You're No Pal Of Mine!

As the title of yesterday's post made painfully clear, I blew all my saved-up ideas in one unnecessarily lengthy Grab Bag with the predictable consequence that today I have nothing to write about. 

Okay, "nothing" is a strong word. Also not remotely accurate. I have a whole slew of things I could write about but none of them is suitable for the hour or two I have available to put something together. 

So I'm not going to bother. I'm going to say one thing about a gaming event, get AI to make me a header image, stick a song on the tail-end and call it done. Pathetic, isn't it?

Let's start with the gaming thing. One of the games I'm theoretically but not actually still playing is Once Human. I went on and on about how much better it'd be if they'd just give us permanent servers where we could settle down like it was a regular MMORPG and then they did and I pretty much never logged in again.

I still have OH installed and, I think, updated, so I could go back at any moment. I just need a push. And now I have one. Or I will have, in about a month's time.

Once Human is hosting a collaboration with... Palworld. I know! It sounds nuts, doesn't it? Until you think about it.

Apart from one looking like it was designed by a sugared-up eight-year old and the other by a teenage techno-goth, the two games are really quite similar. They're both open world survival games with a large building component and most importantly they both rely very heavily on capturing creatures and putting them to work.

In Palworld it's Pals. In Once Human it's Deviants. Pals roam around your home. Deviants roam around your home. Pals come with you and fight stuff. Deviants come with you and fight stuff. Pals let you do things you couldn't otherwise do. Deviants...

You get the idea. The mechanics are really very similar indeed and so are the results. Luckily for Starry, the studio behind Once Human, they didn't make it so you have you catch Deviants by throwing small spheres at them from a distance. No, you walk up to the Deviant, which is already inside a sphere, and you catch it by holding up your hand, which is entirely different.

I'm not clear on whether the  event is a one-way deal, with Pals appearing in Once Human but not the other way around, or whether Deviants will also be popping up in Palworld. Even if it's the latter, I doubt very much it would be enough to induce me to go back, even for a visit. Palworld is the open world survival game I liked the least of all the ones I've played, although even then I liked it more than that suggests. It was fun. Just not as much fun as all the others. 

I also very much doubt a brief return to check out this event will get me to spend much time in Once Human. I seem to be finding it very hard to stick at any games just now. There does seem to be a lot going on in OH, though, what with this, a new scenario and some more Vision Wheel shenanigans, so who knows? With all of that, something might click.

Another game I'm eyeing up just now is Erenshor, the solo MMORPG. I played the demo and enjoyed it but I never followed it up. It's been in Early Access for a while and there's supposed to be a big patch today that changes a whole lot of systems and mechanics so this might be a good time to start. 

I'm wondering if I might do better with something like this than with an actual MMORPG right now. I'm assuming Erenshor, unlike an actual MMO, allows you to pause or stop at a moment's notice, which is one of the main things that puts me off playing most of the games I usually enjoy. I'm wary of starting anything that can't be easily interrupted these days. 

What I really should be doing, gaming-wise, is getting back to Wuthering Waves, of course. There's yet another content drop coming. I could have embedded that video too and the one before but I haven't watched either of them for fear of spoilers. I took all that trouble to catch up and the moment I got there, I stopped playing and fell behind again. I should probably prioritize that instead of starting anything new.

That's about all I have for today and it's more than I thought I had. 

Let's finish with a song. Not one of mine. Still pondering how best to present those. Ihave more than a hundred now, which is a problem all of its own. 

How about an old favorite I'm not sure we've had on the blog before.

Blurry Moon - Charlotte Gainsbourg

That's Charlotte Gainsbourg's first new song since 2018, which predates the appearance of regular music features on IF, explaining why she's not appeared here before. (Actually, I just checked and she kind of has but only as the featured artist on Jim Jarmusch's band SQÜRL's John Ashberry Takes A Walk, on which she speaks and doesn't sing.)

And also, of course, in that whole post I did about Merci La Vie.

 Pretentious? Moi?

Time to stop before I say something embarassing about post-structuralism.

 

AI used in this post.

Just the header image, which was generated at NightCafe using the very annoyingly-named HiDream |1 Dev. What is it with that vertical downstroke I always have to peer at my keyboard to find? 

The prompt, taken directly from the text, was ""you walk up to the Deviant, which is already inside a larger sphere, and you catch it by holding up your hand", line art, color, retro". Default settings. 

I then trimmed the top and bottom because I forgot to change the format to 4:3. And then I ran it through Dithermark just for the hell of it.

Close observers will have noticed the hand has six fingers. I thought the good image generators were past all that now but obviously not. Then again, it isn't clear the hand is human, so there's a get-out if needed.