There's No Motivation...

It's Week Four of Blaugust and we're into Staying Motivated Week. Krikket was kind enough to post a list of questions back when all this started and I think I'm just going to answer them. Sounds like that'll just take a lowish level of motivation, which is about as much as I can summon up today.

Here they are in bullet point format:

• What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?
• What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?
• What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals?
• What drives you to blog?
• Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?
• How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall?
• Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them!

You know what? I'm going to replace those bullet points with numbers.

1. What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?
2. What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?
3. What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals?
4. What drives you to blog?
5. Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?
6. How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall?
7. Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them!

Is that better? I think it makes the whole thing look more official, don't you?

1.  What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?

Well, one thing I do is mess around with the form to keep myself amused. Like, I might take a set of questions, copy them, paste them, look at them and think "Those would be easier to answer if they were numbered." Which, obviously, they wouldn't, so that's an affectation. Then I'd cut and paste them a second time and change the bullet points to numbers. And then I'd write something about how that's what I'd done, as if it mattered.

It's completely pointless but it's fun. Doing things like Sidebars, Footnotes and Edits, having an imaginary conversation with myself or the imagined reader, interrupting the flow, using tenses that don't seem to sit well together and figuring out how to make them work grammatically, getting all meta and self-referential and generally arsing about. All those keep me motivated.

Also, ignoring the question I've been asked and answering the one I thought I'd been asked or that I wished I'd been asked. That's a good one. And writing the post that wants to be written instead of the post I thought I wanted to write.  Never be afraid to take a hard turn into something you hadn't planned to post about. 

That's actually a serious point, that last one. Look, I've highlighted it to make it stand out, so it must be. Also, playing around with the fonts and the colors is another good one. I don't do that often enough.

As for tricks, when something other than writing a post feels impossible, I don't know! What d'you think this is? Therapy?

2.  What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?

Hmm. Do I have blogging goals?  I'm not at all sure that I do. I think I had some, once. I probably started out hoping that someone would read what I posted and leave a comment. And then that happened and for a while I hoped more people would read and comment. And that happened. And then I kind of stopped caring so much about al of that and instead what I mostly hoped was that the same people who were already reading and commenting wouldn't stop. Which has mostly happened although if I go back and look at comments of years past, it's unsettling how many regulars just disappear. Luckily, new ones appear to take their place. Sometimes.

As far as all of that goes, Blaugust is, if anything, counterproductive to my goals. I've said before that while I don't trust any of the stats I get from Google and Blogger, they can at least be compared against themselves for consistency and what they tell me every year is that fewer people seem to look at this blog during Blaugust than at almost any other time. 

I'm not saying it's my participation that causes it so much as that, when Blaugust comes around, there are more posts for everyone to read and attention gets stretched thin. I find myself reading more widely but less deeply. I'm skim-reading posts on blogs I normally read in full and slipping posts on blogs I usually skim. I bet a lot of other people are, too.

You might think that any loss of attention from regular readers would be more than made up for by the influx of new ones from all those extra Blaugust blogs but I get the strong feeling almost none of those bloggers pay attention to this blog at all. Certainly few of them leave comments, this year or any year. And I suspect, from things they say one their own blogs, that they don't much care for the more traditional, long-form, comment-enabled gaming blogs. Why should they? It's just a bunch of old people, posting about old-people stuff, in an old-people sort of way.

So, no, I don't think participating in Blaugust is getting me much closer to where I want to be but it would be a lot easier to tell for sure if I had any idea where that was. Which I don't. Not really. I guess I mostly just want to stay where I am and not go anywhere in particular.

 

3.  What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals? 

Didn't we just cover that in the last question? I haven't got any... oh, wait! Blaugust goals. Not blogging goals. Geez. Good thing this isn't an exam. Remember how the teachers always used to say the most important thing is to read the question?

Okay then. Blaugust goals. Well, I started out saying I wasn't going to aim for 31 posts, which is exactly what I said last year, and then, again just like last year, I ended up doing precisely that. I've posted every day so far and I've made some considerable efforts to do do it, too. Apparently I can give advice about taking it easy and not getting wrapped up in hitting the numbers but I'm completely incapable of following it. As if that's news.

If we accept that 31 posts is a goal, even though I said it wasn't, (And we should because by their actions, not by their words, shall ye know them (Which sounds like a quote because of the archaic way I phrased it, with a "ye" even, but in fact I just made it up...)) then I guess I'll get the knowledge that, once again, I've proved I can stick at a pointless task for as long as it takes to finish it, even if I've said I wasn't going to do it in the first place. Go me!

If I'd said up front that I was going to post 31 times, I guess it would be a data point towards my being able to keep a promise, stick to a plan and generally do what I say I'll do.All of which would be good things. But since I specifically said I wasn't going to do that, I guess it suggests I can't be trusted.

In fact, if I was going to complete my Blaugust goal, (I still have a week to go so let's not tally the hens just yet.) I'd need to make sure there's at  least one day in what's left of August when I don't post anything. Then I' really would have completed my only goal. But what would I get out of that? I bet I'd be really annoyed with myself. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get anything positive out of it. So I'm going to try not to do it.

Hit my goal by missing a post, that is. Was that not clear? 

4. What drives you to blog? 

Ooh! An easy one! A love of the sound of my own voice, obviously. That, plus an innate ability to sit in front of a keyboard and have words spew out of my fingertips without even thinking about it. If I found any of this hard, do you think I'd do it? Half the posts on this blog are about how much I hate a challenge. I like things that are easy and blogging is really, really easy. Not blogging would be a lot harder.

As for why I blog rather than, say, keep a diary or write in a journal, it's much the same reason: it's easy. Blogger does most of the work for me. I just have to write the words and stick in the pictures and it's a lot easier to do in Blogger than it would be writing it all out longhand and pasting the pictures into a scrapbook. 

Plus I like getting comments and chatting to people about what I've written and what they've written. There's a social element. You don't get that with a diary or a journal. Also, a blog is a diary and a journal, so it's a threefer.

 

5.  Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?

Hmm. Am I happy with my Blaugust? My Blaugust? I guess so, if by that we mean what I've done. I've lied to myself about not intending to post 31 times but I didn't believe my own lies so that's good. I've posted two dozen times in two dozen days, so that's good. I haven't posted anything I'd call desperate just to keep the streak going, so that's good. 

If we mean am I happy with my experience of Blaugust overall, then in Steam review terms I think I'd have to give it a "Mixed". It's certainly been better than last year, when I got quite pissed off with the whole thing for a while and finished thinking it might be the last time I bothered with it. I've also learned a few things, about Blaugust and myself, but I'd better keep those for Lessons Learned Week. I'd hate to talk out of turn.

Blaugust, generally, has always been quite vexing, anyway. I'm not at all sure happiness is an emotional state I'd associate with it to begin with. Am I satisfied might be a more pertinent question. And yes, so far, I think I am.

6.  How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall? 

Back to that again? This is all getting a bit goal-oriented, isn't it? Not to say goal-obsessed. I feel I'm at risk of repeating myself, although when has that ever bothered me? 

I'd say in the most general terms I like to have some vague idea of what I'm trying to achieve but not much more than that. I don't do goals, in the sense of specific outcomes, other than for practical issues where it can't be avoided. 

For those, it's extremely important to reach them as quickly and effectively as possible because then they go away. In life, as a whole, I prioritize the completion of goals that either have to be done by a specific deadline (And I very, very rarely miss a deadline.) or by how much I don't want to do them. The more I don't want to do something that, for practical reasons, I can't get out of doing, the sooner and the faster I get it done. 

That's for unavoidable necessities, though. I'm very much not in the habit of inventing "personal goals". I have things I fancy doing and I do them if I remember and when I feel like it. If I don't do them, who cares? Not me, that's for sure. I'm very happy with giving up on any project at any stage if I've lost interest or if something more exciting comes along. Usually, if that happens, and it happens often, I'll never think about whatever it was again. 

If I do remember it at some point, I might go back and carry on or I might just think "Oh, yeah, that was a thing I was going to do. Oh, well..." and put it back in the forget-about-it box. That's a great box. If you don't have one, you should get one.

 

7.  Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them! 

I do have one. I bookmarked it to use as the springboard for a post of my own and I may well write that post at some point but I'll throw in a link to it now.

It's a post by Bongo Twisty, one of the few new blogs I've discovered this Blaugust that I've really enjoyed. It's called "How do you know if someone hates AI?" and it sums up my own feelings on the controversy very well indeed. Go read it.

Better yet, go read the Substack post by Cedric that Bongo Twisty quotes. Cedric makes a number of excellent points about why the policing of AI in blog posts is likely to be more problematic than the AI usage itself. Worth bearing in mind for next year's Blaugust, I think.

I particularly liked the bit at the end, where Cedric informs Substack of the numerous ways their side-step into the role of Internet Policeman violates his legal rights under the EU's extremely serious GDPR legislation. I have to comply with that at work and I can tell you it is not something you want to mess with.

While we're on the subject, I'd suggest reading some Philip K Dick. Or Kazuo Ishiguro 's Klara and the Sun for a bit of perspective. Or maybe get one of those bags of flour you draw a face on and treat like a baby for a week. Only instead of a face, write the name of your most-hated AI on there instead.

There we go. Questionnaire complete. Did I pass?

Notes on AI used in this post.

I had a bit of a problem with the part where I changed the bullet points to numbers. Blogger kept indenting the numbered list too much so I copy-pasted the html into Gemini and asked it to explain what was wrong, which it did. Then Gemini asked if I'd like it to re-write the html for me so it would work properly and i said I would, thanks. 

I copy-pasted Gemini's version into Blogger and that didn't work either so I reverted to the old version and hand-altered it according to what Gemini had said was wrong with it and that worked perfectly. Which means there's no actual AI-generated content in this post, not even in the html, but there is the faint trace of some AI advice still hanging around like a miasma. 

I wonder if there's an AI detector that can catch something like that? The lingering scent of an AI that passed through, leaving no digital trace? If not, maybe we'd better all just give up on the internet altogether. We're never going to be certain what's human ever again, are we? 

Also, I used Snapedit to remove a few bits of UI from a couple of the screenshots. But as I've said before, I'm not convinced that's real AI. 

 

In Jazz They Call It Improvising

 

Another half-assed post today, I'm afraid. What is wrong with me?

Well, to be honest, it's mostly that I just seem to be really busy. I have no idea why. It's 6.30 in the evening now and this is the first chance I've had to think about writing a post. Let me walk you through my day because that's what everyone wants from a blog about MMORPG gaming, isn't it? Someone running through a repetitive list of mundane daily chores. Oh, wait...

Anyway, like it or not, that's what we're getting, so buckle up. Buckle in. Which is it? Or maybe it's buckle down. 

Okay, we're doing that are we? Alright then. I did an English degree, albeit nearly fifty years ago. I ought to be able to do this without looking it up.

There's "Buck up" but I'm not talking about that one. That's completely different. (Or is it...?)

Then there's "Buckle in", which I can't in good conscience say I've ever heard anyone say. I've heard people say "Strap in" or more likely "Strap yourself in", which obviously means the same thing, there or thereabouts. A strap has a buckle, after all, or it's not much of a strap.

What is it that Bette Davis says in All About Eve?  In my head I hear her saying "Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride" but I bet that's not right. It's been almost as long since I saw All About Eve as it has been since I did that degree. In fact, I first saw the movie at one of the college film society showings, although I have seen it on television since. But that was in the eighties. Hardly surprising I can't remember the exact line.

 Hah! The exact line is "Fasten your seatbelts! It's going to be a bumpy night!" Bette's not buckling anything. Not up, in, down or sideways. She's fastening.

That didn't help much, did it?

Let's come at it from the other side. What I meant was something like "prepare yourself". I wasn't trying to suggest it was going to be difficult, let alone turbulent. Just that you should face the fact that it's coming, like it or not, so you might as well accept it.

I'm not sure any of the buckles or straps quite do the job there. I think I actually was unconsciously eliding the "pull yourself together" encouragement of buck up with the "get ready for trouble" implicit in buckle in. 

All of which gets us precisely nowhere. Bloody philology.

So, Beryl wakes me up at about 7.30am, which is an hour later than usual, probably because the heatwave has receded and it's nice and cool. She won't get on the bed and settle down because she wants to play but it's too early for all that nonsense so she goes off and lies down at the top of the stairs while I lie around in bed for half an hour, listening to Hancock on the radio until I'm properly awake.

To be strictly accurate, it's a fairly modern recreation of one of the "Missing Hancocks", one of the shows from the fifties that was scrubbed or skipped or lost, recreated by a bunch of actors impersonating the original cast. I stopped listening to the real Radio 4 sometime around Brexit, for obvious reasons, and I've never started again.

I only listen to Radio 4 Extra now, which is a weird hodge-podge of old sitcoms, drama, whodunnits, panel games and documentaries, all running on a daily loop so that if you listen all day, you'll hear everything three times. Which I often do. Hear things three times, that is, not listen all day. 

The big attraction for me is that it's the only station that has absolutely no news at all. I'm more than happy to hear the same awful 1980s sitcom dredged up from the dregs of Radio 2 if it means I never have to find out what's going on in the real world.

I get all my news from various entertainment websites through Feedly, which does give me a slightly (More than slightly.) skewed world view. I know a lot about the legislative program when it comes to things like the collapse of the live music infrastructure in small venues around the UK, the problems bands have touring in Europe post Brexit and the issues arising out of huge companies gaining monopolies over ticketing.

I know who's died within hours of them joining the choir invisible, which is presumably what they are doing, since most of the celebrity deaths I get to hear about are musicians. On the other hand, I didn't know Bill Oddie had died until someone at work told me. I'm not surprised Stereogum and Pitchfork didn't think it was worth mentioning but shame on the NME! The Goodies had five singles in the Top Twenty back in the seventies and Bill Oddie wrote all of them.

I just want to make it clear I don't think that's a good song, by the way. Or even a funny one. Bill Oddie wrote a lot of much better, funnier songs than that, although he didn't write any of them for The Goodies. But that was their biggest hit. #4 in 1975. You can see why we needed punk to come along...

Anyway, getting back to the plot, after I get up and have breakfast (A wholemeal bagel and a piece of wholemeal toast, both with sliced banana, and a cup of tea.) I go and do the weekly shop, as I always do on a Wednesday. After that, I catch up with all the Blaugust posts from overnight and leave a few comments. (Is this historic present working? I think it was at the start but not any more. I'm going to drop it.)

Since I was at the PC I sorted out the issue with Stars Reach not updating. It's ready to play now but it's 7.45 PM as I type this and I still haven't found the time to log in.

Then I had a bath and after that I moved a whole load of stuff out of the "conservatory" (Lean-to, really.) into the car so I could take it to the recycling center, where I had a 2pm appointment. After that I hung out the washing that I'd had to bring in last night because there was rain forecast. 

Then Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if I wanted to take Beryl on Paw Patrol. That's what we call a twenty minute loop around the neighborhood that Beryl likes to do at least every couple of days so she can reacquaint herself with the messages left by all the other local dogs and add her comments. It's dog blogging, basically.

Not long after I got back, I got a text telling me I had some stuff I needed to do, relating to the sale of my mother's house. That involved logging into a website, reading a bunch of legal nonsense and printing it out so I could sign it and get it witnessed, which is going to have to wait until the weekend when I'm at work because I don't talk to any of the neighbors except about dogs so I can hardly pop round and ask them to witness me signing a legal document. Put a paw-print on it, maybe.

That took me pretty much up to lunch and lunch took me up to the time when I needed to get in the car and go to the recycling center.

After I'd done that, I had to take two bags of clothes and two more of books to the charity shops. I say "shops" because there are about half a dozen in the same road but at any given time only one or two of them will be accepting donations. Today was a good day. The first one I tried took the lot. 

Since I was there, I went round all the rest just to see what I could find. I do not want to get into a death spiral of clearing stuff out only to fill the space with more kipple but I'm okay with the odd replacement, now and again. I got a book by Peter Bogdanovich called " "Who The Hell's In It?", which should make a good bathroom read.

I always forget Bogdanovich was a writer. I think of him as a director but he was a critic before he directed, just like Truffaut, Godard and the rest of the Cahiers du Cinema crew. And now I want to watch some of his movies again. And Truffaut's. Not Godard's, though.

By the time I got home it was about three in the afternoon. I'd said I was going to look for some places we might go away for a couple of days in September so I did that for about an hour until Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl came back from visiting a granddaughter. I sent her links to a few holiday ideas (Mrs Bhagpuss, not Beryl or the kid.) and then I just had time to read some more Blaugust posts before it was time for tea. 

After tea I sat down at the PC again and booked one of the places, under Mrs Bhagpuss's instructions, and then I got myself up to date with Blaugust before starting this post at half-past six. And even then I only got as far as Bette Davis before Beryl bounced in to tell me it was playtime, which took up another forty-five minutes.

And now here we are, gone eight in the evening and I haven't logged into a single game yet because I haven't had time! This is most days at the moment. No wonder I only play games in short bursts.

I'm going to say I think this will improve, in respect of the blog, when a) Blaugust finishes and b) the days get shorter. I do a lot less around the house in the Autumn and Winter and that frees up a lot more time for gaming. And I do think Blaugust leads to a lowering in quality all round, approximately commensurate to the increase in quantity. There are a lot of filler posts and I'm writing too many of them.

Can do better. Will do better. 

Tomorrow, with luck, I might actually play Stars Reach for half an hour and then I can post about it, which will be the only reason I'm playing it. In the meantime, I'm sure everyone's already seen Wilhelm's report. Also there're the new updates for  both Neverness to Everness and Wuthering Waves this week so it's not like I'm short of something to play or to write about.

But now, though, I'm going to have to slap a couple more pictures in this post, think of a title, press Publish and then go take Beryl for her final walk before I wash up and go to bed, where I plan on watching some more Dr. Who and maybe another episode of the positively bizarre anime Chainsmoker Cat, which I'm determined to get through if only so I can blog about it.

Things I've Found In The Back Of A Drawer - #2 In An Irregular Series

Once upon a Blaugust, I hatched a plan to fill out the extra days by posting about my badges (Or buttons. Or pins. Whatever your local vernacular calls them.) At the time, I'd just found a plastic bagful and it seemed like something I might be able to spin up into a mini-series.

Well, that didn't happen. And it's not going to happen this year, either. When I tipped the bag out and looked through the collection it didn't spark much joy, as the extremely trite and glib saying goes. I didn't think I'd be able to come up with enough amusing or interesting anecdotes based on the random selection of cheap metal buttons to justify a post, let alone a series.

Times change and so do moods. Looking a that bag today I reckon I could work the contents up into something. Whether it would be something worth reading is another matter but a thousand words is a thousand words. And one day I might do it, too, but this is not the day and those images you see up there at the top are not those badges.

Nope. This is another bunch of badges I found at the back of a drawer a week ago, which qualifies them for inclusion in this Blaugust's pointless makeweight series, Things I've Found In The Back Of A Drawer. They literally could not be more qualified. It's not even a metaphor!

Why these ended up there instead of with the rest I have no idea but it's an eclectic selection. 

When I was a teenager and a twenty-something, badges were very much A Thing. Everyone went around covered in the things; on jackets, on bags, on hats, on anything you could stick a pin through. I bought or otherwise acquired dozens of badges over a couple of decades and I took as much care in the wearing and display of them then as I do with my tee-shirts now. (I'm known in certain circles for my tee-shirts, I'll have you know. I might have to do a post about that some day. They're all modern, though, my tees. I don't collect them, I just buy them and wear them.)

This selection is very mixed. It's a bit of a cross-section of the whole, in a way. I have no idea why these particular examples ended up in the same place. They certainly couldn't have been worn all at the same time. I think they're all broadly from the '90s and that's as tight as I can narrow it.

Let me take you through them, as far as I can. There's a few I don't even recognize. They might not be mine. Well, they are now...

1 - Batman. Specifically, the Batman from the highly-rated 1990s TV show, Batman: The Animated Series. Catchy title. I own this on VHS but I only watched a few episodes. The animation is excellent but I found it a little dull. No idea where I got the badge from. (That's a sentiment you're going to get very fed up of hearing by the end of this post.)

2, 4, 10 and, I believe, probably 7 and 8 as well - Fresh Nation. Fresh Nation was a clothes shop and brand in the '90s. I used to shop there quite a bit. They specialized in a kind of rave/skate/graffiti culture look, lots of cartoon figures and bold graphics. I'm a little surprised there's no Wikipedia page. Looking it up now, it seems it was a much more local operation than I was aware of at the time. I might still have a couple things of theirs at the back of the wardrobe (I don't actually have a wardrobe.) but they haven't been fit to wear for a couple of decades. I imagine I picked those badges up off the counter as freebies when I was shopping there.

3, 11, 26, 29 - Literally no idea. Can't remember ever seeing them before. I did wear slogan badges but usually the messages would either be surreal or humorous. "Deal With It" is not a phrase I would ever have been likely to say or indeed think. 

As for the cat, it's more of a brooch than a badge. It's nice, too. I'd wear it now. I was Team Cat for the longest time, before I became Team Fox and now, thanks to Beryl, Team Dog. I didn't wear cat badges often though, unless they were famous cartoon cats. 

The little one is some ineffable design that means nothing and the last one means just as little, even with the word "Touchmark" slapped all over it . Looks like a brand logo but I can't recall ever seeing it before. Google has no suggestions.

5 -  I've never been to Paignton Zoo. I'm not sure I've even been to Paignton. I probably bought this in a junk shop or a market. In the 90s, I bought a lot of stuff that way before I started playing EverQuest and switched to collecting completely useless virtual crap instead.

6. I ate a lot of Mini-Rolls as a child. And I mean A Lot. I had the kind of metabolism then that let me eat ridiculous amounts of sweets, biscuits, cakes, chocolate, bread... you name it, without putting on an ounce. If it was sweet or stodgy and full of useless calories, I ate it. And I was stick-thin. It didn't catch up with me until my mid-20s, when I finally stopped being able to eat enough for three people and still look underfed. Luckily for me, once I figured out what had happened, my reaction was to eat less so I've carried on looking much the same all the way through to now. That badge is a 90s one, I'd bet, so clearly I still must have thought Mini-Rolls were cool then. I know better now. Mini-Rolls are not and have never been cool. No wiki entry for Mini-Rolls, either.

9. Aha! This is a good one! Strumpet is the name of a song by one of my favorite bands of the 90s, My Life Story. I saw them three times. Might have been four. I imagine this badge came from one of those gigs. I have a much better trophy, though. It's framed on the wall a few feet from where I'm sitting. The number 12. I believe I may have told that story, such as it is, before.

12 - Another Batman badge. I don't even like Batman all that much. Why all the badges beats me.

13 - Hmm. That's a weird one. The wolf looks vaguely familiar but I can't place it. It's a thin metal circle with no rim. The writing looks Cyrillic? Again, it might be a bit ravey? Rave culture was big back then...

14, 18 - Two Proof of Admission badges from UKCAC, the United Kingdom Comic Arts Convention. It was organized and run every year by some close friends of mine, all through the 80s into the 90s. I think I was at all of them. I worked some, too, but mostly I tried to avoid doing that. If you're hosting a panel it means you can't really start drinking seriously until it's over and that's no fun!

15 - I can't even... what? Heinz Meanz Bard?  Is there a joke there I'm not getting?

16 - Everyone likes crisps (Chips to you, if you're reading this from the States.) but Golden Wonder, despite being very successful, are not great crisps. Not something I'd want to advertise or even associate myself with. Can't imagine how I would have come by it or why I kept it.

17 - Fantastic was a comic published in the 1960s by Odhams. Along with its slightly less-successful sister publication, Terrific, it specialized in reprinting Marvel Comics several years late, in black and white and re-sized. I worshiped it as a child. It was my gateway drug into the Marvel Universe. 

I already had a DC addiction from the much stronger, undiluted real thing which was freely available in most newsagents. So were Marvel comics but distribution was utterly unreliable, so the single-issue stories DC were still putting out were much more appealing than Marvel's multi-issue epics, half of whose episodes you knew full well you'd never find. Except in Fantastic. I still have all those Fantastics and Terrifics. They're in the loft. They might be worth something if I hadn't cut all the back covers off. There was usually a super hero pin-up on the back and my bedroom wall was covered in them. 

The badge looks like an original but I didn't get it in the '60s. I bought that one in the '90s, I'm pretty sure.

19 - As I did this nifty, enamel Butlins pin. I have a vague memory of going to Butlins as a child but I can't remember much about it. I have an equally vague memory of buying this badge about thirty years later because I thought it looked cool in an ironic, retro style. It was all bloody post-modernism as far as the eye could see in the '90s.

20, 21, 28 - And the same motivation would have led to me buying these three. I mean, look at them... They're still weirdly retro-cool even now, after that sort of thing has been absolutely flogged into the ground. The Ever Ready Solar Spaceman one is really tempting. I might start wearing some of these again, as ironic contrast, on my very modern tee shirts. Hmm. KPop Demon Hunters tee with the Esso Tiger... [Edit: Looking at it more closely, I think that's actually a badge from a protest about Esso, not an Esso badge. Greenpeace ran one in 2001 so Google tells me but that image doesn't feature. I coldn't stand Greenpeace then anyway. Or now, if they still exist.]

I don't, in fact, own a KPop Demon Hunters tee, to be clear. But I'm not averse to the idea of getting one.

22 - Another quality enamel pin. I'm guessing that logo might be Warner Bros.? Not sure.

23 - Glaxo Babies! Now that has to be an original. It's water-damaged, too, suggesting it saw some wear.  The Glaxos, as we used to call them, were one of my favorite Bristol bands of the late '70s. I saw them a bunch of times, headlining and supporting, and they were always great. They had that herky-jerky post-punk funk sound down to perfection. Their first album is really excellent. They had to change their name after a while because of legal threats from whoever owns Glaxo (It's GlaxoSmithKline, of course, now known as GSK.) They changed it to the Gl*xo Babies. That told those pesky billionaires!

They'd disappeared into the fog of time until Alex Turner and Miles Kane's Last Shadow Puppets started covering the Glaxos'  This Is Your Life. 

24 - Hang on! Bootlegger turn! This one's an official NVQ pin. You got one if you successfully completed the program, which I did back in the '90s. In fact, I beta'd the damn thing. I was working at British Telecom at the time, one of the UK's largest employers, and my bit of the company was asked to test the rollout of the new National Vocational Qualification. With a degree already, I didn't really need a non-degree level equivalent but what the hell. They gave me time to do it at work, so I did it. Technically I have that on my CV, for what good it ever did me.

25 - Peppermint Patty is my favorite Peanuts character, as I'm pretty sure almost anyone who's been paying attention would easily have been able to guess. Red hair, freckles, sassy as hell, always looks cool, has massive self-confidence except when she thinks too much... pushing all the buttons there. I like Snoopy too. Who doesn't? So it's a double-header. It's also one of those big badges that you can really only wear one or at most two of at the same time without looking like a local radio DJ.

27 - It's fate! Saved the best for last without even trying! Dolly Mixture are/is, as any fule kno, my favorite band of all time. I have a post to come in this very series about something very interesting relating to the Dollies that I found, yes, in the back of  a drawer.  I'll save the details for the post. This badge, though...

It's from the late '70s/early '80s. I remember wearing it all the time back then. I think I had more than one, though, so this might not be the actual one I wore. Did they throw them out at gigs? I don't think so. Maybe I got it in a record shop? I doubt it because I never saw a physical record by them until long after. It's a mystery. Although not much of one, admittedly.

And there we are. As pointless posts go, this one's right up there but I did at least manage to keep it fairly short. 

Short is good.

Don't Judge A Book...

Week #2 of Blaugust already and it feels more like week #20, doesn't it? Every year I look forward to Blaugust  and every year, as soon as it starts, I remember why last year I told myself that would be my last.

Still, no-one said it was going to be fun, did they? Oh, wait... I think I might have done...

Luckily we have prompts to keep us going. And theme weeks. And community projects. I'm really glad no-one thought to call that the Community "Challenge". I could do without any challenges, thanks. I could do with some idea, though.

Let's see. What have we got this week? One moment, while I refer to Krikket's invaluable primer. Now, that sounds like a magic item you'd be happy to see drop, doesn't it? 

Krikket's Invaluable Primer:

  +5 Int, +10 to all casting skills, right-click for effect: "Aura of Encouragement".

I was so tempted then to plug that lot into NightCafe and gussy up a thumbnail but I suppose I'd better resist. 

Oh, what the hell. Let's make an experiment out of it!

On the left we have the image I made at NightCafe, using one of my freebies for GPT Image 2 low. It  took approximately thirty seconds to make, including writing the prompt and waiting for it to process..

On the right is one I made with Canva. That took me closer to thirty minutes than thirty seconds, using their stock images and (As far as I know...) no AI. Although it's hard to be sure. Canva certainly has AI options but I don't think they're on by default. But these days, who can be sure?

Now, honestly, that all didn't turn out the way I expected. When I saw the result I got from Night Cafe, my immediate reaction was well, that looks pretty professional. If I saw it in a game I wouldn't think twice. It would fit right in. Also it got all the spellings right. A lot of models can do that nowadays but still not all of them.

I didn't think there'd be any  hope of my coming up with something on my own that would be even a tenth as good. I can't draw at all, for a start. My first thought was to get a real book, take a photograph, upload it to Paint.net and start fiddling around with it but then it occurred to me that long before anyone ever heard of generative AI, there must have been all kinds of websites and apps that would make icons for RPGs. I thought I might even have remembered dicking around with one or two, back in the dark ages.

I googled it and got a link to a reddit thread that looked relevant. Everyone there seemed to be recommending the same three or four options, one of which was Canva. I'd seen a lot of mentions of Canva in the Mentor channel on the Blaugust Discord. It's what was used to make the lovely, starry logo you can see up at the top there, I believe.

I found Canva and had a quick look at it and it did not look promising. The search function didn't find anything even remotely close to what I asked for, which was "A spell-book as commonly seen in RPGs". That didn't even get me a book!

I was tempted to give up before I'd even gotten started but I tried a few other variations, had a scroll through the results, and decided the search function was so bad I'd be better off starting with the most general option possible and working my way back. So I just asked it find me "A Book".

Suddenly there were thousands of them. Possibly millions. It took me half a minute to find one that looked like it might work. I picked it and swapped to the Text function. I added the title and then spent five minutes resizing it, changing the font and swiveling it around so it looked roughly in perspective with the book itself. Then I did the same with the detail text.

The result looked pretty bad. It was an ugly brown and white book on a white background. It also had a huge "Canva" watermark across the middle that I'd have had to sign up for the free trial to remove and which beyond that you'd need to pay a subscription to keep off your screen. Obviously, I could have removed that using SnapEdit, but since SnapEdit claims to use AI, that would defeat the object of the experiment. Also I have no idea what the legality of removing a watermark from an otherwise free image might be.

As well as the watermark, there was also some text at the top, ironically saying "Remove Watermarks", which was the button you press to get to the payment screen. All in all the image looked pretty horrible. I wish now I'd saved it so you could see just how bad it was. 

Oh, hey, guess what? I did! Doesn't look as bad as I remembered it, either. 

Still, it was something. Somewhere to start. I downloaded it and uploaded it to Paint.net to see if there was anything I could do to improve it. I thought it would certainly look better in a post if it had the same color background as the rest of the blog, so I changed the white to the correct shade of dark blue. That looked easier on the eye. I am not a fan of white backgrounds, by and large.

The watermark still looked bloody awful, though, that being the primary purpose of huge watermarks in the middle of images. Watermarks meant to make it clear what software was used for copyright or similar reasons generally sit tidily at the bottom in small type, making themselves unobtrusive. Only the ones designed to piss you off  so much you consider springing for the cost of removing them sit there right in the middle, staring at you malevolently.

I imagine if you're really adept with Paint.net you could probably figure out a way to remove a watermark but I am not that skilled. Or skilled at all, really. I just press the buttons, see what they do and if I don't like it I undo it. So that's what I did. [Edit: as you can see below, I did figure it out. The cross-hatching is something else, though.]

I just selected the basic brown book color then drenched the area with the watermark to see what would happen. What I got is pretty much what you can see. The brown overwrote the text of the watermark but it also spread around, across and over the rest of the text and the gold-leaf bindings very much as though I'd spilled water over the cover of the book. And it looked pretty good, I thought.

Sure, it's a bit fuzzy and ill-defined now but that gives it a spurious patina of authenticity. It looks like a badly faded image of an old, leather-bound book. Serendipity works its magic once again.  

I used the same process to get rid of the remaining "Remove Watermark" text and that was that. Well, except for getting the two images to sit nicely side-by-side on the page, for which I had to get Gemini to run me up some HTML. So much for not using AI. 

But not on the image itself, that's the crucial thing. Experiment still valid!

With all of that done, the biggest surprise for me was that I actually prefer the image on the right. It's funkier. It has better eye-feel. What's even odder is that I was perfectly happy with the AI image until I saw the other one. 

The question that needs to be asked is, do I prefer the one I made mostly because I made it? The AI image was incredibly easy to produce and I feel no particular connection to it. It's not like I even spent any time on the prompt. The Canva version, though, took me a good while and I had to think about what I was doing the whole time. Do I only prefer it because of the time I invested?

Then, when it comes to creativity, is the one I "made" objectively any more creative than the AI version? All I did was pick a pre-made image, type some text and then edit it. At best it's creative editing but I wouldn't even give it that much credit. The process itself feels as soulless and artificial as using AI. It's just a lot slower and more inefficient.

Also, it should be noted both images are really only drafts. I could get something much closer to the Canva one with AI. In fact, I could upload it to NightCafe and use it as a starting image and then refine it to get it to what I want it to be. And I could carry on working with the Canva image in Paint.net, add some filters, buff it up, sand it down... just like you can see I have done, over to the right, in fact.

I think the point I'm making, to myself as much as anyone, is that these are both clearly tools, of use mainly to people who either don't have the drafting skills to create the images from scratch, or the time, or both. Under current law, both are equally legal but a lot of people would argue, quite vehemently, that morally they're very different.

If I set up my own local LLM on a PC at home, though, and trained it only on copyright-free images, something I could quite easily do, if I could be bothered, then the issues over misuse of resources and copyright infringement would cease to be relevant, leaving only the much more abstruse and metaphysical consideration of what, in essence, constitutes human creativity. I imagine the arguments over all of that could fuel enough controversy to keep Blaugust going until Christmas.

One thing I can say for sure, though, is that somehow, without even meaning to, I've come up with another 1500 words (1625 if we're being picky and most likely it'll be over 2000 by the time I get to the end of the footnote.) without ever getting to the topic I sat down to write about, namely the prompts Krikket gave us for this week.

Those will have to wait 'til tomorrow!

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

As it says above, I made the image on the right at NightCafe. I used GPT Image 2 Low, which is normally only available to subscribers but for which I happened to have a freebie. Those expire very quickly so I thought I might as well use it. 

The prompt was "A thumbnail image of a spellbook for use in an online RPG, with a rubric reading reading "Krikket's Invaluable Primer: +5 Int, +10 to all casting skills, right-click for effect "Aura of Encouragement" ", which I mostly lifted straight from the text of the post. I wish now I'd have removed the "for" because a simple "right-click effect..." would have read better but I didn't so that's that. As I said, though, if I was really going to use the image for anything practical, this would just have been the first draft.

The other use of AI was some HTML I got Gemini to write for me so I could get the two pictures to sit comfortably next to each other. Many years ago, before AI would ever have been an option, Blogger woild have done all that for me, no problem. If you go back far enough on this blog you can see lots of posts where I place two pictures or two videos side to side. 

Back then, all I had to do was add the images then drag and drop and it would work. Well, nine times out of ten it would. Now it's no times. Too many things in Blogger that used to be easy are now either hard or impossible. 

One way to fix that would be to (Re-)learn HTML or Mark Up or whatever the heck it is the kids are using nowadays. Or I could do what I bet most of the kids are really doing and ask an AI to do it for me. 

Turns out they're pretty good at it, too. I asked Gemini "Can you give me the correct HTML to be used in Blogger that will position two images side by side?" and in about three seconds it gave me seven lines of code to paste into Blogger to fix my problem.

I pasted them in, cut and pasted the correct image details, then did it again with the actually correct ones, and it worked perfectly. Took me maybe five minutes. Trying to do it without AI would have taken me a lot longer and once again, all I'd have ended up doing, if I could even have done it at all, would have been to find an example of someone else's working HTML online, using Google search, then cut and paste it into Blogger. That is literally what I've always had to do before.

Is that more authentic in some strange, existential fashion? Or is it all just copying someone or something else's work? If so, does it matter whether you copy a human or a machine, especially when you're trying to tell a machine what to do?

Also, it's fun getting Gemini to correct Blogger's mistakes because not only are they Google cousins but Gemini seems to take every opportunity to get a dig in at Blogger's expense. I'm easily amused.

And verbose. That's just over 2200 words, for the record... 

Oh, and if we're being completist about all of this, I also re-used a line of HTML Gemini gave me the other day to get text to wrap correctly around the images. Not sure if we're required to reveal repeated usages. 

Is This The Place I Come To Complain About Blogging?

 

The image at the top is there because this was going to be a post about the new fishing event in Neverness to Everness. That's not happening any more (Tomorrow, probably.) but the picture still has some relevance qua "picture", so I'm going to leave it in. It's a lot prettier to look at than the rest of the pictures in this post, that's for sure.

Now it's not about fishing, this is a post about blogging. More specifically, it's a post about Blogger, in which I moan about it. 

Whining about blogging?  Really? Do you have to? Can't we have fishing? 

No, you can't. My blog, my prerogative. It's Blaugust and if you can't moan about blogging in a blogging festival, when can you moan about blogging? Also, is anyone else starting find the words "blog" and "blogging" sound weird ? And there's nearly a month of this left to go...

Before I get into the moaning proper, I will just say it's possible some of what I'm going to complain about could be caused by my PC rather than Blogger itself. It's not like I haven't had other issues there. My money's on Blogger, though.

Yesterday, when I was talking about "my very first blog", which of course is this one, I mentioned that, back in 2010, I'd considered both WordPress and Blogger for the honor of hosting my nascent blog. That suggests I'd done some research on both of them so I could make an informed choice. It might suggest it but it's not what happened.

About all I can remember is that I signed up for both then looked at the UI and the controls and decided Blogger looked easier to understand than WordPress. I can't honestly remember but I very much doubt I did more than take a glance and maybe try to make a page. Might not even have done that much.

I very definitely had no clue how popular either of the platforms would have been at the time or which blogs I was following used which. I also wouldn't have had the least idea how well-maintained or frequently updated they were. So it was pure luck that I picked the one that never changes. 

That's the Gold Standard for software, for me. If I could, I'd lock every app at the point where I decide I'm satisfied with it, which would usually be five minutes after I've chosen to use it at all. If I'm not satisfied by then I'll already have uninstalled it. 

 

I won't say developers never make changes I appreciate but I will say that it's a racing certainty I won't need or want the huge majority of their "upgrades" or "improvements", almost all of which I'm virtually certain only exist either because someone's job depends on them demonstrating their worth to the company by "innovating"or else on the company's desire to find yet more ways of squeezing money out of the customers.

Blogger is owned and operated by Google, the megacorp that shuttered its much-loved RSS service, Google Reader in 2013, citing declining use. Google Reader's primary function was to get blogs into the hands of readers, so logic would suggest Google's blogging platform, Blogger, ought to have been next to go. If the readership was declining, surely the authorship must have been dropping away too.

And yet, more than a dozen years later, here we all still are, some of us writing, a lot more of us reading Blogger blogs. (That word's not getting any less weird the more I use it, is it?) Did Google decide they'd made a mistake, canning Google Reader? There was business there still, for sure. Plenty of new RSS readers moved into the space Google had vacated. Perhaps they saw that happening and thought they'd leave Blogger alone for a bit, just to stop anyone getting ideas. 

These things do happen. There's a furniture salesroom around the corner from where I live that's been there for a decade. It never has any customers and I mean never. I have literally never seen anyone go in or come out. 

Before it was a furniture store, the building used to be a supermarket. The new business puzzled me for a long time until someone, who keeps an ear to the ground where these kinds of things are concerned, told me that when the small supermarket moved out, one of the big supermarket companies bought the lease, although they were aware that, due to longstanding issues of local politics in the city, they wouldn't able to open their own branch there. What they wanted to do was to stop any of their main rivals getting in there instead. 

Since then, nothing's changed in local politics, so it's still an imaginary furniture shop. I imagine the cost of running it empty (Well, it does have furniture, to be fair. Just no-one to buy any of it.) isn't even a rounding error for the huge supermarket company behind it, just like Blogger won't even be a dot of dust on the screen when someone at Google is looking at a spreadsheet for those rounding errors. Blogger most likely still exists because Google is so unfeasibly huge, no-one who matters remembers it exists.

Not that I think anything so calculated is going on with Blogger. Benign neglect is the story there, or so I've always believed. And it suits me very well. I get a frisson of schadenfreude every time I read someone complaining about the latest thing an update to WordPress has broken. 

I got used to Blogger in a matter of weeks, did all the fiddling with it I ever planned on doing and now it'd be my preference if it stayed the way it was then until the heat death of the universe. So I'm not best pleased to see very worrying signs that someone at Google is starting to tinker with it. 

 

For as long as I can remember the Insert Image function has been nothing much more than a drop down menu leading to a blank window with a blue Browse button in the middle that lets you select a file from your PC or from various other sources. And that's still all it is, except one day last week or the week before, the blank window got a makeover.  

Now it has a dotted line all round it and gentle curves at the corners. And there's a big, green cloud in the middle to let you know you're about to upload your image to the cloud. 

Fine. If you must. And it was fine. Until it wasn't.

I've been using Blogger's Insert Image function ever since I started this blog. It's always worked flawlessly. I've developed the habit of editing my images in Paint.net, saving them in a file cleverly named "Blog", then uploading them to Blogger via the Insert Image window before positioning and resizing them on the page, using the tools provided by Blogger for the purpose.

For a while, after what seemed to be purely a visual update, nothing changed. And then, a couple of days ago, the whole thing stopped working. Now, when I try to upload a picture, I invariably get the message "Transfer encountered too many consecutive failures". 

 

A Google search offers a number of possible fixes for the problem. I tried a couple and they didn't work. I might have gone on to try the more invasive options but luckily I remembered that you don't actually need to use Insert Image at all. I just liked it because it was neat and tidy. 

You can simply cut and paste images straight into the draft. All the images in the posts for the last few days were added that way. They appear there huge, bloated and falling off the page but the same tools I always used to resize images soon fix that. Once they're there, you can mostly drag them around the same as always, although they're a bit more pernickety to handle. 

Overall, though, it's actually faster and easier than the old way. And it means I'm not duplicating images in storage the way I always have (Because of course I never cleared the dupes out or deleted anything.) In an odd way, I'm kind of happy with how it's turned out but it is undeniably a more primitive method and I'm only using it at all because Google broke the more sophisticated one. (Unless, as I say, it's my PC playing up...)

 

The first signs of this renewed interest in Blogger came a few weeks ago, when a new button appeared in the line of controls along the top. It's hard to miss. It's the only one that's not in black&white. On a mouseover it identifies as "Insert widget or AI powered enhancements" and until this moment I have never pressed it to see what it does. 

I'm going to do that  now. Hold on to your seats! Aha! It pops up another button that says "Insert Google Search Widget". I am not pressing that!

Instead, I googled it, in part because having google interrogate google to tell me what it's up to always amuses me. According to this very helpful link the button ought to give me a two-option drop-down menu, with the option I'm seeing plus another that would allow me to "auto add links to search." 

Apparently both of these options "create links to Google Search pages". The first, the one I have, adds a colored icon to your links, along with a relevant picture. Apparently it doesn't work very well yet, which is fine with me because I'm not going to be using it unless it's for humorous effect.

It does, at least, only put those pictures where you tell it to put them. The other new feature, the one that has an icon that looks like a magic wand, uses AI to go through your post and figure out for itself what might be worth linking. Then it goes to google search, finds a link and adds it to your post, all without bothering to ask you if you approve.

Like hell it does! Look, I'm somewhere towards the positive end of the AI spectrum, by the standards of this community at least, in that I can see uses for it and I think of it as merely a tool to be used not a threat to be stamped out but I'm sure as hell not going to abrogate responsibility for placing links to external sites on my blog and hand it over to some algorithm with delusions of adequacy!

 

Then again, I don't even have the magic wand in the menu, so it's a notional issue for the moment. I remember now, I did see it wafting around at the bottom of the screen for a while, which apparently is what it used to do before they added the button at the top, but it's gone altogether now. And good riddance!

Finally, when I was writing yesterday's post, I kept getting the feeling Blogger was trying to make me type in blocks, the way WordPress does. I kept having to move the cursor back up a line after every paragraph. It's stopped today, so maybe I was imagining it. 

I'm very familiar with the Block method from the comment sections of WP blogs, which also use it. I quite like it. Well, I certainly don't hate it. It sort of fits the way I put a post together so I'm not opposed to something like that being added to Blogger... as an option.

My feeling is that all changes of this sort should be optional. I'm sure some people have been crying out for little colored icons next to their links and I'm happy for them to get what they asked for. Just so long as I don't have to have them too.

I fear, though, that now someone at Google has noticed they own a blogging platform this will just be the start of it. At what point the whole thing will become so annoying I'll have to start thinking about other options is impossible to say but I'm sure that time will come. For now, though, I'm going to carry on as before, with work-arounds as necessary.

And I'm not going to press any more brightly-colored buttons. You never know what they might do.