Day Two - Blaugust, Blog Rolls And Beryl

The second day of Blaugust and I'd like to assure everyone not every post here this month is going to be about the event. That really would be taking the metatextual high road, which I can't deny has its appeal, but no. There are more things in life than Blaugust.

This one is, though. It's in the nature of a set-up post and also a grab-bag of sorts, although it's a mighty small bag. You wouldn't get much shopping in this one.

Wilhelm opened the bidding yesterday with a complete list of all 98 runners in this 2025 Invitational but by this morning I see he's had to update that four times already. We're now up to 114.

I left a comment last night saying I wasn't sure how I'd keep up with all of them, not just in terms of time spent reading but, more pragmatically, how I was even go to know when anyone had posted anything new. In previous years, I'd been in the habit of adding every new blog to my Blog Roll but that was when almost all of them were at least somewhat related to the boroad theme and purpose of this blog, namely gaming and popular culture. 

Last year Blaugust made quite an effort to spread the net wider and draw in bloggers from all kinds of non-gaming sources as well as vloggers, podcasters and who knows what all else, which was great for me as a reader, viewer and listener but it no longer seemed to make quite as much sense for to include all of them in the sidebar. Instead, I just whacked them all into my Feedly and followed them in private.

At the time, as I recall, the free version of Feedly had a limit on how many RSS feeds you could add. I seem to remember it being a hundred but I may have made that up. I'm pretty sure there was a limit, though, and I think I was getting quite close to it. Consequently, I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to follow all the dozens of new Blaugustinians. (Thanks to Gaudete Theology for the new collective noun - it rolls off the tongue a lot more sweetly than Blaugustians, which is what I'd been using until now.)

I was toying with the idea of making a separate category in the Blog Roll and adding them all there but I didn't relish all the cutting and pasting it  would take. By this morning I still hadn't done anything about it and just as well, too, because the very first Blaugust post I read after breakfast was from Owls at Owlblog, (Aka Owls Of The Godless Internet.) who'd solved most of my problem for me!

Owls has put together an OPML file (I say it like I know what one of those is...) with RSS links to all the current Blaugust blogs. You can import the whole lot into your RSS feeder of choice with one click. 

I cut and pasted the link into Feedly this morning and it worked perfectly. You do then have to go through them all and "Follow" them individually but that takes about 1% of the time it would take to add the whole lot the old-fashioned way. Thanks Owls!

I did also try the same trick with Blogger's Blog Roll widget but it wasn't having any of it. It didn't reject it but neither did it add anything at all. There may be some way of getting it to co-operate but although this year's new intake doesn't seem quite as wildly disparate as 2024's, I still think it's probably not going to be appropriate to add every one of them to the roll, so I'm not going to pursue it any further.

To give some idea of the challenges ahead, I read just the latest post from each of the new blogs I'd added, which was about a third of the total number of participants and it took me more than an hour. I know from experience that a lot of blogs will slow down their output as the event rolls on but this first week is going to be rough!

It's always fun to meet everyone for the first time, though. I was surprised to find several new Blaugustians posting in languages I don't read so those aren't going to be taking up much of my reading time. Nice to see the range of the event expanding, all the same.

Better yet from my perspective, there are a couple of blogs that seem to be primarily focused on images. I'm always happy to see more pictures in my feeds. And in that spirit I'm acceding to a request from Redbeard in the comments yesterday, when he asked for "more Beryl pics".

Here's she is, lounging in what used to be Mrs Bhagpuss's computer chair before it started to list to one side and rattle alarmingly. Mrs Bhagpuss bought a nice, new chair but Beryl had always liked to slip onto the old one whenever the opportunity arose, so I brought it into my study and now she sits on it behind me, keeping an eye on what I'm doing. She can also just about see out of the window from it so that's another attraction.

A few of the new blogs this year seem to be actual, old school web-logs or personal online diaries, which is very welcome. Takes me back to the old GeoCities days, when I used to randomly wander from homepage to homepage, reading about the small incidents in lives of people I'd never otherwise know. 

There are also several music blogs, something both very welcome and, I think, a first for Blaugust.  I
wonder what contact pulled those in? Unfortunately from my point of view, the preferred linkage among them seems to be to Spotify, which I don't use, but if nothing else the presence of nusic-based blogs will empower me to make more music posts of my own. Like I need any encouragement...

That's almost it for the round-up but I'd like to call attention to two particular posts I read this morning, both of which had some very helpful, practical advice to offer. (Three, of course, counting Owls.) 

The first was Calishat, who was talking about an app she's developed that goes by the name of Attention Junction. Or maybe it's a website she curates. I'm not sure on the naming conventions these days.

Anyway, whatever you call it, what Attention Junction does is "analyze the historical views of two Wikipedia pages, identify spans of public interest as expressed by unusually-high page views, find overlaps, and turn them into Google / Google News searches". It looks very interesting and I've bookmarked it to play around with later.

Finally, I'd very much like to highlight a post by Nick Simson in which he recommends an article by Ben Werdmuller called Evaluating AI. It's one of the most lucid, balanced and downright useful examinations of the ever-controversial topic I've read to date. What's more, it's not just of academic interest, it contains practical information and advice that I will certainly be referring back to as I explore, experiment with and make use of the various AI options and vendors in the future.

And that's my little trawl through the new stuff. Incomplete of course, since more blogs have joined since Owls compiled his list. I just hope I haven't missed anything amazing...  

Ten Glorious Years! Give Or Take A Year. Or Two.

 

And so it begins. Did I say that last year? Let me just check... Nope. But I bet I said it some year, on the First of Blaugust, because if keeping a long-running blog tells you anything about yourself, it's how predictable you can be and how many of your supposedly original thoughts and ideas are just ones you had many times before and then immediately forgot.

Or maybe that's just me. I quite like it, actually, It does at least denote some welcome element of constancy of character, which I was brought up to think of as a good thing. 

So, anyway, Blaugust. As I was saying yesterday, it's even more welcome this year than usual because I'm low on the ideas front just now, at least for things to post about that aren't alienating to some and of no interest to most. It means I'm more than averagely grateful for the leaning-posts of Blaugust's special-interest weeks and topic suggestions. 

Let's see what we have for Week One... hang on a moment, I think Krikket has a list...

 

 

There we go! That's the Themes nailed down. And what topic suggestions do we have within those headings? Just Week One will do for now, I think...

Week One – Welcome to Blaugust Week
August 1st – August 6th

• What made you decide to do Blaugust this year, and what are your personal goals?
• Did you start preparing for Blaugust before the August 1st start date? If so, what did you do ahead of time to make sure you’d stay on track?
• Do you remember how you heard about Blaugust for the first time?
• If this isn’t your first Blaugust, what keeps you coming back to do this year after year?
• Community Builder Bonus Prompt: Who are the Blaugust bloggers who you keep reading all year round?

Let's have a bash at those, why not?

Why did I decide to do Blaugust this year?  

Not quite as simple an answer as it might be. Most years the reason would be "Because I always do it" or "Because it's fun". Last year, though, it wasn't as much fun as all that, especially towards the end, by when I was feeling quite burned out, trying to keep up with the immense volume of posts from a record number of contributors while also hitting my 31 posts in a month target. 

By September, I was very much of a mind not to do Blaugust in 2026, by which I really meant I wouldn't formally sign up for it. Every year a few people shadow the event without filling in the registration form. I did it myself before I took the wafer back in... ooh, look! 2015!

That was unexpected! It appears this is my tenth anniversary Blaugust. My first was in 2015. Which of course makes this the eleventh time I've participated. Except there was that one year we did it twice with Blapril as well and wasn't there one year when it didn't happen at all, or am I imagining that?

Of course, another benefit of having a long-running blog is you can go back and check things like that. Give me a moment...

Okay, now that's weird. So, it seems that after making my 31 posts back in 2015, I didn't do another Blaugust for two years. 2016 and 2017 are just normal posting months with no mention of the event. 

Doing a little primary research, it seems that 2017 was the year the event lay fallow, so that fits with my memory of how things went. But what about 2016? Did I have such a bad time in my first Blaugust I didn't care to repeat it? Let me check...

Don't burn out. Enjoy it. Keep it casual.

And here we go! On the last day of Blaugust I posted a full account of my experience, in which it transpires that I hadn't signed up after all, only shadowed the event, all the while acting as if I was part of it. And it seems the reason I opted out of the opt-in was a requirement that you had to also sign up to some service by the name of "Anook", which I didn't want to do. 

What the hell was Anook? Why was it deemed necessary? I don't recall ever hearing of it again. 

Interestingly, it seems from my review that I didn't enjoy my first Blaugust all that much and for almost exactly the same reasons I found it a bit stressful last year - too many posts by others to keep up with, too much effort posting every day myself. Blimey, Charlie! If I'd known what was to come...

I concluded by saying "If Belghast runs Blaugust again next year I'll think very carefully before deciding whether to join in" and clearly what I thought, when I got to thinking, was that I wouldn't. Then Bel skipped a year and in 2018 I signed up all official like nothing had happened and I haven't missed a Blaugust since.

All of which means that, if we count Blapril, this really is my tenth Blaugust! Yay! Didn't miss it after all!

What are your goals?

Don't burn out. Enjoy it. Keep it casual.

Every year I've taken part I've hit the 31 posts. Sometimes that's been very easy. Other times it's been a struggle. This year I'm going to let it be what it will be. I do think that using the topics and suggestions will make it a lot easier if I do decide to go all in. I mean, look at this post. It's writing itself.

Do you start preparing beforehand?

I have done in previous years. I've planned my own series of posts a month or two ahead of time. I've written things in advance so I had completed posts in the bag, all ready to drop in on days when I didn't have time to put anything new together.

Last year I had the bright idea of saving up the idea I had to celebrate EverQuest's 25th Anniversary until August, so I could get the benefit of all those extra posts during Blaugust. That worked really well, although in the end I only used eight of the proposed twenty-five posts during the event. I'm still working my way through the list even now, so I guess I could roll out the remaining seven EQ25 posts this Blaugust...

Othe than that, this year I have made no preperations whatsoever.

Do you remember how you heard about Blaugust for the first time? 

Not exactly. I mean, I know vaguely how it happened - bloggers I followed mentioned it or were participating in it so I came to it organically. Precisely where my first sighting of the word "Blaugust" itself occurred, though, I can't be sure but I said in that 2016 post linked above that I first became aware of Blaugust the year before, 2015, which I believe would have been a couple of years after Belghast came up with the original concept.

So I wasn't there at the beginning but I arrived at the party not too long after it started.  

What keeps you coming back to do this year after year?

I think many of us feel the duality each year
when Blaugust heaves its mighty bulk into view.

It's so, so tempting to say "masochism", isn't it? I think many of us feel the duality each year when Blaugust heaves its mighty bulk into view. It's one of those things you both look forward to and dread at the same time. It's fun but often it can be too much fun and too much fun is enervating. 

I personally have no interest in all the awards and challenges, as can be seen by the complete absence of any of the badges on the blog. If I'm brutally honest, I don't just not care for them, I dislike them. Reminds me of being in the Boy Scouts, something I never once in my life, even as a small boy, thought was something I'd want to be associated with. Not my kind of thing at all.

Conversely, though, it certainly is the community that brings me back every year. It's a club, isn't it? And this is the Annual General Meeting.

When I was in the British Amateur Press Association (BAPA), which for anyone who hasn't heard me bang on about it before was a kind of analog version of blogging from back when the cutting edge of technology was a photocopier, we used to have an AGM, usuallly held at the Central Mailer's home and often involving an overnight or weekend stay. 

It was a big party, basically, to which many of the people who contributed zines to the bi-monthly APA came from all over the country and even from other countries, since we had a few members from outside the UK at times. 

Blaugust is basically that, only for a month and without the drunkenness and fist-fights. It's when many of the people whose posts I read every week and with whom I swap comments all year get together for a big party. Who wouldn't want to come back for that every year?

And here we all are! Happy Blaugust everyone. Let's get the party started! 

(As for the "Community Builder Bonus Prompt: Who are the Blaugust bloggers who you keep reading all year round?" I'm not touching that! It's "Who's your favorite child?", isn't it? Let's just say "All of them" and leave it at that. I mean, obviously we all know it's actually "some of them" but this way everyone gets to feel they're included. And of course everyone is!) 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

For new readers, if I use any AI images or other artifacts or services in a post, I'll always annotate it in a footnote. My view on AI is that it's a creative tool like any other but in the current climate I feel it's polite to mention when it's being used so anyone with strong objections can, like, erm... I dunno... unsee it or something? At least not be fooled into thinking they liked it and then find out later they really didn't.

I like to use a lot of illustrations on the blog and abstract posts like this are notoriously difficult to break up with images so these are the posts where you're most likely to see AI. I use NightCafe almost exclusively, where I have a huge bank of free credits waiting to be burned and that's where both of these were done.

For images in these kinds of posts I like to pull out a phrase from the body of the text and throw it to an AI image generator to see what it comes up with. It's a game. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. In this case I got an image I was willing to use first time, both times, which is rare.

The specific model I used for both was something called Virtual Utopia XL. It happened to be the last one I'd used for reasons I may get to in another post and I just left it as it was when I ran the new prompts. 

As for the prompts, you can see them in the captions to the illustrations. Both had the same style instructions appended, namely "line art, color, retro-futurism". Again, those were already set, for reasons I may get to later in the month. Runtime was "Short" and all the weights were 50%. 

 

Krypto? Two Days In A Row?

I'm looking forward to Blaugust beginning on Friday for the simple reason it'll give me something to write about. Let me rephrase that. It'll give me something to write about that someone might want to read. 

It's not that I'm short of ideas. More that I'm short of ideas that fit the supposed purpose and function of this blog, which started out as place where I could write brief, pithy opinion pieces about Massively Multiple Online Roleplaying Games and shifted over time to accomodate anything and everything in the broad sphere of popular culture that interested, irked or excited me.

And so it remains. Except, as astute readers may have noticed, it now features mostly posts about things I might watch or play or read or otherwise consume rather than those I actually have consumed.

Which is fine, I guess. As a reading experience I'm not sure there's a huge qualitative difference in a post where I describe some new game I read about and speculate on whether I'd want to play it and one where I recount in needless detail my personal experience with a game I have actually acquired an played, based on little more than the tutorial, which is probably as much as I'm ever going to see of it.

Ditto songs. Back when I came up with the intentionally faux-naif title What I've Been Listening To Lately for my regular music feature, it did at least tend to include some songs I'd been playing in the background while I was writing other posts. Now, it's mostly songs I've heard once and bookmarked, then  listened to once more as I decide what goes into the latest post. 

And does it matter? Probably not. They're songs I liked enough to make a note of and then enough more to keep in on a second listen. I can assure everyone I do still listen to a lot more new or new-to-me songs than ever make it onto the blog, so anything that appears here has at least passed the audition. 

Similarly, I read about and watch trailers for plenty of games I can't even be bothered to bookmark and some of the ones I do save for later get kicked out on review without ever meriting so much as a mention here. Does that make those posts materially inferior to the endless stream of uneccessarily lengthy analyses of every last, tiny development in Guild Wars 2, something that provided the backbone of this blog for the best part of a decade?

Second-to-last GW2 screenshot I ever took. Apparently in October 2023,
which means I must have played more recently than I thought.

 

Posts on TV shows describe a slightly different arc. I very rarely, if ever, write about shows I haven't seen and usually I wait until I've seen the entire run before putting finger to key. Which would be all well and good if I was actually watching any but at the moment I'm not. I literally haven't looked at any of my streaming platforms at all for almost a couple of weeks now. I'm not writing about TV because I'm not watching any.

What I am doing, as I've mentioned far too often, is making music with AI. I do this all the time now. It is close to being the only leisure activity/hobby I have at the moment. It's taken over all the time I used to use both to play games and watch shows and some extra besides. And I have more sense than to post about that more than once in a very long while, much though I'd love to. It'd be the blogging equivalent of cornering someone at a party and reading them your poetry.

With any other spare time I get, I've been scanning, digitizing and editing the novella I mentioned, from which I'm spinning off all these songs. That's taking some time, too. What I'll do with it after that remains to be seen but I won't just be putting it up on this blog or talking about it here other than in this kind of tangential reference. I want to do something a bit more substantive than that although I'm still puzzling over what that might be.

All of the above makes for a somewhat self-indulgent post on the last day of July but a week from now, as we approach Week Two of Blaugust - Introduce Yourself Week - it will suddenly become entirely relevant, appropriate and apposite. Even tomorrow, on Blaugust Day One, it will kind of make sense. 

Maybe don't read it until then? Oh, sorry... too late...

Anyway, in the spirit of writing about things I haven't done, let me say a little about the two new superhero movies that just came out - Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first thing I wanted to say is that I have considered going to see both of them. And, indeed, am still so considering.

This is a notable event. I believe the last movie I went to see on release at the cinema was Arrival back in 2016. If I've seen anything since, I can't remember it. I'd blame my absence from the cinema on the pandemic but on that evidence I'd dropped off the wagon well before then. 

Post-pandemic I have tried to get my former movie-going partner to come and see a couple of things with me but she's not interested any more, having also had the habit broken by the enforced shut-down. As for going with Mrs Bhagpuss, who's never been a keen cinema-goer but could occasionally be tempted, now we have Beryl, who cannot be left Home Alone (Although she could sit with us as we watched Home Alone, together, at home, I suppose. I've never actually seen Home Alone...) going out together to do anything non-dog-friendly involves such a logistical performance neither of us can be bothered with it.

Which leaves going to the movies on my own, something I used to do not all that infrequently when I was younger. Much younger. 

I have no existential objections. It's actually a good way to see movies if you want to concentrate on the film rather than have a Shared Social Experience. It's just a bit more effort than I'm quite ready for... although that might be changing.

I want to see Superman enough that I did get as far as looking up the times of showings. I was thinking of going this week but my mother had a health scare and ended up in hospital so a lot of time was spent driving backwards and forwards that could have been spent sitting in a darkened auditorium.

She's back home now, though, and next week is - in theory - clear of obligations (See how long that lasts...) so maybe...

I am and almost always have been a Superman fan, of course, which explains some of the interest. All the same, I haven't felt any burning desire, let alone need, to see a Superman movie since Christopher Reeve first donned the cape in 1978. This movie feels different, though, as evidenced by my previous posts, gosh-wowing over the trailers. 

Superman (And even more so Supergirl.) fans of a certain age have a very particular view of the right way to do The Superman Family. It's been a while since there's been a movie that felt like it might come anywhere close to the mark. This one does and it seems almost rude not to celebrate the occasion by paying to see it.

If Superman has been inadequately served by Hollywood, though, what about The Fantastic Four?  Marvel's First Family, the bedrock on which the entire Marvel Universe was built, have infamously never been given the treatment they deserve by any medium other than the comics themselves. There have been some FF films and they have been bad.

  (The 2015 Version. Apparently the movie is even worse than the trailer. Scary thought.)

By all accounts, the new one isn't. It's good. Maybe very good. That alone makes it worth seeing, if only out of curiosity.

The thing about the Fantastic Four, though, is that they were always more respected than loved, even by Marvel fans. In the 1960s, Superman was old-fashioned in a way that seemed wholly appropriate to the company that published his adventures but the FF always seemed to carry an aura of The Establishment about them that made them something of an odd fit for Marvel's increasingly counter-culture image. 

Let's be honest - Reed and Sue Richards came off like someone's parents. Then Franklin Richards popped out and they really were. What with Johnny Storm seeming to have walked off the set of 77 Sunset Strip and Ben Grimm acting like he had to be in his forties at least, I never really got how the FF were supposed to be part of the same teenage Swinging Sixties set as SpiderMan or the X-Men. It's no wonder their classic run is a whole series of introductions for hipper heroes like the Silver Surfer and Adam Warlock. 

For all that, the team is seminal, with an importance that can't be ignored. Once again, if there's finally a version of the Fantastic Four up on screen that works, I can't but help feel I ought to make some effort to go check it out.

Chances are I won't. I'll likely end up getting both movies on DVD or even watching them on a streaming platform, although that's possibly even less likely to happen than seeing them at the cinema.

I almost said, if you've seen either of them, let me know what you think in the comments, but then I remembered I'm still trying to avoid spoilers so maybe don't do that just yet. Save it for the post when I talk about actually having seen either or both of them.

You might have a while to wait. 

Here, Boy!

It's been a while since I played DCUO. Given that I post about it every time I play, it seems safe to say it was back in January, when I got stuck on Felix Faust at the end of the first chapter of the game's new "narrative-led" approach and never bothered to go back to try and beat him on a second try.

At least I did actually play the game that time. Usually, all I do is log in, claim whatever's on offer, wander around my new Base wishing I hadn't torn down the old one, put up a few posters, sigh at the prospect of redecorating, wish once again I'd stayed where I was, even if the new Base does have a better view, then log out.

Now and again, probably no more than once a year and mostly not even that often, I might go outside for a fly around. Perhaps even do a couple of missions. The days when I tried to keep up with even the most basic solo content at the start of each new Episode are long gone.

DCUO is a game I used to play. Worse, an MMORPG I used to play, making it even harder to return. How many of those are there, now? Literally hundreds, I think. 

It is, at least, one I still very occasionally write about, which puts it ahead of 95% of them, but it's a game I write about less and less. So, why am I writing about it today?

Because there's a freebie I want of course! Just about the only thing guaranteed to get me to patch up and log in to an MMORPG I no longer play is the prospect not just of something for nothing (You get that in virtually all of them every time you log in these days so it's no incentive at all.) but the offer of something I find specifically appealing, coupled with a limited window of opportunity to grab it.

It's a very weird kind of FOMO. Mostly, fear of missing out is not an emotion I'm personally familiar with. I can let most things slide without being at all bothered. If it's not too much trouble I might extend the very slight effort necessary to pick up something I'm not all that interested in or attend some event that only very mildly intrigues me but if I happen to forget to log in and miss it, I really couldn't care.

There are a small number of games to which I still think, with increasingly slight evidence, I might one day go back and for those I might make a little more effort to acquire something that could be useful, if I did ever return. Things like level boosts or an extra character slot that sometimes attend a promotion, those might be worth not missing out on. 

But these days, even the sort of giveaways that would once have had me looking up my old passwords - mounts or hats for example (I do like a hat, as I believe I have established previously.) - aren't always enough to trigger a response.

So, why am I patching DCUO as I type this? An 8Gb download it is, too. 

I'll give you one word. One name. 

Krypto.

But wait a moment. Don't I already have Superman's dog? Didn't I post about it when I got him and haven't I posted several screenshots since then of my character playing with him in her Base?

Yes, yes and yes.  

But, see, here's the thing... that Krypto can't leave my Base. This Krypto can!

DCUO has a mechanic I've never bothered with. It's called the Ally System and it's relatively recent, dating back only to 2021. When it was announced, I imagined it would be something like the Mercenary systems in the EverQuest games, an NPC you could hire and have fight alongside you as a permanent companion. That would have been great. 

It wan't that. It was more like one of those dumbfire pets EQ mages and necros get, the ones that have fancy names but really just appear, do some burst damage and vanish. They're fancy spells with a visual is all. You'd have, say, Harley Quinn as your ally and when you called her she'd appear out of nowhere, do a big AE, then vanish. 

Big whoop.

Okay, they all also had some secondary and passive effects and there was some upgrade system you could use to enhance them but once I found out you'd barely get to see them before they left, I lost interest. Until now.

What's happening in the current update is a complete overhaul of the system to turn it into something a lot more appealing. Instead of just popping in, doing a special attack and leaving, now your allies will stick around for a while. Still, sadly, not for good like a proper Mercenary but long enough to cycle through their signature attack twice and do some regular fighting alongside you while they wait for it to recharge.

I mean, it's still not great, is it? But it is better. 

The name of the update is Superboy Ally and Ally Update, which doesn't even sound like something thought up by a committee. In a committee at least one person would have vetoed that gibberish. Seriously, who's naming these things now? I'd blame AI but clearly no AI would come up with anything that dull. It takes a human to be that unimaginitive.

Also, as you've probably spotted, it's "Superboy" in the lead, not Krypto. But where the Lad of Steel flies, can the Dog of Steel be far behind?

Well, yes and no. Krypto is part of the package but he's kind of Superboy's Ally, not yours. What happens is, you call on Superboy and Superboy calls on Krypto. 

Okay, technically you do the actual calling, too, in the form of burning a Supply Drop trinket. Nothing's ever simple, is it? 

And what's a Supply Drop trinket, anyway? It's a consumable you can get from a dispenser in your base or from a vendor or in various other ways. Again, I knew they existed but I've never bothered to use one, so I'm not speaking from personal experience.

I guess that's going to change. I'll have to do it at least once, just to see Krypto appear whereupon, I'm assured, he will attack enemies, weaken them with his super-bark and if anyone happens to get knocked down, attempt to revive them. I suppose that means I'll have to do some fighting just to see it happen. 

Also, as I have only just discovered, Krypto has been in the game as an actual Ally in his own right since 2022. So maybe I should just go to Cyborg and buy him. Cut out the middle-dog, so to speak. In fact, seeing he was once given away as a freebie, chances are I already have him and I've just forgotten about it. 

Oh, and Superboy will be there too, of course.

I have only a very vague understanding of who Superboy is in the DC Universe these days. 

I used to know exactly who he was. He was Superman when he was a boy. Just like Superbaby was Superboy when he was a baby. Even a kid could follow the logic.

I have literally hundreds of comic books featuring Superboy's adventures in and around Smallville, growing up on the Kent farm, going to Smallville High, hanging out with his best pal Pete Ross and, of course, courting and being courted by my favorite character in the entire Superman mythos, Lana Lang. 

Sadly, Superboy hasn't been young Clark Kent for a long time. I know Jon Kent had the name for a while but who's using it now I'd have look up. Hang on... let me do that... okay... that's a new one on me. 

So, in answer to my google query "Who is Superboy in 2025?", Gemini's summary reads

"In 2025, Superboy is primarily known as Kon-El, also known as Conner Kent. He is a genetic clone of Superman and Lex Luthor. Conner Kent is a prominent member of the Superman family and is known for his involvement with the Teen Titans and Young Justice. In the Young Justice animated series, he is a founding leader alongside Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Robin, and his relationship with Miss Martian is a significant part of his character. "

I'm not vouching for all the ancillary detail there but after cross-referencing the substantive point then, yes, it does seem that the Superboy we'll be allying with is going to be Conner, who I do actually remember from when I watched Titans. I seem to recall he was a colossal ass then but that was Titans. Everyone was. 

Anyway, I don't care about Conner. Or any of the Superboys, unless its the Silver Age Superboy I grew up with. I'd take him as an ally although it goes without saying I'd rather have Supergirl. Any of the Supergirl variants, really. And believe me, there are plenty of those.

Would I rather have Supergirl's pet Streaky the Super-Cat as an additional Ally instead of Krypto, though? Hmm. Not so sure about that. Streaky was always kinda sneaky. He had a great line in that side-eye cats like to give you. Also he was not exactly what you'd call reliable.

Moot point. No-one's offering me Streaky. Or Supergirl. I'll just have to settle for the boy and his dog. 

And after all that, the game has patched up and I can log in. I believe there's a bit of work to do before I can take possession of the pair ("Complete Patrol 3 in Campaign 2025", whatever that entails...) so I'd better get on with it.

I'll report back when I'm done. With pictures to prove it. 

The Plan Is No Plan

Ahead of Blaugust, which begins on Friday, I thought I'd post a list of everyone who's signed up so far. I knew there had to be one somewhere because Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob posted a then-complete list of all the names and blogs a few days ago and he must have gotten it from somewhere! 

Turns out he's the one who's maintaining it this year and he's been kind enough to format it and include a link (Which I won't include since I don't believe Wilhelm has posted it himself yet.) 

Here's how sign-ups stand so far:

A Lovely Harmless Monster

A Nerdy Fujo Cries

Achille Toupin

afsheen.me

Alligators And Aneurysms

An Archaeopteryx

august morning

Axxuy.xyz

Aywren's Nook

Calishat

Casual Catte Creations

chaosgoat.neocities.org

Chasing Dings!

Contains Moderate Peril

Cubic Creativity

Dave Henry Blog

Divergent Rays

EVE Online Pictures

Exposition is Inevitable

finnybox

Forking Mad

Gaudete Theology

Geek on a Harley

In An Age

Indiecator

Inventory Full

isa.tiger.place

Juhis

Kay Talks Games

Keeroks Space

Lameazoid.com

Lars-Christian's website

leekscosycorner

leveret.study

Mailvaltar - MMOs and other stuff

manonamora's computer

Many Welps

Midnight Dreaming

Mmo one night

Monsterlady's Diary

Musings and Mumblings

Musings on seeking

Nejimaki Blog

Nerd Girl Thoughts

Nerdy Bookahs

Nero Villagallos O'Reilly Art Blog

NickSimson.com

Nik Kantar

notes / druchan

Notes by JCProbably

owlblog

Pixel Nomad

Queen Of Squiggles's Blog

Reay Jespersen

ribo.zone

Rosaria Delacroix

Shadowz Abstract Gaming

Small Good Things

Tales of the Aggronaut

Taxodium

Technbuzz

The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Dragon Chronicle

The Ghastly Mirror

theTangentSpace

Tim Bornholdt

Time to Loot

Ubergeek Kellys World

Unidentified Signal Source

Virtual Moose

Why I Game

Words of the AgingGamer

Words Under My Name

Your friendly neighborhood Blu

That's exactly 74 blogs which, by a wild co-incidence is exactly the same number I claimed had signed up when I posted my Day One Blaugust post last year. I was a bit behind on the count then, as I recall, and by the end of Blaugust the grand total had grown to an astonishing 119 so there's plenty of room for more this year. 

Do tag on if you fancy it. The sign-up form is here.

More than half of the above are names I don't recognize, which is fantastic. Lots of new  blogs to check out. Looking forward to that most of all. I guess I could start looking at them now but it seems like cheating to go peek before the gun goes off.

Of course, in most cases it probably will turn out to be no more than a peek and maybe a supportive comment. It took me a while to learn my lesson but I've finally come to realize that trying to keep up with more than a hundred bloggers, most of whom are trying to post every day for a month, is just too much of a good thing.

A picture of Beryl,
because you have to break the text up with something
and would you rather have AI?

If you add that to the dozens of RSS feeds in Feedly that already ping me daily, some of them many times every day, it's not hard to see the potential for burnout. And yet every year I somehow manage not to see it anyway and pile in to that first week, trying to read everything. 

By the start of the second week, I'm already feeling overwhelmed. Even the inevitable drop-out rate as people find they didn't want to post every day after all, or couldn't, or wish they'd never started, doesn't bring the flood down to manageable levels. Last year I felt it particularly badly and made a promise to myself that I wouldn't do it again next time. We'll see how that goes.

I always have a lot less trouble with the writing thirty-one posts myself part. Thirty-one posts that anyone would want to read is another matter but that's not part of the challenge. Maybe it should be but who would judge!

Even so, I also decided I would actively avoid the 31 posts thing this year. I had a clever trick in mind. I wouldn't post on 1 August, so I'd automatically have missed the target. Except then it occured to me that the challenge isn't to post on all thirty-one days of the month but to post thirty-one times during it. And that inevitably means that at some point I'd find myself double-posting to catch up.

So I'm not going to make any rules for myself this year and I'm not going to set up any special routines or series, as several other Blaugustians have already said they're going to do. I'm just going to treat it like any other month and post when I usually do. Probably. 

Who knows, really? It's so easy to get carried away. And it's one of the easiest times to just knock out a quick post because of all those prompts and the wealth of other good posts to bounce off. So I'm making plans to not have a plan.

The way my plans have been going lately, that's probably going to fall apart, too.

The New New

Despite my immense solipsism, I have still managed to listen to a few new tunes by people other than me since last time. Got some good ones, too. 

Of course, when I say "new" I don't always mean "new". I have one candidate running in the background now. It's from 1989. Mind you, it sounds like a ton of stuff I heard last year that was supposedly new-new so go check the dictionary, I guess.

Not going to start with that one, though. More of a mid-programmer. Always an idea to open hard, I think. 

Have you made playlists? I bet you have. Everyone makes playlists now. It's difficult, isn't it? Gives you some respect for people who have to do that kind of thing for a living, although I suppose it gets easier with practice, like everything else.

Anyway, There are a couple of obvious candidates jostling for the job of opening the post this time. Guess I could flip a coin. I have a stack of them on the desk in front of me. It's between Fcukers and Punchbag, neither new to this space... 

Heads Fcukers, Tails Punchbag...

 Play Me - Fcukers

The winner! How do you say their name, do you think? I'm assuming it's "Fuckers" and they spell it that way to be clever but maybe it's as it looks. Like, Ferkukkers. 

I mean someone thought it was a good idea to call a band !!! and then tell everyone it was pronounced Chkk! Chkk! Chkk! so frankly it's anyone's guess. Unsurprisingly, I haven't heard anyone say their name on the radio yet...

I Love This! - Punchbag

Yeah. Should have gone with that one, shouldn't I? Can't go against the coin, though. The coin decides.

That's a great chorus. Reminds me of something but I can't think what. I find that happens a lot these days.
 

Chains And Whips 

 Clipse, Kendrick Lamar, Pusha T, Malice

I'm thinking it's probably as well I don't have a video for this one. There might be one. I haven't looked.

Clipse was all over my feeds this week, as if everyone knew who they were and were just waiting for them to drop something new. Which, since they date back to 1994, I guess people might have been.

I never heard of them until a few days ago. How does that happen? I mean, I read a freaking book on the history of hip-hop last year or the year before. Were they in it? Can't recall but I don't believe so.

Good though, aren't they? Also, since Clipse is made up of Pusha T (Who I have heard of...) and Malice, it seems a bit weird to have them both also listed as if they were featured artists on their own song... but that's how they have it on their official channel so I'm just gonna go with it...

 Goldie Montana - Goldie Boutlier

This could not be fresher. It dropped yesterday and I literally only spotted it a few minutes ago, in the recommends next to one of the tunes above as I was pulling the link from YouTube. Why it hasn't appeared in any of my feeds is almost certainly because no-one's really pushing Goldie hard enough. There's a lot of new music being made and it's not just luck when you get to hear about it.

Puzzling title for a puzzling song. Sometimes having the lyrics in front of you really doesn't help as much as you'd think it might. It seems like it's about a gold-digger's wedding. I can parse it all except 

"You’ll get the estate"

What d'you make of that? Some quirk of the law I don't know about? Explanations welcome in the comments and not just from lawyers.

 Look At That Woman

 Suki Waterhouse  (Role Model cover)

Welcome to the rock section of our program. Cover of a song I never heard before so new to me twice. I did do due diligence and listen to the original and I did not enjoy it. I like Suki's cover though. It's very, very seventies, isn't it? That's not as common as it used to be. It's all nineties and noughties now.

 New Year's At The Airport - Yawn Mower

Case in point. This lot either have a good publicist or a knack for doing it themselves. Unlike Goldie, everything they do pops up in my feeds, even though I'm not convinced anyone cares. After week on YT and with links on major music websites, which is how I found it, it has 555 views. Their channel has 95 subscribers. 

I'm wondering if that terrible dad pun name is the key to their unsuccessful success so far? It certainly was what got me to click through the first time I saw it, mostly because I couldn't believe anyone would actually call themselves that. And what's with releasing a song about New Year in July? And with a video memed on The Big Lebowski? I can't help but wonder if at least one of them doesn't have a day job in marketing somewhere.

I don't even like the song much, either. I just wanted to write about it. See? That's how they get you.

Pillman's Got A Gun - Jobber

If we're going to have 90s slacker rock, which by all means lets, I'd much rather it sounded like this. One for the wrestling fans among you. Great title for anyone, though and a really nice video. 

Musically, it reminds me of a whole lot of 90s bands I liked in the way the sweet, tuneful vocals fight their way out of the guitar storm once in a while before being dragged back under. This is one where having the lyrics in the description really would help. So of course there aren't any.

 Fanciable Headcase - King of the Slums

If we're talking great titles, this one has two of them. The same clip taken from 80s/90s BBC show SnubTV, is also on YouTube under the equally great title Vicious British Boyfriend. Not sure which is the official version or which I prefer.

I vaguely remember this lot but by name only. Not sure if I ever heard them when they were around. This is from 1989 but they were going through the 90s, I think. There was a lot of this around back then but not with violin like that, more's the pity. Trumpet and electric violin ought to be the first two instruments in any rock band after guitar, bass and drums. Certainly way before any kind of keyboards or someone jigging about behind a set of conga drums.

Pick Up That Knife - Wednesday

We conclude our brief visit to the Land of Rock with yet another great title and a typically gorgeous number from critical darlings Wednesday, a band never short of column inches in all the usual journals. And deserving of the attention, too.

It's her voice, isn't it? Aimee Mann meets Patti Smith. What's not to love in that? I should play more Wednesday.

Speaking of, did you see Netflix are claiming there could be seven seasons of (the other) Wednesday? We haven't even had the second yet and how long has that been? Two years? At that rate, five more will take us into the mid-2030s and Jenna Ortega will be in her mid-30s too. I hope Wednesday'll at least be in post-grad studies by then.

Still, when did Netflix ever make seven seasons of anything?

Doom Bikini - james K

Not sure if Doom Bikini' qualifies as great title but it did get me to click through, so...

Come for the title, stay for that synthesizer wheeee-oooh-wheeee. I am a total sucker for that thing. It's one of the reasons Venice Bitch is my favorite of all Lana's songs. I'd love to know exactly what makes it and how and then I'd like to be able to make it myself. 

 The Daylight - Robin Kester

In this one it's that bass tone. Also very familiar. Can't help but love it whenever I hear it. Certain sounds just do something, don't they? This one's full of 'em, actually. That processed guitar too, although I could do with it not playing those exact notes. The whole production here, in fact. 

One of those songs that's exactly the sum of its parts, I think, which is not a bad thing at all.

Let in the Night - R. Missing

Always leave 'em wanting more. And everyone wants more R. Missing, amiright? Well, rest easy. More R. Missing guaranteed. Just keep coming back.

Also I just noticed that's daylight followed by night. I could maybe get the hang of this programming thing one day, if I keep at it. 

It's Beautiful... But What Does It Mean?

I had a very simple plan for today. I was going to patch up Wuthering Waves, log in and do as much of the new story content as I could cope with, then stop and have lunch. After lunch, I was going to write a post about it. The story, not the lunch.

And that's still the plan, except for one very slight variation. I won't be writing about the new story any more. I'll be writing about the old one.

I thought I'd finished the main story quest last time. I thought I was ready to jump straight into whatever came next as soon as it appeared. I even said so in print. Confidently. Definitively. 

And as I also said then, I even had the screenshot to prove it. A screenshot that read 

"No Content. No New Quest". 

I'm just going to have to take your word for that, Lupa.

Under the Main Quests category in the quest journal.

I don't know... seems pretty conclusive, doesn't it?

Except for one thing I'd missed...

Kuro, in their wisdom, decided to split the story content in Update 2.4 into two parts. I had indeed finished the first one but there was a Part Two I didn't even know about. 

Chapter II Act VI - Flames of Heart dropped on 3 July. 

I didn't spot it because I haven't logged in since I finished Chapter II Act V - Shadow of Glory back in June. I also didn't read anything about it in any of my gaming feeds, which is a bit worrying. I imagine it was covered, WW being a very popular game, but either I just didn't see it or I didn't bother to read past the headline.

Luckily, it only took me a few seconds to figure out I still had another chapter to do before I could take a look at the new stuff. And anyway, the old stuff was still new stuff to me, so I was fine with having to take a bit of a run-up to get to the current chapter, Dreamcatchers in the Secret Gardens. 

Looking at some of the commentary around Kuro's decision to split the last drop into two episodes, I see there was speculation that the second part might be more combat-focused, presumably fueled by the fact that the first part very much wasn't. If anyone was hoping that prediction would turn out to be correct, they'll have been disappointed.

I can't remember exactly how long the first installment took me back in June but today's session, in which I did nothing but the aforementioned Flames of Heart, lasted a couple of hours. I did have to stop once to play with a very insistent Beryl, so maybe it was about an hour and a half to an hour and three-quarters of actual gameplay.

Don't mind us, We just live here.

Or, to be more accurate, about fifteen minutes of pressing buttons. The rest of the time I was watching a movie. 

A very absorbing and enjoyable movie with some excellent acting, skilled direction and superb set design but also with a plot that was very hard to follow. 

I mentioned last time, how the plot in Wuthering Waves is generally "so arcane and abstruse I can barely follow it". It's really not getting any easier, even now more of the mysteries have been revealed.

In fact, forget the plot... I couldn't even claim I understand the setting. I imagine we're all used to games and books and movies and TV that relies heavily on the audience's preconceptions and prior experience and which draws extensively from a huge corpus of long-established tropes, symbols and devices? Well, Wuthering Waves doesn't do a lot of that.

It's not a Western fantasy with dwarves and gnomes and elves and orcs but it's not strictly an Eastern fantasy with dragons and demons and spirits either, although there are a few dragons or dragon-like creatures, now and then. 

It's not science fiction in the familiar aliens, rayguns and spaceships mode, but there are plenty of robots and one hell of a lot of advanced technology. It sometimes has an urban-fantasy or cyberpunk moment but mostly its just hard to place, exactly.

I guess it might fit uncomfortably within the ill-defined parameters of science-fantasy but then doesn't everything? That's a tag that never feels like it's telling you much, anyway. 

Oh, right... that makes everything clear...

It's post-apocalyptic in a  sense, in that there was some sort of catastrophe called The Lament in the near-past, but that seems like it must have been either a very metaphysical event or longer ago than you'd think from the way everyone talks about it because there's very little sign of devastation in the urban areas and not much in the hinterlands. You have to go a fair way into the boondocks to see the remnants of the disaster, whatever it was.

There are superior beings in the world but they aren't gods or deities per se. They're "Sentinels" or "Guardians", usually tied to a locale like some kind of genius loci. There's an evil version called the Threnodian but your guess is as good as mine what sort of entity that is.

There are Tacit Discords,  aggressive mobs that come in industrial quantities. They're the grunts of the game, filling the roles orcs or demons might take in other settings.  And then there are Echoes, which are like the TDs but on your side. Mostly. Except when they're trying to kill you.

Somewhere behind all of this is some network of what I can only take to be AIs: sentient supercomputers that run everything but frequently have issues or need assistance for reasons I could not begin to explain. They seem to be fairly universal in a world made up of city states, each with its own form of government - monarchies, technocracies, theocracies and so on.  

And everything is sound or music-themed, from the Resonators and Echoes to the Frequencies that make up everything in the entire world. That's not confusing at all...

How all of this ever came to be I have no clue, although I'm more than willing to believe it's explained somewhere in the narrative. That's part of the problem - everything is explained in the narrative. So much is explained so often, in such detail and by so many characters, many of whom are written to novelistic standards, meaning there are unreliable narrators and limited narrators and subjective narrators and first-person and third-person and omniscient... that in the end the sheer wealth of information isn't just confusing but overwhelming and, I find, impossible to remember, even if I feel like I understood it at the time.

The game also uses any number of visual and gameplay devices to tell its story. I tend to dwell on the cinematic elements but there are sections told in stained-glass panels, in picture-books, by holograms and malfunctioning robots, in pages torn out of notebooks, on computer screens, in flowcharts and over com-links. Significant plot and narrative elements are sometimes conveyed by way of mini-games, where the whole game becomes a 2D scroller or a platformer, something that really doesn't add to my ability to follow what's going on in the story.

And of course there's the ever-popular developers favorite - key speeches on major plot points delivered by significant NPCs in the middle of a pitched battle. Always fun, that one.

Somewhere in the back of all of this lies one of the most meta-fictional devices I've ever encountered, namely the ability of some of the characters to place other characters and even the player-character, inside a fictional reality within the game-world, sometimes without the game giving any indication it's happened. Awareness is then leaked in ways that are familiar from novels and movies but even when the artifice is revealed it persists, stubbornly, as though just knowing something isn't real isn't enough to stop it being real.

And there's a lot more besides. Not least, The Fractsidus.

The Fractsidus might be the real arch-villains. Or they might be just another faction. At one point I thought they might be anti-heroes or even The Good Guys.  And maybe some of them are. Who's to say they all have the same agenda?

The Fractsidus have been in it almost from the start and they keep coming back. In the next chapter it looks like we might find out something more material about the mysterious organization or at least one of its members, Phrolova, because she's set to be the next playable Resonator and therefore is presumably the player's ally for the meanwhile, at least.

I was very keen to find out more when I logged in this morning but now I guess I'll have to wait a little longer. I have a full slate of things to do through into the middle of next week so it's going to be a while before I can clear the necessary morning or afternoon to watch the next Wuthering Waves movie. 

Pretty sure I won't be any the wiser about what's really going on by the end. But that's how I like it.

Nothing Seems To Satisfy

I wasn't going to do anything to commemorate the death of Ozzie Osbourne. But then I didn't have anything else in mind and I hate to skip a day when I'd normally be posting...

And it is true that although I haven't listened to Sabbath for, oh, about half a century and I've never heard any of Ozzie's solo stuff - ever - and I haven't seen even a few seconds of The Osbournes... Black Sabbath was my first favorite band.

Weird but true. For about five minutes (Okay, a year.) when I was in my very early teens, my best friend and I thought Sabbath were the best band we'd ever heard. Of course, we didn't exactly have the breadth or depth of musical experience we'd have by the time were fifteen...

Anyway, I bought Masters of Reality when it came out in 1971 (Meaning I must have been thirteen...) and then backfilled the first two albums, Paranoid and Black Sabbath, which turned out to be very easy to find in my favorite used record store. My pal bought Sabbath IV the following year but by then I'd already moved on to kneel at the feet of the Velvet Underground and the rest of their art-house ilk so heavy metal just wasn't pretentious enough for me any more.

There was no second coming for metal for me, either. I still don't much like any of it. My fling with the heavy stuff was brief and left little impression. While I retain a nostalgic affection for some of the prog bands I liked around the same time (Well, Yes mostly. The rest I can do without.) I can't say I've ever felt the urge to go back and listen to my old Sabbath albums. Which I still have, of course.

There is one song of theirs that I do still listen to, though. It's hard to beat in its field and it seems to stand a little to one side of most of the rest of the Sabs catalog. What's more, it's the only Black Sabbath song I'm likely to hear coming at me down the street from the bunch of buskers who "perform" on weekends, fifty yards from the doorway of the bookshop where I work. (That said, they did take a run at War Pigs once. I bet that didn't put much in the bucket.)

Obviously I'm talking about Paranoid. Let's hear it one more time. 

Paranoid - Black Sabbath

There they are on Top of the Pops in 1970. I don't remember seeing them. It might be very slightly before I started watching the show or maybe I was out that evening. Kicking a ball against a wall, probably. 

I didn't actually realise Paranoid was a Top 40 hit. (Top 30 then, I think, actually... Top 40 came later.) Again, I think it just predates my obsession with the weekly chart rundown. I'm slightly too young to have been there for the start of Ozzie's career and I'm only ten years younger than he was when he died.

There are many covers of Paranoid on YouTube and most of them are like you'd expect. Not all of them, though.

Paranoid - Lonely Sock 

Paranoid - Harp Twins

Paranoid - Cindy Und Bert 

Paranoid (That She Mighteth Be A Witch) 

Starshine Audio

Something there for everyone, I think.

Ozzie famously had a great sense of humor. I hope he'd be amused by at least a couple of those.

Rest easy, Prince of Darkness and thanks for starting me on a lifetime of listening to great music. Even if very little of it was yours.