Christmas, Cryptic, Coke, Charli XCX And All The Rest

I didn't post yesterday, even though I could have. It felt like skipping school, by which I don't mean it felt fun. I was never one of those kids who enjoyed an unjustified day off. I could never quite forget I ought to be somewhere else. This was a little bit like that. Especially since I knew I had a busy few days coming up, what with work and other things, so I legitimately wouldn't be posting then. 

Also, there's the post count to think about. I hit the big three hundred in 2024 and it's on the cards for 2025. I need another 48 posts in thirty-three days. With the Advent Calendar to come it's doable. But only if I don't keep bunking off...

Speaking of which, let's start there.

The Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 

2022 was the first year I did one. I went with stock images and a single tune, all of which I sourced myself. It was hella fun so I did it again in 2023.

That was the year I tried to get the LLMs to find me some obscure Christmas songs, a job they signally sucked at, choosing instead to just make stuff up. AIs were still cute and funny then, like puppies. 

Not that everyone agreed. I had more success using AI image generators for the pictures but it lost me at least two readers, who made a point of letting me know they were going in the comments. I imagine quite a few more just stumped off in silence.

It didn't stop me calling on AI for help the following year but I did at least make some allowance for reader sensitivity. In 2024 I had the brilliant idea of doubling up with two tunes for each day, one Naughty, one Nice. I picked all the songs myself but for the images I used my own photos for the nice numbers and had AI do the nasty ones. That way, people could opt out of AI and still get to open a door every day.

It was a lot of work, not just the double-posting but because I also decided not to look at any pre-existing lists of Christmas songs. Too much work, in fact, which is why this year it's back to one window a day, although some days, when you open the flaps, you may find more than one song. 

This year, too, in keeping with my mild disillusionment with the way AI is going, there will be no AI involvement at all. The pictures will all be Public Domain images sourced from art galleries, museums and any other archives I can find. 

That has turned out to be a lot more work than you'd think. I can see why people use AI. It saves so much time. I'm already thinking that next year I might start with an AI image and then distress it, the way I do the non-AI pictures I use for music posts. That feels like it would be both faster and more fun and also legitimately involve at least some degree of human creativity.

As for the songs, I learned from last year's experience. Trying to find a couple of dozen unusual or obscure Christmas songs without looking at any lists or collections or playlists of unusual or obscure Christmas songs anyone else has done is a) really hard work and b) exhausting. 

This time I haven't even attempted to be original. I looked through a lot of other people's Christmas lists and cherry-picked. That led to me finding other songs that weren't on the lists,   so at least some of it is my own work. It sure went a lot faster this time, anyway, and I felt a lot less burned out by the end.

It's still quite annoying not to talk about the songs as I post them but I think that would kind of defeat the point of an Advent Calendar. The last couple of years, Redbeard has been kind enough to leave a comment on each day's entry, which gave me the chance to monologue about them in reply. If no-one comments this year, which is more than likely, I'll just have to do a separate post at the end. Don't think I won't!

Next up...

Oh, this is a Grab-Bag post, by the way. Did I not mention that?

Good News/Bad News

 

Which is it? Hell if I know. When I read that Embracer was selling Arc Games and Cryptic and that it was a management buyout, I had a couple of thoughts. The first was "I guess that's good news for Cryptic" and the second "Who is Arc Games?"  

Generally speaking, I'd say that if you're playing an MMORPG and the company that owns it sells it to someone else, you'd probably prefer it went to the people already making the content for it. Always assuming you're enjoying the game, that is. It seems like the safest option, aesthetically and emotionally, although possibly not financially.

Also, if your game was currently owned by Embracer, I guess you'd be forgiven for thinking anyone else would be an improvement. Then I read the article about the buyout on MassivelyOP, which clarified some things and confused others. 

Arc Games is what Perfect World Entertainment (PWE) turned into. It looks like it's some of Arc's management team that's mostly involved in the buyout, funded by Chinese company XD. As MOP points out, though, Embracer had already gutted Cryptic and handed the remnants over to one of Embracer's own divisions, DECA, while apparently Arc Games remained responsible for publishing Neverwinter, Champions and Star Trek Online. So that's as clear as concrete.

I haven't played any of Cryptic's games in years but I have at some point played them all. Champions I just didn't get on with. STO, I thought, was a decent enough game but I have very little affection for the Star Trek IP and I think you'd need quite a bit to want to keep playing for long.

Neverwinter, though, I did like. I played it a fair bit, on and off, although in common with most of the literally hundreds of MMOs I've dabble with over the years, I never got all that far. There are a couple of dozen posts about it here, though, and of the three, it's the only one I occasionally think of going back to visit.

Whether this latest development makes that more or less likely is hard to predict. If it's just a case of changing the names on the board-room door then no, I guess it doesn't. If it actually leads to a material difference in the way the game is developed, then yes, maybe.

The real question, as always, is who is playing any of these games now anyway? I guess someone must be because the buyer, fancifully named Project Golden Arc, paid  Embracer $30m, which seems at the same time a lot and not much. Thirty million for three established and operating MMOs sounds pretty cheap when you consider EG7 paid ten times that for Daybreak just five years ago. On the other hand, I repeat, who plays Cryptic MMOs in 2025? Looked at that way, it sounds like a lot of money after all.

I'm guessing this will be an ongoing story. I look forward to further developments.

Oh God, Not More AI Nonsense...

I could probably do two or three posts a week just on news items about AI that turn up in my feeds. Most of them I read and forget about but a few really demand some kind of comment or examination. Especially the ones about music. Here's an example.

Right after I published yesterday's post, I got the news that Warner had done a deal with Suno. This follows a deal Udio signed with UMG last month. Udio and Suno are the two leading generative AIs involved in creating music, Suno being by far the superior of the pair, in my opinion.

Until very recently, both were facing lawsuits from the three giants of the record industry, two of which are Warner and UMG. As far as I can tell, Warner is still suing Udio and UMG is still suing Suno. The third, Sony, is suing both of them. I guess the music stopped when it came to Sony and the parcel was already all unwrapped. Pity there wasn't a third AI in there, then they could all have gone home with prizes.

This is exactly what we should have expected, anyway. The way the whole AI scene is going now feels like a mirror of what happened to all the previous technical innovations that threatened the huge media conglomerates. First they try to close them down and then they buy them out. After that it's either close them down themselves or assimilate the technology and use it for their own purposes. 

It's great for the sell-outs, who get a big payday and don't have to go to jail, but it's rarely - probably never - good news for either the current users or the artists trying to protect themselves from their predations. Arguably, it may be good news for all the hundreds of millions of people who didn't even know the tech existed until the majors repackaged it and sold it to them. That's how we got Spotify, after all. Then again, look how well that turned out...

Immediately I read the news, I went straight to Suno to see how they were spinning it. I was not impressed.  They claim "You’ll still be able to create original songs the way you love today." but I very much doubt that will last long. They've already announced changes, coming "soon", meaning "a paid Suno account will be required to download songs from the product, with each paid tier enabling a specific number of downloads each month."

That seems weird to me. I guess it depends how many downloads you get. If it exactly matches the maximum number of songs you can make under a given payment plan, then it's a non-issue. If it's fewer, though, then it makes very little sense. Why let anyone download a percentage of the songs you allow them to make? Unless, I suppose, you intend to charge them extra for the rest. Double-dipping, I think they call it...

We'll see the details soon enough but it's not going to affect me directly. I have already downloaded all my finished songs as MP3s and burned most of them onto CD so they can't do much about that. I have a few days left before my current Pro subscription runs out and I'm currently downloading everything agasi, this time in .wav format, along with a bunch of the also-rans, too. 

I'm sure as hell not going to download everything I've made. There are several thousand versions of songs of mine on Suno now because you literally cannot delete anything you ever make. Most of them I never want to hear again, so I won't be wasting hard drive space on them. I still own the copyrights under Suno's own agreement anyway, so they can just sit there forever as far as I'm concerned.

I will not be renewing my subscription when it ends, either. Unless, of course, they offer me another huge discount. Then I might. I also might come back for another go when all those Warner artists, who must be just so excited so be signing away their rights so we can all start remixing their work, which looks like being the game plan. That sounds like a fun toy. I have a whole post on that but it's still brewing.

You Don't Have To Be An AI To Deepfake

Is deepfake a verb? It is now. 

This made me smile. We hear so much about AI copies of famous people, both their images and their voices, it was oddly refreshing to read about such an old-school, analog way of doing much the same thing. 

Johnny Cash's estate is suing Coca Cola over a commercial Coke has been running for a few months, in which - allegedly - a Johnny Cash tribute singer was hired to sing in the lamented country star's signature style. For about five seconds, while some guy (If we're supposed to know who he is, I don't..) wanders through a crowd of sports fans. 

It hardly seems worth complaining about, let alone paying lawyers, but I guess if you have a brand you have to protect it somehow. Shame to think of Johnny Cash as a brand but that's the 21st Century for you.

Some TV Talking 

I had plans today to review the second season of Man on the Inside, along with a quick sidebar on the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 5 but a full review is a post of its own so I'll just say of MotI I liked it but not as much as the first season. Not sure the format can stand a third. It already seems to have turned into more of a family dramedy than a comedy crime show. A full review may or may not follow.

ST 5.1 was a trip, though. I was genuinely taken aback by just how big a deal it felt, especially given I came late to the party. If this was the old days of broadcast television it would have been one of those water-cooler moments, I guess.

Netflix has taken the Wednesday option and pumped it up, dropping the season in three parts, with the final episode also being screened in 350 movie theaters across the USA. It is the streamer's most successful series ever, so I guess they want to make the most of this last hurrah.

The first tranche is four episodes and I did consider watching all of them back-to-back. They're all somewhere around 70-80 minutes long so it's an afternoon, not a whole day. 

In the end I opted to stick to my established practice and just watch one every evening. I watched the first last night. It started slow and ended fast. I was gripped from the intro to the credits and I am not going to say anything about it other than that. I'm doing my absolute best to avoid all spoilers, including what anyone else thinks about it, which believe me has not been easy, so I won't contribute to anyone else's problems if they haven't already seen it.

Always Leave 'Em Singing

Yes, the obligatory musical ending. I have so many songs bookmarked now. Any opportunity to shed one gratefully taken.

House - Charli XCX (Feat. John Cale)

From the soundtrack of Emerald Fennel's adaptation of Wuthering Heights, already controversial before it's even been released. My first and so far only experience of Emerald Fennel's work was her novel Monsters, which at the time I thought was the most amoral Young Adult book I'd ever read. 

It still is and I still do. Only now she's famous so we have it faced out with a Recommends card. Which I did not write. But I would have, if anyone had asked me.

John Cale, of course, among his many, many accolades, is the man I saw perform at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, only a handful of years after the crimes in question, wearing a copy of the signature mask used by the infamous Cambridge Rapist. Even in a hall full of worshipers and admirers, it caused something of a stir. 

Among this company, Charli looks like the nice, polite, well-behaved one...

And We'd Have Gotten Away With It, Too, If It Hadn't Have Been For You Pesky Humans...

Before I changed PC, I had a whole bunch of bookmarks concerning various developments in AI that I was planning on stitching into some kind of post. Because I chose not to transfer anything at all across to the new machine (A decision that feels better every day. It's been like moving from cluttered, disheveled old house to a clean and tidy new one.) all of those are lost.

Okay, no they're not. They're on the old computer, which still works perfectly well. I just can't be bothered to go into the other room where I've left it and switch it on. No-one wants to read a load of old stuff about AI, anyway, not least because anything anyone wrote about it more than a few days ago is almost certainly out of date by now. 

On the other hand, it's that or yet another post where I go into painful detail about what I'm doing in New World, so AI it is. 

It's not like I need all those bookmarked articles and reports and opinion pieces to write a post about it. Things are moving so fast, it's hard even to hold a consistent uninformed opinion, let alone one based on actual facts. 

A couple of months ago, I was wholly convinced by the bubble scenario. The entire AI edifice is completely unsustainable. Millions of people are making a fortune using the almost-free services but no-one providing them has any idea how to make any money from facilitating the much-heralded Webpocalypse. 

Any day now, the individuals and institutions funding the whole thing are going to pull the plug and that will be that. Then the economy will crash and no-one is going to be thinking about AI any more anyway because we'll all be too busy breaking up our furniture and burning it to keep warm, once all those data centers stop super-heating the atmosphere.

Or all these AI services everyone's using for free now will start charging and then charging more and at the consumer end AI will just be another service you can subscribe to if you can afford it but how many of those are you paying for already and do you really want AI more than you want TV or movies or games?

Meanwhile, all the businesses and government departments that bought in to the AI hype will be discovering it doesn't do what they were promised it would and they won't have been able to let as many people go as they thought they would or if they did now they'll have to hire some or all of them back because AI just isn't cutting it on its own.

Any of those. Most likely all of them at once. That seemed like how it would go.

There was plenty of support for all of those timelines. The pieces I had bookmarked were all talking about surveys and reports that said businesses that had tried AI were finding they weren't getting anything done any faster or cheaper and in fact maybe it was even a bit slower and more expensive, what with having to have everything the AIs did checked by a human and probably re-written by one, too. One opinion piece suggested the companies that would do best out of the whole thing would be those who didn't invest in AI at all but instead snapped up all the good people being let go by those who did, so that when the inevitable collapse came, they'd be in pole position to take advantage of it. 

As for the public, it felt like there was so much push-back.  Not just from all the people who, understandably, didn't want to lose their jobs but from the consumers and customers and clients who would supposedly be the ones paying for the products and services AI would make it possible to supply more cheaply and efficiently. If everyone's boycotting your stuff it hardly matters if you saved money getting it to market.

One of the articles made what I thought was a very telling point. Historically, gamers have been among the earliest of adopters of new technology and also the most willing to spend quite significantly over and above the going rate to get their hands on whatever was being sold to them as the latest, bleeding-edge gadget or gimmick. 

This time, though, gamers have to be about the most rabidly anti-AI consumers out there. The merest rumor that someone's spotted a single AI-generated image in a game has them out with their pitchforks and torches. If you can't convince gamers to accept AI, the argument goes, how do you expect to sell it to anyone else?

All of which must feel very comforting to anyone who never liked the thought of AI in the first place. Well, except for the crashing the economy and starting a global recession part, that is. When Mark Zuckerberg said move fast and break things I'm not quite sure that's what he meant. Then again...

Except, doesn't it seem to be taking a long time for this bubble to burst? And hasn't an awful lot of the damage been done already? Once the AI is embedded in the infrastructure, just how easy is it going to be to get it out? And how much would that cost? It's all very well to say we can't afford to keep it but now we have it, can we afford to let it go?

Sticking with games, because I really do not want to think about the AI-controlled robot war dogs that will be taking over the policing of our streets any time now (And they can climb stairs, you know. It'll be like when the Daleks learned how to levitate. Nowhere will be safe.) it's obvious all the really big producers want to go full AI. Some, like Square Enix and Ubisoft, are open about it, but you can bet every one of them has a plan in place already for when they can stop dealing with those pesky creatives and just talk to nice, obedient LLMs that have never been trained on the history of the Union movement.

I could link to any number of news items and articles where games executives are pictured drooling over the prospects but I'll limit it to just this one, which surprised me by its positive tone. It's from GamesIndustry, which I'm guessing is officially neutral on the general topic of AI (Not on the topic of General AI, though, another kettle of extinction for humanity altogether.) but which more often than not chooses to sound quite sniffy about the whole idea.

The tl:dr for that link is that Ubisoft (It had to be them, didn't it?) is in advanced testing for AI-controlled alternatives to players. Obviously not to all players. How would that make money? Just to the players other players would usually play with.

It shoudn't come as any kind of surprise. I mean, it's not like actual players haven't been asking for it for years, is it? How many blog posts have you read over the last decade and a half, where someone was either ranting about how all anyone wants to do these days is play MMORPGs like they're playing a single-player game? Or that MMORPGs would be so much more enjoyable if it wasn't for all those stinky players?

I'll tell you how many. A shit-ton. As I've said a few times before, the first time I really noticed the
strength of feeling on the subject was when Gordon from We Fly Spitfires posted about playing Guild Wars 2 for the first time, fighting the same mobs and doing the same quests but not having to speak to anyone, let alone actually form a group.

We Fly Spitfires is long gone so sadly I can't link directly to it but I referenced that post and talked about the general topic of playing solo with others back in 2018. I don't believe gamers in general have become markedly more social since then so it's hardly surprising if one of the best use-cases for AI is seen as getting rid of other players. It's what a lot of them have been wishing for for years and voting, as they say, with their feet, although with their backsides might be a better way of putting it, what with all the sitting down gamers tend to do.

Whether those same gamers want exactly what Ubisoft is trying to sell them is another question. That GI post describes how the various AI-NPCs have different personalities, varying from "stoic" to "bubbly" for the grunts who join you in the fights to "authentically annoying: self-satisfied and occasionally belittling" for the mission commander who tells you what to do and where to go.

I'd have thought one prime reason many players would like not to have to deal with other humans would be all that messy personality stuff. But then, in a commercial release, once the tech has been passed as ready to meet the public, I imagine you'll be able to pick the personalities of your team to suit your tastes. 

Based on how AIs work now, I imagine the default option will be a bunch of flirtatious sycophants who just can't get enough of your amazing insights and truly incredible ideas. No doubt there's someone out there looking for a sarcastic AI partner who treats them like dirt but I'm not convinced a video game based on a Tom Clancy novels is where Ubisoft is going to find them.  

From a personal perspective, I feel like every week that passes leaves me less interested in and enthusiastic about AI than I was before. It was amusing a few years ago, amazing a few months ago, and now it's starting to bore me a little. It doesn't infuriate me - yet - but it's getting harder and harder to summon up the required goshes and wows for the endless, iterative, baby steps forward.

At the moment, I'm tending towards the opinion that AI in its current incarnation is going to end up being yet another of those not particularly interesting things we all have to use and pay for, whether we like it or not, like broadband service providers and local taxes. Try living on grid in any town or city in the Western Hemisphere without either of those and see how far you get.

Equally, try excitedly and repeatedly telling your friends how wonderful they are. See? Now no-one wants to talk to you any more.

Azuriel wrote a great post bouncing off the last one I put up about AI, in which he suggested the natural conclusion of the course I appeared to be, if not advocating for, then at least traveling along willingly, would be a future where we gave up on "content" altogether in favor of stimulating our pleasure centers directly until we all died of dehydration and/or exhaustion. It's not that I don't find it an attractive picture but I suspect that, at least in the lifetimes of most people likely to have read this far, it'll turn out to be something a lot less dramatic than that.

In my own case, it feels as though the future is probably going to involve considerably more involuntary use of AI, as it embeds itself inexorably in every aspect of all our lives, while at the same time my voluntary, personal involvement with the technology will decline. I've stopped making AI music, for example. It feels like I've done that now and, while it was immensely enjoyable and satisfying while I was doing it, I'm not missing it at all now I've stopped. I'll probably do it again at some point but it isn't something that's going to occupy me for the rest of the time I have left.

Another indicator is what's happening with this year's Inventory Full Advent Calendar. I've shortlisted all the songs now and I didn't use AI at all. In fact, I skipped straight past the Gemini AI summary at the top of every Google search I did and went straight to the links. 

As for the pictures, there won't be any AI images this year. I've decided they're boring. We've all seen far too many and they all look the same. They're also both too good and not good enough at the same time, which is a terrible combination. 

I actually still like making them and looking at them for my own enjoyment but I don't feel it's likely that anyone else is going to share my pleasure, which I'm well aware comes mostly from having made something that looks like the picture in my head, not form any intrinsic qualities of the images themselves. They require back story that would be inappropriate and counter-productive other than as illustrations to a narrative.

The main reason I won't be using any AI for the calendar this time, though, is that AI just isn't cool any more. Two or three years ago, even if some people really, really hated it and left comments saying they weren't going to come back if they were going to have to look at AI images, I felt like it was hip and clever to be making them and sharing them. Now, it feels like the default option. Everyone does it. I'd rather do something a little different, even if it is more work. 

And let's be honest, it is more work. A lot more. No wonder so many people do choose to use AI. It may not get you the right answer or draw you a great picture but it will give you an answer and a picture and it will do both in seconds. 

If you're putting a blog post together, quite often any answer or any picture will do. I mean, no-one really reads this stuff, anyway and even if they did, they'd most likely have the pictures switched off. It's not like I'm using AI to gather evidence for a court case or diagnose an illness, after all. Or even write a job description or an essay that someone's going to grade. No-one would be that lazy, surely. Or that gullible...

Look! All the way to the end and not one word about what I've been doing in New World! I'm really tempted now to give Gemini a precis of what I did in Aeternum yesterday and have it write a post for me, then put it up and see if anyone notices.

I never said I was going to stop using AI, did I? Or stop writing about it, either. I'm just not going to pretend I think it's cool any more. That'd be as bad as believing the best movie ever made was Fellowship of the Ring...

As for using it, I'll guess I'll stop when it's neither fun nor useful any more. We're not quite there yet but we could be soon. That's just the voluntary uses, though. I doubt any of us is going to be able to opt out entirely, ever again, short of going full Into The Wild.

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Ironically, I didn't use any until I got to the final sentence, when I couldn't remember the name or author of the book I wanted to reference. I typed "what's the book where the guy walks into the Canadian wilderness and is never seen again" into Google Search and the AI Overview came back with "The book you are likely thinking of is Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer", which was indeed the right book.

The AI then went on to point out that it was the Alaskan wilderness, not the Canadian, that the person Krakauer wrote about, Christopher McCandless, walked into, but that there was another book, "Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell", published recently, which tells the story of an explorer who vanished in the Canadian wilds back in 1910. 

Gemini (For it was they, I assume.) then gave me precis of both, accurate in the case of Into The Wild at least, although I'll have to take the other on trust, along with links to Amazon for the Krakauer and the publisher's website for the other, so I could buy them both.

Given that Gemini wasn't just right but righter than I was, I suspect the days of being able to assume the AI summaries at the top of Google Search aren't to be trusted may be limited, although I do have to say that only a couple of days ago the same AI Overview told me about some album or other than sounded really interesting but turned not to exist, at least not so far as an actual Google Search could tell me. So maybe don't stop checking their work quite yet. 

Notes on Non-AI used in this post.

All the writing and all the pictures.  The first and second image are photos of things made by Mrs Bhagpuss and given to me as presents. The third image is two things made by her (The felts.) and two made by me (The mirrors.) all hanging in our hallway, as does the final image, a framed print I won in a raffle back inn the '90s. 

An art raffle. 

It was the nineties.

Don't you miss the nineties? 

You Wait Years For A Feel-Good Comedy Like Ted Lasso...

I finished watching another TV show last night so I suppose that's what I'm going to be writing about today. It would probably make more sense to save a few up and do a portmanteau post about all of them but then I'd probably have forgotten what half of them were about by the time I got to write about them, so maybe it's better I keep on top of things.

The show I've been watching is another sitcom. There's a surprise. 

I really like sitcoms. I grew up with them. They were a staple of my viewing - of everyone's viewing - from when I was a child, through my teenage years until I was well into my thirties. More so even than soap operas. Certainly more than serious drama. 

Even now, sitcoms remain an important part of almost any programmer's schedule, whether it's a broadcast network or a streaming platform. And there's persistent cultural interest in the history of the genre. There are documentaries and movies and stage plays based on sitcoms from the fifties through to the nineties. I've seen or heard quite a few.

There are novels, too. I just finished reading one centered on a fictional sixties sitcom. It felt like it was based on a specific show, although I don't think it was any I've seen. I'd tell you what the book's called and who wrote it but I read it in proof and it's not out until next year so I'm not supposed to review it or quote from it. I enjoyed it, though, I'll say that much. 

It's not surprising that, even with my longstanding interest in the genre, I didn't really recognize whatever specific show was being referenced. We didn't get a lot of the really big U.S. shows over here when I was growing up. I don't think we got Leave It To Beaver or The Honeymooners or Gilligan's Island, for example, and even if we had it would most likely have been late, incomplete and out of order.

The novel mentions a number of real sixties sitcoms that we did get, though, and the author clearly doesn't think much of many them. The classics, like the eternal Lucy, get due reverence but there's little respect shown for all those fanciful shows with supernatural or surreal elements, like The Munsters, My Favorite Martian or I Dream of Genie, most of which made it over here and all of which I watched every chance I got. 

None of those get a good word in the novel but the author and the characters all seem to save their greatest disdain for what was one of my favorite shows as a child, The Beverley Hillbillies. I can't pretend that's unfair. It is not, I have to say, a show that's aged well. I tried to watch a couple of episodes on YouTube a decade or so back and it was heavy going. 

A lot of sitcoms from the fifties and sixties have lasted a lot better. I watched the entirety of The Dick Van Dyke Show on YouTube a few years ago. It stands up very well. The Addams Family remains a favorite with many, sixty years after it was first broadcast. I have the box set of the entire run of Sgt. Bilko next to me right now and I could pull out a disc at random and watch any episode and it would still be sharp, witty and very funny.

So, anyway, I like sitcoms. I've watched a lot, read about some and I know a reasonable amount about the history. There certainly aren't as many around as there used to be but I'd say there are still plenty of good ones being made. They're not the linchpins of the schedules the way they once were but they're still culturally and commercially significant, especially when they feature a well-known actor in the central role.

At which point, I imagine, someone reading this is going to guess I'm about to review the second season if the Ted Danson vehicle, Man on the Inside. I am not. I'm watching it but I'm only up to Episode 4. You'll have to wait for my thoughts on that one. 

The show I've just finished watching is Running Point. Terrible title. I haven't been able to remember it even for twenty-four hours between episodes on my one-a-day schedule. I just had to look it up for this post. I can't remember the last time I watched a whole season of a show and couldn't bring the name of it to mind by the end.

In case you haven't heard of it, Running Point is a basketball comedy airing on Netflix and starring Kate Hudson. I can give you the elevator pitch in a sentence: Ted Lasso meets Arrested Development. 

Better do the SPOILER WARNING here, I guess. 

The longer version? Kate Hudson plays Isla Gordon, youngest of the four Gordon siblings and the only girl. The very wealthy Gordon family own the L.A. Waves basketball team, of which eldest brother Cam has been President since their father died. The team employs all four of the Gordon kids in one capacity or another, with Isla shunted off to the sidelines as the Charity organizer.

At the start of the first season (There's only been one season so far.) Cam, who has a crack and coke addiction, goes into rehab. His two brothers each expect to take over but Cam hands the controls over to Isla. 

This sets up a Ted Lasso scenario, where a completely inappropriate person is given control of a major sports team. As with Ted, it turns out she's really good at it, even though at the start it looks like she'll be a laughing stock. And even more like Ted, it becomes obvious after a while that the person who gave her the job expects and wants her to fail.

The whole story arc is almost identical, with Isla making left-field choices that turn out to be inspired, bringing the fractious team together by sheer force of personality, winning over grumpy and self-obsessed players and cynical journalists alike with her genuine enthusiasm and basically shining like a feisty ray of sunlight over everything and everyone until the team starts acting like a real team and winning matches again. 

Seriously, you could probably project the two storylines simultaneously onto a screen and have them overlap almost perfectly.

As for the Arrested Development comparison, that's a bit of a looser fit. There are plenty of dysfunctional families in sitcomland, after all. Schitt's Creek might be almost as good a match. 

Still, the nature of the Gordon's dysfunctionality reminded me quite strongly of Arrested Development, with the relationships between the siblings and their hangers-on occasionally edging towards the irreal if not the surreal. When the fourth, previously unknown, Gordon sibling turns up a couple of episodes in, and turns out to be a lovable, naive, adolescent, whose puppy-dog enthusiasm counter-points the narcissism and interior focus of the rest of the clan, the congruencies become hard to miss. 

Okay then. So it's not exactly original. But is it any good?

Yes, it is. The sporting storyline works as well here as it it did in Ted Lasso. Kate Hudson is as appealing, relatable and amusing as Jason Sudeikis, the supporting cast is strong, especially the three brothers. (I particularly liked Scott MacArthur as middle brother Ness.) Most importantly for a sitcom, the script is consistently and reliably funny.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the basketball scenes, of which there aren't many, far more convincing than their equivalents in Ted Lasso. That may be because I have seen a lot of football matches on TV but very few basketball games. 

Or because I have never been able to follow the action on a basketball court. It's too fast and frenzied. Or maybe they got mostly real basketball players to do the action shots. Whatever, it worked a lot better for me than the borderline embarrassing on-pitch antics in Ted Lasso.

The script is partly credited to Executive Producer Mindy Kaling, who co-wrote the first and last episode and wrote Episode 2 alone. It was seeing her name in the credits when Netflix offered the show up as a suggestion that got me to give it a try, although now I actually think about it, I'm not sure I've ever watched any of her other shows. That's the power of name recognition for you.

I'm happy I did, anyway. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole season. 

It's very much a feel-good comedy (Again, like Ted Lasso.) and I can take any number of those, provided they also have a bit of bite, which this one certainly does. Kate Hudson is a very good comedienne, not just in her delivery of the numerous smart remarks and come-backs but in some very good physical comedy, too. The running gag where she doesn't see the extremely clean glass partition wall gets funnier every time she walks into it.

I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Ted Lasso. It's "inspired by" not "ripped off". If the success of the pair of them leads to a spate of feel-good sports comedies, I won't be complaining.

For non-sports fans, it sits very snugly in the long tradition of both family and work-based sitcoms. If you like to see siblings and/or co-workers striking sparks off each other, this should suit very well.

The whole thing motors along for ten episodes, none of which felt like filler, before wrapping up relatively neatly. The exceptions are Isla's love life, which starts out simple and ends up very complicated indeed and the mystery of what the hell Cam might be up to. 

That one goes unaddressed to the point where I was starting to think the writers had just forgotten about it altogether... until the very, very last scene, when suddenly there's not only a cliff to hang off but a bombshell to hang on to on the way down if you fall. 

It's just as well there's a second season on the way.  

Bless Me Padre, For I Have Killed You. A Dozen Levels Too Late But Who's Counting?

I wouldn't normally be posting on a Sunday. I'd be at work. It's coming up Christmas, though, and my work pattern has been shunted around a little, so here I am. I thought I might do a little catch-up on where I am with New World.

Still playing, for a start. Every day, almost. Longer sessions than I've been used to lately, too, although that still only means a couple of hours, most days. 

It's an incredibly comfortable game, New World. Cozy, almost. It shouldn't be, given the bleak lore, heavy focus on combat and over-saturated mob density, all things that usually make a game feel enervating after a while. And yet, somehow, it's always felt like a pleasant place to pass some time.

It has for me, anyway. Even back in pre-alpha, when Amazon Games still thought they were making a PvP sandbox, I remember trotting around the beautiful countryside, taking screenshots no-one but me would ever see, thanks to the very strict NDA, and generally enjoying the peaceful vibe.

Yes, there are zombies everywhere (Not what they like to call them but it's what they are, all the same.) but they move slowly and don't react until you're past them. Everything's a bit that way, slow on the uptake, except maybe some of the animals. Boars and big cats are particularly quick to engage and you really, really don't want to tangle with the bears.

But mostly you don't have to. There's an excellent road system. If you stick to the highways you won't run into much trouble. Not until you have to cross one of the many bridges, that is. They all seem to be positively infested with skeletons. And there are some checkpoints, gates, tollbooths and the like. They might need a detour through the shrubbery.

It's hard not to keep veering off the road, though. The pickings are so good. There's stuff just lying around everywhere for the taking. It's a kleptomaniac's paradise. There are chests and boxes and stashes of all kinds in and around every building. Not just the ruins. The intact homes, too. Go into someone's house and, provided they've been corrupted or tainted or whatever the hell it is, you can kill them and steal their stuff. It's not just socially acceptable, it's positively encouraged.

 

What with the sightseeing, the stealing, the murdering and the foraging (Did I not mention the endless supply of herbs, ores, skins and timber?) it's easy to while away hours without really doing anything much. That's mostly how I played on my first post-launch run, a couple of hundred hours, with sessions that lasted twice or three times as long as they do now.

Back then, I did somehow find the time to follow the main storyline as well. And do a bunch of side quests. But it was a rare session when I didn't lose track of the plot as I veered off course to see what I could fill my bags with. That, plus the crafting and the rep grind to buy a house and then decorating it... it all made for a slow meander to the level cap.

I must have been weeks, months, behind the bubble. In the end I did get there somehow but by then the game was out of fashion and I'd had enough for a while, so I moved on. And now I'm back, of course, the cap has gone up. 

One of the perks of maintenance mode is that returning players only have to play catch-up once, I guess. I can't count the number of times I've had to do it in some MMORPGs that had the nerve to keep on adding content every time I took a break.

This time it didn't seem to matter much. I got all wrapped up in the mount questline, which didn't appear to care what level I was. Actually, that's not entirely true. It does give you a recommended level for each stage but I don't think it's hard-locked. In any case, at Level 60, I was well over the height limit.

Well, for a while. A few days ago, though, I finished the last of the wolf-riding races and the woman who set the courses told me I ought to go to Brimstone Sands to speak to the next race organizer. Brimstone Sands is that big zone they added a while back, the one before Nighthaven and it's designed for levels 60 plus. (I think when it was added 60 was still the cap, so it's probably all doable at sixty. Not easily, though.)

So now I'm back to doing "at level" content, or I will be if I do the next set of time trials. Which would be fine if I didn't have to fight anything. The races themselves are strictly non-combat but they frequently take you right through the middle of those thick clusters of mobs at gates and on bridges. 

It didn't matter when the mobs were in the thirties and forties. If I had to, I could just hop off and slaughter them all. When the archers (And there are no shortage of archers in this game. And snipers.) took pot-shots at me as I rode through, they either missed me or did very little damage. I certainly never fell off my pony. Or my wolf.

In Brimstone Sands it's different. Arrows, bullets and musket balls hit hard enough to dismount me and you can't remount until you're out of combat. Killing the mobs takes a while. Running away on foot until they leash takes even longer. Get knocked off your mount more than once and there's no chance you'll finish the race before the timer runs out.

Time to get back on the treadmill, I guess. Gear and levels both. 

One good thing that always happens when you've been away a while in many MMORPGs is that all the stuff you couldn't afford to buy on the auction house last time you were there is suddenly on sale at a fraction of the price. No-one wants gear for ten or fifteen levels below the cap.

Except me, of course. What is the cap now, anyway? 70? Let me check... yes, it went to seventy with the Angry Earth expansion that I didn't buy, which explains why I stopped at sixty. And now they're giving that expansion away for free, I have another ten levels to do.

Or, more to the point, I have another two levels to do right away, because gear in New World has level requirements and from browsing the traders last night it looks like there's a big step-change at Level 62. I ended up buying a load of very cheap upgrades with a minimum level of 56 or 57 just to be going on with but I'll be replacing those as soon as I do another level and a half.

I did go test it to see if the new gear was sufficient to make Brimstone Sands as easy as I'd like. It wasn't. It's fine, I could do it, but I'd have to take the fights seriously and I have no desire whatever to do anything of the kind.  

Instead, I thought I'd go clear up my quest journal. I have a ton of old quests in there I can go finish up in lower zones. Mid-40s quests give decent xp and they're pleasantly unchallenging. Except for one.

Padre Nuñez. I hate Padre Nuñez! He's a Level 48 boss and I've needed him for a quest since... I don't know... it must be years now. I got the quest when I was in the mid-40s and I've tried to do it easily a dozen times. 

Sometimes I can't find the bastard at all. He wanders along the roads on his estate but half the time I go there he's nowhere to be found. Those are the lucky times.

When I do find him, he kicks my ass. He pretty much one-shot me when I was the same level as him and it's barely gotten any better since I've outleveled him. He's one of those gravedigger mobs that walks around with a coffin strapped to his back, which means you have to break the damn box before you can hurt him if he turns his back on you. 

That's bad enough but he also heals himself and drops some weird spinning scythe thing made out of light that whirls around and takes huge chunks off your health if you don't get out of its way. Which would be fine, except if you try to back off he pulls you to him somehow and if you manage to resist and get out of range he often breaks combat, goes into "Retreating" mode, runs away and heals to full health.

So he's fun...

Still, I thought at Level 60, with the best gear I could find for my level on the Trading Post, surely I'd be able to get the better of him. 

Nope. I found him (Eventually.) and launched a full-on frontal assault. Shock and awe tactics. It was a lot closer than usual but when it came down to the wire and we had about 5% health each, he outlasted me and I died. 

I was not happy. When it's that close, you know it's just a matter of either luck or slightly better tactics so I tried again. And this time, for the first time ever in all the times I've visited his estate, I discovered  he has a fixed spawn at some kind of outdoor shrine or altar. 

Well, he is a priest...

How I never saw it before I can't explain. I also don't recall ever seeing it mentioned in any walk-through I read. There he was, though, with two guards. He had his back to me. I think he was praying.

Having learned nothing from all the other times, I launched myself at him from behind. I killed his two guards and backed off as he dropped his stupid blue lights. And this time, for whatever reason, he followed me without reeling me in or breaking combat. His health was dropping fast! And he didn't self-heal! Or turn around so his coffin would protect him!

He just fought like a regular person, face to face, no tricks and I kicked the crap out of him. It was super easy. Barely an inconvenience!

Maybe that's how you're meant to do it. Fight him at his altar. Maybe he buffs himself there and I caught him before he had time to finish. Maybe the leashing is more generous in that area. Maybe I just got lucky.

Don't know. Don't care. Never have to see him again. Well, unless I ever level up another character but I don't think there's much chance of that...

What with that quest and a few others much less stressful, I made it about two-thirds of the way through Level 60. I can't say it feels quick but it's certainly enjoyable. My plan now is to trundle steadily through a bunch of mid-40s/low-50s quests until I ding 62, then buy a whole new set of gear and get back to the races.

Looks like I'm playing New World again. For a while, anyway.

Good Job, Niffty! - Hazbin Hotel Season Two

Remind me what I said about Hazbin Hotel Season One... ah yes... "great fun from beginning to end". Also "one of the sweariest shows I've ever watched." And I found the characters (All of them, apparently.) "memorable and frequently endearing."

My conclusion? "Highly recommended, provided you don't shy at swearing, sex, religion or song and dance numbers."

All of which applies equally or possibly even more so to Season Two, with the exception of the "great fun from beginning to end" part. I loved the season as a whole but I found the opening couple of episodes overwhelming. Not always in a good way.

Another thing I said about Season One was that it was "a full-on assault to both eyes and ears" and that turned out to be doubly true of the opening of the second season. I'm not sure if I'm out of practice or if the show does actually ramp up the hysteria but I had some difficulty not just following the plot but also hearing what anyone was saying. 

That hasn't happened to me before. Not in a show like this, anyway. Maybe I'm going deaf. I don't think it's that, though. If it was, I'd be having trouble with other show. I'm not. Just this one.

There is some precedent. There was a moment, back in the deep swamplands of the mumblecore era, when I couldn't always make out what the unbearably naturalistic characters were slurring (Looking at you in particular, Garden State, although now I learn that's technically not a mumblecore movie because it actually has a plot. Could have fooled me.) I had to switch the subtitles on for some of those. 

I've rarely had any difficulty picking out the sense and substance in animation, though, even when people are screaming and yelling and explosions are going off all around.

When all that's happening and the dialog is set to music, though? Apparently that's too much for me now. Halfway through Season 2 Episode 1 I had to switch the subtitles on so I could figure out what they were singing about. 

That worked for the songs but then I found if I left the subtitles on after the singing stopped, the subtitles were too distracting. I've been happy to read subtitles for movies since I was a very young teenager. The BBC used to show subtitled foreign films all the time and then I went to university and spent three years watching movies in all kinds of languages (Okay, mostly French...). 

The thing is, nearly all of those films, being arthouse movies, were either visually slow-moving or static. Until Diva and Subway and Run, Lola, Run, anyway. (Although I've actually never seen Run, Lola, Run. I ought to do something about that sometime...) Having your eye constantly drawn to the bottom of the screen didn't generally lead to you missing much of the action. There was no action.

Hazbin Hotel is all action. The screen is a constant firework display of vividly colored (Red, mostly.) weird-looking characters caroming off each other, the walls or the ceilings. It's kinetic and chaotic and almost impossible to take in even when you're looking right into the heart of everything that's happening. When you're half watching the characters and half reading the subtitles, it's totally impossible.

Or it was for me, anyway, in those first two episodes. I had to compromise by toggling the subtitles on when the singing started and off again when it stopped and it was distracting to say the least. I never felt like I was fully engaged, let alone immersed.

And then with Episode Three that all just...stopped. I don't know why. I don't think the show got any less frenetic. I think maybe I just acclimatized to it. From then on, I loved Season Two every bit as much as Season One. More, probably.

Oh, just editing this in... SPOILERS from here on. 

The plot is really involving. It makes sense and you can follow it. Charlie's plan to offer Redemption to sinners in Hell paid off at the end of Season One, when Sir Pentious's selflessly sacrificed himself to save Cherri, an altruistic act that sent him straight to Heaven. The problem is no-one believes it happened and there's no way to prove it. Even Charlie doesn't know for sure that it's true.

Meanwhile TV Demon Vox is ramping up his campaign to become the #1 Sinner in Hell and turn himself into a god. Well, a demi-god, anyway. Alastor, the Radio Demon and Vox's nemesis, is sulking, plus there's something very dodgy about him anyway, even if no-one in the Hotel suspects.  

There are so many sub-plots and back-stories and secrets being hinted at but never explained. The whole thing is layered far beyond reason and good luck trying to unravel it. If ever a show was designed to be re-watched and slo-moed and picked over for hour after hour, it's this one.

None of which I've done or am likely to do, of course. I like not knowing what's going on. Or rather, I like to know something is going on, I just don't care if I ever find out what it is. 

On that level, Hazbin Hotel works wonderfully. It has a single, straightforward, linear adventure plot - Charlie wants to do a good thing, Vox wants to do a bad thing, their two things are in conflict. Which is going to win? Anyone can follow that, pick a side, and start cheering. (No-one would pick Vox's side. Would they? Please tell me you wouldn't...)

Beneath that, it's all a churning, roiling maelstrom of grudges, lies, secrets and despair. It is Hell, after all. You wouldn't expect anyone to be happy, would you?

Enter Niffty. Niffty's always happy. She doesn't do subtext. Niffty grins and cleans and stabs. She stabbed Adam to death in Season One, which I imagine got her a standing ovation all around the world, let alone in Hell. The absence of Adam in Season Two is in itself enough to make the entire show feel lighter. I really, really could not stand him.

Niffty is my favorite character in a show where I like almost everyone. In fact, now Adam is gone, I think I do like everyone. Even Lute, who makes it very hard to like her, sometimes. I can see her point, though. Even Abel, ditto and ditto. 

The show is a musical. It's sometimes easy to forget. I certainly never came out of any episode humming the tunes. Mostly I couldn't remember the melody lines ten seconds after the singing stopped. Amazon keep trying to push the Soundtrack CD/Stream before every episode but I can't imagine ever wanting to listen to any of it away from the context of the show.

That said, the songs are fine. They mostly work while they're happening. One or two I thought dragged on a bit but mostly they didn't outstay the limited welcome I was willing to give them.

The finale, though... Wow!

I loved the finale. I thought it was pretty much perfect. The pacing could hardly have been better, with the whole thing following the structure of a caper movie and doing it brilliantly. I was just starting to notice, more than halfway through, that there hadn't been any songs at all and then there they were, just in the right place, just at the right time.

It was a fully satisfying conclusion to a compelling and engrossing storyline. Every major character's arc concluded there or thereabouts as I'd hoped it would. Niffty's fight with Velvet was just sublime. Niffty has so many great lines in it, too. Check it out above. It works on its own as a short.

That whole scene comes freighted with so many resonances. It's like the animators from Looney Toons and Animaniacs and AAP and Ren and Stimpy all got together and decided to have a baby. Er... no... not that...

I hadn't really thought about it too much until now but Hazbin Hotel is a very Western animation. I'm so used now to just about anything that isn't Disney or Pixar being shorthanded as "anime" I don't pay it any attention but this is so firmly in line of descent from the tradition of Hollywood animators of the 30s onwards it's impossible to miss.

In fact, at its core, Hazbin Hotel is an updated, adult progression of the shows that proliferated on TV in the 90s and 'aughts, which themselves paid tribute to the Golden Age of cinema animation. It's louder, faster, redder and much, much, much swearier but it's wholly recognizable as part of that lineage. Maybe that's why I love it so much.

The final episode ends with all the loose ends knotted so tidily you might wonder where the lead-in for Season Three was going to come from. And then Charlie's phone rings...

There will be a Season Three. It's been renewed. And there'll be a Season Four, too. The deal has been signed for both. Actually, it was signed months ago. Amazon have a hit show and for once they seem to know it. 

Looking forward to next season already. 

 

Late Night Brainstorms

It's been two weeks since the last What I've Been Listening To post and things have gotten a little out of hand. Bear with me a moment while I go get my laptop...

Ah, that's better. I emailed myself all the songs I've bookmarked since last time. More than forty of them. Since I stopped using Suno I seem to have gone a bit crazy over new stuff. I go looking for it most nights, either before or after I watch My Shows™ . 

Don't you hate that expression? "My shows"? I do. I never use it. I think it, though. Is that worse? 

Speaking of which, until I realized just how many songs I had stacked up waiting for a turn, today's post was going to be a review of the second season of Hazbin Hotel, which I finished watching last night. That'll probably be tomorrow now but just to give you an idea what I thought about it, I added this T-shirt to my Christmas Wishlist earlier this morning.

Also, it occurs to me that someone may be wondering why, instead of emailing my own bookmarks to myself, I don't just sync Firefox on the laptop and desktop. Or why, indeed, I didn't do that with all my apps and services when I changed PC. 

It's simple. I don't like them to be the same. I like them to be different. I like every device - desktop, laptop, phone, tablet - to be an individual. Who am I to tell them they have to be like all the others? Don't they have lives of their own? Dreams? 

Well, no, they don't. I'm not delusional. I know they're machines. And it is inconvenient, the way I do it. It would be a lot easier if I had all of them set up to be as similar as possible. I still don't like it, though. So I don't do it. Much.

Enough waffle. We have so many tunes to get through. How am I ever going to choose?

Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale

Hah! Easy! That's a set starter if ever I heard one. There are a lot of Lana clones now - and I mean a lot - but almost all of them behave like she never made an album before Norman Fucking Rockwell. I mean, yes, okay, it is one of the best albums ever made, but still.

Aimee doesn't just do Early Lana. She does Early Demo Lana. Pre Born To Die Lana. That's the era where I started and I miss it so finding this was like a lightning stroke. Obviously I wanted to know if there were more.

 Let's Get Married - Aimee Fatale

And there were. Although not many. Aimee is new on the scene. But come on! It's like time slipped. I don't know how long she can keep on mining the vein but I'm here for it while she does. I know it's not the original. It's not even original. But as she says herself...

 It Could Be Better (But It's Good Enough) 

Aimee Fatale

And that's pretty much all there is of Aimee. When there's more it's a safe bet it'll turn up here.

 New Age - Sleepazoid

When the algorithm kicked this up I thought it might be a cover of the Velvet Underground classic. It is not. Bangs though, don't it? I guess you could even say...

She Goes - Girl Group

No? Oh, come on! You've heard worse links on the radio. But anyway...

 I Didn't Come Here For Art - Lynks

Did you?

Alright. I'll stop. 

There's always at least one band like this on the U.K. scene, with a "singer" who did Eng. Lit at Uni and wants you to know and who mostly talks through the whole thing. I won't name and shame but the irony level in the bit where the poodle with the megaphone leads a chant of "No more try-hard, spoken-word, art-school shit" could split a planet.

Not that Lynks is that band. They're not even a band. They've clearly heard a few, though. A few too many. Haven't we all?

Transporter Girl 

Haruka Kamiko Feat. Paint and Copter

Then again, it could be worse. Your pal could take you to a club to see something like this...

Okay, not the actual dematerialization part. That would be cool. And terrifying. just the band, all dressed in Star Trek drag. That would be even more terrifying! 

Wow! We're really getting through these today, aren't we? Must be because I'm talking less than usual. Let's see if I can keep it up.

 666999 

 Arthurnevawakes Ft. R!R!riot & Taco & Billionhappy

That might be the longest artist credit ever. I cut & pasted it from YouTube. Too fricken long to type out, that's for sure. It's a good thing no-one goes into actual record stores and asks for stuff any more. Imagine going into HMV and asking for that. Where would you even start?

Then again, !!! were around when people still bought CDs. It's literally impossible even to look them up on Google using the typography. It comes up "Your search - !!! - did not match any documents." You have to type Chk Chk Chk to get to them.

Weren't we just talking about some people being too clever for their own good?

I Can Talk To Your Voicemail - Colatura

Voicemail. That's another thing I don't like. I use it, all the same. You have to, don't you? I don't want to, though. You could divide the whole world up into things you use that you like and things you don't like but have to use anyway, couldn't you? 

No. No, you couldn't. You could say it if you were a radio DJ, though, and people would ring in for hours telling you which pot they'd put which thing in. And that would be another show over and you'd go home and feel like you'd done a good day's work. Or like your life was a bleak, purposeless void. One or the other.

 Emails - Hotpants Romance

I'm sorry. Do your ears hurt now? I was going to keep that one to myself, along with a few others I found recently, but it was just such an irresistible segue. 

That's only fifteen years old, that video. And the song for that matter. It looks like it was filmed before email even existed. Okay, not before it existed. I know someone's already down in the comments saying how email goes back to the sixties but I mean when people actually started using it. (I had a whole bit here about hunter-gatherers and mammoths but it really didn't work so I took it out. It really is important to know how to edit. Kill your babies and all of that...)

I like email, by the way. Best of all communication systems in my opinion. Well, except talking. Probably.

Young Boys - The Catholic Girls

This is one of the ones I was going to keep to myself. Not the worst of them, either. Very much against my better judgment, here it is. I think this is where I'm supposed to say "It wouldn't be allowed nowadays". This was 1982, too, not the freedom land of the seventies, as Lana would say.

It's also really, really good, as is most of their stuff. I'd never heard of them before. I thought I knew that era and that genre (Herky-jerky avant-garde new wave.) fairly well but there's always something new to discover.

 THE TWINS 

 Flavor Crystals x Suburban Lawns

Like this, for example. I took the order of the title and artist directly from YouTube but it's misleading. The song is Flavor Crystals by Suburban Lawns, the archetype for all herky-jerky avant-garde new wave bands and I believe "THE TWINS" are (Only.) the dancers. I could be wrong. (But I'm not.)

Willow Song - Meels

Remember that guy in the dog hat up above? The one going on and on about how he hadn't come here for art? Well, boy, did he ever come to the wrong place!

She may not sound like it but Meels is in direct line of descent from the Screamers, Suburban Lawns and the rest of the early-eighties arthouse crew. Not so much in her sound but in the way she presents. Half the comments on the YouTube thread for this one are more interested in how the video replicates a lost age of blurry VHS cassettes than they are in the song. I suspect Meels might be, too.

 Potbelly Jesus - Whirlybird

Now we're in a country mood, why not? 

Okay, I guess I'd better wrap this up now. It's running long even if I'm not saying much.

 Teenage Ramble - Lexie Liu

Not that I want get obsessive about views but it is a fascinating subject. Lexie Liu is a pretty big deal. She has more than a quarter of a million subscribers to her YouTube channel. She put this up three days ago, though, and only fifteen thousand people have watched it. That's not even 6%. What does it mean?

Means 94% of people can't take a hint, I guess. Bad luck them.

 MOLLY - Ecca Vandal

Now that's what I call dancing!

Pretty sure this isn't about her BFF Molly. Or then again, in a very important way, maybe it is.

I could go on (And on...) but I'd better stop.

All The News That's Fit To Steal: EQII Rage Of Cthurath, Soulframe Preludes and Guild Wars Reforged

This isn't a news blog. Is there any such thing? Still, sometimes a bunch of stories turn up in the news cycle all at once with at least some relevance to what I do here. And sometimes they turn up when I'm short of time and happy to link a few press releases and embed a few promos and call it a post. 

Am I selling this? Yeah, maybe not...

So, anyway, let's start with the most relevant piece of news, which is that we have a date for the new EverQuest II expansion Rage of Cthurath. It's December 10, 2025. 

Obviously it's 2025. A bit pedantic of them even to mention it, isn't it? I mean, it really would be news if it was December 10, 2026, I guess. It's not like Darkpaw is Rockstar or something. (I've never actually played a Grand Theft Auto game, by the way. Maybe I should do something about that sometime...)

As part of the promotional push for the expansion. Darkpaw did a Livestream on their YouTube channel yesterday. It's pretty long. Nearly two and a half hours. Does anyone have time for that? If so, knock yourselves out. Here it is.

I certainly don't. I watched about fifteen minutes at the start, where they're flying through the new zones (Which look gorgeous, by the way.) until the swooping camera started to make me motion-sick. After that I skipped through to see what else was in there and didn't find much of interest. I guess I watched maybe half an hour altogether.

There's a full transcript on YouTube that I also flicked through. As far as I could see they don't really go into anything that affects me - a lot of stuff about group and raid dungeons and the new Public Quests, for example. I won't be doing the first two and PQs I always figure out as I get to them.

Other than that, mostly just confirmation that the outdoor zones are big and have record amounts of verticality. That makes sense when you consider the creatures that live there can all fly. Of course, we won't be able to fly, not until we've explored the whole place on foot, but I'm sure we're all used to that by now.

It all looks very impressive, visually. Solo content sounds solid. There are three overland zones and the Signature questline wraps up at the end of the second, leaving the third, I'm betting, for sopping up enough extra xp to hit the cap. If it's anything like the last two expansions, leveling will be slow going. I'm looking forward to it, although I'm not promising I'll get all that far this side of the New Year. Bad timing for me, these December releases.

Next up, something that got a mention in the comments of Tuesday's post, namely Soulframe. In case you either didn't know or had forgotten, which would be easy to do since it barely seems to get a mention in anything I read, Soulframe is the in-development MMORPG from Digital Extremes, makers of the very sucessful and also rarely mentioned around here Warframe.

Warframe is SciFi. Soulframe is fantasy. I tried Warframe a few years back, didn't hate it but didn't much like it either. It was the setting as much as anything that put me off. The gameplay seemed okay. 

On that basis, I'm mildly interested to see what the same game looks like with a fantasy skin and I'll be able to satisfy that curiosity very soon because in just five days DE is going to start selling "Founders Packs" giving access to what they're calling "Preludes".

Preludes is DE's name for pre-alpha so this is a buy-in pre-alpha. Are we really desperate enough for those now? Ohh, yes!

How it works is a bit confusing but there's a video. It's only about seven minutes long. I watched it and didn't learn much. Here, you try.

There's also an hour-long livestream video that I haven't watched. Maybe that tells you more. I wouldn't know. I got all I needed from the FAQ,which I read in about a minute. That seemed way more efficient.

I am definitely not interested enough in Soulframe to buy into a pre-alpha. I mean, not unless it costs, like, five dollars or something. I don't think they've announced the pricing structure yet but I'm sure it won't be that.

And finally, something for free! Always my favorite price point.

Of course, it's only free for people who already own the base product, which in this case is the original Guild Wars. They are lowering the box price for those who don't, though. 

I do own Guild Wars, as it happens. All of it. The game plus all the expansions/DLC/whatever they're called.

This is relevant to the blog in a couple of ways, the first being that it's a game I have played and written about before but second and more important because Guild Wars has been in maintenance mode for more than a decade and look! People still play it! It still gets good service from the developers. You might almost say it has a future.

When Maintenance Mode gets mentioned, I can immediately think of two games that have been almost thriving under the regime: Guild Wars and Final Fantasy XI. What they have in common is that they're both under the protection of game developers who genuinely care about them, even though they each have newer, much more successful MMORPGs on their books.

New World (That's where I'm going with this but I'm sure you were ahead of me.) had a development team that cared for and valued it but I don't think many people believe it was beloved of the company that owned it. Maybe the comparison isn't valid. Or perhaps, since ArenaNet is a part of the much bigger and generally hard-hearted NCSoft, it might be.

I can think of another example, too: Rift. Rift also wasn't well looked after by the company that owned it, or at least not in the end. Trion sold Rift to Gamigo, who gave it a bit of attention for a while and then effectively put it out to pasture. 

No-one generally has a good word to say about either NCSoft or Gamigo but in a face-off with Amazon, I suspect both would coming out looking like the good guys by default. At least they've kept the servers up and even Gamigo manages to keep some events recycling in Rift to give the illusion someone cares. The game is currently experiencing a bit of a dead cat bounce thanks to a player-led initiative. It's not a lot but it does at least show that maintenance mode doesn't mean the end.

For Guild Wars, Reforging might even be the end of maintenance mode. There's yet another video. It's thirty seconds long. It went up on YouTube two days ago and it has nearly two hundred thousand views already. 

For comparison, the EQII video I linked has a tad under two thousand views. The Soulframe one has eight thousand. A lot of people are interested in a version of classic Guild Wars with updated graphics and Steam Deck compatibility, apparently.

Given a response like that, it's hardly surprising ArenaNet are hinting there could be new content, too. We'll see, I guess. I haven't played through all the old content yet. I was planning on it either but if there's a shiny, new version I'm going to get for nothing, I might change my plans.

At the moment, though, I'm enjoying New World. It's a really good game. I always knew it was, seeing as how it's my second most-played game on Steam at over 250 hours. And counting.

I just hope someone at Amazon notices what other companies do with their old MMOs and at least doesn't want to make things look even worse than they already do by closing the whole thing down at the earliest opportunity. I'm not counting on it, though. I doubt we'll ever get to see New World Reforged.