Beryl And The Crows

Following on from Thursday's post, yesterday evening we went to feed the crows again and this time I remembered to get my phone out and take some video. Naturally, since I was filming her, Beryl didn't particularly feel like playing so the results aren't very dramatic. It took a while to get any shots of her doing it at all. 

She seemed far more interested in checking out the food we were tossing onto the grass, just in case she might have changed her mind about eating any of it in the last couple of years, which of course she had not. It's always best to check where food's concerned though, or that's Beryl's motto anyway.

Beryl is a smart pup (Not just an indulgent owner's claim - poodles are top of the canine intelligence charts and poodle hybrids are all pretty clued-in by dog standards.) and she learns quickly from experience. It looks as though she's already figured out the crows aren't going to let her get close enough to do whatever it is she imagines she'd do if she caught one so she's not all that interested in them any more.

Even so, she still likes to make them fly up into the air, so every now and then she'll trundle towards one to make it flap about a bit. She loses interest a lot quicker than she did a week ago, though. Or maybe she just wasn't in the mood. She can be a bit of a princess that way.

The light wasn't great. It was late in the evening and the sun was nearly down, as you can see from our  long shadows, which I very unprofessionally allowed to intrude on some of the shots. The camera on my cheap, aging phone is also not good by modern standards so the quality is pants. I should have asked Mrs Bhagpuss to do the filming on her iPhone but I didn't realize just how bad mine would be until I got home and took a look at the results on a bigger screen.

Anyway, for what it's worth, this is what she looks like when she makes the effort. Impressive, isn't it? I'm not surprised the crows don't take her seriously.

Off the back of the last post, as I was googling "Dogs playing with crows" to see if I could get some kind of image to use, I ran across the YouTube video embedded below. It's very interesting, as are many of the comments. 

Crows are well-known to enjoy various kinds of play but I was unaware they have a kind of game where they tweak the tails of other animals. Apparently this is quite common. Having watched the gang of crows in the video harassing the elderly dog (I agree with the commenters who reckon the dog is enjoying it just as much as the crows, though.) I wonder if Beryl isn't going to get more than she bargained for one of these days.

Copy That!

Until yesterday, I was unaware of the existence of a Wes Anderson parody subculture on YouTube. I mean, I shouldn't have been. It's more than predictable. Wes Anderson has to be about the easiest director to parody since, oh, I don't know... Tim Burton?

I was alerted to the phenomenon by this news squib at NME. I'm no more than a casual admirer of Wes Anderson and I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing another word about Star Wars so I only clicked through to read it because of the mention of AI. I'm glad I did, though. The trailer is enjoyable on its own merits, either as a parody or a wish-fueled fever dream. Take a look.

There's no direct explanation of where the AI comes in although the static shots with barely-nodding heads make their provenance reasonably plain. The voice-over also sounds generated but as for the script it's hard to say. It's bland enough to be artificial but humans can be pretty beige, too. 

The three-paragraph description makes no mention of the methodology used and the channel's home page doesn't add anything, either. I was curious so I looked a little deeper. Don't get excited. I didn't find much.

At first, I assumed the folks who run the channel, Curious Refuge, had just linked it from someone else who'd made it but no, as their Twitter feed, where it first appears, has it: "We made a #StarWars trailer in the style of #wesanderson..." They just don't say how they made it.

In the lengthy thread that follows (Three-hundred-plus replies.) plenty of people ask which AI software was used but I couldn't see any direct response from the creators. Someone going by "Redacted" baldly states "The entire thing was hand drawn. Even the script." but I have no clue what connection that account has with the creators of the video or on what authority that definitive statement rests. It's most likely sarcasm.

A bit of a mystery, then. And just to complicate things a little more, the trailer is called "The Galactic Menagerie", which turns out to be the exact same name as another YouTube video, also very recent, but this time very definitely created by AI, specifically Midjourney and ChatGPT.

No clarity, then, but the upshot was my introduction to the sheer number of Wes Anderson parodies on YouTube, many of which are indeed facilitated, if not wholly created, by AI. The general principle seems to be just to have MidJourney whip up a batch of static images, then string them all together in a slideshow. Like this:

There are dozens, scores, possibly hundreds of these and very impressive showcases for Midjourney and other AI image generators they make, too. Unfortunately, very few bother with any kind of script, even an AI generated one, which makes them curios rather than compelling visions of an alternate reality.

At least this creator gave it a go, even if, by their own admission, the result was "a really bad video".

Actually, it's not that bad. It just doesn't really go anywhere, for which I blame the script, which was written by ChatGPT, which can do better. Maybe don't accept the first draft?

At least there are credits for all the tools used: ChatGPT, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, D-ID, and CapCut, for the record. Of those, ElevenLabs was new to me and looks very interesting. CapCut, too, although it's nothing specifically to do with AI.

At the moment it seems that, should you want to create something that stands out, you still need actual human intelligence, either in the writing, the editing or preferably both. This re-envisioning of Tarantino's oeuvre through the lens of Anderson's signature style is old tech - clips from the original movies spliced together - but it makes a powerful case. Who knew they had so much in common?

Could AI do that yet? You'd think pattern matching would be one of its strengths, so maybe, but could it make the leap from recognition and enumeration to conclusion, let alone deliver a visual lecture with this kind of ironic detachment? Probably not. Or, more likely, probably not yet...

One thing occurred to me as I was watching these videos (And loads more.) There's presumably a reason why YouTube has such a strongly-developed culture of video parody, whether artificial or human. It'll be because parody enjoys an unusual level of protection from the predation of copyright lawyers. If you don't want your work taken down, let alone to be on the end of a lawsuit about it, you'd best make sure you're taking the piss. [Edit: Thanks to Shintar linking this Tom Scott video in the comments, I'm now aware that YouTube's licenses do much to shield uploaders of all kinds of otherwise copyright-infinging content from the attention of corporate legal divisions. Parody and review do still offer protection above and beyond that baseline, though.]

On the subject of copyright, here's a sentence I never thought I'd need to type:

I agree with Grimes.  

Copyright does indeed suck. It was invented to aid monarchs and governments in  enforcing their will and codified to protect the vested interests of non-creative monopolies. It was for good reason that Frances Hardinge put the Stationers among the villains of her very excellent first two novels, Fly By Night and Twilight Robbery.

Giving the keynote speech at the annual International Music Summit, Grimes said, "Art is a conversation with everyone that’s come before us. Intertwining it with the ego is a modern concept."  She was directing her comments at the music industry, which "has been defined by lawyers" in a way that "strangles creativity", something that could equally be applied to most, if not all, other activities restrained by the dead hand of copyright law.

As reported in NME, her speech included more lucid and reasonable observations on the miserable status quo. She's in a fine position to throw stones because she, unlike many, hasn't just accepted the potential paradigm-shattering impact of AI but embraced it. If you want to make your own Grimes song, knock yourself out. Or indeed your own Grimes video.

How many will willingly follow her lead remains to be seen. It could be a trickle rather than a flood, I fear. Until the inevitable pressure of the future breaks down the stubborn resistance of the past, then, I guess we'll all just have to stick our tongues in our cheeks and keep poking sticks through those copyright bars. It's all we can do. 

For now.

Raid On Darkmist (Could Have Gone Better...)

I'm probably going to write a whole post about the really excellent Light and Shadow event in Noah's Heart but I probably ought to finish it first. In the meantime, here's a compilation of two of the cut scenes I stitched together.

I couldn't help thinking of the airship raid at the start of Guild Wars 2's first expansion, Heart of Thorns. I think I like this one better.

And now I'm off to try again, This time we've done our acclimatization training and we've split into two teams. Here's hoping it's enough...

Maybe We'll Love It

Continuing this week's impromptu theme, yesterday's post barely came closer to what I'd meant to write than the day's before. I did always plan to use the promo video for Guild Wars 2's upcoming Champions: Power update but only as an example of a point I wanted to make about how promotional videos can sometimes work against the purpose for which they're made.

This was something I found myself thinking about after I'd watched the spectacular official video for Chemtrails Over The Country Club,  the title track from Lana del Rey's follow-up to what is now one of my top five favorite albums of all time, Norman Fucking Rockwell. 

We should probably have the video right away so we know what we're talking about. Watch it to the end.

Objectivity can be hard to come by when you love an artist 's work as much as I love Lana's. It gets harder yet, when you find yourself dealing with a sequel, not just to what may turn out to be the artist's career high but to what is probably also one of the highlights of your own lifetime spent listening to popular music. When Mariners Apartment Complex dropped back in 2019 I played it over and over like I hadn't played anything since... well, since I first found Lana back in 2012, as it happens, but perhaps more meaningfully since I was buying vinyl back in high school.

Even that breathtaking impact did little more than hint at the glory of what was to come. Next we had Venice Bitch, clocking in at just under ten minutes, suggesting something like Ride's epic sweep, opening with what seemed a simple, sweet pop song, only to subvert and shatter those expectations in a psychedelic surge that felt like decades compacted, spiking. 

Those two promos created such pressure. The visuals perfectly, ineffably melded with the songs. They're works of art but so are many pop videos. The Venice Bitch video, though, it's also a drug. It's psychotropic. I'm guessing it works the way ASMR works. Or something like it. 

 

Back in 2019 I watched it over and over and I rarely got to see the end. Or the middle, sometimes. Even if I watched it in daylight, by somewhere around the six or seven minute mark I'd be in a trance state. Usually the coda would bring me back, Lana intoning "If you weren't mine I'd be jealous of your love"  like a mantra, phrasing like Marilyn, splitting "weren't" in two until everything came clear.

If I watched it at night, well, chances were I'd be fast asleep before the end. I haven't watched it for a while but yesterday I did, thinking about writing this today, and the magic's still intact although repeated exposure has built some limited immunity. I managed to keep my eyes open, at least. Just barely.

Norman Fucking Rockwell, when it arrived, turned out to have a dozen more tracks all as good as Mariners or Venice Bitch. Some, arguably, better. And there were more videos, made to the same standard. The whole thing had "career high water mark" stamped all over it. You'd have to be David Bowie to move on from something like that.

So releasing a superb collection of spoken-word poetry was a masterstroke. Could have been a calamity but not if you have the literary chops and especially not if you have the voice. And Jack Antonoff.  

A palate cleanser, anyway. And here we are, two years later, a few months late, waiting on the reveal. We've had a taste already. The official video for Love Me Like A Woman, the first single off the album, released at the tail end of last year, comes replete with  handheld camera shots and faux Super8 home movie filters and it also uses some of Venice Bitch's choppy tricks to similar effect. 

I find it disorientating but instead of inducing a trance state it gives me mild motion sickness. Also, the last few seconds, when the song's ended but the incidental conversation continues, brings me out of one moment into another in a way I'm certain is intentional but which I find oddly exclusive.

The "live" version of the same song from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon though... Oh, my. That has an entirely different power. It focuses attention wholly on the song and the performance and in doing so opens up a world. As a tempter for the album I find it compelling. 

 

And so to Chemtrails itself, or the video, at least. It was linked on Pitchfork when I checked Feedly a few days back. I watched it immediately. For some reason the link wouldn't open the YouTube original so I foolishly watched it in the embed. Too small. Impact blunted. Rookie error.

Then I went to YouTube, as I should have from the start, and watched it fullscreen. It's a stunning video that follows Lana's long-established fifties technicolor fetish with a horror movie twist I didn't see coming. That twist took me right out of the song, although the color keying was already so strong I wasn't fully inside to begin with.

Chemtrails Over The Country Club is a great song. It's even a great Lana del Rey song. But I wasn't sure of that until I watched this simple lyric video. It lets the song speak for itself, without all the drama. 

Lana's songs attract a lot of fan videos. Some of them, like the ones Mermaid Motel makes, are as good or even better than the official promos. There are always plenty of lyric videos, too. This may not be the prettiest made for Chemtrails but it's the one I watched first and now it's the one I keep watching.

Here's a thing. Watching that lyric video has something of the same ASMR effect on me as the Venice Bitch. Less intense. Mellower. But my skin tingles. It's a physical sensation. I have it on in the background as I type and I had to stop, tab out and stare at the lyrics as they reveal themselves. 

And this lyric video makes me more excited for the full album than the spectacular mini-movie I saw first. Not just because the song can breathe free but because of something in the simplicity, the inexorable, rolling inevitabilty.

A great video is a great video. A great song is a great song. Put the two together, you might get something greater still. You might get Venice Bitch. Or you mightn't. It's a gamble. Maybe just make a movie?

And the greatest gamble of all must be whether something greater than the two parts is even what you want. If you're making art, then, yes, of course. If it's commerce? Maybe not.

Getting back to games, if anyone who's mostly interested in those is still reading, which has to be doubtful, it's something we see a lot. I wrote about it, in some detail, nearly three years ago. The same links I'd use here are there, if anyone needs examples. I'm sure you can all think of plenty of your own.

That GW2 video I linked yesterday falls squarely into a category I call "Hey, guys! Remember our game exists?" It's the default for trivial updates in ongoing franchises. Mmorpg players see it a lot. When you have your income stream locked in you can afford to tread water that way. For a while.

When you have an expansion coming, though, you need to bring your A-game. For all my reservations, that Chemtrails promo is doing what it needs to do. Just not really what I need it to do. But then, much as yesterday, Lana doesn't need to sell me. And I guess neither does GW2.

For entirely different reasons.

We Got You Covered

I have a whole bunch more WoW Classic posts in mind - the thing's like a post idea generator right now - but I get the feeling it might be time for a palette cleanser. So why not let's have some more cover versions! That's not a question, by the way.

Last time I led with an outstanding cover of an Eno song. Here's a version of another tune written by Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, to give him his full name. (Although if you google "Eno's Full Name" you'll find it's just Brian Peter George Eno, apparently). Ask him, next time you meet him.

Performed by "Courtney and me", the me in question being William Trevaskis, it would almost be the definition of bedroom pop if they weren't playing in their living room so as not to wake the baby. It's not that great a cover, technically, but it's so charming that doesn't figure.

They also have a cover of "Equestrian Statue" by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, for which all the music is produced on Commodore 64 and Gameboy. That one sounds disturbingly professional. The keyboard Courtney's playing in the video is a Commodore 64 one, too, I think.

For a full-on professional cover of yet another of Eno's seemingly bottomless barrel of superb songs, who better than St Vincent? I'm yet to be entirely won over by Annie Clark but I won't argue that everything she does is steeped in quality and this is no exception.

(That's enough Eno. Ed.)

Changing gears, next up we have Kira Piru with a pretty straight cover (possibly not the best choice of adjective...) of Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night". There are better covers of this seminal banger around, not least this one by The Vaccines and Kira's band kinda flatten everything a bit. Also her vocal is a little linear but but I just love her attitude and the way she's so obviously enjoying herself, even if the band aren't entirely on board with the vibe.

The performance comes from Australia's Triple J radio station. They have a show called "Like A Version", where they "invite a musician or band into our studios, tell them to bring their instruments along, stick microphones in front of them and ask them to play one of their own compositions as well as a song they love by someone else." The results are mixed but there are some real gems in there. They have a YouTube channel or you can go straight to the source.
 

There are a few radio stations, broadccast and web-based, that have strands or programs that do something very similar. BBC Radio 1's "Live Lounge" is one of the best known, not least because the station's profile means they get some really major players in, keen to show off their chops. It seems to get quite competitive at times.

Just a week ago, Lana del Rey did Ariana Grande's "Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I'm Bored" while apparently reading the lyrics from a smart phone. It's weird but good weird. Supposedly it's a fairly faithful version but since I haven't heard the original I can't really comment. I've been trying to get up to speed with Ariana Grande but so far I haven't made much progress.

I'm all over Charli XCX though! Here's her girl-power dismantling of Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off". Tay's classic is bombproof. I've heard so many covers and the brilliant clarity of the original, one of the best pop songs of the decade, always shines through.

Charli, a force of nature in her own right and a true force for good in the world, gives it everything and then some. Her kick-ass band, sublimely cool in black-and-white stripes, hit an almost motorik groove as they give out with some of the best call-and-response backing vocals since The Shangri-Las.

The third cover-specialist channel I mine for nuggets is A.V. Undercover, which sadly ended in 2017 after eight seasons. They had an unusual take on the covers concept in that they sent a list of twenty-five songs to the bands who were booked for each season and as each band chose one it was removed from contention, leaving the slower respondents with an ever-diminsihing choice.

That's probably why the overall quality isn't all that. A few bands are playing songs they'd never even heard of, let alone heard. When the right band gets the right song, though, you get Charlie Bliss joyously re-decorating one-hit wonder Len's "Don't Steal My Sunshine".

Or, even better, The Regrettes incinerating The Sweet's glam stomper "Fox On The Run".

So much for big, commercial organizations showcasing major acts and celebrated indie comers. Let's finish with a couple of "press record and hope" bids for internet fame. Actually, the first one's a bit higher than that on the indie food chain. "My Toys Like Me" have a detailed wikipedia entry, two albums and a live history that includes supporting CSS and playing (way down the bill) at several major festivals. They also make some striking videos.

Even so, their eerie, disconnected cover of Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" has only managed to rack up around 7,000 views in nine years It rather makes the case for one of the six comments it's received in that time: "...the best band no-one has heard of".

And finally... a ukulele cover of The Ramones political, polemical classic "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg". To be frank, I have mixed views on the ukulele. At the one extreme you have the superb Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and at the other a million hamfisted covers recorded in bedrooms across the known world on webcams set slightly askew... as, all too often, are the vocals.

The YouTube search I just did to find this particular number turned up no fewer than five uke covers of Bonzo plus a bunch more on acoustic guitar. What it is about The Ramones that make people think they're perfect for four or six nylon strings? It beats me... oh, wait, no it doesn't... three chords!

Maybe one of the other uke covers is better than its.a.peach's. I haven't watched them all to check. I always really liked this country-inflected version, though, so that's what we're going with. I guess I'm not alone because after five years it's up to 45k views.

That's it for now. I could go on but there's only so many links I can expect anyone to click. I have some ideas percolating for the next few music posts, including songs about superheroes and songs by bands with the word "Pony" in their name or the title of the song. I have a couple of dozen of those downloaded and I'm always looking for more.

Such fun!

New MMOs for 2014: There Are Some

J3w3l has some trailers for forthcoming attractions up, along with her second take on WildStar. That, along with both her and Keen's enthusiastic responses to the latest EQ Landmark promo (may as well embed it - everyone else has...) got me thinking about what we have to look forward to for 2014 in MMO Land.


Off the top of my head I could think of WildStar, EQLandmark, The Elder Scrolls Online and... well that was it, really. Come on, there must be more than that. Maybe it's my memory failing. That age thing again.

Remembering stuff, though, that's so 20th Century. We have machines to do that for us now. So I googled "mmo 2014 releases".

Top Free MMORPG.net offers Star Citizen (don't care, won't play, won't be out in 2014 anyway), EQNext (care so much it hurts, will play unless dead, don't believe it will be out until the very end of 2014 at the earliest), Titan (yeah, right), PK Project (um, excuse me?), Lineage Eternal:Twilight Resistance (not quite clear what this is but I've successfully managed to avoid the Lineage franchise for the last decade and a half...) and World of Darkness (now you're just being silly).

I won't go through all the rest of their, um, idiosyncratic list, although it did remind me that The Crew, despite being delayed, is due out next summer. Not all that interested in the gameplay on that one but the prospect of being able to take a virtual road trip across the continental United States has a certain appeal. 

Games Radar has a very slick slideshow that includes the usual suspects but throws in some marginally interesting possibilities like the two hyper-realistic South Korean offerings, Bless and Blade and Soul, neither of which appears to have any kind of Western release scheduled.

They also name-check Black Desert, which I was interested in briefly but am no longer and Otherland, in which I was very interested indeed but which I was sure had been cancelled. On checking it appears that, weirdly, the Gamigo website is still up although the latest news refers to the closed beta from over a year ago. I'm pretty sure it's dead.

Other than that the Games Radar list offers a smattering of funded Kickstarter projects like Embers of Caerus, Pathfinder and City of Titans, all of which are nominally interesting but won't see daylight in 2014.

Ten Ton Hammer includes both EQNext and Pathfinder in its Top Six Sandbox MMOs To Watch In 2014, a list which intriguingly includes TESO, which I hadn't realized was supposed to be a sandbox, along with a previous hot tip now fading fast, ArcheAge. Mention of that one reminded me of Trion's other iron in the fire for next year, Trove. They're both games I'm moderately interested to take a look at but I can't say either is stoking any great fires.


Massively has a round-robin of staff picks for next year that doesn't really shed much light on anything other than the predilections of the individuals involved but the paucity of suggestions on offer does serve to back up my own feeling that 2014 is going to be a really thin year for MMOs. Not having played Halo and not having much interest in space-based games, Destiny, one of the few MMOs the Massively crew add to the pile, doesn't press any of my buttons. Neither doesTUG, yet another of the seemingly endless spawn of Kickstarter-funded sandbox titles.

 So back we come around to where we started. I'll try most any MMO for flavor and in our brave new world of open betas, free to play and try-before-you-buy there's no reason not to give any or all of them a run. Curiosity and the potential for getting a blog post out of the experience almost ensures I'll try all of them at some point but I'm not actually looking forward to playing any of them.

I don't even have the same sense of excitement and expectation for EQ Landmark that I had for, say, GW2 or The Secret World back in 2012. I'm interested in in it, sure, but I can't help thinking it looks like work. No, it's EQNext I really want to play.

And that, I think, is the heart of the problem. Everything else is just marking time until EQNext, which probably won't be out until 2015. Next year is looking like another year of more of the same - GW2, EQ2, all the old favorites - unless, as I very much wish it might, one or more of the MMOs on these lacklustre lists manages to pounce on me and sink its fangs in deep.

Failing that, anyone have any other good tips for 2014?

To The Lighthouse : GW2

Just after Christmas last year I reported on the construction being undertaken by the Ships' Council (or was it The Lionguard?) on the new Lion's Arch Lighthouse. At the time I was somewhat concerned about the health and safety risk caused by the slow updating of the Tyrian GPS (Grimoire Positioning Service) which at the time was directing travelers over a sheer cliff, and also about the fate of the brave lighthouse guards who could still be seen milling around inside the broken-off stump.

The sight last night of a majestic, fully-functioning lighthouse over in the alternate dimension of Eorzea made me think perhaps I'd better go check what progress had been made. The good news is that the map no longer directs you to your death and that the stranded lionguards appear to have been rescued, although possibly they just ate all their supplies and then each other before the traumatized survivors climbed down and fled to live feral in the mangrove swamps of nearby Bloodtide Coast. There were Charr in there after all...

Work on the new lighthouse is proceeding, albeit slowly. A couple more storeys have been added but the thing still looks a long way off casting a beam. What with all the refugees pouring in from the Molten Alliance raids and then the preparations for and disastrous disruption of the Dragon Bash festival I suppose the authorities have had their hands full, but even so. We do need that lighthouse!

Also available here

I took it upon myself, at great personal risk, to undertake an inspection of the remains of the old tower and I can report that it seems architecturally sound and solid. If building a complete new Lighthouse is proving too difficult or expensive I'm pretty sure the old one could be renovated.

And I'm pleased to say I didn't find any evidence of half-eaten Asura or Sylvari splinters used as toothpicks.

Kill Ten Rabbits : GW2

I really have no excuse for this, let alone any reason, but I made it so here it is:

I wonder about myself sometimes...

Rata Sum Labs Presents... : GW2

Is there no end to their ingenuity?

Dragons Vs Airships : GW2

So, I went to Orr. It took me two hours from Straits of Devastation to Cursed Shore, at which point I discovered Mrs Bhagpuss, on her new Charr Warrior, hadn't been representing, didn't know I'd left and hadn't heard a word I'd said as I oohed, aahed and wtf'd my way across Southern Kryta.

We stopped for lunch and re-started.

Take two and as a duo we covered the same ground in twenty minutes. As reported, Orr is all undead all the time. I recognize this theme from several previous MMOs. Really, what is it about the undead? Maximum level means Undead, Dragons, Demons or The Void and that's about it.

Seriously, someone come up with something new.

Still and all it was hella fun. And when a shadow passed over me I looked up, and...

C'mon ArenaNet. Don't tease. If Allods can do it, you can. Let us up there!

Tequatl The Sunless : GW2

Yesterday I met my first Tyrian dragon. I'm not a big fan of dragons in MMOs. They tend to be overused and under-impressive. Not so here.

I believe there's some back-story that I haven't really been following concerning Elder Dragons. I hope Tequatl's one of them because if he's just a Junior Dragon I may need a bigger screen.

 

The fight itself lasted a few minutes. For a good deal of the time I was running around playing cub reporter taking photos and shooting video and for quite a while I was stuck inside a bone wall Tequatl dropped right on top of me, so I missed the finer points of the battle, such as whether that Asuran Laser ever fired.


In the end the dragon was defeated somehow and I got Gold for doing...something. Best dragon fight I have had in any MMO. Bring on the big ones!

The War With The Dredge : GW2

It was said that as we saw deeper into Tyria the complexity of the dynamic event system would begin to reveal itself in a way that hadn't been apparent in beta. Many took this with a large pinch of salt. Based on my experiences in Dredgehaunt Cliffs last night, my salt is going back into the cellar.

The camps there seem to be under perpetual assault by the Dredge, changing hands with the frequency and violence I remember so fondly from the glory days of Rift's later beta weekends. Below the ground events are stacked in cramped tunnels that open into breathtaking, chaotic Dredge mazeworks reminding me of Kasaravi gulch on amphetamines. Get beyond that and there appears to be a full scale war going on.

We were there for several hours and the action never stopped. What it will be like in a month or three, how this madness will manifest with fewer people passing through, who knows? Can't wait to find out.

Settling In : GW2

Over a week in and how green is the grass this side of the fence? Green as green, and scattered with daisies, that's how green. Oh, there's the odd dandelion here and there, and one or two molehills, but that's one fine lawn I'm looking at.

A few passing thoughts as I lie back in my striped deckchair sipping iced tea through a straw...

Auto Attack

Did you know you can set any of your main weapon skills as your Auto-Attack? There's a tiny line of text in the mouseover that tells you. Just highlight the skill you want and hit Ctrl-Mouse 2. Since every weapon only seems to get one skill with an instant refresh I'm not sure how much of a gift this is, but it's nice option to have.

Self-Combos

If you can use a torch you can set things on fire! No need for an elementalist - be your own combo. No wonder my charr ranger keeps yelling "I make a great team!"

One of my very favorite things as a pyro in Rift was being able to throw down a casting circle at my feet and stand inside it flinging spells. It was the most magelike thing I've ever seen in an MMO. Then they took it out and let you cast and move - boo! hiss! As a ranger I start every fight by setting the ground around me on fire with my torch, then I swap to my bow and fire arrows through the flames, setting both the arrows and anything they hit on fire. Trolls hate that so much!

An unmarked jug fills faster

Who would have thought that filling a progress bar to complete an event would be so much more entertaining than completing a count? Events that ask you, for example, to reduce the morale of centaurs without telling you exactly how many centaurs you need to kill are radically more emotionally involving, for me at least. The fewer actual numbers I see, the more I believe in what I'm doing.

Trains are back! 

Really, who could have predicted that? When a mob reaches the end of its leash and gives up it becomes non-aggressive as it runs backs to its stamping grounds, but other than that, fair game! I've been mining silver and had people run up to join me with a train of angry ettins and the ettins have preferred to stomp me first. I've had people run past me with something hot on their tail and had it spot and jump me instead. And with every train comes a potential derailment, the old trick of plunking an arrow into a pursuing predator and pulling it off its fleeing prey. Perfection!

Faction too

For a game that doesn't seem to have bothered with a faction system, boy does GW2 have a deep faction system. Play Attenborough for a while and go observe who doesn't like whom, what likes to eat which, whose territory must not be encroached. It's a complex nest of liking, loathing and toleration. And you can play one off against another to your benefit. Hours of imaginary anthropological research ahoy!

Falling Is funny

Did they get Disney in to do the character animations? No, it's more like Warner Bros circa 1942. Wonderful knockabout stuff. It's worth falling off something high just to see the flattened animation. Never seen the wind knocked out of a character more convincingly. When my Wolf-Bear gets hit with a knockback he flies through the air and bounces or lands spread-eagled like a hunting lodge rug. It's comedy gold!

On the molehill front, the blasted Trading Post still isn't working. Other than that nothing worth mentioning. A few rough edges that will soon smooth off. Onward and upward.

Chekhov's Gun : GW2

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."  

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Or in MMO terms, don't put in a ground-mounted cannon/laser-destructor/harpoon-gun, allow me operate, aim and fire it then give it nothing to hit but dirt. I'm looking at you, Warhammer Online.

If you're going to do it, do it like this.

(And yes, I did install FRAPS today and yes, I am learning how to use the YouTube account I've been neglecting for three years. So sue me).

Running Up That Hill : GW2

Animation. No, not Tom and Jerry nor yet UPA. The way your character moves. People do go on about it. Can't play because of how the barbarian's elbow sticks out when he swings his sword or the mage turns her toes in when she throws a fireball.

I never really got that. I tend to spend more time looking at hotbars than at my characters when they are actually doing something and anyway there are usually so many explosions, special effects, spurting arteries, flying body-parts, huge numbers and speech-bubbles flying about it's all I can do to work out where my character is, let alone notice whether the articulation of his imaginary joints is authentic.

Blase as I may be about the fine points of swordplay and finger-waggling, though I do take notice of how my characters run. There's a lot of traveling in most MMOs, much of it done the hard way - on foot. Watching a half-elf hopping along like a hiker with a pebble in his Dr. Scholls or a dwarf rolling like a toddler with something he really doesn't want to tell you about going on back in the caboose can be distracting to say the least.

YouTube in slightly better quality here.

In GW2 I have the opposite problem. I could watch my Charr run for hours. I do watch my Charr run for hours. It's one of the reasons I'm getting so little done.

Off he goes on all fours, bounding across the iron platforms of the Black Citadel out into the eternal autumn of Ascalon. Beautiful, beautiful world. Beautiful, beautiful charr.

Turn off the UI, turn up the sound and prowl. Listen to the pad of  tiger feet on metal, in the dirt. Leave pawprints in the snow and hear the soft crunch fade. Be the cat.

Other races are available. Why?