Nothing Seems To Satisfy

I wasn't going to do anything to commemorate the death of Ozzie Osbourne. But then I didn't have anything else in mind and I hate to skip a day when I'd normally be posting...

And it is true that although I haven't listened to Sabbath for, oh, about half a century and I've never heard any of Ozzie's solo stuff - ever - and I haven't seen even a few seconds of The Osbournes... Black Sabbath was my first favorite band.

Weird but true. For about five minutes (Okay, a year.) when I was in my very early teens, my best friend and I thought Sabbath were the best band we'd ever heard. Of course, we didn't exactly have the breadth or depth of musical experience we'd have by the time were fifteen...

Anyway, I bought Masters of Reality when it came out in 1971 (Meaning I must have been thirteen...) and then backfilled the first two albums, Paranoid and Black Sabbath, which turned out to be very easy to find in my favorite used record store. My pal bought Sabbath IV the following year but by then I'd already moved on to kneel at the feet of the Velvet Underground and the rest of their art-house ilk so heavy metal just wasn't pretentious enough for me any more.

There was no second coming for metal for me, either. I still don't much like any of it. My fling with the heavy stuff was brief and left little impression. While I retain a nostalgic affection for some of the prog bands I liked around the same time (Well, Yes mostly. The rest I can do without.) I can't say I've ever felt the urge to go back and listen to my old Sabbath albums. Which I still have, of course.

There is one song of theirs that I do still listen to, though. It's hard to beat in its field and it seems to stand a little to one side of most of the rest of the Sabs catalog. What's more, it's the only Black Sabbath song I'm likely to hear coming at me down the street from the bunch of buskers who "perform" on weekends, fifty yards from the doorway of the bookshop where I work. (That said, they did take a run at War Pigs once. I bet that didn't put much in the bucket.)

Obviously I'm talking about Paranoid. Let's hear it one more time. 

Paranoid - Black Sabbath

There they are on Top of the Pops in 1970. I don't remember seeing them. It might be very slightly before I started watching the show or maybe I was out that evening. Kicking a ball against a wall, probably. 

I didn't actually realise Paranoid was a Top 40 hit. (Top 30 then, I think, actually... Top 40 came later.) Again, I think it just predates my obsession with the weekly chart rundown. I'm slightly too young to have been there for the start of Ozzie's career and I'm only ten years younger than he was when he died.

There are many covers of Paranoid on YouTube and most of them are like you'd expect. Not all of them, though.

Paranoid - Lonely Sock 

Paranoid - Harp Twins

Paranoid - Cindy Und Bert 

Paranoid (That She Mighteth Be A Witch) 

Starshine Audio

Something there for everyone, I think.

Ozzie famously had a great sense of humor. I hope he'd be amused by at least a couple of those.

Rest easy, Prince of Darkness and thanks for starting me on a lifetime of listening to great music. Even if very little of it was yours.

Five Characters In Search Of An Illustrator

If you're going to carry on reading today's post, I'm afraid you're going to have to indulge me. There's no purpose to it other than for me to create yet one more self-indulgent reflection of myself I can gaze into, lovingly, which seems to be my main occupation these days. Also, it's mostly about AI so that's always welcome, isn't it? Anyway, consider that a trigger warning and act accordingly.

I have mentioned, repeatedly, that I've been spending a lot of time (A lot of time...) working on making artificially-generated music from various organically-generated sources. Most recently, and very definitely most successfully, the source has been a novel I tried to write in the mid-90s. 

It was (Still is, I guess...) called The Final Line and it revolves around a chosen family - not an expression in common use then, I don't think - of four youngish adults and a close friend or two as they deal with the typical concerns of any group of friends in their late twenties or early thirties - death and resurrection leading to demonic possession, mass murder, general mayhem and being hunted to extinction by the provisional wing of the Roman Catholic church. The usual everyday stuff we've all been through, I'm sure.

It's a bit like the plot from This Life grafted onto the characters from Twin Peaks but in an episode of the X-Files, I suppose. It was the nineties, after all. 

It's also the sort of thing that everyone in in my own friend group back then was doing. I don't mean we were all hanging out together, drinking and smoking in the day and going out murdering people at night, well not the last bit anyway. No, I mean the construction of extended narratives focusing on that kind  of behavior. I think at least half a dozen people in the Amateur Press Association I belonged to back then were doing something similar. Maybe more.

I hadn't read my story for a good, long while before I picked it up again a few months ago. I'd run out of songs I'd put down on cassette in the eighties and I was scratching around for something to use to keep my Suno addiction fed. God forbid I should actually have to sit down and write something original. I'm far too old for that.

Johnny Paradigm

It occurred to me I might be able to extract a paragraph here and there from something I'd already written, just to keep the hobby going a while longer. The obsession, I mean. Let's call, it what it is.

Being my own #1 fan, I'd always thought it was good but re-reading it after a long gap I was astonished just how good. As I've often aid, I had no idea at the time how I wrote it other than it involved what I like to think of as a fugue state, like I know what that means. There are many passages I can't imagine having written but apparently I did. I mean, there was no-one else there at the time so it must have been me, right?

I'm the worst person to assess it anyway, so I'll stop going on about it and get on to the point I was going to make. Two points, really. 

First, it turns out descriptive, poetic prose is a really good source for song lyrics. Barely needs tweaking. It took me a while to get into the swing of hacking it up thoroughly enough to make it flow properly but even from the start it was clear it was going to make for much better songs than I used to write, mainly because it forced me out of the usual, rigid, traditional structure I always thought songs demanded. Anyone would think I'd never actually listened to any.

This isn't a post about songwriting or using AI to make music, though, believe it or not. I'll do one of those soon I expect. Or maybe I won't.

The second point about the story was how much of it there was. I never finished the draft that I was embarrassed to call a "novel", which is probably why I'd always thought of it as being quite short but I've now transcribed it I find it comes to more than 35,000 words. 

I haven't done a final word count because I only have it in the seventy or so original pages, as it was published in the apa. I need to proof-read it, edit it and collate it into a single file before I'll have an exact count but it's definitely pushing the accepted boundary of a novella - forty thousand words - and it's not even finished.

I was dreading getting it onto the PC. That would be a lot of typing. Fortunately, this is the 21st century and no-one needs to type anything twice any more. I couldn't find a readable file for the original draft on any of my old floppy disks but it occurred to me there was probably some free website that would turn an image of text into a text file for me. And there was. There is.

There are loads of them in fact but the one I used, the best by far of the several I tried, was the no-frills and proud of it jpgtotext.com. If you ever need to convert a Jpeg into a text file, I thoroughly recommend this extremely simple option. It allows you to upload ten images per day for free, although one day it let me upload twice as many for no apparent reason. If you need more than that, the pricing is extremely cheap but I just did my free allotment every day and had it all done in a couple of weeks.

Cado Babe with Cathy

It produces a very accurate text file in seconds, even from some pretty dodgy thirty-year old photocopies of dot-matrix print-outs. None of the other websites I tried came anywhere close to doing as well. Most of them were next to useless, in fact. Some couldn't read the images at all and those that did garbled so much it would have been quicker to r-type the whole thing than correct the errors in the edit.

Some of those failures claimed to be "AI driven". This seems to me to be a very good example of one of the problems with what we're calling AI these days. Most of it isn't AI at all. I bet those weren't. People slap "AI" on the front of all kinds of apps and programs and utilities that would just have been called algorithms a couple of years ago because they think it's the way to get customers. Get them, maybe, but not keep them. For that, you need a service that works.

The number of songs you can get out of even thirty-five thousand words of prose is finite and I must be getting close to the limit now. I've done over fifty already so I really can't complain. I love almost all of them, too. I listen to them all the time, to the exclusion of just about anything else. How long that will go on will be interesting to find out.

It could be a while. At present, I'm making them so fast I forget the ones I did a while ago, so when I listen to playlists I've made I keep surprising myself. I also have a second, longer, completed novel from the same time that I will almost certainly start mining when I'm done with this one, so I'm good for a while yet. 

Just to make it even less likely I'll stop, Suno recently added a feature that's absolutely perfect for me. It lets you direct the AI to make new songs using only the songs on a given playlist as reference. That means you can control the outcome with a great deal of precision and end up with a whole lot of songs that sound like they were made by the same imaginary people. 

I'd probably never take the headphones off again if the damn thing worked. It's in beta and so far it works just well enough to let me hear how perfect the output would be if it didn't glitch and scratch and skip and pop constantly like a vinyl album someone dropped into a deep fat fryer then tried to play. God willing they get it fixed soon. It's so frustrating it makes me growl.

Working with The Final Line so extensively over the last few weeks, though, has made me keener than I was back when I wrote it to do something with it. What, I'm not sure. These days, it's incredibly easy to self-publish but I'd have to finish the thing for that and the main reason I didn't do that the first time was because I have no idea how it's supposed to end. I have a slightly better idea now though...

Buddy. Last name pending.

Other than actually publishing it, I could put it up on a website or a blog or turn it into an audio book with AI reading it. I did once try to read it myself. I have a couple of chapters on cassette. It's very hard work, though, reading that much prose aloud. No wonder people get AI to do it. 

There was a very revealing article at GamesIndustry.biz yesterday, quoting extensively from voice actor Jane Perry's keynote speech at Develop:Brighton 2025. I recommend reading the whole thing but I was struck by her observation that generative AI has already taken a big bite out of voice actors' potential employment because the profession isn't all about exciting movies and games. A lot of it is less  romantic and most likely quite tedious work on things like "audiobooks, narration, corporate videos, e-learning, localisation".

Leaving aside the enormous amount of very badly voice-acted "localization" I've suffered through in various F2P imports, something for which AI replacement could only come as a blessed relief, that's a pointer to the kind of work that won't just be taken by AI tomorrow but that's already being taken by it today. I believe in the realms of self-publishing, authors quite commonly read their own work if they want to sell an audio version, though, so using AI would only be taking work away from themselves.

It won't be any comfort to anyone who used to make a decent living voicing incredibly boring corporate videos but in this respect AI isn't so different from the endless march of technology through the ages. When I got my first job working for an insurance company back in the early 1980s, if I wanted to send a letter, which was a big part of my job, I had to read it into a Dictaphone, walk down the corridor, hand it in to the woman in charge of the twenty typists sitting in the typing pool then wait a day to get it back, typed up, occasionally with errors that needed a second stroll up the corridor. 

By the time I left that company two or three years later, I had a PC on my desk and I was typing my own letters and printing them out on the printer next to me. The typing pool was gone. Jobs, like games, have their time then leave. Or they would if no-one kept making petitions to stop the flow of entropy. 

One thing I won't be doing is getting ChatGPT to give me some ideas, as Jeromai has been doing with one of his old stories. He's been writing a fascinating account of how he's been getting on, which I recommend to anyone curious about the process.

I'm far too prissy about my own prose to let any AI get its chrome paws on it so I'm stuck with doing it myself. We'll see how that goes. I have no such compunctions about the illustrations, though. I'd like there to be some pictures and I can tell you no-one wants to see anything I'm ever going to draw so it's either pay someone or get an AI to do it.

Cado Babe Under Glass

The idea of paying someone is intriguing. I've seen a few examples of illustrations various bloggers have commissioned and they've been pretty good, by which I mean they seem to realize the intentions of the commission quite accurately. I wouldn't rule that out for the future but for now, while I'm just in the playing around with ideas stage, AI is the inevitable answer to my curiosity about what my characters might look like, outside my head.

I am lucky enough to have one superb illustration already. Back when I was serializing The Final Line in the apa, one of the other members, professional comics artist and colorist Steve Whitaker, now deceased and very much missed, was so taken with one of the characters, he drew a picture of her and gave it to me. I've had it on my wall for thirty years.

This morning, I tried uploading that image as a seed so I could get an AI image generator come up with some variations. The results were not impressive. In fact, they were awful. I should say upfront that I was so annoyed with the first two that popped out, I gave up on the idea immediately, so it's very possible some more effort on my part would have seen some improvements but really I couldn't bear to go on.

Instead, I went back to the good old ways and did some text prompts instead. I wrote some character descriptions, used those as prompts, tweaked them a little as I went along and ended up with a set of images of the five core characters I'm fairly-to-very happy with. You can see those here today.

I won't go through the entire methodology in detail. I may do a separate post about it because I find it interesting even if no-one else does and it would be good to have a record. What I will say here is that I get by far the best results from the cheaper, supposedly less-sophisticated models than the expensive state-of-the-art super versions.

NightCafe is a website I often mention when I'm talking about AI and it's another I very much recommend. It has a generous free option, which is all I've ever needed, but it also regularly hands out free tokens for the upmarket AIs that otherwise require you to subscribe. Not that I recommend those, for the reason I just gave...

NightCafe has always handed out five tokens a day just for logging in but they recently gamified that into something any MMORPG player will immediately recognize as "a daily". Now, you still get a minimum five free tokens a day but you have to "create" something to get them and now you get an RNG roll to see how many tokens you've won. Five is guaranteed but you can get all sorts of numbers above that. And you get a fat reward for completing a "streak". I got 25 tokens for doing seven days in a row recently.

 Because I've been diligently collecting my free tokens every day for ages, I have almost three thousand in the bank. Again very generously, they don't expire, so there's no pressure to use them and I only bother with making AI pictures when I have a reason these days, not for fun like I used to. The fun in doing that wore off a long time ago.

Rachel Sunday and Sheba

I spent about two hours at NightCafe this morning. That's how long it took me to get satisfactory images of five characters. The time wasn't spent evenly across all of them. Looking at the images, all of which are handily stored indefinitely on my account, I see the first character took me just four tries, the second twenty-two, the third five, and the fourth and fifth both four goes each.

Guess which one took four times as long as any of the others? Yep. The one I already had a picture of, done by a human artist. Using that as a starter was a complete disaster but trying to get anything even a tenth as good by creative prompting wasn't much better.

And that's because I had an actual image with which to compare the results. Benchmarking the output of an image generator against a mental image is a lot more forgiving than comparing it to a real, high-quality picture.

Even leaving aside the personal connection, which honestly did color my reaction a little, the hand-drawn image just has something none of the AIs have. Life. It doesn't even look all that much like the character I had in my head back when I created her but ever since Steve handed me his idea of her, that's who she's always been.

Which isn't to say the AI versions of the characters are bad. Not at all, They're pretty good and I'm pleased with them. They're satisfying because I was able to nudge the AI into giving me something that closely resembled the image in my head, though. Steve gave me something he saw in the character and made me see it, too. AIs can't do that. Yet.

Which is why I don't think artists have much to worry about, aesthetically. They're always going to be preferable to and better than AI, at least until AI becomes truly sentient, at which point I would guess it will have better things to do than knock out commercial art samples and pictures of waifu by the gazillion.

At this point the post started to spiral into a general rant about AI and we've surely all had more than enough of those by now. I exercised my right as a human writer and deleted the rest of it. Another thing we can do that AIs can't. Exhibit judgment. 

I'm off to play with that potentially game-changing, practically infuriating new feature in Suno for the rest of the afternoon. Wish my blood-pressure luck!

PS. That's Sally Mandragora at the top, in case you were wondering. 

How Hard Is Too Hard?

I really don't have anything much to talk about today, or nothing most people reading are likely to be interested in, anyway. More like actively annoyed by, I would guess. I left a comment on one of Tipa's posts the other day, to the effect that I'd rather write about AI than gaming most days and I'll add now that I'd rather write about music than either.

When I do write about games here, which I think is still easily the majority of the time, it tends not to be about MMORPGs. Belghast has a thought piece up today that goes some way towards explaining why that might be. 

The idea that MMO developers pay too much attention to the hardcore is far from new, of course. I remember discussions and arguments about it often on blogs like Spouse Aggro and Hardcore Casual, well before I had a blog of my own and I've been blogging since 2011. 

Has it gotten worse, I wonder? I'm not sure. It's easy to forget the pattern of these things.

There was a long period, measured in years, when there seemed to be more complaints within the blogosphere about MMORPGs getting easier than the other way around. The hardcore perspective back then seemed to be that they were fighting a mostly-losing battle against the dumbing-down of the genre, with filthy casuals swarming over the battlements to parade up and down the castle walls, showing off their vanity pets and fancy mounts, rather than learning their rotations and parsing their DPS like real players should.

All of that got muddled up with the Free-to-Play revolution, too, the theory being that if you let anyone in without proving they owned a credit card and were willing to use it, the whole thing would fall apart. Of course, at the same time, the exact same people were complaining bitterly that the F2P hordes were all-too-willing to whip out their credit cards to buy power and advantage in the cash shop...

None of it made much sense then and it makes even less with the benefit of hindsight. But of course, we all see things through our own lens or from the inside of our own silos. Assuming you can see anything out of a silo, that is, which would, were it true, break the metaphor.

Scopique points out in the comment thread to Belghast's post that "there’s the potential that such not-so-hardcore MMOs exist, but they aren’t on your radar for one reason or another". This is a very valid observation, one made all too rarely in my opinion, as we all tend to write as though our experience is somehow universal, something of which I'm as guilty as anyone.

Kay of Kay Talks Games, another blog I believe I picked up in last year's Blaugust (Or possibly an earlier one...) and still read with enjoyment, even though I rarely find cause to mention it here, wrote a very good piece about the problem a while ago. I've been meaning to say something about it ever since but haven't found the opportunity until today

The post is called Gaming Bubbles, which is self-explanatory and I found it particularly interesting since it comes from someone who knows of the genre but generally doesn't play many MMORPGs. I found it particularly telling that she says, of Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online, "Those games have accumulated 26 million and 23 million players, respectively, yet I never really hear about them online unless it’s someone bringing up how disastrous the Fallout 76 launch was."

It's all too easy to assume everyone else is talking abut the same issues we focus on but it's long been my impression that, in what we loosely and not entirely accurately call "the West", very few self-identifying gamers would be able to name more than a handful of MMORPGs, let alone claim to have played any of them. (And if they had, it would inevitably be World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV.)

If you cast the net outside the self-proclaimed "gaming community", I'd bet the question would be met with a blank stare. Both the movie and the infamous South Park episode were so long ago now, I doubt many non-gamers remember WoW exists.

In that context, whether the developers' assumed focus on the hardcore part of the audience is misguided or merely an act of increasingly desperate self-preservation becomes much harder to judge. It's very tempting to think that, were the barriers to entry lowered and the obsession with endgame abandoned, currently uninterested casual gamers would come flocking in but I suspect the result might be somewhat less heart-warming. Or commercially desirable.

There might be little or no increase in interest from the casuals but some of the disgruntled hardcore might leave. Probably for one of the gazillion games that likes to describe itself as "Souls-like". The success of Dark Souls certainly added some fuel to the hardcore argument that everyone wants challenging content as well as giving those who actually do somewhere to go to find it.

One MMORPG company that gets - often grudging - approval these days for being able to hold and serve an audience is Daybreak, particularly in relation to EverQuest, which is still objectively successful, albeit on a small scale, after more than a quarter of a century. It's also frequently cited as a benchmark for difficulty in the genre, even if it isn't anything like as difficult as it once was. 

I don't play much EQ these days but I do play EverQuest II and there you can see the devs trying to balance on a slack rope over a ravine as they attempt to appease the voluble and volatile hardcore, the people who presumably pay most of their bills, while trying to ameliorate the situation for the softer-core crafters, decorators and general casuals, who pay the rest. With the game almost certainly teetering on a financial knife-edge, they really can't afford to piss off any significant demographic to the point where money stops changing hands.

To a greater or lesser extent, I imagine many MMO companies are in similar situations. That explains some of the decision-making, although I also think that game devs en masse are almost bound to be more hardcore than the overwhelming majority of their potential customers. It would be hard for them not to be, really. Wilhelm makes that point in some detail in Bel's comment thread.

And, as has been demonstrated countless times, developers think the broad mass of players in their games are going to find content easier than they do. Also proved by experience is the way the cutting edge of the playerbase will always either find new content too easy or work out some way to trivialize it the developers never imagined.

As Muspel says in the same thread, multiple difficulty settings are always an option. EQII has done a great job of that by literally making every new dungeon come in several flavors, with the same content available for solo and two grades of group, if not raids too. 

That's a welcome approach that I certainly appreciate but it does tend to push players even deeper into their own, ever smaller silos. While it's true that every motorist is also a pedestrian, it's not always true that every raider is a soloist, so not everyone is going to appreciate the effort that's been made to satisfy all tastes.

I don't have a solution for any of this. I don't think anyone does. If they did, they'd presumably be running the biggest, most popular MMORPG out there right now. 

And maybe they are, at that. Looping back to the idea that we don't really look far outside our own comfort zones, I'm occasionally reminded that almost no-one I read ever blogs about some of the biggest MMOs, like Old School Runescape or whichever version of Lineage is in favor these days. For all I know, someone in one of those may be thinking of all of this as a solved problem already.

I kind of doubt it, though. I suspect it falls under the rubric “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. Abraham Lincoln used to get the credit for saying that, which would mean the problem has been around for quite a while, but these days it seems to be accepted that it was first said by John Lydgate, who died in 1451, so we've known about it for a lot longer.

And I fear we're probably stuck with it.

The Games I'm Playing Stay The Same

 

It's now clear to me that Wuthering Waves is an anime I watch, not a game I play. There is the minor inconvenience of having to press the space bar to move the dialog along every so often and the major nuisance of having to stop and fight something once in a while, but fundamentally, I log in when there's a new episode, watch it, then log out until the next one drops. There's a new one next week and I'm looking forward to it in just the way I would if it was a new season of a show I liked.

 

In theory, I ought to be doing much more than just the MSQ. There's a huge, open world, plenty of side-quests and companion stories and a whole raft of activities that would easily occupy my time for hours and hours. But I'm not doing any of them.

 

Instead, any time I feel like playing an anime-style MMORPG, I fire up Crystal of Atlan instead. CoA is nowhere near as good as Wuthering Waves. It doesn't have the storyline, the characters, the graphics or the game design to give WW a run for its money. By comparison it's paper-thin. And yet I keep choosing to play it instead.

 

Partly, as I've said before, it's the sheer number of things to do in Wuthering Waves that puts me off. Apparently you can indeed have too much of a good thing. Mostly, though, it's the way the story is delivered, which does feel extraordinarily like a tv show.

 

It takes me three or four hours each time to get through the new chapter, which is very comparable to the time it takes to watch the eight or ten episodes of a single season of a show. Then, when that's done, there's a month or two to wait before the next chapter, which feels like an accelerated version of the wait for the next season.

 

To complete the comparison, most of the time I really am doing nothing but watching a screen. The amount of interaction required seems to get smaller every time. It really has reached the point now, where I think I'd prefer it if there was an actual show I could watch instead.

 

This morning I sat through the full seven and a half minutes of the trailer for next week's update, Version 2.5, Unfading Melody of Life. Here it is so you can have the pleasure, too.

 

The main story is still the prime focus, insofar as it comes first, but it only takes up two and a half minutes of the run-time. The rest of the trailer, more than twice as long, goes through all the other new stuff that's coming, almost none of which I'm interested in and much of which I don't even understand.

 

I can see there are some changes to Echoes that I'm probably going to have to pay some attention to if and when the difficulty increases, although it's by no means certain that will happen. If anything, the game has gotten easier since I started playing. There's also something called "Special Story Experience" that caught my attention, but it's not explained in any way so I'm just going to have to wait and see if it's relevant to me.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes next and I'll be happy to find out more about Phrolova and the Fractsidus. It's always entertaining when that mysterious organization turns up and causes trouble. Other than that, everything else, I imagine, I can and will ignore. 

 

Over in Crystal of Atlan, I dinged 50 earlier in the week. Only ten more levels to go and I'll be at the cap. I imagine it will happen. Nothing seems to getting much more difficult although I do need to keep upgrading my gear, something I rarely bother to do in Wuthering Waves, so I guess technically CoA is more challenging in terms of combat.

The reverse is very much true when it comes to the story. CoA is very straightforward. It reminds me a little of reading a children's picture-book sometimes, in that there are a lot of declarative statements, simple observations and didactic explanations. Nuance, subtlety and complexity are mostly absent.

 

That goes well with the art style, which also has a picture-book look about it, but the combat is comparatively convoluted, involving a lot of combos and dodging as well as a surprising amount of in-combat interaction with objects in the environment - ringing bells, climbing ladders, leaping on and off moving platforms and the like.

 

Consequently, it feels a lot more like playing a game, which I think may be why I choose it over Wuthering Waves every time I find myself thinking "Hmmm. I'd like to play a game now..." 

 

Falling between the two extremes on my current gaming calendar is Marvel's Midnight Suns. Actually, it doesn't so much fall between them as set them up as two opposite poles between which the player constantly needs to switch. 

 

I can see why there was so much pushback from players at launch. It's quite irritating to have to swap to what is effectively a completely different game every so often just to get to the point where you can go back and carry on playing the game you wanted to be playing in the first place.

 

The way it seems to work - I've only been through one cycle so far - is that you move through the storyline in a pedantically chronological and literal manner, constantly switching from one mode to the other. 

 

After the tutorial you move to a base, where all the characters either live or are staying as guests for the duration of the crisis. From there, you select missions, so far one at a time with no choice, to which you travel by portal. On arrival a fight starts almost immediately. That's the tactical RPG part of the game, which is what I "bought" it for and which would, I imagine, have been the reason most people did. 

 

The game lets you move back and forth, going on missions, throughout the course of a day and doing practical stuff back at base but when night comes you have to stay at the base for a "Hangout" or a "Club Meeting", something which mostly involves deep and meaningful conversations with other members of the team.

 

The conversations aren't bad but they definitely aren't so fascinating I look forward to them. Looking it up, I see that there is in fact a way to avoid Hangouts, although it's not recommended because you get good bonuses from doing them. Also that they don't seem happen as often as I imagined. There appear to be more complaints about too few Hangouts in the game than too many. Maybe Firaxis tweaked it post-launch or maybe the complaints at the start were from people over-reacting without really knowing how it all worked. Not like that ever happens...

 

The hangout part of the game has slightly put me off playing, though. I tend to play tactical RPGs quite specifically so I can enjoy some turn-based combat on demand, which makes having to plod through a bunch of conversations to get to the fights quite irritating. The actual fights thmselves are good fun though, so I will put up with the inconvenience. For now, anyway.

 

I can't help thinking it would have been a lot better if they'd picked more interesting characters, though. Then I might have wanted to talk to them. But then, post MCU, I'm increasingly finding Marvel characters very bland compared to their pre-MCU comic versions or, indeed, to just about any characters from DC, either pre- or post-DCU. They all seem to have a whiff of the corporate about them these days.

 

Finally on my gaming schedule, I'm still plugging away at Overseer in EverQuest II. Just before I started this post, I dinged Overseer 55, for which there's an Achievement, although it's still five more levels to the next tier. When I reach that, I'll finally be up-to-date. It'll have only taken me about six months...

 

With luck I should have it done by the end of the summer, so I'm well on track for the Autumn/Winter expansion.

Blurring The Boundaries

Friday. Traditional day of the Grab Bag. I have a few ideas. Mostly game-related, too. Let's see what's in there...

First up, a couple of news stories about the positive influence of gaming. I know, right? We ought to be past that by now. But are we? 

Video Games Are Bad Good For You 

The new trend seems to be people who are already famous for something, testifying about how gaming in general, or a specific game in particular, helped them to do what they do and/or become who they are, by which, of course, I mean who we know them as. Who they actually are is and will always remain a mystery.

The two celebrities, if I may use that catch-all, are Bella Ramsey and Taylor Fritz. I vaguely knew Bella Ramsey's name but I couldn't have told you where from. Taylor Fritz I'd never heard of, although I bet my 92 year-old mother has. 

In case you're as clueless as me, Ramsey is an actor who's appeared in Game of Thrones and The Last of Us, among other things. Two shows I probably should have watched but haven't and most likely never will. Fritz is a tennis player, good enough to have made the semi-finals at Wimbledon this summer, hence my mother's undoubted knowledge of his existence. In fact, according to the article, he's ranked #5 in the world.

Pirate Penguins. Possibly.

Their gaming-related... I nearly said "confessions" there, which would have been telling, but I guess they're more like affirmations.... their gaming-related stories - let's go with that - involve exploring gender identity in Bella's case and... erm... being about as good at League of Legends as he is at tennis in Taylor's.

Honestly, neither of those revelations should be remotely surprising and they really aren't presented that way, either. We do seem to be past the time when famous people playing video games was, in itself, worthy of comment. At least now it has to be relevant in some way to what we hear about them in other contexts, to provide supporting evidence of their journey in some way.

The interesting parts of both stories for me were the specifics not the generalities. I thought it felt quite significant that Bella Ramsey explored her gender identity while playing Club Penguin. Not so much because she had one that she felt needed exploring but because of the venue she chose for her explorations. 

I'm fairly confident that wasn't what Disney had in mind when they bought the game for $350m in 2007. They also owned Toon Town, another child-focused MMORPG at that time and I'm almost certain I've read another account of someone famous exploring their gender identity there, although I can't remember who that might have been. Please append notes and sources in the comments if you do.

It does make a very good case for the anonymity and fluidity of these games for children and young teens. Free Realms is another one where stories like this come up quite not infrequently. Maybe John "Smed" Smedley should have thought a bit more about the social and cultural benefits before shuttering the much-loved MMORPG, rather than complaining how hard it was to wring money out of kids.

The part of Taylor Fritz's tale that caught my attention wasn't that he was really, really good at LoL. He's a world-class sportsman. You could predict that. No, it was that he made a point of explaining he didn't, as you might imagine, play League of Legends to relax or wind down or get away from the challenges and tensions of international tennis. 

On the contrary, he pointed out that playing LoL at the level he does (Emerald.) is "very mentally taxing and mentally draining" and requires his full attention and engagement. It makes a convincing case for eSports being taken seriously, when one of the world's top sportspeople says playing a video game requires as much from him as his real-world sport. Okay, as much mentally. But still...

I Am, But What Am I?

Following on from Bella Ramsey's gender explorations in Club Penguin, I thought I'd link to one of last year's Blaugust newcomers, Cynni of Cynni's Blog. We had a lot of new bloggers join last year and I put most of them either in my Feedly or on the blog roll but over the months since then I gradually unsubscribed from nearly all of them. I already spend altogether too long every day reading blog posts. It just wasn't feasible to keep up with all of them.

The ones on the blog roll, though, I didn't remove and I still actively keep up with a few, even if I don't read every post. Cynni, in common with a disturbing number of bloggers I follow, seems to have been having a pretty bad time of things lately but she always has a good perspective on life and I found her post on gender identity very informative and thought-provoking. 

I also just finished a very good book by Griffin Hansbury that made me think even more. The book is called Some Strange Music Draws Me In, a lyric from Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot, and it's a coming-of-age novel about a trans man. Er... boy... er... well, it's complicated, isn't it? Language, I mean. And gender. 

Read the book, that's all I'm saying. I learned some things.

I find myself thinking about this stuff a lot nowadays. Partly that's because it's in the culture in a big way now but mostly it's because I keep wondering what it would have been like to have grown up in a culture where those concepts were more fluid than they were when I was doing it. 

Tenses are complicated, too, aren't they? Yes, I do wonder what it's like for people who are growing up in that social and cultural environment today but mostly I find myself idly transposing the times, imagining how things would have been, had it been that way then, when I was in school and college, not how it would be for me if I was in school or college now. There is a difference.

I am old and I'm not about to change who I've always been or perhaps more accurately who I've always thought I've always been, although the sheer range of descriptive genders I encountered, many for the first time (Well, the first time in print. I'm sure I've met many inhabiters of said genders in life without realizing.) both the post and the book do offer plenty of options, smoe of which do resonate with me, at least to some degree. For now, though, my pronouns remain he/him and I don't foresee making a shift from the gender identity I've always accepted. 

But of course it's a lot more complicated than that. Again. Isn't it always? As I think about it, there have been  so many times I haven't conformed all that closely to the labels I've been wearing, so many behaviors I've exhibited and choices I've made that don't exactly fit the shape those labels describe. It's very apparent that we're not all just one thing even if some of us definitely are.

And it's not like I didn't recognize and talk about it back then, either. What we now call gender identity was a fairly common topic of discussion in some of my social groups in the eighties and nineties. We just didn't have the language to express the shades and nuances that are all up in the culture now. Mostly we used to get drunk and speculate about our friends, who speculated about us, when we weren't around. Pretty sure that's not well-thought of these days.

I wish we had talked more about our own identities rather than trying to figure out other peoples'. I'm not saying it would have led to different choices but it might have. It would almost certainly have affected my understanding of who I was and who I could be. Probably, I would have ended up much the same but I wouldn't claim it as a certainty. 

It would have been better to have had the language to talk about it, anyway. In the end, it's always about the language, isn't it? Everything is.

I have a few more solid discussion topics along these lines stashed away but I'm saving them for Blaugust so instead I'll just slide into a couple of snippets that kinda-sorta relate to things I've mentioned earlier in the post.

Now That's A Weird Name

Reaper Actual, I mean. It is, though, isn't it?  Is it a quote? A reference? A pun? Does it mean something or is just supposed to sound cool? And if so, does it?

Whatever it's doing, it's the latest attempt by the aforementioned John Smed Smedly to get back into the gaming industry. As a player, that is. 

No, wait, that's not helping... I don't mean he wants to play some video games. I'm sure he does that in the evenings and on weekends already. I wonder what his League of Legends rank is?

No, I meant get into it as a player like in the Robert Altman movie, The Player, by which I don't mean to suggest Smed's going to start producing movies or ending up killing anyone... well, not anyone real. He's certainly going to end up killing a lot of virtual people because he's all about the PvP and his new project is... 

... well, I'm not sure what it is, other than it's called Reaper Actual, which not only tells you nothing but doesn't even really suggest anything, other than perhaps some kind of homicidal accountant. No, hang on... I'm thinking of an actuary there, aren't I?

MassivelyOP, the only place I've seen it reported so far, don't seem to know what sort of game it is, either. They stop short of labeling it an extraction shooter, merely noting it has "extraction shooter gameplay".  They aren't really all that interested in speculating about what other sort of gameplay it might have because they're far too busy boiling the tar and plucking the chickens. 

Reaper Actual is going to be on the blockchain. Wave the red flags. I must say I thought we were over the blockhain now. And Web 3.0. And Crypto (Although not Krypto. We're definitely all over Krypto, not over him. See? Language again...) I thought AI had eaten all of their lunches and now we were consolidating all our techno-fears in one, handy package.

Anyway, I'd say I'll be interested to see what Smed comes up with this time but I'd just be lying. I'm not interested in anything he does except out of habit. Blockchain or not, I won't be playing it. I just wish he'd retire, really, although as I'm finding out, that's not aways the choice you make, even when it's an option.

And finally...

Google Blinks, Meta Casts Shade

Ye gods, that's a convoluted sub-heading. Let me unpack it. 

Remember Google Glass? It was a long time ago, wasn't it? Just as a quick refresh, it was a project Google was big on for five minutes that involved a pair of glasses with built-in video cameras and internet connectivity. 

It got the same treatment every other new tech gets these days, namely scorn, derision, fear and hatred and Google limply caved to popular pressure (Or internet bullying, to give it its other name.) almost immediately, dropping plans to develop it for the mass market in 2015 and pretending it had never happened. 

They didn't actually stop development, though. They re-marketed it as a specialist product and it was quietly adopted for certain market sectors. There were still versions available commercially as recently as two years ago, although the project is now officially and finally dead.

Since then, other companies have produced similar devices and no-one seems to have noticed or cared. Privacy doesn't seem to be quite the buzzword it was back in the twenty-teens, does it? And now Mark Zuckerberg is getting in on the act. 

I found out about this in a very odd way. My mother is officially registered as partially-sighted, meaning gets information sent to her from various sources, telling her about services and prodcts that may be helpful. She got a flyer in the mail from one of the government-sponsored organizations that handles visual impairment, inviting her to go to the local library for a hands-on with some new glasses you could get that would read things like bus timetable or bottle labels out loud for you when you looked at them.

We've had stuff about these things before but they usually run to several thousand pounds a pair and you can't just walk in and try them on anywhere, so it seemed like a good opportunity to see if they'd justify that kind of investment. 

My mother went to the library, gave them a go, didn't think she'd get on with them, and that would have been the end of it, except she brought back the leaflet she's been given and it had the actual name of the device, which hadn't been on the original flyer, so I googled it. Ironically, as it turned out. 

The Meta Wayfarer Sunglasses are made, as the name suggests, by Meta in co-operation with RayBan, (Hence "shade" in the sub-heading. I know. Painful, isn't it?). The concept looks a lot like Google Glass to me. 

It has a built-in video camera and uses AI for instant translation, among other things. You can livestream from your glasses to Facebook and Instagram. It uses your smartphone for the internet connectivity but apart from that it seems to do everything everyone said would mean the end of civilization if Google Glass caught on. It's also about a tenth of the price I was expecting so I imagine take-up could be high. 

Of course, they have the advantage of looking exactly like RayBans, which means instead of throwing rocks at you in the street if they see you wearing them, they're more likely to be calling out "Cool shades, bro!". By comparison, Google Glass made you look about as obvious as if you'd hung a sign around your neck saying "Caution: Filming In Progress". 

Ten years too early and wearing the wrong clothes. Poor old Google, eh? Probably should get out of the lab more. Still, maybe it's time Zuckerberg caught a break. That VR thing didn't go so well, did it? 

And that's all I have today although not all I have. More when there's a free slot.

Final thought... just imagine how much better this post would have looked if I'd used AI illustrations. Didn't even think of it until I was about to hit publish. That tells a story all its own... 

Contains Multiple Spoilers For The Show "Mythic Quest"

Following on from yesterday's post, the other show I've been grinding my way through over the last couple of months is Mythic Quest. As I'm sure almost everyone reading this knows, MQ is a sitcom in which the sit is a video game company, specifically a company with one hugely successful game, an MMORPG called - obviously - Mythic Quest.

In fact, it only occurs to me as I type this that I have no idea what the actual game studio is called, or indeed the parent company that owns it, some unspecified conglomerate based in Canada and referred to only as "Montreal". That does seem almost emblematic of the show, which largely coasts by on a lot of vague, hand-wavey gestures to the way the industry works, without ever really bothering to fill in the precise details.

Or that's how it seemed to me. I've never worked for a game company, so I'm in no position to comment on the accuracy, authenticity or realism. I have worked in plenty of offices though and if any of them had operated the way this one does I'm pretty sure there wouldn't just have been walk-outs, there's have been lawsuits. Bullying appears to be not just endemic but fully endorsed at all levels.

But then, by most accounts I've heard over the years, the video-game industry prides itself on not following the same rules that would apply to "regular" businesses. Certainly the various scandals, exposes and lawsuits we've all read about over the last few years would support the kind of image Mythic Quest presents. Indeed, by those standards, it would probably be seen, if not as an exemplary employer, at least better than many.

These were the kinds of thoughts that frequently went through my mind while watching all four seasons but especially so in the third and fourth, which are far less focused and coherent than the much tighter-plotted first two. It's odd to find myself focusing so much on the sit of a sitcom. Usually that's the part that gets a pass on all kinds of unconvincing propositions because it's just a backdrop no-one really cares about.

Here, though, the show being set in an MMORPG development studio was the main reason I started watching the show in the first place so it's harder to ignore all the things that make no sense, of which there are so many! Mythic Quest, the game, is a real enigma for a start. It clearly starts out as a parody of World of Warcraft , an interpretation the constant "cut scenes" that stud almost every episode strongly support. Later on, though, someone obviously decided it would be more fun to parody Roblox instead, so they simply drop a version of that game inside the MMORPG and then that's all we ever hear about..

During the course of the four season run, Mythic Quest receives two expansions and a third that becomes the game-within-a-game instead, although whether they're still calling it an "expansion" by that point is unclear. The first kinda-sorta seems to fit into the MMORPG theme, being made by the entire company and released in a recognizable way, but the other two make absolutely no sense at all. 

For a start, both of them appear to have been devised, designed, coded and created by - at most - three people, one of whom has never done anything of the kind before and one of whom is a Brad McQuaid style visionary who, it later transpires, sits down at the keyboard so infrequently he doesn't even know his own passwords. Weirder still for an MMORPG, it seems the final expansion, Elysium, made in secret by just two people but universally acclaimed as a masterpiece by everyone who plays it, can apparently be played through in a couple of hours. On a spectrum starting at suspension of disbelief and ending at creative license, this checks in somewhere way past the end - taking the piss.

Most of this sort of drift happens in seasons two and three. In the first two seasons it's nowhere near as hard to believe Mythic Quest as a game millions of people play or that it's being maintained and developed by a believable gaming studio. The kinds of issues that arise, like Nazis monopolizing the chat channel, are broadly recognizable from any MMORPG gamer's experience.

It's pretty clear by the end of Season 2 that the writers have taken the MMORPG scenario about as far as they can and probably further than they'd have preferred. And even in the earlier seasons, the best individual episodes are the few where the plot and action moves away from the Mythic Quest studio, either back into the past or out into the world.

And there's the problem. A game company just isn't a very fruitful prospect for a comedy. It's basically "The Office" with a bunch of technology the audience doesn't care about and a load of jobs that have to be explained before anyone can say anything funny about them. And even then, about the only joke seems to be that management don't like, respect or listen to creatives and creatives are passive-aggressive punchbags.  

It's not much to work with. The writers' need to open the whole thing out is plastered all over the later seasons, which may be why very little that happens after the end of Season 2 makes much sense.

All of that is entirely understandable, even forgivable. It happens in most sitcoms although rarely to this degree or this fast. If it didn't, entire runs would be like some kind of never-ending bottle episode (Although that is pretty much how some of the most successful sitcoms have played it...) You have to get out of the situation sometimes to let the thing breathe.

What I find harder to forgive is the wildly inconsistent character development. The show's real strength, as with most sitcoms, is the characterization. Well, that and the jokes, of course. Gotta get those laughs. Mythic Quest has a typical, sprawling sitcom cast, with a core of seven characters (Eight in the first two seasons) and twice as many regulars. 

Most of them have only one notable character trait (Sue is Nice, Jo is a sociopath...) so it's quite hard for their personalities to develop at all. Others, like the two leads, Poppy and Ian, have  ~ maybe ~ two traits on a good day but they do somehow also manage to exhibit at least a modicum of growth over the course of the full run. That's fine for a sitcom. Anything more would make it a dramedy and no-one wants that.

My problem comes not with the ones who stay the same but with the ones who... change. 

Alright, my problem, specifically, is with Dana and Rachel. 

Okay! Okay! I admit it! My real problem is with Dana.

Dana's character arc is so disruptive and unbelievable, I found it often derailed the entire show for me. She starts out as a sweet, somewhat shy QA tester, the absolute lowest of the low in terms of respect in the industry generally and the Mythic Quest office in particular. She and her fellow QA, Rachel, have a very sweet and entirely believable, slow-burning, mutual attraction that develops over the first two seasons until they end up in a committed relationship. It's very cute and often very funny.

Then Dana starts to change. First, she tries to make her own game. She's never done anything of the kind before but with incredible persistence and the eventual grudging assistance of super-coder Poppy Li, Dana eventually gets her game finished. And it's predictably terrible. She ends up using Playpen, the game-creation app Poppy knocked up in a few minutes to keep Dana off her back, to make something better and that leads Poppy into dumping her current expansion plan in favor of Playpen.

This comes across like a transparent attempt by whoever makes the decisions to stop writing about MMORPGs and move on to something with a much bigger reach. The It's-not-Roblox-but-yes-it's-Roblox clone ends up eating both Mythic Quest and the show from the inside. 

In one of the least convincing storylines I've seen for a while, Dana uses Playpen to create the most popular and commercially successful game-within-a-game-within-a-game, making Montreal a lot of money. She gets nominated for a major award but she doesn't win. A seventeen year-old girl she once gave an inspirational speech to does. 

Dana' reaction? She storms across the hall and hisses death threats into the stunned girl's face. Even if it was funny it would be funny at the expense of the character but it's not funny. Not at all.

The writers then double down on the new Dana, who I don't believe ever does or says anything pleasant again. By the end of the final season, she's self-identifying as "the finest coder of my generation" and being offered Poppy's job. That's some career move in.. what... two years? But then stuff like that happens to a lot of the cast. They're clearly in some kind of accelerated timeline.

And I'd still probably accept it as par for the course in sitcom-land if it didn't come with that complete and total change of personality. There is just no way the Dana in Season 4 is the same person as the Dana in Season 1. 

Her partner, Rachel, arguably has a similarly swervy character arc but because she's funny (Something Dana is not. Pretty much ever.) and because although she does things the S1 Dana would never have done, she does them while still looking and sounding like the same person and often having the grace to look like she can't believe what she's doing, I didn't have such a problem with it. Also, she can pretty much get away with anything in that narwhal onesie...

I've picked on Dana's arc because it frequently took me out of the show, thanks to just how unbelievable I found it, but most of the characters go through similar unconvincing changes. In one way it's not that unusual for a sitcom but in another it is - these are the kind of things that usually don't start turning up in the script until the dying seasons of a show that's been going for a decade or so. 

And that's the real problem. Mythic Quest runs into the sort of story issues after two seasons it takes most sitcoms at least six or seven to reach. Seasons 3 and 4 are evidence of the writers thrashing around for a theme or a through-line and not finding one. It's absolutely no surprise the show was cancelled after the fourth season. The surprise is that it made it that far.

All of which makes it sound like I didn't enjoy it, which is the opposite of the truth. I enjoyed it a lot, even the later seasons. I liked most of the characters. It was fun spending time with them. The acting was great, the writing was sharp, the jokes landed and the setting had a weird but welcome familiarity. I'd watch it again, although I might skip a couple of episodes here and there.

As I said, the characters are the big attraction. I'd be hard put to name my favorite. I kept changing my mind on that. I disliked Jo intensely when she first appeared but came to like her a lot, particularly for the way she, unlike most her colleagues, never really deviated from that initial persona. She was also probably the character I found the funniest, although Rachel made me laugh a lot, often just with her facial expressions and permanent startled-rabbit act. Brad was rock solid and intentionally hard to pin down, David was like a muppet come to life and Ian and Poppy rode the line between genuinely obnoxious and amusingly arrogant quite brilliantly.

For all the show's many strengths, though, it is hard to deny the very best episodes were the handful of flashbacks and character pieces, where the writers dropped the main plot stopped for a while and gave us a self-contained short story. In most shows, those are the episodes that slightly annoy me as I tap my fingers, waiting for the next installment in the storyline I'm already invested in. In MQ, it was felt more like why can't they do this all the time?

That, I suspect, is what the commissioning editors thought too, because although the show didn't get a fifth series, it did get a spin off, wittily titled Side Quest, which I have yet to watch but which very much looks like four more of those standalone stories. I think I'll watch that next.

And finally, appropriately, that ending. Oh, wait, which ending? There are two. 

I didn't know that when I watched the finale a couple of days ago and found it deeply satisfying. In the version I got, now apparently canon, Ian does exactly the right thing for the first time in his life and Poppy responds in exactly the way I and I imagine most viewers would hope she might, leaving the audience to watch the credits roll with a huge sense of both relief and satisfaction. I wish all shows ended as well.

If I'd seen it on first broadcast, though, it would have been slightly different, with the two allegedly platonic partners sharing a passionate kiss. That went down so well, it seems, they re-shot it and dropped all that yukky kissing stuff.

Except I assumed that was where the pair of them were headed after the credits rolled anyway. So, meh. Works for me, either way.

Only Murderbots In The Building

It's been a while since there was a proper TV post here and that's because I've barely watched anything since about Easter. I used to have a fairly reliable routine, where I'd finish up on the desktop in the late evening, do a few necessary chores, take Beryl for her last, short walk and then settle down in bed to watch shows on my Kindle Fire or my old laptop, the one that wasn't good for much else.. 

Sometimes I'd watch a movie or surf YouTube instead (Or as well.) but either way I'd be watching not doing. And then I got a new laptop and that was when things changed. For a while I experimented with gaming, either natively or through a streaming link to the big PC. Then I started doing bits and pieces, the sort of things I'd be doing if I was at my desk and before I knew it there wasn't much difference between sitting up and lying down.

The capper came when I started in on the music-making. For the last couple of months or more I've been writing and recording a new song nearly every day. Some take me a couple of hours, some more like eight or ten. The process always begins with me emailing myself the rough lyrics from the desktop and polishing them up on the laptop in bed, before recording a guide vocal and uploading it to Suno to get a feel of how it's going to work. 

Sometimes the very first version is so nearly there it hardly seems worth my time trying for anything better but mostly it's just the beginning of a lengthy editing session that runs long into the next day. Unsurprisingly, none of this leaves much time for watching TV but I have still been making some kind of effort to keep up with my ever-growing watchlist. 

Not a very good effort, it must be said. I paused Netflix at the start of June because neither Mrs Bhagpuss nor I was really watching anything there and as far as I can see nothing's turned up on the platform since that would change anything. Netflix lets you pause three months in a row so I have one more left but after that I'm not sure how it works. Cancel or pay up, I guess, although what the penalty for cancellation would be I don't know. Probably some kind of inducement to return if precedent is any guide.

Prime, obviously, is still up and running. It pays for itself in free postage, let alone free games, so that's not likely to change. Prime Video is a bonus, really. It wouldn't matter if I never watched it, like I almost never use Prime Music.  As it happens, though, Amazon sent me a great offer a couple of months back, Apple+  for three months at less than half-price, so I'm also subbed to that. 

The timing could have been better, for sure. There were a bunch of shows I was meaning to check out when I bought in but I haven't even looked at any of them. Even so, everything I have watched since then has been on the channel. 

"Everything", though, comes to precisely two shows, total. And after that long and entirely unecessary scene-setting, it's those two shows I'm going to review here because I have finally finished both of them. It took a couple of months but I did it! Go me!

Murderbot 

I didn't have much choice but to take my time with this one because Murderbot dropped a single episode every Friday for ten weeks. Just like the old days. I hear people complaining about this kind of scheduling all the time. It's obviously a way to keep people subbing for longer than they might otherwise do but I quite like it anyway. I wouldn't want every show to do it but it's fun to have one or two that drip-feed like this, so I have time to actually look forward to the next episode.

I certainly looked forward to Murderbot, albeit not for the plot, which progresses at a stately pace without much in the way of sidebars or filler, largely avoiding cliff-hangers and not creating a great deal of curiosity over what might happen next. It has more of a novelistic feel than is usual these days, when every show seems determined to plant a hook hard enough at the end of every episode to be sure of reeling you in for the next. It is an adaptation from a series of novels so I suppose that follows but then so are lots of shows and most don't show such restraint.

As far as the original novels by Martha Wells are concerned (Seven already in print with an eighth on the way.) I was aware of them from work but I'd never read one or really thougt of starting. I'm thinking of reading them now to the point that I'm probably going to add them to my "Things to buy me for Christmas" list. 

The TV show has been picked up for a second season and in retrospect it does feel like a set-up for an ongoing series, although I can't say it occurred to me while I was watching. The entire first season is just the first book, though, so the scope for a good, long run is clearly there.

The premise is very simple: a security robot (Cyborg, technically.) hacks its governor module and gains self-determination. Usually that would be license for a gorefest but not here. The SecBot, played with excellent restraint by Aleksander Skarsgard, given freedom to choose, pretty much chooses to be a slacker. All it wants to do is watch shows, particularly Sci-Fi and Science Fantasy shows, something that probably seemed a lot less meta in print than it does when you see it happen in an actual Sci-Fi show.

Of course, circumstances don't lead to a peaceful life of box-set bingeing for our reluctant hero, who has to keep its self-activation secret while carrying on with the job required of it both by the Megacorp that owns it and the customers to whom it's been leased. Equally predictably, that job very rapidly spins out of control causing hilarity to ensue, along with considerable bloodshed.

I guess you might expect a lot of blood in a show called Murderbot but this is a very post-modern take on the action genre. "Murderbot" turns out to be the name the central character secretly calls itself, partly ironically but also because it had digital flashbacks of actually murdering a considerable number of people, back when it was little more than an observer, trapped in its own armed and armored body.

That's emblematic of the ambiguous ground on which the whole enterprise rests. Neither the viewer, the cast nor Murderbot itself is ever wholly sure whose side its on, what its motives are or what its likely to do in any sudden-death situation, of which there are plenty.

That's a difficult balancing act to maintain indefinitely and the show doesn't always pull it off. It was clear to me quite early on that Murderbot was unlikely to murder anyone who wasn't a true and direct threat to it or its clients. I certainly didn't expect it to go on a killing spree and - spoiler - it doesn't. 

It does, however, do several things, some of them very violent, that I wasn't expecting, so the writers do ultimately carry the central conceit of dumping an unpredictable killing machine in the midst of a bunch of bleeding-heart liberal vegans (Let's be honest. They're fucking hippies.) just to see what might happen. 

The hippies provide an excellent collective of tropes, quirks, twitches and really annoying habits, individually infuriating enough that you'll probably find yourself wishing Murderbot would explode the heads of every one of them at some point or another and yet I ended up finding them all endearing in their own way. Collectively, they really are stronger than their often very annoying parts, so point made, I think..

The acting is as good as acting always is these days. Are there any shows any more where the acting is bad? I can't remember seeing any in years. Not like when I used to watch proper TV and it sometimes seemed like some of the cast must be reading their lines from notes scribbled on shirt-cuffs and scenery. And reading them badly, too.

Skarsgard himself is very good in what I imagine has to be a very difficult role, technically. He has to convey a whole range of complex emotions, frequently involving irony, while presenting as almost emotionless. He manages it very well with not much more than some eye movement, a slight variation in stance and the lightest of changes in intonation. He gets some leeway to express his true feelings in the internal monologue/voiceover passages but a lot of the time he's keeping it tamped way down and doing a great job with the limited emotional range the part allows.

Of the rest of the cast, the obvious standout is Noma Dumezweni as the expedition leader Ayda Mensah but I also liked David Dastmalchian as the troubled and very untrusting Gurathin and  Anna Konkle as Lebeebee, about whom I will say no more in case of spoilers. 

Murderbot is described by Apple as an action comedy and that seems about right. It is pretty funny at times and there's a fair amount of action. The special effects are solid and it's a good SciFi show of the kind that takes the audience's familiarity with the trappings and conventions of the genre as read. Don't expect much in the way of back-story or world-building.

And don't expect too much from the plot, either. I mean, there is one and it's fine but this is fundamentally a character piece not a thriller or a whodunnit. There are bad guys and good guys and the former do things to the latter and then there's a resolution where traffic goes the other way but almost all the baggage that usually attends all of that is mostly missing. 

And it doesn't matter. In fact, thinking about it now, I'm fairly sure it's a better show for leaving nearly all of that stuff out. If it tried to explain how everything works, socially and culturally or technologically, there'd be a lot less time for all the character interaction, which is the heart of the project. 

Particularly notable is the way the piece has such obvious political intent and yet makes so little play of it. The casting carries a lot of the weight and the many underplayed, under-emphasized conversations between characters takes on the rest. It's an odd approach in that it really isn't subtle and yet somehow it manages to give the impression it is.

 

The oddest thing, though, is that even with ten episodes in which not all that much happens, the one significant fault I'd lay on Murderbot is that it occasionally feels rushed. It's hard to explain how a show with such a dazed, ambling pace, a show in which nothing much changes most of the time, can still feel like it's flipping through the pages of the script like a flicker-book but that's how it struck me at times.

The most notable example is the season finale. It's very successful in terms of moving the plot  forward and tying up loose threads but it suffers noticeably from charging through the necessary stages of its wrap-up much too quickly. It could and probably should have been twice as long.

Still, it ends up just where it should and just where you'll probably hope it will (Something it has in common with that other show I've been watching.) so no real complaints from me. I'd much rather have a rushed ending that feels good than one that takes all the time it needs and still ends up feeling unsatisfying.

And as for that other show... well, I've gone on long enough for one post. It'll have to wait for next time.

Murderbot, I recommend. It's not a masterpiece by any measure but it's solid, well-crafted, well-acted and entertaining, as well as being quite funny quite often. It's a bit of a "quite..." show all round but I found it very satisfying nonetheless.