Friday In My Mind

Friday again? Didn't we have one last week? Oh well, here goes...

Twitter Goes Boom! Again.

Thanks to Firefox Monitor, I bring you news of yet another in a never-ending stream of data breaches. Seriously, these will literally never end. Even though it's really tempting just to ignore the notifications, I always feel I ought to do something...

It does get particularly irritating when the source is 

a) Something I signed up to a decade ago

and

b) Have pretty much never logged into since

not to mention

c) Have no intention of ever logging into again.

So, this morning I dug out all my Twitter details, which, yes, I still have, thank-you, and changed all of them. Should I ever want to use Twitter, which will never happen, I now have a specific email address just for that. It will not be used for anything else, which means it will never be used at all. 

Now no-one will be able to steal my unused Twitter account with no followers and no posting history and pretend to be me, someone no-one has ever heard of. Phew!

So Long, Tracy Hyde

Here's the timeline:

Ten years ago: For Tracy Hyde form in Japan "as a solo project for Natsubot".

One week ago: I "discover" For Tracy Hyde, while searching for something entirely unconnected on YouTube.

Three days ago: I share my discovery with the world - or at least the infinitesimal part of it that reads music posts here. I'm less than effusive, observing "It may be shameful to admit it but this is exactly the kind of song I'd probably skip over if it was by an English or American band."

One day ago, morning: Pitchfork reviews For Tracy Hyde's latest album, Hotel Insomnia, giving it a big 7.6 thumbs up under the headline "The latest album from the Japanese shoegaze band shimmers with restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest."

One day ago, afternoon: Pitchfork reports "For Tracy Hyde, Japanese Shoegaze Band, Break Up".

I  hope it wasn't anything I said...

I Like Cartoons

No-one calls them "cartoons" any more, do they? If it was good enough for Top Cat...

Once again, it seems I'm watching a lot of animated television. I swear it's not intentional. It just keeps happening.

I mentioned how frustrating I found it, not to be able to footnote my entries in last year's musical Advent Calendar. Case in point, Day Nine, which featured Woofin' and Meowin' by Inventory Full favorites Superorganism.

This tune was written specifically as the theme for the Christmas Special of a show called Housebroken, a Fox animated comedy featuring Lisa Kudrow as "A dog named Honey who runs group therapy sessions to help neighborhood animals manage the neuroses brought on by their owners and each other." I had never heard of the show before the song popped up on one of the music feeds I follow but pretty soon I'd seen every episode.

Luckily for me, since the show has no distribution in the UK, some kind-but-arguably-irresponsible person has posted them all on YouTube. Even more luckily, as yet no-one has put a stop to it. 

I wasn't expecting great things, as I'm sure you won't be if you just watched the awkward, official Fox trailer at the head of this section, but I was substantively impressed. The show's way better than I imagined it would be. 

Housebroken is a smart, funny. well-written show that frequently goes in directions I didn't anticipate. The characterisations are solid, the situations believable-for-sitcom and there's a delirious sense of surrealism hanging around the whole thing. Highly recommended, especially for anyone with pets.

Sadly, I've consumed all the Housebroken content that's available right now but I have two other much longer-running animated shows on the go, both on Amazon Prime. One's a very old favorite that I belatedly realised I'd never really seen that much of; the other's a show I'd never heard of until a couple of weeks ago, almost certainly because it's Canadian. 

It took a combination of the worldwide web and the growth of streaming services to reveal the depth and breadth of Canadian popular culture to the world. Now the curtain's been lifted, it's catch-up time. This particular revelation is the animated spin-off of a live-action show I really want to track down as well. 

They're both called Corner Gas. I imagine some people in the US may know the show but as far as I can tell it never had distribution in most of Europe (Finland and Cyprus being the exceptions). Instead, for some arcane marketing reason, it showed mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. 

The animated version reminds me very strongly of King of the Hill, a show I watched in the '90s. It also has some similarities to recent Canadian sitcom hit Kim's Convenience and US classic Newhart, although in none of those shows was the main character a comic-book fan, something that automatically puts Corner Gas ahead on points.

The other show will, I'm sure, be familiar to most people reading this. It's Daria.  

I watched a few episodes of Daria on Channel 4 in the '90s but they were mostly out of sequence and I remember little about them. What I mostly remember Daria for is the voice-pack for Baldur's Gate I downloaded and installed that made my character speak only in phrases sampled from Tracy Grandstaff's performance as the title character, Daria Morgendorffer.

As you might imagine, that gave my first play-through of the game a certain edge it otherwise wouldn't have had. I lost that voice-pack when I changed computers and my second run at the game was nowhere near as compelling without it. 

It's been a revelation to watch the show from the beginning, learning who all the characters are and how they interact. I'd remembered it as something close to a monologue but it's really more of an ensenble show, as are most really good sitcoms. The animation is incredibly minimal, as was the unfortunate norm of the time, but the script and voice acting more than makes up for the lack of visual finesse.

Renewal Patrol

While we're on the subject of TV shows, I just finished the third season of Doom Patrol. As is my practice, I immediately tabbed over to Google to find out if there was going to be a fourth. Question expecting the answer "No".

To my amazement, not only was a fourth season commissioned, it's already showing on HBO Max. Given the frequent reports of cancellations to various DC projects following the appointment of James Gunn as Studio CEO, it seemed to me, having watched with increasing amusement the extent to which the showrunners of Doom Patrol were willing to subvert the entire concept of superheroics, there would be little chance of a slot in the supposedly more commercially-focused New DCU.

Then again, given the timeframes, I guess Season Four is already legacy product. Season Five has to be the one that's in doubt. I have yet to watch any of the current, fourth, season, which has no UK distribution at present, but it would be deliciously ironic should it turn out to be the final exposure. 

Doom Patrol holds the record, as far as I'm aware, for longest set-up for a superhero team. I thought two seasons from Cloak and Dagger was pushing it but we've watched these characters bicker and equivocate for three full seasons over whether they are - or even want to be - any kind of team. They don't even get a collective name until the final episode of Season Three, when Cliff "Robotman" Steele comes up with... Doom Force. 

Personally, I'd like to see a spin-off show featuring Dorothy and the Dead Boy Detectives, the team of paranormal investigators (Two ghosts and a medium.) with whom she leaves the show in Episode Three of the third season. Maybe they'll be back in Season Four. I hope so.

And that's about all I have for today. Another Friday afternoon ground down to dust.

Onwards!

Getting Settled In

A sure way for me to tell if I'm genuinely excited to play a game or I'm just logging in because I think I might get a blog post out of it is whether I fire the game up right after breakfast, even when I have other things I should be doing instead. That's what happened this morning, so I guess I really am up for the latest EverQuest II expansion, Renewal of Ro, even if I had completely forgotten it was going to launch yesterday.

I did have other things on my mind, of course, not least my winter migration from the upstairs room where I usually play (and write this blog) to the one downstairswith the gas fire and the big window that gets the sun most of the day, making it much easier to heat and keep warm. 

With all the dire warnings of fuel charges escalating out of control plus the sudden change in the weather, meaning it actually feels like winter at last, not late spring, I decided it was no longer tenable to spend most of my time in what is indubitably the coldest, least insulated room in the house. Much of yesterday was spent relocating and reorganizing. 

I'm still not entirely settled in my winter palace. I'm not crazy about sitting with my back to the window, facing a wall, and the table I'm using instead of my computer desk, which is too much trouble to move, is a couple of inches too high for ergonomic perfection. It doesn't help that my ancient swivel chair, the one I inherited from my stepfather, who must have died at least fifteen years ago, while still generally sound and comfortable (The chair, not my deceased relative.), no longer goes up and down like a good computer chair should. 

There's also so much stuff under the table - around four thousand comic books I boxed up to sell years ago but then couldn't find anyone who wanted to buy them, or at least not at a price I was willing to accept - that I can't stretch my legs out straight. I'm probably going to have to come up with a better solution if I don't want to get cramp in the middle of a boss fight.

Then there's the issue of connectivity. Years ago, when we had a new router installed by our ISP, I got them to put it in the upstairs room I was using as a study at the time. That's now Mrs Bhagpuss's craft storage room. You can barely get in the door. It's also right at the front of the house, which means the wifi signal barely reaches the back of the house.

It didn't used to be a problem until I bought a smart TV a couple of months ago. Modern television sets are basically computers, something that had passed me by in the twenty years since I last owned a TV. I did a lot of research before I bought this one and still pretty much got it wrong, to the point that I'm now thinking of buying another. 

The one I bought is nothing much more than an oversized android tablet and like any tablet it needs an internet connection. I knew that when I got it but I didn't realise how inadequate my existing wifi would be for the task. I already had a booster but even that didn't make much difference, so I got a proper router to replace the infamously poor modem/router supplied by my ISP (I'm sure anyone in the UK will be able to guess immediately who that is.)

It turned out to be one of those lucky mistakes. I'd been meaning to improve the wifi for a couple of years but it was always one of those "it'll do for now" situations. The TV brought things to a necessary head and just in time, too, because I really didn't want to have to run yet another 30m ethernet cable through the house. 

Instead, I just put the extender next to where I now sit downstairs and connected it to the PC with a regular, 2m ethernet cable because apparently my desktop PC doesn't do wifi. Of course, the connection it's using now is wireless until those final two meters. Don't tell my computer.

I was curious to see how well it would work compared to the wired connection I've always used until now. The surprising answer is very well indeed. As far as I can tell, it's exactly the same. I literally can't tell the difference. 

I played Noah's Heart last night and EQII this morning and they both felt smooth as butter. Lord of the Rings Online was laggy but when isn't it? Going back to LotRO recently has felt like going back in time a decade and a half, to when mmorpgs and internet latency were synonomous. Seriously, if Standing Stone is a part of Daybreak, can't they borrow some better servers from EverQuest or something? Or at least get some advice on how to fix the problem?

Anyway, I'm kind of getting there, although I still need to do some work before my new lair feels as cosy as it should. The main thing is, I'm warm now and it isn't costing us a fortune.

As for Renewal to Ro, so far it's exactly as expected. I've seen maybe two-thirds of the first zone, done a handful of quests, already replaced two of the items I only equipped earlier in the same session and generally had a very good time. 

Following the standard practice of recent expansions, flying is disabled until you reach a certain point in the Signature questline. There's a lore-apporopriate reason for that, which looks as if it'll feature in the story, somehow. The landscape is fairly flat, anyway, so travelling on foot hasn't presented any problems.

One major departure from the last expansion is that I was easily able to kill the first solo overland named I happened upon. That's something I'd always expected to be able to do - until Visions of Vetrovia, where I never managed to kill a single one. 

There were supposedly solo weekly quests in VoV for overland names -  or"major threats" as they're called - just like in every other expansion since 2014's Altar of Malice, but even by the end of the expansion cycle I still couldn't get any of them below half health before they either killed me or I had to retreat. I'd still love to know what that was all about...

I was so pleased with myself to have triumphed, I took three screenshots; one just before Tickrupt the giant tick bit the sand and two more after, both when the achievement popped and when my merc observed, somewhat sarcastically in the circumstances, "Your demise was the only conceivable outcome.". For once, he wasn't looking at me when he said it.

The real test of the solo-friendliness of the new expansion will come when I reach the point where I have to enter the first dungeon. That can sometimes come as a bit of a slap with a wet fish. I'm optimistic that it'll be fine this time, though. Everything so far seems well-tuned and expansions where the level cap doesn't change do tend to be easier.

Before then, I have a lot of behind-the-scenes work to do . It's only when a new expansion drops that I really realise just how far I've let things slip. It's time to stop hoarding all those rares I stockpiled last year and get on with crafting all the spell and combat art upgrades I never got around to making, for a start. I looked at my Necromancer this morning and realised she still has Apprentice level abilities right across the board.

And that's why it's the Berserker who gets to go first, yet again.

Waiting For The Future, Staring At The Past.

Regular readers who pay attention (there must be some...) might well have expected the final post in the Pitchfork 25 series today. Unfortunately I haven't written it yet. I had enough trouble sidling up to Chemtrails from behind in yesterday's post. I'm not nearly ready to take on Norman Fucking Rockwell (again) quite yet.

I also have Blue Banisters on my mind. Is it going to match up to the last two? If it does it'll be a trio to stand with Bowie's Berlin trilogy or the first three Roxy Music albums, air not many get to breathe. 

You might think I'd be in a position to judge by now, what with the album having been out for a couple of days, but I'm doing everything I can neither to listen to any of the songs or read any reviews, which is a lot harder than you might think.

It's a bit like the classic episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the one where Terry and Bob try to go a whole day without finding out the result of a football match. Here it is, if you haven't seen it, or if you have and you'd like to again. And who could blame you?

 

That's a reference that both dates me and geo-locates me. I'm pretty sure I've seen exactly the same plot in a U.S. sitcom, though. Can't remember which one it was or I'd have used it instead. It sounds like it ought to have been an episode of Seinfeld but I don't really like Seinfeld so I wouldn't have thought I'd know it if it was. Do feel free to tell me what it might have been in the comments. Or, better yet, what it was.

I expected reviews to crop up on the various music news channels I follow - Pitchfork, Stereogum, N.M.E -  and they have, although it's easy enough not to click through to read them. Website monetization policy dictates everything has to have some kind of clickbait heading, though, so even glancing at the feed these past couple of days has been a ride.

It seemed safe enough to take a look at Lana performing Arcadia on Colbert. That's one of the tracks I've already heard. It's been out in the wild for weeks. I guess we could have that now.

If it sets the standard we're in safe waters. But why am I trying to avoid hearing the album anyway? You may well ask.

Bad timing. Mostly that. Bloody-mindedness. Masochism. A bit of those, too.

I put it on my wishlist, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. I should just have pre-ordered it like I did Chemtrails and NFR. But no, I thought it would be nice to get it for my birthday. Which is in mid-November. So now I have to wait. Like an idiot.

Of course, I don't have to wait. I don't have to own it, let alone buy it, or have someone buy it for me, to hear it. I subscribe to the official Lana del Rey YouTube channel and every track on the album is up there, in full. 

I've been reading science fiction since I was ten years old but it never prepared me for this. I knew we were promised jetpacks. I knew we were going to be living on Mars. I knew we'd have wall-screens and the people on TV would talk back to us (Oh, wait, that happened, didn't it?). No-one told me all music would be free.

 

Is it though? I mean, I imagine someone makes some money from those tens of thousands of views that no doubt will soon be hundreds of thousands then millions and if someone's making money someone must be paying. Just not me. Still, you'd think the record company would want to give the actual album a head start.

Only no-one buys albums any more, do they? I think we went over that yesterday. We all just listen to songs on streaming services. And yet here they are, the albums, still popping out as though it was 1977. And getting reviewed the same way, too, as though they matter. Strange times.

Ah, 1977. The year the Clash told us there's be no more Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones, just as  some guy named Hans Fenger finally gave up his dreams of being a rock star and turned his guitar hand to teaching classic rock songs to kids in the Canadian school system instead. I could tell you the story but I'd just be cribbing from this piece on Stereogum. Go read it and come back if you have no clue what I'm on about.

 

I probably heard my first track from the Langley Schools Music Project on the radio back around the turn of the millennium. I think it was the Beach Boys' depressive classic In My Room. By then those recordings were already over twenty years old. Now it's the twentieth anniversary of the time someone found a copy of the original, self-released vinyl album and decided it might be of interest to someone apart from the families of the kids who played and sang on it.

I own a copy. Not of the original vinyl version obviously. That would be unbelievably weird and also cool enough that you can bet you'd have heard about it long before this. Not even of the 2001 CD. No, I have a copy on cassette that my friend Andrew kindly made for me when I asked him to.

Clearly I didn't pay for my music then, either. And clearly I had no more shame about it than I do now. Home taping killed music, by the way. It's dead. There is no music any more. Just like we all go to work in flying cars and eat three-course meals in pill form while wearing silver jumpsuits with a big zip up the back.

There's a TV documentary about the whole affair that I haven't seen. Or hadn't, until now. It's on YouTube. I have it on in the background as I write this. You can watch it, too, if you want. Here's the first part.

 

There was a radio documentary about it on the BBC, as well. I heard that when it was broadcast. All of it. You can too, if you want, assuming the BBC allows you to, where you are. I know they don't always. In case they do, here it is.

I hadn't thought about the Langley Schools Music Project in a decade. I haven't listened to it in at least that long. Like all such things it lives mostly in my memory, for what that's worth.

Listening to some of it today, I think it stands up. Not every track. Honestly, I always found it a bit much to listen to as an album, end to end. Since I only had it on a C60, though, I didn't have an awful lot of choice.

If it had been discovered today, I wonder if anyone would bother playing it that way, start to finish? Who'd have the patience?

And maybe it would always have been better, a song here, a song there, an off-kilter chorus drifting in, out of place on some curated playlist, ghosting like a radio station from another dimension, some place people listen to music like that because that's what music sounds like, there.

It's the past, filtered through that past's past, filtered through the past of that past's past. It's a future that never happened even though it already has. Don't cross the streams. 

Or do. 

Probably do.

GW2 Halloween Mount Rental Can F Itself

Once in a while I'll find myself wanting to write about something for no better reason than it's been on my mind or because I like it and want to talk about it. Which is fine if I have something to say about whatever it is, but not so fine if I sit down, look at the screen and realize I have no real clue what I'm doing.

When that happens, the sensible thing would be to put that topic to one side, at least for a while. Write about something else instead. I tend not to do that. 

I tend more towards this, what I appear to be doing right now, namely typing and hoping. Hoping something will begin to fall into place. Hoping I'll somehow spontaneously generate some sort of insight or inspiration, frame a thesis or an argument or at least come up with a wisecrack or two.

The source of my troubles today isn't a video game. I have a few posts I could throw together about those. Mostly about New World, no surprise to anyone, since I seem to be spending almost all my gaming time there right now. As I mentioned last time or the time before that, I'm not short of ideas for things to write about when it comes to Amazon's mmorpg/survival crossover hit (Currently basking in the warm glow of a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam.)

Even though it's my blog and I have no obligation to keep anyone entertained and amused other than myself, I do tend to get a little self-conscious if I find myself focusing exclusively on a single title day after day. God knows why. It's not like I haven't done it before - and often.

In recent years it's happened with WoW Classic, Valheim and to a lesser extent with many others. Bless Unleashed, anyone? And it's not as if, with New World, it wouldn't be justified. It's not every year we get a major AAA mmorpg from a Western publisher, let alone a pretty good one.

Still, I'd like to break things up a little. Get some light and shade going. Variety, spice, all that stuff.

And there are other things I could be posting about. Something mildly annoying happened to me in Guild Wars 2 today, for example, that I might have used as a peg for a minor rant although really it's so trivial it would barely merit a tweet on that Twitter account I don't use.

Oh, maybe I'll give it a couple of paragraphs, anyway. It's mount-related, which I'm sure won't shock any longtime readers. My antipathy to mounts in GW2 isn't any kind of news around here.

Mrs. Bhagpuss is doing all of the Halloween content on three accounts this year, as she usually does. That wouldn't directly affect me, only there's a mount race. Ever since mounts were added to the game there's always a mount race.

I actually like mount races, believe it or not. It's content specifically designed for mounts that doesn't de facto screw over the rest of the game. And while I'm not very good at them (I never win or place until late in the day, when most people who actually know what they're doing have gotten all the rewards they wanted and moved on to other things.) I'm not terrible, either. I can get round in the timers required to get the achievements, handily enough.

So could Mrs. Bhagpuss, if she didn't get motion sickness just from looking at a mount. I am not exaggerating for effect there. Today she actually got motion sick just from talking to me about them.

What always happens is that I do the mount races for her. As I said, I like mount races. It's a pleasure for me to run a few extra. Or it is anywhere other than in the Mad King's Labyrinth.

At this point, anyone who plays GW2 is probably imagining I'm going to complain about the endless stuns, snares, and knockbacks, the insane mob density and the extreme hazards of Steve and his frightnight friends jumping out in front of you at any second. Nope, that's all just par for the course, to mix a sporting metaphor.

Here's the problem: to do the race in the two minutes allowed to get the annual Halloween holiday achievement you need a mount. Obviously. It's a mount race. Duh! And to have a mount you need Path of Fire, which is fair enough in content released during and after that expansion but which might be considered unreasonable in content that was around before. 

ArenaNet think so. They'd really, really like for every GW2 player to buy PoF but they hate to leave money on the table and they don't want to look like big meanies so as soon as they started to introduce mount races to holiday events they also added the option for anyone to rent a temporary mount for a few silver.

That means we can do the full smorgasbord on all our accounts, should we so choose, not just the PoF ones. Only there are strings. Of course there are. If the rented mounts were as good as the real ones, what would that say about the game? (That GW2's a generous and open-hearted kind of game? Nah. That everyone who'd paid for the expansion had been ripped off, of course!)

The mount you get is always a raptor and with no masteries it waddles along like an eggbound duck. It's slow and awkward but it is fast enough, just, to get you round in time if you really go at it. Well, in all the other races it is.

In the Lab there are a couple of extra hurdles to jump. Not literally. That would actually be easier. The first is the mount rental vendor. It's not a permanent fixture. In thematic keeping with every other utility vendor on the map, someone has to pay the Mad King's Herald to get the mount guy to spawn. 

Hiring the vendor costs the outrageous price of one gold, which is a lot of money when you realize the vendor only hangs around for about ten minutes. Meta, isn't it? You literally have to rent the guy who rents you the mount. 

What's more, unlike every other holiday event, where you can use the rented mount over and over again even if you lose it, in the Lab you get one go and that's it. If your raptor gets clawed to death by griffons or torn apart by skeletons as he almost certainly will, he's gone for good.

Wait, it gets worse. When you pay the Herald, the vendor spawns at the foot of the central ramp, close to where the race begins and also near to the NPC who allows you to take a time trial when the race isn't up, a trial that also counts towards the achievement.

Sounds fine, doesn't it? Unfortunately "close " isn't the same as "close enough". You can't talk to either of the NPCs from the vendor. They're too far apart. 

Never mind! It wouldn't make any difference if you could. You have to register for the race or the time trial, whichever you want to do, but if you rent your raptor first, when you speak to the NPC the raptor despawns. You can't re-summon it so you have to go back to the rental guy for a refresh.

For the race proper that's not so bad. There's a couple of minutes wait before it begins so you have plenty of time to get set. The race, though, only happens once every fifteen minutes or so and you need to do it successfully, within the two minutes, three times for the achievement. If you did it perfectly you'd need to be there for 45 minutes and you'd have to pay three gold for the rental (well, someone would - if you're lucky it might not come out of your pocket every time.)

You'd be very lucky to succeed three times out of three on that clapped-out lizard. Chances are you'll need more goes than that. And that, too, would be fine if you could just pop the time trial and keep going over and over until you got the three Silver finishes it takes.

Except the time trial begins the moment you accept, at which point you do not have a mount because, even if you did, speaking to the time trial guy made it despawn. You have to leg it up the ramp, click on the vendor and accept the dialog option to make the mount spawn. That takes several seconds and you're still a second or two from the starting gate.

The timing on the rented mount is so tight those few seconds are more than enough to make you fail almost every time. I say "almost" because I know for a fact it is possible to get silver on the rented mount since I did it today. Once. With just under two seconds to spare. 

If anything, knowing it's possible makes it even more annoying. It means you can't just write it off as a total waste of time. It can be done so it's got to be done. It's just not going to be done with any pleasure or enjoyment or good grace, more like with a lot of cussing and in a temper.

It also means ANet would be perfectly within their rights to shrug like Mad King Thorn and walk away. Not everything has to be fun and anyway you should have bought the expansion if you wanted a mount. The race is easy enough with a real one.

Halloween in Tyria goes on for a very, very long time. Over a month. I have until 9th November to get that race done, successfully, five more times. It will happen. I don't like a challenge but I will accept one, once in a while. 

I think someone could organize the whole thing better, all the same. How about stopping the mount from despawning every time you speak to an NPC? Oh, wait, all mounts do that. Terrible design but I guss we're stuck with it. 

Okay, how about allowing the player to resummon the mount from a hot key instead of having to go back to the vendor? That shouldn't be beyond the abilities of someone to code in, surely?

Or maybe you already can and I just don't know how to do it. Maybe there's a keyboard shortcut. Y'know, I just bet there is. I probably should have looked into that before I started ranting.

I would have, too, if I'd known this was what I was going to write about today. Turned out to be more than a couple of paragraphs, too, didn't it? And I never even got around to mentioning that original topic, the thing I said I'd been wanting to write about but didn't know what I was going to say about it.

It was Kevin Can F Himself, the metafictional postmodernist sitdram starring Annie Murphy from Schitt's Creek currently showing on Amazon Prime, by the way, just in case you were wondering. I guess you got that?

It's a shame, because something did start to come to me as I was hammering out those opening paragraphs, just like I hoped it would. Something that would have tied in with yesterday's post, too.

Oh well. Too late now.

Binge Watch Sorrow?

Wilhelm has an excellent post up at TAGN, looking back at a year of what he describes as "binge watching" but which I would probably just characterize as normalized twenty-first century viewing habits. It's such a well-structured piece I mentioned in the comments that I planned to steal the headings for a cover version. And so I have.

• No commercials is pretty nice.

Yeah, that's one thing we already kinda know, here in the UK. I grew up watching tv without commercials (or, as we used to call them, and as older people still do, "adverts") because about ninety per cent of everything I watched was on the BBC. It was a class thing to some extent, the way everything in Britain is a class thing (everything in the world, actually, only most cultures aren't as comfortable about saying so, openly). It was also an education thing. 

My family being weirdly muddled about class the way a lot of families were in the sixties and seventies, we used to watch ITV sometimes but we felt bad about it because watching "the commercial channel" was something the lower classes did. (We only had the one back then and come to think of it, why did we call it "the commercial channel" but call the commercials "adverts"?).

Actually, that's post hoc rationalization. I was a child and I didn't think about stuff like that and my grandparents, with whom I grew up, were Quakers from a rural and working-class background, who I never heard mention "class" at all. My mother wore mini-skirts and rode around on a Lambretta like she was expecting David Bailey to pop out of a hedge at any moment so I don't imagine anyone around me was heavy into sociological placement theory. We just didn't like our shows being interrupted by commercials. Seriously, who does?

• I still won’t buy pay-per-View.

Me neither. In fact, to date I never have. I've thought about it a few times but so far there's never been anything I felt I couldn't wait a little longer to see. Or a lot longer. Or never see at all. 

I will buy virtual, though. I don't like to. I prefer to buy on DVD (Yes, still. And I don't even have a Blu-Ray player so it really is DVD) for reasons that I'll cover in a later bullet point. It annoys me that, as Wilhelm says, you never really own anything you buy digitally and in practical terms I'll probably never get around to re-watching stuff I buy that way anyway, so the difference between buying the one-off option to watch it on pay-per-view and "owning" it is notional at best... but there you are. I never said I was rational. 

 

• There are too damn many streaming services.

So infuriatingly true.  There are way too many streaming services, each with their own exclusives, but worse still they aren't all available in all territories and even when they are some of them operate local programming. I would dearly love to be able to watch all of the shows that used to be on DC Universe but before that even got rolled out to the UK it got rolled up into HBOMax, which is unlikely to launch here until at least 2024 because of HBO's existing contract with Sky and I am damned if I am going to subscribe to Sky in this or any other lifetime, not even to watch the Legion, which I think got cancelled before it got made, anyway.

Then there are the sub-streams. What even is "Starzplay"? I already subscribe to Amazon Prime. How is it they're showing me stuff from a supposedly separate service to which I have to subscribe yet again? Do they own it? If so, why isn't included? If not, why is it even there? I managed to get around it the first time by taking the free trial for a month so I could watch the only Starzplay show that interested me, Doom Patrol, before cancelling without having to pay but that trick won't work for Doom Patrol season two, which I have variously heard is better/as good/not as good as the first. I'm going to have to wait until it comes out on DVD.

I already have too many subscriptions. Let's see... for games I have Daybreak's All Access and I haven't cancelled World of Warcraft yet although I probably should. For media I have Amazon Prime and Netflix. There's also a hosting service for Mrs Bhagpuss's business website, which I pay for, for some reason, and our ISP, which she does. Do I want any more? No I do not. But I bet I'm going to end up with some, anyway.

• Finding things is hard.

Isn't it, though? Wilhelm was talking more about the problem of knowing what to watch next but as I said in the comments, I've found other bloggers to be a more than adequate source of recommendations. No, what I find unecessarily difficult is navigating the totally useless interfaces someone seems to imagine are aesthetically pleasing and functionally valid. Which they are not.

Seriously, can anyone find anything on these these shuffleboards? It's all lines of categories that make no sense even if the same dozen shows didn't just replicate over and over across all of them. Why is it we hear so much about algorithms and AI and how they're going to replace human thought and yet at the same time everyone complains constantly about how fecking useless they are? 

All I really want is a basic, searchable a-z list. Is that so hard? I want to be able to type "sitcom" into a search field and get an alphebetized list of every sitcom on Netflix. If I could then narrow down my search by keywords, like "1990s" or "US" or "New York" that would be aces but honestly I'd just settle for plain, vanilla a to z.

Someone's going to pop up the comments explaining how I can already do that, I bet. I hope so...

 

• I am torn on weekly versus all at once content.

Me too. Although "torn" is putting it a bit strongly. I'm skewed heavily towards "all at once". In theory I have some lingering nostalgic affection for the days when I'd meet up with friends and we'd get drunk arguing over the latest plot turns in some tv show or other. Or when a conversation would start up at work about some sitcom relationship development and everyone would take sides.

Was that really all that great, though? Or was it just something we did? And people still do do it where I work only they do it about shows I don't watch and movies I haven't seen. And really, it doesn't make any of them sound all that interesting. The people or the shows.

Against that, there's the truly huge benefit of actually being able to remember, in detail, what happened not just in the previous episode but the previous season. In the days when we all used to watch this stuff as it was broadcast it would have been a week since you saw the last episode and maybe a year (or several) since you saw the season where the current plot developments were set in motion.

Condensing a decade of broadcast television into a few weeks or even a few days of concentrated viewing is a genuine, intellectual paradigm shift. It brings the architectonics of the form into clear relief. I can see how the whole thing works and that's glorious. It adds a whole new level, creates a deeper texture, makes everything matter more. 

Movies always worked this way. You commit yourself to their reality for a fixed period as your own slides into the background. Emotional connections and reactions are heightened. Reality bends. It's one of the reasons cinema was taken so very much more seriously than television for so long. Now that gap has narrowed. About all that cinema has left is the communal experience and since the pandemic not even that.

• We have been biased towards shows versus movies.

Following on from the last point, what tv shows have that movies don't is length. A very, very long commercial movie (shut up Andy - I said "commercial") might run three and half hours. Even a very short tv series runs twice that long and many hit three figures. There used to be a trade-off between length and quality but those days are long over. Now you get movie quality at tv length and there's a feedback function whereby sustained quality for longer produces even higher quality, at least in terms of emotional engagement. 

I could hammer out a list of fifty, a hundred movies that I love and which have affected and moved me deeply but in all but a handful of cases I can't pretend I have an imagined emotional relationship with their characters the way I do with the dramatis personae of Buffy or Parks and Recreation or Roswell or Bojack Horseman... or even frickin' How I Met Your Mother, which I'm seven seasons into right now and all of whose characters I would happily slap, vigorously and repeatedly, with a wet fish, and yet who feel, bizarrely and disturbingly, like people I somehow actually know.

So, yes, tv shows over movies for me, right now. It'll change if and when I want to get my emotional hit in concentrated form rather than slow release. Bound to happen, sometime.

• I could cut the cord were it not for sports.

Well, for a start, I don't have a cord. We don't have any kind of cable contract and never have had, even though we do, quite literally, have "cable". We've had a fiber-optic connection since the mid-90s, when the city we live in was an early adopter of the technology. It's one of the reasons we haven't moved yet. But we've never used it for anything other than the internet.

As for sports, the only one I'm really interested in is cricket and I only like to listen to that on the radio.

• It really sucks when the internet goes down.

Yeah, it does. Fortunately, that's very rare in our house. And we do have other options, namely several hundred DVDs. Because we're old people, so we still buy those. In fact, we buy DVDs of the same things we watch on streaming sevices and then we watch them on the streaming services and don't watch the DVDs, which often we don't even take out of the shrink-wrap. Because as well as being old people we're also pack-rats and we like stuff we can touch. And hoard. And paw over.

Of course, as anyone who's ever played an mmorpg knows, the moment you lose access to something you can't think of anything else other than that thing even if before then you weren't thinking about that thing at all. So having a load of offline options really only works when the internet isn't down so, yes, it really sucks when that happens. 

 

• It does not replace the theater experience.

No, it does not. But then, it's been a long time since I went to the theater. Actually, it's been a very, very long time since I went to the theater, because over here "the theater" is not what we call the place they show movies. We call that "the cinema". The theater is where people walk about and project and you have to use opera glasses if you want to see their expressions (Except, naturally, it's not the opera, either. Who names this stuff?).

In the 1980s I went to the movies every week or two. In the nineties that dropped to every couple of months and by the turn of the millennium I was down to two or three times a year. Of late it's been an annual outing with my friend on one of our birthdays and some years we don't even manage that. And yet, I agree, watching movies at home doesn't quite equate to seeing them in the dark with a bunch of strangers. Will that ever happen again? For some people, surely. For me, this last year may have broken my habit for good.

On the other hand, my mother, who is eighty-eight years old, has been going to the cinema almost weekly since the 1940s. She's the one who's been missing the live cinema experience during the pandemic. So it's not just a young person's thing. Maybe I'll follow her example and get back to the cinema on the regular when I retire. If there are any cinemas left by then.

• I still cannot watch exactly what I want on demand. 

See above. This is a real problem because we are all spoiled babies who have to have everything we want right now. Or maybe because in an age of digital technology it should be possible to have all of human creativity immediately accessible to everyone at the click of a button. One of the two.

And, honestly? I'm okay with some shortages in the supply chain. I grew up in a world where you counted yourself lucky if you even happened across an article in a magazine that mentioned some movie or tv show or record album or book that sounded like it might be something you'd get excited by if you ever managed to find it, which you had to assume you never would if it was any older than that year, or that month, or that week, depending on the medium. 

Your chances of experiencing almost anything first-hand were infinitesimal and you knew it, so imagine how utterly stoked you'd feel when, once in deep blue moon, incredibly, unbelievably, serendipitously, you'd stumble, in a flea market or a yard sale, upon a copy of something you'd only ever heard about. Or when you switched on the tv late at night and saw an elusive title roll across the screen....

Yes, I'm very much happier that nowadays I can discover anything from the last hundred and fifty years from the comfort of my chair, read about it in depth and in detail, for free, then order a copy to stream on my screen immediately or be delivered to my house the next day. That's how it should be. But it's still nice, just once in a while, to have to work for it. And maybe it's good to know that, just very occasionally, there are a few things that will remain forever out of reach.

I mean, we can't always get what we want, right? But we can try. And, sometimes, we get what we need. Kinda...

Yeah, no. Gimme it all and gimme it now.

On Repeat

A topic that bubbles up in conversation now and then, when people talk about playing mmorpgs, is the time-consuming nature of the hobby. People occasionally out themselves as addicts or make a point by quoting extraordinary /played statistics running into hundreds or thousannds of hours over a number of years. It's a given that successful, long-running games come with more curated content than most of us are likely to consume even once.

In some ways mmorpgs have more in common with other media than they do with video games, even those that come in series. Single-player games tend to have finite narative arcs that alternate paths and endings merely complement. Almost all non-competetive games have some kind of completion state, whether it's a Game Over screen or a full set of achievements.

It's as well, then, that mmorpgs hang around. When Blizzard's John Hight says of World of Warcraft "Why should it ever end?" he's doing no more than stating the obvious in the form of a rhetorical question. Why indeed? There's no reason. 

In these days of boxed sets and streaming platforms, a long-running mmorpg isn't all that different from a series of movies or a long-running TV show. Time was when you'd need to catch something like that on broadcast or release. Maybe, if you kept your eyes open, you'd get another chance on repeat or rerun or revival. 

 

Nowadays, it's harder to think of things you can't access at will. Even failures and flops live on in a dim half-life, uploaded to YouTube from glitchy VHS cassettes or released back into the culture by creators hoping for another shot at an aesthetic validation they never experienced the first time around. Unsuccessful online games are one of the rare cultural entities that fade and even there, like a superhero's death, you can't count on it lasting.

Jeromai was talking recently about purging games from his hard drives: "I used to just keep the game around… just in case. Well, part of deliberate unfettered gaming is to loose that fetter. UNINSTALLED. Gone from the hard disk. What’s the harm? I can always re-download it again when I get the urge to play it again. The save files are mostly all intelligently maintained or cloud saved these days".

It's true, although I suspect many of us will take a little longer to feel entirely secure in our non-ownership of things we really care not lose. But then, nothing is ever guaranteed. Files corrupt. Disks break. Tapes fade. Even books burn. It's maybe safer in the ether, after all.

The medium isn't the message, anyway. What's stopping all of us going back and doing it over isn't access to the data. It's time.

And playing mmorpgs takes for-frickin'-ever! Even with things on fast-forward, with all the short cuts and the  boosts and the skips. Look at that WoWHead chart I put up yesterday, telling you how long it takes to go from ten to fifty in different expansions. The shortest time is twelve hours. 

Twelve hours!  Twelve hours to get a single character to the old cap, experiencing just a fraction of the basic content of one expansion, from the perspective of one race, one class, one faction. At which point, in the minds of many - possibly most - the game is just about to begin.

Not that most people really are going to get through even that small portion in any twelve hours. It's going to take the average person twice that, I would bet, unless they literally skip the actual content of the content.

Twenty four hours, which is less than it took me to level my shaman, is long enough to watch all three seasons of Stranger Things, something I was doing concurrently with my recent stint in WoW.  It was the disparate experiences that sent me down this track. Also the similarities.

When I finally got around to playing WoW about five years after it arrived I was surprised to find it wasn't at all what I was expecting. I'd heard plenty about it. Plenty. It was a cultural phenomenon and I thought I had a pretty good handle on it despite never having played it.

Yeah, well, I was right and I was wrong. WoW wasn't not what I was expecting but it was much more than I was expecting. It had depth and feeling I hadn't anticipated. It also reminded me very, very strongly of other mmorpgs, some of which I liked better, and yet it didn't disgrace them. In some interesting ways it shed light on them and made me appreciate them even more. And want to play them again. 

Stranger Things is like that. It's not quite the cultural phenomenon WoW was in it's prime but it's the show that made many of us take notice of Netflix as something more than just a distribution service. It had sufficient cultural capital to penetrate the mainstream as a trope, an analogy for a genericized cultural nostalgia, similar to how WoW stood in for nerd culture in general back in that South Park episode and a score more noughties comedies.

I thought I had ST pegged; eighties' nostalgia filtered through a post-nineties' ironic lens. A mash-up of all those Spielberg-influenced, D&D-quoting, kid-friendly movies that themselves referenced a Saturday Morning Pictures culture long forgotten even then. All thrown into a blender with monster-of-the-week hits sequenced all the way from the Outer Limits to the X-Files.

And then I watched it and, like WoW, it turned out to be everything I thought it would be and something entirely different at the same time. Just as WoW, back when I first played it in 2009, was both easy and hard, so Stranger Things is both light and dark. In both cases I went in expecting a frothy, sugar-sweet rush that wouldn't last and came out feeling strangely changed; satisfied yet unsettled; fulfilled yet wanting more.

Good art bounces. Playing World of Warcraft always makes me think of playing EverQuest. It makes me consider what that game did first and did right. It makes me consider what came after and how at least a part of the culture changed because of it and is still changing now.

 

As I was watching Stranger Things I couldn't but help compare it with its preternatural progenitor, Buffy. As in mmorpgs of a certain stripe everything comes back to EQ, so in television shows like this, everything comes back to Buffy but in the case of Stranger Things there are tighter correlations than just that. I could start my dissertation on the touchstones right now. I imagine someone already has. 

What it really makes me want to do, though, is re-watch Buffy from start to end. And I could. I could do that. It would take me six days. If I did nothing else but eat and sleep. Taken at a more realistic pace, five or six episodes a day, I could be through it in a month. 

Which is still a hell of a long time. One day I'll do it but time is growing short. As life passes, things pile up. It's hard enough to keep pace with everything new that's added without revisting and re-evaluating.

Except you have to. You really do. Nothing worth doing is worth doing only once, at least not when it comes to art and culture. It all needs to be looked at again and again, set in context with itself and everything else. The cheese does not stand alone.

One of the more curious effects of this peculiar year for me has been the recovery of my re-reading habit. For many years I re-read as a matter of course. I would often irritate people in pubs with my theory that it's the third time that counts. The first read is all about discovery, the second about comparison. The third is the first clean read. I can elaborate, trust me, but I won't.

 

Working in a bookshop for twenty years broke me of the habit, not intentionally but through the sheer, unceasing torrent of free, new books. I never had time to re-read anything because I had to keep winnowing that pile. This year, for the first time in a long time, at home, surrounded by thousands of books, I started to re-read. And it was good.

Only my rule of three didn't apply so much. I could barely remember having read most of the books in the first place. It was more like reading them for the first time, again. You really need to re-read in real time to keep the doors of perception propped open. Same with movies, TV, music...

And, I guess, mmorpgs? Maybe? I'm not sure. Because we for damn sure aren't likely to start again from scratch and do the whole thing over, are we? I mean, many of us come around a few times. We go back to older games and give them another spin. But it seems to me that's more like playing a few tracks from an old album than reading a whole novel or even sitting through a full movie.

With Shadowlands launching today a whole new layer gets added to the cake. And, trust John Hight, they'll keep adding. Because why in the hell should they ever stop?

But we will. We will stop. Which is why we have to make choices, like Jeromai. What to keep. What to lose. And, for me, what to pick up again, and when, and how many times. How many more times?

I am so going to re-watch Buffy. Maybe I could use the time I'm not using not playing Shadowlands...

In The Loop

I was flipping through a folder of old Guild Wars 2 screenshots (I have nearly thirteen thousand of them now), looking for illustrations for yesterday's post on NPCs when I happened upon the picture above. Just for a second I was back in the Loop.

The tall-trunked pines, the blue and gold automaton, self-dismantling architecture streaming up into the sky. The resonance felt uncanny.

I've been watching Amazon's latest high-profile project, Tales from the Loop.  So far I've only seen two of the eight episodes, all of which were released simultaneously in early April.

It's been described variously as "Thoughtful television for the slow days of lockdown" (The Independent) "Artfully slow-moving sci-fi" (The Guardian) and "Another dystopian drama for your lockdown watch list" (NME). Digital Spy believes the show is "more than just Amazon's Stranger Things" despite both being set in the 1980s. Well, a 1980s, although after the two episodes I've watched I'm not sure how you'd know. It looks as much like the 1950s as the 1980s to me.

The two things everyone seems to agree on, whether they like the show or not, is that Tales from the Loop" is very beautiful and very, very slow. That's what drove Joel Gilby of The Guardian to distraction: "Loop is very beautiful, but that’s where the praise ends. Fundamentally, I consider it rude to take an hour of someone’s life and only tell seven to nine minutes of story across it", he says of the first episode, one of the most thought-provoking and emotionally disturbing hours of television I've watched in years. I guess you either get it or you very much don't.

The pace is astonishing. I can entirely understand how some viewers might - will - find it frustrating. Shots don't just linger, they glaciate. There's a scene in the second episode where you can literally watch paint dry. Almost everyone speaks slowly, often quietly, often with little inflection. Conversations barely start, rarely continue, often drift. Half of every episode seems to be people walking through woodland.

I find the whole thing mesmerizing. I absolutely love it. Time seems almost to stand still while I watch. If you think nothing's happening, you're wrong. Everything is happening. If I was going to say anything negative, which I'm not,  it would be that an hour isn't nearly long enough.

Unusually (uniquely?) the series is based not on a novel or a comic but on paintings by Swedish Artist Simon Stålenhag. The soundtrack is by Philip Glass. One of the eight episodes is directed by Jodie Foster. This is a project that takes itself seriously and with ideas on this scale it needs to.

I need to re-iterate that I've only seen two episodes so this is not a review. In gaming terms it's a first impressions piece. What I would say is that, contrary to the numerous claims I've read suggesting Tales from the Loop as warm, cosy, nostalgic comfort viewing for lock-ins, I found it disturbing, unsettling, unsafe. If I had to slot the series into a genre, based on what I've seen so far, that genre would be existential horror.

The themes of loss, dissociation and identity put me in mind not just of Philip K Dick but of Kafka. The setting, a small town deep in pinewoods, inevitably invites comparisons with Twin Peaks. There's more than a touch of Lovecraft lurking in those woods, too.

To put it mildly, this is not an easy watch. It's bleak, dark, almost nihilistic. It's compelling. I really hope the next six episodes live up to the promise of the two I've watched. It would be one hell of a standard to keep up.

I could go on at length but I'll wait until I've seen the rest.

I wish I could remember what that golem in GW2 was doing, too.

Television, Internet

One of the reasons I started playing MMORPGs was because there was nothing to watch on tv. Until the mid 1990s I'd always been a serious consumer of broadcast television and when I say "serious" I don't just mean I watched a lot of it, I mean I took television seriously.

I didn't just watch it. I talked about it, thought about it, wrote about it, collected it. When home video became a thing in the 1980s I began to build up a library of tv shows, filling my shelves with VHS cassettes the same way I filled the house with books, comics, vinyl and CDs.

And television seemed important, then. Watching was a social act. A bonding ritual. Along with music it was the glue that held society together. Or it was until that all fell apart.

By the time I got around to installing EverQuest in November 1999 I'd already lost faith in the God in the Corner. By then, for a couple of years Mrs Bhagpuss and I had been playing more video games than we watched tv. I'd already all but stopped watching altogether when I stepped onto the wooden platforms of Kelethin for the first time. And fell off.

Falling to my death and losing my corpse on my first evening did not deter me. I stuck with EQ and that was that for television for more than a decade. I almost literally did not look at a screen, other than my CRT monitor, for wel over ten years.

I remember vividly how far removed I became from the televisual experience. It wasn't just that I didn't know the shows any more, it was that my brain ceased to be able to interpret the images. On the very rare occasions when I visited someone and saw a tv playing I felt like Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, only instead of being fascinated I was repelled.

With deep irony, I timed my withdrawal to co-incide almost exactly with the explosive growth of of non-broadcast television and the concomittant, meteoric rise in both the quantity and the quality of available content. Television entered a new and radically transformed golden age and I missed it all.

Luckily, along with the new direction came new technology. Television joined books and music in the long afterlife of the culture. You no longer had to be there. You could wander up later. You'd miss the zeitgeist, sure, but we all missed Dickens' moment yet we still read him. Okay, I don't read him but the point stands. I could, if I wanted.

I still don't watch broadcast TV. As best I can tell it remains, for the most part, abominable. Also inconvenient. What brought me back to the wider form was the discovery I could download television to a pocket device and watch it on a tiny screen in my hand. A very, very tiny screen. Less than two inches square.

I don't think I have that MP4 player any more but it gatewayed me back into television. Over the years I've stared at any number of small screens, from my trusty iPod Touch up to an ironically "gigantic" ten inch Windows tablet and back down to my current platform, Amazon's reliable-if-annoying Kindle Fire.

These days I'm in the habit of watching whole runs. Not in the now-traditional box-set binge over a lost weekend but in hearty bites over a few weeks. I watch in the late evening, in bed, for a couple of hours. It began as thirty minutes right before I went to sleep but the habit has grown. Now I often go to bed early just so I can watch more stuff for longer.

At first I ran through some old favorites, sitcoms mostly. I found them on YouTube, where the quality varied wildly. I learned a lot, both about the history of the medium and the way that long-form, episodic narrative works. It's far easier to see the structure when you watch in a week what would have originally taken a year.

I worked my way through television's comedic back pages, all the way from sixties classics like The Dick Van Dyke show to 90s obscurities like Boston Common, trying to give myself an education in what I'd missed but eventually the poor quality of the recordings on YouTube began to wear at my resolve. I'm no graphics nazi but I do like to be able to see peoples' faces. Like everyone else I turned to box sets, which I watched on the seven-inch portable DVD player I bought to take on holiday.

And then I got Amazon Prime. Jeff Bezos kept offering three months for free and I kept resisting but one day I had some stuff to buy and there was postage and I thought, "Why not? I can cancel it later". Only, I didn't cancel it. I started watching stuff. Often, ironically, shows I already owned on DVD but hadn't gotten around to taking the shrink-wrap off yet because it had only been five years, well maybe ten, and who has time to unwrap stuff?

Streaming was just so much more convenient and the HD picture was so much better. Over the last couple of years I've run through most of what appeals to me on Prime. It's a good selection but it's quite surprising how fast you get through it.

I always like to have the next thing lined up when I near the end of a series because coming to a dead stop can be jarring. Right now, though, there's not an awful lot left that's calling out to me, which is how I let myself be talked, once again, into a subscription, this time to one of Amazon's extra channels. 99p a month for three months, that was the deal, and there was one show on there I really wanted to watch - Doom Patrol. I'd pay a lot more than 99p to watch that.

Only, now I have watched it. It was great - even better than I hoped it would be, let alone than I expected. But it's over now until they make some more and with things as they are, who knows when that might be?

I have a complete box set of Veronica Mars waiting so I have my supply lines secured but that means getting the little DVD player out and I don't want to. To avoid having to do that I was even wondering whether to subscribe to a second streaming service. I'd really like to finish watching Umbrella Academy on Netflix. I started last year but I can only watch it on Mrs Bhagpuss's PC (for a very uninteresting reason I won't bother to explain), which makes it too awkward to bother.

As I was dithering over that decision I was also scrolling through the shows Prime was trying to foist on me. The recommendation algorithm there is... not good. And then I noticed something called AFK. It seemed like a very odd choice for title. Out of idle curiosity I clicked on it and read

Well, that sounds... embarassing. Still, I don't know, maybe it might not be completely terrible? It had four stars from customer recommendations, for what that's worth (not much). I read some of the reviews:

"If you've ever played an MMORPG then you can relate to this series. It is low budget, but don't let that run you off. This little gem is very well written and some of the actors are amazingly good."

"This is one of those low budget finds you sometimes discover on Amazon, very short episodes but its a real winner of a show"

"Honestly, at first, it was kinda bad. It's clearly low budget and I just had it on in the background 'cause was a cool concept. Gamers getting stuck in the game. Nothing groundbreaking, but around halfway through the first season the quality improved massively. And by the end of the second season, I was hooked. "

And I have to agree. It is low budget. Some of the actors seem to have more enthusiasm than experience. The script can be a little on the nose. But the characters are very well conceived, much of the acting is convincing, there's a surprising amount of nuance, the narrative arc is sound and a good percentage of the jokes land.

All in all it's a lot better than I expected. It also raises a lot of very interesting questions about the nature of the hobby itself. Nothing we haven't all thought and talked about plenty of times, but framed in a context that casts new light on some old topics. It made me think, which is above and beyond the call for something like this, I'd say.

The AFK project began as a web series, a whole other part of the tv forest I have yet to explore. In truth, I've been keeping well clear of it until now for fear of what I might find. As a lifelong advocate of the DIY ethic in music, comics and writing, I have no idea why I would do that, other than that I can be an idiot sometimes.

Anyway, I consider this a lesson learned. I need to cast my net wider and keep my mind more open. There seem to be a few more of these shows floating around. I'll see if I can't make some space in my extremely busy schedule and give them a try. 

Recommendations welcome.