Good Things Come - Carole & Tuesday Season 2

At nearly sixty-five years of age (This month!) I must be about as late to the anime party as anyone. I have to wonder why it's taken me this long to get here, especially when you consider I was fending off friends and acquaintances determined to persuade me Japanese animation was going to be the next big thing as far back as the early '90s. Actually, now I think about, that's almost certainly the reason.

There was a surge of interest in the genre (Is it a genre?) among my then-peer group even before that. I think it began as early as the late 'eighties. I remember Akira doing the rounds of the art house cinemas around then before it turned up on TV not long after, to much hype and ballyhoo. I remember watching it and thinking it was okay but not really being able to see what the fuss was about.

It didn't help that the people I knew who were really into anime (And manga.) back then exhibited a kind of quasi-religious mania about it. They seemed determined to proselytize and it was counterproductive, at least with me. 

Life Lesson: never go too hard when trying to share your new obsessions. A few hints and a seeming unwillingness to go into detail gets people curious enough to look into the topic for themselves. Everyone loves to feel they're the ones who discovered something new and wonderful, not that they're just following some trend. (See? I can give advice just fine. It's taking it I'm bad at!)

The upshot was that I mostly turned my back on the form (I like "form" better than genre.) for a quarter of a century or so. Over the years, active resistance decayed into indifference before finally crystallizing into curiosity. I could have saved myself a lot of wasted years by just being more open-minded in the first place but that applies to a lot more than anime.

In the end it took the advent of streaming services to break down my last residue of reserve. The damn things were right there in front of me every evening. All I had to do was click on them. Why not?

Of course, I still know absolutely nothing about the form (Sticking with that.) so my picks have been hit or miss to say the least. I've been happy to receive advice and suggestions both from commenters here and from people at work who've been steeped in this stuff for years but in the end I've mostly been using the same methods that have always served me so well in other media, by which I mean choosing books by their covers and bands by their names.

I've had the Crunchyroll app installed on Kindle Fire and the website bookmarked on PC for years now, but the choice there is so overwhelming I bounce off it every time I look. Mostly I'm happy to make my selections from Netflix and Prime, where a lot of the curation has already been done for me.

I'm also well aware the correct way to watch all non-English language movies and TV shows, animated or live action, is with subtitles but at this stage of life I really don't care so much about authenticity as I do about being entertained. From a practical perspective, dubbing is far less intrusive in animation anyway. The distracting mismatch between the shape of the mouth and the sounds coming out of it either already exists or isn't relevant. Who knows how a talking rabbit's mouth would work? Added to that, the voice acting on just about everything I've watched has been very good, so why not enjoy it?

The upshot of all of this is that my initiation into anime has been both hopelessly populist and steeped in ignorance, an approach which I think may, ironically, work in my favor. When I saw "Carole and Tuesday" I knew absolutely nothing about it. I had no idea it was by the same person behind the magnificent Cowboy Bebop. Obviously, had I known that, I would have been expecting greatness, which is precisely why I try not to know anything about what I watch until after it's over. Nothing dampens an experience faster than unrealistic expectations.

If I knew nothing about its provenance, why did I decide to watch the show? Simple.

• It was on Netflix.
• I thought the title sounded really cool.
• It was about contemporary music.

Only two of those things turned out to be true. 

I'm looking at the Overview and First Season Episode descriptions on Netflix right now. It isn't until Episode Seven that there's even a hint that the show takes place anywhere other than the here and now. And even then it's vague and ambiguous.

Carole and Tuesday is set in the future, on Mars. It's SciFi. That came as a big surprise. You would think someone might have thought to mention it when writing the promotional material but apparently either no-one thought it was relevant or they assumed anyone interested would already know. There's also no suggestion that the show carries a strong and coherent social and political message throughout, something that's there in the background from the start but which comes front and center for the whole of the second season. 

The high quality of the music should perhaps not have come as such a surprise but it did, anyway. I have a YouTube playlist from the show running as I write this and every song I've heard so far works perfectly as polished pop even without the visuals. That said, the impact of some of the songs is orders of magnitude greater when you see and hear them in their correct narrative context.

I already gave my thoughts on the first season, which I loved. I wondered whether the second could sustain the quality and the good news is that it absolutely could. The bad news is... no, there isn't any bad news. It's all good.

Well, unless you count the fact that there are only two seasons. It would be nice to have more. But even then, it's good to have a real ending and Carole and Tuesday has one, provided that, like me, you like endings that are really beginnings.

Season One very much sticks with the the premise of the show, which is that two young musicians meet by chance, fall into performing together, get noticed, start building a career and after many setbacks and some triumphs, succeed. 

"Success" in a musical career can only ever be a starting point, though, so Season Two begins with the pair not that much further forward than when they began. Rather than simply carry on the same story, Season Two opens out the backstory to reveal much more of the world in which the two girls live and offer some hints about how it came to be the way it is.

Along the way the two leads learn much about themselves, change the lives of others and finally change their world. It happens on another planet and in another time but it feels as real as if it had been the contemporary tale I was expecting. The show is in no way an allegory but it's rich in allusion to events, atitudes and issues familiar to us all from our own histories, both personal and cultural.

As a narrative it's coherent and always plausible. The setting is a heightened reality but a completely convincing one. As with most anime I've seen, (Pitifully few.) there's almost no exposition and very little explanation. For me, that's one of the form's most appealing features, although I imagine others may find it frustrating. 

Thematically, the show brings in issues of pollution, gender, political corruption, sexuality, race and identity, embedding and entwining those themes in the narrative, always allowing them to emerge organically from character and setting. The social and political concerns never unbalance the core story of two girls trying to make it in the music industry and how many of those situations came to be is largely left to the viewer's imagination. 

Emotionally, Carole & Tuesday is satisfyingly complex, with multiple characters revealing surprising aspects of their personalities and pasts, often without feeling any need to elaborate on them. It's an exhillarating choice, leaving the viewer feeling they've glimpsed a life in passing, like overhearing a snatch of conversation on the street. 

Relationships between characters, ranging from friendships to romance to familial obligations and more, are all uniformly well-handled with both sensitivity and maturity. There are few if any simple characters in Carole & Tuesday. For an ostensibly teen-oriented story, the whole show feels remarkably adult, in the most positive meaning of the word.

I found the girls' rival, Angela, particularly impressive in her testing journey to self-knowledge but almost every character, major and minor, made an impact that stayed with me. Writing this, I find myself remembering many of them in much more detail than I would normally retain this long after watching.

It would be typical of me to finish without mentioning the animation itself. Somehow, even though I find animated art intensely emotionally involving, frequently responding to its color and movement with a visceral, even a physical reaction, I tend to skate over all of that when talking or writing about it. I'm better at interpreting and describing static comic art than moving pictures. Well, more comfortable, anyway.

So far, the standard of animation in all the anime I've watched has been exceptional, as have the aesthetics. Even in my small sample the variety has been astonishing. Carole & Tuesday reminds me of a particular kind of 1960s-70s picture-book illustration, with its clear lines, pastel flats and unmistakeable jazz sensibilities. 

All of that is exemplified in the sublime opening sequence that introduces every Season Two episode. Coupled with one of the most lyrical and ethereal of all the show's excellent songs, it's one of the most impressive opening sequences I can remember. I watched it in full before every episode and I've watched it several more times since, just for the joy of it. I included it in a previous post and I make no apologies for sharing it again.

I'm sure I'll be watching the whole series again, soon and more than once. It's a great show. I reccommend it unreservedly.

Carole and Tuesday set such a high bar that I thought the next anime I watched would have little chance of clearing it. The next anime I watched turned out to be Beastars, so I was wrong about that. 

But that's a tale (Or a tail.) for another time.

Being Lazy Is Hard Work, Sometimes

I might have had something more substantial to post today if I hadn't spent several hours watching YouTube videos explaining how to make animated movies using AI, then following links to various utilities so I could play around with the tools. After all of that, my takeaway is that, while the technology may have come a long way, it still has a lot further to go before it can do what I want it to do, by which I mean everything.

The way things stand now, what I can see is a whole lot of extremely useful short-cuts that will save both professionals and dedicated amateurs a great deal of time and effort, just like I found when I was looking into whether I could get a team of AIs to write and draw a comic book for me. Unfortunately, that means instead of a project taking a few weeks, it might now take a few days, when what I want is for it to take a few seconds.

Basically, I want AI to be magic. I want to wave my wand and mutter a few incantations and have a fully-finished, polished, animated movie, ready to publish on my YouTube channel or on the blog or some other place where almost no-one will ever see it. In an ideal world I wouldn't even have to wave the wand. The AI would just know what I wanted and make it for me, without my even having to ask.

This would probably be a good time to ladle out that old pudding "Be careful what you wish for." There's an episode of Carole & Tuesday that hints at what will probably happen if and when the AIs reach that level of sophistication. It's Series One Episode 4: Video Killed The Radio Star. (Every episode of both seasons is named after a well-known song, usually with some relevance to what happens within it.)

This blog post gives a rough impression of what happens in that episode. I sugest not reading the comment thread, though. (And now everyone's gonna do exactly that...) 

Before anyone brings up my own long-promised post on the show, I'm happy to say it's done! I finished it a few days ago but I've been sitting on it. I'm not really happy with it - it's superficial - but I know I'm never going to finish the five or ten thousand word essay I have roiling around in my head so I'll just have to suck it up. I might publish it tomorrow. Depends what else comes along. 

The impact of AI on music and especially on songwriting is a major theme of Carole & Tuesday. The whole premise of the show is that the two girls are extremely unusual in that they write their own songs with no assistance from AI at all. Almost all songwriting in their time is at least AI-assisted, if not entirely subcontracted to software. 

Carole and Tuesday are both already singer-songwriters before they meet but it's a plot point that they only really attain a standard that's commercially viable when they pool their resources and write in tandem. Before then, barely-solvent Carole tries to supplement her meagre gig economy income by busking, mostly playing keyboard instrumentals no-one stops to hear, while poor little rich girl Tuesday composes songs on her acoustic guitar and sings them to herself in her lonely bedroom, somewhere in the invisible depths of a vast mansion.

Every other musician and singer we see in the entire show either performs work written by AIs or works with AIs to create their own music. To almost everyone in the narrative, the idea that anyone would try to do the whole thing alone seems not just unlikely but faintly ludicrous.

When Gus, the girl's manager, reformed alchoholic and one-time drummer in a speed-metal band called Lazy Sandwich, tries to get a video made on the cheap by buying an AI video bot called IDEA, the results are predictably terrible. Worse, the AI is a con artist, completely fooling everyone into thinking it can somehow whip up a stat-of-the-art music video for no money and no effort (By the bot, that is. It's a lot of effort for everyone else.)

I don't think we have to read very far between the lines to see what's going on there. Even four or five years ago, when Carole & Tuesday was being made, creative artists didn't like what was coming. They were right to be worried. 

The protracted actors strike wound up today (Pending final approval by the members.) following an earlier conclusion to similarly-motivated industrial action taken by their screenwriting colleagues. A number of issues were involved but in both cases fear of an AI takeover was one consideration. 

The compromise agreements reached revolve not around an abnegation of the upcoming technological revolution but a means of benefitting from it financially. A share of the spoils. 

And, to be fair, some say over whether studios can do away with existing actors, while still enjoying the public interest in those same actors' generated by their former appearances as living beings. I'm pretty sure the studios will be looking further ahead, to the day they don't need any actors at all, so it's only a temporary stay of execution for the craft but I guess it'll keep the current crop happy for now. Whether we'll even have live screen actors in fifty years is another question, as is whether anyone around then would still want them by then.

As I've said before, I believe all of this will have about as much long-lasting effect on the coming AI-pocalypse as the objections of eighteenth century weavers had on the success of the Spinning Jenny but as with the Industrial Revolution, a full turn will take longer than its proponents would like or its opponents fear. That's what I find so frustrating about it.

It's interesting to see the difference in rate of change between the various media to which AI is being applied. Applications requiring just a single, static image could very fast be approaching the moment when humans won't be necessary at all. I wouldn't think this would be the best time to take up a career producing book covers for self-published e-books for a start. I imagine most DIY authors will also be doing the pictures themselves before long.

As I found today, though, getting the images to move convicingly still takes rather more effort than I imagine most dabblers would care to give. I had no difficulty following the processes outlined in the videos I watched, most of which involved little more than typing prompts, selecting suitable results, then a lot of cutting, pasting and uploading. The problem was being bothered to do it.

Of course, that says more about me than the software. Once, the sheer amount of fiddly detail wouldn't even have slowed me down. 

Watching someone else fast-forward through the nitpicking process reminded me of that summer, back in the 'nineties, when I bought a sampler and spent a week making a three-minute song using samples of Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. I was quite pleased with the result but even I didn't want to listen to it again once I'd finished. 

Or there was the time in the early 'aughts, when Mrs Bhagpuss was away with the kids for a few days and I spent every evening making "music" with some sequencing software I'd bought. Again, by the time I'd finished, I never wanted to hear any of it ever again.

The first time, I thought it was time well spent; the second time, I wasn't so sure. If I was in my teens or twenties right now I'm pretty sure I'd be staying up 'til 2am every night, working on some ludicrously time-consuming AI project. At the age I am now, I flatter myself I'm over all of that. 

What I want, as I said, is for the AI to do just about all of it for me and I'm already getting tired of waiting. I never got my flying car or my jet pack and we still can't get our meals in pill form but I can't help thinking this new future is a lot nearer than those science fantasies ever were. It's just not near enough!

Still, every day brings something new. The anouncement made at OpenAI's DevDay that all their AI tools are now available in one package is drawing a lot of attention. With the integration of DALL·E 3 into GPT4, you don't have to swap from text generator to image generator any more. That's sure to save some time. 

Elon Musk is trying to get in on the act but the less said about that the better. Meanwhile his erstwhile partner, Grimes, is - as always - playing both sides. The more I know about her, the better I like her.

There's also a growing trend towards personalised AI packages that allow you to feed in your own data to get responses more closely tailored to your requirements. NightCafe chides me every time I log in because I haven't yet trained my own model, while GPT4 Turbo now lets you input the equivalent of a three hundred page book as a single prompt. With additions and improvements like those, the possibilty of my having an AI write and illustrate a whole post that might plausibly pass as my own work gets nearer every day.

I probably wouldn't use it for that even if it were possible. I like writing posts. Then again, it'd be handy on days when I'm just not feeling it but don't want to skip.

What I really want, though, in addition to a GPT-powered wifi mic and speaker combo I can clip to Beryl's collar so I can talk to her and have her seem to talk back, are some AI apps that can produce music I want to listen to and video I want to watch, infinitely and on demand. Games I can play, too, why not? And I'd like it to tailor them to my preferences from nominal input that doesn't take me more than a minute or two.

Is that too much to ask? I mean, come on!

Right now, though, the best I can come up with is something like this. That's Dylan Turner's lo-fi generator and I've had it on in the background the whole time I've been writing this post. It does a job but it's no Julia Holter.

While I was there, I spent a while playing with Dylan's other toy, LudoTune. It lets you build three-dimensional structures with colored blocks and have them play music. 

Well, some people can get them to play music. I made an IF logo for the blog that plays a station ident. Kinda. If you squint. With your ears.

And that is why there's no real post today (Although the Carole & Tuesday digression is solid, I think.) Once the real AI gets here, there'll be none of this nonsense. It'll be solid gold every time. 

I bet you. 

 

Notes on the AI used in this post.

Ironically, I had a ton of trouble getting images to illustrate my text. I used up a load of credits at NightCafe, trying various models and prompts. None of them were really what I wanted. It turns out that if an AI doesn't know who you're talking about, it's really bad at making a picture of it. Who'd have thought? And it seems as though Carole & Tuesday just isn't sufficiently well-represented in the training data for any of the AIs to be able to render a recognizeable image of even the main characters, let alone the supporting cast. 

This, of course, is where the work comes in. I could have supplied sufficient images to train a model of my own but life's too short to do that for one blog post so instead what we have is:

Top image: DreamShaper XL alpha2 at 50/50, from the prompt "Carole & Tuesday the characters from the anime of the same name . 1970s cartoon. Full color". Background filled out by Uncrop, then manually cropped by me because it kept putting distracting extra characters, peering into the frame or mugging from behind. It's great, being photobombed by an AI.

Third image: same model, same settings. Prompt "drummer in a speed-metal band called Lazy Sandwich. Include the name of the band on the drums. Anime". I had ten goes at ths one and that was the only one that even came close. The AI did not, as asked, "Include the name of the band on the drums". I put that in myself in Paint.net. 

Fourth image: SDXL Beta 50/50. Prompt "Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. Scooby Doo style." I did nine of these. I was trying to get a picture of Dale Cooper making a deal with Gus from C&T but none of the AIs could understand what I wanted. One of them put Cooper in a bar and wrote "Gus" on the wall behind him. Another had a hand reaching in from outside the frame offering Dale something that looked like a mutant squirrel killed by a truck. It sounds better than it was.

Traditional And Modern - Scattered Thoughts On A Friday

Following on from what I said yesterday I was going to be posting about today, this isn't going to be the promised (Threatened?) music post nor my considered thoughts on Carole and Tuesday. It might have something to do with AI in but it's beginning to look very much as though everything will, soon enough, so probably no need to draw attention to it.

I guess we may as well just call it another Friday Grab-Bag. On Friday. Again! Two weeks in a row that makes it! Who had that on their bingo card? No-one, I bet!

Panda³

It's back! Panda Panda Panda, that is. (You can sing it to this tune - boy did I have to work to find a version I was willing to link!) 

I'd forgotten all about it. I had a clear window of a couple of hours this morning so I thought I'd try and nail down another instance in the signature quest from EverQuest II's soon-to-be-last-year's expansion, Renewal of Ro. As soon as I opened the launcher I saw two news items - one for Panda Panda Panda, the other for something called Gear Up, Swag It Up, which appears to be the new Gear Up, Level Up , another event that always runs around this time of year.

The main purpose of both GULU and PPP used to be to get everyone ready for the upcoming expansion but I guess it finally occured to someone that we only get a level increase every other year these days. Also, levelling up takes a fraction of the time it once did. I doubt anyone needs much help with that.

Gear is another matter. The panda quests, if you do the whole nine weeks of them, will get you something for every single slot plus all the necessary augments, not to mention a bunch of other useful stuff. When the quests were first introduced it made a huge difference to power levels but these days the difference is more incremental. 

I went straight over to check this year's rewards and they're good but not as good as the drops from the Shattered Overture instances. On the other hand, the panda quests are super-easy and extremely quick, plus you're guaranteed to get everything, whereas the SO instances take a while, aren't a cakewalk and give drops that have an element of RNG involved.

Of course, for anyone who plays more than one character at max level, the real attraction of the Panda quests is that they're account unlocks. You can get the rewards on as many characters as you like just for doing the quests once. Can't turn that down.

Usually I follow the walkthrough at EQ2 Traders but there doesn't seem to be one this year, possibly because Naimi Denmother is now the dev who writes them all, so I guess it would seem a little odd for her to hand out instructions. Never mind. The wiki has everything you need. Or it will have, when each quest appears.

As for Gear Up, Level Up I got a reward for it when I finished my main quest instance this morning so clearly you don't have to do anything in advance to qualify. I haven't been to look at the vendor yet but the Swag Shield buff ought to help me finish the Sig Line in good time for the expansion so I'll probably get that.

Speaking of which, isn't it about time we got the name of the expansion and the pre-order details?

How Are The Mighty Fallen

Demoted to a couple of paragraphs in a grab-bag. How humiliating! I read Amazon's blog on October's Prime Gaming giveaways last night and realised that even though I could have gotten a whole post out of the details, I really couldn't be bothered. 

I'd have to read up on a whole load of games that don't interest me and think of something snarky to say about them all and I really don't care enough to do it. I'm sure they're all perfectly fine for people who like that sort of thing and I'm far too mature to get a kick out of mickey-taking just for the sake of it. (Shut up at the back!)

Also, I get the feeling this has been one of the least-useful series I've done over the years in that no-one other than me really seems to mention Prime Gaming any more. I might be the only one left who cares, always assuming anyone else ever did. Or that I do.

I am still mildly interested to see what I can get for free each month. There's usually at least one game I think I might enjoy. This month that's definitely the bizarrely-named GRUNND.

The game's Steam page has a lot of detail, which is more than can be said for Prime Gaming. It's a kind of point & click adventure, which is good, but based on platforming design, which might not be. It's "inspired by the works of Franz Kafka and David Lynch", which is right up my street, as is the mention "Southern Gothic" but I'm not so keen on the influence of "Black Metal".

It sounds worth a look, anyway. I'll be claiming that one when it becomes available on 5 October. 

I'll probably also grab The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters the week after. It's"an atmospheric, story-driven game" set in a haunted school. All this month's choices are vaguely horror-related to fit in with Halloween. Horror's not really my thing but as I observed a while ago it seems to be creeping into everything nowadays, which has had something of a numbing effect on my sensiibilites. I can stomach a bit of horror better than I once could, anyway.

And that's probably it for this month. I suppose I might claim Ghostwire: Tokyo, which I had at least heard of, but honestly it's not speaking to me. Other than that, I claimed something for New World and Guild Wars 2 and that was it. The GW2 freebie includes a top hat, which is worth mentioning, I guess...

Still Looks Like A Brick To Me

I've never had a Facebook account and I have almost no interest in VR so I haven't been paying all that much atention to Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta project, other than to chuckle when Wilhelm points out the latest idiocy. As with Musk and Twitter, I really don't have a dog in the fight so it's easy to just sit back and treat it all like some wacky sitcom.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, to see this pop up in my feeds yesterday, followed by some quite cogent analysis this morning. Inbetween the two, I did a little research of my own, from which I learned not just that "Smart Glasses" are a thing but that they've been one for several years.

If you put "Smart Glasses" into Amazon you get over two thousand results, everything from simple specs offering Bluetooth hands-free calling at less than a tenner up to AR/VR sets costing thousands of pounds. Plenty of them have built-in video cameras, allowing you to film whatever you happen to be looking at, which I thought was the feature that had pitchfork-waving mobs threatening to burn Larry Page in effigy outside Google HQ when Google Glass was making headlines a few years back.

I always thought Google Glass was a great idea. It seemed so obvious that a light, comfortable, inconspicuous wearable, offering a heads-up display and access to social media was the inevitable next step after the smart phone. Only mass hysteria over spurious privacy issues and Google surprisingly running scared of public opinion stopped the device becoming ubiquitous.

Despite publicly withdrawing from the fight, Google quietly kept on with the project, developing and selling "Enterprise" versions to industry for a decade before finally throwing in the towel this spring. What lies behind that decision only Google knows, although this article lays the blame squarely on the cost, which at $1500 does seem steep. 

Pricing for RayBan's Meta Glasses, which I believe you will need a Meta account to use, start at a fifth of the cost of Google Glass - just $299. Not only do they have the video capability that supposedly caused all the ructions last time, they allow for hands-free livestreaming through Facebook and Instagram. 

If it wasn't for the tie-in with Facebook, I'd be wishlisting a pair of those right now. They look like the future to me, at least in principle.

I would not, however, be considering the actual Meta Quest 3, the device whose launch triggered my investigation to begin with. It's a clever idea with its "Passthrough AR", meaning you can see a representation of the real world as relayed by cameras in the unit, rather than being cut off altogether from reality as in previous VR headsets. 

It's still waaaaaay too big and waaaaaaay too weird to imagine wearing anywhere other than in the privacy of your own home, though - and even then you'd only want to wear it when no-one else was home to see you doing it. I mean, doesn't it remind you of that face mask Hannibal Lecter used to wear?

Still, we are clearly edging closer to the future we all thought was coming a decade ago. The last couple of would-be hype trains - NFTs and Crypto - ran into the buffers of their own worthlessness and ineptitude, while the one before them - Virtual Reality  - shunted itself into a siding, where it remains, of interest only to a relative handful of hobbyists. The next couple coming down the track - AI and AR - look far more likely to instigate the kind of paradigm shift we're all hoping for.

We are all hoping for that, aren't we? If only it wasn't Mark Zuckerberg driving the engine. (And I haven't even mentioned Snoop Dogg as a Dungeon Master...)

And Finally

I had more but it's getting late and my mouse is being really weird so I'm going to stop. I was going to finish with a tune but it seems I don't have many new ones to choose from. Good thing I didn't try and do a music post after all, eh?

Oh, I know! Let's have some Carole and Tuesday!

Don't worry. I'll be obsessed with something else soon enough. You'll look back at this little fad some day soon and wish it could have lasted longer!

Intertextuality Friday

Super-quick Friday Grab-Bag because I wrote most of a longer post this morning before realizing it was going nowhere and now I don't have time to do much of anything. But I'm working tomorrow and we're going away for a couple of days next week - yes, actually "away", although not so far away we won't be able to drive there in a morning - so there probably won't be any posts for a bit, unless I take my laptop, except some of the keys aren't working and I don't particularly fancy posting some experimental piece that doesn't use the letter "B".

Enough drivel. Let's get on.

When Do I Get To Play WoW?

I said I wouldn't until either Blizzard got better or Microsoft bought them. I see from today's news that the last brick in the wall is about to topple. The CMA has provisionally approved the buyout. "Residual concerns" remain but apparently Microsoft is already "offering remedies" to calm any remaining qualms. I guess there could still be a twist in this never-ending tale but it seems a lot more likely things will now proceed in a stately manner to a resolution that suits everyone. Well, almost everyone. 

I don't know why I care, really. I don't play WoW all that much. I subscribe occasionally for a month or two but mostly I just futz around on the endless free trial. It's not like I've been jonesing for Azeroth ("Jonesing", for younger readers, used to be a slang term for addiction, specifically drug addiction, although later any kind of craving. Oh, who am I kidding? I don't have any younger readers.)

I would quite like to have a go at Cataclysm Classic, if and when it arrives. Most of it would be new content to me and I've heard that if you don't have prior attachments to the originals, some of the do-over zones are pretty good.

Started three consecutive paragraphs with "I" there. My old deputy headmaster would have his red pen out by now.

Words and Music

I was intrigued to read two reports this week about the very different approaches taken by the publishing and music industries to the looming threat to their business models posed by so-called AI. The music industry or at least the UK arm of that global monolith (Can a monolith have arms? I very much doubt it.) released "five fundemental rules" for engagement with our new digital overlords;

At a glance, those seem surprisingly reasonable and pragmatic. I'm very encouraged to see the would-be gatekeepers acknowledge that at least some of the people they're meant to be protecting might actually want to engage with this sort of thing.

Personally, I'd love to start messing around with the tech but I'd also like to feel comfortable putting the results on my YouTube channel and linking to them here and right now I'm definitely not going to be doing that. If they work out some copperplate licensing agreement with Google, though, I'm in there!

Meanwhile, George R R Martin, John Grisham, Jodie Picoult and fourteen more authors have filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infingement. That's not actually news. It happened a couple of months ago. I had heard about it before and tried to pay it no mind but yesterday I saw this at NME and the close-up of George in that hat and waistcoat was just too much to ignore.

The spectacle of vested (Hah!) interests clashing in this way is unattractive enough without framing the whole thing as some kind of battle for the soul of literature, when we all know it's about the money. George R R was a SciFi writer once upon a time, too, which somehow makes it even worse.

FFinger-Lickin' Good

If you want another example of how in the end it's always all about the money, Square Enix have you covered. I first saw this at MMOBomb under the headline "WTF IS Colonel Sanders Doing In Final Fantasy XIV?", which is exactly what I was thinking. 

I ate some KFC chicken once. It was in the early 'eighties, before I gave up eating meat altogether. I wouldn't say the Colonel's secret recipe (I'm guessing it's secret. If not, it should be.) turned me into a vegetarian but it sure didn't help. 

The most disgusting thing I've ever eaten was a brawn sandwich (Aka head cheese, which should tell you all you need to know. I'd link to the recipe but it would literally make you vomit just to read it.) It was handed out free on darts night in the pub where my college pals and I used to hang out in the even earlier 'eighties. That bucket of KFC chicken ran it a close second.

Maybe fried chocobo will taste better.

I So Don't Want It To End

Carole and Tuesday, that is. One more episode to go. Pretty sure I know what the seven minute miracle that saved Mars is now. Just have to watch it happen.

There will be a full review but for now let me say the second season is as good as the first, maybe better. The theme and opening sequence is going to be an all-time favorite. I could watch it over and over and I already have.

I've been looking at Carole and Tuesday merch. There are a number of large wall posters but none of the ones I've seen feature any of the scenes from the Season 2 intro, which seems like madness. Literally every shot is a poster waiting to happen.

Don't take my word for it. See for yourself.

I googled the lyrics to see if I could figure out what the song's about. It doesn't seem to relate to anything in the show unless it's in the final episode and I haven't seen yet. Maybe it's a hat-tip to P.J. Harvey. The show does name-check a lot of 20th century artists so it's not that unlikely.

Whatever, I love it. Been singing it in my head (And out loud.) for days. Carole and Tuesday has a lot to say about AI and music, by the way. I could iterate on that in the light of the aforementioned five fundemental rules but I'll save it for the review.

Last Of The Gang To Die

Crossing the streams, a zeitgeist game I never played spawned an anime I really loved when Edgerunners appeared as a post-launch prequel to Cyberpunk 2077. Without getting too spoilery, the series pretty much ran as a one-and-done, the ending leaving little room for a second season, the final episode being one of the more conclusive and downbeat resolutions I've seen for a while.

It was good to hear that the legacy of the show lives on in the game itself in the form of a lore-appropriate memorial. I've got T-shirts featuring both Rebecca and Lucy on my wishlist. That'll be my tribute although I guess playing the game might be a better one.

There's Something To Being Human After All

When I posted a video by yeule last week I said "We'll be hearing from her again. And again, I'm pretty sure." Oh boy. Ironic foreshadowing. Also misgendering, for which I can only apologise. I did not do my due diligence.

I also knew pretty much nothing about the post-human phenomenon that is yeule. I didn't know they were from Singapore, for a start. I don't know a lot about Singapore other than that my mother thought it was very clean when she went there. I guess when you beat people for dropping chewing gum that'll happen. 

Anyway, it's not the kind of environment you'd expect to foster teen rebellion or then again maybe it's exactly that. Either way, according to Pitchfork's review of their third (!) album, sofstscars, yeule "first started toying around with music production as a young teenager in the early 2010s, after they saw a live video of Grimes on the internet and thought, “This fucking bitch does it all by herself… so I’m gonna try.”"

The first two albums are variously described as ambient, glitch and "Asian post-pop".  Also vaporwave, I've seen, which tracks. yeule, who's name as I'm sure someone who isn't me will have realised long ago, comes from the Final Fantasy franchise, leaned heavily into post-humanism for their persona but the third album sways the other way, embracing the soft, messy reality of being human.

I don't know why it's taken me this long to notice them. I'm ashamed of myself, sometimes. I'm busy right now going through their back catalog. Here's one yeule made earlier. It seems relevant, somehow.

And finally...

Speaking of pronouns, on the always-reliable recommendation of Xyzzysqrl, I downloaded the demo for Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain on Steam. I played it, enjoyed it, wishlisted it. I'll wait for a sale to buy it, though. It's cheap but I'm even cheaper.

I wouldn't have mentioned it only it has by far the most impressive choice of pronouns at character creation I've ever seen. I took a screenshot.

I remember a really long time ago, long before the current on-trend gender awareness set in, reading a long list of possible pronouns and what they implied. It must have been a long time ago because I know I was at work and it's been a decade and a half since I had the good fortune to be able to web-surf and educate myself on the company dime.

Given the level of debate over the use of "they", I'd almost allowed myself to believe there were only the three choices left. I mean, I know that's not true. I was watching or reading something recently where someone's preferred pronouns were I/I... hmm, what was that? 

Anyway, even though I was theoretically aware other pronouns were still in play, it's nice to be reminded. I almost feel sorry I'm stuck with boring old he/him although I guess if I was that sorry I wouldn't be. Stuck with it, I mean.

And now, I think it's bedtime, which means the finale of Carole and Tuesday. Conflicted doesn't begin to cover my feelings about that...

End Of Season - Discontinued

I'm going to do the usual here and cram three shows into one post when really I ought to give each of  them a post of their own. At least I'm not going to attempt to blend them all together in one half-baked critical pie, so there's that...

Disenchantment Season Five

Last night I watched the fiftieth and final episode of Matt Groening's Disenchantment, which for some reason I always want to call "Disenchanted". The fifth season was mostly satisfying with a soupcon of disappointing to taste. Episode L as a closer, though, (They count off in Roman numerals for some reason.) really did the job.

The best thing about the series coming to an end after five ten-episode seasons is that at least the writers knew this was going be the last. I don't believe the whole thing was plotted as a five season arc because if it had been it surely would have made a lot more sense but these days you have to learn to be happy with the endings you get and this was about as tidy a wrap as I've seen for a while. Where Titans and The Owl House both left a number of options intentionally open for possible future storylines, Disenchantment seemed determined to not just to close every door but firmly lock them all and throw away the keys.

The finale was written by Groening himself, his only episode in the entire series and the only one in the entire run credited to him alone. In fact, his only other writing credit on the whole series was the Season One opener, which he co-wrote with Josh Weinstein. Weinstein also wrote the penultimate and pre-penultimate episodes, giving the climax something of the feel of parents coming back to tidy up the old family home before moving out for good.

The show debuted on Netflix in 2018 but I didn't start watching until I subbed to the streaming service a couple of years later. In 2021 I mentioned it here for the first time with great enthusiasm: "The writing is subtle, the characters convincing, the stories compelling and the animation supple...I like it so much, for my birthday I asked for three different t-shirts featuring various characters". I'm wearing one of them as I type this.

By 2022, though, I'd cooled off a little: "We're on Season Four now and I'm not quite convinced it's as strong as the previous three". At the time I wrote that I'd only seen the first three episodes and I was prepared to reserve judgment but by the time I'd seen them all I found I didn't need to revise my opinion all that much. I still enjoyed the show a lot but it definitely didn't seem to have either the focus or the bite it once had.

Season Five does little to reverse that trend. I still loved it but I loved it as a fan. As a critic, I'd say it felt a little baggy in places. There were a lot of fight scenes. Visually it remains a treat, filled with fleeting gags that demand heavy use of pause and rewind. The voice acting was on point as always although I felt the dialog wasn't always quite as sharp as I remember from the early years.

The characters remain as loveable as ever, many of them even more so, with the show's unusual but extremely welcome habit of remaining ever-open to genuine emotional growth and personal redemption. The show has a vast cast of recurring characters, some of whom, like Mop Girl, graduate from background artiste to starring role. Others shift from villain to hero or at least become the kind of people who try to do the right thing once in a while.

The central characters, Bean herself, Luci, Elfo and King Zog especially, show so much personal growth across the five seasons they're scarcely recognizeable as the venal, vicious, stupid, selfish people we were introduced to back in Season One. Without spoiling any of the details, I will at least reveal that all of them, along with quite a few more, get very happy endings indeed; endings which, I have to say, seem entirely merited.

The overwhelming sense I got from the final episode was one of closure, which is what you want from something like this, I guess. I almost never let the credits play all the way through but for once I waited until the very end. I had the feeling there would be a final word of some kind and there was: the drawbridge to the castle winches up and the entire castle vanishes, just as if it had never existed at all. 

You can't really make it plainer than that. I guess we won't be getting any more Disenchantment. In a way I'm disappointed because I've spent a lot of time with these characters and I'd happily spend a lot more. In another way, though, the show began to amble a while ago. If you're the sort of viewer who needs these things to be going somewhere in a fairly obvious and definable way, you'd probably say it went on a little too long.

On balance, I'm happy to let it rest where it landed. Whenever I think of Disenchanted now, the images that come to mind will mostly be of people I liked being happy. Maybe not for ever after but at least for a while. It's a pretty good way to end a show.

Carole & Tuesday Season One

A couple of nights before I came to the end of my run with Disenchantment, I wrapped up the first Season of what's quite possibly my favorite show of the year so far, Carole & Tuesday. 

Not that it came out in 2023. It originally debuted in Japan in 2019 and appeared on Netflix almost immediately afterwards. For some reason, Netflix didn't choose to flag it up as something I might want to watch until a few weeks ago. That was the first I heard of it.

The extremely brief description looked interesting: "Part-timer Carole meets rich girl Tuesday, and each realizes they've found the musical partner they need. Together they just might make it." I like shows about bands trying to make it. There aren't nearly enough of them for my liking. I'm always up for another. I added it to my watch list and as chance had it a space opened up almost right away.

When I started watching I got a bit of a surprise. The thing that thumbnail neglects to mention is that the whole thing takes place in the future. And not just any future - the future on Mars! Oh, and it's directed by Shinichirō Watanabe, the director of Cowboy Bebop (The anime version, not the live-action remake.) which makes it more of a big deal than I realised.

These are the sort of things you think someone might think to mention when attempting to lure viewers in but I'm glad Netflix marketing department were slacking for once. The science-fiction setting, which is marvelously eliptical and utterly lacking in any form of exposition, as all the best SciFi ought to be, set all my expectations spinning as I settled down to watch what I thought was going to be a relatively mainstream, contemporary show. 

As for the presence of the director of one of my favorite animated series, I didn't even discover he was involved until I started researching the show for this post. It made me feel all kinds of pleased with myself when I found out. I'd been debating in my mind whether to mention all the ways the show reminded me of Cowboy Bebop, something I was a little concerned might reveal more about my very limited exposure to anime than demonstrate any perceptive critical analysis on my part. Apparently all those years studying practical criticism in college weren't wasted after all.

I have a lot of things to say about Carole & Tuesday but I think I'm going to save most of them for another post, after I've seen the next Season. There are only two. I haven't started the second because I enjoyed the first so much I want to come to Part Two as a true sequel, not barrel right into it as if I was watching a soap opera.

I would like to mention the structure of Season One, which I thought was exemplary. Despite the fantastical setting and the melodramatic narrative, there's an inarguable authenticity to the whole thing. The show steers remarkably clear of those "Well, that would never happen" moments. Instead, the destinies of the two young singer-songwriters from opposite sides of the wealth divide intertwine in a wholly believable, even logical fashion.

Everything that happens could happen. Most of it probably wouldn't but that's why we're hearing these girls' stories and not someone else's. Mere credibility wouldn't run an engine as powerful as the one that drives this show, though; for that kind of traction you need a more formal structure, the kind with its own internal consistency, along wit the sort of architectonics that make everything hang just so.

What's a better platform for a tale of musical rags to riches than a talent competition? And what's more hackneyed and cliched? To turn that coat inside out and make it look like new without even showing the seams is some trick yet they pull it off with seeming ease.

The keys to the trope's success as it plays out in Carole  & Tuesday are first the way it creeps up, unflagged and unexpected and then the way it entirely takes over. It's almost like a show within a show... until suddenly it's not.

Shows about talent competitions are generally just that; shows about talent competitions. They can be fine but we know what we're going to get, going in. Carole & Tuesday upends all of that. The show uses the formality of the competition as a scaffold, not a framework; it's not there to prop the narrative up; it's there to let us get closer to the story.

It's also about the third or fourth way the duo search for some kind of way in to a music industry even more closed to outsiders than our own. In their world, AIs write the songs; humans merely perform them. Social media creates buzz but buzz doesn't necessarily translate to interest from anyone that matters. Except sometimes the people that matter aren't always those you think.

The overwhelming impression I got, watching Carole & Tuesday, was that it was just that; overwhelming. That's mostly why I found myself thinking of Cowboy Bebop early on. There's so much subtext you can scarcely see the story for it sometimes. Nothing ever seems unfreighted with meaning, from a street scene to a sunset to a freeze-frame. It's a rich mix.

I watched the show with the English-language dub. I'm a subtitles guy when it comes to live action but for animation I'm happy to use my ears. The voice acting is mesmeric and odd. Carole is normality itself; Tuesday sounds like one of the companion characters in a video game. There's a wide mix of accents and timbres, all of which work towards making Mars seem not like Earth, which is as well because it looks like Earth, most of the time.

The script itself I find absolutely fascinating. It has that hyper-real quality so familiar from the best translated games. Everything is impeccably correct, grammatically, and yet much of it sounds heightened, somehow. There's an indefinable formality about the way people speak that I find quite delicious. 

It's a very specific register that no-one I ever heard naturally uses and I love it. I particularly love the codas that append themselves seemingly uninvited to the end of simple, declarative sentences, as if saying just exactly what you mean isn't quite always enough, somehow, but always needs qualification, preferably with a conjuctive adverb.

In a show for which music plays such a central part, none of this might be enough if the songs didn't come across so it's a blessing that they do. It's also a mystery that they work so very, very well in context, when most of them sound somewhat less impressive, heard alone. I had the soundtrack playing while I wrote some of this post and although it's all good stuff and nice to listent to in the background, there's littlesense of the kind of emotional impact it packs in the show itself.

And that, of course, is exactly as it should be. Carole & Tuesday isn't a concert movie. It's not the animated video of some actual band's greatest hits. It's a story in which music plays an important part but it's important the music doesn't take over entirely. Like Carole and Tuesday themselves, the songs and the images need to work in harmony to become more together than they could be apart and that's just what they do.

I've said more than I was going to say. I'll leave it at that for now. Obviously, I recommend this one highly but I imagine most people reading this, those who'd be interested, anyway, will already have seen it, long before I did. You won't need me to point the way.

Cannon Busters Season One (And Only.)

And finally in this trilogy, a show I finished watching months ago but never got around to reviewing. Cannon Busters is yet another anime that premiered on Netflix back in 2019 but which I didn't discover until this year. Although it was produced in Japan it's an adaptation not of a manga but of an American comic-book from the early aughts. 

The comic, however, was written and drawn by LeSean Thomas, an animator who for at least the last fecade and a half has mainly worked in Korea and Japan. I gave up worrying about authenticity years ago so I'm just going to go ahead and consider it in the same bracket as all the other shows it reminds me of, which would be Cowboy Bebop (Again.) Edgerunners and Edens Zero.

I liked Cannon Busters a lot but I wouldn't claim it was a great show let alone one that makes a whole lot of sense. It's more of a picaresque romp in which a crew of very disparate characters careen off each other like lightning bugs in a mason jar. 

The animation, as I'm coming to understand seems to be the norm with these things, is both kinetic and engaging. A big part of the pleasure in animation, whatever the style, comes from just watching, something I always knew but had forgotten. When your eyes are having fun your brain doesn't always need to be getting in the way.

Much the same can be said for the ears. Cannon Busters opens and closes with a couple of really great themes. The music througout is top class. 

As for the acting, once again, the English dub is entrancing. SAM, played by Kamali Minter, is incessantly upbeat in the way only a robot could be. Stephanie Sheh, playing Casey, inevitably my favorite character, makes SAM sound downbeat. Philly the Kid (Kenny Blank) is almost permanently outraged or manic, frequently both at once, something which ought to make listening to him exhausting. It does, only in a good way. 

I found all of them and the rest of the cast a joy to spend time with. The plot, such as it is, rambles like a drunken Eagle Scout through a series of settings that throws the Old West and the Old East into some kind of retro-futuristic steampunk blender to make a fizzing cocktail of tropes that ought never to fit together except when, like this, they do.

The whole farrago is shot through which such an exuberant sense of innocent self-indulgence you just can't help but love it. Well, I did, anyway. 

Unlike the first two shows in this post, however, Cannon Busters does not come all tied up with a neat bow around the final episode. It stops resolutely in mid-climax in the clear expectation of a second season which, so far, has not appeared. Since it's been four years now, it seems unlikely it ever will.

If you can stomach a show that ends in the middle and you don't hate enjoying yourself more than you know you should, I'd recommend Cannon Busters wholeheartedly. If a lack of resolution makes you itch or you believe plots always ought to make sense, well this is probably not going to be your kind of thing...