darlings just now, or they were last year at least, and they richly deserve it. Triple-J churns out an endless stream of covers, by no means all of them memorable or worthy of their originals but it's a high-profile promo slot for artists and some people really get competitive about it so there are some standout performances. 

This is top of the range. It starts out sounding a little flat (As in unemotional, not off-key.) but when Mica Tenenbaum starts to sing... oh boy. She really works her way into every corner of Bowie's peculiar phrasing. 

As Mathew Lewin, the other member of the duo, observed, "It’s a great kind of weird, experimental pop song". They haven't made it feel any less weird but I guess forty-five years have smoothed away some of the odder angles.

Even so, it still sounds weird. Imagine what it sounded like in 1980!

Oh No! He's Back!

Some people may count this as good news. I don't think I would. It is news, though, provided you're inside a certain bubble, which everyone reading this either is or has been at one time.

Yes, John "Smed" Smedly has returned. Whether his latest venture will bear any more fruit than the last two remains to be seen. Certainly, the precedents aren't encouraging. 

The much-hyped "Hero's Song" was cancelled before it got a full release, although Smed did get some credit for giving all the money back. As for his six-year stint with Amazon Games... anyone remember what he did there? I don't.

He left Amazon in 2023 and since then he's been quiet but it seems he hasn't been idle. He's back, alongside another name you might remember from Sony Online Entertainment, Matt Higby. Higby was Creative Director for Planetside 2, a game I think I played twice. Maybe three times. He also worked on pretty much every other SOE game at one time or another. His full credits include EverQuest, EverQuest II, Free Realms and Clone Wars.

The two of them have been cooking up something from pretty much the moment Smedley quit Amazon so I imagine he went straight from the one to the other. These people never seem to take a day off. 

As to what they've been working on, no-one's saying, yet. MassivelyOP are speculating it could be some kind of military shooter, based on what's showing on a couple of monitors in the background of the publicity shots. If so, it's of little interest to me and anyway I imagine, whatever it is, it's years from being something any of us will play. 

More More More - The Molotovs

A little less than a year ago, I did a whole post about the Molotovs, which seems like an odd thing to have done, in retrospect. I think it was the raw energy that got my attention. That and the covers they were doing at the time.

They did have a couple of originals even then and now here they are with their first, official single, a self-penned number called More, More, More, demonstrating that you don't always have to cover other peoples' material to be a covers band. 

Honestly, if this sounded any more like the Jam... well, there's no good way to end that sentence because it would be impossible for anything to sound more like the Jam than this does without actually being the Jam. I bet it sounds more like the Jam than Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler's From The Jam ever did, and they were the Jam!

Whether sounding exactly like a specific band from the late 'seventies makes any kind of sound, commercial sense is up for debate. I think the retro needle has swung well into the 'nineties now, maybe even the 'aughts. 

Then again, Britpop was built on a foundation firmly laid down in the 'sixties and the Jam were mining tthe same sources for all they were worth, back in the 'seventies, so I guess it's all there and thereabouts the same thing, seen from space. 

It is endlessly fascinating to me that these sounds can just go on and on, fascinating and attracting people of a certain age. It's as if something happens to the brain in mid-adolescence, making neurons fire every time there's a valve amp with the gain turned up, a guitar with too much treble and and a barking voice that sounds like it ought to be flogging china down the market.

I like it, anyway. I mean, I've heard it a million times but I can always hear some more. Some More. More More even.

Less, Less, Less

That's what I'm asking for. I can't face another ninety hopefuls all in one go. Yes, it's the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Longlist again. 

There's a playlist if you can face it. It's over two hours long. I haven't even started on it yet and I'm thinking this year maybe I won't. The returns seem to get slimmer every year.

I scanned the full list, which was surprisingly hard to find, to see if there was anyone on there I'd heard of. Usually there are a few. This year the only name I recognized was Dirty Blonde and I don't much like them. Too rawk for my refined tastes. They are good, though.

Given they were the opening act on the Big Top stage at last year's Isle of Wight Festival, it would seem they're also overqualified. I'm sure the publicity will be welcome all the same but it's a bit like those established acts who enter Eurovision, only to come 23rd. More risk than perhaps the reward could ever have been worth for them. I mean, the big payoff from the ETC is £5k and a slot on one of the main stages. Dirty Blonde might have been in line for one of those anyway. A 2pm slot when no-one is paying attention, sure, but still... 

I don't have anything left but music now so if you're not into digging the new scene I'll bid you goodbye. For the few that remain...

The Wolf - Witch Post

You know those songs that go on too long? Yes, I know. It's most of them. Well, this isn't one. I could have this on a loop for hours. Maybe I'll make one and post it to YouTube. People do that. I'm learning all sorts about making videos and content just now. I could branch out.

Also, it's one of those songs you just can't hear loud enough. And the video is great, too. Really, it's got everything. I wasn't quite as keen on their first single but the last one was good and this is way better again. All the videos are good, too. They could be something, maybe.

I think that's about it. Oh, alright then. One more, since you ask so nicely. Would you like Yung Lean being shot full of arrows or would you rather have Sept hanging out with their girlfriends? Difficult choice, I know. Let's have both, then.

It's always both, isn't it?

Babyface Maniacs - Yung Lean

Remember when Yung Lean was off the radar of anyone under twenty? And Drain Gang sounded like it was probably something from an Anthony Burgess novel? Yeah, well, those days are long gone.

All the critics call Yung Lean a rapper but I'm not sure that's what he's doing here. Or anywhere, really. Then, why would I know? Whatever he's doing, he's not doing it for me. I like it all the same.

Braces - Sept

The song goes back to 2022 but the video is brand-new. It's a real mood piece, the song. The video is more of a vibe. I'm not one hundred per cent convinced they go together.

The lyrics, all of them, run like this:

I said I liked you, I said I missed you
Never forget you, said I won't let you
I did it wrong
And now I cannot believe

Just like my braces
You're caught between my teeth
Like

You're in a hurry, I'm cold cut
Say not to worry, I love you, but
I didn't know
How could you see me so clean?

You hate yourself
But you don't know what that means
Like...

 

I dunno. They look like they're all having a much better time in the video than that would suggest. 

I could listen to that one a loop, too. I really ought to look into how to make those. Like I need another project right now...