An Unexpected Return To Hethereau

Since my PC decided to go on the fritz a week or so ago, I've barely played any games at all. Other than when I've been on holiday, away from home, or too ill to play, it has to be the longest I've gone without gaming for nearly thirty years. 

At first I barely noticed. It's summer, the weather's been lovely and I've got more than enough practical things to do - gardening, my ongoing project to sort and clear all the cruft and kipple from the house, taking Beryl for interesting walks - without needing to sit in front of a screen. If I do want to sit down and do something less physical, there's blogging and song-making to keep me busy. 

Anyway, I've been drifting away from gaming of late. I've mentioned it a few times. I play fewer sessions and they tend to be shorter than they would have been even three or four years ago, let alone back in noughties, when I devoted most of my leisure hours to MMORPGs. Chances are I wouldn't have been playing all that much anyway. 

Or so I thought, so it was quite a surprise to find out how much - and how quickly - I missed my games. Even though I was getting a lot done around the house and garden, which was very satisfying, and I was getting lots of time in the sunshine, walking in the countryside with Beryl, which was fun, I still found I had more time than I quite knew what to do with, some days.

There were hours, here and there, where I felt a little adrift. Those were the times I'd usually have been logged into something or other, doing a bit of leveling or a quest or two or fiddling around with the decorations in one of my many imaginary homes. Not being able to do any of that gave me some useful perspective on what value even a modest amount of gaming adds to my day. 

It's more than just habit. It's a core part of the way I've lived my life for so long now that to cut it out completely feels wrong, just like it would feel wrong to stop reading or listening to music. That was actually a bit of a surprise to learn.

My intention was - and still is - to buy a new gaming PC and a gaming laptop as well. Thanks to the money I will eventually receive from my mother's estate (Eventually - it'll come some time but it's hard to say when.) I am for once in a position to spend a reasonable amount of money on myself and decent gaming hardware doesn't seem like too much of an indulgence for once. 

I'm a notorious prevaricator when it comes to choosing anything that's going to cost a significant amount, though, and I'm not looking at off-the-shelf models this time, so once you allow for a few days for fitting and testing and shipping, even if I made up my mind and placed an order today, it could be the best part of a week before I could sit down at a new PC and log into a game.

A game I want to play, that is. I have plenty of games I could play right now, on the hardware I have. But being able to play any old game isn't the issue. I want to play the games I want to play and the game I most want to play at the moment is Neverness To Everness. That's the one I'm missing. 

That was a surprise, too. I knew I liked it but I wasn't expecting its absence to feel like when your favorite MMORPG goes offline for extensive maintenance. That sense of an irritating itch you just can't quite reach to scratch.

Plus there's DCUO. I know! I know! I don't even play DCUO. Not really. But it's the Summer of Supergirl (Damp squib of a summer for some but not for me.) and Digital Ink keeps giving new Supergirl stuff away. Like the duster coat she wears in the movie.

Having seen the movie, which I loved, as you'll know if you've been keeping up with the blog, I realized I really wanted that duster coat. I've always loved duster coats. Who doesn't? I'd buy one for myself if I wasn't worried I'd look a complete twat in it. But I can just imagine my DCUO character wearing one. She'd look so cool!

It's not time-critical. If you miss the window to earn these things for free through normal play, you can just buy them later for Daybreak Cash, of which I have plenty. Or I think you can... I hope you can... Maybe you can't.. Maybe you have to buy them while the event is still running... 

That was how my logic went on Saturday. I guess that's FOMO? I don't experience it often enough to be sure. It could just be sensible forward-planning. Whatever you want to call it, it was a spur. And what it spurred me on to do was see if this PC could at least let me log into DCUO for long enough to buy a coat, even if it crashed right afterwards.

This PC has what are supposed be decent integrated graphics, so far as integrated graphics can ever be described as decent. They're supposed to be good for what's euphemistically and optimistically called "light gaming". Exactly what that might mean in this context I couldn't tell you. When I bought it, I already had a pretty good graphics card so I didn't pay too much attention to what the in-house alternative might or might not be able to handle. 

I probably never would have considered using the integrated graphics to play games until I started having all these conflicts with the card. Then, the first time I tried it with EverQuest II a little while ago, it didn't go well. I thought I'd given up on the idea but I wanted that duster coat so  why not? What's the worst that could happen, right? I've already broken this machine twice and look at it now - working just fine.

This is the point where you're probably expect a story about how I nearly bricked the whole thing just for the sake of an imaginary overcoat. Luckily, that's not what happened. 

What did happen was that DCUO ran flawlessly. I started off very cautiously, collecting my login rewards and checking to see what I needed to do for the coat. It turned out I could either just buy it (And all the other items that came with the event package, a few of which were pretty nice too.) for 2000DBC or I could do some dailies and reduce the total cost by 200DBC a day.

If I'd had ten days, maybe I'd have done that and gotten my coat for free. But I didn't have ten days. The event had less than half of that still to run. Even so, I thought I'd get started. Neither the game nor the PC had crashed so I was getting curious. I wondered if I'd be able to do something simple like a few dailies?

Yes, I would. I did. And I couldn't really tell much, if any, difference from how the game played through the GTX 4050. I hadn't even changed any of the graphic settings but it all seemed to zip along just fine. I did all the dailies that counted for the event and a few more besides. I wasn't timing it but I think I'd probably played for about an hour when I decided I'd had enough.

I thought about whether I'd want to do the same again for another few days just to save maybe a thousand DBC and I was pretty sure I wouldn't  so I bought the coat. It cost me 1800DBC minus the 10% discount for being a member, so 1620DBC altogether. 

Since DBC has a nominal exchange rate of 100DBC to the dollar, that's just over $16. Would you pay $16 for an imaginary duster coat? I wouldn't. Then I did anyway. And I still had more than 30k DBC left. I'm DBC rich, still. 

Once I'd gotten my coat, I spent another half-hour or so redoing Nini Mo's whole outfit. They've certainly improved how that works over the years. I remember it being very fiddly and unintuitive but it seemed very comfortable this time. I have quite a lot of options, including not just in all the costume slots but cosmetics, auras, colors and effects. And for possibly the first time, I could find them and apply them all without much trouble.

I put together a look I was pretty happy with. I'd love to show it to you but one thing that didn't seem to work with the integrated graphics was the screenshot key. I tried the in-game version and the good old reliable Windows+Prt Scr method, all without success. I'm sure I could figure out how to make it work but DCUO screenshots tend to look like crap anyway so it doesn't seem likely it'd be worth the effort. You'll just have to imagine it. 

Nini Mo also has the Super-S-Symbol on her chest now, if that helps. I got that in the package, too. And Supergirl will come hang out at my base now. An imaginary $16 well spent, if you ask me.

So that was DCUO and Supergirl done. I logged out and waited for the PC to crash and it didn't. Then it went on not crashing for the rest of the day. Hmmm.

Sunday, I had to work so I wouldn't have been playing much anyway but this morning I started to wonder. If the onboard graphics could play DCUO, could they maybe handle NTE? 

First, I had to find the installation. It wasn't on any of the three disks in the case. I found it on an SDD I had in an external caddy. I plugged that into a USB slot and patched up the game. It didn't take long. The big new update doesn't get here until Wednesday.  

Then it was time to log in and the launcher wasn't happy. I got a big warning, telling me my device didn't meet minimum spec and politely suggesting I might like to try another device instead. That might have put me off but I'd already worked out, through a combination of Can You Run It? and Reddit threads, that although my integrated graphics show up as having less than a gigabyte of VRAM, they can actually draw as much as they need from system RAM, as much as 4GB if you tweak the bios, something I haven't yet tried, not wanting to invite trouble.

I ignored the warning and carried on. Loading was a little slow, thanks to playing through an external drive, but once I was in the game everything seemed fine. I didn't notice any stuttering or hitching with the graphics on "Balanced" but just to be on the safe side I dropped them to "Smooth", Hotta's interesting choice of name for the second-to-lowest setting.

Two hours later I logged out after a thoroughly enjoyable session. I did all the usual things, restocked my cafes (For which I always do my own shopping, meaning a lot of traveling through  Hethereau.), stopped a bunch of random street crimes (Combat seemed completely normal.), bumped into Lacrimosa in a couple of places (There's an event where you have to meet her numerous times, allegedly by chance, although there's a list of where she'll be...) and finally a long and very enjoyable quest I just happened to pick up as I was running around.

When I logged out... nothing happened. Apparently I can play NTE just fine on integrated graphics. Then again, I was playing it just fine on the graphics card until I wasn't, so who knows? 

All of which somewhat changes my plans. I'm still going to get a gaming laptop for certain. That'll give me portability for gaming such as I've never had, something I will certainly enjoy and  use. I think I'll still get a new gaming laptop, as well. It will give me redundancy for the next time something breaks. This his machine can move into the back-up slot and its predecessor can go to the recycling center, which will save me trying to figure out how to fix it. 

In the meantime, though, it looks like I'm back to playing Neverness To Everness, until and unless that breaks something else. I'm very much looking forward to the new update on Wednesday and just two hours in the game today gave me more than enough ideas for several posts, not counting this one, so expect to hear more about it.

If you're going to blog about gaming, I guess it really does help to play some games now and then... 

Settling In or Just Another Day In Hethereau

Here's a first-world blogging problem if there ever was one: new games give you far too much to blog about. Such a terrible situation to find yourself in! Enough ideas for a dozen posts but how are you meant to choose? 

Maybe pick the most immediate, the one that's right there in front of you, shimmering with vitality and immediacy? Or should you let it rest a while to settle and prove? But if you do, will it join all those other, unwritten posts? Drift away into the void, never to be seen?

Should you stand back, take the broader view? Focus on the details?

What are you trying to achieve, anyway? Do you want to tell stories? Offer advice? Share information? Analyze and explain? Are you looking to give a show and tell with pictures? A critical essay on one specific aspect of the game? Half a dozen bullet-pointed paragraphs on several?

Or perhaps you find yourself so stunned by choice all you can do is write about how hard it is to choose at all.

Yeah, that really would be a waste of time, wouldn't it? So let's not do that. 

Lens Flare

When this blog was young, I'd have done a whole post about it. Just the sort of sidewise lean I loved back then. Mind you, that whole post would only have been the length of one section of this one. I valued concision more then, too.

Oh, but how I love lens flare! It hits me like a drug. When I say I like a game there's a non-trivial chance what I really mean is it gives good lens flare. Quite a lot of the imports I've been keen on the last few years answer to that.

On any given day you care to name, there's a strong possibility I'll have been staring into the sun, mesmerized by the glare, fascinated by the halo, seeing the eternal in the ephemeral. Again. 

And taking screenshots. 

Do you know how hard it is to not take screenshots of lens flare? Especially at sunset or sunrise. Games have golden hours just like Hollywood needs. I have to talk myself down, convince myself they aren't magical moments never to be repeated. Just coded performances, another show same time tomorrow. 

By The Clock

It should get easier now, I found the clock. I found it yesterday. 

Actually, I didn't. The game told me about it. Oh, wait, I didn't mention the name of the game yet, did I? Neverness To Everness. I guess you guessed that, though.

I was doing a quest. Not that they call them quests. Games with contemporary or futuristic settings tend to avoid giving that mystical gloss. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what they are called in NTE. Missions, maybe? Doesn't matter anyway, except that names always matter. But let's not go there just now.

It was one of those deals you get in games sometimes, where the NPC tells you to come back in a while. A few minutes, a few hours, tonight, tomorrow, after dark, when you've had time to think about it. Any time but not right now, ok?

They're annoying, aren't they? Does anyone actually enjoy being fobbed off by an NPC with a "Give me a day and I'll have finished making your boots."? Why do developers even bother? Is it just to piss people off?

Rhetorical question. Of course it is. Here's a tougher one. What might be going through a developer's mind when they add a quest like that, one with a hiatus, then pop in a hint telling you if you can't be bothered waiting you could just spin the hands on the clock and make it happen right away?

That's what NTE does. I met this woman who was selling her car for real cheap except you could tell she didn't really want to. She asked me to come watch her race so I could check out what a great bargain it was but the race didn't start until six in the evening and it was midday then. 

The car was a real steal and I wanted it plus there was obviously a backstory and I wanted that too. I thought I'd do something else for the afternoon and come back later. 

Only I didn't need to bother. It seems you can set the time to anything you want. The weather, too. Those sunrises and sunsets? Any goddam time you please! 

All of which is top quality of life and so very welcome. Only, if you're allowing that, why even suggest waiting?

I think it's for "realism".  It's not clear if the street races are even legal but they all happen after dark. Maybe the roads are just quieter then but I kinda doubt it. All the bad things happen at night, don't they?

I guess it would make even less sense if you could talk to an NPC any time of day and a race would magically begin right there and then, though. Oh, the compromises we make for authenticity.

Friends Would Be A Reality Show Here

You know that thing everyone mocks about Friends? Ok, ok! I'll be more specific. You know that one thing? How everyone always points out how unrealistic it is, to put it mildly, that a bunch of twentysomethings with crap jobs, if they even have any job  at all this week, could afford live in those apartments in New York? Or any apartment?

Yeah, well you ain't seen my pad in Hethereau! I got it yesterday and it is saaweeet! So sweet!

I was wondering when housing was going to appear, so I had a poke around and found you have to get to Tycoon Level 5 first. Tycoon Levels probably needs a post of their own but the tl:dr is that it's how you get all the casual/leisure options, like fishing and housing and runing a business, assuming you call that last a leisure activity, which I fricken' do not.

I was momentarily concerned it might be a grind to get to Level 5 to open the feature that most interested me but it wasn't. I'm sure there will be grinds in the game but I haven't hit any yet. 

It took me a couple of sessions to get to where I needed to be and by sessions I mean fragments. I did some Tycooning in-between exploring and questing and taking screenshots of atmospheric weather conditions. I suppose it might have taken me an hour, all added up.

So, getting on the housing ladder was quick and easy. It was also cheap. And like most things in the game it was quasi-realistic. I had to go to a real estate agency, where the realtor showed me what she had on her books. That part was convincing enough.

The illusion of reality started to break down when I saw that only one property was available at my level, the rest needing to be unlocked. Then it shattered completely when I found out how much it cost: 200,000 Fons. That's almost chump change!

What? It sounds like a lot? I suppose... I mean, 200,000 is a biggish number. But then, of course, if you don't play the game you have no idea what a "Fon" is so it might be a fortune or just a whole lot of nothing. 

I can't say I have a clear mental image of a Fon either. Bloody stupid name for a currency if you ask me. Every time I see it pluralized, it makes me think of Henry Winkler. Maybe they should have called it the Winkle. 

The important part is that, even though I've only just started playing, and even though I've spent most of my time goofing around, I still had enough cash on me to buy the apartment outright. And that was after I'd leased a cafe and bought a car!

I imagine there'll be a whole post on housing at some point, not to mention the truly bizarre entrepreneurial economy, but for now I'll just say that just the starter home is a fifth floor duplex with huge picture windows and stunning views. If this is what a part-time gig at a down-at-heel, back-street enterprise in a poor part of town, run by a drunk and staffed largely by children gets you, god knows what I'll be able to afford when I get a real job! 

I bet you wish you lived in Hethereau. I know I do.

Otterness To Notterness

Nimgimli posted yesterday, listing a few things that were harshing his mellow in NTE and one of them was Taygedo. 

Taygedo is an otter with a television for a head because what else would he be? He works for the Eibon Antique Shop, the struggling business the PC gets drafted into right at the start of the game for reasons that are still not as clear to me as they probably should be. 

Taygedo communicates almost entirely by the use of the word "Taygedo" or slight variations, a bit like Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. He occasionally throws in a few grunts and squeals but conversations involving him mostly run along the lines of the old subtitled movie gag, where several sentences of dialog are rendered in the titles by just that single word. Only in reverse.

I feel relatively neutral about the gimmick but it's self-evidently as likely to infuriate as delight. It certainly annoyed Nimgimli. However endearing or otherwise you find him, though, I do think making Taygedo the central figure in a lengthy storyline close to the start of the game is a high risk strategy.  At best.

Add to that, the plotline doesn't just give you an otter with a televison set for a head repeating one word over and over ad infinitum. It also asks you to stop whatever you're doing so you can help him set up a date with another otter (No TV head for this one.). You have to take him shopping, buy him clothes and gifts and then to pretend he's your boss so he can impress his date, who he's given the impression he's much more important than he really is. 

Basic 1960s sitcom plot in other words. I was going to say "minus the mechanical animism" but then I remembered My Mother The Car.... I can see why Nimgimli was losing patience if that's waht he'd been doing.

I'm quite enjoying it myself. I've bought Taygedo the gear. I haven't yet been on the date yet. So that's something to look forward to... 

Setting Boundaries  

Finally, for this post that is, there's the issue of where to go next. Or rather where the game's going to let me go. 

I've been doing a lot of exploring and some of it has taken the form of seeing how far out of town I can get. It varies and it's not nearly as obvious as you'd imagine.

Hethereau is bounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by some lush green hills. I was fairly sure neither would be available to explore and I was mostly right but not entirely. 

The sea is just sea for the most part. The distant hills are out of reach but there is a substantial out-of-town wilderness area with campgrounds and a somewhat manicured stretch of woodland you can wander around in if you want. Not much to see there except trees but it's nice to get out of the city for a while.

Across the river and stretching along the coast is what looks like another part of town although it could be a separate conurbation entirely. I wanted to see what it was like. 

It would be an exaggeration to say I felt confident I could go there. That would imply some element of doubt. I had none. I didn't think about it at all.

I happened to be strolling along the beach opposite when I got the urge to go take a look so I took a right-turn to the ocean and ran straight into the red No Access barrier that materializes when you try to go somewhere you shouldn't. Because I can't take a hint, I tried a few other ways- gliding, crossing the bridges, swimming - no joy.

You can see the area is fully developed. There are even cars moving through the streets. You just can't go there. Ooh, I was cross! Why even put the thing there if it's just a tease?

I was crosser still, when I tried to go to PukaLand. PukaLand is an amusement park on an island just off the coast. Or maybe its on a peninsula. You can see it from anywhere on that side of the city, its fairground identity established by a huge ferris wheel and a Disneyesque castle. 

You can see it but you can't see it. You can go up to the gate but you can't go in. That damned red screen again.

I can't say whether these and other inaccessible locations are places not yet "in the game" or whether they open up at certain points in the storyline but either way it's frustrating. I guess the positive take is that it means there's more content ready and waiting to go, one way or the other but damn! I wanted to go there now!

And that's it for today. Just some random thoughts among many. Plenty more where those came from but I'll try to narrow it down to just the one next time. 

Maybe.

No promises. 

Persistence Pays Off - Project:Gorgon Goes Live At Last!

Hey! I played another game! For nearly an hour! And really enjoyed it, too. It had that true, old school MMORPG dopamine-drip grip, the one where you want to keep moving from mob to mob just to see what they drop and to watch your skills tick up.

It was Project:Gorgon, of course. The long-running project of Eric Heimburg and the now sadly-deceased Sandra Powers finally went Live yesterday. It's a game that hoovers up all the bits that worked in all those Golden Age classics and throws them altogether in a kind of MMORPG gumbo that somehow tastes really good. That's not just my opinion, it's what everyone was saying, albeit without the culinary metaphors, in General Chat, which for a change was mostly polite and amicable.

Everyone was going on (And on...)  about the games they used to play, back in the day, and how much P:G felt like all of them. It reminded people of Vanilla WoW, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call (1 and 2), EverQuest (1 and 2), Anarchy Online... I imagine there were more but the chatter was so distracting I had to turn it off so I could concentrate on what I was doing.

What I was doing was mostly wandering around, opening the map, raising skills and killing mobs. I could have worked on some quests - I've played Project: Gorgon before (There are two dozen posts about it on the blog, the earliest dating back to 2013. ) and I had some pending - but I just wanted to relax. Questing involves too much thinking. 

Slaughtering mobs doesn't. Neither does raising skills. That's one of the joys of P:G, at least in the early stages. There are a whole lot of skills and doing almost anything is likely to raise at least one of them. What good that does is another matter but it's always fun just to see the numbers go up.

Happily for me, I was also playing a character for whom the mobs in the meadows around Serbule, the starting city, posed little threat but still gave good xp. Well, until I made the mistake of attacking two Mantises, that is. Not the first time I've made that mistake, either.

Before any of that, though, I had to remake my character for looks. There are new character models and character creation options and they're a huge improvement. Here's what my character looked like before and after:

Okay, not exactly a fair comparison but I promise Rarrfa didn't look any better in the original with her helmet off. She looks great in the new version, though, doesn't she? I was really happy with how she converted.

The whole game looks better although graphics have always been very weird in Project: Gorgon. As I believe you can still see from the 2013 post linked above, the game has never looked quite as visually impressive as it did in the pre-alpha demo, when the buildings, at least, were almost photo-realistic.

The current version is excellent all the same. Or at least it is once you get into the Settings and tweak the details. I thought the whole thing looked a bit ropy when I got in so I opened the controls to see what I was on and it turned out the game had defaulted to "Poor".

It says something about Eric's approach to marketing that there even is a setting called "Poor". Most designers would avoid using negative concepts like that, preferring to call the low graphics option something like "High Performance". 

I was pretty sure that if my PC could happily run Baldur's Gate 3 on decent settings it could do a lot better than "Poor" for P:G but I was curious to see what the game itself would choose. There's an option to auto-adjust the quality level so I checked the box and was instantly upgraded to... Fair.

Seriously? You think that's the best I can manage? I toyed with the idea of banging it all the way up to Ultra or whatever and then bringing it down when I ran into problems but in the end I just wanted to get on with the killing so I left it on auto, which uses frame-rate to decide on the graphical fidelity.

And it has to be said, the game looked pretty good, although that might have been because of the other visual setting I toggled - Brighter World. I thoroughly recommend switching that on. It makes a huge difference. In the day it can be a bit garish so maybe just put the lights on when the sun goes down although if you like a super-saturated, almost psychedelic filter, you might want to keep it on all the time.

Once I'd sorted that out and also set a key for hiding the UI (Why that's not a standard preset in all games beats me...) I was off on my killing spree.

I killed a lot of Brain Bugs and various spiders. I killed some pigs and a wolf. A tiger attacked me so I killed that, too. Most of them dropped something and sometimes it was actual gear. That's so old school, getting your armor and weapons off the local wildlife.

I butchered all of them for the skill-ups and botched most of the butchering. Then I buried the results which increased my Compassion. What good a high Compassion skill does you, I have no idea but I'm sure a high one is better, somehow.

As I wandered about from mob to mob I noticed I was also getting skill-ups in Cartography. The map was slowly filling itself in as I went but not in those big chunks you usually see with Fog-of-War systems, just a thin line where I'd been traveling. It looks like it would take an awfully long time to uncover an entire map that way but I still much prefer it to, for example the Stars Reach method of finding and activating specific points, which turns into a very frustrating scavenger hunt after a while.

After about half an hour, I ended up at the graveyard, where several players were fighting with the undead. I sent a few skeletons back to their unquiet rest before making my terminal error of pulling a couple of lurking Mantises.

When I revived back in Serbule I thought I'd take that as a good moment to stop, so I did. You need something like that as an exit line in Project:Gorgon because, like all the games it echoes, there's no end to anything. You log in and do stuff until you don't want to any more and then, if you have the will-power, you stop. And if you don't you carry on until you're entire life falls apart and you rage-quit and spend the next two years bad-mouthing the game on every forum you can find. Or at least that was the traditional response, back when there were forums....

If anyone's looking for a good, old-fashioned MMORPG that also recognizes times have changed since the Golden Age, there's no need to look any further. Project:Gorgon does everything everyone keeps saying MMOPRPGs don't do any more. Apparently that's still not enough to get a thousand people online playing it at the same time but what more people are waiting for, I can't imagine.

If it's the closest thing to EverQuest in 1999 you're looking for, I'd still recommend Monsters & Memories but if you want something less specific and with potentially broader appeal, you probably can't do much better than give Project: Gorgon a few hundred hours of your valuable time. 

Or a few thousand. It is an traditional MMORPG, after all. 

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!

Hey, Stars Reach! It's Been A While! How's It Going?

Bless me Ralph, for I have sinned. It has been ninety-five days since my last Stars Reach post. I think. Something like that, anyway.

Which is actually a lot less than I thought. I completely forgot I logged in at the end of May. I thought I hadn't set foot in the game since before the Kickstarter. 

That's what I told whoever it is that has the fun job of reading all the surveys and collating the data, anyway. I do like a survey but when I got the email a few days ago - well, the three emails, since I'm still signed up for the testing program on multiple accounts - I wasn't going to respond because what could I have said? I have no clue what Stars Reach is like now, it's been so long since I've played.

But then curiosity got the better of me and I opened one of the forms, just to see what they were asking, and it turned out they only wanted to know what people thought of the first hour of the game. 

Don't bother trying to dodge.
They use death as a teaching aid here.

I have been keeping Stars Reach patched up, even though I haven't been logging in and Playable Worlds is now running a series of lengthy tests as they gear up for 24/7 testing. This was on Saturday and I had the feeling a test had just started, which indeed it had. In fact, it started last Thursday and it's still going as I write. 

Why not, then? I could give them an hour of my time and report back on what I thought about it. I mean, I did kind of sign up to test the thing, not to mention be in the creator program (Ironic laughter...) although any responsibility for any of that I ever felt dissipated the moment my credit card got charged for the Kickstarter pledge. I'm a paying customer now.

First, obviously, I had to make a new character. Well, in a manner of speaking. There is now some slight semblance of a character creation process but it's two choices and move on. 

There's a bit of flavor text, which I personally find obnoxious and have already complained about in feedback more than once. Oddly perhaps, I do not find being repeatedly addressed, sneeringly, as "meatbag" endears me to the game or makes me want to come back for more. 

All you really get to choose at this stage, though, is your name and race. Everything else is "To be added" or some such excuse. I guess that does at least tell us we will be able to customize our character, one day.

Most irritatingly of all, the whole "what you look like changes every time you zone" thing is still going. It's disorienting enough to have your character randomized at the start but to have it re-randomized just when you were starting to get used to it is infuriating. If that's actually testing something - still - then fair enough but it seems unlikely. In fact, now I think about it, maybe it's not even intentional. Could be a bug?

How come I was allowed to take this picture, then?

Once that was done, the game let me in and I played through the extremely brief tutorial, which I quite enjoyed. It's new since I was last there, takes place in space, and goes through the basic controls quite effectively, although it took me several goes to get the crawling under the fallen beam part right and the bit where it gives you a fire extinguisher feels redundant when there turns out to be no fire to extinguish.

It does a job, though, and the space station looks quite impressive. It's a much better way to begin than the previous version. 

At the end of the tutorial you have to pick a class. They don't call it that, of course, (They call it a "profession".) because this is a classless game where anyone can be anything but it damn well is a class all the same, or at best an archetype. From memory you can be a crafter, an explorer, a warrior or something I've forgotten. Farmer, maybe?

The game tells you not to worry too much about it because later you can do all the things but that's like your school-teacher telling you not to complain about having to learn the boring stuff now because it'll get interesting when you go to college. Who bloody cares? I want to do something that's interesting now!

Or fun. I'd take fun.

If I hadn't already played about fifteen hours of various stages of pre-alpha, back when you really could do what you liked right from the start, even if there wasn't that much of it to do, I think this time would have been fun. New stuff generally is. Without the novelty factor and by comparison to how it used to be , though, it seemed a bit limited. Dull, even.

Ha bloody ha.

I picked Explorer, which I was well aware would mean running around, listening to an echo-locator pinging as I tried to find sixty-four flashing pyramids. Under the new regime, you only get the tools you need for your designated job, so it was do that or don't do anything at all. Not like the good old days, when you could do a bit of this, a bit of that, switch things up to keep it from getting boring.

The really glaring problem with Exploring as it is now is that it's highly reliant on players both having good hearing and keeping the in-game sound on (Unless there's some alternate, visual setting buried in the controls, somewhere, in which case they should tellyou about it.)

As we all know, most gamers switch the sound off and play either Norwegian death metal at ear-splitting volume or true-crime podcasts instead, so asking them to listen to several hours of pinging just seems rude. And as for those who've already lost most of their hearing from too much Norwegian death metal, well they have no chance at all.

Except they kind of do because you can just run around and wait for the pink pyramids to pop as you get close to them, which is all I did. I did that for about half an hour and found over a dozen, which is more than I expected but fewer that it would have been if I hadn't had to keep stopping to fight and/or run from the extremely aggressive wildlife.

Is this the Down escalator?

I have been complaining about this design choice since pretty much the first time I ever played the game and while it has improved it's still very far from acceptable. EverQuest's infamous Gates of Discord expansion should not be the template for newbie zones in any game. 

They do at least give you a gun - an Omniblaster - no matter what class you pick, so you can try to defend yourself but good luck with that when you get swarmed, as you inevitably will. By the time I gave up, after my second (Or was it third?) death, I'd earned more points in combat-related skills than all the others put together. That seems ridiculous, especially when I thought I'd picked a non-combat class so I wouldn't need to fight anything. Can't say I was surprised about it though. It happens every time. 

All of this was very familiar, as was the terrain, hacked up by players and left full of holes to fall down as it was. The grass does seem to grow over the piles of debris now. It looked more like a huge field full of mature ants' nests than the usual abandoned quarry, so that was an improvement, visually anyway.

A close look at this picture will prove
I have no observational skills whatsoever.
Also wow! Gravity is really slimming!

Speaking of visuals, the one huge leap forward for Stars Reach since I last played has to be what it
looks like. I always thought it was an attractive-looking game but now it's positively gorgeous. The graphics are highly stylized but they really do look beautiful. I took some screenshots and I would have taken more if the camera controls weren't so goddam awful. Seriously, you should surely at least be able to 360 around your motionless character without having to go into the settings to work out how to do it. If it's even possible. I never did work out how but it may be in there, somewhere.

The whole time I was playing (Okay, it was only three-quarters of an hour...) the only other players I saw were afk at the revive spot, presumably where they'd died and wandered off to do something more interesting instead, leaving their characters idling. I'm sure there's something going on somewhere that's more engaging than what was happening where I was and that's presumably where the players are but I know from experience just how much work there is before you get anywhere near anything like that and I have no intention of going through all those steps again, or not until I'm confident whatever progress I make won't be wiped before the next time I log in.

My brief session did gain me enough experience to fill out the survey, so after I logged out that's what I did. I doubt my answers were very helpful, consisting as they did of  a lot of "None of the Aboves" as a long list of options seeemed to have no relevance to anything I'd done or seen. 

I did, however, take the opportunity to write a short essay in the "Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?" section. I had the good sense to copy and past it into a local file, so here's what I said, word for word: 

Before today I hadn't played since before the Kickstarter. I'd pretty much decided by then, after the earlier tests I was in, that it's not really my sort of game. No narrative makes it feel directionless and so far there's no real way to build a character in meaningful ways, by which I mean working on appearance and personality. Having what your character looks like keep changing outside of your control is a game-breaker, even in a testing phase. Even in a test I need to feel some attachment to my character or else it's just like a job I'm not being paid to do. As for gameplay, it's too heavily oriented around skill acquisition all of which takes far, FAR too long. Movement is enervating. I feel physically tired after a few minutes because of the way I have to drag the camera to see anything. Not being able to swing the camera 360 degrees with the character remaining still is very frustrating. Also the combat is deeply irritating. Should be able to play a non-combat character and not have to fight at all. Aggressive mobs have absolutely no place in starter areas, let alone in these numbers. Basically, I find most aspects of the game annoying. It has great potential but the mechanics appear to be almost intentionally getting in the way of any of it being fun. Having played for 45 minutes today, I do think it has improved but I still don't feel like playing again. I would recommend it to others because I can see how it would appeal to some people but it doesn't do much for me.

I did kind of bang that out in a bit of a temper because, as often tends to be the way, I ended my Stars Reach session feeling quite irritable and annoyed. It's a weird experience. The game seems like it ought to be fun but somehow it mostly isn't. It's a lot of fuss and bother for not very much  reward let alone entertainment but it feels like it shouldn't be.

In the past I've tended to put that down to it just not being my sort of game but really it's not all that different, mechanically, to any other survival-crafting game and I've had great times in several of those. So what exactly is it about Stars Reach that increasingly seems to rub me up the wrong way?

Partly, I think, it's that this really is still very early in the development process. Most of the time, most of what's there works fairly well, which is great, but also means the game has an unfortunate tendency to feel a lot more finished than it really is. It does say right there on the loading screen that it's "pre-alpha". You don't get much earlier than that. 

Much of what feels like it's missing feels that way because it really is missing and for very good reason: it hasn't been done yet. It will be, one day, and complaining that it's not there now seems silly. Unfortunately, if you're asking me what the game feels like now, as surveys tend to do, then without all the stuff that isn't in yet, well, yes, it probably is going to feel bad. Unavoidable, perhaps, but there it is.

The other thing that puts me off is much more nebulous. Stars Reach just feels like it doesn't really want me to be there. It's a hostile environment with very few amenities and everything is hard work. And there doesn't really seem to be much of a reason why I should be there, anyway. What am I actually supposed to be doing? 

One of those games that looks better when you're there than in screenshots, I think.

The snarky narrative wrapper that currently offers just about all there is for context really doesn't help. Apparently I'm an idiot from a race of idiots who messed everything up, only to survive on charity that's given grudgingly at best. The game wastes no time in making the player feel positively unwelcome which is a big risk that for me very much does not pay off. 

Having the game insult the player, let alone having that be the only way the game communicates, seems like asking for pushback, which in the case of a video game would usually consist of logging out, uninstalling and then bad-mouthing it to anyone who'll listen. I imagine there are people who find the "meatbag" routine hilarious. I am not one of them.

But more than that, there's a fug of earnestness surrounding Stars Reach, as if somehow playing it might be good for you. It reeks of being in the Scouts or some kind of social program, where everything builds character or community or is for your own good. Hard to put my finger on why it feels that way  but for me it's there and it's been there from the start. 

Again, almost certainly a big positive for some people but not me. I don't respond to it well at all and the combination of that sensation with open insults is just weird. And not in a good way.

And yet, as I said in the survey, I would recommend Stars Reach to others. It has the potential to be a solid experience when it's finished and it's not too shabby even now. It runs well and it looks good and there's enough to do to keep you busy for a while, which I'm sure is more than enough for a lot of people, not to mention more than what a lot of games a lot further along in development can offer.

So please don't let me put you off if, unlike me, you don't mind being called a meatbag every five minutes. 

In The Night Cafe

In the "AI Used In This Post" footnote I include with every post that uses any form of generative AI (Well, when I remember...) I almost always mention NightCafe. I can't remember when I first found the website but it must have been at least a couple of years ago and since then I've rarely gone anywhere else for my AI image needs.

AAM XL Anime Mix v1

Until today, when I did a bit of googling in support of this post, I had no idea NightCafe was an Australian operation. I also didn't know it had a mission statement: "to democratise art creation". The site's "About" page is worth a read. I won't paraphrase it here because it's a two-minute read but I recommend a click-through.  

I'm currently reading Supremacy by Parmy Olsen, which tells the story behind the development of the biggest of the Western AI developers, Deep Mind and OpenAI. I'm not far into the book yet (It's my bathroom book so I'm reading it a few pages at a time.) but the most surprising thing to me so far is the extent to which the individuals who started all of this had existential, humanitarian and even altruistic reasons for doing so.

I believe part of Parmy Olsen's purpose in writing the book was to show how those lofty goals became subverted by capitalism but I won't pre-empt the twist ending. I mention it mostly as a corollary to the brief description of Angus Russell's flash of inspiration for NightCafe, which was when a friend came round to his apartment and commented on how bare it looked with no pictures on the wall.

Nightmare Shaper v3

Somehow that led Angus to start a crusade to "allow anyone - regardless of skill level - to experience the satisfaction, the therapy, the rush of creating incredible, unique art." I'll pass over the inevitable argument that kind of statement is bound to start because this - believe it or not - isn't a post about the rights or wrongs of generative AI.

No, this is just another gamer's blog post where someone tells you how they've been grinding and now they've leveled up. Or something. 

Since I started using it, NightCafe has become increasingly gamified. There was always a log-in daily where you got five credits just for visiting the site each day, and there have been competitions running for as long as I can remember, none of which I have paid even the slightest passing attention.

A few weeks ago the administrators (Probably Angus's wife, who's the  Chief Operating Officer.) decided to turn that daily log-in into something a little more active, so now you have to make a picture before you get your free credits. It's a good deal because the minimum payout is still five creds but now there's a dice-roll to see how much more you get on top of that and on a good day you might get ten or fifteen.

DALL-E 3

Better yet, there are streaks. Every five days gets you a bonus ten credits and after a certain number of days you get an extra bonus and a title. I'm an Owl, which comes at thirty days. Next comes Horse at a hundred, then Bear at two hundred and Eagle after a full year.

I'd be further along but I missed a day because for some reason, one day I didn't get the email reminder. Until then, it had never failed to appear in all the time I'd been using the site. Now I take great care to check in every morning, email or no, because the penalty for missing a day is to slide all the way back down the snake to the start.

Not that it matters. The credits keep rolling in just the same and what difference does it make whether you're an Owl or an Eagle? Except it will matter to someone because there's a Leaderboard. 

I didn't know until today there was such a thing. Now I do, I still find it hard to believe. Who makes a leaderboard for a utility website? What would be going in someone's head to do a thing like that? 

Ideogram V3 Turbo

Top of the table today is Amelezz with a "1.2k day" streak, which suggests the streak thing has been going on a lot longer than I thought. If not for that one slip, I might be somewhere on that leaderboard. I doubt I missed many days since I first discovered the site, if any at all, and that has to be at least a couple of years ago..

But even then, my name still wouldn't show up on the board because I have never registered an account under any name. I must have filled in some form long ago or else how would they know where to send the emails but it doesn't seem to have required anything more than the address because my creations are all still accredited to "Anonymous User". 

Unlike Suno, which has a similar pattern of gamification and where I'm unknown as That Darn Cat, no-one is going to find anything I've done by searching Nightcafe. Mind you, they won't find much at Suno either, only the experiments I made when I first found the app, also a couple of years ago. All my recent work there remains resolutely private.

Google Imagen 4.0 Ultra

I am not tempted by leaderboards or likes and I am not a fan of gamification. In fact, I'm against it. When the new system was introduced I was irked. 

I could just have ignored it and stopped collecting the credits. I already had plenty, getting on for three thousand, and since I only use a handful every few weeks, whenever I need something for a post, I was hardly likely to run out.

I wasn't so angry I was going to do myself out of a free supply of credits just on principle, though, so I contented myself with some passive-aggressive push-back. I decided I wouldn't give NightCafe the satisfaction of seeing any new prompts from me to earn those credits. Instead, I'd re-use the exact same prompt every day.

For the first day of the new regime I pulled up one of the images I'd used for this post, which at the time was the most recent use I'd made of the app. I cut and pasted the prompt - "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism" - to generate a new image and that's the prompt I've been using every day since.

Fluently XL

The whole point of NightCafe, as opposed to other AI Image Generation sites, is that it collects together many, many models. The Pro version, for which you have to pay, has the most but even the free version has around sixty. 

At the start of my streak I just used whatever model I'd left in the chamber after the last time I visited but pretty quickly it occurred to me to try a different model each day. Had I been planning it, I'd have started at the top and worked down but as it is I've just been picking one on a whim and trying not to duplicate too much. At some point, I need to go back and note down all the ones I've used so I can make sure to try all the others.

It's been fascinating. The similarity of the images is striking but so are the differences. As of today I have forty-seven images from the same prompt which, you'll notice, does not mention anything about the way the figure should be facing, their ethnicity, the time of day or what exactly I mean by a "corn field".

All of these and many more are details left to the AIs to work out. It's very instructive to watch them doing it. 

Mysterious XL v4

In so far as it's possible to tell, all the women are white, often typically northern-European in appearance. There are one or two where it's slightly ambiguous but there are no dark-skinned faces and most of the clothing is broadly western in style. 

That seems telling because the prompt makes no mention of ethnicity or global location but although I didn't realize it when I came up with the prompt, "dustbowl" is a term apparently quite specific to 1930s America, as made familiar by movies and novels in general and Steinbeck in particular. I always imagined it to be a lot more generic than that.

That goes some way to explaining the clothing, too, which is vaguely appropriate to that setting with a lot of blue jeans, denim jackets, and long canvas dresses. Again, I only specified that it be "old" and "worn", something not all the models seemed to notice.

Neither did I say which way the figure should be facing but only nine feature a figure walking away from the viewer. All the rest are walking towards the camera except for one extreme outlier, apparently crossing the path from the left to the right. 

Juggernaut Flux Lightning

As for age, the various models took a fairly broad interpretation of "young", with the female figures
seeming to vary from mid-teens to mid-thirties. Two of the models ignored the instruction to make the figure "young" altogether and went for a white-haired, much older woman instead. 

All of the models, without exception, interpreted "corn field" to mean maize or sweet-corn., something I suspect shows a very strong North American bias in the data. When I wrote the prompt I wasn't imagining anything like that, as can be seen in the original short story from which the quote was taken. Where I come from, a "corn field" loosely means any arable crop. I was most likely thinking of wheat or barley. Certainly not maize. It also seems to clash somewhat with the aforementioned tight interpretation of "dustbowl".

Only a handful of models added anything significant to the background and when they did it was usually something that gave the image a somewhat post-apocalyptic or sci-fi feel. I'm not really sure where that comes from. Maybe it's just me, seeing things that aren't there.

Animagine XL v3

Another handful gave the figure something to carry, almost always luggage of some kind. There's a single image in which the woman appears to be holding some kind of gun. Most of the women are bare-headed but there's a smattering of hats. One very odd take puts the figure in what looks like a space-suit.

Given that I didn't give any suggestions at all on palette beyond the single word "color",  the collection is remarkably consistent, all shades of yellow and brown. Sepia is a particular favorite. Occasionally there's a pleasant blue sky. The very few images that use a lot of color really stand out. 

Every shot is taken in daylight, too, although a couple look like the sun is about to go down. Again, that was never specified or even mentioned so presumably "daytime" is some kind of default.

This degree of relative consistency is something I've also recently noticed as a feature of Suno, where I've had cause to reuse the exact same prompts multiple times, with just a single word changed, trying to fine-tune something. It's clear that whatever the mysterious black-box processes behind these images and sounds might be, they're far from random.

I'm very pleased with the portfolio I'm building up of these unnamed women, making their way across a somewhat forbidding landscape. I intend to carry on re-using the same prompt at least until I've run it through all the available free models, not so much to prove or test anything but just because I find it really entertaining to see what comes out each time I press the button.. 

When I'm finished, maybe I'll pick a dozen or so of the best ones and have them made into a poster. It could replace my Bojack Horseman by the Pool that faded so badly in the sun I had to take it down. Nightcafe does offer a print-and-frame service but I think I'll be doing this one myself.

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post:

Google Imagen 4.0

The prompt is in the post. All the models are given in the captions except for the four shots in the header image. The upper pair are both by Flux from before I started using a different model each time so it's no surprise they're so similar. The two beneath them are by two versions of the same model, HiDream I1, so again the similarity is explicable, although not so much the congruence of those two with the ones by Flux. The variant models for those two are HiDream I1 Dev on the left and HiDream I1 Full on the right. I notice the "full" model is a lot sharper and clearer.

My favorite, by some margin and not just of the selection you see here but of the entire run so far, is  the fourth from the top: the mid-teen girl in dungarees, carrying a heavy-looking sack and staring down at her feet, looking worried. That's very close to the image I had in my mind of the unnamed girl in the story and the very dusty, red-tinged field she's walking through is very like the setting. Perhaps surprisingly, that one's from a model one of whose whose biggest claims is that it "Excels in typography, producing text that closely resembles human-designed artwork."

I didn't use several of my other favorites because I was trying to give sense of the range and and to illustrate certain points I'd made. Before the event began, I was toying with the idea of posting one image a day throughout Blaugust and I might still do something like it, after it finishes. It just seems a shame not share the good ones.