Lost In The Dark

An update on where I am with EverQuest Online Adventures. I wish I knew! This may be the darkest game I've ever played. Not dark as in edgy and unsettling. Dark is in I can't see where the heck I'm going nearly all of the time.

At first I thought it was just at night. Then the sun came up and it barely made a difference. This is outdoors I'm talking about, by the way. Out in Steamfont. Or Steamfont Mountains if you prefer. Sometimes people call it that although given most of it is flat as a pool table, I'm not sure why. 

At least, that's what they call it in the Norrath I know but then, this isn't that Norrath. Here, the gnomish capital is called Klik`Anon not Klak'Anon so who knows what the locals call the countryside. Maybe it's just the gnomish accent.

Anyway, can you even call it a capital when there's just the one city? I guess that'd be a city-state and those don't have capital cities by definition. Come to think of it, most nations in most MMORPGs are city-states, aren't they? How many have more than one city? Freeport and Qeynos are supposed to be the centers of empires but apart from a few villages and trading posts, what other towns and cities do they control? 

Dragging myself back to the point, Klik itself isn't too bad. It's underground so it's not exactly sunny but at least there's decent street-lighting. Not to mention the glow from the lava pool. 

There's another thing. When did the gnomish homeland turn into an offshoot of Lavastorm?  There must be an active volcano somewhere in the area, judging from the burning embers constantly falling from the sky. 

That's outside, obviously. Inside the city there's just this great pool of seething lava. It's not even cordoned off but then gnomes never were big on health and safety.

The same screenshot from the top of the post, with the black borders removed and the rest "auto-leveled" to show what it would look like without the filters. I'd take this version any day. Or night.

 

After several hours running around the tunnels, mostly looking for merchants who aren't even there, I have a vague sense of the size and layout of the city although, if I'm honest, I wouldn't even have that much if it wasn't for the Prima Guide. 

Remember those? I could never see the point of them back when EverQuest was a big enough success to attract third-party publishing. They only told you what you could already read in the manual or get for free from online resources like EQAtlas and Allakhazam. 

Well, I'm glad of them now, I can tell you. Online resources decay fast when a game ceases to be as popular as it used to be and if that game shuts down altogether...

So it's very helpful of Project Return Home to have posted a PDF of the entire Prima Guide to EQOA.  I've been making much use of it, especially the maps, without which I'd probably still be wandering around the Magicians' Guild, which turns out to be stuck right at the back.

I wish I'd consulted it sooner last night. It might have saved me an hour of fruitless searching through the byways of Klik for the merchant who sells copper springs. He's called Merchant Samwe, which I know from looking up the details of the quest on the EQOA wiki, another resource without which I would be both figuratively and literally lost because the game itself tells you nothing.

There's no map, neither full screen nor mini. There's only the most basic quest journal that gives you minimal, static information and doesn't update as you progress. The NPCs do talk quite a bit when you get the quests from them but you can't go back over the dialog so if they offer any hints you'd best not miss them and, if your memory is like mine, better write them down as well. Which obviously I haven't been doing.

So far I have completed precisely three quests. The starting quests you get as a Gnome Magician. Here they are, as detailed in the Wiki, with notes from me appended:

Lvl 01
Starting NPC: Werlib Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
You need to go get a Student's uniform from Tailor Nokar (it's free).

Could not find Nokar at all until I got the map from Prima. Even then it took ages.

Lvl 02
Starting NPC: Werlip Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Werlip sends you to Spiritmaster Lacy, who binds you and sends you to Coachman Rizkar.

This would have foxed me because Rizkar is outside the city and Quackook doesn't think to mention it. By sheer chance, I'd already bumped into the Coachman when I was exploring so I at least knew he wasn't in Klik. I still had a lot of trouble finding him again, all the same.

Lvl 03
Starting NPC: Werlip Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Werlip sends you to out of town to kill rats, return with two strands of rat fur.

Again, I'd seen rats as I was wandering around outside. And this time Quackook does mention they're common outside the city. What he doesn't tell you, and what you'd never believe if he did, is that rat fur is rare on a rat. I had to kill half a dozen before I got my first strand. 

As you can see, you get one quest at each level. I am now Level 5 and still stuck on Starting Quest #4:

Lvl 04
Starting NPC: Professor Dandersoft
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Dandersoft will make you a new staff if you bring him the following items: A Copper Spring - Purchase from Merchant Samwe, Bottle - Purchase from Grocer Guzzlewugs, Snake fang, Ant Chitin 

Again, I happened to have seen Guzzlewugs already, although in the event I bought an empty bottle off some other merchant because several of them seem to sell them. I was most likely just lucky that the first snake I killed dropped a fang. As for the chitin and the spring... read on.

Each of these ultra-basic starting quests has taken me about an hour, almost all of it trying to find the relevant NPCs. Without the Prima Guide I'd still be looking, mainly because the NPCs who hand out the quests never bother to mention if one of the people they want you to visit is outside the city. 

Even without all the aimless searching it would take a while because when someone sends you get ant chitin they not only don't tell you where the ants are, they also don't mention there are considerably fewer ants than you'd expect, or that most ants do not drop any chitin when you kill them.

I spent about an hour last night just trying to find an ant that would give me what I wanted. I made numerous circuits of the starting area outside the gates of Klik without seeing any ants at all so I followed a path - in the pitch black night - to who knows where until I finally found a couple, who of course didn't give me what I was after. 

In the course of an hour or so, I managed to find about half a dozen more and they dropped all kinds of body parts - legs, antennae, eyes - but not chitin. Eventually, out of frustration, I went through a guarded gate in the wall and wandered about in what I now know must be a higher-level part of Steamfont. It was too dark to see much but luckily hammering the Right Button targets nearby creatures so I was able to track down an ant, which finally gave me the chitin I was looking for.

And then a bigger ant ran up and killed me in one hit. Luckily, not before I'd looted his buddy. 

That gave me a handy ranger port home to Klik anyway so I was happy enough. No XP debt at level 5, either, which is the level my magician is now. 

XP comes in huge chunks. Handing a quest has dinged me every time so far but just killing mobs as I explore brings in a ton of XP, too. I'm not sure if that's how it always was or if the server admins have jacked up the gain. I'm very happy with it either way. I'm sure it won't last.

Since I was back in town and I had all the other bits and pieces the Prof wanted, I thought I'd just quickly find Merchant Samwe and get the spring, do the hand in and then quit for the night. Hah!

I did a couple of circuits of Klik, tapping RB to bring him up on target. No luck. I went round again, more carefully, stopping to cycle through everyone and going into all the buildings. Still no luck.

I went to the Prima Guide and looked at the map of Klik. Every NPC is listed and numbered with their location marked. Samwe is not one of them. He isn't in the fricking city at all.

Even in Klik it gets ridiculously dark away the main drag.

After some time searching online and in the guide I finally figured out he's somewhere in Steamfont, near the lake. I found him on a map and went to look for him. 

I'm still looking. I couldn't find him anywhere and it got so late I had to give up.

I did find the spot on the map where he was meant to be, or I thought I did. He wasn't there. Neither was the guy who sells low-level mage spells in the guild when I looked for him, which is why at Level 5 I still only have three spells and no pet. Which is a problem. Magicians get pets at Level One. It's kind of the point of the class...

The problem is, I don't know if my information is out-of-date or just plain wrong or if, this being an emulator, the merchants I'm looking for just don't exist. I find it unlikely an emu would be as functional and stable and well-populated as it is (Chat is like any live MMORPG - busy all the time, people trying to form groups or get rezzed...) yet still missing the most basic starter content like spell vendors but who knows?

What is plain to me is that EQOA is very old-school in its design  - much more so than modern EverQuest - and yet the old hooks that made EQ so infamously addictive in its day still work. I'm not remotely suggesting the gameplay I've been describing hasn't been frustrating - it very definitely has - but also weirdly compelling. 

I do wish I'd started in a city with some daylight, though. Maybe Freeport. The Deserts of Ro are usually glaring by day and starlit by night. That would be a big improvement on dark all the bloody time.

I'm considering making another character for that reason alone but there's every chance I'll end up making a character of each race anyway, just to see all the different starting cities. The not-exactly-nostalgia factor is very high with this one.

That's EQOA then: not the MMORPG I was expecting to be playing but the one I am. And may be for a while. 

Wednesday Addams' Half-Term Report

So, I watched the first half-season of the second series of Wednesday. Is it okay to review half a season? I guess so, if that's how it comes.

There seem to be a whole slew of different ways streaming platforms choose to parcel out the goodies now. 

At one extreme there's The Online Box Set deal, where the whole season gets dumped onto the service on day one. Up at the other end, there's Let's Pretend It's The Nineties, when a single episode appears on the same day of the week, every week, until it's all over. 

A lot of people like the Box Set approach and it does have the merit of allowing viewers the choice of how to pace things. It's up to you to binge-watch or show some restraint. My preferred cadence is one episode a day so it works for me but it's obvious why the streaming platforms don't always want to do it that way. It front-loads views hugely and almost invites people to watch and wander off. 

On the other hand, it's like doing a cannonball into the cultural pool. It gets everyone's attention. That has to be good for attracting new subscribers.

Letting the season play out old school, the way the networks used to do, risks annoying the impatient but also locks everyone in for however many weeks the season lasts, which is presumably good for holding on to the subscribers you already have, always assuming you don't piss them off so much, doing it that way, they jump ship anyway. 

Having grown up with most shows playing out weekly, I'm generally fine with it. Plus if it's not a show I feel super-strongly about, I generally have the self-control to wait until all the episodes are available and then watch them one-a-day, as is my wont.

In between those extremes come the always-annoying variations, where several episodes drop at the start and more follow, sometimes one a week or in pairs or who the hell knows what. If anything's likely to make me not bother getting started, it's three episodes today then one a week for three weeks, then two together at the end. Just stop it!

Wednesday didn't go for any of those, opting instead for half the episodes now and half in September. At least, I'm assuming it's an even split. That would be eight episodes and eight is one of the common runs these days. That or ten. It's always an even number. 

I haven't checked because I'm trying to avoid spoilers and every time you run a search on anything there's a risk. You'd think just the number of episodes would be safe but who knows? 

Oh, alright then. I'll chance it...

Yep. It's eight. I squinted at the screen and that's all I saw, so phew! Got away with it.

And that would be an appropriate point for me to issue a SPOILER notice I guess. I have no idea what I'm about to write next but it's a fair bet it'll have some details that anyone who hasn't yet watched the first half and plans to won't want to know.

 

Hah! Can't miss that! I did say I wasn't exploiting the full range of visual options on the blog, didn't I? 

So, what was it like then, Season Two, Part One? 

Good, I thought. Very good, even. I watched the four episodes in four consecutive evenings and really looked forward to it each time, which is the proof. 

They're all an hour long, give or take a couple of minutes, but they felt shorter, another good indicator of quality. I also did absolutely nothing but watch the screen for the whole hour each time, by which I mean my mind didn't wander at all. Immersion was high.

The first episode began with a recap, which I certainly needed. Even as I was watching it I could barely remember most of the plot from last time. That has a lot more to do with my non-retentive memory than how memorable Season One actually was. 

I had already read that Wednesday's putative love interest from Season One, Xavier, wasn't coming back, thanks to some purported indiscretion by the actor. This is what I mean by spoilers being hard to avoid. 

I was surprised when the script dealt with his absence in the first episode. I thought they'd just pretend he'd never existed. Apparently he's off at some Swiss Finishing School for Outcasts so theoretically he could return, possibly recast, but I don't think anyone's likely to care enough about the character to want to bring him back. I can't really remember who he was anyway.

What I do remember is that in Season One there seemed to be some element of attraction between Wednesday and her roommate Enid. A lot of people were shipping them by the end of the season, to the extent that the producers came out and stated fairly plainly that it wasn't happening. 

I think they said then that they were rowing back on the whole romance thing, at least where Wednesday herself is concerned. It certainly was a major theme of the first season, who she might want to let into her closed circle of one. And the retrenchment does indeed appear to have happened. There's still a romance sub-plot but it's all focused on Enid and her competing beaus, the snake-hair guy from the first season, who has plenty of brooding personality and some teen-werewolf male model, who so far has the charisma of wet sand but who Enid is not unreasonably attracted to, given his dark good looks and general werewolfiness.

I'm rooting for snake-hair. He has good comic timing and a nice line in internalized angst and there's some chemistry between him and Enid that's absent between the would-be consenting werewolves. Clearly I don't like him enough to remember his name, though. Let me check... oh god, it's Ajax. No wonder I forgot. Who could take that seriously?

I did enjoy the various shenanigans with Enid and her two suitors but it leans very heavily into sitcom territory, which is somewhat true of the show as a whole. Of course the Addams Family has always been a sitcom at heart. I do find that easy to forget sometimes.

Speaking of the Family, they're much more present this season, with Morticia and Gomez moving into a lodge in the school grounds for wholly unconvincing plot convenience and Pugsley joining his sister as a student at Nevermore, ditto. Catherine Zeta-Jones, who I have never noticed, let alone rated, as an actor, makes an excellent Morticia, although I felt she was softening a little too much towards the end.

 

Luis Guzman as Gomez is... well, I guess Gomez is supposed to be unsettling. I'm still wondering what his quirk is, too. The global population in Wednesday-world is divided into Normies and Outcasts and every Outcast appears to have some paranormal ability but what Gomez's gift might be I still have not the slightest idea. Other than a taste for eating bugs and rats, something he shares with Pugsley, who can also generate electricity like his uncle, but surely eating bugs isn't enough on it's own. I mean, we're all supposed to be doing that, now, aren't we?

Pugsley is annoying but, again, Pugsley is meant to be annoying. He's been teamed with Eugene from the last series as some kind of double act that doesn't entirely come off. Both of them seem to have aged by about five years over the summer holiday, too. Someone does actually mention it at one point, which is good. It's impossible to miss so best make a feature of it.

Just about everyone from the first season, other than the aforementioned Xavier, returns. We'll be here all day if I go through the whole lot of them but I will just say I was surprised and delighted to see Christina Ricci pop up again, reprising her role as Marilyn Thornhill. I thought we'd seen the last of her and it seems highly unlikely we'll see any more now, after what happened in Episode 4, but I guess when you have magic in the mix you can't rule anything out.

New in the mix are Steve Buscemi, hamming it up big-time as the new Principle, Billie Piper, playing a music teacher, Joanna Lumley (With an American accent.) as Morticia's mother and Christopher Lloyd as a head in a jar. On wheels. The producers have suggested there may be seven seasons of Wednesday, which clearly suggests it's going to turn into another Harry Potter Retirement Plan For Ageing Character Actors but that's fine by me. They all put on a good turn.

Oh, and let's not forget Agnes, Wednesday's lower-classmate, super-fan and rival for the role of creepiest student on campus. I'm not sure about Agnes. She's a fun character and her invisibility affords her endless plot opportunities but the more we see of her, the less invincible Wednesday appears and I've always felt that invincibility, along with inscrutability and total lack of affect, are what makes Wednesday, as a character, work so well. 

Agnes gets the better of Wednesday altogether too much for my liking. Also, how the hell did she contrive to hang all those knives from the ceiling in the bell-tower and how did a slight, thirteen year-old girl manage to knock out two werewolves and transport them from Wednesday and Enid's room to the top of said tower? The way it's all done quite overtly off-camera suggests no-one in the script conference had any idea either.

The plot as whole, it must be said, does not bear too much close examination. I could pick on any number of threads and pick them into holes. Also, the main villain of Season One Part One is not so much a Big Bad as a Minor Threat. I'm guessing they're saving the real villain for Part 2. 

Which I am very much looking forward to watching. For all its glazing over awkward plot points and not making a whole lot of sense most of the time, Wednesday is a show bubbling over with pleasures. The script is consistently amusing, there are some good visual gags and character after character has me wishing they'd get more screen time. 

Jenny Ortega, who I probably should have mentioned earlier since it's her show, continues to be the perfect Wednesday Addams. Also, she's really short, isn't she? Now half the cast has grown up a little, it's hard to miss just how tiny she is. 

Possibly my favorite character, though, is Uncle Fester. He was always great in the original black and white series and Fred Armisen does a fantastic job of re-creating exactly that vibe. He and Wednesday seem like a natural team, too. The flashback to Wednesday, looking about eight years old, driving the getaway car as Fester robs a bank was a highlight of the half-season.

Part Two arrives on 3 September. I should have finished watching it by the end of that week. Expect a second part to the review to go with it soon after. 

A Little Appreciation Now And Then Would Be Nice...

Today sees the start of Creator Appreciation Week in Blaugust. This used to be a separate event, back when it was known as Developer Appreciation Week, a name that clearly reflects Blaugust's origins in the gaming community. 

Now the net is cast wide to catch... well, anything. And anyone. Artists, musicians, writers, coders, streamers, social media gurus, the company that makes those cute shoes you really, really like...

And bloggers, I guess. Why not?

One notable thing for me about this year's Blaugust, compared to previous events, has been the number of posts I've bookmarked because they contained factual information or links I thought might come in handy later. We seem to have attracted an above average number of people who make web resources or collect and distribute information about those who do. 

Among this year's Blaugustinians whose posts have caught my attention in this way are a couple I've already mentioned in previous posts - Nick Simson, who put me onto an excellent overview of the current and potential future state of AI/LLM usage posted by Ben Werdmuller and Tara Calishain of Calishat, who created both Attention Junction and MiniGladys, which I immediately bookmarked and then, of course, haven't used. But they look really useful!

I also bookmarked my Favorite Radio Stations, a post by The Virtual Moose. 

There was a time when I listened to the radio a lot while playing MMORPGs. As I've always said, I find the in-game sounds and music an integral part of almost all games (The exceptions being the handful where I find it literally unlistenable but those are vanishingly rare, thankfully.) so I always have both on and turned up loud enough to hear clearly. 

I've always been quite comfortable having two or three sound sources playing simultaneously and though I'm very poor at paying attention to more than one of them at a time, I'm quite good at shifting my attention from one to another as appropriate, whenever something interesting or important crops up. 

They do need to be different kinds of sounds - two pieces of music playing at the same time is a cacophony - but ambient and combat sounds from a video game, music and speech all seem to use different processing channels in my brain so they barely clash at all. 

In the olden days, when few MMORPGs used much in the way of voice acting, I was able to have speech radio on while I played but that ceased to be a viable option a long time ago, now almost everything is voiced. 

As game developers leaned into voice acting, so website developers pulled back from it. Remember the days when you'd go to a website and tinny machine music would start playing immediately? No-one wanted that and now you hardly ever hear it. Which means web-browsing and blog-reading is perfect for having music on in the background.

I used to listen to Canadian and Australian and American ultra-local stations, mostly on Sundays, as they interviewed local "celebrities" , people unknown to anyone fifty miles outside of town, or went through the local events calendar in excruciating detail. I found it very relaxing.

To find them, I used a website (No-one called them "apps" then.) called Radio Garden. I haven't tried  it for a long time but it's still there. It spins a globe and you can travel anywhere and listen to any radio station in the world.

Well, unless you live where I do. It seems that for the last couple of years the UK has become a Radio Walled Garden, with anything from outside the borders of the four nations being blocked for "licensing reasons" related to "copyright and neighboring rights-related matters". Another good reason to use a VPN, I'm sure.

I also used to pick on college radio stations to hear the eclectic and peculiar mix of music they'd program. The Virtual Moose post reminded me how much fun that used to be and made me think of doing it again, and I'm happy to say all their links work just fine, so how that figures with the supposed copyright issues is anyone's guess. 

My appreciation to all the actors involved, from the blogger who reconnected me with my previous self, the creators and maintainers of the app that makes listening to radio from all over the world not just possible but simple, provided you don't happen to live in the UK of course, and to the people at the radio stations themselves, who keep the medium itself alive. 

When I was thinking about what I'd do for CAW, I considered making it an all-AI edition, with links to the numerous sources I now rely on to do pretty much anything here. I might still do that but if I do I'll probably get side-tracked by trying to decide what is and isn't "AI". The label gets slapped onto anything and everything now and I'm pretty sure half the apps I'm using would just have been called "algorithms" five years ago.  

I'll leave that for another post as I stick to my theme of shouting out Blaugustinians, in which context I particularly want to mention ribo.zone, where today's post is all about dithering. I potter and I ramble but I don't often dither but it turns out not being able to make your mind up isn't what the post is about.

Dithering is the term for the pointillist visuals used throughout the Ribo Zone. It's one of the more attractive aesthetics on display in this year's Blaugust and I absolutely will steal some of that look if I can. Luckily, I don't need to resort to burglary because Loren, the person behind the blog, is happy to give it away. 

They linked to an app called Dithermark, which I immediately bookmarked and then started playing around with. You can see some examples in the post and I feel certain there will be more, so my appreciation to both Loren and whoever 's behind the app.

And finally, some music. This Blaugust has been notable for being the first I can remember in which several of the blogs are mainly or wholly about music. I'm not sure whose social media outreach brought them in but they're a very welcome addition.

I've learned a couple of things from following the various musical bloggers these past couple of weeks. Firstly, my fantasy of having a blog where I post a new tune every day is probably viable. One song a day, I mean. More than that is too much. And secondly, if you're going to make your blog a discovery-point for music, you probably ought to supply links to a variety of platforms where readers can hear it.

I am 100% guilty of not doing this myself and I'm probably not going to change but if you only link to, say, YouTube, as I do, you're making an assumption that everyone uses that platform. And they do, don't they? Just like everyone uses Spotify. Except I don't use Spotify, so I never click links that go there. And Spotify is most definitely not being appreciated by me, not today or any at other time.

Soundcloud I very much do appreciate but unfortunately, whenever I click on links to songs hosted there, the volume is earsplitting and there never seems to be any way to change it, so I've learned through operant conditioning not to do it. Bandcamp, which I also appreciate, is fine but fiddly, which means I tend not to bother with them, either. 

Because of all that, most of which is entirely my own fault, the musical blog this Blaugust that I've spent most time on has been the African Music Forum. I know next to nothing about African music. I saw Prince Nico Mbarga play live at the first ever WOMAD festival and later I saw Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba at the Ashton Court Free Festival but that's about the extent of my experience.

It's been fun to be exposed to what feels like a random sampling of a vast warehouse of musical treasure every day. I don't listen to all of the selections but the ones I've cherry-picked have been great. Favorites so far have been Dr. Footswitch and Black Disco. 

AMF is exemplary in including multiple options for listening but it also always leads with a video from YouTube, which is why I've had so much fun with it. I'm so lazy!

And finally, since we're being musical, I just want to shout out a final Blaugust contributor, Wavelengths. I don't generally listen to podcasts and I haven't been listening to this one but I do read podcast blogs and this is a good one. 

I enjoyed the post on the PSP, a device I always wished I'd owned when it was in vogue and which, having read this, I still would like to try, but mostly I would like to thank them for bringing to my attention the existence of a full-length album by Ninajirachi. She turned up on one of my What I've Been Listening To Lately posts not that long ago but I don't believe I'm currently subscribed to her YouTube channel, so the release of her album "I Love My Computer" had passed me by. 

I'm sure I'd have caught up with it sooner or later but thanks to Wavelengths it was sooner. I listened to the whole thing yesterday and it's great. It almost fills that gap left by the unexplained disappearance of Superorganism. Whatever did happen to them, anyway?

That's my round of applause for Blaugust bloggers done for now but it might only be round one. This has been a very good Blaugust for me in terms of finding new voices to listen to, by no means all of which have I mentioned here today. I'm saving that for the final "Lessons Learned" week. 

Normally I find lists of which blogs people liked best in Blaugust a little uncomfortable - you just know everyone who reads them is looking for their own name and feeling at least a little disappointed when they don't find it - but this time I do have several clear favorites, who I will definitely be continuing to follow after the event ends, so it seems a bit ingenuous not to admit it.

I may also do another CAW post on a few non-blogging favorites, too, if only to prove there is a world outside Blaugust. 

Sometimes it's hard to remember. 

Hello Tiger, Wherever You Are

I'm still digging through my archives (Read: unsorted piles of papers stuffed into cupboards, blanket trunks, suitcases under the bed and any shelf space not already fully occupied by comics and books.) in search of the zines I produced during the eighties and nineties. So far I've found... some of them.

How many there were and how many remain to be found is an open question. I can't remember when I joined BAPA although since I first met many of the people who later went on to be mainstays of the cult project while I was still at university and I graduated in 1981 or 1982 (You'd think I'd remember but I don't.) and I didn't quit the apa until pretty close to the millennium, I guess I must have been in it for more than a decade, possibly quite a lot more.

The mailing frequency was mainly, if not entirely, bi-monthly and I doubt I missed many mailings. I also frequently submitted more than one zine at a time so that suggests I must have produced somewhere between sixty and a hundred zines. So far I've found less than half the low end of that estimate. 

Given that I'm certain I'd never have knowingly disposed of any of them, they almost have to be somewhere in the house. My fear is that they're in the loft. I put a lot of stuff up there when we moved in, thirty years ago and I had trouble getting up there even then. Access is through a very small trap door in the ceiling of the bathroom and I haven't attempted it for about ten years. I'm not keen to try it now but I suppose at some point I'll have to.

But not today. Today I managed to find all nine issues of the other long-form fiction piece I was working on back in the nineties, which goes by the provisional title An Outside View. I also found a separate zine in which I go on at some length about how it's finished and the next stage is to submit it to publishers. 

All the covers. Not as well-preserved as the Final Line ones.

I don't sound at all keen and my estimate of my chances of attracting any kind of interest is highly pessimistic. In the end, I never did send it anywhere.

But... I do still have the revised, completed text on floppy disc and by some miracle the other day I managed to get Windows 10 to read that disc and copy it onto hard drive. That means I now have both of them digitized in a modern, useable format. One is 45,000 words and incomplete, the other 55,000 and done.

I've re-read the unfinished one and I love it. I thought it was great at the time and I'm very pleased to say that it completely stands up to both my memory of it and my original estimation. That said, the main reason I love it is because it's exactly the sort of prose I loved to read then and love to read now and judging by the careers of the authors I know who write that way, it is a niche market to say the least. 

The next step is to re-read the other one. The finished one. That one I was not all that happy with back when I wrote it so it'll be interesting to see if I like it any better now. I suspect I might.

Either way, I have no intention of reviving my plan to send it to anyone for consideration. That seems like very pre-millennial thinking. If I do anything, I'll either get it converted into an e-book or just host it online somewhere. No rush. It's waited three decades, it can wait a bit longer.

More interesting for the blog, today I found an old zine from the late '90s where I go on a bit about the prospects of doing exactly what I just mentioned, namely putting the work up online. That appears to have been a possibility I was considering even in 1998. 

I also speculate about the entire apa moving online and suggest I would prefer it if it did. Given my recent comments about what we've missed by moving away from the scissors and paste, that does seem like some heavy-handed ironic foreshadowing. 

I also came across some reviews of gigs I'd been to that I rather like. Four separate evenings out get the treatment and three of them I remember fairly clearly. One, though, I had absolutely no memory of whatsoever (Although it has come back to me a bit since reading the review.)

If you'd asked me if I'd ever seen Prolapse or Urusei Yatsura I'd have said I'd never even heard of either of them, far less seen them perform. Shows how much I know.

Hello Tiger - Urusei Yatsura

That's them. And that's the single of theirs I'd bought that made me think they were worth going to see live. It's pretty good, isn't it?

I guess we should take a look at Prolapse, too. Especially since - spoiler! - it seems I liked them better on the night. Hmm. And quite possibly still do.

And here's the proof. (Well, down there's the proof. Blogger didn't want to center it properly, so I had to move it. Never had that problem with Spray Mount.)

If the image is too small to read, never fear. It's embedded in the full text as transcribed the truly excellent Image To Text Converter. 

 
Prolapse/Urusei Yatsura - Bristol

I meant to see UY last year but didn't get round to it. I bought the sharp recent single, Hello Tiger, and thought I'd better make more of an effort. It was only a day or two before the gig that I realised Prolapse were supporting. I remember Andy Roberts talking them up and taking me to task for calling them "ordinary". By now I couldn't even remember what they sounded like.

There was a third band on the bill, Magoo, who I'd never heard of, so I reckoned I'd be safe getting there about nine. When I arrived the place was packed and there was a band on stage, nondescript, no singer. I guessed it would be Magoo and put them down as Mogwai wannabes. They finished the number (can't call an instrumental a song, can you?) and two singers walked on.

One, male, was tall, had out-of-control curly dark hair, looked raddled, old and maybe a little touched. He prowled and stalked and fiddled with the mike stand. The other, female, was small, blonde and picture-perfect. They began a fast, staccatto attack and didn't let up for half an hour. 

I liked them, then I liked them a lot. It was obvious who they were like. They were like the Fall, like the Beatnik Filmstars are like the Fall - a friendly Fall, one that doesn't take itself so very seriously. They were also not unlike the Gang of Four. The musicians were apparently from the same institute of higher education as the Replicants, while the male singer could have been the Replicants' singer's edgier, dissolute brother. Neither he nor the girl could sing, or, if they could, chose not to: Mostly, one would talk while the other shouted. It worked. The girl looked surrealistically pristine centre-stage, while her co-singer messed with her hair, put her in a headlock, tried to wind the microphone cord round her head. She looked pissed off, but didn't try to stop him.

Thirty minutes and they were gone. They were better than the Fall, last time I saw them. I wished they could have played longer.

A fast change-over and Urusei Yatsura push past me in the middle of the hall as they come to the stage from the back of the crowd. (Bands do this occasionally at the Fleece, but since most of them don't, I assume it's an affectation). They look like an indie band - there's a curly haired one, a lanky, limp-haired one, a dark-haired girl, a drummer. I'm looking forward to this...

After four numbers I'm seriously considering going home. They are pedestrian, unoriginal, dull. The limp-haired guitarist sings lead and he isn't very good. The songs plod. Even the band don't look interested. I decide to wait for the single, at least. Then the curly-haired guitarist takes lead vocals, and it's as if a different band has come on. Suddenly the air crackles with energy, the lyrics are clear and the guitars are electric. At the front, the crowd begins to move, to surge and leap. The lanky guitarist moves to backing vocals for the rest of the set and every song is fun again. The curly haired singer has a knack of sounding as though he's singing through a distortion pedal even though he's not.

People are stage diving and crowd-surfing which, in the Fleece, is near-suicidal. "We should be paying to watch you!" the lanky guitarist comments.

They end with a number where the curly guitarist jams a drumstick behind the strings and beats it with another until the strings snap. Then they exit swiftly through the audience, pushing past me again while the crowd goes wild.

No-one plays encores anymore, it seems.

And since I'm in a bit of a rush this evening, I'll leave it there for now. There may well be more from the archive, especially if I run short of ideas. 

Dog Days And Giveaways

No, not Beryl again. Prime Gaming Giveaways, which seem like they're really becalmed in the doldrums of late summer this year.

Remember when I said I was going to stop reporting on these every month? Well, it's just too easy a post to miss. Also, it's nice to have regular features. On a blog, I mean. Not on your face. We can't all be Sydney Sweeney, which is probably just as well.

So, what have we Prime Gamers got to look forward this month? So far, not a lot. But then, we haven't hit Second Thursday yet.  

Week One nets us a couple of big fish and tiddler. The big fish are well past their prime, but I imagine there's still some good eating in them...

Look, I'm just going throw that metaphor back into the lake, if it's alright with everyone. Or even if it's not. I mean, I bet I could keep the fish-related imagery going all through the post because fish puns are like shooting a hippopotamus in a barrel (How he got into a barrel I don't know - © Groucho Marx.) But I'll restrain myself (Insert dad joke here...)

Five paragraphs in and I've said nothing. Beat that, ChatGPT!

Ahem. Getting back to the point. 

The three games in question are

Sid Meier’s Civilization® III Complete 

Sometimes it feels like I've played the Civilization series because I've read so much about it on blogs, especially TAGN, but I never have. I don't believe I've ever played any 4X games. I don't even know why they're called "4X". I could look it up but I'm not going to. I probably won't start with this one either but it's not out of the question so I'll take it. It's currently 80% off on Steam anyway, making it less than a pound to buy, so it's not much of a bargain, even for free. 

THIEF: Definitive Edition 

I have a feeling Thief was already in the offer from last month but I'm too lazy to check. I seem to remember mentioning before that I dislike stealth games and Thief is the reason why. I bought it when it came out - the box is still in the house somewhere, with the disc still in it. I really did not get on with it at all. Too hard but worse, too boring. Pass. Also, since I'm just noticing how very low-value this month's offer is, I'll mention this is just £3, at full price, on GOG...

The Academy: The First Riddle.  

As for The Academy, it's "a puzzle-packed adventure set in a school filled with mystery", which sounds  like something I'd play if I was in the market for a cheap-ass Harry Potter knock-off, which I might be now the real thing is off limits. I was planning on claiming it but it wasn't showing up on my Prime Gaming page so I had a closer look and guess what? I already claimed it back in March 2021! It may be twice the price of Thief on Steam but this is the second time they've given it away. At least. Another non-bargain, then.

So much for this week. What's upcoming? And I'm only going to talk about the interesting ones. If you want the full line-up, it's on the blog.

Not this blog. This blog. 

Two days from today, on Thursday 14th, you can make your choice from 

FATE: The Traitor Soul - Not the first FATE game that's come up on Prime, I think. There was one last month. Looks like they're giving the whole series away. They do a lot of that. "Very Positive" Steam rating. Suppose I'll take it.

Tin Hearts - Compared to Lemmings in the Prime blog, which is worrying. I was addicted to Lemmings for a while. Everyone was. Not sure I want to go there again. It doesn't actually look anything like Lemmings, though. It looks mildly interesting. Might as well claim it.

Filthy Animals -Not to be confused with the movie of the same name. Or the "Australian supergroup".  A "heist simulator" apparently. Is that a recognized genre? Looks mildly amusing but only "mostly positive" on Steam. Probably going to end up claiming it then forever afterwards forgetting I own it.

Not in the running: Necroking.

 And a week after that, on the 21st, because this month Thursdays are all a handy multiple of seven...

Labyrinth City: Pierre the Maze Detective - I was sure this was going to be one of those tedious hidden object games Prime likes to use as filler but it turns out it's an actual game and a weird one. It's like a Where's Wally book come to life. (Where's Waldo if you prefer. Or Where's any other pop culture phenomenon you care to name - Taylor Swift, Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog... we have a whole shelf of them at work.) So I guess it is a hidden object game but a much more original one than usual. Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam. I'll give it a go.

Silver Box Classics - Four very, very old games but possibly of some interest still. "This collection brings back a gathering of adaptations of the events in the first four Dragonlance role-playing modules, at the beginning of the War of the Lance. These were the first games that brought the world of D&D to PC."  Dragonlance was my era. AD&D rather than D&D as it once was and later reverted to being. I read and reviewed the first Dragonlance novel when it came out. Didn't think much of it as I recall. Never read any of the others. I'll claim this but looking at the screenshots on Steam (Where it has a Positive rating from just eleven reviews.) I can't imagine playing any of the games. Or not for long, anyway.

It's just those two for the third week. I didn't skip any. On to the last week, starting on the 28th.

... aaaaaand nothing. That's an anti-climax, isn't it? I mean, there are games being given away in the final week of August. They're just not anything I'd consider claiming and I said I wasn't going to preview stuff I wasn't interested in. 

Okay, two of them are things I theoretically might have been interested in. One's a sort of dungeon crawler and the other's yet another D&D game, but the first is a sequel to a game I wasn't bothered about the first time around and the other looks older than gaming itself. It's embarrassing in a way, the kind of games Prime is trying to pass off as interesting or exciting these days.

Oh, alright, I'll do you the links...

Heroes of Loot 2

Fantasy Empires

Happy now?

And the final game, which I am not going to link because it only encourages them, is a hidden object game called City Legends: The Ghost of Misty Hill. The Collector’s Edition no less, although I wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with anyone who actually collects these things.

That's the lot for August. Roll on September, eh?

EverQuest Online Anemoia

This morning I realized a lifelong ambition. Alright, not lifelong. Maybe a decade? I've had it for a while, anyway.

As plenty of people reading this will most certainly know, there was once a console version of EverQuest. It was called EverQuest Online Adventures, usually abbreviated to EQOA, and you can read all about it here. 

Or not, because that's a really skimpy Wikipedia article. I'm astonished. If there's one area of human activity that's been heavily over-represented on Wikipedia ever since it started, it has to be video games.

Still, it covers the basics, which is that the game launched in 2003 and closed down in 2012. Nine years isn't terrible but by MMORPG standards it's a blink. That's always going to be more of an issue with console games than on PC, I guess, thanks to the need to remake them for each new hardware generation at the same time the old generation is becoming obsolete, taking much of the playerbase with it. 

Or maybe that's not how it works. How would I know? The last console I owned was an Atari 2600. I vaguely knew the game was around while it was up and running so it was of notional interest to me at best. I sure wasn't about to buy a PS2 just to try it.

At some point, though, I started to get curious about what I'd missed. Not just with EQOA but all kinds of EverQuest-associated spin-offs and side projects I'd paid no attention to while I was playing the real thing. I bought almost all the EQ RPG and EQII RPG books, one of the comics, the Lords of EverQuest offline game... I even dabbled with the possibilities of playing the EQMac version, which was still running at the time.

The one I really wanted to play, though, was EQOA, which I'd heard good things about and which everyone who'd played it seemed to remember with great affection. There was an emulator project called Project: Return Home that I kept an eye on for a while - I have the website bookmarked and I'm in the Discord, although I rarely remember to look at either of them - but I wandered off and mostly forgot about the emulator before anything much got going.

And somehow I managed to miss completely that there was a fully-functioning emulator out there, with a public server that's been up and running for a while. It's called Sandstorm and I spotted a post on MassivelyOP about it last night, just before I was about to turn off the laptop and go to sleep. It seems they've just added fishing and that's news...

Well, it was sure news to me, anyway, even though it seems MOP have been reporting on the "Rogue Server" for at least a year. Shows how much attention I've been paying. It was after midnight when I read that post and I was excited enough to start downloading the files on the laptop immediately before I came to my senses and postponed the attempt 'til morning. 

After I'd had breakfast and walked Beryl and Mrs Bhagpuss had gone off to do some grandchild-minding, I set to the daunting task of figuring out what needed to be done to get the thing working. On the desktop this time.

And it wasn't that hard. I found the Sandstorm homepage, downloaded the patch that gets you access to the server, then downloaded the  PCSX2 emulator that lets you mimic a Playstation 2 on your Windows PC. Probably should have done those two the other way round...

 

After that I pretty much followed the instructions, interspersed with watching a YouTube How To video and downloading some stuff I apparently wasn't supposed to. All of that would have taken me about half an hour, tops, if one of the downloads hadn't slowed to a crawl. So I went and had a bath and did some chores and came back an hour later and... it was still downloading. 

But only for another couple of minutes, thankfully. I carried on with the Swedish furniture approach to computing, slotting file a into folder b as instructed, until I had what looked like a working PS2 emulator with one game installed - EverQuest Online Adventures. 

I double-clicked and up came the old, familiar tune. Seems EQOA used the exact same version of the theme as the original. I was soooo excited!

I hit Play and... it didn't work. No network connection. 

Fixing that took about twenty minutes and if you asked me how I fixed it, I wouldn't be able to tell you. That's been my experience for most of the time I've been doing stuff like this. I know enough to muddle through but not enough to know why something I've done has fixed a problem I didn't understand to begin with.

 

It's results that count, though, isn't it? Not like anyone's going to ask me to show my workings. And it's amazing how often googling fixes, applying them then fiddling about with them when they don't work seems to get the job done in the end. I ticked and unticked a lot of boxes and eventually something must have shaken loose because the greyed-out option to add a network connection colored up and I was able to work through the new set of instructions and make contact with the Sandstorm server.

And there I was at character creation. Quite a moment. And very interesting for an EQ player. Everything was the just same but not really.

For example, there's a class called "Alchemist" that doesn't exist in PCEQ. I was very tempted to try that first but then it seemed like it would be better to go with something familiar just to get the hang of things so I picked a Gnome Magician. If there's one class/race combo I ought to know how to play, it's that.

I was very impressed with character creation. In 2003, PS2 graphics would have been aesthetically superior to PC, I imagine, but even if that's not generically true, the EQOA character models are a lot prettier to look at than their contemporary EQ equivalents. I really liked the tall, pointed hat and one of the facial options even came with a huge pair of spectacles.

There were plenty of helpful descriptions, too. A lot more helpful than I remember anything being in EQ back then. That happy trend continued throughout the time I played, which ended up being an hour or so, with plenty of genuinely helpful tutorial tips and explanations.

And I needed all the help I could get, I can tell you. Klick`Anon, the EQOA analog of EQ's Klak`Anon, is a lot flatter and easier to navigate than the original but it's still a fricken' maze and as far as I can tell EQOA has no in-game map. 

I needed one because the first quest I got was from my guildmaster, who wanted me to go find a tailor called Nokar and get a student's uniform. That took me about forty minutes, most of which was aimless wandering and the rest looking the quest up on the web.

My research told me Nokar liked to hang out in the Marketplace, which would have been more helpful if there were any signposts or notices in Klak to tell me where the Marketplace was. By then, I had already spoken to several merchants as I blundered in and out of their stores, including at least three tailors, none of whom were called Nokar. I figured he must be in the area somewhere but I just couldn't see the blasted gnome.

I was using a controller because as far as I can tell there's no other option and it didn't help that the on-screen prompts about which buttons to press didn't match the ones on my generic accessory. It kept saying Press X when in my case X did nothing and what I should have been pressing was A. 

After a while that all sorted itself out as my brain began to translate the instructions to the language of my controller without my having to think about it. I figured out I could mash R1 to cycle through all the nearest interactables just like hitting TAB in Old EverQuest, so I ran around the dark streets of the clockwork city randomly targeting gnomes until finally Nokar showed up on my radar.

 

Luckily, by then I'd also read that you had to BUY the robe off and thank Tunare I had because it was way down the list of things he had for sale and I would never have thought to scroll down that far. I really expected him to know about my quest and just give the damn thing to me for the asking. At least he didn't want any money, which was just as well because I didn't have any.

Before I found him I had a few unscheduled adventures. There's a really annoying bridge over the river that runs right through the middle of town that has a gaping hole in the middle. I jumped over it the first time but on the way back I fell through and landed in the river. 

I couldn't figure out how to swim upwards to get my head out of the water and I couldn't find a way to get out. My breath meter was ticking slowly down to my inevitable death by drowning and I'd reconciled myself to finding out how the death mechanics worked the hard way, when I miraculously swam up a ramp with about two seconds of air left and found myself back on dry land.

That wasn't the only time I fell. I came out of a building one time and stepped in some hole or other to find myself in what I guess must have been the bad part of town, where the Rogues hang out. Probably the Necromancers too, if Klick is anything like Klak. 

One nice thing about EQOA compared to its originator is the naming conventions for NPCs seem to be a lot more comprehensible. Half the NPCs in regular Norrath seem to have been named in the same way gold farmers used to name their throwaways. In truth, they aren't - their names follow some arcane lore rules - but the effect is much the same. 

 

In EQOA, they all have proper names that someone clearly spent some time thinking up. Well, the gnomes do anyway. Can't speak for any of the other races. I found it made the place feel quite cheery.

Before I got my student uniform, I even managed to get a bit of fighting in. My explorations took me out of the city into what I presume must be Steamfont. It was hard to be sure because it was the middle of night. It's always the middle of the night in every game somehow, especially when I want to take screenshots. 

Leaving the safety of the town gave me the chance to see how much more thought had gone into making the game user-friendly than ever went into EQ itself. As soon as I emerged from the city gates a pop-up appeared to warn me I was going to have to think about combat and asking me if I'd like to learn how to equip a weapon.

I said I would and the game proceeded to walk me through Inventory and all the associated tabs, where to find my abilities, how to equip spells and weapons, how to con mobs, how to attack and - crucially - how to run away. I found it all very helpful, particularly when it told me what buttons to press on the controller, even if they weren't always the same buttons I had to press on my controller. At least I knew what I was looking for.

 

Since I was there I thought I might as well have a bash at fighting something. Literally a bash, since I had a stick in my hand. I conned a few things and the lowest was a white (Even) con spider. I chased it and hit it and killed it in a couple of blows. 

Charged up with my victory and figuring if a white con was that easy, how hard could a yellow con be, I took on a yellow-con rat and got my chance to discover how the death mechanic worked after all. I think I did two points of damage to the rat before it killed me in three hits. It'll be a different story when I get my pet. Well, I hope it will...

And I will, too. Get my pet. Now I've finally made my way into this version of Norrath I'm reasonably confident I'll hang around for a while. I've been waiting long enough to visit, after all.

There seemed to be quite a lot of activity. Chat was busy all the time I was there and it was far from peak. My next quest is to find Spiritmaster Lacy and Coachman Rizkar, both of whom I bumped into while I was looking for Nokar. 

The question is, will I ever be able to find them again? 

Some Puppy Walking

Beryl the dog is three and a half years old now, give or take. Since she was very first allowed to go out of the house, after her puppy shots had done whatever it is they do, she's been going to stay with our friend every second Saturday morning, which is the only time both Mrs Bhagpuss and I are both at work at the same time.

Yesterday, said friend gave us a copy of all the old videos and photos she took of Beryl back when she was little. It was a lot!

I've just had a look through them all and it seemed like it would save me the trouble of writing a post be fun to put one up on the blog. 

My first choice was one of Beryl chewing her lamby, a teething ring shaped (Vaguely.) like a lamb that she still very occasionally plays with. I picked that one mostly because it was one of the few in landscape format.

Obviously, my next thought was music. In Ye Olden Dayes I'd have had to look around for a suitable song, which would be fun but would probably have taken me most of the rest of the day. 

Thanks to the magic of world-destroying AI, and at the mere expense of all future life on the planet, it's now simplicity itself to generate a suitable three-minute backing track to go with a three-year old video of a dog going for a walk, to post on a blog that maybe at most a couple of hundred people will ever see, most of whom will never even bother to watch the video, while half of even those few that do will most likely turn the sound down so they don't have to listen to it.

I mean, that's a fair trade-off, isn't it? 

So I went to Suno, copy-pasted a prompt I'd used a few times to fair success, set the option to "Instrumental" (Because if there's one thing I really don't want Suno doing, it's writing any of its terrible lyrics...), named the track "Puppydog Chewtoy" and let the AI get on with it.

The first pair were awful. I'd foolishly but intentionally left the sliders at default (50% Weirdness, 50% Style Influence). I thought it might be "interesting". I was wrong. It might as well say "Do you want to listen to this or shall I put it straight in the trash?". Which is what I did.

I reset the sliders to what I always use for my own songs - 0% Weirdness, 100% Style Influence. (When I'm uploading my own stuff there's a third slider for Audio Influence, which I also set at 100% so as to have the singer follow my exact melody and phrasing, instead of trying to impersonate Mariah Carey or the frontman of some hair metal band, which seems to be the AI's happy place. And even then I often have to add "No shrieking, yelling, diva performances" in the verboten box.)

The second version was infinitely superior. Well, one of the two takes, anyway. I know tastes vary but I can listen to this kind of two chord lo-fi chugging for literally hours at a stretch. I could do without the drummer going batshit crazy on the crash cymbals every minute or so but it's a small price to pay for the satisfaction of the churn before and after.

I fired up good old Windows Movie Maker, which still does a job even though I have plenty of better options, loaded in the clip, added the music and... it was way too short. The tune is a second shy of five minutes. The clip was fifty seconds. 

I tried adding a couple more clips but it didn't really work and anyway it was getting to be too much like work so I had a rethink. The longest clip was also one of the best so I loaded that instead and tried again. 

And stap me if the music wasn't an all but perfect fit. Serendipity is king. Or queen. Or non-gender-specific regal rank. Twice as long as it needed to be but that was fine. I just faded it in and out and bingo! Done. 

I was going to host it directly on Blogger, for which there's an option that I rarely use. Now I remember why. It has a 100Mb limit. This was only just over the limit but rather than fiddle about with it to get it dow to size, I just uploaded it to my YouTube channel and linked it from there. (Beryl actually has her own YouTube channel but I'd have had to change Google IDs and all sorts so I pretended I'd forgotten about it.) Also, the tune now had a totally irrelevant name but I fixed that by calling it something entirely different when I uploaded it.

I think it turned out pretty well for a half-assed, low-effort, slacker affair. And now you can enjoy it, too. If you like puppies. And soulless, generic indie drone-rock made by robots.

But who doesn't, eh?  

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post

Just the music, made as described. 

The full prompt was "Lo-fi indie drone-pop with dreampop influences layered with simple drums and quiet drone bass, Stacked fuzzed guitars, soaked in rich drone effects, create a dense, evolving texture with dual vocals, twin vocals, two singers, rich timbre baritone male vocals, soft, cute female vocals float delicately above,"  

As you can see, for an instrumental, most of that is doing nothing at all. I was just too lazy to take it out (And curious to see if Suno would add humming or wordless vocals. It did not, sadly.)

After the first truly awful results I also added the negative prompt "lounge, loungecore, easy listening". In my experience, Suno frequently completely ignores negative prompts. Sometimes I think asking it not to do something actively encourages it. In this case, though, it worked. No hint of loungecore to be heard.

Not A Saggy, Old Cloth Cat Then?

I wouldn't normally post today but since it's Blaugust and since Wilhelm at TAGN gave me the idea for a post where I barely have to do anything at all...

I guess it's probably still Who The Heck Are You? week in Blaugust. I haven't checked but we haven't been going seven days yet, have we? It's all a bit of a blur. Anyway, Wilhelm reminded me of that thing a few people around this corner of the blogosphere were doing a year or two back, when AI was still quaint and amusing, which was to play Ask The AIs. 

You'd ask them some really obvious questions and then have a good laugh at the answers. It was a fun game for a while but sadly it couldn't last.

There's a blog in my blog roll called AI Weirdness that used to do nothing but demonstrate the bizarre quirkiness of LLMs and Image Generators. It's been very, very quiet for a long time but by chance Janelle Shane, who's blog it is, posted something yesterday.

As evidenced by Janelle's long silence, broken only by sporadic posts months apart, the AIs stopped behaving like funny little toddlers and started giving boringly straight replies. They still hallucinate, of course, but rarely in an amusing way. 

These days, I only ask the LLMs something if I think they're going to give me a useful reply, by which I mean if I want them to do something I already know they're good at. I certainly never ask them for anything to which I don't already know most of the answer. It's more like getting them to go fetch the files than asking them to do primary research.

They're very good at generating prompts for other AI apps, for example. If you want to get a good result out of an image or music generator it often pays to ask an LLM to frame the prompt for you. They speak the same language, I guess.

One thing that used to be amusing was to ask an LLM to tell you who you were. Or who another blogger was. That's what Wilhelm did and although he wasn't very impressed with the results, they looked to me not dissimilar from something a harried sub-editor might knock up to introduce an article about someone they'd just had to spend five minutes researching in the files.

So I thought I'd ask the three of them - ChatGPT, Gemini and Co-Pilot - who they thought I was. Somewhere in the back pages of this blog is a post where I did the same thing, once before. It might be interesting to compare the results to see if the AIs have gotten any better but that would involve more effort than I plan on putting in on this Saturday evening. Feel free to go look for it yourself if you feel so inclined. There's a search function. Or you could ask an AI to do it for you.

Here are the three responses I got, along with my comments. If anyone would like to have a go, asking about themselves, it'd be fun to get a post-chain going about it. Tried suggesting that last time, too, as I remember. Don't think it got much take-up.

Gemini is the AI I use the most often so let's start there. I've inverted the colors to make it more readable but you may need to expand it to see it properly. I probably should have cut&pasted instead of taking a screenshot.

As you can see, I pre-empted the inevitable by telling all the AIs I was not, in fact, a pink, cloth cat. I had enough of that last time.

I found Gemini's response quite odd. It seems to want to tell me who other people think I am rather than making any definitive judgments of its own. I'm curious as to who these bloggers might have been, who said such complimentary things about me - in quotes, no less. It's certainly true I have been called a "contrarian" in my time but not, as I recall, since I've been blogging. I wonder who said that. Or did Gemini just make it up?

Gemini got the name of the blog right and also mentioned Mrs Bhagpuss, which is an AI first. The final bit about the Fantasy Critic League seems extremely random but it is at least true. Why pick on that out of the thousands of things it could have chosen though? Maybe it wanted one very recent fact?

All in all, not at all bad. Doesn't mention anything I've ever written about except games, but then none of the others do either. I have almost five hundred posts tagged "Music" but no-one cares about those, so why should AIs be any different?

Granddaddy ChatGPT next. I have always found ChatGPT to be less reliable than Gemini but others have reported exactly the opposite. This result really supports my view that this is the most over-rated of the three. Gemini didn't say much but what it did say was right. ChatGPT says more without really adding anything substantive and gets some of the very basic facts completely wrong.

I am very much not well-known in the Elder Scrolls Online community. I think "utterly and completely unknown" would be nearer the mark. I have barely played the game, have fewer than twenty posts tagged either with the full name or ESO, and I haven't mentioned it for many years. My blog is also not called "Bhagpuss's Gaming Blog", which would be a terrible name. 

The rest of it is vague puffery which I'm happy to accept and preen over but which is functionally meaningless. It could fit dozens of gaming bloggers as well or better. 

All in all, quite poor. Worst of the three, as we are about to see.

Co-pilot! You're up! And as you can see, it's a hell of a lot easier to read than the others so points for that. Also for the intro, in which Co-Pilot agrees with me that I am indeed not a fictional cat. I was worried there for a moment.

I can't argue with the dismissive tone as Co-Pilot makes it clear I'm not "a widely recognized public figure" either, although I wasn't claiming to be. And once again I'm quite re-assured to be told I don't appear to be a fictional character. Nice opening.

Even more points for the color, the sub-headings and the bullet-point list. Co-Pilot is crushing it on the style front. 

Better still, every one of those bullet points is correct. It knows I'm using a pseudonym, it gets the name of  the blog right, it names the two games that I've written about most frequently and LotRO isn't a bad third choice. It also specifies MMORPGs rather than just games or gaming, although I don't really write about MMOs all that often these days. I do wonder how long I'd have to go on not really writing about MMOs for that to change. Decades, probably.

Again, I'm hardly the right person to comment on the accuracy of the description of my prose style or my place in whatever "community" Co-Pilot thinks it's spotted, but I wouldn't strenuously argue with any of this. Not even over "nostalgic". 

All in all pretty darn impressive. All the facts correct, most of them relevant and everything laid out beautifully.

I declare Co-Pilot the winner. Shame I don't really use any Microsoft products other than Windows itself, especially not for search. Maybe I should make the effort to use Co-Pilot in future instead of just lazily going back to Gemini every time I have a job fit for an AI.

And since this is supposed to be a quick filler post, I'll stop there. I look forward to seeing anyone else's AI-generated bios but I suspect I might be waiting a while. 

 

Notes on AI Used In This Post

Apart from the LLMs, obviously. Just the top image, then. Produced by Google Imagen 4.0 Fast at NightCafe from the prompt "An AI working hard, researching to write a precis biographical introduction to an article about someone it's never heard of - line art, color". Default settings, short runtime.

If you ask any image generator for a picture of an AI it will always, at least in my experience, give you a robot. I didn't want a robot but I also didn't want to waste any more credits trying to get anything else. Imagen, even the non-pro "fast" version, is relatively expensive (Two credits per image. Some of the models are .5 per image and the results seem just as good to me.)

It's a perfectly serviceable illustration for a post about AI and its limitations but I wouldn't be using it for anything else.