Do You Come Here Often?

This week is Introduce Yourself Week in Blaugust. Of course, this not being my first Blaugust, I may have done this a few times already... in 2018, 2019, 2020 (In April for Blapril that time...) and last year. I seem to have skipped 2021 for some reason but since I'm always talking about myself (It's my favorite topic of conversation.) I'm sure there was something in there, too.

So, what is there to say for another year that I haven't said already? A lot, in theory, but once you factor out the things no-one would be interested and the things I don't want to put on record, probably not much at all.

So rather than go over the dry facts of my age, my employment and my education like I was drafting my CV (Resume, if you prefer. It's in a foreign language either way and I don't just mean linguistically.) or tell a bunch of stories about things that happened so long ago I've half forgotten if they even did, I thought I might cleave to the original purpose of this blog and to a large extent of Blaugust itself and say something about my gaming and my blogging and how they go together.

I'm not going to rehash the argument I keep having with myself about whether or not I'm a gamer. I think if you can say you've been playing games for all of your adult life, even as you're just about to hit state pension age, it's a little self-serving to start claiming you're not a gamer. 

When I say "gamer", I should probably clarify. I mean video gamer. Even a handful of years ago I wouldn't have needed to bother making that clear but these days it might as easily be board games. I'd say there'd been a resurgence or a renaissance but really was there ever a time when board games held anything even close to the cultural position they've assumed recently? If so, I missed it.

My video game history is straightforward. It started with one of those home systems that played Pong, moved through arcade games but not arcades themselves because all the machines I played were in pubs. Not surprising. I was already of legal drinking age when they began to appear. (Eighteen is legal drinking age where I come from, by the way.)

From there it's the Atari 2600 and ZX Spectrum in the 'eighties, when I'd be playing games at least a little most weeks, some weeks a lot. Then there's a gap of maybe four or five years when I didn't really play video games at all until in the mid-90s I bought a PC with the intention of using it to write a novel but instead ended up first playing adventure games and offline RPGs before taking the fatal plunge into online gaming with EverQuest in late 1999.

And so began my lost decade, when I probably averaged forty hours a week playing MMORPGs and any time I wasn't playing I was most likely reading or writing or talking about them. I came out of that gradually, not because my interest waned so much as because it diversified as the games and the genre changed.

I've written prodigiously all my life and gaming, even relatively obsessively, never put a dent in that. I wrote constantly but ephemerally while I played, leaving countless thousands of words on forums and in comment threads, never to be read again. 

I like that. I'm a strong believer in the ephemeracy of popular culture. Almost all of this stuff is made to be forgotten, especially the best of it, so we should be comfortable knowing that anything we say about it will go the same way. 

Even and still, I itched a little for more permanency. Self-contradiction is a virtue. I started this blog a dozen years after I started EQ and I'm still here a dozen years on. The words sit there now for anyone to see but of course they're no more read than all those tears in the rain that came before. We fool ourselves if we thnk otherwise but potential carries power, all the same. If something could happen, it could have happened and that's warming.

The blog I made, as I imagined it, was an MMORPG blog. Not even a gaming blog. With small exceptions, MMORPGs were all I played. Over time two things changed; I played other games and I wrote about other things. But I still mostly played MMORPGs and I still mostly wrote about them.

And now I don't. Not either. Not really.

It wasn't a choice. I didn't sit down and give myself a good talking to, tell myself enough was enough, it'd been a good run but to all things there's a season and it was time for a change blah blah blah and all like that. Nope. I just drifted.

Where I drifted to tells you something. It tells me something, anyway. I was thinking today about whether I'd rather play games or write about them and I realized I couldn't even give that a straight answer. Obviously, I want to do both but day to day what's my split? I dunno. You tell me.

Then I started to push that out into others of my interests - music, books, movies, TV, all the corrupt faculties of the culture. Every one of them I'd do if I didn't write about them but the more I do any of them the more I want to record what I think and feel about it. Record and re-order. And share. 

Why did this blog shift focus a few years back to bring in all of the above as well as games? Was it because I wasn't finding enough in the games to fill the pages or was it that once I'd given myself permission to write about the other things I enjoyed I found I myself enjoying those things more and wanting to do more of them? Did that leave less room for the games? Is that what it was?

These are rhetorical questions. Don't go expecting answers. If I gave any they'd change tomorrow. I contain multitudes as Walt Whitman liked to say, which is just another way of saying I can't make up my mind.

If you'd asked me a few days ago if I was losing interest and enthusiasm for gaming, specifically online gaming, specifically MMORPGs, I'd have said oh yes, I am and I can prove it. Just look at the hours I don't play. It's a rare day when I put in more than an hour or two. Mostly I just do some dailies and we all know that's not playing.

Maybe a couple of times a week I might stretch to three or four hours across the whole day. An hour in the morning, another in the afternoon, a couple in the evening. Even then, though, how much would be gaming qua gaming and how much just gathering information to post about gaming? I think we know.

But then today I was going to write this post and guess what? I didn't want to because I wanted to play Palia. And guess what? I played Palia. 

Still only for a couple of hours but I'll play more after this. And I don't even think Palia is that amazing. It's more that it's new and it's clean and sharp and it has a few things for me to do that I haven't done to death already. And that had me thinking about other games I've played these last few years and how it seems, when the right hook dangles, I still get caught just the same.

It's tempting to think that after forty years the hook just needs better bait but I'm not seeing that so much with music or books or any of those other attractions I mentioned. I keep biting there. It keeps tasting so good.

So maybe I should just shut up. It seems I can't even say for certain if or how much I like gaming any more so what's the chance of revealing anything deeper? 

These introductions kind of rely on us knowing who we are and that's a life's work. Part of the reason I write this blog is to find out and if you keep reading it you'll likely end up knowing as much about me as I'm willing to let be known, which may well be more than you want and will certainly be more than you need.

In time, it may be even as much as I know, myself.

 

*** Glossary of Illustrations ***

#1 Blaugust 2023 masthead. Provided as part of the Blaugust Press Kit.

#2 Generated in NightCafe by the prompt "Board gaming night in the Renaissance." Model used: SDXL 1.0

#3  Generated in NightCafe by the prompt "An arcade gaming machine in a British pub in the 1980s. In color." Model used: Stable Diffusion 1.5

#4 Generated in NightCafe by the prompt "A gallery exhibiting a pop art painting called "The ephemeracy of popular culture"" Model used: Stable Diffusion 1.5

#5 Generated in NightCafe by the prompt "I wanted to play Palia. And guess what? I played Palia." Model used: Stable Diffusion 1.5

 

Stuck In The Middle

Or towards the end. Or almost at the beginning. Not, in any event, completed.

At time of writing I have five TV shows in the rotation, two on Prime, two on Netflix and one on its own, probably not entirely legal, platform. They are:

• Good Omens 2
• Two Broke Girls
• Edens Zero
• Young Sheldon
• The Owl House

Three comedy-dramas and two sitcoms. Or if you prefer two live action shows, a cartoon and an anime. Or maybe two mainstream shows, two fantasies and one science-fiction. There's a lot of ways to box these things.

I'm not watching an episode of each of them every day. I was, before Good Omens 2 came along. The other four are all "Half-hour" shows, meaning episodes vary in length from about 21 to 28 minutes (Another way to divide them up) and I can watch four half-hours back to back, in my allotted viewing time of 90-120 minutes but Good Omens 2 runs somewhere closer to 45-50 minutes, so every time I watch an episode of that, I have to decide which of the other four to skip. So far, it's been Edens Zero every time.

Since I'm talking about Edens Zero, let's start there. God forbid we'd stick to the order as I've written it down.

Edens Zero

I don't believe in the concept of "guilty pleasures". Okay, I do, kinda, but to qualify it would have to be an interest you genuinely would not willingly allow anyone else to know you were indulging in, so by definition you wouldn't be posting about it on the internet.

Edens Zero is just a bit embarrassing to admit to, mostly because it comes laced with a strong element of adolescent smut. I'd rather it didn't but it's not awkward enough to stop me watching because other than that it's fast, funny and smart. 

The anime is a spin-off from a manga that's been serialized weekly since 2018. I know even less about manga than I do about anime and it was news to me there were weekly collections. That old saw about the similarities between the cultures of Britain and Japan keeps running true.

I'm twenty-two episodes into the twenty-five episode first season, which is the only one Netflix has the rights to show. I'll probably have to watch the second season on Crunchyroll.

The plot is marginally more coherent than some other anime shows I've tried. It veers crazily off-course occasionally but mostly it keeps to the mainline and I'm finding it fairly easy to follow, although don't let that fool you into believing I'm saying it makes any sense.

The big draw for me, as usual, are the characters, all of whom are distinctive, even the minor roles and bit players. It always helps a lot if there are characters I like and in Edens Zero I like most of the main cast, particularly Rebecca, Happy, Pino, Homura and the Four Shining Stars. 

It's not co-incidental that all of those are either female or non-human. The main male characters tend to be quite annoying, particularly the central character and primary protagonist Shiki, who is hyperactive to the point exhaustion, and Weisz, who I just want to slap. 

The animation can also be a tad sugar-crazed but only in short bursts. There are long passages where people just stand around and talk quite normally with no-one's jaw dropping wider than an anaconda swallowing a peccary and no-one cartwheeling untouched through a hail of bullets. Those are the parts I like best.

As well as the space-opera setting, which I always enjoy, there's a good deal of light satire on contemporary pop culture and social trends, most of which is nicely observed. The subplot about Rebecca's ambition to hit one million subscribers on her B-Cube account allows some good points about current social media - or social media a couple of years ago, anyway.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the shows's social agenda, though, is the insistence on all kinds of intelligences, human or artificial, being worthy of equal respect. As a metaphor for real-world prejudice it strikes home and the current technological frenzy gives it an extra edge. It's an occasionally uncomfortable reminder that boundaries exist to be broken down, not built up, and its points are mostly well-made. 

Not bad work for a smutty adolescent fantasy. 

Two Broke Girls

Talking of smut...

I only started watching Two Broke Girls because I was flat out of sitcoms and I was desperate. I'm a lifelong sitcom fan. I enjoy both the form and the execution and while I wouldn't consider myself a true afficionado, I do fancy I have some insight borne of long experience.

On the face of it, this looked like a fairly unappealing prospect. A broad comedy set in a working-class environment (Rarely a comfortable fit for the inevitably middle-class writers.) with a very strong inclination toward innuendo. A bit of a throwback to the seventies, indeed.

It had five stars on Prime from almost a thousand reviews, though, so I thought I'd at least give it a try. That was a few weeks ago. I'm just coming to the end of Season Five (Of six.) I guess the experiment was a success.

I was at least partly right. It is a throwback. It's the kind of half-hour show that would have fitted right into network schedules in the eighties. Except if it had been shown on network TV then they'd have had to edit out so many of the jokes it'd have been a five-minute show. Maybe.

That the show aired on CBS from 2011 to 2017 says a huge amount about cultural drift. The central characters are two unmarried twenty-something women who routinely have casual sex (Transactionally, at least in Max's case) habitually drink and take drugs to the point of being almost perpetually high even while at work, steal from their employer, disrespect all forms of authority and generally behave about as badly as men in sitcoms have ever behaved.

It's all but impossible to imagine such characters being deemed acceptable network fare even in the 'nineties, let alone in the glory days of Marlo Thomas or Mary Tyler Moore. As for the script, it's a constant barrage not just of sexual innuendo but of plain talk about sex and sexuality. I've never heard so many references to masturbation, vaginas, penises and breasts outside of a medical documentary. It's as if using formal words for these things rather than the usual demotics somehow frees the concepts up for family comedy.

It originally aired next to other sitcoms I've watched - How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory - neither of which is remotely as raunchy or drug-addled. At one point it was even replaced in the slot it had occupied by Supergirl, of all things. Just knowing this forces me to a degree of cultural realignment.

So much for the sociology. What about the comedy. Is it funny? Well, pretty, yes. The script isn't always that great and the topical gags, of which there are many, really don't carry a decade on, but as with all the best sitcoms it's the cast that keeps you watching. 

I'd say there's some very solid ensemble work but mostly it's an endless round of solo turns with every performer giving the next respectful space to get the laughs when their turn rolls around. Kat Dennings as Max has amazing delayed timing which she uses to enormous effect, seemingly doing nothing while controlling the pace and the tone. Beth Behrs as Caroline is much more in the scenes in traditional sitcom fashion, holding the whole thing together as a narrative. 

Everyone else pretty much does their party piece with Jennifer Coolidge (Sophie) inexplicably drawing huge but largely unconvincing cheers every time she walks through the door. I found her character quite annoying to begin with but she wore me down over five seasons. 

Is it a classic? No. It has plenty of flaws, the premise makes no sense (At all!) it's episodic to an extreme, it lacks coherency and continuity, it's occasionally (Mildly) problematic on both gender and race. As for authenticity, they keep a thoroughbred horse in the yard of their roach-infested Williamsburg appartment in a shelter built by two visiting Mormons in a barn-raising ffs! You can see where more money gets spent on the show as it becomes successful and more money doesn't always mean more laughs.

Is it a good sitcom? Yes. It's funny, likeable and as smart as it needs to be. When you hear the theme tune you feel like getting comfortable and leaning back in your chair (Or in my case, bed.) for half an hour in a small world where nothing really bad ever happens and everyone has something amusing to say. What more do you want from a sitcom?

Well, one thing you might not want but which I got is the sight of an extremely unexpected name in the production credits. One of my favorite singers, the wonderful Rachel Sweet, co-executive produced Season Five and wrote two episodes, including the truly bizarre Episode 6. It's a far cry from the second Be Stiff tour.

Or maybe not.

That ran so long (And I barely feel I got started...) I'm going to have to split this into two posts. Possibly three.

You Call That Intense?

As I was doing my due diligence, going through all of the fresh Blaugust posts popping up like mushrooms after summer rain in my blog roll yesterday, I came across MDi of the M Disk Playlist. From there I inevitably found my way to his YouTube channel and from there I ended up here, taking yet another of those psych profile tests. 

I started to watch MDi take it but as I was watching I realised I wanted to take it too so I had to stop. Part of the premise is you listen to snatches of music unfamiliar to you, which is obviously not going to work if you just watched a video of someone else listening to all of them.

The test is hosted, created and administered by Musical Universe, which began as "an academic pursuit" at my old alma mater, Cambridge University. (British people do not say "alma mater", by the way, or I never heard anyone say it, but if we have a similar expression I never heard that, either, so alma mater will have to do.)

Musical Universe is now a start-up dealing in something called "virtual music therapy" with a focus on "telehealth, neuropsychiatric screening and wellness", none of which I intend to address here in any way whatsoever. I'm just interested in how the test does on telling me what kind of  music I like. 

Spoiler: not very well, at least from my subjective point of view. Others may disagree.

It's called the Personality and Music Test, and it claims to "show how your personality type links to your music preferences". I was interested in finding out my preferences; how they linked to my personality type, not so much. 

Having completed the thing I'm not sure I'm all that much wiser about either but then I got so hung up on why it didn't even seem to be able to tell me what I liked with any accuracy I never really got around to considering whether what it said about my personality seemed accurate, let alone how the two connected.

The test consists of thirty-five questions and took me about a quarter of an hour. I also took what appears to be the original, academic version, still available here. That one is much longer. It took me the best part of forty-five minutes, including nearly nine minutes listening to a chunk of Debussy, which is nine minutes of my life I'm never getting back.

The results of both tests were... surprising. Surprising in the sense that I found them largely meaningless, something I certainly wan't expecting given the build-up. If the tests can't accurately tabulate the kinds of music I like and dislike then there's not much point trying to correlate the results with anything else.

Normally, when we all post about these kinds of tests, we have a nice, neat pie chart or infographic to display to show how we did. I don't have anything like that. Instead I have a bunch of screenshots of textual explanations of the categories and a few tables of numbers.

The presentation could certainly use some work. The   commercial, start-up version of the test is arguably the worse of the two, given the need to appeal to more than an academic audience. The academic one is... well, it's pretty much identical. They don't seem to have gussied it up at all for the general public. Maybe that's intended to add gravitas.

It's not the presentation that's the real problem. Nor is it the extensive and detailed personality testing, for which you have to answer a very great many questions indeed, especially on the academic version. All of that is pretty much par for the course whan it comes to these online tests.

No, where I have some very real issues with the process is in the music clips you're asked to listen to and the ratings you're required to give them. The audio part of the test consists of twenty-five, fifteen-second clips from various songs culled from YouTube. They're supposed to be obscure enough that you won't recognize any of them, which apparently would bias the results.

You listen to each piece then rate it according to the scale above. Simple enough but problematic for me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, almost without exception, the clips are unremarkable, bland and ordinary. Maybe fifteen seconds just isn't long enough or maybe they simply picked poor examples of the various styles. I guess insisting on songs no-one in the world is ever likely to have heard before is likely to point towards mediocrity.

Secondly, four of the nine grading options are what I would call extremes. I hardly ever like or dislike any music "Extremely" or "Very Much". Most music of all types has something interesting or enjoyable to offer but very little has boatloads of either. Again, if you're going to factor out all of the acknowledged great music from the start because too many people will recognize it, you're going to trend towards the bland and if you then ask people to grade your bland selections you're going to bias for bland scores across the board.

And that's exactly what happened. I listened to all twenty-five samples and my reaction to almost every one of them was "Meh". Most of my responses were either "Slightly" one way or the other with a few straying into "Moderately". There was little chance of anything rating "Very" or "Extremely".

I did the whole test on the commercial version first before I knew that's how it would be and my results were... bland. Everything was either "Low" or "Average". I didn't really like anything, I didn't really hate anything. The only category I rated "High" on was Contemporary and that's because those were the only clips that sounded like they had any energy at all. Everything else was so... flat. 

Even allowing for all of that, the results from that first version of the test seemed uninformative. "Average" occupies fifty per cent of the range. Given the grading system asks you to choose from nine variations that seems lacking in granularity.

It may well be the way it has to be for statisitical analysis but it really doesn't cut it for a popular test. I guess that's fair. This is not meant to be a popular test. It's supposed to be more serious than that. Which is a pity because I was hoping for something a lot fluffier and more fun.

Because I'd found the regular version unsatisfying, I went on to do the full, academic version afterwards and even though I found it infuriatingly long-winded, I found the results both more enlightening and more entertaining. Instead of a verbal description of your level of engagement with each musical style, you get a numerical score, which oddly makes the whole thing feel more, not less, accessible. 

There's also a much more detailed explanation of the methodology and how the scores are calculated, which I found quite helpful in understanding both what they indicated and how they applied to what I would consider to be my tastes.

With this extra information, I was able to pinpoint what seems to me to be a fundemental flaw in the methodology. 

I imagine anyone who's bothered to read, let alone listen to, my many music posts here would expect that I'd score fairly highly on the "Intense" preference. I have written entire posts here on punk and power pop. I've mentioned how my introduction to popular music came with an adolescent infatuation with heavy metal music. I occasionally refer to myself as an ex-punk. I was in a fricken' punk band ffs. Even my current obsession with hyperpop and various glitchy soundcloud subgenres seems to me to feed directly into a preference for intensity in music.

So why do I score lowest on intensity, even after I heavily adjusted the way I responded to the same clips when I did the academic test so as to rate them relatively rather than absolutely, as I had in the commercial version? Well, I'll tell you why...

It's because I've heard and enjoyed far too much "intense" music to react with anything other than irritation at being expected to give the time of day to examples as uninmpressive as the ones in the  test. The Spazzys or Rammstein they are not! 

I didn't rate them all "Dislike Moderately" because I moderately dislike loud, fast, abrasive music. I love loud, fast abrasive music! I rated them that way because they were poor examples of the style. Mostly, they weren't loud, fast or abrasive enough! 

Also they weren't very good. I disliked them on critical grounds, if you will, not aesthetic.

I suspect that's also why I scored highest on "Unpretentious" and "Contemporary". The unpretentious songs were vaguely country or rockabilly, two genres about which I know very little and in which I am easily pleased. They also both famously appeal to people out for a good time and a few beers. Unpretentious sums those styles up well but it also implies a low bar. It's easy to sound just about okay with a slap bass and a chorus everyone can sing along with so the clips in that style have an inbuilt advantage.

As for contemporary, it may be the area where I make the most effort to keep up these days but I'm barely running to stand still. I don't know enough not to be too easily impressed. The supposedly contemporary clips probably sound as mediocre to people who know what they're listening to in that area as the intense ones did to me.

It seems to me that the more you know about the five styles represented in the test, the less likely you are to give these specific examples high marks. You're more likely to give them punishingly low marks instead, precisely because they're disappointing examples of your favorite kinds of music.

It seems like a decent way of assessing a general response, which can then be correlated with the emotional index, but it's going to stumble every time it comes up against someone who has a genuine ear for or strong affiliation with any of the styles.

With that caveat in mind, I'd recommend either test as an interesting experiment. I preferred the longer one although I wish I'd known just how long it was going to take before I took it. Then again, I did do all five sections. You can just do the "Musical Taste" part on its own if you prefer and that's the same length as the commercial test. Actually, it's the same test only with different grades.

I don't regret doing the tests but I do wish either of them had been as much fun as I was anticipating. If anyone knows of anything similar that's a bit more... shall we say ... entertaining, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Palia Closed Beta: First Impressions

 I had something else scheduled for today's post but as soon as I opened my email this morning and found

<< this in my inbox I figured I'd be changing my plans. There's no NDA, something developers Singularity6 have thoughtfully flagged up as soon as you log into the beta, so after playing for about an hour, I'm free to give my very first impressions.

I would've played a lot longer but my client lost connection to the server and I took it as a hint. I'd already taken a couple of dozen screenshots and made a few notes, so why wait?

Let's begin at the very beginning. A very good place to start. (Sorry, but Palia does have a Julie Andrews kind of feel to it, what with the innocence and the mountains and the vaguely Alpine fashions.)

Download and installation was very quick and easy. Nothing of note to report. It's a 15GB footprint, on the small side for an MMORPG, I'd say.

Almost the first thing you see when you log in is what in EverQuest's glory days used to be known as the "Play Nice" policy, here known rather charmingly as "Village Values". This sort of thing never worked all that well back in the day but I think it's safe to say it'll be taken a lot more seriously now.

These days, my aging PC regularly fails to meet the minimum specs for new games but it makes the cut for Palia, although every setting defaulted to "Low", which made everything look somewhat bland. I think that may be a beta issue because, when I went into Settings and asked the game to auto-select the correct levels for my system, it changed them all to "Medium". 

That made the game much prettier and I imagine it's a lot prettier still on the highest quality. Maybe I'll get to see it that way soon. I'm planning on upgrading my graphics card in September which, along with the boost to 16GB Ram and the new 1TB SSD I've already added this year, ought to see me fit to play most new games for another year or two.

Getting back to Palia, first I had to make myself a character. That was fun.

No, it was. And it isn't, always. I'm often conflicted about Character Creation. If it's too basic I chafe over the lack of variety but if it's too complex I get annoyed about being asked to deal with a level of detail no-one is ever going to see. 

Palia, I think, has it about right. There are lots of choices but no sliders. You can pick from a largish selection of presets - head shape, hair style, eye make-up, all the usual suspects - but it never feels overwhelming. It took me about ten or fifteen minutes to come up with a character and a look that I really liked.

Given the nature of the game, you'd expect there to be some nods to current trends on diversity and there are. More than nods, actually. I think Palia is probably the first MMORPG I've played where there's a hejab option. 

Not that the word is ever used. It's just there, along with a number of hairstyles that most likely have significance to some. Without it feeling like anyone was trying to make overt socio-political statements, the whole process seemed pretty much on point with what really ought just to be the norm nowadays. 

There's no mention of gender at all, as is becoming the baseline for these things. I was kind of expecting to be asked for my preferred pronouns at some stage but that didn't happen. I was asked to give my character both a full name and a nickname, the latter of which the inhabitants of the world would use when they spoke to me. I guess it does neatly sidestep the pronoun issue if the NPCs just call you by your nickname all the time. 

As for overall appearance, it's all about body-type now, which works for me. I picked one of the two options and set about making one of the cliched characters I almost always make in games that only allow you to be a human. It's as well I was able to make something I was happy with because as yet there are no do-overs.

Normally I don't appreciate only being able to be a human but it is sort of par for the course in games that look like this so I was expecting it. What I wasn't expecting was for my character's humanity to be called out immediately as unusual. All the players in the game are human but none of the NPCs are, which is certainly a twist. 

There's a short cut-scene and then it's into the game proper - whereupon there's another cut-scene. It's not exactly on Final Fantasy XIV level but it does seem that cut-scenes might be more of a thing in Palia than I'd have guessed. Luckily, they're pretty good cut-scenes. Also short.

It could, of course, just be that cut-scenes feature heavily in the tutorial. Palia has the kind of tutorial I strongly favor, one where you just get asked to do things you'd probably want to do anyway in the place where you'd expect to be doing them, namely the core game-world, rather than doing something overly dramatic and portentous in some instance you'll never see again.

I ran around for an hour doing all the things you'd expect. I learned how to use WASD to move, how to use Space to jump and Shift to sprint. I learned I could climb up vertical surfaces by running at them. I learned how to talk to NPCs by pressing F and how to switch between tools like axes and picks by pressing R.

Every system I was shown worked smoothly and felt comfortable.  Most were very familiar from similar systems in other games but I felt almost instantly at home with even those that were new to me. 

In a clever narrative wrinkle, when I arrived at the village inn in search of a room, I was told they were all full with all the strange humans who'd suddenly started appearing and I'd have to go camp out in the woods instead. From there I received a plot of land of my own, which I had to clear of rubble before crafting my own tent.

When I came to place it, I was taken aback by the size of the thing. I'd been expecting something like the pup tent you get in New World but when I put it up, it turned out to be a giant marquee. I'm not sure what the point of it is because I hadn't even gone inside to look around before I was off on another mission to speak to the mayor about getting a house.

I also spoke to the mailman, who delivered me letters from the locals responsible for training new arrivals in hunting and fishing, along with a bow and arrows and a fishing rod. Not sure how those fitted into my mailbox. 

I spoke to someone who was going to teach me how to cook, to a gardener who gave me some seeds and told me how to plant them and to several more villagers I just happened to bump into. It sounds like a lot but I found it well-paced and not at all confusing. 

It helped very much that all the dialog was well-written and all the Villagers had distinct, if also distinctly one-note, personalities. In that sense it reminded me greatly of the My Time At Portia/Sandrock games, although I imagine it's something of a staple approach within the genre.

As in those games, you can ingratiate yourself with the villagers you meet by chatting with them, something I did by accident before the tutorial got around to explaining it, always assuming it's going to. I noticed there's also some kind of system whereby the responses you choose have an elemental code - Earth, Air, Fire and Water - which presumably means something. 

Again, whatever that meaning might be has yet to be explained but I'm happy for it to take a while. I don't need to be spoon-fed. I'm eager to find outwhat else the game may have to offer but I'm in no hurry.

It's very early days but I think I've already taken to Palia. It looks like it'll be fun and in comparison with some beta/Early Access titles I've played, it already feels polished and professional. I'm sure there will be rough edges but I haven't scraped up against any so far.

I like the look of the world and more importantly I like the look of my character, something that always makes a huge difference in terms of whether I feel like logging into a game. (I've actually only just realised she looks uncannily like my first wife, back when we'd just met...)

There are all the usual attractions associated with gathering, building and decorating to look forward to but I get the sense there may also be some kind of plot. If there is, it feels like it might be an interesting one. 

We'll see. I think, even on this brief introduction, it's safe to say I'll be exploring Palia for a while.

Sad Goth Girl And The Treehouse Pajamas

If there's one thing I have to say about Dragon Nest 2: Evolution it's that for a game that's supposedly predicated on making money by selling you stuff, they sure are generous with the free samples. I've only been playing for a few days and my character's already better-looking than many I've played for years - or ever - in other games.

It's all happening so fast I'm finding it hard to keep up. It's certainly too much to report as it happens. In the last few, short sessions I've acquired four pets, two outfits and a pair of wings. And they all look great!

Thanks to a weird glitch when I logged in on Sunday, I can offer a benchmark illustration of what my character looked like when she started. For some reason, the game reverted to the default appearance until I rebooted Bluestacks and this is what I used to look like in the dim, distant past of a few days ago:

Ah, the sweet innocence of youth. Although I see I still have my sad goth girl fairy pet.

She's not called Sad Goth Girl for real. I wish! She's not even a fairy. She's officially my Swan-Like Elf pet, which is weird, there not only being nothing remotely swan-like about her but also because my character is an elf, too. It's like a human having a pet human. I think there's a name for that...

Here's a close-up, taken earlier as you can tell because I'm wearing my Ranger outfit. (I'm just going to use "I" and "my character" and "she" interchangeably from now on and not just in this post, either. It's really too much trouble, trying to keep my pronouns straight and if I want to identify as an elf, is it any business of yours? (I do not want to identify as an elf. Let's just make that clear right now...))

Did you also notice Swan-Like Sad Goth Fairy-Elf is wearing a crown? It adds yet another layer of mystery. Have I somehow enslaved a member of the elven royal family? Or is it just an affectation, like when King wears that crown from Burger King in the first episode of The Owl House so he can call himself King of the Demons?

(That's what Douglas Coupland called tele-parabalizing, by the way. I'm re-reading Generation X, something that will no doubt feed into a future post or two. It's a handy neologism. Pity it never caught on.)

Another thing that happened during the glitch was this. I got abducted by aliens. 

No, not really. This is actually a mount. I wish it was my mount but it's not. Not any more. When I couldn't get my outfit to display properly I tried mounting up to see if that might shift something and instead of my Angelic Sheep I got this. 

I've seen people flying about in these things. There's a ray-gun that flips out from the underneath and swings about in a vaguely threatening manner. It took me a few goes to get it in shot. In some of the pictures I discarded you could see my foot sticking out of the bottom of the spaceship. Shoddy alien tech!

I didn't get to keep the spaceship but I do get to wear this baseball outfit whenever I want. There's a baseball cap that comes with it but it goes on backwards, something that always makes anyone look like a dick. It's a look even an elf can't carry off so I'm sticking with the bunny ears. Everyone knows those are cool.

The baseball outfit comes from some login event or holiday or something. I'm already losing track and the game's only just started. There's an actual Summer Beach Party thing going on but it's cash-shop only so I haven't been able to make myself look like this.

Probably just as well. Honestly, I'd be embarassed to post a picture like that if it wasn't that I've played Final Fantasy XIV and everyone seems to find it perfectly acceptable there. And anyway, I've got something even more awkward to show you later.

But first: wings!

Every game needs wings but not every game knows how to do them. Guild Wars 2 definitely doesn't. I acquired several sets there over the years and not one of them fitted properly. It always puzzled me. The GW2 art department is generally top-class but when it comes to attaching accessories to character models it looks like they farm it out to the interns. 

My DN2:E wings fit perfectly. I got them from a new activity that opened up when I dinged 16. Don't ask me what it was. It has the word "feathers" in the title, I remember that much.

If I learn a bit more about how it works, maybe I'll do a post on it, but for now here's a shot of the Feather Insertion screen where you perform Feather Synthesis with the intention of making yourself some fancy wings. Out of feathers. What else?

I made some and when I'd finished they looked like this:

As you can see, they fit me like I was born with them. Not like I got them for a hen party with a budget of "Don't spend more than $5. We all know it's not going to last".

It's a look I'd happily have settled for but this game doesn't like for you to just settle. Before I even had time to appreciate how great I was looking I was already opening the chest with my next outfit inside. 

Remember I said I had something awkward to share?

I'll warm up to it with the description. Make of this what you will.

Nervous? You probably should be. I was.

I mean, we've all wanted to skip school to spend the day in a treehouse in our PJs. That's a normal thing normal people want, right?

As it turns out, it's all quite innocent. Well, relatively-speaking, although what dictionary they must have been using if this is their definition of the word  "pajamas" beats me. 

To my eye, it looks more like something you'd put on to go to a party than anything you'd sleep in. A little dressy for a treehouse, too. It also really does not go with those boots, as you can see from the shot below. Swan-Like Elf can't bear to look.

It's not without its charm, all the same. I'm hoping there might be some slippers still to come. Or maybe some actual pajamas. It does say it's part of a set and this is just the top.

We'll just have to see what I get next time I log in. There's almost bound to be something.

Guild Wars 2 And The Telaran Takeover

I'd be overstating things if I suggested I'd been in two minds whether or not to buy Secrets of the Obscure, the upcoming Guild Wars 2 expansion, when it releases on 22 August. I really haven't been thinking about it at all. 

I played GW2 pretty much without a break for more than a decade, from launch until early this year, when I finally drifted away but I can honestly say I haven't missed the game since I stopped. I get the ocasional email from ArenaNet telling me what's going on but I don't bother opening most of them. I see news items about the game on various websites but I rarely read past the headlines.

I did pay a bit more attention to the news there was going to be an expansion this summer, following the previously-announced change of emphasis on content delivery as it transitioned from free Living Story updates to regular paid DLC. I wasn't expecting anything to come of it quite so soon. I thought I'd have at least until the autumn to build up a sufficient degree of nostalgic fondness to make me consider coming back.

In the event, the new expansion is arriving before I've had the chance to start missing the game and it certainly doesn't help that what's been advertised looks like a relatively small-scale affair largely made up of scraps, for which we'll be asked to pay almost as much as we did for a full-scale expansion. The ridiculous name didn't do much to build any enthusiasm, either.

Today I finally saw something that made me think I might want to think about buying the thing when it comes out after all. Realistically, I was always going to buy it eventually. I just imagined I could probably leave it perfectly well until next year. Or the year after.

What changed my mind? Or, I should say, what may have changed my mind, if I've come to a firm decision, which I haven't, yet, and if my mind had been made up to begin with, which it wasn't?

It was the email to the left and the press release on the GW2 Website to which it links that did it.

I've only reproduced part of the email but it's the relevant part, although the news that Zojja's back with Felicia Day voicing her very definitely did not hurt. 

But I already knew that and it hadn't been enough to rekindle my interest sufficiently to change anything. So what, exactly, did?

It was this: in a move so meta-ironic it makes me wonder what decade we're in, GW2 is turning itself into Rift. 

Literally. Don't believe me? Have it direct from the Marketing Dept.'s mouth, then:

        Rift Hunting

"With the help of the Heart of the Obscure, you’ll find nascent rifts across Tyria. Fully opening a rift will reveal Kryptis invaders who were roaming Tyria while hidden from sight. Defeat enough of them, and a more formidable champion will appear for you to face. Taking down the final Kryptis target will allow you to close the rift and will grant you Kryptis essence: powerful material you can use to craft weapons, armor, legendary armor, and bait to lure out deadlier Kryptis from rifts.

At launch, you’ll be able to find rifts in several explorable zones in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure areas, central Tyria, Cantha, and the Crystal Desert. Rift activity in explorable zones not associated with Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure will cycle on a weekly basis. If you use the Heart of the Obscure in maps without active Kryptis rifts, you’ll get pointed to those that have them. In a future update, you’ll be able to progress to even deadlier hunts designed for larger groups of players.

The enemies coming out of a rift scale with the size of the group fighting it. That means that you can party up with friends for rift hunts, weave them into other open-world activities you’re doing, and even help out if you come across a stranger fighting to close a rift in the wild."

That is the exact premise on which Trion originally marketed their 2011 MMORPG "Rift", which came out a year before Guild Wars 2 and which undoubtedly broke ground for GW2's "mould-breaking" hot-join, open world group and zerg playstyle. They haven't even bothered to change what they're calling the damn things. They're rifts ffs!

Rift was a good game in 2011. I played the hell out of it for six months. I wouldn't mind another run. Of course, Rift is still around but it's a Gamigo ghost-world now. Good luck finding enough people running around there to do rifts the way they were meant to be done.

If ArenaNet fancy turning parts of GW2 into a Rift-revival theme park then I don't mind taking a few rides. I'm minded to buy the expansion now just so I can enjoy the frenzy of the first week or two before it all quietens down.

That said, GW2 is far better set to keep content like this active over the medium and long term than most games. I mean, people still do those bandit fights and they haven't been relevant content for more than half a decade. It's also a step back down the road along which I feel GW2 should never have stopped travelling, so I feel kind of honor-bound to support it.

I guess I'll be going back to Tyria towards the end of the month, then. At least for a while. I'm not sure if it's a welcome return or I'm being reeled back in...

And So It Begins

Well, there's a masthead you'll be seeing a lot of this month. I must have spotted it atop half a dozen blogs this morning already and it's not even half past nine. 

Unless you've arrived here randomly from Google (In which case Hi! Nice to see you!) you'll already know today is the first day of Blaugust, festival of the supposedly moribund yet actually still surpisingly lively pastime known as blogging. 

I'm not going to go over what Blaugust is yet again. As Jeremy Paxman seemed to get a peculiar pleasure out of saying at the start of every episode of University Challenge until he retired last year, we all know the rules, let's just get on with it.

As of the first of the month, it appears we have seventy-seven participating blogs, up seventeen from just a few days ago, when I posted what I never thought was going to be the definitive list. I'm not going to attempt to keep that thing updated but I have at least tried to add all of the newcomers to my Blog Roll. 

Despite my concerns as expressed last time, they all seem to have been accepted, so I guess three hundred isn't Blogger's high-water mark for these things after all. I must be over that by now although I'm blessed if I'm going to go through and count them all again.

As always, if anyone's participating and doesn't see their blog in the list to the right, drop me a comment and I'll add it. Ditto if the name isn't as you'd prefer or you spot any other infelicity. If you see your blog right down at the very bottom, just lying there like a mafia victim at the bottom of the harbor, it means Blogger can't find your RSS feed. Even Belghast's spreadsheet doesn't have a working one for everybody.

As I was adding the new ones this morning, I noticed several were hosted by NeoCities, the retro-revivalist version of the much-missed GeoCities platform. I take this as a sign of good things to come.

One of our new participants this year, Bitterly Indifferent, has a post up about how the current state of the WorldWide Web and associated services points towards a return to Internet Family Values. There's a link in the post to a piece in The Verge which is itself stuffed with links to corroborative evidence for the argument, some of which are quite interesting. I lost three-quarters of an hour last night sifting through them and some of what I read gave me ideas. If you like ideas you might want to have a look. 

Not everyone likes ideas, of course. Ideas can be scary. If you're going to get through thirty-one days of Blaugust posting every day, though, you're going to need at least a few. 

Fortunately, Blaugust comes with a set of ideas of its own as well as some weekly themes, for which there's a handy illustration I might just slot in here...

I'll probably try to include at least one semi-relevant post for each named week. This one definitely counts as a "Welcome To Blaugust" post. I made a list of fallback ideas of my own a while back and I might drop in a few of those if inspration doesn't strike, as it sometimes fails to do during Blaugust.

It's always as well to have a backup plan. Two years ago I riffed off the Pitchfork People's List and that carried me through the month very comfortably.

 Last year, though, I decided I'd just wing it and honestly it did not go well. I made my thirty-one posts but on a few occasions I felt stressed and overall I enjoyed the event less than usual. 

This time I've done some prep. Not only do I have my fallback ideas, I've already finished three posts that aren't particularly timelocked. I can slot those in whenever I need them. I'm also technically on holiday this week but I'm not going anywhere and the weather forecast is poor so I'll most likely knock out at least a couple more extra posts to stick in the Blaugust bank. That alone should see me through.

Added to that, the timing for the event is excellent this year. There are a whole bunch of big games and expansions launching or going into some kind of open access during August - Palia, Wayfinder, Baldur's Gate 3 and Guild Wars 2's Secrets of the Obscure - so that should give the gamers amongst us plenty to write about.

It's notable that I had to qualify that last paragraph. Time was when I'd have been safe in assuming every Blaugustian was going to be writing mostly about games. Those days are long gone. 

It's probably for the best although I'm not wholly convinced that a community can coalesce purely around a shared interest in blogging. I've worked in a book store for a quarter of a century and I've had ample opportunity to observe book-buyers in their natural environment. While a love of books will get them all through the door, once inside they quickly split into cliques and clades that at best want nothing to do with each other and are not infrequently actively hostile.

That said, it was ever thus. (Geez. "Ever thus"? Who talks that way?) Even when we all wrote about MMORPGs there were lines drawn between game-specific blogs, general blogs, PvE blogs, PvP blogs, casual blogs and hardcore blogs. People just like to put themselves in boxes, I guess.

I know I do but that's one pecadillo I won't be posting about here...

Anyway, for one long month we're all bloggers together, whatever our tastes, topics, predilections or platforms. Longform, shortform, video, audio; Blaugust opens its arms wide to all.

Welcome to Blaugust 2023. You'll fit right in!