Yesterday Project: Gorgon, Today Project Genie

 

The release of Google's Project Genie has generated a certain amount of attention, almost all of it revolving around the apparent lack of concern expressed by the tech giant for the basic concepts of intellectual property rights and copyright. The news items I've seen so far all focus on how famously defensive IP owners like Nintendo and Disney are likely to react to an app that supposedly lets anyone clone and iterate on their copyrighted properties for the low, low price of $124.99 a month.

According to IGN, some investors are already marking down stocks in other game-making platforms like Unity and Roblox, presumably on the basis that their day is done and in some bright future we'll all be our own game-makers. Or something.

All of which is twaddle, obviously. As all the reports make clear, Project Genie can't make games. It can't even make frameworks for games. Neither can it make virtual worlds. 

What it can do is generate a sixty-second interactable snippet, a fuzzy glimpse into a notional, imaginary, three-dimensional environment that has neither persistence nor purpose. It's a curiosity that would probably help a few idle hours pass happily enough, a bit like making paper planes and throwing them out the window or having a tea-party with your stuffed toys. 

Personally, I wouldn't pay $124.99 a month for the privilege but if it was on Steam for less than $10 I might give it a go. I imagine it'd be quite amusing to play, with for a while.

Of course, that's ignoring the legal issues. As I said, the first thing everyone seems to have tried to do is replicate their favorite video game, mostly with very limited success. 

Even if the results are useless in any practical sense, though, it's hard to imagine the companies currently milking those IPs for every last cent feeling particularly sanguine about letting unlimited, bad versions loose into the community. There's such a thing as tainting the brand, after all.

Let's imagine the famous characters aren't up for grabs. You can't make your version of Mario or Sonic. You have to stick to an original idea of your own. Is anyone but you going to be interested?

One day it may indeed be possible for you or I to type a couple of paragraphs in plain English into an AI app and get a finished game out the other end. I'm close to the end of a book called Supremacy by Parmy Olson on the development of AI and if there's one thing that comes through very clearly it's that the software consistently outruns the expectations of the people behind it. One day you're crowing about some really not very impressive development you've just made and the next thing you know is someone else has jumped ahead a couple of orders of magnitude, leaving your seven-day wonder looking like yesterday's news.

If that does happen with the game-making AI, though, it's unlikely Project Genie will be the name on the box. Everything in AI seems to move forward in a weird, leapfrogging dance. Whoever starts something rarely gets to finish it. 

Even if it does become possible to generate fully functional virtual worlds from plain English text prompts, the history of gaming doesn't entirely suggest that would wipe out everything else. Roblox is an outlier. A very, very big outlier, true, but an outlier all the same. There's clearly a sizeable market for making your own video games and selling them to other gamers and Roblox has mostly cornered it.

 For as long as I've been gaming, which is getting on for fifty years now, there have always been game-making programs that purported to allow gamers with imagination but little or no technical skill to create and sell their own games and those have always been niche.

In the 1980s I wrote text adventures with  a utility called The Quill. Lots of people did, then saved them on cassette and sold them through the back pages of gaming magazines. In the '90s I made a full-length RPG scenario with Neverwinter Nights and uploaded it to one of the dedicated, online repositories along with many thousands of others, where it probably remains to this day.

I've dabbled with many other game-making packages, none of which required anything less than a huge amount of time and effort to create anything recognizably game-like. There have even been programs to make your own MMORPG, none of which seems to have resulted in any MMORPG I ever heard of. And of course there are the semi-pro, cut-down versions of the real thing, like Unity or Unreal, that you can buy into for an almost not unreasonable investment.

If anyone with some minimal degree of skill and a very much larger amount of time and enthusiasm wanted to make a "playable world", they have and have had for a very long time, the means to do so. The appeal of AI is that soon no-one will need any appreciable skill or time to make a really impressive video game. It'd be nice to think you'd still need the enthusiasm but honestly that's probably optional too.

Except I'm not sure all that many people really want to. Imagine for a moment a scenario where Project Genie actually works. Imagine you could type in a brief description of the sort of virtual world you'd like to see, the kind of characters and plot you'd want to engage with and the general gameplay you'd enjoy there. How about...

Setting: A High Renaissance setting in which the industrial revolution happened a couple of hundred years early. Some Steampunk trappings but not too many. The game is set in a small city-state with a coastal border and some mountains, a lot of forest. Low magic, some werewolves and vampires, grudgingly integrated in the cities, not tolerated in country areas. 

Plot: The high king is ageing. He has no obvious successor. He wants to leave a legacy so he makes covert moves to back a potential candidate who wishes to improve the status of the non-humans in the state. This is potentially popular with the urban elite but could cause rebellion in the countryside. 

Gameplay: RPG mechanics with hierarchical magic and skill development. Dropped gear. Turn-based combat.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Took me less than ten minutes, straight off the top of my head. Imagine if I could drop that into an app, go make a coffee, then come back and download a complete game.

It'd be fun once. Just like writing a game with the Quill and NWN was fun, once. I even enjoyed playing through my own games. Again, just once. 

Did I send off for anyone else's self-written Quill games, though? No, I did not. I didn't even download any of the myriad, free NWN adventures. Maybe a couple, just to have a look. But even then I never played them for more than a few minutes.

What about Second Life? All the games people made there? Did those take over the market? Not hardly.

And even the supposedly ubiquitous Roblox hasn't exactly wiped every other game off the screens, has it? Sure, a lot of people, kids mostly, play it but is it all they play and do they mostly play it because it's what they have access to and what they can afford? Like Runequest, famously the first MMORPG of so many people when they didn't have the money or the technology for anything more impressive, are these games really successful because of how good they are or how accessible and available?

It's really hard to be sure. If AI output was demonstrably not slop but really top quality, indistinguishable from very good human-made work and you could generate whatever you wanted on the fly - books, movies, games - would most people move over to it? I'm not sure they would. 

I think they'd still need to be marketed to. I think there'd need to be a buzz. People like to watch, read, play things lots of other people are playing, so they can talk about them, argue about them, share the experience. At that point, it might not matter that the product was AI-generated but it would still very much matter that it was high-profile and being talked about, out there in the media.

If it was something no-one but the person watching or playing it would ever hear about, I suspect the potential audience would be somewhat limited. I think there's certainly a demographic that'd be happy to sit at home, alone, playing reading and watching the insides of their heads acted out by imaginary characters but, like VR, I just don't see it becoming normative, mainstream behavior.

In the end, I suspect that even were AI ever to reach the point where it can produce high-quality entertainment with almost no human input, it's still going to be only a certain, very small percentage of that work that gets the attention of a human audience. And it won't be for it's AI qualities but for the human-to-human interactions it facilitates.

In other words, we may all end up playing AI-generated games but we'll still be playing the same ones or else we won't be able to talk about them. And more importantly, no-one will be able to sell them to us.

Persistence Pays Off - Project:Gorgon Goes Live At Last!

Hey! I played another game! For nearly an hour! And really enjoyed it, too. It had that true, old school MMORPG dopamine-drip grip, the one where you want to keep moving from mob to mob just to see what they drop and to watch your skills tick up.

It was Project:Gorgon, of course. The long-running project of Eric Heimburg and the now sadly-deceased Sandra Powers finally went Live yesterday. It's a game that hoovers up all the bits that worked in all those Golden Age classics and throws them altogether in a kind of MMORPG gumbo that somehow tastes really good. That's not just my opinion, it's what everyone was saying, albeit without the culinary metaphors, in General Chat, which for a change was mostly polite and amicable.

Everyone was going on (And on...)  about the games they used to play, back in the day, and how much P:G felt like all of them. It reminded people of Vanilla WoW, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call (1 and 2), EverQuest (1 and 2), Anarchy Online... I imagine there were more but the chatter was so distracting I had to turn it off so I could concentrate on what I was doing.

What I was doing was mostly wandering around, opening the map, raising skills and killing mobs. I could have worked on some quests - I've played Project: Gorgon before (There are two dozen posts about it on the blog, the earliest dating back to 2013. ) and I had some pending - but I just wanted to relax. Questing involves too much thinking. 

Slaughtering mobs doesn't. Neither does raising skills. That's one of the joys of P:G, at least in the early stages. There are a whole lot of skills and doing almost anything is likely to raise at least one of them. What good that does is another matter but it's always fun just to see the numbers go up.

Happily for me, I was also playing a character for whom the mobs in the meadows around Serbule, the starting city, posed little threat but still gave good xp. Well, until I made the mistake of attacking two Mantises, that is. Not the first time I've made that mistake, either.

Before any of that, though, I had to remake my character for looks. There are new character models and character creation options and they're a huge improvement. Here's what my character looked like before and after:

Okay, not exactly a fair comparison but I promise Rarrfa didn't look any better in the original with her helmet off. She looks great in the new version, though, doesn't she? I was really happy with how she converted.

The whole game looks better although graphics have always been very weird in Project: Gorgon. As I believe you can still see from the 2013 post linked above, the game has never looked quite as visually impressive as it did in the pre-alpha demo, when the buildings, at least, were almost photo-realistic.

The current version is excellent all the same. Or at least it is once you get into the Settings and tweak the details. I thought the whole thing looked a bit ropy when I got in so I opened the controls to see what I was on and it turned out the game had defaulted to "Poor".

It says something about Eric's approach to marketing that there even is a setting called "Poor". Most designers would avoid using negative concepts like that, preferring to call the low graphics option something like "High Performance". 

I was pretty sure that if my PC could happily run Baldur's Gate 3 on decent settings it could do a lot better than "Poor" for P:G but I was curious to see what the game itself would choose. There's an option to auto-adjust the quality level so I checked the box and was instantly upgraded to... Fair.

Seriously? You think that's the best I can manage? I toyed with the idea of banging it all the way up to Ultra or whatever and then bringing it down when I ran into problems but in the end I just wanted to get on with the killing so I left it on auto, which uses frame-rate to decide on the graphical fidelity.

And it has to be said, the game looked pretty good, although that might have been because of the other visual setting I toggled - Brighter World. I thoroughly recommend switching that on. It makes a huge difference. In the day it can be a bit garish so maybe just put the lights on when the sun goes down although if you like a super-saturated, almost psychedelic filter, you might want to keep it on all the time.

Once I'd sorted that out and also set a key for hiding the UI (Why that's not a standard preset in all games beats me...) I was off on my killing spree.

I killed a lot of Brain Bugs and various spiders. I killed some pigs and a wolf. A tiger attacked me so I killed that, too. Most of them dropped something and sometimes it was actual gear. That's so old school, getting your armor and weapons off the local wildlife.

I butchered all of them for the skill-ups and botched most of the butchering. Then I buried the results which increased my Compassion. What good a high Compassion skill does you, I have no idea but I'm sure a high one is better, somehow.

As I wandered about from mob to mob I noticed I was also getting skill-ups in Cartography. The map was slowly filling itself in as I went but not in those big chunks you usually see with Fog-of-War systems, just a thin line where I'd been traveling. It looks like it would take an awfully long time to uncover an entire map that way but I still much prefer it to, for example the Stars Reach method of finding and activating specific points, which turns into a very frustrating scavenger hunt after a while.

After about half an hour, I ended up at the graveyard, where several players were fighting with the undead. I sent a few skeletons back to their unquiet rest before making my terminal error of pulling a couple of lurking Mantises.

When I revived back in Serbule I thought I'd take that as a good moment to stop, so I did. You need something like that as an exit line in Project:Gorgon because, like all the games it echoes, there's no end to anything. You log in and do stuff until you don't want to any more and then, if you have the will-power, you stop. And if you don't you carry on until you're entire life falls apart and you rage-quit and spend the next two years bad-mouthing the game on every forum you can find. Or at least that was the traditional response, back when there were forums....

If anyone's looking for a good, old-fashioned MMORPG that also recognizes times have changed since the Golden Age, there's no need to look any further. Project:Gorgon does everything everyone keeps saying MMOPRPGs don't do any more. Apparently that's still not enough to get a thousand people online playing it at the same time but what more people are waiting for, I can't imagine.

If it's the closest thing to EverQuest in 1999 you're looking for, I'd still recommend Monsters & Memories but if you want something less specific and with potentially broader appeal, you probably can't do much better than give Project: Gorgon a few hundred hours of your valuable time. 

Or a few thousand. It is an traditional MMORPG, after all. 

We're On A Roadmap To Nowhere

Since it seems to have been the roadmap thing that caught the most attention yesterday, I'll go with it. It's a nuanced story with potentially worrisome implications and it also has the merit of relating directly to the main MMORPG I play these days, if and when I'm playing any, so it makes sense to give it some air.

Here's the background. Angeliana, the Senior Community Manager for both EverQuest titles, took to the forums over a week ago to clear up some concerns that had been expressed in Discord over the non-appearance of a 2026 Roadmap for either game:

"We have seen some people asking across forums and Discord about the status of a Roadmap for 2026. This is to inform everyone that we have chosen to forgo a roadmap this year. Our reason for this is simple: we would like to knock out the redundancy in posting the same information repeatedly and would much prefer to post articles closer to when things will be occurring, such as events and important news."

She later followed that bald statement with a gloss:

"The sole reason for this decision was the consensus in our forum threads, Discord, and social media post with the roadmap of it being the same things (such as yearly events) every year, so the roadmap was redundant information. We've decided to not post the roadmap and just post the important events and information closer to when they are happening instead of a roadmap. This does not mean the game is going into maintenance mode, or that it is closing down. It simply means we are attempting to remove redundant posts which we were told were unnecessary in years past.

Seasonal events and such can still be found in the in-game event calendar as well."

EverQuest players, who are by far the more sanguine and reasonable of the two tribes, seem largely to have agreed with the decision:

"Honestly, putting a document that was 90% events that happen every year and then trying to convince people that they were "accomplishments" was a bit of a con on the players. It was a good decision to stop doing it."

"I actually think the lack of a public roadmap makes sense when you compare EverQuest to other long‑running franchise"

"Yeah, the roadmap was just an event calendar, which we have in game... we love the new direction!"

Others were more concerned with the presentation of the change than the change itself:

"Redundancy or not it’s not a good look"

Most of that was on the first page of the thread. The other four spin off into minutiae about specific changes people are hoping for or dreading and the whole roadmap issue seems to get forgotten.

Over on the EverQuest II forums,  the temperature, as always, was higher:

"So, the answer to the lack of clear communication is to have less communication. Got it."

"It sounds like they have no clue what they're going to do and couldn't deliver on any promise they may have made."

"Doesn't bode well for the future of EQ2."

The EQII thread grumbles on for ten pages. I stopped reading after three. You can always rely on EQII players to find a way to spin anything into a guarantee the game is either about to go into maintenance mode or close down altogether. EQ players tend to take a longer view.

The kerfuffle went on so long Jenn Chan, Producer of both titles, had to step in and calm everyone down:

"Hey all, we've been reading your concerns with the dropping of a formal public roadmap this year. Just wanted to drop a quick non-fancy non-formal note in here for you all that made it to this page in the threads.

We're planning on putting out two Game Updates this year has we have for many-many years and there is a new expansion slated for the end of the year as has been the tradition. For those of you on Origins servers, Anashti Sul and Dozekar will be getting Rise of Kunark. Additionally, there will be a new Time-Locked Expansion server coming this year as well. This on top of all the numerous things we're regularly updating, improving, and fixing throughout the year.

No one can predict the future, but I can tell you we're expecting to keep putting out new things for you through the year and hopefully for many-many more years in the future."

That's basically a Roadmap without the fancy graphics. Or a Producer's Letter without the endless recaps and back-slapping. She's basically admitting that very, very little changes, year-on-year, in either game. There's a long-established rhythm that rarely varies and everyone who plays knows perfectly well what it is.

So what does the Roadmap do? Well, I guess it's primarily a PR device. It's a nice graphic that gaming sites can use as filler, which at least gets the names of the games out there again. It's also, theoretically, an enticement for people who've never played or who haven't played for a while to see what's coming and maybe decide to join in.

On that basis, it seems like it would generally be worth a day of someone's time to put one together, even if it didn't say anything very new. On the other hand, after a few years, it's going to start looking a bit obvious to everyone that these games just do the same things, year after year, so maybe there are better ways to promote the titles.

The nominal reason for dropping Roadmaps is that players have been complaining Roadmaps don't tell them anything they didn't already know, which is almost certainly true. As a lot of commenters point out, though, what those complainants were hoping for were more relevant, useful Roadmaps that did tell them something, not the complete removal of Roadmaps altogether.

My feeling is that those sorts of Roadmaps aren't possible. The precise, technical gameplay detail people are asking for is not going to be amenable to being locked down months in advance. That's like asking for July's Patch Notes in February. 

As for macro changes and events, there pretty much are none that we don't already know about - two Game Updates and One Expansion per year has been the pattern for a decade now. Every so often there's a major technical development or a big UI switch but those often get delayed so it makes good sense to announce them separately, when they're imminent.

Even if it may be perfectly sensible to stop doing Roadmaps, you do have to wonder why a developer would take the risk once the tradition has been established. Yes, players are going to complain it's more of the same old, same old but it's a fair bet there's going to be a bigger hoohah if the Roadmaps just vanish. Surely the really safe, lazy option would be to keep banging out the old copperplate versions, taking the mild flack for not saying anything new and carrying on?

I have no idea why they didn't do that but I can speculate with the best of them:

• Literally no-one at Darkpaw was keen to do a Roadmap this year so rather than draft someone to do it they decided not to bother.
• They were all so deluded they really believed players would be happy to see the back of Roadmaps.
• Someone looked at how much it cost to produce the Roadmaps and decided axing them could pay for a new coffee-maker.
• Someone realized the games were already in a weird kind of de facto Maintenance Mode, albeit one that includes two big, free updates and a paid expansion a year, and it seemed like a good idea to acknowledge the situation, without actually admitting to it.
• Management knew EG7 was going to make some genuinely major change in 2026 (Could be good, could be bad...) and since there was no way that could be included in a Roadmap, it was either lie about it or don't do one.

Or, more realistically and more depressingly, the Darkpaw team genuinely doesn't know what this year holds and isn't willing to commit to any kind of timetable. We know the games are in more trouble than usual. The last EQ TLE server didn't do all that well and then there was the Heroes Journey, peeling loyal players off and turning them so now they'll most likely never come back. 

As for EQII, it's always a little surprising it keeps going. The players always seem to hate most of the changes that get made, most of which only happen because the devs are desperately trying to come up with ways to keep the game going. Unfortunately, every change seems to drive a few more players away and the population keeps getting smaller and smaller...

I don't read too much into just the abandonment of Roadmaps. The games do both have a really excellent in-game calendar that covers about 75% of what was in the Roadmaps, while the other 25% is mostly the two GUs and the XPack, all of which turn up as regularly as any Holiday Event. No-one who plays the games needs a Roadmap.

On the other hand, abandoning them is undeniably a Bad Look. I really don't see why they wouldn't just do the minimum, knock out the usual, boring, predictable graphic, send out the press release and let it go. I don't think it's a portent of doom per se but it's certainly an odd choice.

I guess now we'll have to wait and see if Jenn Chan carries on with her Producer's Letters. Those are even more redundant than the Roadmaps, much of the time, what with half of everything she says referring to things that have already happened. Logic says if Roadmaps go, Producer's Letters should, too. Common sense, self-preservation and, let's hope, any self-respecting Marketing Department, says the opposite.

Just one, final, unsettling observation. I'm always alert to qualifiers and I noticed immediately just how many Jenn dropped in her supposedly re-assuring statement: "planning", "expecting", "hopefully" and, most chilling of all, "No one can predict the future". 

Maybe not but I suspect she might have had a premonition...

 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

That ugly second illustration. As opposed to the ugly first illustration. Honestly, they're both pretty horrible. It took me about the same amount of time to find, copy and deface the original 2025 EQII Roadmap as it did to draft a prompt and run four versions at NightCafe, of which the one I used was the first, so the other three don't really factor in, timewise. I just thought surely I could get something better but noooo....

The model I used was Z-Image Turbo and the prompt was "A Roadmap Graphic for the MMORPG EverQuest II for the year 2026, with "CANCELLED" stencilled across it in huge letters. Visual style to resemble an infographic to be used in a slide projection." It did the job - I asked for something dull and boring and that's exactly what I got.

It handled the title perfectly for a change so I guess if I'd specified some headings I could have gotten something that looked a lot more convincing instead of the nonsense it came up with on its own. Then again, maybe that's Koada`Dal or something. I mean, it could be...

 

When They Talk About The Meta, I Don't Think This Is What They Mean...

I'm finding it increasingly awkward to come up with ideas for game-related posts when I'm really playing just the one game. Yes, still that one, Played Time now just nudging into three figures according to Steam and still very obviously nowhere even close the end. 

One odd thing I notice as a blogger is that if this was a new MMORPG I was playing, it would feel completely legitimate, not to say expected, for me to post a dozen or more times in excruciating detail about the gameplay. I've done it countless times with any number of MMOs, the great majority of which I've ended up playing for considerably less than a hundred hours and I've rarely thought to ask myself if anyone really cares, let alone whether it's a reasonable use of my time.

With single-player games, though, it feels like the way to go is maybe one or two posts at the start, just to announce what game it is I'm playing and what sort of a first impression it's giving, then nothing more until I've finished and it's time for a full review. It's an approach that works well for most of the single-player games I actually finish, nearly all of which are likely to be point&click adventures or narrative-driven games of some kind and which, crucially, are unlikely to take more than ten or fifteen hours, tops.

Survival games and the currently vogueish action-rpgs like Wuthering Waves, even if they're not multiplayer or I'm not playing them as such, slew much more to the MMORPG end of the spectrum. They frequently feel like MMOs even when they aren't, which makes it very easy to write about them as though they were.

Really, ridiculously big single-player RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, though, (And I'm not sure there are all that many others...) don't fit into any box. It would be very easy for me to do whole posts on what the characters look like, on the dress-up options (Not least that there are some.) on inventory management, on the combat, the stats, the skill trees... all the standard topics I'd fall into talking about out of habit if I was obsessed by a new MMORPG.

Only, doing the same for Baldur's Gate 3 feels at best self-indulgent but mostly just pointless. Who even cares? The game's two years old and developers, Larian, have made it extremely plain they're done with it, want no more to do with it, won't be making any more content for it and are more than happy to move on from it. Sometimes I get the impression they wish they'd never gotten involved with it in the first place. 

With an MMORPG or any live service game that's still getting updates, commenting on how the game looks and plays feels like a conversation. With an RPG that's final and complete, talking about it feels more like hearing an old recording playing in an empty room.

But what's the alternative?  Hah! I'm so glad you asked! I can tell you that!

 

Since BG3 is still literally the only game I'm playing, as far as gaming goes I could post about:

• Games I'm Not Playing But Might If/When I Ever Get To The End Of This Bloody Monster
• Games I Used To Play Long, Long Ago
• Games I'm Looking Forward To Playing If/When Someone Gets Off Their Backside And Finishes Them
• Things Going On In Gaming In General

Or I could post about non-gaming topics. I always do plenty of that. Except, just now, I'm really only playing this one game, reading the usual random selection of books and slowly working my forward through the Dr. Who Archive on the BBC iPlayer. I'm not listening to enough new music to put a solid playlist together or watching enough new TV shows for a full post about anything. (I did watch the second episode of Haunted Hotel last night. That was good...)

Does anyone really care what I think now about the Dr. Who seasons I last watched when I was in my teens, though? That's how far I've got so far. There's really a shit-ton of Dr. Who, isn't there? I never really appreciated the sheer voloume of the franchise before. 

I do have things to say about the show but again it seems like the world has probably had to put up with more than enough old men droning on about the things they thought were so great when they were young already, especially if the only conclusions they come to is that those things were pretty great after all.

Most of this is happening because I have so much annoying, difficult real-life stuff going on at the moment, not helped in the slightest by Mrs Bhagpuss and I both suffering form a nasty and persistent cold-like bug that makes getting any of it done a real challenge. It means all I really want to do with my free time is as little as possible. 

BG3 is a drug, basically, and so is old, familiar television and, for that matter, the kind of books I've been reading lately. (I might argue all reading is a drug-like experience but that would require me to put a coherent argument together which, as must be obvious from this post, is not something I'm up to doing just at the moment.)

It's not that there aren't things to talk about. Actual, gaming -related topics I may or may not find the will to discuss this week include:

• The Official Launch of Project:Gorgon
• Daybreak Games' decision to abandon Roadmaps
• The Return of Jack Emmert to Cryptic
• The Unexpected Signs of Life in Rift

I'm listing those out in the hopes it might induce me to write something about them later. I don't suppose it will but you have to try, don't you?

I could also just stop posting for a while but as you can see I'd rather bang out a few hundred words of waffle and blether rather than let the post count fall to danger levels. I can get one of these done in an hour, provided I don't attempt to say anything of import.

This is the exact time AI would come in very handy, isn't it? I could just feed those bullet points into Gemini or ChatGPT and have the glorified predictive text apps knock out the first draft. Then I could edit that to make it look less plasticky and who would be any the wiser? 

Did I do that already? Aha! Wouldn't you like to know?

Alright, I didn't. The AIs just aren't that good yet. It'd be even more work than writing one of the damn posts myself. 

I will throw in a couple of AI illustrations though because I have fecking hundreds of them stored up and I might as well use them for something. I have them because I do the daily challenge at NightCafe every day, so as not to break my streak, which is over a hundred days now, and I've gotten so blase about it I just click on whatever they suggest and let the AI play with itself.

Now, that is a post I do want to write: what the hell do the people behind NightCafe think they're playing at? How does it benefit them to give away orders of magnitude more credits for free than I find it possible to imagine anyone ever needing? Aren't they supposed to making money selling them? And why are all the prompts virtually identical? Robots, airships, decaying jungle ruins, explorers...

And now, since I seem to have wandered entirely off-topic, not that it was ever all that clear just what topic I was on, I think I'll call this post done.

Hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing it but then I love free-styling. It's always fascinating, finding out what I'm going to say next.

Sure! I'll Just Add It To My List...

Since I have a ludicrous number of real-life issues going on that mitigate against me writing anything that requires effort or commitment right now, I'm going to grab onto a comment of Tipa's, spin five hundred words out of it and call it a post. I know. We all expected more but sometimes life disappoints

Here's what Tipa said, talking about my complaints about just how damn big Baldur's Gate 3 is:

"I really think this is not a game for completionists. You're not supposed to see everything and do every quest. It encourages quick but meandering playthroughs; two or three times and each time lots of new things."

I think that's good advice for a gamer but it doesn't really address the issues for anyone who's chosen to roleplay their character, even very lightly. And BG3 is, after all, a D&D game. Roleplaying is kind of the point, isn't it?

Like a lot of people, I generally try to avoid playing Evil characters. I also steer clear of playing jerks, blowhards, pompous asses and selfish gits. Mostly what I play are either trippy cartoonish characters for whom everything is one big gosh-wow life experience or pollyannish do-gooders who trek around the map like the Littlest Hobo on steroids.

Either approach means that if someone asks me to do something that doesn't sound positively sociopathic, the chances are that I'll do it. Or agree to, at least. It's a particular issue in BG3 because so many of the requests are so plausible.

Because I'm also anything but a completionist, not all the promises I blithely make get kept. I don't intentionally break them, I just get distracted and forget I made them. In every RPG I've ever played, on or offline, my quest journal is usually stuffed so full I have to delete unfinished quests just so I can keep adding new ones. Which I do.

That never bothers me as a player. I don't have any issues with not finishing quests or leaving them hanging. I don't often care how things turn out. Very few stories in RPGs are sufficiently interesting for not knowing the ending to feel like it's going to be a problem.

As a character, though, I do sometimes feel a degree of commitment. It's often when I come to make space in the Journal that I'm reminded of promises I made and that's when I feel like maybe I should go do something about them. 

The upshot is that in a game like BG3, where there are what seems like literally hundreds of NPCs asking me to do things for them, many of whom, for a change, could make a fairly convincing argument that they couldn't do those things for themselves, it's more than averagely likely that at some point I'm going to start feeling the pressure.

 

I mentioned in another post that almost all dialogs do have some kind of "Get lost, pal. I have better things to do than fix your dumb problems" option. I'm sure that works beautifully for people who love roleplaying bastards but it clearly isn't going to do much for me. Later in the game there may also be a few "I'd really love to help but I'm kind of busy saving the world right now" answers, which is obviously an improvement but, honestly, still feels much too rude (And self-aggrandizing.) for me to be comfortable saying it.

The inevitable result is that I agree to everything anyone asks me, then start trying to do it until I meet another NPC who asks me to do something else and I switch tracks to do that instead. This happens over and over again and pretty much describes my progress through all RPGs.

BG3 does have the advantage that many apparently unrelated questlines end up being connected after all, so dotting about between them doesn't always mean nothing's getting done. On the other hand, some of the interactions are so abstruse and unforeseeable that, when you run into one of those, it feels like a real bait&switch.

The prime example of that in my playthrough so far has been Korlach's clockwork heart. She's one of the numerous companions I have never invited to come adventuring with me but who hangs around in my camp anyway. All of them seem to think being a camp-follower means I have to fix their entire lives and of course I'm far too polite to tell them to sod off so I always promise to do my best. 

As an aside, all my three regular party-members love me. Well, two of them absolutely worship me and the third is only lukewarm because I refused to sleep with her, twice. Apparently the one thing every character I play has no issues saying a firm "No" to is any kind of sexual relationship.  

Other than that, though, she loves me too, and the reason they all think I'm so goddamn wonderful is because I agree with everything they say and promise to do everything they want. And since they're always with me, unlike the NPCs who watch me walk away, never to return, those are the promises I actually keep.

I fully intended to keep my promise to Korlach and find her a mechanic to fix her malfunctioning pump but before I even got going on that, there was a scripted incident that I'm fairly sure I couldn't do anything about and after the smoke cleared, the one person who could do the repairs was dead. I spent a while googling to see if there was any alternative but apparently this guy is literally the only smith in the whole of sodding Faerun capable of doing the job.

Which is obviously bollocks and bad writing. I imagine any competent Dwarven forge could have done the work for a very reasonable fee, not to mention about a gazillion other crafts-persons or magic-users, not to mention the infinity of clerics that could have brought the guy I needed back from the dead. But no. Get that sequence in the wrong order and you've had it.

Again, fine. Actions have consequences and all that. Win some, lose some. All the cliches. The thing is, if you have no real idea which quests are simple, which are complex and which have critical decision points, it's hard-to-impossible to triage them for efficiency or even sanity.

That's not a problem for me, either, generally. As I've said, what I mostly do is quite similar to what Tipa's suggesting. I meander through the plot, wandering back and forth across the landscape, picking up quests and dropping them again, only finishing any of them by chance. And for fifty or sixty hours, that's a lot fun.

Unfortunately, fifty or sixty hours barely scratches the surface. The one thing in Tipa's suggestion that really doesn't seem viable is the idea that anyone could have a "quick" playthrough. What would "quick" even mean in this context? Forty or fifty hours? 

I guess you could set some rules on what sort of quests you were willing to take. No helping refugees. No helping devils. No helping rude people. 

Or on how many - only speak to a couple of NPCs in each new area, for example, and completely snub the rest. Then, on your next playthrough, you could swap those rules around. You'd probably always have to hit certain nodal points in the main plot but I'm sure they can all be approached in various ways.

Even if that did indeed give you several playthroughs that felt quite different, though, it does nothing to address that awkward roleplaying problem. You'd either be roleplaying some kind of opinionated bigot, only willing to help those who "deserved" it or some spell-slinging time-and-motion inspector, willing to help but only according to a quota system.

If I'm finding this problematic, how must genuine completionists be feeling? Hard to imagine, since it's an alien mindset for me. It seems like they'd find it as abrasive as sand in a bathing costume but who knows? Maybe they love it. Maybe having a hundred and fifty hours of gameplay before they get every "i" dotted is the dream. Certainly, the game seems to be almost universally adored so I guess it must be.

BG3 is just an extreme example of the problem, anyway. I think AgingGamer is onto something when he comments that "80+ hours often seems too big". That's where I've felt the ennui set in before and it's happening again here, although I'd say things generally begin to feel stale after 60 hours.

There always comes a time when I just want to be done with the damn thing. That's when I realize I'm not even thinking about the quests any more, just slogging through them without taking in much of the detail. 

I hit that point in BG3 at start of the weekend. I haven't played for a couple of days, mostly for unrelated reasons. The longer I'm away, the less I feel like going back, although I'm not yet so fed up with it I'm going to quit altogether. I'll keep picking away at it but, as often happens with MMORPGs, it's starting to feel more like a habit than a pleasure. (It's worth pointing out that MMOs seem to manage to delay this sort of reaction for orders of magnitude longer than other genres, which presumably is why developers keep insisting on making more of them...)

As for playing Baldur's Gate 3 more than once. Well, maybe in a few years. 

Thanks, But I Couldn't... Oh, Go On Then...

Want to know what I think of Baldur's Gate 3? I mean, I haven't actually finished it yet but Steam tells me I've played for nearly ninety hours so I guess I'm entitled to an opinion. And I have one.

It's too long!

Geez! Is it ever! I got to the end of Act II yesterday and immediately I was in two minds about whether I wanted to carry on. That's not the reaction a game ought to engender as you arrive at what should be the climax of the central narrative. There should be a thrilling sense of everything coming together at last. All will be revealed. One last, epic battle and roll the credits!

Instead I figured, given that Acts I and II had taken well over eighty hours, unless the whole thing was going to be ridiculously bottom-heavy, I probably had at least another thirty of forty hours of content still to go. Did I want it? Not really.

I took a break and had a bit of a think about it; whether to just quit, at least for now, but in the end curiosity won out. Before I took the road to the city of Baldur's Gate itself, though, and turned my back forever on Act II, I thought I'd go to the store to replace some supplies I needed. 

Except there was no store to go to, not in Act II. Not any that I could think of. All the vendors I'd seen since leaving the Underdark had been killed. Not that I could remember that there'd been more than one or two of them, anyway.

In fact, the last vendors I could remember were back in the mushroom area of the Underdark in Act I, which did seem to have far more vendors than the rest of the game. I considered whether there would be places to shop in Baldur's Gate itself. You'd think so but who knows? Best not take the chance.

Instead, I thought I'd just nip back and hit up the ones I was sure of before moving on. I knew there was no going back to the previous Act as far as questing went but shopping? That'd be okay, surely...

I knew where the elevator was to take me back down but when I got on that irritating "Dream Presence" appeared and started handing out Dire Warnings about what would happen if I broke my promise/shirked my duty.

Obviously, I ignored her. It was easy. Who ever listens to gnomes, anyway?

Back at character creation one of the things you're asked to do is pick an appearance for your "Guardian".  There is absolutely no explanation about who or what this "Guardian" is but I figured it was probably going to be one of those fairies or cartoon animals that flap around and give you unwanted advice in so many games. 

On that basis, I gave it the silliest appearance available and made it a gnome. Unfortunately, the Guardian aka Dream Presence turns out to be an extremely serious character with absolutely no sense of humor at all, just a whole load of portentous and mysterious promises and threats, none of which carry well when being delivered by a three-foot tall gnome in a ball gown.

That's an example of an uninformed choice. BG3 specializes in them. It's almost a feature. 

When I say BG3 is too long, that does depend to an extent on which choices you make. It can be a lot shorter if you decide to do something the developers didn't want you to do. For those they do try to steer you away but infinite saves make it hard to take the warnings seriously. 

My come-uppance just for trying to nip back and buy a few potions before getting on with the job was dramatic. I was immediately discovered by the Big Bad, who took control of my character and unleashed of an apocalyptic swarm of mindflayers the length of the Sword Coast. Up came a big, black "Game Over" screen. It didn't have "Told You So" on it but it might as well have done.

That was my third Game Over event. There was one where I refused to do something the developers clearly wanted me to do and all the True Souls ceramorphed into mindflayers and ate the whole of the Sword Coast or something. I forget the exact details but it wasn't a happy outcome. 

Then there was the time I backed up Gale, when he wanted to blow himself up to kill the Elder Brain. It seemed like a good idea at the time but he was standing right next to the rest of the party so when he exploded the castle fell down and everyone died including us. We did get the Brain though and I don't believe there was a mindlfayer apocalypse that time, so I'd call it a win, albeit a Pyrrhic one..

So I guess you can have a shorter game if you want. Just not a very satisfying one. Assuming you want anything that feels like a "good" ending, you have to keep on slogging through and trying not to piss off the people who made the game, who are all clearly some variant of Lawful Alignment. Chaotic behavior really riles them up.

Here's the thing. BG3 very much wants to have cake, eat cake and keep plenty more cake for later. It wants you to have freedom to choose but to make the choice it intended you to make all along. 

For a game that prides itself on flexibility and verisimilitude, it also does not place a great deal of stock in logic or consistency. There's a good deal of talk about urgency and time running out and once in a while, if you don't get a move on, something will happen without you. Mostly, though, everything waits until you have the time and inclination to deal with it.

Four can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

Some of the more jarringly game-like moments come with the many times NPCs stand around and completely ignore what's happening because they don't have a script to tell them how to react. As I discovered in Act I, if you manage to set something up so as to kill a bunch of baddies without them knowing you've done it, the rest of them just stand around next to the dead bodies as if nothing happened. And they'll keep doing it forever unless you initiate something.

More mildly, lots of dialogs don't really address or recognize events that have happened if they weren't quite what the game expected. Some of this is probably unavoidable but sometimes it just looks lazy. 

After an absolutely titanic battle at the end of Act II, one that would have worked perfectly well as the climax to the whole game in my opinion, my character enjoyed a very lengthy post-battle dialog with someone, while the other three members of her party stood behind her and listened. 

Except two of them had been killed in the fight and were really lying dead at her feet. As soon as the dialog ended I had to figure out how to get back to camp and have Withers resurrect them, at which point they all magically seemed to know what had happened while they were dead. I guess the explanation is in the word "magically" but it's not a good explanation, is it?

There's nothing wrong with any of this per se. Video games aren't perfect reflections of some alternate reality, just clever mock-ups. Larian have likely taken things about as far as the technology allows. The problem is that they've tried to go wide as well. 

The story in BG3 is very much not a linear narrative. There's a through-line, sure, but it has a bewildering number of branches. That would have been more than enough but there are also any number of smaller stories that appear to have no direct significance to the core storyline. Sometimes it turns out they do, after all, but not always.

This makes sense in Act I, where everything is new and unfamiliar and who knows what might turn out to be relevant. It's less convincing in Act II, when the stakes are higher and the urgency more obvious. By the final act, surely, everything should come to a head with no time for seemingly irrelevant distractions.

Hah! Good luck with that!

Once I'd reloaded and pretended I'd never tried to go back into the Underdark after all, and after a somewhat unexpected event in camp that I won't attempt to recount, the party finally arrived in Act III proper only to find themselves in a sprawling suburb, packed with refugees, all yelling about their myriad problems. It was like stepping into a completely different game.  

It's a long walk to the shops...

I looked at the sheer scale of the place, which wasn't even the city itself, just a village outside the walls, and decided I had a whole lot of "content" still ahead of me, even before I got inside. Too much. 

Rather than engage with any of it, I just started wandering around, opening up the map, which inevitably led to meetings with a bunch of people asking me to do things for them or trying to kill me. Before I'd even thought about it, I had a whole new set of quests, some of which looked like they might be related to the main plot and others which seemed like obvious side-stories.

To be fair to the designers, there's almost always an option somewhere in the dialog along the lines of "I'm far too busy saving the world to bother with your trivial little problem" but you'd need to be a sociopath to feel comfortable taking it. It's like the "You can do this if you insist but it means the end of the world if you do" options I was complaining about earlier. They're mostly there to say "well, you had a choice" but it's really no choice at all.

So here I am now in Act III, with the whole of Faerun supposedly teetering on the edge of extinction and only me and my team standing ready to pull it back and what am I doing? Solving the murder of a priest, exposing a blackmail ring and investigating an extremely dubious circus. Oh, and watching an ox turn into an apple. I ought to sell that ox to the circus...

With Act III the whole thing suddenly turns into some kind of point&click adventure game only without the pointing and clicking. It's a very odd pivot. One minute we're in the planes arguing with god-queens, the next we're looking for evidence to present a murder case to the investigating officer (Who just happens to be a flying elephant but we don't talk about that.)

I'm aware that some of this is going to tie in to the main plot. That's already apparent. I'm fairly sure that some of it won't, though, and even if it all did, it'd still be a bizarre way to carry on after what felt like a genuinely climactic ending to Act II. It's as if the whole game is starting over again.

And that's really what I mean about BG3 being too long. They could quite reasonably have released each of the three acts as separate games. There has to be at least fifty hours of solid content in each of them, easily enough for a full-price release, even without the high replayability factor. 

Would I rather have had a trilogy of more compact RPGs? Yes, I think I would. I think that would have left me wanting more, which is supposed to be the entertainer's mantra. Instead I find myself wanting less. 

It would also have meant a new game to look forward to every two or three years rather than a long wait and then a huge splurge. Expectation and excitement would have built to a glorious climax instead of exhaustion setting in well before the end.

I should make it clear, before someone points it out in the comments that, yes, obviously I could just pace myself. I could take a break between acts or more as I go along. I could even play Act I now, Act II next year and Act III the year after that, if I really would have preferred a trilogy.

I could but naturally I won't. Who does that? Like most people, I'll either binge 'til I finish or rage-quit and never go back when it gets to be too much. 

For all the praise the game has received, I'm guessing mine might not be as much of an outlying reaction as all that, either. Looking at the Steam Achievements, of which there's handily one for reaching each Act after the first, I see that only barely over half of all players even make it as far as Act II. 50.7% to be precise. By the time they get to Act III, that falls to a sliver under 40%. 

Nearly two-thirds of all the people who played the game didn't even stay for the final act. I wonder how many got to the very end? And will I be one of them?

I guess I'll find out soon enough. If you call another forty or fifty hours. soon, that is.

All She Wanted Was To Do Her Best

Yesterday, a post about books about music, today a post about music about books. Or, more specifically, a book: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. 

The Bell Jar was Plath's only novel. It was published under the pen-name Victoria Lucas, partly because Sylvia didn't want her mother to read it but also because she thought it might be considered a bit of a pot-boiler and she was worried it might affect the more serious reputation she hoped to develop as a poet.

It came out in January 1963, while she was still alive, unlike most of her poetry, much of which didn't make it to hard covers until after she put her head in the oven a month later. She wrote the novel under the sponsorship of something called the Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, whose representatives were not impressed. They called it "disappointing, juvenile and overwrought".

Hah! What did they know? 

I first read The Bell Jar at University, where I was studying for a degree in English Literature. Back then, it wasn't taught in schools, like it is now. It wasn't even on my course. 

As far as I can remember, neither was Plath, although to be fair to the Cambridge syllabus of the late seventies and early eighties, there was a great deal of choice involved. Maybe I opted to do something else the week other people were doing Plath. Or maybe she just didn't have the rep then she does now.

My introduction to the tragic icon was much more personal. I was roaming around the upper levels of the faculty library, where no-one ever seemed to go, pulling random books off shelves and trying them out for size. One of the books I pulled was Plath's Journals, which I sat and read for what might have been hours. It was certainly much of an afternoon. 

From there, I went on to read a whole lot more of her work and several of the many biographies that kept getting commissioned because Plath scholarship has been an industry for decades now. I even read her poetry and I've never been a great poetry fan. Not of reading it, anyway. Writing it, sure, when I wasn't old enough to know better, but reading it? Not so much.

All or some of that may be true. Hard to be sure. But then, truth has little to do with loving Sylvia Plath. Never did.

Either way, The Bell Jar became one of my very favorite novels and remains so, although again you have to temper such judgments with a flick of reality when you think of how long ago it was you actually read the damn books. 

For decades I maintained an extremely consistent top three favorite novels of all time: Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar and Tender is the Night. 

I've read Catcher at least half a dozen times, the most recent being in the last five years and it holds up. Is it still my #1 of all time? Maybe, maybe not. It wouldn't be far off, though. 

Tender, I've read four or five times, in both the original published version and the "as Fitzgerald intended" reprint. It gets better every time and I can't decide which structure I prefer.

The Bell Jar, though, I'm not even sure I've read twice. I think I have. But even if I'm right, it's still only twice. Which is weird. 

I certainly haven't read it for decades although I have, several times, tried to listen to the audio version read by Maggie Gyllenhaall. The problem with that is that I always listen to it in bed and the rhythm of her voice sends me to sleep. I listened to it again last night and I got as far as the part where Esther leaves the apartment as Lenny the DJ is trying to seduce Esther's friend Doreen. I think that'd be about twenty pages in, at most.

The whole audiobook is on YouTube if you fancy giving it a go. Not the most convenient platform, granted, but you can't beat the price. It's an absolutely stellar performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who sounds exactly like Esther ought to sound. She also makes no attempt to "do" any of the voices, a practice all readers of audiobooks would do well to follow. I highly recommend it although I can only speak from experience about the first half-hour or so. I'm going to have to burn the thing onto CD and play it in the car if I'm ever going to get to the end of it.

 

That's all by way of an introduction to the following selection of songs, either just called "The Bell Jar" or with some variation of the words in the title. Plus a few bonuses at the end.

I have a real thing for songs that use the names of famous people or books or movies in the title and there are a lot of them. Sometimes, when I get the notion, I pick a name and YouTube it to see if anyone's written a song. I did that a few weeks ago with Catcher in the Rye and the pickings were slim. I had it in mind to do a post like this about the Salinger classic but I couldn't find enough good examples so it occurred to me to try The Bell Jar instead.

That went a lot better, except that the phrase is in common usage outside the context of the novel so not all of the songs have anything to do with the book. In fact, I'm not sure the next one does. It's really good, though, and it has the right feel, so I'm allowing it. 

The Bell Jar - Chrissy Brennan

Isn't that just gorgeous? So many famous singers and songs. So many almost no-one ever hears. Doing my bit to spread the word. No need to thank me.

The Bell Jar - Honey Gentry

This one's definitely on message although it's using the conceit of one legend to reflect light on another. The resonances are powerful. Someone's probably written a whole PhD thesis on the similarities.

Bell Jar - Louise and the Pins

Another where the mood is unmistakably in keeping with the supposed inspiration but the lyrics don't easily reveal a specific connection. Too good to leave out, though, just because the provenance is unproven.

The Bell Jar - Nervous Young Men

The lyrics of this one make it pretty clear where they got the idea. Also, there's corroborative evidence. Nervous Young Men was an early project of Will Toledo, best known for his work in Car Seat Headrest. More from them later. Clearly, Will has read the book. Probably more times than I have.

Inside The Jar - The Silver Bayonettes

Enough with the ambiguity! "Based on the Sylvia Plath novel "The Bell Jar" and the poem "My Mother" written by her daughter Frieda Hughes". Clear enough for you? Not my favorite of the selection by a long measure but I can't fault the intent.

Bell Jar - The Bangles

By far the best-known track based on the book, I think. Written by lead guitarist Vicki Peterson, who gives it a rockin' tune and an elliptical, elusive lyric that evokes the spirit of the novel without making it obvious. Great song. 

Inside The Bell Jar - Car Seat Headrest

"I turned on the gas
And rested my head upon the racks of the oven"

I think that's all the proof we need here.

My favorite of them all. I have never paid the slightest attention to Car Seat Headrest until now, despite their name cropping up over and over again in links and articles. It's a terrible name. Why would you click on anything to hear a band called that? I imagined they'd sound like Coldplay or Muse, about the worst thing you could imagine of any band. 

Well, they clearly don't, do they? I'll have to pay more attention when their name comes up in future.  

Sylvia - The Antlers

And now, to finish, a couple of palette cleansers. There are some longer, live versions of this on YouTube (One's over thirteen minutes!) but they don't have any of the sonic backlash, which is what appeals to me. Without that it sounds a bit like what I imagined Car Seat Headrest were going to sound like and no-one wants that. Also, more lyrics about heads in ovens. She did do other things, you know...

i was all over her - salvia palth

You can't really do a whole post about Plath-related songs and leave this one out, can you? Well, I can't, anyway. Any excuse to hear it again.

Well, that was fun. I hope we all learned something. 

I do like a themed music post. Maybe I'll do another, and soon. 

Read It In Books

Even though I've been a compulsive reader almost all my life (I wasn't born knowing how to read, sadly, so I had to wait a few years before I could get started.) I have never been one of those people who keeps a record of my reading. Why would I? I don't keep records of anything I do - or not in any kind of organized fashion, anyway.

I do write this blog, of course, and before that I used to produce an apazine every two months for about a decade and a half, so there's plenty of written evidence to support my cultural experience but it's a sporadic trail at best. About the only time I ever tried to keep any kind of strict account of my reading habits was that one time in the 'eighties, when I hand-wrote a review of every book I read for a year.

Actually, I didn't even make it to the end of the year. I think I gave up in about October. That journal must be somewhere in the house. I wonder if I could find it...

The answer to that turns out to be "No", which is just as well. Otherwise, this would have derailed into a post about all the books I read in 1986 or whenever it was instead of what it's supposed to be, which is a review of Girl To City by Amy Rigby.

As I've said before, I tend not to write much about books here, even though I probably read at least forty or fifty every year. I don't know exactly how many since I'm not kwriting down the titles or using one of those websites or apps that collects and collates the details (Something even the thought of which gives me the shivers...) but it's pretty easy to tell just by looking at the discard pile. 

I tend to put each book I've read in a stack on the floor and keep adding more until the tower threatens to fall over. Then I start another one next to it. Eventually, when the whole thing becomes unstable, I'm forced to sort through them and find somewhere more permanent, generally another stack in another room. The perils of having a large house- there's always somewhere to put things, until one day there isn't...

The main reason I don't write as much about books as I do music or games or TV is that I work in a bookshop and I get a lot of my books for free, most of them as proofs which, as a training course I had to do this week reminded me, cannot be reviewed anywhere. Well, not legally.

I could review the published titles I read, many of which I also get for nothing, but I always feel a moral obligation to give my employer first refusal. It's not compulsory but it is strongly suggested that we place reviews of books we've read on our website, something I have never done. I don't want to put my reviews on any commercial website, whether or not its owned by someone who pays my bills, so the compromise is not to write any reviews at all. 

When I finally retire, I imagine I'll start reviewing books I've read here although chances are they'll be old ones. Once I stop getting my books for free, I plan to start an extensive re-reading program. 

I used to consider re-reading to be considerably more important than reading. My mantra used to be that the third time was the charm. I had a rationale all worked out, too. 

• Read One is for pleasure. You're enjoying the book so much you let it all wash over you. After you finish you're left with a strong emotional impression but it's most likely weak on detail. 

• Read Two is for comparison. As you progress through the book, things come back to you and you inevitably frame your new experience in terms of your old. You end up knowing how well the book has stood up to your memory of it and whether it meets your expectations but once again you probably haven't paid all that much attention to the technicalities.

• Read Three is for appraisal. By now, you probably know what to expect and the immediacy of your reactions should be muted. This is when all those details you never noticed before start to make themselves known and when you begin to understand the finer points of the structure and the architectonics. 

Any reads after that are either indulgence, obsession or you're an academic of some sort. God help you.

That was how I used to see it. I've loosened my views a little. There are many ways to approach a text. Still, the Three-Read Method seems pretty reliable to me.

With all that in mind, I'm happy to review Girl To City here for a couple or three reasons. 

Firstly, I paid for it myself. Granted, I only paid half price because that's a perk of my job but the training course I just did made no mention of the discount we get implying any responsibility beyond not abusing it by selling the books on EBay. 

I will not be selling Girl To City on EBay or anywhere else. I will be keeping it and one day re-reading it because it's very good. And then, no doubt, reading it a third time to discover what I really think about it. The older I get, the worse that plan begins to look.

Secondly, I have no intention of reviewing it properly. Mostly I just wanted to mention it so as to give it what little publicity I can, in the hope someone else might decide to get hold of a copy and read it, thereby giving themselves the pleasure and also putting a very small remittance into Amy's pocket.

Thirdly, in March the sequel, Girl To Country, will be published in the U.K. (It's out in the U.S. already, I believe.) I'll be getting a copy as soon as it's available and chances are I'll post about that one, too. If I was really patient, I suppose I'd wait until then and review the pair of them together but although I am quite patient I'm not a fucking stone.

Fourthly, though, and the real reason I wanted to post about it, was to embed this excellent promo video, which Amy made herself. 

You won't really know if you haven't read the book but that's truly excellent visual summary of the whole thing, coupled with a lyric that also stands as an extremely concentrated record of the core of the story. Quite brilliantly conceived, in fact. Pretty much a work of art in its own right, that video.

The only reason I know abut Amy Rigby at all is because she's been Wreckless Eric's musical and romantic partner for a good, long while now. I'm going to apologize for that right now. It's a crappy way to come to anyone's work but it can't be helped. That is what happened.

I've always been something of a Wreckless fan, although I can't claim to have kept up with his career the way I have, say, Lloyd Cole or Lana. A few years back, probably around the time of the pandemic, I thought to check what Wreckless was up to and I ended up buying a couple of CDs and subscribing to his excellent, if too-infrequently updated blog. Since he now both records and performs alongside his partner, I was introduced osmotically to Amy Rigby, who also happens to be a first-rate blogger. (I find the fact that he's on Blogger while she's on WordPress oddly amusing. I wonder if it means anything?)

It was the quality of Amy's blogging that made me want to read her memoir. Having read it, I can say she's not just a great blogger, she's a top-flight memoirist.

Memoir is a dangerous genre. There's a lot of... I guess the current buzzword would be slop. It's not like we ever needed AI for that. Ghost writers have been pumping it out by the barrel-load for decades. Good memoirs, though, are thrilling. This is a very good memoir.

It's good because it's extremely well-written. Amy Rigby has a strong and immediately recognizable prose style, lyrical, personal, warm and occasionally self-deprecating. In common with other songwriters whose books I've read, her prose has a musicality that lifts it off the page. It's a sensual pleasure similar to listening to her sing.

It's also good because she's had a ridiculously rich and interesting life, even though she barely seems to realize just how rich and interesting it's been. Some memoirs drop names on every page. Amy doesn't drop names, she scatters them like someone kicking through autumn leaves, scarcely noticing as they fly up all around. 

She lived in New York from the late '70s through to the '90s, arriving as an art student in her late teens, with a stint in London for good measure, leaving as a feted singer-songwriter with a rapturously-reviewed album. In-between, she met and hung out with just about everyone in the NY punk and no-wave scenes, sang, recorded and performed with everyone from Robert Quine to Warren Zevon and pretty much lived the fantasy life almost everyone I knew in the 'eighties would have killed to have had.

None of it made her any money. None of it made her famous enough that anyone reading this will ever have heard of her. (Prove me wrong in the comments, I dare you.) She was in  several bands, none of whose names you will recognize. I was fairly cognizant of the scenes she was a part of, or thought I was, and I'd never even seen the names so much as mentioned in passing until I read her book. 

Even her incredibly well-received and reviewed mid-nineties album, the magnificently-named Diary of a Mod Housewife, apparently famous enough to rate its own Wikipedia entry, rang absolutely no bells with me. I've listened to it online now and I can recommend it most highly. The song that backtracks the promo, Summer of My Wasted Youth, is from another album, the equally well-named Middlescence. I need to get CDs of all her albums...

Girl To Country is one of the least-glamorous music memoirs I've read, although that's a competitive field. In many cases, though, the lack of glamor is in itself glamorous, as in James Young's memoir Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about the time he spent with touring with a heroin-addicted Nico or Nina Antonia's The One and Only about heroin addict Peter Perrett. 

Unlike the subjects of those books, Amy Rigby isn't a tragic romantic with a fashionable habit. She's a girl from Pittsburgh who doesn't really know what she wants to do other than that she wants to do something. That something turns out to be music and she's good at it, which surprises her more than it surprises anyone. 

But all the time she's making music she's also holding down an endless series of temp jobs. She's so good at it they make her Temp of the Month. Playing guitar is cool and all but it don't pay the bills.

Half a century on, she's still out there, trucking her guitar and amp around small clubs in backwater towns, playing her songs to the handful of people who care. It's the rock and roll reality not the rock and roll dream and yet somehow it's the dream all the same. At least she doesn't have to temp any more.

I could go on but better I stop and let you go read the book for yourself. Or if you don't feel up to that level of commitment, at least go read her blog. 

I mean, we're all bloggers here, aren't we? You know it's the right thing to do.