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...
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