What Does It Mean?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few months back, as I was trying to put together a post about the New York No Wave movement of the late 1970s and early '80s, I happened upon a video clip of a band I'd only vaguely heard of: The Del-Byzanteens. The clip was intriguing enough in itself but the really interesting thing about it was the keyboard player, Jim Jarmusch.

Back in the eighties I was quite the cinephile. I had favorite directors (Hal Hartley, Alex Cox, Ridley Scott... the usual suspects) whose movies I'd go to see as soon as they were released, in much the same way I'd buy the latest albums by bands I liked.

I saw Jim Jarmusch's first five widely-distributed films, Stranger than Paradise, Down By Law, Mystery Train, Night on Earth and Dead Man as they came out. Even so, I'd somehow managed not to notice he'd been in a band and a pretty good one at that.

The No Wave post never really came together. It's a deliberately difficult genre and even the best-known bands didn't offer much purchase for the prospective television booker. Equally, fans didn't come equipped with palm-sized cameras the way they do now so the period isn't rich in ad hoc hand-held footage.

I haven't given up on the idea. A No Wave post is still a more likely prospect than my next project, a post featuring people who started out as musicians but ended up becoming much better known as directors. That's because, other than Jim, I couldn't really find any.

I'm open to suggestions but the criteria has to be that they were active and performing or recording, in bands or solo, before they became well-known in cinema. People who leveraged their fame to indulge their musical fantasies (Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood) definitely don't count.

One of the great things about the worldwide web in general and YouTube in particular is the way random searches turn into serendipitous chains of discovery. The No Wave post sputtered and the musicians-turned-directors never got started but instead I ended up spending an hour or so delving into the early stirrings of gender politics in 1960s girl groups.

The Del-Byzanteens only ever issued one seven-inch single. It came out in 1982 with an original, "Draft Riot", on the A-side and a cover on the reverse. "Draft Riot" is unusually tuneful by No Wave's challenging standards. The chorus is positively catchy. It's the B-side that sounds off-kilter and weird.

Built around an endlessly repeating bass riff, underpinned by Jarmusch's churning organ fills and revelling in cyclical vocals that sound like some kind of meditation, "Sally Go Round the Roses" exudes an atmosphere both psychedelic and unsettling. Reading the comments as it played, I was more than a little surprised to find the original had been a hit for a girl group called the Jaynetts way back in 1963.

The early 1960s has long been a byword for musical mediocrity. The accepted position is that rock and roll fell sick on Elvis's induction into the army in the spring of '58 and didn't recover until the Beatles' first chart success in the fall of '62. Once that recovery began, though, it picked up speed like a train.

1963 and 1964 gleam with strange and unlikely glimmers of the future, from the Monks to the Kingsmen but some of the best material undoubtedly rests in the safe hands of the girl groups. The Shangri-Las, the Ronnettes, the Crystals and all the sparkling, shimmying trios have lasted far, far better than anyone then could have imagined.

I'm very far from being an expert in the era or the genre but I'd reckon to recognize all of the better-known names and many from the minor leagues. I'd also expect the titles of most of the bigger girl-group hits at least to ring a bell. Apparently I don't know as much as I thought, because not only was the Jaynetts a new name to me but I'd never heard of, far less heard this, their signature tune and big hit, which peaked at #2 on the Billboard Top 100.

Fair enough, perhaps, for someone in the U.K. to have missed out on such a milestone. It wasn't a hit over here and anyway I would have been all of five years old. Less forgiveable, surely, for me to have missed covers by Grace Slick and the Great Society and Donna Summer.

Regardless, I was eager to find out more. And what a lot more there turned out to be. Sally Go Round the Roses casts a long, dark shadow. Here's how the extensive Wikipedia entry describes it:

"... unlike other pop songs of the day, with a spooky, even ominous, musical ambiance heightened by the sometimes odd and opaque lyrics, which gave the song a mysterious feeling... "

The original does sound different from the early sixties norm but it's the enigmatic lyrics that have built it a legend. Wikipedia again:

"Sally Go 'Round the Roses" could be interpreted as a conventional song of heartbreak over cheating, or it could be – and has been – seen as alluding to deeper matters, including drug use, illegitimate motherhood, madness, suicide, or, most especially, lesbianism".

That's one heck of a load for a three minute pop song to carry. Here's the lyric in full so you can make up your own mind:

Sally go 'round the roses. (Sally go 'round the roses.)
Sally go 'round the roses. (Sally go 'round the pretty roses.)
The roses, they can't hurt you. (No, the roses, they can't hurt you.)
The roses, they can't hurt you. (No, the roses, they can't hurt you.)

Sally don'tcha go, don'tcha go downtown.
Sally don'tcha go, don'tcha go downtown.
The saddest thing in the whole wide world is
To see your baby with another girl.

Sally go 'round the roses. (Sally go 'round the roses.)
Sally go 'round the roses. (Sally go 'round the pretty roses.)
They won't tell your secrets. (They won't tell your secrets.)
They won't tell your secrets. (No, the roses won't tell your secrets.)

Sally, baby, cry, let your hair hang down.
Sally, baby, cry, let your hair hang down.
Sit and cry where the roses grow, you can sit and cry, not a soul will know.

Now that's a good lyric. You can take it any way you want and it's not going to argue with you but it leads you in a direction it wants you to go. It's really not that difficult to see why it's been adopted as a proto-lesbian cri de coeur although you could probably make a case for any interpretation that involves someone suffering heartache and social isolation.

Interpreting pop songs is a tricky business at the best of times but even more so when the performers, writers and producers are disparate individuals with conflicting motivations and power. In the case of the Jaynetts, the "band" wasn't even a group but several singers pulled out of other combos for the recording session. 

According to Wikipedia, the whole thing was the gestalt creation of more than two dozen people, including twenty or so different vocalists. The person who initiated the whole affair reportedly hated the final result, although veteran songwriters Lieber and Stoller were sufficiently impressed when they heard it to want to buy the rights. It went on to be a top three hit and a formative influence on both the San Francisco and Laurel Canyon sounds, so what did the guy who came up with the idea know?

 

This all reminds me what a minefield the whole "liking pop songs because of what they mean" can be. I recently dropped Poppy from my YouTube subscriptions because now she's safe and happy, in control and doing what she wants, I find I don't much like her music or her videos any more. 

It's problematic in the extreme. I really liked That Poppy. I was this close to joining her church a couple of years ago. When it was alleged that that version of Poppy was mostly the result of emotional manipulation by her producer, Titanic Sinclair, it became increasingly difficult and eventually impossible to hear, see or enjoy the older work in the same way. 

 

Except I do still like those tunes and I do find the alien Poppy persona diverting, whereas the metallic tone of the new stuff isn't at all to my taste and I'm unlikely to get much from her make-up tutorials. I'm left feeling very happy for her that she's escaped from an intolerable situation to flourish on her own terms but thinking it's time to wish her well and let her go.

Maybe I'm being hasty in turning away. Poppy, of course, only this year recorded an excellent cover of one of my all-time favorite songs, itself originally made famous by an extremely controversial duo, whose backstory involved no end of machiavellian manipulation by a difficult Svengali figure. 

In the end it turned out t.A.T.u. weren't even "proper" lesbians. That none of it was real, by some measures of reality, does nothing to reduce the power, the drama, the feels of those magnificent performances, those towering, thundering, anthems. For anyone who took heart and felt better about themselves because of them, all was exactly as true as it needed to be. Nothing has changed, or should have.

Pop music is never real. That's why it's always real. The songs, the videos, the performances take on lives outside the lives of their creators. It's always a challenge, integrating the two. Or seperating them. Sometimes it can't be done. Sometimes it's not worth trying. 

It's not where the music comes from that matters, anyway. It's where it takes you.

Just go with it.

I Can Take A Hint

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Flosch pointed out in the comments, Trüberbrook was actually last month's free adventure game on Amazon Prime. Or something. It wasn't available to download any more by the time I wrote my post, anyway. 

There's an adventure game most months, or it seems like it. Good for me.Apart from rpgs (mmo or regular), adventure games are about the only video games I really enjoy.

This month's free adventure game on Prime is The Inner World, also available for £11.99 on Steam, although since you could sub to Prime for £7.99 and then cancel you'd have to be pretty crazy to pay that much. Except, oh no, wait, that won't work... it was free, but only until 11 September! So now you do have to pay for it after all.

We've all been there, right?

 

 

Seriously, are they trying to make it difficult? It used to be so simple. Just four or five games each month, for a month. Now look at this list for September, courtesy of Gamespot. 

If you parse that, (thirty-two games in all) you can see the original five free games per month are still there, available all month and only this month. Then there's some obvious tie-in with SNK, whoever they are, where you can get what's probably ever game they ever made (twenty-two of them and not one I'd take for free) any time from the start of September through 'til the end of March next year.

Finally, and crucially, there are four "bonus games", all of which you can have for nothing from the beginning of the month, only each of them drops out, week by week in turn throughout September, until the last one's gone by 2 October. Most of those same "bonus games" were also bonuses in August, as was Trüberbrook, which doesn't even appear on Gamespot's September list, even though I installed it on 4 September. Then again, maybe I confirmed it in Augusrt and didn't get around to downloading it until later...

I 'm going to have to do a whole lot more fact-checking before I post about these things in future. Recommending something that's free is one thing but £11.99 is very much another and £24.99, which is what Trüberbrook is currently going for on Steam, is something else again.

I'm not sure that's technically accurate.

Those are not unreasonable prices by any means but I wouldn't pay them. I'm only playing both games because they come free with a service I already pay for and use. Then, I'm really enjoying both of them, so does that make sense? Shouldn't I be more pro-active? Seek out games like this and buy them immediately, rather than passively wait for Amazon or some other subscription service to throw them my way?

Yes, well, maybe. And maybe not. I am enjoying them but my enjoyment is qualified, significantly, by the fact I didn't have to pay for them. That has a lot to do with both of them being adventure games. It's a genre I claim to like - and I do - but it's also one I find problematic at times. Most of the time, really.

I've been playing adventure games on and off since the very early eighties. In all those years I'm not sure I've ever finished one without a walktrhrough. In the days before the worldwide web, when I bought my adventure games on cassette and played them on a ZX Spectrum, there were no walkthroughs unless maybe a magazine printed one or there was a hint sheet you could send off for, either of which might take weeks to turn up, by which time I'd be playing something else and wouldn't care any more. 

Back then, when I got stuck, and I always would, that was it. I didn't finish the game at all. I just bought another and played that until I got stuck again. And so on.

Who didn't?

It made buying adventure games an ambivalent process. I'd be excited at the prospect of a new game and for a while I'd have a really good time, problem-solving and exploring. And then I'd bog down on some puzzle I couldn't fathom and I'd get frustrated and fed up and the game would go on a shelf and never be played again. 

If I'd made it a good way through I wouldn't really mind. The stories were generally not so good you'd care whether or not you ever found out how they ended. It was always more about the process than the content. If I'd gotten stuck before I'd really got going, though, I'd feel I'd been ripped off, somehow, even though it was as likely to be my fault as the game's that I couldn't work out what I was supposed to do next.

The arrival of free, instantly available walkthroughs effectively removed the issue of buying something I'd never be able to finish but it brought with it another set of problems all its own. Once you start resorting to a walkthrough to play an adventure game you can't help but notice that what you're really doing is watching a very badly-paced movie or reading a very stilted and awkward book. 

You never think of these things until it's too late, do you?

 

For me, playing an adventure game these days is a balancing act. I try to avoid using walkthroughs as much as possible. The further I get without having to look anything up, the better I feel about the game and my experience playing it. When I get stuck I try to figure it out for myself but only up to the point where I start getting annoyed. 

At that moment I do one of two things: stop playing or consult a walkthrough. Taking a break sometimes allows my brain to reset. When I come back to the game the next day I won't necessarily slip back into the same groove. I may see something I'd missed or think about the situation from a different angle. Stopping like that is a risk, though. Sometimes I just never come back to the game at all.

Going for the walkthrough is more likely to keep me pushing on through but it, too, has risks. I try to skim-read so as to do no more than catch the hint of an idea that pushes me over whatever hump I'm caught on. Oddly, games that have actual hints built in really irritate me. Go figure.

Pretty much the whole genre right there.

If I can finish an adventure game while skipping through the walkthrough like a stone across water, I'll end up satisfied. If I find myself having to read paragraph after paragraph of instructions or, god forbid, watch a YouTube video every time the game moves to a new scene, the whole thing starts to feel pointless in the extreme. 

I played The Inner World for the first time today, for a couple of hours. There's a lot I like about it. It's visually appealing, it's well-written, it's funny and the voice acting is mostly excellent. The controls are very comfortable, too, which always helps. 

The puzzles are of the middling kind. So far most of them have what I'd call fair video-game logic. Clearly anyone who tried to do almost anything that happens in an adventure game in real life would find themselves detained for their own safety in short order but action in The Inner World does have the necessary internal consistency to make sense in context. 

So far I would estimate I've been able to solve about two thirds of the problems myself and of the remaining third I generally have the correct solution, I just haven't been able to put together all the necessary intermediate steps. Only a couple of times have I had to say "well, that would never happen!".

I'll take "Things a psychopath would say" for $500

I've had to use a walkthrough a few times but it's been interesting to see that the solutions suggested aren't necessarily the solutions I've ended up using. There seems to be plenty of flexibility in what order things can be done, which is good design.

Even though I'm well within my personal tolerance for acceptable interventions, though, using the walkthrough has made one aspect of the game even harder to ignore than it would otherwise have been: The Inner World really would work better as an animated cartoon than a game.

Or possibly a radio play or a podcast. There's an awful lot of of dialog. A big part of the gameplay is talking to characters multiple times about multiple topics. It's fun because, as I said, the writing is good and the voice acting better. What's not so great is that the majority of my time is spent either clicking to make someone say their next line or sitting back and listening to them say it.

Trüberbrook, by contrast, isn't as well-written or as funny and the voice acting isn't as good but it's a better adventure game. There's a more even balance between the watching and listening part and the gameplaying part. The difficulty of the puzzles is also pitched almost precisely in my comfort zone. I'm about halfway through now, I think, and I haven't had to use a walkthrough once. Ok, once. Just the tiniest glance that confirmed I was doing the right thing already. Hardly even counts.

I'd recommend both games. They're each strong, fun experiences. Would I pay to play them, though?

Nope. But then I don't have to, do I? 

This is the modern world. No one has to pay for fun any more.

Threatened By My Work Ethic

Posts here haven't exactly fallen off a cliff but there's certainly been a slowdown of late. Partly it's that I don't have a great deal to talk about right now, particularly where gaming's concerned. A lot happened in August but now September's here we seem to be moving into the usual period of post-summer consolidation before the inevitable next surge of activity in November and December. "More of the same", while very welcome for regular gameplay, doesn't offer up quite as many topic hooks.

Another factor, somewhat counter-intuitively, is the lockdown. Which, of course, we don't officially have any more. Except we kind of do, in a way. 

You'd imagine that an extended period of enforced home-stay would lead to more games being played rather than the other way around and for the first few months that was indeed the case, not least because there wasn't a whole lot else to do. By the middle of June, though, my workplace had technically re-opened and by the middle of August activity in and around the center of the city had returned, if not to normal, then at least to something that might be mistaken for it at a casual glance.

I, however, have remained at home, my services not yet required. This had a strange psychological effect on me. I began to feel I ought to be more productive, use the time better. 

It's true that I have always liked to be busy. I describe myself as very lazy, which is true if you define laziness the way I always have, namely only doing things you neither need nor have to do. Given the choice, I'll usually spend my time doing things that are entirely pleasurable rather than those that are entirely necessary.

There's a lot of crossover between the two, though. There are quite a few things that need doing that I find I quite enjoy, once I get started. It's the getting started that's always been the problem. I'm very good at doing things that really have to be done now. Not so good at getting to the things that also need to be done, just maybe not quite yet.

Last year was a bit of a dry run for 2020. I had a great deal of time off work then, too. Around six months altogether. The big difference was that, then, I was quite ill. Being ill means not being able to do all that much and not caring, either. Well, it does with me, anyway. 

So last year I really did play a lot of games and write a lot of posts. I played the heck out of World of Warcraft Classic, for a start. This year I've done a lot of gardening, decorating, renovating and general round-the-house stuff. Nothing on this scale but a lot for me. And I've played games and written posts.

I think, though, that at the moment I'm probably playing video games for fewer hours every day than I have for twenty years. As far as regular gaming goes, I'm down to doing not much more than dailies in Guild Wars 2 and Overseer quests or missions in the two EverQuest games. All of those together take me a total of maybe an hour to ninety minutes, scattered across the day.

It's very much not from a lack of interest, enthusiasm or enjoyment for the games. It's much more from the significant satisfaction I'm getting from doing other things. Before sitting down to write this post I was up a fir tree at the end of the garden, sawing the branches off. And then the trunk, or some of it. I've done quite a lot of that sort of thing these last couple of weeks.

All of this might be about to change because yesterday I finally got the call to come back in to work. I start again next week. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was very much in two minds about the prospect before it happened. I was half expecting to get to the end of the furlough scheme and then find I was being made redundant. Had that happened I would have been happy enough to treat it as enforced early retirement and gone with it.

I still suspect that may be the eventual outcome if we get a bad Christmas, which we very well might, but for the time being I'm quite surprised to find I have some limited enthusiasm for returning to the old routine. 

My favorable feelings, I have to admit, are significantly enhanced by the fact that I'm only needed two days a week so far. We'll see how it goes but I suspect that having two days at work and five at home will remove all of my (very) low-level discomfort with being paid to do absolutely nothing and replace it with a conviction that I've done my whack and the rest of my time's very justifiably my own.

Which could mean I play more games, not less. Certainly on the days I work. I won't be doing anything useful when I get back, that's for sure. I'll be surprised if I can stand up. Mindless grinding may well be about all I can manage.

It also means I won't be posting anything on those days, either. Probably. Unless something happens that can't wait.

The upshot should be a move to four or five posts a week rather than the almost daily schedule I've been keeping since March. Which days I post might be a bit less predictable. Not that it makes a lot of difference. Just thought I'd mention it.

And now I have, so that's that!

Park Life : EverQuest

I spent all afternoon playing Trüberbrook and all evening putting up shelves (wire cubes, in fact) in my new room and now I don't have time to write a post. Opportunity!

Here's a bunch of screenshots I took about a week ago in what must be one of the prettiest EverQuest zones I've ever seen, Sul Vius, the Demiplane of Decay.

It reminded me more than somewhat of Barcelona's Parc Guell, a high compliment indeed. EQ was never the best-looking of games even when it was new but this shows just what you can do even with such an ancient toolset. All you need is a little inspiration.

I went there for some quest or other. I had no idea where it was. I'd never even heard of it. It's from the 2015 expansion The Broken Mirror about which I know absolutely nothing. If all the zones look as good as this, though, it's somewhere I very much look forward to exploring.

No doubt I'll get round to posting something more substantial about it when that happens, but until that happy day, enjoy!

Didn't Know I Wanted: Trüberbrook

Life is weird, there's no denying it. Remember a few years back when we were all talking about how subscriptions were dead? Some of us were happy about it and some of us were angry but almost no-one pretended subscriptions had a future. (Yes, okay, maybe one or two...).

Now here we all are with subscriptions to everything. Music, television, movies, games, delivery services, phones... you name it, we're signing up to be billed monthly. And it changes things, doesn't it? The what and the how.

Yesterday I was writing about Stargirl. Would I have watched it if I didn't have a subscription? Well, maybe. But not the way I did, or when.

I'd have waited until it came out on DVD then I'd have put it on my wishlist and then I'd have waited until someone bought it for me for my birthday or Christmas and when they did I'd most likely have put it on my huge stack of DVDs waiting to be watched. I'd probably have gotten around to it about five years from now.

Did they really have palm-sized portable dictaphones in 1967?

This afternoon I spent the best part of three hours playing Trüberbrook. If Trüberbrook wasn't one of the games that comes free with Amazon Prime, not only would I not have been playing it, I would never even have heard of it.

This is far from an original observation. Quite a few people have pointed it out as part of the ongoing discussion over the wisdom of buying things on release, before release, at full price, in sales, in bundles and to which list we can now add getting them for "free" as part of some kind of membership or subscription.

I just mention it to put the core content of this post into some kind of historical perspective. I'm about to give my first impressions of a point-and-click adventure game that I neither sought out nor paid for. How did we get here?

Of course, on one level I did seek it out. Amazon Prime gives away a bunch of games every month and most of them I don't even download, far less play. I picked this one because it's a genre I generally enjoy, the thumbnail caught my eye and the short text description I read threw in a couple of keywords that triggered a Pavlovian reaction in me.

And why does it say "Gas Satation" up there in American English when we're in Bavaria?

"Inspired by TV series like Twin Peaks and The X-Files" will do it every time. Well, Twin Peaks will.  It's marketing shorthand for "we made this for people like you". Same thing goes for blurbs on the back of books that mention Catcher in the Rye. They're usually terrible but at least I can rely on them being my kind of terrible.

Trüberbrook is not at all terrible. It is peculiar, though. For one thing, it subverts the Twin Peaks trope by setting the game in 1960s Germany. 1967, to be precise. It's mostly made by Germans, I believe, so that explains the locale if not the time period.

Having played through the prologue and Chapter One, I'd have to say the game feels neither partiularly sixties nor especially German to me. It could be set in any generic central European country as imagined by someone who'd once spent a week or two staying in alpine guesthouses, doing a bit of hiking in the foothills. Some of the interiors look like pastiche Americana to me.

Not even when it's damn fine coffee?

As for it being the mid-sixties, other than a battered VW bus and a black and white cabinet tv, there's precious little that would have looked out of place on several recent holidays I've taken. Scenery is timeless and so are small hotels. And fashions don't really give much of a clue if all the characters wear either suits or windbreakers, hiking boots and blue jeans. The first world war spiked helmet is a giveaway, though, I'll give them that.

The milieu may not live up to the billing but the graphics most definitely do. Trüberbrook has an unusual design aesthetic, with all of the scenery and backdrops constructed as miniature scale models, then captured with a 3D scanner. The characters are digitally animated over the sets and the effect is odd, charming and delightful.

Graphically, the game is also fluid and functional. Moving from place to place is simple and straighforward with very few of those annoying stutters when you run up against somewhere the animators didn't intend for you to go. Character animations reminded me somewhat of stop-motion or possibly even puppetry. They're convincing without striving for naturalism.

Spookiest scene in Chapter One. Actually, the only spooky scene in Chapter One...

Point and click adventures live or die by the ease with which objects can be manipulated to solve problems. In that respect Trüberbrook is exemplary - providing you're not one of those people who thrives on picking up every possible object then stuffing them all in your voluminous backpacks so you can sort through all of them over and over before "using" everything on everything else until something clicks.

This game won't let you do that. Firstly, there really isn't all that much you can pick up and secondly if something can be used on something else the game generally tells you so. What's more, if a combination of different objects is required, the interaction will select all of them for you. 

I found that very helpful and perfectly satisfying. To an extent it does push the gameplay further down the slope towards "interactive movie" than some prefer but I always found plenty to think about and plenty to do.

Look away now if you don't want to know how to catch a fox in a box the hard way.

Another crucial component of a good point and click adventure is the puzzles. Without those you don't have any gameplay at all. My preference is for puzzles to be as logical and naturalistic as possible.

I do not favor the "pick the lock with a fishbone" approach. Far less do I favor those overly complex acquisition chains that expect you to first fashion a fishing rod from a car aerial and the elastic from an elderly aunt's surgical stocking so you can catch a suitable fish, before boning it with the twiddly bit on a Swiss army knife (the one that's usually reserved for removing stones from horse's hooves) which you won earlier in a game of gin rummy with a passing stable-lad.

When it comes to puzzles, Trüberbrook manages to be both simple and complex at the same time. The eventual solution to several of the puzzles, when played out, turns out to be positively bizarre and entirely unguessable. That would have been infuriating -  if I'd had to solve them myself. But I didn't.

Must have been some weasel!

What I mostly had to do was be assiduous in collecting the few useable items I found and diligent in using them when the game told me I could. At the point when I'd collected the correct items and was in the right place the game rewarded me with a sequence of events that on more than once occasion had me laughing out loud. Plus I got to feel clever without having to have done very much, always a nice feeling.

The final remaining pillar of a good point and click adventure is the story, along with which, for the purposes of this first impressions piece, I'm including dialog and voice acting. Let's take those three components in reverse order.

The voice acting is good. Everyone other than the nominal protagonist has a German accent of sorts. Probably an authentic one, given the game's provenance. The lead character is American, although given he's called Hans Tannhauser the nationality on his passport seems almost immaterial. Also I could have sworn he tells another character he's from Berlin at one point...

Fancy meeting you here!

I call him the "nominal" protagonist because he's not the only, or even the first, character the player gets to be. The pre-credit sequence, which I guess is a form of tutorial, all takes place from the perspective of Gretchen the paleoanthropologist. The two of them reminded me quite strongly of Nico and George from the Broken Sword series, a happy similarity, at least in my eyes, although where George and Nico like to engage in would-be sophisticated repartee, these two mostly deal in playground insults and pratfalls. .

The dialog itself is solid. I did notice a few solecisms that I'd put down to the writers either having been translated or not working in their first language but by and large all the characters sound like people having believable conversations.

The game describes itself as being "permeated with a subtle humor" which on the evidence I've seen so far might be pushing it a little. It is quite funny but I'm not sure I'd call it subtle. The promised Twin Peaks atmosphere comes and goes. The X-Files motif seems more consistent.

Yeah, but it's still up a tree. Explain that, Doc.

As for the central narrative, I'm not at all sure I've spotted it yet. What little plot there is seems to consist a quantum physicist and a paleoanthroplogist behaving like two seven year olds acting out their favorite Famous Five adventures.

So far, I'm having a very good time. Three hours in and I didn't once have to look anything up online, far less consult a walkthrough. That's a recommendation in itself.

Last and most certainly not least, there's a fox called Klaus that everyone seems to think is a cat. He climbs trees and likes fish, so maybe he is a cat. That's got to be worth the price of admission on its own.

The price of admission in my case, of course, being a subscription to Amazon Prime. Which I was already paying. So it's free. Or is it?

I don't know any more and, frankly, I don't care.

Stargirl Interlude

By the time I'd watched three seasons of the brutal, nihilistic Titans, followed immediately by two seasons of the occasionally sadistic if mostly playful Umbrella Academy, I was more than ready for something lighter, fluffier and, above all, more unironically and unequivocally heroic. There were several more superhero shows waiting in my Netflix watchlist - Defenders, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage - but before I could take a look to see if any of them might fit the bill I got an alert from my alternate streaming service, Amazon Prime.

I've found the prompts from both Prime and Netflix reliably useful so far. Their algorithms seem to be working well for me. This one felt exceptionally well-judged. It came at exactly the right moment, it featured a character whose guest appearances in another show I'd very much enjoyed and best of all I had absolutely no idea the show even existed.

The show in question is Stargirl, which is, I believe, the latest to roll off the DC Universe production line. As a lifelong DC fan I was very slow to pick up on the bleedthrough from comics to small screen. I'm still very much playing catch-up. Now I'm back in the fold, though, I do try to keep up with what's happening and I would have been quite annoyed with myself for missing this one.

Luckily, I didn't. I might not have known anyone was making a Stargirl tv show but thanks to the Prime prompt I still managed to watch the first season at the earleist opportunity. Earliest in the U.K. at least. We get everything good late.

So, was it any good? And did it manage to wash away some of the bitter aftertaste left by the self-serving cynicism of the aforementioned shows?

Well... yes and no. To both questions.

Whether you're likely to think Stargirl is any good or not depends on your tolerance for typical teen angst as served up by any number of previous CW dramas. That's somewhat misleading, since the CW didn't make Stargirl. DC Universe did. Only DC Universe is no more and Stargirl, whose second season has been commissioned, has gone not to HBO Max but to the CW. Which, honestly, does feel like its natural home.

Even with my extremely high tolerance for high school drama, I was hoping the show would keep the school stuff in the background. It does, although whether it will when the production moves across is another matter. But that's a problem for another day, another Season.

The other thing you'll probably need to have if you're going to enjoy Stargirl is an extremely robust suspension of disbelief. Even by the standards of superhero comics there's one heck of a lot of handwaving required if you're going to get past some of the extremely unlikely choices and decisions made by various characters at pretty much every turn.

I inevitably end up comparing almost every ensemble show with a supernormal teenage cast to the lodestone, Buffy. That's patently unfair but it's often revealing. Take a single, pertinent event that occurs in both shows: the discovery by the title character's mother that she has a daughter who spends her evenings climbing out of her bedroom window to do battle with the superpowerful entities who infest the supposedly sleepy small town in which they live.

How long did it take Joyce Summers to come to terms with the knowledge that Buffy was a Slayer? Did she ever, really? It was a long, slow, traumatic process for both of them, one which I sometimes found difficult to watch. Stargirl's mother, Barbara, adjusts to the news within twenty-four hours, mostly by dint of a bit of googling.

Almost every character seems to have a moment like that. Some have several. And even if you're coping well with their apparent emotional flexibility you still need to deal with their astonishing technological prowess. Stargirl's step-dad, Starman's sidekick Stripesy in a former life, somehow manages to construct - out of old car parts, no less -  a "robot" that acts as as a cross between a Transformer and one of Iron Man's suits.

There's a lot of this kind of stuff. I loved it. It was exactly what I was looking for. It could almost have come from the DC comics I grew up with. It has that silly sixties sparkle. Or maybe fifties, because the nineteen-fifties are something of a trope in Stargirl's aesthetics and soundscape, largely via Pat, who gives the impression of having been around back then even though he looks about thirty-eight.

So, all good then? All the blood-smeared scar tissue left by Titans and the Umbrella Academy nicely wiped clean with good, wholesome superheroics? Yeah, not really.

Stargirl herself, along with her once-again sidekicked step-father, now re-branded as S.T.R.I.P.E. are unambiguously honorable, heroic characters. Proper, old-school, duty-driven superheroes. The rest of the teen Justice Society of America, recruited by Stargirl in mid-season, all have significant, well-telegraphed "flaws" (obsessive and self-centered, angry all the time, bitter and betrayed) but they all do a pretty good job of rising above them.

Until one crucial moment in the season finale, that is. When one of them kills someone.

I won't say who kills who because spoilers but it's a genuinely a shocking moment. Not in the stlye of Titans or the Umbrella Academy, where the shock comes from how vicious or violent or psychopathic the supposed heroes are being, but because of how unexpected it is.

And that's good. But it's still a teenage superhero killing someone in a supposedly fluffy show. The rules have changed, after all.

It's tempting to make excuses. After all, while the good guys are, by and large, genuinely good here, the bad guys are really, really bad. Sadistic, brutal, terrifying. There are a lot of them and all of them are completely horrible. I'd struggle to say which one I detested the most.

Which is probably how it should be. Once again, standards have changed. In the sixties the villains would have been buffoons or caricatures. The Injustice Society seem more suited to the eighties and nineties, when sociopaths were very much in vogue.

It's an odd dichotomy, the fifties/sixties heroes up against the eighties/nineties villains. It works, but not comfortably. And heroes still shouldn't kill. Not those heroes.

If what you're after is fundementally decent heroes and existentially evil villains butting heads under comic-book rules, then Stargirl serves it up consistently, even if the premise itself feels far from consistent. It helps that the action is well choreographed, the writing solid and the acting better than decent.

Brec Bassinger as Courtney "Stargirl" Whitmore is close to perfect in the lead and there are some stand-out supporting performances, particularly Luke Wilson as Pat, Stargirl's long-suffering stepdad and Meg De Lacey as Cindy Berman, our hero's ineffably entitled nemesis. Trae Romano, Courtney's "little brother" Mike, steals just about every scene he's in. I could live without the bulldog but at least he doesn't get any lines.

I thoroughly enjoyed every episode and the two-part season finale is one of the better series climaxes I've seen. Except for the slightly bathetic "after the crisis" Christmas cooldown, that is. I'd have left that out.

Of course, as Wilhelm was bemoaning, now we have to wait. That's the problem with watching things when they're new. Plus there's the added frisson of the change of ownership. As I found recently with Lucifer, that can be a bit of a wildcard. I don't find Geoff Johns' promise that Season 2 will be "different" terribly reassuring, either.

Then again, by the time I get to watch it, maybe I won't remember what Season One was like, anyway.

Read The Fine Print: EverQuest

I guess I should have known. When I posted a Promptapalooza love letter to the room in which I've written every post on this blog since it started, it was inevitable I'd soon find myself moving out. I spent the last couple of weeks returning the first of our two previously unuseable rooms to a state, if not of grace then at least of decorum, whereupon Mrs Bhagpuss surprised me by asking if I'd like to have it as my "study".

I'd been thinking she'd want it to store her ever-growing supply of crafting materials, especially since I already have one large room downstairs filled with my stuff, but apparently she fancies having the room I'm in now for storage, because it's very dry. Well, it is.

Consequently, I spent most of the day moving the contents of one shelving unit from my current lair to my new one and I'm knackered. The sheer amount of stuff that can be crammed into one corner of a small room is unbelievable - almost as unbelievable as some of the things I've apparently thought worth keeping for the last fifteen years.

Anyway, the upshot of all that effort (only about a third done but the hardest) is that I now have neither the time nor the energy to finish the post on Stargirl that I was planning for today. Instead I offer a brief, cautionary tale on chicken counting.

Just a few days ago I was eagerly anticipating my EverQuest magician's imminent arrival at the foothills of EQ's current content. Even before the announcement of Labor Day's double xp extravaganza I was expecting to ding 111 this weekend, at which point I would whisk the mage away to The Overthere to buy her final air pet spell until such time as Daybreak see fit to raise the cap once again.

With the benefit of double xp, which I can confirm does apply to both Overseer quests and unsubscribed accounts, the ding came sooner rather than later. And also later rather than sooner.

This morning, when I accepted the reward that would tip her over the edge, I braced myself for the deafening DING! and... nothing happened. I looked at the xp and laughed. I'd stalled at 99.999% of level 110! What are the chances, eh?

I was so amused I took a screenshot. Then I accepted the reward for the next quest in the absolute certainty it would bring the noise and... nothing. Again! Still holding at 99.999%.

To my credit I did immediately, if belatedly, twig what was going on. Of course, given all the things I've written up 'til now, that's like giving myself credit for noticing the stable door is banging in the wind while the stalls remain notably horse-free, but at least I got there in the end.

As I believe I have mentioned really quite a lot of times, the level cap was raised to 115 with last year's expansion, Torment of Velious. I do not own Torment of Velious. See the problem?

Actually, I do own Torment of Velious. Now I do. As soon as it dawned on me that the reason I wasn't dinging was because I didn't have the expansion I went straight to the Daybreak website and bought it. I did have the very briefest tussle with my sensible side over whether I really needed an expansion almost all of whose content I would almost certainly never get around to using until it was already included among the ones you get for free, but I told my sensible self where to get off. I've been looking forward to getting that pet for weeks!

Luckily for me ToV is on sale right now. Yes, that's because in two or three months this year's expansion will come out and if you buy that you'll get all the previous ones for free, so if I had the patience you might expect of someone my age I could wait until then and get both. Given that I'm planning on re-subbing to World of Warcraft for the pre-Shadowlands patch, the one with the level squish and the removal of the rep requirements to play a Vulpera, this does seem like a particularly inopportune moment to be buying last year's EverQuest expansion.

Well, stuff logic. I wanted it, I got it. And it was on sale so we all know that means I actually saved money! And by the time the next one comes out I'll be playing the EverQuest II one so I wouldn't have time to play the EQ one anyway. And this year's expansion will be full price so if I only want to play last year's and it's on offer...

Anyway, I bought it. And I'm glad I did!

I logged in and out to make sure my account was flagged, then I accepted the reward for one of my two remaining completed Overseer quests and this time I did ding 111. Phew. Now for the pet!

I went into the Guild Hall (very handy for me that I joined that guild that Mrs Bhagpuss was in all those years ago. Now I'm the only one left who plays and I have the Guild Hall all to myself), gave the gnome a few hundred plat for the Miniature Worker Sledgemallet, gave it back to him so he'd switch the portal to The Overthere, zoned, ran over to the vendor and...

Didn't buy my pet spell. Because she wasn't selling it. She wouldn't be, would she? She's the spell vendor from 2017's Ring of Scale expansion. The one that raised the level cap to 110. Why the hell would she be selling Level 111 spells?

 A quick trip to Allakhazam informed me that for Torment of Velious spells I'd need to go to Eastern Wastes (the new version, naturally). And apparently I could get there for free by talking to Belinda in North Ro. At least that would save me giving any more money to that grifting guild Hall gnome.

I cast Throne of Heroes to take me back to the Guild Lobby. There I spoke to the Magus and asked her to teleport me to North Ro. She's been working that route since Lost Dungeons of Norrath back in 2003. Never say there's no use for old content.

Using the Find function on the map (can't remember when that was added but I'm very glad it was) I was with Belinda in no time. She was waiting with a couple of griffins wich, as she explained, she'd only just discovered how to tame and train. There's a surprising amount of lore continuity between EQ and EQII these days.

Belinda cast a spell, worryingly called Barely Tamed Griffon, and off I went. Landing on what looked like the edge of a precipice in Eastern Wastes I quickly located the appropriate vendor, bought all my Level 111 spells and gated. No point hanging around. Not going to be killing anything there.

Back in Plane of Knowledge the mage summoned her new pet. It conned dark blue at 110, one level below her. The old one was 106, because I finally managed to get a focus that works for that level range. I did check whether there was any chance of getting an upgrade that would work on the new pet but not a hope in hell.

Never mind! Her new pet is going to be plenty tough enough at 110 for the places I plan on taking it. The old one was managing pretty well and I don't intend on going anywhere tougher just yet.

I don't know for sure how much better the new one is because I haven't been able to give it a test run.
All of the above I did first thing this morning, before spending the whole day moving stuff from one room to another. Tomorrow I have to visit my mother for her birthday (she's 88, thanks for asking) so I don't suppose I'll get much of a chance to try the pet out then, either.

The strange thing is, having bought the expansion and the pet, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with either of them. Getting 111 and the pet felt more like the end of something than the start. But now I've bought the expansion I feel obligated to carry on for a while just to make the puchase worth it.

On to 115, I guess.