Second of all, I just happened to be on Amazon this Christmas Day morning,
buying a gift card to send to someone by email because, when I
tried to do it earlier in the week, it all went horribly wrong.
Amazon Customer Service was excellent but even they couldn't fix my mistake so I had to put an "I.O.U. 1 (One.) Amazon Gift Card to be delivered on Christmas
Day" note inside the card and, rather than having it go horribly wrong a second
time through me messing up the delivery timer, as would almost invitably have happened, I chose to do it in real time instead.
Which was when I happened to notice an entirely unexpected animated Gift Card option. It was this:
I don't know why you would want to but if you feel like sending someone an animated New World-themed Amazon gift card, now you can! I mean, it's not a very good one but at least it shows Amazon Corporate is really behind the game now, right? Or that's one interpretation.
Anyway, I thought I'd share the good news to all New World fans on this
Christmas Day. I guess there must be some, still. Somewhere.
Also, there would have been a New World Winter Convergence screenshot at the top of the post but updating the game made my PC cry and I had to unplug the external drive New World is on before it would even boot up again, so Nightingale it is.
I said I was going to review the 2023
Inventory Full Advent Calendar and by golly I meant it!
I thoroughly
enjoyed researching it, picking the possibles and making the final choices,
generating the images and posting the finished pages. What I didn't like was not
being able to give a running commentary on all of that while I was doing it, so
this is where I get all that pent-up frustration out of my system.
If anyone remembers, my original plan was to have the AIs do most of the heavy
lifting. I thought I'd get them to find a bunch of less well-known Christmas
songs and then all I'd have to do would be listen to them and pick the best
ones. Unfortunately, that really didn't work out.
In the end, I think I used just two of the suggestions:
Christmas in Nevada by The Willard Grant Conspiracy and
Christmas Is My Time Of Year by The Monkees. The AIs were also
indirectly responsible for several other entries, most notably
Merry Christmas From The Family by Jill Sobule and
Sympathy For The Grinch by 100 Gecs. In both cases, one of the
AIs gave me a Christmas song by those artists that didn't exist, which led to
me finding one that did.
The AIs also gave me another half-dozen or so useable suggestions I just chose to ignore. Some of them, like Snowqueen of Texas, just weren't
Christmassy enough. Others, like the excellent The Christmas Song by
The Raveonettes, felt too obvious.
Snowqueen Of Texas - The Mamas and The Papas
With the AIs largely proving useless, I came by most of the tunes through
old-fashioned YouTube surfing. I spent quite a few hours link-hopping,
listening to a lot of really not very good seasonal material to come up with a
long-list of over fifty.
By the beginning of December I had the first week's posts already done but
after that I surprised myself by changing my mind on almost everything else. I
didn't use half the ones I had earmarked and I kept finding new ones right
until the last few days. One lesson I learned is that, while it's fun to
prep, it's a lot more fun to do this sort of thing on the fly. I hope I
remember that next year.
The images followed a similar pattern. I ran a lot of them up front and
stashed them but most of those went unused. A couple of comments from regular
readers, saying how much they disliked the AI art, made me re-assess it a
little. As I've said, I do actively enjoy the distortion and weirdness but
even I'm beginning to think you can have enough six-fingered hands and dogs
with five legs.
As a result, I started to be a bit more picky about which images I used as the
month wore on. I tried to avoid using the weirder ones (Believe me, I have
some that will give you nightmares.) and to keep the images more closely
aligned with the songs.
Then, on
Day Twenty-Two, something happened. I found a way to use DALL-E 3 for free via
Microsoft Image Creator. The final three images were generated there and I think they look and feel
radically different. I suspect it will be my go-to for AI illustrations for a
while and I hope it will alleviate some of the issues familiar from the
less-polished pictures I've been using up to now.
By far the hardest part was stopping myself writing a paragraph or five on
every song as I posted it. I found it incredibly frustrating not to be able to
show my workings. Next year I might have to add some sort of captions to cover
that.
Fortunately, Redbeard, who gets an
Inventory Full Christmas No-Prize for commenting on every single post,
gave me the opportunity to release some of my dammed-up tension in the comment
thread. I thought I was going to say a few things about some of the songs in
this review but looking back, I think I got most of what I wanted to say out
in those comments.
It's just as well Red took it upon himself to comment on every
entry because if not for that, the entire event would have passed in
near-silence. Atheren popped in to say she was using the Grinch picture
and I think maybe there was one other comment but really I have no idea
whether anyone was listening to the songs or even looking at the pictures.
Luckily, I was doing it almost entirely for my own amusement, so it didn't
matter either way.
Lack of response certainly isn't going to stop me doing another Advent
Calendar next year, far from it. In fact, I enjoyed doing it so much, I've
been trying to come up with an excuse to do something similar as soon as
possible. I really don't want to wait another twelve months to have that kind
of fun.
I'm even toying with the idea of starting a second blog, one rather like
Wilhelm's Eve Online Pictures, where I'd just post a song and a picture every day. I doubt I'd be able to
stop myself from adding a few lines of text, though and next thing you know
I'd be writing a full post so maybe it's not such a great idea...
One unexpected side-effect was that I listened to most of the songs several
times and a few of them really quite a lot more than that. I spent an hour and a half wrapping presents while listening to Day Thirteen on a loop.
My favorite entry over all, though, was
Christmas Eve. Mabes' Alone On Christmas Eve was probably my favorite Christmas song
of the year, for the video as much as for the song itself. The way you hear
the sound of the plates and glasses smashing on the floor as she tosses them
out of shot is absolute genius. I thought the two videos went very well together, which makes it a real shame that whoever posted the second one made their YouTube account private a few days later. I had to replace it with another video that isn't quite such a good pairing. At least the AI image is still perfect.
I listened to a bunch of other songs by Mabes after that and they were all
great, although she doesn't seem to have done all that many, especially
considering she put the first one up on YouTube four years ago. She hasn't
added anything to her channel for over a year so maybe she's stopped making music. I hope not.
I'm going to end this post with one of hers I really like. It's got nothing to do with
Christmas, which is probably just as well.
Here's a thing I'd really like to know: just how long is this Once Human beta going to last? As of last night there's a Christmas event, an in-game scavenger hunt with real-world prizes you can win in a contest on Discord, which is where you can also find a code to claim a santa hat for your character. Plusanother ten thousand invites are going out to new testers, none of which seems like something that would happen if the beta was about to end in a few days.
I only ask because I'm falling into that troublesome pattern of playing beta like it was live. It's a perennial problem. I guess a lot of people experience something like it When a beta's every bit as good, if not quite a bit better, than most Live games, why not play it as if it was here to stay?
It's an existential conundrum, anyway. All games go away, don't they? Does it matter if it happens next week, next year, next decade? Or, as seems ever more worryingly possible, next century. If even then.
Are beta characters less valid just because they're ephemeral? How long is long enough to matter? What makes a character in a video game valid, anyway? Is it all down to how long they keep on not existing? And doesn't intensity or originality count for something? Is fun in the moment an insufficient return for effort expended? Does value only multiply by time spent?
You can drive yourself crazy thinking about stuff like that. Unless you have a metaphysics paper to write I'd recommend not going there. Still, I'd like to know, all the same.
Until I find out, I guess I'll just go on enjoying myself. I've certainly been doing that.
Other than forty-five minutes in that Reign of Guilds beta, which I only racked up "for science", I haven't played any other games since I got invited to test Once Human. The knowledge that I'm going to have to do it all over again, when the game launches, is the only thing that's keeping me from playing two or three times as much as I have been. Even when I resist, I can't motivate myself to play another game instead. I just don't play anything.
It's not that Once Human is that good. I mean , it is good, sure. It's very good but it's no coincidence that most of the games I've devoted huge chunks of time to over the last few yeas have been some flavor of Survival. I'm clearly as vulnerable today to the hooks employed by that genre as I once was to the Diku-MUD inspired tricks of the Classic MMORPG era.
Is that a good thing? Probably not. At least I have a blog now, so I can write about my obsession and in that way convince myself it serves some greater purpose. Without that, I really would have some questions I couldn't answer.
I did spot something today that might conceivably pry me away from OH for a while. Naturally, it's another survival title, albeit one that's out of beta, although I wouldn't like to put money on how long it'll be hanging around.
I'm talking about Dawnlands, of course,and it just got a new update. I was in Steam, spending some of my Christmas Present money on games in the Winter Sale, when I noticed it was pending. I checked the notes and it seems they've added a whole new biome, which is a big deal for a game of this kind. The image in the patch notes looks gorgeous, too. I ought to find time to go check that out, at least.
As for the sale games I bought, I restricted myself to a couple of Point & Click adventures. I can all but guarantee I'll play them fairly soon. I've been itching for a good point & click fior a while, now.
There were several on my wishlist; all discounted, naturally. Is anything not in the sale?I picked Crown and Pawns and Tales Noir Preludes as the best combination of Bargain and Will Definitely Play, two tags Steam really ought to add.
I had Cats and the Other Lives in my basket but I took it out at the last minute on the grounds I'd never find time for three P&Cs. It's at a steep discount, though, so it's odds on I'll crack and grab it before the sale ends.
Anyway, those are my excuses for being on Steam on Christmas Day and for blogging about it afterwards. What excuse I'm going to give for playing Once Human after I post this I'm not so sure.
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