Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Extremely First Impressions

Blue Protocol was never a game I was following - or really paying any attention to at all. I've only ever mentioned it two or three times here on the blog and not at all for a couple of years. 

The most interested in it I ever sounded was at the back end of 2022, when it had been picked up by Amazon Games as the global publisher. At the time, I said I hadn't been planning on playing it, even though I knew there was a lot of hype around the title, but since I had an Amazon Games account already set up, it seemed it might be worth taking a look when it arrived.

It never did arrive, of course. Not through Amazon, anyway. That all fell through for reasons I'm not sure I knew even while it was happening and certainly don't remember now. The game was released in Japan but didn't last long there, closing at the beginning of this year.

And that seemed to be the end of it. Until fairly recently, at least, when I started hearing rumblings about something called Blue Protocol: Star Resonance.  That seemed to be a mobile game at first but then it became apparent there was a PC version or a port or something. Reports on its progress drifted in, here and there, and in that way the name and my recognition of it were kept alive.

I didn't keep a mental note of when it was going to launch. I still had no special plans to play it but I did think maybe I'd take a look when it arrived, if it was on Steam or something and I didn't have to make a new account. Same logic as when Amazon was going to be doing the paperwork, basically.

Then earlier today I saw this news item at MassivelyOP, just as I was wondering what I could find to write about today and I thought there's an idea...

I do enjoy doing First Impressions pieces. They're easy to write and they seem to go down quite well. Usually, I like at least to get through the tutorial before I do one but as I may have mentioned, opportunities to sit down and play three-hour gaming sessions and then spend three more hours turning them into detailed posts are pretty thin on the ground around here just now. 

For example, today I had to drive to the next city over to do some stuff for my aged mother and tomorrow we have a bunch of workmen turning up at the crack of dawn to tear out the old heating system and start putting in a new one, so the first chance I'm likely to get to give the game a decent shake will be Saturday.

But I can download it and make a character. That won't take three hours, will it? OK, I know there have been plenty of times in the past when doing something similar took at least that long but we're past that now, aren't we? 

Nice tee-up for an anecdote about how it took three hours just to download the game and make a character there...

Except the download took about fifteen or twenty minutes and the game installed perfectly and I was able to log straight in and get stuck into making a character right away. Which was fun.

BP:SR is referred to in everything I've read about it as an "anime MMORPG", which could mean a lot of things. In this context, I often feel "Anime" means a look more than anything. I'm not even sure what anime gameplay would be. There as many genres of anime as there are novels or Western games, aren't there? It could be scifi or fantasy or high school drama or historical or... well, anything. 

So that's not much to go on. Visually, though, anime does have a certain look and feel, regardless of the subject matter, and judging purely on Character Creation, which is almost all I've seen of the game so far, this definitely looks like an anime MMORPG.

I really enjoyed making my character even though most of the text was untranslated from the original... Mandarin? 

Sidebar: I'm going to look this up in a moment but I realize all of a sudden that I don't know if this is a Chinese or a Japanese game. I do know the only servers are in China because everyone outside South-East Asia has been complaining about it bitterly and review-bombing the game on Steam for it. On the other hand, every time I saw anything about the original Blue Protocol it always seemed to involve Japan somewhow, right up to the game launching, then closing, there and nowhere else.

On investigation, it seems Blue Protocol itself was Japanese but Blue Protocol: Star Resonance is "developed by Shanghai Bokura Network Technology and published by A Plus Japan". So I guess it's Chinese and Japanese. That's cleared that up, then.

Whatever the language, in Character Creation all the pertinent parts have been translated and the icons
are more than adequate to explain the rest. Well, most of them. I was somewhat at a loss to figure out the meaning of the five symbols that show your character in a variety of poses when you click them but then again that part didn't seem to require any input from the player so it didn't really matter whether I understood them or not.

Character Creation starts with a choice of Body Type and Gender, although the word Gender isn't used and come to think of it I didn't click on the downard-pointing triangle. I just assumed it meant "male". Clearly I need to work on my assumptions some more.

The Body Type is labeled as such but it looks more like an age choice to me, with the options appearing to be Child, Adolescent and Adult. Or I guess they could be Petite, Slim and Well-Built. Depends how you look at it. I went for the middle option, whatever it's supposed to be.

 

From there you get a fairly wide range of Presets and quite a few chances to fine-tune your facial appearance. There are no sliders, other than for color. It's all identikit mixing and matching, which I think I probably prefer to sliders. 

Sliders are far more versatile and you can get much more nuanced results but you can also get sucked into some completely pointless, time-wasting rabbit holes as you try to get exactly the chin density or temple curvature you want, all the time forgetting that no matter how good it looks in Character Creation, you'll never see any of it ever again, once you log into the actual game. It's something of a relief just to pick from a menu and even then I found myself trying to make tiny adjustments that are never going to have any impact on my experience when I start playing the game proper.

I was in character creation for close on half an hour, something I can be reasonably sure of by my Steam played time of 35 minutes. The only other thing I did was watch the very short opening cut scene, then read a short note and put on my starting gear in the room where my character woke up after drowning or whatever it was that happened to her. 

Honestly, I don't know what happened. I wasn't paying attention because Mrs Bhagpuss came in in the middle of the cut scene and asked me a question and I turned round to answer her and neither saw nor heard what happened next, after my character dived down deep into the ocean. When I looked back at the screen, she was in a room somewhere. 

All of that, including what I did when I got to the room, can't have taken much over five minutes, so the rest has to have been making the character. It didn't feel anything like that long, though, which is a strong point in favor of both the tools and the character design.

Oh, and I opened the claim window and got some freebies for pre-registering, which I never did, so I assume everyone gets them. One was a dog you can ride on. looking forward to trying that out. 

Going back to the look of the thing, the character models certainly do scream "anime". There's no doubt about that. I didn't take any of them, but there are plenty of options to have the huge anime-style eyes and the many hair-styles all have that flick-away look that's so familiar. You even get to choose what your teeth look like, which I think may be a first for me.

Hair and eyes are always the two I spend most time on. There are a whole load of pupil choices, which for once actually look reasonable. That took me a while. 

Getting the hair right took longer. You can just take a preset hairstyle but again you can mix and match from "Front", "Back" and "Crown" to get something a little less generic. I was curious about the Crown option. It turns out to be one or two strands of flyaway hair that stick up or out and wave about in the breeze. I toyed with the idea but I suspect it would become quite annoying after the novelty wore off so I settled for the neat and tidy look. 

I have to keep calling her "my character" because one oddity of the process was that at no point did I get a chance to give her a name. I have come across that in other games. It usually means there's some point early on, where naming your character becomes a storyline choice, like when some official asks you to identify yourself or you have to sign some sort of document. We'll see if that happens next time I play.

Which is also when I'll find out if the game has any stickiness I guess. I'm hoping it may be at least as sticky as Crystal of Atlan, which I am theoretically, although not actually, still playing. I did get to about Level 50 or so in that one, which isn't nothing.

The last thing I did before the game dumped me into the opening cut scene was pick a class. There were quite a few to choose from. Maybe ten? I picked the ranged fighter that uses a bow and has a pet that fights for her because I always pick that one. And almost always regret it. The fighter with the giant sword is always more fun. I'll never learn.

All the classes get a difficulty rating. Mine was two stars out of five, so towards the easy end but not the easiest. That was the aforementioned fighter with the big sword. I'm hopeful that the much-maligned auto-combat option will remove any need for skill on my part anyway.  

So far, BP:SR is being torn apart on Steam, with a "Mosly Negative" rating from almost two and a half thousand reviews. I had a quick skim and most of the disses I read seemed to be complaining about things I'm quite keen on, like that auto combat and also auto pathing, or that I don't care about at all, like it being a mobile port, or that I'm expecting not to affect me much, like there being no EU or US servers. 

As for the "boring dialog" and dull quests, I'll make my own mind up on those. It is noticeable that there are a lot of quite sensible, positive reviews, while the negative ones mostly seem to be from people wishing they were playing a different game altogether. I wonder why people bother to download titles they must know they aren't going to enjoy. Seems like a waste of time to me

And speaking of time, that's all I have for this evening, so my first impressions are going to have to end there. For now. There will be more. I guarantee it.

Starting As You Don't Mean To Carry On

Since I'm completely stuck for anything to write about today and since I did say I was going to do it, I guess we might as well have that list of TV shows I started but didn't finish. Always assuming I can remember what they were, that is. And why I stopped watching them.

Here they are, in no particular order, apart from a slight bias towards the few I can actually recall something about without having to look them up...

Loudermilk 

I watched just one episode of this. I didn't hate it but I didn't much like it, either. 

The premise looked promising - an ex-music journalist and recovering addict remakes himself as a "brutally honest sobriety counselor" - but the execution, at least in the first episode, felt lackluster and labored. I fully realize it takes most shows a while to get going but this isn't a sitcom with a twenty-six episode season arc. It's a ten episode dramedy and those really need to kick harder off the wall.

The real reason I didn't follow through, though, was Loudermilk himself. I just didn't like him. I didn't find him appealing or endearing or sympathetic. I found him smug and annoying. In something like this, if you don't enjoy the star turn there's very little prospect of the rest of the cast picking up the slack and given I didn't much like any of them either...

I was a bit disappointed I didn't enjoy it more. I'd had it in mind for a while to give the show a try and then Wilhelm included it in one of his TV posts, saying he hoped it would "scratch a bit of the Brockmire itch". I'd also watched Brockmire and enjoyed it and I would have liked more of the same or at least a passable facsimile.

Brockmire

Which makes me wonder now why I didn't just watch more Brockmire. I mean, there was more I hadn't watched already. A whole season, in fact. Actually, now I come to look into it further, three whole seasons.

And here we go again. Until I wrote this post I was under the impression there were only two seasons of Brockmire. There are, in fact, four. Last year, when I was watching it on Amazon Prime UK, only the first two seasons were available and there was no mention of Seasons Three and Four at all.

This time, though, lack of access wasn't the reason I stoppped. I stopped with Season One because at the end, Brockmire decides to take a new job in another town, leaving behind the entire supporting cast except for the one I wasn't all that keen on.

Obviously, I should have trusted the process and carried on watching to see where the show was going to go. For all I know, the move could have been a total disaster and Brockmire could have been back where he started in S2E2. 

The truth is, I wanted Season Two to carry on just the same as Season One and when it didn't I threw a hissy fit and walked away. I've always intended to go back and try again and now I know there are actually three more seasons I'm more interested than ever. Let's hope my VPN can make that happen because the show isn't available in the UK at all any more.

Blue Period

An anime in which an enervated, bored, popular high school student decides, for some inchoate reason, to slum it with the art kids, only to discover he has a hidden talent for painting. Or something like that. I expect he also falls in love or gets a crush on someone or learns some life lessons, too. All of the above, probably.

I thought it sounded promising and once again I didn't hate it but it didn't hold my attention for more than a single episode. I can remember bits of the plot and a few scenes so it can't have been entirely uninvolving but when you get to the end of the first episode of a character-driven show, the minimum expectation is that you should want to know what happens to the characters next. 

I didn't and I still don't.

Pluto 

Another anime. It's an eight episode limited series and I this time I got half way through before I stopped. My reason for bailing was pretty much the opposite of the one I gave just now.

The premise of Pluto is that there are a small number of exceptionally advanced, intelligent, self-aware robots and someone is killing them all, one by one. That's right. It's an AI serial killer show.

It's beautifully animated. It looks gorgeous. The writing is supple and subtle. The characters are distinct and memorable. The plot is compelling. Each episode is around an hour long so there's time for a huge amount of detail and backstory and world-building, all of which is done well.

So why didn't I finish it? Simple. I just found it too emotionally draining to continue. It was wearing me out. 

The whole show is steeped not just in emotion but in the examination of emotion. Having some of the central characters be robots allows for a continual comparison between what is real and what is artificial, what is valid and what is surrogate. I found it exhausting, especially late at night, like going to bed with a philosophy textbook.

The main reason I couldn't keep up with it, though, were the robots themselves. The show does an excellent job of  presenting these few, special machines as unique and irreplaceable, making it a harrowing experience to see one destroyed forever in each episode.

My sense was that, even if the central character, himself one of the special robots, now acting as a detective, was to solve the case, find and stop the killer and survive the final episode, at best it would be a Pyrrhic victory. By then he'd be the only one left. It would be like watching fire destroy an entire art gallery and having the fire finally go out leaving just one painting unburned.

I will go back and finish this one at some point but I'll really have to be in the mood for it.

Little Witch Academia

And on the exact other end of the entertainment spectrum...

I watched this after a run of super-heavy, emotionally draining shows, including the last one. I was hoping to relax with some silliness. To be fair to the show, there is plenty of that but even in the two or three early episodes I saw, I found myself watching with a creeping sense of foreboding. Very much not what I was either expecting or looking for.

It's a perennial problem with many institutionally-set shows. This one happens to be set in a school but it could just as easily be a hospital or an office or a prison. There has to be dramatic tension and in institutional settings that tension almost always turns inwards on itself.

The particular premise here is that a girl from a humble background gets a place at a school for witches but the place turns out to be full of snobs, bullies and disciplinarians. After only a couple of episodes I could see we were in for an endless series of battles with authority, tradition and repression, during which, over time, the virtues of our hero's kind, empathic persona would slowly - oh so very slowly - work to change hearts and minds. 

I've recently started watching the similarly-named My Hero Academia and it suffers from much the same problem. To many shows do.

It's all very well to teach life-lessons but they can be excruciating to have to live through, even vicariously. How many times do you really want to see the character you're supposed to be associating yourself most closely with be humiliated, embarrassed and made to look and feel inadequate before you reach the catharsis of their ultimate vindication?

Or, in other words, does there really need to be quite so much Shawshank before every Redemption? Maybe there does. There always is, after all. And usually I can handle it. This time, though, I really wasn't in the mood.

The Great Pretender

More anime. I lasted three or four episodes with this one and I liked it but it had something of the opposite problem from either Pluto or Little Witch Academia and that sunk it for me in the end. 

The elevator pitch for this one is that Japan's greatest con artist meets another scammer who's even better at defrauding people than he is. What that doesn't tell you is that they're both total gits.

Watching two self-satisfied, arrogant liars try to out-lie each other for twenty-five minutes does not, in my opinion, make for great entertainment. Once again, the writing seemed fine and there's every chance all of this was going somewhere, but for me to go with it long enough to find out where that might be, the two leads would have to be a damned sight less obnoxious. 

When you're being asked to spend time with fictional criminals, I never feel it's a good sign when you really, really want the police to catch them and bang them up for good. Or for their intended victims to catch them at it and give them a good kicking. Either would be fine.

One Piece

By no means the last show I've quit on but the last I can remember right now. This was one of Netflix' big shows of last year. The trailer looked good and I was looking forward to it. When it started, a friend watched it and told me it was great. I watched the first episode and...

It was a bit dull. I kept meaning to go back and watch the rest but so far I haven't and the longer we go on, the less likely that seems. Maybe one day.

At least it's one episode ahead of Fallout or The Three Body Problem, neither of which I seem to be able to start watching at all. Once again, I thought I was looking forward to both of them but apparently I'd rather watch old CW shows, now I can access them through my VPN.  

The Flash starts out really well and there are nine seasons of that one. Pretty sure I'm going to watch them all.

You're Not From Around Here, Are You?

After I hit Publish on last month's post about not being able to watch the third and fourth seasons of Roswell New Mexico, I did what I said I might do and re-upped to my VPN of choice, which happens to be Mullvad. It's very cheap, has no registration process to speak of and happily supports ad hoc comings and goings with no need for any kind of subscription. 

Also, it has a cute logo of a mole wearing a hard hat. Not that I'm saying that influenced me in any way.

The only drawback is that Mullvad doesn't support Windows operating systems older than Win10, as I found out when I went to use it on my laptop, which stills chugs along on Windows 8.1, partly because I had the disk but mostly because it's too ancient to run anything newer. Luckily, Mullvad supplies its own work-around, which just requires some cutting and pasting so it can piggyback on a third-party service, the  name of which I forget and which I'm too lazy to look up.

Have we been here before? I feel like I'm getting deja vu.

Doesn't matter. The point isn't to discuss the nit-picking details of how I'm passing myself off as a New Yorker these days. It's to say that, as I suspected, no amount of digital camoflage was ever going to let me watch those two missing seasons, which I still haven't seen, for the simple reason that no-one is streaming them for free anywhere.

They are for sale as digital downloads and, courtesy of my spoofed IP address, I could theoretically buy them from Amazon and a few other places but I'm neither ready to pay that price yet nor certain how it would go with my UK payment credentials if I tried. It might come to it eventually but for the while I'm holding off to see if the show returns to a streaming service I can access, one way or another.

Since I'd paid for a month anyway, I thought I'd see what else was available that previously hadn't been, when I was geo-locked to my genuine physical location. The first show I thought of was...

Housebroken (Season 2)

Housebroken, for those who neither know nor likely care, is an American animated sitcom made for an adult audience, featuring a poodle called Holly, who runs therapy sessions for animals in her neighborhood out of the front room of her owner's home, while she's out at work. Holly is voiced by Lisa Kudrow, who you will certainly know from shows like Friends and... well, just Friends, really, although god knows no-one needs another show on their resume if they have that one.

I really enjoyed the first season of Housebroken. There are only two but a third has been commissioned so it must be doing okay, even though it has no more than a mediocre 6.4 on IMDB. I'd give it something closer to an 8, I think. The best episodes are very funny but it does lack a little in consistency. 

The second season is noticeably more cartoonish than the first in that it makes more extensive use of the freedom of animation to stretch the boundaries of a supposedly realistic setting (If you can call anything where cats, dogs, hamsters and pigs sit peacably in a room together without tearing each other apart "realistic". Oh, and they talk and some of them run businesses and... you know what, forget I ever used the word...)

There are also several of those set-piece episodes where characters meet versions of themselves in dreams or perform musical numbers in the style of a broadway show or parody other shows and movies. Sometimes all of those at once. Also, there are a surprising number of scenes - even whole episodes - where one or more of the animals is on drugs. 

At times I thought it seemed a bit much for one season - especially the second. You don't usually get too much of this sort of thing until later in the run, when the writers are either running out of ideas or the show is so popular they feel they can get away with anything. 

That's not to complain, though. Mostly, the more surreal it gets, the funnier it is. I particularly enjoyed the episode with the Thelma and Louise parody. And there's really not much point making an animated comedy about talking animals if you don't lean into the possibilities. 

The voice acting is uniformly good. There's a plethora of famous guest voices but none of them unsettle or unbalance the gestalt of the regular ensemble. The writing is sharp enough, although the comedy can also be also very broad. It's a difficult trick to match those two approaches. Mostly it comes off but  even when it doesn't, things generally move fast enough you're past it before you notice.

The animation is fine. Better than functional, not spectacular, always in the very recognizeable, American made-for-TV style. It sits well in that tradition, not surprising when you find the studio behind it is Bento Box Entertainment, best known for Bob's Burgers, a show I have never watched but which, from the title alone, sounds like it must be the most American show ever. 

It is mildly ironic that such a US-oriented studio should name itself after an iconic Japanese artefact. I'm sure there's a story in that, which leads me neatly, if unexpectedly, on to...

Toradora

Toradora,  as I'm sure someone reading this already knows, is an anime in which male lead Ryuji's ability to put together a perfect Bento Box features heavily. I wasn't going to talk about that show today. I had other ideas but when the universe gives you that kind of nudge it'd be crazy to ignore it.

Not just the anime but the whole IP is a big deal in Japan. It began as a series of light novels, a concept I wasn't familiar with a year ago but now know quite well from work, where we seem to be selling more and more of them. 

We don't currently stock English translations of this particular series. They do exist but they don't seem to be in print at the moment. If they were, I'd order the first in the run to see if it matches up to the anime, which is one of the best I've seen. 

Of course, my minimal exposure to the form makes that a judgment of limited value but don't take my word for how good it is. Here's another opinion. Or just google the reviews. They're uniformly excellent. 

It's widely considered a classic in the high school romance/coming of age genre but it's considerably more nuanced, thoughtful and just downright odd than that pigeonhole would suggest. The cast isn't huge - there are two central characters and something like half a dozen close supporting roles - but everyone, even the minor, recurring characters, gives a strong impression of depth and solidity. 

The narrative throughline, which meanders chronologically through the school year for the full twenty-five episodes, somehow manages to be at once coherent and sprawling. The show opens with a fairly defined concept: Ryuji and Taiga both have ferocious reputations and/or appearances that make their classmates fear and/or respect them. Naturally, over the course of the series, it will be revealed that they are nothing like as scary as everyone thinks and of course they will be revealed to be made for each other.

Yeah. Right. Good luck with that! It's true we get there in the end but as with all the best trips, it's the journey that counts, not the destination. Pretty much every cliche is overturned. Every plot twist you see coming goes somewhere else. Every major character has their own journey to take and all of them end up being more complex than you'd imagined.

I never knew from one episode to the next what to expect but I found the whole thing so emotionally involving I literally pumped my fist in the air and yelled "Yes!" at one crucial moment and threw both my arms in the air with a despairing "FFS!" at another. This is unseemly behavior for anyone but especially someone about to hit retirement age. 

I watched it with the English (American.) dub and I rate the voice acting very highly. I've long been an advocate of V.O. with subtitles but in the case of anime I think I'm definitely leaning towards the dubbed versions. Or maybe I've just been lucky so far.

It's fair to say this is my kind of show but I would recommend it to anyone. It's heartwarming in the best way but also thought-provoking and challenging. The ending, which remains controversial, takes some getting your head around, I'll tell you that for nothing. I was all "Wait! What?" until I had a good long think about it but I'm cool with it now.... I think...

In keeping with my comments from the last time I wrote about stuff like this, I'll be getting Toradora on DVD. Anything you want to watch again needs to be on hard copy now, as I think we can all agree. Which brings me neatly back to where I was going before, and ...

The Conners  (Season One)

Thanks to my VPN I am finally watching the Roseanne follow-up that began all the way back in 2018. Really? Was it that long ago?

I wanted to watch this from the moment I heard of it. Roseanne was one of those shows from the '90s that benchmark the decade (Even though it actually started airing in the very late 'eighties.) Roseanne, Friends, Frasier - whatever ran in the 10PM Friday slot on Channel 4. It's weird to think it now but in the UK, at the time, those and more like them were considered niche viewing only suitable for the minority channel, at least at first.

Of all of them, the only one I have never re-watched is Roseanne but my memories of it, more than a quarter of a century old, remain surrisingly clear. It must have made an impression. The final season, which aired in 1997, I have pegged in my mind as The End Of TV, mostly because it came just two years before I started playing EverQuest and gave up watching TV for a decade and a half. Not because it was... not great, to put it politely.

Apart from that last season, though, I loved Roseanne. Not Roseanne the character, or Roseanne Barr the actor, both of whom I always found annoying, but the rest of the cast. (Okay, not Martin Mull either. He was even more annoying than Roseanne...) so I was naturally interested when I heard the show was getting a sequel. 

That happened in 2018 and everything was apparently going jut fine until Roseanne torpedoed her own show with an exceptionally ill-advised Twitter rant. That looked to be it for the revival until she magnanimously opted out of the show she'd created under her own name, leaving the rest of the cast to carry on under the family banner. When I learned that it would be coming back without the titular character my interest actually increased.

And then I somehow never managed to watch it. I mean I could have. I think it came out here on Sky originally. It's now on Sky Go, whatever that is. Also Apple TV for some reason. It just hasn't appeared on any of the channels or services I'm registered with or subscribed to or can get for free so I kind of forgot all about it.

The Conners is, however, on Netflix in the USA and now, thanks to my VPN disguise, it just shows up on my Netflix account as if it was always there. Which is weird. You'd think there'd be some code to stop that.

I'm very glad there isn't because I'm really enjoying The Conners. It's stagey and occasionally awkward but it's all the characters I remember, behaving like they should. Everyone looks suitably older and more shop-worn although I'd have to re-watch the original series to judge just how far to the left the politics has shifted. It feels like it must be a long way, especially since it seems that in the one, short revival season made before she dropped out, Roseanne was written as a Trump supporter.

John Goodman, Sara Gilbert and Laurie Metcalfe are all as good in their familiar, familial roles as you could hope and Lecey Goransen is better as Becky than I remember, although maybe I'm thinking of Sarah Chalke, the other Becky. There were famously two Beckys...

As an actor, I don't think Laurie Metcalfe has a setting below "Over the Top" but she's counterweighted by Sara Gilbert, playing Darlene with perfect, dry understatement as always. Amusingly, Michael Fishman's DJ is as bland and underwritten as an adult as he was as a child, to the point where it has to be an in-joke.

Of the new characters, I really like Ames McNamara as Mark, the cross-dressing, gay middle-schooler. Child actors can be awkward but he seems astonishingly natural in what must be a very challenging role. His elder sister, Harris, played by Emma Kenney, is winningly reminiscent of her mother, Darlene, at the same age, while somehow looking, sounding and acting completely different. That's a hell of a trick.

The rest of the newbies I'm still getting used to but I'm only in Season One. The show has a very poor rating on most of the review sites I've checked, some of which might relate to residual loyalty to Roseanne Barr or to the show's unexpectedly liberal political stance. I broadly approve of the politics on show but even I was surprised by just how "woke" Darlene has grown up to be. I remember her as more of a Daria-inspired nihilist than any kind of social justice warrior.

I'll have to go back and re-watch Roseanne to see if I'm mis-remembering that. I guess I could faff about, trying to find out if and where it's streaming and whether I can access it but I just checked and you can get the box set of the whole nine seasons for under £35 on Amazon so I think I'll just save myself the hassle and buy it.

Of course, then it'll just sit around on a shelf, unopened, like all the other box sets in this house but at least I'll have the comfort and security of knowing I could watch it, if I wanted to. 

That's got to be worth the money all on its own.

Take Three From The Top Of The Pile

It's past time I did a round-up of the TV shows I've been watching. I've been meaning to do one for weeks but every time I get close I start thinking about how much I want to say and it all seems like a lot. Some of the shows I can deal with in a paragraph but others feel like they need a full post to themselves. 

I've been trailing the prospect of an in-depth post on Beastars since at least last November, for example, just like I did with Carole and Tuesday. The problem with procrastinating is I only retain enough detail to write those kinds of post for about a week or two after I stop watching the shows. I remember the themes and topics I want to discuss but when I come to articulate them, it's hard to bring illustrative examples to mind.

Instead of having them ready, I have to go back and skip-watch whole episodes, hoping to hit on enough relevant scenes to support the points I'm trying to make. That would be absolutely fine and proper for an academic essay- it's exactly what I would have done when I was at college, except I'd have been skim-reading 19th century novels, not speed-watching anime - but I feel it's wholly inappropriate for a blog post that's not even likely to be of interest to most of the people who are going to see it.

Of course, blog posts aren't always - perhaps not even usually - written primarily for an audience. They're as much for the benefit of the blogger as the reader and one of the most consistent factors in my relatively recent return to watching shows made for TV has been the unexpected degree of processing I've found myself needing to do. Writing about them helps with that.

The break I took from watching TV lasted the best part of twenty years. The main reason I took it was that what I was seeing on TV had become so trite and predictable I couldn't find anything in it to merit the time it was taking me to watch the stuff. Then I came back to find just about everything so layered with meaning, so multi- and meta-textual, so self-referential and post-modern and just all-round mentally demanding, even a simple sitcom felt like something deserving of a dissertation all to itself.

The upshot of all this overthinking is a realisation that I need to get on and write about these shows while they're still fresh in my mind. I have to admit to myself that if I don't complete the lengthy, critical pieces buzzing around in my brain within a week or two of coming up with the ideas for them, it's extremely unlikely I ever will. In short, I have to accept it would be better to say something, however slight and inadequate, than keep making vague promises I'm never going to keep to go into everything in the depth it deserves..

That's promises to myself, I should make it clear. I'm not imagining anyone else is sitting there, fuming, thinking "Is he ever going to write that post about Beastars?"

So, with that bout of self-encouragement out of the way (You can do this!) here's a little something about a few shows I've watched in the last couple of months and what I thought about them. 

Beastars - Netflix

I guess I had to start with this one. It seems like a long time ago that I watched it. At the time I thought it seemed quite significant and I also thought I had a lot to say about it. Now I'm not even sure I can remember  what that might have been.

That said, I do remember a lot more about the show than I often do at such a remove. My memories of it are weirdly sensual, an overriding feeling of wonderment, tinged with utter confusion. 

The narrative of Beastars, complex and eliptical in its own right, takes place against the background of a world so strange as to defy rational description, far less explanation. We're all used to seeing anthropomorphic animals, playing the parts humans would take in mainstream fiction, but Beastars takes that conceit to impossible lengths, revealing a world where predators and prey co-exist within a barely comprehensible moral framework. 

They live side by side, study and work together, form friendships and even romantic relationships like civilized people, all while craving each others' flesh, trading in and eating each other's meat and fearing for their own and each others' lives, like animals in a jungle and yet nothing like that at all.

Add conflicting subtexts concerning adolescence and adulthood, licit and illicit acts, personal and collective responsibilty, forbidden love and sexual desire and you have a disorienting, disturbing, deeply thought-provoking work that lives long in the mind after the images fade. It's one of those shows I found myself thinking about over and over, any time my mind began to idle, long after the closing credits ran.

Every part of the production fits together frictionlessly, even as the narative threads jar, one against another. The extremely strong, if even more strongly extreme, world-building rests safely, despite the shifting conceptual foundation, scaffolded in language, buttressed by image. The art design becomes so much part of the ideation after a while, it becomes impossible not to think of the screen as a window into this strange, other world. 

I watched with the English dub and the voice-acting was equal to the challenge set by those words and pictures. The entirety held together as a gestalt throughout the twenty-six episodes of the two seasons, although there were times I was barely afloat in the story. By the end I was no clearer on the motivations of some of the key characters or how they survived in such a world than I had been at the start. I felt I'd been on a long and difficult journey with them. It was one I fervently wished would continue.

And it will, if only for a short while. The third and final season of Beastars is due to air sometime this year. Maybe when it ends I'll have some better understanding of what it was I watched. In a way I hope not. As with all the best fiction, an introduction beats an explanation.

Akuma Kun - Netflix

Let's see how far I get with this one without looking anything up...

It's the story of a teenager who inherits the eponymous title role from his father, a duty that seems to involve solving various supernatural crises, excorcising demons and generally acting as some sort of metaphysical emergency service. Akuma (Is it his title or his name? I forget, or maybe it was never made clear.), who exhibits a disturbing lack of both affect and empathy much of the time, appears to have accepted his role unwillingly, a lack of courtesy he extends to the half-demon sent to help him.

The half-demon, whose name I don't recall, is emotional in a very human way and has supportive mixed-species parents (One human, one demon, obviously.). Akuma, conversely, has an extremely poor relationship with his father, with whom he occasionally is forced to consult for advice, always with very bad grace.

Akuma lives in rented accommodation, for which he's eternally behind with the payments. His landlady is very tolerant; her pre-tween daughter very much less so. She regularly berates, badgers and even attempts to beat up Akuma and a great deal of the business of the show revolves around various people becoming infuriated, angry or disappointed with him, something he rarely and barely seems to notice. 

In between dressings-down, arguments and shouting matches, Akuma and his assistant deal with various demonic plots, infestations and near-apocalypses, all of which form the action element of the show. There's also a through-line narrative of some kind of elevated, mystical nature that I seem to have forgotten almost completely.

The show is funny, sometimes; thrilling, sometimes; dramatic, sometimes. The characters are largely appealing, endearing or amusing. Even Akuma has his good side. Most intriguingly for me, it's yet another anime founded on an assumption that there are demons everywhere. It seems to be an exceptionally common trope, to the point where I feel I should do some research on it.

As usual with these things, being a demon doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person. There's a vampish, succubus-like demon, who appears as a guest star in numerous episodes and frequently threatens to steal the show. Akuma makes a bargain with her to allow her to eat his heart if she helps him and the series ends with her about to make good on the deal.

I really enjoyed this and the characters, if not their names, have stayed with me. As you can probably tell, though, any memory of the actual plot has all but disappeared. That's fine. I'm increasingly of the opinion that, as with music, anime is all about the feels. 

According to Wikipedia, the twelve episode series I watched is the 2023 sequel to the late-80s/early-90s forty episode original. I'd like to see that, some time. Looking ahead, there's no word on a second season. Obviously, I hope there is one.

Good Night World - Netflix

Here's another show so abstruse and abstracted that trying to create a logical framework for it to sit within makes my head hurt. It begins with a comparatively straightforward set-up: four gamers play members of the same family in an online game, without realizing they, the players, are also a family in real life. Cute, eh?

Yeah, not really. Cute is the last thing this show is. 

Two of the players are brothers, one a clinically  depressed, shut-in gaming addict, the other a glib, corporate apparatchik. The third player is their father, a work-obsessed bully and intellectual snob. The fourth is the estranged wife and mother. 

Other in and out of game characters include a girlfriend and a work colleague. There's also a dead younger sister in the mix, somewhere. She died through the father's cold, uncaring neglect, but she may still live on in the game..

Or maybe none of that is true. As the season progresses, it becomes queasily apparent the whole melange is a roiling maelstrom of meta-fictional irreality. Nothing and no-one can be relied upon to be who they say they are, who they think they are or most especially who you think they are. They can't even be trusted to be what they are and neither can either the "real world" or the "game world".

This is not a show for people who fear the breakdown of reality. Philip K Dick fans ought to enjoy it just for that. I did. The characters are harder to love and my advice is not to get too emotionally attached to any of them.

Once again, it's twelve episodes long, only this time it comes complete with an actual ending. There's no second season in prospect and it doesn't need one but apparently there is a prequel, Good Night World End,  available on a streaming service called MangaONE, which I can't even find on Google. If it ever turns up on Netflix or even CrunchyRoll, I'll happily watch it there.

At this point I was going to go on to talk about a show I really liked called DoroHeDoro but I think  I'll save that for another time. This has been plenty for one post. And at least I've made a start. 

That's got to be worth something...

Is There Anything Good On?

People often talk about their Steam backlogs, a habit I originally viewed with incomprehension, then smug self-satisfaction and eventually sympathy. I went through the same cycle I imagine many have, first not using Steam at all  - or even seeing the point of it, really - then using it reluctantly, before coming to view it as a useful resource. Eventually, I reached the point I'm at now, where I treat Steam like an over-enthusiastic puppy, to be enjoyed and played with but never indulged beyond the point where things might get out of control.

My current Steam backlog, or "Library" as I prefer to think of it - that is what it's called, after all - contains 91 games, of which I've played 75, although the "unplayed" sixteen does include several I've already played elsewhere. I'm not claiming I've finished all of those seventy-five games but since a significant number are demos, which I have finished, or open-ended MMORPGs or survival games that can't be finished, I don't think I've done too badly.

My Steam Library isn't what's bothering me, though. I'm just using it as a point of comparison with something that troubles me a lot more - my Netflix and Prime watch lists.

I never hear anyone fretting about these. The obvious difference is that it costs absolutely nothing to add a title to a list on the streaming platforms so the whole "Have I wasted a bunch of money?" question doesn't come into it.

That said, I've always had the impression Steam users are at least as concerned by some sense of obligation to the games themselves as they are about the incurred cost of owning them. It's as though people feel some kind of moral imperative or social duty to play the games, since they've expressed a public interest in them.

I guess that's another factor - the public nature of Steam compared to the private indulgence of the streams, although I confess I'm guessing here. I've never used any of the social functions of Steam. I prefer to treat the platform as if it has no public interface but I'm given to understand that others use it as a quasi-social media platform focused on gaming. At least, that's what Steam itself keeps trying to convince me.

For me, the two things - streaming and gaming - have very different social connotations. Games don't really matter; movies and TV shows do.

It's not a rational position and I have no intention of trying to defend it. If anything, it's an indicator of age but also of cultural identity. I may have played video games for more than all of my adult life but it hasn't been until very recently that I've found other adults around me openly acknowledging a similar interest and owning it as part of their public persona.

Even then, none of those people is more than half my age. It seems as though thirty-somethings no longer feel a social obligation to abnegate their earlier interest in gaming the way very many in my generation and the one after it did. (It's not like those generations didn't play video games. They just seem to have conveniently managed to wipe their memories entirely clean of the experience, so now it's just something their children or grand-children do, at which they shake their heads, whether indulgently or worriedly, not something they spent countless hours doing themselves, once upon a time.)

In my day, as the obnoxious refrain has it, far more so than the infamously self-congratulatory admission often made in certain circles that one is incapable of understanding mathematics, a lack of knowledge of video games was never going to lower anyone's intellectual credibility. More likely, admitting even to having heard of such shiboleths of mundanity as Mario or Zelda would in itself undermine whatever cultural cachet you held.

Not recognizing the names of certain film directors or being unable to bluff convincingly on their key works, on the other hand, could easily result in social ostracization. Television stood somewhere between the two extremes but even with that frequently derided medium there were names it was always acceptable to drop.

To  a great extent, much of this now feels as relevant to everyday life as the social conventions of the Edwardian Age. Dinner party conversation no longer revolves around the difficulty of finding reliable servants. At least I imagine it doesn't. Been a while since I was invited to anyone's dinner party... 

I'm pretty sure if I did get an invite to one this week, no-one there would be talking about the disaster unfloding around the launch of The Day Before. Not if they're my age, they wouldn't, anyaway.

And yet, if you grew up in those times, as I did, it can sometimes require an effort of will to remember that no-one under fifty fucking cares if you've seen Fellini's 81⁄2! (I have, by the way. Don't remember much about it. It was at college so I would probably have been stoned at the time... Is getting stoned at the movies even something young people do any more, or is it as archaic a ritual as hailing a Hansom Cab to get you home in a pea-souper?)

Consequently, it bugs me that I haven't wached everything on my watch lists in a way it doesn't that I may not have played everything in my Steam Library. Which is why it makes no sense for me to keep adding things to those lists every goddam day!

My Netflix watch list is very similar in size to my Steam Library, as it happens. There are 98 shows and movies in there, 31 of which I have yet to watch. That doesn't sound so bad until you realise I added about a dozen of those this month. And by no means do I add everything I watch to the list. A lot I just... watch.

My Prime Watchlist (Amazon calls it that; Netflix goes with the minimalist "List".) is shorter at 64 entries. Of those, I've at least sampled 42. Many have been on there so long now I'm feeling the urge to watch them again, although it's also been so long since last time, they now have that irritating little yellow purse icon next to them, meaning they're not Free With Prime any more and I'd have to pay repeat fees.

At least I don't seem to be adding new stuff to Prime at anything like the rate I'm adding it to Netflix but that says a hell of a lot more about the degraded quality of Amazon's offer than my sense of self-control. In fact, if it wasn't for my relatively recent interest in anime, adding new shows to Netflix probaby wouldn't be much of a problem either.

I suppose I could try to spin the ever-decreasing value of the streaming services as the market falters and fragments as a positive; if I struggle keep my list lust in check then perhaps it's as well someone's working to reduce the temptation for me. Yeah, I'm not going to do that. It's pitiful how far the streaming giants have fallen.

I'm also not going to do anything to curb my acquisitory behavior. I mean, who cares? That's the attitude I need to foster. Shove 'em all in the hole and let 'em rot there. It's not like they're taking up cupboard space like my hundreds of VHS tapes...

In case you were wondering what the point of all this was... well, if you work it out, you might let me know. I started out thinking I'd write something about a few shows I've been watching and this is what we got.

Just to bookmark that, the shows I would have discussed in the post I thought was going to write, had I written it, would have been Beastars, Dorohedoro and Akuma Kun. All anime. All great.

Maybe next time. If I haven't watched a bunch more before then. I mean, those list aren't going to get any shorter if I don't.

Good Things Come - Carole & Tuesday Season 2

At nearly sixty-five years of age (This month!) I must be about as late to the anime party as anyone. I have to wonder why it's taken me this long to get here, especially when you consider I was fending off friends and acquaintances determined to persuade me Japanese animation was going to be the next big thing as far back as the early '90s. Actually, now I think about, that's almost certainly the reason.

There was a surge of interest in the genre (Is it a genre?) among my then-peer group even before that. I think it began as early as the late 'eighties. I remember Akira doing the rounds of the art house cinemas around then before it turned up on TV not long after, to much hype and ballyhoo. I remember watching it and thinking it was okay but not really being able to see what the fuss was about.

It didn't help that the people I knew who were really into anime (And manga.) back then exhibited a kind of quasi-religious mania about it. They seemed determined to proselytize and it was counterproductive, at least with me. 

Life Lesson: never go too hard when trying to share your new obsessions. A few hints and a seeming unwillingness to go into detail gets people curious enough to look into the topic for themselves. Everyone loves to feel they're the ones who discovered something new and wonderful, not that they're just following some trend. (See? I can give advice just fine. It's taking it I'm bad at!)

The upshot was that I mostly turned my back on the form (I like "form" better than genre.) for a quarter of a century or so. Over the years, active resistance decayed into indifference before finally crystallizing into curiosity. I could have saved myself a lot of wasted years by just being more open-minded in the first place but that applies to a lot more than anime.

In the end it took the advent of streaming services to break down my last residue of reserve. The damn things were right there in front of me every evening. All I had to do was click on them. Why not?

Of course, I still know absolutely nothing about the form (Sticking with that.) so my picks have been hit or miss to say the least. I've been happy to receive advice and suggestions both from commenters here and from people at work who've been steeped in this stuff for years but in the end I've mostly been using the same methods that have always served me so well in other media, by which I mean choosing books by their covers and bands by their names.

I've had the Crunchyroll app installed on Kindle Fire and the website bookmarked on PC for years now, but the choice there is so overwhelming I bounce off it every time I look. Mostly I'm happy to make my selections from Netflix and Prime, where a lot of the curation has already been done for me.

I'm also well aware the correct way to watch all non-English language movies and TV shows, animated or live action, is with subtitles but at this stage of life I really don't care so much about authenticity as I do about being entertained. From a practical perspective, dubbing is far less intrusive in animation anyway. The distracting mismatch between the shape of the mouth and the sounds coming out of it either already exists or isn't relevant. Who knows how a talking rabbit's mouth would work? Added to that, the voice acting on just about everything I've watched has been very good, so why not enjoy it?

The upshot of all of this is that my initiation into anime has been both hopelessly populist and steeped in ignorance, an approach which I think may, ironically, work in my favor. When I saw "Carole and Tuesday" I knew absolutely nothing about it. I had no idea it was by the same person behind the magnificent Cowboy Bebop. Obviously, had I known that, I would have been expecting greatness, which is precisely why I try not to know anything about what I watch until after it's over. Nothing dampens an experience faster than unrealistic expectations.

If I knew nothing about its provenance, why did I decide to watch the show? Simple.

• It was on Netflix.
• I thought the title sounded really cool.
• It was about contemporary music.

Only two of those things turned out to be true. 

I'm looking at the Overview and First Season Episode descriptions on Netflix right now. It isn't until Episode Seven that there's even a hint that the show takes place anywhere other than the here and now. And even then it's vague and ambiguous.

Carole and Tuesday is set in the future, on Mars. It's SciFi. That came as a big surprise. You would think someone might have thought to mention it when writing the promotional material but apparently either no-one thought it was relevant or they assumed anyone interested would already know. There's also no suggestion that the show carries a strong and coherent social and political message throughout, something that's there in the background from the start but which comes front and center for the whole of the second season. 

The high quality of the music should perhaps not have come as such a surprise but it did, anyway. I have a YouTube playlist from the show running as I write this and every song I've heard so far works perfectly as polished pop even without the visuals. That said, the impact of some of the songs is orders of magnitude greater when you see and hear them in their correct narrative context.

I already gave my thoughts on the first season, which I loved. I wondered whether the second could sustain the quality and the good news is that it absolutely could. The bad news is... no, there isn't any bad news. It's all good.

Well, unless you count the fact that there are only two seasons. It would be nice to have more. But even then, it's good to have a real ending and Carole and Tuesday has one, provided that, like me, you like endings that are really beginnings.

Season One very much sticks with the the premise of the show, which is that two young musicians meet by chance, fall into performing together, get noticed, start building a career and after many setbacks and some triumphs, succeed. 

"Success" in a musical career can only ever be a starting point, though, so Season Two begins with the pair not that much further forward than when they began. Rather than simply carry on the same story, Season Two opens out the backstory to reveal much more of the world in which the two girls live and offer some hints about how it came to be the way it is.

Along the way the two leads learn much about themselves, change the lives of others and finally change their world. It happens on another planet and in another time but it feels as real as if it had been the contemporary tale I was expecting. The show is in no way an allegory but it's rich in allusion to events, atitudes and issues familiar to us all from our own histories, both personal and cultural.

As a narrative it's coherent and always plausible. The setting is a heightened reality but a completely convincing one. As with most anime I've seen, (Pitifully few.) there's almost no exposition and very little explanation. For me, that's one of the form's most appealing features, although I imagine others may find it frustrating. 

Thematically, the show brings in issues of pollution, gender, political corruption, sexuality, race and identity, embedding and entwining those themes in the narrative, always allowing them to emerge organically from character and setting. The social and political concerns never unbalance the core story of two girls trying to make it in the music industry and how many of those situations came to be is largely left to the viewer's imagination. 

Emotionally, Carole & Tuesday is satisfyingly complex, with multiple characters revealing surprising aspects of their personalities and pasts, often without feeling any need to elaborate on them. It's an exhillarating choice, leaving the viewer feeling they've glimpsed a life in passing, like overhearing a snatch of conversation on the street. 

Relationships between characters, ranging from friendships to romance to familial obligations and more, are all uniformly well-handled with both sensitivity and maturity. There are few if any simple characters in Carole & Tuesday. For an ostensibly teen-oriented story, the whole show feels remarkably adult, in the most positive meaning of the word.

I found the girls' rival, Angela, particularly impressive in her testing journey to self-knowledge but almost every character, major and minor, made an impact that stayed with me. Writing this, I find myself remembering many of them in much more detail than I would normally retain this long after watching.

It would be typical of me to finish without mentioning the animation itself. Somehow, even though I find animated art intensely emotionally involving, frequently responding to its color and movement with a visceral, even a physical reaction, I tend to skate over all of that when talking or writing about it. I'm better at interpreting and describing static comic art than moving pictures. Well, more comfortable, anyway.

So far, the standard of animation in all the anime I've watched has been exceptional, as have the aesthetics. Even in my small sample the variety has been astonishing. Carole & Tuesday reminds me of a particular kind of 1960s-70s picture-book illustration, with its clear lines, pastel flats and unmistakeable jazz sensibilities. 

All of that is exemplified in the sublime opening sequence that introduces every Season Two episode. Coupled with one of the most lyrical and ethereal of all the show's excellent songs, it's one of the most impressive opening sequences I can remember. I watched it in full before every episode and I've watched it several more times since, just for the joy of it. I included it in a previous post and I make no apologies for sharing it again.

I'm sure I'll be watching the whole series again, soon and more than once. It's a great show. I reccommend it unreservedly.

Carole and Tuesday set such a high bar that I thought the next anime I watched would have little chance of clearing it. The next anime I watched turned out to be Beastars, so I was wrong about that. 

But that's a tale (Or a tail.) for another time.

Being Lazy Is Hard Work, Sometimes

I might have had something more substantial to post today if I hadn't spent several hours watching YouTube videos explaining how to make animated movies using AI, then following links to various utilities so I could play around with the tools. After all of that, my takeaway is that, while the technology may have come a long way, it still has a lot further to go before it can do what I want it to do, by which I mean everything.

The way things stand now, what I can see is a whole lot of extremely useful short-cuts that will save both professionals and dedicated amateurs a great deal of time and effort, just like I found when I was looking into whether I could get a team of AIs to write and draw a comic book for me. Unfortunately, that means instead of a project taking a few weeks, it might now take a few days, when what I want is for it to take a few seconds.

Basically, I want AI to be magic. I want to wave my wand and mutter a few incantations and have a fully-finished, polished, animated movie, ready to publish on my YouTube channel or on the blog or some other place where almost no-one will ever see it. In an ideal world I wouldn't even have to wave the wand. The AI would just know what I wanted and make it for me, without my even having to ask.

This would probably be a good time to ladle out that old pudding "Be careful what you wish for." There's an episode of Carole & Tuesday that hints at what will probably happen if and when the AIs reach that level of sophistication. It's Series One Episode 4: Video Killed The Radio Star. (Every episode of both seasons is named after a well-known song, usually with some relevance to what happens within it.)

This blog post gives a rough impression of what happens in that episode. I sugest not reading the comment thread, though. (And now everyone's gonna do exactly that...) 

Before anyone brings up my own long-promised post on the show, I'm happy to say it's done! I finished it a few days ago but I've been sitting on it. I'm not really happy with it - it's superficial - but I know I'm never going to finish the five or ten thousand word essay I have roiling around in my head so I'll just have to suck it up. I might publish it tomorrow. Depends what else comes along. 

The impact of AI on music and especially on songwriting is a major theme of Carole & Tuesday. The whole premise of the show is that the two girls are extremely unusual in that they write their own songs with no assistance from AI at all. Almost all songwriting in their time is at least AI-assisted, if not entirely subcontracted to software. 

Carole and Tuesday are both already singer-songwriters before they meet but it's a plot point that they only really attain a standard that's commercially viable when they pool their resources and write in tandem. Before then, barely-solvent Carole tries to supplement her meagre gig economy income by busking, mostly playing keyboard instrumentals no-one stops to hear, while poor little rich girl Tuesday composes songs on her acoustic guitar and sings them to herself in her lonely bedroom, somewhere in the invisible depths of a vast mansion.

Every other musician and singer we see in the entire show either performs work written by AIs or works with AIs to create their own music. To almost everyone in the narrative, the idea that anyone would try to do the whole thing alone seems not just unlikely but faintly ludicrous.

When Gus, the girl's manager, reformed alchoholic and one-time drummer in a speed-metal band called Lazy Sandwich, tries to get a video made on the cheap by buying an AI video bot called IDEA, the results are predictably terrible. Worse, the AI is a con artist, completely fooling everyone into thinking it can somehow whip up a stat-of-the-art music video for no money and no effort (By the bot, that is. It's a lot of effort for everyone else.)

I don't think we have to read very far between the lines to see what's going on there. Even four or five years ago, when Carole & Tuesday was being made, creative artists didn't like what was coming. They were right to be worried. 

The protracted actors strike wound up today (Pending final approval by the members.) following an earlier conclusion to similarly-motivated industrial action taken by their screenwriting colleagues. A number of issues were involved but in both cases fear of an AI takeover was one consideration. 

The compromise agreements reached revolve not around an abnegation of the upcoming technological revolution but a means of benefitting from it financially. A share of the spoils. 

And, to be fair, some say over whether studios can do away with existing actors, while still enjoying the public interest in those same actors' generated by their former appearances as living beings. I'm pretty sure the studios will be looking further ahead, to the day they don't need any actors at all, so it's only a temporary stay of execution for the craft but I guess it'll keep the current crop happy for now. Whether we'll even have live screen actors in fifty years is another question, as is whether anyone around then would still want them by then.

As I've said before, I believe all of this will have about as much long-lasting effect on the coming AI-pocalypse as the objections of eighteenth century weavers had on the success of the Spinning Jenny but as with the Industrial Revolution, a full turn will take longer than its proponents would like or its opponents fear. That's what I find so frustrating about it.

It's interesting to see the difference in rate of change between the various media to which AI is being applied. Applications requiring just a single, static image could very fast be approaching the moment when humans won't be necessary at all. I wouldn't think this would be the best time to take up a career producing book covers for self-published e-books for a start. I imagine most DIY authors will also be doing the pictures themselves before long.

As I found today, though, getting the images to move convicingly still takes rather more effort than I imagine most dabblers would care to give. I had no difficulty following the processes outlined in the videos I watched, most of which involved little more than typing prompts, selecting suitable results, then a lot of cutting, pasting and uploading. The problem was being bothered to do it.

Of course, that says more about me than the software. Once, the sheer amount of fiddly detail wouldn't even have slowed me down. 

Watching someone else fast-forward through the nitpicking process reminded me of that summer, back in the 'nineties, when I bought a sampler and spent a week making a three-minute song using samples of Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. I was quite pleased with the result but even I didn't want to listen to it again once I'd finished. 

Or there was the time in the early 'aughts, when Mrs Bhagpuss was away with the kids for a few days and I spent every evening making "music" with some sequencing software I'd bought. Again, by the time I'd finished, I never wanted to hear any of it ever again.

The first time, I thought it was time well spent; the second time, I wasn't so sure. If I was in my teens or twenties right now I'm pretty sure I'd be staying up 'til 2am every night, working on some ludicrously time-consuming AI project. At the age I am now, I flatter myself I'm over all of that. 

What I want, as I said, is for the AI to do just about all of it for me and I'm already getting tired of waiting. I never got my flying car or my jet pack and we still can't get our meals in pill form but I can't help thinking this new future is a lot nearer than those science fantasies ever were. It's just not near enough!

Still, every day brings something new. The anouncement made at OpenAI's DevDay that all their AI tools are now available in one package is drawing a lot of attention. With the integration of DALL·E 3 into GPT4, you don't have to swap from text generator to image generator any more. That's sure to save some time. 

Elon Musk is trying to get in on the act but the less said about that the better. Meanwhile his erstwhile partner, Grimes, is - as always - playing both sides. The more I know about her, the better I like her.

There's also a growing trend towards personalised AI packages that allow you to feed in your own data to get responses more closely tailored to your requirements. NightCafe chides me every time I log in because I haven't yet trained my own model, while GPT4 Turbo now lets you input the equivalent of a three hundred page book as a single prompt. With additions and improvements like those, the possibilty of my having an AI write and illustrate a whole post that might plausibly pass as my own work gets nearer every day.

I probably wouldn't use it for that even if it were possible. I like writing posts. Then again, it'd be handy on days when I'm just not feeling it but don't want to skip.

What I really want, though, in addition to a GPT-powered wifi mic and speaker combo I can clip to Beryl's collar so I can talk to her and have her seem to talk back, are some AI apps that can produce music I want to listen to and video I want to watch, infinitely and on demand. Games I can play, too, why not? And I'd like it to tailor them to my preferences from nominal input that doesn't take me more than a minute or two.

Is that too much to ask? I mean, come on!

Right now, though, the best I can come up with is something like this. That's Dylan Turner's lo-fi generator and I've had it on in the background the whole time I've been writing this post. It does a job but it's no Julia Holter.

While I was there, I spent a while playing with Dylan's other toy, LudoTune. It lets you build three-dimensional structures with colored blocks and have them play music. 

Well, some people can get them to play music. I made an IF logo for the blog that plays a station ident. Kinda. If you squint. With your ears.

And that is why there's no real post today (Although the Carole & Tuesday digression is solid, I think.) Once the real AI gets here, there'll be none of this nonsense. It'll be solid gold every time. 

I bet you. 

 

Notes on the AI used in this post.

Ironically, I had a ton of trouble getting images to illustrate my text. I used up a load of credits at NightCafe, trying various models and prompts. None of them were really what I wanted. It turns out that if an AI doesn't know who you're talking about, it's really bad at making a picture of it. Who'd have thought? And it seems as though Carole & Tuesday just isn't sufficiently well-represented in the training data for any of the AIs to be able to render a recognizeable image of even the main characters, let alone the supporting cast. 

This, of course, is where the work comes in. I could have supplied sufficient images to train a model of my own but life's too short to do that for one blog post so instead what we have is:

Top image: DreamShaper XL alpha2 at 50/50, from the prompt "Carole & Tuesday the characters from the anime of the same name . 1970s cartoon. Full color". Background filled out by Uncrop, then manually cropped by me because it kept putting distracting extra characters, peering into the frame or mugging from behind. It's great, being photobombed by an AI.

Third image: same model, same settings. Prompt "drummer in a speed-metal band called Lazy Sandwich. Include the name of the band on the drums. Anime". I had ten goes at ths one and that was the only one that even came close. The AI did not, as asked, "Include the name of the band on the drums". I put that in myself in Paint.net. 

Fourth image: SDXL Beta 50/50. Prompt "Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. Scooby Doo style." I did nine of these. I was trying to get a picture of Dale Cooper making a deal with Gus from C&T but none of the AIs could understand what I wanted. One of them put Cooper in a bar and wrote "Gus" on the wall behind him. Another had a hand reaching in from outside the frame offering Dale something that looked like a mutant squirrel killed by a truck. It sounds better than it was.