I Got My MTV

Can't blame Baldur's Gate this time, even if I did play for a couple of hours this morning. Many demands on my time from much less entertaining sources mean there may be fewer posts - or shorter posts - here for a while. Still, shorter posts have been a dream of mine for years now so it's an ill wind that blows nobody's hat off or whatever the expression is.

In lieu of a proper post, I'm going to take a moment to share a couple of curious time-wasters I discovered yesterday. That could refer to the... shall we call them apps? Not sure. Websites? Could be. Or maybe it's a somewhat uncharitable description of the people who created them.

Very unfair, that would be. Time well spent, I'd say. It's we who watch the results who will be wasting our time. [Oh just get on with it! - The Audience] 

Very well then. I shall. Here's the first.

This one came to me by way of the NME and so far they're the only media outlet I follow to have reported on it, which is unusual. Firstly, because NME, Stereogum and Pitchfork reliably cover the same stories, day in, day out, and secondly because if it didn't happen in Britain, NME is almost always a day late telling anyone about it.

They were ahead of the pack on this one, although it may be that no-one else thought it worth mentioning. The story, for the click-averse, is that "someone on Reddit" decided to respond to MTV's decision to stop showing any music videos at all by recreating MTV as it used to be when music videos were all it showed.

The "someone" is in fact a redditor going by ShillyLou. Why NME declined to credit them by name is unclear.  ShillyLou's account is currently suspended but only, I believe, because the sudden huge interest it attracted triggered reddit's bot alarm.

The actual website - I'm going with that - is called MTV REWIND and it lets you select any decade from the seventies to when MTV pulled the plug this year. It plays music videos with some period commercials thrown in for flavor. Currently there are over 30,000 videos and ten channels to choose from.

There was some concern shown in the reddit thread for the future of the project. People assumed it would quickly get shut down by MTV's IP owner,  Paramount. That seems a lot less likely when you learn that the entire thing is powered via YouTube's API, meaning every song that plays is an embedded YouTube video. I spent some time researching the legalities when I began featuring music videos here. As far as I understand it, if you follow YT's official procedure, they have all the rights nailed down already, so Paramount will most likely have to put up with it.

With that in mind, I look forward to many hours of quality period entertainment, entirely ad and subscription free. ShillyLou isn't taking money for ads and YouTube's own embedding process excludes theirs. 

I recommend it even if you never watched MTV. I only ever watched it in the 'eighties. I wish I'd watched it more, now it's gone. It's like radio with pictures!

The other, somewhat similar project I ran across while I was reading the reddit thread is My Retro TVs. This one offers six decades (50s to 2000s.) of (American) television. Everything from news and sport to cartoons and drama. 

Again, it's all drawn from YouTube. I'm not sure if there are any full-length shows in the mix. I watched about half an hour of it last night and it was all trailers, commercials and two or three minute clips, although I did sit through a full-length Heckle and Jeckle. They never were very funny, were they?

I'm not a big one for nostalgia for its own sake but for me, not having a great deal of familiarity with a lot of the very specifically US Network TV content, it feels more like some kind of art installation. It's weirdly compelling.  

Last and not least but also not quite the same thing, I'm subbed to a very odd YouTube channel, astryuuna, which commenters keep describing as "how YouTube used to be". It's all too easy to forget that YouTube did indeed used to be the playground for mavericks, tricksters and the techno avant garde. Maybe it can be again. These projects prove that it's still possible.

I enjoy all of them, anyway, so I thought I'd pass the pleasure on. If anyone has any similar gems, do feel free to share.  

Cultured, Creative, Tech-Savvy, That's me! - YouTube Recaps My Year

In case you didn't know, YouTube just jumped on the Annual Review bandwagon with something called Recap. And you might not know, at that, because for some reason they chose to launch it in America and then roll it out across the rest of the world over a couple of weeks. I think everyone is supposed to have had theirs by now but there may still be a few Recap-deprived pockets here and there.

Or perhaps yours just isn't showing up for... reasons. I'm not one hundred per cent sure how it's supposed to work, even though I've had a look at the official YouTube blog about it and watched a couple of "How It Works" videos (On YouTube, of course.)

They aren't exactly going out of their way to publicize it. In theory you're supposed to get a banner across the top of your YouTube Home Page to tell you your personal Recap is available but I have two YouTube channels under the same account and it's only showing up on one of them. And it's not the main one, either.

If yours isn't showing and you'd like to see it, you can go to www.youtube.com/recap and providing you're also logged in to YouTube at the time, the very act of visiting the web page should force your shy Recap to reveal itself on your YT home page. I've tried it and it works. Well, it works for one of my channels...

Until this year, I only had the one YouTube channel, under the name Bhagpuss, which is what my original Google account was registered as a couple of decades ago. When I started making AI versions of my songs back in the Spring, I decided I needed to keep them separate, so I made a new channel under the same account. (Until then, I didn't even know that was a thing you could do.) 

The second channel's called That Darn Cat, which is also what I go by on Suno and, for that matter, a few other places. And since I do most of the music-making on my laptop in bed, TDC has turned into my de facto laptop identity. 

I don't usually bother swapping to the Bhagpuss channel to do other things on the laptop, either on YouTube or anywhere else, unless I absolutely have to, which probably explains some of the weirdnesses that occasionally crop up when I comment on other people's blogs, late at night. (And also when I reply to comments here occasionally, although I can edit those so you'd probably never notice...)

Of course, all I really do on the laptop, other than the music, is surf the web, watch streaming video on Prime and Netflix and BBC iPlayer and search for new music on YouTube. If I'm going to do anything more complicated, I'm probably going to wait until I'm back at my desk.

Anyway, I opened YouTube last night and there was this Recap banner at the top. Obviously, I clicked on it to see what it was. I mean, I could guess but I wanted to see for myself...

So I watched it. Didn't take long. And I'll be honest. It wasn't very good. 

If you're used to the level of detail and professionalism in Steam's Replay, for example, you are not going to be impressed by this. Perfunctory would be one word for it. Half-assed would be another.

Trying to be generous, I'll give them a pass because it is the first year YouTube has done one of these. Maybe they're learning on the job. Then again, YouTube has been around for nearly two decades now. Why is this the first year they've thought to give users a summary of their activity? I'll have that pass back, please.

That was my first reaction. My second was "Hey, hang on a  minute! Where are they even getting all this stuff from? I thought I had my YouTube History switched off!" 

Yes. Well. I did. I turned it off years ago. I never look at it and it heavily affects what suggestions and recommendations you get, which is the opposite of what I want. I want to see new things that aren't like the things I've already seen, or I do when I'm searching for new music. Having my own prior search history influence the algorithm is counter-productive.

That ought, presumably, to mean YouTube doesn't have the information stored to compile a statistical analysis and pick out the trends and highlights. At least, you'd hope so or what's the point of being able to toggle the history off?

Before we get into all kinds of conspiracy theories about the evil megacorp lying about what data it keeps, though, I ought to make it clear that when I checked, I found I did not, in fact, have my search history switched off after all. Not on the new account, anyway. Maybe the setting is per channel, not per account. I probably ought to look into that.

It might also explain something I've been wondering about, which is why my recommends on the laptop are so much more consistent than they are on the desktop. It's insidiously comforting, having almost everything that comes be something similar to the things you've already seen. I can see how you could find yourself walled up in a velvet castle of your own making, that way.

It probably also explains why I'm not getting a Recap at all on the Bhagpuss channel, even after i prompt it using the method above. I guess that one does really have the history switched off. I can't say for certain. I haven't been able to find the setting for it yet. 

Then again, I do have an Add-On running in Firefox on the desktop that I don't use on the laptop, which forces YouTube only to show videos from my subscriptions on my home page. That means I get a completely different home page on the two machines anyway, so who knows what's going on?

Whatever it is, I do have a Recap for That Darn Cat and I don't have one for Bhagpuss. The one I've got is extremely limited but also very flattering. Verging on the sycophantic, in fact. It's either been drafted by an AI (Extremely likely.) or by someone trying to sound like one (Worrying, if true.)

I can see why they'd do it, though. I mean, who doesn't want to be told they're a cultured, tech-savvy music lover? All it takes is watching a few music videos and movie trailers (Superhero movies, at that...) and a couple of videos about AI!

It even manages to collate those traits into what would, in an RPG, be called a Class. I'm a Creative Spirit, apparently. Not, you understand, because YouTube knows I've created anything. The Recap doesn't cover anything you've uploaded to your channel. Only what you've watched on other people's. That counts as a creative act to these people.

Speaking of which, I've visited 262 different channels this year. Is that a lot?It doesn't sound like it. I'm surprised it's that few, really. I flip through a couple of dozen most nights. I'd have thought it'd be twice that, at least. I guess there must be a lot of repetition I'm not noticing.

The Recap also tells you which channel you spent most time watching. I'd have liked a Top Ten but no, you just get the one. 

Any guesses what mine was? I certainly wouldn't have got it. In fact, I doubt I would have put it in the top twenty. It was R. Missing. I've watched 31 of her videos and I'm in the top 3% of her audience. Blimey.

All I can say is she does post quite often and I am subbed to her channel so I suppose it shouldn't be that much of a shock. Plus I watch them again when I pick them for posts here and I have posted most things she's done this year. There'll be two of hers in my yearly round-up (Because of course I'm doing one of those, too...)

The only other card that mentions specific channels is a lot harder to explain. Recap attempts, very unconvincingly, to establish some trends in viewing through the year. It pretends I discovered new bands in the Spring, looked for tech tips in the Summer and moved on to watching movie trailers in the Autumn. Which is tripe. I did all of those all year with no particular seasonal emphasis on any of them.

The really odd part, though, is which three "New Bands" Recap chose to highlight: Polly Scattergood, TripleJ and Miami Horror. 

Geez. The only reason I was looking at Polly Scattergood's channel at all was that she hasn't posted anything in four years. I was wondering if she was still alive! As for TripleJ, it's a station, not a band. Granted, it's a music station and I watch bands there but most of them aren't new, even to me. 

Miami Horror, though, really confused me. I had to think for a bit to remember what it was and even then I wasn't sure. They did something with Telenovela that I posted here but it was Telenovela I was mostly interested in, not Miami Horror. I don't recall looking at anything else they've done other than that, so why they get chosen out of the hundreds of acts I must have seen more of this year beats me. What about Witch Post? Or Sunday (1994)? Or Blondshell ffs?

And that's about it for Recap. I'd say I hope YouTube makes a better job of it next year but what I actually hope is that I manage to keep my History switched off and I don't get another one at all. 

It's not like I'll be missing much. 

Or should that be R. Missing much?

This Content Isn't Available

 

"As of this morning, on this account, on my desktop PC, all videos show a black screen with the message "Video Unavailable. This content isn't available". This happens when I try to run the videos directly from YouTube and also when I try to watch videos I have embedded on my blog.

I have logged the account out and back in, cleared the cache, rebooted the machine and tried a different browser. It makes no difference. 

On the same account, on my laptop, the same issue occurs when I access YouTube directly but the embedded videos on my blog still play normally. 

Please correct whatever is causing the issue or, if there is a valid reason for it, please let me know what it is and if there's anything to be done.

Thanks!"

That's the feedback I just submitted to Google in the vague hope someone might do something about it. There are several lengthy reddit threads on the problem, which seems to be fairly common. There are some workarounds that I might try at some point but those have issues of their own, but most of the commenters who report the problem being resolved say it either just went away on its own or after they submitted feedback. 

For others, it didn't  ever go away, or if it did, they didn't feel it was worth coming back to the thread to let anyone know.

I only noticed the problem this morning, after I'd written the first four paragraphs of today's post. I went to last year's Best of 2024 post to check something. I clicked on the link in that post that goes to the playlist I made to accompany it and that's when I found nothing was working. 

At the moment, my other YouTube account is working normally but comments on the reddit threads confirm others have seen the issue spread  to all their accounts. Also, I'm not sure whether the videos embedded on the blog are working for anyone else. 

I'm guessing they are because when I log into one of my many other Google accounts on Chrome I can play videos on the blog and also follow the link to last year's playlist and get that to run, too. I'm listening to it right now. 

God, it's good, too! If you want to test it, here's the link. It's a joy. 2024 was a vintage year for music. 2025 isn't going to match it. 

If anyone isn't able to access that playlist or watch videos on this blog, I'd be grateful if they'd mention it in the comments although I don't imagine there's much I can do about it. Also, if anyone's had this happen to their YouTube account, I'd be interested to hear about that, too. Especially if you figured out how to fix it.

There's a lot of speculation in the threads I read about what might be behind this loss of service. The usual conspiracy theories about Google trying to penalize people for using ad-blockers or even for watching too many videos. Those I discount. 

More credible is the explanation that there's been some security issue with the account (As recently happened to Belghast.) or some penalty applied for an infraction. That, though, would presumably lead to some kind of notification. I haven't seen anything telling me I've done something I shouldn't have.

It looks a lot more like some kind of bug to me. If so, it might get fixed. I'm cautiously optimistic. How long it would take is another matter, though. Could easily be weeks. Or months.

In the meanwhile, I can obviously just move to using another account to keep using YouTube for all my regular viewing needs (And keep making more accounts if they keep failing.). It's going to be annoying but as Wreckless Eric says, we adjust.  

The big question is whether I can work around the problem while it lasts so as to be able to go on embedding videos on the blog. It is, after all, a rather significant element in the range of content here. 

And it's a particularly bad time for it to happen, too.

Here are the four paragraphs I mentioned writing before the issue made itself known: 

Yesterday was the most musical day I've had for a long while. I spent something like five hours writing the What I've Been Listening To Lately post, then went straight into making a long-list for my Pick of the Year. That took another couple of hours and went a lot better than I thought it was going to before I started.

What I have really been listening to for most of the year is my own music. Obsessively and repeatedly. While I've been keeping up with everything else that's around, I can't honestly say I've had anything much on repeat that I didn't make myself. I was expecting to look back through the year's music posts and see a whole load of songs and names I could barely remember, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find that wasn't in the slightest bit true.

Okay, there were some titles and names I didn't recognize but that happens every year. The further I look back, the more of them there are, too. It's natural. The point is, there weren't any more this year than there usually are and better yet there were plenty where my immediate reaction was "Oh, I love that one! I want to hear it again, right now!"

Going in, I thought I might have to reduce the scope to a Top Ten this year. Last year it was a Top Twenty-One for some bizarre reason, only seventeen of which I chose to include on the YouTube playlist I completely forgot I ever made.

And then I found out about the problem. And stopped.

So, yeah, Pick of the Year post. I was looking forward to getting started on that. On hold for now.

Plus, I was just about to go on to talk about this year's musical Advent Calendar. That's more critical. I only realized yesterday there are just three weeks left until I have to start posting a Christmas tune every day. (It will be just one a day this year. That Naughty/Nice thing nearly did for me last time...)

It will still be happening, at least so long as I'm sure anything I put up on the blog will be visible and audible to anyone who cares to see and hear it. If I have to go around the houses a few times to make it happen, I'll do it.  

I'll try and make any workarounds as invisible and seamless as possible but if things look a little weird around here for a while, that might be the reason. 

And if it gets fixed I'll be sure to tell everyone. 

Smashed Blocked or If Only They'd Stayed Hidden

As Redbeard reported yesterday, Google has finally tired of giving stuff away for free. A few months ago the internet juggernaut began experimenting with ways to stop people opting out of seeing ads while watching amusing cat videos on YouTube. 

Oh, wait... my Dated Reference alert just went off! Apparently it's not the noughties any more. Dang! There it goes again. No-one's said noughties since... well, the noughties.

I never watched cat videos on YouTube. The only reason I know people did is because it constantly turns up as a lame-ass joke in sitcoms and comedy novels. I'm reading a comedy novel right now and it's pretty good but even in 2023 it has at least one reference to funny cat videos. Maybe people really do still watch them.

As an aside (No, really?) I was reading something a while back about how many of those early-days internet phenomena, the viral videos that racked up millions of views for no apparent reason, have vanished without trace, although ironically I now can't find where I read it. 

I do remember, however, that the article gave "Charlie Bit My Finger" as an example without mentioning that the reason that one disappeared from YouTube was that the family who owned it sold it two years ago, as an NFT for three-quarters of a million dollars, and as part of the deal removed it from YouTube.

Despite all that, you can, in fact, still watch Charlie biting what I assume is his brother's finger on YouTube. I just checked. I clicked it off after the first second, once I'd established it does indeed play, because I have never seen the clip and fully intend to keep it that way. If you want to check, you can go find it for yourself. I'm not facilitating such behavior.

Getting back to the point, over the last week or so, Google's anti-freeloader faction ramped up the effort to make sure we all do our share in keeping the wheels spinning on the speeding express train of insanity that is the global advertising industry. Back when I thought I was really cool because I'd read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, I used to see advertising as both a valid artform and a fascinating social phenomenon but that feels like a very long time ago, now.

As the Parallel Context post I linked succinctly explains, YouTube viewers using Ad Blockers, which would be all of them with the sense they were born with, have been receiving some very aggressive notifications from Google that they'd damn well better stop! Naturally, this being the internet, the hive mind has been fighting back.

It's a fast-moving and ongoing battle. In the last twenty-four hours my YouTube access has gone from warnings (Three strikes and you're out.) to blackout (Can see everything except the actual video I'm trying to watch, which is weirdly useful and in some ways an improvement. Certainly saves time.) to working "normally" with ads running (Making it unwatchable by any sane person, so good work there, advertisers.) to back to the status quo ante as the combined might of reddit and every anti-corporate coder on the planet strives to wrest back control of their own eyeballs.

For the moment, I'm using YouTube like I was last week but I don't expect it to last. I also don't expect free stuff on the internet to last. This is just the start. Not even the start. The middle, maybe. 

The end will be exactly what every sci-fi author ever has been predicting since I was a child, namely a world filled with wall-to-wall, 24/7 advertising, driving an unavoidable, non-optional, hyper-commercialised culture for the consuming classes, defined as all of us except for a miniscule, mega-rich hyper-elite, most of whose names will be unknown to everyone but their vanishingly tiny peer group.

I am not Tobold (Who'd be having a jolly good laugh at my expense right now for all the times I've chided him for not using an Ad Blocker to watch YouTube, if he ever read anyone else's blog, something I've never seen anything to suggest he does.) so I'm not about to turn this into some kind of political statement. I merely mention it to warn that, depending on Google's success or lack thereof in imposing its will in this regard, I may or may not have to alter the format of my music posts. 

It'd be nice to think I could move to linking to Bandcamp or Soundcloud instead but clearly that's going to present its own issues going forward. Still, I'm sure there'll be some workround I can try. I'm certainly not just going to stop sharing new tunes because Google tells me I'm not doing my bit to keep Keith Richards in Chivas Regal.

And of course they haven't done anything of the kind. That's just me being melodramatic, something to which I've always been happily prone. In fact, for the time being, one of the easier ways to avoid having to watch advertisements for things you wouldn't want if they gave them to you is to view the videos you're interested in on other websites, where they've been embedded. Like this one.

For now at least, embedded videos do not carry advertising, although how long that will last I wouldn't care to guess. It means a couple of things; firstly, the half-dozen or so of my readers who actually check out some of the videos in my music posts should be able to go on doing it without fear. Well, without fear of seeing any adverts. Might be as well to have at least a little fear of what the videos themselves might contain.

It also means, as I discovered yesterday, that I can simply watch the videos on the sites where I find them (NME, Stereogum, Pitchfork etc.), then right-click to get the YouTube URL, paste it into Blogger (Another Google product.) and voila; embedded, ad-free videos. Add as another data point the fact that Chrome (Google, again.) stocks Ad Blockers in its Web Store and they work on YouTube (I just installed one and it works fine.) and you can see there may be parts of the vast Google corporation that don't exactly talk to each other.

Maybe one day all of this will be smoothed out to the point that Google gets exactly what it wants and the rest of the world has to accept it but despite the company's overwhelming commercial success there's precious little evidence of anything even approximating a coherent, structured plan for global domination. It looks a lot more like a hell of a lot of over-excited technicians rabidly making things that interest them with the aid of the giant Scrooge McDuck money pit they've somehow fallen into, while the handful of responsible adults in the building try to firefight the fallout.

Google famously abandons, forgets about or cancels things all the time. Until recently, YouTube has been one of the parts that they've been largely letting get on with making them money, undisturbed. I can't recall a lot changing there for a while. 

Now there's this, which suggests maybe the flood level from the money hose has started to dip a little but there's also the news that they're on the verge of a deal with the recording industry (Now there's a black hat if ever there was.) to facilitate legal AI voice masking. What with that and the runaway success of AI-assisted search under the Bard brand, I think we can all agree our digital future is in safe hands with Google.

In honor of the obvious need to keep feeding the corporate maw, as you'll have seen I've chosen this week to concentrate solely on already known, successful performers. The YouTube warnings do make a point of stressing how using an Ad Blocker impacts the income of artists and creators. I'd hate to see Mick and the boys go hungry, let alone Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, who helped them out on that track.

Fortunately and by a lucky happenstance, a great number of well-known musicians who've featured on the blog many times before have chosen to release quality work this week so I haven't needed to compromise my own, impeccable aesthetic standards to comply. Since everyone knows who they all are, not least because I've told you all more than once already, it also means I haven't needed to include my usual explanatory gloss on every video. 

I'm sure if you need any more information, Bard will be happy to fill you in on the details, some of which it will probably make up especially for you. And all free of charge. For now.

I have a large and ever-growing number of tunes by people I'm willing to bet will be new to most of my readers. (Ha! "My readers". That's presumptious, pretentious and proprietorial. Triple threat! Go me!) so don't be too disheartened by the populist, crowd-pleasing nature of this post. Normal service will, no doubt, be resumed soon enough.

It has also occurred to me in the past, when I've been watching YouTube on handheld devices where I hadn't bothered to install an Ad Blocker yet, that maybe YouTube doesn't place many - or any - ads on videos almost no-one watches. This may be the time to test that hypothesis. 

Unfortunately it won't get rid of the often really quite offensive static ads at the top of the Recommends list but those are quite easily ignored or even blocked physically with a Post-It note. The upside of all of this could be a refocusing on genuinely new and obscure music instead of - as I sometimes worry mildly it might have become - a self-satisfied litany of comfort listening. 

See? There's an upside to everything, if you only look hard enough!

 

 

A note on AI Imagery used in this post, which was just the header this time. 

The prompt was "Ad Blockers drinking and laughing. Futuristic." The AI was Dreamshaper XL Alpha2, my current go-to choice at NightCafe. The image was extended to fit the space available using Uncrop because I always forget to change the aspect ratio from 1:1 to 4:3. What Uncrop added were the left and right figures, their speech bubbles and nearly all the text along the bottom.

I did ask Dreamshaper to give me another version of the same prompt, this time using the correct aspect ratio and it produced something that looks more like the Google Security Team celebrating their success in blocking Ad Blockers than the blockers themselves. It's pretty good, though and I'd hate to waste it so as a little treat for everyone who's made it this far, here it is:

Sound And Vision

I can't remember exactly when I first saw the tag "Visualizer" appended to a YouTube video but it feels like it must have been a few years ago, now. It was definitely well before I started noticing the equally sinister attribution "Distrokid" or the disturbing "CDBaby". Once I'd become aware of them, though, I couldn't stop seeing them everywhere.

It took a while but eventually I cracked and googled Distrokid. It was obviously some kind of distribution network but as to its provenance or authority I had nothing. Turns out it's about as unsinister as a faceless corporation can be. In case anyone else hasn't been able to find the ten seconds necesary to crack the code, Distrokid is "the easiest way for musicians to get music into Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, TikTok, YouTube, and more." Their words, obviously. 

It's not free but it's cheap at $19.99 a year for unlimited digital distribution to all those platforms, per artist. CDBaby's deal is based on per-item pricing. If I had something to sell I'm sure I'd end up using one or the other.

I don't, though, so that's about as far as I'm going with that story. Curiosity satisfied. Job done. 

And for a while, I thought I had the whole visualizer thing pegged, too. It was just some cheap-looking automated animation process that jiggles the screen or generates waveforms in response to an audio signal. It was clearly being used by people without either the time or the resources to make a proper video, although given you can make one on a phone in about the same time it takes to play the damn song, it's hard to imagine who those people might be.

If I'm not misremembering, there used to be something like it, built into whatever audio software we all used back in the 90s. I seem to recall you could have your monitor throw graphic shapes every time you played a soundfile or a CD. It was fun for five minutes but the novelty wore off fast.

The problem with that analysis was the increasing sophistication of the videos flying the "Visualizer" flag. When I first noticed them they were extremely basic - infinity tunnels, shimmering starfields, wobbling text, that kind of thing. Nothing you'd ever actually sit and watch, just some movement to make you feel you weren't stuck with a static image, something which I have to admit does make me move on to another "video" pretty damn fast when I'm surfing YouTube.

As time went on, the imagery started to become more nuanced. There were occasions where I did indeed watch a visualizer as though it had genuine content. Even so, I can't remember seeing one that made me think "Hang on, how is this not an actual video that someone's scripted, performed, directed and edited?" And then this morning I watched this:

That's Cuchillos by the excellent Lisasinson. It's also what I'd call "a video" but their record company, Elefant Records, don't agree. They've officially tagged it as a "Visualizer".

That does seem to blur the boundaries somewhat. I'd have been willing to bet that all the imagery in the video (Which is what I'm going to call it.) had been shot specifically for the occasion. It's a bet I'd lose, as will soon be revealed...

The lyrics are in Spanish, a language in which I can pick my way through a newspaper but don't speak nearly well enough to understand what they're singing. Fortunately, Elefant have thoughtfully provided a full transcript, which I ran through Google Translate, allowing me to affirm that, yes, the imagery in the video is specific to the import of the song. I mean, the bloody title of the thing in English  is "Knives" and the chorus runs

I do not want to hurt you
My knives are not for you

It's not even until halfway through that video the imagery even begins to repeat. It wasn't until I'd seen the whole thing and formed my interpretation that I found out much of it is recycled from another visualizer the band released about three months ago, for their last single Últimamente. That one looks even more like a fully-scripted video, though. Far from undermining my argument, I think it reinforces it.

I was really at loss to understand why either had the Visualizer tag at all, so finally I broke down and googled the whole concept.

Plenty of people seemed keen to explain it to me, although since the British-English spelling of the word (Visualiser) refers to a specific piece of office equipment, not all of them were helpful. Once I'd got my esses and zees sorted out, I found this from 2017, when the phenomenon appeared to be relatively new.

As Aliya Chaudry from 34th Street magazine puts it:

"A visualizer seems to be a simplistic visual intended to accompany a song, much like a music video or lyric video, and it’s a new trend. They tend to be less developed and fully–fledged than music videos, which often have more complicated visuals or a plot and characters. This term could come from music visualizers, software which produce graphics in response to audio, like Windows Media Player. This means that by calling their video clips “visualizers,” artists are arguing that this is the visual representation of their audio pieces."

So, pretty much what I always thought. Aliya also seems to be pushing the alternative term "Visualette". Thankfully, that never caught on, although a quick google search does show a lingering, residual usage. The article also makes the valid point that visualizers are often released as placeholder videos before a full video is available, something I've often seen. 

Less prescient is the idea that visualizers might replace lyric videos or the speculation that they "could just be another weird new trend in music." Five years on, I think we can safely say lyric videos aren't going anywhere and visualizers are here to stay.

Having confirmed the definition, I began to wonder about the source. I'm sure a band like Lisasinson, signed to a large indie label like Elefant, have all the resources they need to make videos or visualizers but what about the rest of us? Is there somewhere you can bang one of these things out at home, for free?

Yes, of course there is. More than one. Here's a list of the top eight. (Weird cut-off point. Who compiled that list? A spider?) I didn't see that one until after I'd done a basic Google search of my own. The top results in that were Veed and Renderforest. I picked the latter purely because of more mellifluous name.

Since I don't - for reasons that would take far too long to go into now - have any original music of my own available to upload, I grabbed a copyright-free MP3 from Pixabay. I combined that with a screenshot from my vast horde and slapped them together. To avoid stretching both Renderforest's freebie size limits and the patience of anyone foolish enough to watch the thing, I cut a short segment out of the audiofile using Audacity, limiting the whole thing to a tidy sixteen seconds or so.

Including the time it took me to find all the component parts, work out how to use Renderforest, remember how to use Audacity, run through the four-stage process and complete the project, it took me no more than twenty minutes to make two test samples. 

They may not be much (Okay, there's no "may" about it.) but as proof of concept they do what they need to. If I had to knock another of these out, say for an actual song, I reckon I could do it faster than I can drink a cup of coffee. Give me a couple of hours, I could probably make one I wouldn't be ashamed to have other people see.

As with most of these technological possibilities, chances are I'll never get around to using it for anything much, although I do have a few ideas.... As for writing about it, I realize I'm a good five years past the time anyone cared. Still, you never know when new knowledge is going to come in useful. 

I mean, I use that AI photo editing site Tipa put me on to a while back pretty much ever day. And does anyone even notice?

Smile And Grin At The Change All Around

There's been a lot of talk these last few days about Elon Musk's grudging acquisition of Twitter. If I'm honest, most of it would probably have passed me by if it hadn't been for the occasional, tangentially-related news item popping up on my music feeds and a couple of posts from Belghast and Wilhelm on my blog roll.

I'm gradually learning more about Elon Musk, someone who, in the rare event I ever thought about him at all, I used only to know as "that guy that Grimes had a thing with, once". As for Twitter, other than when I follow links from articles to something someone's said there, my only real connection to the service ended more than a dozen years ago, when I stopped playing Echo Bazaar, the game that went on to become better known as Fallen London.

Failbetter Games, the developers behind that game and its quasi-sequels Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, went with the original and highly annoying idea of requiring a Twitter handle as login credentials. Twitter at the time was fairly new, having been around for something like three years, and I guess some people still thought it was cute. 

Wildstar, then in development, tried to jump the bandwagon by claiming its nascent quest system would be "directly influenced by Twitter". As Carbine's senior narrative designer Cory Herndon put it, "No one likes writing text that doesn’t get read, and getting our players to read what we write is a challenge we take seriously."

As it turned out, wordy quest text was the least of Wildstar's problems and Twitter itself went on to double its maximum Tweet load from the 140 characters Carbine were copying to a bloated 280, although according to a 2018 press release, few took them up on the expansive offer. Apparently most people can say all they want in fewer than forty characters. Would that I were one of them.

My own Twitter history comprises literally nothing other than automated Tweets put out by the aforementioned Echo Bazaar. That was a very annoying thing some games did back then, sending messages to your mother to let her know you'd just earned the title "Goblin Slayer" for killing your five thousandth goblin. I'm assuming no games do that any more, based on how unpopular a feature it used to be.

Regardless of my own lack of interest in using it myself, changes in how Twitter operates do have the potential to affect me indirectly by dint of the bizarre way everyone from the Leader of the Free World (Archaic term; popular in the last century, now only of historic interest except when used ironically.) to my energy suppliers seem to believe tweeting is the exact equivalent of sending a personalised letter. If Elon, as widely anticipated, unleashes the barbarian hordes, signal to noise ratio will degrade for everyone, whether they participate or not.

The post-acquisition trajectory for Twitter is very far from certain, of course. The damn thing has never made money, has it? Actually, yes it has. Twice. "Twitter has posted a net loss every year, except 2018 and 2019 when it made a profit of just over $1 billion." Most of that money comes from advertizing although some comes from "data licensing and services".

As Kanye West has discovered to his enormous cost recently, if you make your brand sufficiently toxic by things you do or say, people no longer want their names associated with yours. It's a fair bet Elon won't make the same kind of statements that have reduced Ye's net worth from $2b (A figure disputed by Ye, who claimed it was double that.) to a mere $400m and startled some of his fans into seeing him as a potential charity case but if, as some anticipate, his ownership shifts the appearance of Twitter to the public eye into something not much more than the in-house journal of the alt-right, there may be some sensitivity to bleed-over in marketing departments around the globe.

One frequently-voiced response to all of this is to withdraw from the fray, either in a scorched earth, delete all social media accounts and buy a fountain pen kind of extreme reaction or a more nuanced and tentative retreat into the more genteel, guarded, often siloed grounds of lesser-known platforms like Mastodon or Hive Social. (No, me neither, until today.)

Much better-known options like Discord, Reddit and even Tik-Tok also come up as possible bolt-holes but really nothing else is anything like Twitter. I know that and I don't even use it.

What seems far more likely to me than any of the already extant services picking up Twitter's slack is the eventual appearance of some entirely new entity that will do to Twitter what Facebook did to MySpace. It's far too easy for people to see existing cultural monoliths as eternal and irreplaceable, when all the evidence suggests they'll be replaced and forgotten with ease. 

I'll be perfectly happy to see Twitter fade but I'm less sanguine about the futures of other services I value more. Blogger, owned and operated as it is by Google, is always at risk but my inspiration for this post was a change to another Google service that's a lot further up the megacorp's attention scale: YouTube.

As I've made plain many times, I use YouTube a lot. It's my primary source of new music and a strong contributor of factual information and entertainment. I wouldn't have had the nerve to cut Beryl's dog walk light-up necklace to size without first watching a tutorial on YouTube.

I also have a YouTube channel, which I don't use for much, other than some occasional whimsy here on the blog. Until now, that channel has gone by the name of the Google account with which I made it, the tautologous Bhagpuss Bhagpuss. It might sound like a nod to the mighty Duran Duran but it is in fact the highly unimaginitive choice I made a long time ago, when Google briefly decided everyone had to register under their real name and rather than do that I just added a second "Bhagpuss" as my surname, which seemed to suit Google just fine.

Because Google, in common with every tech company, can never leave well enough alone, this morning I received my final notification by email that my new, mandatory "Channel Handle" had been assigned. There is the option to choose one of your own but if, like me, you can't be bothered becauase you don't care, one will be assigned to you. 

I was curious to see what mine was so I clicked through the link to find out. And I was pretty happy with it. That was a surprise.

My handle is now @TheBhagpuss and my YouTube channel is youtube.com/@TheBhagpuss. That, I have to say, is an improvement. I kind of like being The Bhagpuss rather than just plain old Bhagpuss, let alone the somewhat comical "Bhagpuss Bhagpuss".

So, let's take what encouragement we can from this unusual example of an imposed change actually making something better. It can happen! 

Now I just have to remember to use my new handle for... something. That's going to be the hard part.

Wolves Can Smell Petulance... And Body Glitter.

It's Wednesday. We deserve a treat. If you've seen these before you'll be glad for an excuse to see them again. If you haven't... what crypt have you been hiding in?

I started out planning a post filled with songs about Wednesdays but no-one writes songs about the middle of the week. Or not good ones. Then I thought of this.

I was a little surprised to see both seasons were still up on YouTube. I thought they'd been taken down long ago.

I hate to get all nostalgic but didn't the web used to be fun? Or more fun, anyway.

 I mean, we had Adult Wednesday Addams, Poppy, Pronunciation Book...

Is there anyone still doing stuff like that? If anyone knows, don't keep it to yourself. The comment section is right down there.

 And that's the whole of the first season. Someone remind me to post Season Two for Halloween.

Unrealistic Expectations

I've seen an awful lot of discontented posts about Blizzard and World of Warcraft lately. It's hard to avoid them. Even though I'm not currently playing WoW it remains, as it has been for the best part of a decade and a half, the big story in the genre just about all the time.

These days, of course, there isn't just the one World of Warcraft. Blizzard may never have produced a sequel but, perhaps without intending to, they've somehow managed to make it seem as though they have. As with Norrath and a growing number of imaginary worlds, there are multiple versions of Azeroth available now. 

With three distinct and different versions available it's quite possible, likely even, that some are doing better than others. Not everyone is going to be unhappy all the time. Even so, there seems to be a general sense of malaise around the franchise as a whole.

For much of this year it was Retail in the firing line. There seemed to be no end to the complaints and discussions over everything that was wrong with Shadowlands. I kept hearing how most of the mechanics and systems introduced by the expansion were flawed or Not Fun. Either Blizzard wasn't doing much of anything about it or whatever it was doing didn't seem to be working.

As Classic wound down and the countdown to Burning Crusade ramped up, there was a fair amount of excitement but also some apprehension. Choices needed to be made and not everyone seemed comfortable about them. In the event the launch did arrive with the anticipated rush of exhillaration, and yet in a matter of days I found myself reading more tales of woe. 

Players leveling Shamans felt ignored and neglected, left in the old world dust to fend for themselves as the leveling bubble rose through Outlands towards the cap. Then there was the inevitable guild drama over reduced raid sizes, benching and the usual internecine maneuverings guilds tend to foster.

With the advent of the latest patch (9.1 I think it is) there's been a tinge of optimism over in Retail. I've seen commentary suggesting notice has finally been taken of the general levels of disatisfaction. Attempts are being made to turn the ship. Even then, there's a sense that it might be too little or too late or both.

The release of the recent Carbot Animations video "This is World of Warcraft" seems to have ratchetted the anxious tension around the games up another notch. Wilhelm has an excellent post on that, as does Gnomecore. Their positions overlap in a number of interesting way, especially given the extreme difference of their in-game interests and experiences. Both seem to agree the problems, whatever they are, lie as much with players and their expectations as with developers and their intent.

Both the posts also generated some lengthy and thoughtful comments. I get the impression the current state of all flavors of World of Warcraft and of the company behind them is giving a lot of players pause for thought.

It is, of course, not just about the games. It's only a couple of years since decisions taken over what could or couldn't be said in a livestream gave Blizzard unwelcome prominence on non-gaming newsfeeds all over the world. That controversy, bright though it blazed, doesn't appear to have smoldered as long as some expected or maybe hoped. In the end it seems it's the gameplay that matters most; the gameplay and the friendships it sustains.

Or doesn't. And that seems to be the problem. One of the problems, anyway.

In a comment on Wilhelm's post, Shintar linked another WoW video. 

 

I watched it but, like the Carbot video, it didn't really connect with me on the kind of visceral level it seems to have reached almost all of the two thousand or so YouTube viewers who left anguished comments on the thread. It's not that I don't recognize the experiences, albeit from games other than WoW; it's more that I don't look back on those same experiences with the anything close to the kind of emotion I'm reading about.

Perhaps the main difference between the two videos is where the center of gravity sits. The Carbot appears to drill down into what Blizzard, as both creator and curator, first got right and then got so badly wrong. The Pint video, conversely, appears to place a question mark over the validity of the experience itself, leaving the viewer uncertain where the blame, if blame there's to be, might lie.

All of this dovetails neatly into a sequence of posts Wilhelm has been running concerning the unwillingness of mmoprg players, en masse, to accept or even recognize the practicalities of keeping these games alive. Put shortly, it takes money and players don't want to pay.

There's another, closely-related theme playing out elsewhere. It concerns the attitude of players to games developers in general. Kaylriene has an excellent post up about that. He takes a very reasoned and reasonable approach, assuming goodwill on the developers' side, but it's worth reading the very well-argued counterpoint by Jackie in the comment thread, which includes this telling assessment:

"I don’t believe the developers want to engage with the playerbase. They’re not interested in criticism even from the people who can articulate it. If they wanted to communicate they would. My perception is that it’s an inward looking culture rather than outward looking."

It jibes nicely with something I said in my own comment on the thread there, where I asked why it might be, if we accept the premise that games developers do care quite deeply about the quality of their work and its fitness for purpose, that "so many changes in so many games appear to work so badly for so many players".

It's a worrisome question, isn't it? Personally, I've always been skeptical about player involvement in games development. I don't necessarily accept that individual players know what they want and I certainly don't see much in the way of collective agreement. 

Even if players did know what they wanted and could band together to express their wishes coherently, though, wouldn't it feel even worse to know the developers were listening and did care, but were fundementally incapable of doing anything very effective about it? 

Devs aren't gods, after all. Not even gaming gods. On the same day I read Jackie's comment I read this heartfelt statement by a developer for whom I have a lot of time, CharlieX of SmokymonkeyS, creators of the wondeful (now, sadly, mothballed) Ninelives. Despite the idiosyncratic English the emotion comes through perfectly: 

"Sometimes a player tells me, you design your game to more difficult and annoying to prevent the player to get the achieve. Well, this is a wrong idea overall. Sadly, this mean the developer's intend is not going well, and it happens always. Sometimes I go to watch my game player's video and get sick every time I saw the player stuck, get lost, or failed caused by my design."

Just because you know what you want to do doesn't always mean you're able to do it.

So much for the developers' side of the table. Returning to the comments in the threads following both the YouTube videos I mentioned, the recurring, indeed overwhelming theme coming from the players seems to be one of heroically unrealistic expectations. 

Playing World of Warcraft has very definitely been a seminal experience for many. Almost a rite of passage. From comment after comment I get the sense that playing WoW marked a transition from solipsistic isolation to social engagement, at least for some. Some feel betrayed that Blizzard somehow took this away from them. Others seem bereft, almost guilty. They lost the way all on their own.

The Pint video is fascinating in the way it depicts a player who, after playing and then leaving the game, has clearly been able to ground themselves in a committed relationship and, by implication, in the web of adult responsibilities required to support their newfound social status. Even with that support structure firmly in place, however, it just takes a nudge of commercially-driven nostalgia to tip them back into longing for a fondly-remembered past.

Wilhelm has another great post up about what prerequisites an mmorpg developer might need to have in place before choosing to enter the nostalgia market. For most games I think the factors he lists would be sufficient. For World of Warcraft, though, I suspect there needed to be more to make it work.

WoW wasn't just a video game. It was a global phenomenon. Its players weren't necessarily like other mmorpg players, either then or now. A lot of people ended up playing WoW who hadn't played other, similar games before. The things they did there were different to other things they'd done, not just in degree but in essence. 

I'd be willing to bet that some of the people posting elegaic, emotional comments on the threads following these deeply nostalgic videos found social engagement and acceptance in Azeroth for perhaps the first time. In their memory the experience isn't just one of many, another social setting where friendships were forged then forgotten. It was an intense experience that changed them and for that they value it highly.

It's a theme not in any way unique to WoW or indeed to mmorpgs or even video games. I see it repeated over and over in comment threads that draw on any widely-shared experience, from childhood itself through musical trends to a college education to sports... Any moment in a life when everything just seems to fall into place. When people around you understand. When you find your tribe. When you belong.

It always fades. School breaks up. You graduate college. The bands you followed split up or find new directions that don't sound good any more. You don't get picked for the team because you can't run so fast or jump so high and anyway practice is on a weekend and there are things you need to do, more important things. Your guildmates stop logging in, even on raid nights. Life moves on, everything changes, nothing stays the same.

 

If you're hoping that long-lasting mmorpg you used to love is going to buck that trend and stay the same forever, you're in line for a disappointment. It's going to change along with everything else or else it's not going to be there or if it is then no-one will be playing any more. 

And if you believe a Classic server is a time machine to take you and your friends back ten years to when you were younger and freer and life was better, well, you might, if you're lucky, get to take a nice vacation in a well-managed resort version of a specific snapshot of that past. And then time will catch up with you once again and you'll be back where you started, only with more disappointment than you had before because one more fantasy turned out to be just that and nothing more.

Listening to the various voices, the ones that seem most sanguine, most satisfied, are those that recognize a game is after all a game. Not "just" a game. More than that. But not so much more it can stop time and bring back lost youth. The people still having fun in World of Warcraft, both Retail and Classic/TBC, seem to me to be those who aren't expecting it to change their lives, just entertain them for a while.

I suspect that, if developers concentrated a little harder on entertaining people and worried a little less on keeping them locked into a revenue cycle, both sides might stand a better chance of getting what it is they really want. The games might hold onto the interest of more people for longer if players felt more accepted and more at home.

It's a pipe dream, I know, but its one that quite a few people seem to share. A few years back the buzzwords around the genre seemed to be Classic and Retro and Social. Now, the mission statements of many of the plethora of new studios spinning up from splintering mmorpg majors all seem to echo the call for a more emotionally intelligent approach to making mmorpgs. It's not so much a case of turning back time as it is learning from the past.

Whether any of them will be able to turn good intentions into good games remains to be seen but I think we should probably give them the benefit of the doubt, for now at least. If they can pull it off they'll only be giving us what we say we want, after all. 

Whether we'll want it when we get it, though, that's a whole different question.

Echoes In The Canyon

I'm wondering whether YouTube's suggestion algorithm has changed. It seems to do that, on occasion. YouTube is, after all, owned by Google, who can never leave anything well alone.

It's always hard to be sure whether nostalgia's rose-tinted mitts are gussying up the truth of it but I do seem to remember a time when link-hopping down that sidebar brought better rewards, scattering brilliant bursts of seratonin sunshine as the new and unfamiliar sounds and visions burned bright tunnels through dazed synapses.

That seems a long time ago. Of late, and not so late, it's all been famous people doing boring things and so-called recommendations that seem from central casting. And then, just this week, something happened.

It must be a couple of years back when I got so fed up with the nonsense on the YouTube home page I searched for some way to put an end to it. I found an add-on for Firefox that replaces YouTube's home page with your own subscriptions. It has a catchy name. It's called Replace YouTube's Homepage With Subscriptions. 

That's fine. I didn't need it to be imaginative. I just needed it to work. And it did. It does. Perfectly. I absolutely recommend it. You can get it for Chrome, too.

That put an end to the fool's cavalcade of sport, swagger and celebrity smack-talk that had somehow become all YouTube thought I cared for. Never mind that I never clicked on any of it, ever. Just keep shoveling it at them and they'll crack, that's the theory.

With that out of the way, there were just the inane suggestions in the sidebar, so many of which can only be there by dint of payment from somebody. Sting, Shaggy, Jeremy Clarkson... they certainly don't appear in response to any interest I've ever shown. Disdain doesn't count, right?

I did try to find ways to improve those, too. Most fixes revolved around training the algorithm to learn better what I liked but it seemed to me it had had plenty of time for that; a decade and a half already, about how long I've been flipping through the virtual stacks.

The key problem seems to be that I won't allow YouTube to remember anything. I used to let my history build up but then something happened and I cleared it and switched it off. (I can't remember what it was. Nothing exciting or secret or shameful. I just don't recall what it could have been. Maybe I read somewhere to keep it was a bad idea. I can be susceptible that way.)

For years, my YouTube's been working in a void, like one of those people with a rare condition, who wake every morning with no memory of anything from before they went to sleep. Every day YouTube tries to learn again what interests me and then suddenly its all gone.

I like to think that's how it goes. It seems... romantic. Probably it's nothing of the kind. And now, perhaps, something's shifted.

A few days back I clicked on something from one of the dozen channels I follow. Thirteen, now. I added a new one today. Seven are record companies, musicians or YouTubers who produce videos or playlists of other people's music. Six are game companies, gamers or people who produce videos about games. 

Not all of them are active but something fresh comes in from Elefant Records almost every day. Elefant is a Spanish label specializing in dreampop. I keep promising to do a blog about it and I will but this isn't it. I mention it because it was an Elefant act, new to me, that set me on the trail that ended up with me wondering if YouTube had gotten smarter.

That was the video. I don't click on all Elefant's promos. They all look very similar with the yellow band that reminds me of vintage Gollancz science fiction hardbacks and the hypersaturated thumbnails. I click on the ones that have something that catches my attention (if I have time to kill). I'm a sucker for lower case. Also, pup puppy!

After I'd watched and listened to it I felt a little dizzy. All that soft focus, all that image overlay, those strange whirring sounds. And the plaintive drift. Pup puppy pulled me in but it's rebe's show. I was curious to see what else there was. 

Three or four more like that and a handful of live performances, I felt was starting to get the hang of rebe. (How presumptuous of me, I know.). Anyway, I'd seen enough for then.

I don't recall any unusual occurrences in the sidebar that day. The downside of no YouTube history is I can't go back and check if I clicked on anything other than rebe. But I can see what I thought was worth shoring up against internet's inevitable ruin. (We all know it will happen.)

It seems that day I saved seven rebe clips and Billy Eilish's wonderful new single, Your Power. I'm fairly sure I don't need to keep a copy of that. It won't be going anywhere. Or, rather, it will. It'll be going to everywhere.

We should have it before we carry on. It fits. You'll see. Although, trigger warning, probably don't watch it if you have ophidiophobia. I don't. I like snakes and it still scared the crap out of me.

God, that's good. What a time we live in, eh? That we have music like this. Do you think it's supposed to cut off like that at the end? I hope it is but I somehow doubt it.

Still, YouTube suggesting a new Billy Eilish tune is hardly grounds for suspicion. Probably everyone got that one. No, the oddness didn't really make itself known until a couple of days later when I clicked on something else from a subscription. 

There are a whole slew of people who've made their virtual fame by dint of their finely-honed taste and their ability to spot a gem before anyone else does. One such is Thelazylazyme, who has more than half a million subscribers (I'm one, Syp's another) all eager to hear the next wisp of bedroom pop. 

I'm a tad wary of channels like these. It's the same caution I always had for bookshops (ironically). It makes it too easy, "finding" new things this way. It's a bit too much like having a personal shopper. I very rarely use anything I find on channels like that, here. It feels like cheating, somehow.

But things I find for myself by using one of their finds as a seed... that's fine. And it used to work well. Until it didn't. It hasn't worked for so long that I'd almost forgotten it ever did. And now it feels like someone switched the whole thing back on.

I don't know why I chose to click on this one. It's The Songwriter by Stacey. Could that be any more bland? I did though and it's glorious. I had to move on to find the video. Thelazylazyme is a purist that way. A still picture with sound and you'd better be happy. I like to see things move and this so does.

It struck me after the rebe and the Billy Eilish that something was going on here. I'm so used to Lana quarrying the canyon, repurposing the sixties and the seventies, I'd kinda seen it as her thing alone but it's happening all over. Everything looks like a home movie, found footage on Super 8. There's a soft haze in the California sun and is that smoke in the air or is it us, smoking again?

Stacey sounds so much like Karen Carpenter it's a flashback. She knows it. She owns it.

Karen Carpenter had her demons but I never heard one was drugs. Stacey seems equally clean-cut and yet, like the rebe tracks, there's something woozy, off-kilter, and, yes, druggy about it. It was that, I think, that tipped me to something strange in the YouTube recommends that morning.

There's nothing under the radar about the tune I clicked on after Stacey, Vox Rea with Dufferin Ave. In case you aren't getting it there's a whole set-up to leave no doubt. All in 625 lines. When did you last see that? In another music video I bet.

 

From Vox Rea YouTube pointed me at Sasha and the Valentines. Sunflowers, phasing, sunshine. Here we go round again. Yes, there is that noughties production and they turn out to be from Texas not the West Coast (I actually had them pegged as Aussies until I looked them up) but hey, it's Austin. Close enough.

Next stop on the trail Flock of Dimes with One More Hour and we're back in the canyon again. Also notice the television. And how many of these videos have bicycles? Okay, some I haven't linked. There's no room for all of them. But they do.

What's that we have we now? A sound, a style, images. Tropes. Didn't I read once, a while ago, YouTube could do this? Recommend by abstracts? Don't I remember it did that, once? Has it started again?

And currency. Let's not forget currency. That was the thing that struck me hardest. 

There are worlds yet to be discovered in the past, galaxies, universes. I welcome that. Still, it has become tiring, sometimes, being offered so much that's gone and so little that's still here. I'd like the chance to move forward not just look back.

All of these suggestions and lots more I've left out were uploaded in the last thirty days. Most of them seem to be new recordings, performances, films. I'd doubt myself about anything changing if it weren't for that. I swear the newness is new even if what's new in the new is old. We all go round again.

Whatever it is, I hope it lasts. This was a good week.