Commit To The Bit

Somewhat to my surprise, it seems like it's been a couple of weeks since the last official music post. What with all the posts about the music I've been making myself, I'd have kind of thought it would have been a lot more recently than that but I checked and it seems not. I do have a couple of other topics - game-related - to talk about but they could certainly do with some more time to cook so let's go with music instead. Not that I need any persuasion for that.

Of course, there is the awkward question of whether I have anything I want to share. Or that's worth sharing. These past few weeks, all the time I'd normally have spent trawling for tunes has been given over to making them instead. Still, I think I can probably come up with something...

I'll tell you what. Instead of going straight to the music, how about first we hear from someone who knows what they're talking about, explaining how it's done. Charli XCX (For it is she.) won something at the Novellos last night and she gave a speech that deserves to be shared as widely as possible.

First, though... the Novellos. What a sham that is. They are. Whatever. 

I managed to go through most of my life without knowing the Novello Awards existed, even though I've been obsessively interested in popular music since I was about twelve years old and the  awards go back before I was even born. If they ever got reported back when I was following the music press like it was holy writ, I don't remember it. 

I think the first time I ever really noticed the awards was when Noel Gallagher started banging on about them a decade ago. I figured if they were his kind of deal, they were probably best avoided. 

As Harry Styles' win in 2021 suggests, Noel was talking through his hat. Or through something, anyway. Now I'm more familiar with it, it still seems like a proper ranshackle nonsense of an event to me, with very little indeed to do with song-writing as such, so it was a pure joy to wake up this morning and read Charli putting the whole thing into context. She walked away with what I have to assume is the top award, Songwriter of the Year and here's what she said in her acceptance speech:

“To me as a songwriter, but above all, as an artist, conviction is everything. It separates the frauds from the greats, the good singers from the trendsetters. It’s Duchamp’s fountain. It’s Denniz pop, it’s David fucking Lynch. It’s an undeniable sense of style and personality, and of course, it’s embracing the idea of daring to suck, in my opinion, from writing songs with no fear and no agenda other than making something totally reflective of who you are, come the best songs. Songs that can soundtrack a night out, a summer, or possibly even define a moment in time.”

“To all the songwriters in the room, I would just say, do it for your fucking self. Make what you want to hear, not what an A&R person has requested of you. Make something for the niche and not something broad. Don’t try and be clever. Be dumb. Have fun and play your songs to your friends and, above all, don’t be afraid of yourself or of your own internal language, because it’s the thing that makes you distinctly you.”

She said a load more completely true and immensely sensible things, too. I wish I could find a video of the whole speech but so far I can't see one anywhere. Also, I'll just say, not only is it great to hear such excellent advice and self-analysis, it's just as great to hear someone able to articulate it all so clearly and concisely. Many of my favorite songwriters, breathtakingly clear and lucid as they may be in their lyrics, seem to have been sandbagged the moment before they open their mouths at any event like this.

At which point we really ought to have a Charli XCX tune I guess. Is there a new one, though? No, there is not. But there is an old one made new again. By TikTok, naturally. So let's have that.

 party 4 u - Charli XCX

As far as I can gather, this five-year old track blew up on TikTok for reasons unknown (To me, that is.) and Charli went out and made that video for it. Which, I think we'll all agree, is very much "committing to the bit".(That was in a part of the speech I didn't quote, in case you didn't click through the link and read it.)

My problem with the video is I can never watch something where someone runs around outdoors with nothing on their feet without wincing. And that surface looks really dodgy. Do they have some kind of protective spray they use? Or does she have soles like leather?

I hadn't thought of it until this moment but I'm betting the couple of singer-songwriters coming up next have won Novellos too. Hang on and I'll check...Yep. Both of them. Although not, it seems, Songwriter of the Year, so still some work to do there, I guess.

 Got To Have Love - Pulp

This is another video that's exhausting to watch. I'm also not a fan of huge, declarative, not to say didactic titles all across everything. Those were on the video for the last single from the forthcoming album, too, and I didn't rate them then, either.

As for the song, If I'm honest it goes on a bit, doesn't it? I mean, I'm not going to come  over all Pink Pantheress about it and disco anthems do generally just keep on going but I reckon I could make do with the three minute radio edit and leave the long version for the clubs. 

Then again, there's the question of dynamics to consider and this is a real end-of-set stormer that's been constructed with just that in mind so I guess it's as long as it needs to be.

 Pinball - Paul Weller

This is an interesting choice, if I say so myself. I respect Paul Weller as both a songwriter and a performer but I don't actually own a single thing he's done since the Jam and I only ever bought one album by them.

Still, I was oddly excited to read he's got an album of covers coming out and even more excited when I saw the track-list and found he's picked two of my all-time favorite one-hit wonders - this one and Journey by Duncan Browne. Weller is exactly my age so it's not really all that surprising to find he remembers these two songs the same way I do, as something that stood out among the usual pop fare of the 1970s. I don't listen to an awful lot of music from that era now but I keep coming back to these two songs again and again.

The problem with such idiosyncratic and memorable one-offs, though, is that there's really nowhere to go when you decide to take them on. They're generally too odd to turn inside out so you just end up trying to stick as close to the original as you can, which is something I never really see the point in.  Paul's gone for that option and it doesn't do much for me, other than make me want to hear the much superior original again.

Still, I'm sure Brian will be pleased with the attention. And the royalties. He's 80 now and he's probably been more of an actor than a singer for most of that time. He did the voice acting for a couple of characters in FFXIV, which was certainly news to me when I read his Wikipedia page for this post.

Dudu - yeule

At this point I was going to have yeule doing Skullcrusher on John Mulaney's Netflix show Everybody's Live, mostly so I could talk about the show itself. Watching it again, though, I don't actually like it. The song, that is. The performance is amazing and so is yeule but this is not my favorite among their work. By all means go check it out if you're a metalhead though. 

 Luckily, they have another fairly new single out that's much more my kind of thing. No video but it does have a really big cat.

Real Power - Golomb

If we're going to have something heavy, as the hippies used to say, this is much more my scene. They used to say that, too. Uh... we're not the hippies, are we? (No, we're not. This is a hippie.)

I think this is their first single. I have no idea who they are. They know how to make a racket, that's for sure. Also no video. Just use your imagination.

Egypt (Remix) - Westside Gunn feat. Doechii

And concluding the "Heavy" portion of today's program...

I love that rolling chaos sound. Like a junkyard falling down a hill. Don't hear nearly enough of that kind of thing.

 Hollywood Cemetery - Tiger La Flor

I think I'll give up any pretense of presenting anything new this time around. It seems everything I've bookmarked is an old favorite of some sort. Or a new favorite. Let's just go with it.

 Silver Ford - Sunday (1994)

No apologies for yet another from Sunday (1994). They make 'em, I post 'em. There are two more tracks on the EP and I'm not promising we won't have all of them here, eventually.

 Pussycat - Mulu

I don't have any actual (1994) in stock. How about some (1997)?

Utterly forgotten by me until a few days ago, when I came across a mention of it in my own back pages, and most likely forgotten by anyone else who wasn't in the band. Does it hold up? I think so but then there's so much 'nineties in everything I hear right now, it's hard to be sure.

 What's True? - sweet93

Speaking of the 90s... 

For once, Jarret Wolfson gets the sound right! Worth including for that alone. Mostly I just use him as a kind of belweather to find the names of people that might be interesting so I can go elsewhere for something they've done that's actually audible. In this case, though, his live recording is as clear as the studio version. 

And with that I think we may have reached the bottom, if not of the barrel, then certainly of the bag. I'll see if I can't do better next time.

Playing Catch-Up

Since I was so uncomplimentary about the scenery at the start of Dragonflight last time, I thought it only fair I give some praise where it's due. Yesterday I finally got back to playing again (So much for the Winds of Mysterious Fortune - I really dropped the ball on that one...) and after I'd cleared up a couple more quests, the breadcrumb trail took me over the hill and out of the grey-red-black hellscape into a beautiful, lush valley.

Why they wouldn't start with somewhere this lovely I have no idea. Or, wait, yes I do. Someone at Blizzard either has an emotional age of about twelve or thirteen or believes most WoW players do. That'll be it. Also I bet they all listen to some stripe of metal. In the office, likely as not. They all think red and black is cool. 

Okay, red and black is cool. But only in clothes, not in landscapes. Glad we got that cleared up, at least. 

In contrast to what happened the first time I arrived in the Dragon Isles, when I took no screenshots at all, this time I took...  hang on, wait a moment while I count them... eighteen. Could have been a lot more, too.

That was this morning but I got to the new area last night, so why the wait? Ah, well that makes a very nice example of why veterans and developers don't always remember what things are like for a new player. Or a returning player. Or someone who just plain doesn't know what they're doing. You can guess where I fit in.

Here's what happened. I got the quest from the over-enthusiastic but inexperienced dragon cadet outside the Embassy (Nice bit of characterization there.). She'd been deputed by the Majordomo to take me to the camp where there'd been some trouble with some ancestral enemy of the dragons. They'd (Conveniently or inconveniently, depending which way you look at it.) just woken up from... I don't know, hibernation? Stasis? Deep meditation? They hadn't been seen for a long time, anyway, but now they were back.

Before I get to the next part, I have to ask. Why? I mean, why a Majordomo? It's an obscure choice of rank, isn't it? There's an option to have him explain what it means , which I already knew, which was why I wanted to ask him. My not-that-extensive experience of majordomos (Majordomi?)suggest it would be kinda weird to see one commanding an army in the field. More likely to find them organizing the help for a big party in the palace, I'd have thought.

His explanation didn't hold much water but maybe it's different for dragons. Whatever, he was there and he was giving... not so much orders as rather avuncular suggestions it felt like it would be unwise to ignore. So off I went with the cadet, who set off at a jog-trot towards a gap in the hills I hadn't even noticed.

And that was where the problem arose. I was on foot because I generally only mount up in games if I'm planning on going some distance, not if I'm walking (Or running, because it's always running in games, isn't it?) around town. I jogged along behind but the dragon was a lot taller than my vulpera (Isn't everyone? Okay, not gnomes.) and I fell further and further behind.

Waaaiiit! I only have little legs!

The cadet was yammering away to herself the whole way. She never stops monologuing. I was trying to read her speech bubbles although I think she was voice-acted as well. I thought about mounting up but I decided by the time I worked out how to do it she'd be completely out of sight.

Luckily she stopped at the brow of the hill to wax lyrical about something or other and I was able to catch her up. Then, just as I was about to follow her, she shot off and before I could get started she disappeared. I carried on down to the camp but no-one there would talk to me. The quest tracker still told me I needed to be following the cadet to the camp, even though I was already in it and she was nowhere to be seen.

I spent about five minutes looking all around for her. No luck. I figured I was either going to have to drop the quest and start again, if you can do that in WoW, or else go all the way back to the Embassy to see if she'd reset. It was getting late, though, so I decided to leave it til the morning and logged out.

That was last night. This morning I logged back in, hoping maybe the quest would have sorted itself out while I was asleep but it hadn't. I was obviously going to have to go back to where I started but before I did that I thought I'd better mount up so the whole thing didn't just happen all over again. 

And I could not remember how to do it. I must have summoned a mount in WOW scores of times. Hundreds, probably. I was convinced I'd always done it by clicking an icon on a hot bar. And I'm sure that's just what I have done in the past. Only before you can click an icon on a hot bar it has to be on one and as I mentioned last time, all my hot bars were cleansed while I was away.

Now, in retrospect I'm willing to concede that the permanent services hot bar that comes as part of the default UI does include a pretty obvious horseshoe, which should have been a clue. In my defense, it's really small and if you mouse over it it doesn't say anything about a mount. It says something about Collections.

So sue me but I don't think of my mounts first and foremost as something to be collected. I think of them as something to ride. I concede that collecting mounts in WoW is a thing. I've read enough blog posts where people talk about their collection of mounts. It's not, however, one of my things so I didn't make the connection.

What I did do was go through all the keybinds looking for one to summon a ride. There isn't one. Or if there is, it's not included in the in-game information. I also looked through my bags in case there was something in there I was supposed to click but that's not how it works in Azeroth. (How it does work, as in where all those mounts hang out when you're not using them, probably best not to think about.)

In the end I had to google it.  And that's why MMORPGs are so confusing and frustrating for people who aren't intimately familiar with them. Nothing is ever as simple and straightforward as the people who play every day and the people who design the content imagine.

Once I'd found my "Collection" of mounts and pulled one of the icons onto a hot bar, I was ready to carry on. I rode back to the last place I'd seen the cadet (She has a name. I just don't remember what it is. I think it was something like Sarsaparilla.) and there she was. I spoke to her and the whole thing started up again, except this time I was on my Felsteed (Which it occurs to me suddenly I shouldn't have at Level 13, should I?) so instead of struggling to keep up with her, I had to keep stopping so the cadet could catch up to me.

All of which I found quite entertaining and even more so when I finally got to the camp and picked up my next set of quests. I did a couple and then just went exploring. I took all those screenshots with no interruptions because the whole area seems to be remarkably quiet, not to say idyllic.

There's an abundance of curious and interesting wildlife but almost none of it is aggressive. Whole valleys seem to be entirely devoid of threat or danger of any kind. It looks like it would be an excellent place to build a spa hotel. Or to take a party of Playable Worlds devs so they could get an idea of what makes for a fun environment.

After about twenty minutes, I ended up on the coast. I could see the Horde zeppelin service pulling away in the distance so I trotted down the beach in that general direction and in no time ended up back where I'd started. I have made this observation before but it bears repeating: a lot of MMORPGs, WoW being no exception, are more fun when you stop acting like everybody's gofer and just wander off and do your own thing.

I do find it surprising that, in the midst of my current lack of enthusiasm for games in general, it's WoW I most feel drawn to but that's how it is. I was quite looking forward to playing today and I'm quite looking forward to playing some more. I think the very pointlessness of it all is part of the charm.

Lastly, I just wanted to thank Shintar, who left a comment on the previous post with a link to a reddit thread explaining how to free up some of the hard disk space the WoW patcher leaves stuffed with unnecessary clutter. I'm very bad at checking older posts for late comments so I only saw it today, when I opened that one to get the link.

At first, I thought the tip wasn't going to be of any help. I checked the relevant location as advised but the folders in question were measurable in mere megabytes. I was about to forget it, when I noticed there was a folder called "World of Warcraft" inside my "World of Warcraft" folder. 

That seemed weird so I had a good look at both of them and guess what? It was the whole dam' lot again. I had the entire installation, twice, on the same drive. I mean, I knew in the past I'd had multiple installations on different drives but this was a whole new way to waste space.

I deleted everything from the spare installation except the screenshots and that freed up almost 100GB. Then I logged back into WoW in case it might need to replace a few files but it worked perfectly. How that bonus client got there I have no idea but I'm happy to have the space back.

I'll just have to remember to keep an eye on things to make sure it doesn't come back. I certainly don't trust Blizzard to do its own housekeeping. 

We Can Remember It For You Piecemeal

I do feel as though I might be playing more games again soon. I'm feeling that itch. Today, though, I don't have anything to report on that front so here's something on ephemerality instead. 

It's something I'm always aware of. Keeping a blog that records your momentary interests and holds them in stasis is altogether too similar to keeping a diary to avoid it. I used to think and sometimes said out loud that one of the blessings of a blog is that it allows you to revisit your past but, like Monk considering his idiosyncracies, I now wonder if that's not both a blessing and a curse.

I certainly find it uncomfortable to see just how wonderful I once thought things I now don't consider all that great at all. The overwhelming power of novelty is all too clear in the back pages of this blog. Contrapuntally, it's concerning to observe just how many times I say the same thing without seeming to realize it's not just not a new idea, it's not even a new idea to me.

The same, only more so, applies to all that writing I did back in the 'eighties and 'nineties. Not the fiction which, apart from a handful of contemporary references, feels moderately timeless now I revisit it, but the endless lists of favorite things and all those cultural opinions I couldn't keep to myself. 

I was brought to thinking about all this when I came across a file on an old floppy disk yesterday, the full text of a review of the year I did for the APA back in 1998. The year before online gaming swallowed me whole.

The first thing I noticed with discomfort was how much more I'd been doing then in terms of going out and participating. Cinema, live music, visting friends, foreign travel, rummaging through the detritus of other peoples' lives at all kinds of sales and in all kinds of stores. Of all those activities, I think the only one to survive the onset of live gaming was the travel. It took a pandemic to put an end to that.

Still, as much of that drifting down can be laid at the grave of youth as blamed on gaming. I was turning forty then and after that watershed many people, maybe most people, experience a sharp decline in interest in anything that takes them out after dark. Or out of the house at all.

It's later, when retirement arrives, that filling up the time requires the taking up of hobbies and activities. Or so I've heard. Personally, I have more to do than I can find the hours for and that's just here at home. Still, old people do go out more, I believe. Until they can't, of course.

So, shelve the angsting over age and lost engagement. That's not what really set me back when I heard myself speaking across a gap of more than a decade and a half. What surprised, maybe slightly shocked me was the intensity with which then-me recommended books and music and movies I now couldn't remember at all.

And these weren't just passing fancies like the tunes I share here every couple of weeks. I already know plenty of those barely ring any bells with me even a few months on, much less that they'll last seventeen years. No, remember this was my Pick of the Year round-up. These were supposedly the works of art that had had the most impact on me over the preceding twelve months. You'd think I might at least remember the names...

Here's an example. Talking about all the books I'd read that year

"Best of the lot, though, was Jean Thesman's The Last April Dancers, a novel so bleak it could almost be called Plathian."

Anyone heard of it? Anyone? Bueller?

I had to look it up. It was apparently my favorite novel of 1998 but I didn't recognize the name of the author or the title of the book. And guess what? After now I've looked it up I still don't.

Here's the entry on Goodreads. It comes with a handy thumbnail biography of Jean Thesman, who died in 2016 at the age of 86, " leaving behind a significant legacy in young adult literature." She wrote around 40 novels and was known for her "lyrical style, emotional depth, and strong female characters".

I can see why I rated the book so highly. I just don't get why I can't remember anything about it, not even that it existed, not least since I apparently found the experience of reading it "so harrowing I twice had to stop reading it to build up courage to carry on" . You'd think something like that would leave a lasting impression but it seems you'd be wrong.

I do read a lot of books and I do find most of them very hard to recall in detail but in most cases a glimpse of the cover or at most a glance at the blurb will quickly bring a flurry of images and incidents rushing back, even after many years. This one? Not a damn thing. 

Now I feel I need to go look for more of Jean Thesman's work but despite her success it seems there's not much left in print, even in her homeland USA. Used copies, if you can find them, are already acquiring collector's price-tags, especially in hardback. Missed my chance there, it seems.

Of course, it may be that I already have a copy of The Last April Dancers, somewhere in the house. I certainly have most of the other "juveniles" I praised in that 1998 round-up. I'd been going through a phase of scooping them up whenever I saw them, mainly in charity shops where, at the time they were ubiquitous. You never, ever see them now. There's little as ephemeral as a popular YA novel.

Still on my shelves from that 1998 list:  M.E. Kerr (If I Love You, Am I Trapped Forever?  and The Son of Someone Famous) and Barbara Wersba (Tunes For A Small Harmonica  and  Crazy Vanilla). I was only thinking about re-reading Barbara Wersba last week, as it happens. As for "the left field Waltons -go- Survivalist ethos of Cynthia Voigt and her epic Tillerman family saga", I have re-read at least a couple of those since 1998. I can remember all of that lot, vaguely, and yet in the year I first read them all, The Last April Dancers supposedly made the greatest impression. Now it's the one I might as well never have read at all.

From books to music. It's a truism that music's far easier to revisit than fiction. It's all in the length. Three minutes for a pop song; three days for a novel.

And surely to god you'd expect anyone to remember their favorite song of an entire year! I mean, okay, maybe they might not have it in mind but if they saw the name of the band or the title of the song, they'd at least recognize and presumably remember they liked it, right?

Guess what my favorite song of 1998 was, according to my 1998 yearly review? I mean, I took the trouble to put it in print so it has to be true...

I say that because I'm seriously questioning it now. According to what I wrote at the time,  "If I had to choose a favourite-of-favourites for '98, I guess it would be the Slacker tune". 

The what now? Is that a style? A genre?

No, it's a band. Here's "the Slacker tune" I was talking about.

It's called "Scared". It got to #36 in the UK in 1997, so it didn't even come out in the year I was writing about. That's what happens when you buy all your CDs from bargain bins. 

Slacker are at least a step ahead of poor old Jean Thesman in that once I'd gone to YouTube and listened to Scared I did vaguely remember it. And I do like it, even now. Even if Ihaven't thought about it in seventeen years. 

I find it very hard to believe it was the best thing I heard in the whole of 1998, though. Hard as in completely freakin' impossible. It's progressive house ffs!

Here's the full list of my favorite singles of 1998: 

"On CD, my favourite singles were Scared (Slacker); Song 2 (Blur); Glorious (Goya Dress); Kowalski (Primal Scream); Lazy (Suede) Rhino Rays E.P. (Dawn of the Replicants); Ginger  (David Devant and his Spirit Wife);  Pussycat  (Mulu) and  On the Soft (Magicdrive). If I had to choose a favourite-of-favourites for '98, I guess it would be the Slacker tune, but the third track on the Goya Dress  single, 20th Century Box, is pretty dam' magnificent."

Can you believe I rated that Slacker tune more highly than Song 2? Had I been hit in the head?

Not only can I can remember six of those eight songs very clearly (More, actually, since the Dawn of the Replicants CD is an EP.) but I've listened to all of them fairly consistently ever since and several have had their charms exposed here on the blog. How the heck did I think Slacker was the best of them if I then never listened to the damn thing again?

And here's the weirdest part: my runner-up is one of the others I have no memory of at all!  When I read that yesterday, I had no clue who Goya Dress were (Still don't, in fact.) and no memory of any track on their CD single, let alone the third, which presumably was the equivalent of a second B-side.

I listened to that one yesterday as well. It's good. I certainly wouldn't pick it now over On The Soft or Song 2, though.

What am I supposed to read into all that? that my tastes have changed even though my tastes haven't changed? That back then I had good range but poor focus? That my memory is terrible except when it's completely fine?

Dunno. I'll finish with something a bit more encouraging, for my mental state, anyway: movies. It seems in 1998 I was still going to the cinema often enough to have opinions based on experience. And what's more I can remember the movies I wrote about and going to see them at the cinema. Maybe it's that that sticks them in the mind.

"Films, then.  The one I remember most clearly is When We Were Kings, which I found to be a magical recreation of fragmentary memories and images."

I went to see that one, a documentary on Muhammed Ali's infamous Rumble in the Jungle, with my mother, who's always been a fan. I saw it at The Arnolfini, a gallery and arthouse cinema in Bristol. I remember the seats being very uncomfortable. The movie was great, though.

And finally, because I laughed when I read it and to show how much more snarky I used to be back then, my mini-review of the film I liked least in 1998:

"Most disappointing film, by far, was L.A. Confidential, which was pot-boiler twonk; the performances were ordinary, except for Kim Basinger's, which was too artificial and stilted to rise that far, (and would have been insulting to the memory of Victoria Lake, had Basinger actually resembled the Girl With the Peekaboo Bangs in any way whatsoever, which she patently did not); the photography was dull, not even a hint of the Technicolor sheen the reviews lauded; the direction was functional and uninvolving; the script was a mish-mash of incoherent cliche, simultaneously simple to follow and confusing (almost as if it had been very badly cobbled together from the plots of two or three complicated novels, in fact); worst of all was the ludicrous, prolonged shoot-out ending which actually made me feel angry for having paid money and wasted two hours of my life just to get to that climax of banality. All in all, I didn't much like it." 

Even now, I remember it as being two of the most tedious hours I've ever spent in a cinema. My opinion on the film has never shifted although I've had a few quite heated arguments with people about it, the most recent being this year at work. Nothing remotely ephemeral about it 

My opinion, that is. The movie's ephemeral as hell.

Cover Story

Back in the '90s, after I finally got my voluntary redundancy from the very large company I was working for at the time, I took a year off . Didn't do very much with it, other than rest, relax and have a pleasant time until the money ran and I had to find another job. Hey, it was the nineties, okay? You've all seen Slacker, right? If not, you should. Someone put it up on YouTube in 2017 and it's still there so if you want to go watch it now, I can wait.

Anyway... way to derail my own post, right?  So, the point is I had all this time off and one of the things I was going to do with it was write a novel. Only it turns out I don't have a novel in me. How about that? Everyone but me, huh?

What I did have in me, it turned out, was a whole freakin' mess of characters, their never-ending soap-opera-drama, and some kind of ramshackle, rambling narrative that wasn't going anywhere or at least not anywhere I could follow. I just used to sit down at the PC I'd bought specially to write the thing and go into what I can only describe as some kind of trance and come out of it two or three hours later with a few thousand words that, when I read them back, seemed to be nothing to do with me. I had no idea how I'd done it. I still don't.

I'm not saying it was like automatic writing in the days of Conan Doyle but it was freaky as hell and it really took it out of me. It took me about a week to recover so the whole thing moved quite slowly. Still, after a year I had something tens of  thousands words in two unconnected "stories". There was some kind of shape to both of them but if either had an actual plot, I couldn't have told you what it was.

And then I had to get another job and I started to use the PC to play video games, discovered EverQuest, and that was that for a quarter of a century. All of which I believe I've covered here before, not that I fool myself anyone is likely to remember.

While I was writing them, though, those stories, if that's what we're going to call them, didn't just sit on a floppy disk on a shelf. They did do that but they also came out in bimonthly installments in the apazine to which I belonged, meaning they were nominally public, with a theoretical readership of thirty people, assuming everyone bothered to read them. Again, something I've written about before and not the point of this post so let's move on.

What is the point of this post? You may well ask. It's this: I still have all that stuff, both the writing and its physical manifestation in photocopied zines. Of course I do. I still have freakin' everything I've ever done, going back to my exercise books from primary school (They're in the loft.). I never throw anything away.

I mentioned in a recent post that I'd been mining a couple of fragments I wrote around the same time for lyrics to turn into songs to feed into the all-devouring AI maw. That turned out really well. I mean really well. I spun those two short pieces up into a seven song cycle and I'm about as happy with it as I could be, which, since tend I love my own stuff to a positively nauseating degree to begin with, is irritatingly predictable. 

If you want to judge for yourself, I made a playlist. I think they're all pretty good. Your opinion may differ. I'd still like to hear it though.

After the seventh song, even I could tell the well was pretty much dry. Which was when I had my next big idea. Basically, the same big idea but who's telling this? If I'd been able to get seven songs out of a couple of short fragments, how many could I get out of two short novels?

I don't know yet but I've done four so far and once again I'm very pleased with what I've got. Given I'm finding the process addictive as hell and the results astonishingly satisfying, there could be a lot more. There will be a lot more. 

And we're still not at the final point of this post, the lede of which I've buried all the way down here as a reward for the patient, the stubborn and the determined. Here it is: blogging is great and all and I love it but I'm not sure it's as aesthetically satisfying as what came before.

Here's why. 

And that's just the covers. All nine issues of The Final Line, as they originally appeared. Or rather, bleached-out scans that don't do any kind of justice to the grain and texture of the originals, let alone their tactility and feel. Even so, though...

 

I put a good deal of work into making this blog look as good as I think I can get it and I'm mostly happy with the results but I very much doubt any of the images I've used is going to have the lasting impact on me of any of those covers and I'm not even talking about their ability to trigger memories. (Except the last one. That's not good. I think I knew I was done by then and was already moving on.)

 

My point, getting to it at last, is that I'm not quite sure why blogs in general are so much less visually and aesthetically satisfying than those old photocopied zines. They are, though. It's a topic I might return to for Blaugust, an event which the observant reader will notice has been on my mind for months now. 

 

I'll tell you how all those covers were made. I spent hours going through photographs I'd taken, flyers I'd picked up, cinema programs, magazines, bits of paper I picked up in the street... anything. Then I blew them up on a photocopier, cut them up with scissors and knives, pasted them with glue and generally hacked them about until I had something that looked good to me.

 

Is there anything stopping me doing that now? Of course not. I could follow the exact same process or a version of it and at the end, when I'd finished, I could either take a photo of it with my phone or scan it and use it on the blog. But I don't. And why? Because it's easier to take a screenshot and use that. Or, worse, get an AI to fake something up for me. Digitization has made everything orders of magnitude more convenient but at a cost.

The closest I get to that old creativity here, I think, are all the degraded, fucked-about-with images I use at the top of music posts. Making those engages much the same parts of my imagination as those covers did. I'm more likely to look back at those with satisfaction than any other visual images on the blog and yet I pretty much only do it for music posts. Until now, I've never asked myself why. Why not do the same to screenshots or found images or generative AI?

 

I'll have to go away and think about that. What I also wanted to say is that the whole AI music thing seems to have fired up a creative part of my mind that's been dormant for a long time. I have more creative projects going on now than I can handle, which is unusual for me. Mostly I start something and keep to it until I'm done before I move on to something else, although being "done" should not be mistaken for being finished. 

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that there's likely to more of this sort of thing here for a while, since that's what I'm spending most of my free time on just now. Fair warning. Also, I guess, there's a chance some of the usual stuff might start to look a bit different, although honestly I'd be surprised if that happens. Inertia's a bitch.

 

Also if anyone knows why it's now impossible to center images in Blogger, I'd love to hear about it.

What's Hotta And What's Notta

Going to be a short one today (Famous last words...) because I don't have time for a long one and I haven't bookmarked much for the Grab Bag that this is going to have to be. Oh well, onwards and outwards or whatever it is...

Wotta Hotta

Did you know the studio behind the best-named game we're likely to see for a very long whle also has a great name? I didn't until yesterday, when I read this at MassivelyOP. 

The game, of course, is Neverness To Everness, which might just be my favorite game name ever. The studio is called Hotta, which is a very good, memorable name although for once not as good as the game they're making. Have you ever noticed how studios tend to give themselves much better names than they give to their games?

The news is that both beta sign-ups and pre-registrations are open for everyone. The closed beta is global and so is the game, thank heaven. 

I signed up and pre-registered immediately. Literally immediately. I went straight from the MOP page to the website and did the thing. I was that excited.

Only problem was, I couldn't tell if it worked. It was a super-simple process, just an email address and a confirmation code to paste back in. I was expecting a questionnaire and there was the briefest flash of a question about where I was located in the world but it shot off the screen in a micro-second and the whole thing ended, saying it was done. I tried resubmitting my details just in case something had gone wrong but I got told I'd done it already

And that was that. Since then, nothing. I'm used to getting a welcome email right after signing up but not here. It is possible, now I come to think of it, that Hotta already had my details. This may not be the first time I've tried to register my interest. 

Not that I actually want to beta test the thing anyway, you understand. I just want to plaaaaaaaay.

Sorry, I sounded about thirteen then. Still, nice to be excited about a game for once.

Crossover Artist

I don't get too many opportunities to cross the streams between gaming and music here. I am not much of a fan of music in games. No matter how good it sounds when I'm playing, it's very, very rare for anything I hear in a game to sound anything other than just okay at best if listened to on its own. 

Music is famously effective at bringing back memories, so listening to game music on its own can make me remember the fun I had when I played but that's a side-effect at best. The problem as far as I'm concerned is that the very great majority of all music made for games is instrumental and I hardly ever listen to instrumental music by choice. And if I did, it very definitely wouldn't be the kind of cod-classical, orchestral scores that burble along in the background of most games I play.

The shortcomings of game music, though, is a topic for a different post. One I probably should have written before this, now I come to think of it. I'll have to add it to the list.

This isn't about that, it's about a very odd news item that popped up in the NME the other day. I haven't seen it come up anywhere else so I thought I'd share.

Apparently, Caroline Polachek, the much plaudited, hard-to-pigeonhole solo artist and ex-lead singer of  cult favorites Chairlift, has written a song specifically for the sequel to the much-plaudited but never played by me game, Death Stranding. 

In fact, she's doing the title number. It's called "On The Beach". 

The game is called "Death Stranding 2: On The Beach", which is a weird title if you ask me. I can't hear "On The Beach" without thinking of the ultra-depressing, why not just kill yourself, Neville Shute novel. Apparently Death Stranding auteur Hideo Kojima is "a big fan" of Caroline's and the pair of them got into some kind of mutual appreciation thing online that ended up with her asking him if she could write something for the sequel and him saying hell yeah!

The Death Stranding franchise, in contrast, has Caroline Polachek, Chvrches and Woodkid and maybe Nine Inch Nails and Bring Me The Horizon, too. I constantly see comments on YouTube threads for every kind of indie obscurity, thanking the likes of FIFA and GTA for introducing them to some tiny act they'd never have heard of otherwise. I'm clearly playing the wrong games when it comes to music. 

As I said, just about every game I play has faceless instrumental music behind it, some of which works wonderfully to enhance the gameplay or the narrative but none of which I ever think of for a second after I log out. Mostly it's because I play a lot of MMORPGs, I guess. The gameplay there is so endless and endlessly repetitive it demands music that can be ignored. 

I think the only MMO I've played that has real music from out in the world inside it is Once Human and I absolutely love it there. Clearly it can be done. I can see how contemporary sounds might not fit a high-medieval setting but there's no excuse for modern-day or science fiction MMOs. Come to think of it, The Secret World has that record store...

Yeah, I really ought to think about doing a whole post on this. I mean, I just drafted it ...

And that's it for game news. Since we're on the subject of music already anyway, though, I guess I'll just throw out a couple of good tunes and call this done.

 

 

Free Association - Friendship

Now, this is the sort of thing I could imagine in the background of an MMORPG. It could easily be looped to play indefinitely. That's a compliment, by the way. People do that nowadays to songs they really like.

I'd do it to this one. It's from their upcoming album with the great title "Caveman Wakes Up", which I thought was the name of the song until I wrote this post. I dunno if there is a song on the album called Caveman Wakes Up. I hope so.

Cloud Without Tear - R. Missing

Only went up on YouTube eight hours ago so don't try and tell me you heard it already. I think my aunt used to have a sofa like that.

 Diet Pepsi - Blondshell

I wouldn't hang about with this one. Listen to it right now. I've been waiting a week for it and I'm going to have to figure out some way of downloading it before it disappears because I wouldn't count on it staying on YouTube long. Thanks a million to Sonny Graham for uploading it (All the comments are people thanking him.)

What it is is a cover Blondshell did for the weird in-car-only radio station SiriusXM. I had to look up what that was and I still don't really get it. That's get it as in understand it. Get it as in get to hear it... not a chance in hell.

I'm hoping it'll eventually come out in some format I can acquire legally. It's a great song and she's killing it. Shame it cuts off before the end but at least there's what there is.

And finally, since we just had my second-favorite current artist (No prizes for guessing #1), why not have the second runner-up too?

 Devotion - Sunday (1994)

They have a new EP out of the same name. Every track is genius. Her lyrics especially. She's a wonderful writer.

I just bought the first album on CD. I had to go to an independent online record store for it because even though it's a major label release (AristaRCA) it's not on Amazon. I mean, the album itself is - I could listen to it on Amazon Music or buy the MP3 download but the CD? Nope. What's that about?

Modern music distribution is at one and the same time incredible and abysmal. I can get anything for nothing any time but try to buy something to keep and it's a duck shoot. Oh well, I did get it, eventually, so I'm happy. I guess I'll have to make do with a download of the EP though... 

Daybreak Backs Expansion For Unfinished Game

Anyone remember Palia? It was going to be the Next Big Thing for a while and then, like Nightingale and so many others, people got to play it and suddenly no-one was all that interested any more.

Like many of those under-cooked, released-to-soon titles, it's been plodding along, catering, I imagine, to a small cadre of die-hards, who find in it something they can't easily get elsewhere. Along with the regulars, in these half-forgotten games there's also usually a trickle of returnees, coming back to see if anything's changed.

Well, it has. Quite a lot. In fact, Palia just got its first expansion. It's called The Elderwood and here are the bones:

The Elderwood Expansion includes an entirely new Adventure Zone, our first since we launched, which contains a whole new map filled with new content for every skill in the game, new gameplay systems for players to experience, and another chapter in our main story.

At the highest level, this update brings the following changes to the game:

• A new map, the Elderwood, a lush overgrown forest seeping with magic.
• A new chapter of our Main Story.
• A new Villager joining the cast of Palia.
• The introduction of Infected Essence, a major focus of the gathering experience in Elderwood.
• The search for Artifacts and ability to craft Relics, a new equipment type that provides buffs to not only yourself, but your party.
• New Gatherables, including a new wood type and forage you can knock down.
• Changes to mining, making Palium a more abundant resource and introducing dedicated mining nodes for Gold and Silver.
• New Huntable Creatures (and plushies!)
• New Insects, including a frog-like critter called the Rockhopper.
• New Fish, including some ferocious sharks.
• New garden crops found within the Elderwood.
• A new set of Cooking Recipes that make use of everything in the Elderwood.
• Our largest single patch of decor, including multiple new furniture sets.
• The introduction of Courier Pets to the game.
• And last but definitely not least, decor limits have increased on the housing plot from 3,000 to 3,500!

If you need more, the full - very full - patch notes are here. 

I've been looking for an opportunity to mention Palia for a while now, ever since I bookmarked this post at MassivelyOP. I've had it on the shortlist for a Grab Bag for a month (To the day, in fact.) but so far it hasn't made the cut. Today's the day.

The pull-out quote from Bree's interview with Palia's developer, Singularity 6, which she used as the title of the piece, is "Daybreak made Elderwood possible". Gee, it's just like the good old Sony Online Entertainment days, isn't it? Remember when SOE was the place old MMORPGs were put out to pasture? And then, just as they thought they were safe, "sent to the farm" when the Sony Home Office finally noticed what was going on...

Actually, did they ever buy any third-party games other than Vanguard? I know they published a few but that's not exactly the same thing.... 

Scenery looks great.
My character looks plastic.

But this is all getting a long way from the point, which is that, thanks to Daybreak stepping in, Palia isn't just plodding along any more. It's growing. A new expansion and new platforms, too. The game has been available on the Switch for a while but as of this week you can also play it on PS5 and XBox X|S. 

IGN re-reviewed it very favorably a couple of days ago, calling it "endlessly relaxing and incredibly hard to put down" so it seems to be getting fresh attention, something it certainly needs. The game currently doesn't even have enough critic reviews for a MetaCritic rating and that only takes four. 

After two years, Palia has just two professional reviews listed at the aggregator (Presumably soon tobe three if that  new one at IGN counts.) Both are for the Switch version. The PC game hasn't received a single review from a recognized critic or publication in a year and a half but then the game is still in Beta so maybe everyone's waiting for the official launch.

Which makes me wonder. Can games in Beta or Early Access get expansions? Is that possible? Isn't anything added in beta just more core content? Do any of these labels even mean even anything any more?

Don't know and frankly don't much care. Whatever it calls itself, Palia is doing okay. Better than expected, certainly. As I write, there are just under twelve thousand people playing it on Steam. The game hit its Steam peak concurrency with the launch of Elderwood two days ago - 17,508, which is five thousand more players than it got on its original opening day.

I was one of that first influx of excited players back in late 2023. Well, I was more curious than excited, I guess. I was looking forward to playing, anyway, but although I gave it a few sessions, I never really got on with the cozy sim part of the game and there wasn't a lot else going on. I could overlook the  unfinished feeling, naturally, the game being in beta and all, but it felt dull and that's much harder to forgive at any stage of development.. 

Ididn't uninstall though and I have been back once or twice, just to see if it felt any better. When I did, not much seemed to have changed, so I wasn't expecting a lot when I patched up and logged in today. I was pleasantly surprised.

I don't remember fast travel from last time I played. Sadly, still no actual horses.

I'm not going to do any kind of "Second First Impressions" on either the expansion or the game. I haven't seen enough for that. I did go to the new zone to take a look around and I even picked up a few quests there but I only played for a little under an hour and a half. And of that, at least half was spent handing in old quests, claiming the huge amount of freebies waiting in the mail and fiddling around with my house.

I do have a handful of observations to make, even so. Firstly, as you may be able to tell from the screenshots, the new zone looks radically different from the old ones. Much more dramatic, weird, colorful and fantastic. It's also very dark by comparison, although darkness is a relative term in Palia, where you can always see pretty well, even in the dead of night. 

Elderwood felt more dynamic, too. There seemed to be a lot of mobs moving around and doing things other than running away. A whole load of large salamander-like creatures kept spitting huge gobs of green goo over me for a start. Palia doesn't have any actual combat per se (As far as I know...) so it's not like I was at any risk while I was exploring but it did feel different, having monsters behaving aggressively, even if there didn't seem to be a lot of bite in their attacks.

A talking chair gives me a quest. (Actually it was a tiny piksii hiding in the upholstery.)

The whole vibe of the game felt somehow different in a way I couldn't quite pin down. I know I was only there for a short while but not once did I feel the kind of ennui that, in the past, has swept over me within minutes of logging in. 

There seemed to be a lot more to do, for one thing. I didn't have to go looking for quests or speak to everyone in town to find someone who wanted something. I picked up several quests just from examining objects in the world and I found a couple of chests that needed some climbing and scrambling to reach. 

Because I've barely touched the game since the first month, I have no idea how much of the change in atmosphere is down to the new expansion and how much come from incremental changealready in place but whatever the provenance, the game certainly feels different. It feels more alive but also more like a game. 

I don't imagine it's going to be enough to encourage me to keep logging in but that has more to do with my current disinclination to play games in general than any shortcomings in Palia itself. Based on my brief dip into the game today, though, I would say that if anyone's been thinking of giving Palia another try, this might be a very good time.

The Winds Of Mysterious Fortune Blow Me Back To WoW

As I suggested yesterday, I'm not invested enough in any particular MMORPG just now to have a reliable, ready-to-use supply of incidents, ideas and opinions on hand to fill three or four posts a week. It's happened before and no doubt it will happen again. Luckily, I have a well-tested workaround for times like these. 

Actually, I have more than one, this not being my first rodeo as the saying goes (Although if it was really a rodeo then it most definitely would be my first, so that's a weird thing to be benchmarking against...) For today's post I'm combining two methods in a belt-and-braces stylee (And again, who even wears braces these days? Clowns and Jacob Rees-Mogg and that's about it.). 

First, there's the good old "Copy what everyone else is doing" plan, sometimes given a positive spin as "building community" but just as easily defined as pinching ideas from other blogs. In this case, though, the idea I'm pinching is so old that, if it was a folk song, it would have (Trad.) after the title. It's picking up an old game and complaining about how it's too hard/easy/annoying or just plain not as good as it used to be. That one always delivers.

"Incompatible" with what?

There's not really much point trying to build up any suspense by waiting until paragraph four to reveal the name of the game because literally everyone who ever reads this will already know from the picture at the top of the post that it's World of Warcraft. I hadn't really been thinking of going back until I read two posts in quick succession, where Shintar and Redbeard both happened to be talking about their recent experiences in Retail, playing low-levels after being away for a while. 

I won't lie. It was actually Shintar's mention of a levelling event that swung it. I am very much not one of those people who find leveling in Retail too fast. I generally don't find it fast at all, probably for exactly the reasons Shintar outlines (Try it on a character with no Heirlooms and no help from any other characters on the same account some day and see how fast you find it.) Plus I always like events where good loot drops like leaves in the fall.

Both of them play WoW regularly although Redbeard pretty much sticks to Classic these days and Shintar, by her own account, bounces between Classic and Retail. I can't actually remember when I last played either. 

Okay, that's not strictly true. I do remember when I last played Classic, or I can soon look it up. It was right when the big scandal broke and the boycott started. I know because that was what decided me not to renew my sub.

When was that, anyway? My God! It was July 2021! Four years ago! Seems like... well, two years ago, at least. And it turns out I have played Classic again since then because there was a free weekend  almost exactly a year ago and I had a go at that. I'd totally forgotten about it.

As far as I can tell, though, I really haven't logged into Retail for nearly four years. My Battlenet client was obsolete. Had to download a new one. Then I had a 56GB patch to install, which I was hoping was going to be one of those new-fangled ones where, after the digital dust settles, it turns out only a fraction of it was new data. 

Don't look at me like that. I don't know who you are!

Sadly, not this time. It was the full fifty-six gigs and now the drive I have WoW running on is in the red. Probably going to need to do something about that so thanks for that, Blizz. (Mandatory unjustified sarcastic remark quota fulfilled - minimum one per comeback post; no maximum.)

I had lunch while that was going on and it was all finished when I came back so I logged straight in, expecting confusion. I was confused for much of the time I was playing (Just over an hour.) but I also had quite a lot of fun.

WoW is very playable There's no point pretending otherwise. I do think the developers go out of their way - often several miles out of their way - to make it less playable than it could be but the basic structure is so robust it's almost impossible for them to fuck it up completely.

I will take a small portion of the blame for such confusion as there was. It was my choice to play one of my few Horde characters, which was already taking me out of my comfort zone, but even worse I picked one who was camped in Orggrimar.  

I have a love-hate relationship with the Horde capital. I love what it looks like and the general ambience but I hate trying to find anything there. Or even just trying to get from one side of the city to the other. It's not just a maze, it's a chaotic, unstructured mess. It's full of dead ends, there's no line-of-sight and the map is seven shades of totally useless. 

Warband-related perk. I think?

I was confused even before I got to Orgrimarr, though. I knew Warbands were a thing and I had the vaguest idea what they were but it turns out I know nothing about them that's of any practical use. After some trial and error I managed to get some of my characters sitting around a cheery campfire, like a bunch of sitcom characters on an ill-advised camping trip, but only about half of them made it (So maybe it was a horror movie not a sitcom...). 

I couldn't figure out why the rest were only listed on the drop-down list at the side of the screen. I never did manage to get any of those into a campsite. Whether that means they're not in the Warband or if they're in a Warband of their own or if they are all in the same Warband but just aren't showing up, I have no idea. 

I suppose I could go look it up but a) I don't have a lot of faith in the accuracy of online information about WoW, thanks to too many out-of-date or just plain wrong readings in the past and b) I don't care.

Since I'm a cheapskate, playing on the endless free trial or whatever it styles itself these days, none of my characters over a certain level were available. I think the cap for free play is still 20 but 20 is like 50 in old money now, or something? Not a problem anyway. I have plenty of lower-levels who are still allowed to log in and do stuff.

My favorite race in WoW is probably Goblin but I've done a lot of low-level goblining.  My second-favorite is Vulpera and I haven't worn them out yet so I picked on Odelie, a Level 10 Vulpera Warlock and woke her up.

When she arrived in Orggrimar (After the mandatory viewing of the visually impressive but otherwise almost wholly meaningless cinematic for The War Within, the current expansion that I can't play, not having bought it, so why even show it to me?) my first thought was  naturally to get the hell out of town. I would have, too, had Odelie not been standing right next to someone with a quest.

That quest turned out to be the start of a short breadcrumb trail to the expansion before last, Dragonflight. I didn't know Dragonflight was even available to players who hadn't bought it, although now I think about it I do vaguely recall reading something about old expansions being rolled into the current one for nothing. 

And this is one of the nicer views...

Anyway, it seems to be true because after I'd rounded up the scientists and scholars I was asked to persuade to go on the trip (And caught a bunch of stray balloons for some random kid because that's the sort of thing we heroes always have time for.) it was off to the Dragon Isles in a rather impressive zeppelin. The Horde do know how to travel, gotta give them that.

Arrival in the new lands was a lot less impressive. I swear, if I was the Executive Producer of a new MMORPG or the latest expansion for one, my very first ordinance would be "Put the best-looking zone right at the fricken' start". Why do they almost never do that? Why is it that the zone you see first is always a barren desert or a swamp or, as in this case, a filthy grey pile of rocks whose bleak ugliness is only made more depressing by dull, barely-glowing pools of lava?

Horrible place, made worse by horrible lighting. And it's not because the game is old or the engine isn't up to anything better. I have plenty of screenshots of delightful Azerothian scenery, all filled with color and vibrancy and interest. Didn't take any like that today.

Never mind. I'm sure it gets better. I just don't get why anyone would want it to be the first impression players get.

By this point I'd been playing maybe half an hour and I'd made next to no experience at all. I thought I probably ought to make at least some effort to progress so I grabbed what quests I could find and ran around doing them. Or trying to do them. It's quite hard to kill proto-dragons when you don't have any spells on your hotbar.

I'm not sure when or why but it seems while I was away something so significant must have changed that they had to wipe everyone's hotbars. All six of mine were completely empty, except for a single icon that had something to do with Warbands. Yes, them again.

Luckily for Odelie there was a guard nearby and he dealt with the proto-dragon while she sorted out her spellbook. Otherwise that would have been her second death of the session. I know everyone says Retail is so easy now you couldn't get yourself killed if you tried but I assure you that's an exaggeration. Just try running across those canvas roofs in Orggrimar and see what happens.

Once I'd got that sorted out, the rest went quite smoothly. The starting area in the Dragon Isles feels like it might have been designed by the same people who worked on the town planning for Orggrimar but other than that I enjoyed it. 

The gameplay, that is. The story, not so much. I will say, yet again, I find questing in WoW very dull compared to just about any other game I can think of. The quest text is dull both to look at and to read, which makes it hard to get invested in the narrative, such as it may be. 

Functionally, though, it's fine. The kill numbers are low, the drops come fast, the mobs die even faster... what's not to like?

As for the xp it was decent. I played for just over an hour and Odelie went from the start of Level 10 to just into Level 12. Two levels in an hour sounds quite fast (Although, honestly, not that fast by modern standards.) but bear in mind I had full rested xp and there's supposed to be an xp event on. I wonder how fast it would have gone if neither of those was true?

I finished up in the big clearing in front of the Embassy building. There were loads of players there. There were quite a few in Orggrimar, too. For mid-afternoon on a weekday, I thought it seemed pretty busy, especially since it wasn't even current content.

And as I said, I had fun. The xp was nice but the real treat was the loot. I got a couple of the Mysterious Chest drops from the event and while the gear in them wasn't game-changing (Still an upgrade, of course, though.) the 30-slot bag I found in one certainly was. Add to that the 20-slotter I got from a quest and I more than doubled my slots. When I logged in all I had was the default inventory and one ten-slot bag!

The event only has another week to go - I started late - so I'll need to get a move on if I'm going to make the most of it. Whether I have the motivation to keep logging in is a good question but if anything's likely to spur me on it's free bags.