Go Directly To Blaugust. Do Not Collect 200 Gold Pieces

It's Blaugust tomorrow and I have nothing planned. I do have a few, vague ideas floating around but all of them would require annoying little things like research and planning and forethought and I just don't seem to be in the mood for any of that right now. I'm more in the mood for winging it so we'll see how far that gets me. 

I'm not worried about it. If I was, I wouldn't throw several perfectly reasonable topics into a Grab Bag the day before the event, now would I? Just be thankful I haven't held these back to spin up into whole posts of their own just to meet a quota.

Is Your MMO As Famous As RuneScape? 

Who hates Monopoly? No, not monopolies. This is a blog about gaming and popular culture, not politics. I mean Monopoly the incredibly tedious board game I used to play when I was ten but only if no-one would play anything better. 

I haven't played the damn thing in well over half a century but where I work, Monopoly occasionally blows up into some kind of a big deal because Waddingtons  (Showing my age there...) Hasbro keep pumping out special editions. The year they did one for the city where I live, we literally couldn't keep the things in stock.

I very strongly suspect the same will not happen with the latest Monopoly Special Edition: RuneScape.

Yes, hard to believe though it is, RuneScape is getting its own Monopoly board. How many video games can say that?  

Oh, yes, World of Warcraft, for sure. We had that one in. Didn't sell many.

I just looked it up. There are fifteen video game editions of the family fun-wrecking game, according to the Fandom wiki. How many can you name? 

Well, all of them, obviously, since I just put a screenshot of the lot next to this paragraph. But you could have guessed most of them, I bet. 

It doesn't look like it's purely sales-based, although huge sales are clearly a pre-requisite. It very much looks like the key factor is being a big franchise with a presence outside of gaming. More than half of the fifteen also have Hollywood movies or big TV shows based on them. 

All of which makes it doubly impressive RuneScape got in. Is your favorite MMORPG on there? Thought not. Ever wonder just how big a deal RuneScape really is? Here's a clue. It's in the same league as Pokemon, Sonic, Roblox and GTA5.

It's available for Pre-Order on the RuneScape store. The MMO Bomb piece says it's available from October but the store says delivery February 2027. Also, why is it rated 16+ on the box? Regular Monopoly is half that. What is there aboout RuneScape they're not telling us? 

It's Metal, Jim...  

If you didn't know William Shatner once made a very, very bad album of cover versions that included his crazed takes on the sixties staples like Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and Mr. Tambourine Man, you'd better hand your nerd badge in at the desk on your way out. That's Popular Culture 101.

You may even know he's made a few more albums since then. He likes to keep up, even if he's often a decade behind. But did you know he fronts his own metal band? I didn't. Not until I read about it on Stereogum this week.  

Maybe be you did know already. It's not like it's a secret. As the piece points out, Stereogum itself reported back in February that the Shat was prepping a metal album. 

I missed that bombshell, somehow, but I'm doing my due diligence now and telling you about it because I'm sure you won't want to miss the opportunity to hear the 94 year-old cult actor (I nearly put actor in quotes then but that would be a cheap shot. I'm sure he must have acted in something, once.) give his unique interpretations of classics by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

And would you like to see him perform those songs live? I just bet you would. Well now you can! Or you will be able to at next year's Coachella, always assuming he's still up for it then. I mean, he'll be 95...

I know no-one reading this is going to be at Coachella 2027 but these days the whole thing is livestreamed. They wouldn't miss the opportunity to share something like this with the world, would they? We should arrange a listening party...

New Jeans For Old

Gasp as I segue effortlessly from gaming through geek culture to music. It's a veritable masterclass in grab-bagging. It also needs a lot of padding because as must be increasingly obvious I don't have a lot to say about any of this other than sharing the links. 

Seriously, we get all knotted up about people using AI to write blog posts but it's perfectly fine just to precis other people's stuff, throw in a few smart-alec remarks and call that original work, just so long as you don't forget to credit your sources to let everyone know where you stole it from. Is it something to do with the dignity of labor? Does hammering a keyboard add some protective veneer of authenticity or humanity?

Oh dear, he's off on one again. Someone bang him on the back of the head. That usually resets him.

One of the saddest music news stories of the past year or two was the doomed attempt of New Jeans to free themselves from the indentured servitude that is the Idol system. I am no expert in how it all works but you really don't have to be to see how desperately exploitative it all is. That many of the people being exploited have worked hard to get themselves into a position where someone wants to exploit them does nothing to excuse the process.

Not particularly unusually, New Jeans hit a point where they'd had enough but very unusually they tried to do something about it. It was a little like a scene in a horror movie for a while. You could watch them struggling to get free, almost making it to safety, then being seized by a tentacle at the last moment and dragged back under.

And now they've emerged again. Well, four of them have. One was lost, never to be seen again. Eaten by the monster. As yet we haven't had any new music but no doubt it's coming, which poses an awkward moral question over whether to engage with it or not.

New Jeans were my favorite K-Pop band before all this happened, not that it was a competitive field. I guess it's best to hope it all goes well after all they put themselves through but I'm not sure whether I want the New New Jeans to pick up where they left off, making excellent music and uplifting, super-happy videos, or if it wouldn't be easier all round if the new stuff wasn't up to much and they all looked glum singing it. 

Luckily, I don't have any say in it so I'll just take what I get. And probably feel slightly uncomfortable if I enjoy it. But then, I know that feeling... 

At which point I really should move straight into some mildly embarrassing music choice. I'm sure I can find one. Give me a moment...

I Want You (And I Want Him Too) - New Weirdos

Oh, I think that'll do it! In so many ways...

How Early It Was, How Early...

I nearly gave myself a day off from blogging today, what with Blaugust just around the corner and my having spent a couple of hours moving the modem and router to a different part of the house, which was a hot, sticky and annoying job. Also, if I was going to post something, it would have been Neverness To Everness again and I thought perhaps three posts in a row might be a bit much.

I have a few things bookmarked to write about so I figured maybe I'd fling together a Grab Bag. I made myself a coffee, sat down at the PC to get started on that (It's working fine after the router move, thank you for asking.), which was when I saw on MassivelyOP that Stars Reach is going into Early Access in a little over two weeks.

Not just Early Access, either, but as MOP puts it in the headline "paid early access". Ohhh boy... Might as well say something about that, then.

Before I get into any editorializing about the wisdom of the decision, let's talk about the important part: how much is it going to cost and what do you get for your money? I can answer the first part of that question but not the second.

There are three tiers, coming in at $30, $50 and $80. Obviously, all of them will get you the game but what else you get for your increasingly substantial investment is yet to be revealed. I just checked the Steam Store and there are no pre-orders up as yet but there is a "Why Early Access?" spiel that I'm guessing is new? It seems to be the trigger for the MOP post, anyway. That's where their attribution link goes.

Most of it seems to be the usual set of reasons/explanations/promises every developer gives when pitching Early Access but there are some interesting specifics, one being that Playable Worlds only anticipates the game remaining in Early Access for six months. 

Okay, what it actually says is:

 "Our current goal is to remain in Early Access for at least 6 months." 

which isn't exactly the same thing but six months is going to be all anyone hears.

The other line that stood out for me was on the future of pricing after launch: 

"We plan to sunset founders packs and transition to free-to-play at 1.0." 

For some reason, I thought there was going to be a subscription when the game went Live. I remember the thing about only subscribers being able to build homes, for one thing. Now its confirmed as F2P, apparently. Presumably that includes all the game, not just parts of it. If not, it won't really be free to play as such. I guess that would qualify as a Freemium offer but who can keep up with the jargon?

Let's assume Stars Reach really will be completely Free to Play when launch day comes. Not even Buy To Play, although it looks as though Early Access is B2P, what with those pack prices. It's a weird quirk of of the Early Access process, they way developers believe players will pay for an unfinished game that they plan on giving away for free when it's done. And players frequently prove them right, too, which is even weirder. 

If the game is F2P, how is that going to affect the way people play? There's been much discussion over the potential for griefing in Stars Reach (Okay, "much" is pushing it. Wilhelm's mentioned it a few times...) due to the way you can terraform planets with few restrictions or comebacks, other whatever's provided by by local, player-run governments. I'd imagine making the game F2P could stretch the boundaries of player governance to their limits and probably far beyond. The cosy SWG fantasy might not survive the barbarian hordes of F2P. Not to mention the bots.

As for the game itself, it seems it'll be much the same in Early Access as it has been in pre-alpha.  There's a description of available content in the announcement:

"The Early Access version of Stars Reach delivers the core experience, including combat, building, government, crafting, and trade. Players will have the opportunity to create their homestead, defend it against hostile creatures, create and participate in galactic commerce, and travel between planets using spaceports and wormholes. Players will also spend time in space, which features the same core experience as terrestrial gameplay"

Seems about right from what I saw during my intermittent visits, although I found very little of it engaging enough for me to hang around long enough to test the depth of any of those features. I found the appeal of all of them wore off in a matter of hours.

My main problem was that, while the basics of a potential game were certainly in place when I played, I couldn't see much that I recognized as a gameplay loop. There were a few things you could do but no real sense of why you'd want to do them for long. But, hey, that's what testing is for, right? Sorting the basics and honing the gameplay

Early Access, though, is not testing. Oh, I know developers think it is but players don't and they're the ones paying the money so what they think is probably more important. 

Players think Early Access is The Game. You can tell them it's not as much as you want but they won't hear you.

All the caveats and provisos in the world won't stop people seeing whatever's there when they log in and start playing as The Game. They may understand that it's not the Finished Game but it's still The Game and it better be fun and engaging and worth the money.  And if it's any kind of Live Service game, let alone an MMORPG that's meant to be played for years at a stretch, it better be consistently engaging.

People generally don't cut EA releases slack for still being in development. They also tend not to hang around when they run out of things to do and they often don't come back when more gets added. That happens with games that launch officially, too. Retention is always hard. But retaining interest in an unfinished game is harder still.

Early Access is always a gamble but it can pay off if there's a gameplay loop people find attractive. If it feels like a finished game, in other words, even if it's obviously not.

Valheim is a shining example. That game came out with the first half of the game effectively complete. It was a little rough around the edges but all the important parts worked and worked well. What's more, there was a linear progression through four biomes, each of which felt complete in itself. You could start at the beginning and play through to the end of what was there and it felt like you'd played a game. Millions did.

That's a good way to approach Early Access. Give players a shortened version of what the whole game will be. Then the rest, when it arrives, will seem more like an expansion or even a series of expansions. Players leave satisfied and come back to see what's new. (Granted Iron Crown screwed that up by making the second half of the game ten times harder than the first but the principle stands.)

Going into Early Access with substantial systems and features unfinished or entirely missing is asking for failure, especially when you're charging the price of a complete game. And $30, $50 and $80 are full game prices in the AA and indie market. 

So what do you get for the money, anyway? Other than access to the game, which you could already have had if you were interested, back when Kickstarter pledges were on sale.  

We don't yet know and I have some difficulty imagining what extras there might be. A quote on MOP, unattributed but presumably from Raph Koster himself (Hi Raph, if you're reading...) mentions “increasing rewards and cosmetics”, which is about as vague as it possible to be and still say anything at all. 

And "cosmetics"? What's that about? In a  game that hasn't even nailed down full customization in character creation yet? I mean, it's there, sure, but it's extremely basic by the standards of almost any modern MMORPG. What cosmetics could there be?

I realize I'm jumping the gun by posting this. Playable Worlds is assiduous in sending out emails filled with detail about what they're doing or what they plan to do. I imagine I'll be seeing three copies of a PR release in my inbox any day now. (I still get three of everything they send, even after the supposed purge of unused IDs.)

I could have waited for that before I wrote this post but this way I get two bites at the Stars Reach Early Access cherry. Or three. Blaugust is coming and I'll be glad to have a new topic to cover. The actual Early Access launch, when it arrives bang in the middle of Blaugust, is going to be very interesting indeed. 

There should be plenty to post about then, not least how many people EA brings in and how long they hang around. Stars Reach is only available through Steam so there won't be any secrecy over the  numbers. It'll all be there on the Steam Charts where, as I write, no-one at all is playing, presumably because the server is down. I can see the 30-day average, though. It's ten people.

Early Access has to bring in a few more, doesn't it? But how many more? 

Not long to wait before we find out.

Sometimes You Have To Make Your Own Luck

I'd love this to be a post about how I got another S-Class Banner Character on my first try and for almost no effort but sadly my luck didn't run to a third straight win. I thought briefly that it had because on my fifth roll this morning, a big S popped and up came the image above. 

Yes, it's Iroi and yes, for a second there, I thought I'd won her, but I realized almost immediately something else must have happened. When you win any character of whatever class you get a bespoke mini-movie, complete with posing and dialog. This was just a couple of static images.

I was confused enough to stop and fiddle around in the settings and options to see if I could work out what I'd won. It might surprise - or more likely shock - some players, to find out just how little I know about this game, even though I've been playing almost every day for weeks now. 

It surprises me a little, too, although not all that much. I somehow seem to be able to combine a keen sense of curiosity for what lies over the next hill with a bland indifference to how to get there. I'm like a sheep crossed with a cat. 

This is the way it generally goes: I start a new game, run through the opening tutorial then, if I like it, I carry on playing without thinking too much more about it. 

Usually what comes next is a hyper-extended quasi-tutorial that feels like the game's started but which is actually still supposed to be teaching you how to play. The problem with this approach, which I always used to recommend as probably the best way to introduce the various complexities of any game, is that I let it all wash over me and very little sticks. 

I'm sure, at some point, some tool tip or voice-over must have explained what the various buttons do on pretty much every screen but all I've done is click through them as fast as possible because I was already paying and I wanted to get on with the good bits.

It's not until I run into some problem that I stop and try to figure out for myself what all the buttons do or how the systems work. And to be fair to myself, it's not like I needed to know before, is it? Games are very easy and straightforward at the level I'm operating. It makes sense to leave it until I have a reason before digging into the details.

Absent a tutorial or a toll-tip, trial and error usually works. I tried all the buttons and one of them turned out to be a tally of every dice roll I'd made since the game began. It actually keeps the records for a rolling six months but until we get there it's everything. Looking at that, I could see I'd won an outfit.

My first! I was excited.

I needn't have been. Yes, I'd won an outfit. It was a low chance and once again I'd been very lucky to get it. Unfortunately it's an outfit for the character I was trying to win and I didn't win her. So now I have an outfit no-one can wear.

I did check. I wondered if maybe it would work for the whole team but no such luck. It's Iroi or nothing.

I carried on for a while, hoping I'd get lucky twice. I'd pre-set the number of rolls I was willing to use and I had about twenty rolls left before I hit my limit. No dice, so to speak, so I stopped. I'll almost certainly have another go before the Banner changes but for now I was done.

I was still in the mood for some gambling, though, so I thought I'd see what was on the other board, the one that uses the cheap, blue dice. I had loads of those. Last time I looked it was all characters I already had, although you always need multiples to Ascend. This time there seemed to be a couple I didn't remember getting so I thought I'd try a few rolls.

In the end I think I rolled about 25 times. There was the usual sale on where you get eight rolls for the price of ten so I did that a couple of times and then banged out a few singles on top. And I did pretty well. I got the usual couple of dupes but I also got an S-Class I didn't already have - Fadia.

I don't particularly want Fadia. If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure I can remember who she is but every character you acquire opens up some related content like Bonds and background stories so it's always good to get anyone new. 

And maybe I'll need her. After I finished rolling dice I blew a million Fons on scratch cards (I said I was in a gambling mood...) and that made me wonder where I was with my Tycoon levels. Not very far was the answer. I was on Level 19 but all the conditions had been met so I just had to press the button.

For Level 20, though, I was stuck on Exploration again. I had most of the boxes ticked but I still needed five Rabbit Holes (I'd only done one.), three characters at Level 40 (Again I only had one.) and an Anomaly Commission (I  was at 8/9 there). Rabbit Holes were easy. Or they were once I noticed you could adjust the difficulty level. Things didn't go so well before that.

Getting the character levels just meant spending some resources and I had plenty. I can't remember exactly what happened with the Anomaly Commission. I know picked a bad one. I had a look at the options available and I thought I'd try the boxing gloves. I remembered that being easy first time around.

Yes. Well. Maybe it was. The upgraded version, however, is a DPS test and I could not pass it. The gloves take a defensive stance and you have to defeat them in sixty seconds. I couldn't get them under 80%. 

At some point I fought the dog again and got the Arc but how that fits into the picture I can't quite figure out now. Maybe I needed two after all? 

I also did Dragon Gate Substitute, for which, confusingly, you fight some fish, not a dragon at all. They were easy enough, although I made it harder by falling off the roof of the building and having to start over.

The final box I needed to tick after all that was something called  Headless Rider, which is gated by an Anomaly Commission by the name of Ride Assault. I had no clue how or where to find it and it wasn't on the map so I looked it up.

Ride Assault has a complicated trigger sequence, where you have to be driving a car (A bike won't do.) down Foxwindow Avenue sometime between eight in the evening and dawn just to get it to pop. In the highly unlikely event you just happen to meet the conditions, a headless biker appears and if you chase him, he leads you into a tunnel, whereupon he summons a portal to take you to his Anomaly Realm. Then he tries to kill you.

That's not the fight you need for the Tycoon level. It's the fight you need to get that fight. But you have to start somewhere. Having read a couple of guides and fiddled with the clock to get the time of day right, I crashed about on Foxwindow until the biker appeared. I chased him, entered his realm, jumped out of my car to fight him and got slaughtered. It wasn't even remotely close.

I am now going to have to go away, read up on the strats, apply some upgrades and pick a team that has the right elemental qualities to exploit his weaknesses before I take another run at him. This means more research and finding out something about how a few systems work because I barely have a clue on most of them.

Of course, if I had any gaming skills I could probably just brute force it but I don't so it'll require some cheesing finesse. As it stand, not only can I not even begin to read any of the tells that let you know when you need to Counter or Parry. I wouldn't even know what to press if I did. I have never knowingly Countered or Parried anything since I started - nor ever felt like I needed to, either.

And it may be that I still don't. It might be that once I pick the right team and upgrade everyone, button-mashing will be good enough again. I hope so, anyway. I'm certainly not playing this game to git gud, or even for the fights, for that matter. But sometimes you have to make at least a token effort. Either that or give up, an option I always find rather attractive.

That's where I am with Neverness To Everness right now. Slowly learning how the game works so I can avoid playing as much of it as possible. 

Don't anyone try to tell me how to have fun!

Catzebo Carousel

A week ago, I posted something about one of the new, time-limited events in Neverness To Everness, an event that seems to be variously known as "Mews Flash", "Meow Express" or "Cat Dream", depending on the whim of whoever put the whole thing together or whoever happens to have translated the particular bit of text you're reading.

To recap, it's a gambling game where you buy scratch cards from a large, formally-dressed cat standing behind the counter of a booth known as a Midnight Catzebo. You obviously hope you're going to win big but I've been playing every day, or at least every day I remember, and I haven't exactly won big yet, although I also haven't lost big either. 

Most days I just about break even. I tend to stop if I either win or lose more than a couple of hundred thousand. I had a good run this morning with the biggest single win I've had so far, 300k, but I lost that much a couple of days ago so I'm pretty much back where I started.

Having scratched a lot of cards now, I'm certain the cheapest, the 10k ones, are a waste of time. About 90% of them have a single 10k win, so if you buy the full day's allotment of twenty you're going to end up very slightly out of pocket. I've given up bothering with those altogether, except for a little project I'm going to get to in a moment.

The 20k cards are slightly better in that you get quite a few 30k wins, putting you a little ahead, but the overall hit rate is lower, so it works out much the same. I'd barely call the 10k and 20k cards a gamble, they're so consistent in the results they give. It was fun for a while, scratching off all the imaginary foil, but the thrill of that wears off when you realize how predictable it is.

The three types of 50k cards are a lot more entertaining and also where the real money is, if you get lucky. Then again, there's a real chance of blowing more than you can afford before you've noticed if you aren't careful. 

There's no reliable return of your stake money here. Most times you either get nothing or a decent chunk of cash. There are frequently multiple winning slots on a single card. I've had four or five several times, adding up to 200k or so. Conversely, there are a lot of duds, where you don't win anything.

When I first discovered the event, I wondered how many Catzebos there were, scattered across Hethereau. And what the cats operating them were called. I'd seen a couple, so I knew it was a franchise of some kind with multiple outlets and both the cats had odd names (Catvioli and Cat Cake). I was curious (Appropriately enough, what with the cats....) to meet the rest and find out if there was some kind of theme to it all.

This morning I finally got around to doing something about it. I began with the map.

I was still figuring out how that worked. I always seem to take a long time figuring out the basic systems in games these days. I play everything in an ever more casual and laid-back, not to say soporific, fashion or so it sometimes seems. I only started taking a proper look at the map a week or two ago. 

It turns out that, like everything in NTE, it's extremely well-designed. The search function is versatile and powerful and you can set a tracker for anything you see on the map. All the icons are meaningful, too. You can see the Catzebos well enough just from the little cat-heads that weren't there before. 

Still, I didn't fancy poring over the whole thing trying to find them by sight. After a bit of fiddling about, I figured out that all the Midnight Catzebos are listed under the Recommended Locs tab. That was going to save me some time. 

Next, I discovered you can sort all the categories either by district or for the whole city. I got the list up for Hethereau first, to see how many Catzebos there were altogether. It's a nice, round number - ten. Then I selected Miguel District, where Flora happened to be, and started from there. 

Since I seemed to have made a pointless little project for myself, I thought I'd do it properly for a change. I used to do a lot of this sort of thing in MMORPGs back in the day but with the advent of narrative-driven games, quest helpers and never doing any damn thing if it doesn't come with an Achievement or a reward attached, I've fallen out of the habit.

I once spent several days going round all the vendors in Norrath I used regularly with characters of different races and varying charisma stats, making notes on how it affected sales prices. I kept the info in a book on my desk and referred to it when I wanted to sell anything valuable. That's the kind of entertainment I used to make for myself, back when we made our own entertainment. We were simple folk...

Luckily, this project didn't take me days. More like a little under three-quarters of an hour and even that included two trips, one each with Lacrimosa and Sakiri, on the Ferris Wheel that stands (Precariously, in my opinion...) on top of the Floe Cinema. I just happened to bump into them as I was passing. That might get its own post although it probably won't. 

In keeping with tradition, I dug out a notebook and made notes as I ported and trotted around the city. I'd usually take screenshots these days but it occurred to me that even though I was going to take a shot of every booth anyway, it would actually be more efficient to transcribe the details by hand as I saw them, rather than to go back through all the pictures afterwards, looking for the information I needed. 

I would have had to take screenshots of the map, too, if I wanted to give the precise locations. Easier just to write down the names of the streets while I had the map open. It would have been easier still if I'd taken the time to write them down neatly enough so I could read them afterwards but there you go...

Since I was going to be at the booths anyway, I thought I might as well buy a scratch card at each of them and keep a record of my wins and losses, just for the fun of it. I'd already spent my allocated limit for the day, so I chose to buy just one 10k card at each stall, which gave me a chance to test my consistency theory.

Out of ten cards, nine had a winning panel.Every one of them was worth 10k. House takes 10%. Just as I thought.

As I was going round, I found myself thinking about the post I was going to write but also, for some reason, about the ongoing controversy over AI that's raging around Blaugust and something Paeroka said stuck in my mind, about how Blaugust doesn't have any rules about what constitutes a "post", so you could legitimately post a single word every day and it would qualify.

That gave me an idea. What if I didn't use the screenshots of the ten Catzebos right away? What if I saved them and posted one every day in Blaugust when I didn't have time to write a proper post? I don't have a back-up plan for days like that this year and that would be a super-easy way of hitting the target. 

Would that be more creative than prompting an AI for a picture? It's arguable. It might be less creative. I didn't draw those cats myself. Or name them. I very much didn't come up with the idea of putting cats with funny names in booths. All I did was go to where they were and take a picture. Where's the creativity in that?

Take it a stage further. What if I prompted an AI to make a picture of a cat in a booth and then I got my phone and took a picture of my monitor showing the image and posted that? Would that count? How about if I did it on the laptop then carried the laptop around the house and garden and took pictures of the screen with the AI-generated image but with different real-world backdrops? How significant a part of the post is the AI image then? Where even are the lines? It's angels and pinheads all over again!

These are the kinds of things that go through your mind when you take on a repetitive project like this. 

Tempted as I was, I decided not to save my cat pictures for Blaugust, not least because now I've had the idea I can recycle it easily enough if I need to, later. The "photos of AI images" thing is amusing me, too, and the main reason I have a blog is to keep myself amused, so...

Getting back to the ostensible point of this post, I can now tell you the names of all ten cats manning (Or should that be "Catting"?) the booths. They are all male, as far as I can tell, if that's relevant, or they present a male aspect, at least. They all look like 1930s gangsters, if we're going to be frank.

The Ten Cats, in the order I found them, are:

Miguel District 

Cat Ball - Flamingo Avenue

Catvioli - St. Torres Avenue

New Herland

Cat Pastry - In the square with the Wertheimer Tower

Cat Dice - Nutcracker Road

Cat Tart - Camelot Avenue

Cat Sugar -  Yuanmu Hill

Bridge Crossings

Cat Pancake - Bluebeard Road

Unheard Shores

Cat Puff - Just off Coastal Highway Z42

Illusion Town

Cat Cake - Fiscus Avenue

Cat Roll - Coastal Highway Z42 

It does very much look to me as thought these cats must have been named by someone thinking mainly about how hungry they were feeling. With a couple of "Things I Can See On My Desk" thrown in for the sake of variety. 

The outlier is Catvioli. He's the only cat with a single-word name and also the only one whose name isn't an easily recognizable object or foodstuff. I looked it up just in case it had some meaning I wasn't seeing but there doesn't seem to be any. I saw someone on some thread or other suggesting it might be a pun on ravioli but that seems like a stretch.

And of course we'll never know. This is a time-limited event and not a very significant or important one even in the context what might constitute importance in a free-to-play, gacha game. No-one cares what the bloody cats are called or why. 

And yet I've just spent about three hours of my life on it, and that's on top of the three hours I spent on much the same topic a week ago. 

It's nice to have a hobby, isn't it? Keeps us off the streets, anyway. If anyone's under the delusion what kind of pictures we use to illustrate our posts actually matters, maybe they should chew on that for a while.

Music Is For Sharing

Wow! Here I am again with what I've been listening to lately, just two weeks after the last time. It's like there's a plan and I'm sticking to it. 

There isn't, of course, and I'm not. It's just been a bumper couple of weeks. The tunes have just been piling in. I noticed yesterday I had more than enough and they looked pretty damn good, too. Plus I do like to put a music post together on a Friday or a Saturday. It just feels right for the weekend.

It'll be a change from the last one, when I was scratching around for enough to fill the page. This time it's all about what to leave out. Is that better? I guess it'll have to be.

Shall we get on? Yes, let's get on. (They do not move.)

 

 If You Take Away The Music Then What Has She Got?

 Charli xcx

Camera - Charli xcx

 Yeah, yeah, yeah... 

I make no apologies.

In the continuing absence of Our Queen (Latest of many promises, it's now two albums. Maybe later this year. maybe next year. Believe it when you hear it, not before, is my advice. I'd take one now and one later but we don't get to tell Lana what to do. I pity anyone who tries.) the artist most likely to fill the gap has to be Charli. Boy, but she's consistent. Consistently great. When did you last hear a bad song by her? Or a mediocre one for that matter.

One thing she doesn't seem to be 100% perfect on is picking the best one. Or maybe she's just perverse. If You Take Away The Music... is the latest of a string of B-sides that sound better than the A-sides they back. Or they do to me. And even then she makes the B-sides hard to get hold of. Only on the actual vinyl or her Instagram account, which is now, apparently, private. Not that I know how Instagram works.

Lucky for us, someone always uploads them to YouTube, presumably expecting millions of hits. Except it doesn't seem to work that way. Camera, on Charli's official channel, has racked up almost a million views in two days. All the uploads of the B-side added together can only just about manage one per cent of those numbers. 

Which do you think's the better song? Granted, Camera has a fantastic video. It's very distracting. Close your eyes and listen, though, and then tell me those two songs are the right way round when you take the single out of the sleeve.

More than halfway through the year and my front runner for #1 when I do my Pick of '26 is still Playboy Bunny, B-side to SS26. I can't actually remember what SS26 sounds like but I can sing you Playboy Bunny. 

You know what? Let's have Playboy Bunny. You might have to sing it yourself because the sound on this live recording, uploaded off someone's phone, seems to have managed to miss out the vocals almost entirely but so what? It looks great!

 Playboy Bunny - Charli xcx

Live at the Scala in London, from one of her parties to promote the upcoming release of her album Music, Fashion, Film. Needs a strobe warning, by the way. Do not watch if susceptible. 

Can I wait for someone to give me that in a few months or am I going to have to buy it for myself? July is such an annoying mid-period for anyone to put out an album, isn't it? Then again, maybe by Christmas there'll be a deluxe edition with all the B-Sides. Modern marketing, eh? 

I guess we'd better have someone other than Charli now. Shame.

 Blue Shadows ft. Karen O - The Avalanches

Now there's a name from the past. The Avalanches, I mean, not Karen O. I can never remember what band Karen O's from. Some New York avant-garde, alt-rock, no wave/new wave post punk outfit, isn't it? Or am I making myself look foolish yet again? Is it the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? That's my bid. 

Yay! Looked it up and I was right! I can tell you, that feels like quite the achievement these days. Mrs Bhagpuss and I comment frequently on our increasing inability to dredge facts we should know from the clutter and decay of what used to be our memories. 

In my defence, I have never owned a recording by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Not on vinyl, not on CD, not even as a download from YouTube. They're in that strange, grey area filled with acts I constantly see name-checked in interviews or reviews but who I never bother to follow up to see what they sound like. Having said that, I bet I've linked a Yeah Yeah Yeah's song here at some point. If I have, though, I've forgotten what it was.

As for The Avalanches, they're stored in my mental filing system under one-hit wonder novelty band, thanks to the excellent and definitely unforgettable Frontier Psychiatrist. That's definitely turned up here before. I'm sure that's a completely unfair summary of their no-doubt illustrious career but there you go. Make one funny record and you're cooked.

Martini Me Fatso - Matt Berninger

Speaking of titles likely to get you shunted into the novelty rack at Our Price... 

An Inventory Full No-Prize to anyone who can explain what the hell he's going on about. 

Representative extract:

"Pick up a tiny bed, and call me with your mouth, please
If I'm getting kicked out, I'm takin' my harmonica"

Full lyric here. Have at it. (Do you say "lyric" or "lyrics" for the entire text of a song, by the way? I dither between the two.)

 Gary - Blossoms

As I was playing the Matt Berninger track, Mrs Bhagpuss came in and said something but I had the music on so loud I couldn't hear what it was, so I turned Matt off and she said "What's that one? I like it." so I put him back on again. When the song finished, she said "I was listening to Gary by Blossoms this morning, for some reason. Do you know that one?" 

I didn't but I do now. And so do you.

 Trusselina Archimboldi - Trusselina

The hippies at the Roundhouse in 1967 would have loved this, in between all that Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. Smart post-punks would have tipped an eyebrow to it ten years later. It would have gone down even better, drifting across the fields around dawn at some rave in a godforsaken field out in the wilds of East Anglia around the turn of the 90s. And now here it is again. Can we have some more, please?

Jumpupw!nya (ft. Tierra Whack, Leikeli47)

 Chad Hugo

Now that's my kind of hip-hop. I bet they'd love to hear they're making the right kind of sounds to please white British dudes in their late sixties. It's got to be the market all the rappers wish they could crack, right?

Apparently that's Chad Hugo's first ever solo track although he's been around forever as one of The Neptunes, the other being Pharrel, of course. I say that like I knew. Being an expert is so easy. Or rather faking it is. I did it all the time when I was younger. Now I just make a feature of my ignorance and combine it with a puppyish eagerness to learn. That's just as much a pose, of course. But then, isn't everything?

I do know who Tierra Whack is, at least. And now I know who Leikeli47 is as well. Or what she sounds like, anyway. And that she likes to wear a ski mask. Lucky me. Lucky you, too.

 F**k The Summer Up ft. Biker Boy Pug 

 Leikeli47

That might have been my Song of the Summer back in 2015, if I'd known it existed.  Is it too late now?

 Light Over There - RIP Magic

What next? I dunno. I'm spoiled for choice. Never going to fit it all in. I was debating whether to leave out everything that didn't have a video but that would be visualist, wouldn't it? And anyway, isn't it supposed to be all about the music? 

Heh. Good one.

You know how I complain all the time, if complain's the right word, maybe observe, that everything sounds like something else now? Well, this bloody well does sound like Bark Psychosis, so there. I saw them one time. They were stunning and it was all sound. No visuals at all. Well, I mean, I could see them. But they just stood there and let the volume do the work. And it did.

 trauma porn - silt

That's not a million miles away, either. Is this a trend? I'm here for it if it is. Bark Psychosis and This Heat. Two of the most influential bands you probably never heard of. Their existential fingerprints are all over these last two tracks.

I hear someone asking for a tune you can hum. Hah. Middlebrows! Okay. Try this.

I Wanna Be Your Man - Hank Heaven

Yeah, not that one. No copyright on titles, as I've had occasion to explain to more than one confused customer over the years. 

 The Loudest - Violet Odette Harlow

Do you get the feeling she's holding back? I wish she'd cut loose. But then, I guess she's not the loudest.

Oh, I could go on all day but I guess I'd better stop. Let's all have a dance and then we'll go have lunch. Or dinner. Time zone depending.

 Young London - Confidence Man

Can't really leave it there without actually hearing Bomb The Bass, I guess...

Beat Dis - Bomb The Bass

Geez! I'd forgotten how good that was. Is. Maybe I should listen to more old music. That's nearly forty years old! When I'm listening to anything that's not totally new, a thing I often do is work out what would have been as far back in time for me when I was, say, eighteen. So if someone's wondering why some teenager doesn't recognise the name of some band that was famous in the eighties, like Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet, I figure out that when I was that age, it'd be like someone asking why I didn't know who was rocking the dance halls between the wars. That's before even Glenn Miller, which might have been the one and only name from back then I could have named.

Then again, the punk band I was in did a song called Bessie Smith, all about how she died because the white hospital they took her to after a car crash wouldn't treat her because she was black. That was in 1977 and Bessie Smith was famous in the 1930s. So maybe I knew more than I remember I knew. 

Mind you, I didn't write it. The bass player did and he was two years younger than me. 

If I ever had a point there, I've forgotten what it was. Time I was gone. 

You Wait Years For A Cloud Gaming Platform And Then Three Come Along At Once

I was just thinking about posting an update about how my GeForce Now experience had been going, when this popped up in my rss feed. To save you clicking through, it's a news article at Games Industry.biz about Amazon Luna, which is now included with a Prime Gaming subscription.

Wait? Wasn't it already? Didn't they switch "Prime Gaming" over to Luna months ago, when they stopped handing out free games? I thought I wrote something about that at the time? 

Let me check a mo... Yes, I did. Kinda... I mentioned it in a Grab Bag, which is about all it deserved.

The whole thing seemed pretty chaotic back then. I have another post where I talk about being able to access my Good Old Games catalog through Luna, which meant I was able to play games I'd claimed through Prime, but which I redeemed on GOG, on Amazon's cloud gaming service. It was about as convoluted as that sounds. I did it a few times and then completely forgot about it until now, which is about par for the course for these things with me. Make logging in more than a single step and I'll probably bounce, after the novelty wears off.

So, what have they done this time? And is it an improvement?

Ehhh... kind of? I gave it a quick test this afternoon so I have a basic grasp of how it works and I have to say it's not exactly intuitive. Or user-friendly. Or anything like as easy as they seem to think it is. Not for me, anyway. 

Amazon believes Luna offers a low-effort, non-technical, crowd-pleasing way to play games. They see a huge number of people playing on mobile devices, people who own neither PCs nor consoles, and they'd like some of that business, thank you very much. 

Amazon has noticed Netflix getting plenty of traction with their gaming offer, now they've integrated it into their basic service. Take-up there has increased massively and as we all know, no-one gave a toss about Netflix games until recently. (Pretty sure no-one reading this gives a toss about them now, either, but people who read whacking great walls of text on gaming blogs are hardly their target audience.)

I know this because at the same time that news article appeared on GI.biz, so did this. It's an interview with Jeff Gattis, general manager for Amazon Luna and Amazon Game Studios, and he's keen to explain the rationale behind giving away the farm.

That is what they're doing, isn't it? Although Prime subscribers have had some limited free access to the platform for a while, the full Luna service used to require a subscription. Now it doesn't. Is that right?

Who knows how it used to work? Or cares, frankly. I'm not going to waste my time researching it because whatever it was, it's changed now. All these cloud gaming platforms have a free version of sorts, then one or more levels of paid subscription. I don't imagine Luna was much different.

As it stands today (And don't quote me on this because I'm guessing making it up quoting Gemini here.)  there are two levels: you can either get Luna free as part of your Prime subscription or you can pay $9.99 a month just for Luna. Which would seem like an exceptionally bad deal, considering all the other stuff Prime gets you...

Or it would if Prime got you the whole package but of course it doesn't. It gets you what they call the "Standard" package. Or it does if you live in the USA or the UK, which are the only two regions where it's being bundled in with Prime so far . It doesn't look as though Standard is available separately outside of Prime, either. A lot of caveats and conditions creeping in, aren't there?

If you want the Premium package, that definitely costs extra, even if you are a Prime subber. Why you'd want it, if you're in the UK or the US, beats me. The only difference I can see is that you get more games and I'm not even sure of that, as you'll see further in.

That's all already more confusing than Amazon would like to believe, something that I'm sure will surprise no-one reading this. Amazon does not have a reputation for clarity where gaming is concerned.

The whole interview with Gattis is very interesting, not to say revealing, as he talks about the various games divisions within Amazon historically not having known what each other was doing, some of the decisions they made being "weird" and how Amazon were after a big share of the PC/Console/AAA market until they realized Steam, Playstation, XBox and Epic were fighting over the same gamers like a bunch of dogs in a sack and decided not to bother with that nonsense any more. Casts some light on New World's demise, that perspective, doesn't it?

What they want to do now, apparently, is get their claws into the 2.5 Billion active gamers, who don't use any of those upscale platforms. And they think they can do it by making it easy to get in on a device you already have, through a subscription you're already paying. There are 200 million Prime subscribers already so that'd be a good start.

Except my experience suggests getting to the games on Luna isn't quite as smooth an experience as all that. As soon as I read the news, I logged straight into my Amazon account and looked for the games. There weren't any. 

There are thirteen tabs along the top of the page and none of them says "Games". Neither does any of them say "Luna". None of them even says "Prime" for that matter. The nearest I could get was "Prime Video", which goes exactly where you'd think it would. No games there.

Right up in the top, left corner there's the Amazon smiley logo and underneath it, in small, blue letters, it says "Prime". I clicked on that. No dice. Just a bunch of cut-price offers. So where are the damn games?

Finally, in the absence of anything better to try, I clicked on the three horizontal lines with "All" next to them. That gets you a drop-down menu and halfway down it you'll find "Amazon Luna - Cloud Gaming." Click on that and you get a sub-menu with four choices - All Games, Play With Prime, GameNight With Prime and Learn More. 

I went for All Games because why wouldn't I? That got me a page featuring a game I actually want to play, right at the top, as the splash image. Wow! Wasn't expecting that. That's it, up there in the header.

Scrolling down, there's a layout very similar to what you see on Prime Video or indeed Netflix. There's a top ten, the latest additions to the platform and some "Editor's Picks". And as I found out eventually, once you've played a game, you get a "Continue Playing" shelf, just like "Continue Watching" on regular Prime. 

If you scroll right to the very bottom you will finally see an "All Games" button. You can then filter that by Standard or Premium although honestly I could hardly tell the difference. The list of Premium titles also includes all the Standard ones so good luck figuring out what's been added. It certainly wasn't obvious where the extra $9.99 a month value was.

But the good news! There are games in the Standard offer I might at least want to take a look at. Dispatch, for a start. That's on my Steam wishlist. I've been waiting for a decent sale. Looks like I can save my money now.  There's also Death Stranding and both Alan Wake games and Hogwarts Legacy and Hollow Knight...

I might play any of those but I will play Dispatch so I started there. Things didn't go too well, at first. 

The first problem was my browser. There's an approved list and Firefox isn't on it. I can't really rag on Amazon for that. Firefox is increasingly not on anyone's list of approved browsers. I keep Chrome always ready in the background for all the services that won't have dealings with Mozilla any more. 

I swapped to Chrome and that worked. Kinda. Luna opens a full-screen window and my mouse pointer would only display in the top couple of inches. It worked on the whole screen - I just couldn't see it. I had to move the mouse about and wait 'til I saw a button light up. A mini-game all of its own!

After a little of that, I got the game started. Inside I found the same issue with the mouse but you don't really need the mouse in the introduction. It's all watching cut scenes and making choices with the keyboard. 

I gave it a few minutes just to check it worked, which it did, then the traffic noise through my open window drowned out the dialog so I opened the settings and switched the subtitles back on (I'd turned them off at the start.) and guess what? The mouse pointer magically appeared. Must be some glitch with the full window.

I tried to take a few screenshots for this post but the old reliable, Win+PrtScr didn't exactly work. It looked like it might have but there was nothing there when I checked the folder later. That'll have to be sorted or I won't be playing. Can't play a game and not be able to take screenshots. It's inhuman!

At that point I decided to stop and have a look at Netflix to see what games they had to offer. I've looked before and it's been a whole load of mobile games of little interest to me but that was a while ago. 

It still is, mostly. There are a lot of them, though. Can't argue with the amount of choice. And there are a handful of semi-interesting titles scattered here and there.

More importantly, the games are right there on the first page. No digging through drop-downs to find them. Much easier. If Amazon are hoping for the same kind of take-up Netflix is getting, they'd better get their UI guys on the job. But then, Prime Video is a chaotic shambles compared to Netflix, so I'm not convinced they have any UI guys, or not any that know what they're doing...

I did find one game on Netflix I'd be interested to try: Oxenfree. I remember reading about that one a long time ago on someone's blog, or at least I think I do, if I'm not mixing it up with something else. I thought I'd try it just to test the ease of access and Netflix faltered at the first fence.

Obviously it wouldn't work with Firefox but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that Netflix games only work on a mobile device. You can't play them on a PC. 

Officially, that is. By which I don't mean there's some back-door access you can hack your way into via some shady third party app. There's a beta for playing Netflix games on TVs and PCs running right now, albeit only in certain, selected territories, the UK being one of them. I tried it and it worked fine. 

I played Oxenfree for just long enough to make sure it was playable and then I logged out. It looks like an interesting game. I imagine I'll be back.

So now I have three options for playing games I don't own, on other peoples' computers. By far my preferred option is GeForce Now, for which I'm paying, and which I'm finding to be very much worth the money. I can play a huge range of games there that I actually want to play already, many of which my current hardware won't run, or not reliably. Since I subscribed, I've used it pretty much every day.

Amazon Luna places a fairly distant second. It is free, since I won't be bothering with the dubious benefits of the Premium version and it does have a few genuinely appealing titles. Given a choice between even this iteration of Luna and the "weird" Prime Gaming of a couple of years ago, though, I'd revert in a heartbeat. I liked collecting those games, even if I never played most of them. I guess that was too good to last. 

I'm also very skeptical that this latest attempt by Amazon to forge a presence in the gaming sector is likely to achieve much more than the last several ruses they tried. If they think what they've got here is going to feel natural and accessible to the huge, casual gamer market I suspect they're going to be disappointed. Again.

Last comes Netflix. Not because of any shortcomings in the platform itself but because it's clearly not designed for me. I don't have a great deal of interest in mobile games and if I did I'm not sure I'd need Netflix to curate them for me. Most of them are free anyway and I already have several options installed to play mobile games on my computers. And even if I didn't, I imagine that even when the Play On TV and Computer option comes out of beta, there still won't be many Netflix games I'll want to try.

Still, I'm not complaining about being given more options, even if I'm not likely to use them. Nor am I going to whinge about extra value being added to subscriptions I'm already paying, even if the value to me is limited.

And, what with the continuing issues with availability and pricing for computer components and the concomitant price rises, we might all be glad of some options in the years to come. Of course, it is herding us all into the walled gardens of various multinationals, where no doubt we'll be swiftly fleeced like the sheep we've become but as Mrs. Bhagpuss and I often comment, as we stroll the English countryside with Beryl, of all the farmyard animals, the sheep seem to have by far the best deal.

There are worse things you can be than a sheep.  

If At First You Don't Succeed, Do Something Else

I had an idea for today's post but it didn't work out exactly as planned, for technical reasons, most of which I can't say I really understand and none of which I propose to try any harder than I already have to fix. 

What I was going to do was make an online zine, link to it, and explain my process. Only I haven't managed to make one yet. So, as a poor substitute, I thought I'd just make a very short post describing the problems I'm having and what, if anything, I plan to do about them. So that's what I'm doing.

A while back, I happened to be reading a post by either Aywren or Syl that mentioned, just in passing, something called Zines Forever. I'd love to link to that post directly but I can't find it on either of their blogs now, although Syl does have the Zines Forever website linked right at the top of hers, where it goes to her own Indie Game Review zine.

The word "zine" immediately caught my attention. I won't rehash the whole story again but I have a long history with zines: reading, writing and publishing them, that starts in the 1970s and carries on into the 21st century. I've observed numerous times how blogging has in some respects taken over from physical zines, although those very much still exist. Until now, though, I hadn't appreciated that there's an online zine scene as well.

I had a shuffle though a few of the zines on Zines Forever. They cover a wide range of styles and subjects. A lot of them read more like fliers than zines to me. Nothing wrong with fliers. Fliers have a vibrant subculture all their own. I've done my time, too, out there with the bucket and paste under the flyover...

Ahem...

Getting back to the zines, Zines Forever looked like it might be the perfect solution for my back-pages problem. Over the past few years I've managed to find and sort through a fair percentage of all the zines of varying sorts I've been involved with, from my first effort on the school duplicator at the age of twelve to the one and only issue of Mrs O'Reilly's Dog, a punk zine circa 1977, to the many different titles I distributed through several APAs in the '80s and '90s. 

For no particularly good reason, I'd quite like to upload some of those to the internet, where they can roam free and perhaps survive longer and have a better chance of being seen than the aging photocopies here in my house, all of which will, I'm sure, end up in landfill not long after I do. 

Not that I'm going to be buried. Eww! Creepy!

I've been pondering ways to do that but when I saw the Zine Forever site, with its eight-page standard format and very satisfying page-flip, I thought I'd found my answer. I left it a while because it's hardly an urgent project but this afternoon I thought I'd have a go at making a zine.

 When I say "making", what I really mean is converting, of course. I wasn't about to start putting a new one together. I just wanted to upload one of my old ones and see how it looked. 

I picked a short one to start with. Just four pages and two of those only pictures. I got my scanner hooked up and scanned the first page then I went to upload it.

The good news is you don't even have to make an account to upload a zine. And that's all the good news.

The first, trivial, problem was image format. I'd made a .jpg and the site wanted a .pdf. I rescanned the first page and then the other three, all as PDFs It only took a couple of minutes. Then I tried again. 

Trying to upload threw an AMD driver error. It didn't crash the whole PC but it froze the website. I tried a few times with the same result so I googled it. There were no matches specific to Zine Forever but a host of people were complaining about similar problems with AMD drivers for all kinds of things. Apparently they aren't very reliable, to put it mildly, and Windows hates them and keeps trying to overwrite them.

I read through a few of the fixes and tried a couple of the easier-looking ones, all to no effect. I tried in Firefox and Chrome and they were both the same. I thought about starting in on the more complicated fixes, involving changes to the registry and clean installs and fiddling with the bios and I decided I didn't care that much about getting it done.

I must have changed something while I was messing about, though, because when I tried one more time for luck, as I tend to do, I got a different error. This time I was supposedly missing something called WebGPU. I googled that, found out what it was and how I could enable it in Chrome and that it was supposedly already enabled, by default, in Firefox.

Chrome wanted me to give it permissions that it warned might open security holes so I passed on that. Firefox gave the same error message even after I went in and made sure WebGPU really was enabled. There were more fixes for that but it looked like a lot of work and sod's law says I'd probably break something else if I tried. Pass. Again.

Instead, I googled to see if there were alternatives to Zines Forever. There are a few although none looks as good. Still, I thought I'd try one. I remembered Syl (Or Aywren.) had also mentioned using Itch.io for zines. There was an app there called Electric Zine Maker that looked like it was mainly designed to facilitate making printed zines but I thought I'd give it a go anyway.

I downloaded that one, unzipped it and fired it up and it worked just fine. I figured out where the upload button was, which wasn't easy given the pre-schooler-with-a-paint-pot graphic style. I started to upload the first page and...

...it wanted a .jpg file. Or any image file other than a .pdf, pretty much.

At which point I thought, y'know what? I'm going round in circles here! I think I'll get off this roundabout now. It's making me dizzy.

When I can summon up the enthusiasm, I'll re-scan the images as .jpgs. Or convert the .pdfs. Or something. Then I'll try again. But for today, I've had enough.

At least it gave me something to blog about so it wasn't entirely an afternoon wasted.  

By the way, for anyone that's interested, I made eight songs on Suno out of the text on those two pages above. Eight. Yes, eight!

I collected them into a playlist for this blog and here it is.  I think I got them all in the right order. And for anyone who's just a little bit intrigued but definitely not eight songs-worth, here's the title song

It's called I Wish I Could Go Roller-Skating... Chapter 21 of Catcher In The Rye is the obvious touchstone. Phoebe might be who you think she is. Or she might not. She certainly doesn't know. 

I sometimes wish I did...