It's All Just A Little Bit Of History Repeating

Well, this is embarrassing... 

Remember when I complained about not being able to remember my login details for Wuthering Waves? I wrote a whole post about it under the (entirely intentionally) click-baity title "Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now." Remember how, in that post, I said "I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works"?

Yes. Well. About that...

It turns out either I didn't try every account after all or else my capacity for thinking is so diminished I probably shouldn't be allowed out on my own. Either way, I now have my account back. 

So that's good.

This morning, for absolutely no good reason other than that I was idly fiddling around on the desktop while I was trying to come up with something to write about today, my attention settled on the Wuthering Waves icon. Since it was there, I thought I might as well update the game, just in case I decided to start over from the beginning again some day or something crazy like that.

I figured there might be a biggish update waiting but it couldn't be very big, surely, given I'd patched up about six weeks ago. I was half right. 

There was an update and it was huge. 56GB. WW (I refuse to call it WuWa. It reminds me too much of Al Pacino going "Hoo-ah!" in Scent of a Woman.) seems to be one of those annoying titles that insists on re-downloading the entire game every time it patches. 

That annoyed me a little but what it mostly did was remind me that even if I could play the game, which I couldn't, I'd be playing it on GeForce Now anyway, not on my own PC, so  I wouldn't need to update it at all. Let some NVidia technician worry about that. Otherwise what am I paying my £6.99 a month for, right? 

I logged into GFN and started WW going and then I noticed a link that said something about registering your character to see more. Well, you always want to see more, don't you? Unless it's body horror...

The link, when I clicked it, opened a dialog that offered me two accounts that were both, apparently, logged in already. I could tell by the names which email addresses they were using and it momentarily made me think one of them might be my original account to which I'd lost access. 

I went through the various stages to log each of them in and of course neither of them was The One. They were the two new accounts I'd made the last time I did this, each with a single, unplayed Level One character and nothing else. 

In the process of logging them in to check, though, I reminded myself which two email addresses they were. And neither of them was the one I'd say was the most obvious choice. The one I'd have been likely to use when starting a new game I wasn't planning to play for long.

Imagine the screen going all misty as we wind back to how I got started in Wuthering Waves in the first place. It was all because of a passing mention by Naithin, who'd tried the game and not thought all that much of it, mostly because of certain issues he had with the quality of the sound recording as I recall. For some reason. that spurred me to take a look at this oddly-named gacha title and the rest is... well, it's forty posts about the game on this blog for a start.

Back then, I wouldn't have been expecting to do much more than take a quick a look, which is why I didn't bother to set up a proper account. I just used Google's very convenient handshake protocol, the one UltrViolet has just implemented to handle comments on his blog. I tend to use it wherever it's offered because it's so easy and saves so much time. This is how billionaires groom us, isn't it? (Adjusts tin-foil hat...)

And I'm sure it's very nearly foolproof - if you just use the one gmail address for everything, like a normal person. As I'm only just beginning to realize, though, it's a lot less reliable if you have a couple of dozen of them. I'm really going to need to make a note of which address I use for which application in future and if I'm going to have to do that, I might as well just make a regular account the old-fashioned way.

All of this is there and thereabouts a repeat of the process I went through back in June. The one I wrote about in excruciating detail back then. So why am I repeating myself, other than for the sheer, visceral joy of listening to myself talk, of course, always a given on this blog. (I throw that in for any New Blaugustians that may still be plowing through this wall of text in the fading hope some point or purpose might eventually emerge. It won't. Or if it does, it won't be for a while.)

Sidebar - New Blaugustians sounds either like the name of a second-tier superhero team, likely made up of characters who never managed to hold down their own title or if they did it only lasted a dozen or so issues. They'd be based in a city like Denver or Omaha, a good way from either coast, which is where all the action in super-hero comics always happens. 

Or it could be an acid-jazz outfit from the '90s...

At this point, if I had any sense, I'd have admitted I was just repeating the same exact steps as last time and I was going to waste another morning on the hopeless task if I didn't accept the loss and move on. It's that saying about not learning from the mistakes of the past, isn't it? You keep on making them. And that other saying about people doing the same things over and over and expecting them to turn out differently...

 

Yeah, well, that's a bunch of crap. And I can prove it. I didn't learn the lesson and I did do the same thing again and it turned out differently!

Okay, maybe I didn't do exactly the same thing. Maybe, when  I said last time I'd tried "every account", what I really meant was "Every account except the most likely one. The one I should have tired first. The frickin' obvious one."

Or, I guess, maybe I did try that one but something else changed since I did it. I'll leave myself an out because who knows what happened? Not me. I won't say I don't care - it would be nice to know for sure - but I will say I'll never find out so there's no point worrying about it.

Whatever it was, I'm back in Wuthering Waves on my old character, Califlora. She's level 40 and almost at the end of the Riniscitta storyline. To be precise, she has the final Act and the Segue left to do before starting the next big chunk of main storyline, the one I've missed, which itself is the chapter before the current one, which has just begun.

I'm about an update and a quarter behind, I think. Not much further than I was the last time I had to catch up. It's doable.

And I've already started. After I spent what felt like half an hour opening a hundred windows to read about dozens of events I didn't understand and clicking on all the rewards that had been patiently awaiting my return, I looked up how to access the content I was trying to play through back in June, the Edgerunners Collab.

That event is over now but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the Night City adventure itself was permanent content. I also seemed to recall you can jump straight into it without having done the MSQ first. 

It is and you can. It took me some googling to find out how, though. I couldn't figure it out in-game. And even when I did figure it out, I didn't do it.

I was about to and then I noticed you can get to Night City more organically by progressing the main story to the point where you reach "the transport dock" in a quest called "What Burns Beneath The Frostlands". I checked how much I'd have to do to get there and it was "only" four quests down the line, in the first Act of "To The Stars Yet To Shine". It's not like I'm in a mad rush. I thought I might as well walk there. 

Of course, first I'll need to remember how to play. To that end, I worked my way through an exploration quest Califlora had up. She must have been doing it when I last played her although I don't remember it. 

By the time I'd finished it, I had a vague idea of how things worked. Who I had in my team. Which buttons to press. That sort of thing. Annoyingly, the combat controls are just very slightly different from Neverness To Everness but it didn't seem to make too much difference. It was surprising how fast it all came back. 

Whether I can juggle two story-heavy gacha games at once is another question. That's a lot of cut-scenes and voice-overs to get through. But I ought to be able to get to Night City, at least. If I buckle down, I might even be there before the next big content drop in NTE, which ought to be in about two to three weeks. 

If nothing else, it'll give me something new to write about for Blaugust. Always provided I don't forget my login details again...  

Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now

This is going to be a very short post. I know I say that a lot and then run on for several thousand words but that won't be happening today. I had a specific post in mind and I haven't been able to write it so this is the "what would have been" version.

It was going to be about the Wuthering Waves/Edgerunners collab that started this week. I'd been trying to pretend it wasn't happening so I wouldn't start fomoing at the mouth about it but yesterday I saw the trailer in my YouTube subs and couldn't resist. And it was excellent.

 So, I watched that and I read a whole bunch of people saying how good it was, not just in the comment thread but in articles like this one and I thought, well, maybe I'll just check to see if you really have to be all up to date in the game to see the story. And it turns out you don't. 

Kuro recommends you do it in sequence to get the most out of it but they also realize a lot of people might be coming back just for the Edgerunners content because that's one of the main reasons companies do collabs like this in the first place. With that in mind, they've made it a standalone episode you can access immediately or as part of the storyline, as you prefer.

I haven't played Wuthering Waves for a while. A good while. Last September in fact. I didn't stop because I got bored or lost interest. I stopped because it got to be too intense and I found myself taking it too seriously, which is very much not what I want from my gaming. I did plan on watching the story content on YouTube instead, since it felt like I was watching a movie every time I played, but in the event I just drifted out of thinking about it at all. Until now.

The next thing was to check if I had the game installed on this PC. I didn't think I did because I bought it after i stopped playing but as it happens I moved the relevant SDD across and although I removed a few things, Wuthering Waves wasn't one of them.

Great! No need to download the whole thing again, then. I can just patch it up. Yeah... nope. I had to download a new launcher from the website because the old one no longer worked and the new launcher insisted on downloading the entire game, all 100+GB of it before it installed it in the same directory. It took a couple of hours and by the end I had a fresh 108GB client, up about 20GB from where it had been.

That took me past the time I had available to play the thing so I left it for this morning. After breakfast I opened the launcher and hit Play and the damn thing downloaded another massive update. The client now weighs in at an enormous 133GB!

Phew! Still, at least I can finally play the game, right? Ahahahahaha! No!

I can't play Wuthering Waves because I do not have my account details any more. In the quarter of a century I've been playing online games this has barely ever happened to me. I almost always keep a note of my account details for everything - games, services, forums, you name it. And if I don't, I can always at the very least work out what email address I used and recover them.

Not for this one. I almost certainly used the extremely tempting and convenient "Sign in with Google" option. I use it a lot because I'm lazy. It's a bad idea and I know it's a bad idea but I do it anyway because what could go wrong?

Apparently what could go wrong is I could not be able to figure out which google account I used. I have a lot. At least a dozen I use regularly and probably as many more that I've made and then forgotten about. There are only about five or six I regularly use for something like this, though, so again, how hard could it be just to go through them all and find the right one by trial and error?

Harder than I expected. In fact, impossible. 

I tried the obvious two or three and they weren't right. Then I had the clever idea of checking my email to see which one had been sending me the press releases. I have all my in-use email addresses set to forward to one central address so I don't have to keep logging in to all of them.

It was then that it occurred to me that I don't seem to get any emails from Kuro about Wuthering Waves. None at all. I did a search and I never have. Not a single one, ever. Which is very weird. Surely they send them? They'd be the only gaming company ever if they didn't.

Just in case the mail was going to an address I hadn't set to forward, I went through the laborious process of logging them all in. None of them had ever heard from Kuro. While I was at it, I even checked some of the more obscure addresses I haven't used in years. It was a useful hour in that at least I've reset the timers on those so Google won't delete them for a bit longer but it didn't get me any further.

I went through my Little Black Book of Logins page by page. Nothing. It seems I never wrote down anything about Wuthering Waves at all. I don't keep as many handwritten notes about this sort of thing as I once did but I do usually at least make a note of which email address I've used for a new game. Not this time.

Even if I don't keep a note of it, Google must or how would it work? I googled that and found out how to check what apps you've given permissions to, which is a handy piece of information to have. Then I checked all of them and none of them showed "Wuthering Waves" or "Kuro" in the list. 

By this point I was pretty much stumped. I tried checking my laptop, where I once tried to play the game and found it wouldn't run, and my old PC, which meant connecting everything back up, which was a pain. No joy with either of them. And that was the last, worst idea I had.

Reading around the web, it seems there are some quirks with Kuro's login process that mean accounts set up by typing in an email address are registered independently of the same email address selected through "Play with Google" but either way you'd think there'd be a stream of promotions going to that address, which as far as I can see there never has been.

There's also an issue where your account is specific to the Region where you chose to play. If you pick the wrong one on login, the game acts as if you never played before. I tried Europe and America, the only two I'd ever have chosen. Nothing on either. 

I do have a blog though. I know I would never have mentioned a specific email address in a post because I am not completely irresponsible but I do sometimes mention other useful details. So I checked my First Impressions and came up with this potentially telling piece of information: "Downloading and installing the game (It's something like an 18GB footprint.) took just a couple of clicks.... There was no time wasted registering an account. It accepts a Google login, which it doesn't even bother to confirm with an email to the Gmail address you give it." 

Hmm. First, it's grown like Topsy, hasn't it? Second, it never sent a confirmation email. Now that is odd because, while I was trying to get in this morning, I used Google to start a new account and that did send me a confirmation, although it didn't ask for any response. Not that it helps at all but it's a data point.

I'm in on that account now and I see there's an option to "Link Email". Maybe I never took it on the real account. That would explain why I never got any emails. 

Anyway, I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works so the only other option is to contact Kuro Customer Service and see if they can restore access. Thanks to screenshots, I do have the name of my character and the User Id but I never spent any money in the cash shop so I don't have that crucial piece of evidence, without which I'm not sure they'll be all that interested.

I could start over from the beginning. As one person advising someone else with a similar issue helpfully pointed out, if you skip all the dialog it wouldn't take long. Or I could go back to Plan A and watch it all on YouTube.

That sounds like the better option. I'm not convinced pressing the buttons adds anything much to the experience.

Drug Of The Nation? I Wish...

I let slip a while ago that I'd finally gotten around to watching the first season of Arcane, the animated series commissioned by Riot Games and supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, League of Legends. Everyone else, of course, watched the show years ago. The first season came out in late 2021 and the second and final season, which I have just finished watching, premiered three years later. Talk about being late to the party...

Why did I wait so long? It's not like I wasn't aware of it or how good it was reported to  be. The show has stellar reviews. It won a shed-load of prestigious awards. I remember a bunch of bloggers raving about it when it was new and my close friend, who has very good taste in TV and movies, tried to get to me watch it ages ago. 

It was the League of Legends connection that put me off. I've never played the game and never wanted to, which makes for an educative data point alongside Cyberpunk 2077, a game I've also never played but have frequently considered buying. There's an animated series based on that one, too, Edgerunners, and I didn't have any interest in that either, at least not until I found out Rosa Walton of Lets Eat Grandma had done the theme song.

Apparently, the presence of a gaming IP, even one I approve of, can actively deter me from watching a TV show. For corroborative evidence I offer Fallout, another highly-regarded show I have yet to see. This is clearly a personal foible and one I need to address. It's self-evidently preventing me from enjoying some of the very best work in the field.

Having watched Edgerunners I judged it "very, very good". I'm going to have to come up with something a lot more complimentary for Arcane. 

Arcane is possibly the best animated series I've ever seen. If there's a better one, I can't immediately think what might be. I'm sure most people reading this will already have watched it so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of hyperbolic detail about why it's so good. Everyone already knows and if they don't I strongly suggest they stop wasting time like I did and go find out what they've been missing. It's a lot.

The animation is almost literally breathtaking. It did make me draw in breath in surprise or awe a few times. I've spent a lifetime watching animated movies and television shows and I've never seen anything as rich and deep. The level of detail is astonishing but more astonishing still is the extent to which that detail informs the narrative. It's one thing to dress a set, another to reveal a world.

The writing is novelistic. Characters have inner and outer lives that extend beneath, above and beyond the text. There are no ciphers or stereotypes. Even the minor characters have substance.

The plot is labyrinthine, yet always navigable. The story works on multiple levels, from coming of age to family saga to epic myth, and somehow manages to keep all of them balanced throughout. 

Well, almost. The end shows signs of the elision from five seasons to two as Riot decided they'd accrued enough prestige from patronizing the arts and decided to cut their losses as costs spiraled. The fact that the show bears, by all accounts I've read, almost no resemblance to the video game and consequently had little to no impact on that game's profile or profitability, presumably factored strongly in the decision to fold.

Even so, the truncated ending is barely noticeable. The finale leans hard into the cosmic and it works. It might not be immediately comprehensible but it carries.

Who knows what would have happened across five seasons? Would the quality have held up? Maybe it's better it ended when and as it did.

I was certainly satisfied. And satiated. It was a hard watch in the sense that each episode drained me. I could not have watched two in a row without losing something. I'm bitterly aware of how much I missed but the thought of re-watching is overwhelming. In a year or two maybe. 

One thing Arcane did make me want to do was re-watch Edgerunners. I know it won't be an experience on the same level but now I'm wondering how much I might have missed there, too. One watch is never enough for anything, let alone something good.

I haven't gone back to Edgerunners just yet though. What I'm watching, now I have a space in my schedule, is more Angel, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off from 1999, doubling up from one episode a night to two.

I've had the box set on DVD for years and never even opened it. Once again, my main reason, other than sheer inertia, was that I thought I knew what it would be like. I always know. I'm often wrong.

I thought it would be dark, brooding and serious. Angel, as a character in Buffy, never seemed to have much going for him other than moody good looks and some bad-boy attitude, especially when his come-and-go soul went. Even though I knew the first four seasons of his own show also featured Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and even though it's pretty hard to imagine Cordy ever being even remotely serious, that was still the impression I'd somehow acquired.

As, once again, I'm sure most people who come to this blog already know, I was wrong. Or I was for as much of the first season as I've seen so far, fifteen episodes. Maybe it gets darker later. Usually I like to wait until I've seen at least a whole season to comment but in this case I have an ulterior motive.

Before I get to it, let me just say Angel, the show, does not match my expectations at all. Like Buffy (The show, not so much the character.) it's as much a comedy as a thriller. It does hit some dark notes but so far it's orders of magnitude away from the relentlessly grim later seasons of Buffy, the grim, dour, depressing period, after Willow drags Buffy back from heaven. The very seasons that would have been running in tandem with Angel at the time. Who'd have thought Angel would have been the light relief?

Maybe it won't last. Maybe things will turn bleak in the coming seasons. I hope not. I'm enjoying the monster-of-the-week plots and all the mugging and slapstick (Wesley.) and snappy come-backs (Cordelia.). As for David Boreanaz and his perpetually confused look, it's a big improvement over his Heathcliff impression back in the Sunnydale era.

And just as Arcane made me want to re-watch Edgerunners, Angel makes me want to re-watch Buffy. I have the box set of that, too, which is just as well because, unlike Angel, which I'm watching on Amazon Prime Video for free, Buffy isn't streaming on any of my platforms just now.

The advantage of seeing Angel on Prime instead of DVD is convenience. The disadvantage is adverts. Prime, as we know, despite charging a subscription, wants you to pay extra to avoid ads. And here we come to my ulterior motive in talking early about Angel.

Those ads! What the heck are Amazon playing at? 

I don't mean by trying to make us watch them. I get that they're making money coming and going by charging companies to place ads and then charging viewers not to see them but for that ploy to work, wouldn't you think there'd need to be some pattern to it?

There is none! I watched one episode of Angel last week that had an advert before the show had even started, then another less than two minutes later, between the credits and the show itself . Then there were more ads every ten or fifteen minutes until the end. It was incredibly disruptive and annoying. Obviously I didn't watch any of the ads - I tabbed out and turned  the sound off - but just the constant interruption to the narrative was infuriating.

Prior to that, which was an exception, some episodes just opened with a trailer for another Prime show, something that barely counts as advertising at all in my eyes, then maybe popped in one more short ad much later in the program. That was very easy to ignore. Other episodes had the same cadence but with much longer ad breaks, which was more annoying but manageable.

The last three episodes I've watched, however, have had no adverts at all. None. Not even the opening trailer. It's spooky.

Am I'm being lulled into a false sense of security? Has one of my ad blockers, none of which should affect Prime at all, upgraded itself and taken control? Has Amazon not managed to sell any advertising space in these particular episodes?

It's disconcerting. I find myself waiting for the ads to start. I'm not saying I want them to but the suspense when they don't is getting to be altogether too much. At least when Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch the Great Pottery Showdown live on Channel 4, the ads (Which are universally terrible, by the way.) come at the same time in every episode. That's bad enough but it's far worse knowing they could pop up at any time. Or not at all.

I'd love to know if there's a commercial imperative behind the apparent randomness or whether something's just broken. Clearly, Amazon has the capacity both to target ads at specific viewers and also to place them in shows those people are likely to watch. Maybe no-one wants their ads turning up in random episodes of twenty-five year-old shows. Maybe Amazon thinks none of the ads would interest me. Who knows?

I don't but I'd love to. Anyone else getting this kind of sporadic, unpredictable advertising? Or have any theories what my be driving it?

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...

Tuesday Tapas (Does That Work?)

After a run of hefty posts it might be time for a grab-bag, don't you think? Why should Fridays have all the fun? Let's start with the bad news and get that out of the way first.

Chimeraland Server Merges.

It seems the global launch of Level Infinite's excellent creature-crunching mmo/survival mashup hasn't gained the traction the developers might have hoped. We're looking at server merges after just three months.

It's a shame the game hasn't received more attention in the West but for all we like to pretend the genre is in steep decline, there's actually a glut of mmorpgs right now. New additions to the select roster of AAA titles that still dominate the press cycle may be few and far between but new mmorpgs from other territories or independents seem to throw themselves against the cliffs of indifference almost weekly.

I have to admit to being part of the problem rather than part of the solution. I really like Chimeraland but I haven't been playing much. In years gone by I'd have been happy to have made it my focus game. I'd have spent twenty or thirty hours a week playing it, probably for months. I'd have been willing to pay a subscription, too.

These days, the sheer choice on offer makes a commitment like that feel silly. Even so, I still might have bedded down in the game, had I not already put in a stint on the SEA servers and had Chimeraland's global launch not clashed with another new mmorpg, one I hadn't already worn the shine off - Noah's Heart.

Three months later, here I am, still playing Noah's Heart every day. Chimeraland fell out of my rotation very quickly, slipped back in with the "Please Come Back - We Miss You" event, then dropped out for a second time as soon as I'd bled said event dry. 

This sort of thing always makes me a tad anxious for the prospects of the games I enjoy. They're all fragile, dependent on fashion as much as quality. Playing both games over the last few months, despite getting slightly more attention in the specialist media, I'd have to say Chimeraland always looked the more at risk. Although the SEA server I used to play on didn't feel exactly busy, I did see other players most times I logged on. By contrast, on the global server where I occasionally play now, I hardly ever see anyone - and if I think back, I never really have. It's always felt deserted, even at launch.

In practical terms, it makes no difference to me whether Chimeraland has a slew of servers or just the one, so long as there's a place for me. I play solo and never interact with anyone. I don't even know how many servers there were to begin with. I just picked one at random and never looked back.

As for the possibility of losing my house, should someone else's structure be merged onto my plot, that really doesn't matter either. I've barely started working on it. It's one room, a patio and a rooftop viewing area. It would take me a short session to rebuild and I could make a much better job of it.

Even so, server merges are rarely a good sign and Easten imports don't generally have the longevity of local product in the West. I can't help but feel this is a harbinger of worse news to come.

Keeping Busy In Noah's Heart

Noah's Heart, by comparison, seems pretty busy. There are people in all the towns, zipping around on motorcycles and llamas, stacking on top of each other at the crafting stations or just standing around in clumps, doing who knows what.  

The community in Noah's Heart, if you can dignify it with the term, is perforce quite "active". The whole game revolves around something called Activity Points, which monitor and reward your level of engagement with the manifold opportunities available. The very first thing you see each day as you log in is a tally of your activity, although since it's always zeroed at the start of a session I'm not entirely sure why it's there. It would make more sense to have it pop up when you log out.

How busy you keep yourself in the game as an individual is up to you but as I mentioned briefly in a previous post, Guilds are expected to stay on the treadmill. As expected, my previous Greek-speaking guild was forcibly disbanded by the server for inactivity a couple of weeks ago.

I'd found being in a guild surprisingly useful so I immediately began looking for a replacement but every guild with a recruitment drive had strict activity quotas. You can't really blame them, when the penalty for slacking is oblivion.

In the end I decided to go with the method that worked so well the first time, namely doing nothing and waiting to be headhunted. It took a few days but eventually a drive-by invite popped up and I accepted it without a moment's hesitation.

My new guild, which I think, from memory, is called Guardians, is almost full and rates "High" on the health meter. Guild chat is quite lively and this time it's even in English. There are no specific activity requirements that I've seen other than making your daily Donations, something I would always do anyway because there is literally a daily for doing it. 

The big crime is inactivity. If you're offline for more than three straight days without a note from the Guild Leader, you're out of the guild. Since I've logged into Noah's Heart every day since launch, that's not a problem for me at the moment. If I take a break at any point I doubt I'll bother to petition for vacation time. I'll just wait to get picked up by another guild when I come back.

Edgerunners and The Last Bus

By utter co-incidence I found myself watching two very different SF series on Netflix side by side. One was the high profile Cyberpunk 2077 spin-off, Edgerunners, about which I posted right before I began. The other was the made-for-Netflix British kids show, The Last Bus.

The first season of each series just happened to consist of ten approximately thirty minute long episodes. For a week and a half I watched an episode of one followed by an episode of the other, which has to be some kind of object lesson in the breadth of field of which the genre is capable.

Everyone's probably familiar with the ultra-violent, foul-mouthed, hyper-sexualized content of Edgerunners but I imagine the homespun, love-is-the-answer, child-friendly The Last Bus has probably passed most of my readers by. Imagine something the Children's Film Foundation or the National Film Board of Canada might have made in the 1970s, give it a very slightly higher budget and update it for the 21st century but not too much. That's about where we're landing. It's almost literally a SciFi re-imagining of Here Come The Double Deckers, ffs.

I really enjoyed it. As some of the surprisingly positive reviews suggest, the characters and the acting are the series' greatest strength. By the end, I came to appreciate every one of the straggling, random selection apocalypse-dodging schoolkids, although god knows Misha made it hard work at times. I did genuinely shout at the screen more than once, when she was doubling down on her paradoxically apathetic sarcasm.

The special effects were generally acceptable, although whoever signed off on the "bus goes over the cliff" scene clearly needs to think seriously about their choice of career. I mean, how hard is it to drive an actual bus off a cliff? The script was decent and the plot solid. The whole thing ends with an unapolagetic lead-in to a second series, which I very much hope Netflix gives them. I'd certainly watch it.

I imagine Netflix would be only too pleased to give Edgerunners another season. The anime's racked up five star reviews across the board from critics and viewers alike. Having watched it to the end, I'm thinking a second season might be somewhat problematic but I can't really even hint as to the reason without giving some massive spoilers, so I'll just stick to what I thought of Season One.

I liked it a lot. I'm tempted to say I loved it but it would be more accurate to say I loved certain scenes and a couple of whole episodes. That's not to say the whole thing isn't good - it is - but some of it is truly excellent. As Naithin said in a comment (Which I forgot to reply to - sorry, Naithin!) last time I mentioned the show, "I wouldn't put it on the masterpiece pedestal." I felt the structure was a little baggy in places and some of the fight scenes were a tad self-indulgent.

As I said in that post, the only reason I came to watch Edgerunners at all was the involvement of Let's Eat Grandma's Rosa Walton on the soundtrack. Her tune, "I Really Want To Stay At Your House", crops up twice, both times to devestating effect. The whole soundtrack is great, especially the song that plays over the end credits, Let You Down by Dawid Podsiadło.

I let the credits run to to the end after all ten episodes just so I could hear that play. The Franz Ferdinand song that backs the intro sequence is pretty damn fine, too. I watched that through about half the time as well.

Perhaps the obvious comparison would be with Cowboy Bebop, although that may just be because it's the only remotely similar anime I happen to have seen. The two series share a number of key elements, though, including but not limited to a corporate dystopian setting, a crew of characters so cool it's physically painful to watch them, an overwhelming sense of ennui laced with hopeless romance and a nested maze of secrets and betrayals. All it's missing is the dog.

Not being quite as good as your influences doesn't invalidate the attempt, of course, or we'd pretty much have no popular culture at all. Edgerunners is very, very good and that's more than enough.

And that's probably more than enough for this post, too. I'll just end by mentioning some

Music News Snippets

I saw this week that Taylor Swift's upcoming album, Midnights (Already topping my Amazon wishlist) features a collab with Lana del Rey. Given they share a co-writer and producer in Jack Antonoff, himself in the news for snapping back at the increasingly unmoored Kanye over his supervillainesque stance on, well, you name it, it probably had to happen sometime. I'm just glad it's now. 

The new track's called "Snow On The Beach" and I only wish I could bring it to you here but since the album's not out for another ten days and for once nothing's leaked, I can't. We'll just have to wait until Friday week. 

Now all we need is a date for Lana's next. It's only been a year but, man, it feels so much longer...

Give Me A Reason. Yeah, That'll Do.

I haven't played Cyberpunk 2077. I'd like to but my PC won't run it. Well, technically it will. I just benchmarked it at PCGameBenchmark.com and somewhat to my surprise I got a PASS on all of the Minimum Specs but I'm not naive enough to think that would lead to a great experience.

On that test, my rig gets a rating of 37%, which is a failing grade by anyone's terms, although what it actually means is that I can run "371 of the top 1000 most popular games listed on PCGameBenchmark - at a recommended system level", which isn't quite as bad as I thought. Still, that number is only going to shrink.

The site very helpfully analyses where my rig is weakest and tells me what I need to do is upgrade the graphics card, which will "have a big impact on your performance in games." That's quite re-assuring. I've been thinking of doing it for a couple of years but obviously the market wasn't right. Now that crypto's over (Hah!) prices are coming back to a reasonable level, so it's probably time I did something about it at last.

Badge of Shame.

I've also thought about upping the ram. Memory has been very affordable for a long time so that hasn't been what's stopped me. I just haven't been sure it would make much of a difference. Still, it's bound to do something, right? Might as well do both.

Apart from money and availablity, the other reason I've been holding fire on upgrading this six-year old machine has been the prospect of remote play. Streaming if you prefer. Playing on someone else's hardware.

I dabbled with that when I was playing New World and I'll be doing it again when the miracle patch drops. Like everyone else, I'll be back in the queues to see how the new New World plays. I haven't decided if I'll start over so I can play through (And document.) the new-user experience or if I'll carry on with my existing, max-level character. Almost certainly both, I imagine.

New World does run on my machine, albeit not without issues. Although I can play just about normally, my PC makes frightening grinding sounds and chunters away to itself, which makes it hard to concentrate. I keep worrying it's going burst into flames. 

Playing New World on GeForce Now leaves my PC silent and cool but without paying a subscription it leaves me limited to one hour sessions (Albeit chainable indefinitely.) and the performance there isn't always great. It doesn't feel like the ideal time to be investing in a streaming game service, either, what with Google suddenly deciding to pull out of the market. I still believe streaming from remote servers is the future of mass-market gaming but we clearly have a ways to go yet.

Just because I can't play Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't mean I have to feel completely left out. There's a spin-off anime series on Netflix and I just started watching it last night. I'd been aware of it since it first appeared and I had it on my watchlist but it might have been a while before I got round to watching it if it hadn't been for this.

That's the 7" single that came with the deluxe edition of Let's Eat Grandma's utterly wonderful third album, Two Ribbons and even on such a superb record it would have been a standout. I'm not convinced by the logic of putting your very best work on bonus material in collectors' packages but so long as we all get to hear it later I guess it doesn't much matter either way.

Towards the end of that Stereogum article (That you didn't click through and read earlier. No judgment!) there's this delicious tidbit: "In other Let’s Eat Grandma news, they scored the upcoming Netflix series The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, which drops on the streamer on October 28." Oooh! Excited now!

Naturally, the first thing I did was look the show up. Turns out it's an adaptation of a YA series called "Half Bad", the first of which I read in proof quite a few years ago. I can't even remember if I liked it, much less what it was about. The publisher, Penguin, must have had expectations. They made a promo video. That doesn't happen often. Here it is. Just don't confuse it with the upcoming show.

You'd think the fact that I never read any of the sequels would suggest I wasn't very keen but you'd be one hundred per cent wrong on that. I've started any number of series with proofs, many I loved and swore I'd follow, but the problem with reading proofs is that by the time the actual book comes out you've read fifty more. I very rarely remember to follow through on series I discover that way.

My success rate with TV adaptations of YA fantasy series has been pretty good, though, so I have hopes for this one. I'd probably have watched it anyway, when it popped up in a New to Netflix promo. Now I know Rosa and Jenny did the music it's a sure thing.

A lot of indie/pop/rock musicians seem to be working in soundtracks these days. Some of them seem more suited to it than others. Let's Eat Grandma's lush, cinematic sound ought to be a natural fit. Once again, though, releasing in limited format. Not sure about that.

 Still not seeing the Cyberpunk 2077 connection? Don't fret. We're getting there.

After I'd watched the video for "Give Me A Reason" embedded in the Stereogum piece, I went straight to YouTube to download it. As I was listening to it again, I noticed several links to Cyberpunk 2077 in the reccomends sidebar. I thought that seemed odd so when the song finished I clicked through to see if I could find out why they were there. This is why.

Credited to "Rosa Walton and Hallie Coggins", it's not by Let's Eat Grandma as such, even though it sounds exactly like something they'd do. It's a solo effort by Rosa, whose "in-universe alter-ego" is... Hallie Coggins. The song plays on the in-game radio station 98.7 Body Heat Radio and features in the TV show, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, all of which is so meta it burns. Also, talk about limited accessibility...

So far, I've  only watched the first episode of the show. It starts very unpromisingly for reasons that are satisfactorily explained within a few minutes but it's a risky opening. If I'd been flicking through, looking for something to watch, I'd have kept on going.

After the unsettling start the thing picks up traction quickly. I was solidly hooked by about ten minutes in. I'm looking forward to seeing all ten episodes. By accounts I've read, the Rosa Walton tune accompanies a deeply resonant, emotional episode in the show. I'd expect nothing less.

We'll see if watching the show makes gives me a reason to play the game. Who knows, by the time I get to the end of Episode 10 I might even have bought myself a new video card.