I Love Lana (No, Not That One...)

Well, this is embarrassing. Two sketchy Grab Bags, then a day I could have posted but didn't, and now here I am again, still with nothing very much to talk about. That's what'll happen when you spend most of your time tidying up the garden, walking the dog, enjoying some beautiful Spring sunshine and arranging a funeral.

I could actually, finally, really get started on the Zones of Norrath feature I keep dancing around but I've left it a bit late in the day. That might come tomorrow.  

I was thinking of doing something on the new game from my Steam library - the one that seems to have stuck. I've tried several of the new titles I acquired over Christmas and the New Year but it took a while to find one that grabbed me.

All of that sounds like work, though. Enjoyable, satisfying work, sure, but still work. A lot more, for sure, than what I am going to do, which is reprint an article I wrote for a comics fanzine back in the 'eighties. Which one, I can't remember. I know it was published somewhere but if I have a copy, I don't know where it is. I just have the original draft.

Tipa was wondering a while back, what of this shall remain and she was of the opinion that putting stuff on the internet doesn't guarantee anyone's writing the kind of immortality some people used to think it did. Obviously that's true but it's equally true that keeping it in a folder on top of your bookcase doesn't, either. Both rely on someone eventually discovering something you've written and thinking it's worth sharing. I'm guessing that's a tad more likely to happen if you post it where the entire world can see it.

Hmm. But now it occurs to me I don't have the piece digitized yet so now I have to scan it. Damned if that doesn't sound like work after all....and it's done! Turns out it takes literally less than five minutes to do that. God bless technology, eh?. 

I imagine this had a title once but I can't remember what it was so I'm going to call it...

 I Love Lana

I always thought Clark Kent was crazy.

He had the perfect life there in Smallville, didn't he? Ma Kent could have baked apple-pie for America. Pa could have given cracker-barrel lessons to Robert Frost. He had the trust and admiration of everyone in town, from Police Chief Parker down to good ol' Pete Ross. And best of all, the girl-next-door was Lana Lang.
If I'd been Clark, I'd never have left. I'd never have taken a chance on the big city and the glitter of the Pulitzer somewhere in the dim maybe future. And I sure as heck wouldn't have fallen for Lois Lane.

Oh, sure, you can say she's tripwire smart and very, well, metropolitan. And she's good-looking, in an austere kind of way, but after growing up with Lana? No, I never really could believe it.

Clark's boyhood was an American classic. If you strip out all that superheroism, it wasn't so different from Tom Sawyer's - all the world to explore and the next town another country, danger and adventure round the corner of the barn then safe home for supper. And everywhere Clark went, there was his rust-haired shadow, Lana, scarcely a pace behind him.

She was the kind of girl who would have driven you wild. She pried and poked and never let go. She wanted into everything you were doing and if you tried to keep her out she'd want in even more. Clark never seemed to know whether she was his best friend, his girlfriend or some pretty little devilette sent to try him. (He could have used some trying, too).

Clark and Lana grew up with each other. As babies they went on hayrides together and played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in Lana's rec room. They went to the circus and the beach with their fathers, who got on as well together as good neighbors should, despite their different stations in life.

As they grew older, the kids were in and out of each other's houses like cousins. Who knew when Lana might drop round with a cake she'd baked for Ma Kent to taste or Clark pop in to the Langs' to see the witch-doctors' masks from the Professor's latest expedition?

Lana had seen a lot more of the world than Clark, of course. She was the same age, but she'd traveled. Her father was an explorer and archeologist, and he'd often take Lana on field trips. Compared to Clark she was a woman of the world and she made sure he knew about it. As Superboy, Clark had been all over the universe, but he had to keep that to himself, so it didn't count for much.

They didn't just live next door, they were in the same class at school, and whether it was a chemistry experiment or a social event, Clark and Lana always seemed to end up partners. Sometimes it looked as though there was some kind of conspiracy to push them together. You couldn't say they were going steady, but you could tell there was an understanding.

Being Lana's boyfriend could be tough. Any adolescent boy would have had a hard time living up to the image of Professor Lang, Smallville's own Indiana Jones, but Clark had to compete with his peerless other self as well. In the years to come, as Lana's life plaited with Superman's and braided with Clark's, people who didn't understand what they shared would chide and ridicule her, saying she was starstruck or a gold-digger. Yet her friendship with Clark never wavered.

Being Clark's girlfriend had it's downside, too. That scared-of-his-own- shadow routine must have been hard for everyone to take, but at least Ma and Pa Kent and Pete Ross could hug the secret close and feel good. At least they knew why.
If Lana dreamed of marrying Superboy, well, what Smallville girl didn't? But dreams are for dreaming and life is for living, and Clark was as real as real life gets. His timidity was probably the one thing that gave Lana doubts. As she said to the reminiscing wardens of Clark's old orphanage, "He still is cute...whenever he isn't too timid and weak!"

Lana wasn't timid. She had the spirit of a tigress. She was tack-sharp, too, and headstrong. She was a green-eyed redhead and she had all the traits. Truth told, she was almost too much for Clark.

She was definitely too much for Superboy, or so he claimed. When Othar of Thrann, the self-styled Super World, coerced Superboy and a claque of lesser planetary heroes into leaving their homeworlds for ever, Superboy was glad of the rest. "Smallville, where I live, is a nice place", he told Stormboy and the others, "The only thing that bothered me was an inquisitive girl, Lana Lang, who suspected my identity!" The endless procession of crooks and creatures that came to Smallville month in, month out, hellbent on mayhem weren't a problem, then. It was only that pesky girl, who might turn out to be just that bit too smart for him, that he couldn't get out of his mind.

Still, he wouldn't have been without her. More than once Lana caught Clark with his super-shirt untucked, but she never took advantage. Once she actually caught him changing in a phone-booth. Instead of peeking, she turned her back. After all, as she thought to herself, "I'm dying to know his identity, but it wouldn't be right to expose it!"

If you take a moment to think about it, a boy who could fly across galaxies and corkscrew through time shouldn't have had too much trouble finding a bit peace from an interfering girl, even one as sharp as Lana. But then, it was obvious the last thing he really wanted was to get away from her.

He had a club all his own, way up the time-line in the 30th Century. Lana couldn't have followed him there, surely? It would have been easy to keep the Legion to himself, but the Legion had girls, and some of those legionnaires had girlfriends. Superboy could hardly wait to show Lana off.

Lana was up for any challenge. They didn't say feisty then, but that was what she was. She was happy to step up into the super-powered leagues, and she wasn't short of opportunities.

Professor Lang was always bringing home talismans and sacred objects. and he gave as little credence to their possible side-effects as he did to the freedom of worship of their previous owners. He wasn't much more circumspect when it came to alien artifacts. One time he came back from Africa with a 21- inch glowing metal belt which he claimed was "the most amazing discovery I've made in my entire career!" That was saying something given his track record, but he let Lana try it on for size just the same.

The belt was made for "a race of very small, slender people" and Lana was delighted to find it fitted her, if she drew her stomach in a little. More than that, though, it gave her amazing powers.

That was the start of a brief spell as Gravity Girl, who also turned out, luckily, to be invulnerable. ("That's nice to know!" she observed as the first bullets bounced off her chest). In the end Superboy convinced her it wasn't the right career move. He was only too glad to melt the belt with his heat vision but it didn't put an end to Lana's super-heroics.

She established a successful part-time career as Insect Queen, who looked better than you might expect. She had a Bio-ring, a striking yellow-and-black costume and the power to change into any insect she could think of, which was plenty.
When she turned her back on him in the phone booth that time, it was the excuse Superboy had been waiting for. He flew her through the time-barrier to meet the Legion of Super-Heroes as a reward for curbing her natural curiosity.

Lana realized right away that this was a club girls could join. She happened to have brought her Insect Queen regalia on the off chance, but she didn't know that Legionnaires need a natural power to pass the exam and a bio ring wouldn't qualify. She tried out but they told her to go and wait with the other rejects.

Lana didn't get into a pet. She didn't cry or sulk, she called in a favor from Dream Girl and ended up saving four Legionnaires on a mission to Ice City. She was such a hit, they admitted her to the Legion Reserve. They thanked themselves for doing it years later, when they turned up on Lana's doorstep, running down the centuries in fear of Mordru and their lives.

Lana did the right thing then, like she always did when it really mattered. So, she was nosy and sneaky and there was an acid edge to her tongue. So what? She was the best friend Clark ever had or would have. He knew it, too, though he could never resist a gentle joke at her expense.

When Superboy needed someone to help him in his work, it was usually Lana who got the call. Out to break a narcotics ring, he involved Lana in a typically elaborate scheme that required him to pretend to be an imbecile. Lana in turn was required to pretend to take advantage of his disability by tricking him into writing his secret identity in her notebook. "This way", she said, to prove to the audience of dope-pedlars just how far Superboy's wits had dulled "if you ever get amnesia, I'll be able to tell you what your secret identity is!" Ever the wag, Superboy wrote "Clark Kent" in her book and smiled to himself. He'd probably just done Poe in English Lit. At the end, as they laughed together over the private joke, he was thinking to himself, "Even more private than you suspect! The laugh's really on you, Lana, because... I am Clark Kent!"

They had a real rapport, Clark and Lana. They made a good team. In the comic-books they looked the part, perfectly caught by Curt Swan, a master of nuance. The stories they shared were silly, often ludicrous, but Swan and the rest of DC's wonderful artists gave them dignity, while the awkward, naive phrasing of their speech gave them charm.

I grew up with Lana and Clark, while they were growing up with each other. I didn't think so much about it at the time, but the way they were with each other, their mutual respect, helped to legitimize friendships with the opposite sex. Where many comics, especially the British ones, talked up the natural uncertainty and confusion between the sexes that makes girls and boys seem to each other like ambassadors from an alien race, Lana and Clark showed that despite evidence to the contrary it was quite alright to be friends with a girl.

I never lost my affection for Clark, but somewhere along the way I kind of fell in love with Lana. As she grew older and left Smallville I admired her career as a roving TV news reporter for WMET-TV and applauded her graduation to co-anchor on WGBS's Evening News. It seemed so right that after following Clark into journalism, she should end up sitting at the desk beside him, facing the world. "Every station manager in town would give his right arm to have this gal!" Morgan Edge told Clark, and it was no more of a tribute than she deserved.

The WGBS years were my golden-age for the Superman family, and the tart, cosmopolitan Lana, who had to hold the line before a live TV link every time Clark thought of a job for Superman, was the best she was allowed to be. Later came John Byrne and the Reformation. Some of it worked, but babies were being slung out with bathwater everywhere you looked and the real Lana went too. Truthfully, I still care what happens to her, even if I have to do that thing with my mind, eliding the bits of history I don't want in favor of what seems right. Last time I touched base with her she was on the verge of marrying Pete Ross, which seems infinitely sad and plausible.

Whatever happens, Smallville will remain. In the middle of a long, late- summer afternoon where it's always 1959, a dark-haired boy will be walking home a red-headed girl with laughing eyes. She'll let him carry her books. And that's as it should be. 

That was all before the Smallville TV series, of course. That was a very different Lana. But then, over all the years there've been so many...

These days, the whole rickety structure of the superverse is so fatally compromised, only a 12th level intellect like Brainiac 5's could hope to make sense of it. It's far beyond me, now. 

I'll stick with the Bronze and Silver Age Lana. I'm not a big one for nostalgia but sometimes the past does have its allure. 

So Very Real

Last night was a watershed moment for me. I finally ran out of things I wrote or recorded in the 70s, 80s and 90s that I could refashion or remake into new songs using AI. It's taken me more than six months, hacking away at the past a little more every day, but now it's clear cut and there's nothing left but stumps.

Well, okay, not exactly. I could give the longer pieces another pass or two. See if there's anything I missed. I didn't really pry all that much away from the longer of the two extended pieces of fiction because most of it seemed unsuitable for conversion into song lyrics but maybe a different musical genre would shake something else loose. Everything can't be sad dreampop.

And there might be the odd fragment I haven't found, left lurking somewhere in the house. I can think of a couple of pieces I remember writing that haven't turned up yet. One of them would be perfect. But if they still exist, I've run out of ideas on where to look. They weren't in the loft and that was my last hope.

Or maybe not. There are a couple of outside possibilities. I doubt very much that I'm likely to find any of the printed zines but I have a couple of PC floppy disks I haven't been able to read. If I could get into those... 

And before I got the PC in the mid-90s I'm pretty sure I wrote everything on my Amiga 500. Which I still have. And the disks. The problem there is that I'd need a CRT monitor to plug the Amiga into and I got rid of the last of those just after the pandemic, when I was having a clear-out. One more piece of evidence to support my belief that decluttering is never a good idea.

I was looking into it and it seems you can get various adapters to connect an Amiga to an HDMI display but my experience with such things in the past has not always been great and honestly I don't think I can be bothered. If I'm honest, I don't even want to dig the Amiga out from the inaccessible hidey-hole I buried it in when I was almost sure I'd never want to use it again...

No, I think I'm just going to have to accept that those last, few fragments are gone for good. And that's okay. I've recovered and restored a huge percentage of everything I ever did, most of which I thought I'd never see again and none of which I ever imagined would have such a scintillating afterlife.

It's been a revelation, rediscovering eveything I wrote and recorded decades ago, finding much of it was far better than I remembered and then turning it all into something new that's given me an extraordinary amount of pleasure and satisfaction in its own right. I think it's okay to let a few scraps fall through the floorboards.

There is another very good reason to call a halt to the crate-digging, too. If I don't have any more old stuff to rely on, I'll have to start making some new. That would be a whole different adventure, wouldn't it?

I probably ought to start by finishing the pieces I left unfinished back around the turn of the millennium. One, supposedly a novel, I stopped mostly because I didn't know where to go with it next. The other, an episodic string of vignettes, left off, as I now realize, at a very unhappy moment in the story. Both of those deserve proper endings.

After that, maybe I might even come up with a new idea. That'd be the first this century. I don't believe I've had a new idea since the mid-90s. I'm assuming they still exist. It might be a myth.

New ideas are scary, though, and so is making art. Curating it is a lot more comfortable. Perhaps I'd have a better time organizing what I already have and figuring out some way to present it in public. Not that I have any illusions there's a public out there likely to take an interest but I figure it's better to offer it than not, even if there are no takers.

That's a thought that deserves some analysis, isn't it? Why does any creative act need to be shared? Surely the act of creation is sufficient in itself. And if an audience is required, I am it. I mean, I really appreciate my own work. In making it public, would I be sharing it in a spirit of benevolence, offering up something I feel is valuable and worthwhile for the pleasure and entertainment of others? Or would I just be looking for validation and applause?

Yeah, I don't really care much about all that introspective nonsense. Mostly, I'd like it on the web because that maximizes its chances of survival over a longer time-frame and I'm broadly of the opinion that things should persist whenever possible. Besides, someone might get some use or pleasure out of it one day. Also, it'd be really convenient for me to have it all in one place, even if that was actually several places, as in multiple blogs or websites, with the "one place" in that scenario being the collective wrapper of the internet.

As you may have realized by now, those who've stayed with me this far, this isn't so much a blog post as a conversation I'm having with myself as I try to decide what to do next. Coming to the end of the ongoing project I've been engaged with for most of this year has unsettled me a little and this is me, trying to think it through and figure out what comes next.

And do you know what comes next right now? You won't guess. I'll tell you. 

I'm going to go into the bedroom, open the door to the cupboard where the hot water tank is and rummage through the shelves beneath it, where I keep all the very old clothes I'm never going to wear again but haven't gotten as far as throwing out yet. I'm hoping that among them I'll find a T--shirt I bought in Antequerra about thirty years ago.

That T-shirt, which got too small and old to wear decades ago, has a cartoon on the front of five young women. They aren't characters from a comic or a movie or a show. They're just five people someone drew and presumably sold to someone else, who turned the image into a piece of clothing that ended up in a shop in a backstreet of a middle-sized town in Andalusia, where I found it and bought it for no reason other than I liked the look of the characters.

And then, later, I gave them all names and wrote a story about them. Which is one of the pieces that so far hasn't come to light. 

I don't really think seeing the image again will bring any of the names I gave them back to me. Except I already know what one of them is called because she turns up as a character in that series of vignettes I mentioned.

She's called Cat and I'm hoping if I can find the shirt I'll remember which of the five she is. So let me just go see if I can find it...

... and no, I can't. I have, however, discovered the hot water tank is rusting and needs to be replaced immediately, so that was... lucky?  

Also, a reminder that there are things more pressing in life than either writing blog posts or worrying about what happened to short stories you wrote half a lifetime ago. And with that I think I'll go do something useful for a change.  

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Just the music, which was created using Suno from a guide vocal uploaded by me. Actually, I whistled the tune. Mostly I sing them but some days my voice just isn't willing to co-operate and that apparently was one of those days. 

All the lyrics are mine, adapted from the penultimate paragraph, which reads as follows:

"Rachel sometimes does fireworks for us, just as it gets dark, and I help with the snow statues. If I feel lonely she'll hold me, if I ask. When I'm tired I go up to my little room and close the door. I think Rachel has a room somewhere, but I've never seen it, Rachel is very real. Perhaps she's the real one, not me. Cat and Cathy, I don't know where they go. They're ghosts."

As you can see, I didn't change much, just added some emphasis and extra poignancy. I've found the two techniques that work best for turning prose into lyrics are either to add a few rhymes or to use repetition. It's amazing how effectively repeated lines and phrases substitute for rhymes.

I ran lots of variations and fiddled around with them but in the end, the best one was the very first run. It happens that way more often than you'd think. Suno sometimes seems to get worse the more you ask it to iterate. 

The prompt was

 "strings, cello, soft, sweet, low, husky female vocals, Gentle, soft, quiet, restrained, understated chamber-pop soundscape throughout, production very crisp and clear, female vocals low and husky but soft and sweet, Pitch is generally low, a somber quality indie-pop, dreampop fuzz-pop, simple subdued drums, quiet simple bass, quiet fuzzed guitars, strings"

Again, I find repeating things, particularly at the beginning and end of a prompt, helps a lot. It often seems as if Suno fixates on what it hears first, last or most often. 

If you want to hear it on Suno for some reason, it's here.  It's exactly the same though.

But I Don't Even Like Football...

Seems like every other day I start with some variation on "Well, this is going to be a really short post..." and then go on to write at least a thousand words. This is not one of those days.

This time it really is going to be short, although not so much for you, dear reader, if, as I hope you will, you click on the links. If you do, it's going to be two hours of your day gone, like it just was of mine, which is one reason this is not going to be one of those posts that take me two or three hours to write, (i.e. most of them).

There are going to be two links. (Edit: Of course there aren't. Well, there are, because two is inside five, but there aren't just two. And now it's six. I just added another in post. In post in the post. Whatever...) The first is to one of the fine blogs I discovered thanks to this year's Blaugust. 

All month I've been enjoying axxuy's concise posts in their restful shades of green. They've been one of the most consistently entertaining reads of the event, which is probably why I clicked through the link in today's post. Residual good vibes carry you far.

I don't click on most links in posts I read. I mean, lots of people include lots of links all the time. I know I do. I very much doubt anyone clicks through all of them and I'd bet most people don't click through many. I dithered a moment before clicking this one but I'm very glad I did and I'd like to thank axxuy for introducing me to something of value I'd almost certainly never have found on my own.

Probably about time I linked to axxuy's post, isn't it?  It's called Football Forever and you don't need to know or care about American Football to read it. I certainly don't. 

Neither do you need any kind of grounding in the game to click again on the link axxuy includes, which I'm going to put up here in a skronking point size so you can't miss it:

17776

And that is the biggest point size Blogger has. I'd make it bigger if I could.

Where does it take you? Not saying. Axxuy gives a good framing intro. Read that.

What I'd add is that it's quite an undertaking. It took me, as I said, about two hours, end to end. Given that I can't seem to make time to watch a whole movie these days and think an hour is quite a good session in a video game, it says a lot that I didn't even start to think "Just how long is this going to go on?" until I was about ninety minutes in.

People (Who are they, these generic, unreferenced "people"? I don't know but I'm agin 'em.) like to talk about the corrosion of the internet and how nothing is as good as it used to be in the good old days because apparently that's just how we feel about stuff when it's been around a while. And it is true that the sense of play, the sense of wonder, may have gone out of the worldwide web, swept away by the tides of commerce. (Geez! Flowery, much?)

Remember when people (Them again...) genuinely weren't sure if Poppy was real? Or Pronunciation Book? I guess those days of innocent gullibility really are over. Even before AI made the irreal real, we were well past being fooled that way, even willingly. Weren't we? (By the way, more Blaugust props (No-one says props any more. Shhh. You're just drawing attention to it!) to Calishat, without whose excellent utility Back That Ask Up! I would have had to waste a lot more time finding a suitable reference for that That Poppy story.) 

Just because we can't be fooled so easily doesn't mean the web has gone all to shit like people keep saying. There are things the web can do that no other medium can approach and there's still far, far more out there than any of us is ever going to find.

I very, very definitely would not have gone looking for an experimental, multi-media meditation on eternity, framed as a science-fiction novella, on a massive, corporate sports channel but that's where this comes from. Still find that hard to believe. What the hell is it doing there, anyway?

But that's where it is and I suggest you go experience it. It's a ride. 

Thanks again to axxuy and indeed to Blaugust for showing it to me. I'd never have found it on my own and that would have been my loss, which is why I'm sharing it here, because I know for sure not everyone reading this is also reading every other Blaugust blog, let alone clicking on all the links.

And this turned out longer than I planned but then doesn't it always?   

Hello Tiger, Wherever You Are

I'm still digging through my archives (Read: unsorted piles of papers stuffed into cupboards, blanket trunks, suitcases under the bed and any shelf space not already fully occupied by comics and books.) in search of the zines I produced during the eighties and nineties. So far I've found... some of them.

How many there were and how many remain to be found is an open question. I can't remember when I joined BAPA although since I first met many of the people who later went on to be mainstays of the cult project while I was still at university and I graduated in 1981 or 1982 (You'd think I'd remember but I don't.) and I didn't quit the apa until pretty close to the millennium, I guess I must have been in it for more than a decade, possibly quite a lot more.

The mailing frequency was mainly, if not entirely, bi-monthly and I doubt I missed many mailings. I also frequently submitted more than one zine at a time so that suggests I must have produced somewhere between sixty and a hundred zines. So far I've found less than half the low end of that estimate. 

Given that I'm certain I'd never have knowingly disposed of any of them, they almost have to be somewhere in the house. My fear is that they're in the loft. I put a lot of stuff up there when we moved in, thirty years ago and I had trouble getting up there even then. Access is through a very small trap door in the ceiling of the bathroom and I haven't attempted it for about ten years. I'm not keen to try it now but I suppose at some point I'll have to.

But not today. Today I managed to find all nine issues of the other long-form fiction piece I was working on back in the nineties, which goes by the provisional title An Outside View. I also found a separate zine in which I go on at some length about how it's finished and the next stage is to submit it to publishers. 

All the covers. Not as well-preserved as the Final Line ones.

I don't sound at all keen and my estimate of my chances of attracting any kind of interest is highly pessimistic. In the end, I never did send it anywhere.

But... I do still have the revised, completed text on floppy disc and by some miracle the other day I managed to get Windows 10 to read that disc and copy it onto hard drive. That means I now have both of them digitized in a modern, useable format. One is 45,000 words and incomplete, the other 55,000 and done.

I've re-read the unfinished one and I love it. I thought it was great at the time and I'm very pleased to say that it completely stands up to both my memory of it and my original estimation. That said, the main reason I love it is because it's exactly the sort of prose I loved to read then and love to read now and judging by the careers of the authors I know who write that way, it is a niche market to say the least. 

The next step is to re-read the other one. The finished one. That one I was not all that happy with back when I wrote it so it'll be interesting to see if I like it any better now. I suspect I might.

Either way, I have no intention of reviving my plan to send it to anyone for consideration. That seems like very pre-millennial thinking. If I do anything, I'll either get it converted into an e-book or just host it online somewhere. No rush. It's waited three decades, it can wait a bit longer.

More interesting for the blog, today I found an old zine from the late '90s where I go on a bit about the prospects of doing exactly what I just mentioned, namely putting the work up online. That appears to have been a possibility I was considering even in 1998. 

I also speculate about the entire apa moving online and suggest I would prefer it if it did. Given my recent comments about what we've missed by moving away from the scissors and paste, that does seem like some heavy-handed ironic foreshadowing. 

I also came across some reviews of gigs I'd been to that I rather like. Four separate evenings out get the treatment and three of them I remember fairly clearly. One, though, I had absolutely no memory of whatsoever (Although it has come back to me a bit since reading the review.)

If you'd asked me if I'd ever seen Prolapse or Urusei Yatsura I'd have said I'd never even heard of either of them, far less seen them perform. Shows how much I know.

Hello Tiger - Urusei Yatsura

That's them. And that's the single of theirs I'd bought that made me think they were worth going to see live. It's pretty good, isn't it?

I guess we should take a look at Prolapse, too. Especially since - spoiler! - it seems I liked them better on the night. Hmm. And quite possibly still do.

And here's the proof. (Well, down there's the proof. Blogger didn't want to center it properly, so I had to move it. Never had that problem with Spray Mount.)

If the image is too small to read, never fear. It's embedded in the full text as transcribed the truly excellent Image To Text Converter. 

 
Prolapse/Urusei Yatsura - Bristol

I meant to see UY last year but didn't get round to it. I bought the sharp recent single, Hello Tiger, and thought I'd better make more of an effort. It was only a day or two before the gig that I realised Prolapse were supporting. I remember Andy Roberts talking them up and taking me to task for calling them "ordinary". By now I couldn't even remember what they sounded like.

There was a third band on the bill, Magoo, who I'd never heard of, so I reckoned I'd be safe getting there about nine. When I arrived the place was packed and there was a band on stage, nondescript, no singer. I guessed it would be Magoo and put them down as Mogwai wannabes. They finished the number (can't call an instrumental a song, can you?) and two singers walked on.

One, male, was tall, had out-of-control curly dark hair, looked raddled, old and maybe a little touched. He prowled and stalked and fiddled with the mike stand. The other, female, was small, blonde and picture-perfect. They began a fast, staccatto attack and didn't let up for half an hour. 

I liked them, then I liked them a lot. It was obvious who they were like. They were like the Fall, like the Beatnik Filmstars are like the Fall - a friendly Fall, one that doesn't take itself so very seriously. They were also not unlike the Gang of Four. The musicians were apparently from the same institute of higher education as the Replicants, while the male singer could have been the Replicants' singer's edgier, dissolute brother. Neither he nor the girl could sing, or, if they could, chose not to: Mostly, one would talk while the other shouted. It worked. The girl looked surrealistically pristine centre-stage, while her co-singer messed with her hair, put her in a headlock, tried to wind the microphone cord round her head. She looked pissed off, but didn't try to stop him.

Thirty minutes and they were gone. They were better than the Fall, last time I saw them. I wished they could have played longer.

A fast change-over and Urusei Yatsura push past me in the middle of the hall as they come to the stage from the back of the crowd. (Bands do this occasionally at the Fleece, but since most of them don't, I assume it's an affectation). They look like an indie band - there's a curly haired one, a lanky, limp-haired one, a dark-haired girl, a drummer. I'm looking forward to this...

After four numbers I'm seriously considering going home. They are pedestrian, unoriginal, dull. The limp-haired guitarist sings lead and he isn't very good. The songs plod. Even the band don't look interested. I decide to wait for the single, at least. Then the curly-haired guitarist takes lead vocals, and it's as if a different band has come on. Suddenly the air crackles with energy, the lyrics are clear and the guitars are electric. At the front, the crowd begins to move, to surge and leap. The lanky guitarist moves to backing vocals for the rest of the set and every song is fun again. The curly haired singer has a knack of sounding as though he's singing through a distortion pedal even though he's not.

People are stage diving and crowd-surfing which, in the Fleece, is near-suicidal. "We should be paying to watch you!" the lanky guitarist comments.

They end with a number where the curly guitarist jams a drumstick behind the strings and beats it with another until the strings snap. Then they exit swiftly through the audience, pushing past me again while the crowd goes wild.

No-one plays encores anymore, it seems.

And since I'm in a bit of a rush this evening, I'll leave it there for now. There may well be more from the archive, especially if I run short of ideas. 

We're Going To Need A Smaller Bag

It's Friday! The traditional day of the Grab Bag. Or the music post. 

As it so happens, though, I don't have much in the bag to grab right now. Or in the music archives.

I would have loved to do a What I've been Listening To but I haven't really listened to anything much other than myself. I had a look at what I've bookmarked and it would be thin gruel so I'll have to leave it to thicken up a little. 

Still, I imagine I'll come up with something if I just keep writing...

Every Month Starts On A Thursday 

I was moaning the other day about Prime Gaming not sending out blog posts/emails/press releases about the new free games for the month and then this morning I woke up this morning and there it was.

It transpires there's a very simple reason for Prime not informing members of the new games at the start of the month. For them, the month always begins on Thursday. 

One thing I seem never to have taken on board since Prime stopped dropping the entire slate on the first of the month is that now things change weekly, the new tranche always drops on Thursdays. That means the whole thing is disconnected from the monthly calendar, so why they even bother bringing  the name of the month into it at all beats me.

Anyway, there's a schedule of new games for the next four weeks and when I've had time to go through it I imagine I'll cobble together some kind of post about them. It's always an easy one to put together and I enjoy doing it, not least because it gives me one of the few opportunities I'm happy to take to snark about games. Mostly I stick to writing about games I like these days but I think Amazon is big enough to take a few pokes.

Gamify Everything!

I'm very much enjoying playing in Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic league, currently in its inaugural year. The game gamifies game development or rather game production and one of the games I picked was Date Everything!, a game which gamifies dating apps. 

It did quite well for me but I  haven't played Date Everything and I have no intention of ever playing it. You don't, fortunately, have to play the games you pick for the league. That would be an entirely different game, gamified in an entirely different way. 

I also haven't tried the new app I read about at Gameindustry.biz recently but that isn't going to stop me writing about it, either. It's called Ludocene and it describes itself as a "dating app for games".  

What it does is gamify the process of choosing new games to play by aping the tropes of dating apps, which themselves gamify the process of finding a partner, which was what Date Everything was parodying. Is this getting self-referential enough for you yet?  

Apparently, Ludocene specifically uses the conventions of deck-builders to build a deck of recommended games based on game cards you choose or reject. I'm not entirely sure who needs all of that to choose a new game to play but now it's there if you want it. I'm kinda-sorta tempted to try it but maybe I'll wait until Blaugust is over and I have some time on my hands, not just to mess around with the app but to play whatever it suggests I've bonded with .

Looking Good, Reading Fine

Ah, Blaugust! The one-hundred-and-fifty-headed hydra of our times! Seriously, did you realise there are now just shy of 150 blogs signed up to Blaugust 2025? I didn't. I hadn't checked since the day after the event began, at which point there were 114.

Naithin (Yes, him again!) posted a full list of them today and the count at that time was 146. I'm betting on it topping the 150 mark by the end of August. [Edit: I just went to get the link for the full list and it's already up to 159 so I just won that bet...]

I left a long comment on that thread, which I do not intend to rehash here, except to ask again whether there's anyone out there who would genuinely like to read more than four and a half thousand blog posts this August, which is what would happen if everyone on the list successfully met the 31 posts in a month challenge on which the event was originally conceived. 

I am instead going to do what I said I was going to do yesteday, namely respond to another of Naithin's posts, specifically the one on making a blog look really good without using pictures. 

It ties in to something I have in mind to write about, which is the way blogs tend to fail in comparison with the photocopied zines they have arguably replaced. I had reason to look at a load of my old apa-zines from the nineties this week and I was almost embarassed by how much more effort had clearly gone into producing them than ever goes into one of my blog posts now.

See Footnote

I used to mess about with typography and layout all the time. I certainly did use a lot of illustrations, mostly cut out from magazines and cinema programs, photocopied from books and comics or just found in the street. Other people went further and attached physical objects to their zines or pasted their photocopied text onto pieces of wood.

This blog is one of the more heavily-illustrated in this quadrant of the blogosphere and I do take a lot of time and trouble over the pictures and their placement but it's absolutely trivial compared to the effort I used to make when everything was analog and tactile. And one thing I hardly ever do here is mess with the typography.

As Naithin points out, doing that can make a big difference to readability but I have to say that when I was doing it with a photocopier back in the nineties, making things more readable was the last thing on my mind. I used to deliberately make things hard to read, not so much in terms of literary style, although there was plenty of that, too, but literally difficult to make out the words.

And I wasn't the only one at it, either. Looking back at the zines we all round-robined to each other, it's plain a lot of people didn't have accessibility or user-friendliness at the top of their agenda. Or on the agenda at all.

I don't propose to go back to making everything I write as awkward to read as possible but I do think Naithin is right in that some extra thought and imagination when laying out a post wouldn't be such a bad idea. And in the spirit of Blaugust, here are a few links to blogs I read this morning that do just that:

ribo zone - font that looks like typescript, no capitalization, halftone images 

axxuy - actual typescript from an actual typewriter

Small Good Things - very well laid-out, wide, clear, excellent sub-headings, really inviting the reader in 

I also note that all of the above use a soft, pastel background color that feels really... comfortable. Color is another tool I rarely take out of the box.

At this point I was going to go on to discuss syntax, grammar and language in general but I think that's a topic for another post. I'm going to leave it there for now because I have other things to do. Those one hundred and fifty Blaugust blogs aren't going to read themselves! 

In Keeping With Tradition

We'll end with a song. I said I didn't have many bookmarked but I didn't say I didn't have any.

Motel 6 - Tiger la Flor

I'll see your Motel 6 and raise you Super8. I need to get an album by Tiger... Nothing on CD yet, sadly.

Probably no post tomorrow because work but it's Blaugust so who knows?

 

Footnote: That's a photo taken with my phone of the first page of a zine I did for the apa back in the mid-nineties. It's a fragment of a story, the full text of which you can read, clearly, here, along with the other fragment that makes up the whole thing. I also have a seven song sequence now that goes with the pair of them, which I will make public at some point because I'm very pleased with it and I would like people to be able to read the story and listen to the music together.

Back then, though, I really didn't care about an audience. In fact, I wanted to make people work for it if they were going to engage with anything I did at all. My attitude was neatly summed up in a reply I made in print to someone who'd not been appreciative of something I'd written: "Don't do me any favors. I couldn't care less whether you read any of my zines, to be honest. If you don't enjoy them, don't bother." We told it like it was, back then!

It's hard to see in the picture but the whole zine consists of the full text, white on very faded grey, blown up to the width of the A4 page and laid out with no line breaks, capitalization or punctuation, overlaid in the center with the same text in a tiny point size in a narrow, double line-spaced column. 

I was plainly more interested in what the text looked like than what it said - and I was really proud of what it said. Proud enough to want to share but not too bothered about being understood, apparently...

 

Notes on AI used in this post: Just the header image, which is from a series I'm doing that will appear here one day. It was generated at NightCafe using Ideogram V3 Turbo, from the prompt "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism", which is partially taken from the Port Silo story.

Five Characters In Search Of An Illustrator

If you're going to carry on reading today's post, I'm afraid you're going to have to indulge me. There's no purpose to it other than for me to create yet one more self-indulgent reflection of myself I can gaze into, lovingly, which seems to be my main occupation these days. Also, it's mostly about AI so that's always welcome, isn't it? Anyway, consider that a trigger warning and act accordingly.

I have mentioned, repeatedly, that I've been spending a lot of time (A lot of time...) working on making artificially-generated music from various organically-generated sources. Most recently, and very definitely most successfully, the source has been a novel I tried to write in the mid-90s. 

It was (Still is, I guess...) called The Final Line and it revolves around a chosen family - not an expression in common use then, I don't think - of four youngish adults and a close friend or two as they deal with the typical concerns of any group of friends in their late twenties or early thirties - death and resurrection leading to demonic possession, mass murder, general mayhem and being hunted to extinction by the provisional wing of the Roman Catholic church. The usual everyday stuff we've all been through, I'm sure.

It's a bit like the plot from This Life grafted onto the characters from Twin Peaks but in an episode of the X-Files, I suppose. It was the nineties, after all. 

It's also the sort of thing that everyone in in my own friend group back then was doing. I don't mean we were all hanging out together, drinking and smoking in the day and going out murdering people at night, well not the last bit anyway. No, I mean the construction of extended narratives focusing on that kind  of behavior. I think at least half a dozen people in the Amateur Press Association I belonged to back then were doing something similar. Maybe more.

I hadn't read my story for a good, long while before I picked it up again a few months ago. I'd run out of songs I'd put down on cassette in the eighties and I was scratching around for something to use to keep my Suno addiction fed. God forbid I should actually have to sit down and write something original. I'm far too old for that.

Johnny Paradigm

It occurred to me I might be able to extract a paragraph here and there from something I'd already written, just to keep the hobby going a while longer. The obsession, I mean. Let's call, it what it is.

Being my own #1 fan, I'd always thought it was good but re-reading it after a long gap I was astonished just how good. As I've often aid, I had no idea at the time how I wrote it other than it involved what I like to think of as a fugue state, like I know what that means. There are many passages I can't imagine having written but apparently I did. I mean, there was no-one else there at the time so it must have been me, right?

I'm the worst person to assess it anyway, so I'll stop going on about it and get on to the point I was going to make. Two points, really. 

First, it turns out descriptive, poetic prose is a really good source for song lyrics. Barely needs tweaking. It took me a while to get into the swing of hacking it up thoroughly enough to make it flow properly but even from the start it was clear it was going to make for much better songs than I used to write, mainly because it forced me out of the usual, rigid, traditional structure I always thought songs demanded. Anyone would think I'd never actually listened to any.

This isn't a post about songwriting or using AI to make music, though, believe it or not. I'll do one of those soon I expect. Or maybe I won't.

The second point about the story was how much of it there was. I never finished the draft that I was embarrassed to call a "novel", which is probably why I'd always thought of it as being quite short but I've now transcribed it I find it comes to more than 35,000 words. 

I haven't done a final word count because I only have it in the seventy or so original pages, as it was published in the apa. I need to proof-read it, edit it and collate it into a single file before I'll have an exact count but it's definitely pushing the accepted boundary of a novella - forty thousand words - and it's not even finished.

I was dreading getting it onto the PC. That would be a lot of typing. Fortunately, this is the 21st century and no-one needs to type anything twice any more. I couldn't find a readable file for the original draft on any of my old floppy disks but it occurred to me there was probably some free website that would turn an image of text into a text file for me. And there was. There is.

There are loads of them in fact but the one I used, the best by far of the several I tried, was the no-frills and proud of it jpgtotext.com. If you ever need to convert a Jpeg into a text file, I thoroughly recommend this extremely simple option. It allows you to upload ten images per day for free, although one day it let me upload twice as many for no apparent reason. If you need more than that, the pricing is extremely cheap but I just did my free allotment every day and had it all done in a couple of weeks.

Cado Babe with Cathy

It produces a very accurate text file in seconds, even from some pretty dodgy thirty-year old photocopies of dot-matrix print-outs. None of the other websites I tried came anywhere close to doing as well. Most of them were next to useless, in fact. Some couldn't read the images at all and those that did garbled so much it would have been quicker to r-type the whole thing than correct the errors in the edit.

Some of those failures claimed to be "AI driven". This seems to me to be a very good example of one of the problems with what we're calling AI these days. Most of it isn't AI at all. I bet those weren't. People slap "AI" on the front of all kinds of apps and programs and utilities that would just have been called algorithms a couple of years ago because they think it's the way to get customers. Get them, maybe, but not keep them. For that, you need a service that works.

The number of songs you can get out of even thirty-five thousand words of prose is finite and I must be getting close to the limit now. I've done over fifty already so I really can't complain. I love almost all of them, too. I listen to them all the time, to the exclusion of just about anything else. How long that will go on will be interesting to find out.

It could be a while. At present, I'm making them so fast I forget the ones I did a while ago, so when I listen to playlists I've made I keep surprising myself. I also have a second, longer, completed novel from the same time that I will almost certainly start mining when I'm done with this one, so I'm good for a while yet. 

Just to make it even less likely I'll stop, Suno recently added a feature that's absolutely perfect for me. It lets you direct the AI to make new songs using only the songs on a given playlist as reference. That means you can control the outcome with a great deal of precision and end up with a whole lot of songs that sound like they were made by the same imaginary people. 

I'd probably never take the headphones off again if the damn thing worked. It's in beta and so far it works just well enough to let me hear how perfect the output would be if it didn't glitch and scratch and skip and pop constantly like a vinyl album someone dropped into a deep fat fryer then tried to play. God willing they get it fixed soon. It's so frustrating it makes me growl.

Working with The Final Line so extensively over the last few weeks, though, has made me keener than I was back when I wrote it to do something with it. What, I'm not sure. These days, it's incredibly easy to self-publish but I'd have to finish the thing for that and the main reason I didn't do that the first time was because I have no idea how it's supposed to end. I have a slightly better idea now though...

Buddy. Last name pending.

Other than actually publishing it, I could put it up on a website or a blog or turn it into an audio book with AI reading it. I did once try to read it myself. I have a couple of chapters on cassette. It's very hard work, though, reading that much prose aloud. No wonder people get AI to do it. 

There was a very revealing article at GamesIndustry.biz yesterday, quoting extensively from voice actor Jane Perry's keynote speech at Develop:Brighton 2025. I recommend reading the whole thing but I was struck by her observation that generative AI has already taken a big bite out of voice actors' potential employment because the profession isn't all about exciting movies and games. A lot of it is less  romantic and most likely quite tedious work on things like "audiobooks, narration, corporate videos, e-learning, localisation".

Leaving aside the enormous amount of very badly voice-acted "localization" I've suffered through in various F2P imports, something for which AI replacement could only come as a blessed relief, that's a pointer to the kind of work that won't just be taken by AI tomorrow but that's already being taken by it today. I believe in the realms of self-publishing, authors quite commonly read their own work if they want to sell an audio version, though, so using AI would only be taking work away from themselves.

It won't be any comfort to anyone who used to make a decent living voicing incredibly boring corporate videos but in this respect AI isn't so different from the endless march of technology through the ages. When I got my first job working for an insurance company back in the early 1980s, if I wanted to send a letter, which was a big part of my job, I had to read it into a Dictaphone, walk down the corridor, hand it in to the woman in charge of the twenty typists sitting in the typing pool then wait a day to get it back, typed up, occasionally with errors that needed a second stroll up the corridor. 

By the time I left that company two or three years later, I had a PC on my desk and I was typing my own letters and printing them out on the printer next to me. The typing pool was gone. Jobs, like games, have their time then leave. Or they would if no-one kept making petitions to stop the flow of entropy. 

One thing I won't be doing is getting ChatGPT to give me some ideas, as Jeromai has been doing with one of his old stories. He's been writing a fascinating account of how he's been getting on, which I recommend to anyone curious about the process.

I'm far too prissy about my own prose to let any AI get its chrome paws on it so I'm stuck with doing it myself. We'll see how that goes. I have no such compunctions about the illustrations, though. I'd like there to be some pictures and I can tell you no-one wants to see anything I'm ever going to draw so it's either pay someone or get an AI to do it.

Cado Babe Under Glass

The idea of paying someone is intriguing. I've seen a few examples of illustrations various bloggers have commissioned and they've been pretty good, by which I mean they seem to realize the intentions of the commission quite accurately. I wouldn't rule that out for the future but for now, while I'm just in the playing around with ideas stage, AI is the inevitable answer to my curiosity about what my characters might look like, outside my head.

I am lucky enough to have one superb illustration already. Back when I was serializing The Final Line in the apa, one of the other members, professional comics artist and colorist Steve Whitaker, now deceased and very much missed, was so taken with one of the characters, he drew a picture of her and gave it to me. I've had it on my wall for thirty years.

This morning, I tried uploading that image as a seed so I could get an AI image generator come up with some variations. The results were not impressive. In fact, they were awful. I should say upfront that I was so annoyed with the first two that popped out, I gave up on the idea immediately, so it's very possible some more effort on my part would have seen some improvements but really I couldn't bear to go on.

Instead, I went back to the good old ways and did some text prompts instead. I wrote some character descriptions, used those as prompts, tweaked them a little as I went along and ended up with a set of images of the five core characters I'm fairly-to-very happy with. You can see those here today.

I won't go through the entire methodology in detail. I may do a separate post about it because I find it interesting even if no-one else does and it would be good to have a record. What I will say here is that I get by far the best results from the cheaper, supposedly less-sophisticated models than the expensive state-of-the-art super versions.

NightCafe is a website I often mention when I'm talking about AI and it's another I very much recommend. It has a generous free option, which is all I've ever needed, but it also regularly hands out free tokens for the upmarket AIs that otherwise require you to subscribe. Not that I recommend those, for the reason I just gave...

NightCafe has always handed out five tokens a day just for logging in but they recently gamified that into something any MMORPG player will immediately recognize as "a daily". Now, you still get a minimum five free tokens a day but you have to "create" something to get them and now you get an RNG roll to see how many tokens you've won. Five is guaranteed but you can get all sorts of numbers above that. And you get a fat reward for completing a "streak". I got 25 tokens for doing seven days in a row recently.

 Because I've been diligently collecting my free tokens every day for ages, I have almost three thousand in the bank. Again very generously, they don't expire, so there's no pressure to use them and I only bother with making AI pictures when I have a reason these days, not for fun like I used to. The fun in doing that wore off a long time ago.

Rachel Sunday and Sheba

I spent about two hours at NightCafe this morning. That's how long it took me to get satisfactory images of five characters. The time wasn't spent evenly across all of them. Looking at the images, all of which are handily stored indefinitely on my account, I see the first character took me just four tries, the second twenty-two, the third five, and the fourth and fifth both four goes each.

Guess which one took four times as long as any of the others? Yep. The one I already had a picture of, done by a human artist. Using that as a starter was a complete disaster but trying to get anything even a tenth as good by creative prompting wasn't much better.

And that's because I had an actual image with which to compare the results. Benchmarking the output of an image generator against a mental image is a lot more forgiving than comparing it to a real, high-quality picture.

Even leaving aside the personal connection, which honestly did color my reaction a little, the hand-drawn image just has something none of the AIs have. Life. It doesn't even look all that much like the character I had in my head back when I created her but ever since Steve handed me his idea of her, that's who she's always been.

Which isn't to say the AI versions of the characters are bad. Not at all, They're pretty good and I'm pleased with them. They're satisfying because I was able to nudge the AI into giving me something that closely resembled the image in my head, though. Steve gave me something he saw in the character and made me see it, too. AIs can't do that. Yet.

Which is why I don't think artists have much to worry about, aesthetically. They're always going to be preferable to and better than AI, at least until AI becomes truly sentient, at which point I would guess it will have better things to do than knock out commercial art samples and pictures of waifu by the gazillion.

At this point the post started to spiral into a general rant about AI and we've surely all had more than enough of those by now. I exercised my right as a human writer and deleted the rest of it. Another thing we can do that AIs can't. Exhibit judgment. 

I'm off to play with that potentially game-changing, practically infuriating new feature in Suno for the rest of the afternoon. Wish my blood-pressure luck!

PS. That's Sally Mandragora at the top, in case you were wondering. 

I Write The Songs. Well, Kinda...

Over the past ten days I've spent about as much time fiddling about with old tapes and new technology as I used to spend playing MMORPGs. Every available moment, basically. 

When Beryl woke me up at a quarter to seven this morning, I was quite grumpy. I didn't go to sleep until after one in the morning last night, thanks to not being able to stop playing with my new toy. 

That's the downside of having a moderately decent laptop. I haven't had enough sleep since I bought it. I was already staying up too late scouring YouTube for new music. And now this.

"This" is my current obsession: playing virtual bands. Last Wednesday, I covered the first part of the project, the one where I went through my old cassette recordings and digitized everything that wasn't too embarassing to listen to, even in private. There were a few that didn't make that cut.

After I'd transmuted the ancient tapes into MP3s, the next stage was to make them as clear and audible as possible. I was expecting that to be a problem but I was very pleasantly surprised by how well many of them had survived forty years in a cardboard box. I'd been under the impression that the magnetic tape commonly used in cheap compact cassettes in the1970s and '80s had a strong tendency to lose its integrity over time, offering up nothing much more than a few hisses and mumbles, when replayed half a century later.

It seems reports of the rate of degeneration may have been somewhat exaggerated. Most of the tapes I played sounded, there or thereabouts, as good as they ever were. Not that that would be saying much. The sound quality was always pretty poor. It still is but only one or two sounded worse than I remember.

Whatever the quality, I gave all of them at least a couple of passes through various filters and fixes in Audacity, just to be sure. At first I played around with sliders and settings trying to get the "best" sound but after a while I realized all I needed to do was amplify them and appply the default "clip fix" listed under Noise Repair. That gave me results more than clear enough for my purposes. I wasn't establishing an archive. I had other ideas.

Put simply, my plan was to hire an AI backing band to play my songs the way they'd always been meant to be played. I wasn't at all sure that was possible but it seemed like it might be. There was only one way to know for sure.

A while back, when AI was all fresh and new and exciting, in a way it really isn't any more, I spent some time playing around with a couple of the best-known AI music generators, Udio and Suno. It was an interesting experiment, as I said at the time, but it can't have been as interesting as all that because I never did much more with either of them.

I had my reasons for not following through even though, back then, I was stunned by the ability of the AIs to replicate musical genres and create whole songs from nothing more than a few prompts. True, the lyrics they came up with left an awful lot to be desired but I had plenty of lyrics of my own.

Using them, though, created as manyproblems as it fixed. It was strange, to say the least, to hear my words set to thematically similar yet significantly different melodies to those I'd always known. It felt like when you're at a funeral and you stand up to sing a familiar hymn, only to realise the organist is playing a different tune to the one you're used to. That has happened to me more than once and it's always disconcerting.

As I noted then, when I listened to AI vocalists singing my lyrics, " I can feel the new pushing out the old. I can already feel the AI singer's phrasing replacing the way I always heard it in my head." What I didn't say was that I didn't much like the sensation. That was the main reason I didn't pursue things any further.

But what if I could make the AI sing my melody instead? And adopt my phrasing? And maybe even follow my chord patterns and rhythm? What if, instead of a rough approximation, I could get a reasonable facsimile: my song but with full instrumentation and a singer who could, in fact, sing?

As I said, only couple of weeks ago I had no idea if that was possible but it seemed like it might be. If it wasn't going to cost me anything more than time to find out, why not give it a go? 

Well, one reason: ownership.

Ownership, intellectual property rights and copyright, where AI is involved, is still in the digital wild west right now. Until the courts get to grips with it, which could take years, if not decades, and even then will almost certainly result in different rules for different regions and polities, it's anyone's guess who owns what. As always, whoever can afford the lawyers is going to make the rules until then.

It is fairly clear already that no-one can claim copyright of content generated wholly by AI and also that using AI  in conjunction with traditional writing and recording doesn't automatically void pre-existing copyrights. Even so, who "owns" that content is far from certain. Ownership and copyright are not synonymous.

Ownership has more to do with contracts than creation. Most of the services you can use for free include clauses in the EULA making it absolutely clear they "own" what you create by using them. What ownership means in this context is that they have the right to use those songs for any purpose they like, forever. On Mars, when we get there, if they feel like it. (Pretty much the plot of Carole and Tuesday, right there.)

As far as the output of a prompt goes, I couldn't care less about any of that. The AIs can have the content they create out of thin air from my vague suggestion that they might like to have a bash at writing "a song about puppies chasing their tails in a poppy field" performed in "indiepop style, cute female vocals, toy xylophone solo." 

Honestly, they're welcome to it. I just got Udio to follow that prompt and the result was abominable. Genuinely unlistenable, which is why I'm not even going to link it. I'll be comparing my recent experiences with Suno and Udio at some point in this series. Suffice it to say there's a very, very clear winner. And it's not Udio.

When it comes to actual words and music I wrote and recorded in my teens and twenties, though, I'm a lot less sanguine about handing any ownership at all over to some anonymous corporation. As in I'm not inclined to let go of any rights I might still have, regardless of whether I'll ever make use of them.

So I did a little mild research and it turns out that Suno only grabs all supposed rights for the songs you make there for free. If you give them money, that all changes:

"If you were subscribed with a Pro or Premier plan when the song was created, you are considered the owner of the song. You also retain the rights to commercial use for the song, even if you end your subscription."

As for copyright, AI affects nothing. If you owned the copyright before uploading that material, modifying it with AI leaves you with the same ownership you had at the start. In fact, you have to tick a box to say you do own all applicable rights before it will even allow you to upload anything.

I'm sure all of that can and will be challenged in the courts in due course but it's good enough for me right now. We're talking about recordings that have gathered dust under my bed since the 1990s. It's not like I was ever going to do anything with them until this opportunity arose. And it's not like I'm going to do anything meanigful with them afterwards, either, if we're going to be realistic about it. 

All of this is purely so I can hear my songs, coming out of actual speakers, sounding something close to the way I've always heard them in my head. If that's even remotely possible it has to be worth trying.

I subscribed to Suno for a month and then immediately cancelled the subscription just so I wouldn't end up accidentally paying again. Everythng's a recurring contract, these days. It seemed exceedingly unlikely I'd need more than a month so why waste money?

Not that it's a lot. The monthly subscription is a very reasonable $10. Or £10 where I live, since apparently Sterling is at parity with the dollar now. News to me. 

For that you don't just get what passes for ownership. You get 2500 credits to spend on making songs. 

Suno charges 5 credits per song and always makes two songs per prompt so that comes to five hundred songs a month, which sounded like way more than I was likely to need. I mean, I only had a couple of dozen songs I was interested in doing anything with. How many tries was it going to take? Surely it wouldn't take me twenty goes per song to get something I was happy with?

Yes. Well. No. But also yes.

It didn't take me anything like that many. In fact, for the most part, I got a very satisfactory version of each song on the first or second attempt. What I hadn't bargained for was how incredibly enjoyable and addictive the whole "making different versions of my own songs" was going to be. 

Like, insanely addictive. Best £10 I ever spent, quite possibly. I've used over two thousand of my credits already. Luckily, I can always buy more.

And that's about it for today. The story will continue in another post, when there may even be actual musical examples. We'll see. 

Clearly this is now a series. As for the project itself, it's still ongoing. I may need a second month of Suno after all. 

Notes on AI used in this post:

The big, seemingly irrelevant picture at the top is one of the images Suno automatically creates for every song. It usually pulls something out of the title or the lyrics but I have no clue why it went for hearts over a city street. I don't believe the lyrics or the title mention either.