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.