Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now

This is going to be a very short post. I know I say that a lot and then run on for several thousand words but that won't be happening today. I had a specific post in mind and I haven't been able to write it so this is the "what would have been" version.

It was going to be about the Wuthering Waves/Edgerunners collab that started this week. I'd been trying to pretend it wasn't happening so I wouldn't start fomoing at the mouth about it but yesterday I saw the trailer in my YouTube subs and couldn't resist. And it was excellent.

 So, I watched that and I read a whole bunch of people saying how good it was, not just in the comment thread but in articles like this one and I thought, well, maybe I'll just check to see if you really have to be all up to date in the game to see the story. And it turns out you don't. 

Kuro recommends you do it in sequence to get the most out of it but they also realize a lot of people might be coming back just for the Edgerunners content because that's one of the main reasons companies do collabs like this in the first place. With that in mind, they've made it a standalone episode you can access immediately or as part of the storyline, as you prefer.

I haven't played Wuthering Waves for a while. A good while. Last September in fact. I didn't stop because I got bored or lost interest. I stopped because it got to be too intense and I found myself taking it too seriously, which is very much not what I want from my gaming. I did plan on watching the story content on YouTube instead, since it felt like I was watching a movie every time I played, but in the event I just drifted out of thinking about it at all. Until now.

The next thing was to check if I had the game installed on this PC. I didn't think I did because I bought it after i stopped playing but as it happens I moved the relevant SDD across and although I removed a few things, Wuthering Waves wasn't one of them.

Great! No need to download the whole thing again, then. I can just patch it up. Yeah... nope. I had to download a new launcher from the website because the old one no longer worked and the new launcher insisted on downloading the entire game, all 100+GB of it before it installed it in the same directory. It took a couple of hours and by the end I had a fresh 108GB client, up about 20GB from where it had been.

That took me past the time I had available to play the thing so I left it for this morning. After breakfast I opened the launcher and hit Play and the damn thing downloaded another massive update. The client now weighs in at an enormous 133GB!

Phew! Still, at least I can finally play the game, right? Ahahahahaha! No!

I can't play Wuthering Waves because I do not have my account details any more. In the quarter of a century I've been playing online games this has barely ever happened to me. I almost always keep a note of my account details for everything - games, services, forums, you name it. And if I don't, I can always at the very least work out what email address I used and recover them.

Not for this one. I almost certainly used the extremely tempting and convenient "Sign in with Google" option. I use it a lot because I'm lazy. It's a bad idea and I know it's a bad idea but I do it anyway because what could go wrong?

Apparently what could go wrong is I could not be able to figure out which google account I used. I have a lot. At least a dozen I use regularly and probably as many more that I've made and then forgotten about. There are only about five or six I regularly use for something like this, though, so again, how hard could it be just to go through them all and find the right one by trial and error?

Harder than I expected. In fact, impossible. 

I tried the obvious two or three and they weren't right. Then I had the clever idea of checking my email to see which one had been sending me the press releases. I have all my in-use email addresses set to forward to one central address so I don't have to keep logging in to all of them.

It was then that it occurred to me that I don't seem to get any emails from Kuro about Wuthering Waves. None at all. I did a search and I never have. Not a single one, ever. Which is very weird. Surely they send them? They'd be the only gaming company ever if they didn't.

Just in case the mail was going to an address I hadn't set to forward, I went through the laborious process of logging them all in. None of them had ever heard from Kuro. While I was at it, I even checked some of the more obscure addresses I haven't used in years. It was a useful hour in that at least I've reset the timers on those so Google won't delete them for a bit longer but it didn't get me any further.

I went through my Little Black Book of Logins page by page. Nothing. It seems I never wrote down anything about Wuthering Waves at all. I don't keep as many handwritten notes about this sort of thing as I once did but I do usually at least make a note of which email address I've used for a new game. Not this time.

Even if I don't keep a note of it, Google must or how would it work? I googled that and found out how to check what apps you've given permissions to, which is a handy piece of information to have. Then I checked all of them and none of them showed "Wuthering Waves" or "Kuro" in the list. 

By this point I was pretty much stumped. I tried checking my laptop, where I once tried to play the game and found it wouldn't run, and my old PC, which meant connecting everything back up, which was a pain. No joy with either of them. And that was the last, worst idea I had.

Reading around the web, it seems there are some quirks with Kuro's login process that mean accounts set up by typing in an email address are registered independently of the same email address selected through "Play with Google" but either way you'd think there'd be a stream of promotions going to that address, which as far as I can see there never has been.

There's also an issue where your account is specific to the Region where you chose to play. If you pick the wrong one on login, the game acts as if you never played before. I tried Europe and America, the only two I'd ever have chosen. Nothing on either. 

I do have a blog though. I know I would never have mentioned a specific email address in a post because I am not completely irresponsible but I do sometimes mention other useful details. So I checked my First Impressions and came up with this potentially telling piece of information: "Downloading and installing the game (It's something like an 18GB footprint.) took just a couple of clicks.... There was no time wasted registering an account. It accepts a Google login, which it doesn't even bother to confirm with an email to the Gmail address you give it." 

Hmm. First, it's grown like Topsy, hasn't it? Second, it never sent a confirmation email. Now that is odd because, while I was trying to get in this morning, I used Google to start a new account and that did send me a confirmation, although it didn't ask for any response. Not that it helps at all but it's a data point.

I'm in on that account now and I see there's an option to "Link Email". Maybe I never took it on the real account. That would explain why I never got any emails. 

Anyway, I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works so the only other option is to contact Kuro Customer Service and see if they can restore access. Thanks to screenshots, I do have the name of my character and the User Id but I never spent any money in the cash shop so I don't have that crucial piece of evidence, without which I'm not sure they'll be all that interested.

I could start over from the beginning. As one person advising someone else with a similar issue helpfully pointed out, if you skip all the dialog it wouldn't take long. Or I could go back to Plan A and watch it all on YouTube.

That sounds like the better option. I'm not convinced pressing the buttons adds anything much to the experience.

Never Say Neverness

Nobody wants another post about my computer problems so I'll keep this short. 4reelz this time! I just thought it would be worth mentioning that I'm typing this on the new machine, the one that was apparently glassed yesterday.   

How? Beats me.

What happened was that it occurred to me I had a bunch of quite important stuff on the hard drive in the machine I was about to send to the other end of the country, stuff I might need before I got it back, so I tried to remove the hard drive so I could put it in an enclosure and copy what I needed. Only, when I went to do it, I found I couldn't get the drive out. It's super-neatly tucked away and fixed, firmly, with a couple of screws, one of which appears to be accessible only by dismantling the entire case.

That would involve opening the one and only section that has a "Warranty void if opened" sticker, which seemed like it might be a bad idea, seeing as how I was about to return it under warranty. To get around it, there was even a moment when I was contemplating running cables to the drive from one PC while it was still installed in the other and trying to get into the files that way... but then I had an unusual moment of clarity and realised what a fucking stupid idea that would be and didn't do it.

While I was fiddling around in the case, trying to get to the last screw, I removed the PSU, although I didn't disconnect it. I also pulled the connectors out of the hard drive but I'd also done that yesterday and it had no effect on anything then. Those, as far as I know, are the only things I did. 

If I was a sensible person, I'd have left it that and gone back to the replacement machine but I'm pathologically incapable of letting things lie in these situations. I can't help thinking "I wonder if..." Since it only meant plugging a couple of cables into the back, I connected the dead PC to the monitor (Via the integrated graphics port since the GPU was already in the other machine.) and powered it up, just to see what would happen.

And it worked.

Well, kinda. At least the monitor received a signal, which is more than I could get it to do in four hours of fiddling with it yesterday. 

It didn't exactly log in. It did that thing where it told me there was a problem and it was fixing it. Then it told me it couldn't fix it so it offered me a couple more options to try. I plugged in a keyboard and mouse, connected it back up to the network and after a couple more "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" moments it offered me some more choices, one of which was just to start Windows and see what happened. 

So I did. And it worked. Again, only not kinda this time. It actually, properly worked.

I immediately set about changing the video drivers. That was what stopped the replacement PC sending a signal yesterday, right after I updated it to the latest GeForce drivers. I had them down as #1 suspect. 

I was in on the integrated graphics, though, and those are Radeon. But as it happens, I've been getting an error message about them every time I log in pretty much since I bought the machine. I assumed it was because I was using an Nvidia GPU and there was some kind of minor conflict but now it was still doing it without the card even being in the case... 

So I updated the Radeon drivers and the message went away. How about that? Who'd have thought? Thing must have shipped with the wrong drivers to begin with, although the ones it was using did still work.

Next. I re-installed the GeForce 4060 and went to roll back the drivers to the previous ones that used to work just fine, only the roll-back option was greyed out. So I went to Nvidia's website, picked one from a month ago, before the problems started, and installed that instead. Then I went into Windows Defender and added all the individual Neverness .exe files to the whitelist and the whole folder to the Exception list just to be on the safe side.

Finally, I logged into the game, just to see what would happen. It's a always a thrill ride around here, I can tell you.

It was a new installation on the external SDD. I uninstalled and reinstalled yesterday, when I was trying to get it to run over there - without success, I might add - and then I played NTE for about twenty minutes. 

The final test came when I logged out, of course. That's when the trouble was going to start, if there was any coming.

But this time nothing bad happened. I hung around for a while, waiting. Still nothing. I read a few blogs. Still nothing.  Then started this one and I'd been at it a while before it was time for tea. I powered the machine down - another test of sorts - then I came back an hour later and powered it on again. 

And it worked. Normally. No halts, error messages or crashes. Here I am now, typing the last couple of paragraphs and everything still seems fine.

I have no clue what got me in. I don't know if any of the changes I've made will mean I can stay. It might be a permanent fix or tomorrow I might be back where I started. I'd be a lot happier if I knew how I managed to get the thing working again But I'll take the win anyway. I was not looking forward to boxing the thing up and sending it off so anything that means I don't have to bother is good with me.

I really hope this is the last time I'll be posting about computer issues, at least for a while. I wouldn't count on it, though. Remember the old superstition about things only work when you give up trying to make things happen and start complaining about it instead?. It used to be a meme in EverQuest back before there were memes, particularly when people were trying to spawn the Ancient Cyclops for the J-Boots quest.

Funny how often it seems to happen that way, isn't it?

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? 

Turning Back Time And Facing The Future All At Once

Just a very short post to say my old PC finally died. And I'm posting this from my even older PC. 

I forget exactly how old the newer old one was. I found the invoice for it just a few months ago but I still can't recall the exact date, except that I remember thinking it was even longer ago than I expected. I want to say I bought in 2016, which would make it getting on for ten years old but it might be a couple of years either side of that.

It was old, anyway. It's certainly been the longest-lasting PC I've ever owned. I bought it from Overclockers, who build a finished machine from a base model according to your selections. The older machine I'm using now was also from them. They're excellent and I highly recommend them although they're now so focused on the high-end they're no longer much use to me.

At the time, I ordered two identical machines, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss. Hers died last month so it's like they were one of those couples, married a lifetime and as soon as one goes, the other follows on in a moment.

They both went the same way, too. I have no idea what killed them. If I did, I might have been able to fix it. A lot of PCs we've had have "died" and then come back to life after I gave them some kind of Frankensteinian jump-start. I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to google and watch YouTube. Plus I know how to do comparative testing. Together, that'll fix a lot of things.

But not if the machine won't turn on at all. That's what happened to both of them. The first time, when Mrs. Bhagpuss's machine stopped, I did the first, most obvious thing and tried a different power lead. There was a bang and a flash and a small puff of smoke came out the back. I took that as a hint and gave up.

Given the age of the machine and the fact that Mrs Bhagpuss, having come out the far side of her twenty-five year-long gaming phase, is extremely unlikely to need a PC capable of playing anything more demanding than Candy Crush, I didn't bother pursuing it any further. 

Replacing it seemed like a much better option, especially since neither machine was capable of running Windows 11. We had both of them authorized to receive security updates to Windows 10 for another year but we'd already decided we'd need to buy replacements next year so it was just a question of bringing the date forward.

It was very easy to find something suitable for Mrs Bhagpuss. We got one of those clever, new mini-computers, small enough to stick in your pocket. Literally. The main downside is that you can't really add or upgrade anything inside but in the ten or whatever it was years she'd had her last computer, we'd never had recourse to install a single new or alternate component so it didn't seem like it would be an issue. 

She was using a very old monitor because her "new" one, itself pretty long in the tooth, died a year or two back (Anyone sensing a theme developing here?) so we got a new one of those as well, plus a couple of odds and ends and the whole lot came to less than £300. The PC straps to the back of the monitor so you can't even see it and the whole thing has worked perfectly so far. We're aware that these devices have a history of working until they don't, at which point there's not a lot you can do about it, but I figure if we get a couple of years out of this one we'll be ahead and it's under warranty for that long.

In the few days before it arrived, I had Mrs Bhagpuss set up, temporarily, on one of the old-old PCs I keep lying about. (Er... that are always to be found somewhere about the house, that is, not that I consistently misrepresent. English is hard.) That meant when mine died too, I was all ready to go with a short-term alternative.

First, though, I did try to see if I could resuscitate the better one. Since the last time I tried it sparks had shot out of the PSU, I figured rather than a new power cable I'd change out the supply itself.  I swapped in a spare one (Actually a better one. I don't know why it was in the oldest machine.) and... nothing happened. With some trepidation after the previous experience, I tried another power lead. Again, nothing.

A machine that appears to be incapable of powering up at all seems to me to be moving dangerously close to the territory of the electrician rather than the half-assed computer hobbyist. I don't mess with electrics.

Or maybe it was the power switch itself. Or one of the internal cables. Really, it's beyond my ability even to guess, let alone to fix.

And as said, I was going to have to replace it sooner rather than later anyway so my motivation to start learning new, difficult things was very low. Plus, I have a working laptop, so it's not like I was going to be offline.

Still, I prefer to sit at a desk to write these posts and I would like to keep playing the few games I still play these days. So I swapped everything that mattered out of the old machine into the even older one, which was three disk drives including the SSD with the OS on it and the graphics card. I'd have swapped the RAM and the CPU too only the Motherboard wouldn't take either.

To my surprise, everything just worked. Immediately. I've been using it for a day and a half now and for everyday use, there's no discernible difference. Well, okay, it's very slightly slower and it boots up a little oddly but other than that things are pretty much back to how they were.

For web browsing and media and blogging, that is. But what about gaming? Well, it is the same machine I used to play EverQuest II on back in the day so I was optimistic that, at least, would work, especially with the RTX 4060 to do some of the heavy lifting. 

And EQII does work. At least, I can log in and do my Overseer missions, which is about all I was doing anyway. Zoning takes a while and I haven't tried fighting anything yet but I'm fairly sure it would be fine. [Edit: After I published this, I played a little more EQII and ended up in a raid, doing the new, pre-expansion Public Quest in Enchanted Lands. No problems at all. Smooth as butter.]

I can't imagine this set-up will run Wuthering Waves or Blue Protocol or any of the new games I like, though. I mean, the CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 from 2009 and I'm back down to 8GB Ram. I guess I could try it and see...

Well, as the screenshots in the post prove, all of which I took after I wrote that last paragraph, it is possible. But only just. With Wuthering Waves, it took forever to log in and the only viable graphic setting was Ultra Performance. Everything above was a slideshow.

With that, though, I could move around and even fight although I wouldn't say it was fun. The game does still look great even on the lowest settings, though.

But then, I haven't actually been playing WW much lately, have I? Or at all. I should have. I wanted to. But I haven't. So I'm not missing much there that I wasn't missing anyway. 

I was playing BP:SR though. So how does that run?

Okay, actually. Pretty solid, in fact. And on "High" graphics too. Eminently playable. 

And as for all those Steam demos and point and click adventures, I haven't done any testing I'm pretty sure they'd run just fine. Most of them would run on the integrated graphics of my laptop.

So I guess I don't need to make any snap decisions. I can carry on like this for a while. Which is just as well because it's beginning to occur to me that although I play a lot of games and write about a lot more, I don't really have the same needs as a typical "gamer", not when it comes to the quality of equipment I play them on. 

All the reddit threads and reviews I read seem to assume I'm going to want to play the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 on the best settings at the highest resolutions or be ready for GTA6 when it comes out whereas I'm far more likely to be playing the latest mobile port on recommended settings at 1080p. Buying a proper gaming PC for what I'd use it for would be akin to buying a Ferrari to pootle along to the supermarket for the weekly shop. 

For the last three or four changes of PC, I've generally tried to come in somewhere around the low end of mid-range, which has always been plenty, but given that I've been doing very well with a machine that was that a decade ago - and now I'm getting by on one from five years before that - it's a pretty safe bet that even an entry-level gaming PC would put me at least back where I was and most likely a little bit ahead. (I did look at the possibility of building a PC from scratch and I'm sure I could do it but I just don't want the fuss.)

If I also swap in some of the bits and pieces I already have then that machine is going to be significantly above entry level and well above what I've been using for the last many years. I really can't see why I need anything pokier. I just have to make sure I get something with a motherboard that will take the GPU and extra RAM I already have and also, if possible, be good for another round of upgrades in a few years.

My plan, which may not survive contact with my patience, is to wait until Black Friday to see if any suitable bargains turn up. It would be very annoying to buy something now and then see it going for fifty or a hundred pounds less a few weeks later. For the time being, though, I shall muddle along as best I can. We'll have to see how it goes.

Also, that really wasn't "just a very short post", was it? Or a post at all, come to that. More like me talking out loud to myself. Thank you for listening!

Maybe You Just Need To Sleep On It?

Before we get started, some background. This post is emblematic of the problems I was talking about the other day, the kind that can arise when you write posts ahead of publication. I only wrote this yesterday but it's already out of date in some key respects and it would be misleading if I just posted it without an update.

I could have just put the new information in a postscript but that would allow more negativity to accumulate than now seems appropriate, so here's the coda in the preamble. It'll all make sense eventually. Probably.

I logged in to Steam about an hour ago and there was a small update to New World. Once that had processed, I was able to log into the game with no issues at all. I was also able to play completely normally, with no errors or interruptions. 

It looks like most of the problems I was having yesterday related to the big update a couple of days ago. Just my luck to try and come back right after a major content drop. I should have realised. It's not like Amazon don't have a history with this kind of thing.

Everything ran smooth as silk at "High" settings with FPS capped at 60. I didn't try it at "Very High/Unlimited" because it looked and played perfectly well as it was but I'm sure that would have been fine, too. The fans on my new card barely needed to turn. As a test, I can finally say it was extremely successful. I'm very pleased indeed.

I didn't stay long. Typically, now the hardware and the software were all co-operating, the connection to the US East server I play on was very poor. Nothing I can do about that other than move to an EU server and that's not happening. It's usually fine, anyway. This was an exception.

I did hang around long enough to visit my house in Mourningdale and pay the outstanding rent. I remember that used to seem quite onerous but now it looks to be trivial. It was about a hundred gold and I have over 33k from doing pretty much nothing. I spent a pleasant few minutes putting all the furniture I'd acquired in appropriate rooms and then I logged out to finish up this post. 

Everything after the next picture is what I wrote yesterday. Once you've finished it, what you just read will make a lot more sense!

I thought I might as well write a post to kill time while I wait for Steam to verify my New World installation for the second time this afternoon. I should say my New World re-installation. Verifying the first installation really didn't help and I don't imagine verifying this one will, either.

Back up. Why am I trying to play New World? Good question. It's not because of the upcoming Rise of the Angry Earth expansion, interesting though it sounds. I don't actually have any particular desire to go back to Aeternum at the moment. I'm more than busy enough in Dawnlands.

No, I just wanted to use New World to test my new graphics card. As I promised (Myself.) I have indeed bought an upgrade to my extremely reliable but even more extremely outdated Zotac GeForce GTX960, the card that came with this PC, when I bought it about six years ago.

Given that it was barely a mid-range card even then, it's astonishing how well it's lasted. Until recently, it ran every game I threw at it and mostly it ran them well, even when the minimum spec said I shouldn't even bother trying. It's still soldiering on. If I was just going to carry on playing the same games I'm playing now, I wouldn't need to change it.

Of late, though, it's becoming obvious that soon newer games won't be an option, even at low settings. I don't tend to play the most graphically intense kinds of games but it's getting to the point where even new MMORPGs and survival games are starting to look like they might be to much for my old card to handle. 

I was aware it might be a waste of time upgrading the card if it just shifted the problem to my equally aging processor, but I ran a few tests and apparently I got lucky there. My CPU over-performs for what's expected of it. If it does need to be replaced at some point, my motherboard can take something quite a bit better but for now it looks as though I can stick with what I have and still get full benefit from a new GPU.

I've been through this upgrade cycle before - swapping out key components mid-cycle before replacing the whole lot with a new machine - but last time I did it, the whole life of that PC, including upgrades, was shorter than this one's already lasted unchanged. If nothing actually fails then, with the overhead for improvement still open to me, I might get a full decade out of it, which would be amazing.

Because it's been so long since I bought it, just about any new card would have been an upgrade. I could have saved myself some money and picked up something from a couple of generations back . Given the above history, though, I thought I'd take the plunge and buy something up-to-date.

Obviously, I'm talking no more than mid-range, at best. Let's not get carried away. I was going to get a GeForce RTX 3060, which would have been a huge upgrade, but I prevaricated for so long, by the time I finally got my wallet out that card had been superceded by the 4060.

I read a bunch of reviews and it seemed that while the 3060 had had a pretty good reputation, the 4060 wasn't seen as a huge step up. It seemed it was a very decent card, just not sufficiently advanced in any way to justify being marketed as the next generation the four-zero prefix implied.

Hah! Who cares? It's the fourth generation of that line after the one I'd be upgrading from! It might only be 15-17% better than 3060 and that might not be enough for someone to consider trading them out but for me it would be like swapping a mule for a moon-rocket! Okay, maybe not quite, but it would be a hell of an upgrade all the same.

The 4060s I was checking out weren't a lot more expensive than the 3060 I'd had my eye on so it made no sense to go for the older one. I also found out that the 4060 was significantly less demanding on power than the 3060, meaning I wouldn't even need to look at upgrading my PSU, and it was smaller, which would mean I wouldn't have to do any fiddling to get it in the case. The 4060 is also optimized for 1080p gaming, which is a real positive in my view. The 3060 is supposedly better for 4k, but I don't have a 4k monitor and I have no intention of getting one. 

I was even enough on the ball to read some specific reviews for the exact makes and models, which led me to buy an "MSI GeForce RTX 4060 VENTUS 2X BLACK 8G OC", for which I paid more than I've ever paid for any computer component in my life. I got it from Amazon because it was easy and convenient and they could deliver it by 1pm the next day but in fact I checked a lot of places and it was pretty much the same price everywhere, give or take a few quid.

It came this morning, complete with a rigmarole where I had to give the delivery guy a six digit code that had been sent to me by email. Since he arrived about five minutes after I'd gotten up, I hadn't even switched my PC on yet, let alone checked my email but he was very patient and waited for me to get myself together.

A new graphics card is just about the easiest component to swap out but I still managed to have to do it twice because I tried to put the fixing screw in backwards. That wasn't a mistake. I thought it would work better that way. It didn't. 

Since my previous card was also a GeForce, the drivers I already had were fine. They were even up to date. The card worked perfectly out of the box. I ran some benchmarks and was very happy to see that my new card was considered more than capable of running pretty much anything currently available. All that remained was to try it out.

And that's where my problems began. For one thing, as I said, my old card had been doing a very good job of playing all the games I wanted to play right now. I was mostly upgrading so I could play new games - games I don't yet have. I logged into a couple of things but naturally I couldn't tell any difference. 

I could have started jacking up the quality to see what happened. I do tend to play a lot of games below the maximum graphical settings. But instead I thought of New World.

My GTX960 could run New World but it really hated doing it. After a while the whole box would heat up and start to make some alarming noises. I had to keep the graphics on a low setting and even then I didn't like to play for much more than an hour at a time. 

That was why I started playing New World on GeForce Now, a solution that allowed me to play at higher settings without my PC bursting into flames, but which involved jumping through an annoying extra set of hoops every time I wanted to play, including sometimes having to wait in a queue for a not insignificant amount of time. It also meant, somewhat ironically, that I could still only play for an hour at a stretch because that's what non-subscribers get and I wasn't about to pay a subscription just to play a free game.

Of course, playing on GeForce Now meant I hadn't needed to update New World on Steam for about a year and a half. When I came to do it today there were more than 36GB of files to download. That took a while.

Once the game was patched I went to log in and... not much happened. It took what seemed like forever but was actually about fifteen minutes before I could even see my character. Since I last played there'd been some server merges but I didn't much care about that. My houses were safe, apparently, apart from any I might have had in First Light, which was now under occupation by the Angry Earth.

As far as I could remember I didn't have a house in First Light so that was okay. I logged my character in and found myself in what was the new area this time last year, Brimstone Sands. I haven't played since November. I turned the graphics up as high as they go and started to move around but unfortunately my PC was having other ideas.

The new card was absolutely fine as far as I could tell. It was bloody Steam messing about, as per usual. I have a lot of issues with Steam acting like a needy child and wanting attention. I've disabled just about every automatic process I can find but it always manages to be up to something I'd rather it wasn't.

Eventually it started to settle down and I was able to begin moving about again. I collected all the presents that had piled up in my Claim window and then I opened them all. Mostly they seemed to contain materials, few of which I had any memory of what to do with, but there was some furniture in there as well. That was a bit more interesting.

I took a couple of screenshots and started to head out of town, whereupon the game popped up a message telling me I was missing a file and that was the end of that. I closed the client and had Steam do a full file check, which found three files absent or corrupted. It assured me these had now been found and installed so I logged in again.

This time I almost made it to the corner of the street before the game told me it suspected I was doing something suspicious and kicked me out again. Apparently this is a common New World error although I've never seen it before.

Checking, it seems the error is usually related to missing files. Since I'd just done a file check and been told all was in order, I decided to do a full re-install. That turned out to be about 66GB and looked like it was going to take quite a while so I went downstairs and prepped a salad and put the topping on the pizza for later.

When I came back, Steam had closed and my whole PC was unuseable. Something had obviously gone wrong. It looked as though the PC was doing some work on itself so I waited for it to finish. And waited. And waited. 

After about a quarter of an hour I lost patience and shut it down. It started up okay so I opened Steam and carried on downloading from where it had crashed, which was about half-way. That took a while, during which I caught up with all the "End of Blaugust" posts I'd missed. Once the re-install had finished I logged in yet again.

It went much faster and more smoothly this time, until I tried to log my character into the world, at which point I was told another file was missing. FFS! I ran the file checker again. This time there were six files missing. Re-installing the whole game had managed to make things twice as bad!

Supposedly the file check had automatically located and installed the missing files but it said that last time. Just to be sure, I ran it again. This time it came up 100% complete.

So I crossed my fingers and went again and guess what? I'm still waiting. This time I got as far as  character log-in but the game has just hung there for fifteen minutes with the HDD whirring away. I'm wondering if it might an issue with the drive. Next plan would be to reinstall New World on a different HDD and see if that makes a difference. 

Or I could just quit while I'm behind and play something that actually works. I've wasted over five hours on this now and all I wanted to do was try out my new card. I'm sure there must be some other game I could use to do that. 

I just got an email telling me Horizon: Zero Dawn is 67% off right now. That was one I thought my PC would balk at. Maybe now's the time to give it a try...

Thief Of Time

It finally happened! I missed a day! The daily posting streak that lasted more than eight months has come to an end at last. 

It wasn't by choice but I can't say I'm sorry. I don't have an addictive personality but I do hate to break a streak. That's how I gave up drinking without even meaning to.

Posting daily hadn't been any kind of a problem until we got the puppy but these last few weeks have been something of a challenge, as must have been obvious in the quality, or lack thereof, of some of the posts. I wasn't expecting looking after a puppy to bite quite so voraciously into my leisure time. With me only working a couple of days a week there's certainly plenty of it. Even so, it turns out it's quite hard to do anything much with a dog asleep on your lap.

Really, though, it's been gaming that's taken the hit, not blogging. I've dropped from several hours a day to maybe a couple, if I'm lucky.  Most of what I'm doing is dailies and point and click adventures. It doesn't offer an enormous amount of inspiration for posts... although you'd be surprised what I can spin up out of almost nothing. Or, I guess, as a regular reader, you probably wouldn't.

Despite all of that, I was determined to keep the streak going, even though of late I've been cutting it very fine, not starting until eight or nine in the evening. That's what I was doing last night, when Windows 10 piped up to tell me there'd been a calamitous error and it would have to go and lie down in a darkened room for a while.

I was literally halfway through a short and boring post about Overseer in EverQuest II (Which we'll still be getting, so don't start cheering just yet.) when the whole thing shuddered and shook, then disappeared. It's taken me until a couple of hours ago to get things up and running again.

I still have no idea what went wrong but I know what happened afterwards. My PC turned into a time machine and took a trip back to 2016. 

It was very weird. The PC closed down and restarted and when it came back my desktop was completely different. Not only had the screen resolution reverted to something I haven't used for about fifteen years, there were only about a third as many icons and most of those were different, some for things I didn't even recognize.

To cut to the chase, after a some digging around in the debris I discovered all three of my hard drives had swapped letters. The E drive had turned into the D drive and D was now C. 

As it happens, the Drive Formerly Known As D used to be the C drive in a previous PC. I'd added it to the new one a few years back. I had three bays, so why not? I just popped it in as it was and I've been happily using it ever since. 

It never really occured to me that it had a full installation of Windows 10 on it. When the drives swapped names after The Incident, the entire operation switched across on reboot, kicking me out of everything I'd been logged into, removing all my saved logins and passwords and generally making it impossible to do pretty much anything.

Oh, and The Incident, whatever it was, also completely removed all the graphic drivers along with all the Ethernet drivers and a bunch of other stuff as well, some of which I've probably yet to discover. It was not pretty, I'll tell you that much.

It was also late and for once I managed to act like an adult. Instead of either trying to get a post up using my laptop or staying up half the night trying to fix things I just shut the whole lot down and went to bed. As I said at the start, if I'm honest, I was relieved to have a good reason to miss a day's posting.

This morning I spent several hours trying any number of possible fixes with no success at all until just before lunch I finally managed to get the Ethernet adapter working again. It really helped a lot, being able to look things up and download stuff on the PC I was trying to fix rather than having to do it on the laptop or my Kindle Fire.

None of the obvious solutions, like just renaming the drives, changing the boot order or physically swapping them over worked. The C drive refused to change its name, I couldn't even find the boot protocols and the motherboard doesn't care which slot the C drive is in. 

Reinstalling Windows didn't work because I couldn't make a boot disk thanks to the laptop and an older PC I happen to have lying around refusing point-blank to believe I have admin rights, even though it literally says right there on the screen that I do. Several other bright ideas turned out to be dim. I was starting to get annoyed.

What turned the tide was finding the original installation DVD for the motherboard and using it to reinstall every driver and then physically removing the graphics card and re-seating it in the other PCI slot. Even after the drivers were all installed, for some reason it was only moving the graphics card that got me back online. I have no idea why.

After that I decided to accept the new normal and just give the old/new C drive permanent status. Not that I had much choice. It took me the rest of the afternoon to copy all of the necessary files to recreate something as close as possible to my old profile in both Windows and Firefox. 

It involved a lot of security checks and verification codes, most of which got sent to devices that either I no longer use or own. Even the ones I do use seemed to be having problems of their own. I really need to get all of that sorted out. It's a perpetual nuisance. 

It was not a fun time but as I type this I'm pleased to say things are near enough back to where they were twenty-four hours ago. The only concern is that I still have absolutely no clue what original failure was about so it could very easily happen again at any time.

The upside is that everything now seems to work a lot faster. It had been bogging down horribly for quite a while and I'd been thinking of doing something about it. Now I can forget it again!

As for the blog, I am going to take this opportunity to stop posting daily. Or rather to stop feeling I have to post daily. If I have things to post, I'll post them but I'll probably go back to my old pattern of mostly not posting on work days. 

Of course, there are only two work days in my work week so that still leaves plenty of time! No-one's safe just yet!