Head In A Hole

There's a new movie out just now called The Sheep Detectives. In it, a bunch of sheep - alright, a flock of sheep then, if you want to be pedantic about it - investigate the mystery of the murder of the farmer who owns them. They know how to do this because the farmer was in the habit of reading them detective stories in the evening because that's a thing farmers do, just like sheep solve murder mysteries. Frankly the one is about as likely as the other.

I watched the trailer last week and it looked surprisingly amusing. By chance, the novel on which it's based came into my hands at work a few days later. I had a look at that as well and it seemed like it would be a fun read.

Do not let any of this supposed evidence fool you into thinking sheep are clever, though. This are fictional sheep. Real sheep are not so smart.

Not that I'm saying sheep are thick. Most animals are a lot more intelligent than they're given credit for and I'm sure sheep, collectively and individually, have the capacity for all kinds of wickedly canny mischief you might not imagine they were capable of. Anecdotal experience of all kinds of domestic animals suggest that's likely to be true. 

I can tell you a couple of things the average sheep is not bright enough to work out for herself, though:

1. It's a bad idea to put your head through a hole in a fence.
2. How to get your head out again if you ignored rule #1.

When Mrs Bhagpuss and I got up this morning, it looked like being a reasonably pleasant spring day. We neither of us had anything pressing to be getting on with, so we thought it might be a nice idea to take a flask of coffee and a couple of apples and go sit on top of a five thousand year old burial mound, since we happened to have one handy nearby.

Stony Littleton Long Barrow is one of the finest surviving examples of a neolithic stone and earth tomb anywhere in Britain but it's not exactly on any tourist trail. There are no signs to direct you there and even if you have an idea where it is, to get to it you have to drive down a single track road with no passing places. 

When you get there, there's a parking space for about four cars and the enterprising small farmer opposite (I mean he farms on a small scale, not that he's the size of a Borrower.) has put out a couple of benches. You can buy an ice cream from him and sit on one of the benches to eat it, assuming he happens to have opened his little hut that day.

We've been there a few times. It's a lovely walk, over the bridge and up the long hill to the barrow. Once there, you have a fine view of the surrounding countryside, which is to say some fields, some more fields and some more fields after that. 

The barrow itself is amazing. I'd show you a photograph but I didn't take any today and I can't find any of the ones I've taken on previous visits. I bet it's on the internet though. Just hold on moment... Ah yes, here's the English Heritage page. And it's on Wikipedia. 

And up there's a picture of the sign at the site itself. I took that this morning, when I thought I might be writing this post.

Take my word for it, anyway. The barrow's a lot more impressive in person than in photographs because you can crouch down and shuffle inside it and get an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia even if you don't normally have a problem with confined spaces. It's worth the long walk up the hill just for the relief of getting out of the damn thing and back into the sunshine.

But this isn't really a post about the barrow. It's about the walk back. 

We had Beryl with us but she was on her lead most of the time because the entire hillside as far as you could see in any direction was rife with sheep. There are often sheep there but this was way more sheep than usual. 

I quite like sheep. They look decorative, they're non-threatening and they nearly always get out of the way when they see you coming. Not like cows, which sometimes express a disturbing degree of interest and have been know, all too frequently, to trample people to death. My aunt and uncle once had to jump into a hedge to avoid being trampled. They're both dead now, although not from bovine trampling, I'm pleased to say.

As for horses... do not get me started on horses. I grew up with horses in the fields next to my house and
you do not want to go into any field that has horses in it, trust me. Horses have a very peculiar sense of humor, which includes running at people as fast as they can to see how they react. Then they stand there and laugh at you when you run away or fall over. At least they do if you're lucky. If not, they trample you, too.

So much for horses and cows. Sheep, though, sheep are fine, so long as you don't have a dog with you. Not that the sheep go for the dog. More the dog goes for the sheep and it all ends in tears and/or a fatality, usually for the sheep but sometimes for the dog, if the farmer happens to be out and about and has brought his gun and in my experience no self-respecting farmer leaves the house without a gun.

Beryl is not a dog for running after anything bigger than a squirrel and sheep are the size to her that elephants would be to us so we're not worried about her doing them any actual harm. Still, some sheep get scared by any dog, even small ones, the way elephants are supposedly scared of mice and we don't want to scare the sheep or get Beryl shot so she's always on her lead if sheep are around.

On the way back, though, we went along a high ridge and the sheep were hundreds of yards away along the bottom of the valley so we let her amble along behind us for a while until I spotted one, lone sheep ahead of us, apparently grazing in the hedge. There's always one that has to be different.

I put Beryl back on her lead and we were about to go around the sheep when we realized this sheep wasn't being different. This sheep was stuck.

The dim-witted creature had apparently tried to reach some particularly tasty leaf just out of reach in the hedge and now it had its head firmly wedged in a square of wire. As we got near, it thrashed about a bit and tried to force its way further into the hedge, which wasn't a great plan. Mrs Bhagpuss took control of Beryl, who was starting to express some interest, and I went to see if I could unstick the poor creature.

Sheep aren't exactly wild about about letting people they don't know come within arm's reach but this one didn't have a lot of choice. I've rarely had the opportunity to test it before but it seems as though, if they really can't get away, they go completely still, presumably in the hope of being taken for a particularly fuzzy boulder. Or maybe it was my soothing tone.

The sheep stood dead still and let me pull her head this way and that, even move her ears about, as I tried to see if there was any way I could maneuver her loose. There was not. I bent the wire as far in all directions as it would go but it was obvious the head that had gone in with sharp end first was not coming back out with the thick end leading. Same principle as a lobster pot, presumably.

We spent a while thinking about it but there was clearly no way to shift the sheep without a pair of wire-cutters. We decided we'd best leave the sheep be and see if we could find the farmer to let them know. We were pretty sure the small farm at the bottom of the hill had nothing to do with the sheep on the hills but there was another big house right in the fields where the sheep were roaming so we carried on down the path to to try there.

That turned out to be a bust, No-one home but a dog. I don't think is was a sheepdog, either, although I only heard it barking.

We worked out way back to where we began and I tried
the other farm. The one that sells the ice-cream. There was someone there but as we'd suspected they didn't own the sheep. Or any sheep. 

Still, even being the nearest person to some sheep comes with its own responsibilities. The chap's face did fall a bit when I explained the problem. "Oh, not again..." he said. 

He cheered up a bit when I asked him if he had a pair of wire-cutters I could borrow. "I don't mind going back up and cutting her loose if you can lend me a pair", I said, although what I was really thinking was "What a jolly jape! I hope he lets me do it!" In my head, I was nine years old and it was an Enid Blyton story...

The farmer (Not really a farmer at all, in fact, just someone with a couple of alpacas and a horse in a field behind his house. Yes, alpacas. Surprisingly common around these parts...) offered Mrs Bhagpuss a coffee while she waited and I trudged back up the hill to the sheep which, when I finally got there, was no more glad to see me than it was before.

Once it had calmed down a bit and resigned itself to being eaten by wolves or whatever it thought was going to happen, I was able to cut through the fence-wire with the cutters and watch the sheep just stand there as if nothing had changed. 

It turned out she wasn't just being extra-specially suspicious or even extraordinarily dim; she'd also managed to get some wool on her head wound round a strand of barbed wire because whoever fenced the field obviously though a thick hedge and a sturdy fence didn't make it nearly secure enough, so they'd run a strand of barbed wire between the two as well, just to be on the safe side.

I can tell you now that you can't cut wool with wire cutters. Or I can't, anyway. Luckily, with a bit of encouragement the sheep gave a mighty shake of her head and tugged herself loose. Then she scampered off, bleating. 

It would be nice to think she was saying thank-you but she bloody well wasn't. She never looked my way once, just towards the rest of her pals, all of whom had abandoned her to her fate without a second thought. She was either yelling at them to ask what the hell they thought they were playing at or trying to warn them about the crazy human with the metal claws.

For me, it was back down the hill to return the wire-cutters and accept a cup of coffee. Beryl and Mrs Bhagpuss had watched the whole thing from a comfortable distance. Beryl, reportedly, was not impressed with my heroism, although apparently she was quite interested to see me go and come back.

Dogs are easily amused. Sheep are dim. Life goes on. 

Dog Day Afternoon - AQ3D Style

OK, it was Dog Day Morning for me but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it. And anyway, it was actually last night when I spotted that AdventureQuest 3D was celebrating something called Dog Day.

My reaction to the news was mixed. I was happy to find out there was such a thing as Dog Day but also uncomfortably aware I was going to have to do something about it. I mean, I covered Cat Day when they ran an event for that. Beryl would never forgive me if I did any less for dogs.

The problem is, I don't really play AQ3D. I haven't even been logging in to open the free daily loot chests for weeks. I was saving up the cash shop currency you get for doing that so I could buy something nice for the house I never visit but then I spent it all on my spiffy new catsuit (Which looks great, by the way.) and that pretty much killed my motivation to carry on.

Since I'd spent almost all my magic money, and assuming the dog event was likely to run along very similar lines to the one for cats, I didn't think there'd be much chance of my getting a full set of dog cosplay gear but I thought maybe there'd be something I could afford with whatever change I had left from last time. Anyway, I knew I had to write about the damn thing so after we got back from walking Beryl and feeding the crows this morning, I logged into the game to see what my options might be. 

Better than I expected, as it turned out. 

I know it's unlikely anyone who's going to read this will be thinking of doing the event so there's no point going into a whole lot of detail about how the event works. It is indeed basically the same as the cat one, as expected, anyway.

There's a boss fight which no-one ever seems to be doing when I log in. The new dog boss stands right next to the old cat boss because both events are running simultaneously. I was half hoping the Vicious Cat and the Big Dog (Those are their boss names. Scaary!) would start scrapping with each other but no such luck.

There's a selection of dog-themed onesies, hoods and tails on both the pet vendor and on Not Alma, who has now added Dog? to her species subscript alongside Cat? just to make her even weirder than usual. All of those were well out of my price range considering that, after my cataclysmic spending spree I only had just over a hundred Dragon Crystals left.

Luckily, before logging in, I had taken the trouble to read the notes for the event and I remembered seeing something about house items. A flip through the various tabs showed me several of those, including a kennel, a feeding bowl and several dogs, all dozing in convincingly doglike poses.

None of them were very expensive but they were on sale for a variety of currencies, some of which I had, some I didn't. I had the right ones for the dog sleeping on her back and for a feeding bowl so I bought those. I also checked the cat tab and bought a sleeping black cat as well. If my new dog is going to be home alone, she's going to want someone to play with and I am very much Team Cat and Dog these days..

On that note, one new addition that came with dog day is a voting booth where you can vote for your preferred pet - Dog or Cat. The rubric explains, somewhat unecessarily I felt, that the vote is confidential and all in fun. I'm not sure how it could have been otherwise, although I suppose some kind of  flag could have appeared over your head as you cast your vote. It's happened before. Remember Evon vs Kiel?

I dithered for a while over which way to vote. Until we got Beryl I wouldn't have given it a second's thought. I was Team Cat for more than sixty years. Now, though... In the end I opted not to vote at all, which makes something of a mockery of the Just For Fun theory. I might be taking all of this a little too seriously but then I get like that with votes in video games. Real life voting is so much more straightforward.

After that, I thought about logging out. I'd done my duty to dogdom and I had enough for the post. I had a feeling there was more, though, so I looked around and found Aria the Pet Shop owner had a quest marker up.

Again, to save time I won't go through the details. The important part is that there's a quest to get a pet dog called Klaus. Pretty sure he's a German Shepherd. The quest is a six-parter, which honestly is really short for this game. Aria has another non-event quest to get a dog called Fluffy that has thirty-five stages (!)

Klaus's quest looks easy as well as short so I'm hoping to find time to finish it. It would have been nice to have done it in time for this post but we can't always get what we want.

Other than that, I think I'm probably done with both cats and dogs in AQ3D for now. It's a very time-consuming game and I'm trying not to get sucked into any of its many time-sinks. On the other hand, there is also a bonus XP event going on right now as well and I did ding doing quests for Aria this morning...

And this is how they suck you in!

And Your Little Dog Too

Even though I work in a bookshop I almost never buy new books. Okay, sometimes. I did buy the new Rainbow Rowell last week but only because it was signed and she has such a nice signature. And I didn't pay actual money for it. Just magic money I got for free because I have some of that.

In fact, thinking about it, I doubt I've spent real, out of my pocket, in cash or by card, out of my bank account money on a book for a decade. Maybe two decades. And even before I worked in a bookshop I very, very rarely went into one and if I did even more rarely came out with a book.

All my life, most of my book-buying has been done on the cheap or for free. I've tended to avoid used book stores, or second-hand bookshops as they were called when I was growing up, almost as much as shops selling new books because the owners are often unpredictable and the prices wildly inflated.

I've always preferred to get my books from charity shops (Thrift stores for the American reader.) or car boot sales (Yard sales I guess is the US equivalent although it's not quite the same thing.) Remaindered bookstores used to be an option, too, but you don't see those so much any more. 

On the other hand, quite a few churches seem to have set aside an area where books donated by parishioners are sold for very small sums, so that's a relatively new source for me. Go in for the architecture, come out with a book. Churches don't have to be all about God. Or about God at all, apparently.

Those are all good sources of cheap books but why pay even that much when you could pay nothing at all? I'm drowning in free books at work but even if I wasn't a surprising number of the old, red telephone boxes have been re-purposed into repositories for given-away books looking to be re-homed. You're supposed to leave a book and take one although I don't think anyone's keeping track.

Even before I worked in the trade and when phone boxes still had phones in them, I used to get books for nothing. It's surprisingly easy to do. In the 'eighties, a friend of mine took over the editing of a small semi-pro comiczine. Either it already had a column reviewing Sci Fi and Fantasy books or he instituted one, I can't remember which, but he started getting review copies from publishers and pretty soon he had far more than he could cope with so he farmed them out to anyone willing to write reviews. If you contact publishers even now and tell them you write for some website or book blog they'll most likely send you stuff. They seem almost desperate to give the things away, sometimes.

I read a lot of books that way, books I would never have read otherwise and that's the big benefit of buying books the way I do. If you buy new you'll most likely get the latest by authors you like or those who've been recommended to you, either by friends or reviewers or - if they're doing their job properly - booksellers in the stores where you shop.

You can browse, of course, but because so very, very many books are published, even when they're still in print, outside of the obvious, you'll be lucky to run into a copy of any particular one on the shelves of your local bookstore Even in a big bookshop the range is limited to What's New, What Still Sells and Classics. Books are an iceberg. Most of them are invisible, forgotten, out of print, gone. 

Anyone who's hung around here for a while will likely know I choose chance over certainty. I prefer random drops in games to points systems where you save up and buy what you want. By and large, I'm less bothered about missing out on things I know I'd enjoy than I am about missing out on things I don't know about. 

If you look up to the right, you'll see the Inventory Full Mission Statement, which I'll wager many regular readers have never noticed. After all, it's barely readable in lilac on deep seagreen blue because I also cherish obfuscation.

I came up with it all the way back in 2011, when I named the blog Inventory Full and it sums up what I believe to be the Explorer's raison d'etre: Opening boxes, looking inside. I meant it almost literally back then but over the years it's expanded to become a mantra. 

It's why this blog has come to focus more on endless First Impressions of games I'll never stick with and long reviews of demos for games I'll never play in full. It's why the music posts are scattershot collections of apparently unrelated genres and artists. It's why so many posts start out seeming to be about one thing then end up being about something else entirely.

This is one of those posts. It starts off looking like it's going to be about books then it turns towards blogging before finally heading to where it was always meant to end up: Marilyn Monroe, her dog and Chappell Roan.

Marilyn Monroe is eternal. I was four years old when she died and by the time I was at college she'd been dead for almost twenty years but she was still on my wall along with Che Guevara and Humphrey Bogart, who were dead as well. Forty more years and I don't know if students still put up posters of Che and Bogie but I doubt it. Marilyn, though, shines ever on.

Because she's never far from my mind, when I saw a book in a charity shop last week with the entrancing title "The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe" I bought it immediately. The dog, who is real, was called Maf as shorthand for Mafia Honey, which is what Marilyn named him after Frank Sinatra gave him to her and you may read into that what you will.

I recommend the book, which is still in print. The author is Andrew O'Hagan and here's an interview he gave about it to The Paris Review in in 2011  which I also recommend. It's a lot shorter so there's no excuse for skipping it.

At this point you might imagine I would be about to review the book but I'm not. I will say it's funny, smart and over-written to the point of hilarity. I very much enjoyed it for what it is but even more for what it told me.

The author very clearly did a lot of research, something I often find off-putting but which, in this case, I found fascinating, Maf, like all dogs, reads minds and therefore knows all that everyone he's spent time with knows, meaning the book is stuffed full as a sausage with quotes, anecdotes and facts, many of which I did not already know.

Of all the new stories, the most fascinating to me was the tale of the Monroe Six. These were half a dozen adolescents in New York in the mid 'fifties, who took to following Marilyn everywhere she went. Rather than calling the police or going to the courts for a restraining order, Marilyn, perceiving they were different from the ordinary order of celebrity seeker, welcomed their attention. 

At the time, Marilyn was working on her stagecraft and also attending numerous celebrity events that had her traveling about the city, providing the Six with numerous opportunities to meet her. According to an excellent post at The Marilyn Report, referencing another piece in the French edition of Vanity Fair (Issue #105 if you want the original. In French, naturally.) she "called them by their first names whenever she met them, asked about their lives, and always agreed to pose with them". 

Not only was she gracious, she was unguarded to a degree that's hard to imagine now. Marilyn already knew from experience how grasping and greedy for attention fans could be and yet she not only made time to chat to the six teenagers and pose with them for pictures, she even "invited them upstairs for a soda in the apartment she had just rented with her new boyfriend, the novelist Arthur Miller."

If you need any proof that the world was very different then, there it is. I was struck most forcibly by the way things have changed since then by reports I was seeing on my news feeds at the same time I was reading about the Monroe Six concerning some things this summer's blow-up star, Chappel Roan, was saying on Tik Tok about "creepy behavior" by so-called fans.

It's worth reading - or better yet listening to - Chappell's rant in full. It's not even a rant. It's a considered, thoughtful, argument. She is clearly both right in calling out the kind of intrusive behavior she's concerned about and justified in highlighting the extent to which it has become - or at least is becoming - normalised.

Whether she'll be able to hold back that tide is another question. It'd be nice to think people would listen and maybe re-assess their attitude but then if they could do that they'd probably not be a problem in the first place. 

Chappel later expanded on her reasoning, saying "I want to love my life, be outside, giggle with my friends, go to the movie theater, feel safe, and do all the things every single person deserves to do."

It's hard to argue that's not a valid ambition. The chances of her being able to achieve it in a world where millions of people know her name and her face seem slim but I hope she can.

Marilyn Monroe in 1955 was both more famous than Chappell Roan and more recognizeable. It's quite amazing she was able to go about with such freedom even then although it's probably fair to say that New Yorkers might have been too cool to freak over a movie star. 

One advantage she had was that everyone who knew her knew her from how she appeared on film. When she would go out and about she'd wear a headscarf to cover her famous blonde hair and apparently that way she could walk right on by without being spotted. 

Marilyn was finessing the rift between public and private to her advantage. Chappell Roan only wishes she could: "When I’m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a work event, when I’m doing press…I am at work. Any other circumstance, I am not in work mode. I am clocked out." She looks as different - more different - in her regular make-up and clothes from her stage persona than Marilyn did in her headscarf but it's not helping. 

If it was the 1950s, Chappell could walk down your street and you'd never know it. But it isn't the 1950s. Her off-stage look is as well-documented as her on. She's in her street clothes in the videos she's made saying the things she's said. If you saw her, you'd know her.

Fame isn't a light you can switch on and off but then neither is recognizing a famous person in the street a license to behave like an ass, let alone like a sex-criminal. The Monroe Six figured that out and they were just fans in their teens. So should anyone else who isn't a sociopath. 

 

*** Some Notes On AI Used In This Post ***

The only AI here is the image at the head of the post. It was produced at NightCafe using Starlight XL. The prompt was "Marilyn Monroe's (small, white, fluffy dog 1.5), Mafia Honey, with Marilyn beside a swimming pool. (1950s line drawing 1.5)". All sliders were pushed right back to try and maximize adherence to the prompt. The numbers in brackets are supposed to give added importance to those elements although I may not have parsed that part properly.

Having obtained the result I wanted after several less than successful attempts with other image genearators and settings, I then ran it through the upscaler at NightCafe to increase the resolution. The original image had a second, weird-looking dog on the tiles behind Marilyn so, before I upscaled it, I used NightCafe's Selective Edit function to remove it. 

I was under the impression that all the upscaler did was enhance the definition but apparently it also makes improvements of its own choosing because it put the second dog back, only this time much better rendered and looking like an actual dog. Still, I didn't want Marilyn to have two Mafs so I downloaded the upscaled image and took it to SnapEdit, where I removed the excess canine. Image enhancement there also uses AI, by the way, so this is one AI correcting another AI's mistakes.

While I was looking at the enlarged image there, I realised Marilyn had grown an extra knee. It's easy to miss these things. I used the AI image remover to clean that up and then I noticed another flesh-toned patch behind her actual knee. That could have been her hand - it would have been a natural position for it to be in - only it might have meant her arm was a bit longer than you'd expect so for safety's sake I took that out as well.

Two dogs and three knees.

With all that done, I was reasonably happy with the outcome. It's not really a 1950s line drawing as I imagined it, more like a magazine illustration, but that's close enough. The woman doesn't look exactly like Marilyn either but I'm pretty sure if you asked ten people who it was supposed to be, eight or nine of them would say Marilyn Monroe.

At this point you might well be wondering why I bothered with AI at all. Couldn't I just have used an actual photograph of Marilyn and/or her dog? There are enough of them online after all. The reason for that is a slight nervousness over copyright. I usually don't worry about it  because the kind of images I tend to use are mostly of things or people who I wouldn't expect to draw much attention or for the owners to be much interested if they knew.

Photos of Marilyn Monroe are a different prospect altogether, though. People get very touchy about that sort of thing. I did at one point have a couple of photos taken from the session shown in the YouTube video but I took them out for that reason and put the video in instead because as I understand it, Google have arrangements in place to cover copyright issues on YouTube, provided all of their protocols are followed correctly. Since I use Blogger's internal Add Video From YouTube function I think I should be good there. They are both owned by Google after all.

The advantage of using an AI image is that, as Wilhelm pointed out in a reply to my comment on his excellent rant about AI yesterday, (Hi, Wilhelm and congrats for making this far down the post if you did! Perseverance rewarded!) is that under current law, at least in the USA, AI images aren't copyrightable and in most jurisdictions the whole legal position is utterly unclear and likely to remain so for a very long time. At the very least, it's safer to use an AI image than to "borrow" an existing one off the internet.

I would also say at this point that a good deal of the criticism about the generic look and feel of AI images, something I've been guilty of endorsing more than once, does tend to reflect a lack of interest in doing the necessary work to improve those images and make them better. AI is just another creative tool. You still have to do the real work. 

I'm not saying the picture at the top is anything special but it is pretty much what I was imagining when I thought of the idea and it's only good enough for me to be reasonably satisfied with it because I spent half an hour working on it. We are very much not yet at the "Press a button and get what you asked for" stage and maybe we never will be but to write the whole thing off as a failure because of that is like throwing away your brushes because you can't be bothered to mix the paint.

Or something.

Don't Applaud. Just Throw Money.

What with all the other exciting new games, betas and demos flying around of late, I feel I've been neglecting the only game I pay a subscription for: EverQuest II. Okay, technically the All Access Membership isn't a "subscription" as such and it also applies to EverQuest, DCUO and Planetside 2 but even on the odd occasions I play any of those other games, I don't take advantage of my membership perks. I pretty much only use those in EQII.

I haven't forgotten about the old game entirely, though. Towards the end of last month, just before Blaugust began, I managed to creep a little further towards the end of the Signature Adventure questline from last year's expansion. I finished two more instances and a couple of open-world segments. I think I have maybe four more instances left and I'm reasonably confident I'll get them done before the next expansion arrives.

Even though I haven't done much to upgrade my gear this year, what with the current season of Overseer rewards being very much less overpowered than in previous years, I still found the instances significantly easier than I was expecting. Even the small, incremental increase in power afforded by the gear I've received from doing holiday content made quite a difference.

It was so much easier, in fact, that I was able to ignore most of the bosses' special attacks and just stand there pummeling them. That is absolutely my preferred combat style. There was a fair amount of being thrown up in the air but I use one of my cloaks with the Featherfall effect if I suspect I'm going to get kicked around and it works wonders.

I was enjoying myself and making progress, which is always a heady combo, so I might have expected to do a little more but these days I have to limit my serious game-playing to the times when I can guarantee I won't be interrupted by a small dog jumping up and battering at my mouse-hand with her paws.

Beryl has an almost supernatural ability to be fast asleep for hours until the precise moment when I begin doing something that can't easily be interrupted, whereupon she seems to teleport to my side and begin her "You must come NOW!! It can't WAIT!!" routine. It's a strong contributory factor to my current preference for low-stakes gameplay that can be dropped at a moment's notice, although I admit it was pushing at an already open door.

For the same reason, I thought at first I'd have some difficulty fitting in the required minimum ten runs through the Summer Jubilee dungeon to get my new Plume but luckily I discovered early on that you can cheese the whole thing by mentoring down. Even so, I still didn't manage to get it done during the first two holidays, Tinkerfest and Scorched Skies. 

The third and final holiday of the summer, Oceansfull, was my last chance so when I saw this morning that it had started I thought I'd better waste no time and get on with it. I couldn't remember how many runs I'd done already. I guessed it had been at least three in each festival, maybe four, so I was expecting to have to do it two or possibly three more times.

It turned out to be just the once! I was very surprised when Meldrath's battle-suit thingy crumpled at the end on my first try today and the "A Jubilee For You And Me" achievement popped. I didn't even realize what it was for a moment but then I saw the plume and realised I was done.

Well, not really. If I wanted to do it properly I'd need another ten ticks on my Trial of Elements dance card. That gets you the upgraded version. Given that Oceansfull is here until 23 August and you can do the instance every three hours, obviously I have time to fit it in. I can rip through it in barely a quarter of an hour so it wouldn't take me much more than a couple of hours in total.

It's not very likely I'll bother. Doing it ten times got me three Plumes, one for each of three key combat stats (Crit Bonus, Health and Ability Doublecast.) and also the Plumes of Inspired Jubilation recipe book that lets me make (Inferior.) versions of all three for any of my other characters, should I decide they might need them. It's exceedingly unlikely I'll be doing any content that needs anything better before the next expansion comes out and by then I imagine we'll already be looking at upgrades.

Doing the instances those ten times, plus whatever other holiday content I did, which wasn't much but also wasn't none, I somehow amassed exactly one hundred Silver Jubilation Medals. Since I was at the vendor getting my plumes (Which are free.) anyway, I thought I might as well have a look at what else was on offer.

I'd already bought a couple of odds and ends when I spotted that you can buy this year's silver medals with last year's copper ones - at an exchange rate of three to one. When I saw that I decided it was probably best to spend mine now instead of just hanging on to them in the vague possibility that I might want them for something next year.

I bought some paintings and several potted plants along with another bag of teleportation pads. Those always come in handy. It still left me with plenty of medals so I chucked caution to the wind and bought myself a dog.

The dog, a cosmetic pet, goes by the description of Wire Haired Retriever, which someone with an extremely literal turn of mind felt necessary to correct on the forums, claiming it should really be called an English Setter. My aunt had an English Setter for many years and whatever this dog is meant to be I can guarantee it's not one of those.

It doesn't have to be any recognizeable breed, of course, because this is fricken' Norrath! Have you seen the kind of animals they have there? Why would anyone take issue with a specific breed of dog? Just be glad the thing's not part hell-hound.

I tried to get a decent picture of him but for all the game's many merits, one feature EQII distinctly lacks is one of those in-game photo suites I've come to love. Seriously, if they'd just release a good on as an add-on feature, I'd happily pay Daybreak $20 for it. I'd take it over an expansion, frankly. I know I'd get more use out it, long-term.

Failing that, you'll just have to squint and see if you can make out what my dog looks like. His name is Scruff because he is one. He barks very convincingly, which is probably going to give me even more problems with Beryl at some point.

There's some new content for Oceansfull I'd like to do so I'll try to get another session in before the Othmir pack up their conch-shell caravanserai and move on, taking the Summer Jubilee with them. Next stop on the carousel is probably the expansion prelude, followed by Panda Panda Panda. 

My All Access Membership expires next month. I will be renewing for the nineteenth consecutive year. I may not get as much use out of it as I once did but I'd hate to be without it. 

I guess on that basis we can add this post to the Blaugust Creator's Appreciation Week pile. Thanks again, Daybreak!

Who's That, Again?

I see from all the "Hello! This is me!" posts popping up in my blog roll that we've entered "Introduce Yourself Week". Normally, I'd probably skip the introductions on the grounds everyone likely to read them already read them last Blaugust and the Blaugust before that but as Wilhelm points out, we have a significantly bigger than usual intake of first-timers, so it would only be polite to say a few words about myself, I guess.

Introducing yourself on the internet is different to introducing yourself in person, of course. As the famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 had it "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog".

I'm not a dog. I am a big fan of the New Yorker, though, if that's a thing someone can be, when they've never bought a copy, far less subscribed. Back when there was only the physical magazine, it was a high day and a holiday if I ever even saw a copy. I think the first time I got my hands on an edition would have been when I was at college, around the turn of the decade, going from the seventies to the eighties. 

Growing up in the U.K. we didn't have the New Yorker; we had Punch. Punch was alright in its way. I certainly used to read it with enjoyment when I was in my teens, if I found it lying around in the school library. Being a lifelong comics reader, I was naturally attracted to the spot cartoons but some of the articles were worth a look too - not that I can remember any of them now.

Whatever Punch's merits, it definitely wasn't the New Yorker. It wasn't the place you went to read the best contemporary short fiction before it found its way into collected editions. Fine humorist though Alan Coren undoubtedly was, Britain's own Thurber if you like, even the best whimsy and snark isn't going to go fifteen rounds with the likes of Salinger, Updike, O'Hara or Munro.

Even though Salinger was then and remains now my favorite author, he'd long ceased to contribute anything, having withdrawn to the seclusion of his well-appointed cabin in Cornish, New Hampshire. The last story he published in the New Yorker (Or anywhere.) was Hapworth 16, 1924. It appeared in the June 11, 1965 edition and that was the last anyone saw of it, other than in faded copies of the magazine languishing in dentists' waiting rooms across America.

Three decades later someone tried to publish that lost story. Like most attempts to get Salinger back into print, it didn't go well. 

"My" Cambridge college, in a horribly blurry shot borrowed from the Internet. I don't believe I took a single photograph in the three years I was there.

I heard about at the time because by then I'd grown up, graduated from Cambridge University with a lower second in English Literature (The Drinker's Degree as it was unkindly but accurately known.), worked for a year in a comic shop, trained as a computer programmer without following through, taken a job in an insurance company as a clerk and ended up writing and editing the house magazine while running the marketing department, been married and divorced, spent a while licensing vehicles for one of the of biggest fleets of vans in Europe, before being made redundant, finally ending up doing what I've done for the last quarter of a century, namely working in a bookshop.

When I started there it was in the Mail Order department, which was just beginning to take its first, nervous steps into the digital world. Since I'd been working with computers since 1982 and not only knew what the World Wide Web was but had been using it daily in my previous job since the start of the nineties, my application for the task of dealing with these new-fangled email inquiries was happily accepted.

Within a year that had morphed into a full-scale online operation, the details of which will have to wait until I'm no longer employed by the same company. Suffice it to say, at that time not one person in a thousand in this country would have heard of Amazon, let alone been able to tell you it was a place you could buy books - and only books.

One of the things I did with my generous redundancy package from the telecommunications company I'd spent five years with was buy a PC of my own. I'd been using them at work for fifteen years by then but it had never occurred to me before to get one for myself. 

For most of my adult life I'd had what we used then to call a "home computer"; first the inevitable Sinclair Spectrum - a ZX48 -  then the bigger one with the built-in disc drive, and finally an Amiga 512. The idea of having a "real" computer in the house, the kind I used at work, didn't occur to me until I was in my late thirties. I mean, what would I do with it?

What I did for much of the first year after I got it was write a novel. Two novels. Neither of them got finished. 

Here's an important fact about me, possibly the most relevant thing I've revealed yet, at least so far as Blaugust and blogging is concerned: I love my own writing. No, I really love it. I'm not just saying that. It's embarrassing how pleased I am with my own stuff. If I had to name my favorite writer (Which I just did. It's Salinger. Does no-one listen?) I'd really have to excuse myself from competition first.

There's a huge, huge problem with liking what you do: you're always satisfied and satisfaction is death. That thing writers say - all artists, really - about never being happy with the end result? Cherish that feeling. That's motivation, that is. Without it, you'll get nowhere. 

At best, like me, you just churn it out, read it back, chortle with pleasure and sit back, happy. It's not a great look, if I'm honest.

Apparently it was a sequel.
Never knew that at the time.
Probably should have guessed from the title.

As far as the novels went, there was a bigger problem. Unlike this sort of thing, which I can (Self-evidently.) knock out effortlessly without taking a breath, writing fiction is hard. More than that, it's scary. It was for me, anyway.

During that year, I would sit down at the keyboard and wait for a moment. Sometimes a lot more than a moment. Then I would start typing. An hour or two later I would stop and read back what I'd written and most of it would be unfamiliar to me. When I read it back a few days later it would be entirely as if someone else had written it.

Even now, reading what I wrote then, I cannot imagine how it could have been me. It's like spirit-writing or channelling. I always found it extremely draining and after a few months I found it too disturbing as well so I stopped. Haven't written any fiction since, other than a handful of in-character pieces in the early years of this blog.

So, there I was with a PC and nothing to do with it. I had a chat with Mrs Bhagpuss, with whom I'd bought a house and had been living for about five years by then, and for the first time discovered that she was interested in computer games (Again, as we called them back then.) It also turned out she'd played some tabletop RPGs back in the eighties, most notably Call of Cthulhu, and so had I. Amazing how you can get that far into a relationship and something like that just never comes up.

We started playing video games together. RPGs like Might and Magic VI and VII, Return to Krondor and Baldur's Gate, as well as adventures like Broken Sword. After a year or two we began to run out of ideas for what to play next, which was when I had the bright idea of trying one of the new, somewhat intimidating online rpgs. In November 1999 I bought a copy of EverQuest and that was pretty much that for a couple of decades.

Now, here I am in 2022, still playing video games, still even playing EverQuest on occasion. I haven't logged in for a few weeks but my subscription remains unbroken since the end of the last milennium.

I did try several times to subscribe to the New Yorker but at the time they wouldn't have me, even for the digital edition. I didn't have the right IP. I might try again although I can think of a few other services I'd rather sub to, now subscribing's back in fashion. 

When it comes to entertainment, art and creativity, though, most things I want come free. The F2P revolution could have been designed with my playstyle in mind. It's turned online gaming into a vast party with a free bar. I just wander around, sampling everything, picking up anything I fancy then putting it down when I've had enough.

Beryl. When she was younger.

And that's what this blog has become, too. A rolling record of things I've sampled and what I thought about them, bundled in with a clutch of opinions, reminiscences, speculations and the very occasional rant. I've always loved the sound of my own voice and I've been writing since I could hold a pencil. Blogging was made for me. I can only apologize for the outcome.

I do also have to admit that of late the quality has slipped somewhat. I could blame it on my age but actually I blame it on the dog. Six months ago, before Beryl arrived, there were occasional longeurs, when I struggled to think of something to do. I've dropped my working hours to two days a week as I enter pre-retirement and in the dark, cold, wet days of late winter there were times when I entertained the thought that I might have too much time on my hands. I certainly had all the time in the world to work on posts, polishing them 'til I thought they shone. (Not at all the same thing as them actually shining, obviously.)

Yeah, well that didn't last. Two and a half hours of dog-walking a day put paid to any concerns I had about finding something to keep me busy and also any semblence of organization or coherency in the posts. It's quite hard to hold onto your train of thought when a dog suddenly appears next to you and starts barking because she wants to... I don't know... anyone speak dog?

A dog is for life but a puppy's just for a while, though. She's already turning into a surly teenager and in six months, with luck, she'll be a responsible young adult. Just like I was. (I'm fond of irony. It's a cultural trope over here.)

This is my twelfth year of blogging. I don't suffer from triskaidekophobia, thankfully, although I am finding myself to be increasingly superstitious as I get older. You won't catch me not saying hello to a single magpie, that's for sure. 

I feel I have a few years of blogging in me yet, everything else being equal, so with luck and the will of the fates, let's meet back here in a year's time and do it all again. And if we get another batch of first-timers I'll try and come up with something different by way of an introduction.

Oh, who am I kidding? I won't even remember what I wrote by this time next week, let alone next year!

Beryl Vs Badger

If there's been a distinct drop-off in quality here this last week, you know who to blame. Yes, well, okay, me... but also her. Her up there, biting the badger (Not a euphemism.)

This is Beryl. She's a ten-week old Poochon puppy. A Poochon is a cross between a Bichon-Frise and a Poodle although to me she looks like the lead from "Honey, I Shrunk the Sheepdog!". (Not a real movie. As far as I know.)

I took some good footage of her playing with the giant badger muff (Also not a euphemism. You put your hands inside him to keep them warm. That's literally what he's for.) I was planning on editing it and making a decent post out of it. Certainly a better post than this one, anyway.

I spent about four hours, on and off, trying every possible trick to get the video off my phone and either onto the PC or into the Cloud but Google and/or Android and/or Microsoft and/or the whole damn lot of them together were having absolutely none of it. Google Photos, Google Drive, GMail, USB leads and MicroSD cards, none of them wanted to play.

In the end I managed to get two photos and a two-second clip to upload. Not much you can do with that. 

Mrs Bhagpuss offered to film Beryl on her iPhone so we did that. Then it turned out only half of it had recorded. Not the good half, either.

I'm not one to give up just because the universe is obviously giving me hints. Not to mention it was far too late in the evening to think of anything else to post. And here we are.

In the shot above, Beryl is in her kitchen basket, a converted whiskey barrel that made the entire house smell like a distillery for days after it arrived. She's looking deceptively calm except for the devil-dog eyes. An artifact of technology, I'm pleased to say. I'd be worried if she really looked like that.

With luck I'll get some better video of her soon because what I have to offer today is really not good. At the rate she's growing, though, it's probably best to slam up something fast. She won't be a puppy forever. 

And that, I'm embarassed to say, is all I've got. Take it or leave it. Although, if you're reading this, I guess that decision's already been made.

Day Of The Dog

The big news today is that we got a dog. Well, Mrs Bhagpuss got a dog. I got a dog by association. 

She's not much of a dog, yet. More like a 1:4 scale model of a dog. I was going to take some pictures but I think that's going to have to wait a while. She's asleep right now and what she mostly looks is the wool you'd get if someone sheared an extremely small sheep.

In recognition of the momentous occasion I shall once again delve into my massive folder of fun for whatever songs that mention dogs I can find that I haven't already used. If you wish, you may accompany the music by scraping the bottoms of any barrels you have handy.

I thank you.

Your Dog - Soccer Mommy

Here's one that had to sit out the Dog/Cat Deathmatch on the subs bench back in 2020. It's got a great F-bomb in the opening verse that would sit well in that post I keep talking up that I haven't gotten around to writing yet, the one where I try to make the case for creative swearing in song lyrics. I can see I'm going to use up all the good ones long before I ever get to finish the post but never fear! I'm starting to tag possibles as I find them so maybe in another couple of years I'll have enough new ones to get started.

Rattlesnakes and Dogs - Jenny Don't and the Spurs

I do like me some alt-country, especially when it rolls like a train. Add this to the long list of songs I thought I'd featured before but according to search have not. Going to be finding that more and more the longer I keep doing this sort of thing. I'll stop mentioning it soon.

Call Me Cruella - Florence and the Machine but really Now I Wanna Be Your Dog - Joel McRea (at 2.45 or thereabouts)

If you'd have told me in 1975, when I was playing my cut-out copy of the first Stooges album at ear-splitting volume and making believe I was three thousand miles away and ten years older, that one day a Russian ice dancer would be using Now I Wanna Be Your Dog as her backing music at the Winter Olympics, let alone that the version she'd be skating to would be taken from the soundtrack of a Disney movie, I think I'd probably have punched you in the face. Either that or ripped up my rock 'n' roll membership card there and then and gotten into jazz instead.

Dog Days Are Over - Florence and the Machine

If we're going to have Florence at all I guess we should have this one. I'm cheating a little in as much as this isn't the version I have on my hard drive but there are about a million videos of Flo and the band doing the dog on YouTube and this is probably one of the earliest. I never really cottoned to Florence that much, truth be told, although I like this one and Kiss With A Fist. I never really noticed how seventies she sounds. It could almost be Sonja Kristina singing there.

Jizzney - A Giant Dog

That's pretty much it for songs that mention dogs in the title but there are still a few bands that call themselves after dogs we haven't had. Or to be more accurate that we have but they were doing other songs that aren't these ones. I have no idea what "Jizzney" means and I expect I'm better off that way.

The Walk - Dog Party

One of the big, lasting claims of the punk movement was a return to the three-minute single. I was all for it at the time but these days I feel three minutes is still way too long for most songs. One of the best things about Tik-Tok (and there are a few) is that it's forcing popular perception of what counts as a song to change and fast. Get on, make your point, get off. You'd be surprised how often a minute and a half is more than enough for that. This one's 1.22 and it doesn't need to be a second longer.

Canyons of Your Mind - The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

This is either everything that was right about the 'sixties or everything that was wrong. I'll leave you to make up your own minds.

And I really, truly think that's the last time I can dredge up any more songs about dogs from what I already have. I'd better start looking for some new ones because for some reason the topic keeps coming up. I need some more songs about cats, too. And foxes. 

I'll get right on that.