I Guess That's What Everything Is Now.

I certainly wasn't planning on making any political statements today - or any other day for that matter - but sometimes it's harder to avoid than you might think. Like when you're browsing your media feeds after lunch and this comes up. 

I was pondering a response when Roger at Contains Moderate Peril beat me to it. Thanks, Roger! Saves me having to formulate any kind of reasoned, rational response, something I'm not sure I'd have been capable of, at least not just yet. 

Games Industry chimed in after that with an assurance that gaming wouldn't be affected, which I'm sure was the first thing on everyone's minds but kudos for staying in your lane, GI. Rest assured, the kids will still be able to play Minecraft and Roblox, apparently, although there needs to be some clarification on what the exemption actually means. Supposedly it excludes games but  not "gaming platforms" and media, so expect to have to supply Google and WordPress some ID any day now, if you want to carry on reading your favorite UK-based gaming blogs. 

Seriously, on that last point, I don't see why blogs wouldn't qualify as a form of social media, unless the legislation is only interested in some form of direct messaging, not conversations carried out in public. I guess we'll have to wait for the exact wording, although now I come to think about it, the ban includes YouTube, which I've never even remotely thought of as social media anyway. 

Who knows? If blogs really aren't included, maybe we'll see a revival of interest. For a couple of weeks, until they get added to the proscribed list, that is.

I can't make much sense of it yet. Livestreams are banned. But does that only mean livestreams like on Twitch, which have text panels where everyone talks at once in real time? Or is it also livestreams like sporting events or music festivals on Amazon Prime or Netflix or the fricken' BBC, where no-one talks at all and we all just watch like it's television? Who knows what the hell they're talking about. I guess we'll have to wait for the paperwork.

This has to be an overstep, doesn't it? I mean, I'm pissed off by it and I am very much not one of the annoying crew that keeps bleating on about the daed internets. I'm not even all that especially bothered by the current fad for supplying "identification" to all and sundry, although I was pretty pissed off by the time I'd had to send selfies of me holding up my passport five times in one week (Almost true story. Only slightly exaggerated.)

Every medium has its Wild West era but it never lasts. Enjoy it while you can is my advice but don't expect it to stay that way. We had some fun. Now it's over. Teacher came back into the room.

That said, this blanket ban seems like a response on the level of John Major's infamous Dangerous Dogs Act. I was tempted to go a lot further back, compare it to King Cnut holding back the waves, but as we all know, I'm sure, he was trying to demonstrate how he couldn't do anything so ridiculous, not to prove he could. He was trying to make the point that just because he was King didn't mean he could do anything anyone wanted him to do. Our currently elected overlords seem not to have taken that lesson to heart.

I guess, since I'm nearly seventy now (I need to keep saying that out loud in a vain attempt to get used to the idea. I do still have a couple of years to go...), I ought to be able to stand back and ignore this nonsense. It's not going to affect me, after all. Except I'm sure it will. Not sure how, yet, but I'll bet it won't be anything good.

Perhaps the most interesting thing will be to see how the target demographic responds. Are they going to welcome it? Accept it? Ignore it? If it works, will teenagers genuinely feel they've been given their childhood back? And if they have, will they want it?

I didn't think "childhood" was anything most adolescents particularly valued but maybe that's changed. It's been a long time since I was a child or a teenager, although you might not think it to read this blog. When you were in your teens, did you think of yourself as a child? Did you want everyone else to see you that way? I didn't. At least I don't think I did. As I said, it was a long time ago.

And come to think of it, wasn't the current government talking about lowering the voting age to 16? Is anyone sensing a degree of inconsistency? 

Oh, well. No point going on about it. It hasn't happened yet. It might never happen. If it does happen it might not work. Anyone from Australia reading this? How's it working out for you over there, so far?

I was going to leave you with a final word from Astryuuna on one of my favorite YouTube channels. She's  a lot closer to the target age bracket and although I think she'd probably just escape it, she's having some problems of her own with people trying to tell her how to use the social media and technology she grew up with.

Astryuuna's widely praised for flying the flag for how the internet used to be before it got ruined by a devil's handshake of censorship and commercialism. She's also very NSFW, so be warned. She makes a lot of good points in her latest video, though. She usually does. You don't have to be sane, rational, balanced or reasonable to be right. Or, as the proposed legislation suggests, very, very wrong.   

And then I thought, no, why take the risk? She does go in hard in the latest rant. I don't want to get into trouble by association. Which is indicative of how a moral panic gets to you, isn't it? Go look her up yourself if you're interested. It'll be worth your time. 

Instead, I'll go out with a nice, safe option. Here's a Voice Of Today saying something vaguely relevant. 

Chloe Slater, aged 23, already waxing nostalgic about the good old days of her Southern Youth, although from the video it looks more like she grew up in the '80s. It's not quite jumpers for goalposts but it's not far off. The camcorder's a particularly nice touch.

Cracking song though. I wonder how all the new Chloes out there will get to see videos like that, when YouTube's banned?

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Just the two images, both generated through NightCafe as usual, although I'm typing this listening to some songs I made last week on Suno. Does that count?

I made the second image first, using the prompt "King Canute on his throne on the beach with the tide coming in. He's  surrounded by sycophantic nobles. Canute is checking his mobile phone to see what people are saying on social media about his attempt to hold back the waves. In the style of a stained glass window in a medieval cathedral." You'll note I spelled Canute the way it was spelled when I was growing up, not the way it's usually spelled now. I don't know why I thought an AI wouldn't recognize it otherwise.

For that image I just used whatever model was in the chamber, which happened to be Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. I was pretty happy with it, too, but when I needed a second image I thought I'd run the same prompt through one of my Pro freebies, in this case GPT Image 2 Low. Blimey, Charlie! It's a lot better, isn't it? So I used that one for the header and relegated poor old Flux to the body. Maybe there is some point to paying a sub after all.

Slackers, Wannabes And Chancers Need Not Apply

Due to circumstances beyond my control (Multiple mildly annoying real life events, mostly of the things breaking down or needing to be replaced variety, having to be dealt with at once.) posts here may be a tad more sporadic than usual for a while, and/or shorter, and/or obviously cobbled together in a few minutes with little or no regard to whether they make sense/are of interest to anyone/appear to be in any way original or worth the virtual paper they're written on. 

Whether anyone would have noticed if I hadn't just pointed it out is another question altogether...

Anyway, in that spirit, here's something I bookmarked to write a thoughtful and considered post about and then did this instead.

Up there at the top, that's the splash for the new EverQuest II Content Creator Program as announced by Senior Community Manager Angeliana on the forums on Friday. What the significance of the image might be I have no idea. It looks like Ice vs Fire but how that has anything to do with creating content beats me. I guess it might be a metaphor but if so I can't imagine how it would be a complimentary one. When fire and ice meet, all you get is a lot of steam.

The forum post itself contains a daunting amount of detail about the new program. A lot of it seemed slightly odd to me and some of it I felt almost verged on the passive-aggressive, as if whoever wrote it was anticipating people trying to blag their way onto the program without having the necessary bona fides. Then again, gamers, so...

The elevator pitch is that the program offers "an official initiative by Daybreak Games to support and empower creators who bring the world of EQII to life." but when you read the whole thing it seems more like an attempt to spin up some social media presence, something the game is currently lacking, by handing out bribes. 

Not a bad idea at all. What surprised me were the requirements for inclusion in the program, which seem very stringent, especially for a twenty year-old MMORPG with a relatively small player-base, and most especially in view of the way that player-base skews towards the upper end of the age scale, at least for online gaming. 

Nevertheless, Angeliana is uncompromising in her determination to professionalize the enterprise. The whole things begins with this statement of intent:

"This is the first official round of the Creator Program. Spots are limited, and while many applicants may meet the base requirements, acceptance is not guaranteed. We’re prioritizing active, engaged creators who align with the goals of the program and can help us shape the future of the EQII community."

My first thought was to wonder if there would be enough interest to fill the available spots at all. The idea that there will be such a rush to join that spots need to be limited seems a little fanciful. How many EQII players even use social media, much less create it, I wonder? Is there really going to be that much competition for places?

Further down the announcement there are some quite specific entry requirements:

"Who can apply?

• Creators aged 18+
• Content makers generating at least 15 pieces of content in the last 90 days across at least three categories (Streaming, Writing, Long-form Video, Short-form Video, Podcasting, Social Reach)
• Must be in good standing in the EverQuest II community"

Over 18s only is standard, of course, and being in "good standing" (I.e. not currently banned or suspended from the game.) makes perfect sense.  I don't have an issue with any of that. 

It's the "15 pieces of content in the last 90 days across at least three categories" part that I find hard to rationalize. I mean, even as an either/or, it seems like a big barrier to entry but both?

And while it's very nice to see blogs included among social media. (It says "writing" in the above quote but elsewhere blogs are specifically mentioned.), who is out there writing blog posts, making videos and podcasting about EQII more than once a week? Anyone? Enough people to make restricted access to a program specifically designed for them necessary?

In case what's expected isn't clear enough from the bullet points, the announcement goes on to delineate the expected participation levels in excruciating detail:

Eligible Content Types (must meet at least 3):

• Streaming:
  • Streamed at least 3 times in the last 90 days
  • VODs must be viewable
  • Must average 10+ concurrent viewers
• Social Short-Form Video Content:
  • Posted at least 3 videos in the last 90 days
  • Platforms include TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc.
• Writing:
  • Written at least 3 articles in the last 90 days
• Long-Form Video Content:
  • Produced at least 3 videos, each 15 minutes or longer, in the last 90 days
• Podcasting:
  • Produced at least 3 podcast episodes in the last 90 days
• Social Media Reach:
  • Have at least 200 combined followers across all platforms
  • Posted at least 9 Social posts in the last 90 days
• X, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Other

So, you need to be active across a number of platforms and operate using a number of media and be consistent about it before you're deemed worthy of consideration for one of the limited places on the program. For which, if accepted, you will be entitled to:

Full access to all adventure packs and expansions through the most recent release

All-access account status

Marketplace cash each month for in-game use

Content Codes to give away to your audience

Access to promo content and preview codes for upcoming expansions

Opportunities to be featured in official EQII social media or articles

Which, actually, isn't bad. You get free expansions beyond the ones that are already free anyway. You get your subscription paid, which is worth a decent chunk of cash. You get some toy money to spend in the game (Although I wonder if that's just the 500DBC you get for being an All Access member anyway?)

You get giveaways for your audience (Twitch Codes and the like, presumably.) You get a first look at the new stuff (Which as far as expansions go, you would generally get for pre-ordering anyway, so once again, probably nothing you couldn't already get as a regular player, just for free.) so you can write/talk/video about it, presumably, unless it's under NDA, of course. And you get to be talked about by people who actually get paid to do what you're doing for free. Big whoop.

Personally, I'd rather pay for my own expansions and All Access membership and get to see everything at the same time as everyone else. I never use the beta access for Game Updates or expansions because it spoils the fun when the real thing arrives and as for getting the expansions and membership for free, I always feel that if someone's giving me stuff like that, even if they make it plain there are no strings, there are ALWAYS strings.

At the very least it makes me feel uncomfortable if I want to say something negative. It's bad-mannered, like accepting an invite to a dinner party, eating the food and then criticizing the host's taste in wallpaper and soft furnishings. I mean, you can, if you want, but everyone's going to think you're a dick, even if they secretly agree with you and so they should.

At this point, if I really wanted to bulk this post out, I'd have no trouble doing it. The announcement goes on and on and on... I could cut and past half a dozen more sections like the above, most of which repeat the previous ones and maybe find something to say about them but that would be as much of an overkill as the thing itself. 

Why there needs to be such a wealth of detail in the opening announcement beats me. Maybe the legal team wrote it. It certainly reads like it.

Anyway, I won't be applying but I can think of two or three bloggers who'd I'd happily endorse if they were interested. I imagine they'd have more sense than to apply, though.

I'll be interested to see if the whole thing goes anywhere. I suspect it won't but I'll be happy enough if it does. More coverage of EQII out in the world would be nice, especially if I can scrape it for posts of my own!

Breaking News - Hello Kitty Is A Cat

 

Yesterday, I was stunned to read - in The Independent, no less - that “Hello Kitty is not a cat.” According to the article, which quotes as its source Sanrio director of retail business development Jill Koch, in an interview she gave on the Today Show, "She’s actually a little girl born and raised in the suburbs in London."

It seemed so unlikely I wasn't prepared to accept it just like that, even on the say-so of a respectable, old media source like a national print newspaper, where traditional, pre-internet journalistic standards might be presumed still to exist, so I engaged in a modicum of fact-checking. Something you might have thought whoever subbed the piece for the Indie might have thought to do before running it.

It's not as though it took me much time or effort, either. It took maybe thirty seconds to confirm that

a) It's not true.

and

b) It's not news.

The claim originally surfaced a decade ago in a 2014 Los Angeles Times article, ahead of the style icon's 40th Anniversary, when Christine R Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii and the author of  Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek across the Pacific, was interviewed in relation to a Hello Kitty exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum. 

Among other surprising facts, Yano revealed that Hello Kitty "is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature." She also explained that Sanrio, who presumably ought to know, had made all of this very clear to her in a response to the script she sent them for approval while preparing the show.

It seems the revelation didn't gain quite as much traction in the U.K. back then as it has now, on the occasion of Hello Kitty's fiftieth anniversary, when it suddenly resurfaced and became a news story across the British media. If you google it, you'll find numerous reports on all kinds of responsible outlets, from The Guardian to Sky News.

Once again, none of them seemed to think it worth checking with Sanrio for confirmation, possibly because this time the claims were, after all, being made by a senior representative of the company.Apparently no-one even bothered googling it.

Had they done so, they'd soon have discovered, as Kotaku did back in 2014, that the whole thing was nothing more than a combination of translation issues and cultural differences. The Kotaku piece goes into considerable detail about the nuances of language that apparently led to the confusion, all of which are very interesting but which I won't repeat here. 

The key facts were summarised neatly by The Week, where Catherine Garcia explains 

"Hello Kitty is just one in a long line of personified animal characters, including Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and others. Although he may be able to drive cars, steer boats, and serve as a sorcerer's apprentice, Mickey's still a mouse, just like Hello Kitty — who bakes, goes to school, and is on the side of a 777 — is still a cat."

Why it ever needed anyone to spell this blindingly obvious fact out in simple terms is as much a mystery as how the story came to be resurrected (Hint: It's the fiftieth anniversary and hey, look! There's Hello Kitty in the news!) I'm actually more concerned by the apparent failure of almost all of the mainstream news sources to realise the "news" they were breaking was a decade out of date than I am to find they didn't bother to do due diligence on a silly-season story about a cartoon cat.

Anyway, in honor of the Great Event I'm pleased to present for you a choice selection from the many, many songs that have been written in Kitty White's honor over the last half century. That's Hello Kitty's real name, by the way. Did you not know?

Some of these may have appeared here before but they may also be the best ones so no apologies for bringing them back. And with that, let's have

Hello Kitty - Avril Lavigne

Avril's having something of a renaissance right now. She played Glastonbury for the first time and in what the NME described as "one of the weekend’s most highly-anticipated performances" she played a dozen of her best-known hits. This wasn't one of them.

Hello Kitty - Jazmin Bean

I'm pretty sure Kitty and her twin sister Mimmy would't be allowed to watch this. It'd either give them  nightmares or make them big-headed. Bigger-headed....

Hello Kitty - PiNKII 

Or this one, either, probably. For other reasons. Then again, PiNKII is PG compared to most of the rappers who've riffed off  HK. I had to stop clicking on those after about the fifth one I tried. Seriously, what is with rap and Hello Kitty?

HELLO KiTTY - OH!DULCEARi x LESTON

Spanish-language hyperpop is a sub-genre I am coming to adore. The glitching in this is superb. Two million views on YouTube says I'm not crazy, too.

🪲Hëłłœ Kįttÿ🐜 Alice Longyu Gao

Pretty much just Avril Lavigne for little Kitty White then, I guess. I mean, this one probably could do with a content warning. I guess they all could, although it's a bit late now...

Maybe we'd better finish with something wholesome.

Hello Kitty: Super Style! - Carly Rae Jepsen

Pity it's so short but then - SO IS HELLO KITTY!

Boom! Boom!

Okay, now that makes me wonder... is Basil Brush really a fox...? 

Hello Kitty would get that reference. She is British, after all. 

Daisy Jones & Co.

Believe it or not, I have actually been taking notes in anticipation of a catch-all Friday post for this week. I know, right? Pod person alert!

Of course, when I say "taking notes", what I really mean is I've been bookmarking pieces that sparked an interest or making brief mental notes on things I've heard or seen. It's not like I've worked up an essay plan or anything. I still have to sit here and somehow spin this base metal into gold. Gold thread. Whatever.

It's a useful step in the process, anyway; the mere act of recording an idea. It tends to lead to musing, not to say brooding. It's a bit like prepping vegetables. You don't want to start too soon or they'll lose their freshness but getting some of the work done ahead of time does make things a whole lot easier when it comes to the actual cooking. 

Okay. I'll stop with the analogies. They're not helping. When did they ever?

Let's see what we've got. Here are the topics I bookmarked, literally or figuratively, this week:

1. The Daisy Jones and the Six adaptation and soundtrack album.
2. Velma becomes the worst rated show on IMDB ever.
3. Lockwood & Co.
4. Syberia

Not a lot, is it? Still, these things tend to balloon. I'm sure it'll be enough. If not, we can always pad things out with a song or two.  

Let's start with #s 1 and 3 because they fit together in an unexpected way.

For anyone who hasn't stepped into a bookstore in the last couple of years, Daisy Jones and the Six is a novel by Taylor Jenkins Read. Read is the 39-year old author of eight novels, the last four of which are set in the same universe, as we're now, almost unselfconsciously, training ourselves to think of these things. 

As far as I can tell, no-one paid much attention to the first four. Until I did some research for this post, I hadn't even heard of them, which is kind of surprising, seeing what a huge deal the rest of them have been and what I do for a living. 

This, though, is how publishing works. I can't count the number of "new authors" I've watched being "discovered", only to find they have a back catalog going back years. It applies to several of my favorite writers of recent times- Rainbow Rowell, Emily St. John Mandell, Frances Hardinge - and now, thanks to TikTok, which is in the process of rewriting the rules for both publishers and booksellers, it's happening to dozens of authors all at once.

Taylor Jenkins Read isn't, so far as I know, a TikTok phenomenon. I'm not really sure what caused her sixth novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, to catch the reading public's attention but by the time it happened I, for once, already knew who she was.

I'd read Daisy Jones and the Six a couple of years before, in proof. It had a catchy cover, an engaging title and it was about a rock band in the 1970s. Predictably, I gave it a try; less predictably, I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

I have something of a history with novels about rock groups. When I was a teenager there hardly were any. Rock music wan't seen as something adults wanted to read about, I guess, and in the days before the Young Adult genre existed, adolescents were barely even thought of as a market, other than for exploitation and media spin-offs.

Still, there were a few. All Night Stand by Thom Keyes was one that often got mentioned although, as I found out when I finally tracked down a copy, it's not very good. I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo by Nik Cohn was another. I was lucky enough to grab a copy of one of the best ever written, Mick Farren's The Tale of Willy's Rats, when it was published in 1974. It's been out of print pretty much ever since.

Nowadays, every kind of musical act from a struggling indie band to a bunch of global megastars is as likely to turn up in prose fiction as any artist, actor or creative profession - other than writer, of course. Writers just frickin' love writing about writers. Even so, books that focus on the process of being in a band still aren't that common.

What's even more unusual are fictional bands that make the transition from the page to the recording studio. I'm not talking about the kind of projects I addressed recently, where a band made up of actors features in a movie or a a TV show, then takes the whole performance on the road. That happens more often than the reverse, where musicians are hired to recreate the sound of a band that already exists (And has usually already split up.) in the pages of a novel.

Until it was announced that a scad of professional songwriters, among them Marcus Mumford, Phoebe Bridgers and Jackson Browne, would be coming up with an album's-worth of songs by Daisy Jones and the The Six, to be recorded by "instrumentalists who’ve played with Rilo Kiley, the Who, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, David Bowie, Elton John, Jeff Beck, the Wallflowers, and more", the only example I could think of off the top of my head was the radio adaptation of Iain Banks 1980s novel Espedair Street. 

Banks himself wrote the words and music for the imaginary band, Frozen Gold, in collaboration with Nigel Clark. It was performed for the show by a band put together for the purpose, aired twice, then was never heard again. It remains my go-to for proof you can't just find everything you want on the internet.

I read a lot of books and I rarely remember much about them afterwards, other than a fairly clear impression of whether I liked them or not and whether I thought they were any good, not necessarily in any way the same thing. I liked Daisy Jones and The Six and I thought it was good. I went on to read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which was even better.

Read is both marketed and widely thought of as a light, romantic, middlebrow writer, whose books are aimed at and appeal mostly to young women. In common with plenty of other writers caught up in that commercial bracket, she has plenty to offer readers of a much wider demographic but don't get me started on the horrors of genre marketing. With luck, the adaptation, due to appear on Amazon Prime next month as a ten episode mini-series, will introduce her work to a whole new audience. If it's any good, that is.

Adaptations of novels are tricky things even when there isn't an entire discography to spin up out of nowhere. I mentioned The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself, a version of Sally Green's Half Bad that was shown on Netflix last year. I watched the whole thing with considerable enjoyment. It was a dark, grimy, glamorous, disturbing vision of a contemporary world where magic was real. It was critically well-received and sat in Netflix UK's Top Ten for a while but I'm sure it won't surprise anyone to know it's already been cancelled.

At least, as an adaptation of an extant series of novels, there's no need to guess what would have happened next; you can just go read the book. That's something I may well do, both for Half Bad and for the Netflix show I started watching a couple of days ago - Lockwood & Co.

Lockwood & Co. is based on a series of YA novels by Jonathan Stroud and for once I haven't read any of them, neither before or after publication. I thought I had. I mistakenly believed - unti l I fact-checked it - that Stroud was also the author of the long-running "Spook" series, which I did read the first of in proof a long time ago and which Mrs Bhagpuss liked enough to buy the first half-dozen or so, when she spotted them in a charity shop, although I'm not sure if she ever got around to reading any of them.

In fact, it was Joseph Delaney who wrote the Spook books, whose ghost-hunting premise and teenage protagonists appear to be all the two series have in common. Still, the imagined link to something I knew and liked was enough to catch my eye - that and the uncanny similarity between Lockwood & Co. as an organization and DC Comics' Dead Boy Detectives, originally created by Neil Gaiman and who I first encountered in the TV version of Doom Patrol.

Each team consists of two boys and a girl, all in their late teens. Both outfits act without adult supervision to investigate supernatural phenomena and solve mysteries. The main point of departure would seem to be that both Dead Boy Detectives are, as the name suggests, dead, while Lockwood and his pal are most decidedly still alive.

As I write, Lockwood & Co. is #1 in Netflix UK's Top Ten. I've seen the first two episodes and they are fast, fun and already a good deal less frothy than I was expecting. The set-up, a roughly contemporary Britain in which angry, incoherant ghosts have been ruling the night and killing millions for over half a century, certainly gets points for originality from me. If it's been done quite this way before, I haven't seen it.

As well as what look like solid viewing figures, the show also has both audience and critical acclaim. As Forbes fumes, though, this means nothing when it comes to whether we'll ever get to see a second season. In that article, Paul Tassi makes the same point that's been raised here several times - writers of these shows are just going to have to learn to deal with the massive uncertainty over whether they'll get to continue their stories and stop ending every season with a cliffhanger, whose resolution, more likely than not, will never come.

As I've said, though, fear of an unresolved narrative is not going to put me off  trying new shows. And, once again, in this case there's a safety net. If the show doesn't get picked up for a second (Or third, or fourth...) season, I'll just have to read the books.

Always assuming, of course, that the adaptation stays faithful enough to the original make that a rational option. It's not always the case as, by absolutely all accounts I've seen, the newest take on the Scooby Gang demonstrates.

But I've gone on long enough. Velma will have to wait, along with Syberia. Probably just as well.

In Another League

Three weeks ago, when I read this interview with the BBC's Steffan Powell over at Gamesindustry.biz, I thought sure, that's fine, but you're "Radio 1 Newsbeat's gaming reporter". Your target audience is fifteen to twenty-nine year olds. Of course you're going to take gaming seriously. 

Just hearing the argument voiced by a representative of the media giant's most teen/young adult-oriented station risks undermining the argument that "The oil tanker is turning in terms of the mainstream media's approach to games”, doesn't it? 

Powell makes the point, repeatedly, that he can be 'parachuted in' to offer his insights to other parts of the network, but when he says things like "If a story is appropriate for other bits of the Beeb, we share it. She's a big beast, the BBC, and it can be quite confusing..." it doesn't entirely give off a vibe of everyone in the corporate monolith being on the same level, to use a gaming metaphor. Or even the same page.

I'm not for one moment denying there has been a change in attitude towards gaming in the media. I'd say that, as a general topic, it's treated not too differently now from the way popular music was treated in the '80s and '90s. Enough people in enough senior positions have grown up with it to understand at least a little about it and to realize that even if it's not something they personally enjoy, other people of their age and educational background find it engaging.

Gaming is still some way from where pop music sits in the media cycle today. These days even relatively minor musicians, people who had, at best, cult followings when they were alive or who enjoyed two or three hit records anyone's likely to temember, are deemed worthy of sizeable obituaries in the quality press. Anyone who ever had a session on the John Peel show is pretty much guaranteed a documentary.

You don't quite need to be the gaming equivalent of David Bowie or Elvis to get that kind of treatment in the mainstream but you probably have to at least be Leonard Cohen. Gaming to the media still means violence, gambling and addiction. Actually maybe that's not such a stretch from the way they cover popular music after all...

I read that article three weeks ago and promptly forgot about it. I certainly wouldn't be writing about it now, if it wasn't for one thing.

This morning I clicked on my bookmark for the cricket coverage at BBC Sport. I wasn't sure if the fourth Test with India started tomorow or Friday. It didn't say on the main page so I clicked the link that said "Live cricket coverage on the BBC". 

That took me to a page that very helpfully told me "There are no scheduled Cricket live coverages." Next to it was yet another link: "Select All to view our full range of selected coverages". So I clicked on that and this is what I saw:

The BBC not only covering the League of Legends UK Championships but selecting the final as recommended viewing? Placing it between Premier League and European football? Giving it that degree of equivalency and legitimacy?

I guess things are changing faster than I thought.