Have You Done That Little Job I Gave You Yet?

A couple of days ago, I mentioned in passing that Panda Panda Panda was back. The event, which used to be known as Days of Summer, when it started a litle earlier in the year, is a series of weekly quests in EverQuest II that, at least on the face of it, offers a huge boost in power for casual players at the cost of very little effort indeed.

At least, that's how it appears until you take a closer look at the way it works. I had the opportunity to do just that yesterday, when I went to pick up the first of this year's quests and found I hadn't finished last year's yet. Or started them, either.

Technically, I had started the 2024 set of nine quests, but only in that I'd visited Bao Bao, the current Panda-in-Residence, and taken the first one. It was in my Journal but I hadn't actually done anything about it in twelve months. Bao Bao was not interested in giving me this year's quests until I finished the job I was already on.

I had thought you could skip the ones you hadn't done. You'd probably want to if you were a new or returning player because the event has been running since 2017, meaning there are now seventy-two quests in the full sequence, not counting the new ones this year. There are a lot of rewards from previous years that still have some currency, not least the huge number of house items, but the main thrust of the event has always been to gear up and who wants a load of outdated armor with inferior stats?

The wiki is somewhat confusing on whether you can skip the years you don't want to do: "Each of the quests must be completed in the order they were released, starting with the quests from 2017. You cannot skip ahead to later points in the quest series. *2023 can be completed without previous progress in this questline." (Emphasis theirs.) Why 2023 is different from the rest I couldn't tell you but it doesn't seem to have been the start of a new, more relaxed ruleset because this year's starter quest looked to be firmly gated behind completion of last year's.

I imagine the reason I thought you could skip was because in 2023 you really could. Maybe I did. I haven't checked. I vaguely remember deciding last year that, since I wasn't going to use any of the gear, I wouldn't bother doing the quests. Or maybe that's post hoc rationalization. It's entirely possible I just forgot.

There were nine quests in the 2024 set. There are nine every year. It takes us through the autumn to the arrival of the annual expansion, one quest dropping every week after the regular update, usually, on a Tuesday. It's a pleasant weekly ritual to get the new one, fly around for a few minutes ticking the necessary boxes, then come back to see what new stuff you can grab off the store-panda.

If you let yourself fall behind, however, it all feels a bit less amusing. Last night and this morning I did all nine quests. I did it the fastest way possible, using my All Access Membership for instant travel to and from the various zones, moving between the various locations within those zones on my very fast, max-level flying mount and using the detailed walkthrough, complete with copy-and-paste waypoints, from the Wiki.

Since I was on my Level 130 Berserker, all mobs in every required zone were grey to me and non-aggressive. All I had to do was port, fly, gather and return. It still took me two hours to finish all nine quests.

The quests themselves were exactly as they always are: gather some samples from various parts of Norrath so some lazy/greedy/cowardly panda can satisfy their curiosity/stuff themselves stupid. Bao Bao is quite an endearing panda as these things go and the quest dialog was amusing enough but the most interesting part to me is how long the dev team can keep the whole thing going. 

There's a whole gang of pandas standing around in Sundered Frontier now. I think there are three questgivers and two vendors at least. When the thing started in 2017 there was only Yun Zi handing out the quests and he did his own storekeeping.

Thanks to the wiki, I had very little trouble finding everything. Almost all of the items were there in profusion. Most of them sparkled and some were oversized. A couple were none of those things but the wiki warned me about that and told me where to look, with accompanying screenshots. 

The only part that gave me any real trouble was the quest that asked for some foliage from Lesser Feydark. Lesser Fey is and always has been a total pain to navigate. It has no portals at all accessible via map travel. The best you can do is map to either Butcherblock and take a griffin from the cliffs above the dock or port to Greater Feydark or Steamfont and fly to the zone-in.

I went via Butcherblock first, only to find that the BB entrance brings you in on the opposite side of the map to where you want to go. I figured it would be faster to map-travel to GFey and come back in from that side than to fly across the whole of LFey so I did that and it wasn't. 

I'd forgotten that you land in Kelethin and Kelethin has its own map and I got myself lost coming out of the dumb elf tree city and ended up wandering about for ages before I finally worked out where I was supposed to be going. 

Once in LFey it wasn't much better because the whole place is constructed from a bunch of separate valleys with invisible walls preventing you from flying between them. You have to follow rivers and go through tunnels and you can't fly through most of the connections so you have to go on foot. The whole place is a confusing, annoying mess and flying really doesn't make it any easier.

So that was fun. I got it done eventually, anyway.

With all of that out of the way, I was finally able to get the first of this year's quests, for which we will be collecting rocks, just for a change. It turns out Bao Bao, who demonstrated his lack of self-control when it comes to stuffing things in his mouth all through the 2024 questline, ate his way through his grandmother's entire vegetable garden and now he needs to give her some pretty rocks for her collection to get back on her good side.

Guess who'll be doing the hard work lugging those rocks about. Muggins, that's who.

And that brings me to the question, once again, of whether it will be worth it. I looked at the first set of rewards, which include a bunch of purple Augments, some weapons and the inevitable bags of decorating items and... that's it. 

Usually there are full sets of armor for all weights and dozens of Augments, along with a few other odds and ends, utilities and so on. I'm not sure if that means none of those things are going to be on the vendor this time or whether they'll only appear week-by-week. And if they aren't going to be there, does that mean there's going to be a substantial change to the way gear works in the new expansion?

Or does it just mean someone has finally admitted that handing out three full sets of gear in three months, each of which upgrades the one before, is taking generosity beyond the bounds of reason? If so, you can bet there will be howls of complaint.

Not that the dagger I took does upgrade the best one already available to me, anyway. I took it because it's an upgrade for the weapon I was using but I wasn't using the best weapon I own. I haven't claimed the weapon from the Anniversary crate yet. The panda dagger won't upgrade that and if there is panda armor this year and it has the same Resolve as the weapons, that won't upgrade the anniversary gear, either.

In fact, it will be much worse. The Anniversary stuff is 525 Resolve. The new panda weapons are 505. 

Even if we discount the Anniversary gear, which you only get for one character on the account, Resolve 505 isn't going to cut it for long. As a casual soloist I already have lots of 495 pieces so it's a minimal upgrade and it will be instantly rendered redundant the day the expansion arrives. I don't know what the Tishan's gear will come in at but you can bet it will be at minimum 505 and come with Augments that work in the new zones, which none of the old ones will.

Some of that is speculation. This is, or should be, a level cap increase year. Those are usually when things change the most so anything could happen when the expansion arrives. As must be plain from everything I ever write about EQII, the game is ferociously over-complicated, especially when it comes to gear and stats. The team have been trying to strip away some of the accrued cruft for a while now but every time they remove anything there's an outcry, not least from the crew that claims to play EQII specifically because it's complicated and difficult to understand.

I'll be doing the panda quests anyway. They're a fun little diversion and don't take too long (Lesser Feydark always excepted.) and they unlock the vendors for the whole account so it's a useful option for some of my sub-max-level characters. Most of all, though, I don't want to fall behind again. 

Who knows, next year the pandas might come up with something different. If they do, it'd be nice to be able to grab it right away instead of playing catch-up first.

Smokes And Mirrors

Somewhat to my surprise, I find it's been more than three weeks since the last What Have I Been Listening To Lately. That may be because pretty much all I have been listening to for months is the music I've been making myself with Suno. 

I listen to my own songs every day. On the desktop, on the laptop, in the car, at work. I listen to the new ones and the old ones and all the ones inbetween. I listen to them in preference to everything and anything else, including all the things I would have been listening to before. 

Even Lana doesn't get much of a look-in at the moment, although that would change pretty sharpish if she'd actually get on and release something. How long has the new album been delayed now? Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. came out in March 2023 and the follow-up, curently going by the idiosyncratic working title "Stove", is now scheduled for January 2026, having slipped several dates already.

That'll be the longest gap between full-length releases since the start of her career, even including the work she did before she became Lana del Rey. There haven't even been any teaser singles since Henry, Come On! back in April of this year. I guess that's what married life does for you.

When I can tear myself away from the mirror, I have at least been keeping up with some new music, here and there. It's all a little sporadic and random and I haven't been doing a lot of trawling for tunes on my own, mostly relying on news feeds to pop me hints, but I have collected a few good picks for the post I'm about to write. Am writing. Have written, as I do the final edit.

Where to start? Something fast and loud is usually indicated to get the party started. Let's see...

Ah, yes, this will do nicely.

 POSH - The Pill

I mean, where do you begin? They put so much work into the videos, The Pill, don't they? And the attitude! As they say, if you could bottle it...

That drumbeat is incredibly familiar, too. But then everything is, now. It's a blessing and a curse. 

It's the deadpan that sells it, I think. All their songs have it and it just levels the whole thing up. Apparently irony hasn't entirely gone out of fashion after all. 

They remind me of a band I really hoped would go somewhere but didn't, Ice Cold Slush, although now I watch the Slushies again, maybe not so much. Perhaps I'm thinking of someone else. There are a lot of female duos. It's hard to keep them straight.

 Every Ounce Of Me - Jenny On Holiday

Ooh! Ooh! Thematic segue! This is Jenny Hollingworth, one half of Let's Eat Grandma, probably the best female duo of the last several years (I'm including Wet Leg in that, although really I think they should be considered a full, five-piece band, even though they never are.) 

Lets Eat Grandma is another favorite of mine now well overdue for a new album. The truly excellent Two Ribbons came out in April 2022 and there's been pretty much nothing since. Well, they did the soundtrack to that TV show I liked, the one that changed its name half-way through, The Bastard Sone and The Devil Himself, aka Half Bad, which was the title of the source material, an excellent YA trilogy by Sally Green.  

LEG (Never noticed how that acronyms until now.) have not, I'm very happy to say, broken up. They're just doing that annoying thing all groups do at some point, namely putting the band on hold while they "pursue solo projects". They're childhood best friends who became critical darlings while they were still extremely young (Late teens.) and then suffered some personal tragedies and had a big falling out, the reconciliation from which led to the last album. Hardly surprising they both want some time out from each other. It's just good to hear from them again. Either of them.

 Blue Velvet - Princess Nokia

But then, as Princess Nokia so wisely points out, girlhood is a spectrum. 

I know sod all about rap and not much more about hip-hop, even though I've been listening to it on and off since the late 'eighties and I own a very good book on the history of the genres, which I have even read. That book, like most writing on hip-hop, talks about "flow" a lot. I'm not convinced I know what flow is but I'm pretty sure Princess Nokia's is exemplary.

I also don't exactly know what a "drop" is but again, whatever the hell the bass is doing in this one is probably it. Does something to the insides, doesn't it?

 Tip Toe - Tierra Whack

Copy-Paste last two paragraphs. Find"Princess Nokia". Replace with "Tierra Whack". 

 went to bum a cigarette - april june

Why is it that even though I don't smoke and haven't in a very, very long time, I still get triggered by the word in lyrics and titles? And when I say "triggered" I don't mean, as I immediately realized would be the natural interpretation, "triggered to want a cigarette again", something that never, ever happens, but "triggered" as in "immediately pay attention to"?

I might very well have clicked through this when I happened upon it, even if it had been called something else, because "april june", no capitalization, is a an attention-getter. But it was the word "cigarette" that did it. Also the phrase, "bum a cigarette", which I used to hear a lot but haven't for a while. 

I've commented on this before but given the precipitous drop-off in tobacco smoking, (Down to an historic low of just under 12% of the adult population in the UK, as of 2023.) it seems odd that so many songs and music videos feature people lighting up, drawing in, blowing out and rolling up. It is true that the age demographic with the highest incidence of smoking is the 25-34 range, which is bang on for the artists making the music and acting in the videos I tend to feature here, but even there it's not even 15% that smoke. You'd think it would be off-putting to the rest of the target audience, especially with the youngest group, 18-24 year-olds, showing the fastest-falling tobacco use of all. 

And it's almost always actual cigarettes, too. Hardly ever vaping, which has an even smaller take-up, just in case you were thinking that's what all the kids do nowadays. I guess it's just that smoking does still make you look cool, just like your parents always said it wouldn't. Even now hardly anyone's really doing it. Or possibly because.

 Temptation Inside Of Your Heart 

Thurston Moore (Velvet Underground cover)

Let's switch tracks. I've been reading a lot of interviews Lou Reed did with various music journalists over about forty years recently and also reviews of all his albums, so he's fresh in my mind again. First time that's happened for a while.

Lou was my first, great musical crush. I got into the Velvet Underground at a fairly early age, just a few months before Lou's solo career finally took off with Walk on the Wild Side in 1972. I bought every one of his solo albums on release, from Transformer through to New Sensations, twelve years later. I dropped off the Lou train after that but I've picked over the stuff I missed and filled out some gaps since then, so I feel I'm pretty much up to speed on his long career.

This particular number never got a studio release while the Velvets were around but it turned up on the excellent VU compilation, where it was one of the stand-outs. This, in my opinion, is not a great cover. It starts out well but wanders off half-way through. Sonic Youth have always been one of those bands I feel I ought to like more than I actually do and this kind of demonstrates why. Still, nice to be reminded of the song again, although I suggest going and listening to the original.

Lou Reed Was My Babysitter - Jeff Tweedy

Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco I also feel I should like more than I do. I didn't much like this, the first time I heard it, but it's a bit of a grower. He's clearly doing Lou although he sounds more like Jonathan Richman at times. But Jonathan was doing Lou, too, for a long time anyway, so it's much the same thing.

I strongly empathize with the sentiment behind the song, which in Jeff's words is that "I was babysat by fucking Lou Reed, literally, in my bedroom as a 10-year-old, 12-year-old kid. His music was a more legitimate mentor to me than most of my teachers." That was me, too, although I can't match jeff's impressive 10-12 age profile. I'd have to add a couple of years on the front end of that.

 Aston Martin - Liv de Toma

Enough with the rock. Time for some pop. Also, I just found out how to email a whole bunch of videos  and have them all turn up as little thumbnails you click on and they open in full screen inside the email client. Isn't that neat?

There are a lot of singers doing this kind of thing. Most of them I glaze over after a few lines and some of them stick and it's hard to be sure why. Then a fraction of the stickers go on to break out, like Addison Rae, while most of them just thrash around for a while, going nowhere much. Then they vanish. Or turn into something else.

I'm guessing this will be the only time we get to see Liv de Toma here but who knows? 

She's A Director 

 Mechatok (feat. Isabella Lovestory)

I probably ought to have known who Mechatok was but I didn't. I had to look him up. He's a producer based in London and Berlin (Like they all are if they're not in New York or L.A. I guess...) who's worked with a bunch of people that feature here regularly - Charli XCX, Bladee, Yung Lean...

And now Isabella Lovestory, whose involvement explains why I clicked through. It sounds a bit synthwave to my ears. I do like a bit of synthwave now and again.

 Sad Dog - Madi Gaines

So much for the pure pop part of the post. I'm not sure what Madi Gaines would call what she's doing but not "pop", I imagine. The internet as a whole is pretty convinced it's "queer indie rock/shoegaze". 

A weird thing that's happening now is that I keep hearing songs by other people that sound not unlike the songs I'm making myself. This is one. It's there in the rhythms and the phrasing and the intonation. Maybe I'm making indie rock/shoegaze, too, although I'm not about to appropriate the qualifying tag. Then again, the characters in the songs, they would. Some of them.

My late-blooming songwriting is very, very different from the stuff I was doing back in the eighties. Better, I think, but then I would, or I wouldn't keep doing it. What I'm less sure about is whether that's a direct consequence of my method, re-purposing prose, or if it's that I've developed a different ear, listening to a lot of contemporary artists. If I was one of those old guys who only ever listens to stuff they liked when they were young, would everything I'm doing now sound like it did when I was doing it forty years ago? 

I guess I don't need to care. I'm not one of those guys. Thank god. I pray I never will be.

OK, it seems I had quite a few more tunes stacked up than I thought. This is going to run long unless I watch myself. I think we'll have three more and save the rest for later. But which three?

Maybe not the same people that were in the last one. So no bar italia or Goldie Boutier this time round, good though the songs are. You can always click through if you're interested.

Paris - Mikayla Geier

Here's someone new. Gen Z can't get enough of the jazz, so I hear. I can, quite easily, but I do like a bit of bossa once in a while.

 me, myself and god - Faerybabyy

Don't think we've had Faerybabyy for a bit, have we? Well, we're having her again now, whether we have or not. If I had to give this a one-word review, that word would be "insistent". I suspect you might choose another.

 Make Time/Waste Time - Snowmen

Hah! Saved a noisy one for last, for once. That's a real set-closer they've got there.

I'm having some trouble remembering when I last saw a less likely-looking lead singer. If this was one of those seventies movies that follow the rise of some imaginary rock group from the back rooms of working men's clubs all the way to drugs, dissolution and super-stardom, you know there'd be a scene about half an hour in, when the big record company that just signed them takes the out-of-his-depth manager aside and tells him the singer has to go.

I'm not sure it works that way nowadays but I still have trouble seeing this guy on the late-night chat show circuit. Of course, that's not going to be a problem much longer...

Ooh. Politics. Probably time I stopped. 

Out Of The Fog They Came

EverQuest II is a very busy game for one that's been plodding along for more than twenty years, largely catering to the same, ever-diminishing group of players. I've mentioned the plethora of holiday events many times. Since all of them tend to get one or two additions every year, the dense crust of content surrounding each gets thicker all the time. But the holidays are just one of the numerous content streams that keep bubbling up, over and over again.

Panda Panda Panda, for example. That's back. It's not exactly a holiday, in that there's no specific event being celebrated. It's just some agarophobic pandas with a warehouse of extremely powerful items they keep trying to give away for information they could very easily google. Assuming Norrath has the internet, of course.

I'm not going to say any more about Panda Panda Panda today because although I read that the event had started, I haven't been to see what the reclusive bears want this time. I'll get a separate post out of that soon enough, I'm sure.

I'm also not going to talk about the new(ish) Fabled dungeon that only arrived in the game a short time ago, with the summer update. It does have a solo mode I could try out but until yesterday I hadn't bothered to find out didn't know where the zone-in was. I do now but it's going to have to wait until I'm both in the mood and have the time for a proper session.

No, today I'm going to reveal a very few facts about this year's expansion prequel event, Heralds of Oblivion. Every year we get one of these, whether we want it or not. Sometimes they can be really good. I can remember a couple that kept me occupied for weeks, putting several characters through them for the experience or the loot. 

 

Mostly though, and especially recently, they've been a bit thin. Usually a very quick quest to introduce us to the next, previously unheard-of, Norrathian secret society and a bunch of repeatable quests so we can ingratiate ourselves with them for no very obvious reason. There seem to be an unlimited number of these groups, most of them self-appointed guardians of something or other, roaming around the world like a bunch of Boy Scouts looking for old ladies to help across the street or planar incursions to repel.

This yeare's bunch are called The Flamebearers and they differ from the usual run of do-gooders by being associated with Lady Najena, who I could have sworn was a Medium-Sized Bad last time I met her. She's organizing this year's bunfight all the same so maybe it's one of those enemy-of-my-enemy things or perhaps she's had a bang on the head. I imagine we'll meet her at some point and she'll monologue all about it.

Angeliana on the forums claims "Heralds of Oblivion is shaping up to be the biggest prelude event to rock Norrath since 2018’s Against the Elements event that preceded Chaos Descending." If I could remember what that one was like I might be able to benchmark against it. I bet I posted something... ah! Here we are...

"I spent more than two hours helping Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science this morning. The introduction to the event was even more perfunctory than usual and the quest itself took less than ten minutes, half of which was finding the main questgiver... "

Hmm. That doesn't sound like it was much to write home about, does it? But wait...  "None of that mattered a jot when I got stuck into the gameplay. It's exactly what I want from an MMO."

Aha! That's more like it! And I remember something about it now. It was a big, open world affair, where you could fight waves of mobs and close rifts, just as if you were... playing Rift, I guess. I also noted "the rewards are fantastic", suggesting it wasn't just fun but profitable, too.  

It's too soon to say if this year's prequel matches up but the signs are promising. I ran through the first several quests last night and those were more substantial than usual. They took a while and involved some travel and some combat that was easy but not a complete walkover, thanks to mostly taking place in endgame zones, where I had a lot more trouble from random, wandering mobs than the ones I was there to kill. (There are also tradeskill quests for the non-combattants among us. I took those but haven't done them yet.)

 I can immediately see the similarity between 2025 and 2018 - it's another bunch of rifts that spawn waves of mobs you have to dispatch before firing up your doohickey and closing the portal. I did that the required number of times to progress the quests, along with a few other menial tasks, acquiring a bunch of event tokens along the way. Who takes those and what they give you for them I do not yet know.

I also don't know where the next questgivers are, the ones that hand out what I'm guessing are the repeatable quests. The event neatly sends you to whatever the highest-available open world zones for your character level might be, so in my case the NPCs will be somewhere in the two endgame open world zones, Sodden Archipelago and Western Wastes, but I couldn't find them and it was getting late so I decided to wait until someone posts their exact locations on the wiki or, better yet, adds the POIs to EQ2Maps.

I can say that the rifts I've had to close so far are not random. They appear in the same spots and have a fairly short cooldown, of the order of five or ten minutes I'd guess, meaning you can just pick one and stay there as long as you need. Or you can fly around like a dumb-ass like I did, looking for new ones, until you finally realize you just keep coming back to the same two.

At max level, I'd recommend the ones in Western Wastes for the simple reason that zone is much less cluttered with foliage, as the name suggests. A lot of it is flat ice floes, which makes spotting the rifts as you fly around much easier. Sodden Archipelago is a jungle and a bunch of ravines, so not ideal for aerial reconnaissance.

The storyline is interesting. Well, it is if you play EQII. Not, I imagine, for anyone else. The rifts are planar but don't appear to come from (Or, presumably, go to...) any planes we already know. The creatures coming out of them are vaguely elemental but of that odd order of elements that includes things like fog and mist. Dragon magic seems to be involved but there's no obvious draconic connection.

 

At one point a treant of some sort turns up and starts throwing threats and accusations about. Everyone denies having any intent to invade the plane of wood or wherever the hell the thing comes from but it pays no attention and keeps on ranting. 

I have to say I was intrigued. It made me wonder what the expansion might involve and where we might be headed, which is clearly the main point of an expansion prequel, so job done there, I'd say. I'll definitely follow the questline to the point when it becomes certain there's nothing more but repeatables for token or faction left. I might be at that point alread or I might not.

After that, I guess it depends how much fun closing the rifts is and how good the rewards are. I'll get back to you when I know more. 

All in all, though, a very solid start to this year's expansion cycle. 

And... We're Back!

That didn't take long! If it had been a weekend, I guess you could have called it a weekend break. Not sure there's a name for two nights away when those nights are Monday and Tuesday.

We had a great time, anyway. The weather forecast was very poor but the actual weather turned out much better. We had a couple of showers but things mostly stayed dry and the sun was out for a good while both days and today as we came slowly back. We did get a downpour in the middle of the night and the bus leaked a bit, here and there, but only in places where it didn't matter.

The bus in question is a double-decker that's been converted into a two-bedroom apartment, with the bedrooms and a large lounge upstairs and a kitchen, dining room and sitting room downstairs. It's amazingly roomy, larger than plenty of actual flats I've been in (And lived in.) although it might not seem that way if you were six feet tall. 

I used to be five-eleven but I've shrunk with age, as people do. Now I'm more like five-nine and I could stand upright with about an inch clearance in the center of the rooms. A couple of times I grazed my head against the ceiling even so.

Not that that detracted from the excellent experience. We both agreed we'd happily live in a conversion like this. There would be plenty of room for two people (The bus actually sleeps four according to the website but if it was two couples who shared the two double beds, at least another two could easily sleep downstairs on the long, padded seats.

The whole thing is completely off-grid, in a field up a dead-end country lane, leading out of a tiny village. Electricity is solar-powered or from a generator. We managed with just the solar because the generator is apparently noisy and you have to text the guy to come over and start it. We had plenty of power to keep the lights on at night and charge our phones and my laptop so what else do you need?

 

There's a wood-burning stove, which we didn't use, and a gas cooker (Bottled gas.) which we did. Also a microwave, which we didn't even notice until we were just about to leave. As well as no mains electricity, there's no mains water. 

So what comes out of the taps, then? Air? No, water, but not from the regular supply. It comes from an underground reservoir of undetermined (By me...) provenance. There's a warning that it's not suitable to drink neat from the tap but that's immediately undercut by a further note that all the locals use the same supply and they drink it, the implication clearly being "so, are you going to be a wuss about it?")

We drank it. Although only in tea and coffee, so it was boiled first. Also we cooked with it. Boiled again, though. Beryl drank it neat but then she drinks out of muddy puddles. Actually, she deliberately stirs up the mud in clean puddles with her paw so as to make them muddy and then she drinks out of them. I've seen her do it.

Beryl absolutely loved the bus. She acted like it was her new home from the moment we got there and settled down faster than I've seen her settle anywhere new. She's crazy for stairs and steps so she was up and down the very steep staircase all the time. (That's another thing you might want to bear in mind if you have mobility issues - the spiral staircase is not for the wobbly of limb.)

The view was fantastic, provided you like a view that resembles a still photograph. Seriously, you could stare out the window for ten minutes at a stretch and never see movement. If it wasn't for the odd bird flying by you could make that ten hours.

Beryl, as you can see, took the opportunity to practice her zen mastery. She stared happily out the window at nothing for ages. Of course, dogs can smell things three miles away, so I imagine there was a rich scent vista to keep her occupied.

 

Outside, apart from endless, empty fields, there's a completely self-contained patio with seats, tables, barbecue equipment and a separate shower unit. We had the bus door open all the time and Beryl could go out safely and potter about with no danger of her wandering off. Not that she would. She doesn't like to be more than a few yards away from one or other of us if she can possibly avoid it.

We did some driving around the local area, which is all farmland, villages and very small market towns. It's close to moorland but we didn't go onto the moors this time. We did go to a reservoir with the amusing name of Wimbleball Lake, though. It was very low after the long, dry summer but the nature reserve around it was great for walking on a sunny, late summer day (Or early autumn, depending how you're counting.)

And that is our holiday for the year. Since we got Beryl we don't go far or for long. Maybe one day we'll get her inoculated and dog-passported and take her somewhere exotic. Like France. Or even Northern Spain. I think that would be about her limit. She's a great traveler and she loves new places but she doesn't do well with heat. Perhaps we should go north instead of south...

We're here for now and the foreseeable, though, so normal blogging service may be resumed. Or it may not because I have to figure out a new schedule involving driving over to see my mother three or four times a week instead of once a month as I have done since... well, always. 

Also I have to buy a car to do the driving in. We've always managed with one between us up to now. 

All of which means, if there are unusual gaps in continuity here, that's probably why. Although I don't really expect it will make that much difference. I can knock these things out a lot faster than I usually do, if I have to. 

Like this one, for example... 

I'm Currently Out Of The Office (And Sleeping In A Bus)

  

I realize now a picture of the bus would have been good but it's night and I haven't taken one. Hang on, maybe I can steal one... Okay, that's it, up there.

It's late, I've the drink taken (First time in many months.) and I'm sitting in the dark, typing this on the laptop in a converted double-decker bus, in a field, in the middle of nowhere. 

Yes, I'm on holiday (Or vacation if you prefer.) although only for a couple of days because with Beryl (Who's asleep beside me.) that's about all we can manage these days.

I just thought I'd pop up a quick post to say there may not be another for a day or two. I'm certainly not about to write anything, so let's just settle for a somewhat appropriate tune.

If that's not what this is then I don't know where we are.

Normal service may be resumed at some indefinite point in the future. 

A Token Effort

Introducing...

The Community Token System

Wait! What? What the heck is that? 

You may well ask. Here, I'll let Angeliana, Senior Community Manager for EverQuest II explain. 

Got that? Good, because I'm not sure I have.

As far as I can make out, it's a new reward system for participating in events. Sometimes inside the game itself but mostly on social media. 

There's one running already, Can you guess what it is?

No, you can't. You'd be all day trying. It's an anagram competition in which you have to unscramble the names of ten NPCs. Here, have a go. See how you do.

• ovine roofgarden
• bermilksop nostril
• age hypo thorp
• alvina vibes
• ashton kneecapped
• celery mayo
• balking bilgegregg
• adrea hemoglobin
• atomize hats
• alga stung

No? Me neither. I've been playing this game since 2004 and none of those is ringing any bells. And do you know why? Because, like any rational person, I don't pay any attention to the names of NPCs. 

Why would I? I'm not going to hang out with them or call them up on the phone. Either they want me to do something or they serve a function. Why would I need to know the full name of a bank teller or a shopkeeper? Maybe, if it was on a name badge, I might know their first name but would I remember it for next time? 

In fact, I have all overhead names in EQII set to Mouseover so I only ever see them when I specifically target someone. I don't need all that visual clutter and cruft.

Looking at the anagrams, several of which are really good, I suspect Angeliana, or whoever came up with the list, enjoys making anagrams out of peoples' names in real life. I've known people who do that, some of them quite compulsively. 

People who aren't engaged with the whole anagram concept but want to make some kind of puzzle tend just to randomize the names or words into gibberish. True afficionados make new words and often try to make them as funny as they can or fit them somehow to the personality of the name's owner. That's clearly what's going on here.

Obviously, I won't be sending in my answers because I don't have any. If I did, though, I'd be sending them directly to Angeliana in a Private Message, which seems quite an odd way to go about it, although I guess you can't have people just posting the unscrambled names on a forum thread.

Except I have seen other games do similar puzzles and use exactly that form of response, which always suggests the whole thing is actually a giveaway, not a competition at all, like all those codes you can type in to get freebies that are supposedly special rewards for doing something in particular but which get re-posted on third-party websites and social media and work for absolutely anybody. Not that I ever uses any of those...

In contrast, this is a genuine competition. There are only thirty prizes and Angeliana is going to select them randomly using  a "Wheel Of Names", which she says like it's a thing we all know. She's even going to record herself doing it "to show validity of the wins."

It all seems remarkably complicated to me, especially for a couple of tokens to spend in a gift shop. Maybe Ogor the Ogre (Even Ttobey isn't buying that name.) sells really good stuff, though, like the endgame raid gear Shintar was telling us you can get for another new token feature in Star Wars: the Old Republic. 

Yeah, he isn't, though. I was curious so I went to have a look at what he's got to offer. He was very easy to find. He's in Qeynos and Freeport (Because in Norrath it's standard practice to be two places at once if you're an NPC.). I never have a clue where any new NPC is likely to set up their stall in Qeynos but in Freeport it's always down by the docks or in the charmingly-named Execution Plaza (Political prisoners executed every hour, on the hour, since 2004.)

Better yet, you can ask a guard and get directions. They used to just swivel on their heels and point but now they still do that but also send a glowing trail right to the person you're looking for. I tried it just now and Ogor was literally about  fifty feet from where I was standing, so that was embarassing.

As you can see, he is not doling out raid gear for a token or two. He hasn't got any useable gear at all. Someone more cynical than me might say he hasn't got anything useful at all.

He's got a lot of house items, which is always nice but nothing so special you could imagine anyone wanting to unscramble a whole bunch of anagrams, then type the results into a chatbox in the hope of winning a lottery to get enough tokens to buy two of them. And remember, this is "a bit harder of an event", which is why you get two. Mostly, I can only assume, you'll be getting just one. If you're lucky.

Other than that, Ogor has a couple of quite nice petamorph wands, some decent appearance-slot robes, a couple of illusion items, some fireworks, two vanity pets and a peculiar-looking ground mount in the shape of a wolf wearing a saddle and bridle. The wolf looks like there's moss growing on it, too.

This is all the same sort of stuff that routinely gets given away in holiday events, of which, as I've noted before, Norrath has a plethora. It appeals to a very specific demographic that seems to make up a significant proportion of forum posters and quite possibly of the playerbase as a whole. I can't remember exactly when it happend but at some point in its twenty-year history, EQII became a game suited mostly for absolutely obsessive min-maxers at one end and completist collectionists of fluff at the other, with not an awful lot of room for anyone inbetweeen.

The latter are going to see some merit in the new Community Token System, I'm sure, although collectors and decorators tend to be picky. The endgame statisticians are presumably going to ignore it entirely. Whether there's much cross-over between the two factions I wouldn't care to speculate.

I don't think I'd go out of my way to earn tokens for any of Ogor's stock. If I happen to acquire any, though, I won't complain. I'd quite like those petamorph wands. 

I suppose it's going to depend mostly on what the events are like. I note that as well as competitions and similar events on the forums or Discord, Guides can also hand out tokens as rewards in the game itself. I haven't seen a guide event for a while but it's nice to know they still exist and also that Guides now have a way of encouraging players to join in with ad hoc events rather than just re-running the familiar Guide Quests (Not that those aren't always welcome - you can get some nice bags that way.)

Angeliana does also say that "From time to time, he will even get some items added" so we can hope for better, later. I very much doubt he'll ever have anything more than cosmetics to give away, though.

And that's fine. When I first read the forum post announcing the new feature I did worry for a moment that it was a replacement for Panda! Panda! Panda!, which does give some very good gear for the minor effort of some extremely easy questing.

The supposed lore explanation "Ogor the Happy, wants terribly to be an adventurer. Alas he cannot, so he needs you to get him some Norrathian Fables and bring them to him. In turn, he will let you choose from a plethora of items he happens to have sitting around." does make his motivation sound remarkably similar to Yun Zi's. I suspect that has more to do with lack of imagination than anything else. It's also how Qho's super-annoying gathering questline is explained.

Also, I just proved myself a liar by remembering their names immediately, without having to look anything up. I guess some NPCs do familiarize themselves over time after all.

Good luck getting a funny anagram out of either of their names, though!  

How Very Civilized

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd have to write.

Last night I played some Civilization IV.

Heh. After all those years of reading other people blogging about the Civ series and 4X games in general and thinking "Well, it's all very interesting to read about but I can't imagine ever playing something like that". A bit like EVE or Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, I guess. Some games are just more fun to read about than play.

Or so I thought. And quite possibly still do. Too soon to say for sure.

Obviously, I wouldn't have tried it at all if I hadn't gotten it for free from Prime. I'm scratching around at the moment, trying to find something to play that can hold my attention but which can also be stopped at a moment's notice. I was going through the options when I noticed it and thought, well, why not?

Talking of options, boy, there are a lot of them! Everyone likes to talk about their Steam backlogs but I've always said I don't really have that much of one. Which is true, as it goes, although not as true as it used to be. My Amazon Prime Gaming backlog though...

I have 162 games on Prime, of which I have played nineteen and finished five. On GOG I have 60, with just three played and none finished. On Epic Games I have another 40 titles, of which I have played exactly two - and one of those is Fortnite. All of them, across the three platforms, bar a handful, were freebies from Prime - and I probably claim less than half of the games Prime gives away.

And yet somehow, even with almost 250 unplayed titles to choose from, I can never seem to find anything I want to play. Worse, when I do pick something and give it a go, it doesn't stick. 

Which is how I came to install and open CivIV a couple of days ago. It seemed like it might be worth a try. I mean, everyone else seems to enjoy it...

So, did I? Enjoy it, that is?

Hmm. Tough question. I'll get back to you when I have an answer. 

So far I've played for a couple of hours in two sessions and it's been... occupying. Time certainly passes. There's a lot to do. It keeps you busy.

For my first session I jumped straight in and started playing. That wasn't so much a choice as a mistake, by which I don't mean it went badly, just that I didn't mean to do it. I assumed there'd be an in-game tutorial. There is not.

There is a Tutorial, of course. I just didn't notice it was a separate option on the main menu. I'd completely forgotten that's how they used to do it in the old days.

Starting without any kind of lead-in or explanation was an odd experience. Confusing but also fairly straightforward, by which I mean the game is somehow still playable, even when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing or indeed what you ought to be doing.

That's mainly because every single UI element seems to have a mouse-over tool-tip and most actions seem to require not much more than a left click. I just moused over everything and started clicking and something approximating a game seemed to coalesce around me.

I left everything on the defaults. I built a city. I killed some bears. I explored to clear the fog of war. I built another city. I kept picking from lists of options and the years rolled by. I started at the dawn of civilization, 4000 BC, and by the time I finished an hour later it was the Renaissance.

For some reason I kept founding religions, which seemed extremely weird. I was playing as Spain and yet I still managed to found Buddhism, then Confucianism, then Taoism. I would have thought a necessary corollary of founding Confucianism, for example, would be that you'd have to be Confucius, or for a ruler to take the credit, they'd at least need to count Confucius as a subject. It seemed unlikely either he or Buddha would have been living in Barcelona or Madrid at the time but I guess they must have gotten there from China somehow...

Other leaders kept popping up to ask me to make deals with them or break deals I'd made with other nations. I always agreed with whatever they wanted and always made peace not war. I hadn't figured out how to get my army to fight anyone except bears and lions so peace seemed like the best option.

I had trouble getting any of my units to go where I wanted anyway. I lost Barcelona because someone attacked it and I couldn't figure out how to get a Warrior unit over there in time. It didn't seem to matter much because by then I had a third city and I was having more than enough trouble managing two of them. I was quite glad to see Barcelona go.

I could tell there was some kind of score being kept in the lower right-hand corner of the screen but I didn't really know what made the numbers change or what the victory condition might be. I figured bigger numbers were probably better, though, and Spain was either at the top of the list or at least in the top half most of the time. There were always other civilizations doing a lot worse than me so I was happy enough with how things were going.

All of that went on for a little over an hour before it started to get on top of me a bit. I figured out how to save the game and stopped. I could see how someone could get into that "Just one more turn" frame of mind I've read about, especially if they knew what they were doing. It is quite compulsive, pushing the button to see what happens next.

I guess I must have enjoyed myself at least a little because yesterday I felt like having another go. I thought maybe I ought to try and find out at least a little about how to play so I googled around for a while and learned... there is a Tutorial after all. I did think it was strange there wasn't one but then I thought maybe, back in the day, the game would have come in a box with a manual as thick as a novel and you were probably supposed to read that before you got started.

Last night I tried again, only this time I didn't load up my saved game. I opened the tutorial instead. 

I learned a few things, not least what Sid Meier sounds like. At least, I assume that's him, reading out the instructions, like a high school history teacher, following a familiar lesson plan on a warm afternoon in front of a drowsy classroom, just before school breaks up for summer. And the balding fellow with the fixed smile, dressed like a sales assistant at a discount warehouse? That must be Sid, too. The guy clearly doesn't have much of an ego.

The tutorial was helpful, anyway. The most important thing I learned was that you have to right-click to get anyone to go where you tell them. That explained a lot.

There was some useful information about why you might want to do certain things, too, not just how you'd make them happen. As I said, for the most part it's not too hard to figure out what things do from  the tool tips but it's much harder to see why you'd want to do any of them. I mostly just picked stuff I like, like art and literature and music and ignored all the boring agriculture and industry. I probably should have played Greece.

What became clear from the tutorial is that the game is basically a management sim. In all the thousands and thousands of words I'd read about it, I don't think that had ever really come across. People always blog about the interesting stuff, don't they? Who declared war on whom or who invented what. They never tell you how many tiny little repetitive actions it took before anything interesting happened at all.

I was about to say I've never liked management sims but then it occurred to me that's not entirely true. Right at the beginning of my gaming life, I used to play them quite enthusiastically. I remember one my ex-wife and I used to play a lot on the ZX Spectrum, a political sim where you had to manage all kinds of factors to keep yourself in power. I remember we used to sit there in our bean bags and shout at the screen. 

I think it was called Dictator. Yep! That's the one. I bet I still have the cassette somewhere.

I even wrote a management sim once. I think it might be the only game I ever coded from scratch. I wrote it one afternoon at my mother's house on my step-father's Oric computer that he'd won in some competition and never used. It had some ridiculously tiny memory measured in kilobytes and I wrote a moonbase sim for it that worked, just about. I wrote it in RAM, though, so it only existed for that afternoon and never again.

All of that was back in the eighties. The early eighties. I don't believe I've played a management sim since. 

Of course, the 4X genre is a hybrid, with other gameplay beyond resource management. There's a big map to explore and you can fight animals and people but most importantly there are all those familiar names. That's what makes it interesting.

And surreal. It's very peculiar to have Elizabeth I suddenly appear and start schmoozing you, especially when Julius Caesar just left. It reminded me a bit of that Philip Jose Farmer series, Riverworld, where everyone who ever lived has been brought back to life at the same time, in the same place. Without that, I doubt it would be half as engaging.

I stuck with the tutorial for about an hour but then it was time for Beryl's evening walk so I had to stop. I couldn't see any way to save the tutorial so I just logged out. If I have to go back to the beginning and do it over, I don't think I'll bother. I reckon I know enough to get started now.

Will I, though? Am I engaged enough with the concept for another session? Possibly. It does, as I said, occupy the mind, which is welcome at the moment, as I negotiate some changes in routine, with my 93 year-old mother suddenly needing a lot more support to stay in her home than usual and her living an hour's drive away and we only having the one car.

On the other hand, there are plenty of games that do a pretty good job of occupying the mind and I can think of plenty whose gameplay would be more to my taste than 4X offers. Just none of the ones I already own, apparently. 

Maybe this is the time to buy Baldur's Gate 3.