I know it's Wednesday but here's a grab-bag anyway. Why should Fridays have all the fun? All these have been around before but there may have been... developments.
A Stone Rolls Up A Hill...
Let's start with... I want to say a rant but it's more of a whine. Regular readers may (But almost certainly won't.) remember that three weeks ago I dinged 51 in the EverQuest II version of Overseer and immediately posted to complain about how freaking slow it was going. I said then that it had taken me the best part of three months to get there from the mid-40s and that getting to a new season just meant I had to start from scratch all over again.
Well, guess what? Here we are, three weeks later and how far have I got? Not quite halfway through Level 52, that's how far. Impressed? I'm bloody well not!
Getting through 51 was a pain. Since it was a new Season, I was back to just two blue missions, which meant having to log in several times a day to recycle them. Slowly - oh so slowly - I managed to scrape up enough missions to fill out my allotted ten per diem but as I got a few yellow ones, with longer timers and cooldowns, I still had to set them several times a day to maximize my chances of getting more yellow ones.
Eventually - and it seemed like a lot longer than three weeks - I scraped up enough yellow missions that I could justify setting all ten once a day. That doesn't mean I have ten yellows now. That's the dream. No, I have seven and I'm willing to sacrifice three daily slots to blues just so I can log in after breakfast to set and forget.
This is not "playing a game". This is, at best, admin. I don't hate it because stuff like this does at least give some structure to my days, which otherwise might start to feel a little untethered. That's always a danger when you (Semi-)retire. Still, it's hardly what you'd call fun.
As I also think I said last time, I'm unclear on exactly how far I have to go to catch up to where I should be in Overseer. Accurate information is harder to come by than it should be. There is an achievement for hitting 55, though, and another for 61, the latter of which states "Become a Level 61 Overseer to unlock season 7", so I assume I need another nine-and-a-half levels.
Based on how long it took to do the last ten, if I keep this up without missing a day I don't think I can count on being Level 61 by the time the freaking expansion comes out! I always wondered why one of the higher-cost packs included the current Overseer Season as a perk. Not any more!
None of this really causes a problem if you play EQII the way people used to play MMORPGs, by which I mean all the time and obsessively, as though it was a vocation, a job and a religious belief all rolled into one. With that mindset, daily Overseer missions become just one more thing to do on a never-ending list.
It's comforting, in a way, the repetition, which I guess is why people accept it or even welcome it. Certainly saves you having to think of anything else to do. For a game that you're playing casually, though, it makes no sense whatsoever. So why am I doing it?
I guess at some level I must enjoy it. Probably best not to think about it too hard.
Don't You Know Who I Am?
I was simultaneously excited and annoyed yesterday to read the news over at MMOBomb that Neverness To Everness is about to go into closed beta. Excited because NTE is by some margin my most hotly anticipated new game right now. Annoyed because I signed up for testing at the first opportunity and so far I've never heard a word.
That sounds awfully entitled, doesn't it? Why should he think he's going to get an invite? Millions of people sign up for these things. What makes him think he's so special?
Yeah, not that. What annoys me isn't that I haven't gotten into any round of testing so far, it's that I've never had a single communication from Hotta, the company making the game, at all. And that's odd.
Usually, as soon as you sign up for testing, the company behind whatever it is starts to deluge you with promos and news and offers and more sign-ups. The whole reason they offer the places in testing in the first place is to harvest contact details so they can do exactly that. Or so I always thought.
Either I'm wrong or this game's being made by people who think differentl. Or - and this is what really bothers me - my sign-ups never made it through the process at all and I'm not even registered as an potential source of future income.
I said "sign-ups" plural there. You might have spotted it. That's because I already had this worry last time they opened some kind of test. I suspected then that I might already have signed up but I tried again just in case. It didn't entirely seem to work but it wouldn't let me try again so I left it at that. Didn't have much choice, really, other than to sign up under different contact details, something I know from experience would almost certainly come back to bite me in the backside later on.
That's still a possible course of action I might take. Not that there's any real point to any of it, of course. It's a F2P game that I definitely wouldn't put much time into during a testing phase anyway, and it's most likely under NDA so I couldn't even blog about it. So why do I care?
Because I want to play the damn thing! That's why! Even just for a few hours, to satisfy my curiosity and scratch this irritating itch. It's nice to have at least one game I'm actually excited about and it's frustrating to feel locked out, even from the publicity cycle.
You know what? I might just go and sign up again after I finish this. It's not like I'm short of email addresses I could use.
There Can Only Be One... More
People, and I'm one of them, often complain about how there are far too many streaming services these days and how it costs a fortune if you subscribe to all the ones that have something you want to see. My solution, again like a lot of people, from what I hear, has been to drop some of the ones I had been subbing and watch less, rather than to spend even more money adding more.
I put Netflix on Pause last month for a start. I've barely been watching anything since I started making AI music, which is what I do late every evening in the time-slot I used to reserve for watching shows. (Also in the morning and in the afternoon but let's not go there just now.).
I checked with Mrs. Bhagpuss if she was watching anything on Netflix at the moment and she wasn't so it seemed like we were paying to not watch anything on Netflix, which I figured we could probably do for free. A few weeks before that I cancelled Disney+ for the very good reason that we both agreed it was a big disappointment. Everything there I want to watch I've already watched even before it was on the service and the originals and exclusives aren't exciting enough to get me to watch them before I get to a whole load of unwatched shows and movies on services I already have or don't have to pay for.
In place of the two losses there was one addition. Amazon Prime had an excellent offer on Apple+, £3.99 a month for three months. I took that and even with the music pushing everything else aside I have actually used it. I'm watching Murderbot and catching up on Mythic Quest. In fact, those two make up 100% of my viewing right now.
With all that in mind, what would it take me to subscribe to another streaming service? Obviously I'll unpause Netflix at some point, most likely when either Stranger Things or Wednesday arrive, but a completely new one?
This. This will do it. I will, without hesitation, subscribe to Hulu if that's what it takes to watch the Buffy reboot when it happens. If Neverness To Everness is my most hotly-anticipated video game, this is its televisual equivalent.
Want to know the best thing Sarah Michelle Gellar says in that interview? It's not that everyone, dead or alive, will feature in the reboot (If she has her way.). That's fantastic and I'm one hundred per cent behind it but there's something even better than that to look forward to:
“It will be lighter than the last few seasons of the original”
Thank-you! Thank you so much! I've been wanting to do a full rewatch of Buffy for a long time but for once it hasn't been finding the time that's been the problem. It's that I can't summon up the willpower to put myself through all that trauma again.
If there's a longer, bleaker run in a supposedly upbeat, humorous, popular fantasy series I don't really care to know about it. (And nobody better mention Bojack Horseman.) When I was watching Buffy the first time, there were days when I didn't want to hit Play. Even when I really, really wanted to hit Play just to find out what happened next..
I'm not saying I'd like to go back to the Monster of the Week slapstick of the first couple of seasons but damn! There has to be some acceptable mid-point.
Okay, it looks like I've gone on so long about not very much I've taken all my allotted time and space. Which is great! Now I can go have lunch!
The Taste Test
Let's end with a song, like the comedians did, back in the really-not-that-good-after-all old days.
A little while back, Blondshell did an exclusive cover for in-car streaming service Sirius XMU and some kind soul put it up on YouTube. I featured that version here but it cut off just before the end. Checking back to the post (Which just so happens to be the same one I already linked above.) it's also now "Blocked in your country on copyright grounds".
Fortunately, Sirius XMU have officially released official version so I have absolutely no hesitation in sharing it again. Let's hope that's not blocked too. I can't actually tell until I post it.
What's more, the cover is now a highlight of Sabrina's live set, as must be obvious from the audience reaction in the next clip. For an artist of her prominence, she sure does still play some small clubs, doesn't she?
She's playing a club like that in the next city over from where I live in a few months and tickets are still available. I'm thinking about it. Haven't been to a club gig in twenty-five years or so. It was already feeling a little odd when I was in my early 40s so it'd be very weird now.
Of course, it'd be fine if I wanted to see all the same bands I saw back when I was young - everyone who does that is old, onstage and off. Maybe I should do that a few times, just to get back into the rhythm of things before I try seeing anyone I actually want to see. It certainly wouldn't be because I wanted to see any of those old duffers again...
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