Things To Do On A Hot And Sunny Day

Well, it turns out the problem with my PC I was talking about on Monday may not have been anything to do with Neverness To Everness after all. I logged out of EverQuest II yesterday and the same thing happened, only this time I couldn't get the machine to wake up again. 

I spent most of this morning trying every fix Gemini, reddit and YouTube could suggest, including but not limited to reseating the ram, swapping it around, reseating the GPU, changing cables, changing monitors and removing and replacing the CMOS battery. Nothing had the slightest effect. 

So here I am, blogging from my old PC, which works fine (Fingers crossed, touch wood...) It's still on Windows 10 but I'm good for security updates until October, when all support ends, so it'll do me until I either get the other repaired or replaced. It's still under warranty but it's back-to-base of course, which is pain. I've submitted a request so we'll see how that goes.

The only real drawback of (Temporarily.) reverting to the old PC is that it won't run Neverness To Everness. I'm a bit surprised because it ran Wuthering Waves flawlessly and I wouldn't have thought there was that much difference. I think it's one of those annoying hard-coded blocks, where the launcher checks the exact specs of the machine and refuses to go on if they don't meet the minimum. I'd much rather they just let me try it and find out. I've run plenty of games perfectly well on machines that didn't meet minimum spec before.

Actually, I just googled (Yay! Live blogging!) and it isn't that at all. Apparently NTE does run on sub-standard hardware, so I need to look into why it's not doing it on mine. 

It'll be a shame if I have to stop playing for a while, not only because I was really enjoying it but because I was up-to-date, for once. I've finished all the main story quests that were in the game at launch and I was ready to start on whatever comes with the new update, Dreamwalk Corridor, which lands on June 3. 

And the live blogging continues... I looked into it and NTE runs on Google Play Games for PC, which I have installed on this old machine already although I don't think I've ever used it. And i'm not using it now, either.

I tried it and it told me I wasn't entitled to play games with Google because I don't have hardware virtualization enabled. Also, while it was pointing out my deficiencies, it told me my graphics drivers were out of date.

I just updated those the other day on the new machine and when I swapped to this one I also moved the good graphics card across so I knew where to go and which ones to get. I did that and then looked up how to enable hardware virtualization, which requires going into BIOS and flicking a switch.

I powered down and restarted and... nothing. Well, something. I got as far as the Windows logo, then a spinning circle and then nothing. I tried doing that a few times until the fun wore off, then I tried booting into Safe Mode and that didn't work either because there didn't seem to be any such option.

I did manage to get into the BIOS, though, by accident, so since I was there anyway, I enabled hardware virtualization. Then I got on the laptop and looked up how to enter Safe Mode now there's no sign of it at boot-up. It's a good job there are three PCs in the house, isn't it? (Actually, I think there at least five that work. Well, four now, I guess...)

I followed the instructions on how to get to Safe Mode, which are ludicrously complicated these days. The walkthrough is literally a 12-step program, which is what you're going to need if you try and fix your own computer problems. At the 11th step, whoever wrote the list whispered an aside ("Isn't this so much easier than pressing F8 on start-up?") Litotes and irony! Gosh-wow! They really must have been pissed.

Anyway, at least it worked. I was able to get in and roll the video drivers back to the last ones. You know, the ones that worked. 

And now I'm wondering if that could have been the problem with the new PC. When did Forza Horizon 6 come out? 19 May. I have a feeling I updated my GeForce drivers the same day, although not for that reason. Which would have been about the time I started having problems...

Tempted though I am to open the cases and swap everything around again just to find out for certain that it wasn't the reason, I have a better idea. I'll stick an old Radeon card in there instead and see if that works. It's not going to use the GeForce drivers so it should, if the drivers were the problem. Hang on...

Nah. Wasn't that. Never thought it was, really. The PC also has integrated graphics that don't use Nvidia drivers as far as I know and they weren't working either.  Still, nice to be sure.

Getting back to the main plot, once I was able to get in again, I went back to Google Play Games to get NTE and bloody Google told me it still wouldn't let me play because my CPU wasn't up to the job. Well screw you, Google! Just because it's, like, a decade old...

It's looking like no Neverness To Everness for me until I get my PC fixed or replaced but the good news is I just got confirmation that the company I bought the PC from is happy to look at it under warranty.  Even if they can fix it, I very much doubt they'll do it in time for the big NTE update, especially since I don't even have the boxes to send it in yet. They want me to send it back in two boxes, one inside the other, assuming I didn't keep the original packaging, which of course I didn't.

As it happens, I did keep the box. It was a nice, big, solid one and I thought it might come in useful for something but luckily it hasn't so it's just sitting there, waiting to be used. Believe it or not, though, I don't also have a second, slightly smaller box to go inside it or indeed a second, slightly larger one tp put it in. I'll have to get one or the other before I give a date and time for the courier to collect it.

And that was how I spent my day. Aren't computers fun? 

Luckily, it was only the second-hottest of the year, after yesterday's record-breaking hottest Spring day ever. (33C in the shade in our back garden. I took a theromemeter out and measured it. Don't tell me I don't know how to have a good time!) Nothing I like better than doing several hours of fiddly tech stuff with sweat dripping off my nose into the electrics...

For the time being, I imagine there'll be a pause in posts about Neverness To Everness, which will probably come as a relief to some readers. On the other hand, they might be replaced by posts about Wuthering Waves, if I decide to get my anime fix there instead for a while, so don't get too comfortable.

Or I might just play EQII for a bit. I was doing some things there before NTE knocked me off course. At least my old PC can run that one. Suck on that, Google Play Games!  

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Three images from the AI-generated suggested prompts I use every day to get my daily done at NightCafe. I never even look at the details beyond checking if there's some kind of animal involved and if there's neon or cyberpunk or noir in the description. I also never change the model so I guess it's whatever I used the last time I cared. Since I'm burning up the planet making these things, I figure I might as well get some use out of them. 

And they are quite pretty. Particularly the fox. I really like that fox, with his waistcoat and his weak left eye. It's not his fault he's artificial...

Vibe Blogging

Today's post is going to be a bit of a mixed bag, I think. 

Not a Grab-Bag. I have a sort of format for those and this isn't going to fit it. It's just a few things I wanted to post about that probably won't make full posts of their own. 

Then again, maybe one will blow up into something bigger as I write, in which case I'll just come back and delete this introduction and no-one will ever know! <Twirls mustachio. Supervillain laughter.>

Always On

First, something that definitely isn't worth a whole post. I just want to moan about it. Unlike some people, Nimgimli for one, I've had absolutely no technical problems with Nevernesss To Everness so far. No bugs, no UI glitches, no performance issues. For me, playing on PC, it runs as smoothly as any viscous liquid you care to name. 

Playing is no problem. The problem comes when I stop. In the last few days - I bet since one of the frequent updates, although I couldn't nail down exactly which - whenever I log out of NTE, about half a minute or so later Windows tells me it's "run into a problem" and needs to reboot. That would be annoying enough but it turns out Windows can't reboot and I end up staring at a black screen until I switch the power off and restart, after which everything works perfectly until the next time I stop playing NTE.

Apart from being annoying, I worry all this sudden stopping and starting will damage something, so I googled for explanations and fixes. First, I did it the old-fashioned way. I checked reddit threads and watched YouTube videos but no-one seemed to have the exact problem I did and nothing they suggested seemed particularly helpful, so I thought I might as well let Gemini have a go, since it kept on offering.

Gemini was extremely co-operative. It asked pertinent questions, gave me lucid explanations, offered fixes, walked me through what to do when I had difficulties implementing them and basically acted like the best kind of IT department I've ever had to speak to (And I've spoken to plenty.)

All of which would be great if the solutions Gemini provided had worked. They did not. Oh, they worked in the sense that all the commands and instructions were accepted when I followed them and they did what they were supposed to do. It just didn't stop NTE crashing my PC on exit.

But then, neither did any of the non-AI fixes and suggestions I tried. If it was a football match it'd be a no-score draw. (But then, I just used Gemini to fix a perpetually annoying issue I have with Blogger getting the color of links wrong and it sorted it out perfectly in ten seconds, so I guess AI wins in injury time.)

Of all the various possible reasons offered, by far the most likely seems to be a conflict with the Anti-Cheat software NTE uses. From long experience with online games, the most likely fix is going to be putting up with it until the developers patch again and it magically goes away. Until then, I might just try shutting the PC down immediately I log out to see if I can beat the crash. That'll be fun. [Edit: Tried it and it works so that'll be my temporary solution for now.]

Had Gemini's fix actually worked, I might have been here today singing AI's praises. That'd be a popular post, I'm sure. If anything, anti-AI sentiment seems to be growing. It used to be mostly in my gaming and music feeds but now it's increasingly present in just about anything I read. As for positive sentiments regarding our would-be artificial overlords (That's Google and Amazon and whatever Elon Musk is calling himself today rather than the inert and blameless software itself, of course.), those seem to be very thin on the ground indeed. 

 

Search Me 

All of which does make me wonder, even more than usual, how this is all going to pan out. I heard the rumor that Google plans to replace search entirely with some kind of Agentic AI (I do love that word - Agentic - don't you? Doesn't it just ooze futurity? Algorithms never had that kind of PR.). It sounded a bit worrying so I checked (Using Google Search, inevitably.) and it turns out to be the usual kind of hyperbolic over-exaggeration humans have been using to get Eyeballs or Clicks or whatever the metric is these days since at least the day Buzzfeed went live. Which was exactly twenty years ago. I just checked. (Google>Wikipedia.)

In fact, Google Search continues as before, according to a statement Google gave USA Today, who bothered to ask them, but there will be a new All-AI front end as well. That, inevitably, will be Google's new focus and I'm sure it will be the first/main thing you see, which means most people will use it without thinking any more about it. I imagine their hope is that Search itself will wither away from neglect and disuse and they'll be able to discontinue it at some future date when no-one cares any more.

Will that happen? Hard to say. How did Google take over from all those other search engines - AltaVista, Netscape, Yahoo and the rest - in the first place? It was faster, more accurate and more comprehensive, that's how. People used it, found it did the job better and stopped using the older search engines. 

Have people changed that much in a couple of decades? If they find the new AI Agents are worse than the search they had before, will they not move away from Google to something that gives them what they want? Isn't it just handing a huge opportunity to a new "Traditional Search" provider to come into the market? 

Or, much more likely, will most general internet users find AI means much less fiddling about and reading websites and a lot more getting quick answers that work well enough, often enough, which will be plenty to keep almost everyone at least happy to go along with it? Too much effort just to get back to something they probably won't miss anyway.

So, yes, I imagine AI Agents are going to replace search if only because I'd bet the huge majority of users never really liked searching to begin with. It was always a necessary inconvenience for most people and I'll bet they'll be glad to see the back of it. People who actively enjoy searching as we've known it have to be a pretty small minority of web users, surely?

I'm kind of on the fence about the whole thing. I definitely don't hate AI. I just wish it was better. Maybe it will be, one day. Or maybe the current technology, which seems to be part brute force and part black magic, is a dead end and it'll never be entirely reliable. I suspect that's more likely but it's too soon to jump one way or the other. 

You Want Me To Draw You A Picture? 

All of which brings me to a little discussion that took place in the comments on a post over at The Friendly Necromancer, where Stingite was talking about feeling guilty for using AI art to illustrate his (Other.) blog, rather than, for example, hiring an actual artist to do it.

I said in the comments that it's a notional argument. No hobby blogger is ever going to commission an artist to provide illustrations for posts except on an absolutely exceptional basis. I must have read tens of thousands of blog posts now and I can't remember ever seeing it done. It didn't happen before AI so AI isn't stopping it happening now. No artist is starving because a blogger stopped commissioning spot illustrations for their posts. 

Very, very occasionally I have seen someone commission a piece of art to be a permanent feature on a blog. I remember Belghast doing it for a masthead a couple of times and I have a vague idea one or two others may have done something similar. But no-one who posts several times a week is going to pay a commercial rate to a professional artist for even one illustration per post, let alone the half-dozen or more most people who use pictures at all like to throw in

And that in turn got me thinking about The Olden Days. I'm not talking about Ye Olde Webbe of Yore that so many people, most of them barely old enough to have experienced it the first time around, seem so struck on bringing back. I'm talking the way things were before the worldwide web even existed.

When I came back from college in the early 1980s, one of the first things I did was start a comics fanzine with my then-wife, a friend of ours and the guy who owned the comic shop I worked in. We put out seven issues over two years and then our friend took over the editing and publishing of a bigger, more successful 'zine, which he eventually turned into a semi-pro operation. I switched to writing for that and we pulled the plug on our own zine.

Every issue of our original zine was stuffed with what we called "Spot Illos" - either decontextualized images, used to break up the text, or more targeted images, intended to support it. We also had comic strips sometimes and full-size cover art for every issue.

A minority of the pictures were drawn by my wife, who was a great comic artist and should have made a career out of it, but most were done by people who read our zine and who were active in comics fandom at the time. Some of them already had a foot in the door of professional comics publishing, some went on to be professional comic artists later, but most remained hobbyists and amateurs.

Whatever their status and ability, no-one got paid a penny. No-one expected to be paid. Paying people for art that wasn't going to be sold for a profit was not a thing anyone did, wanted to do or even thought about doing. All people wanted was to see their work and their names in print. If they did have professional aspirations, they'd add it to their portfolio so they could at least show potential employers something they'd had published but most of our contributors weren't even that ambitious. They just liked to draw and enjoyed sharing the results.

If something similar was part of blogging culture, the way it was always part of the 'zine culture I grew up with, no-one would need AI to draw them a picture. There'd be no shortage of people happy to provide it for free. We always had far more submissions than we could use. 

And we had a smaller readership than many hobby blogs, too. From memory, I think our print run was about 300 at the peak although the semi-pro zine my friend ended up editing and publishing ran to ten times that eventually. And I don't believe he ever paid anyone anything, either, until a bigger publisher picked him up and gave him a budget to go pro with an actual comic.

There could be a place on the web where bloggers could ask for images to illustrate posts and artists could supply them for nothing more than credit and a link. The technology has been in place for years to allow something like that to grow into a global free exchange of talent. Granted it would never be quite as instant and frictionless as generating an AI image but the results would be so much better it would be worth the wait. Probably. Although now I think about some of the pictures we published, let alone the ones we didn't...

Maybe something like that does exist already. I know it does for paid, commissioned art. If it does, though, the evidence has never shown up in any blog I ever read. And I'm certainly not offering to set up any such kind of website myself, although ironically I imagine I could get an AI to to code it for me if I was. They're supposed to be good at that sort of thing.

And even if someone else did all the donkey-work, it wouldn't be great for me as a user anyway. It would better suit people who write their posts with at least a little lead-time. I tend to bash mine out on the day and I don't think there are many artists out there who'd be happy to get a request after lunch asking them to knock out half a dozen pictures before tea. 

That's how AI wins, I guess. It may be soulless but it sure is fast and it never complains or makes excuses. It never says "Do it yourself. I'm busy." Or fobs you off with "I've just got to walk the dog and do a bit of shopping. But I'll get to it as soon as I can. Promise!" 

And yet, I don't use a lot of AI art here any more. It's not even because readers don't like it. When I do drop a few AI illos into a post, most people just ignore them, I think, assuming they even notice. As Stingite says, AI's much better at doing art than it used to be so it doesn't stand out the way it did.

No, it's more that I find it a bit dull, now the novelty value isn't there any more. I'll use it if I need to but it's purely functional, not the crazy thrill-ride it could be a few years back. I get better results dicking around with images in Paint.net, anyway, and that feels a lot more creative than writing prompts. I'm not at all sure it is but it feels that way.

Hmm. I seem to be wandering away from whatever point I had. Not that I expected the post to go anywhere but at least I got a few things off my chest. I had a couple more somewhat-related topics to talk about, too, but since this has clearly gone on long enough already (More than, probably...) I'll save those for another time. 

Now... shall I use AI to illustrate this post? Would that be ironic? Post-modern? Provocative? 

Or just plain lazy? 

Stars Fell Like Rain or Two On A Tower

Want to know how many screenshots I've taken in Neverness To Everness so far? A tad shy of a hundred and fifty. I'd say I've been quite restrained. I thought it would be more than that but I just counted them and it's not, so pardon me while I give myself a cookie.

I've been out and about some, that's for sure. All over the place. Opened all the map now, by visiting each of those big, golden spikes that let you see what's around you. Lift the fog.

They do something else, as well, I think. Something much more important to the welfare of the city than just making it easier to get around. Mint explained it to me but I forgot what she said the moment she stopped talking. I kind of tune her out, sometimes. You have to, really.

Mint hardly ever stops talking. She's hyper-excitable. She loves her work, she loves to chat and she loves to eat, too. 

Don't they all? Not just in NTE. It's all the open-world gachas. It reminds me of how, in The Beano I read as I was growing up, when every character seemed to be obsessed by food. 

For readers who grew up deprived of the output of Dundee's unlikely publishing giant, D.C. Thompson, The Beano is a comic aimed at children aged from maybe five to ten or so, although plenty of readers stick with it for a lot longer than that. 

Then again, who isn't familiar with The Beano? I just learned - from Wikipedia so it must be true - that The Beano is "the best-selling comics magazine outside of Japan, having sold more than two billion copies to date. Wait, how did we get onto The Beano? I don't even like the fricken' Beano that much! 

Oh yes, I remember. Characters being obsessed with eating... 

It makes sense that child characters in a publication aimed at children would be crazy for candy. Children have a limited number of objects of desire and the subset deemed acceptable by parents is likely smaller still. Even with the fashions in parenting that roll relentlessly through the culture, kids always want sweets and savories, even if they're not always allowed to have them. It makes sense there'd be a craving fiction could exploit.

So, I get why all kids in all comics seem to have the appetites of cavemen, treating every taste of sugar and salt like a drug hit, but it makes a lot less sense to see the same behavior in self-directed, independent twenty-somethings in the games I'm playing. But it's there.

I've already been out for ice-cream with Mint and she ate so much she got stomach-ache from the cold, the cure for which was that we both went to a different cafe for hot chocolate! Mint and Flora are bonding over food. They might even be flirting. It's hard to tell.

Flora is my character's name, by the way. Does everyone find it as hard as I do to keep the names and pronouns straight in posts about what they've been doing in the games they play? 

I've long claimed I don't identify with my characters in that way people do when they try to make all of them look as much like they do as possible and on one level that's true but on another, quite possibly a deeper and more significant one, it's really not. My confusion of identity leeches out in posts, where I tell stories about what "I" have been doing, then have to stop myself and reframe it as what my characters have done.

It hasn't helped that until very recently I had a policy of never naming my characters in posts. That's because back when I started blogging, when I was much more sociable in games than I am now and MMORPGs were much more sociable places, and when people who played them occasionally read blogs, there were a couple of occasions where someone recognized one of my characters in game from reading the name in a post and sent me a /tell about it.

Being noticed made me feel a bit uncomfortable so I stopped outing my characters by name and took to referring to them by their classes or races or some similarly impersonal designate. Then, as time went on and the games I played became less and less social, often to the point of being single-player, or if not then feeling like they were, and as the number of people reading what I wrote drifted down and down, it started to feel like mentioning character names was probably going to be less of a problem than it had been, assuming it ever was one to begin with. 

Using proper names certainly made it easier to structure the sentences, so I slipped into doing it and now here I am, although as you can see from the rest of the post, I still have trouble separating myself from my characters.

So, Flora and Mint... 

I'm not a fan of dating in games. I've said that before. I mean, if it's a dating game, sure, fine, go for it. I just won't play it. 

I think of dating as a genre not a feature. Except that's just me, I guess, because it's clearly both, just like PvP. You can have a game where the whole point is to kill other players or you can have one where it's just one of the many things you can do. It's only when you can't play the game at all without engaging with it that it becomes a PvP game.

Until recently, dating hasn't really been a thing in the kinds of games I play, even as an option. I can't think of an MMORPG that has it although I'm sure there must be some. Mabinogi comes to mind for some reason...

It has been a thing in RPGs for a while, though. I think there was something of the sort in the first Dragon Age, which must also have been the first time I became aware the concept even existed. Not the concept of dating itself. I knew that existed. I wasn't raised in a monastery! Player-characters in video games simulating courtship rituals with NPCs, I mean. That sort of dating.

I found it very weird at the time, I remember. Creepy, really. I'm not sure I can articulate why but I suspect it's an analog of the uncanny valley idea, the way the appearance of something can be just slightly off in a way that triggers some lizard-brain warning. 

As with many unfamiliar ideas and experiences, time and repeated exposure has normalized dating NPCs for me to the extent that I now mostly think of it as just something I could do but don't, as opposed to something I'd never do. 

Except I said yes to Mint's offer of ice-cream and I said nice things to her about the time we were spending together, so I guess that means it's just something I don't usually do now, not something I never do. Even when it's not necessary to the plot.  

But then, I've been doing a lot of things in Neverness To Everness that have very little to do with the plot. Assuming there is a plot. I think there's a plot? I'm not entirely sure.

If there is, I certainly haven't seen much of it. I've been far too busy, and not just out getting ice-cream with Mint (Hmm. That makes me think of King Krule's classic Out Getting Ribs...) or putting my palm on tower touch-plates. Just exploring, really. There's so much to see. And I've seen so many things. I've seen stars falling like rain...

No, really, that's a thing I saw! And an achievement I got. Stars Falling Like Rain (Witness a meteor shower.) Except when it happened I thought it was something else. And maybe it was.

I was up a tower at the time. Not one of those stubby golden ones that are really public art not architecture. No, this is the truly towering tower that rises into the clouds over Heathereau. It has a name but I can't remember it offhand and it doesn't come up in any of the forty screenshots I took while I was climbing.

I've climbed a lot of things in video games. I've written before about how climbing used to be a thing people did in MMORPGs before the developers even began adding climbing skills to the games. Back then, climbing was as much about breaking the game as it was seeing the sights.

With the coming of the current wave of whatever we're calling the genre that started with Genshin Impact, climbing has turned into something of a focus feature. I bet all the games have it now. Wuthering Waves certainly does. I've never had a climbing experience quite like this one, though.

The tower goes up and up and up. It feels like it's never going to stop. There are big observation platforms with telescopes (That you can't use - they missed a trick there.) then smaller railed rings clearly meant for maintenance workers and then nothing but the pure climb, up an ever-narrowing column studded with projecting spurs you can rest on if you're careful, until  one, final, tiny railed platform barely wide enough to walk around before the last stretch to the very top, where you can haul yourself up and stand on the beacon-light that shines over the city, the highest thing in the world. 

All of which would be too terrifying to contemplate, much less attempt, if it wasn't for being able to stick to sheer surfaces like Spider-Man and glide like the Falcon if you fall. But I didn't fall. I flew. 

At the end, when there was nowhere else to climb, I launched myself into space and glided all the way down to the second-highest tower in the city, far below me. And there was a story all its own when I got there, let me tell you! But It'll have to be a story for another day because I'm not finished with this one yet.

When Flora got to one of the higher platforms - not, I seem to remember, the last one - that achievement popped. I thought at the time it was for reaching a certain point in the climb and it may have been but if so it was also trigger for something much more spectacular. 

I'd started climbing in the late afternoon and now night had fallen and suddenly the sky was full of blue fire. A meteor shower, processing very slowly across an arc of the heavens, moving not at all like falling stars. Over the course of several minutes the sky lit up from side to side in a great, glowing arc, a rainbow made out of only indigo and blue.

It's one of the more memorable events I've seen in gaming, all the more so for being both unexpected and understated. It felt like it just happened and I just happened to be there. Perhaps it was linked to my climb (I just googled it and it seems you have to be up the tower when the meteor show happens to get the achievements but whether being there also causes it is unclear.) but even if it was, Flora doesn't know that. 

For her it's just a thing that happened. Lucky for her she had her camera. 

Thirteen Songs for Friday 13th Pt. 2

I was scanning down the list of posts this morning, looking as I sometimes do for any kind of pattern in the viewing figures, when I noticed a draft I didn't recognize. When I opened it up to see what was inside there was nothing but two YouTube links. Obviously I clicked on them to see what they were.

Songs. Nothing but a couple of songs. Obviously ones I'd considered including in a music post. Only I never do it that way. For a long time now, all I've been doing is tagging possible post fodder as "Favorites" in Firefox then, when the time comes, looking through what I've got to pick out a few I haven't used already. It's messy, chaotic and highly inefficient. Suits me perfectly.

It also means that mostly, when I post another episode in my extremely unpopular "What I've been Listening To Lately" series, there aren't all that many songs in there that I have been listening to lately. 

I mean, it's not like there aren't any. There's always a sprinkling. I listened to White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter a dozen times before I posted it. But then, I would, wouldn't I? 

Also, as an aside, I just brought it up on YouTube to play in the background as I wrote this and it took me three search terms to find it. Lana+white didn't work and neither did Lana+feather, although the first finds other songs in her extensive catalog - White Mustang, White Dress - and the other gets you that duet with Billie Eilish she did on Billie's Birds of a Feather. 

I had to go all the way to Lana del Rey+hawk before her current single came up. Does that sound right to anyone? I mean, the damn video has 4.2m views. You'd think the algorithm would be smarter about it. If I was Lana's publicist, I'd be pissed.

Anyhoo, I was only looking at the view-count out of curiosity. I stopped worrying about how many people read anything here years ago. Most counts are contradictory anyway. I don't trust any of them. 

Except, lately, I've noticed the figures down the right-hand side of the list of posts does seem to make a kind of sense. Tells a story, even. That's the one labeled "View Count" on mouseover and it does actually seem to mean something, for once.

I can see the page views trickling in there as soon as I publish. Usually a few people catch the post immediately and then the tally rises slowly over the next day or so until it hits about a third to a half of the number of people Feedly tells me follow the blog. 

From that, I can see fairly clearly which kinds of posts get more attention. Music posts are right at the bottom of the list. Maybe a fifth of my supposedly loyal audience takes a glance at those. TV and media posts, it depends on the subject matter. Gaming posts get pretty consistent views, with the popular games getting the most, as you'd imagine.

The biggest winners seem to be topical posts, especially ones with titles that make it clear what they're about, although people do seem to find those even if the titles I give them skew a little sideways. For example, the most-viewed posts this year so far were on the Steam Winter Sale, Discord asking for proof of age and layoffs at Playable Worlds, in that order. 

It's all notional, of course. Even if I was certain what the numbers meant and even if I trusted them, I still wouldn't tailor my posts to make them go up. Although I do like to see numbers go up...

I only mention it as an introduction to how this came to be a music post in the first place. Oh yes! That's what it is! Did I fool you? Have you gotten all the way to here without realizing you'd been suckered?

Yeah, that won't work. Readers can smell a music post a mile away, no matter how I try to hide it. So, for the handful of you still here, let's get to it! First up, those two mysterious tunes I saved in a draft post several weeks back.  

Bad Bad Milk - Oh! Gunquit

Where that one came from I have no idea. Fourteen years old so I guess it turned up in the sidebar suggestions when I was looking at something else. The self-described "'rumble-bop trash blitz freak-a-billy'" five-piece was formed in 2011 and they’re still going. There's a whole sub-culture of this kind of thing. It never penetrates the mainstream but it's always there. Been around since I was at college, at least, so that's half a century. Must be a fun lifestyle.

Go Away - Junky58%

The answer to the eternal question "What if the Ramones had been Japanese? And girls?" Ok, that's two questions...

Yes, I know exactly what you're thinking. It's "How great would it be if they covered the Carpenters' "Top of the World", isn't it? Thought so. Well, ponder no longer!

Ok. That's those two squared away, plus a bonus cover. Now what have I got marked for real? Oh, I know! How about the UK's entry for this year's Eurovision Song Contest?

Eins, Zwei, Drei - LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

Remember post-modernism? Big in the 'nineties? Looked a lot like the future, then. That's the trouble with the future, though. Hang around too long and you have to live in it.

On that note, we'll have to wait until May to find out how it does but you can place your bets now. Here's a compilation of all 35 entries boiled down to just over seventeen minutes of power ballads, flag-waving, and forced wackiness. Should be a fun four hours...

Time - Star Moles

Speaking of time...

Got a lovely roll to it, don't it? Sounds like something Johnny Walker might have played on his afternoon show in the 'seventies, back when I was still at school. Is that a good thing?

Genuine Connection - Swell

Because sometimes you just wanna rock.

 if you wanna party come over to my house- Fcuckers

And othertimes you just wanna dance.

Arms Wide - sadie

Hey! We  had that one last time! 

Yeah, like you remember...

No but it's true. I put it in and wrote eight paragraphs off the back of it and then when I was done I thought "I'd better just check...". Probably should have done that first. Anyway, not wasting all those words so it's a second go for sadie! I think that might be the first time that's happened. 

Also, wow, was it really a whole month ago I did one of these? To the day, no less. And two Friday the Thirteenths in a row, too. Spooky!

Until about a year ago, if you'd asked me (Which, why would you?), I'd have said pop songs were three minutes long. They're not, though, are they? They never have been.

I was thinking about it yesterday, when Mrs Bhagpuss was getting ready to take Beryl to work. (Beryl has a job, by the way. It's only an hour every other week but she gets paid. I won't go into details. Confidentiality and all that.)

Anyway, as she was getting ready, she had The Weakest Link on (Mrs Bhagpuss, that is, not Beryl. Beryl doesn't really watch TV although it's HD, which apparently dogs can see and recognize, which they couldn't with any earlier definition.). It was a celebrity edition and Pink Pantheress was on, which was bizarre to say the least of it. She did really well, too. Last to be eliminated before the final head-to-head.

Anyway, Mrs Bhagpuss had no idea who Pink Pantheress was, which tells you something about market separation. I'd have said she was kind of a big deal now but everyone's a big deal these days and still no-one's heard of them. (Tell Chappel Roan that and see what it gets you... then again, Mrs Bhagpuss knows exactly who Chapell Roan is so maybe we're on a different scale of fame there...)

Getting back to the point, one of the things Pink Pantheress was famous for fifteen minutes for was saying no song needs to be longer than two minutes thirty. When I was making all those songs with Suno last year, a lot of of them were well under three minutes long. I worried about it a bit until I started to notice so were many of the songs I grew up listening to on the radio.

See Emily Play? 2.47. Happy Jack? 2.07. I Get Around? Two minutes dead, when they did it for Ed Sullivan; a few seconds longer on record. Sure, songs - even some singles - got a lot longer in the proggy seventies but mostly they held that line. 

Later, as I made more and more songs artificially, they got longer and longer. And they still sounded great to me. Short? Long? Doesn't matter, does it? Songs are the length they need to be. Well, the good ones.

Oh, yeah. That all started because Arms Wide starts and ends in media res for a running time of 2.10 and it's perfect that way. Also, I freakin' love autotune! Why do people hate on it?

So, what else do we got? Let me check my laptop a mo... Oh, wow... there's some really good stuff on there... I should have started with a couple of these. 

Never mind! It'll be a bonus for the hardcore. Anyone still here?

Thisworldly - R. Missing

Best one from R. in a while. She knocks them out and they're all quality but this is a dreamer. That stately pace. That ethereal tone. Very, very 'eighties, in the best way. 

Bad Moons - American Football

Remember what I was saying up there about songs being the length they need to be? Case in point.

Is it just me or does it sound like the Smiths? Did Morrissey invent emo? God, I hope not...

Okay, three more then this can be Thirteen Songs for Friday 13th Pt. 2 and it'll seem like I planned it!

American Girls - Harry Styles

Hah! Who had Eurovision and Harry Styles on their Bhagpuss Bingo Card today? No-one? 

Classic title, good tune, clever video. What more do you want?

 The Way It Goes - Aimée Fatale

Remind me - what year is it again? She's playing in the next city over from me in April but if I didn't make the effort for Sunday (1994) I don't suppose I will for Aimée, either. God, I'm so old now! (Not to mention lazy.)

And finally. A banger to finish.

HEELS BROKE = DIED - MGNA CRRRTA

Oh yeah, that one was NSFW just a little. Maybe could have mentioned that. Only the words, though, and who listens to those?

 

The Story I Made Up

Remember when I was doing that series, where I posted about all my EverQuest characters, or some of the older ones anyway? Probably about three or four people actually enjoyed those posts but they had the huge benefit for me of being something I could always drag out if I was completely stuck for ideas.

That hardly ever used to happen. I had more ideas for posts than I had time to write. Not any more. I've been at this for - what is it? - coming up for fifteen years now. Maybe I have finally said everything once, to quote David Byrne. 

Which reminds me. They - and by "they" I mean I have no idea who but probably someone in the band, maybe? - found an old demo tape of Talking Heads doing some numbers from the first album, before they were even a four-piece. I think it must have been Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz. Jerry Harrison would have come over from the Modern Lovers a little later, I imagine.

I don't why I'm guessing. I could just go read the news item where I heard about it, of which so far I've only glanced at the headline. Let me do that a sec, just so I know what I'm talking about...

Ah, that's reassuring. I got most of it right. It's cuts from the first two albums, though, not just 77. 

The first two Talking Heads albums are two of my favorite albums of all time, even if I haven't listened to either of them in twenty years. I am not good at going back and listening to old stuff, even old stuff that was very important to me once. 

I was talking to someone at work about that the other day. It's been three years since Lana del Rey last released an album and I find I'm listening to her less than I was. It takes that continual drip of new material to keep me engaged, apparently. Just sheer quality isn't enough. How shallow I am.

I bet those first two albums hold up, though. Talking Heads were unimpeachable for a while back then, until they turned into the New Wave's answer to Steely Dan. 

Not to denigrate the Dan. Does anyone call them that? "The Dan"? I very much doubt it. 

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I were talking about Steely Dan just the other day, which I would like to point out is not something we would normally be caught doing. 

We were watching an old edition of Pointless on YouTube, which very much is something we would normally be caught doing, especially at tea-time, and there was a question about the Beach Boys Top 40 hits in the UK. I remembered a few but there was one I thought might be a good bet for most people not to get, which was the one where they look back at their early days and get all nostalgic about them. 

I couldn't remember what it was called and I complained to Mrs, Bhagpuss that the main reason I couldn't was that I kept thinking of the Steely Dan song "Do It Again" and it was blocking me from the title of the Beach Boys song, which was something similar. And then the Beach Boys song came up, as a pointless answer, and it bloody was "Do It Again", so I had remembered it, even though I didn't know I'd done it. Bloody Steely Dan!

Anyway, that led to a discussion about how Steely Dan made two great singles, namely Do It Again and Reelin' In The Years, before they became so ultra-professional only other professional musicians could stand to listen to them. The same thing that happened to Talking Heads, give or take. 

No-one wants rough edges on a coffee table but on a band they're a feature. Or can be. Smoothing them all off is a mistake.

I wonder what those demos sound like. Shall we find out? Together.

Well, that was lovely. I wouldn't call it "raw punk minimalism" though, would you? Would anyone? Maybe they mean some of the other tracks on the 3CD set because that version of Psycho Killer sounds more like psych-folk than punk.

I saw Talking Heads in... when would it have been? Going to have to look it up...  May 1977, supporting the Ramones. I'd be lying if I said I remembered much about Talking Heads' set. I really only remember the Ramones for the bit when the power went out and they all stood there like puppets with the strings cut.

I really need to get on and write down all the gigs I went to before I lose the whole lot. Maybe that could be a feature. Bhagpuss name-checks gigs he went to half a century ago and tells everyone he remembers nothing about them. I can see that being very popular.

To quote David Byrne again, how did I get here? I sure didn't sit down intending to write about New York art-punk in the 1970s. Good example of how you always have something to write about even when you don't know what it's going to be, though, isn't it? Or maybe that should be I always do.

Ah! Now I remember! Back to the thing about my EverQuest characters and how handy it was to have that feature to fall back on, whenever I couldn't come up with anything better. If I ever needed a backstop like that, this is the time.

So, I've had this idea floating around for a while, now. Months. I thought I might go through all the zones in EverQuest II and reminisce about them. I thought of doing EverQuest but Wilhelm pretty much covered that for the 25th anniversary. I don't think anyone's done EQII though, or certainly not recently.

Obviously I wouldn't do all the zones. There must be a few hundred by now. Just the ones in the original game and maybe a few favorites from the early expansions. That should last me longer than than the rest of my life, given I'd probably only do a post every few weeks. Or more likely months. 

Today won't be the first because look! I've done a post already! I'm just putting the idea down in writing in the hope it might make it happen. 

Of course, it might help if I was actually playing EQII, like I was when I came up with the idea, but I imagine I'll be back in Norrath soon. Well, if I ever get to the end of Baldur's Gate 3. And if I don't go from there to Project: Gorgon, which I keep thinking I might.

There we have it, anyway. A potential new feature that will only appear when I can't come up with anything more interesting and which almost no-one is going to want to read. I bet that's sold it to you all!

Now all I have to do is come up with a snappy title... 

When They Talk About The Meta, I Don't Think This Is What They Mean...

I'm finding it increasingly awkward to come up with ideas for game-related posts when I'm really playing just the one game. Yes, still that one, Played Time now just nudging into three figures according to Steam and still very obviously nowhere even close the end. 

One odd thing I notice as a blogger is that if this was a new MMORPG I was playing, it would feel completely legitimate, not to say expected, for me to post a dozen or more times in excruciating detail about the gameplay. I've done it countless times with any number of MMOs, the great majority of which I've ended up playing for considerably less than a hundred hours and I've rarely thought to ask myself if anyone really cares, let alone whether it's a reasonable use of my time.

With single-player games, though, it feels like the way to go is maybe one or two posts at the start, just to announce what game it is I'm playing and what sort of a first impression it's giving, then nothing more until I've finished and it's time for a full review. It's an approach that works well for most of the single-player games I actually finish, nearly all of which are likely to be point&click adventures or narrative-driven games of some kind and which, crucially, are unlikely to take more than ten or fifteen hours, tops.

Survival games and the currently vogueish action-rpgs like Wuthering Waves, even if they're not multiplayer or I'm not playing them as such, slew much more to the MMORPG end of the spectrum. They frequently feel like MMOs even when they aren't, which makes it very easy to write about them as though they were.

Really, ridiculously big single-player RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, though, (And I'm not sure there are all that many others...) don't fit into any box. It would be very easy for me to do whole posts on what the characters look like, on the dress-up options (Not least that there are some.) on inventory management, on the combat, the stats, the skill trees... all the standard topics I'd fall into talking about out of habit if I was obsessed by a new MMORPG.

Only, doing the same for Baldur's Gate 3 feels at best self-indulgent but mostly just pointless. Who even cares? The game's two years old and developers, Larian, have made it extremely plain they're done with it, want no more to do with it, won't be making any more content for it and are more than happy to move on from it. Sometimes I get the impression they wish they'd never gotten involved with it in the first place. 

With an MMORPG or any live service game that's still getting updates, commenting on how the game looks and plays feels like a conversation. With an RPG that's final and complete, talking about it feels more like hearing an old recording playing in an empty room.

But what's the alternative?  Hah! I'm so glad you asked! I can tell you that!

 

Since BG3 is still literally the only game I'm playing, as far as gaming goes I could post about:

• Games I'm Not Playing But Might If/When I Ever Get To The End Of This Bloody Monster
• Games I Used To Play Long, Long Ago
• Games I'm Looking Forward To Playing If/When Someone Gets Off Their Backside And Finishes Them
• Things Going On In Gaming In General

Or I could post about non-gaming topics. I always do plenty of that. Except, just now, I'm really only playing this one game, reading the usual random selection of books and slowly working my forward through the Dr. Who Archive on the BBC iPlayer. I'm not listening to enough new music to put a solid playlist together or watching enough new TV shows for a full post about anything. (I did watch the second episode of Haunted Hotel last night. That was good...)

Does anyone really care what I think now about the Dr. Who seasons I last watched when I was in my teens, though? That's how far I've got so far. There's really a shit-ton of Dr. Who, isn't there? I never really appreciated the sheer voloume of the franchise before. 

I do have things to say about the show but again it seems like the world has probably had to put up with more than enough old men droning on about the things they thought were so great when they were young already, especially if the only conclusions they come to is that those things were pretty great after all.

Most of this is happening because I have so much annoying, difficult real-life stuff going on at the moment, not helped in the slightest by Mrs Bhagpuss and I both suffering form a nasty and persistent cold-like bug that makes getting any of it done a real challenge. It means all I really want to do with my free time is as little as possible. 

BG3 is a drug, basically, and so is old, familiar television and, for that matter, the kind of books I've been reading lately. (I might argue all reading is a drug-like experience but that would require me to put a coherent argument together which, as must be obvious from this post, is not something I'm up to doing just at the moment.)

It's not that there aren't things to talk about. Actual, gaming -related topics I may or may not find the will to discuss this week include:

• The Official Launch of Project:Gorgon
• Daybreak Games' decision to abandon Roadmaps
• The Return of Jack Emmert to Cryptic
• The Unexpected Signs of Life in Rift

I'm listing those out in the hopes it might induce me to write something about them later. I don't suppose it will but you have to try, don't you?

I could also just stop posting for a while but as you can see I'd rather bang out a few hundred words of waffle and blether rather than let the post count fall to danger levels. I can get one of these done in an hour, provided I don't attempt to say anything of import.

This is the exact time AI would come in very handy, isn't it? I could just feed those bullet points into Gemini or ChatGPT and have the glorified predictive text apps knock out the first draft. Then I could edit that to make it look less plasticky and who would be any the wiser? 

Did I do that already? Aha! Wouldn't you like to know?

Alright, I didn't. The AIs just aren't that good yet. It'd be even more work than writing one of the damn posts myself. 

I will throw in a couple of AI illustrations though because I have fecking hundreds of them stored up and I might as well use them for something. I have them because I do the daily challenge at NightCafe every day, so as not to break my streak, which is over a hundred days now, and I've gotten so blase about it I just click on whatever they suggest and let the AI play with itself.

Now, that is a post I do want to write: what the hell do the people behind NightCafe think they're playing at? How does it benefit them to give away orders of magnitude more credits for free than I find it possible to imagine anyone ever needing? Aren't they supposed to making money selling them? And why are all the prompts virtually identical? Robots, airships, decaying jungle ruins, explorers...

And now, since I seem to have wandered entirely off-topic, not that it was ever all that clear just what topic I was on, I think I'll call this post done.

Hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing it but then I love free-styling. It's always fascinating, finding out what I'm going to say next.

Read It In Books

Even though I've been a compulsive reader almost all my life (I wasn't born knowing how to read, sadly, so I had to wait a few years before I could get started.) I have never been one of those people who keeps a record of my reading. Why would I? I don't keep records of anything I do - or not in any kind of organized fashion, anyway.

I do write this blog, of course, and before that I used to produce an apazine every two months for about a decade and a half, so there's plenty of written evidence to support my cultural experience but it's a sporadic trail at best. About the only time I ever tried to keep any kind of strict account of my reading habits was that one time in the 'eighties, when I hand-wrote a review of every book I read for a year.

Actually, I didn't even make it to the end of the year. I think I gave up in about October. That journal must be somewhere in the house. I wonder if I could find it...

The answer to that turns out to be "No", which is just as well. Otherwise, this would have derailed into a post about all the books I read in 1986 or whenever it was instead of what it's supposed to be, which is a review of Girl To City by Amy Rigby.

As I've said before, I tend not to write much about books here, even though I probably read at least forty or fifty every year. I don't know exactly how many since I'm not kwriting down the titles or using one of those websites or apps that collects and collates the details (Something even the thought of which gives me the shivers...) but it's pretty easy to tell just by looking at the discard pile. 

I tend to put each book I've read in a stack on the floor and keep adding more until the tower threatens to fall over. Then I start another one next to it. Eventually, when the whole thing becomes unstable, I'm forced to sort through them and find somewhere more permanent, generally another stack in another room. The perils of having a large house- there's always somewhere to put things, until one day there isn't...

The main reason I don't write as much about books as I do music or games or TV is that I work in a bookshop and I get a lot of my books for free, most of them as proofs which, as a training course I had to do this week reminded me, cannot be reviewed anywhere. Well, not legally.

I could review the published titles I read, many of which I also get for nothing, but I always feel a moral obligation to give my employer first refusal. It's not compulsory but it is strongly suggested that we place reviews of books we've read on our website, something I have never done. I don't want to put my reviews on any commercial website, whether or not its owned by someone who pays my bills, so the compromise is not to write any reviews at all. 

When I finally retire, I imagine I'll start reviewing books I've read here although chances are they'll be old ones. Once I stop getting my books for free, I plan to start an extensive re-reading program. 

I used to consider re-reading to be considerably more important than reading. My mantra used to be that the third time was the charm. I had a rationale all worked out, too. 

• Read One is for pleasure. You're enjoying the book so much you let it all wash over you. After you finish you're left with a strong emotional impression but it's most likely weak on detail. 

• Read Two is for comparison. As you progress through the book, things come back to you and you inevitably frame your new experience in terms of your old. You end up knowing how well the book has stood up to your memory of it and whether it meets your expectations but once again you probably haven't paid all that much attention to the technicalities.

• Read Three is for appraisal. By now, you probably know what to expect and the immediacy of your reactions should be muted. This is when all those details you never noticed before start to make themselves known and when you begin to understand the finer points of the structure and the architectonics. 

Any reads after that are either indulgence, obsession or you're an academic of some sort. God help you.

That was how I used to see it. I've loosened my views a little. There are many ways to approach a text. Still, the Three-Read Method seems pretty reliable to me.

With all that in mind, I'm happy to review Girl To City here for a couple or three reasons. 

Firstly, I paid for it myself. Granted, I only paid half price because that's a perk of my job but the training course I just did made no mention of the discount we get implying any responsibility beyond not abusing it by selling the books on EBay. 

I will not be selling Girl To City on EBay or anywhere else. I will be keeping it and one day re-reading it because it's very good. And then, no doubt, reading it a third time to discover what I really think about it. The older I get, the worse that plan begins to look.

Secondly, I have no intention of reviewing it properly. Mostly I just wanted to mention it so as to give it what little publicity I can, in the hope someone else might decide to get hold of a copy and read it, thereby giving themselves the pleasure and also putting a very small remittance into Amy's pocket.

Thirdly, in March the sequel, Girl To Country, will be published in the U.K. (It's out in the U.S. already, I believe.) I'll be getting a copy as soon as it's available and chances are I'll post about that one, too. If I was really patient, I suppose I'd wait until then and review the pair of them together but although I am quite patient I'm not a fucking stone.

Fourthly, though, and the real reason I wanted to post about it, was to embed this excellent promo video, which Amy made herself. 

You won't really know if you haven't read the book but that's truly excellent visual summary of the whole thing, coupled with a lyric that also stands as an extremely concentrated record of the core of the story. Quite brilliantly conceived, in fact. Pretty much a work of art in its own right, that video.

The only reason I know abut Amy Rigby at all is because she's been Wreckless Eric's musical and romantic partner for a good, long while now. I'm going to apologize for that right now. It's a crappy way to come to anyone's work but it can't be helped. That is what happened.

I've always been something of a Wreckless fan, although I can't claim to have kept up with his career the way I have, say, Lloyd Cole or Lana. A few years back, probably around the time of the pandemic, I thought to check what Wreckless was up to and I ended up buying a couple of CDs and subscribing to his excellent, if too-infrequently updated blog. Since he now both records and performs alongside his partner, I was introduced osmotically to Amy Rigby, who also happens to be a first-rate blogger. (I find the fact that he's on Blogger while she's on WordPress oddly amusing. I wonder if it means anything?)

It was the quality of Amy's blogging that made me want to read her memoir. Having read it, I can say she's not just a great blogger, she's a top-flight memoirist.

Memoir is a dangerous genre. There's a lot of... I guess the current buzzword would be slop. It's not like we ever needed AI for that. Ghost writers have been pumping it out by the barrel-load for decades. Good memoirs, though, are thrilling. This is a very good memoir.

It's good because it's extremely well-written. Amy Rigby has a strong and immediately recognizable prose style, lyrical, personal, warm and occasionally self-deprecating. In common with other songwriters whose books I've read, her prose has a musicality that lifts it off the page. It's a sensual pleasure similar to listening to her sing.

It's also good because she's had a ridiculously rich and interesting life, even though she barely seems to realize just how rich and interesting it's been. Some memoirs drop names on every page. Amy doesn't drop names, she scatters them like someone kicking through autumn leaves, scarcely noticing as they fly up all around. 

She lived in New York from the late '70s through to the '90s, arriving as an art student in her late teens, with a stint in London for good measure, leaving as a feted singer-songwriter with a rapturously-reviewed album. In-between, she met and hung out with just about everyone in the NY punk and no-wave scenes, sang, recorded and performed with everyone from Robert Quine to Warren Zevon and pretty much lived the fantasy life almost everyone I knew in the 'eighties would have killed to have had.

None of it made her any money. None of it made her famous enough that anyone reading this will ever have heard of her. (Prove me wrong in the comments, I dare you.) She was in  several bands, none of whose names you will recognize. I was fairly cognizant of the scenes she was a part of, or thought I was, and I'd never even seen the names so much as mentioned in passing until I read her book. 

Even her incredibly well-received and reviewed mid-nineties album, the magnificently-named Diary of a Mod Housewife, apparently famous enough to rate its own Wikipedia entry, rang absolutely no bells with me. I've listened to it online now and I can recommend it most highly. The song that backtracks the promo, Summer of My Wasted Youth, is from another album, the equally well-named Middlescence. I need to get CDs of all her albums...

Girl To Country is one of the least-glamorous music memoirs I've read, although that's a competitive field. In many cases, though, the lack of glamor is in itself glamorous, as in James Young's memoir Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about the time he spent with touring with a heroin-addicted Nico or Nina Antonia's The One and Only about heroin addict Peter Perrett. 

Unlike the subjects of those books, Amy Rigby isn't a tragic romantic with a fashionable habit. She's a girl from Pittsburgh who doesn't really know what she wants to do other than that she wants to do something. That something turns out to be music and she's good at it, which surprises her more than it surprises anyone. 

But all the time she's making music she's also holding down an endless series of temp jobs. She's so good at it they make her Temp of the Month. Playing guitar is cool and all but it don't pay the bills.

Half a century on, she's still out there, trucking her guitar and amp around small clubs in backwater towns, playing her songs to the handful of people who care. It's the rock and roll reality not the rock and roll dream and yet somehow it's the dream all the same. At least she doesn't have to temp any more.

I could go on but better I stop and let you go read the book for yourself. Or if you don't feel up to that level of commitment, at least go read her blog. 

I mean, we're all bloggers here, aren't we? You know it's the right thing to do.