Small Bunny, Big Eyes (And Ears. And Feet. And Fingers. Wait... Rabbits Have Fingers?)

Genuinely super-short post today as I try to stay vaguely in touch with Blaugust through a very (For me.) busy few days. I didn't have much of an idea for something to write about and then I saw this at Nerdy Bookahs. 

According to Paeroka, in addition to her recent community singalong Low Stakes, Hot Takes, Krikket also suggested a kind of mirror-image theme, Small Joys, Big Smiles. 

I did consider joining in with the hot takes but when it came to it, I couldn't summon up even the tiny amount of vitriol needed to rant about anything trivial enough to count. I know, right? I don't understand it either! It's just being put on the spot, I guess. 

When I saw Paeroka's post tonight, though, I knew instantly what I could bring the table for Show and Tell this time. I'm sitting here looking right at it!

And seriously, joys don't come any smaller than this one. Wait a sec - let me measure it...

Five centimeters exactly. Or two inches if you're still living in the twentieth century. Or America. That's the same length as the first two joints of my index finger.

Of course, you all know what I'm talking about because he's up there at the top of the post. No point trying to keep up the mystery. There is none.

Well, except what he is and where I got him. The first is quite easy. He's the Vaillant Hare. No, me either, or not until I googled him. And now I know far more than I wanted to. 

For a long time I thought he was the mascot of a chain of garages or fuel stations but it turns out he's
actually the front-bunny for a hot water and heating company called Vaillant Group, about whom I know nothing and intend to keep it that way. Until this minute I had no idea he was still working. I'd assumed he was an artefact of an older, softer, sillier era. And judging by what the current incarnation looks like, I think I was right.

I don't know the age or origin of my little mascot, which I have always called, adn plan to go on calling, the Vaillant Bunny, even though I ought to know better after reading Raising Hare, a book I may have mentioned in a previous post. )Actually, I think I may have mentioned the Vaillant Bunny before, too... nope... search says not.)

Hare or rabbit, he looks fifties or sixties to me although it's more than likely they just never bothered to change the design until after the millennium.

I didn't buy him. I found him. I can't remember where but it was in the street, I think, and I have a feeling it was in France. I've always liked to pick up odd things and pop them in my pocket as I'm out and about. Mrs Bhagpuss does it too. It's amazing what people drop.

I also can't remember how long I've had him but it's a long time. Certainly more than a decade. He lives on the stand of my monitor, along with a whole load of clutter. You can see from the very meta photo, with this post on the screen, just how very messy my desk is - and believe me I cleaned it up a little for the shot.

You can also see from the close-up that he's quite dusty. I didn't realise until I took his photo just now. I'll give him a bit of a brush-down after I finish this.

I've sometimes said, not entirely unseriously, that if there was a fire, he'd be the first thing I'd grab. Of course it would have to be a fire that started while I was at my desk but that's a fairly likely scenario, given how much time I spend here.

Why he brings me so much joy is hard to explain. It's partly his expression, which looks somewhat crazed, along with the way he's pointing at a picture of himself, as though to say "That's me! Don't you know who I am?" It's also his outfit, which I now realise is probably meant to be workman's overalls but which I've always thought makes him look like the disgraced ex-presenter of a children's TV show, now reduced to shilling for a gas station somewhere out in the boondocks.

About now it's probably starting to become obvious I could easily busk a couple of thousand words on the subject, as if anyone ever doubted it. I'm not sure that would be in anyone's interest, mine or yours, so I'm going to stick to what I said at the start and keep this super-short. 

What? No, it's not! It's not even 800 words yet! Okay, well, yes, it probably is now...

I'd better stop. 

...except to say there's another first-rate example of Small Joys, Big Smiles hiding in that picture of my desk. If I'm still stuck for something to write about tomorrow, I might tell you what it is.

Hmm. Actually, now I look closely, there are two...

Okay, now I really am going to stop! 

Footnote To The Previous Post...

Not to start an entirely different post but...

You know what? The hell with it! This is long enough to qualify as a post in its own right, so why not? 

Blimey Charlie!  You'd have thought it would be simple enough to get an AI to draw a picture of three kids in a trench-coat, right? I mean, how hard could it be?

I started out at NightCafe with a prompt ripped straight out of the text of the post - "three kids in a raincoat trying to get in to the cinema to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon" to which I added "magazine illustration, 1950s, black and white line art, cartoon, New Yorker style". I left all settings on default.

Running that through HiDream I1 Fast got me the very nice illustration at the top (Not the top of this post. This is the footnote. This post.) with the flawless typography and the unarguably accurate interpretation of what I'd asked for. I mean, yes, that is "three kids in a raincoat". A raincoat each. My bad for not specifying one raincoat between the lot of them, I guess.

I tried the same model four more times, using variations such as "three kids standing on each other's shoulders inside a single raincoat, pretending to be one adult, in a raincoat" (Second image.) and "three kids, standing on each other's shoulders, wearing a single trench-coat, pretending to be one adult" (Third image.) but every time it gave me three separate kids, only now without the movie title, which I'd left untouched in the prompt.

I gave up trying to get HiDream to understand what I wanted and tried half a dozen other models, from the newest and most sophisticated of the non-Pro versions like Google Imagen 4.0 fast to older ones supposedly tuned to produce comic-style images like ArthemyComics v 5.0. 

The newer models gave me something that looked very similar to HiDream, except for Imagen, which gave me two kids in separate trench-coats, except that one of them seems to have her feet on back-to-front. That could be an indication that there are two kids under there, only she's exactly the same height as the kid next to her and he really looks like just one person. Here, have a look for yourself and see what you think.

Also the typography is wrong. Not very impressive from Google, there.

The older models were much, much worse. Neither of them stacked the kids up and one of them didn't bother with any kids at all, preferring to give me what looked like an adult super-villain in a trench-coat and some kind of bizarre, adult mutant in a short jacket. You don't want to see it. Trust me. 

Or the other model's attempt, which was at least two kids, just not kids from this planet. And not on each others' shoulders, either. And only one of them was wearing a trench-coat. 

Oh, alright then...

Now you wish you hadn't asked, don't you? That was by Rabbit v7, by the way.

I was a bit miffed by this point but the HiDream pictures were at least  pleasant illustrations so I decided to use them for the post. But then I couldn't leave it alone so I thought I'd google the general idea of "three kids in a trench-coat" to see if I could find a specific reference to give the AIs as a guide. 

And do you know what? It appears to be a lot more obscure in origin than I thought.  There doesn't seem to be all that much agreement on the first time it appears - the Little Rascals gets mentioned, as does Disney's 1937 Snow White. For examples, Vince Adultman from Bojack Horseman gets a lot of play, which is a pretty damn meta way of trying to explain the thing, if you ask me.

Clearly none of that was going to help, although I did try throwing the Bojack reference into one of the prompts. Didn't work. 

Finally, I had the bright idea of asking ChatGPT to draw the image for me, only before I let it try I was going to ask it if it knew the trope. If it could describe the concept, maybe it could draw it. Or get one of its AI pals to do it, anyway.

Me: Are you familiar with the trope of two (Or three) small children, standing on each others' shoulders inside a large trench-coat so as to pretend to be an adult? 

ChatGPT: Yes! That’s a well-known comedic trope.

It usually involves two or three children (sometimes even small animals or cartoon characters) stacking themselves vertically, hiding inside a long trench coat, overcoat, or robe in order to pass as an adult. The idea is that they can sneak into places children normally aren’t allowed—like bars, nightclubs, or secret meetings—or trick authority figures.

A few things that often come with the trope:

The “adult” looks unnaturally tall and awkward, with strange proportions.

Their voice gives them away (either squeaky, multiple voices arguing, or poorly disguised deep voice).

They often struggle with walking smoothly, balancing, or reaching for things.

It’s usually played for slapstick comedy when they get exposed (the coat falls apart, one kid sneezes, etc.).

It shows up a lot in cartoons (Looney Tunes, Animaniacs, Spongebob, etc.), comics, sitcoms, and even films. Sometimes it’s done straight, sometimes it’s parodied as a ridiculously transparent disguise.

Do you want me to dig up some specific well-known examples of this trope in media?

I didn't want it to do that. I wanted it to draw me a picture. And it did. It's the third image in the post. (Not this post, obviously. But I didn't need to expain that, did I?)

And it's approximately what I asked for, although I'd have preferred it without the extra leg. Also, I'd have preferred a good cartoon, which this isn't. It's about as perfunctory as you could get and still be recognizable. 

Also, ChatGPT took ages to produce it. So long, in fact, that I was starting to think I'd have to log out and try again because something had obviously gone wrong. I must be spoiled by NightCafe, which takes maybe five seconds at most to produce a result. This felt like ten times that at least.

All things considered, I'm certain that if I could draw even passably well I wouldn't be bothering with AI at all for anything like this. I'd have been able to knock out three or four decent spot illustrations in the time all of that took (A couple of dozen if you include how long it's take me to write this footnote!) 

And finally, I just generated a new image for the top of this post, now it's going out on its own, and just bloody look at it! It's not even close! 

The prompt was "two kids, standing on each other's shoulders, wearing a single trench-coat, pretending to be one adult, like Vince Adultman in Bojack Horseman, trying to get in to the cinema to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon magazine illustration, 1950s, color, line art, cartoon, New Yorker style".

I got an alien and an adult in trnechcoats and a kid in what looks like a Norfolk jacket. 

Thanks very much, Stable Core.  

Shtick At It!

This is Staying Motivated Week in Blaugust and I'm motivated to use it as an excuse not to come up with any original ideas of my own for today's post. It'll take some thinking about anyway, though, because motivation isn't generally a problem for me, at least not when it comes to blogging.

Most days, all I need for motivation is the pleasure of listening to the sound of my own voice. It feels like I've seen an unusual amount of blogging-about-blogging this year, even for Blaugust, an event that specializes in that kind of introspection. A number of bloggers have even touched on the troubling issue of whether they have anything to say - or at least anything anyone wants to hear. 

That's never really been much of a problem for me, even if I do sometimes drop in a would-be smart remark about some post or other being nothing anyone's going to want to read. If I really believed that I certainly wouldn't have hit Publish on the post in question. It's all just part of the shtick.

Ah, the shtick! It's different to the voice all those writing coaches and courses and How-To guides hold up as the endgame for writers. The voice is the true you. Your shtick is... well, what is it?

It's a bunch of tics and mannerisms, all bundled up in some catch-phrases and signature tropes, to make some kind of easily-recognizable gestalt identity you can crouch down inside and work with your hands as if its a real person. It's a mask and a cloak and a soft shoe shuffle. It's two kids in a trench-coat, trying to get in to the cinema to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon - or rather it's dropping that peculiar image in as though you expect everyone to know what you're on about.

Or in my case, at least, it's apparently a whole lot of ill-judged similes all crowding together to simulate a metaphor that doesn't entirely come off. Or partially, for that matter. Also the use of a lot of unnecessary qualifying adverbs that really aren't adding any substance.

Wait, though...

What does any of that have to do with motivation? 

I'm so glad you asked!

(Having conversations with yourself in print. There's another...)

Here's what. It's fun. And that's the motivation that works best for me. Having fun. Quite specifically, having fun writing. 

This is the thing. I like writing. I like it a lot. I should. I've been doing it for a long, long time. If I didn't like it, what would that make me?

When I was a child, one of the first things I can remember wanting to do was learn to read. And I wanted to learn to read so I could read books and comics for myself and not have to wait for someone else to do it for me. 

Once I had it down, I started reading for fun and never stopped. And very soon after reading for fun came writing for fun because once you can read, why wouldn't you want to write?

That was about sixty years ago. I was a slightly late starter with reading because my mother specifically didn't want me to learn before I went to school so I wouldn't be out of step with everyone else. And in those days, few kids started school before they were five years old so that's how long I had to wait.

I've told that story before (And better.) right here on the blog. I'll throw this in free as an extra motivational aside - no-one is going to remember. 

I wouldn't worry about repeating yourself, something else I've seen come up this year as a de-motivating factor. Everyone repeats themselves. I also wouldn't worry about anyone remembering anything you've written, not unless it was last week. And honestly? Probably not even then. No-one ever does.

Except, of course, that one person who quotes you, almost verbatim, from memory, years and years later, when the subject comes up again, bringing up something you said that you've long forgotten but they never have. That's happened to me a surprising number of times and its always both highly flattering and deeply disturbing. 

You mean someone was actually paying attention? Geez! That's amazing! But also terrifying...

And so rare. I wouldn't worry about it. I've written literally millions of words and exposed them to public scrutiny and I guess it's happened to me at most a dozen times. Mostly you can easily get away with rehashing the same opinions and even the same anecdotes so long as you aren't too blatant about it. And anyway, you can always turn the fact that you know you've said it before into a feature of the story, like I just did then.

So, to recap: motivation = fun + self-confidence. Write because you enjoy writing and don't assume anyone is paying close attention.

Hang on... wasn't there something about a "shtick"?

Why, yes, I do believe there was. That comes under the "Fun" umbrella. 

How do you make sure the process of writing is fun? I keep hearing people saying they enjoy "having written" but that they don't like the writing process itself. Writing is hard, they say. Or hell, in the extreme cases. 

Which is fair enough. It can be. I mean, I'm not here to tell you I had fun writing my dissertation on William Blake back in University.  I most certainly did not. It wasn't even fun when I'd finished. It's only in my mind because I came across it in a box in the loft yesterday, when I was up there looking for some other things I'd written almost as long ago. Things I really did have fun writing. 

So, yes, not all writing is fun. But blogging should be. I mean, if not, what the heck are you doing it for? Go and do something you enjoy instead. This isn't school! 

If you kind of enjoy it but not always or not enough, having a shtick is one way to make it funner.

That's a fragment of the shtick right there, that "funner". I know and you know that "funner" isn't a word but I know that you know that I know, so I feel free to use it anyway. Better yet, I know that you know what it means, even though it's not a real word. And because we both know, then it is a real word, isn't it?

I also know that just seeing it in print is going to make someone shake their fist and go "Grrr!" and that's all part of the fun, too. (Oh, sure, it's all fun until someone loses an eye, isn't it? Or forgets to dot one.)

A lot of my favorite bloggers have shticks. Also prose styles and voices, which are like the shtick's grown-up, better-educated, better-behaved siblings. Those are the blogs I look forward to reading, whatever the posts are about.

Okay, not whatever. There are some topics so abstruse or niche or just plain dry that no amount of shtick or style can make them fun to read. But mostly, if it feels like the writer was having fun, it'll be fun to read. (I'd caveat that with the ifs and buts it deserves but I'm trying not to spoil the mood here...) 

The point ((Oh, he's got a point! We were wondering!) (And that didn't really work, did it? Not sure that routine ever does but I will keep on using it anyway. Sometimes a shtick starts using the writer rather than the way round it ought to be.)) 

Ahem. Going to start that sentence again. It got over-parenthesized and the end fell off.  

The point is that a shtick, unlike a prose style or a voice, is overtly performative, which means you, the writer, are performing as you write. And that's where the fun comes in.

It's the blogging equivalent of putting on your favorite song, grabbing the dog by the front paws and waltzing her around the living room. Not that I'd ever do that. Except when the music stops, instead of an over-excited dog and some knocked-over furniture, you have a blog post.

And there's your day's work done. Edit for sense, stick in some pictures, if that's your thing (It's mine, it isn't everyone's.) think of a title and hit Publish. Presto, Blaugust honor satisfied. 

Until tomorrow, when you get to do it all over again.

Always assuming you can wait that long. 

I mean, now you're having so much fun...

 

AI Used In This Post...

Please see next post! 

Always Save Your Stubs

For quite a few years now, I've had the fanciful idea of making a comprehensive list of all the live gigs I've been to and all the bands and solo acts I've seen. I don't know why. It's something to do, isn't it? And it'd be of interest to me if not to anybody else. 

A decade ago it would have been an extremely patchy record indeed. I'd have had to rely on my memory, which has never been good and only gets worse with age and time, plus any ephemera I might have lying around in the form of ticket stubs or concert programs.

I am a pack-rat by nature and inclination. One of my mantras, borne out of personal experience, is that I've never regretted holding on to anything but I've often regretted throwing something away. Present me can't pretend to know what future me will need, so why take the chance? Also, we have plenty of space. It's not like we have to crawl through tunnels of old newspapers to get to the fridge.

Even so, ticket-stubs were never something I held onto. Mostly I'd have chucked them in a bin on the way out of the hall or left them in a pocket to be thrown away later. 

I did keep a handful of stubs I thought had some significance, like the one from when the Who played Swansea FC's ground in 1976. That's still in the clutter on the mantlepiece in the front room, where I put it when we moved into this house thirty years ago, although ironically, that's a gig I have no trouble remembering without a small square of cardboard to prompt me.

As for programs, I stopped buying those quite soon after I started going to gigs. They were expensive. And anyway, you only ever saw them at concerts in actual concert halls. I started off going sse bands in big, formal venues like that but after the mid-70s, most of the bands I saw played in cellar clubs or the back rooms of pubs. No-one was selling program for any of that and it was all long before the time every last tiny indie band arrived at the venue with a wagon-load of "merch" to sell from a table by the doror.

A better record of what I'd seen would have been the ubiquitous fliers handed out before every gig by representatives of the venue, people running fanzines, members of other bands and anyone with some kind of event to promote. I knew people who collected those but I just used to take them, glance at them and drop them on the floor, like almost everybody else. I kinda wish I'd kept them all now, which proves the truth of my mantra, I suppose.

Apart from the odd item that somehow survives, like the satin scarf I bought outside the venue when I saw Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel at the Colston Hall in Bristol in 1975 ("Best Years of Our Lives" tour, supported by Sailor.), about the only concrete evidence that remains are the mentions I made in the apazines I published during the 'eighties and 'nineties and the letters I wrote to my then-girlfriend, now ex-wife, in my first year at university, when we were maintaining a long-distance relationship by post and payphone. 

She was kind enough to give me back my letters when we split up but I've never re-read them. They're in the loft, which is also where I'm hoping the rest of my apazines are. I might try to force myself through the tiny trap-door later today to see if I can find any of them. [Edit: I did and they weren't there. Then I turned the house upside down looking for them and finally found them safely tucked away in folders in a cupboard downstairs. Still, it was interesting to go in the loft again...] If I do find them, maybe I'll learn about other gigs I went to and immediately forgot, like the  Urusei Yatsura/Prolapse one I was talking about the other day.

Just as an example of how weirdly revealing that might be, I was looking through one of the zines I have been able to lay my hands on just yesterday, when I came across this statement as I looked back on my cultural year of 1997:

"I saw a few live acts - not as many as I should have, as usual. They can't have been that brilliant, 'cos I can't remember many. Unexpectedly best was certainly Ragga and the Jack Magic Orchestra..."

Who?! Seriously, who the fuck were they???

Man in the Moon 

 Ragga and the Jack Magic Orchestra

Them, apparently. Geez! That was the highlight of my whole year? No wonder I stopped going to gigs soon after.

I do now have the faintest recollection of seeing a band that reminded us a bit of Bjork, playing in the back room of a pub. I could not have told you what they were called, though, and I very definitely have no lasting memory of it beaing a... well, a memorable experience.

In the same 'zine I also mention going to see Pregnant, one of Gareth Sager's many, largely unsuccessful projects. I had no memory of that gig, either, although, as always, I do now, since the organic AI that runs all our memories has had the time to hallucinate one for me. 

I do at least remember the band, one of whose albums I own on CD. Gareth Sager, who used to be in the retoractively-seminal The Pop Group, moved through a number of excellent bands during the eighties and nineties, several of which I saw and all of which I rate pretty highly. Pregnant was perhaps the last of them I paid attention to, mostly because a year later I wasn't paying attention to music at all any more.

 

Moodmaster - Pregnant

That, as far as I can tell, is Pregnant's one and only appearance on YouTube and it's on Gareth Sager's own, extremely frugally stocked channel. He's put up precisely seven videos to represent his near-fifty year career. 

Pregnant were good, as I think the tune above proves, although not as good as Sager's other band with the same singer, Head. How good or bad Pregnant might have been isn't the point, though. The point is I saw them and I'd forgotten about it. I mean, I saw Head and never forgot about that and I didn't even like them at the time. (I came to love them later...)

I'm kinda curious to find out how many bands I can remember seeing and how many specific gigs I can nail down. Not for any reason much other than to have a list. I really like lists and this is one I've thought about making for years.

And it would be, if not easy, then at least easier than it would have been before various people far more obsessive about record-keeping than I started posting itenararies for their favorite bands online. It's still a very patchy record but it's something. That's how I can say with certainty that the Cockney Rebel gig I mentioned earlier took place on 23rd March 1975. Before I checked the web I knew it was the mid-70s but that was about all. (Also, just as an unecessary caveat against trusting our would-be AI overlords, even as I picked the correct link from the search results to find the exact date, Gemini's AI summary at the top of the screen was confidently informing me there was no record of any Cockney Rebel gig at the named venue during the given year...)

I thought I'd be on safer ground with the first gig I ever went to, which was Hawkwind. I remember quite a lot about that one, probably because a) it was my first and b) I was too young to get served at the bar so I was sober. Without looking anything up I would have said it was either 1972 or 1973 and I know it was at The Locarno in Bristol. The support bands were some German crew I don't remember the name of and Fat Mattress, the band Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience trucked around Britain with little success after Jimi died.

The German band, literally the first live rock group I ever saw, were dull and very easy to forget even a week later. Fat Mattress never showed up, their spot being taken by comedy-folk singer and local hero Fred Wedlock, a replacement that could only have made sense in his home-town. He went down a storm with the  hippies, space cadets and proto-metalheads that made up most of Hawkwind's regular audience. Hawkwind were thunderingly loud and as mesmeric as you'd expect from them in their pomp, it being the classic line-up with Lemmy on bass, Stacia dancing and Liquid Len doing the psychedelic light show.

Before I started this post, I tried to pin down the exact date. I knew the venue and the approximate year so I thought it would be easy enough. It turns out Hawkwind played the Locarno no fewer than three times in 1972-3, on 10 July and 19 November 1972 and then again on 28 June 1973. They were a hard-working bunch of hippies for sure, although throughout the seventies it was common for the same bands to play the same cities several times a year, often in the same venues. Nobody talked much about tour fatigue in those days, let alone considered cutting back on the dates for the sake of their mental health.

To figure out which of those three it was, I can triangulate with my second-ever gig, which I remember even more clearly. That was Yes at the Hippodrome in Bristol. They played the double-album Tales From Topographic Oceans, in its entirety, even though it hadn't yet been released. TFTO came out on 7 December 1973 and the gig I saw was on 18 November 1973. I can even tell you the setlist, thanks to this website, and I can bloody well remember it, well, now I see it!

• The Firebird Suite
• Close to the Edge
• Siberian Khatru
• And You and I
• Close to the Edge
• Tales from Topographic Oceans :
• The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn)
• The Remembering (High the Memory)
• The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun)
• Ritual (Nous sommes du soleil)
• Heart of the Sunrise
• Roundabout

As you can imagine, if you've ever heard any of their work, it was a very long evening. Don't take my word for it - here's a bootleg of the actual gig, from the start of Topographic Oceans to the end. That an hour and forty minutes and there was at least half an hour before that.

I sure as hell didn't go a whole year between my first and second gigs so the Hawkwind show I saw must have been on 28 June 1973. I would have been fifteen, which makes me a tad older than I've always thought. I went with my friend Pat, who'd certainly been going to see rock bands since he was twelve or thirteen. Having a Hell's Angel for an older brother will open those kinds of doors for you, I guess.

The upshot of all this is that it's a project that might take me a while but with which I could conceivably have some partial success and in the process Imight learn a thing or two about myself as well. Not least that I once had worse taste than I like to admit. (Not looking at you, Yes or Hawkwind. I'm still happy to include both of you in my CV. The Jack Magic Orchestra, though...)

If I do ever get around to putting the list together, you can rest assured it will end up here. So there's something to look forward to for all of us!

 

Notes About AI Used In This Post

The header image, generated at NightCafe using Google Imagen 4.0 Fast on default settings from a prompt using an exact quote from the post: "The German band, literally the first live rock group I ever saw, were dull and very easy to forget even a week later. "  

I was hoping for something a little more abstract but the first image was a black & white "photo" of some very dull-looking men. I then re-ran the prompt with "Line art, color, magazine illustration" appended and got the image used in the post. It was weirdly tinted yellow for some reason, though, so I ran it through Paint.net to turn it sepia. 

It's funny how the drummer doesn't have any sticks. 

 

Do It Again!

I've left it a bit late for a post today so let's hope this is going to be as short as I think it should be. Doesn't always follow that when I have nothing much to say, I don't take long saying it.

The post is about EverQuest Online Adventures again because apparently that's what I play now - a decades-old, discontinued game for a console three generations out of date, reanimated as a grey-market PC emulation. I mean, it's not like anyone's made any new games since 2003, so it makes sense, right?

But that's where the mouse-pointer finds its way now, whenever I feel like playing a video game. I played yesterday and I played today. Couple of hours each time. These days that's a lot for me. 

And did I get much done? 

Hah! Has anyone played this game? Wouldn't be asking that if you had, I bet.

No, I did not get much done, thank-you. Not by any reasonable estimation. And yet it felt like I did. 

Sound familiar? It will if you ever played EverQuest or one of its contemporaries, back in the days before MMORPG players began to value their time. An awful lot of doing nothing and then feeling smug about it. Or furious. One or the other, depending how many times you died.

Let me see if I can remember just what I did achieve in those two, two-hour sessions...

About as bright as it gets in Steamfont, believe it or not.

I started off by going to see if I could solo the Level 5 Gnome Magician Class Quest. The one the guy who gave it to me said I'd need a group for. 

Actually, what he said is that I'd need the help of some other apprentices because if EQOA is anything it's a role-playing game. More self-consciously so than EQ, I'd say. Everyone seems to be very much in character there. The NPCs, that is. Not the players.  

The quest asks you to go kill some Mindwhippers. To the best of my knowledge, the Norrath I'm familiar with doesn't have any of those so I had no clue what they might be, let alone where. The quest guy seemed to assume I'd know, being a local. 

He did give me some extremely vague directions but nothing I could use. I'd already done a lot of running around. I won't dignify it by calling it "exploring". I hadn't seen any mindwhippers so I thought I'd at least try and save myself a little trouble by looking the quest up online. 

From a few sources I found out that Mindwhippers are wasps. Why they're called something so dramatic I have no clue. Are they wasp enchanters? It's possible, I suppose. I also got a rough travel plan on how to get to them, which boiled down to "Go out of the West gate, turn West and keep heading West". 

So of course I went out of the East gate.

That wasted about a quarter of an hour. Once I'd figured out the problem, I went back in and then out the other gate and glory be I found the damn things! Took me another ten minutes but there they were. Most of them conned red but one was yellow so I thought I'd give it a go.

• First pull, it killed the pet. I ran away and lived. 
• Second pull, I tried to root the wasp, it came after me, I ran away and lived. The pet didn't.
• Third pull, I got killed by a roaming red con wasp before I even finished casting. 
• Fourth pull, I sent the pet in and nuked. I got the wasp quite low before I got aggro. The wasp came at me, but I thought I still might be able to take it so I stood my ground and kept nuking. I was wrong.

At that point I decided the guy had been right all along and I'd need some help. Or else some levels. 

Anyone know if he was always called Q`Anon?

I was also fed up to the back teeth of it being dark all the frigging time so I thought I'd go exploring and see if it got any lighter anywhere else. I was Level 5 and I didn't seem to lose any xp on death or gain any xp debt and there's no corpse recovery in EQOA so it seemed like a good time for a roam.

Using Right Button as a kind of radar I headed South, threading my way through the increasing number of aggressive red mobs - Large Spiders, Fire Ants, some sort of bear, a few wolves, a Decaying Skeleton and eventually something very unexpected - a Dragoon. 

Dragoon in Norrath is a rank peculiar to Dark Elves. These Dragoons turned out to be guards outside the DE home city of Neriak. 

At that point I hadn't begun to come to terms with the extremely different topography of this new Norrath. Since then I've studied the map in the Prima Guide and I have a slightly better understanding of the layout but at the time I came across the Dragoons I was very confused.

I stopped and took alook at the map (Out of game, of course. There is no in-game map.) and saw that Klick`Anon is in the far North-East, directly above Neriak, which is directly above Freeport. That last pairing is the same as in the Norrath I'm used to but in that one the gnomish city is on a different continent altogether.

That gave me the idea of finding my way into Freeport, where I thought I could at least register with the Coachman so I could get a ride next time. That's something EQ never had but which EverQuest II, which came out a year after EQOA, did - point-to-point, safe travel by NPC mount. I even thought I might bind in Freeport, since they have a Magicians' Guild there, along with something approximating an actual day-night cycle.

Unfortunately, I overshot the entrance to Freeport by what must have been several relative miles, ending up deep in the Desert of Ro. I only figured that out when it was too late, after something killed me and I woke up back in Klick.

Somewhere in the desert,
where if it isn't exactly blazing sunlight,
you can at least see where you're going.

That was the end of my first session.  No material gains maybe but plenty of valuable new knowledge acquired. That's why it felt so satisfying.

Today, I thought I'd finish that trip to Freeport. To spoil a good story, I never got there. I didn't even get as close as the last time. Somehow, whereas the previous day I'd been able to avoid all the dangerous mobs, today I kept getting jumped on in the dark by ants, spiders and things I never saw coming.

After a couple of deaths, I did a bit of googling to see if  there was an easier route. There wasn't, but there was another coach station near a village on the way to the Elf starting city, Fayspire. It looked like it might be an easier trip, so I changed my travel plans and went there instead.

Tried to go there, I should say. All the advice is to "follow the road" but I never saw any road. My screen is so dark I can barely see the trees in the forest let alone whether I'm running on a paved surface or just dirt and pine needles. Another hour of wandering around in the dark, hammering RB and getting killed a couple more times and I'd had enough. 

If you're frustrated by things you can't change, concentrate on something you can. I couldn't get the screen any brighter (I tried...) and I couldn't kill the mobs that were killing me but I could kill weaker ones and level up and with enough of that, maybe I'd be able to survive a few more hits and run away more effectively.

I spent the next half-hour or so grinding light and dark-blue cons back in the starting area until I dinged Level 6. That was astonsihingly enjoyable. I didn't realise how much I'd missed it. 

My new clothes.
(Image auto-leveled so you can see them.)

Once I'd dinged, most of the mobs went green or light blue so I moved outside the walls and went looking for slightly tougher prey. I found enough dark-blues to be going on with but once again I ran foul of some aggressive red con ants and got myself a free port back to bind. 

Which was fine. I was loaded down with insect body parts and bits and pieces of rat and snake. I needed to get shot of it all anyway. I sold it all to one vendor and checked another for new spells. 

Nothing more until Level 8 it seems, so I spent my money on a full set of vendor armor instead. It added a lot to my armor class although I very much doubt that will mean much to an angry red-con. Still, if it helps me run an extra few yards before I fall over, it might be the difference between life and death.

I re-summoned and re-buffed my Water Elementaling for what seemed like the twentieth time and went out to carry on grinding xp, which was when I discovered Level 6 is the point at which xp debt kicks in. Took me half a dozen kills to clear my debt before I started making real xp again. It also made me a lot more cautious, which slowed things down a bit more.

A bubble into Level 6, Mrs Bhagpuss announced it was tea-time so I stopped and after tea I started writing this but once I've finished, there's a very strong possibility I'll log back in and grind some more. If I can get to Level 8 and buy the next pet, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to take those Mindwhippers without outside assistance and probably survive the trip either to Freeport or Fayspire, too.

Someone by the name of Judy Thompson left a comment on today's post at TAGN in regard of World of Warcraft, saying "you can’t go back and do it over". I read that right after I'd been thinking just the opposite. 

EQOA thus far really does feel going back in time. It's not exactly like doing it over but it's the closest I've come since the first time I played on a retro server, many years ago. Maybe closer. 

The trick is that it's the same but also different. A lot of the skills and knowledge are transferable but not so many that it feels straightforward or obvious. There's a lot of learning to be done and also some unlearning. 

I guess what I'm saying is that it's familiar but not over-familiar. How long that feeling will last remains to be seen but it's a good one to have, while it lasts. 

In The Night Cafe

In the "AI Used In This Post" footnote I include with every post that uses any form of generative AI (Well, when I remember...) I almost always mention NightCafe. I can't remember when I first found the website but it must have been at least a couple of years ago and since then I've rarely gone anywhere else for my AI image needs.

AAM XL Anime Mix v1

Until today, when I did a bit of googling in support of this post, I had no idea NightCafe was an Australian operation. I also didn't know it had a mission statement: "to democratise art creation". The site's "About" page is worth a read. I won't paraphrase it here because it's a two-minute read but I recommend a click-through.  

I'm currently reading Supremacy by Parmy Olsen, which tells the story behind the development of the biggest of the Western AI developers, Deep Mind and OpenAI. I'm not far into the book yet (It's my bathroom book so I'm reading it a few pages at a time.) but the most surprising thing to me so far is the extent to which the individuals who started all of this had existential, humanitarian and even altruistic reasons for doing so.

I believe part of Parmy Olsen's purpose in writing the book was to show how those lofty goals became subverted by capitalism but I won't pre-empt the twist ending. I mention it mostly as a corollary to the brief description of Angus Russell's flash of inspiration for NightCafe, which was when a friend came round to his apartment and commented on how bare it looked with no pictures on the wall.

Nightmare Shaper v3

Somehow that led Angus to start a crusade to "allow anyone - regardless of skill level - to experience the satisfaction, the therapy, the rush of creating incredible, unique art." I'll pass over the inevitable argument that kind of statement is bound to start because this - believe it or not - isn't a post about the rights or wrongs of generative AI.

No, this is just another gamer's blog post where someone tells you how they've been grinding and now they've leveled up. Or something. 

Since I started using it, NightCafe has become increasingly gamified. There was always a log-in daily where you got five credits just for visiting the site each day, and there have been competitions running for as long as I can remember, none of which I have paid even the slightest passing attention.

A few weeks ago the administrators (Probably Angus's wife, who's the  Chief Operating Officer.) decided to turn that daily log-in into something a little more active, so now you have to make a picture before you get your free credits. It's a good deal because the minimum payout is still five creds but now there's a dice-roll to see how much more you get on top of that and on a good day you might get ten or fifteen.

DALL-E 3

Better yet, there are streaks. Every five days gets you a bonus ten credits and after a certain number of days you get an extra bonus and a title. I'm an Owl, which comes at thirty days. Next comes Horse at a hundred, then Bear at two hundred and Eagle after a full year.

I'd be further along but I missed a day because for some reason, one day I didn't get the email reminder. Until then, it had never failed to appear in all the time I'd been using the site. Now I take great care to check in every morning, email or no, because the penalty for missing a day is to slide all the way back down the snake to the start.

Not that it matters. The credits keep rolling in just the same and what difference does it make whether you're an Owl or an Eagle? Except it will matter to someone because there's a Leaderboard. 

I didn't know until today there was such a thing. Now I do, I still find it hard to believe. Who makes a leaderboard for a utility website? What would be going in someone's head to do a thing like that? 

Ideogram V3 Turbo

Top of the table today is Amelezz with a "1.2k day" streak, which suggests the streak thing has been going on a lot longer than I thought. If not for that one slip, I might be somewhere on that leaderboard. I doubt I missed many days since I first discovered the site, if any at all, and that has to be at least a couple of years ago..

But even then, my name still wouldn't show up on the board because I have never registered an account under any name. I must have filled in some form long ago or else how would they know where to send the emails but it doesn't seem to have required anything more than the address because my creations are all still accredited to "Anonymous User". 

Unlike Suno, which has a similar pattern of gamification and where I'm unknown as That Darn Cat, no-one is going to find anything I've done by searching Nightcafe. Mind you, they won't find much at Suno either, only the experiments I made when I first found the app, also a couple of years ago. All my recent work there remains resolutely private.

Google Imagen 4.0 Ultra

I am not tempted by leaderboards or likes and I am not a fan of gamification. In fact, I'm against it. When the new system was introduced I was irked. 

I could just have ignored it and stopped collecting the credits. I already had plenty, getting on for three thousand, and since I only use a handful every few weeks, whenever I need something for a post, I was hardly likely to run out.

I wasn't so angry I was going to do myself out of a free supply of credits just on principle, though, so I contented myself with some passive-aggressive push-back. I decided I wouldn't give NightCafe the satisfaction of seeing any new prompts from me to earn those credits. Instead, I'd re-use the exact same prompt every day.

For the first day of the new regime I pulled up one of the images I'd used for this post, which at the time was the most recent use I'd made of the app. I cut and pasted the prompt - "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism" - to generate a new image and that's the prompt I've been using every day since.

Fluently XL

The whole point of NightCafe, as opposed to other AI Image Generation sites, is that it collects together many, many models. The Pro version, for which you have to pay, has the most but even the free version has around sixty. 

At the start of my streak I just used whatever model I'd left in the chamber after the last time I visited but pretty quickly it occurred to me to try a different model each day. Had I been planning it, I'd have started at the top and worked down but as it is I've just been picking one on a whim and trying not to duplicate too much. At some point, I need to go back and note down all the ones I've used so I can make sure to try all the others.

It's been fascinating. The similarity of the images is striking but so are the differences. As of today I have forty-seven images from the same prompt which, you'll notice, does not mention anything about the way the figure should be facing, their ethnicity, the time of day or what exactly I mean by a "corn field".

All of these and many more are details left to the AIs to work out. It's very instructive to watch them doing it. 

Mysterious XL v4

In so far as it's possible to tell, all the women are white, often typically northern-European in appearance. There are one or two where it's slightly ambiguous but there are no dark-skinned faces and most of the clothing is broadly western in style. 

That seems telling because the prompt makes no mention of ethnicity or global location but although I didn't realize it when I came up with the prompt, "dustbowl" is a term apparently quite specific to 1930s America, as made familiar by movies and novels in general and Steinbeck in particular. I always imagined it to be a lot more generic than that.

That goes some way to explaining the clothing, too, which is vaguely appropriate to that setting with a lot of blue jeans, denim jackets, and long canvas dresses. Again, I only specified that it be "old" and "worn", something not all the models seemed to notice.

Neither did I say which way the figure should be facing but only nine feature a figure walking away from the viewer. All the rest are walking towards the camera except for one extreme outlier, apparently crossing the path from the left to the right. 

Juggernaut Flux Lightning

As for age, the various models took a fairly broad interpretation of "young", with the female figures
seeming to vary from mid-teens to mid-thirties. Two of the models ignored the instruction to make the figure "young" altogether and went for a white-haired, much older woman instead. 

All of the models, without exception, interpreted "corn field" to mean maize or sweet-corn., something I suspect shows a very strong North American bias in the data. When I wrote the prompt I wasn't imagining anything like that, as can be seen in the original short story from which the quote was taken. Where I come from, a "corn field" loosely means any arable crop. I was most likely thinking of wheat or barley. Certainly not maize. It also seems to clash somewhat with the aforementioned tight interpretation of "dustbowl".

Only a handful of models added anything significant to the background and when they did it was usually something that gave the image a somewhat post-apocalyptic or sci-fi feel. I'm not really sure where that comes from. Maybe it's just me, seeing things that aren't there.

Animagine XL v3

Another handful gave the figure something to carry, almost always luggage of some kind. There's a single image in which the woman appears to be holding some kind of gun. Most of the women are bare-headed but there's a smattering of hats. One very odd take puts the figure in what looks like a space-suit.

Given that I didn't give any suggestions at all on palette beyond the single word "color",  the collection is remarkably consistent, all shades of yellow and brown. Sepia is a particular favorite. Occasionally there's a pleasant blue sky. The very few images that use a lot of color really stand out. 

Every shot is taken in daylight, too, although a couple look like the sun is about to go down. Again, that was never specified or even mentioned so presumably "daytime" is some kind of default.

This degree of relative consistency is something I've also recently noticed as a feature of Suno, where I've had cause to reuse the exact same prompts multiple times, with just a single word changed, trying to fine-tune something. It's clear that whatever the mysterious black-box processes behind these images and sounds might be, they're far from random.

I'm very pleased with the portfolio I'm building up of these unnamed women, making their way across a somewhat forbidding landscape. I intend to carry on re-using the same prompt at least until I've run it through all the available free models, not so much to prove or test anything but just because I find it really entertaining to see what comes out each time I press the button.. 

When I'm finished, maybe I'll pick a dozen or so of the best ones and have them made into a poster. It could replace my Bojack Horseman by the Pool that faded so badly in the sun I had to take it down. Nightcafe does offer a print-and-frame service but I think I'll be doing this one myself.

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post:

Google Imagen 4.0

The prompt is in the post. All the models are given in the captions except for the four shots in the header image. The upper pair are both by Flux from before I started using a different model each time so it's no surprise they're so similar. The two beneath them are by two versions of the same model, HiDream I1, so again the similarity is explicable, although not so much the congruence of those two with the ones by Flux. The variant models for those two are HiDream I1 Dev on the left and HiDream I1 Full on the right. I notice the "full" model is a lot sharper and clearer.

My favorite, by some margin and not just of the selection you see here but of the entire run so far, is  the fourth from the top: the mid-teen girl in dungarees, carrying a heavy-looking sack and staring down at her feet, looking worried. That's very close to the image I had in my mind of the unnamed girl in the story and the very dusty, red-tinged field she's walking through is very like the setting. Perhaps surprisingly, that one's from a model one of whose whose biggest claims is that it "Excels in typography, producing text that closely resembles human-designed artwork."

I didn't use several of my other favorites because I was trying to give sense of the range and and to illustrate certain points I'd made. Before the event began, I was toying with the idea of posting one image a day throughout Blaugust and I might still do something like it, after it finishes. It just seems a shame not share the good ones.

Train Keeps On Rolling

Is it any wonder the games industry as whole is having problems selling new games, when you consider the efforts that have been made over the last couple of decades and more to persuade people to keep playing the ones they already have? MMORPGs were just the advance guard for the self-destructive process, which can also be seen in television, movies, books and just about every form of popular entertainment there is.

The shift to a "Live Service" model for what sometimes feels like every game of the last five (Or is it ten?) years is starting to feel like one of those Roadrunner cartoons - Wile E Coyote frenziedly rolling a huge boulder up a hill in furtherance of some clever plan that hindsight will tell him was always destined to fail, just not in time to prevent it rolling back down and crushing him flat.

I was thinking about this this morning when I found myself spending nearly two hours "playing" EverQuest II, a twenty year-old game I bought when it came out and have never uninstalled. And that a day after I spent a similar amount of time "playing" EverQuest Online Adventures, a game that might be new to me but came out even before EQII.

It's not just live games that go on forever. The other day was I writing about all those Prime Gaming giveaways I was going to claim, all of them games that have been around for years. Further evidence that nothing ever goes away any more, especially since half of them have to be claimed through Good Old Games, a service whose raison d'etre is to stop old games from ever going out of circulation.

EQOA is a prime example of the depth of the problem. It's a live service game that's not even live. The genuine, live version did manage to do the near-impossible and close down for good a decade ago, thereby theoretically creating an opportunity for another game to pick up its dispossessed players - and what happened? A bunch of those same players went and rebuilt the damn thing so they didn't have to stop!

It's sometimes said that irony died the day Henry Kissinger collected the Nobel Peace Prize but irony dies every day now. This month, a new MMORPG by the name of Ship of Heroes will launch. It's been slightly delayed because Steam wasn't ready, but it's coming. Too late, most likely, but it's coming all the same.

Ship of Heroes was conceived as a lifeboat for City of Heroes players after that game closed down. CoH was so beloved, apparently, that its demise triggered the creation of several would-be successors, all racing to be the Hero of Heroes. 

Unfortunately for all of them, and in no small part because it seems to take figuratively forever to make an MMO these days, at least outside of China or South Korea, long before any of the new games were ready, the old one popped back up like the baddie in a slasher flick. Not dead after all, just stunned!

With the old City of Heroes not just back in emulator form but officially endorsed by the rights-holder and therefore stable enough for even the most risk-averse ex-player, there didn't seem to be much point in the others carrying on. One of them, inevitably my favorite of the three, Valiance, gave up the chase. 

The other two did not. City of Titans continues in development and Ship of Heroes is almost ready to set sail, most likely straight into the sunset if some of the speculation I've read comes true. No-one seems to give the game much of a chance. It's hard enough, competing with still-running games from years ago let alone zombie games that won't stay dead.

None of which is new, of course, but as the years roll on, the cumulative pressure from more and more of the games we used to play, and to a great extent still do, builds and builds. It's a phenomenon that's starting to be talked about and not always positively. There was a time when anniversaries with zeroes on the end generated a spontaneous round of respectful applause but there's such a thing as outstaying your welcome and signs of impatience are starting to show in some of the responses.

As I said earlier, it's not just games, either. Following music news these days can be a mildly surreal experience. When I began to get back into the swing of things in the early twenty-teens after a decade or so away (Playing games. Mostly the same ones I'm still playing.) the trend was all about bands getting back together. It started in the nineties and kept gathering speed until now they're no more likely to stay disbanded after a split than super-villains are to stay dead.

Of late, though, it's not enough for the stars of yesteryear to reform for a quick comeback and maybe a nostalgia tour or a Vegas residency. They will insist on writing and recording new material. It's an ongoing project. The bands come back and carry on like they'd never been away. 

And since it generally turns out that their aging fans aren't all that fussed about the new songs, the current fashion for a while has been to celebrate the anniversaries of the records the fans do want to hear - the old ones. Every day it seems like I'm reading about some band re-issuing an album on the tenth or twentieth or fortieth anniversary of its original release or playing a special gig at some prestigious venue, where they'll perform the thing in full. Some even go so far as to do whole tours just playing the one album with all the tracks in the right order. It's all eras now.

I guess the gaming equivalent would be all these "classic" servers, many of which seem to do extremely well. World of Warcraft Classic, by some estimates, eclipses the current "Retail" version. As for Runescape, a game sometimes said to be played by even more people than WoW, I don't know the exact numbers but from the way it's reported, it almost feels like Old School Runescape is the main version.

When I said at the top that all of this started whirling around inside my brain as I was playing EQII, you might have wondered why I put quotation marks around "playing". It's because I'm not at all convinced that's what I was doing or that it's what any of us are doing in MMORPGs any more. The whole genre was always somewhat antithetic to the concept of play but what I did this morning had nothing playful about it whatsoever.

At best, I was preparing to play. That's often the way and I know it's not just me because I keep reading blog posts where someone goes into detail about all the things they've had to do to get ready to tackle some content or other - a raid or an expansion or a quest or whatever - and how long it's taking and how much work it is.

I've spent most of this year trying to get my Necromancer in EQII ready to take the lead in this year's expansion when it lands and she's not there yet. This morning I checked all her spells, decided I could improve on nearly all of them, got my Warlock out, who's also my Sage and therefore my spell-crafter, had him make a bunch of upgrades, swapped them over to the Necro by way of the shared bank, scribed them all and then took her out to test them on some current-content solo mobs to see how much of a difference it had made.

That took me a couple of hours and the verdict was "not enough". So now I'm going to have to test the same content with my Berserker to see how far behind him the Necro is so I can judge how much more work I need to do to catch her up. 

I don't think that describes "playing a game". In the most positive light, it sounds more like a hobby such as gardening, where you have to prepare the ground and plant the seeds so you can potentially enjoy the results months later.  As for the dailies we all religiously do so as not to waste whatever rewards they offer, those are much closer to doing regular household chores than "playing". 

And yet we all go on doing it. In those games we've had installed for years. And when we've had enough for a while and search around for something else as a change of pace, chances are we end up in another game we used to play or maybe one we haven't tried yet but that's been around for just as long or even longer.

It's not to suggest we don't also buy and try new games. We definitely do because novelty is its own reward. But how many of those games do we then stick with for any length of time? 

The old-fashioned ones with a beginning a middle and most importantly an end, yes, those we buy, play and finish. But not so many of them as we used to because why would we need to? Three games on my Steam Wishlist are on deep discount this week and I got as far as putting them all in my basket before I realized I wouldn't have the time to play any of them because I already don't have time to play the old, online games I'm maintaining and the old, free games I'm claiming. So I put them back.

There are all these old games still there and running and getting new content and demanding all that time and investment because the older they get the more complicated it becomes to play them and no-one dares stop because if you fall off the bus you'll have one hell of a job climbing back on.

And anyway, why would you buy a new game when so many developers are so keen to give you some for free? Probably they're old games you enjoyed years ago but that won't run on your PC any more except look! Now they do! Wouldn't you rather play one of those again than something new you might not even enjoy?

Anyway, you get the point, I'm sure. Is it any wonder developers are finding it hard to get traction with their new games? Is it any wonder they're desperate to cut costs or to keep people playing the games they already made, if those games have somehow managed to pick up an audience? No wonder the finance guys want to farm it all out to AI. Closest thing they can get to getting out of gaming altogether, which I bet would be their first choice.

There was a grebo band in the eighties by the name of Pop Will Eat Itself. They saw the future coming, obviously. They split up in 1996 but it goes without saying that they're back together now.