Wishing You All A Very...

First of all

Merry Christmas!

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.

Any Color You Like So Long As It's Black. And On Fire.

I was hoping for something quick to post about today, seeing as how I was forced to spend most of the morning and some of the afternoon fighting with my PC, after it woke up this morning and decided the last three years must have been a dream. It's done this before and I have no idea why. It suddenly reverts to a previous profile and loads everything as if it was 2021. 

Once I'd gotten that sorted out (Whether the fix will stick is another matter.) it was time to take Beryl for a walk and by the time I got to think about what to post about it was almost tea-time. Luckily, right around then I received an email from Amazon Prime telling me there was a gift waiting for me in New World.

Sorry. New World Aeternum. Keep forgetting that part. And it's important, too, because that's why we're getting presents. Amazon still trying to drum up interest.

There is also an event on, the annual repeat of the Winter Convergence festival, about which I've posted before. That was fun the first couple of times but I don't think I'd have bothered to log in for it again this year. Free stuff, though...

Except it isn't really anything I want. It's appearance armor, which is fine, but it's big, clunky, clanky armor, the kind I never like to see any of my characters wearing, in any game. 

It's black, too. Possibly there's fire coming out of it. There is in the video. It looks like it was designed by a fourteen year-old boy and for all I know, perhaps it was, but more likely that's who the designers think mostly plays New World Aeternum these days.

And they may be right. I wouldn't know. 

I do know that the armor in question is modeled on the stuff Arnold Schwarzenegger wears in the New World Aeternum (I'd abbreviate it but then it'd be NWA, which is something entirely different...) segment of that new Prime Video show, Secret Level. When he's wearing anything at all, that is. Mostly he poses with his shirt off.

I nearly said "episode" there, too, but I'm not convinced a fourteen minute standalone counts as an "episode" of anything. It's a short, at best.

It's quite good, though, for what it is. I just watched it. Didn't take long. Fourteen minutes, in fact. As I said.

The animation is slick and stylish, especially the faces, which look pretty much like live footage of actual people. Not sure that's the best direction for animation but it's impressive all the same. Some of the movement is a little video-gamey, especially in long shot, but by and large it's all very convincing. 

The story concerns a character I've met in the game itself. Everyone who's played the new version of New World will have met him. He's the main quest-giver in the starting area. Sound choice for recognition value.

He's also a fairly memorable character in the game for his personality and humor, much of which makes the transition to the TV screen. Arnie does an excellent job of voicing King Aelstrom (For it is he.), playing him with an understated, affectionate irony that comes across very well. 

There are, I think, only three other speaking parts, one of whom only gets a handful of lines and another who speaks only in... I want to say Latin? Not sure. It needs subtitles, anyway.

Arnie's sidekick is played by Steven Pacey, of all people. He was Tarrant in the third and fourth seasons of Blake's Seven but I don't remember him having a west country accent back then. Of course, that was more than forty years ago. Maybe he moved to Devon. A lot of people retire there and he must be of an age.

The plot, such as it is, is engaging enough and quite amusing but, more importantly, it does a very good job of contextualizing the absloute basics of New World and indeed all MMORPG gameplay, namely that you die over and over and over and over again and only by dying repeatedly do you ever progress. Apart from that, the scenery looks like Aeternum and...

No, that's it. Other than that it doesn't really have much to do with the game at all. Well, there's a bit at the very beginning where a load of soldiers dressed up like conquistadors are on a sailing ship and it sinks. That happens in the game. But then everyone forgets all about it because it's embarassing and so they do in the video, too.

I would have included some screen grabs from the show but Prime is extremely determined no-one shoud do that. All you get is a black screen if you try. There are ways to get around it but I can't be bothered. If they don't want the free publicity, sod 'em.

Instead, I was going to use a few shots of my character in game, wearing the new armor. I went to log in and ended up downloading the entire game all over again, What is it with games on Steam these days, that they have to re-install the whole thing every time there's a patch. It's starting to tick me off.

After it downloaded it had to "install" and that failed at 50% so now it's doing the whole 73GB again and I have lost whatever patience with it I ever had so there will be no in-game pictures. So there!

As for Secret Level, I find myself mildly encouraged. I wasn't going to bother watching any of it but now I might, if I find myself with a quarter of an hour free and nothing better to do. 

They can put that on the posters, if they like.

Just Like Starting Over: New World Aeternum X Once Human: The Way Of Winter

After yesterday's extended diversion it's time to play catch-up. Two of the bigger gaming stories of the week were the relaunch/rebranding of New World as New World Aeternum and a new season for Once Human. And as it happens I've played enough of both to have some first impressions, so here they are.

The first thing I want to say applies to both of them: these are two highly playable games that give me very little of that familiar disconnect we've all felt when coming back after a layoff. Granted, it hasn't been all that long since I last played either of them but the core gameplay loop and the functional mechanics of each is so clear and clean it's hard to imagine it would be much different, coming back after a much longer time away.

Then again, in both cases the latest updates do strongly encourage, if not mandate, a restart. It's always easier  if you come in at the beginning instead of halfway through.

While the gameplay in each may be extremely easy to pick back up, I very much cannot say the same for the look and feel in the case of one of the pair. I spent more time - considerably more time - fiddling with the settings in New World Aeternum than I did playing the game itself, trying to make it look like the game I remembered or even just a game I was willing to spend more than thirty seeconds in. 

Here we are at last!

At one point I was strongly tempted to log back into my old (Now legacy.) character to check if I was misremembering how uncluttered the screen used to look. I have a vision in my head of New World as a clean, virtual world experience, not a jabbering mess of disconnected words and images but maybe that was beta. Whatever and whenever it was, I'm pretty sure the game never looked as chaotic and disorganized as this.

Some of it is personal preference, of course. I have a very strong dislike of seeing names and numbers bobbing about on screen so my first act in many new games is to go into the settings and turn off almost everything that displays over players' heads - names, guilds, titles - all the cruft no-one but the person playing the character ought to give a toss about. 

Then I do the same for NPCs, stripping out all the on-screen identifiers unless removing them fundementally breaks gameplay. Ideally, I like to have all information appear on mouse-over or, failing that, on a click. I want to be the one who decides what displays when, not the developer. 

I also switch off all floating damage and healing numbers, on myself and on the mobs. I can see that information far less obtrusively elsewhere on the screen or I should be able to, if the designers have done their jobs.

It took me far, far longer to get rid of all that crap in NWA (Unfortunate acronym, that, isn't it?) than it ought to have done. Far longer than it does in most games and, to my memory, longer than it used to in this one, too. Not everything I wanted to switch off had a toggle and it was a lot harder than it needed to be to find the off button for those that did.

At one point I even tried playing with the HUD off. Great for immersion but hardly practical.

In the end, even after I'd literally checked every single entry on every menu, I couldn't find any way to switch off player names,something that I have long considered to be a basic option in any multiplayer title. In a game with which I felt less investment, this alone would be enough to make me give up and play something else. Now I'm wondering whether New World ever let you switch the names off or if it was always this way and I was just too excited to care at the beginning, while later on there weren't enough other players around to make it feel like a problem.

The problem with names is, of course, always far worse when a game is new and popular. I don't know how popular NWA is going to stay but certainly when I played it was absolutely heaving. There was a huge crowd milling around the starting area and chat was a nest of vipers, spitting venom about platforms.

NWA is Amazon's attempt to launch New World as a console game and the new servers (Standard Servers as they're called.) all facilitate cross-play between console and PC gamers. That sounds very friendly and inclusive, on paper. In practice, not so much. 

I was surprised and irritated to find the acrimonious rivalry between these groups lives on. I thought it died out years ago. It seems no, sadly. A bit of friendly ribbing is one thing but this felt like a the supporters of a couple of rival sports teams taking it outside for a knock-down brawl.

It reminded me of the old days in MMORPGs, when every new game launched to the background of an ill-tempered debate in General on whether it was better than World of Warcraft. Back then it sometimes felt as though Blizzard stans bought new games as they appeared just so they could log in on launch day and tell everyone what suckers they were for playing and how they should all uninstall and go play WoW instead.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice this is the same screenshot I cropped for yesterday's post.

I prefer to have chat on but not when it's nothing but an endless argument between people with fixed opinions and others taking sides for the sake of an argument. That's no more entertaining when the sides are PC vs Playstation vs XBox than when it's game vs game.

It was, once again, a lot harder to work out how to dull that racket than it should have been. AS I say, I prefer to have chat on when possible, so first I tried some milder solutions, like limiting chat to only players on the same platform as me, an option whose very existence seemed like an admission of defeat by the developers, or dropping out of General. 

And that did largely alleviate the platform wars problem but only long enough to reveal a more fundemantal issue. Chat continued to scroll endlessly, filled with various invites and requests to join this or do that. There seemed to be a lot of links people wanted everyone to click.

For some reason I can't quite explain, but which has to relate to the font or the colors or both, even with the chat box safely tucked away in the lower-left corner of the screen, I just could not ignore it. Every time I looked elsewhere on the screen, something would flicker in my peripheral vision, low down on the left and I'd glance at it and lose focus on what I was doing. It was unmanageably distracting so in the end I caved and switched chat off altogether. This is not ideal in an MMORPG and it's something I hardly ever do or feel I need to do but I couldn't figure out any way around it.

It's instructive to compare that with my experience playing Once Human the next night. Even though the server I played on there was listed as "Nearly Full" when I joined it and it was only a few hours since the new Season had become playable, I had absolutely no problems with chat. Not only were people not behaving like nine-year olds in the schoolyard but the chat box itself, even though it was the same size and in the same location on screen, posed no distraction whatsoever, even when plenty of people were talking.

I didn't take any pictures of the horrible UI so here's one from a cut scene instead. Although, come to think of it, if anyone can tell me what that stupid timer thing at the bottom is and how to get rid of it, I'd be vey grateful. I couldn't shift the damn thing and it kept coming back.

This is a design issue more than anything. I notice it in various games. Sometimes chat imposes itself on the game, sometimes it sits back. Usually you can tweak it to push that one way or the other but in NWA it seems determined to be in your face, all the time, no matter what. Or not there at all, which is where it is for me now and where it's likely to stay. Amazon wanted to pretend the game wasn't an MMO so I'm meeting them halfway.

That's a lot of talk about the UI but it represents the amount of time and attention I felt I had to give it in the game to make it baseline playable. Once I'd finally managed to get that done, I was able to start enjoying myself. And I did.

New World has given us several cinematic introductions in its short life and now it has another to show off. They're always fun to watch, although I'm not necessarily a huge fan of mini-movies at the beginning of video games. The new one blends some of what was there before with some fresh scenes and does, I think, make more sense overall.

Indeed, the whole introduction, including the short tutorial section, is much tighter and cleaner now although I suspect that may only because someone at Amazon finally decided to sit down and work out what the game was going to be about. Probably about time that happened.

Character creation is still embedded in the introduction, which was always a nice touch. There are some new looks. It's a relatively limited selection by modern standards but that's fine. I know from long experience that if I make a character more than a few degrees outside my established preferences I'll fail to bond with them and not want to play them, so as long as I can make someone who looks there and thereabouts like all my other characters, I'm good.

Come on in! The water's lovely!

The basic tutorial tells you how to move and hit things and is extremely visual. There are lots of very bright colors and plenty of explosions. I think it's supposed to be exciting. Then it ends and you get to see the world where you'll be spending time and it feels slightly odd, as though you've come off a ride, back into the busy, bustling theme park itself, all lines and chatter and milling about.

Part two of the tutorial, the part where some very chatty characters give you simple tasks to do and praise you inordinately when you do them, as though you've somehow outpaced all reasonable expectations, takes place on the same beach it always did. The tasks are much the same, too - kill some boars, kill some corrupted sailors, loot some wrecked ships, recover some lost things, find the source of corruption in a cave and destroy it - but the flow is much better and the reasons for doing what you're doing seem a lot clearer than they used to.

Part of that is the dialog and voice acting delivered by the two new NPCs at the campfire, all of which is well above standard. The third NPC, the pirate captain, seems about as I remember her but she's fine, too. Not as good as the "king" and his long-suffering friend but good enough, even if her accent is a bit on the "Oirish" side.. 

I got as far as the first settlement in the one session I've played so far and there seemed to be a fair amount of new dialog, although it's possible it's the same old stuff and I've just forgotten it. Or indeed that it was added in one of the earlier revamps and I never played through it at the time. Whatever, it feels pretty solid; definitely better than I remember.

Yes! I knew it!

As for the physical feel of the thing, it's the same pleasurable experience it always was. New World has one of the best action combat systems I've tried. It feels fluid and natural and intuitive and they don't seem to have changed anything much that I can sense, which is just as well. 

The world looks great as always, there's lots to see and plenty to loot and there's a constant drip of dopamine as skills upgrade on use and new abilities come in. As has generally been the case, once I started playing I didn't want to stop. 

I didn't even feel annoyed by having to start over. It felt like an opportunity more than an imposition although whether I'll ever have the time to get a new character all the way back to where I left the old one is another matter. I wonder if it's safe to assume this will be the last time we're asked to do it?

Perpetual new beginnings is something of a feature in Once Human, where the need to keep re-starting been a major point of contention since launch. The seasonal structure there has met a certain amount of pushback from players and required numerous official statements and explanations from the developers who, if they ever feel they may have made an error of judgment in insisting on it, certainly haven't let that change their minds as they try to impose their vision on the game. 

Like quite a lot of people, even though I wasn't against the seasonal structure per se, I couldn't find the motivation to engage with it for the first reset, where the options were to do the same thing again at higher difficulty or do it again with other players trying to kill me. This time, with a completely new scenario taking place on an entirely new set of maps in a different part of the region, complete with new questlines and plot, though, this feels almost like the game just got an expansion.

Meet the baddies.

That's not such a leap when you think about it. Although The Way of Winter does require you to start over to some degree, so do most MMORPG expansions. You generally need to begin by replacing all your old gear just to be able to handle the new content and that's not much different from what happens here. The new gear you craft to get started may look like the old stuff you used to have but it isn't the same. The old stuff didn't keep you warm. This does. 

Expansions come with new features and that's the expansionesque feature of the new Season in OH. Now you can die of frostbite or heatstroke! What a thrill! In practice, it's just another stat to manage but I quite like it all the same.

I also like the new plot, which involves a really sinister new villain, the head of the Vultures, a criminal gang we've been slaughtering from the get-go. Nice to find out who they are at last and what it is they're up to. 

Their leader, Igna, is written and played with suitable arrogance and snark and I found him genuinely scary. So did Matsuko, the girl with the butterfly stuck to her face, who really doesn't like it when the he projects his image into her supposedly secret pocket-dimensional lair. That's how the new Season begins and I found it engaging and immersive. Once Human has consistently strong writing and voice acting and this is right up to par.

That's not threatening at all...

Things continue to go well after the introduction. There's a choice of starting points - a double choice in fact. You can opt to go into the scenario at a lower level, suitable for newcomers, or enter at a more difficult point, appropriate for experienced players. Obviously I chose the easier one, a choice which then  split into three possible locations on the same map.

I picked the one with the name I liked best and off we went. Once again I had to glide down from a hundred meters in the air, hanging on to the feet of a large hawk. It's a weird way to begin any game but it seems to happen a lot these days. Did it start in Fortnite, this falling from the sky routine? I think that's the first time I saw it. Hard to remember now, it's happened so often since.

Once I reached the ground I started to notice the cold right away. That, I think, was just bad luck. It happened to be just coming on nighttime when I arrived (Didn't I say it's always night when I log in to any game?) and the temperature naturally fell when the sun went down. Since this is an MMORPG, I don't think that time of arrival can have been set for me specifically. I was just unlucky not to get there in the daytime, when it would have been pleasantly warm.

It gave me an introduction to the new temperatue mechanic, anyway. And hypothermia. It gave me that, too. Luckly, hypothermia is just a debuff. It's freezing that kills you. 

I don't know, V. Why don't you tell me? I'm sure you're dying to.

I went straight into survival mode, built myself a camp, killed some deer (Reindeer!), striped their hides and made myself a whole new outfit with a bonus to cold resistance. I would probably have done just that anyway but as it happened it was what V, my glowing bird pal, told me to do because I was still in a sort of extended tutorial. Not surprising, since I had picked the newbie option, after all.

Naturally, by the time I'd gotten myself dressed and protected myself from the cold, the sun came up and it got warm and I didn't need protecting any more. Ho hum. So it was off to the nearest town to see what they had for me to do.

My welcome there wasn't the warmest (Hah!). There was some shouting and gun-pointing until the guard spotted my Mayfly backpack, which as usual worked like some kind of not-so-secret masonic handshake and I was in. Once again, the dialog and the voice acting was strong. It's always a good sign when I find myself wanting to listen to the end even though I've already read ahead and now what they're going to say.

And, also once again, that's where I left it; safely ensconced in the starting town, ready to move on to whatever comes next. I find myself in the happy position of wanting to carry on playing both of these new-old games, my enthusiasm for both seemingly refreshed by the forced re-starts rather than, as it could easily have been, set back.

Maybe because every time someone like you sees them you imagine we're your best mates and you give us the keys your house? Cos that's what keeps happening...

I suspect it's likely I'll get further with Once Human, which has actual new content, than with New World Aeternum, which is only offering a revised version of what was already there. Then again, The Way of Winter is only good for six weeks or so and then I'll have to start again, again, whereas this, hopefully, ought to be the last time I need to start over in New World.

As for which is going to be the more successful overall, at the moment, the clear leader in the relaunch stakes, as far as Steam is concerned, is Once Human. It has almost twice as many people playing as NWA, although there Amazon will be mostly be looking at the console numbers, I'm sure. Still, the PC game has taken a bump, too, so we'll see how that lasts. 

As for which of the approaches will have the greatest success in the longer term, I have no idea how well NWA might do on consoles but on PC I'd back Once Human, whichseems tohave burned fewer bridges and made a better job of hanging on to the players it already has so far.

I plan on playing both, on and off. I don't even mind if I have start over again at some point. Just let's leave it a while, now, eh?

Truth, Time And A Third Word Begining With "T" I Can't Think Of Just Now...

You ever have one of those weeks where everything happens at once? This blog's having one of those right now. 

There's Next Fest, for which I have seven demos to cover, four of which I've already played and one of which I've already reviewed, so that's going about as well as could be expected. Better, really. 

There was also that new, hot game that no-one's talking about that I downloaded the demo for before Next Fest even began. I've played (Some of) that one and posted about it already too, so ditto.

Then there's the launch of a brand-new, highly-anticipated open world RPG that's definitely not an MMO, which has been out for three years now and that millions of people have played, many hundreds or even thousands of them on the same servers at the same time, actually (Oh, stop it!). New World Aeternum, it's called. 

I downloaded that one, with considerable difficulty, yesterday and last night I made a character. She's Level 8 so that's a work in progress, pretty much the same as the game itself, which has been re-envisioned at least three times now to my certain knowledge. Will this be the version that sticks? We'll see soon enough, although whether anyone still cares might be a more appropriate question.

After that comes the second full PvE season in Once Human which, unlike the last two seasons that don't really count because they were just revamped versions of the first season with some bits moved around and some difficulty settings tweaked, brings a huge amount of genuinely new content to the game. 

There's a whole new region with four zones, as we would have called them in the olden days, before everything went seamless. That's an expansion by some people's reckoning. I can think of marketing departments that would be hanging the expansion label on an update like that and charging for it, too.

I read the latest press release for the update yesterday (Version 1.3 - The Way of Winter - that's what it's called.) and it does sound really interesting. Exciting, even. I've had had a really great time playing Once Human for (Checks Steam...) eighty hours so far so I'm looking forward to getting in and seeing all the new stuff. The update went live today and I have it downloading as I write. Now I just have to play it for a while and then post about it. 

I could get right on that today, only late yesterday evening, just as I was about to switch my PC off for the night, I got an email inviting me into a "playtest" for another MMO. I downloaded the client but as yet I haven't checked whether there's an NDA or anything. The email didn't mention one and I haven't signed anything but I probably should double-check before I start rambling on about it in public.

By a conservative estimate, I make that nine posts pending at least, assuming I give all the demos a post of their own, which I'm hoping I won't have to but which experience tells me I probably will. To make it a nice, round ten, I just finished watching two TV shows I want to talk about. At least I can usually portmanteau several of those into one post so I shouldn't have to go to eleven.

I realize I have now spent eight paragraphs basically doing one of those posts about blogging that no-one wants to read but I blame that on Stuart Lee. Mrs Bhagpuss put one of his books on the bathroom book pile and I've been reading the bit where he goes through one of his touring shows as broadcast on the BBC, line by line, with extensive footnotes, talking through his process. I have always had an unfortunate tendency towards unconscious imitation. I think this might be one of those times.

And now I have to go take Beryl for a long walk in the countryside. It's been raining for two days straight and she's barely been outside but today the sun has come out and supposedly it's not going to rain all day so she's more than due. I'll have to pick this up again later. 

At least Once Human has updated now, so that's something off the list, at least.

And now I'm back. 

Is there any point to these "stepping away from the keyboard" sidebars, I'm wondering? It's like when Joanne says she has to go pee in Nobody Wants This. Or, rather, when she does it in the fictional podcast of the same name she co-hosts with her sister, in the hit TV show, also called Nobody Wants This. 

That, what I did there, besides being confusing, thanks to the embedded metafiction, for which I'm not to be held responsible, is called tele-parabalizing. 

Okay, it's not but it kind of is all the same. Douglas Coupland coined the term in his seminal novel Generation X, where he also came up with a whole slew of descriptive terms and labels for quasi-cultural activities that I'm sure he hoped would catch on, making him his generation's answer to Shakespeare. That didn't happen, as the Observer's Christine Smallwood somewhat unkindly pointed out in 2006, fifteen years after the publication of the book itself, but I have a bunch of those definitions in tiny frames on my kitchen wall so I haven't been able to forget them as easily as everyone else.

That's an interesting article, by the way, the one I linked then, although I only skimmed it so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the detail. Still, it is curious how GenX seems to have slipped through the cracks between Boomers and Millennials. Also, what was Generation Y, described in the piece as "the kids who were teenagers when Mr. Coupland was making it big"? Anyone remember them?

My feeling has long been that all generations need to be subdivided at least once. The life experiences of children growing up a decade apart are frequently too different to be tidily conflated. We probably should talk about Early and Late for all generations, which I guess would make Gen Y early Millennials. 

I didn't come here to talk about any of that, though. I seem to have gotten myself side-tracked. Again.

While I'm down this byway I might as well mention that, if you google "tele-parabalizing" to check if indeed it might have caught on more than you thought it had, as I just did, (It hasn't.) you'll find one of my posts, the frankly wonderfully-named Sad Goth Girl And The Treehouse Pajamas, at #4 in Google's list. Now I've mentioned it again I wonder if this post will also appear in future searches for the phrase? 

Probably not because the only reason the other one ranks that high to begin with is because I misspelled "parablizing". Coupland spells it without the second "a" and since he made it up, I guess he knows.

This is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the imminent "Death of the Internet" we're all supposed to be worrying about. I mean, just how reliable was the information we were all lapping up before the rise of the AIs anyway?

I mentioned earlier that I'm reading a Stewart Lee book (It's March of the Lemmings in fact, although that's not the cover of the edition currently lying on the floor of our bathroom.) In it, he occasionally refers in considerable detail, often with dates and names, to cultural artefacts that don't exist. Sometimes he then tells the reader he's made them up but mostly he doesn't.

For example, when he mentions "an Essex folk song collected by the archivist Shirley Collins in the '50s",  he's referring to a real person but when the sentence carries "from the old traveller singer Gonad Bushell" he's making stuff up. Specifically, what he's doing is collating the name of Gary Bushell, a right-wing music journalist and cultural commentator no-one likes with the name of Bushell's old band, The Gonads.

That one's a very obvious joke but "The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion: Anadolu Psych 1965-1980" by Daniel Spicer, which I assumed he'd also invented, turns out to be entirely bona fide, as does Julian Cope's band Brain Donor, a Cope project I was completely unaware of until I read about it in Lee's book. 

At one point, Stewart also quotes a lengthy post by someone purporting to be a stage manager, accusing Lee, in an unsettlingly calm, world-weary tone, of all kinds of behaviors and actions that turn out to be provably untrue. But that's what truth is: anything someone tells you until someone more convincing tells you otherwise.

I was reminded of that when I was in the launderette a couple of hours ago (I took a load of washing round after we got back from walking Beryl. If I was a comedian I guess I might say something like "This is what my life has become" but it's pretty much what my life already was, except now we have a dog...). As the load was in the drier, I was reading a novel called Starling House by Alix E Harrow and I was struck by just how many precise, specific references the author makes to books and songs which I was pretty sure didn't exist, at least not in the form she said they did.

For example, on page 44 the protagonist, Opal, makes a passing reference to "that one Prine song that everybody still hates", which would be largely meaningless and pass mostly unnoticed if it wasn't for a footnote on the same page, in which an unnamed annotater (Definitely another character, not the author.) explains "Opal is referring to John Prine's 1971 song "Paradise" on his debut album".

This is an actual song and that is an actual album and the lyrics do concern the mining industry in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, which is where the novel is set - in a small town called Eden. Prine's father grew up in Paradise, a small mining town in the same county and the song is about his experiences there.

Prine's song does not, however, include the line "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Old Gravely's coal train has hauled it away", as stated in the footnote because Gravely Power is a fictional company invented by the author. What John Prine actually wrote and sang was "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.", which is admittedly very similar but not the same.

According to Wikipedia, the real mining company that strip-mined the real Paradise was called the Peabody Coal Company. The fictional founder of the fictional Gravely Power that did the same to the fictional Eden was John Peabody Gravely. 

This seems to me to be getting extremely close to the kinds of "hallucinations" seen in AI-produced text, albeit here intentional rather than accidental. And being set down in print, it's now in the cultural record as much as anything on the internet. Maybe it even has more authority that way, even though its in a novel. Books have gravitas.

There's more, too. Across the next four pages, Alix E Harrow incorporates the full text of a supposed Wikipedia article on fictional author Eleanor Starling. There's nothing very unusual about writers creating other writers who never existed and filling out their bibliographies as though they did but backfilling fake internet data into a printed book adds a level or two of complexity, not to say confusion. 

Here, once again, the author includes a number of direct and specific references from our non-fictional timeline. They're extrmeley well-done and wholly convincing.

For example, there's a quote attributed to Guillermo del Toro: "the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier but to lay it bare". It sounds like something the director might have said, although clearly he couldn't have said it, as the fictional Wikipedia article suggests, about the equally fictional author Eleanor Starling. I did wonder if it was an actual quote, re-purposed but in fact it's wholly made up. De Toro never said it at all.

Better yet, there's a reference to Josh Witter's third studio album, "Hello Starling", which supposedly includes a song called "Nora Lee and Me" as a hidden track, Nora Lee being the name of the girl in The Underland, the one and only book Eleanor Starling ever wrote. 

Josh Ritter's third album really is called Hello Starling, although presumably for entirely different reasons. Having the song be a "hidden track" on it is a master-stroke because, of course, hidden tracks do exist but are never listed anywhere, so even if an internet search brings up no trace of any song of that name you can never be absolutely sure it doesn't exist. All we need now is for Ritter to read the book and decide to write the song and include it as a hidden track on future editions of the album and reality will have fractured into shards.

All of this suggests that humans are and always have been perfectly capable of muddying the factual waters all on their own, without the help of soi-disant artificial intelligences and lumbering LLMs. The internet, which was always awash with nonsense, may yet become so sodden with falsehood it will sink to the bottom of the data sea and lie there, a rotting wreck filled with misinformation, fantasy and lies but whether that makes it materially different from the recorded corpus of human thought and expression from the previous several millennia is questionable at best.

Did I have a point? If I did, I think I made it. Let's move on.

Actually, let's stop. That took most of the day and now I'm one post further behind where I wanted to be. Result!

I suppose I'd better get on and play another of those demos. Or take a look at that game I'm supposed to be playtesting and see if it has an NDA.

Off I go. Wish me luck. And here's hoping I make a better job of this tomorrow.

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the final image, which was generated at NightCafe using Real Cartoon XL v4 from the prompt "Nora Lee and Me starling house the underland line drawing color dark gothic scary". It was the second attempt. the first, where the prompt didn't have the "dark gothic scary" part, turned out way too bright and cheerful, as you'd expect.