#19 - Ratha - Born 4 July 2004 - 59 Days 21 Hours

Here she is. Ratha, the last of the significant characters we're going to meet on this long, slow, much-delayed journey through EverQuest's first quarter-century. As her close on sixty played days suggests, she got out quite a bit. Also, if this series didn't have an established format for the titles, I'd definitely have called this post Born On The Fourth Of July.

One thing this series has taught me, as if I didn't know it already, is that my memory is shot. Even that suggests it was ever any good to begin with, which it most certainly wasn't. I have always had a bad memory and waiting a couple of decades to write anything down sure isn't making it any better.

It'd be lovely if I could say for sure why I decided to roll up a new character on July the fourth, 2004, which would have been very close to the end of my second stint playing EQ as my main MMORPG. To recap a little, the first run lasted from November 1999 to whenever Dark Age of Camelot went live (9 October 2001) and the second from about six months after that until I got into the EverQuest II beta sometime around the end of August or the start of September 2004.

There was a third substantive phase that began when EQII puttered out about six months after launch, a fourth around the time of the Serpent's Spine expansion in September 2006, (That was the expansion that was intended to re-boot the franchise and nearly succeeded) and a fifth and final hurrah, at least as any kind of group player, when Seeds of Destruction arrived in October 2008, bringing with it the game-changing Mercenary feature. 

Since then, I've been back a good few times, occasionally for quite long runs lasting several months, but always as a solo player. After I created Ratha in June 2004, though, I never again felt the need to start over from scratch with a brand new character, or at least not one that stuck. I may well roll the final five names on this list into a single post because there won't be much to say about any of them.

Ratha, though, has a very substantial history. And if I could remember it, I'd tell you what it was. Here's what I do remember...

Her name, for a start. She's named after the central character in a novel called Ratha's Creature by Clare Bell, the first in a series of novels collectively known as "The Books of the Named". She's a sentient, prehistoric great cat, who learns how to use fire, so you can see why I went there. 

There are five books in the series, published sporadically between 1983 and 2008. I used to review books for a semi-pro comics zine back in the eighties, which is how I got hold of the first and second books in the series. They were review copies. I still have them and they made a big impression on me at the time although not so much that I've re-read either of them since or hunted down the three remaining volumes. 

Looking at them online now, I'm not too surprised to see they're all out of print (Although you can get them all on Kindle.) but more so to find they're quite collectable. I'll have to see if I can complete my set and finish the story.

As usual with just about every name I've ever given a character in any game, no-one sent me any tells saying they recognized the name or commented on it in any way. There seems to be very little common ground between the kind of books I read and the tastes of people who play these kinds of games. Which, of course, makes those books ideal sources for naming characters.

So that's why she's called Ratha. As for why she's a Beastlord, not too long before, we'd been spending a great deal of time grouped with an Eastern European guy around college age, young for our crowd, whose name I forget although I have a feeling it will come back to me [Edit - it didn't.] so I'd had plenty of opportunities to study the Beastlord gameplay as it was then. And boy was it OP!

A lot of EQ players strongly disapproved of Beastlords when they were introduced. The pushback was a factor in why the class didn't carry over into EQII, only being added there years later.

They were widely seen as easy-mode upstarts, created by the devs as some kind of sop to the idea that EQ was too difficult - too difficult to play solo and too difficult to get groups, both of which problems Beastlords seemed designed to fix.

Beastlords could do lots of things other classes could do, making them almost as good all-rounders as Norrath's famous jacks-of-all-trades, Bards. The big difference was you needed a lot of skill to play a Bard but any fool could play a Beastlord. That was their reputation, anyway. And it was half-way true. Having spent a lot of time with a couple of the best bards on the server, I knew what an incredible class it was but also how much chance I had of playing one well - none. The Beastlord, though, looked manageable. 

It also looked far more nuanced and interesting than its bad reputation suggested. Played competently, let alone well, a Beastlord could tank, heal, buff, handle crowd control and provide decent dps both at range and in melee. There was always something for a Beastlord to do in almost any situation or any group make-up. Shamans hated them for it because they did everything people wanted a Shaman for - not as well but well enough for most groups - and a lot more besides.

As I'd seen, though, since we frequently played in groups with a top-class Shaman, the two classes were perfectly able to sync if the players were willing. But then, in those happy days most of the players I grouped with regularly were both skilled and socially competent. I know! Hard to believe, isn't it? Shame it didn't last.

I do remember that those were my reasons for making a Beastlord. I just don't recall now why I needed a new character at all. Just looking at the dates, it's unlikely verging on impossible that whatever it was Ratha was meant to do ever got done. Not unless it only took a couple of months and in those days very little in EQ took as little time as that.

What actually happened that summer before the beta is lost to time but afterwards, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally abandoned the listing wreck that was EQII six months post-launch and returned to the safe harbor of the original EQ, literally no-one we knew there was still playing. They'd all left for... who knows? We only ever saw one of them again.

For that and other reasons, we declined to pick up where we left off on our established characters and instead started playing new ones. I've already written about our times on Stromm, which I remember relatively clearly, but how Ratha fits in is much more cloudy. She might also have been on Stromm for a while but if so I've forgotten about it.

What I remember very clearly are the times I spent playing her in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss. We had a good go at Depths of Darkhollow, the September 2005 expansion that all happens underground and we did a lot of the Serpents Spine expansion together. Ratha was my main character for both of those. I think we got to about Level 50 in TSS, probably stopping before we got to the end of Goruka Mesa, a zone that goes to the mid-fifities.

When we came back for our final duo tour in Seeds of Destruction three years later, it was for a hugely enjoyable romp through dozens of zones that had previoulsy been far out of our range. Playing as a "duo" comprising a Necromancer with a powerful pet, a Beastlord with an even more powerful pet and two full-time, dedicated Mercenary healers made us not that far off being a full group. 

It certainly allowed us to explore most zones in every expansion from Gates of Discord through to the opening of Secrets of Feydwer, few of which either of us had seen before. If the game was a theme-park, then anything earlier, even the once-impenetrable Elemental Planes and the Plane of Time itself, was the equivalent of the kiddies' tea-cup ride.

We had a great time. We kept it up for months, working our way through expansion after expansion, starting all the way back in Planes of Power and working our way up, swapping to the next if it ever got too hard, picking up AAs by the thousand and adding real levels steadily too, thanks to EQ's deep vertical progression that means expansions several years old frequently still bring in at least a dribble of xp, providing you can kill mobs by the score.

All good things... as they say. By the starter zone of Secrets of Faydwer, the expansion immediately preceding SoD, our levels had almost caught up with the cap and we had to play properly. Duoing was still practical and fun but it was clear we weren't going to get much further and knuckling down to grind out a few per cent of a level each session, while taking care not to get killed, wasn't nearly as much fun as romping across whole zones leaving a trail of smoking corpses in our wake.

That was the last time we visited Norrath together. We moved on to duo in several more MMORPGs, eventually settling down for another decade in Guild Wars 2. Mrs. Bhagpuss is probably done with MMORPGs now, after two full decades playing them pretty heavily. I continue to pick away at the genre, albeit with considerably less enthusiasm these days.

As for EverQuest, as I said, I've been back plenty of times since that final run in Seeds of Destruction. As I recall, the first time I returned alone, I did pick Ratha back up in the expectation of adding a few levels. She did get a couple more but, while she's a competent soloist with a mercenary behind her, it seemed awfully slow compared to what I'd been used to doing with her. It didn't last.

She ended up, beached in the mid-80s (Like a lot of us...) I did think about using last year's free Level 100 boost on her but there's not really much point. I would never play her and if I was going to boost anyone it'd probably be my Necromancer... who we'll meet next time. 

Didn't I already have a Necro, though? I did! Well remembered! He's still around. Somewhere. Just not in the right place. So the new Necro it would have to be.

Nikolaiovitch is his name. I'll tell you all about him another day. 

Trust me, it won't take long.

Sticking The Ending

We talk a lot around here about how poorly streaming services treat the properties they represent. How shows get dropped after one season if they haven't picked up traction. How multi-season arcs just fall right off that cliff they thought they were hanging onto, leaving everyone who cared high and dry and wondering what the hell happened. Shows with decent ratings get canned because something else might do better or come to a juddering halt because one of the leads did something the platform doesn't want to be associated with.

It's not like the old networks were more forgiving or responsible or artistically committed. If anything they were worse in all respects but they were also slower, steadier, less flighty. They did drop shows fast if they didn't pick up an audience but first they'd shunt them around the schedules a bit and maybe try a second season with a new theme tune and title sequence to see if there was any movement. And they always had the holy grail of syndication in the distance so there was some motivation to keep the momentum going, once they'd gotten the train rolling.

It was a real surprise to see news reports predicting "Wednesday could run for seven seasons". Not only is that very specific, it seems counter to any previous logic. Shows last as long as they hold an audience, keep their stars and someone crucial to the production process doesn't get a better offer.

And seven seasons of Wednesday, with the slight evidence of just two seasons to go on, wouldn't mean even seven years, which would itself be a long time in streaming culture. The show first arrived on Netflix in November 2022 and the second part of the second season has just aired, almost three years later. If they can't speed that up, completing seven seasons of Wednesday would take a couple of decades! The students of Nevermore Academy are going to look about as convincing as teenagers as the cast of Grease! by then.

But I'm not here today to talk about Wednesday. I haven't started on the second half of the new season yet. (By the way, as an aside, the post I did on the first half of the season was the least-read of all the posts I published during Blaugust, according to Blogger's page-view stats, which I find fairly reliable. By quite some margin, too. Given the supposed popularity of the show, that seemed surprising, until it occured to me maybe people didn't even click on it in fear of spoilers. If that was you, maybe go back and read it now?)

No, today's subject is a show that not only managed four seasons before it ended but which also came to a close in a dignified, coherent and satisfying fashion. It can be done, which makes me wonder a) why it isn't done more often and b) why it was done like that for this particular show.

At this point, if this were a podcast, I could come in with the big reveal. Unfortunately, that doesn't really work with a blog or at least not a heavily illustrated one like this. Everyone who cares knew what the show was as soon as they looked at the image at the top, although I did try to pick one that wasn't totally obvious.  

It's Upload, of course, the Amazon Prime show about a near-future digital afterlife, where anyone rich enough can have their brain scanned (And their head literally exploded.) so their memories and personality can be uploaded into an eternal spa weekend. I posted about the first season here and the second here, although neither season got a post of its own. 

I seem to have omitted to mention the third season entirely, all of which does tend to suggest I wasn't that engaged with the show. That would not be true. I really liked Upload. It was one of the first shows I got into, when I started watching TV (Well, streaming TV...) regularly again after a decade and a half of not watching anything at all (Thanks, Covid.) and that's perhaps why it made an impression that's lasted.

In production terms, Upload has done quite a bit better than Wednesday, in that it's only taken five years for four seasons to make it to the screen. Granted one of those seasons is really only half a season but still. 

In fact, no two seasons of Upload have the same number of episodes, which is odd. The first has the most with ten, the second has seven, the third eight and now just four in the final season. They also vary quite a bit in length, with most hovering around the half-hour mark you might expect for the sitcom the show was originally promoted as being but the final season stretching out past forty minutes each time. 

Although it's very much a comedy and it does rely heavily on a specific situation, Upload never was much of a sitcom. Struggling to describe the first season, I called it "partly a romcom with a lot of rather unsubtle social satire ladled on top but it's more a murder mystery". The mystery got solved but the drama just grew and grew until it turned into a world-wide conspiracy. The comedy stuck around and as for the romance... there was always a lot of romance, all the way to the very end. 

When it came to the second season, I expressed some concerns about "huge chunks of the premise, let alone the plot, not making any sense at all if thought about for more than a moment", something that never really changed. But as I also said, it didn't matter because the characters were engaging and so well-played they made me want to know what happened to them, whether it made any sense or not.

When Season Three came to an end I was unsure whether there would be a fourth. It did end on a cliffhanger but then don't they all? I'm not even sure why writers bother any more. It can't be much of a motivation for viewers, the way it used to be in the network days, when you knew if the story was still going, a show would be coming back because cancellations were always signalled way in advance and writers had time to re-write before the final episodes.

Everything is so fractured now, with so many streaming platforms, most of them requiring an opt-in, paid subscription, and with shows not infrequently swapping from one service to another, it really doesn't feel at all like the old days, when there was a kind of certainty, not to say inevitablity to it all. Around this time of year there'd be a whole big deal about the Fall Season shows. You'd see them trailed over and over on the stations you watched and you'd know what was coming whether you cared about it or not. 

Was that better? It could be stultifying, sure, but you knew where you were.

I didn't even notice that Upload was back until a few days after it had happened. None of the media outlets in my feeds mentioned it, Prime didn't plug it in the top attractions they were showing me and I certainly didn't get any emails about it. None of the streaming services seem to send out promotional emails the way most gaming companies do, even though several of them have my email address. 

I only noticed by chance that it was back, when I was scanning down Prime Video's horrifically jumbled and messy home page. It was somewhere down on about row five or six, off the bottom of the screen. Given they clearly have data to tell them I watched every episode of the previous seasons, you might have thought they'd want to let me know there was another but apparently they don't care.

So, was it any good? Well, let me see if I can answer that without spoilers... 

... maybe some spoilers in a general sense....

... I mean, even if I say it was satisfying or if it was disappointing, those are kinds of spoilers...

...so if you want to keep your own view absolutely pristine, now would be the time...  

And we're back. And no, I'm not going to drop any big reveals of the plot or the details but I am going to give away the emotional tenor of the ending. It was good. It felt satisfying. It had some light and shade and a little more nuance than perhaps I was expecting. 

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the production team and the writers have left themselves just enough wriggle room to carry the whole thing on at some unspecified time in the future, if the opportunity arises. It wouldn't be the first time a show with a planned ending turned out not to have ended after all.

Assuming that doesn't happen, though, I'd imagine most viewers will feel they can live with the way it finished. It's mostly a happy ending. Most of the characters you like get to walk off into the sunset with the love of their life (Not that all of those loves can actually walk...) The bad guys get what's coming to them, or some of them do, at least. I was very happy with the resolution of Ingrid's arc, she being my favorite character. I wouldn't have predicted it after Season One, either, so that's a gold star to the writers.

As for the plot, in keeping with the entire series, none of it really bears close examination. Or casual examination. Any examination at all, really. If I started picking holes, we'd be here 'til Christmas. But none of that matters. If you start with an unrealistic proposition, everything you build on that foundation is bound to fall apart if you lean on it. So don't lean on it is my advice. 

Just lean back and enjoy it. Let it wash over you and pick what sense out of it you can. It's stuffed full of topical references and tiny satires that spill out all over the plot for no good reason so why not just indulge yourself? 

I'll just mention one of those: the Millennial references. They stood out for me. I hadn't even tried to date the whole thng until then. It's in "the future" but if they'd ever said how far I'd missed it. This time, though, there were a couple of scenes with some very specific data points, namely that the central characters, all of whom seem to be in their thirties (Ingrid, specifically, is thirty-four in the final episode. Nathan, according to Wikipedia, was 27 when the series began.) have Millenials for parents. 

On the most commonly-used generational timeline, the last Millennials would have been born by 1996. The children of Millennials, for the most part, are Gen Alpha, for which as yet there is no agreed date-range but which is broadly seen as covering the 2010s to about now. Even the oldest Gen Alpha wouldn't be hitting thirty until around the middle of the century and most of them will get there after 2050.

Which doesn't seem that crazy. I'm so used to everything set in "the future" seeming to imagine decades of technological development telescoped into a few years that it seems strange to see extrapolations from current experiments being given something approximating a reasonable development arc. We could have self-driving cars, digital brain scans and sentient AI by the 2050s or 2060s. All of that is being worked on right now. I mean, we won't but it's not like saying we'll have terraformed Mars or perfected matter transmission by then.

So, that's Upload for you. A very enjoyable show, often funny, sometimes exciting, always heart-warming, never made a lot of sense. I did tear up a little, right at the end, even though the final scene had been telegraphed for most of the last episode. 

I'm sorry to see it end but I'm very happy to see it end so well. 

May The Fourth Be With You. Again. And No, Not That One.

I really did not think I was going to get a post done today, for various reasons including but not limited to being out most of the day and not having any ideas that weren't going to take a lot more time than I had to spare. But I'd forgotten it was the first Thursday of the month. And what does First Thursday mean?

Prime Gaming giveaways!

It sure took me long enough but I have now figured out that Chris Leggett, under whose byline the Prime Gaming Blog appears each month, isn't terminally disorganized. He can read a calendar. It's just that for him, for some reason I still don't, as yet, understand, the month always starts on Thursday.

So, what have we got for September? And I warn you, this is going to be quick because I've left it really late and I'm in a rush. I might not even get through everything.

Let's have the games you can grab right now, anyway. There are three of those and they're all reasonably interesting:

Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft Series

Ravenloft was my favorite of the AD&D campaigns I played through, back in the 'eighties. It was new then and there was only the one module: Ravenloft itself. Or at least that's how I remember it. It's been popular ever since and now there are loads of spin-offs, including the two in this double-pack, Strahd's Possession and Stone Prophet. I'll be claiming them but I had a look at the D&D games Prime gave away last month and they just looked so very off-puttingly old I didn't take it any further. These look a little more modern but not a whole lot. Can't imagine I'll play them but I did like Ravenloft...

Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition

Didn't we have this one last month? Oh no, that was Civ III. Is this one better? I guess it's newer, at least. Might as well take it anyway. Maybe one day I'll be in the mood for one of these. The day has to come sometime.

Into The Breach

Now, this does look quite interesting. It's a turn-based strategy/puzzle game. I'm always looking for more turn-based strategy games, preferably without puzzles. I'm very picky so it's harder than you might think. I try quite a lot of them but very few stick. Marvel's Midnight Suns didn't and neither, I suspect, will the one I started last night, Dark Envoy, a previous Prime giveaway. Both of those are sorta-kinda third-person 3D games, which is not really what I'm looking for. I'm after something more along the lines of Baldur's Gate or Divinity: Original Sin, visually at least, with little characters you move about like pieces on a  board. This one looks something but not exactly like that. Worth a go, anyway.

Next Thursday (Because everything happens on Thursday in Primeland (Except Wednesday, of course, but that's another Prime altogether.) we get Afterimage, which looks beautiful but also not remotely like anything I'd ever play, being a 2D action adventure. Pass. Probably.

Then there's Spelljammers: Pirates of Realmspace, another D&D title, albeit from the sideloaded "Spelljammer" universe. My TTRPG group in the 'eighties knew about Spelljammer but I don't recall anyone ever suggesting we play it so it has zero nostalgia value for me. It also looks ancient and has a "mixed" rating on Steam. I'll still claim it but I know it's just going to sit there.

Third we have Tower of Time which looks exactly like the kind of turn-based strategy game I was saying I was after... well, in the screenshots, anyway. It seems like it can be played in various ways, from tactically, with pause and slow-time, through to full-on, real-time action combat. There are various difficulty modes and even a permadeath option so something for everyone. It's got some decent reviews so I'm optimistic about this one. Definitely claiming it.

And it it doesn't turn out to be as good as it looks, maybe  Subterranean Mines of Titan will do a job. It's yet another turn-based rpg. Seems to be the month for them. Can't say the screenshots are doing much to whet my enthusiasm though. Too fussy and not my preferred aesthetic. I'll take it anyway, I guess.

A week later we get Residual, a very nice-looking 2D platformer I will completely ignore, plus yet another in the FATE series, this one subtitled The Cursed King, and... er, no, that's it for Week Three, just the two. I'll take the FATE game but I haven't tried any of the earlier ones in the series yet. Prime clearly has a policy of scooping up entire franchises and feeding them out month by month, which is great if it's something you like but kind of annoying if not. 

Speaaking of which, on the last Thursday of the month, there's yet another dumb hidden object game I won't even bother naming. That's a hard no. I might, however, claim Pixel Cafe, a visual novel/time management hybrid. It's a prety weak ending to the month, though, especially since Pixel Cafe is currently a whopping 94% off on Steam, making it worth less than a dollar.

And that's it. I said it was going to be quick and for once I wasn't lying!

The Sun Comes Up On Another Vision Of The Past

Stars Reach isn't the only game in alpha (Sorry... pre-alpha...) running lengthy testing sessions just now. Monsters & Memories is also ramping up towards reaching some kind of always-on state later in the year - or perhaps early next year - by keeping the servers up for longer and longer periods.

There's a "Community Alpha Test" on right now. It started on Sunday and it runs through this coming weekend. There's another one, even longer, due in November.

I like Monsters&Memories. I like their testing program, too, it seems. This is the ninth time I've posted about the game and eight of those posts are me talking about what I did during a test. 

It's a curious contrast with Stars Reach where, enthusiastic as I may have been at the beginning, that  enthusiasm has waned, along with my interest, until it feels like only a misplaced sense of duty and the hope of finding something to fill a blog post keeps me logging in at all. Conversely, while I probably don't have any more played hours in Monsters&Memories than in Stars Reach, whenever the opportunity arises to take another look at M&M, I find myself getting almost excited at the prospect.

Not that I've been taking huge advantage of the longer tests in either game. I couldn't manage even a full hour in Stars Reach the other day and I didn't time it but I think my Monsters&Memories session yesterday evening came up a little shy of two hours.I really enjoyed it, though, and I hope to get one or two more sessions in before the servers close down on Sunday. 

It definitely helped that after I'd downloaded the latest launcher and patched up the game to the current version, my character from last time was still there, waiting for me. As I was saying in the feedback I sent to Playable Worlds, even during a testing phase, some sort of continuity is vital to keep players engaged. Well, to keep me engaged, anyway.

Not that it would have made any material difference if I'd had to re-roll and start from scratch. My character from last time hadn't even finished Level One. All she'd done was wander around the overwhelmingly huge city, getting constantly and repeatedly lost, trying to find the two or three NPCs needed for the one or two quests she had, before taking equally long to find the city gates so she could go out into the newbie yard and get killed almost immediately by a large beetle.

That, with only a few small variations, describes all my experiences with Monsters&Memories in every test so far. I make a character or pick up where I left off with the last one. I jog endlessly through the streets, up the countless steps and stairways, in and out of the innumerable buildings. round and round and round, sometimes with no goal in mind at all, sometimes hoping I might somehow stumble across some specific named NPC. 

It's usually dark. There's never any kind of map. Even in the city there are things that want to kill you. Outside the gates, on the sands, if you ever find out how to get there, nothing awaits you but darkness and death.

And yet it's somehow quite compulsive. Partly, the game just looks so good. I've seen reviews that say otherwise and it's certainly a low-detail, low-texture environment but the highly stylized design is effective and the lighting is really excellent. Every time I find myself taking lots of screenshots, few of which do the visuals I'm seeing in the game justice. Atmospheric lighting effects are notoriously hard to capture in stills.

At Level  One, gameplay is literally identical to EverQuest circa the turn of the millennium, which is hardly surprising. As I say every time I write about M&M, it basically is Classic EverQuest. 

This time, though, I managed to get further with the questing than ever before and it occurred to me that the exact period it's re-creating has to be a little past "Classic". I'd peg it around the time low-level armor and weapon quests were added, a process that began in 2002. Before that you wore cloth drops from orc pawns and liked it.

The extent to which the whole things feels just like playing EQ back then is astonishing. The mobs are the same. The spells have the same names. Some even have the same visual effects. 

You have to collect your quest drops in a six-slot bag and "combine" them into a new, separate "bag" that's actually a quest item. Then you hand it in by picking it up on your mouse pointer and dropping it onto the receiving NPC.It doesn't get much more old school than that.

Whether anyone under 35 would ever want to do any of it seems both highly unlikely and also quite beside the point. This is an old game for old people. 

Or is it? I read something quite interesting during Blaugust, where someone was saying the decades-long fetish for ever-better graphics is now washing up against the rocks of a generation raised on the likes of Minecraft and Roblox, games where everything looks like its made out of a load of brightly-colored blocks and no-one cares. Not to mention Old School Runescape.

And what do I know about the quest methodologies in those games, assuming they even exist there? Maybe combining a bunch of scorched skeleton bones in a burlap sack by pressing a big button marked COMBINE feels perfectly normal to people under 20 now. 

I'd bet the rate of progress doesn't though. Boy, is it ever slow! 

Or is it? These assumptions need to be challenged!

It took a while but it did finally occur to me last night that maybe I might be leveling up faster if I spent more of my time actually killing things and less of it running around the city. In EverQuest in 2002 we didn't generally expect to get our XP from quests. We just ran out the city gates ten seconds after we were created and got straight down to killing rats, like any normal person would.

 I find these days - and indeed these last couple of decades - that just the existence of a linear questline is enough to make me forget everything I once knew. In game after game I step on that escalator the moment I see it and do my best to ride it to the top, all the while complaining about how on rails the whole experience has become. 

When I find myself in a game that doesn't bully, bribe or cajole me into questing for a living, which neither Monsters&Memories nor Stars Reach does, rather than congratulating the developers on their thoughtfulness and consideration in treating me with respect, as someone capable of setting my own goals and finding my own fun, what do I do? Complain the game is aimless or purposeless or not even a game at all and start bleating on about how there's no narrative structure, like some caricature of an actor asking "...but what's my motivation?"

Just fricking get out there, kill stuff and watch your numbers go up! What more motivation do you need? I tried a bit of that yesterday and it got me to Level Two. Well, that and the quest hand-in...

I don't know. It's been a long time, hasn't it? Is this what we want any more? Is it what I want?

I guess when Monsters&Memories goes live I'm going to find out. Pantheon didn't do it for me so this is probably the last hurrah of the Golden Age horde. 

It's looking promising so far.

Remind Me Why I'm Doing This, Again?

If anyone needs an exemplar for the dictionary definition of a grind in MMORPGs, please direct them to EverQuest II's Overseer system. You may already know all about that, of course, from previous commentary on the feature here, although I find it quite unlikely, given the way posts on EQII are probably some of the least-read in the history of the blog, at least since the last few readers who still played the game moved on to other things.

I've certainly complained about it often enough, as I was reminded when I went back this morning to look over some of the more than forty (!) posts tagged with with the "Overseer" label. And guess what? I'm going to complain about it again!

I'm also going to wonder out loud what the heck I think I've been doing these last six months or so, which is roughly how long it's taken me to get where I am, my foot resting at last on the final rung of the ladder (Or is it?) Since some time back in the spring, I can't remember exactly when but I mentioned in May that I'd been at it for a month, I've been logging into EQII every day, pretty much without fail, just to set my ten allotted daily missions and collect the rewards from the day before.

Why? I don't know! That's becoming increasingly clear. 

The original idea was to get my lapsed Overseer levels back to the cap after a couple of years of not bothering with it at all so my necromancer, who I'm preparing to take the lead in the upcoming expansion later in the year, would be as up-to-date as I could make her on every front. I also thought at the time that it might be useful for her to have access to the gear from the at-cap Overseer reward chests because in the past I have made quite a lot of use Overseer items to fill in gaps here and there, when the right items just haven't dropped for me.

That, I can tell you now, is not going to happen. As I mentioned only recently, the current "Thank you for still playing this ancient game" freebie, the EverQuest II 2025 Subscriber Crate, contains a full set of Resolve 525 gear, a very substantial upgrade to anything any of my characters is currently wearing and a lot better than even the best stuff likely to fall out of a Season 7 Overseer crate. 

Granted, there's only one of those chests per account (Although you can also buy them in the Cash Shop for an eye-watering amount of DBC.) but in a few weeks the annual Panda extravaganza will begin, bringing with it further upgrades and then the expansion itself will arrive, complete, no doubt, with the now-expected Tishan's Chest on the ground next to the first quest-giver, from which we'll be able to kit ourselves out in everything we could possibly want, with stats that will upgrade anything short of current raid gear.

I can't even give stuff to my Mercs now. The last couple of xpacks have handed out full sets of Mercenary gear, too. And mounts. And familiars. And, for that matter, the damn mercenaries themselves, not that I've been getting any of those. Of which, more later.

Okay, then, the Overseer gear's a bust but what about all the other goodies? Well, let's see. There are the potions. I have literally hundreds,maybe thousands of those stashed away and I hardly ever remember to use any of them. I am terrible about using consumables. I pretty much only remember they exist when I hit some kind of difficulty wall and have to start scratching around for any possible toe-hold to scramble over it. 

Thankfully, there hasn't been much of that sort of thing in the solo timelines these last few years, long may it continue. It does make all those potions somewhat redundant, though, and even if I did need some, I'm sure the ones from a tier or two back would suffice. I'm not going to need the very best ones, not in the content I'm going to be doing. 

I also don't need more unlocks for mount barding slots. I already have plenty of those stored in the bank. They're all identical, season to season, and they've been popping out of the reward chests for years.

Ditto the very useful time-reducing potions that speed up mount, merc and familiar leveling. Again, I need them but I already have plenty. More is always good but I'm most likely never going to get through the ones I have banked. It's certainly not worth the trouble of keeping Overseer going every day just for those.

One thing that is worth it are the rare crafting mats. I would probably keep at it for those alone. I like gathering but it takes two rares to make each Expert scroll these days and just upgrading one new tier of spells for one character gets through sixty to a hundred rares. That's days and days of gathering even with all the boosts and bonuses and some good luck on rng and while I find it quite the meditative activity, there are limits even to my boredom threshold.  

Overseer pumps out a steady stream of rares, all the kinds too, so it's easy to sell the ones you don't want on the Broker and buy the ones you do. Takes a lot of the randomness out of the process.

The other thing I'd like to get from Overseer is Mercenary Tokens. You need one of those before most of the available mercs in each expansion will entertain the idea of working for you and there are lots of mercs I don't have yet. You need as many as possible to boost the stats of your Mercenary Battalion, about which do not ask because I don't understand it well enough to explain, but trust me, it's a thing. 

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I no longer seem to get any Merc tokens from Overseer. I used to get far more than I had any use for but over the last two or three tiers, although they're clearly there in the list of possible drops, I haven't seen single one from many hundred of crates. I'm guessing that's some kind of bug but who knows? Also, they used to be tradable and they sold on the broker for coppers, so I probably should look into just buying them next time I log in...

So, why am I bothering? Just for the rare mats and the hope, one day, merc tokens might start dropping again?

Well, yes, kind of... but mostly because, having seen just how fricking hard it is to get caught up, I really don't want to fall behind again. And also because I thought I was almost there. After today, I'm not so sure.

This morning I dinged 60 Overseer, something I've been very much looking forward to because I thought it would put me in the current season, Season 7. And it did... except now I'm not sure it is the current one.

It's the latest one there's any information about on the wiki and the gear looks like it's there or there about the right stats for the current expansion but I was a little disconcerted to see a new Achievement appear on the list for Season 8 Overseer, with the condition "Become a Level 71 Overseer to unlock Season 8". 

I'm hoping that's a placeholder and that Season 8 does not, as yet, exist. There's also an achievement for Level 65 Overseer, though, which reminds me that, even if there's no Season 8 yet, I do still have to grind another ten levels just to get to the end of Season 7.

It never ends. Or rather it does but never soon enough. And now, of course, I have all the "fun" of  logging in and out all day to refresh and collect my two (Count 'em! Two!) low-quality, one hour missions. They're on a half -hour refresh, so that means logging in and out at least ten times every day until I start to pick up the longer, better-quality missions and eventually build up enough options so it's back to once a day again.

That took f.o.r.e.v.e.r. last time or it certainly felt like it. [Edit: In between finishing the post and editing it, I picked up a set of rewards and got a three-hour, yellow Mission so that's rng working in my favor for a change...] Not looking forward to it at all. But I'll do it because the alternative - falling behind again - is worse.  I mean, what if they suddenly decide to stick something good in the chests for next season? Then where would I be?

And that, I guess, is how they get you.  

Hey, Stars Reach! It's Been A While! How's It Going?

Bless me Ralph, for I have sinned. It has been ninety-five days since my last Stars Reach post. I think. Something like that, anyway.

Which is actually a lot less than I thought. I completely forgot I logged in at the end of May. I thought I hadn't set foot in the game since before the Kickstarter. 

That's what I told whoever it is that has the fun job of reading all the surveys and collating the data, anyway. I do like a survey but when I got the email a few days ago - well, the three emails, since I'm still signed up for the testing program on multiple accounts - I wasn't going to respond because what could I have said? I have no clue what Stars Reach is like now, it's been so long since I've played.

But then curiosity got the better of me and I opened one of the forms, just to see what they were asking, and it turned out they only wanted to know what people thought of the first hour of the game. 

Don't bother trying to dodge.
They use death as a teaching aid here.

I have been keeping Stars Reach patched up, even though I haven't been logging in and Playable Worlds is now running a series of lengthy tests as they gear up for 24/7 testing. This was on Saturday and I had the feeling a test had just started, which indeed it had. In fact, it started last Thursday and it's still going as I write. 

Why not, then? I could give them an hour of my time and report back on what I thought about it. I mean, I did kind of sign up to test the thing, not to mention be in the creator program (Ironic laughter...) although any responsibility for any of that I ever felt dissipated the moment my credit card got charged for the Kickstarter pledge. I'm a paying customer now.

First, obviously, I had to make a new character. Well, in a manner of speaking. There is now some slight semblance of a character creation process but it's two choices and move on. 

There's a bit of flavor text, which I personally find obnoxious and have already complained about in feedback more than once. Oddly perhaps, I do not find being repeatedly addressed, sneeringly, as "meatbag" endears me to the game or makes me want to come back for more. 

All you really get to choose at this stage, though, is your name and race. Everything else is "To be added" or some such excuse. I guess that does at least tell us we will be able to customize our character, one day.

Most irritatingly of all, the whole "what you look like changes every time you zone" thing is still going. It's disorienting enough to have your character randomized at the start but to have it re-randomized just when you were starting to get used to it is infuriating. If that's actually testing something - still - then fair enough but it seems unlikely. In fact, now I think about it, maybe it's not even intentional. Could be a bug?

How come I was allowed to take this picture, then?

Once that was done, the game let me in and I played through the extremely brief tutorial, which I quite enjoyed. It's new since I was last there, takes place in space, and goes through the basic controls quite effectively, although it took me several goes to get the crawling under the fallen beam part right and the bit where it gives you a fire extinguisher feels redundant when there turns out to be no fire to extinguish.

It does a job, though, and the space station looks quite impressive. It's a much better way to begin than the previous version. 

At the end of the tutorial you have to pick a class. They don't call it that, of course, (They call it a "profession".) because this is a classless game where anyone can be anything but it damn well is a class all the same, or at best an archetype. From memory you can be a crafter, an explorer, a warrior or something I've forgotten. Farmer, maybe?

The game tells you not to worry too much about it because later you can do all the things but that's like your school-teacher telling you not to complain about having to learn the boring stuff now because it'll get interesting when you go to college. Who bloody cares? I want to do something that's interesting now!

Or fun. I'd take fun.

If I hadn't already played about fifteen hours of various stages of pre-alpha, back when you really could do what you liked right from the start, even if there wasn't that much of it to do, I think this time would have been fun. New stuff generally is. Without the novelty factor and by comparison to how it used to be , though, it seemed a bit limited. Dull, even.

Ha bloody ha.

I picked Explorer, which I was well aware would mean running around, listening to an echo-locator pinging as I tried to find sixty-four flashing pyramids. Under the new regime, you only get the tools you need for your designated job, so it was do that or don't do anything at all. Not like the good old days, when you could do a bit of this, a bit of that, switch things up to keep it from getting boring.

The really glaring problem with Exploring as it is now is that it's highly reliant on players both having good hearing and keeping the in-game sound on (Unless there's some alternate, visual setting buried in the controls, somewhere, in which case they should tellyou about it.)

As we all know, most gamers switch the sound off and play either Norwegian death metal at ear-splitting volume or true-crime podcasts instead, so asking them to listen to several hours of pinging just seems rude. And as for those who've already lost most of their hearing from too much Norwegian death metal, well they have no chance at all.

Except they kind of do because you can just run around and wait for the pink pyramids to pop as you get close to them, which is all I did. I did that for about half an hour and found over a dozen, which is more than I expected but fewer that it would have been if I hadn't had to keep stopping to fight and/or run from the extremely aggressive wildlife.

Is this the Down escalator?

I have been complaining about this design choice since pretty much the first time I ever played the game and while it has improved it's still very far from acceptable. EverQuest's infamous Gates of Discord expansion should not be the template for newbie zones in any game. 

They do at least give you a gun - an Omniblaster - no matter what class you pick, so you can try to defend yourself but good luck with that when you get swarmed, as you inevitably will. By the time I gave up, after my second (Or was it third?) death, I'd earned more points in combat-related skills than all the others put together. That seems ridiculous, especially when I thought I'd picked a non-combat class so I wouldn't need to fight anything. Can't say I was surprised about it though. It happens every time. 

All of this was very familiar, as was the terrain, hacked up by players and left full of holes to fall down as it was. The grass does seem to grow over the piles of debris now. It looked more like a huge field full of mature ants' nests than the usual abandoned quarry, so that was an improvement, visually anyway.

A close look at this picture will prove
I have no observational skills whatsoever.
Also wow! Gravity is really slimming!

Speaking of visuals, the one huge leap forward for Stars Reach since I last played has to be what it
looks like. I always thought it was an attractive-looking game but now it's positively gorgeous. The graphics are highly stylized but they really do look beautiful. I took some screenshots and I would have taken more if the camera controls weren't so goddam awful. Seriously, you should surely at least be able to 360 around your motionless character without having to go into the settings to work out how to do it. If it's even possible. I never did work out how but it may be in there, somewhere.

The whole time I was playing (Okay, it was only three-quarters of an hour...) the only other players I saw were afk at the revive spot, presumably where they'd died and wandered off to do something more interesting instead, leaving their characters idling. I'm sure there's something going on somewhere that's more engaging than what was happening where I was and that's presumably where the players are but I know from experience just how much work there is before you get anywhere near anything like that and I have no intention of going through all those steps again, or not until I'm confident whatever progress I make won't be wiped before the next time I log in.

My brief session did gain me enough experience to fill out the survey, so after I logged out that's what I did. I doubt my answers were very helpful, consisting as they did of  a lot of "None of the Aboves" as a long list of options seeemed to have no relevance to anything I'd done or seen. 

I did, however, take the opportunity to write a short essay in the "Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?" section. I had the good sense to copy and past it into a local file, so here's what I said, word for word: 

Before today I hadn't played since before the Kickstarter. I'd pretty much decided by then, after the earlier tests I was in, that it's not really my sort of game. No narrative makes it feel directionless and so far there's no real way to build a character in meaningful ways, by which I mean working on appearance and personality. Having what your character looks like keep changing outside of your control is a game-breaker, even in a testing phase. Even in a test I need to feel some attachment to my character or else it's just like a job I'm not being paid to do. As for gameplay, it's too heavily oriented around skill acquisition all of which takes far, FAR too long. Movement is enervating. I feel physically tired after a few minutes because of the way I have to drag the camera to see anything. Not being able to swing the camera 360 degrees with the character remaining still is very frustrating. Also the combat is deeply irritating. Should be able to play a non-combat character and not have to fight at all. Aggressive mobs have absolutely no place in starter areas, let alone in these numbers. Basically, I find most aspects of the game annoying. It has great potential but the mechanics appear to be almost intentionally getting in the way of any of it being fun. Having played for 45 minutes today, I do think it has improved but I still don't feel like playing again. I would recommend it to others because I can see how it would appeal to some people but it doesn't do much for me.

I did kind of bang that out in a bit of a temper because, as often tends to be the way, I ended my Stars Reach session feeling quite irritable and annoyed. It's a weird experience. The game seems like it ought to be fun but somehow it mostly isn't. It's a lot of fuss and bother for not very much  reward let alone entertainment but it feels like it shouldn't be.

In the past I've tended to put that down to it just not being my sort of game but really it's not all that different, mechanically, to any other survival-crafting game and I've had great times in several of those. So what exactly is it about Stars Reach that increasingly seems to rub me up the wrong way?

Partly, I think, it's that this really is still very early in the development process. Most of the time, most of what's there works fairly well, which is great, but also means the game has an unfortunate tendency to feel a lot more finished than it really is. It does say right there on the loading screen that it's "pre-alpha". You don't get much earlier than that. 

Much of what feels like it's missing feels that way because it really is missing and for very good reason: it hasn't been done yet. It will be, one day, and complaining that it's not there now seems silly. Unfortunately, if you're asking me what the game feels like now, as surveys tend to do, then without all the stuff that isn't in yet, well, yes, it probably is going to feel bad. Unavoidable, perhaps, but there it is.

The other thing that puts me off is much more nebulous. Stars Reach just feels like it doesn't really want me to be there. It's a hostile environment with very few amenities and everything is hard work. And there doesn't really seem to be much of a reason why I should be there, anyway. What am I actually supposed to be doing? 

One of those games that looks better when you're there than in screenshots, I think.

The snarky narrative wrapper that currently offers just about all there is for context really doesn't help. Apparently I'm an idiot from a race of idiots who messed everything up, only to survive on charity that's given grudgingly at best. The game wastes no time in making the player feel positively unwelcome which is a big risk that for me very much does not pay off. 

Having the game insult the player, let alone having that be the only way the game communicates, seems like asking for pushback, which in the case of a video game would usually consist of logging out, uninstalling and then bad-mouthing it to anyone who'll listen. I imagine there are people who find the "meatbag" routine hilarious. I am not one of them.

But more than that, there's a fug of earnestness surrounding Stars Reach, as if somehow playing it might be good for you. It reeks of being in the Scouts or some kind of social program, where everything builds character or community or is for your own good. Hard to put my finger on why it feels that way  but for me it's there and it's been there from the start. 

Again, almost certainly a big positive for some people but not me. I don't respond to it well at all and the combination of that sensation with open insults is just weird. And not in a good way.

And yet, as I said in the survey, I would recommend Stars Reach to others. It has the potential to be a solid experience when it's finished and it's not too shabby even now. It runs well and it looks good and there's enough to do to keep you busy for a while, which I'm sure is more than enough for a lot of people, not to mention more than what a lot of games a lot further along in development can offer.

So please don't let me put you off if, unlike me, you don't mind being called a meatbag every five minutes. 

So Long, Blaugust, And Thanks For All The Blogs

Last day! Has it been fun? I'd say so.

I was going to run this after the event had ended but it makes more sense to keep it in bounds. Who knows? Maybe someone I'm shouting out will even see it now!

As I said a few posts ago (Not going to go digging back through them all to link to it.) for the first time ever I'm actually going to name-and-praise the new-to-me and new to Blaugust blogs I really enjoyed. Handily, I put all the fresh names in a separate pot over in Feedly right at the start so it's pretty easy to find them. God knows it wouldn't be if all I had to work with was my memory.

I'd say they're in no particular order - I'm certainly not ranking them - but since I used the handy OPML file gifted to us by Owls and that's alphabetical, that's what order they're in. Other alphabets are available.

All of the following will be staying in my RSS feeds long after Blaugust ends. 

African Music Forum -  There were several all-music blogs in this year's line-up and at the start I would have bet against this being the one I'd end up enjoying and listening to the most but the others seemed to focus on music I found very dull so I stopped clicking through after a few posts. I've never been much of a "world music" fan although I've certainly heard plenty over the last few decades. I went to the first-ever WOMAD festival but never felt like going to another and there was a time when I thought if John Peel didn't stop playing so much highlife I'd have to find someone else to listen to late in the evenings. All of that notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed lots of the tracks and artists AFM introduced me to during Blaugust, especially all the funk and jazz. 

august morning -  There are never as many picture-focused blogs in Blaugust as I could wish. Or in the blogosphere generally, for that matter. I'm guessing most people who want to post photos do it on Instagram. Maybe I should look there. Except I don't even have an Instagram account. Which all means I was very happy to see this one, the picture-oriented blog of Jedda, also responsible for another blog on this list.

Axxuy - Short, friendly, varied posts on a restful green background. I bookmarked several posts by axxuy as possible bounce-offs during the month, mentioned the blog in a couple in dispatches and finally went the full bounce yesterday.  At first I thought it was going to be a whole blog about vintage typewriters, which would have been fine, but it opened out to be about all kinds of things and always interesting.

Calishat - Another I bookmarked several times. I liked the chatty and engaging style but this one also has great pracical value. I've already used a couple of the search apps and I'm keeping them to hand for the future.

Joelchrono's Blog - Always a fun read. Very chatty and easy-going. I liked all the gaming stuff but even better were the throwaway asides giving a glimpse of everday life in Mexico. This is the sort of thing I used to eavesdrop on in the old GeoCities days. I don't miss most of that, especially not the juddering, jarring graphics, but I do miss the casual visits to other people's lives, something the more structured blogs we have now don't always offer.

Notes by JCProbably -  And here's another one. Again, it's a window into another world or I should say another part of this one. One thing I particularly like about JCProbably is the creative use of fonts. It brings home what I was saying about how we, collectively, seem to have forgotten some of the creativity that used to come with paper and paste. If I steal anything from anyone in Blaugust this year it'll most likely be the use of script instead of italics. This is Jedda's other blog, by the way, although I'm sure you all knew that.

Reay Jespersen - Along with the previous one, possibly the most personal of the personal blogs this time around. A real web log of what's going on in someone's life, or in their mind, or both, which if we're going to be brutal about it, is only going to hold a stranger's attention if it's a very interesting life or if someone has some very interesting ideas or if they're blessed with the knack of making one or other or both sound interesting. At least two of those hold true here. I read every post with interest, attention and pleasure. Even left a couple of comments.

ribo.zone -  I was enjoying this one until it stopped about half-way through the month with a post about being half-way through... very meta! Another soothingly pastel green blog with plenty of what I learned is called "dithering". I was clearly lying when I said the only thing I'd steal this time would be the script fonts. I've already stolen the dithering and used it several times.

Small Good Things - Another one that signed out half way through, only this time with an actual goodbye. I was very sorry to see it go although I understood the reasons clearly enough. There are plenty of blogs in my feeds that talk about health issues sometimes, particularly mental health, but I don't often feel I've learned something new the way I did with this one. It helped that Hollie was learning them at the same time, I guess. I hope everything's working out and if and when you're feeling ready to blog again, I'll be happy to hear about it. This is why I never remove blogs I like from my feeds even when they go silent. It's always nice to think one day they might spring back into life.

The Virtual Moose -  Just a solid, interesting, well-presented blog that kept coming up with interesting reads throughout the month. I bounced off one of them, thinking it was a subject that might get some traction and of course it got no response at all. (Well, not about the actual topic, anyway.) How very Blaugust. I also downloaded a game demo after reading one of the posts but I haven't played it yet.

The Works of Egan -  I generally don't jibe with coding or tech blogs. There were several this year that I didn't get on with at all. It's not so much that I'm uninterested in the subject matter, more that the way it's presented frequently hits me as alienating and exclusionary.  Not, I'm sure, with any such intent by the writers but like many specialisms it can be prone to silo architectonics and echo chambering. This one isn't by any means a tech blog although it leans in that direction sometimes. It's more of a general read and it has a very open, welcoming feel about it that invites you to come inside and join in, which I did, happily.

 Wavelengths - This one's not so much a blog as the front end of a whole suite of media projects including podcasts and YouTube videos. It's also very professional. I didn't listen to any of the podcasts or watch any of the vlogs but I did read all the blog posts and the introductions to the other stuff, most of which qualify as short posts in their own right. Always entertaining although I'm not a fan of the green and white on grey-black color scheme...

And there we go. An entirely co-inidentally round dozen, all of them blogs to which I'm very happy to have been introduced. I'll go on reading them, hopefully all the way to next Blaugust, when I hope they'll all return for another round.

As I will. It's been a good one. I'm already looking forward to the next. 

Thanks to Belghast for inventing Blaugust and to Krikket and the others mentors for carrying it on Bel's behalf this time around. I'm sorry I didn't do more but then it doesn't look like any more was needed. It all seemed to go beautifully.

Hope to see some of you tomorrow as usual and the everyone else next year! 

But I Don't Even Like Football...

Seems like every other day I start with some variation on "Well, this is going to be a really short post..." and then go on to write at least a thousand words. This is not one of those days.

This time it really is going to be short, although not so much for you, dear reader, if, as I hope you will, you click on the links. If you do, it's going to be two hours of your day gone, like it just was of mine, which is one reason this is not going to be one of those posts that take me two or three hours to write, (i.e. most of them).

There are going to be two links. (Edit: Of course there aren't. Well, there are, because two is inside five, but there aren't just two. And now it's six. I just added another in post. In post in the post. Whatever...) The first is to one of the fine blogs I discovered thanks to this year's Blaugust. 

All month I've been enjoying axxuy's concise posts in their restful shades of green. They've been one of the most consistently entertaining reads of the event, which is probably why I clicked through the link in today's post. Residual good vibes carry you far.

I don't click on most links in posts I read. I mean, lots of people include lots of links all the time. I know I do. I very much doubt anyone clicks through all of them and I'd bet most people don't click through many. I dithered a moment before clicking this one but I'm very glad I did and I'd like to thank axxuy for introducing me to something of value I'd almost certainly never have found on my own.

Probably about time I linked to axxuy's post, isn't it?  It's called Football Forever and you don't need to know or care about American Football to read it. I certainly don't. 

Neither do you need any kind of grounding in the game to click again on the link axxuy includes, which I'm going to put up here in a skronking point size so you can't miss it:

17776

And that is the biggest point size Blogger has. I'd make it bigger if I could.

Where does it take you? Not saying. Axxuy gives a good framing intro. Read that.

What I'd add is that it's quite an undertaking. It took me, as I said, about two hours, end to end. Given that I can't seem to make time to watch a whole movie these days and think an hour is quite a good session in a video game, it says a lot that I didn't even start to think "Just how long is this going to go on?" until I was about ninety minutes in.

People (Who are they, these generic, unreferenced "people"? I don't know but I'm agin 'em.) like to talk about the corrosion of the internet and how nothing is as good as it used to be in the good old days because apparently that's just how we feel about stuff when it's been around a while. And it is true that the sense of play, the sense of wonder, may have gone out of the worldwide web, swept away by the tides of commerce. (Geez! Flowery, much?)

Remember when people (Them again...) genuinely weren't sure if Poppy was real? Or Pronunciation Book? I guess those days of innocent gullibility really are over. Even before AI made the irreal real, we were well past being fooled that way, even willingly. Weren't we? (By the way, more Blaugust props (No-one says props any more. Shhh. You're just drawing attention to it!) to Calishat, without whose excellent utility Back That Ask Up! I would have had to waste a lot more time finding a suitable reference for that That Poppy story.) 

Just because we can't be fooled so easily doesn't mean the web has gone all to shit like people keep saying. There are things the web can do that no other medium can approach and there's still far, far more out there than any of us is ever going to find.

I very, very definitely would not have gone looking for an experimental, multi-media meditation on eternity, framed as a science-fiction novella, on a massive, corporate sports channel but that's where this comes from. Still find that hard to believe. What the hell is it doing there, anyway?

But that's where it is and I suggest you go experience it. It's a ride. 

Thanks again to axxuy and indeed to Blaugust for showing it to me. I'd never have found it on my own and that would have been my loss, which is why I'm sharing it here, because I know for sure not everyone reading this is also reading every other Blaugust blog, let alone clicking on all the links.

And this turned out longer than I planned but then doesn't it always?