Towards A Supercute Future

Regular followers of the Inventory Full blog roll may recognize the name Martin Millar. I added his blog to the list a while back. He doesn't post often and when he does it's mostly just to let us all know he has a new book coming out, which is why I put the link there in the first place. I really want to know when Martin Millar has a new book coming out.

Martin Millar is an exemplar of something I've been pointing out to would-be authors for a quarter of a century or more. I tend to meet a lot of them, one way or another. As he explains in this short post, Millar's been a professional writer of fantasy and science fiction for thirty-five years and yet he's still, in his own words, "struggling". Despite much commerical and critical success over his long career, he is, as far as I can tell, without a publishing contract and back, once again, to publishing and publicizing his own work, a route to publication that is, thankfully, much more practical and productive than it used to be.

I first became aware of him and his work when I met him hawking copies of his comic around the bar at one of the UK Comic Arts Conventions I attended in the eighties and nineties. I didn't buy one of his comic books - I only wish I had. I can't even claim the meeting fixed his name in my mind but a year or two later, one of my friends who'd been sitting with me during the brief exchange in the UKCAC bar, gave me a copy of The Good Fairies of New York as a Christmas present.

I loved it. I went on to read just about everything else he'd written at the time and I've kept that up, on and off, ever since. I say "on and off" because for a long while I had no idea Millar also writes under another name - Martin Scott. 

As Scott he's written a dozen fantasy novels featuring the mercenary-turned-private-investigator, Thraxas. The series sold well, especially in the USA. It got off to a great start, with the first winning the World Fantasy Award. Despite commercial and critical success, after eight books his UK publisher had had enough and his American publisher fell out with Millar's agent over rights, leaving Millar to self-publish. Four more volumes have appeared since then, with more to come but you'd pretty much have to know about the series already to get your hands on one. You're unlikely to walk into a bookshop and find a copy.

Good though the Thraxas series is - and it's very good - Millar's best work has been published under his own name. I'd recommend pretty much anything with his name on, especially the aforementioned "Good Fairies of New York" and the absolutely wonderful Kalix the Werewolf trilogy but what I'm here to talk about today is his latest literary creation, the stunningly good Supercute Futures series.

I've just finished the second, Supercute Second Future, and it's possibly even better than the first. If I read a sharper, funnier, more thrilling extrapolation of the present into the near future this year I'll... well, I'll be delighted, obviously. But there won't be one. This is as good as it gets.

The future Supercute presents is one I find extraordinarily easy to accept. If you want to know what the future of gaming is going to look like, I think this is a good place to start. Also the future of the planet, although that's a far less appealing prospect.

Millar's vision of online gaming in the late 21st or early 22nd century (Dates are hazy.) shares some similarities with Tad Williams' Otherland, another convincing glimpse into our hobby's possible future, but where that series now seems dated, Supercute World feels like it's just about to happen. Millar completely sidesteps all the current vibey tripe about the crypto-driven metaverse (Words he never even mentions.) to jump straight into a scenario that seems far more likely - huge, intricate, AI-driven virtual universes that act as global social networks, while retaining all the functionality of massively multiple online role-playing games; vast, bright, busy, vibrant spaces that provide a refuge from reality for millions trapped in miserable conditions as the world falls apart.

All of which would be highly depressing if it wasn't for the characters and their incredibly upbeat, optimistic, can-do attitudes. From the creators of the ever-growing Supercute empire themselves, Mox and Mitsu, the world's self-acknowledged cutest super-geniuses, two lifelong friends now so bio-technically enhanced and adapted even the most sophisticated security systems can't recognize them since they ceased to register as either human or machine, to Supercute SuperSuperFan Amowie and her teen pals Raquel, Brigit and Meihui, collectively known as Keoma Bishojo, to WELCAT (An acronym for We Especially Love Clothes and Toys.) a quantum supercomputer who represents as a cat, to the irritable Dr. Ishikawa and her paramour, Supercute security chief Ben Castle, former enemies now allies of Mox and Mitsu, converted to their cause, if very much not to their cult of personality...

I could go on. And on. There are dozens of characters and every one of them crackles with individual charm or menace,
even though they may only get a line or two, like Ammo Baby, ferocious leader of the Ultra Waifs, one of Supercute Space Warriors' most famous player teams (Guilds, if you prefer.) 

If this all seems overwhelming then so it should. The books are a non-stop torrent of action, adventure and fashion advice. And yet, to any mmorpg player, much will feel familiar. Supercute Space Warriors, the crowning glory of Supercute's portfolio of games, offers a vast galaxy of adventure that's immediately recognizeable as an mmorpg. In it, Keoma Bishojo go on missions, earn experience, level up and engage in PvP. The Ultra Waifs raid there. The myriad NPCs, AI-controlled, behave in very much the way so many developers have told us they would like to achieve, with something that looks almost like and yet is not free will. Yet...

Underpinning all of this is a positively insane amount of world-building and a rock-solid adventure plot, all tied together by Millar's deceptively simple prose. He's as adept at action sequences as he is at nuanced characterisation and he's a master at building tension. Even though Mox and Mitsu are incomparably competent and always stronger, faster and smarter than anyone else, there's never a moment when you don't feel that this could be the time they over-reach. 

There's pretty much nothing about the Supercute Future series that I don't love, except that there are only two books in it so far and I've read them both. I only wish I was in the happy position I imagine most people reading this will be and still had that pleasure to come.

On the other hand, if the prospect of seeing the words "Super" and "Cute" collapsed together in myriad combinations like "Extra Super Always Happy Bundle", "Super Space Unicorn", "Supercute Super Colour Super Plastic Beads Set, Deluxe Edition", "Supercute 100 Different Kitten Earrings Funpack", over and over again to the point of madness doesn't appeal, or your heart doesn't race at the thought of yet another Super-Kitty Rampage overturning the Stonehenge Cuddly Super Set, sending Presenter Bear and Plumpy Panda scurrying for safety, maybe this is not the book for you, after all. 

It'll be your loss.

Eviction Notice

Just a little FYI for any EverQuest II players out there. There's got to be someone, right? Two weeks from today, on March 21, the Kaladim server will be merged into Antonia Bayle. The Tarinax PvP server is also merging into AB at the same time, although I'm pretty sure that's not going to affect anyone reading this.

None of this should come as much of a surprise. It was in the roadmap, after all. I confess I'd completely forgotten about it, all the same. According to that schedule, Tarinax will be replaced by a new PvP-TLE server next month but there's no new PvE-TLE server this year, hardly surprising since the most recent, Varsoon, hasn't yet unlocked the third expansion, 2006's Echoes of Faydwer.

Kaladim is "only" four years old. I put only in inverted commas because I remember when John Smedley speculated in an interview that the original EverQuest might, with luck, last three to five years. EQ is twenty-four this month. EQII will be nineteen later this year.

Still, by modern standards, four years isn't much of a run. I was surprised when I logged in this morning  to see the announcement. I'd have thought Kaladim might have had a while longer to go before the inevitable roll-up. It just goes to show the industrial nature of Daybreak's special rules server operation, I guess. They roll out, they roll on, they roll up. No drama. And now I come to think of it, at the automated pace of Time-Limited Server unlocks, I suppose four years is the full, expected life.

The process is streamlined to a fault. There's an astonishingly re-assuring FAQ on what you need to do to prepare: in short, nothing. Over the years, during what must by now amount to dozens of similar events, every possible problem has been revealed and solved. Banks, houses, inventory, mail, even those dungeons you made to store tens of thousands of housing items (Yep, that really is what the hardcore decorators use that old, mothballed feature for.) it all just moves seamlessly across.

About the worst that's likely to happen is you might get an x or two added to the end of your name. That's happened to me a few times, even though I generally pick very unlikely names. For Kaladim, though, I chose something so obvious I was excited enough to have snagged it I made a post about it. I'll be miffed to lose my rights to Lana. I never did give her that surname...

I'm actually mildly irritated to find the server is folding at all. It's not as if I play there often but I have been in the habit of dropping by for the holidays to do some quests, pick up a few sticks of furniture, maybe a hat... I had things quite nicely set up and I particularly liked the way everything Lana owns is something she's picked up for herself at low level by doing the kind of things someone who lived in a world like that might feasibly do for fun or profit.

Of course, it will all transfer with her, unchanged, but it won't have the same metaphysical imprimatur. It's the sort of thing that used to mean a great deal to me, when I took virtual worlds a lot more seriously than I do now. Vestiges of that level of attachment still surface occasionally.

I also don't much like Antonia Bayle. It used to be the official roleplaying server - may still be, for all I know - and for a long time it was by some margin the most highly-populated. Then something happened to it - I don't know what - and the population crashed to the point that Daybreak were actively trying to encourage people to transfer there for a while.

I'm guessing it's still the lowest population of the mainstream servers because every merge seems to take Ant Bayle as its destination these days. I don't have anyone there at the moment but only because the last time this happened I moved somewhere else before I was pushed. 

You can do that because Daybreak is happy to give you the choice if you care enough to take it. As the FAQ explains, "Right now, if you log in to your character, you will find a character transfer token that will allow you to pick the server to which you wish to transfer. You will be able to use this token until the servers come down for the merge on March 21, 2023."

I'm going to get right on that as soon as I finish this post. I haven't decided yet where to go. All my other characters bar one are on Skyfire so that's the obvious choice but moving there will strip away any residue of originality that might be left. Once on Skyfire, Lana will have access to all the wealth and resources of my high-level characters, instantly rendering her insignificant and meaningless to play.

In fact, her very isolation over on Kaladim was what held my interest in how she was doing. It was a small reminder of the way I used to play, when I'd regularly start new characters on fresh servers just for the pleasure of having to raise them by their own bootstraps. In the case of Kaladim, I particularly appreciated the way certain overpowering Veteran and special event  items I'd normally have been able to claim on any character I made were blocked until the server caught up with the apropriate era, although it's fair to say that by now all those have unlocked anyway.

Not counting Kaladim, Tarinax, Test and Beta, there are currently eight servers to choose from: the aforementioned Antonia Bayle and Skyshrine plus Halls of Fate and Maj`Dul all use the standard ruleset, while Isle of Refuge is the "Free Trade" server and the most recent addition, Kael Drakkel, is flagged "Lore and Legend". The current TLE server, which, as I said, is Varsoon, also uses a free trade ruleset and the final server is the EU-based Thurgadin.

I'm still mulling over my choice of destination. I'm tempted to give Varsoon a try. If not, I might go to Isle of Refuge. They both at least offer the possibility of something different to the experience I can already get on Skyfire. I already have a character on Kael Drakkel, where you start at 90 and stay there because everything, everywhere is the same level. I tried it for a while but I really couldn't see the point so I won't be going back.

I note that the instructions on the server transfer token, unlike those in the FAQ, do stress that shared banks, mail and broker boxes need to be cleared before moving, so there's some housekeeping I'll need to attend to before I leave. With the deadline just a couple of weeks away, I suppose I'd best get started.

I've Got My Glasses On My Face

Anyone remember Flyff? I wrote about it in June last year, when the seventeen-year old game was being re-launched as Flyff Universe. At the time, the U.K. was in the grip of a heatwave and my main reason for mentioning it was the attraction of being able to play it in a browser, thereby reducing the risk of my PC bursting into flames. 

The weather cooled off and I stopped playing. I haven't thought about the game since. Until this morning, when I received an email. No introductions or greetings, just this massive flyer.

Mmorpgs don't really let you forget about them any more. Not if they have your socials. They send you emails and tweets and probably ask your mother on Facebook how you're doing these days. (I really don't know how Facebook works.)

I used to be largely immune to this sort of passive-aggressive marketing. I used throwaway email addresses to sign up for games I was trying out and then never looked at those email addresses again. In recent years, though, as I've found myself returning to any number of old games, either out of curiosity, nostalgia or in the hope of finding something to post about, I've fallen into the habit of linking those dusty email addresses to the one I look at every day. 

I'm not sure what that does to my security levels but it certainly means I don't miss out on as many "Please come back! We really miss you!" campaigns and their associated freebies, handouts and outright bribes. 

It works, too. I can see why they all do it. I can't resist a freebie at the best of times and they make it seem so easy. Sometimes it even is.

Coming back to Flyff really could not have been any easier. All I had to do was find my old login details. The game runs in a browser so there was no downloading or updating. When I logged in, the first thing I noticed was a gift. It was right there on my hotbar, waiting for me.

I jumped to the conclusion that it was the welcome back for lapsed players because, as you can tell, I hadn't actually bothered to read the email in any detail. As I crop and edit the screenshots for this post, I realize it wasn't that at all. It was a "Global Launch Gift". I was under the impression the global launch had already happened back when I made an account last June but I'm happy to be corrected if it means more free stuff.

I wasn't a hundred percent sure what to do with the thing so I clicked it and it vanished. At that point I might have welcomed a little more information but I am a veteran of these giveaways, after all. I knew enough to look in my inventory to see if it had magically moved itself there. It had.

I opened it up to see what was inside. There was a lot of stuff. You can see it all listed out there, over to the right.   Most of it was the usual boosts and buffs, very welcome for anyone planing on taking the game seriously but not much more than inventory clutter to the casual visitor.  But there were two very interesting items at the head of the list that caught my eye right away; wings and glasses. 

What is it about glasses in mmorpgs? In real life, a set of frames balanced on the bridge of your nose rarely adds to a person's mystique but in games they're cool as hell. I love a good pair of glasses. As for wings... I don't think any more needs to be said.

I clicked on the Lucky Black Glasses Box and another window popped up. The game really seemed to be taking this thing seriously. At first sight the meaning of the list wasn't immediately clear. I glanced at it and didn't grasp the full implications. All the glasses are black. All the glasses are slatted. There are percentages that presumably represent your chance of winning each of them. 

And there are some numbers followed by an ellipsis, suggesting something has been left out or cut off. It was only after I'd hit the "Open" button and received my pair that I began to understand what it was.

The glasses I received were time-limitted to seven days use after first use. Those are the ones you have a 20% chance of receiving. It could have been worse. I could have had glasses for three days (30% chance) or just a single day (34%).

I guess I should be happy to get even a week's wear out of them but I'm not. I don't like time-limited items in mmorpgs. The whole concept seems mean-spirited. I realize it's a way to bring in some steady income in a F2P title that can't rely on monthly subscription income but I still find the whole thing annoying. 

I would never pay money for a loaner, even though logically it makes as much sense as paying a sub. Getting one for free is acceptable but still, somehow, disappointing.That said, they look great. And it's not even as though I'm going to be playing the game long enough for them to expire whie I'm using them. I probaly won't even log in again after today, at least not until they send me another email telling me I can get something else for free.

On the other hand, had I been one of the one-percenters who got a set of black slatted glasses for permanent use, I know I'd have been quite unreasonably smug about it, so I really have no moral high ground to stand on here. I'm just complaining for the sake of it, which is the prerogative of the blogger, is it not?

After the glasses I moved on to the wings. Those, I'm pleased to say, are yours to keep for as long as the game lasts. Which, given it's coming up to its eighteenth anniversary, could yet be a while.

They look pretty good, too. I'm happy with them, although it's a pity "you can't fly with them" as the description explains. Given that Flyff is literally a game built around flying - the very name is an acronym for Fly-For-Free - it does seem a bit churlish to be giving away dud wings.

Moan, moan, moan! That's all you do. And yes, there's some truth in that. Mostly, though, I'm just pleased to get stuff handed to me for doing nothing. Even if I'm never going to make much use of any of it.

That said, I do still have a vague ambition to get far enough into Flyff one day to be able to fly. It seems weird that it's not something you can do right from the start. I think I might have to look into it to see just how long it takes and how difficult is to get there.

For all its modernization as it morphs from plain old Flyff to Flyff Universe, with a revamp due some time very soon for yet another makeover to Flyff Universe Reborn  (Pre-register now if you want yet more freebies!), Flyff is a pretty traditional, old-school game. I found that out this morning as I was trotting through the trees looking for ambulating mushrooms to complete a quest.

 

I'm not talking so much here about the mechanics, although those would feel very familiar to any player newly arrived in a time machine from 2005, but the way players approach them. It's a good old while since I last received a throrough overbuffing from a passing stranger but it happened to me this morning within minutes. I remember it happening to me in Rose Online, another retro title of similar vintage last year, too.

It used to be the thing to do back in the early noughties. High level players would hang out in starter areas, blessing lesser levels with their powerful damage shields and regens. A good buffing could turn a newbie into an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction. Some people got so addicted to the feeling of power they wouldn't leave the village until they'd been buffed up to a diamond-hard glare.

It wasn't as simple as handing out a couple of buffs and moving on, either. There used to be all kinds of etiquette associated with the process. You could as easily get yelled at in tells as receive a grateful bow. The whole thing might be worth a post of its own, some day, if I can bring myself to write it.

I was generally in favor of the practice, although there were times when it could be disruptive or unwelcome, but the one thing I really didn't appreciate were the self-appointed guardian angels, who buffed you  then hung around to make sure you made good use of their largesse. As a new player, the last thing I wanted as I familiarised myself with my class was someone following five paces behind, watching every damn thing I did.

The person who buffed me this morning was one of those. In retrospect, my mistake was probably saying "Thanks!". I should have just stayed silent, as if I hadn't even noticed. At the very least I shouldn't have added that cheery exclamation mark. 

Thanks to the extremely overpowering buffage, I finished my quest in seconds, one-shotting everything. It was fun and I would have carried on but the person who'd buffed me, who now seemed to have me on auto-follow, ran behind me all the way to the questgiver as I went to do my hand-in and then stood around waiting to see what I was going to do next.

What I did was log out, which was exactly what I used to do back in the day when something like this happened. I'm all for a quick conversation, a friendly wave and a name to add to my friends list but if you want to avoid acquiring a stalker it's best to be ruthless and act decisively. Get it wrong and next thing you know you're changing servers. Or games.

It is, as they say, all part of life's rich pageant. Like a lot of annoying things, when they're not there you find yourself kind of wishing they were. I'd rather have to ghost an over-enthusiastic player or two, now and then, than move through a world filled with nothing but ghosts, players who never acknowledge your existence in any way at all.

As for the game itself, I imagine I'll be back, sometime. History suggests it. One day I might even learn to fly. Me and the pigs, both. Plus, I guess I'll have to log in again if I want those daily Welcome Back rewards. It would be plain rude to turn them down, wouldn't it?

Playing By The Rules

I took a day off posting yesterday for the very good reason that I couldn't immediately think of anything I wanted to post about. I could certainly have come up with something if I'd tried but I didn't feel like trying all that hard so I didn't bother. Everyone always said that Bart Simpson was a bad influence. 

Today I'd normally be working, so I wouldn't be posting anyway, but I'm on holiday, so since I didn't post yesterday I guess I should today. Is that how it works? I don't know. I lost my blogging rulebook a while ago.

The only problem is, I don't really have much more of an idea what to post about now than I did twenty-four hours ago. Maybe I'll just do one of those Friday Grab Bag posts but on a Sunday. Actually, Sunday seems like a better day for it, wouldn't you say?

The First Rule Of Fight Club

Let's start with something with some socio-cultural heft to it, why don't we? Although the hysteria over Non-Disclosure Agreements seems to have subsided somewhat of late. I remember a while back when it was a hot topic in mainstream news. I guess it might still be. I stopped paying attention the news about, oh, I guess it must be eighteen months ago now. 

I get a ton of cultural updates on everything from gaming to movies to the arts from a number of sources but I opted out of all politics and general news channels, both online and off, towards the end of the second pandemic year. What with Brexit and covid it had all become so deeply inflected and recursive there seemed little point listening any more. If anything important I genuinely need to know about happens, it either seeps into my attention via cultural osmosis or Mrs Bhagpuss will tell me. Otherwise, I don't need to hear about it.

Back when I was less hermetic, I remember there being a lot of talk about how NDAs were very bad things that were threatening the future of free speech as we know it. That mostly seemed to apply to the kind of documents handed out by one celebrity's lawyers to another's or from some megacorp's legal department to someone's literary agent. No-one was really talking about the NDAs I get asked to sign from time; the ones you have to accept before they let you test a video game these days.

My problem with NDAs for unreleased games is that these days I pretty much only want to "test" them so I can blog about what they're like. Once upon a time, in the ancient past, I wanted to get in because it was so gosh-darned thrilling just to be accepted. Like joining some kind of elite club. If I got in, I took the whole thing as seriously as if it was an actual job. Later, when beta tests ran for months, even years, I wanted to get in so I could play the game as though it was already live.

Familiarity killed the thrill and the commitment. Early Access killed the need. Nowadays, I'm happy to wait until the gates open to the public, which is generally around the same stage of development I'd have gotten into an old school closed beta anyway.

No-one puts an NDA on Early Access or open beta so it makes sense to wait. As I said, my main motivation is usually the opportunity to get a few blog posts out of the experience. Games like Noah's Heart that I go on playing day after day, month after month, are extreme outliers. A swift flick through the blog's back pages will show my average stay in a new mmorpg or fellow traveler rarely sees out the month.

Still doesn't stop me applying for testing programs, though. For one reason it's rarely clear up front whether there's going to be an NDA or not. Some developers follow the old "All publicity..." homily, even now. And then, not all NDAs are the same. Sometimes they're tight enough to choke on but other times there's plenty of give. I'm more than happy to sign up to a "No Livestreaming" clause if I'm allowed to  wax cynical in prose.

In the past year or two, I've made my decision at the point of signing. If I get an invite, I read the NDA. All of it. Carefully. Mostly, that's the end of it. I decline to sign and move on. On that basis, I've skipped a couple of in-development games I really wanted to see, which I'll almost certainly buy and play when they release. In at least one case, I'm still not convinced declining was the best decision, either. 

Then, a couple of days ago, for some reason and none, I signed one. And that's the last I'm going to say about that. I have another couple of applications pending for games I'm arguably more interested in. If either of those comes through I'll probably sign up there, too. Or maybe I won't. Whether I do or not, no-one's going to know about it. These things are so strict you can't even tell anyone you've been accepted. 

Fight Club has a lot to answer for. 

I've never seen Fight Club, by the way. Or maybe I have. If I had, I wouldn't tell you, now would I?

The First Rule of Tufty Club

My god, that ages me. Or does it? Tufty Club feels like it was even before my time. I only heard about it. I never was in it. 

Oh, wait, does everyone know what Tufty Club was? Because I'm awkward and because it amuses me, I'm going to give you this link to explain it. Apparently Tufty was doing his thing right into the seventies but I swear I only ever knew him as something that happened before I was born.

Anyway, the point of Tufty Club was to tell everyone about road safety, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything I'm going to say here. I only mentioned it at all because I was trying to think of the antithesis of Fight Club and it was the first club that popped into my mind. Which, I guess, tells you plenty about what's in there. 

The extremely labored and unconvincing segue I was going for would have had something to do with secrecy and openness but I think we can all agree it's not going to come together. Also, the first rule of Tufty Club would have probably been "Look both ways before you cross the road", which is just confusing the issue even more. All it was supposed to do was introduce a little "What I've Been Playing" section, anyway. Geez! What a totally overblown and unecessary introduction for such a mundane topic. 

Anyway, we got there eventually. So, what have I been playing? Noah's Heart, obvs. I'm level 99 now, closing in on the big three figures. It doesn't stop there, either. I saw someone who was level 105 the other day. I could give you about a dozen more kinds of levels I'm chasing there as well but I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say I'm playing every day and enjoying it a lot, still.

Other than that, one of the big games of my week has been the really excellent Artifact Krewe, which is not only one of the most aesthetically pleasing, visually gorgeous games I've ever played but also a lot more nuanced and layered than I expected. Skrool, the develper, really ought to think about remaking it without the proprietary Guild Wars 2 content and releasing it commercially. It's more than good enough.

The other is Nine Noir Lives, which has also turned out to be deeper than I expected. Okay, not deeper. It's still a jokey, "wouldn't it be funny if everyone was a cat?", Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe pastiche. Nothing's changed there. The depth I'm talking about is the sheer quantity of dialog chains and the exceptionally diligent way the developers seem to have anticipated every possible interaction and crafted an appropriate response for it. 

There are some generic "That doesn't need peanuts" results when you try to add peanuts to someone's shoe (Just as a frinstance.) but most everything gets an individual outcome, which just makes me want to ram all the things together to see what happens. That'll be why I'm still in Act One but loving it.

Some of the puzzles are a bit too puzzling for me but I have a solid walkthrough to help with that. I've only needed to glance at it a handful times and only for long enough to get a hint. The solutions are all very fair, once you get a nudge in the right direction.

I did start Blacksad and liked the graphics, characters and writing quite a bit but it's waaaaay more actiony than I expected. The quicktime games are relentless. I'd have to be in the mood and I mostly haven't been. 

As for Baldur's Gate, I claimed it, downloaded it, installed it, made a character and logged out. It looks very slick on the screen. A good job of bringing it up to date, I'd say. I spent a while investigating voice packs to see if I could track down the old Daria set I used to have but since the top Google search for "Daria soundpack Baldur's Gate"goes to a post on this blog, I think I can forget about it. I'm never reliving that experience, sad to say.

The First Rule of Celebrity Club

Okay, I know "Celebrity Club"'s not a thing but it is really, isn't it? We all know it. Just like we all know the first rule there has to be "Have famous parents". 

There's been a lot of kerfuffle in my media feeds of late concerning "Nepo Babies", which is a band name if ever I heard one. It seems like the most ridiculous twaddle to me. So, knowing people in the line of work you hope to follow opens doors and having the same name gets you noticed. Big fricken deal. You still have to be able to Do The Work. 

Is it any different from a plumber or an elecrtrician or a garage mechanic? If it says Jenkins and Son over the door, does that mean Jenkins Jr. gets a pass on their HNDs or NVQs or whatever the hell set of initials you need these days? You still have to know which end to hold the spanner.

Why was I thinking about this? Because when you see something standing on its head it draws your attention. Last week NME informed me out of the blue that someone called Rob Grant had an album coming out. About the only person I could think of by that name was the guy who co-wrote the overrated SciFi sitcom, Red Dwarf. I very much would not want to listen to an album by him.

Setting Sail On A Distant Horizon - Rob Grant

The Rob Grant in question, though, is someone I find one whole helluva lot more interesting. He's Lana del Rey's father. 

Lana, as you will remember, started out as Elizabeth "Lizzie" Grant, before she changed her name to May Trainor, then Lana del Ray, before finally settling on the version we know today. Her dad, it transpires, is a bit of a piano player himself. He has a co-writer credit and also plays piano on one song, Sweet Carolina, on Lana's last album, Blue Banisters. 

Ahead of the June 9th release of ‘Lost At Sea’, Grant pere's debut album, two tracks have been pushed to YouTube for our perusal and they make for pretty pleasant listening. It's a stone certainty I'd never have given them a moment's attention were it not for his daughter's name but that would have been my loss. It seems beyond ridiculous to complain about fairness just because someone's playing the cards they've been dealt.

Off the back of this unusual twist, I was going to put a whole music post together featuring tracks by children of celebrities and I may well yet get around to that but for now I'll just drop this one in from my "What I've Been Listening To" slush pile.

Moonbath - Sateen Besson

I came across this organically, somehow. As I watched the video, which even now only has just over thirteen hundred views after four months on YouTube, I found myself wondering how she got that bed into the forest. It seemed like a little much for a home-made video for an unknown's first song.

It did, in fact, seem me like the sort of thing you might expect from a famous movie director known for startling, dreamlike imagery. Someone like Luc Besson, for example. So I googled her and of course "Sateen Besson is a French rising Instagram model, social media influencer, and actress who boasts a significant fan base on Instagram. Additionally, she is renowned for being the daughter of the famous French director and screenwriter Luc Besson".

It's a good tune and I'm glad to have heard it. I'm even gladder to have heard this one, which sadly doesn't have a dreamlike video to go with it. If Sateen's family connections add anything, it's interest above and beyond the work itself. You have to womder if she asked her dad for tips on how to get that bed out there. Not to mention how to get it back. 

In the end, everyone has a past, everyone has a family and as the saying goes, you can't choose your relations. If only, eh?

I have more but that's probably enough for a Sunday. Or any day, come to that.

Buffy By The Book

For Christmas, among many other things, I got half a dozen Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. Before the end of January I'd read them all. I enjoyed myself so much, I bought another three and last week I finished those, too. They took just as long to read because they were each twice the length of most of the first batch.

Having now read nine Buffy novels, an uncommitted observer might assume I'd have read most of them. They would be very wrong. According to the Buffyverse wiki, there are well over a hundred, including the short story anthologies and the titles focusing on individual characters like Angel, Willow, Xander, Cordelia and even Spike and Drusilla.

Even though the TV show ended its seven season run with a genuine and satisfying conclusion twenty years ago, novels have continued to appear ever since. The next, The Bewitching Hour, featuring Willow's ill-fated girlfriend Tara, is scheduled for publication in August.

The never-ending stream of Buffy novels may be exceptional but movie and TV novelizations that set out to retell the plots in prose form are a long-established, if little respected commercial phenomenon; one that mostly flies under the radar. It would be an exaggeration to say the sub-genre has a poor reputation in literary circles; I don't believe it has any reputation at all. 

I haven't read all that many but based on the few I have, I'd say that was shortsighted. William Kotzwinkle's adaptation of E.T., for example, is about as demented as any of his other novels. He appears to have taken the money and then written whatever he felt like and no-one cared enough to stop him. Indeed, the publishers liked either his approach or his sales well enough to commission a sequel, E.T. and the Green Planet.

Even when the writing is barely more than functional, it's often fun to replay the storylines in your mind. I read the novelization of Pretty in Pink a couple of years ago and while it certainly didn't qualify as great literature, it not only brought the characters to life but showed them from a sufficiently different angle as to make me re-examine some of my feelings about them.

Spin-off novels from successful TV series that go on to develop original storylines are marginally more respectable than those that just follow someone else's script but even then they sit at the very foot of the genre table, itself generally positioned somewhere close to the literary establishment's back door. The low reputation is scarcely surprising, given the way quality tends to vary wildly as the IP moves from publisher to publisher and writer to writer across the years.

Bearing all of that in mind, and for no better reason than I felt like it, I thought I'd post some very short reviews of the nine Buffy books I've read so far. I'll be reading plenty more, as soon as I get my hands on some, but I don't propose to make a habit of reviewing them here. Then again...

 

Halloween Rain - 1997 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

The second-ever novel based on the TV show. There was a novelization of the original movie published five years earlier and an adaptation of the first season's storyline, entitled The Harvest, came out a couple of months before this original story but no-one gave me either of those.

Halloween Rain was the first of the Buffy novels I received that I read, naturally, since I wanted to read them in chronological order. In this, I was not following my own advice. At work, I sometimes suggest new readers not start with the first book in a long-running series because there's a significant risk the writer won't have gotten to grips with the characters or the setting right at the start. It can be off-putting. Better to begin with one of the good ones and then, if sufficient interest develops, fill in the gaps later.

Halloween Rain isn't bad enough to put you off reading any more Buffy books but I suspect that someone who hadn't already bought in to the Buffyverse wouldn't be converted on this evidence. It definitely feels like a book aimed at young readers - significantly younger than the audience the TV show attracted later in its run but probably around the age the producers expected to get when it began. The main characters don't really sound like the TV versions and the plot, featuring an evil scarecrow, is a bit labored. I got through it but not comfortably.

Coyote Moon - 1998 - John Vornholt

A significant improvement. By no means a good novel but it lopes along nicely enough. The plot revolves around a bunch of were-coyotes (It's a thing, apparently.) and a Ray Bradburyesque carnival. Characterisation is a little better but still feels off, somehow. I enjoyed it considerably more than the last one, though.

Night of the Living Rerun - 1998 - Arthur Byron Cover

The author's name was very familiar to me so I looked him up. He did the novelization of the Flash Gordon movie but I think I remember him from his association with with Harlan Ellison. The two of them even co-wrote an issue of Daredevil, although I don't believe I've read it.

The trend in quality continues upwards. This feels more like an actual novel. The non-core characters feel more solid, better defined; the plot has more nuance; the language is richer. It's still a genre potboiler but it's a decent one. 

The problem for me remains the characterization of the familiar characters from the show itself, none of whom sound quite right still. Buffy (Both the character and the show.) does rely very heavily on wisecracks and quick-fire repartee, not the easiest of styles to replicate in prose. 

Blooded - 1998 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

This is where things really begin to pick up. The authors, who seemed a little adrift in Halloween Rain, appear to have come firmly to grips with both the Scooby Gang and Sunnydale. Everything seems a lot more convincing although the dialog still struggles somewhat with the cut and thrust of teenage banter. 

The plot, which involves an ancient Chinese vampire trapped in a sword, who manages to possess Willow on a school trip to a museum, holds together very well. There's a notable shift into genre horror that will sustain and increase through the rest of the novels on this list. and the sixth Buffy novel is also consideraby longer than the rest, marking a willingness to expect more of the readership and a desire to go deeper.

Child of the Hunt - 1998 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

The first Buffy novel I can say I unequivocally enjoyed throughout. There's a major step-change at this point, although it was heralded in the previous novel. Everything now feels directed at the upper end of the YA range, rather than the lower and the focus is squarely on actual horror, not the fairground ride version. 

This book also marks what seems to be the beginning of a consistent drive by these two writers to stake out (Oh dear...) their own interpretation of the Buffyverse. Characters are introduced who will reappear in later titles and there's the beginning of an integration into the milieu of myths and legends that have little or nothing to do with vampires and demons , something that will escalate in subsequent novels by the same writing team. 

I liked this one a lot. Enough to make me want to read more by Golden and Holder. But first I had to finish the next, penned by another familiar name.

Return to Chaos - 1998 - Craig Shaw Gardner

According to Wikipedia "Craig Shaw Gardner is an American author, best known for producing fantasy parodies similar to those of Terry Pratchett". I wouldn't normally take that as a recommendation and although I've seen his name on many a public library bookshelf, until I read this, I'd never even picked up a book he'd written.

On the basis of this, I definitely wouldn't shy away from his name on a spine in future. Return to Chaos is a fast-paced, funny horror novel that comes closest so far in capturing the spirit of the early Buffy seasons. I particularly appreciated Gardner's take on Cordelia, the popular-girl frenemy just now integrating - not entirely willingly - into the gang. There's a moment late on in the book when Cordelia appears at precisely the right moment, doing precisely the right thing, when I did actually cheer out loud.

The main thing I didn't like about this one was the shoehorned-in romance between Buffy and a new character, which felt both awkward and unconvincing. Then again, the same thing happened a few times in the show, so I can hardly single out Gardner for blame there.

The Gatekeeper Trilogy - 1999 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

Although these three titles were published separately, I'm taking them together for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I bought them as a slipcased set and secondly it's very much a single, thousand-page story chopped up into three volumes.

This is the point at which, for me, all the main characters really begin to sound and act like their TV originals. Except for Cordelia, perhaps, who I thought Craig Shaw Gardner gave a fairer shout, everyone has sharper, funnier things to say and interaction between the gang feels organic and natural. Several members of the extended cast make welcome appearances in cameo or supporting roles and Sunnydale feels better represented than at any time in the preceding half dozen books.

Perhaps the most important thing to say about the trilogy, though, is that all vestiges of any genre other than horror have been jettisoned. This isn't a high school novel in any meaningful sense, even though there's possibly more talk about being in high school than ever before. The action moves from back and forth from California to Boston to Europe to alternate planes of existence, leading the cast to spend much time discussing ways to avoid being expelled for continued absence from school but the upshot is always that the world needs saving so school can just damn well wait. Added to that, at least half the main characters now seem to be adults.

As well as being the most focused and coherent storyline so far, I also found parts of it to be the most challenging. As the geographical and social landscape shifts, so to does the moral ground beneath the Scoobies' philosophical feet. There are some very uncomfortable and morally repugnant scenes involving torture and murder, during which characters make choices I was and am not comfortable with them having made. It's just as well these novels are considered non-canonical. I'm not sure there's anything comparably amoral in the show itself.

The plot of the trilogy is absolutely relentless. There's a lot of action, a lot of fighting, a lot of puzzling and detective work and endless death, dismemberment and destruction. It feels like a war novel in places and gets so dark that Spike and Drusilla's scenes feel like light relief, which is disturbing as hell when you stop to think about who they are and what they're doing.

Even though it's by the same authorial team, The Gatekeeper Triology feels like Helter Skelter compared to Halloween Rain's Yellow Submarine. Where things go after this I can't begin to guess but then the show went places surely no-one could have predicted when it began. I'm keen to find out if the novels follow.

I Killed Bambi

So. That music post I was going to do. The one I kept hinting at. Well, I'm not going to do it any more. Probably. It sounded like a good idea but it turned out to be not so good after all once I'd gotten into it. I mean, I'm not saying never. Probably don't ever say never. Okay, to some things, yes, sure, but not to ideas for posts about music. That's a door that doesn't need to be closed for good, just pushed shut for a while.

I guess it wouldn't do any harm to say what it was. It's not like it was a big thing, after all. It's all this hedging and hemming that's made it sound like it was something. Which it was not. Well, okay, it was something. Everything's something. It just wasn't anything much.

See, what happened was, there was this piece on Stereogum about a new EP by audiobooks (Who really should think about that name, btw.) and I watched the video for the track Burnt Pictures, which you can see here , if you didn't already, and I liked it so I went to YouTube and watched some more of their stuff, which was when I saw this one, which I liked best of all of them.

He Called Me Bambi - audiobooks

Creepy, isn't it? In, as they say, a good way, although how something can be creepy in a good way is hard to explain. Language is fun. Anyway, one thing listening to it did was put me in mind of a band I hadn't thought of for a long time- the Bambi Slam. 

I had a twelve-inch single by the Bambi Slam back in the '90s that I used to play quite a lot. I guess I still have it, if it comes to that. It had a track on called "Hit Me With Your Hairbrush" that I remembered as being pretty good and I thought I might enjoy listening to it again. 

It stands up alright although it's a bit more psychobilly than I recalled. Reminds me of the Screaming Blue Messiahs, about whom I have an anecdote I do not propose to repeat here. It also made me wonder how many other songs about Bambi or bands with Bambi in their name there might be.

Answer: way more than you would ever imagine. I ran it through Lyrics.com and got 

It really didn't help that "bambi" appears to be a word in its own right in a whole bunch of languages, including meaning "baby" in Yoruba, which I'm guessing is where Walt Disney got the name from in the first place. 

I was still keen at that point. I spent a couple of hours trying out likely candidates. Anything that looked like it might be funny or strange or even maybe actually good. It wasn't a great couple of hours, if I'm honest. When I came to review, even the ones I'd flagged as possibles weren't all that wonderful.

So, I'm gonna shelve the Bambi Project for now. Maybe one day I'll have both the time and the enthusiasm to shuffle through those thousand-plus results in search of half a dozen good ones but that day is not going to be today.

And it doesn't need to be because I have far more new-to-me tunes I want to share than can fit in one post. There will have to be cullage. Which is a word, in case you were wondering.

Incorrect - King of Cats

Remember Garden Center from last week? This is the band lead singer Max Levy was in before that. He's toned it down some since then, hasn't he? Before King of Cats (Or possibly at the same time.) he was in Joanna Gruesome, who I vaguely remember. They're good too but I'm saving them for next time. It'll be good to have some continuity.

All I Got - Frost Children

The past is nice but the future's in the present. Then again, hyperpop feels like it's already slipping backwards. I came in too late, I think. The new 100 Gecs record just sounds like pop-punk revivalism to me. Okay, not "just" but too much. It's like when Poppy veered off into metal. Sometimes you have to get off the train.

Tides - Sadie

Yeah but not yet. Not when there are people out there making music as lush and dreamy as this. Keywords: woozy, hypersaturated, liminal. But is it even hyperpop? I listened to some of her other stuff (All good.) and it sounded more like synthwave to me. But what do I know?

Haffmilch Holiday - Decisive Pink (Jane Weaver remix)

I thought it was about time we heard something from Jane. I'd prefer a new album but remixes are always interesting. The original sounds quite Jane Weaveresque so it's not that much of a makeover. She mostly thickens it up a lot, makes it sound less tinny. She's touring the US right now so here's your chance to go see the magic happen.

Barley - Water From Your Eyes

Art rock. Doncha just? Bits of this are almost bluesy. I don't have a lot to say about it other than that so let's move on.

Idaho Alien - Youth Lagoon

There's a backstory to this guy, I think. He used to record as Youth Lagoon then he stopped for a few years and went with his real name, Trevor Powers, instead. Now he's back as Youth Lagoon again. I imagine it means something but I couldn't tell you what. 

I will tell you, though, that he makes great videos or has them made for him. (This one's "Shot, directed, and edited by Tyler T. Williams.") I watched several and they're like little mini movies. Worth searching out, especially if you want to see what small towns in Idaho look like. Jane Weaver's playing the Treefort Music Festival in Boise, Idaho in three weeks' time as part of an absolutely insanely huge line-up, including a whole bunch of people I'd love to see. Frost Children are going to be there. Dirk Gently is right; everything is connected.

In Verona - Lael Neale

While we're on an art kick, how about eight minutes of drone inspired by Romeo and Juliet? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

It's on SubPop, which always makes me suspicious. Videos on Vevo do, too, although if pushed I'd struggle to explain why. I need to get over these unreasoning prejudices.

Bummer - Midnight Lobster

And finally, because I think we all deserve a bit of cheering up after the last two, here's something that made me grin like a monkey. I love everything about it, from the keyboard player's maxi-dress to the singer's face paint to the handclaps. I particularly love how much it sounds like the wonderful Camera Obscura. If only more bands did, what happier people we'd all be.

Can't resist quoting some of the lyrics, too. How's this for a couplet?

"can't find my lover , coz they are fucker 

don't even bother, you're just a bummer"

Says it all, don't you think?

Steam And Glyph, Sitting In A Tree

That Frankenstein's Monster of a mash-up above is what happens when you go to play Rift through Steam these days. It's what happened to me, anyway. You may be luckier.

I often think of dipping back into Rift, when I see the name in my Steam library. Once in a while I take the plunge and when I do I usually potter around for a while, knocking out a level or two on one of my many characters, which is how I come to have more than sixty hours played.

Of course, I've actually played Rift for far, far longer than that. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it pretty much exclusively for six months from launch back in 2011, when we were in the habit of racking up a good thirty hours, even in a slow week. We both had multiple max level characters by the time we finally moved on, back to EverQuest II then The Secret World and finally Guild Wars 2.

In fact, I was still playing Rift as my main mmorpg when I started this blog. The very first post, My Bag, was about inventory management in the game. I was taking the name of the blog very literally back then. 

In that post, I was pontificating about an incoming "quality of life" change that would make managing inventory easier. I was against it. "This is the kind of service I try my hardest to avoid", I said, as I compared it to valet parking  - as though I'd ever been offered valet parking by anyone, anywhere - "I like my bags being a mess... I'll thank you to keep your hands out". 

The whole post is emblematic of how I thought back then. I really set out my stall. A dozen years on, the irony is intense. If there's one single factor that prevents me from returning to characters I used to play, in any number of old mmorpgs, it's the terrifying sight that greets me the moment I open my inventory.

I had exactly that problem today when I finally got into Rift although I had plenty of trouble even before that. The main reason I was trying to log in at all was that I'd seen a couple of news items about the game, one of which told me I could have Premium access for a couple of weeks for nothing and the other that if I didn't link my Steam account with the Glyph launcher Gamigo acquired when they bought Rift from Trion I could forget about playing for good.

I had a notion I'd already linked the two platforms at some time in the not-so-recent past so I just hit Play from my Steam library and waited to see what would happen. And waited. And waited.

After what felt like several minutes of nothing happening at all I lost patience and pressed Stop. A warning of some kind came up but I overrode it, telling the damn game to get on with it and shut down. Nothing happened. Again.

After several more subjective minutes I got really fed up and tried to close Steam, which disappeared but then reappeared instantly when I tried to re-open it, as it very well might, seeing it had only pretended to close in the first place. I tried to close it again by selecting "Close Window" from the icon in the task bar but all I got was a mesage telling me to chill while Steam closed Glyph or opened it or asked it out for coffee. The two of them were doing something together, that's all I know.

Around about then Glyph opened and Steam closed. Or vice versa. Either way I got control of my PC back so I started over. I closed both of them and restarted Steam. This time I let Steam take as long as it wanted, which was a good old while (I timed it- it was three minutes) and finally Glyph reappeared. I pressed "Play" again - on Glyph this time - and Rift finally opened for me.

I have to say this does not immediately strike me as an improvement over either the old system, where I just fired up Steam, Play in Steam and a few seconds later I was in the game, or the older old system, where I just fired up Glyph, pressed Play and a few seconds later I was in the game or the oldest old system, where I just clicked on a desktop shortcut to the executable in the Rift folder and a few seconds later... you get the idea.

I also have to say I can't see the point of having Rift installed in Steam any more, if all Steam does is open Glyph. I might just as well go straight to Glyph and cut out the middle man. And I would, if I knew where it was. Only I can't find it because the Search function in my installation of Windows 10 is broken, but that's another story altogether. 

It's just as well I don't really want to play Rift, I guess. Or rather, having played it for about an hour, I'm good for another few months. By then, maybe Steam and Glyph will have gotten their act together.

I did have fun while I was playing, though, as I think the screenshots confirm. There's a good game there, still, somewhere, if you can just find the bloody thing.