I realize now a picture of the bus would have been good but it's night and I haven't taken one. Hang on, maybe I can steal one... Okay, that's it, up there.
It's late, I've the drink taken (First time in many months.) and I'm sitting
in the dark, typing this on the laptop in a converted double-decker bus, in a
field, in the middle of nowhere.
Yes, I'm on holiday (Or vacation if you
prefer.) although only for a couple of days because with Beryl (Who's asleep
beside me.) that's about all we can manage these days.
I just thought I'd pop up a quick post to say there may not be another for a
day or two. I'm certainly not about to write anything, so let's just settle
for a somewhat appropriate tune.
If that's not what this is then I don't know where we are.
Normal service may be resumed at some indefinite point in the future.
You may well ask. Here, I'll let Angeliana, Senior Community Manager for EverQuest IIexplain.
Got that? Good, because I'm not sure I have.
As far as I can make out, it's a new reward system for participating in events. Sometimes inside the game itself but mostly on social media.
There's one running already, Can you guess what it is?
No, you can't. You'd be all day trying. It's an anagram competition in which you have to unscramble the names of ten NPCs. Here, have a go. See how you do.
ovine roofgarden
bermilksop nostril
age hypo thorp
alvina vibes
ashton kneecapped
celery mayo
balking bilgegregg
adrea hemoglobin
atomize hats
alga stung
No? Me neither. I've been playing this game since 2004 and none of those is ringing any bells. And do you know why? Because, like any rational person, I don't pay any attention to the names of NPCs.
Why would I? I'm not going to hang out with them or call them up on the phone. Either they want me to do something or they serve a function. Why would I need to know the full name of a bank teller or a shopkeeper? Maybe, if it was on a name badge, I might know their first name but would I remember it for next time?
In fact, I have all overhead names in EQII set to Mouseover so I only ever see them when I specifically target someone. I don't need all that visual clutter and cruft.
Looking at the anagrams, several of which are really good, I suspect Angeliana, or whoever came up with the list, enjoys making anagrams out of peoples' names in real life. I've known people who do that, some of them quite compulsively.
People who aren't engaged with the whole anagram concept but want to make some kind of puzzle tend just to randomize the names or words into gibberish. True afficionados make new words and often try to make them as funny as they can or fit them somehow to the personality of the name's owner. That's clearly what's going on here.
Obviously, I won't be sending in my answers because I don't have any. If I did, though, I'd be sending them directly to Angeliana in a Private Message, which seems quite an odd way to go about it, although I guess you can't have people just posting the unscrambled names on a forum thread.
Except I have seen other games do similar puzzles and use exactly that form of response, which always suggests the whole thing is actually a giveaway, not a competition at all, like all those codes you can type in to get freebies that are supposedly special rewards for doing something in particular but which get re-posted on third-party websites and social media and work for absolutely anybody. Not that I ever uses any of those...
In contrast, this is a genuine competition. There are only thirty prizes and Angeliana is going to select them randomly using a "Wheel Of Names", which she says like it's a thing we all know. She's even going to record herself doing it "to show validity of the wins."
It all seems remarkably complicated to me, especially for a couple of tokens to spend in a gift shop. Maybe Ogor the Ogre (Even Ttobey isn't buying that name.) sells really good stuff, though, like the endgame raid gear Shintar was telling us you can get for another new token feature in Star Wars: the Old Republic.
Yeah, he isn't, though. I was curious so I went to have a look at what he's got to offer. He was very easy to find. He's in Qeynos and Freeport (Because in Norrath it's standard practice to be two places at once if you're an NPC.). I never have a clue where any new NPC is likely to set up their stall in Qeynos but in Freeport it's always down by the docks or in the charmingly-named Execution Plaza (Political prisoners executed every hour, on the hour, since 2004.)
Better yet, you can ask a guard and get directions. They used to just swivel on their heels and point but now they still do that but also send a glowing trail right to the person you're looking for. I tried it just now and Ogor was literally about fifty feet from where I was standing, so that was embarassing.
As you can see, he is not doling out raid gear for a token or two. He hasn't got any useable gear at all. Someone more cynical than me might say he hasn't got anything useful at all.
He's got a lot of house items, which is always nice but nothing so special you could imagine anyone wanting to unscramble a whole bunch of anagrams, then type the results into a chatbox in the hope of winning a lottery to get enough tokens to buy two of them. And remember, this is "a bit harder of an event", which is why you get two. Mostly, I can only assume, you'll be getting just one. If you're lucky.
Other than that, Ogor has a couple of quite nice petamorph wands, some decent appearance-slot robes, a couple of illusion items, some fireworks, two vanity pets and a peculiar-looking ground mount in the shape of a wolf wearing a saddle and bridle. The wolf looks like there's moss growing on it, too.
This is all the same sort of stuff that routinely gets given away in holiday events, of which, as I've noted before, Norrath has a plethora. It appeals to a very specific demographic that seems to make up a significant proportion of forum posters and quite possibly of the playerbase as a whole. I can't remember exactly when it happend but at some point in its twenty-year history, EQII became a game suited mostly for absolutely obsessive min-maxers at one end and completist collectionists of fluff at the other, with not an awful lot of room for anyone inbetweeen.
The latter are going to see some merit in the new Community Token System, I'm sure, although collectors and decorators tend to be picky. The endgame statisticians are presumably going to ignore it entirely. Whether there's much cross-over between the two factions I wouldn't care to speculate.
I don't think I'd go out of my way to earn tokens for any of Ogor's stock. If I happen to acquire any, though, I won't complain. I'd quite like those petamorph wands.
I suppose it's going to depend mostly on what the events are like. I note that as well as competitions and similar events on the forums or Discord, Guides can also hand out tokens as rewards in the game itself. I haven't seen a guide event for a while but it's nice to know they still exist and also that Guides now have a way of encouraging players to join in with ad hoc events rather than just re-running the familiar Guide Quests (Not that those aren't always welcome - you can get some nice bags that way.)
Angeliana does also say that "From time to time, he will even get some items added" so we can hope for better, later. I very much doubt he'll ever have anything more than cosmetics to give away, though.
And that's fine. When I first read the forum post announcing the new feature I did worry for a moment that it was a replacement for Panda! Panda! Panda!, which does give some very good gear for the minor effort of some extremely easy questing.
The supposed lore explanation "Ogor the Happy, wants terribly to be an adventurer. Alas he cannot, so
he needs you to get him some Norrathian Fables and bring them to him. In
turn, he will let you choose from a plethora of items he happens to
have sitting around." does make his motivation sound remarkably similar to Yun Zi's. I suspect that has more to do with lack of imagination than anything else. It's also how Qho's super-annoying gathering questline is explained.
Also, I just proved myself a liar by remembering their names immediately, without having to look anything up. I guess some NPCs do familiarize themselves over time after all.
Good luck getting a funny anagram out of either of their names, though!
Here's a sentence I never thought I'd have to write.
Last night I played some Civilization IV.
Heh. After all those years of reading other people blogging about the
Civ series and 4X games in general and thinking "Well, it's all very interesting to read about but I can't imagine ever
playing something like that". A bit like EVE or Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, I
guess. Some games are just more fun to read about than play.
Or so I thought. And quite possibly still do. Too soon to say for sure.
Obviously, I wouldn't have tried it at all if I hadn't gotten it for free from
Prime. I'm scratching around at the moment, trying to find something to
play that can hold my attention but which can also be stopped at a moment's
notice. I was going through the options when I noticed it and thought, well,
why not?
Talking of options, boy, there are a lot of them! Everyone likes to talk about
their Steam backlogs but I've always said I don't really have that much
of one. Which is true, as it goes, although not as true as it used to be. My
Amazon Prime Gaming backlog though...
I have 162 games on Prime, of which I have played nineteen and finished five.
On GOG I have 60, with just three played and none finished. On
Epic Games I have another 40 titles, of which I have played exactly two
- and one of those is Fortnite. All of them, across the three
platforms, bar a handful, were freebies from Prime - and I probably claim less
than half of the games Prime gives away.
And yet somehow, even with almost 250 unplayed titles to choose from, I can
never seem to find anything I want to play. Worse, when I do pick something
and give it a go, it doesn't stick.
Which is how I came to install and open CivIV a couple of days ago. It
seemed like it might be worth a try. I mean, everyone else seems to enjoy
it...
So, did I? Enjoy it, that is?
Hmm. Tough question. I'll get back to you when I have an answer.
So far I've played for a couple of hours in two sessions and it's been...
occupying. Time certainly passes. There's a lot to do. It keeps you busy.
For my first session I jumped straight in and started playing. That wasn't so
much a choice as a mistake, by which I don't mean it went badly, just that I
didn't mean to do it. I assumed there'd be an in-game tutorial. There is not.
There is a Tutorial, of course. I just didn't notice it was a separate
option on the main menu. I'd completely forgotten that's how they used to do
it in the old days.
Starting without any kind of lead-in or explanation was an odd experience.
Confusing but also fairly straightforward, by which I mean the game is somehow
still playable, even when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing or
indeed what you ought to be doing.
That's mainly because every single UI element seems to have a mouse-over
tool-tip and most actions seem to require not much more than a left click. I
just moused over everything and started clicking and something approximating a
game seemed to coalesce around me.
I left everything on the defaults. I built a city. I killed some bears. I
explored to clear the fog of war. I built another city. I kept picking from
lists of options and the years rolled by. I started at the dawn of
civilization, 4000 BC, and by the time I finished an hour later it was the
Renaissance.
For some reason I kept founding religions, which seemed extremely weird. I was
playing as Spain and yet I still managed to found Buddhism, then Confucianism,
then Taoism. I would have thought a necessary corollary of founding
Confucianism, for example, would be that you'd have to be Confucius, or
for a ruler to take the credit, they'd at least need to count Confucius as a
subject. It seemed unlikely either he or Buddha would have been living in
Barcelona or Madrid at the time but I guess they must have gotten there from
China somehow...
Other leaders kept popping up to ask me to make deals with them or break deals
I'd made with other nations. I always agreed with whatever they wanted and
always made peace not war. I hadn't figured out how to get my army to fight
anyone except bears and lions so peace seemed like the best option.
I had trouble getting any of my units to go where I wanted anyway. I lost
Barcelona because someone attacked it and I couldn't figure out how to get a
Warrior unit over there in time. It didn't seem to matter much because by then
I had a third city and I was having more than enough trouble managing two of
them. I was quite glad to see Barcelona go.
I could tell there was some kind of score being kept in the lower right-hand
corner of the screen but I didn't really know what made the numbers change or
what the victory condition might be. I figured bigger numbers were probably
better, though, and Spain was either at the top of the list or at least in the
top half most of the time. There were always other civilizations doing a lot
worse than me so I was happy enough with how things were going.
All of that went on for a little over an hour before it started to get on top
of me a bit. I figured out how to save the game and stopped. I could see how
someone could get into that "Just one more turn" frame of mind I've
read about, especially if they knew what they were doing. It is quite
compulsive, pushing the button to see what happens next.
I guess I must have enjoyed myself at least a little because yesterday I felt
like having another go. I thought maybe I ought to try and find out at least a
little about how to play so I googled around for a while and learned... there
is a Tutorial after all. I did think it was strange there wasn't one
but then I thought maybe, back in the day, the game would have come in a box
with a manual as thick as a novel and you were probably supposed to read that
before you got started.
Last night I tried again, only this time I didn't load up my saved game. I
opened the tutorial instead.
I learned a few things, not least what Sid Meier sounds like. At least,
I assume that's him, reading out the instructions, like a high school history
teacher, following a familiar lesson plan on a warm afternoon in front of a
drowsy classroom, just before school breaks up for summer. And the balding
fellow with the fixed smile, dressed like a sales assistant at a discount
warehouse? That must be Sid, too. The guy clearly doesn't have much of an ego.
The tutorial was helpful, anyway. The most important thing I learned was that
you have to right-click to get anyone to go where you tell them. That
explained a lot.
There was some useful information about why you might want to do
certain things, too, not just how you'd make them happen. As I said, for the
most part it's not too hard to figure out what things do from the tool
tips but it's much harder to see why you'd want to do any of them. I mostly
just picked stuff I like, like art and literature and music and ignored all
the boring agriculture and industry. I probably should have played Greece.
What became clear from the tutorial is that the game is basically a management
sim. In all the thousands and thousands of words I'd read about it, I don't
think that had ever really come across. People always blog about the
interesting stuff, don't they? Who declared war on whom or who invented what.
They never tell you how many tiny little repetitive actions it took before
anything interesting happened at all.
I was about to say I've never liked management sims but then it occurred to me
that's not entirely true. Right at the beginning of my gaming life, I used to
play them quite enthusiastically. I remember one my ex-wife and I used to play a
lot on the ZX Spectrum, a political sim where you had to manage all kinds of
factors to keep yourself in power. I remember we used to sit there in our bean
bags and shout at the screen.
I think it was called
Dictator. Yep! That's the one. I bet I still have the cassette somewhere.
I even wrote a management sim once. I think it might be the only game I ever
coded from scratch. I wrote it one afternoon at my mother's house on my
step-father's Oric computer that he'd won in some competition and never
used. It had some ridiculously tiny memory measured in kilobytes and I wrote a
moonbase sim for it that worked, just about. I wrote it in RAM, though, so it
only existed for that afternoon and never again.
All of that was back in the eighties. The early eighties. I don't believe I've
played a management sim since.
Of course, the 4X genre is a hybrid, with other gameplay beyond resource
management. There's a big map to explore and you can fight animals and people
but most importantly there are all those familiar names. That's what makes it
interesting.
And surreal. It's very peculiar to have Elizabeth I suddenly appear and
start schmoozing you, especially when Julius Caesar just left. It
reminded me a bit of that Philip Jose Farmer series,
Riverworld, where everyone who ever lived has been brought back to life at the same
time, in the same place. Without that, I doubt it would be half as engaging.
I stuck with the tutorial for about an hour but then it was time for Beryl's
evening walk so I had to stop. I couldn't see any way to save the tutorial so
I just logged out. If I have to go back to the beginning and do it over, I
don't think I'll bother. I reckon I know enough to get started now.
Will I, though? Am I engaged enough with the concept for another session?
Possibly. It does, as I said, occupy the mind, which is welcome at the moment,
as I negotiate some changes in routine, with my 93 year-old mother
suddenly needing a lot more support to stay in her home than usual and her
living an hour's drive away and we only having the one car.
On the other hand, there are plenty of games that do a pretty good job of
occupying the mind and I can think of plenty whose gameplay would be more to
my taste than 4X offers. Just none of the ones I already own,
apparently.
Naithin posted something the other day about his experiences with the AI music generation app Suno, which I've been using for most of
this year. As I said in the comment thread to his post, it's largely replaced
playing video games for me, in the way playing games once replaced watching
television. I very much doubt it'll hold my attention for more than two decades, the way
MMORPGs did, but for now it's still feeling quite compulsive.
There's probably a whole series of posts I could write about various aspects of making music this
way - practical, philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, legal - but not right now.
Today I just thought I'd share an idea I had for a parlor game, to be played
using your LLM of choice, an idea that only occurred to me last night as I was
asking mine, which happens to be Gemini, a question.
Mostly, when I'm working with Suno, I make up my whole prompts from scratch. I do
re-use a lot of them, often with certain key phrases changed, trying to
finesse the exact result I'm after, but I'm not usually trying to re-create
the signature sound of a specific band or singer, more the sounds I hear in my
head.
Occasionally, though, I look at something I've written and wonder what it
might sound like if it had been covered by someone I like. Or, for that
matter, don't like. Even more occasionally I find myself wanting to make
something that sounds entirely unlike anything I'd come up with on my own, both for inspiration and
variety.
To that end, now and again, I go to Gemini and ask it to give me a prompt for
Suno that describes how a particular genre or band sounds. Feed those into Suno unedited and the results aren't often all
that close. You can always recognize the influences but it's not like you can copy and paste from one AI to another and pump out convincing ersatz albums by your favorite acts like some kind of
amateur
Top of the Popsknock-off operation. Well, not yet, anyway.
It would be an amusing party game to generate a bunch of those, play them
and have people try to guess who they were supposed to be. I can imagine that being
a lot of fun with enough drink taken. If I thought anyone would actually take
the time to click through and listen, I might have knocked out a few myself and included them here.
But that would be a lot of work and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of
readers would be interested enough to listen to even a few bars. That sort of thing really requires a bunch of people together in a room to be fun.
What would be
much easier and also a better game for a blog would be if I just copied and
pasted a few of Gemini's prompts to see if anyone can recognize the acts from the
descriptions.
Gemini is pretty good at describing what singers and bands sound like.
Disturbingly good, actually. The shorthand explanation of how "LLMs work by analysing vast banks of data to ascertain the next most
likely word" seems to collapse pretty quickly when you look at the results.
Self-evidently, there's more to it than that, or the output wouldn't be so
convincing. When I saw the descriptions I was getting, my first thought was
that Gemini had to be precising a whole bunch of reviews and picking out the
most commonly-expressed opinions but even if that's all it is doing, it's weirdly accurate.
What it mostly makes me think is that well-known bands and singers have such a
definitive, known, recognizable style it can quite easily be encoded in a
couple of paragraphs. A test of how accurate that encoding is might be to ask
someone if they could tell the band from Gemini's description of what they
sound like.
And if that's not a parlor game, I don't know what is.
Oh, one other thing. When I started doing this, Suno had a two-hundred
character limit on prompts. That forced Gemini to be very succinct. I think
those make for a better game, although they're far less interesting in
themselves than the ones it puts up for the new thousand-character limit.
Those are more like entries in a musical dictionary.
Shall we try a couple? Of course, there is the slight problem that some of the
bands I may have been asking about aren't as well-known to the readership of
this blog as they might be but we'll see how we go. Let's start with a
few short ones, all of them pretty famous.
1.
"Epic rock ballad, theatrical vocals, powerful piano, soaring
melodies, dramatic drums. Over the top emotion."
3. "Dissonant blues, fractured rhythms, raw vocals, free jazz elements,
odd time signatures. Experimental rock." (Gemini apologized before offering this one, saying "It's challenging to precisely replicate the uniquely abstract and
complex sound of ------ within the constraints of a short Suno
prompt."
Answers, in classic magazine style, at the bottom of the page. Or better yet,
click through the number to see the act in question in full flight on YouTube.
I think most of those are fairly easy to guess but it's always hard to tell, if
you already know the answers.
Much more intriguing and educational are the longer prompts. Some of
these really made me think about the artists in question, sometimes in a
different way to how I would usually have considered their work. Unfortunately, these
are really too long to include more than a handful in a blog post and, more
problematic still, most of the ones I've done have been for bands I wouldn't
really expect anyone to get.
Create a song with a delicate, chamber-pop feel. The melody
should be intricate and pastoral, driven by acoustic guitar, cello, and
oboe. The vocals should be a male-female duet, singing with a gentle,
melodic, and slightly ethereal quality. The rhythm should be subtle and
understated, possibly featuring soft, brushed drums. The overall mood
should be whimsical and melancholic, like a folk-tale set to music, with
a touch of art-pop sophistication
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Okay, that's Shellyan Orphan. And I think it's pretty close, except
there's not always two of them singing. But speaking of duos...
Create a psychedelic, country-lounge duet with a distinct
male and female vocalist. The male voice should be a deep, world-weary
baritone, delivered with a cool, nonchalant swagger. The female voice
should be a soft, breathy, and slightly detached soprano. The music
should have a lazy, sun-drenched feel, with a loping, cinematic rhythm.
Instrumentation should feature twangy, reverb-drenched electric guitars,
a prominent bassline that walks slowly and deliberately, and a gentle,
brushed drum beat. The atmosphere should be both sultry and melancholic,
like a slow-motion scene from a western film, with a sense of fatalistic
romance and hazy desert heat."
Now that is eerily accurate, I'd say. It's
Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra and I specifically asked for them "as they sounded on their version of Summer Wine."
I was curious enough about the provenance to try googling individual phrases
with Lee or Nancy's names to see if I could track down a specific review or
article from which they'd been taken but there was nothing. However Gemini is
doing it, lifting descriptions wholesale from published texts doesn't seem to explain it.
Now three more I won't immediately reveal. At least one is blindingly obvious,
I'd say, and the other two are guessable if you're familiar with the
fairly-famous acts in question, although on of the two was only really
well-known in the UK.
Create a richly orchestrated, orchestral pop song with a
sense of wistful innocence and profound introspection. The soundscape
should be built on a foundation of lush vocal harmonies, layered
meticulously like a choir. The instrumentation should be a kaleidoscopic
mix of traditional rock instruments and unconventional sounds: think
harpsichord, French horn, cello, and subtle, otherworldly electronic
sounds like the theremin.
The production should feel like a
"pocket symphony," with a dense, "Wall of Sound" quality where every
instrument and vocal part is given its own space. The arrangement should
be dynamic, with unexpected melodic and rhythmic shifts, moving between
serene, introspective sections and soaring, anthemic choruses. The mood
should be both joyful and deeply melancholic, capturing a feeling of
bittersweet wonder. The song structure should be more like a suite, with
distinct musical sections seamlessly spliced together to create a
unified, emotional journey.
Create a dramatic, operatic pop song with a grand, majestic
feel. The vocals should be a deep, resonant baritone, delivered with a
formal, theatrical, and deeply melancholic tone. The orchestration
should be lush and sweeping, featuring soaring strings, blaring horns,
and a full choir. The melody should be stately and complex, with
unexpected shifts and a sense of cinematic tension. The lyrics should be
poetic, dark, and enigmatic, telling a story of romantic tragedy or
existential dread. The overall sound should be one of epic grandeur,
blending chanson and Broadway with a noir sensibility, creating a
sophisticated and deeply moving soundscape."
Create a theatrical and eccentric art-rock song with a
baroque pop feel. The vocals should be a hyper-dramatic, trembling
vibrato, delivered with a campy, highly stylized theatricality. The
melody should be intricate and somewhat ornate, with a prominent, crying
violin and a lush, romantic piano. The rhythm section should be
understated but propulsive, providing a dynamic backdrop for the more
flamboyant elements. The sound should feel both raw and refined,
combining the glam-rock energy with the delicate precision of a chamber
orchestra. The atmosphere should be one of decadent, melancholic
glamour, full of quirky flourishes and a sense of sophisticated
playfulness."
That's enough for now. Also, it's most of the ones I've done. I said I didn't
do it often.
I might do it more now I've realized what a good game it makes, though. And
obviously it doesn't have to be music. You could get your pet LLM to give you
a short description of an artist
("Large-scale canvases featuring soft-edged, rectangular blocks of color that
seem to float and radiate, aiming to evoke profound human emotions from the
viewer" - Mark Rothko.)
or a writer
("gritty realism, complex world-building, and moral ambiguity. He uses a
multi-protagonist, limited third-person perspective to tell an intricate,
sprawling narrative where beloved characters can be killed off unexpectedly,
reflecting the harsh, unpredictable nature of his fantasy world". - George R.R. Martin)
or a game's art style
("a highly recognizable and influential stylized high-fantasy look. It is
characterized by exaggerated proportions, vibrant colors, and hand-painted
textures that prioritize readability and a timeless, "cartoonish" aesthetic
over photorealism". - World of Warcraft)
Back in the eighties, when my pals and I used to sit around into the early
hours making up exactly these sorts of games, this would have been iterated on
over and over. The potential for making your own entertainment with AI is huge and if you
ignore the drain on the environment it seems like one of the more harmless
uses of the technology I can think of.
I might be using it for my Advent Calendar this year. I have a few ideas...
Answers down here for those with an aversion to hypertext.
A bit further
Here we go
1. Meatloaf
2. Tom Waits
3. Captain Beefheart
4. Pet Shop Boys
5. Nick Cave
Psychedelic Chamber Pop - The Beach Boys (Specifically God Only Knows and Good Vibrations.)
It doesn't say much for my observational skills or my critical faculties that
it was only a couple of minutes ago, when the title of this post popped into
my head, that I realized why every episode of Wednesday's second season
is some kind of pun on the word "woe". It's not that I didn't notice. I
did. I just thought "Huh. That's a dumb pun..." and immediately forgot
about it.
With that in mind, it might be as well to treat anything more I have to say
about the show with some caution. Clearly I am not going to be a very reliable
witness. But, hey, you work with what you've got.
And in that framework, I'm going to say I found the second half of the season
very much more to my liking than the first. Not that I didn't enjoy Episodes 1
to 4. I enjoyed them quite a bit. I just didn't see how they were leading to
anything or even going anywhere much.
Episodes 5 to 8 went everywhere and lead to a lot. A lot of deaths. A lot of
revelations. A lot of changes. Oh, probably ought to give the spoiler warning
now... but that one I used last time was really annoying, wasn't it? And
everyone here can read, right? So if you haven't seen the show and plan to,
maybe this would be a good time to go find something else to do. Maybe
bookmark this for later. It's not like I want to lose the page views...
Okay, we all good? Then let us continue.
I thought all four episodes on the downslope of the season were excellent.
Much more engaging than the earlier ones and also less bitty. There seemed to
be a lot more of Wednesday and she was more central to the action. The rest of
the Addams Family were there but their presence felt more in context, rather than the
somewhat shoehorned-in plot mechanics employed in Part 1, when the writers had to come up with a reason for them to be there at all. With their continuing presence
explained and established, they felt more like supporting cast members, no
different from the teaching staff or the Sheriff, instead of pulling all the
attention to themselves and away from the actual star.
Speaking of whom, Jenny Ortega was on particularly fine form, I
thought. The body-swap episode, which I loved, made it very clear just how
much acting she's doing, something that's not always apparent. I don't really
know her well from any of her other work, although obviously I know of it and
did before the show even aired, so in my mind the Wednesday Addams character
and the actor playing her were mostly interchangeable.
When the most important thing you have to do as an actor is maintain almost
the exact same expression and tone of voice throughout, it makes it quite hard for
an audience to realize just how much work you're doing. With Enid inhabiting
her, Wednesday was free to laugh, smile, talk in something other than a
monotone and even move her arms as she walked. Or, I should say, skipped!
The opening of that episode, where Enid-as-Wednesday is in full KPop dance
mode, is a great shock start and one of the rare times the trope of starting
the story at the end (Well, the middle in this case.) and then tossing up the
"16 hours Earlier" interstitial actually worked. Honestly, it felt genuinely outrageous. I was ready to be outraged. And then I was charmed and
delighted instead, which is a pretty fine bait&switch if you can pull it
off.
Speaking of Enid, she gets far more to do in the second half of the season.
Oh, sure, she's in the first four episodes, all the time, but she doesn't know
what's going on and the atmosphere between her and Wednesday is sour and it
never feels comfortable. I know, I know... Wednesday isn't supposed to be
cosy. But still, you want the team to pull together, don't you? I do, anyway.
Emma Myers is excellent as Enid as always and her story arc develops in a very
interesting fashion. As with everything in the show - and in most fantasy
shows if we're going to be sensible about it - a lot of things don't bear
close examination. I'm not entirely convinced by the Alpha lore, or perhaps
it's the naming convention that's confusing. Wouldn't the Alpha be the
dominant pack member? Why would the pack shun their Alpha, let alone hunt her down and
kill her?
That, however, may all be explained at some future stage, most likely in
Season 3, since the really excellent ending of Season 2 sets everything up for just that. And since I've mentioned it already I'll take the end out of order. I just
loved it and I can tell you exactly why.
For one thing it's a set-up, not a cliffhanger. It's the best way to go out of
a season, leaving your audience excited for what might come next, rather than
frustrated because something got cut off in mid-flow.
For another, it's a very open-ended set-up. It's entirely possible the third
season of Wednesday might not be set in Nevermore Academy at all. All those
problems with the students starting to look like they really ought to be doing
post-grad work just fall away if the school setting isn't there as a
backdrop.
And for the third and possibly best thing (Apologies to the actual Thing.) it brings back
Uncle Fester along with the delicious possibility of a prolonged
Wednesday-Fester double act. I'd take a whole spin-off series of that.
Season 3 could be a wilderness adventure, a road-trip or pretty much anything.
Or it could be a pre-credit sequence, then back to Nevermore. For
that matter, Season 3 could take place entirely in the summer break and Season
4 could be the start of the next academic year.
I hope not, though, and I'm not sure Nevermore is even still in business, anyway.
There's one line in the last episode, I forget who's speaking, where someone
clearly suggests the school has closed. Possibly for good.
For that matter, I was never sure just
how much of the school year had passed by the end of Season 2. All the parents turn up and everyone goes home but is that the end of the Fall
semester or has a whole year gone round? Or have they all just turned up to
take the kids away because the place is on fire and the Principal has just been publicly exposed as a murdering con-man?
Oh, yeah, and he's dead, too. The Principal, that is. And one of the
teachers. And there's a dead Hyde on the werewolf statue. And a couple more
people died earlier. It's a bloodbath (Except blood is one thing you never
seem to see - it's a very not-gory show, oddly.)
Throughout the season but mainly in Part 2, a lot of people die, including a
whole bunch of major supporting characters played by famous guest actors.
Steve Buscemi, Christina Ricci, Christopher Lloyd... It seems a bit wasteful but then, just
dying doesn't mean you're not in the show any more.
Gwendoline Christie's character, Larissa Weems, Nevermore's
Principal in Season 1 died but now she's back as Wednesday's spirit
guide (She's great, too.) and the previous Sheriff, also killed in Season 1, makes a couple of cameo appearances in Season 2, so I wouldn't rule out a reappearance from any of
them.
This is, of course, one of the things that can undermine the emotional
significance of... well, any plot development really, in a show like this.
It's the old horror movie problem, where no-one's ever really dead until
you've seen the body. Except in fantasy, even if you've seen the body burned
to a crisp, it doesn't mean whoever burned isn't coming back.
I'm long-since inured to it after a lifetime of reading comic-books. My
reactions are in the moment. They pretty much have to be if you commit to this kind of thing. I rarely find myself saying "Well, that would never happen..." while it's happening right there before me. Doubt only comes later, when I'm
thinking too much as I write something like this.
After two seasons, it's still a little hard to figure out exactly what genre of
show Wednesday is supposed to be, always assuming it's intended to be any genre at all. It's a
fantasy-comedy-drama but also a detective show, something I had thought might
just be a season 1 thing but apparently is going to carry on. It's also
quite the soap opera at times and you get the feeling someone really, desperately wanted it to be a
romcom until they were talked out of it.
There was some press about that in relation to Wednesday herself, when it was
made quite plain, coming into the second season, there was to be no more mushy stuff with
the title character. Probably a good decision. Wednesday needs to retain that trademark dark purity and intense focus to be recognizable as the long-established character. The slight fuzziness around the bleak edges as she
develops genuine friendships is already enough of a risk, without throwing
romance into the cauldron.
Enid picked up the romantic slack for most of the season but I was interested to
hear her tell Agnes, the one, very strong, Season 2 addition to Team
Wednesday (Sorry - I think I mean The Nightshades.) she was done with
boyfriends for a while. Whether that's a marker for the future, meaning a
further pullback from romantasy, or just a wobble for Enid before she gets her
romantic mojo back, I guess we'll find out next season. She's not going to be
going on many dates as an Alpha werewolf who can't turn back into a girl,
though, so there's that to consider.
Agnes, the human equivalent of a set of skeleton keys, makes a much better showing
(Ha!) in the second half of the season. I found her a little one-note in the
first but as she reveals just a little of her background and personality she
becomes considerably more interesting, not to say poignant. Her rapprochement with Enid was sweet
and quite touching although I'll miss those little spats, pitting Enid's
spluttering lupine outrage against Agnes's cloying, passive-aggressive sarcasm.
Pugsley remains as pointless and charisma-free as ever, but since that's his
well-established personality I suppose we can't complain. By the end of the
season I was feeling slightly more sympathetic to him so there's some progress
but I could happily do without him from now on. Morticia and Thing continue as before although it was a surprise for a disembodied hand to get an actual character arc. I'm betting Lurch will get one eventually. He certainly hasn't had a lot to do so far.
Perhaps the greatest revelation was the reason for Gomez's lack of paranormal abilities. I have always wondered just why he's part of the outcast world but now I have two valid explanations. Firstly, as Morticia says, it's a matter of attitude, not aptitude, and secondly he did used to have electrical abilities like Fester and Pugsley, so in some odd way he almost represents a disabled Outcast. All this lore fill-in is fascinating. I can take plenty more as the series goes on.
One thing I tried to notice was whether having an episode be directed by Tim
Burton made any appreciable difference. I'd like to think that, if it did, I'd
have been able to say afterwards which specific episodes he helmed but I
don't believe I can. I'm looking at
the credits
now and I see he directed the final two, which I did think were the
strongest of the whole season, but I'm not sure how much that had to do with
the direction as opposed to them just being the climactic drawing-together of
all the plot points.
And those plot points were tied up neatly enough, if not with a pretty little bow. There
were a few loose ends left dangling here and there but only enough to give the
writers of Season 3 something to grab onto. I found the whole thing a deal
more satisfying than I expected after what felt like a relatively baggy and
incoherent first half.
It does make me wonder how smart an idea it was to split the season in the
first place. I realize it was done for commercial rather than aesthetic
reasons but in retrospect I wonder if it might have had the opposite effect
from what was intended. I can imagine a few Wednesday fans feeling somewhat
less invested after watching episodes one through four, left perhaps not as excited
as they could have been for the rest.
If the whole thing had either dropped week on week for a couple of months or
landed in a big, binge-friendly block, I suspect the story arcs might have
felt more coherent (Or noticeable, even.) and the sense of anti-climax that
came with the end of the first half might not have been felt, or felt so
strongly. It'll be interesting to see if Netflix goes the same way next time.
Of course, that's likely to be at least a year from now. It's a long time to
wait, isn't it? I don't think I used to notice these lengthy gaps so much back
when all TV was broadcast in real time. Now, in the age of on-demand
entertainment, it does feel very strange to have to wait so long.
In the mean-time, though, there's apparently an Uncle Fester spin-off in the
works. Too much to hope it'll be that Fester/Wednesday double act I was
wishing for earlier. (When I wrote that yesterday I didn't know about the
spin-off, either...) but I'll take it as it comes and gratefully.
To conclude, as a whole, I was happy with Wednesday Season 2. I'd like to re-watch it
without the hiatus to see if it does, in fact, hold together better that way.
But not right now.
I have a lot going on, as you might tell from the reduced output here at the
moment. This should have posted yesterday, neatly on a Wednesday, but outside
factors intervened as I imagine they will continue to do for the foreseeable future. I might have to miss more than the odd post. Or maybe not. We'll see how things go.
Here she is. Ratha, the last of the significant characters we're going to meet on this long, slow, much-delayed journey through EverQuest's first quarter-century. As her close on sixty played days suggests, she got out quite a bit. Also, if this series didn't have an established format for the titles, I'd definitely have called this post Born On The Fourth Of July.
One thing this series has taught me, as if I didn't know it already, is that my memory is shot. Even that suggests it was ever any good to begin with, which it most certainly wasn't. I have always had a bad memory and waiting a couple of decades to write anything down sure isn't making it any better.
It'd be lovely if I could say for sure why I decided to roll up a new character on July the fourth, 2004, which would have been very close to the end of my second stint playing EQ as my main MMORPG. To recap a little, the first run lasted from November 1999 to whenever Dark Age of Camelot went live (9 October 2001) and the second from about six months after that until I got into the EverQuest II beta sometime around the end of August or the start of September 2004.
There was a third substantive phase that began when EQII puttered out about six months after launch, a fourth around the time of the Serpent's Spine expansion in September 2006, (That was the expansion that was intended to re-boot the franchise and nearly succeeded) and a fifth and final hurrah, at least as any kind of group player, when Seeds of Destruction arrived in October 2008, bringing with it the game-changing Mercenary feature.
Since then, I've been back a good few times, occasionally for quite long runs lasting several months, but always as a solo player. After I created Ratha in June 2004, though, I never again felt the need to start over from scratch with a brand new character, or at least not one that stuck. I may well roll the final five names on this list into a single post because there won't be much to say about any of them.
Ratha, though, has a very substantial history. And if I could remember it, I'd tell you what it was. Here's what I do remember...
Her name, for a start. She's named after the central character in a novel called Ratha's Creature by Clare Bell, the first in a series of novels collectively known as "The Books of the Named". She's a sentient, prehistoric great cat, who learns how to use fire, so you can see why I went there.
There are five books in the series, published sporadically between 1983 and 2008. I used to review books for a semi-pro comics zine back in the eighties, which is how I got hold of the first and second books in the series. They were review copies. I still have them and they made a big impression on me at the time although not so much that I've re-read either of them since or hunted down the three remaining volumes.
Looking at them online now, I'm not too surprised to see they're all out of print (Although you can get them all on Kindle.) but more so to find they're quite collectable. I'll have to see if I can complete my set and finish the story.
As usual with just about every name I've ever given a character in any game, no-one sent me any tells saying they recognized the name or commented on it in any way. There seems to be very little common ground between the kind of books I read and the tastes of people who play these kinds of games. Which, of course, makes those books ideal sources for naming characters.
So that's why she's called Ratha. As for why she's a Beastlord, not too long before, we'd been spending a great deal of time grouped with an Eastern European guy around college age, young for our crowd, whose name I forget although I have a feeling it will come back to me [Edit - it didn't.] so I'd had plenty of opportunities to study the Beastlord gameplay as it was then. And boy was it OP!
A lot of EQ players strongly disapproved of Beastlords when they were introduced. The pushback was a factor in why the class didn't carry over into EQII, only being added there years later.
They were widely seen as easy-mode upstarts, created by the devs as some kind of sop to the idea that EQ was too difficult - too difficult to play solo and too difficult to get groups, both of which problems Beastlords seemed designed to fix.
Beastlords could do lots of things other classes could do, making them almost as good all-rounders as Norrath's famous jacks-of-all-trades, Bards. The big difference was you needed a lot of skill to play a Bard but any fool could play a Beastlord. That was their reputation, anyway. And it was half-way true. Having spent a lot of time with a couple of the best bards on the server, I knew what an incredible class it was but also how much chance I had of playing one well - none. The Beastlord, though, looked manageable.
It also looked far more nuanced and interesting than its bad reputation suggested. Played competently, let alone well, a Beastlord could tank, heal, buff, handle crowd control and provide decent dps both at range and in melee. There was always something for a Beastlord to do in almost any situation or any group make-up. Shamans hated them for it because they did everything people wanted a Shaman for - not as well but well enough for most groups - and a lot more besides.
As I'd seen, though, since we frequently played in groups with a top-class Shaman, the two classes were perfectly able to sync if the players were willing. But then, in those happy days most of the players I grouped with regularly were both skilled and socially competent. I know! Hard to believe, isn't it? Shame it didn't last.
I do remember that those were my reasons for making a Beastlord. I just don't recall now why I needed a new character at all. Just looking at the dates, it's unlikely verging on impossible that whatever it was Ratha was meant to do ever got done. Not unless it only took a couple of months and in those days very little in EQ took as little time as that.
What actually happened that summer before the beta is lost to time but afterwards, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally abandoned the listing wreck that was EQII six months post-launch and returned to the safe harbor of the original EQ, literally no-one we knew there was still playing. They'd all left for... who knows? We only ever saw one of them again.
For that and other reasons, we declined to pick up where we left off on our established characters and instead started playing new ones. I've already written about our times on Stromm, which I remember relatively clearly, but how Ratha fits in is much more cloudy. She might also have been on Stromm for a while but if so I've forgotten about it.
What I remember very clearly are the times I spent playing her in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss. We had a good go at Depths of Darkhollow, the September 2005 expansion that all happens underground and we did a lot of the Serpents Spineexpansion together. Ratha was my main character for both of those. I think we got to about Level 50 in TSS, probably stopping before we got to the end of Goruka Mesa, a zone that goes to the mid-fifities.
When we came back for our final duo tour in Seeds of Destruction three years later, it was for a hugely enjoyable romp through dozens of zones that had previoulsy been far out of our range. Playing as a "duo" comprising a Necromancer with a powerful pet, a Beastlord with an even more powerful pet and two full-time, dedicated Mercenary healers made us not that far off being a full group.
It certainly allowed us to explore most zones in every expansion from Gates of Discord through to the opening of Secrets of Feydwer, few of which either of us had seen before. If the game was a theme-park, then anything earlier, even the once-impenetrable Elemental Planes and the Plane of Time itself, was the equivalent of the kiddies' tea-cup ride.
We had a great time. We kept it up for months, working our way through expansion after expansion, starting all the way back in Planes of Power and working our way up, swapping to the next if it ever got too hard, picking up AAs by the thousand and adding real levels steadily too, thanks to EQ's deep vertical progression that means expansions several years old frequently still bring in at least a dribble of xp, providing you can kill mobs by the score.
All good things... as they say. By the starter zone of Secrets of Faydwer, the expansion immediately preceding SoD, our levels had almost caught up with the cap and we had to play properly. Duoing was still practical and fun but it was clear we weren't going to get much further and knuckling down to grind out a few per cent of a level each session, while taking care not to get killed, wasn't nearly as much fun as romping across whole zones leaving a trail of smoking corpses in our wake.
That was the last time we visited Norrath together. We moved on to duo in several more MMORPGs, eventually settling down for another decade in Guild Wars 2. Mrs. Bhagpuss is probably done with MMORPGs now, after two full decades playing them pretty heavily. I continue to pick away at the genre, albeit with considerably less enthusiasm these days.
As for EverQuest, as I said, I've been back plenty of times since that final run in Seeds of Destruction. As I recall, the first time I returned alone, I did pick Ratha back up in the expectation of adding a few levels. She did get a couple more but, while she's a competent soloist with a mercenary behind her, it seemed awfully slow compared to what I'd been used to doing with her. It didn't last.
She ended up, beached in the mid-80s (Like a lot of us...) I did think about using last year's free Level 100 boost on her but there's not really much point. I would never play her and if I was going to boost anyone it'd probably be my Necromancer... who we'll meet next time.
Didn't I already have a Necro, though? I did! Well remembered! He's still around. Somewhere. Just not in the right place. So the new Necro it would have to be.
Nikolaiovitch is his name. I'll tell you all about him another day.
We talk a lot around here about how poorly streaming services treat the
properties they represent. How shows get dropped after one season if they
haven't picked up traction. How multi-season arcs just fall right off that cliff
they thought they were hanging onto, leaving everyone who cared high and dry and
wondering what the hell happened. Shows with decent ratings get canned because
something else might do better or come to a juddering halt because one of the
leads did something the platform doesn't want to be associated with.
It's not like the old networks were more forgiving or responsible or
artistically committed. If anything they were worse in all respects but they
were also slower, steadier, less flighty. They did drop shows fast if they
didn't pick up an audience but first they'd shunt them around the schedules a
bit and maybe try a second season with a new theme tune and title sequence to
see if there was any movement. And they always had the holy grail of
syndication in the distance so there was some motivation to keep the momentum
going, once they'd gotten the train rolling.
It was a real surprise to see news reports predicting
"Wednesday could run for seven seasons". Not only is that very specific, it seems counter to any previous logic.
Shows last as long as they hold an audience, keep their stars and someone
crucial to the production process doesn't get a better offer.
And seven seasons of Wednesday, with the slight evidence of just two seasons
to go on, wouldn't mean even seven years, which would itself be a
long time in streaming culture. The show first arrived on
Netflix in November 2022 and the second part of the second season has
just aired, almost three years later. If they can't speed that up, completing
seven seasons of Wednesday would take a couple of decades! The students of
Nevermore Academy are going to look about as convincing as teenagers as
the cast of Grease! by then.
But I'm not here today to talk about Wednesday. I haven't started on the
second half of the new season yet. (By the way, as an aside,
the post
I did on the first half of the season was the least-read of all the posts I
published during Blaugust, according to Blogger's page-view stats, which I
find fairly reliable. By quite some margin, too. Given the supposed popularity
of the show, that seemed surprising, until it occured to me maybe people
didn't even click on it in fear of spoilers. If that was you, maybe go back
and read it now?)
No, today's subject is a show that not only managed four seasons before it
ended but which also came to a close in a dignified, coherent and satisfying
fashion. It can be done, which makes me wonder a) why it isn't done
more often and b) why it was done like that for this particular show.
At this point, if this were a podcast, I could come in with the big reveal.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really work with a blog or at least not a heavily
illustrated one like this. Everyone who cares knew what the show was as soon
as they looked at the image at the top, although I did try to pick one that
wasn't totally obvious.
It's Upload, of course, the Amazon Prime show about a
near-future digital afterlife, where anyone rich enough can have their brain
scanned (And their head literally exploded.) so their memories and personality
can be uploaded into an eternal spa weekend. I posted about the first season
here and the second
here, although neither season got a post of its own.
I seem to have omitted to mention the third season entirely, all of which does
tend to suggest I wasn't that engaged with the show. That would not be true. I
really liked Upload. It was one of the first shows I got into, when I started
watching TV (Well, streaming TV...) regularly again after a decade and a half
of not watching anything at all (Thanks, Covid.) and that's perhaps why it
made an impression that's lasted.
In production terms, Upload has done quite a bit better than Wednesday, in
that it's only taken five years for four seasons to make it to the screen.
Granted one of those seasons is really only half a season but still.
In fact, no two seasons of Upload have the same number of episodes, which is
odd. The first has the most with ten, the second has seven, the third eight
and now just four in the final season. They also vary quite a bit in length,
with most hovering around the half-hour mark you might expect for the sitcom
the show was originally promoted as being but the final season stretching out
past forty minutes each time.
Although it's very much a comedy and it does rely heavily on a specific
situation, Upload never was much of a sitcom. Struggling to describe the first
season, I called it "partly a romcom with a lot of rather unsubtle social satire ladled on top
but it's more a murder mystery". The mystery got solved but the drama just grew and grew until it turned
into a world-wide conspiracy. The comedy stuck around and as for the
romance... there was always a lot of romance, all the way to the very
end.
When it came to the second season, I expressed some concerns about "huge chunks of the premise, let alone the plot, not making any sense at all
if thought about for more than a moment", something that never really changed. But as I also said, it didn't matter
because the characters were engaging and so well-played they made me want to
know what happened to them, whether it made any sense or not.
When Season Three came to an end I was unsure whether there would be a fourth.
It did end on a cliffhanger but then don't they all? I'm not even sure why
writers bother any more. It can't be much of a motivation for viewers, the way
it used to be in the network days, when you knew if the story was still going,
a show would be coming back because cancellations were always signalled way in
advance and writers had time to re-write before the final episodes.
Everything is so fractured now, with so many streaming platforms, most of them
requiring an opt-in, paid subscription, and with shows not infrequently
swapping from one service to another, it really doesn't feel at all like the
old days, when there was a kind of certainty, not to say inevitablity to it
all. Around this time of year there'd be a whole big deal about the Fall
Season shows. You'd see them trailed over and over on the stations you watched
and you'd know what was coming whether you cared about it or not.
Was that better? It could be stultifying, sure, but you knew where you were.
I didn't even notice that Upload was back until a few days after it had
happened. None of the media outlets in my feeds mentioned it, Prime didn't
plug it in the top attractions they were showing me and I certainly didn't get
any emails about it. None of the streaming services seem to send out
promotional emails the way most gaming companies do, even though several of
them have my email address.
I only noticed by chance that it was back, when I was scanning down Prime
Video's horrifically jumbled and messy home page. It was somewhere down on
about row five or six, off the bottom of the screen. Given they clearly have
data to tell them I watched every episode of the previous seasons, you might
have thought they'd want to let me know there was another but apparently they
don't care.
So, was it any good? Well, let me see if I can answer that without
spoilers...
... maybe some spoilers in a general sense....
... I mean, even if I say it was satisfying or if it was disappointing, those
are kinds of spoilers...
...so if you want to keep your own view absolutely pristine, now would be the
time...
And we're back. And no, I'm not going to drop any big reveals of the plot
or the details but I am going to give away the emotional tenor of the ending. It
was good. It felt satisfying. It had some light and shade and a little more
nuance than perhaps I was expecting.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say the production team and the writers have left
themselves just enough wriggle room to carry the whole thing on at some
unspecified time in the future, if the opportunity arises. It wouldn't be the
first time a show with a planned ending turned out not to have ended after
all.
Assuming that doesn't happen, though, I'd imagine most viewers will feel they
can live with the way it finished. It's mostly a happy ending. Most of the
characters you like get to walk off into the sunset with the love of their
life (Not that all of those loves can actually walk...) The bad guys get
what's coming to them, or some of them do, at least. I was very happy with the
resolution of Ingrid's arc, she being my favorite character. I wouldn't have
predicted it after Season One, either, so that's a gold star to the writers.
As for the plot, in keeping with the entire series, none of it really bears
close examination. Or casual examination. Any examination at all, really. If I
started picking holes, we'd be here 'til Christmas. But none of that matters.
If you start with an unrealistic proposition, everything you build on that
foundation is bound to fall apart if you lean on it. So don't lean on it is my
advice.
Just lean back and enjoy it. Let it wash over you and pick what sense out of
it you can. It's stuffed full of topical references and tiny satires that
spill out all over the plot for no good reason so why not just indulge
yourself?
I'll just mention one of those: the Millennial references. They stood out for
me. I hadn't even tried to date the whole thng until then. It's in "the future" but if they'd ever said how far I'd missed it. This time, though, there were
a couple of scenes with some very specific data points, namely that the central
characters, all of whom seem to be in their thirties (Ingrid,
specifically, is thirty-four in the final episode. Nathan, according to
Wikipedia, was 27 when the series began.) have Millenials for parents.
On the most commonly-used generational timeline, the last Millennials would
have been born by 1996. The children of Millennials, for the most part, are
Gen Alpha, for which as yet there is no agreed date-range but which is broadly
seen as covering the 2010s to about now. Even the oldest Gen Alpha wouldn't be
hitting thirty until around the middle of the century and most of them will
get there after 2050.
Which doesn't seem that crazy. I'm so used to everything set in "the future" seeming to imagine decades of technological development telescoped into a
few years that it seems strange to see extrapolations from current experiments
being given something approximating a reasonable development arc. We
could have self-driving cars, digital brain scans and sentient AI by
the 2050s or 2060s. All of that is being worked on right now. I mean, we
won't but it's not like saying we'll have terraformed Mars or perfected
matter transmission by then.
So, that's Upload for you. A very enjoyable show, often funny, sometimes
exciting, always heart-warming, never made a lot of sense. I did tear up a
little, right at the end, even though the final scene had been telegraphed for
most of the last episode.
I'm sorry to see it end but I'm very happy to see it end so well.
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