Quarter 4 2024 - Pt. 1 Of Who Knows?

OMG! Where to start? Thanks to the advent calendar it's been... let me check... nearly three months since the last non-seasonal music post. Stop that cheering at the back! That's enough time for me to have bookmarked well over a hundred possibles and to have developed several fresh obsessions. And I have done both those things.

Where to start? I dunno. I guess I'll just scroll down the long, long list and see what jumps out. Maybe we'll get lucky and some sort of theme will appear. Don't count on it though.

I suppose, logically, I ought to just junk anything I was listening to longer ago than much before Christmas. This feature is called What I've Been Listening To Lately, after all, not "What I Listened To Once A Couple Of Months Ago And Now Can Barely Even Remember". But then we'd risk missing out on some really good stuff.

Oh the responsibility of it all...

Okay, let's open big.

 You Let My Tyres Down - Tropical Fuck Storm

I have Everett True to thank for this one, again. Most of what he says really annoys me but he does keep coming up with the goods. A five-minute epic that tells you more about life in Australia than you most likely will ever want to know. I have to say that the contemporary crop of Aussie bands, fantastic though many of them are, certainly can't be doing much for the tourist industry down there. 

I wanted to use the rather good video but it's age-restricted so YouTube won't allow embedding. This a great alternative take though.

Parched - Old Mervs

See what I mean? Barely any sea and no beach at all. And where's the Sydney Opera House? I can see all the tags and back-street garages I want right here at home, thank you very much.

So, anyway, that's from my Antipodean Period, which was sometime back at the beginning of November, I think. Shall we have one more? Why not?

The Unguarded Moment - Ruby Fields (The Church cover)

It's a bit clean compared to the grittier original but her grin of relief when she hits the high notes at the end makes it. The Church have to be one of the most underrated bands of all time. If they'd come from the USA or even Scotland they'd be famous the world over but because they're Australian it's all "Who? No, sorry, never heard of them."

Alright, before this turns into an Australian special (And believe me I have the tunes here...) let's switch tracks.

Vampire In The Corner - Magdalena Bay

From Imaginal Disk, an album that sits high in just about every Best Albums Of 2024 list I've seen. This live version doesn't really give much credence to those placings but I wanted to use it for the ridiculous sunflower that reminds me of  Peter Gabriel doing Supper's Ready with Genesis circa 1973. Is that the kind of behavior we want to encourage? I think not!

I was skeptical about the hype but then I took the time to listen to most of the album and now I'm on board with it. I do recommend listening to the studio version or you'll be as mystified about why anyone rates these guys as I was.

LL/STUNN - The Hellp

Looks like we might have run up against a seam of zeitgeist hype. Let's mine it. The Hellp, like Magdalena Bay are/is a duo because aren't/isn't everyone these days? I think they might be tangentially connected to the indie sleaze revival even though they come from the wrong coast. They do like to fill their videos with would-be supermodels so I guess that counts. 

I was introduced to them by the ever-valuable Kieran Press-Reynolds in his review of their album, LL, which I notice does not feature in any 2024 Best Lists whatsoever. Kieran describes their sound as "a wanton mixture of electroclash, ’00s dance pop, and digital hyperactivity". I'll take his word for it. Whatever it is, I like it.

One more bang-up-to-date tune and then we'll spin the wheel again, I think.

Air On A G String - bassvictim

Another KP-R rec, this one from his 2024 list. I did warn you. There's no video for this one, which is probably just as well.

Almost certainly more to come from that source but for now we'll move on.

Wanderer Guide In Taipei - Wayne's So Sad

I've been spending a good deal of time of late, musically-speaking, in what I've always thought of as South-East Asia but which Wikipedia tells me is actually a mix of SEA and plain old East Asia. Bands and even solo artists across the region tend to give themselves the kind of names that make it impossible to resist clicking through. Wayne's So Sad is a fine example, both of the sort of naming convention I find so appealing and the reason curiosity is so often its own reward.

I believe I came across our Wayne by way of one of my stand-out discoveries of recent times, the truly excellent Salty Chick. I think we'd better have something from her next.

鹽焗雞$alty Chick - 今晚好想好想打俾你

According to Google Translate, this one's called "I Really Want To Beat You Tonight". It's from her album, which is definitely called "Sorry I'm A Fuck Girl" so it might even be true. Google translates her name as "Salt Baked Chicken" though, so I wouldn't count on it.

That's Why I Gave Up On Music - Yorushika

Speaking of translations, here's a fine example of why they feel so slippery and treacherous too much of the time. There's a full translation of the lyrics in the YouTube description and since it's on the songwriter's own channel I think we have to accept it as the official version. If you play the video with the subtitles on you get the exact same English lyrics. 

They're bleak to the point of nihilism, making a fantastic contrast with the bubbly, upbeat melody. Try this verse:

"I’ve thought about it, but I still don’t understand why I truly don’t want to get older
Just thinking “Someday I’m going to die” makes my chest feel hollow
“What will I do in the future?”
When I grew up I understood
That I’m not going to do anything at all"

And that's one of the cheerier ones.

Then there's this English Language cover by rachie, who also translated the lyrics. Her version of the same verse goes:

"I’m suddenly taken back to that time
Growing old was the only thing on my mind
Knowing that someday I would die was like a stab in the chest, though I never understood why
“Hey do you know what you’ll be doing one day?”
Passing by the years I knew what I would do one day
I’d be doing nothing at all."

That almost completely loses the existential despair of the original and replaces it with an almost affectionate nostalgic sentimentality. The whole song also takes on a Western pop feel in rachie's hands that's nice enough but which, I'd like to think, anyway, would be unlikely to have attracted the 185m YouTube views of the original.

Then again, rachie's version is closing in a million views so someone likes it. Come to think of it, I like it. I just like the original a lot more.

One more from the East and we'll swap continents, I think.

Blue Nylon Shirts - Thee Michelle Gun Elephant

When it comes to peculiar band names, these guys have you covered. For once, though, there is a vaguely plausible explanation. According to Wikipedia "Their unusual name originated when a friend mispronounced the title of an early jam session recording; featuring cover songs of Thee Headcoats (one of the band's main influences) and from The Damned's album Machine Gun Etiquette."

Thee Headcoats, as I'm sure everyone reading this knows, was Billy Childish's band, or one of them, anyway. I was planning on a conceptual segue here, sliding effortlessly across to a tune I was listening to a week or two ago by some acolyte of the "Medway rennaissance man" as the Guardian once styled him. Unfortunately, I can't remember who it was so that's a bust.

Instead, how about some inauthentic garage rock? That's where Billy made his rep, after all.

Wild Teens - The Incredible Staggers

Another rich source of bizarre names is the ever-rolling garage/surf/psychobilly revival circuit. By the standards of their peers, The Incredible Staggers are conservatively monickered I guess but it's still an odd thing to call yourselves. But then, they seem to be quite an odd bunch.

I suppose we'd better bring this thing to a close about now. Experience tells me more than a dozen tunes in one post is pushing it. Although, frankly, most of these posts start pushing it long before the dozen mark. Whatever "it" might be...

 Boytoy - EQ, Estratosfera, Qiri

You got me! Yes, I did originally click on this because it's by "EQ". So, as they used to say, sue me.

EDM from Argentina. Now we've heard everything. (No, not by a loooooooooooooooong chalk!)

And finally...

Du Hast - Los Colorados (Rammstein cover)

If you only knew how hard I'm trying not to type "And now, something for the ladies!" but that kind of humor won't fly in 2025, so I'll resist. I'm sure there's a name for the specific rhetorical device I just employed to try and get away with having my cake and eating it there but I don't know what it would be. I wasted a good education on parties and drink. 

Also on drugs, speaking of which you can expect a musical special on that very subject soon, since I just noticed I seem to have quite a lot of songs about it. Also a covers post. I have some good ones. And there will probably one or two or even three specials on genres, locales and individuals because I barely scratched the surface of the pile with this set and there's a lot of stuff in there that's just too good to waste.

Other opinions are available but here it's only mine that counts.

Is This thing On?

This is going to be a fairly short post, in part because it's kind of a proof of concept. I'm writing it on my new laptop, instead of my desktop, to see how comfortable it feels. 

So far? It feels pretty good.

When I say "new laptop" I mean, of course, new to me. Have you seen the price if new laptops these days? I have and I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you! 

Refurbished ones, on the other hand... They're really cheap. I paid a little under £200 for this one to get a much higher spec than anything brand-new in a similar price range. To get a similar spec on a new machine would have cost around three times as much. Maybe more.

And this machine is probably about as low-spec as I wanted to go. I don't need a laptop that can run new, AAA games but I would at least like one that play some of the older games in my Steam library. The model I bought is meant mainly for business users, I think. It only has integrated graphics but it should be able to run quite a few of the games I want to play. It's going to be interesting, finding out which ones are playable and which aren't.

Oh, I suppose I ought to say what it is. It's a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T480. The model came out in 2018 and was discontinued in 2021 so it's three-to-six years old, I guess. Somewhere in there. That might not sound great but it's replacing my Dell XPS PP28l, which I bought pretty much when it first came out - in 2008.

And it still works, kinda. Dells do go on and on. I had to replace the Hard Drive a few years back and for about a year now the B,N and Space keys haven't worked, which makes typing fun, but it's fine for web-browsing and watching YouTube and Netflix, which is what I've been using it for. 

Beyond that though, it's so old and feeble it can't even reliably operate as a remote terminal for my desktop. I used to use Splashtop to play games on it but now it just cries if I try. The new one can, though. Perfectly. All part of my cunning plan. 

Because our house is old, the upstairs front room, where I have my P.C., is too cold in the winter while my other hideout, downstairs and also at the front, gets too hot in the summer. Consequently, I've been in the habit of moving up and down with the seasons. 

This year it hasn't really gotten cold enough to force me to shift my PC and associated clutter downstairs but January is predicted to be bitter so I either have to deal with higher heating bills to keep myself warm upstairs or make the effort and move down, even though by now it will only be for about three months. I really don't want the hassle, which is why I've been putting it off.

I was thinking about replacing the ancient Dell anyway, for obvious reasons, and it occurred to me that if I had a laptop that was good enough to write blog posts on and also play some less-taxing games, I ought to be able to "work" and play in any room of the house, all year round.  I could even sit out in the garden in the summer, now I also bought a more powerful router last year. 

If I felt like it I could probably play newer titles, like Wuthering Waves or Once Human, on the laptop using Splashtop, like I used to before the Dell rolled over and begged for mercy. GeForce Now and Luna are possibilities, too.

I spent a good while pondering on which laptop to get. I didn't have a specific budget but I didn't want to spend more than I needed. In the end it was more a matter of deciding what I didn't want than the other way round. 

I didn't want any kind of Chromebook for a start. I didn't want anything running on a processor too weedy to do much more than my Dell, either. I did a lot of research on that and it's amazing how feeble some of the CPUs in brand-new laptops. I guess if you just watch stuff, look stuff up and do your admin, you wouldn't really notice. Some people seem to prefer it that way. If you read the reviews on Amazon, you'll see people almost boasting about how the new machine they just bought can't play any games at all as if somehow that makes them better people.

I also quite liked the idea of being able to open the thing up and swap some components if I wanted, or needed to, later on. Even repair it, within my limited capacity. Not that there's much I can do but I can at least change a battery or swap out a disk drive. Not an option with most of the machines I looked at.

Finally, given the imminent demise of Windows 10, I wanted something Microsoft wouldn't be able to wash their hands of in a few months. Neither my desktop nor Mrs Bhagpuss's meet the criteria for Win11 upgrades (Although they would if I put better CPUs in them, which I might when the time comes.) so in that sense, if in no other, the new laptop would actually be the most up-to-date computer in the house. Always excluding Mrs Bhagpuss's new iPhone 15, I guess...

The T480 I chose came with Windows 11 Pro installed. It has 16GB Ram and an i5 CPU. 8th Gen, whatever that's worth. It also has what's reckoned to be a very good keyboard and after writing this I can confirm it's well above what I'm used to on a laptop, although it's still going to take some getting used to after my mechanical one. Definitely good enough to blog with, anyway, which is the important thing.

Apart from the lack of a dedicated graphics chip, pretty much unavoidable unless I wanted to pay a fortune, the only real thing I don't like is the size of the SSD, which is only 256GB. That seems to be standard for laptops in this price range and some way  above, though. Easy enough to upgrade if I feel it's necessary.

In fact, I've already ordered a 1TB SSD as an add-on but I'm in two minds whether to use it to replace the current one or to put it in an enclosure and use it as an external drive instead. I actually think that might be better for my purposes, given my seeming inability to resist downloading every damn game I see. It'd be nice to keep the drive with the operating system on nice and clean for once.

So much for hardware. Software is another issue altogether. One thing I never remember is just how long it takes to get a new PC set up in the particular way I like it. The Lenovo worked perfectly straight out of the box or at least it did once I'd jumped through Microsoft's hoops, but then came the hours of installing all my favorite apps and changing  endless Windows defaults to eliminate as much of Microsoft's malign influence as possible.

To be fair to MS, it's not so much that there's anything wrong with Edge or Media Player and the rest per se. It's just that other options are so much better. I guess one day I'll have to give up using Firefox, since already there are well-known websites that refuse to recognize it, but until that dark day comes I will keep the faith.

That said, it's ironic that the single biggest problem I've had so far, getting Splashtop running on the laptop, turned out to be precisely because I was using Firefox. Or, more specifically, because the first add-on I always install is No Script. It's an essential protection in my estimation but you do have to remember to whitelist stuff sometimes, or at least toggle it off when you need to. That's how I came to waste those two hours this morning - I forgot I had it installed.

Splashtop is working now and I've tested it with Wuthering Waves and Cloudpunk. Both run perfectly through the remote connection to my PC upstairs with no lag or delay that I can tell. 

Unfortunately, while Wuthering Waves is perfectly playable when my character is stationary or I move her using the keyboard, something is making the point of view spin wildly whenever I use mouselook, which is unfortunate because that's how I move all the time. I'm looking into that but I won't be exploring the new continent on the laptop until I figure out a fix.

Cloudpunk has no such problems. In fact, if anything, I find driving the HOVA a little easier on the laptop, for some reason. Maybe it's the smaller screen or because I have it closer to me. Or maybe I'm just getting the feel of it. 

I played for over an hour this afternoon and had an excellent time. It's a very good game and my suspicions of a deeper, darker narrative beneath the surface are already proving to be well-founded. More on that another day, I'm sure.

Quite possibly more on the new laptop, too. It's going to be a while before I get to grips with all its idiosyncrasies. For example, I couldn't figure out how to take screenshots in Cloudpunk because the default Steam screenshot key, F12, didn't seem to be doing anything. Turns out Lenovo assigns specific functions to the F keys and you have to turn the feature off if you want to use them as God intended. 

All things considered, though, I'm very happy with my new toy. Fingers crossed it carries on behaving itself. It has a year's warranty but I could still do without any problems cropping up that need more of a fix than looking something upon Google or watching a YouTube video.

They All Rolled Over And Two Fell Out : The Steam Winter Sale

Happy New Year everyone! 

And with that out of the way, rest assured this is safe place! There will be no resolutions, predictions, reviews or any other acknowledgment of the change of date. There may be some looking ahead or looking back but nothing that mightn't just as easily crop up in a post here at any time of year.

For example, I'm about to recount my time with this year's Steam Winter Sale, which is only seasonal in the loosest sense of the word. It's still going, by the way, in case you haven't committed. You still have until 10AM Pacific tomorrow to make your mind up. Unless you're reading this after then, of course, in which case I guess you'll have to wait for the next one.

This year, I bought some games in the sale, which might well be the first time ever. It wasn't as as many as it could have been but it was still quite a few for me. 

I took my time over it, too. I had a good look at what was on offer when the sale began and picked out half a dozen likely prospects. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me now but presumably related to me planning some kind of blog post about it, I took a screenshot of my Basket so I can confirm the six games I picked. I'm pretty sure I'd have forgotten the ones I didn't buy already, otherwise.

I can remember how I made my choices though. My thinking went like this:

Divinity Original Sin: played D:OS2 a few years ago and enjoyed it, until it annoyed me and I stopped. Never finished it but I clocked up over ninety hours, making it my sixth most-played game on Steam. It seems a fair bet that I'd get some value out of the original, although you do have to assume the sequel improved on it, so it could feel disappointing in comparison. The deciding factor here, though, was the price. At 90% off it seems positively rude to refuse.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister - Lost Valley: This is DLC for the main game, which I played last year and mostly enjoyed until the very end, when I couldn't beat the final boss. That was fine because I realised I didn't need to anyway, since when you do the game just stops so why even bother? This DLC adds a complete campaign, starting at Level 1 using fresh characters, so it's basically a new game on top of the old one. Reviews are decent and although the discount isn't huge, it was cheap to begin with so why not?

Cloudpunk: Had this on my Wishlist for a while. Not sure when I added it or how I came to hear of it but it very much looks like my sort of thing. It's a cross between NeoCab, which I loved but which apparently took me less than five hours to finish. (Seemed like a lot more but in a good way...) and Cyberpunk 2099, which I really would like to try but is a) still too pricy for me even at 50% off and b) might not run well on my aging PC. 65% is a very attractive discount and again this one wasn't very expensive even at full price.

Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain, Hello Goodboy, Cats and the Other Lives: I added all three of these to my Wishlist after I played their demos at various Next Fests. They've all been on sale before and I haven't succumbed so either the discounts back then weren't great or I don't want to play them as much as all that. 80% on Cats... is very appealing and 65% on Goodboy is pretty sweet. 40% on Penny isn't all that tempting but conversely it's definitely the demo, of the three, that I enjoyed the most.

I am quite good at not rushing to judgment on this sort of thing and the sale does run for a while so I left the six in my basket until after Christmas, then sat down and had another look. In the second round, only Penny Larceny failed to make the cut. I do want to play it but I'm pretty sure I can do better than 40% off - although now I check, that's the best offer there's ever been for the game on Steam so maybe I can't.

I still didn't press the Buy button. I gave it another couple of days for the final thrill of the hunt to dissipate, then I went back a third time. I was about to buy all five when it occured to me that there was one game in the list that I didn't really remember much about: Hello Goodboy. All I could recall was the obvious fact that it had a dog in it. 

That lack of recognition seemed concerning. I could remember quite a lot about both Cats and the Other lives and Penny Larceny so not knowing anything about Hello Goodboy other than what I could deduce from the title and the thumbnail seemed odd. 

So I did a little digging, by which I mean I read some of the Steam Reviews. The common theme among them seemed to be how very short the game was. That made me wonder just how much more entertainment I was likely to get out of the full game than I'd already gotten from the demo. Added to that, it's one of those games where extended gameplay comes from replaying the whole thing several times to see all the different endings, something I almost never do. I pretty much always accept whatever ending I get and move on.

With that new information, I not only took Hello Goodboy out of my basket, I culled it from my Wishlist, too. I should probably go back and do that to a few more games I added after playing Next Fest demos. As I've said a few times, for me there are often quite substantial diminishing returns from full games after I've played the demo. I can be something of a tapas gamer at times.

That left me with the four titles shown above, which I duly purchased, although not without a modicum of confusion as to what I'd actually bought. Somewhat confusingly Solasta: Lost Valley appears on the invoice but doesn't merit it's own spot in my Library, being subsumed as DLC into its parental Solasta tab and I seem to have been gifted not only the listed D:OS - Enhanced Edition but also D:OS Classic as well, which does apear in its own right in the Library. What the difference beteen them might be or why anyone would want both I have no idea and most likely I'll never find out because I'm sure I won't be playing both.

The whole enterprise cost me less than £20, well under my budget, so I may yet add another game or two before the sale ends. On the other hand, there's the small issue of finding the time to play whatever I buy, so maybe not.

On that, I have already made a start, at least. I put an hour and a half into Cloudpunk over the last two evenings. I'm loving it so far but I find it takes too much concentration to stick with for much more than an hour at a stretch. I can see why some reviewers describe it as a chill experience - certainly I haven't had to fight anything yet - but they must be considerably better at flying a hovercar than I am.

More on that one, no doubt, when I get further into the story. So far it seems charmingly episodic but I suspect there's a more robust narrative lurking beneath the surface. Cyberpunk tales are rarely heartwarming, after all.